The cry of the crowd. The roar of a lion. The clash of metal. Starting in 80 CE these sounds rang through the stands of the Colosseum.
On hundreds of days a year, over 50,000 residents of Rome and visitors from across the Roman Empire
would fill the stadiums’ four stories to see gladiators duel, animals fight, and chariots race around the arena.
And for the grand finale, water poured into the arena basin, submerging the stage for the greatest spectacle of all:
staged naval battles. The Romans’ epic, mock maritime encounters, called naumachiae,
started during Julius Caesar’s reign in the first century BC, over a hundred years before the Colosseum was built.
They were held alongside other aquatic spectacles on natural and artificial bodies of water around Rome
up through Emperor Flavius Vespasian, who began building the Colosseum in 70 CE on the site of a former lake.
The Colosseum was intended to be a symbol of Rome’s power in the ancient world, and what better way to display that power
than a body of water that could drain and refill at the Emperor’s command? Vespasian’s son Flavius Titus fulfilled his father’s dream in 80 CE
