After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Side of Ancient Rome's Colosseum

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

In today's episode, we're taking you inside the towering walls of Ancient Rome's Colosseum to find out the dark reality of what happened there.From the sex appeal of gladiators, to the choreographed means of human sacrifice, and the eternal question: did they really have sharks in there?!Joining Anthony and Maddy today is historian and Rome-based tour guide, Alexander Meddings, to take us back to this world.Edited by Amy Haddow. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark and we love you if you are, we would love you just a little bit more. If you could vote for us in the listeners choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email. You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30. If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing

right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The twisted tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. Hello and welcome to After Dark. Now, in today's episode, we are going right to the very heart of the drama in the ancient Roman world, the Colosseum. And here's Maddie to tell you a little bit more. Beneath the Coliseum, it's dark. Down here, the air is thick with the stench of sweat and wild animals.

Their cry is echoing from distant cages, deeper still, into the amphitheatre. Sand falls from the wooden platforms overhead, their planks creaking with the weight of a baying crowd, the same sand that will soak up the gladiator's blood in the heat of action. Our gladiator stands in silence, waiting for his moment, knowing it must be close. Though what's waiting for him out on the arena floor, he has no idea. He tries to stay limber under the weight of his armour, shifting from leg to leg, his sword heavy in his hand. A pulley groans, as slaves heave heavy ropes, and now, from its dark underbelly, the Coliseum, this magnificent and horrifying monster, begins to stir into life. Trapped doors slide open like the lid of a tomb, and our gladiator steps forward into sharp light to whatever fate is awaiting him.

His journey to this point has been shaped by violence, and it's only fitting that it will end in this, a monument to the empire's absolute dominance over life and death. While the crowd screams in a heady mix of horror and delight, a bloody concoction of punishment and storytelling unfolds before them. Entertainment has never been so deadly. But this is not just a story of ancient games. This is a story about what a civilization is willing to sacrifice the spectacle.

This is after dark, and this is the dark side of Rome's Colosseum. Hello, it's Anthony. Yes, she still is. I forgot who I was then. Just who she is, but she is still Maddie. I am too excited to do this episode. I am actually really excited to do this episode. Because this episode, as Maddie was saying,

there is all about the Coliseum. And actually, if you've travelled and if you've seen the Coliseum, then you know that it's often very often romanticised. actually it's got a really rich and often very grisly history. And that is the history that we are going to have to explore in this episode. Now, we can't do this alone. So we have been joined once again by historian and travel writer Alex Meddings. Alex, thank you for joining us again on After Dark. Thank you for having me back on. This is one of those ones that people and I am including myself in this, the people probably think they know how we're going to discuss this.

But actually, as I was reading the briefing notes for this episode, I was thinking to myself, I actually don't know the history of the Coliseum at all. It's a whole different thing than what I thought I was getting into. So I am really, really excited to chat about it. Alex, tell us about the world that the Coliseum is built in at this time, just to give us some of a kind of historical grounding before we get into the details of what we're going to be talking about. We're in the first century AD and we're towards the beginning of the Roman Empire, a period in which you have essentially one emperor who is in control of Rome. at the political pinnacle, rather than the republics,

so rather than a bunch of senators who are all making the decisions. And the Coliseum is built throughout the 70s AD, but really we have to go back a little bit before to the reign of Nero to understand the context behind which the Coliseum was built. And so during the reign of Nero, a great fire breaks out in the year 64, for which Nero is held accountable by some sources.

And this fire decimates about a third of the city, city, including the area where the Coliseum will later be built. And Nero uses the devastation here to build himself an enormous golden palace known as the Domus Aurea, which you could still actually visit today in Rome. Because that's what everyone wants when their city is burned down, a giant palace for the emperor. A massive vanity project. Of course. And it was meant to be this splendid architectural achievement, which had a kind of revolving, rotating roof on a dining room, its own woodland and forest and its own artificial lake in the valley between the Kailian Hill and the Opean Hill, which is where the Colosseum will be built. And when Nero falls from power, in the year 68, there is a revolt against him, and Nero is declared an enemy of the people and forced to commit suicide.

