the Coliseum was many things a Marvel of engineering a testament to Rome's ability to do way too much all the time and the absolute worst place to lose your friends after a bathroom break it could hold up to 80,000 togga clad lunatics all of them sweaty drunk and they for one reason only to see something or someone die in a spectacular way the shows were insane Gladiator battles obviously mock Naval Warfare cheer why not they'd flood the entire Arena and have men fight to the death on boats because nothing says functional Society like simulating real
battles just to spice up your afternoon imagine if the Super Bowl halftime show featured an actual War well I mean the last one almost did cuz Drake was sacrificed to the gods by Kendrick Lamar but I digress the danger wasn't just limited to the guyss in the arena either sometimes the wild animals got bored fighting trained hunters and took their talents to the audience picture yourself minding your business eating ancient Roman nachos and suddenly a full-grown lion is trying to climb into your rle and let's not forget about the stampedes if a particularly big Angry
thing got loose or if the crowd got a little too rowdy meaning they were probably blackout drunk on cheap wine thousands of people could get trampled trying to escape it was like Coachella if Coachella had actual Tigers the Coliseum wasn't just a place to watch DEATH it was a place where if your luck ran out you might get upgraded from spectator to unpaid performer if you think Morning News is rough try kicking off your day with 9,000 exotic animals being violently taken out for sport Welcome to the the vonis the ancient Roman version of Animal
Planet if Animal Planet was run by Psychopaths the coliseum's opening act wasn't just some Gladiator duel no no no that came later first the Romans needed a warm-up round of industrial scaled Wildlife Slaughter lions tigers elephants rhinos if it walked crawled or swam it was getting dragged into the arena and promptly introduced to some guy with a spear and because the Romans had a real sense of drama they didn't just kill animals outright that'd be too easy some of them were trained to perform tricks first picture this a lion jumps through a flaming hoop the
crowd erupts in Applause the lion takes a bow and then bam speared right through the ribs talk about the worst gig in Showbiz they even went for the big weird stuff hippos sure crocodiles why not giraffes some poor Roman intern was definitely in charge of figuring out how to make a giraffe angry enough to fight and let's talk numbers during the coliseum's grand opening in 80 ad Emperor Titus decided to show off just how much hated biodiversity he kicked off the games by killing 9,000 animals over 100 days Rome a civilization that could build aqueducts
heated floors and highways but also thought what if we stabbed a zebra for fun the Romans believed in Balance mornings were for animal cruelty afternoons were for watching grown men stab each other and lunchtime well lunchtime was reserved for public executions because nothing pairs better with a stale piece of bread than watching a guy get torn apart by a bear these weren't your ordinary born executions where someone just got their head chopped off and that was that no no the Romans had flare they stag executions as theatrical performances forcing The Condemned to reenact mythical stories
except instead of Happy Endings there were fatal endings ever heard of Prometheus the guy who stole fire from the gods and got his liver pecked out by a bird for the rest of Eternity as punishment ouch the Romans love that one so much so that they would chain a real person to a rock release a hungry bird and let nature take its course then there was Orphus you know the tragic musician who tried to rescue his wife from the underworld in the Coliseum version orpheus's story ended when they released a pack of hungry bears on
him which to be fair is probably a way better ending that whatever Netflix would have come up with this is what the Romans called entertainment they didn't have Netflix they didn't have HBO no true crime documentaries so they just made their own in real time in front of an audience of 50,000 screaming lunatics bone Appetit Gladiators with rock stars of ancient Rome except instead of doing drugs and trashing hotel rooms they were doing steroids and getting stabbed in the face the big misconception is that every gladiator fight ended in death it didn't killing a trained
Gladiator was bad business these guys were like high value athletes and no one wants to see their MVP get shanked at round one that being said accidents happened one wrong move and suddenly you're less rising star in more ancient Roman ground beef and if the crowd didn't like you well that's where things got dicey if you fought badly or God forbid bid were kind of boring the Emperor or the audience could vote on whether you lived or died and just like modern sports fans burn their jerseys when their team loses Romans got emotionally invested in
their favorite Gladiators they had fan clubs and graffiti they even had Birch you could buy little Gladiator action figures except instead of coming with a cool playet the real version came with crippling PTSD but the ultimate Gladiator Flex if you survive long enough you could earn your freedom imagine Tom Brady winning enough Super Bowls to get out of his contract except instead of throwing touchdowns he's dodging swords sports fans today like to think they're hardcore Eagles fans throw batteries and also throw snowballs at Santa Claus British soccer hooligan start riots and Lakers fans set things
on fire whether they win or lose but all of them would have been eaten alive in the Coliseum the Roman crowd was unhinged they weren't just there to watch they were part of the action they bet on Gladiators like it was fantasy football they screamed insults like it was a Twitter argument and occasionally rioted so hard that the emperor had to send in the Army and they had power if they liked a gladiator they would chant his name cheer him on probably throw a toga at him like he was a Roman Harry Styles but if
they didn't like him they could demand his immediate execution by yelling yugala kill him and if you were the poor bastard lined in the sand bleeding hoping for Mercy you had to watch 50,000 people wave little handkerchiefs to decide your fate imagine the most brutal episode of America's Got Talent ever even the emperor wasn't safe if the games were boring the crowd could Heckle him Shan insults or just start throwing their snacks at his VIP box imagine Jeff bezos's at a football game getting pelted with hot dogs by 50,000 angry fans now the Coliseum wasn't
just a death Arena it was also a technological Masterpiece a masterpiece filled with death traps but still beneath the arena was the hypogeum a complex system of tunnels trap doors and elevators that made the whole blood bath possible think Disneyland's underground tunnels except instead of moving mascots around they were launching tigers the battle the hypo GM was chaos workers had to Wrangle wild animals reset the battlefield and make sure some poor Gladiator wasn't hiding in the corner hoping everyone forgot about him it was part Stage production and part horror movie the trap doors were unpredictable
imagine standing in the arena looking tough sword in hand and then bam the floor opens and suddenly you're face to face with a pissed off rhinoceros mistakes happened wrong lever wrong moment and suddenly a line is in the crown instead of in the arena and let's not forget floody the Coliseum for Naval battles the Romans built the stadium so Advanced that they could turn it into an actual ocean somewhere in the future Elon Musk has taking notes it was all impressive dangerous and entirely unnecessary but that was Rome why build a stadium when you can
build a death machine after a long day of watching people and animals lose their lives for entertainment the Coliseum had one last show cleanup Duty because when you spend 12 hours turning the arena into a blood soell crime scene someone has to mop up the mess first the bodies Gladiators criminals and unlucky Spectators who lost a fight with a runaway elephant had to be dragged off the sand if a gladiator was particularly popular or particularly dead his corpse might get a proper burial with Fanfare the rest toss into Mass Graves like leftovers at an a
can kill Buffet then there were the animals dozens sometimes hundreds of exotic Beast lay scattered around like a very unethical Zoo explosion and since Romans hated waste the animals were often butchered and sold as meat imagine paying top thear for a line stake just because it technically won its fight and the sand oh the sand the Romans had a word for blood soaked Arena dirt herena cinta and because humans have always been weird people actually took jars of it home as souvenirs that's right ancient Rome was selling murder sand centuries before Etsy so after a
full day of Mayhem Carnage and questionable decision-making the Coliseum staff ra the herena Kenta reset the props and got ready to do it all again because the Coliseum was more than a stadium it was a slaughter house with a gift shop thanks for watching nutty Productions How would you survive in the Roman Coliseum let us know in the comments and don't forget to like And subscribe for more nutty stories from Humanity's past
