Archaeology Odyssey

Type 4a; see Elizabeth Lyding Will, “The Roman Amphoras,” in Anna Marguerite McCann et al., eds., The Roman Port and Fishery of Cosa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 182–201.

Martial, Spectacula, 5.65.

Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 22.

Cicero might ask: “But what pleasure can it possibly be for a man of culture, when either a puny human being is mangled by a most powerful beast, or a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear?” (in Letters to his Friends 7.1.3 Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929); but Cicero clearly went to the shows.

Elephants, rhinoceroses and zebras were wiped out in northern Africa, and hippopotamuses and crocodiles were pushed south from Egypt into Nubia. (See J.J. Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994], pp. 105–108.)

Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 5.3, translated by K. Lake, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912); Apostolic Fathers 2.233.

Tacitus, Annals 15.44.3–8.

See K.M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 130 (1990), pp. 44–73.

Tacitus, Annals 12–56; Suetonius, “Claudius,” in The Twelve Caesars 12.6; and Dio Cassius, 61(60).33.3–4.

Seneca, De Ira 2.2.4, trans. J.W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).