The Colosseum

AD 80: OPENING EVENTS

The Colosseum was officially opened under the new emperor Titus in AD 80, in an extravaganza of fighting, beast hunts and bloodshed that is said to have lasted a hundred days. The scale of the slaughter is hard to estimate. We have no figures at all for deaths among the gladiators, but Titus’ biographer, Suetonius, claims that during these celebrations (though not necessarily in the Colosseum itself) ‘on a single day’ 5000 animals were killed – a claim that has been boldly re-interpreted by a few modern scholars to mean ‘on every single day’ of the performance, so giving a vast, and frankly implausible, total of half a million animal casualties. One of the fullest accounts of the proceedings, by the historian Dio writing in the third century, is rather more modest in its estimates: he reckons that 9000 animals were slain in all. But elsewhere, discussing games given by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, Dio reflects on the difficulty of calculating the correct tally of fighters or victims. ‘If anyone wanted to record their number,’ he complains, ‘they would have trouble finding out and it would not necessarily be an accurate account. For all things of this sort get exaggerated and hyped.’ The Roman audience’s appetite for slaughter was presumably well matched by the capacity for boasting on the part of those who put on the shows.

Many of the practical arrangements are also tricky to reconstruct. One question that has puzzled archaeologists and historians for centuries is whether or not the central arena was flooded during these opening games. Dio writes confidently of how ‘Titus suddenly filled the arena with water and brought in horses and bulls and other domesticated animals which had been taught to swim’ (if ‘swimming’ is what Dio means when he says, literally, ‘had been taught to behave in liquid just as they did on dry land’). And he goes on to describe Titus producing ships and staging a mock seabattle, apparently recreating one of the famous naval encounters of fifth-century BC Greece, between the forces of the cities of Corcyra and Corinth. This extraordinary spectacle would certainly not be possible in the building as it survives today, for there is no way that the basement of the arena (with its intricate set of lifts and other contraptions for hoisting animals) could be waterproofed. Maybe when the amphitheatre was first built, before the insertion of all that clever machinery, it had ingeniously allowed for the option of flooding. Or maybe Dio was mistaken. Suetonius, in his account, certainly suggests that the water displays took place in a quite different purpose-built location. Even Dio himself, in describing the spectacles that must have spread widely over the city during the hundred days, has some of the water sports – including another mock naval battle, this time apparently involving 3000 men – staged in a special facility constructed by the first emperor Augustus.

Whether or not the Colosseum was miraculously converted back into a lake (which would have been a neat joke on Nero’s private lake that the public amphitheatre had replaced), the range of displays put on for the building’s inauguration were the most lavish that Roman money and imperial power could buy. Dio again refers tantalisingly to fights staged between elephants and between cranes – though exactly how they made these birds fight each other is hard (or awful) to imagine. He also mentions that women were involved in the wild beast hunts, while being at pains to reassure us that these were not women ‘of social distinction’. But the most vivid recreations of these spectacular events are found in Martial’s book of poems (The Book of the Shows) which was written to commemorate the opening of the amphitheatre. Exaggerated flattery of his imperial patron Titus, these verses may have been. There is no doubt a good deal of wishful thinking and poetic licence in the details of the spectacles described. Nonetheless, this book is one of the very rare cases where we can bring together a work of ancient literature, a specific ancient building and what happened in it on one particular occasion. The poems help us to glimpse not only what might have taken place there, but what a sophisticated Roman audience might have found to admire in these horrible, bloodthirsty performances. They bring us face to face with the (in Roman terms) exquisite inventiveness of cruelty.

Martial starts by praising the building (‘All Works to Caesar’s Theatre give place’) and then stops briefly to highlight the exotic, polyglot crowd which has turned up for the greatest show on earth: a wonderful combination of farmers from the wilds of northern Greece, the weird Sarmatians from the Danube who drink their horses’ blood, and Germans and Ethiopians, each sporting a different style of curly hair. The first ‘act’ he celebrates is one that modern readers must find most shocking. It is not from what we now imagine to be the standard repertoire of these shows: gladiators and wild beast hunts (or alternatively the execution of criminals by animals, as in ‘Christians versus lions’). Instead, it is a strange ‘charade’, re-enacting a story from mythology – for the Romans a no less important and distinctive genre of displays in the amphitheatre. In this case the story played out is that of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete whom the god Poseidon (in order to punish her husband) made fall in love with a bull: the famous half-bull/half-human Minotaur was the result of the union. Martial’s poem appears to claim that this event was acted out before the audience in the amphitheatre, between a woman and a live animal, while praising the capacity of the show to ‘make real’ such ancient (even to the Romans) mythological tales. As Thomas May’s, rather too gleeful, seventeenth-century translation puts it:

