Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Colosseum About this episode Join Dan in Rome as he unravels the dramatic story of the Colosseum and the gladiators who fought — and died — for glory. From the origins of gladiatorial combat in funerary rites to the elaborate, politically charged spectacles of the Imperial era, Dan reveals what it took to reach the top and what really happened when a fighter lost.
Beginning in 64 AD with the Great Fire of Rome, he charts the rise of a new emperor, the construction of the colossal amphitheatre, and the ingenuity and brutality of the inaugural 100 days of games in 80 AD. Along the way, expert historians join Dan to separate fact from Hollywood fiction, bringing to life the greatest show on earth.
This is part of our series 'Dan Snow's Guide to Europe' and a version of this episode was released as a mini-series in November 2024.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore
You can watch Dan's documentary on Gladiators on our History Hit documentary channel - sign up at: https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
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Transcript 15,057 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:23 Dan Snow? Hi folks, I hope you're all enjoying my guide to Europe so far. We've been to Paris, we've been to Edinburgh, but you can't say you've done all the great sights of Europe without swinging into Italy and visiting the most iconic Roman site of them all: the Colosseum. Now, if you're a long time listener to this podcast, then firstly, thank you very much. And secondly, you remember that we were in Rome last year for the release of Gladiator 2? We made a mini-series all about the true history, the real history of the gladiators. We stripped away the mythology. And it was frankly so excellent that I just feel I ought to broadcast it again. So I'm gonna share it with you again. This time, we've turned it into one mega-episode, so it's well worth a listen. In fact, a re-listen, if you're on a particularly long journey. And if it's the first time, if you're new to the show, well, you're in for a complete treat.
3:08 Dan Snow? This is the story of the Colosseum of Rome. Enjoy.
3:20 Dan Snow? 64 AD. Rome was burning. A great fire swept through the city, destroying a third of it. Scholars trawled through the ashes of the forum, while mothers and fathers wept in the ruins of their family homes. The city was a shadow of its former self. To add insult to injury, what was gonna rise from the ashes was an opulent, golden palace. Not for the people, but for the emperor. The Domus Aurea, built for the Emperor Nero, with its lavish gardens and palatial halls,
4:02 Dan Snow? it would take up something like a third of the city's footprint. Rumours swirled as to whether Nero had started the fire himself as part of a land grab. It's no surprise that by the time he died, four years later, he was probably the most hated emperor yet. With his suicide, Rome was thrown into further chaos and misery. Three emperors temporarily filled the position, none of them presenting a lasting solution. It looked like Rome's grip on its empire might loosen with each change of emperor.
4:37 Dan Snow? But then, a new emperor emerged: Vespasian. A man of humble beginnings, whose judgement and self-discipline marked him out as a potential ruler.
4:51 Dan Snow? He vowed to restore Rome to its former glory. He wanted to create something new, something extraordinary that would show the people of Rome that the empire was as proud and indomitable as ever before. It would be an arena on a scale unlike anything seen before or since. A stadium fifty metres into the sky that could hold upward of fifty thousand spectators. A place where people from the furthest reaches of the empire would travel for days just to stand in its shadow. Where the greatest fighters would compete for adoration and freedom.
5:26 Dan Snow? Where Rome could demonstrate its dominion over its enemies and subordinates. It would sit at the heart of the city, purposefully on top of the foundations of what would have been Nero's palace. It was the Colosseum of Rome.
5:44 Dan Snow? This is the story of glory in the Roman Empire. Who had it, and who would do anything for it?
6:05 Dan Snow? The early autumn sun is bathing the city of Rome in a golden light. There's an energy here today, and that's the same energy that's drawn people here for millennia. The city cradled between its seven legendary hills that have witnessed a lot of history. The rise and fall of an empire, the birth of legends, the shaping of the Western world. Only in Rome do you find Michelangelo Renaissance masterpieces alongside imperial sites, like the Forum, the Pantheon, the Colosseum. And you get mad Baroque wonders like the Trevi Fountain. All of it just a stone's throw away really, from the HQ of the Catholic faith.
6:49 Dan Snow? Basilicas like St Peter's, St Paul's.
6:54 Dan Snow? Every corner of this city is a bewitching blend of art and faith and the echoes of distant past. You cannot walk through the streets here without feeling the weight of that history. And I say that everywhere, but it is truer nowhere more than Rome. The people that walked these streets, inhabited these palaces and worshipped these temples, shaped the world as we know it today. Rome slowly gained in power over five centuries, around about 500 B.C. Initially as a monarchy, then a republic governed by senators, building wealth through trading wine and olive oil and doing a bit of fighting as well. By about 27 B.C. it became one mighty empire ruled by a Caesar, an emperor.
7:39 Dan Snow? And it would rapidly go on to rule over an imperium, an empire, which included around a third of the population of the world at the time. That had its ups and downs over two, two and a half, three centuries. Before finally, and I know I'm stepping on a lot of historical landmines here, folks, a mixture of external enemies, internal schisms, all sorts of problems really, let it into decline and Rome, much as its former empire in the West, was conquered in about the 5th century A.D. by people previously regarded as barbarians. For around four centuries within that story, the Colosseum stood at the heart of Roman life.
8:21 Dan Snow? It is a marvel of engineering, completed in around eight years. It was a feat of astonishing ambition. It was designed by merging two semicircular theatres into one massive amphitheatre, the largest in the Roman world. Gleaming white from limestone, it was once adorned with brightly painted details. It was colourful. There were statues of Roman and Greek gods, Zeus. There was Jupiter and Hercules, Venus, all standing proudly in their arches in the middle stories, casting their gaze over the crowds below. In the Colosseum, men fought animals, they fought each other, the crowd roared them on. For the Romans, it was a straight old amphitheatre. It only became the Colosseum in the medieval period because of a colossal statue of the Emperor Nero
9:06 Dan Snow? that had once stood nearby. As spectators queued to get in clutching their tickets, they'd have passed by the feet of the gigantic statue. On the other side, the huge fountain, tumbling layers of water. I'm standing in front of it right now, looking up at it, and I'm alongside what seem like millions of tourists. And I know that everyone that comes here is just struck by the magnificence of the Colosseum. Similar emotions, I'm sure, to how our Roman forbears would have felt. And that, of course, was just the point, the Colosseum wasn't just built as a venue for gladiatorial games. It had an important political purpose. What doesn't, folks? Vespasian, the emperor who began it in around 70, 72 or so AD,
9:48 Dan Snow? thought this enormous building would help to cement his dynasty at the apex of the Roman world. Now, I'm going to stroll over to the Forum, I'm so happy I can say that sentence, to meet Dr. Shushma Malik, an expert in Roman history, to discover more about the origins of the Colosseum and the state of the empire in which it was built.
10:14 Dan Snow? Shushma, we're sitting on the Palatine Hill, we're looking down over Rome, over the Forum. It's the view the Caesar's had.
10:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's quite spectacular, isn't it? It's an amazing place to be to get a sense of Rome. I mean, the Forum, yeah, it's the place of the Caesar's, but it's also republican. And then there are all these layers of history that talk about the different kinds of cities that Rome is and has been.
10:37 Dan Snow? And up here, there's a nice little breeze. This is where Augustus chose to make his home.
10:41 Speaker 04 Yep.
10:41 Dan Snow? And most of the emperors followed the tradition?
10:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, a lot of the emperors followed that. It's a good place, it's up out of the city. It's, like you say, has a nice breeze.
10:51 Dan Snow? So in 70 AD? What's the state of the empire? Give me a quick audit.
10:55 Speaker 04 So in 70 AD, I mean, we talk about the imperial period and we talk about emperors, but actually, most of the Roman Empire was acquired before the emperors. So when Rome was still a republic. So Rome has been expanding. It went south to North Africa. It went east into Greece and modern day Turkey. It's got by this point as far as the Middle East. And then also, under Claudius, it went west to Britain as well.
11:20 Dan Snow? So it's the really big empire that we're recognised from all the endless maps. It's near enough its territorial peak, not quite, but near enough.
11:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's getting there.
11:28 Dan Snow? But the 60s have been a nightmare.
11:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, the 60s are difficult because we have at the beginning the Boudicton revolt in 62 is one of the things that the Emperor Nero has to deal with. I mean, Britain isn't necessarily the heart of the Roman Empire, but it's still something that needs to be sorted out. But actually, when we get into the mid 60s, if we're talking in Rome, there's the fire that happens in 64. There've been fires in Rome before, of course, but this was huge. This was a very big, big fire and it was devastating for quite a lot of the city. So that was a problem again that Nero then had to deal with afterwards. And he poured lots of money into it with a big building programme that helped to rebuild the city as well as his own palace,
12:15 Speaker 04 which gets remembered very well in the histories of the period.
12:19 Dan Snow? Now, Shashma, I know you're the world's leading expert on Nero. If you would just sum up Nero, does he deserve his shocking reputation?
12:27 Speaker 04 So Nero was the last of the Julio Claudian emperors. He ruled from 54 to 68 AD. He's in our history books, as it were, sort of painted as the opposite of the Emperor Augustus. He's very young, he's only 16 when he becomes emperor. He's characterised as being under the thumb of his mother and some powerful advisers. So he gets characterised as a sort of inexperienced person who politically is naive and then politically difficult when we get into his later empership. So he is someone who isn't necessarily the automatic choice of someone who would rule, but finds himself in this position and does things that some would say were popular with the people,
13:12 Speaker 04 was perhaps a bit difficult for the Senate on various occasions. But ultimately, he was criticised because... He was far too interested in luxury, he was far too interested in his own pursuits, he was far too interested in the theatre and far too interested in chariot racing for the likes of sort of Roman senators.
13:29 Dan Snow? He's a showman, not a fighter.
13:31 Speaker 04 It seems so, yes. In sixty-eight, he's declared a public enemy by the senate and takes his own life.
13:38 Dan Snow? And then, there is the year of the four emperors.
13:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the year of the four emperors is sixty-nine A.D. and that follows Nero's death. And what we have then is what the senate thought was going to be quite a good succession. So, when they decide to declare Nero a public enemy, they do have a plan, and the plan is supposed to be the rule of an emperor named Galba, who is the opposite of Nero in many ways. He's older, he's got a good military experience, he's got, you know, the support of his own legion behind him. But unfortunately, Galba is not particularly popular with the imperial bodyguard, as we sort of call them, the Praetorian Guard in Rome. Our sources say he doesn't pay them enough, he doesn't give them enough gifts.
14:20 Speaker 04 So, he is deposed, and then we have the emperors Otto and Vitellius afterwards, and then eventually the general named Vespasian wins out again with the support of the army, with the support of his legions in Egypt, and he becomes the first emperor of what we call the Flavian dynasty.
14:38 Dan Snow? So Vespasian's is going to be a pretty important figure in Roman history, right? Because he was a soldier, he was a, in my part of the world, he's famous for being the man who helped subdue what is now southern England, perhaps even conquered the Isle of Wight. But he was born outside royal circles, was he? Was he an aristocrat?
14:52 Speaker 04 So he became a senator. He is someone who, like you say, didn't come from a traditional sort of aristocratic background, but was rising in the political elite under the reign of Nero. And he fell out of favour with Nero, it seems, and that's why he was sent to Judea. So there was a war going on with Judea in the late sixties A.D. and he went there. But he is someone who has both military experience and some political experience as well, but he's not perhaps what we would imagine as a natural successor to found the next dynasty. But then, it's not clear who a natural successor may be. Maybe would have been, we're in new territory. But then part of what Vespasian can do is sort of put his stamp on things.
15:34 Speaker 04 He can instigate a building programme, he can talk about a rejuvenation, right? So we've had the last of the Judeoclaudians, we've had this horrifically traumatic period, and now we're coming into the reign of a new dynasty. And that's not easy to see as a transitional point. So part of the way that he made that transition work was through things like buildings.
15:55 Dan Snow? So he launches big building projects. What's he doing there? Is it about actually trying to please the people of Rome, sort of strengthen his grip on power? Is it about his own prestige? What's going on?
16:06 Speaker 04 So part of what Vespasian is probably doing is, well, finishing some of the building projects that Nero had started. So Nero, of course, is rebuilding Rome when he died. He needs to think about kind of what he wants Rome to look like himself. But also he has the money behind it. So that war in Judea, the spoils of that war, which includes selling prisoners of war into enslavement, that is part of what paid for, a big part actually, of what paid for this building programme that Vespasian put into place that then gave the people a different, perhaps, sense of the space in Rome. So the lake of Nero's golden palace was the place where the Colosseum was built.
16:47 Dan Snow? He's allowing the public back into what had been, well, a place where Nero had been planning his slightly grandiose imperial projects.
16:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, and there's probably a case to be made that Nero would have opened parts of his house to the public as well, to have sort of spectacles there. But this is giving it, I guess, symbolically back into the public hands. But we shouldn't really overlook the fact that the Colosseum or the amphitheatre is also an immensely political space. So it's somewhere the emperor can be seen, it's somewhere that people can go and shout at the emperor, petitioning the emperor, where they can have visibility but also, you know, contact with the imperial family. So it has a range of functions as a space.
17:30 Dan Snow? Vespasian decides he's going to build an amphitheatre, but unlike any other amphitheatre in the world, this is of ginormous scale. What's he doing there?
17:38 Speaker 04 So he's putting his sort of stamp on that space, re-appropriating that Neronian space. There's a whole set of things that go along with the idea of the opening of the Colosseum. Games can be thrown, spectacles can be thrown, the re-enactments of battles that people haven't seen before. And it's also a place where... The empire can sort of be on show as well. So there's sorts of animals that you could get because Rome has an empire. And you can go into the centre of Rome, into the Colosseum and see them.
18:07 Dan Snow? So it brings the empire to the Roman population?
18:09 Speaker 04 It does. The really big games do. I'm not saying on a daily basis, but the big games.
18:14 Dan Snow? What's at stake here? Vespasian has witnessed his three predecessors meet terrible ends in a very short amount of time. Is there a sense that you need to keep Rome satisfied, happy, overawed, calm? Otherwise, well, his life, that of his dynasty, could be in danger.
18:32 Speaker 04 So one of the things that Vespasian was able to do that's really important to understanding kind of the relationship, I think, between emperors and the people in Rome is that he could show himself to be a good benefactor. So benefaction was a huge way that the emperor interacted, not only with the people in Rome, but also with the wider provinces. So for Vespasian, it's going to be, and is, a very big part. He needs to show himself as worthy, if you like, of that, to have found a new dynasty, to be a successor of some of the Judeo-Claudians.
19:01 Dan Snow? How unusual was it? I mean, were there other amphitheatre in Rome?
19:04 Speaker 04 Not at the time the Flavian Amphitheatre, that we call the Colosseum, was built. There had been temporary wooden structures and then a stone one was built, but it was destroyed in the fire of 64. So also, it's something that Vespasian could do. It's another entertainment space. We have theatres and we have the Circus Maximus, but this is Rome's amphitheatre.
19:24 Dan Snow? We're sitting here on top of the Palatine. The Colosseum is so remarkable from here. Such a, it really does dominate the landscape. It was an incredibly ambitious thing to do by Vespasian, wasn't it?
19:37 Speaker 04 So part of what emperors do is build things that are bigger and better than their predecessors. So someone like Vespasian is thinking about making something that's spectacular, that's more beautiful than the previous dynasty had. But it is significant, perhaps, that no one else builds an amphitheatre quite like Vespasian did.
19:55 Dan Snow? So the bar was now so high, it could not be heightened?
19:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, and it lasted as well. I mean, we can sit here now and, yes, there's ruins, but there's also quite a considerable, when you think of what's happened in Rome in the intervening centuries, millennia, there's still quite a lot of it that has survived.
20:13 Dan Snow? It's difficult to comprehend the scale of the task. It's only getting up close that you realise just how enormous and complicated the Colosseum is. But the Romans were ingenious builders. With eighty archways on that iconic external wall, the arena is made up of roughly 100,000 cubic metres of travertine stone and over 300 tonnes of iron clamps to hold it all together. Its foundations plunge 40 feet into the earth, into the site of a drained lake. They rely heavily on a substance of the Romans' own devising: concrete. Even their method for lifting the enormous stone blocks onto the higher levels was a feat of engineering in itself.
20:57 Dan Snow? I met Dr Simon Elliott, a leading Roman historian, at the Colosseum to find out just how they did it.
21:07 Dan Snow? Why is it such an amazing building?
