What Was the Colosseum Used For?

The Colosseum in Rome, officially the Amphitheatrum Flavium, was used primarily for gladiatorial games, but its repertoire was far broader than that. For almost four centuries, the arena staged animal hunts, mock naval battles, public executions, and elaborate pageants of imperial power, all of it free of charge to an audience of as many as 80,000 spectators. The building was a machine for producing awe, designed by the Flavian dynasty in the 70s and 80s CE and operated on a scale unmatched anywhere in the ancient world. For the wider world of Roman spectacle, see Roman Entertainment, and for the story of who built it, see Who Built the Colosseum?.

Gladiatorial Games, the Munera

The central spectacle of the Colosseum was the munus, the gladiatorial show, a ritual combat in which two or more trained fighters, the gladiatores, fought one another to the death or to the mercy of the crowd. Although gladiatorial games had been held in Rome since at least 264 BCE, when they were fought at a funeral to honor a noble dead, they did not become a regular, large-scale public phenomenon until the Empire, and the Colosseum was the permanent home of the most lavish examples.

A typical day began with a parade of the gladiators into the arena, dressed in expensive costumes and saluting the imperial box with Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant — “Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you.” Fights then proceeded by category. There were the lightly armed retiarii, with net and trident, fighting the heavily armored secutores; the murmillo, with a fish-crested helmet; the Thracian, with a small round shield; the eques, who began on horseback; and the dimachaerus, who fought with two swords. A referee, the summa rudis, walked the arena with a staff, and the audience judged the fallen fighter’s fate with a raised or downturned thumb. Most fights did not in fact end in death, but enough did that the wooden sword, the rudis, given to a retiring gladiator was a mark of great honor.

The Inaugural Games of 80 CE

The Colosseum was inaugurated by the emperor Titus in 80 CE with a hundred days of games that have been remembered as the most extravagant single festival in Roman history. The poet Martial, who was in Rome at the time, devoted an entire book, De Spectaculis (On the Spectacles), to the opening days. He recorded 9,000 animals killed in the inaugural ceremonies, and described hunts of lions, leopards, bears, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giraffes, bulls, crocodiles, and even an elephant, and he described a flock of exotic birds released from beneath the arena in a great artificial grove that suddenly opened its leaves to reveal the trees within.

The festival of 80 CE also featured naumachiae, mock naval battles, in the flooded arena. The tradition of the naumachia went back to Augustus, who in 2 BCE staged a battle on the artificial lake at the other end of the city, but the Colosseum’s basin had been designed with a system of drains and channels that allowed it to be flooded on demand. Titus’s naumachiae involved thousands of combatants, often condemned prisoners, fighting on actual warships, and the resulting carnage, both human and naval, was remembered for generations.

Venationes, the Animal Hunts

Outside the gladiatorial days, the Colosseum was repeatedly the scene of the venatio, the staged hunt of wild animals. Romans had developed an enormous appetite for exotic animals from across the Empire, and the trade in lions from North Africa, bears from the Balkans, leopards from Anatolia, and elephants from beyond the Sahara became one of the most lucrative forms of long-distance commerce in the ancient world. The opening of a hunt, the pompa, was a parade of the day’s animals, with a painted backdrop of the terrain in which the hunt was supposed to take place — a forest, a mountain, an island.

Hunts could be dangerous. Skilled hunters, the venatores, faced the animals in armed combat; condemned prisoners were thrown unarmed into the arena as a public execution. Some hunts were mounted to celebrate imperial victories, with the names of the defeated peoples written on placards beside the animals. The imperial biographer Suetonius recorded that the emperor Domitian delighted in the venationes so much that he would greet the morning in a small alcove beside the arena, surrounded by children and women, in order to watch the beasts being baited.

Damnatio ad Bestias and Public Executions

A third major use of the Colosseum was as a place of public execution, the damnatio ad bestias, in which condemned criminals were thrown to wild animals or otherwise killed in elaborate public ways. The arena’s logic was partly religious, partly political, partly a form of mass entertainment: criminals were expected to confess on the way to death, and the crowd watched as a public demonstration that justice had been done.

A particularly notorious use of the Colosseum was the execution of early Christians, traditionally believed to have been common. Modern scholarship is more cautious: there is no certain evidence that the Colosseum was used for mass martyrdoms of Christians before the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd century CE, and the famous image of Christians being thrown to lions at the Colosseum probably applies only to a small number of isolated incidents, not the regular program. The most famous legend, that of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who was reportedly torn apart by beasts in the Colosseum during Trajan’s reign, rests on later, hagiographic sources.

The Hypogeum

Beneath the wooden floor of the arena lay the hypogeum, a two-level labyrinth of corridors, animal cages, dressing rooms, and mechanical lifts that gave the Colosseum its theatrical sophistication. The hypogeum was added by Domitian after 80 CE, replacing the earlier system of trapdoors and pulleys. Eight vertical lifts, raised by counterweighted winches operated by teams of slaves, could bring animals, scenery, and even gladiators up to arena level without warning, allowing the staged surprises of a suddenly appearing lion or a parting curtain of water.

The hypogeum has been largely excavated in modern times, beginning in the 1870s, and today visitors can descend into the passages and see the cells in which animals were kept before being raised to the killing floor. The complex also contained an extensive system of water channels used to flood the arena for the naumachiae, though the hypogeum’s later configuration made large-scale naval battles impossible, a key reason why the naumachiae of the 1st century CE did not continue into the 2nd.

The Last Games and the Afterlife

The Colosseum saw its last recorded games in the early 6th century, long after the Western Roman Empire had fallen. By the time of the emperor Honorius, who according to tradition banned gladiatorial combat in 404 CE after the monk Telemachus was killed by the crowd for trying to separate the fighters, the great games were already a memory, and the building itself had begun the long slide into the ruin that successive earthquakes and stone-robbers would make of it. Its stones were quarried for Renaissance palaces and papal fortresses; its arena was planted as a vineyard and grazed as a field. Yet even as a ruin, the Colosseum remained Rome’s most recognizable monument, and it is the building to which most visitors still come today.