How literally should we read this? Are we to take it that these opening celebrations of the Colosseum, under the admiring eye of the emperor Titus and of the massed ranks of Roman citizens, really featured sex between a woman and a bull? Possibly. There is other evidence for dramatic executions of criminals in the Roman arena along these lines (presumably the woman would not have survived the encounter, which we assume to have been some form of quasi-judicial punishment). Condemned criminals were induced – again, it is difficult to see quite how – to take part in their own death scenes as if actors in a play. Later in The Book of the Shows Martial focuses on the crucifixion of a man, who seems to have re-enacted in the amphitheatre the punishment of a legendary Roman bandit called Laureolus, until he was put out of his misery by a bear imported from Scotland. He simultaneously reminded the audience of the myth of Prometheus, whose particular divine punishment was to have his liver continually devoured by vultures during the day and grow back again at night:

This is also an aspect of games, that Tertullian – a late second-century Christian from North Africa, and a particularly strident religious ideologue – picks out when he complains that criminals in the amphitheatre take on the mythological roles of Attis (who castrated himself) or Hercules (burned alive). Even closer to Martial’s woman and the bull is an episode in Apuleius’ brilliant novel The Golden Ass, also a product of second-century North Africa. Apuleius recounts how a woman convicted of murder was condemned, before being eaten by a beast, to have intercourse in a local amphitheatre with an ass – in fact the human hero of the story, transformed into an ass by a magical accident. The brainy ass is not convinced that the lion will know the script, and fears that it might well eat him instead of the woman, so he scarpers before the performance.

On the other hand, we might be dealing with a rather different kind of charade. It is not so much a question of how feasible the intercourse described would be; historians have been predictably ingenious with their solutions to that problem, and have plenty of parallels from modern pornography to hand. More to the point is that there is nothing here to disprove the idea that the ‘bull’ was in fact a human being in fancy dress and that the ‘reality’ of the union was something injected by the poet. After all, the wonderfully fantastical Golden Ass and the tirades of Tertullian are hardly very strong evidence for standard practice in the arena. Martial’s contribution to the celebration, in other words, might have been to take a piece of play-acting in the Colosseum and to make it real (by treating it as such) in his verses.

Whatever reconstruction they prefer, most modern scholars have been keen to stress that Martial did not disapprove of such spectacles. True enough. But by using approval or disapproval as the touchstone, this observation tends to miss what Martial so positively admires in the shows and spectacles that he evokes and recreates for his readers. In contrast to the common modern view of the crude sadism of the arena, Martial’s poems repeatedly emphasise – uncomfortable as this must be for us – the sophistication of what was on show at the Colosseum’s inauguration, its clever echoes of the cultural and mythological inheritance of the Roman world, and the wily thoughts about representation and reality (‘what had been merely myth became real punishment’) they prompt. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the Roman amphitheatre is not how to explain the violence and cruelty that took place there, but how to explain the way the Romans described and explained that violence.

In the other thirty or so poems that make up the celebratory collection for the Colosseum’s opening, Martial develops these themes. One playfully (and horribly) subverts the myth of Orpheus, the magician who could charm the animals: the Orpheus figure in this display works no such magic – he is torn apart by a bear. No fewer than three poems take as their subject a pregnant sow killed in one of the beast hunts: in a striking coincidence of birth and death, baby piglets emerged from the very wound made by the spear. Others reflect on the miraculous shifts engineered between water and dry land (so perhaps supporting Dio’s claims about the flooding) and on the paradoxes of the wild and the tame that were on show in the amphitheatre. A tigress, for example, scored a first by attacking a lion when she would have done no such thing in the wild: the truth was that domestication had actually increased her ferocity. Conversely, an elephant that had just dispatched a bull spontaneously came and knelt as a suppliant in front of the emperor; so too did a deer, who in this way miraculously escaped the hounds chasing her. The message – all the stronger for being delivered in this mass gathering – was that even the animals recognised imperial power.