21:09 Speaker 05 The Colosseum is unique, in a sense, because it's twice the size probably as any other amphitheatre in the Roman world. 65,000 people, Dan, it is immense.
21:20 Dan Snow? What technological hacks allowed them to build on this scale?
21:24 Speaker 05 Well, it's a great example of the Romans nicking ideas from other people. And one of the ideas they nicked was the vuswar arch. So you have your spring line, your vuswar, the curved sections of the arch, the keystone locking everything together in the middle. And it's such a clever technique for building because you can stack arches on top of arches on top of arches. And so if you look at the Colosseum, the Colosseum is basically a series of arches. The really interesting thing actually is that in terms of building techniques, they've used lots of different building designs from around the Roman world, all together in one place. So you can see representations of columns between the arches, but on the bottom, they're the most basic kind of column, which is the Doric column, just with a flat plinth. And then the second row of vuswar, the columns in the middle,
22:09 Speaker 05 they are Ionian columns, with a beautiful scroning at the top. But then, on the third level of vuswar arches, the columns in the middle, are Corinthian columns with a really fancy tops. So you go, basic... All right, amazing. So it's all about showing sort of every aspect of the Roman world.
22:26 Dan Snow? And presumably then those arches, as well as being very strong and light, they let the light in and the air. I mean, it doesn't get too stuffy in there.
22:33 Speaker 05 I think in actual fact, the key thing here, Dan, is actually letting the air in because actually, if you think about it, effectively it's a stone bowl in the middle of a country that's not cold. So for the majority of the year, it's actually going to be just like it is today with the blazing sunshine. It's going to be exceptionally, exceptionally hot in there. So you want every means you can of letting air in. And of course, the archers, classic. So not only did the archers make the Colosseum, they also cool the Colosseum.
23:00 Dan Snow? How do they make it so high? Are we talking cranes or scaffolding or great ramps of earth?
23:05 Speaker 05 A bit of both. So the Romans used two kinds of crane when they're building. So they use an A-frame crane, which is exactly what you find engineers using around the world today. But also they use a tread wheel crane. The tread wheel's powered by a tread wheel, literally a tread wheel in the middle, which is powered by slaves.
23:23 Dan Snow? Like a hamster wheel.
23:24 Speaker 05 Exactly right. The slaves treading on a wheel. The beauty of the tread wheel crane is scalable. So you can make it as big as you want within reason. So for the majority of the Colosseum, you'd be able to get to the top, probably using a tread wheel crane. If you had something which was too big, then what they would do is use scaffolding. So smaller A-frame, medium to large tread wheel, very large scaffolding.
23:53 Dan Snow? And you can always mount cranes on that scaffolding presumably as well.
23:56 Speaker 05 You can, Dan, but personally, I wouldn't want to work on one of them.
23:59 Dan Snow? Is it really the same in many ways in function and form as a modern stadium?
24:04 Speaker 05 Absolutely, yeah. So let's take for example the Olympic Stadium in Rome itself. So the Olympic Stadium, home to Roma and Lazio, in the Olympic Stadium, you have a roof. You have-
24:15 Dan Snow? And the Colosseum had a roof.
24:17 Speaker 05 Colosseum did have a roof. It had sails, vella, sails. So it has banks of seating and it has the arena where the football's played. It has exactly the same banks of seating and it has the arena, in this case, where people killed each other.
24:31 Dan Snow? And getting in and out?
24:33 Speaker 05 In a modern arena like the Olympic Stadium, you have big gates, you get in and out of the stadium. The Roman Colosseum is exactly the same. Of course, in the Colosseum they were called vomitorium, because you vomited people in and out. That's where our word vomit comes from today.
24:46 Dan Snow? I love that, the vomitorium. The way that we get people in and out of stadiums, sort of through the banks of seats. It's charming, that's a Roman idea. Do you know how much this would have cost? And do Roman emperors, a bit like the sort of American Congress, they did just write their own cheques? I mean, is there any way in which there's actually lint and that gold in the imperial treasury?
25:04 Speaker 05 Well firstly, the Roman treasury is called the fiscus, and that's the emperor's fiscus treasury. So the emperor is in charge of the treasury. That treasury pays for every public aspect of Roman life. It could pay for building public buildings, it could pay for the games themselves, it certainly pays for the military, which is usually what the emperor needs to keep him in power. So the fiscus treasury is central to the Roman emperor's success. However, there's a double blind here for the spectators in the Colosseum, because the fiscus treasury is filled with money from tax. The people who pay the tax are the people, like the people of Rome. So they're paying the taxes for the emperor to spend the money they give the emperor to show off to them.
25:40 Dan Snow? Is there a sense in which though, if a successful military campaign or you loot an enemy's capital, does money flow in? Do emperors tend to spend big money on, after those kind of fiscal events?
25:52 Speaker 05 An emperor would spend bigger and bigger and bigger, the more he needed to secure himself in power. So often you get a series of games taking place when an emperor takes power. So he can show off, I'm the new guy, I'm the rich guy, I can actually really look after you. And also, if he has a military defeat, again, distracting the masses. Or if there's a major event like a plague or an economic crash, he's distracting the masses.
26:19 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. The best is yet to come. Stick with us.
26:34 Dan Snow? Vespasian wanted the Colosseum built in a mere ten years. That would require an astonishing amount of manpower. But for the Romans, that wouldn't be a problem. In the first century, the Roman population was roughly fifty million, spread across the empire. It's believed that ten to twenty percent of that were slaves. That's five to ten million individuals.
26:58 Speaker 05 Slavery was an intrinsic part of Roman society. Slaves were at the bottom of society, then freedmen, who were freed slaves, and then free men, who had never been slaves, and then aristocrats. So it's an absolutely normal part of Roman society. In the Roman world, probably one in ten people is a slave, right? If it gets any more than one in ten, it becomes a bit problematic because the Romans were terrified of slave revolt. So everyone's heard of Spartacus, but the Spartacusian slave revolt was the third servile war or revolt. So the Romans were terrified of slave revolt, so about one in ten is the norm.
27:29 Dan Snow? Where are these slaves coming from?
27:31 Speaker 05 So it depends what kind of slave you're talking about, Dan. So in a Roman household, your kids could be taught by a grammarian, who might be a slave from the Greek-speaking world. If you're talking about working in the metallae, mines and quarries, there could be prisoners of war. So they're coming from the far north of Britain, what we call today Scotland, or from the far north of Germany, north of the Rhine or Danube, or they could be coming from the eastern frontier, they could be Parthians, or they could be coming from south of the African frontier, they could be Berbers. Basically, there are people who are beyond the fringes of the Roman world, who are captured in conflict.
28:02 Dan Snow? And would it work a little bit like the Elizabethan slave traders going down to West Africa? Would you not just capture them directly with Roman arms, but would you buy them off trans-Saharan networks and things like that as well?
28:13 Speaker 05 Absolutely. It's interesting that Britain in the Roman world was famous for a variety of exports before the Roman conquest, one of which was slaves.
28:23 Dan Snow? So Britain's part of this Roman trading network before it's incorporated formally into the empire?
28:27 Speaker 05 Absolutely, and part of the trade are slaves. Absolutely normal. Remember when Caesar conquered Gaul? He famously killed a million and enslaved a million. So you can imagine a million enslaved Gauls. Suddenly start flooding the slave markets in Italy. At the end of the Symbion Wars in the one twenties and one tens B C. Again, the Symbion were Germans. The slave markets in Rome were flooded with German slaves. So this is millions of people being captured and then sold as slaves.
28:56 Dan Snow? Obviously, there were loads of different kinds of slaves. Is it possible to say what slaves' life was like?
29:00 Speaker 05 So being a slave is not a good thing. You don't exist in terms of your own agency. You have no power over your own future. That being said, in the Roman world, a slave could earn money. And a slave could be manumitted, so they could be freed. And they'd get freed for two reasons. One is they would buy their freedom from earning money. Or two, because their master decided that he'd free them for good service. So you could be freed. And once you were manumitted, you became a freed man. Now, a freed man could do everything in Roman society. So in the Roman world, a freed man, a freed slave, could become fabulously rich. So the father of the Emperor Pertinax, the son of a slave who became the Roman emperor.
29:43 Speaker 05 His father was a multimillionaire running a logging business in the Po Valley, who had started life as a slave. Now, the interesting thing for these freed men is they were Roman citizens. They could vote, they could do most things that Roman citizens could do, but they could not stand for public office.
