Six gladiators, killed in the arena eighteen hundred years ago, are brought back from the dead.

Brutal, bloody, spectacular… gladiatorial games epitomized the violent soul of the Roman Empire. Yet the men behind the masks remain an enigma. Now skeletons excavated from a Roman cemetery in York, England, are revealing the lives and deaths of six gladiators in more vivid detail than ever before; their rules of combat, the foes they faced and the blows that killed them. Forensic evidence from their remains is making real the legends of the arena: the Bestiarius; Secutor, the pursuer; Equites, the horseman; Murmillo, the heavyweight; Retiarius, the net fighter; and Thracian, the swordsman.

Based on the scars discovered on their skeletons and tests carried out on their remains, their brutal lives are realized through the drama of full-impact, combat reconstructions and visually enhanced state of the art CGI.

October Films for Channel 4 (UK) and National Geographic Channel (US) (2009)