But what of the gladiators? Only one single poem in the whole Book of the Shows features a gladiatorial bout. We must assume that the hundred days of celebration saw combat after combat between the usual array of star fighters, hardened veterans and raw recruits. But here one encounter must stand for all. The fighters concerned were ‘Priscus’ and ‘Verus’, both (stage-)names with a ring: ‘Ancient’ and ‘True’. They were such an evenly matched pair that the crowd demanded their honourable discharge from gladiatorial service (their ‘mission’, as Killigrew’s translation has it) and in the end the fight had to be declared a draw. But, as so often, the eye of the poet (if not of the audience on the day; who knows?) was as much on the emperor as on the spectacle in the arena itself. It is Titus, we are told, who enforced the terms for the bout, Titus who sent them rich rewards for their valour, apparently while the fight was still in progress, and finally Titus who sent them the palms to mark their (joint) victory.

Given our own image of these bloody combats, it is perhaps surprising that this courageous but apparently bloodless draw should be the only gladiatorial fight commemorated at the inaugural games in the Colosseum. Even more surprising is that – so far as we have been able to discover, at least – this poem is the only account of a specific gladiatorial bout to survive from the ancient world. We have plenty of boastful claims of gladiatorial numbers, a good deal of discussion about the appeal of the gladiators themselves and the valour, or the horror, of the fighting, not to mention tombstones recording their death in the arena, and countless images of these distinctively dressed combatants, decorating everything from cheap oil lamps to costly mosaic floors. Yet the only thing approaching a description of an actual contest between two individual gladiators is this tale of imperial generosity and the ancient equivalent of a goalless draw in AD 80.

ON WITH THE SHOW

Spectacular shows over many days, such as those that opened the Colosseum, were infrequent – though much trumpeted – events in the monument’s history. The enthusiasm of individual emperors for these spectacles varied considerably, as did their generosity. Some were notoriously stingy. Others gave special games to celebrate the anniversary of their succession, for their birthday or victory over foreign enemies, or even to commemorate the glories of a predecessor. In the first decade of the second century, for example, the emperor Trajan gave the biggest bloodbath ever recorded, presumably in the Colosseum, to celebrate his conquest of Dacia (modern Romania). Dio again has some facts and figures: the shows took place on 123 days; 11,000 animals were killed, 10,000 gladiators fought. This time we have more details not from poetry written to commemorate the occasion, but from a record included in a calendar of public events inscribed in stone, from Rome’s port of Ostia. This more or less matches Dio’s picture of the scale of the events, but also makes clear that the celebrations did not take place in one continuous ‘sitting’ of more than a hundred days of solid slaughter. Instead they were broken down into smaller units. First, in 107 and 108, there were preliminary games in blocks of twelve or thirteen days, with over 300 pairs of gladiators at each. Then came the main show, which according to the inscription was staged on 117 days between June 108 and November 109 and involved ‘4941 and a half pairs of gladiators’ (the ‘half pair’ being a good indication that gladiators who survived one bout might fight again later in the same show – otherwise whom did the stray ‘half’ fight?). Maybe Titus’ inaugural games were divided up in this way too. It would certainly have made the organisation of animals and human fighters easier, and no doubt also have ensured a keener crowd. The idea that the Romans happily devoted weeks and weeks on end to watching displays of unadulterated slaughter in the Colosseum is probably a modern fantasy. Titus and Trajan would have understood the value of breaking the monotony, and of rationing the violence.

The regular performances in the Colosseum were not these blockbuster shows sponsored by emperors. It had been a tradition going back decades before the building of the Colosseum that Roman aristocrats would present shows – involving gladiatorial combat or wild beast hunts and displays, or a combination of the two – as part of their bid for popularity with the Roman people. These were the occasions that took place in the Forum or in temporary amphitheatres. Whatever the dangers of mass gatherings of the electorate, in the toughly competitive politics of the city of Rome, particularly in the years just before the advent of monarchy under Augustus, a good performance no doubt enormously helped a man’s chances of winning prestige and public office. Shows hosted by aristocrats outside the imperial family certainly continued through the first century AD and presumably after 80 also took place in the Colosseum. We say ‘presumably’ because ancient writers were so fixated on the emperor’s shows that they give us precious few details of any others.