30:02 Speaker 05 Now, for a Roman citizen, standing for public office was a way of showing how successful you'd been. And the freed men, that's a lot of people, by the way, couldn't do that. So what they did was monumentalize their success in life through their funerary monuments. So if you go to Pompeii and you go through the Herculaneum Gate, there's row after row, as the road goes towards Herculaneum, of monuments, funerary monuments, mausoleums, tombstones and things. Most of them are actually from freed men, freed slaves, to show how successful they've been in life. Because they couldn't have the inscriptions around the forum saying, oh, I've been this magistrate or that, because they weren't allowed to stand for any magistrate.
30:40 Dan Snow? The slaves were unable to buy their freedom. I mean, presumably, some conditions would have been horrific. Life would have been nasty, brutish and short.
30:45 Speaker 05 Certain kinds of slaves had terrible, terrible, terrible lives. So within the Roman criminal justice system, one of the punishments was to be condemned or enslaved to work in the matala, which are mines and quarries, for the rest of your life. Which means you go in the hole and you don't come out.
31:08 Dan Snow? So to what extent can we say that Roman imperial might was built on the back of this slave labour, presumably the iron of a weapon's been quarried in mines like that? So I mean, it's without that slave class, Rome wouldn't have been what it was, what it became.
31:22 Speaker 05 In our world, we rely without thinking on technology to do things for us. It's just there and it just happens. I want to make an espresso in the morning, I put the pot in and I press a button and I've got a coffee because the machine's doing the work for me. And I go in a car, which is computerised, a train, which is computerised, or a plane, which is computerised. And I don't think about it. It just happens. It's exactly the same in the Roman world, switching out technology for slaves. It just happens. So I wake up in the morning in my fine townhouse and it's clean because the slaves have cleaned it. It just happens. I have an amazing dinner cooked in the Calina kitchen of my townhouse by the slaves and
32:07 Speaker 05 it just happens. I don't think about it. They are the modern equivalent in a Roman context of our technology.
32:14 Dan Snow? And I guess Rome can swell to a million people because fresh water can be brought in, sewage can be pumped out, all because of aqueducts and sewers built by slaves?
32:21 Speaker 05 Absolutely, yeah. So they're built by slaves. So you might ask yourself the question, what's in it for me as a slave to build an aqueduct supplying water to Rome? Well, because you have a terrible life anyway. It's because of what happens to you if you misbehave as a slave. So you could end up in the arena or you could get sent down the metalla. Interestingly, crucifixion in the Roman world was an execution specifically designed only for slaves, only for slaves. So when Christ was crucified, it was deliberately portraying him as a slave. The Romans were showing him as the bottom of society. So you could end up with the most brutal death of many kinds of brutal death, which is a crucifixion.
33:05 Speaker 05 And if you go on the far side of the Esqulion Hill, outside the Serbian land walls, there's a specific area, which in the early imperial period was where the bodies of crucified slaves were chucked in burial pits, which all had to be dug up about a century later when the city expanded and they had to dig up the burial pits for crucified slaves.
33:26 Dan Snow? What about the workers on the Colosseum, bin slaves?
33:28 Speaker 05 I would have thought nine tenths of them.
33:30 Dan Snow? And what did you think that experience was like? Would they try and look after them because they were quite skilled or were they quite disposable?
33:35 Speaker 05 Well firstly, they are disposable. And there's a never ending flow of slaves when you need them, you know, you need 10,000 men to help build the Colosseum, well, I'll have 10,000 slaves. As many as you want, it's all scalable and it's absolutely normal. So if the button was pressed by the emperor, I need 10,000 slaves to build the new amphitheatre, then you get them.
33:55 Dan Snow? Do you have any idea how many people might have died constructing the Colosseum?
33:59 Speaker 05 No, but it would be thousands and thousands and thousands. And the really poignant thing is these are people who live lives in the same way we live lives today, and there's no record of them. So it's a really important point I always make, Dan, when I'm going around any Roman amphitheatre, which is glorified in modern culture through movies like Gladiator. Most people think it's fun, but it's not, it's a terrible place. It's a place of industrial scale, public murder, effectively. That's just what happens in the arena, but the people building it are dying all the time as well, and they don't matter.
34:34 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History, there's more coming.
34:42 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us, mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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38:03 Dan Snow? Slavery is central to the story of the Colosseum. From the labourers who no doubt keeled over in the heat, building it, to the victims of the spectacular show deaths. But slaves also played another role in the Colosseum. They were, often, the gladiators, owned by the gladiator schools. Most were killed in battle, died of wounds, or lived a life of indentured servitude to the owner of the school. But the few who were resilient, strong enough to make it to the top, lucky and skillful enough to keep winning, well, they had an opportunity to gain their freedom, granted by the emperor.
38:51 Dan Snow? It seems that the first gladiatorial fight, or at least the first on record, took place around 264 BCE, at the funeral of Senator Junius Brutus Pera, where six warriors fought in pairs in a sort of tribute to honour the dead. Over the decades, the ritual aspect gradually faded, and what started as more reverent custom grew into a form of popular entertainment. By around 183 BCE, it had evolved into the kind of larger public event we'd recognise. As Rome transformed from republic to empire, gladiatorial combat became formalised, evolving into an organised sport hosted by wealthy patrons and emperors,
39:36 Dan Snow? moving entirely away from its roots as funerary games. And it was during this imperial era that lots of specialised gladiator schools emerged, known as familiar gladiatoria, a system where fighters trained and lived under strict discipline, with attention paid to their diet and healthcare. After all, these were the premier league footballers of the day. If you visit Rome today, you can get an idea of what it would be like to go to gladiator school, albeit a modern one, slightly less brutal, which you can leave whenever you want. It's exactly what I'm going to do now, to see what it takes to get into the arena, because not everyone has what it takes to be a gladiator.
40:19 Dan Snow? This is historian and gladiator expert Alexander Mariotti.
40:26 Dan Snow? Okay, Alexander, we've come to, well, it is literally a gladiator school. Only in Rome do you have a gladiator school.
40:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, ludus, of course. You know, it's an opportunity to learn what the sources don't tell us. That's the great thing about coming to a place like this, is you can try the weapons, you can try the helmets, and you get a physical knowledge which we are missing. When you read the sources, you don't get that part.
40:51 Dan Snow? How are gladiators chosen? Are they just slaves captured in combat?
40:55 Speaker 05 No, absolutely not. We know that by 75 B.C., half of gladiators are freedmen. But what we also know is that there was a certain requirement of physicality to become a gladiator. You just couldn't get anybody to become a gladiator. You had to have the right stuff. You had to be physically the specimen, the right kind of specimen. But we also know that they're chosen the same way the Olympic athletes are chosen. So Philostratus tells us that when you get an athlete, you look at him, you study his body, you know what kind of athlete he's going to be. Apply that to gladiators.
41:23 Dan Snow? And why? Because different styles of fighting demand different physics.
41:26 Speaker 05 So for example, if you're going to be a gladiator that fights with a net and trident, the retiarius, you've got a piece of armor called the galera, which is just a shoulder pad made of metal, and that's it. That's all the armor you have. So you don't have a helmet, which is wonderful if you're a good-looking guy. In fact, if you have the right attributes, also in being handsome, then you're going to be a crowd pleaser. But if you're going to be a secutor or a marmella, these are the heavy sets, they've got big helmets that encompass the entire head, they've got a big shield, and they had to be physically kind of like heavyweight boxers. They had to be big guys, able to sustain the weight of the armor and be able to fight effectively with it.
42:03 Dan Snow? Okay, so cast your expert eye over me. What would, which one would I have been?
42:08 Speaker 05 Oh, definitely retiarius. You've got the...
42:10 Dan Snow? A tall, skinny guy?
42:10 Speaker 05 A tall, slender, but you've got the looks as well.
42:14 Dan Snow? Yes!
42:15 Speaker 05 The ladies are going to love you. You might become like Calitus. Calitus is a famous heartthrob of the ladies, whose writings on the walls of Pompeii have survived, telling us that he's the netter of the ladies. He's a crowd favorite.
42:29 Dan Snow? Yeah, I'm sure he was also a 46-year-old guy with a bad back. That makes absolute sense. But then I'm very lightly armored. I feel a bit naked going into that fight.
