Mrthfx

The Emperor (may he live forever) has invented a new form of battle for his birthday gladiatorial spectacle.

There are two armies, each consisting of one hundred trained warriors. Each is armed with an identical gladius. Apart from this they wear a simple loincloth. They have no other accoutrements.

The arena is the shape and size of a standard soccer pitch. There are fences to prevent warriors straying outside of it.

The armies start at opposite ends of the arena and are securely and effectively blindfolded. For the purpose of this question please assume that this cannot be circumvented by any form of cheating.

To begin the battle, a drummer standing in the centre beats a tattoo and the two armies start marching towards the sound. The drummer leaves before being reached and battle commences.

Assumptions

The armies will fight to the death and to the best of their abilities. The winning side is the one that has one or more survivors. To ensure the armies continue to advance, the fence behind them will be moved forward at about half walking speed. It has sharp spikes in it. Anyone who tries to escape will be executed by sighted guards and the armies know all the facts beforehand. They have been allowed two weeks ahead of the battle to decide tactics.

Question

Is there any reason that this is unsustainable and must inevitably descend into chaos with collateral deaths or can there be an effective winning strategy?

I believe that by having sound signals and by initially marching arm on shoulder or arm on loincloth, it is possible to have an effective battle plan and at the very least avoid killing members of the same team. Am I right?

Given battle joined with gladius and not pilus, absent scutum, parma or cætra, your gladiators will have to delink arms immediately that battle is joined, and very quickly will separate and each individual will, perforce, rotate and translate as they feel they need to match a given opponent. They cannot coordinate while actively fighting - any sound based signaling gives an opponent a target to follow or strike.

Strategy would be pre-arranged; combat would be damn near silent except for grunts of effort, breathing and the sounds of footwork and the screams of the injured or dying.

Though in terms of one-on-one combat, one technically can train for blindfolded combat via sound, foot-detected vibrations etc, it's incredibly difficult, fraught with error and in the case of live edged weapons, a guaranteed death sentence for all but the most craven of cowards - especially in open melée - you just can't discriminate the sounds enough to triangulate and parry/riposte effectively, and if you do, you have no clue who else nearby is either an opponent, where they are relative to you, and in what phase of footwork, chamber, striking, or parry/riposte they are.

Hell the melée exercises I've taken part in were confusing and challenging enough without blindfolds - and I was a decent fencer and a better martial artist back then (though not anymore, sadly) no-one lasts long - not even the best in the group.

It's an unmitigated slaughter with almost no amusement to it, and a criminal waste of gladiators with skill and talent - if he keeps this up, the Emperor (may he rot forever) will be deposed and executed in the street like a dog. The populace follow the gladiators with passion, identify with the more virtuous and victorious, and have fantasies that virtue is rewarded in the arena for the brave and pure-hearted; treating those with whom the populace identify (and who enact violence as proxies in ways the populace wouldn't dare) like animals to slaughter carries societal and political consequences so great that even the disbanded Senate might ignore the risks re-convene to mount a coup, if they felt the populace behind them in it. Remember, he is a barracks Emperor - can't leave the army barracks and wander freely amongst the populace for fear of being spotted and killed.

However, if instead of trained gladiators, this becomes the preferred execution for cutpurses, corrupt empire minor officials, and butchers who are caught with their thumbs on their scales... the populace may yet vote to erect that gilded statue of the Emperor he so desperately wants.

The emperor has re-invented the andabatae

"The Emperor (may he live forever) has invented a new form of battle for his birthday gladiatorial spectacle": boo, hiss.

The emperor shows the same lack of a classical education, and indeed a barbarous disregard for all things Roman, as our very own Chasly from UK.

andābătă, -ae, m., a kind of Roman gladiator, whose helmet was without openings for the eyes, and who therefore fought blindfolded for the amusement of spectators. (A Latin Dictionary, founded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin dictionary, revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by. Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879. Available at Perseus.)

Wikipedia has this to say:

Andabata:
A "blindfolded gladiator", or a "gladiator who fought blind". Cicero jokingly refers to andabata in a letter to his friend Trebatius Testa, who was stationed in Gaul. The passage associates the andabata loosely with essedarii, chariot fighters. The word is extremely rare in classical sources, and of doubtful etymology; Delamarre suggests it as a Latinised borrowing from Gaulish. (Wikipedia, s.v. List of gladiator types)

The reference in Wikipedia is to M. Tullius Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares (Letters to Friends), 7.10.2:

(Cicero writing from Rome to his protégé C. Trebatius Testa in Gaul, in November or December 54 BC)

Sed tu in re militari multo es cautior quam in advocationibus, qui neque in Oceano natare volueris studiosissimus homo natandi neque spectare essedarios, quem antea ne andabata quidem defraudare poteramus. Sed iam satis iocati sumus.

However, in military matters you are much more cautious than at the bar, seeing that you wouldn't take a swim in the ocean, fond of swimming as you are, and wouldn't take a look at the British charioteers, though in old time I could never cheat you even out of a blind-folded gladiator.² But enough of joking.

²) Andabatam, a gladiator with a closed helmet covering the face, who thus fought without seeing his adversary.

(Translation and note by Evelyn Shuckburgh, 1901. Available on Wikimedia.)

Note that the andabatae were considered comic relief -- they fought for the entertainment of spectators. Nobody paid to see blindfolded men bumbling around; and the Romans actually knew a thing or two about gladiators.

For the poor, and for non-citizens, enrollment in a gladiator school offered a trade, regular food, housing of sorts and a fighting chance of fame and fortune. Mark Antony chose a troupe of gladiators to be his personal bodyguard. Gladiators customarily kept their prize money and any gifts they received, and these could be substantial. Tiberius offered several retired gladiators 100,000 sesterces each to return to the arena. Nero gave the gladiator Spiculus property and residence "equal to those of men who had celebrated triumphs."

(Wikipedia, s.v. Gladiator. The quotation is from Suetonius.)

Finally, here is an extract from The Private Life of Romans by Harold Whetstone Johnson, Chicago, 1909, available at Project Gutenberg:

Gladiators fought usually in pairs, man against man, but sometimes in masses (gregātim, catervātim). In early times they were actually soldiers, captives taken in war (§347), and fought naturally with the weapons and equipment to which they were accustomed. When the professionally trained gladiators came in, they were given the old names, and were called Samnites, Thracians, etc., according to their arms and tactics. In much later times victories over distant peoples were celebrated with combats in which the weapons and methods of war of the conquered were shown to the people of Rome; thus, after the conquest of Britain essedāriī exhibited in the arena the tactics of chariot fighting which Caesar had described generations before in his Commentaries. It was natural enough, too, for the people to want to see different arms and different tactics tried against each other, and so the Samnite was matched against the Thracian, the heavy armed against the light armed. This became under the Empire the favorite style of combat.

Finally when people had tired of the regular shows, novelties were introduced that seem to us grotesque; men fought blindfold (andabatae), armed with two swords (dimachaerī), with the lasso (laqueatōrēs), with a heavy net (rētiāriī), and there were battles of dwarfs and of dwarfs with women. Of these the rētiārius became immensely popular. He carried a huge net in which he tried to entangle his opponent, always a secūtor (see below), despatching him with a dagger if the throw was successful. If unsuccessful he took to flight while preparing his net for another throw, of if he had lost his net tried to keep his opponent off with a heavy three-pronged spear (fuscina), his only weapon beside the dagger.