After this, Rome enters a really tricky period. It enters a year of civil war, known as the year of the four emperors, the year 69. And in this year you have four successive emperors who hold onto power for often comically short amounts of time and end in comically grisly ways. And out of all of this, a family emerges called the Flavians, the Flavian dynasty. You have a father called Vespasian, called Titus Vespasianos, and you have his son known as Titus. And they've been away fighting against the Jews over in Jerusalem, Judea, putting down a revolt. and they come back to Rome and they have to try and ingratiate themselves with the Roman people

after a period of very destructive civil war and they realise that the best way to do this is to make a big gesture a big propagandistic political gesture and this gesture is to reappropriate the private land of Calicula so to reappropriate this giant pleasure palace which Nero built

for himself and to give it back to the people by building something for the public And what they settle on is an amphitheatre, a venue where they can have lots of games and spectacles. And they can use these spectacles to promote their own dynasty and their own family. So would you say that this is not only a space of entertainment then, but it's kind of built as a political machine, that this is architecture for politics? Yeah, very much so. And so the emperor is going to use the Coliseum as a place where he can be seen.

and where he can set out his agenda on the sands of the arena below. So you've got somebody at the top, like a figurehead, who is determining the content that appears. And then you're getting people who are voluntarily entering this space for free, in both cases, and they're witnessing this kind of awful bloody material play out, which kind of plays upon their primal instincts. Now, in this space, the emperor appears, in the case of the Roman Empire in the imperial box.

And he's giving the illusion to the people in this forum that they have a voice and they can use this space to communicate with the emperor or communicate with his figurehead. But in reality, that's not really happening. But the important thing is the emperor is seen in this space. And it's also keeping people entertained and it's keeping them frightened because you're importing all sorts of beasts from the farthest flung reaches of the Roman Empire and you're showing them to people for the first time, rhinos, hippos, lions.

And you're kind of saying there be dragons, very scary stuff. But here, under my protection, under the protection of the Roman Empire, you're safe. It's such a complex and fascinating space, isn't it? We know just in terms of like the actual size of it, the Coliseum stood about 50 metres, torch for 165 feet and can hold somewhere between 50,000, 80,000 spectators. But even within that scale, there's something about the proximity of ordinary people to, yes, these extraordinary spectacles, these extraordinary creatures, these extraordinary athletes, these gladiators, but also to the emperor himself. And that there's, that must have been

somewhat unusual, right? That you can come into a space where you are in that physical proximity and you can see the literal physical emperor. How often did that happen elsewhere in Roman public life? Quite rarely. You would see the emperor all the time on coins, even if you're not living in Rome, but throughout the empire, you're going to get his portrait of appearance. on coins, sculptures, statues, but in Rome itself, not that often. The other place where you'll see him a lot, however, is the Circus Maximus, which is the main chariot racing track, and by far a bigger venue than the Coliseum. If the Coliseum could hold about 50 to 80,000 people, the Circus Maximus could perhaps accommodate in the region of 250 to 300,000. So about a third of Rome's

population. That's ridiculous. Wow. And the emperor's appearing there too. And that was arguably a more popular sport chariot racing than gladiatorial combat. It's kind of like modern day football, whereas gladiatorial spectacles more like kind of boxing or tennis or like individual prowess. But yeah, the Coliseum offers a great opportunity for the emperor to show himself to the people. And how the emperor behaves in the Coliseum is kind of a marker of what kind of emperor he is. And so a good emperor should be involved and attentive to the wishes of the crowd, but not too involved. So, for example, the likes of Caligula or Commodist later on are criticized because they have people in the crowd, allegedly pulled out of the crowd and beaten up or murdered for criticizing their favorite faction or gladiator or whatever. But you also shouldn't be not involved enough.

Like Augustus and Julius Caesar are both criticized for bringing paperwork to do, which is generally doesn't go down very well. It's a little like Wimbledon Center Court today, you know, on the BBC, like the camera pans in on the royal family in the royal box. Like, there's a balance that you have to strike between not kind of screaming, come on, Nadal, but also not... Yeah, clapping politely, but... Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. I love that. Alex, paint a picture then of if you were just an everyday person and you were walking into the Coliseum, what is around you, what is the impact that this space is having on you? Immers in that world before we get into the nut and bolts of it.