42:38 Speaker 05 Well, you're lightly armored, but you've got a huge advantage to yourself, which is that you don't have a helmet that is, one, obscuring your view. Secondly, it's not restricting your breathing, because the big helmet encompasses the head. Provides great protection, yes, but at the same time makes it very hard to breathe and very hard to see. So that it's the advantage and the disadvantage.
42:58 Dan Snow? Imagine we were back in ancient Rome, how would this gladiator school have operated?
43:02 Speaker 05 So you had barracks where people could stay. So obviously the slaves didn't stay there. If you're a freedman, you might actually live at home and then come and train in certain days and stay the ludus closer to the match. You had barracks, you had a mess hall where you could eat, you had um you had a medical center. You actually had an infirmary, so you had an on-site your doctor and that that tells us a lot about gladiators.
43:24 Dan Snow? So actually, rather than condemned slaves, we think of them more as, well, premiership footballers, I mean, highly trained athletes.
43:30 Speaker 05 They're the first superstar athletes of history, more so than the Olympians. The sense of a modern superstar, of a modern athlete, has a wide reach. You just have to look at footballers, if a footballer's playing, people will go to that match. Gladiators had the same draw, Olympians did not. They didn't go throughout the whole empire. The thing about gladiatorial combat is that your name was known throughout the empire. If you're a superstar in Rome, you're a superstar for sixty million people. One-third of the world's population likely knows who you are.
44:00 Dan Snow? And what would the training regime have been like in these places? Pretty brutal?
44:05 Speaker 05 Absolutely. I mean, what we know about it is that the training is so intense that they start using the same training for the Roman army. And we're talking in republican times. So you've got people like Scipio Africanus. He's using the same training they're using for the gladiators to train the soldiers. So military training and gladiatorial training was on a par. And that tells you just the high degree that these athletes were put through to make them into champions of the arena.
44:29 Dan Snow? Do we have any idea how they trained?
44:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, the sources don't specifically mention gladiatorial training, but we're very lucky because we have Vajetius, a Roman writer, who tells us about military training. And as we know, they're symbiotic. So we know the kind of systems they used. He says, in fact, that no man on the arena or the battlefield can become successful without fighting against the palace. So the palace is a wooden post, like a wooden dummy, and you were taught, kind of moves as you would in any martial art reading. You're taught a series of hooks and jabs, of swipes. You're taught what we call katas in karate. But what we also know is they're using a system called the tetrad. So it's a four-day split. Already the Greek athletes, they have training programs, yearly training programs.
45:12 Speaker 05 It's kind of like gym culture today. And they have diets to go along with.
45:17 Dan Snow? So the gladiators would have been given the same thing. So they had a thing called pulse. It was like a stew almost, you know, I always think about the stew that they give to sumo wrestlers to sort of beefing them up and kind of very similar, mostly barley, grains. Okay, so I'm at the ludus, I'm training hard, I'm eating well. Yep. And I've got my net and I've got my trident. Is there a tournament? Is it like a knockout? How do I advance? Well, you start with a couple of exhibition matches, just to get yourself known. Your ultimate goal is you want to fight in the Colosseum. The Colosseum's the big time. It's Wembley, it's the Super Bowl, it's, I mean, you've got the largest crowd. You've got more than likely about 85,000 people. That's a crowd. And how electric, the moment you walk through, they're going to cheer your name. It's intoxicating.
46:01 Dan Snow? So you have the draw as to why you want to do it. So, once you've done a couple of exhibition matches, you have to become a crowd pleaser. You've got to win the crowd. So you probably learn a couple of techniques that would separate you from your opponents. But also you make appearances. So there's parades three days before the fight where the gladiators walk through the streets and so people get to see their heroes. Maybe a politician's getting elected, so he's going to hire you out to appear there. And it's just about getting your name out there so that people want to see you. They say, I want Danachus to be in the Colosseum because I'm only going to go to the games if he's there.
46:38 Dan Snow? So close your fist and get yourself, there we go, in a good position and just start swinging, almost like a figure eight. Here we go. I'm getting the hang of this. Right, you've got to, you've got to keep going, swing open, open. Give me the trident. Nice. Oh, no, yikes. I'm going to do that. Blah, I've lost it.
47:05 Dan Snow? Seventy-eight A.D. Two years from completion, the Colosseum already towers over the surrounding buildings. But then tragedy strikes. Emperor Vespasian dies. His vision for Rome and this monumental arena passes to his son, Titus. For the first time in the empire's history, the throne is inherited from a father by a biological son. A powerful bond of blood. It was now the next era of the Flavian dynasty. Titus, determined to honour his father's dream to restore Rome's glory, vows to finish the Colosseum. He promises not just a spectacle, but a triumph of grandeur, a statement heard in every corner of the empire.
47:47 Dan Snow? In 80 AD, he announced 100 days of games to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. Thousands of executions, exotic animals, and of course, the best gladiators from all over the Roman world.
47:59 Speaker 05 Okay, so I've been training really hard here in Gladiator School. I can use the net and everything. I'm set to compete on the biggest of biggest stages, the Colosseum. Meanwhile, my producer, Mariana, who you'll have heard me talk about on this podcast before, she's my biggest fan at NACH. So as I prepare for the fight of my life, she's going to find out what it would be like to go to the games and watch me compete.
48:24 Speaker 04 I've settled in for a whole day of entertainment, which is great for the authorities because it means I'm not on the street causing trouble. So Simon, can you just give me a rundown of what a day at the Colosseum would be like?
48:35 Speaker 05 So you turn up about sort of nine o'clock, queuing with your ticket to get in, and then you're settling your seat by 10 o'clock. And around 10 o'clock, through one of the main gateways onto the arena floor, you'd have the procession, the big procession, which would feature a lot of the participants in all of the various activities of the day. Touring round and round and round the arena floor. And then, they would all go back, getting ready to perform whatever they're going to do, all part of the theatre of the arena. And then, you would have an hour or two of beast hunts. Always the same in every Roman amphitheatre, anywhere in the Roman world. You'd have beasts imported from across the entirety of the Roman Empire. Remember, this is an empire that spans three continents. So you're talking about lions, and tigers, and bears, and panthers, and elephants.
49:20 Speaker 05 Famously ostriches. So for example, the Roman Emperor Commodus, his favourite sport when he was the emperor in the arena, and he did participate in the arena fighting drugged animals and drugged gladiators. But his favourite entertainment for himself in the arena was to fire arrows with a sickle-shaped head to Chop the heads off running ostriches. On one famous occasion, he chopped the heads off a hundred ostriches. And then famously picked one up and waved it in front of the senators who were watching. Waves the ostrich hedge up and down and goes, "Ow, ow, ow." If you don't behave, then this will happen to you as well. And then he laughed, and all the senators had to laugh because they had to pretend he was funny because it's the emperor. So it's basically hunting beasts for entertainment. It's interesting to consider how the beasts ended up in Rome in actual fact.
50:04 Speaker 05 Because you're talking about, there's a hundred days of games, that's tens of thousands of animals. How did they get to Rome? Well, it was an industrial scale operation across the empire. Let's look at North Africa. Everywhere you go in Roman North Africa, you can find mosaics which show beasts being hunted in the wild to get put in cages to then be sent to Rome to appear in the Colosseum. So the beast hunts were fed by an industrial scale hunting operation which was empire wide.
50:31 Speaker 04 And is it the case that certain factions of the Roman army were notorious for capturing different animals?
50:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, it all depends on where you're based. I mean, in this phase of the empire we're talking about with Titus and Domitian. It's the pre-cumulate phase of empire, so that's the first half of the Roman Empire. So in this phase, the military were largely based around the borders of the empire on the frontiers, either conquering new territory or defending territory. And therefore, where they were based mitigated what kind of beasts that they would hunt.
50:59 Speaker 04 So there's a bit in Gladiator two where one of the gladiators comes in on the back of a rhino. Is that something that would have happened or is that just Hollywood?
51:08 Speaker 05 That's pure Hollywood, but it's interesting, actually, rhinos did appear in the arena. So any animal you can think of, actually, on the three continents of the Roman Empire, Europe, Asia, Africa. Any animal you can think of, including tigers from India, they would appear in the arena. Famously, the first hyenas which appeared in the arena came from India as well. So in actual fact, they're not just coming from within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. They're coming from outside the Roman Empire as well. And we know from written sources, they had rhinos in the arena. We don't have any evidence that people were riding the rhinos. It's a bit Lord of the Rings for me or Game of Thrones, but they did have rhinos.
