"The Dying Gladiator"

My Italian friends told me, "Don't leave Italy before seeing 'The Dying Gladiator.' It is so moving." And so, on my last day, on my own, I entered the Room of Antiquities of a small town museum. Sprawled on his back, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes - "his hawk-eyes" - fixed on the sky, the gladiator lay waiting for death to descend. He was dying the way he lived. Some claimed his death was unjust, murder really: he had refused to slay his young opponent whom he had defeated easily. So other gladiators slew both of them. He watched his brother-warriors, but did not resist them. And two streams of blood soaked into arena sand. Other claimed there was no special heroism: he was too bloodied to stand, and leave the arena. His doom was sealed, as if his death had been decreed by more than human agents. And what do I think some twenty centuries removed from the event? I want to see his death as redemptive. Some good must arise from his suffering even as his body is emptied of life.