It's nothing short of space. spectacular. So it is enormous. It is colourful, which is something that we rarely take into account, the fact the ancient world was very, very colourful. And the Coliseum, in the kind of the archways that you have now, there would have been lots of colourful statues, sculptures, that have been a big winged statue of the emperor riding a chariot above the arch, we believe as you entered. There's also the giant bronze colossus of the Emperor Nero, which is in the vicinity of the Coliseum, which in fact gives it its name. In antiquity, you'd have known it as the Amphitheatron Flavium, the Flavian amphitheater, called Caesar's Amphitheater, the Flavian amphitheater after the family that built it. It's enormous.

I mean, you said yourself that it rises to roughly at height of like 50 metres or so. It has many different strata, and so you have different seating for different classes. And kind of the higher class, the more prestigious you are, you're going to be more. towards the action at the bottom and then the lower class you are or if you were a woman or a slave which in which case you don't even really have a class you're going to be right at the top and it's almost a kind of circular panopticon where you can just kind of watch everybody and keep check of everybody and what they're doing and see and be seen yeah i love this idea that it's very much performative everyone is involved in this performance it's a kind

of like collective consent to be part of it right you're not just it's not just it's It's not necessarily like going to the theatre today or something where you're just sitting in the dark and watching something that's unfolding lit before you, but you are taking part in this as well. Let's talk about the arena itself, the actual arena floor, what's going on there, Alex. And I think we have to take a moment

to acknowledge the catastrophe that was Gladiator 2. And I'm going to ask you, I know the answer, but did they have sharks? They certainly didn't have sharks, no, because they couldn't get any salt water this is the major obstacle to that they may have

flooded the Coliseum during the inaugural games of the year 80 so it took about 10 years to build the inaugural games are held in the year 80 under the reign of Titus Vespasian has now died so his son is ruling over the empire

and even today academics and archaeologists bicker with one another about whether they ever flooded the Coliseum Um, technically they could have done before they built the underground, the Hippogame section, a year or two later. I doubt they did. I doubt they flooded it and put on these kind of grand naval battles. Um, and I doubt this for two reasons.

The first is that there was already a venue for this, not far away in a district known as Trastever in Rome, where they had an enormous Naumachia, a big naval stadium where you could do this. You could have aquatic gladiatorial combat fought on these big ships. So it makes little sense that it would have taken place in this venue. And secondly, if you've been to the Coliseum, you'll know that it's quite small. Like the arena floor is not that big. And so if there were ship battles, it's going to be less the spectacle you saw in the second gladiator film and more kind of like bloke's on a lilo in like a Benadorn pool, just kind of like going at one another with like spheres.

I mean, I would pay to see that too, but, you know. Wow. Okay, so not like Gladiator 2. I'm sorry to anyone out there who really enjoyed it. I love Gladiator 1, but I have to say, did walk out of Gladiator 2, and it's now like the way that I judge people when I meet them. It's like an opening question. Did you enjoy Gladiator 2? Yes, we're not going to be friends.

I'm so sorry. So it's going to be controversial, right? And then tell me complain if you want to. What I think strikes me so much, Alex, there is whether or not they were having these sort of flooded battle scenes is it's so kind of mechanised and constructed and there are so many sort of complicated moving parts to the arena. You know, I'm thinking about in Gladiator One, obviously canon historical text. You know, the trap doors coming up and those big tigers coming out and things like there's a lot of kind of trickery and yes, spectacle. And am I right in thinking

there was also kind of retractable awning so that presumably so people didn't cook to death? I mean, you're talking to us now from Roman. It's very hot, believe. What I would do for a retractable awning, right now. So there was a retractable awning to keep the people cool. Weirdly enough, those who had the best seats at the bottom closest to the action would not have been protected by it. So actually, it was better to be up in the bleachers among the women and the slaves, funnily enough.

