Arena by John Pearson

Author:John Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

VII The Beasts

During the 1850s, the energetic French who ruled the city at the time upset the Romans and the romantic foreigners in Rome by clearing the arena of the Colosseum of the rich jungle of greenery that had been growing there for centuries and starting to excavate. Nobody knew quite what they would find, but it was generally thought scandalous to strip the Colosseum in this way. Only a year or two before, an English botanist had spent many happy hours identifying and listing over a hundred separate varieties of plant life in this small area. Some of them were rare; some even came from Africa and Asia and were not normally found in Italy at all. His theory was that they were the descendants of plants seeded there directly from the feeds brought for the African and Asian animals in the arena.

It seemed a far-fetched theory at the time, but it was reinforced by the discoveries of the determined Frenchmen. As they went ahead, their spades laid bare for the first time in centuries the centre of the Colosseum as it is today. The maze of walls and passages and cells under the arena revealed the ingenuity of this huge machine. Some of these subterranean areas had clearly been used for the scenery that contemporary accounts described rising up from the arena during the shows. Other parts housed the gladiators as they waited for their moment in the arena. But by far the largest part of this whole Colosseum underworld was used for animals. Careful detective-work was to reveal the ingenious arrangements that were made to produce these wild beasts in enormous numbers when they were needed on the floor of the arena. There were the dens, the ramps and even evidence of a large lift, worked with counterweights and pulleys, which carried the largest animals up to the arena.

These discoveries seemed to contradict contemporary accounts of the Colosseum. As we have seen, Suetonius’ report of the inaugural games described in detail how the arena had been filled with water for aquatic games and battles. This would have been impossible without flooding the cellars, and it is now thought that these underground works were added at the end of the second century, when the Colosseum was being reconstructed after the fire damage of AD 192. They must have changed the character of the shows. Nautical performances were no longer possible. Instead, the Colosseum must have been increasingly devoted to the great spectacles involving wild animals on a scale the world has never seen before or since – the venationes.

Although held in the same arena and often on the same programme as the gladiatorial shows, these venationes were quite separate from them. They had a different origin, a different purpose and were conducted, not by gladiators, but by specially trained hunters called bestiarii. The bestiarii were generally looked down on by the gladiators and had their own training schools. In the arena they wore none of the splendid uniforms

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