Many of these may have been by the emperor’s standards modest, even amateurish, occasions, with a restricted repertoire of both gladiators and beasts, a long way from the popular image of sadistic excess. In fact, legislation was enacted and re-enacted through the Roman empire to limit the number of gladiators an ‘ordinary’ aristocrat might present and to regulate the displays. It was, after all, in the emperor’s interest to prevent potential rivals currying popular favour with lavish spectacles. But some aristocrats did evade the restrictions (which may not have been consistently or efficiently enforced anyway) and poured money into shows to enhance their public image. Even when it was centuries since they had been obliged to seek the votes of the people, their reputations still depended on ostentatious success. And, instead of a dangerous rivalry, some emperors may have felt that it was a relatively harmless way for them to spend their money.

At the end of the fourth century, a man by the name of Symmachus (a well-known defender of traditional Roman religion against the growth of Christianity), more than once invested huge amounts of time and wealth in funding shows to mark the public advancement of his son. We read in his Letters of his attempts to acquire exotic beasts: antelopes, bears, leopards and lions. It was not always worth the trouble or the cash. The bear cubs that he procured, for example, turned out to be emaciated specimens, but at least not quite the disaster that the Saxon gladiators were: twenty-nine of these strangled each other on the evening before their scheduled performance. But disasters or not, it was all phenomenally expensive. One Roman historian, whose work now survives only in snippets quoted by later writers, reckoned that Symmachus spent 2000 pounds of gold (in standard ancient Roman currency 9 million sesterces) to celebrate his son’s tenure of the office of praetor. That is a sum large enough to feed nearly 20,000 peasant families for a year at minimum subsistence, or nine times the minimum fortune required to qualify for senatorial rank, the topmost elite of Roman society. Allow for some exaggeration and suppose only 20 per cent of it went on the show; it still gives an idea of the level of expenditure that might be involved.

In the end it is hard for us to know how to visualise the Colosseum in Roman times. One picture is very much that offered by epic movies: an auditorium packed with spectators, an arena covered with animals, beast hunters and gladiators, and dripping with blood. The other is a much more everyday, low-key image: an auditorium hardly bursting at the seams, with a rather tame troupe of B-team gladiators and some mangy animals that have seen better days. That is always the dilemma with imagining Rome. Do we embrace the larger-than-life vision that is projected by later writers and by many Roman writers themselves? Or do we cynically suspect that for most of the time, outside a few very special occasions, the reality was a lot less impressive, frankly rather tawdry? And how do we decide?

The same dilemma confronts us when we come to ask how often the Colosseum was in use. For Trajan’s celebrations of his Dacian victory through 108–9, it was apparently hosting performances almost one day out of five. But what was ‘normal’? No one knows. Strikingly few days, though, are assigned to ‘regular’ gladiatorial games in any of the Roman calendars that have been preserved: in the fourth century AD it seems that, out of 176 days of ‘holiday’, just over a hundred were devoted to theatrical shows, sixty-four to horse and chariot racing and only ten days to gladiatorial games. Are we to imagine that, outside special occasions, the Colosseum would have been mothballed? Or that it would have been a constant bustle of workmen and administrators clearing up the mess, getting ready for the next show and doing running repairs on the fabric and machinery? Or that, for much of the year, it provided a convenient home for all kinds of other activities that readily colonised its city-centre location, a place to flog your wares, take a nap, sight-see or make a pick-up? Again, no one knows. But when we reflect on the significance of the shows that took place in the Colosseum, it is worth remembering that, as with Christmas, sheer frequency is not necessarily a good guide to cultural importance.

‘HAIL CAESAR. THOSE ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE YOU’?

To read most modern accounts of the shows in the Colosseum (or indeed of those, admittedly smaller-scale, displays in amphitheatres all over the Roman empire) you would think that a handbook to such events survived from the ancient world – or at the very least a series of programmes, laying out in detail the order of ceremonies according to a standard pattern. We are repeatedly told that the sequence of the day’s events in the arena was fixed by rule or custom. In the morning were the wild animal hunts: more or less exotic species (and the more exotic the better, of course) put to fight each other or pitted against trained marksmen and hunters, some on horseback, others on foot, picking the animals off with spear, sword or arrow. In the ‘lunch break’ came the public executions, either in the ‘mythological’ form that Martial evokes, or in other varieties of ingenious slaughter and torture (including the notorious lions), or just plain killing.