And so I guess for the price of prestige, you also had to put up with the suntan if you're right there at the front. But that depiction in the first gladiator film of the Trapped Door, doors and the animals and all of the scenery and the stagecraft is spot on. That's really accurate. And so this whole underground hippo-game section is used for precisely that purpose. So to keep all of the stage sets, to keep the wild animals who are all caged up, and then to kind of raise them to the sands of the arena, to the arena, as it was called. It's the Latin for sand, which gives us a word arena today. And then all of these bloody spectacles would play out.

Well, I have an image in front of me, Alex, which is a mosaic that one can find inside the Coliseum that represents gladiators fighting. And it really is remarkable in the, if you are a costume historian or if you are designing costumes for Gladiator One or whatever it might be, what a gift these images are. They are, I'll try and describe them, but it's kind of a hodgepodge of different scenarios. It's not necessarily one coherent image. But we have one guy in a tunic and he's also got bandages around his knees and his ankles and he's got a spear and he's spearing a leopard or some kind of a big cat.

And that is a pretty fearsome looking cat, by the way. We also then have others kind of prostrate on the ground. They've got a dagger lying by their side. He looks like he's, you know, forlorn. We've got these incredible pieces of armor. Like, just like you do see in the first gladiator film, where, you know, it's coming down one arm and it looks incredibly muscular and masculine

and then the head piece as well, more allusion to different knives and whatever there. Now, there is one fellow who appears to me to be upside down and I'm not entirely sure exactly what's going on. So I'm going to defer to you and Alex, I'm not sure if you have this image in front of you or if you know what I'm talking about. Yes.

But he is upside down. Well, it looks like he's upside down wearing a kind of a medieval tunic, but that is not what's happening. So tell me what is happening, Alex. I know you're spot on. So this is, I think, the figure Madzikinus on the left-hand side. He's dead, but they haven't quite grasped perspective in this mosaic, so they're not very good at illustrating that he's like laid flat house on the floor. It seems that he's been butchered by the guy on the right, whose name is Alumnus. And we know that he's won this particular encounter because he has a bloody dagger. And also he has Vic, or Wick, on the right of his name, which stands for Victor. So he's just one of victory. against this other gladiator. Aluminous, it seems, is a Ritarius.

So he's a kind of gladiator that fights with a net, a trident, and presumably to get the job done, a dagger. And then it looks like he has toppled a secutor figure or perhaps a more heavily armoured figure. But as you say, you have the whole kind of range of gladiatorial types on display here. And on the right hand side, you also have the wild beast hunter, which is kind of a separate spectacle from gladiatorial combat, but no less bloody.

You have essentially sometimes trained huntsmen against animals, and then sometimes just condemn criminals who were given a spear, wished all the best of luck, and then sent out onto the sands. Yeah, let's talk about the kinds of people who were gladiators then, because in this music we have, as you say, we've got these names, these labels above the heads of all of these different figures. And I know that a lot of gladiators were almost celebrities of their day. They were sort of, you know, famous sportsmen, I guess, would be the analogy. But they weren't all from the same background, were they. Some were enslaved. Some were criminals. As you say, some were trained huntsmen who were brought in specifically for animals. So how on earth does

anyone end up in this situation? Because presumably it's not a career that you would seek out. No, no, no. I mean, you're essentially condemned to die unless you're incredibly lucky and very, very good at fighting. And even then, your fate relies on the wood. of an emperor or an audience. So gladiators are the lowest of below. They belong to a group of people we know as the infamis, and these are essentially the likes of prostitutes, those who use their body and kind of advertise their body for public enjoyment and consumption, actors, prostitutes. So gladiators are very much seen as the lowest of the low. And gladiators are largely formed of slaves or captured prisoners of war, for example, Spartacians.

