Animals in the Roman Arena
The number of the tamed animals in the amphitheatre is as astounding as the skill of their trainers. Plutarch, writing under Vespasian, says that the imperial games of Rome amply…
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, in Three Volumes, Vol. II by Ludwig Friedlander, 1908.
In the amphitheatre the animals were hunted, made to fight one another, and let loose on men; but some few harmless and rarer sorts were only paraded. They used to be decorated, as though for a sacrifice or procession. At the celebration of the decennalia in 263 two hundred tamed animals, variously bedecked, led the way to the Capitol, and 200 white bulls for the altar with gilded horns, and broad coverlets of coloured silk on their backs, followed by Gallienus himself: and pictures of sacrificial and amphitheatrical animals are preserved, showing them decorated in this fashion. Seneca prefers the lion, terrible in his natural beauty, to one with gilded mane and glittering with plate of gold. Lucilius and Juvenal speak of white-washed bulls brought up to the Capitol, and Pliny of sheep with purple and scarlet fleeces. At the sixth of the twelve performances given by Gordian I as Aedile at Rome, there were 300 ostriches tinged with vermilion, which were, with the rest, abandoned to the people.
The number of the tamed animals in the amphitheatre is as astounding as the skill of their trainers. Plutarch, writing under Vespasian, says that the imperial games of Rome amply exemplified animal intelligence and docility. Under Augustus even, animal-training had so far become a regular profession (practised in Alexandria more than elsewhere), that Manilius ascribed luck in it to one particular constellation.
Julius Caesar was escorted home by elephant torch-bearers, and Marcus Aurelius and Cytheris the dancer drove in a chariot drawn by a team of lions. Lions, panthers, bears, boars, wolves, tame and wild, were kept in the palaces of the emperors and nobles. Performing apes who acted plays, drove in chariots, rode on dogs, served to amuse the rabble.
Ancient tamers aimed at training animals in directions contrary to their nature. Wild bulls let boys dance on their backs, reared, or, together with horses, performed tricks in water, and, like charioteers, remained motionless in swift two-horsed cars. Stags were bridled, and pards yoked; cranes circled, and fought each other singly. Unwarlike antelopes bunted at one another to the death. Sea-lions were trained to greet the people by looking at them, and barked in answer to their names. Lions were as obedient as any dog; in Domitian’s spectacle they were set to catch hares in the arena, carry them back to their master in their teeth and let them loose anew. At the command of their dusky teachers elephants knelt, danced to the tune of the cymbals banged by a brother elephant, sat down to table; or four would carry a fifth in a litter like a woman in childbirth; or they would walk a rope and write Greek and Latin.
Pliny asserts that one of a troop which was being trained was a slow learner, and hence was often beaten; but could be heard by night practising his lessons. The Romans were tender of elephants, and found something human in their docility. At Pompey’s games a large number were killed, and the people were indignant and almost turned against Pompey.
And with the exhibitions of performing animals there alternated fights of wild ones: a rhinoceros and an elephant, a bear or a bull, an elephant and a bull and so forth. Natural savagery was artificially heightened. They were driven in to the sound of whips, pricked, hot irons applied, dolls of straw thrown in front of them, which they angrily tossed, or tied together with long ropes, and the people exulted at seeing them rend each other’s flesh. Similar, or greater barbarities have excited the popular passion of modern days, e.g., the Hetzhaus at Vienna, or at Madrid in 1853 the fight of the bull Senorito with a tiger, when the bull survived.
Also in the Roman amphitheatre, skilled and armed huntsmen with high-class hounds stepped in to fight the savage animals. The hounds were got from the greatest distances; in Strabo’s time, from Britain, then famous for sporting-dogs, which the Gauls used, besides their own, in war even. Symmachus, for his son’s quaestorian games, received seven Scottish hounds from Flavianus, which excited the admiration of Rome: it was said they had been brought in iron cages. The hounds were trained for the hunts; Martial says of a bitch Lydia, belonging to Dexter, that she had been educated by the masters of the amphitheatre.
Wearied by the harassing dogs, lions, panthers, bears and bisons fell before the arrows and javelins, in which last Moors and Parthians were especially proficient. Bears were sometimes seen killed by a fortunate blow on the skull, lions blinded by a cloak, and thus easily killed. Carpophorus, a huntsman celebrated by Martial, had laid low twenty savage animals at one exhibition; had he lived earlier, the poet says, his fame as an exterminator of monsters would have exceeded that of Hercules and all the heroes put together.
Bull-fights were popular in Greece and native in Thessaly: under the Empire they were a favourite pastime at Eleusis, Athens, Pergamus, Miletus, Smyrna and Lesbos; and, after Caesar’s introduction of them, they were frequent at Rome: the wild animals were irritated with red rags, and faced by matadors on foot, on horseback, who, after the Thessalian custom, wearied them out, and then dragged them down by their horns. Claudius made a division of the mounted Praetorians under their officers fight African panthers, and Nero made them fight 400 bears and 300 lions.