51:42 Speaker 04 And you mentioned Commodus battling drug. Animals and drug gladiators.
51:47 Speaker 05 Absolutely, yes. So Commodus was the son of Marcus Aurelius. Never lived up to his dad's expectations. When his dad Marcus Aurelius died and he became the emperor, his dad actually appointed forty of the leading senators to be his mentors to make sure that he stayed on the straight and narrow. And by the time Commodus was assassinated in one nine three, only one of them was still alive because he'd killed all the other thirty nine. So actually, he was the real deal, bad guy Roman emperor. For me, my least favourite Roman emperor in actual fact. And there is evidence that towards the end of his life, actually, he did start to consider himself to be a reembodiment of the demigod Hercules. So he started dressing in his daily life as Hercules. Uh, he had statues of himself created dressed as Hercules. And then he appeared in the arena in the Colosseum dressed as Hercules. But of course, he's the emperor.
52:33 Speaker 05 So whoever's running the games on behalf of the emperor is not going to actually allow him to even remotely get into danger. So although he was fighting gladiators or beasts in the arena, they were drugged.
52:44 Speaker 04 So you've had the beast hunts, then what's the next thing that I can expect to see?
52:48 Speaker 05 Then it's the public execution. So that's basically theatrical executions to entertain the public. Remember, the Romans were like us but different, as all peoples of the past were. And one of their big differences, certainly in the Western world, is the attitude to casual violence, which is a very normal thing in the Roman world. Remember, the average life expectancy was thirty five years because of the huge levels of infant mortality. You find with these ancient civilizations, Greece, Rome, Egypt, that they were obsessed with the afterlife, and that's because they went to the afterlife probably more quickly than they would choose to, especially if they're in the arena.
53:22 Speaker 04 And with those public executions, they were quite elaborate, weren't they? Dramatizations of Greek plays where the slaves are playing the the Greek hero and the way that they are killed in the story.
53:34 Speaker 05 So the public executions, you know, the stage would come up and it's dressed to recreate a scene from mythology. Could involve a minor or have a guy with a sort of like an imitation bull's head on. They could recreate a battle of the past, the Battle of Zama, see, they'd have pretend elephants on the stage and the people being executed dressed as Carthaginians. Or it could be a scene from mythology, it could take any story from mythology, where people are dying terrible deaths. And that's what's being enacted for public entertainment.
54:02 Speaker 04 It seems like it's about more than just the execution, but watching, I guess, the psychological torture of those people. Knowing that that's gonna happen, being played out for a long time, really, it sounds a bit like a horror movie.
54:16 Speaker 05 It really is like a horror movie, especially to our sort of our sensibilities, but from a Roman perspective, you're seeing it time and again and time and again and time and again, so it just becomes the norm, you know, so you just think it's a normal part of life, seeing people being psychologically and then physically tortured to death. It's terrible, actually, it really sits badly with our sensibilities, certainly with my sensibilities, but, you know, for a Roman, it's normal.
54:36 Speaker 04 And how much influence did spectators have in the fate of those who were thrown in the ring against the lions or against other combatants?
54:44 Speaker 05 Difficult to tell an actual fact, because we're looking at through the prism of modern portrayals of what the arena's like, sort of movies and Hollywood and things like that. So it's difficult to say, but certainly if it was a public execution, you are gonna get executed. There's no way out of it, you're gonna get executed for entertainment.
54:58 Speaker 04 Okay, and another phrase that we're used to hearing is being thrown to the lions, and often that's Christians. Again, was that something that happened?
55:06 Speaker 05 Absolutely. So in various phases of the principate phase of the Roman Empire, the first half of the Roman Empire, you could have persecutions of minority religions, certainly, and in particular Christians we see today with emperors like Nero or Diocletian as an example. The persecutions took place because something bad had happened and the emperor wanted to distract attention from the real reasons why the bad thing had happened, so they blamed, in this case, the Christians, and then they were persecuted. And part of the persecution was for them being sent to the arena and executed in public.
55:36 Speaker 04 And is the removal of bodies done in a equally theatrical way, or is there some dignity to it?
55:42 Speaker 05 It dragged off, leaving a trail of blood in the sand, and then the sand's brushed to make the blood disappear, and then you may as well not have existed. For the majority of people in the arena, that's exactly what it is. You've now stopped being useful to them because you can't entertain them. That might not be the case for the superstars of the arena, the gladiators. So you may well find that if it was a superstar, rock star gladiator being killed in the arena, then they may actually have a much more formal burial after the event, and they may be carried out in the arena with much more dignity.
56:13 Speaker 04 There's lots of killing through the day, so there's obviously a lot of blood. How messy is it?
56:19 Speaker 05 You need a very, very regular water supply to wash everything down all the time, because it's very messy. It's not just blood you're talking about, it's every kind of human and animal effluent you can think of. So the place would stink to hide, haven't seen. You need a regular supply of water just to keep the place clean enough so that people didn't die before they went into the arena.
56:37 Speaker 01 Is there any levity in this day of mass death? Is anything going to make me laugh?
56:44 Speaker 05 Certainly for us in our world, you would not laugh at any aspect of what is happening in the arena because you've got to remember it's people being murdered for public entertainment. So for us, no, there's nothing that will make us laugh. But for the Romans who are just seeing it hundreds of times in their lives, et cetera, a normal part of their lives, they might find something funny, et cetera, in a way that would jar with us today.
57:06 Speaker 01 So no clowns, no jugglers or anything?
57:08 Speaker 05 Clowns and jugglers, only if they were being dressed as such for public entertainment in the public executions.
57:14 Speaker 01 And I've heard about epic water battles. Were they real and did they happen at the Colosseum?
57:21 Speaker 05 Not necessarily at the Colosseum. We do know that the Romans could flood some arenas because they had aqueducts and water supply systems and drainage systems which allowed the arena to be flooded. So they could recreate a naval battle, which might be part of the entertainment in the public executions, or it could be part of the gladiator fights, where the gladiators sailing various kinds of vessels. So they did do it, but to my mind, it's hugely, hideously expensive, so it didn't happen very often.
57:45 Speaker 01 And when it did happen, is it kind of like a swimming pool? Or is it the whole arena? And are there sources that say that, you know, there were ships and weapons and?
57:56 Speaker 05 It will be the whole arena. There will be probably recreations of Roman galleys, but small, because it's fighting, Roman war galleys. They've got to find a way of making that watertight. And if you think about the Colosseum, it's the largest arena by a long way in the Roman world. It's absolutely enormous for 65,000 people. So making that watertight would be difficult, I think.
58:17 Speaker 01 And so I'm there all day, so I might want to take a break. And I actually might want to put a bet on Dan, since I believe in him so much. What would I do about that if I wanted to put a bet on Dan to win?
58:29 Speaker 05 I think in a Roman arena, inside and around it, everywhere, you'd have legal and illegal gambling taking place. We're talking about one of history's great, get-rich-quick societies. So there's this enormous disparity in wealth between the very rich and the very poor. Enormous disparity and most people are of the very poor moving up towards the middle classes and the difference in their wealth compared to the very, very rich is so big, it's almost indescribable. So every opportunity you can have to actually make money doing anything you would take because it will literally change your life. So a lot of people will gamble big actually to try and make a difference to their lives. They'll live it, I mean, they're in the arena in the first place to be distracted from the mundanity of their normal life anyway.
59:13 Speaker 05 So if you can get rich through a successful gamble, then you would do it. And it's a really long day. Food is synonymous with a good day out. Sports and, you know, baseball and hot dogs go together. What would I eat throughout the day? You'd be snacking all day. So I think the first thing you need to do before you go and see Dan in the arena is carve up yourself. So eat loads of bread and eggs and cheese for your breakfast. So you're all nicely carved up. Got to remember as well, you're going to be sitting outdoors for an entire day on a hard seat. So the next thing you want to do, if you can afford it, is take a cushion. As you enter the arena, you may buy some snacks to take in with you and then they're being sold all the time as well. So it could be a bag of olives, it could be a bruschetta, except there's no tomatoes, obviously. So a bit of bread and
59:57 Speaker 05 olive oil instead, with a bit of cheese on top maybe. But snacking all day, bread, olives, cheese, dried meats, that kind of thing. Great. That sounds like a day for me. And don't forget the wine. In actual fact, you would be encouraged to drink wine because it's safer than drinking the water. Yeah, I suppose because you've got 65,000 people and they're there all day. There are logistics around that. Where do people go to the bathroom? Off to where they're sitting. 65,000 people. So people just... Some of them would have, yeah. Where they sat.