is a Thracian. He's from kind of the area of modern-day Macedonia, and he's captured in battle and made to fight as a gladiator. But yeah, you'll spot on to say that there's also a kind of appeal of gladiators. There's a kind of sex appeal of them as well. So sometimes you get aristocrats who want to kind of dress up and have a bit of a go. You get the Embra Commodus, who famously fights as a gladiator, and we must come back to that, because it's really, really fun. If this is in Gladiator 1, Comed? Yeah, it is the same. Joaquin Phoenix? Okay. The very same and it's actually again a pretty decent representation of what the emperor according to our sources was like only the emperor that we have in our sources spent more time kind of beheading

ostriches and shooting bears from the safety of the imperial box somebody had to do as I suppose The Twisted tale of Amanda Knox is an 8-episode Hulu Original Limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotion complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. I feel for the spectators

after just sit there watching him just spear a hundred bears from a distance. Wow. So, yeah, gladiators do hold this kind of sex appeal. And we have a text from a juvenile, a satirist, who writes about the wife of a senator who runs off with the gladiator.

And he's described as this kind of 40-year-old with like a cauliflower ear and a permanently weeping eye from all of the combat and a scar, disfigured face. But he's a gladiator. And so that's why she runs off with him. I can totally understand that. I once went to an 18th birthday party in Bath

when the entire Bath Rugby team came in and let me tell you, wow, cauliflower ears all round, but magnificent. So, you know, I feel like I can understand that. I mean, I wanted to ask, you know, you talk about gladiators there being in the same social class as sex workers. And I wonder, are gladiators made sexually available to fans, essentially? Is that something that happens? It could be.

Once you become a gladiator, you forfeit all of your rights, if you ever had them. That is, I mean, if you go from directly being a slave or a prisoner of war, then you never had the rights to forfeit in the first place. But we're told that gladiators had to essentially take a vow when they become a gladiator, similar to when you become a Roman legionary. And it's a very kind of 50-shades kind of vow. It's like I vowed to be beaten, burnt, whipped, and all of this for the pleasure of others. once you forfeited to all of your independence

you can then be pimped out by your lanister you can be pimped out by the owner of the ludus of the gladiatorial barracks or kind of living quarters in which you live and so we do get examples of this gladiators can also be sold on and so we're told that certain emperors had their own private collection of gladiators

apparently colligula had a group of gladiators that were trained not to blink and some emper's like to keep the company of them and also do certain sexual things to the blinkers. Okay. I'm not going to pretend to even have an interpretation for that. Nobody does. Well, okay, good. I'm in good company then. We shouldn't maybe be surprised by some of this. First of all, I love this idea of like, I'm seeing this blood-soaked sand that you're describing in certain of these activities, Alex, but we shouldn't maybe be surprised because from the very launch of this venue or of the Coliseum,

Blood is very much part of what we're experiencing. So we're seeing sieges, we're seeing battering rams, chariots, mass killings. Talk to us about what some of those early launch festivities would have looked like. Well, historical context is quite important here, especially for understanding the religious aspect of these games. There is a kind of human sacrifice element that goes right back to where the Romans understood gladiatorial combat came from, which is that you have a kind of choreographed means of human sacrifice. It's a bit boring to just tie them up and cut their throat, but if you kind of

make them dress up and go at each other with swords, then at least it adds a little bit of a spectacle to the whole thing. And so these inaugural games, which take place in 80 or 81, follow a really torrid time for the Roman Empire. So under the reign of Titus, you had the eruption of Vesuvius and a destruction of Pompeii. You had another fire which tore through the city, and you've had a plague. And so it was really important for the Romans that these games were spectacular

and that you had lots and lots of death, because the more death, the more you stand a chance of appeasing the gods. And so we're told that 9,000 wild beasts are killed during the inaugural games, which take place over 100 days throughout that year, presumably not back to back because it would get really stale

I think even for a kind of committed in the Roman audience member I'm trying to do the maths of like how many animals that would be a day but to sort of space it out yeah yeah because I mean another source tells us that 5,000 died in a day but then if it's 9,000 in total

5 in a day then you're slaughtering squirrels for the other for the rest of the week I mean it's mice or something yeah yeah but there is and it's important to stress there is this religious aspect of the games. And so when we see films like