But another of the spectacles of the amphitheatre consisted in those frightful executions of men tied to stakes and defenceless, or—to prolong their torture—insufficiently armed and delivered to beasts, who were sometimes specially trained for the work. The victims with limbs torn asunder and covered with blood were seen begging, not for mercy, but delay of death till the morrow. Or their wounds were so huge that curious physicians had an opportunity (e.g. Celsus on Galen's authority) of seeing the interior of the body. And these scenes of horror were episodes on a stage, possibly to lesson the gruesomeness: but modern feeling is doubly shocked at mechanicians and artists being called in to set off and prolong the agonies of the delinquents.
Strabo mentions one of these spectacular executions. Selurus, a robber, called the son of Etna, as he had practised his trade there, had been condemned to death by the beasts: a scaffold was erected on the forum, on which he stood, and foundered, dropping Selurus into the cage, where he was soon devoured.
The Flavian Amphitheatre provided most amply for a full theatrical outfit of devices and scenery for the sights. A building near the Colosseum, erected, it may be, by Domitian, contained all the properties for imperial spectacles, and the administration of this summum choragium was entrusted to a procurator, who was also possibly appointed by Domitian, a freedman, ranking, however, with the procurators of the smaller provinces.
As at Puteoli and Capua (where the amphitheatres were perhaps used for imperial spectacles), the Colosseum was built on huge substructures, twenty-one feet below the present level. Into these underground chambers men, animals and machines could be conveyed unnoticed from the choragium by outside entrances, and at the Capuan amphitheatre, which is almost as large as the Flavian, there was room for a thousand men. Apollodorus, the architect, proposed to Hadrian to connect the substructures of his temple of Venus and Rome with those of the amphitheatre, to allow more space for the properties. Thus the whole scenery, and all the actors and animals, could be suddenly shifted, raised, lowered or made to disappear in the most surprising manner.
Roman mechanicians attained very great skill, and could easily lift their scaffoldings and ante-rooms into the air noiselessly, break them up and close them together again. At Severus' games in 202 the arena was transformed into a ship, which all at once broke up, and discovered a mass of the most various animals, bears, lions, panthers, ostriches, and bisons, who instantly assailed one another: during the seven days 700 animals were exhibited and killed. At Nero's performance, described by the poet Calpurnius, the ground repeatedly yawned open, and a magic wood of glittering bushes with fragrant fountains sprang into view, immediately to be inhabited by monsters of foreign climes, who emerged from the depths.
Theatrical and pantomimic performances also took place in the arena; only the actors were condemned criminals, who were practised in real and not illusionary torture. They appeared in precious tunics embroidered with gold and purple mantles with golden crowns; but, like the fatal gifts of Medea, these garments too suddenly burst into flame and consumed their unhappy wearers. Such inflammable stuffs were called by the populace tunica molesta, and, when in 64 A.D. the Christians were condemned to death for alleged complicity in burning Rome, they were tarred and resined, and used as torches at night, or wrapt in hides and torn by dogs.
Tertullian says men even hired themselves out to run a certain distance in a burning tunic. Perhaps there was no single torture or cruel death known to history or literature, not used to divert the Roman amphitheatre. ‘There,’ says Tertullian, ‘we have seen the castration of Atys, and a man burnt alive to represent Hercules’ living pyre on Mount Oeta’: a Greek epigram records a thief being burnt in this tragic fashion. Martial saw one culprit hold his hand over burning coals to represent Mucius Scaevola, till it was consumed: and a robber Laureolus, the hero of a well-known farce, was crucified and torn asunder by animals. He describes how the limbs slowly dropped off, and the body became shapeless, and consoles himself with the reflection that the sufferer must have been a patricide, a robber of termples, or guilty of arson and murder. And, at the same spectacle, another criminal appeared as Orpheus from the depths, re-emerging from Hades. Nature was enchanted by his playing, rocks and trees moved to greet him, birds hovered over him and animals crouched at his feet, and, after the spectacle had lasted long enough, he was torn to pieces by a bear.
Besides mythology thus heinously interpreted, there were indecent scenes; Europa or Pasiphae and the bull. Boys, as Cupids, flew up to the awning. And mythology was improved on: Daedalus was devoured by a bear, a Hercules borne up to Heaven on a bull. And then the arena became a lake, in which Leander swam to meet Hero, Nereids assembled in charming groups, and stars shone over the heads of the Dioscuri.
Friedlander, Ludwig. Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, in Three Volumes, Vol. II, George Routledge & Sons, Limited. 1908.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