1:00:28 Speaker 05 I can see why, you say it would smell. It's why it's better to be at the back if you're a lady sitting at the back because you're sitting nearest to the valle sales, the awning, so you've got more chance of being out of the sun. And there's nothing cascading down from above you, down to the front. Oh, so I'm full of bread, I'm drunk, I'm ready to watch Dan fight. You are. You're basically enjoying the two key things which a Roman emperor wants you to have to make you happy and not cause any problems. You've got your bread and you've got your circus. Or in this case, the arena.
1:00:59 Speaker 05 This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up.
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1:02:35 Dan Snow? Titus's reign was brief, lasting only two years. And when his brother Domitian rose to power, he saw the Colosseum as his chance to carve his name deeper into Rome's history. He wanted to leave his mark on the arena and make it even bigger and grander than before. But the most crucial change Domitian made was actually hidden from the public eye. But it was one that took Colosseum shows to a whole new level. I'm right next to the arena floor now. I'm at the level the gladiators would have been fighting on. And there would have been a wooden floor, covered with a thick layer of sand spread on top. In fact, interestingly, it's from the Latin word 'sand', 'arena', that we get our word 'arena'.
1:03:19 Dan Snow? And all of these rooms and corridors beneath the arena floor were actually not in the original building. They were added on to by Domitian. He ordered this to be excavated out, a huge new subterranean space created. It's called the hypergeum, which just literally means 'the underground'. And it's a really complex network of tunnels, passageways, and chambers, all underneath the arena floor of the Colosseum. This was really the engine room. This was the backstage area, the engine room for what was going on the arena above. And this was a place of blood, and sweat, and injuries, and nervous young men, condemned criminals, and terrified animals. Slaves would be wrestling those beasts into cages.
1:04:03 Dan Snow? Wounded gladiators were coming past on stretchers, treated by medical staff. And they'd be the equivalent today's stage managers, bellowing orders and whipping people into shape, perhaps literally. But this wasn't just a storage area and a holding pen. It was so much more than that. Simon, this is the true magic of the Colosseum, isn't it?
1:04:24 Speaker 05 Magic is an interesting word, because what you have here is a hole in the ground. The only lighting you have when the stage is up is going to be from torches and lamps, so it's going to be flickering light in the darkness. It's going to be humid and hot, and it's going to stink to high heaven. Because you've got animals, you've got people, everything's been run by slaves, with a military making sure everybody does the right thing, etc. It would have been like being in hell. The stage goes up and down, and up and down. And on the stage, when it goes down, it gets dressed. So let's say the public executions, they could be done in a theatrical style. So they could be used to recreate a famous battle from history. Let's say it's going to be the Battle of Zamah.
1:05:06 Speaker 05 So the slaves are dressed as Carthaginians, there'll be some props looking like elephants, the stage would then look as though it's in North Africa. It would go up, and then the Carthaginians, the prisoners, will be executed, they'd lose the battle, and then it would go down. Dead bodies removed, blood washed off, so on, and then it's redressed. In this case, you'd then go up and it'd be part of the gladiator fight afterwards.
1:05:28 Dan Snow? How are these platforms being raised in life?
1:05:30 Speaker 05 I'm standing on a stage and surrounding me are hydraulic systems, so wheels and pulleys and levers, hundreds of them, which are powered by the thing that powers everything in the Roman world: slaves.
1:05:42 Dan Snow? Okay, so there's beasts down here, there's criminals, are there gladiators down here as well?
1:05:47 Speaker 05 So, Dan, if you were a gladiator, you'd be getting up at the crack of dawn, so as soon as the sun rises, basically, you get up and then you get a hearty breakfast, so it's going to give you all the carbs that you're going to need and all the energy you're going to need to perform. But then, a lot of your day is spent waiting. So remember that the gladiator fights are the last of the three main events in the arena on a day. So you're not going to get into the arena until two or three in the afternoon, probably, and then that's the first gladiators. The gladiator fights are various kinds, it could be lots, it could be only a couple, there could be beasts thrown in and so on and so forth. You could be on at the end of the day, so you could be waiting all the time. And the place you wait is down in the hypergym, in the depths of hell.
1:06:32 Dan Snow? If I'm a gladiator, I get a chance to, you know, warm up, go through my paces?
1:06:36 Speaker 05 As a gladiator, even though you're a slave, you're the most elite form of entertainment that you would have in the Roman world, so effectively you're a rock star. So you are going to get looked after, you are going to be fed and watered, make sure that you're hydrated and carved, ready for your performance. You'll be doing training, you'll be stretching your muscles, you'll be getting a massage to sort of like make sure that you're sort of able to move effectively as soon as you perform. But you can't get away from the fact that actually spending most of the day waiting. And the really scariest thing is, you could be spending most of the day waiting to be killed.
1:07:15 Dan Snow? Would the gladiators, would guests come and see them backstage?
1:07:19 Speaker 05 So as you're waiting, Dan, down in the hypergym, you wouldn't have fans coming down into hypergym, because it is like being in hell down there. It's the professional end of the arena, so people wouldn't come and see you there, but they would come and see you beforehand in the gladiator barracks. And if they're really good fans, they could bring you food and drink and entertain you in other ways.
1:07:38 Dan Snow? So if I'm a retiarius, how am I entering the Colosseum? Because I know I'm going out feet first.
1:07:45 Speaker 05 You would be expected to entertain people, all the way from the emperor in the Imperial Box, all the way down to the people sitting at the back, especially the women sitting at the back, and let's face it, Dan, they're the ones who really want to see you. So you're going to entertain them, and you'd be prodded and poked as you went out into the arena, and reminded at every point as you walked out from the dark into the light, and then you blinked as the blinding sun smacked you in the face as you walked out of the hell of the hypergeum. You'll be reminded that you're there to entertain people. See, wave your arms in the air, there's your net, there's your trident, and you give, through your helmet, making you look like a fish, a mighty roar.
1:08:29 Dan Snow? So you imagine the music's blaring, because they had a full orchestra that played music to the fights, whether the beast hunts or the gladiator fights. You've got the crowd going mad, and then the announcer says, "And here he comes, all the way from the distant lands of Britannia, the people's champion, three times winner, Britannicus Snow." And as you come through the trapdoor, 80,000 people cheer your name.
1:08:57 Dan Snow? I mean, who wouldn't want to be a gladiator? Or, alternatively, you would come from one of the entrances, and that's when you're the champion gladiator, that's when you're the heavyweight, the title fighter. And as you're coming into the arena, there's actually someone behind you holding your stats, which I always think is fascinating when we watch boxing matches in UFC. It says, you know, wins, losses, you actually had that on a stand to tell the audience your career, your background.
1:09:22 Speaker 05 So, obviously, Britannicus is a total legend. This is the main event.
1:09:26 Dan Snow? Yes.
1:09:26 Speaker 05 Is he fighting to the death?
1:09:28 Dan Snow? No, no, no, no. We have a great description that belongs to Alexander Severus, the last of the Severan dynasty, which is, of course, the dynasty that will be very famous, because it's the dynasty from Gladiator 2 now. And it says that "The Emperor gives special dispensation to use sharp weapons." And again, you know, there's no rule of thumb for gladiator or combat. It's a 700 years span of sport. It was bound to change a different... But they probably would have used blunt weapons most of the time. And it isn't a fight to the death, of course not. You are a champion gladiator, you are irreplaceable. And the emperor knows that. You know, we forget that the emperor really, apart from a few exceptions, doesn't care about the sport. He cares about the crowd.
1:10:12 Dan Snow? The sport is just the way to win the crowd, so he wants the crowd to be happy. It's up to the people and your fans. Though sometimes, you know, we as fans watch our sports games, we'd like to kill one of our players. We wouldn't really like to kill them, but we think about it. You know, when they miss a goal or something. It'd be very rare for an audience to condemn a gladiator to death. So it's not just a bloodbath? No, but there is a bloodbath, but it's not gladiators. You've got Noxai, which are prisoners of war or criminals who are condemned to death. They're fighting to the death most of the time. Or they're being executed. And what happens is later Christian writers compound Noxai prisoners, beast hunters and gladiators into one sort of figure, which is the one we see in the movies.