Gladiator and you see the kind of audience who are formed of these, you know, men and women kind of standing together, you know, really enjoying the bloodshed and like spittle kind of coming out of their mouths and kind of shouting for who they want put to death. Yes, but then it's also reverent. So I think you've got something like a mix between Sunday Mass, in which everyone's dressed for their best wearing Toga and again, centre court at Wimbledon, only with more shouting out and a lot more violence taking place on the court or the arena below. And also the executions which take place at the kind of interlude of the games. So between the animal stuff in the morning, the animal hunts and the gladiatorial combat in the afternoon, you have public

executions, which again, a sacrifice. Is this just people being brought on and killed? Is there any kind of performance or choreography with that? It's very performative. And so the historian Tom Holland kind of rather beautifully described it as a mix between a snuff movie and the Cirque de Soleil. So it's like kind of extreme violence and then there'll be a bit of a story and then clowns will come out afterwards.

And all of the executions that we know of from the inaugural games because we have a very good source which is the epigrammist Marshall who was an eyewitness and he allegorically kind of describes what's going on. And what you have are reenactments

of historical or legendary episodes with which everyone would be familiar, played out with a twist. And so it would be a bit like if we were to get somebody now dressed up as Bambi's mother and make them run around in a little glade and then either kind of shoot them with arrows or just like a giant, like, bear comes out

and just like gauze the person dressed up as Bambi's mother. And we're like, oh, Disney, that's nice. So in this case of the inaugural games, they're playing on myth. And so you have, for example, a woman who is conditioned, them to death, who plays the role of Pacify, who was the wife of King of Nossos and the Minotaur, who gives birth to the Minotaur. And we're told that she's made to couple with a bull and then is put to death, or possibly dies while coupling with a bull. They're playing upon a myth. We have no

idea what that looks like in reality, whether she's actually being ravaged by a bull or whether it's a guy dressed up as a bull. Maybe it was actually very garish and a bit amateurish. And you have a guy in a terrible bull costume. We don't really know. Or maybe it's an actual bull, which would have possibly had precedent in other parts of the empire, being condemned to be killed by an animal. You have another example of a guy who is dressed up as a famous Roman bandit, who was then crucified, and this guy is also crucified, but basically he's also having his innards eaten out, gourd out by a big Scottish bear. Specifically a Scottish bear. A Scottish bear. A Scottish bear. Caledonian bear.

No other bear will do. With an accent and a hunger. Yeah. Deep-fried organs, sorry. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. This is so interesting because I think it sort of speaks to that, as you said, that kind of combined element of performance, but also punishment. And I suppose the enjoyment as a spectator would have come from seeing so-called justice done within your concept of the state and the society that you live in. And then also that entertainment factor. I had a question. We're talking about mythology and how that mythology is represented within the Coliseum.

But the Coliseum also itself gives birth to a different type of mythology, but modern mythology making nonetheless. And it's kind of a big glib in relation to what we've just been talking about. But I think it's kind of, it's worth people knowing what's invented and what's not. I'm going to just say four words and you can go from there, Alex. And those four words are thumbs up or thumbs down. That was five words because I put it. in an oar, apologies. But talk about that thumbs up, thumbs down thingy. So this is the emperor during the Roman Empire, or before it would have been the sponsor of the games, a figure

known as the editor, who is essentially channeling the will and the whim of the crowd and deciding who lives and who dies. So gladiatorial combat is very rarely to the death. I say very rarely. We really have no idea, but Mary Beard has done some stonking scholarly work and kind of used gravestones to figure out it might be about one in six in every performance that takes place, maybe one in six gladiators die, either on the field of battle or afterwards from their wounds. But yeah, those that don't end up dying, the emperor can, and again, using this big public forum, can gain popularity by channeling the will of the people and doing something with the thumb to convey the message to the gladiator on the floor below. What they did, we don't

really know, whether it's up or down, we have no idea. They just did a thumb thing. And then, if this gladiator is condemned to die, something really, really sinister happens, which would have been a really good thing to have featured in the gladiator movies, but never did. So, yes, there's the idea that the gladiator, who is the victor will kind of perform the cuda grass, so they'll actually butcher the one who's lost the fight. But there's another figure who will come onto the arena sands called the Chadon, who in mythology, he was the ferryman in Greek mythology who'd ferry the souls over the river sticks to the afterlife. And this is a really sinister figure who's kind of dressed as this kind of mythological, kind of devilish character. And he'll come on

