The bronze is perhaps eight centimeters tall and has been in Hannover’s Museum August Kestner for longer than most living people can account for. It shows a Thracian gladiator — the Thraex type, one of the most popular and most recognizable in the Roman arena — in full equipment: the curved sica sword, the small rectangular shield, the elaborate crested helmet with its full-face visor, the greaves protecting both legs. The label reads simply Gladiator, sog. Thraex, Roman Imperial period, first century AD. It sits on a glass shelf among other Roman bronzes, modest in scale, extraordinary in specificity. Whoever made this knew exactly what a Thraex carried and wore. They made this figure because there was a market for it. That market is itself part of the story.

The bronze is Roman, from the Albani Collection, and it sits now in the Louvre’s antiquities hall on a plinth of dark marble, moving through nothing. The lion has one paw resting on a sphere — the globe, the world, the totality of things worth possessing — and the posture is neither aggressive nor relaxed. It is the posture of ownership. The sphere is already subdued. The question of whether anything else needs subduing remains open. This is not a lion that has just won. This is a lion that expects to win.