1:10:53 Dan Snow? The poor slave, the bloodbath, all these tropes that we think about gladiators are very distinct, different classes. So you say the crowd condemning gladiators, how do you mean? Well, it's ultimately the crowd who decides. You know, again, the emperor's using the gladiator to win the crowd's favor. And ultimately, that's why gladiatorial combat died in Rome especially. Because the Roman mob had no power anymore. Once the capital was moved to Constantinople, the crowd's favor was irrelevant to the emperor. So they didn't spend the money to win them anymore. And that's why it died out as a sport. That's why the Colosseum stopped being used because the inhabitants of Rome had no political values. So the crowd is the ones that ultimately decide they're the most important part of the whole equation.
1:11:36 Dan Snow? So there is truth of that sort of trope about there's a fallen gladiator and a victor has to ask permission whether or not to dispatch him. There's an element of truth to that? My thought is that what happened is when a gladiator was injured beyond recovery. I think it's a way of, not an execution, but putting him out, it's a dignified death. You know, they didn't torture the gladiators, even when they talk about death, they talk about. Strike to the throat or to the back of the neck. So it's not torture. It's a noble and quick death, a painless death. In the arena, gladiators got different kinds of weapons as they fight in different ways. Yeah. It's all about the show. You're pairing up a gladiator with one strength, but one weakness against another one with complementary or contrasting strengths. Exactly.
1:12:17 Dan Snow? And again, its origins are the battlefield where, once you've defeated a whole bunch of people, that's happened with the Samnites, for example. They're defeated and the battlefield is strewn with this very ornate armour, some of which is in the British Museum. There's some wonderful examples. I highly suggest anyone go to the British Museum, second floor, go look at the Samnite armour. Because you see the origins of gladiatorial armour. It's kind of, it's almost fantasy related. There's like big horns and waves and, and it became so exciting to see these over the top helmets, these weapons. But each weapon, each piece of armour brought with it a specific style. That was the excitement as well. It's a different combination of fighters and the different styles gives it that sort of thrilling edge as a sport. How do you win and lose?
1:13:01 Dan Snow? In Hollywood, obviously you get killed or mortally wounded. What's, how do you win in your opinion in reality? So you've got between three to five rounds of between three to five minutes. So they, you know, they would have stopped for illegal strikes, but also the rounds means that you stop, give the fighter a rest, and it means that when he comes back, he's going to fight at a more exciting intensity. If your purpose was simply to kill them, you just go, here's two swords, like in the movies, like we see Russell Crowe, we see Maximus fighting tigers, here's two swords until somebody wins. That doesn't work. And it would be pretty boring. The rounds gives you the ability to be more intense, to give these short bursts of excitement. And it also means that the fighter can give his best performance. Points, it's a point system.
1:13:43 Dan Snow? So maybe to disarmament, I'm sure that there was a complex series of, of rules that went along with it. I mean, we know that there was rules because there's referees to ensure that the rules are being followed. So it would have gone to points. And that's why we know, for example, of inscriptions like Fyama, the Syrian. Who, you know, wins twenty-eight, he's drawn eleven, he's lost five, and he retires at the age of thirty. So, people did lose, they did draw. In fact, Verus and Prescuss, the gladiators who fight on the opening of the Colosseum, they both win, they drew. So the first fight of the Colosseum was not in death. The most exciting and most important fights and most famous ends in a draw. So do you think they would have known, those two on that opening fight at the Colosseum,
1:14:27 Dan Snow? they're both gonna walk away from this, hopefully, this is not to the death? Yes, but they also were aware of the risks. I mean, the thing is, it depends on the emperor. There are emperors who have no care for life. Caligula, you know, Nero, Claudius himself, who had a particularly cruel streak. So you had to be careful because you had to know that the emperor did hold sway of your life. If the emperor wants you dead, you're dead. But you take that risk, you go into the arena knowing that the emperor might say, "You didn't fight well, and I don't care what the crowd thinks, I want you to die, and I want you to be executed." And then you were expected to face death with courage. But you also knew as a gladiator, are you going, what fight you're going into. So you're going in a fight with sharp weapons? Okay, you know that. It's a fight to the first blood, it's a fight to the death. You were aware of it beforehand, the risks were put before you.
1:15:11 Dan Snow? So if I lose, if I'm disarmed, I'm tripped up, I'm getting a bit fatigued, I'm kneeling on the arena floor, either I could, one extreme, face death, or I could just dust myself off and fight again the next set of games? More than likely, you're gonna dust yourself off and fight again. The amount of money that's been invested in you has to be recouped. And so we know that when you rent a gladiator, you're actually paying an insurance. If the gladiator is injured during the fight at your exhibition, let's say you're a senator, you're putting on some games to impress people, win some votes, and the gladiator injures the other one in the fight, you're gonna have to pay for that because that's a loss of earnings for the ludus. And if I win, I'm a star? And if you win, you have the acclamation of the people of Rome.
1:15:53 Dan Snow? The name Britannicus will echo through the empire. All the ladies will love you, and, most importantly, you will gain what everybody wants to gain. Mortality, because let's face it, here we are, talking about them at the foot of the ruins, the bones of the Colosseum, not even the full Colosseum, and we're still fascinated by them.
1:16:14 Speaker 05 And now my name has been etched into the annals as a champion fighter, while my adoring fans have the opportunity to indulge in their obsession as they leave the arena. So Simon, I've had the best day at the Colosseum, even though I've seen some pretty harrowing things. Since Dan is my boss, I have to say that I'm glad to see that he survived another day. Now we're leaving the Colosseum, is there a gift shop? The Colosseum is surrounded by things, shops, selling trinkets, trinkets of any kind. It could be a loyal lamp with a gladiator picture on it. It could be a vase with gladiator pictures on it. It could be a tiny little Lari's statue for your household, laurarium,
1:16:59 Speaker 05 where you worship your household gods on a daily basis, representing one of the gods you favour, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and military strategy, or Mars, the god of war, or Venus, the goddess of love. So it could be anything and everything. So basically, it's what we would today call merch. And if you're a modern day fan of Dan, I guess you could just follow and subscribe to his podcast. You could. And if you actually pay a little bit more, he would send you his loincloth.
1:17:31 Speaker 05 Romans enjoyed over 300 years of Colosseum games before its decline in the 5th century AD. Gladiatorial fighting was banned in 404, just as the Roman Empire was reeling under existential threats. Rome was facing invasions, economic turmoil, pandemics. Not surprisingly, maintenance of the Colosseum was not their top priority.
1:17:56 Dan Snow? In the centuries after, it became a burial site, it became a fortress, and a source of building materials for other churches and palaces. Later, in the 18th century, the Catholic Church declared the site sacred, asserting that many Christians had been martyred there, though so far, no one's found any real evidence of that ever happening in the arena. Nevertheless, the Colosseum took on a new role as a place of reverence, and was left as a ruin. It was as late as the 19th and 20th centuries that efforts to restore and preserve the Colosseum started to be made. And of course, now it's one of the most famous buildings on earth, one of the wonders of the world, attracting an average of 16,000 visitors every day.
1:18:41 Dan Snow? Those people enter the Colosseum because, like millions of others around the world, they remain fascinated by that most Roman of institutions: gladiators, where sport, violence, and entertainment come together.
1:19:02 Dan Snow? Thanks so much for listening, folks. That's all I've got for you. We've reached the end. But if you do want to see my adventures in Rome, and see how I trained to be a gladiator, then you have to check out the History at Documentary on our video channel. Follow the link in the show notes to sign up. And there's still plenty more to come in my guide to Europe. I'm going to be heading to Knossos on the Greek island of Crete to unravel the mysteries of the Minotaur and track the rise and fall of the great Minoan civilisation. We're already collecting suggestions for next summer, so do let us know where you want us to go. The email is [email protected] . See you in Greece, friends.
1:19:49 Speaker 04 Pessimism, it's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care, and help lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.
1:20:19 Speaker 02 This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Grainger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies, to PPE, to hand tools, he counts on Grainger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.
1:20:52 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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