Rome, in the year AD 80. And the newly built Colosseum. One man who appeared in the Colosseum's inaugural games was a gladiator called Verus. So memorable was his fight that it was immortalised by one of the greatest poets  of ancient Rome. Verus' words and actions in this film are based on the latest historical evidence on the lives of the gladiators. This is Verus. And this is his story. Many gladiators came from the fringes of the Roman Empire, countries like Moesia, Rome's troubled frontier  in the Balkans. One day in Spring the Romans attacked our village. Our women and children fled. We stayed and fought. But we never stood a chance. And so I became a slave. It took 50 days to reach Italy. We were all sold off at auction. I was still strong and ended up in a quarry  outside of Rome. We called it the pit. At midday it felt as if you were being baked alive. We had a saying: There are no old bones in the pit. We worked from sunrise to sunset, every day. But they didn't break me. The slaves in the quarry were cutting stone for a vast new construction project in the centre of Rome. It was financed from here, the imperial treasury which contained loot seized from the temple of Jerusalem during the Judean wars  seven years before.