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Updated: May 14, 2025
There were thousands present who had survived the pestilence, who had been present fifteen years before when she had let herself down into the arena and had rescued the retiarius. They remembered her spectacular interference and were curious as to how she would now comport herself. Brinnaria, erect and calm, fanned herself placidly. Almo won his fourth bout.
No retiarius ever netted him, yet the net seldom missed him more than half a hand's breadth. When the disappointed retiarius skipped back to the length of his net-cord and retrieved his net by means of it, Palus let him gather it up, never dashed at him, but merely stepped sedately towards him. If the retiarius ran away, Palus followed, but never in haste, always at a slow, even walk.
"Yes," said the ædile's wife with complacent importance, for she knew all the names and qualities of each combatant: "he is a retiarius or netter; he is armed only, you see, with a three-pronged spear like a trident, and a net; he wears no armor, only the fillet and the tunic.
To keep himself in the background, and to fling over the head of the raw Chief Magistrate a web of intertwined influences, any one of which alone would be useless, but which taken together were not to be broken through; to revive the lost art of the Roman retiarius, who from a safe distance threw his net over his adversary, before attacking with the dagger; this was Ratcliffe's intention and towards this he had been directing all his manipulation for weeks past.
There was a town on the Hellespont called Sigeum, which had long been a subject of contest between the Athenians and the Mitylenaeans. Some years before the legislation of Solon, the Athenian general, Phryno, had been slain in single combat by Pittacus, one of the seven wise men, who had come into the field armed like the Roman retiarius, with a net, a trident, and a dagger.
Facing this portentous tower of metal was a gladiator of the sort known as a retiarius, equipped solely with a long-handled, slender- shafted trident, like a fisherman's eel-spear, and a voluminous, wide- meshed net of thin cord. His only clothing was a scanty body-piece of bright blue. His feet were small with high-arched insteps. Brinnaria particularly noticed his perfectly shaped toes.
Brinnaria knew perfectly well that the betting on a set-to between such a pair was customarily five to three against the secutor and on the retiarius. Yet she felt the sensation usual with onlookers in such a case, the sensation purposed by the device of pairing men so differently equipped, the sensation that the mailed secutor was invincible and the naked retiarius helpless against him.
Ju'lius Cæsar, during his ædileship, exhibited at one time three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators; but even this was surpassed by the emperor Trajan, who displayed no less than one thousand. The gladiators were named from their peculiar arms; the most common were the retiarius, who endeavoured to hamper his antagonist with a net; and his opponent the secutor.
So little did he impress beholders as mobile, so emphatically did he impress them as stationary, that he might almost as well have been an upright stake, planted permanently deep in the sand. I first saw him fight as a secutor, matched against a retiarius.
Last of the day's exhibitions, came the fencing match between Palus and Murmex, at the center of the arena, empty save for those two and their two lanistae. All others in the arena, including the surgeons, their helpers and the guards, drew off to positions close under the podium wall. Murmex and Palus fenced in all sorts of outfits, except that neither ever fought as a retiarius.
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