Ever wondered what it was like to attend a day of gladiatorial combat at the Colosseum in ancient Rome? No, me neither. But judging from what we learn tonight on THE COLOSSEUM: BLOOD & SAND WITH DAN SNOW (C5, 9pm), the concluding part of this oddly fascinating history series, it sounds as though you would have had a lovely time.
OK, maybe “lovely” isn’t quite the right word. But lively, certainly, and jam-packed with activity. In modern parlance, it would have scored jolly highly, by the sound of it, as a “spectator experience”.
When they emailed you the next day, with one of those how-did-we-do emails, you’re bound to have given it four stars out of five.
Having spent much of episode one telling us how and why this legendary amphitheatre was built, Dan turns his attention tonight to what it was like to go there for a show, as part of a crowd of roughly 65,000, and immerse yourself in the entertainment.
Would you, for example, have spent the day baying for blood? Quite possibly, although you may have been a tad disappointed in that regard.
Plenty of it was spilt, he’s assured by one of the experts he chats to, but there were far fewer fatalities at these events than Hollywood would have us believe.
Training up these fighters for months, only to have them run swords through one another’s tummies with gay abandon, would frankly have been a bit mental, the expert points out, albeit not in those actual words.
The gladiators were actually considered superstars, even sex symbols, if more by their female followers than by the powers-that-be. The vast majority of them lived to fight another day.
Tickets for these occasions, Dan also discovers, were free but hard to come by. Powerful figures would distribute them to those below them in the social pecking order, to buy their loyalty.
As for the form these tickets took, they generally came as tokens or fragments of pottery, scrawled with the info required to gain you entry.
All pretty low-tech, of course, by today’s standards. There was certainly no QR code. Nor even – wait for it – an SPQR code, ha ha! (To appreciate that joke to the full, you may wish to look up those initials. Trust me, it will be worth it.)
We also hear the place had public loos, food outlets, even somewhere you could buy yourself a goblet of wine.
A little more surprising is that every so often the crowd would be sprayed with scented water, not just to cool them down but “to keep the stench of blood at bay”.
Weird, huh? We haven’t had that in Britain since the Luton vs Millwall FA Cup sixth-round tie in March 1985.
