The Gladiator March

"The Gladiator" is a march by John Philip Sousa, written in 1886 while Sousa was leader of the US Marine Band.

The Gladiator was written as a tribute to Charles B. Towle, a journalist at the Boston Traveler.  The journalist introduced him to the Knights Templar. Speculation has long surrounded the title for the piece, but one hypothesis is that the title referred to Towle himself, a gladiator of sorts who used a pen instead of a sword. 

Sousa had not written many marches before that, and none of them received great popularity. The Gladiator, however, sold over a million copies – a record for the time and was soon performed frequently.