What would a fight between a Gladiator and a Spartan be like? Who would win in an arena/battlefield?

(Avoid thinking about Spartacus of Thrace who was defeated by Crassus %26amp; Pompey.)





Latin:


Gladiator, -oris m.


Spartiates, -iatae m.|||In an arena, the question is one of experience, skill, cunning, and luck. Is the gladiator a veteran of a hundred combats? A thousand? Is it his first?





Is the Spartan a hardened veteran? How well does he adapt?





All things being equal, the safe money would be on the gladiator in the arena, because that's what he's trained to do. A gladiator is a fighter, not a soldier. That's not to say that Spartans weren't adept at hand-to-hand combat, but their weaponry, shields and tactics evolved to fight as a group, and not as individuals.





On the battlefield, the opposite is true. Victory is dependent on things like prowess and courage and skill with a weapon, but critically important are tactics, supply, communication and above all, discipline. To a large degree, that's what military "basic training" is (and has always been) about: breaking down the individual in order to rebuild him as a member of a team.





Sure, Gladiators occasionally fought in massed games designed to look like small battles, but in reality these were nothing more than big brawls. Spartacus' armies did well, after they learned to work well together, and Spartacus and others learned a thing or two about tactics, strategy, and logistics. And ultimately Spartacus' forces were defeated when their discipline failed.





A well-fed, well-trained, well-disciplined Spartan army under experienced leadership would almost certainly annihilate an army of individual gladiators.|||John P. is correct that gladiators lived long after Sparta collapsed. Consequently, any answers would be based on speculation.





That being said, I would assume that a gladiator would have an advantage in an arena, while the Spartans would be dominant on a battlefield. The reason for that is that the gladiator's training was based on 1 v. 1 combat, while the Spartans were trained to fight in formations on battlefields.|||I would say the Spartan would win, they train to fight to the death in battle. A Gladiator fights to win in the arena.|||The two types never met in battle, nor in the arena. They were some hundreds of years apart.