At my school, I’m taking Latin as a language and I’m in the club for it called JCL. (Junior classical League(Otherwise known as Latin Club). Recently we had an event called Lupercalia, basically Rome’s Valentine’s day. At the event, I got to do a Gladiator battle with one of my friends and perform with another one of my friends.
I got to put together a costume for the gladiator battle so I had to first find some inspiration. Finding inspiration was hard because there were very few female gladiators. Luckily I was able to get an idea of how I wanted the costume to look. The next step was finding the pieces. The first thing I did was go to Goodwill to see if they had anything that could work as gladiator costumes or any props. In the end, I found a shirt and a skirt. I later found out the skirt had built-in shorts and pockets. Score! The next step was to create a helmet and wrist cuffs, so I headed off to the interwebs to look for a how-to video. I found one relatively quickly and got to work. After a lot of cutting cardboard and duck taping, I had a pretty snazzy-looking helmet and wrist cuffs. After that, I used some silver spray paint that I had leftover from my Halloween costume to make the pieces look like metal. Then I used some watered-down acrylic paint to make the pieces look withered and used. Finally, I added a shawl that I used to wrap the costume together.
Finally, the day arrived, Monday, February 14, 2022, and after putting my costume on I started on my makeup. For the makeup, I did a scar down one side of my face and another one on my lip. After a little help from one of my friends, the scar looked pretty realistic. Sadly I didn’t get very many photos of the costume or the makeup.
The first gladiator battle was the one I was in and it started with me and my friend. He used a trident and I used two swords. (our teacher was worried that we would end up hitting each other with the sword so hard that either we would get hurt or break the sword, but in the end, everything was ok) The gladiator battle ends with me laying on the ground after my leg has been chopped off. Then my friend pretended to cut off my arm and step over me and revel in his triumph. As he was reveling in his triumph, I stood up, only using one leg and one arm, And stabbed him in the back. I then proceeded to say “consumsit stercum” which is a not-so-nice way to say eat poop in Latin.
After the gladiator battles, there were performances where one of my other friends and I proceeded to do a musical song. After that, we later lead a sing-along with the songs everyone in Latin uses to help them memorize the endings of things like verbs and nouns. In between our acts, this band played some covers of songs and dang were they good! Later there was a fake roman wedding followed by a group dance called Zorba. It was basically like the hora, but there were no chairs and the pace kept speeding up. It got so fast that people started falling over left and right. Overall it was a pretty fun experience and I hope I get to do it again next year!