with a branding iron, a boiling hot branding iron, and a mallet. And he'll hold the branding eye against the flesh of the gladiator to check he's not just pretending. And then he'll smash his head with a mallet. Wow, that's a job. That is somebody's job. Okay, well. And just really sinister to watch. And again, depending on how well it's done, it might look really amateurish. Like if, you know, if it's a bit clownish, it's going to make it even more disturbing. If it's a bit of a tawdy costume, all of bright pink slippers, I don't know. We don't have many descriptions, but. Yeah, it's so interesting to me that there's one person assigned to deal out this kind of level of death, that maybe that is useful, even within this kind of circus of chaos and hacking people

to death and hacking animals to death and all of that, that actually when all of that's calmed down and there just needs to be an end, that the ability to be able to call someone on who can do that I think is quite important. I'm sort of obsessed with this figure. I mean, obviously very, very, very grim, but I think that kind of almost administrative but also performative role is very, very fascinating. I should give a caveat. We have limited information for the existence of this figure. So it may be that they featured only in like one example of the games held on one occasion. Or it could be that he featured every single time. The problem with our sources for the Coliseum and the games is that they're very patchy. And so we always run the risk of making

this assumption that because it happened once, that must have been the prescription. So, for example, when I give the order of play in which you get the animal hunts first and then you get the executions and then gladiatorial combat. That's what we know from the evidence, but they also presumably change it up an awful lot. And again, Mary Beard makes a really good analogy here, but it's a bit like looking at a photograph of a graduate student on someone's mantelpiece dressed in their robes and their mortarboard, and assuming from that that every single day student's dressed like that. I have adored your analogies throughout both of these episodes. Alex, I think they're so illustrative. But we've talked about the piece of land that was Caligulas and then how

taken over from Nero's buildings. We talked about this was for the people, for their entertainment, to kind of give back to them. We've talked about the blood and the sand and the animals and the gladiators. Talk to us about how it declines then. How does this massive thing that is supposed to be the celebratory point or coming together at least for the people, how does this start to then die away and literally in some cases crumble away. So I think the spectacle itself remains very popular. We, I think, give a little bit too much weight to the role of Christianity in this. There is definitely a Christian backlash.

So as Christianity is on the rise, as Christianity is adopted by more and more Romans, there's an idea that actually human sacrifice is abhorrent and we ought not to be doing this, even though there's no evidence that any Christians were themselves sacrificed in the Colosseum, nonetheless fed to lions. That tended to happen in the circus maximus, all of the Christian killing or in various other circuses. So you even get examples of Christians who are quite into the games. St. Augustine, a source from the late third, early 4th century, tells us of a figure called Olympias, who would later become a bishop of Rome. And he goes along to the games early in the 4th century and he promises not to look because the whole thing, you know, appalls him.

But he's kind of there peeping through his hands like we do when we watch horror films. And he catches glimpse of some blood shooting out someone's jugular and then he's hooked. So then Augustine describes how, you know, you can see that fierce passion for this new sport in his eyes and he can't take his eyes off it. So I think this has been overstated. And even though it's a little bit boring, I think the real explanation is money. So once Rome is sacked in the 5th century, in 410 in particular, and loads of stuff is looted, perhaps including the Colossus, the massive statue of bronze next to the Coliseum, it's hard to justify spending so much money on gladiatorial spectacle and wild beast hunts, and it cost a fortune. We have a good source called Simicus, he's a senator who's left quite a lot of writing, and he essentially tells us how much it cost him to put on a spectacle to get a a few hundred lions and bears shipped over to Rome. And he also gets some Anglo-Saxon gladiators

who inconveniently strangle each other to death before they're actually sent out onto the sands of the arena. So he feels kind of hard done by about that. Symmacus, clearly has no empathy as a person. So it's really expensive to put on these games. And once Rome has been sacked, you have to channel money elsewhere. You have to prioritize rebuilding. You have to prioritize defense spending.

