The Borghese Gladiator is a Hellenistic life-size[1] marble sculpture portraying a swordsman, created at Ephesus about 100 BC, now on display at the Louvre.

[2] It was found before 1611, in the present territory of Anzio south of Rome, among the ruins of a seaside palace of Nero on the site of the ancient Antium.

In the days when antique sculptures gained immediacy by being identified with specific figures from history or literature,[3] Friedrich Thiersch conjectured that it was intended to represent Achilles fighting with the mounted Amazon, Penthesilea.

Misnamed a gladiator due to an erroneous restoration, it was among the most admired and copied works of antiquity in the eighteenth century, providing sculptors a canon of proportions.

In the United States, a copy of "The Gladiator at Montalto"[7] was among the furnishings of an ideal gallery of instructive art imagined by Thomas Jefferson for Monticello.