It was not until the afternoon, so it was said, that the gladiatorial bouts proper began. The fighters entered, hailed the emperor with the famous words ‘Those about to die salute you’ and the real fun started. They sported different types of armour and weaponry, and had adopted a range of fighting styles: there were ‘net-men’, for example, heavy-armed ‘Thracians’ and ‘Samnites’, and murmillones or ‘fish-heads’ (so called after the emblem on their helmets). Although all kinds of formation were possible, they usually fought in pairs, one to one, trainers and umpires on hand to supervise the carnage, stretcher bearers (dressed as gods of the Underworld) to carry out the dead and wounded, as well as a blacksmith and forge for instant repairs. The victors may have been handsomely rewarded with popular fame, lavish presents from the sponsor of the show and ultimately (as was the fate of Priscus and Verus) with an honourable discharge. A wounded or defeated gladiator, on the other hand, was at the mercy of the audience. He would hold up his little finger as a sign of surrender, at which point the crowd would roar their preference for killing or sparing, putting their thumbs up or down. Many of the onlookers probably had a vested interest in the outcome and a small fortune staked on individual fighters (in fact the night before the show, the gladiators had their last meal in public, which gave aficionados a chance to study their form before placing their bets). But it was finally up to the sponsor to decide whether to spare the man’s life or have him killed.

This is the scene captured in perhaps the most evocative modern painting of the Colosseum’s arena (illustration 8). Jean-Léon Gérôme’s canvas, painted in the early 1870s, shows a victorious combatant standing triumphant over a ‘net-man’ (or retiarius; his trademark net and trident have fallen to his right), who seems to have collapsed over a fighter dead or injured from a previous bout, but not yet cleared out of the arena. The victor wears one of those elaborate helmets distinctive of several types of gladiator, here decorated with a fish – though it is hard to pick out except on the original (now in Phoenix, Arizona) or on very large-scale reproductions. He is meant to be a murmillo. Equally distinctively, he displays a large amount of naked flesh. For one striking feature of Roman gladiatorial combat, compared with medieval jousting and knights all protected in their chain mail, was the exposure of so much of the bare body; it is as if they had to be visibly vulnerable. We are witnessing here those tense few moments while the winner waits for a sign from the emperor, seen sitting in his imperial box in the carefully reconstructed Colosseum. Kill or not? But our attention is drawn to the women on the front row (presumably the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses who were, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the only women allowed to watch from these ringside seats). With disconcerting eagerness they are signalling their desire for the kill, thumbs down. In fact, the title of the painting is the Latin phrase ‘Pollice Verso’, literally ‘Thumbs turned’ – the phrase used by Roman writers to indicate the vote for a kill. Despite modern scholars’ often confident claims to the contrary, we do not actually know in which direction Romans ‘turned their thumbs’. It may have been ‘up’ for death and ‘down’ for mercy; or, as Gérôme imagines it, vice versa.

This is the painting that is supposed to have inspired the director of Gladiator, Ridley Scott: ‘That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘I knew right then and there I was hooked.’ It also forms a sequel to another painting of Gérôme’s, finished a decade or so earlier in 1859. In this other canvas (which has ended up in Yale University Art Gallery) we see a small posse of gladiators who have just entered the Colosseum’s arena – obviously not the first fighters of the day, to judge from the corpse past which they have just had to walk. They raise their arms to acknowledge the emperor. The title of the painting, again in Latin, is that famous phrase: ‘Ave Caesar. Morituri te salutant!’ ‘Hail Caesar. Those about to die salute you!’

Sadly, there is no evidence at all that this phrase was ever uttered in the Colosseum, still less that it was the regular salute given by gladiators to the emperor. Ancient writers, in fact, quote it in relation to one specific spectacle only, and not a gladiatorial one. According to the biographer Suetonius – and Dio has much the same story – it was the phrase used by the ‘naval fighters’ (‘naumacharii’; condemned criminals according to the historian Tacitus) in a spectacular mock battle on the Fucine Lake in the hills east of Rome, put on in AD 52 by the emperor Claudius, just before his almost equally spectacular feat of draining the lake. The story was that when the emperor heard the word ‘morituri’ (‘those who are about to die’) he made a feeble joke by muttering ‘or not, as the case may be’. Somehow the naumacharii picked this up and, taking it as a pardon, refused to fight. The emperor was forced to hobble off his throne and persuade the men back to the fight. This frankly implausible tale (how on earth were the fighters on the lake supposed to have heard the words muttered from the safe distance of the imperial throne?) is the only reference we have to the words which have become the slogan of gladiatorial combat in general, and of the Colosseum in particular, in modern culture (illustration 9).