And so, yeah, it just becomes very expensive to put the games on. We're told that what really does it for gladiatorial combat is a final fight presided over by the Emperor Honorius, in which a Christian by the name of Telemachus, a Christian monk, tries to go and stop the fight by getting onto the arena sands. He kind of, like, is a modern day streaker, but fully clothed. he kind of jumps over the barrier and he runs on to try and break the fight up and he's killed by the crowd. We don't know how. There's no detailed description. So maybe stone to death or they're kind of throwing their food at him. No idea. The Emperor Norius is apparently so disturbed by this

and finds it so disgusting that he orders a ban of the games in the 400s. And then wild animal hunts stop in the 500s. And after this, yeah, the games at the Coliseum die down and the more monument is used for other purposes. I have a final question, Alex, before we wrap up. And I know that one of the strings of your gladiatorial bow is that you take people on tours of Rome and you communicate the history that you spend so much time learning about and writing about to those people in those spaces.

And I just wonder what your relationship as someone who lives in Rome is with the Colosseum and what it means to the city and to Romans today. It's the best surviving and the most impressive surviving monument, arguably in the entire Roman Empire, but certainly in Rome. Maybe the pantheon also is on a par, like the temple to all the gods. And so it's kind of an icon of the city. But that's because it's the best surviving. Ancient Romans would have been impressed by many other structures. We're told that when I think the son of the Emperor Constantine visited Rome, he was especially taken aback by the forum of the emperor.

protracian by the circus maximus and also yeah kind of by the colosseum that's all right as well so yeah a lot of that is kind of an accident of chance in the sense that the coliseum is the best surviving structure but what the coliseum is today uh i have a bit of an ambiguous relationship with it what we show tourists now is the barebone skeletal structure of the coliseum bereft i think of a lot of explanatory notes and stuff that gives it context throughout it is history, it's been used for many things. There used to be remnants of an arena floor, where in the 19th century, kind of European Arab Scretz on Grand Tours, who go and, like, frolic with locals and, you know, do all sorts of, like, after-hours stuff. And it was also, up until quite recently, a very green

and bucolic area. It had, like, hundreds of species of flora and plants, which were, many of which are bought in in the fur of animals that were condemned to die there. And this is something that really came after the age of Mussolini, which is basically the destruction of everything that over the subsequent centuries is built on top of Roman remains, all of that is destroyed in order to get to the heart of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and the old stuff, because that's the stuff that Mussolini was really into for his own political reasons, because he wanted to draw a parallel between himself and the emperies of old. We've destroyed quite a lot of stuff, which should have also been very interesting to see in the process of getting to these ancient remains.

And yeah, I think we could do a lot better than we do now in managing the Coliseum as an area of cultural patrimony and the kind of half-constructed arena floor that you have. Alex, where can people find you? Because if they are heading to Rome and they want to be shown around by an expert, I can think of nobody better to show around the next time I'm there. I'm going to be looking you up and seeing how best to get around this place. With pleasure. Where can they find you?

The best place would be through my website, which is Alexander Meddings.com. I also have another domain Appiah with Alex, which is for Tours of the Appian Way, which is kind of my specialism. And those would be the best ways, I think. Great. And you can kind of request tours from there. Alex, it's truly been so enjoyable to take both of these episodes.

So we had this episode on the Coliseum, and we've had the Caligula episode. And it's been so incredible to really feel immersed. and it goes to show that actually the fact that you are living there and experiencing these things on a daily basis almost, how that brings it to life for you. And the expertise that you bring to both of these subjects has just been so accessible and fascinating.

I know the After Dark listeners will really respond to this. So thank you so much for taking the time to come in and talk to us. Thank you for listening, of course, as ever. Be aware, guys, we now have a YouTube channel. Go and have a look at our episodes over there. In fact, you can watch this very episode over there. You can see Alex baking in his flat because it's absolutely roasting over there right now.

It is so warm. So go and check out our YouTube channel too. And of course, if you need to get in touch for any reason, you can get in contact with us on afterdark at historyhit.com. Once again, thank you for listening. And until next time, happy listening. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu Original Limited series

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