|| A Gladiator's Queer Star-Crossed Love Story||
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The former Champion of Champions gladiator seizes a chance to forge the next prodigy of the arena, but when his bull-headed student and would-be-lover proves to be a hardcore enemy of the Empire...
Below I reproduce two quotes from The Guardian article, available on the Internet and last accessed by me on February 07, 2023.
This article was published in 2019 and inspired this story. I wrote 'Champion in Love' to contribute to the learned debate (alluded to in the article) about why two men could have been buried together, hand in hand. I wanted to shed light on the great mystery confounding the scientific community of what the bond between these two men might have been.
I want to be clear, however, that my story takes place in an AU world and takes many artistic liberties with gladiatorial combat and lifestyle. Real stuff is blended with so much fiction in this story, it doesn't even pretend to be a historical narrative.
Thank you for reading!
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The "Lovers of Modena", a pair of skeletons so called because they were buried hand-in-hand, were both men, researchers have found.
The bones, from between the 4th and 6th century AD, were found in a cemetery in 2009 near Modena in northern Italy.
[...]
The discovery of two individuals buried hand-in-hand, or even embracing, is nothing new. The Lovers of Valdaro, who died nearly 6,000 years ago, were buried in Italy's northern province of Mantua. There have been other cases in Greece, Turkey, Romania and Siberia. In all of these instances, however, the couples were male and female.
"There are currently no other examples of this type," Federico Lugli, a researcher at the University of Bologna and the lead author of the 'Scientific Reports' study. "Many tombs have been found in the past with couples holding hands, but in all cases there was a man and a woman. What might have been the bond between the two individuals in the burial in Modena remains a mystery."
Researchers believe the two might have been siblings, cousins or soldiers who died together in battle. [...]
