An analysis of the lives of ancient Rome's gladiators explores how they were both despised and hero-worshiped, chronicling how tens of thousands of gladiators perished publicly over the course of six hundred years.

March AD 80. In Rome, the Emperor Titus has announced that there will be a hundred days of games to open his new amphitheatre (now known as the Colosseum). Flavia, Nubia and Lupus take this opportunity to go to Rome and search for their missing friend, Jonathan. Their search leads the young detectives straight to the games, where they must face wild beasts and gladiators to accomplish their mission.

He won his fame—and his freedom—in the gory pits of Rome's Colosseum. Yet the greatest challenge for once-legendary gladiator Caros Viriathos comes to him through a slave. His slave, the beautiful and mysterious Pelonia Valeria. Her secret brings danger to his household but offers Caros a love like he's never known…. Should anyone learn she is a Christian, Pelonia will be executed. Her faith threatens not only herself, but her master. Can she convince a man who found fame through unforgiving brutality to show mercy? And when she's ultimately given the choice, will Pelonia choose freedom or the love of a gladiator?

He was a titan, standing taller than the Empire State Building. He was voted one of the “100 Smartest New Yorkers” and deemed by People Magazine and his peers one of the top half-dozen defense attorneys in the country. His was a household name, so when he died in 2014, the world’s leading newspapers ran lengthy obituaries of him. As an attorney, he was a warrior, a Roman gladiator, feared by prosecutors, respected by judges. He represented clients as notorious as mobsters Paul Castellano and Carlo Gambino, and as diverse as Ross Perot, Studio 54, Keith Hernandez, the New York Jets, MGM, Def Jam Records, and Columbian drug lords. He argued before the Supreme Court, and several times remade criminal law in ways that remain to this day. Of nearly 1000 cases he tried, he won more than 80 percent. He was described as a combination of Bob Hope and Darth Vader. He was superhuman, brilliant, charming, and unforgettable. He was trial lawyer Jimmy LaRossa, and they’ll never be another American lawyer quite like him. This is his story, Last of the Gladiators: A Memoir of Love, Redemption, and the Mob by his son, James LaRossa Jr.

In Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator, the Soviet Union won the Cold War. The Russians were a little smarter than they were in our own world, and the United States was a little dumber and a lot less resolute. Now, more than a century later, the world's gone Communist, and capitalism is a bad word. For Gianfranco and his friend Annarita, a couple of teenagers growing up in Milan, life in a heavily regimented, surveillance-rich command economy is just plain dreary. The eventual withering-away of the state doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. Annarita's a hard-working student and a member of the Young Socialists' League. Gianfranco is a lot less motivated--but on the other hand, his father's a Party apparatchik. The biggest excitement in their lives is a wargame shop called The Gladiator, which runs tournaments, and stocks marvelous complex games you can't find anywhere else. Then, abruptly, the shop is shut down. Someone's figured out that The Gladiator's games are teaching counterrevolutionary capitalist principles. The Security Police are searching high and low for the shop's proprietors, who've not only vanished into thin air, but have left behind sets of fingerprints that aren't in the records of any government on earth. Only one staffer is left: Gianfranco and Annarita's friend Eduardo. He's on the run, and he comes to them in secret with an astonishing story: he's a time trader from our own timeline, accidentally left behind when the store was evacuated. The only way Eduardo can get home to his own timeline is if Gianfranco and Annarita can help him reach one of the other time trader sites in this world--and the Security Police will be on their tails all the way there. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

From the author of Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons comes an eye-opening new look at one of the most popular spectacles of ancient Rome. This detailed, fascinating guide covers every aspect of the gladiator phenomenon from the types of equipment the different classes of gladiator used to the high place in society these sportsmen came to occupy.