The rhinoceros had to be provoked. It stood in the middle of the arena, sluggish, ignoring the men around it, until the handlers finally goaded it into a temper — and then it put its head down and threw a bear into the air “as a bull tosses dummies from his head to the stars.” That line comes from Martial, a Spanish poet working the crowd in Rome, who wrote a whole little book to celebrate the shows in the Flavian Amphitheatre. The animal had been hauled across the Mediterranean from Africa to die in front of a city. First it had to be made to fight.
This was the morning entertainment, repeated day after day in the games with which Titus opened the building in AD 80 — a hundred of them, by Cassius Dio’s count.
The thing on the sand
Look only at the sand of the new arena, and the whole point of the games is already there. What lay and bled and was dragged off it, round after round, was the empire itself, brought to one building and laid out a piece at a time. The Colosseum’s first hundred days were a map made of corpses — a geography lesson written in blood, legible from the cheapest seats. Everything else about the spectacle is a detail of how that map was drawn.
The catalogue of species reads like a survey of the known world. Martial, who watched and wrote, names lions and leopards and a tiger, bears, boars down to a pregnant sow, bulls and bison and the animal he calls a bubalus, elephants, a doe with hounds at her heels, and the rhinoceros. Cassius Dio adds cranes. The animals on that sand had been pulled from every edge of the empire and beyond it: lions and leopards and elephants from North Africa and the Nile, the rhinoceros from somewhere deeper in the continent, bears from the cold forests of the north — Martial’s is a Caledonian bear, from what is now Scotland — and a tigress he places on the Hyrcanian ridge, the forests below the Caspian, deep in Parthian country.
To put a bear from the far northern frontier and a tiger from beyond the eastern one in the same arena was to make a statement no map could make as vividly: that one man’s reach ran from the Atlas Mountains to the shores of the Caspian — past the edge of the ground Rome actually governed — and could pull the most dangerous things alive out of any of it.
How the map was filled
None of this was cheap or easy. Capturing a leopard or a bear meant nets, pit traps, and specialist hunting units, some of them attached to the army. The animals had to be fed and kept alive across thousands of miles, herded to ports, loaded onto ships, unloaded at Ostia and brought up the Tiber, then penned in one of the walled animal compounds the Romans called vivaria until their morning came. Many died on the way, of stress and disease and the shock of strange climates. The expense was the emperor’s, and that was the point.
Cassius Dio, writing more than a century later but drawing on earlier records, gives the number that has stuck: animals tame and wild slain “to the number of nine thousand” over the course of the games. Suetonius, closer to the events, says five thousand beasts of every kind in a single day; Eutropius, later, gives the same five thousand as the total for the dedication. Every one of those figures is staggering, and all of them describe the same thing — a slaughter sustained day after day for over three months, the carcasses dragged out and the sand raked over between rounds.
The building that held it
The arena that swallowed all this was new. Vespasian had begun it around 70, on a site loaded with meaning: the drained lake of Nero’s Golden House, the private pleasure-park the last of the Julio-Claudians had built for himself in the heart of the city after the great fire. Vespasian, who came to power in the chaos after Nero’s suicide, tore the playground down and put up something for the public on top of it. He paid for it, in part, with the plunder of Jerusalem — the spoils of the Jewish War, the same campaign commemorated on the arch that would go up nearby, in Titus’s memory, after his death.
Vespasian died in 79 with the amphitheatre nearly finished. His son Titus completed the upper tiers and, in 80, opened it. The Flavian Amphitheatre — the name “Colosseum” came later, from a colossal statue of Nero that stood beside it — could hold something on the order of fifty thousand people. It was the largest amphitheatre Rome had ever raised, and a new dynasty with a thin claim to legitimacy needed to fill it with something the city would remember. What it filled it with was death on an industrial scale.
A contest, then a corpse
The hunts — the venationes — filled the mornings. Trained beast-fighters called bestiarii worked the arena with spears, and Martial built several of his epigrams around one of them, a man named Carpophorus. One poem has him spearing a bear, a leopard, and a lion of unheard-of size; in another the bubalus and the bison yield to him, and a lion flees him headlong into other men’s darts. In a third the poet measures him against the heroes outright: had the old ages produced Carpophorus, he writes, Marathon would never have feared its bull, nor the woods of Nemea their lion, nor Arcadia its boar — the monsters of myth reduced to a morning’s work for a professional. Man against animal, animal against animal — all of it was staged as a contest, and almost all of it ended the same way, with the animal dead.
Even the survivors served the message. Martial describes an elephant that, having beaten a bull, knelt before the emperor in the imperial box. No keeper had trained it to do this, the poet insisted; the beast simply felt the divinity in front of it and bowed. It is propaganda, and obvious propaganda, but it tells you exactly what the games were for. The wildness of the empire’s most distant frontiers, brought to Rome and made to die — or, better still, made to kneel.
The killing was not confined to animals. The midday slot was given over to executions, often dressed up as myth: a condemned man cast as Orpheus, or as the bandit Laureolus, hung on a cross Martial insists was not a stage prop and given to the Caledonian bear — the poet opens that epigram with Prometheus chained to his Scythian rock, feeding the tireless bird, and lets the bear take the bird’s part. The afternoons brought the gladiators. Dio reports that the arena was even flooded for a mock naval battle, ships floating where the hunts had run that morning, the crews impersonating Corcyreans and Corinthians; Suetonius puts the sea-fight in an older artificial lake across the city instead. Which of them is right is still unsettled — one engineering study reckons the aqueducts could have filled the arena in about an hour, while others doubt the building could have been made to hold water at all, and too little survives about how the Colosseum was operated to decide it.
Martial calls the emperor only “Caesar,” and that one vague word has cost scholars a great deal of argument. His book was long read as a straight record of Titus’s hundred days, but not a single epigram in it names Titus outright, and some of the poems — the rhinoceros among them — may describe shows Domitian staged in the same building a few years later. The collection is a reliable witness to what the amphitheatre was used for and an unreliable one about which emperor was watching.
What Rome was meant to see
Martial opened his book of the games by sweeping aside the wonders of the older world. Let Egypt stop boasting of her pyramids, he wrote, let Babylon say nothing of her walls, let no one praise the temple at Ephesus or the tomb at Halicarnassus. “All labor yields to Caesar’s Amphitheatre. Fame shall tell of one work in lieu of all.”
That was the frame the regime wanted, and the games inside delivered it in a language cruder and more direct than any poem. The pyramids said: we can stack stone. The Colosseum, in its first hundred days, said: we can reach across three continents, into wildernesses we do not even govern, seize the living things in them, ship them to a single building, and kill them in front of fifty thousand citizens for sport.
The nine thousand carcasses were the empire crossed off one animal at a time. On the last day of the games, Dio says, Titus wept so bitterly that the whole crowd saw him do it. Dio gives no reason. He was dead himself within little more than a year. The building outlasted the dynasty, the empire, and the wonders Martial had dismissed, and it is still standing.