Gladiator

About the Gladiator series

Simon Scarrow's Gladiator quartet is a young-adult companion to his adult Eagles of the Empire novels, following a teenage boy, Marcus, whose father -- a decorated Roman officer -- is falsely accused of treason and vanishes, leaving Marcus and his mother destitute in Rome. Sold into slavery and trained as a gladiator to survive, Marcus fights his way through the arena while hunting for evidence that will clear his father's name and reunite what's left of his family. Fight for Freedom opens the series with his enslavement and first fights; Street Fighter and Son of Spartacus widen the world beyond the arena as Marcus is drawn into gang warfare on Rome's streets and inspired by the legend of the slave rebel Spartacus; Vengeance closes out the quartet with the reckoning Marcus has been fighting toward since book one.

Set in the same 1st-century Roman Empire as Eagles of the Empire and sharing Scarrow's grounded approach to gladiatorial combat, slavery, and Roman street life, the series is pitched at a younger reading age, with shorter books, a tightly focused single viewpoint, and a more personal revenge plot rather than Macro and Cato's military campaigns. It doesn't require any familiarity with Scarrow's adult novels and introduces no crossover characters, making it a suitable entry point for younger readers curious about ancient Rome before or alongside the Eagles of the Empire series.

How to read this series

Read in publication order -- Fight for Freedom (2011), Street Fighter (2012), Son of Spartacus (2013), and Vengeance (2014) -- as each book continues Marcus's story directly from where the last one ended, building toward a single resolution across all four. There's no separate reading order to consider: this is a straightforward, chronological four-book arc with one protagonist. The series is written for a younger YA audience than Scarrow's adult fiction and needs no prior knowledge of Eagles of the Empire or any other Scarrow series -- it's a complete, self-contained story that happens to share the same Roman Empire setting.