Many of the other elements of the standard reconstruction of arena shows – whether in film, fiction, popular guidebooks or specialist accounts – are only slightly less tenuous. It is certainly the case, for example, that we have plenty of evidence for different types of gladiator, indicated by an array of carefully distinguished titles. Tombstones of fighters often specify this precisely. A wonderfully elaborate memorial from Rome commemorates a ‘Thracian’ from Alexandria, who came to Rome to take part in the shows in honour of the emperor Trajan’s victories in AD 117; he did not live to go home (illustration 10). Another commemorates a gladiator who came from Florence, who died after thirteen fights at the age of twenty-two leaving a wife and two children (and blunt advice to anyone reading his tombstone ‘to kill whoever you defeat’); he is said to have been a ‘secutor’ (‘Pursuer’). Meanwhile in poignant graffiti scratched on a wall at Herculaneum, a town that was to be buried under volcanic debris just as the building of the Colosseum in Rome was reaching completion, a gladiator vows his shield to the goddess Venus if he wins: his name is Mansuetus (a presumably ironic stage-name meaning ‘Gentle’); he describes himself as a ‘provocator’ (‘Challenger’). It is clear enough too that these different types attracted their own groups of fans. The emperor Titus was, according to Suetonius, a self-confessed supporter of the Thracians and enjoyed arguing their merit with the crowd, just like any fan – ‘though without losing his dignity or sense of justice’, Suetonius assures us. Not so his younger brother Domitian, who was a follower of the murmillones. On one occasion, a man in the audience was heard to hint that it was impossible for a Thracian to win while the emperor was using his influence to secure a victory for the ‘fish-heads’. In one of those mini dramas that must (in the telling, at least) have increased the excitement of the show, Domitian had him yanked out of the crowd and thrown to the dogs in the arena with an explanatory placard around his neck: parmularius impie. No translation can match the Latin’s brevity: ‘a Thracian fan, but sacrilegious’.

The trouble comes when we try to match up these different titles with the visual images of gladiators and gladiatorial fights in sculpture, graffiti, paintings and mosaics from places as far afield as Germany and Libya. For in the absence of any surviving ancient accounts which explain the typology, this is the only way that historians have hoped to work out the details of the different styles of costume and different fighting methods adopted by the various brands of combatant. Some distinct categories do emerge. There are clearly contrasting types of helmet. One, for example, seems entirely to cover the face apart from two tiny eye-holes. This is generally thought to belong to the secutor (title page). Others have a broad brim, and were probably worn by Thracians and murmillones (illustration 8, p. 57) – though the general absence of fish emblems makes some historians think that it was the overall ‘fishy’ shape that gave the murmillo his title. But most of the evidence resists easy categorisation. So, for example, despite their name, ‘Net-men’ are commonly shown with their tridents, but only very rarely shown carrying nets. Is this because ancient artists found nets a tricky subject to represent? Or because, however these fighters originated, by the first century AD (pace Gérôme) they no longer in practice used this particular piece of equipment very often? For other categories, it proves very difficult to see exactly what the difference between them might consist in. Was the Thracian the same as a ‘hoplomachus’ (‘shield-fighter’)? Or was there, as some archaeologists try to argue, a crucial variation in the shape of his shield? Were ‘Samnites’ just an earlier form of the murmillones? And what of those categories that are mentioned in literature or on tombstones, but never seem to be represented in images? Why can we find no images of the ‘essedarii’ (‘chariot-fighters’), so often referred to in written sources?

A telling case is one of the most startling and now most frequently reproduced images of any fighter in the arena: a unique bronze tintinnabulum (bell chimes) from Herculaneum, cast in the form of a gladiator attacking his own elongated penis which is half-transformed into a panther or wolf. Leaving aside the difficult questions of where this nightmarish creature might have been displayed, by whom and why – it is a favourite object among modern historians, who want to illustrate the complex identity of the gladiator, and especially the dangerous ambivalence of his sexuality, a subject we shall return to in Chapter 4. In killing the animal, this fighter will castrate himself. ‘There is no more apt icon for the Roman cosmology of desire, and the place of the gladiator within it,’ as one writer has recently put it. But is he a gladiator at all, in the strict sense of the word? His headdress certainly bears little resemblance to that in other images of gladiators. Maybe we should better see him as one of the beast hunters in the arena, a much less common subject of ancient art or literature. Or maybe – and this would fit with his strangely dwarfish physique – he is meant to be a theatrical or mime artist. For all his fame in modern accounts of gladiatorial combat, he is a classic illustration of just how hard it is to pin images of gladiators down.

The fact is that modern accounts which list and illustrate the different gladiatorial types plus their characteristic weapons, and define their particular roles in the arena (‘the usual tactics of the secutor were to try closing in on his adversary’s body with his shield held in front of him’, and such like), are at best over-zealous attempts to impose order on the wide diversity of evidence that survives. Different types of gladiators with different names there certainly were – but how exactly each one was equipped, what particular role they took in the fighting and how that differed over the centuries of gladiatorial display throughout the whole expanse of the Roman empire is very hard indeed to judge.

The question becomes even more tantalizing when we try to fit into the picture the authentic items of gladiatorial armour that still survive – splendid helmets, shields, protections for shoulders and legs (or perhaps arms: to be honest, it is not always clear exactly which part of the body the makers had in mind). There is a considerable quantity of this, most of it, about 80 per cent, from the gladiatorial barracks at Pompeii, excavated in the eighteenth century. At first sight, even if it is not from the Colosseum itself, this material provides precious direct evidence of what an ancient combatant in that arena would have worn, only a few years before the monument’s inauguration. And it matches up reasonably well with some of the surviving ancient images of gladiators. Yet it is far too good to be true… quite literally. Most of the helmets are lavishly decorated, embossed with figures of barbarians paying homage to the goddess ‘Roma’ (the personification of the city), of the mythical strongman Hercules and with a variety of other more or obviously appropriate scenes. It perhaps fits well with Martial’s emphasis on the arena’s sophisticated play with stories from classical mythology that one of these helmets (illustration 12) is decorated with figures of the Muses. It is also extremely heavy. The average weight of the helmets is about 4 kilos, which is about twice that of a standard Roman soldier’s helmet; the heaviest weighs in at almost 7 kilos. Add to this the fact that none of them seem to show any sign of wear and tear – no nasty bash where a sword or a trident came down fiercely, no dent where the shield rolled off and hit the ground. It is hard to resist the suspicion that these magnificent objects were not actually gladiatorial equipment in regular use.

Some archaeologists, predictably, have tried very hard to resist that suspicion, and have resorted to some desperate arguments in the process. Maybe this Pompeian armour was a new consignment, not yet knocked around in the arena. Maybe the short length of the gladiatorial bouts meant that such weight of equipment was manageable for these fit men; it was not, after all, like fighting a day-long legionary battle. Maybe – and this is where desperation passes the bounds of plausibility – the helmets were known to be so strong that no canny opponent would have bothered to take aim at them, hence their apparently pristine state. Maybe. But much more likely is that this armour was the display collection, used only perhaps when the gladiators paraded into the arena at the start of the show (to be replaced by more practical equipment as soon as the fighting started), or on other ceremonial occasions. It was the also the kind of equipment that would best symbolise the gladiator on funeral images or other works of art. Our guess is that what the spectator would actually have seen in the Colosseum or any amphitheatre was probably much less like the figure re-invented by Gérôme (who almost certainly had seen the Pompeian finds), and much more like the more lightly clad, though still recognisably ‘gladiatorial’, gladiators envisaged by de Chirico in the 1920s and the rather more nifty fighters depicted in the casual graffiti from Pompeii (illustrations 13 and 14). There is little reason to think that the gladiators regularly lumbered around the arena in their display kit (which would certainly have allowed no Russell Crowe-style balletics). Perhaps no more reason than to imagine that British university students regularly wear on campus the mortar boards, gowns and imitation fur in which they are dressed for those ceremonial graduation photographs, treasured in their parents’ photo albums.

But what, finally, of the standard programme of displays in the amphitheatre: animal hunts in the morning, executions at midday, gladiators in the afternoon (with the public gladiatorial dinner the evening before to allow the punters to study form)? It is quite true that each of these elements is referred to by ancient writers describing the shows. The question is whether or not it is right to stitch all these references together into a ‘programme’. This is a trap modern students of Roman culture often fall into: pick up one reference in a letter written in the first century AD, combine it with a casual aside in a historian writing a hundred years later, a joke by a Roman satirist which seems to be referring to the same phenomenon, plus a head-on attack composed by a Christian propagandist in North Africa; add it all together and – hey, presto! – you’ve made a picture, reconstructed an institution of ancient Rome. It is exactly this kind of historical procedure which lies behind modern views of what happened at a Roman bath or at the races in the Circus Maximus, or at almost any Roman religious ritual you care to name. And it lies behind most attempts to reconstruct the shows in the amphitheatre too.

Why is it usually assumed that the lunch interlude was the time for executions? Because the philosopher Seneca writing in the mid first century AD, before the Colosseum was built, in a letter concerned with the moral dangers of crowds, complains that the midday spectacles in some shows he had attended were even worse than the morning. ‘In the morning men were thrown to lions and bears, at noon to the audience,’ he quips. And he goes on to deplore the unadulterated cruelty, while explaining that its victims are criminals – robbers and murderers. That is the only evidence for the lunchtime executions (apart perhaps from a passing reference to ‘the ludicrous cruelties of midday’ in Tertullian’s Christian attack on Roman spectacles). In fact, there is just as much evidence for some kind of burlesque or comedy interlude at lunchtime. And that may have been what Seneca was expecting, when he writes that he was hoping for some ‘wit and humour’.

Why is it believed that gladiators regularly had a public meal the night before their show? Because a couple of Christian martyrs in the arena at Carthage in AD 203 were given ‘a last supper which is called a “free supper”’; because Tertullian again, rather puzzlingly, claims that he himself does not recline in public ‘like beast fighters taking their last meal’; and because Plutarch writing at the turn of the first and second centuries AD claims that although gladiators are offered expensive food before their shows, they are more interested (understandably we might think) in making arrangements for their wives and slaves. Maybe that is enough evidence to suggest a regular public, pre-show banquet; maybe not. There is certainly no evidence at all for the punters coming along to study form; in fact, we have no direct evidence at all for widespread betting on the results of this fighting. That is an idea that comes mostly from the imagination of modern historians, trying to make sense of the shows by assimilating them to horse racing, or to ancient chariot racing, which certainly did attract gambling.

Of course, the success of public spectacle depends, in part, on the audience having a general idea of what is going to happen. In that sense there must have been some shared foreknowledge of what was likely to be involved in shows in the amphitheatre: animal hunts, executions, gladiators, plus (on a very lucky day) more adventurous displays such as those mock naval battles. Certainly there is a quite a lot of evidence for the animal hunts often being scheduled in the morning (it might have been easier to keep the gladiators hanging around than the animals); and casual references to ‘the morning shows’ do usually seem to refer to the hunts and other animal displays. But success also depends on novelty and surprise. We must reckon that, rather than the rigid order of ceremonies often assumed, the performances at the Colosseum varied enormously according to the ingenuity of the presenter, the amount of money at his disposal, the practical availability of beasts, criminals or gladiators. After all, a hundred days of spectacles with executions each lunchtime would surely have soon exhausted the supply of condemned men and women, even in a society as brutal and cruel as Rome. These games must have been the same and different each time.

The Colosseum and its shows are the most familiar part of ancient Roman culture in the modern world. Films and novels, as well as serious scholarly accounts, present to us a relatively consistent picture of the performances in the amphitheatres. At the same time as we puzzle at the cruelty and the bloodshed involved, at why they did it, we feel relatively confident that we know roughly what it was they did. Most readers will be able to close their eyes and conjure an image of the Colosseum in full swing. That is why it is such an important monument in the history of modern engagement with ancient Rome. This chapter has tried to suggest that some of that confidence is ill placed. It is much harder than we often imagine accurately to recreate the scene in the killing fields of the Colosseum; still harder (as the extraordinary series of poems by Martial prompts us to reflect) even to begin to understand what it was the Romans themselves saw in this slaughter.

But happily, looking closer at the Colosseum is not only a matter of discovering that we know less than we thought. The next chapter will turn a shrewd eye towards some of the Colosseum’s cast of characters: from the gladiators again, through the lions to the emperor and audience, and to what we can tell of their reactions to what they witnessed. Of course, these were only part of the cast list. Apart from a handful of references on tombstones and other inscriptions to slaves and ex-slaves who looked after the costumes or guarded the gladiators’ weapon store, the vast slave battalions who serviced the building and its entertainments, the cleaners and gate-keepers, the wardrobe-mistresses and the odd-job men, are now completely (in the old catch-phrase) ‘hidden from history’. Nonetheless, if we change the focus of inquiry slightly and ask rather different questions of the evidence we have, we discover that we know more than we thought rather than less.