Polar Bears in the Roman Colosseum?

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There’s a strange and intriguing reference in the writings of a first-century Roman poet who describes a showdown between bears and seals (or, as he called them, “sea-calves”) in the Colosseum. Only polar bears are known to fight seals, so this raises a question no modern scholar has yet been able to answer: How on Earth would arctic bears have traveled to the heart of the Roman Empire?

A clue to the ursine mystery has recently emerged—in the first English language book on Scandinavian Roman-era history, Dagfinn Skre's The Northern Routes to Kingship. Skre places Sweden, Norway, and Denmark at the periphery of the empire, showing that Denmark was only a four-week march from the Roman frontier. And in fact, the Roman military was recruiting from the region by the late first century A.D. So the social networks and infrastructure were in place to facilitate the movement of exotic animals that Rome craved for its spectacles.

I reached out to Michael Kulikowski, a professor of classics at Penn State who wrote about Skre’s work for the London Review of Books, for more on how polar bears could have ended up on the sands of Rome’s most famous arena.

“We know that there were European brown bears, elk, moose, and musk ox from the far north that are all attested in the Roman area,” he tells me, explaining that the trade in northern species probably began because the supply of African animals had been exhausted by the first century A.D. Polar bears would have been a rarer commodity, but they “could easily have drifted on pack ice” to mainland Norway and been captured, Kulikowski says.

And how do you subdue a polar bear without modern technology? We can extrapolate from descriptions and artistic depictions of Roman roundups of animals in Africa. What normally happened was that a prey animal was tied to a stake and positioned in a disguised pit, explains University of Iowa historian Sarah Bond. The carnivore would approach, fall into the pit, and be snared in a net. In some instances, animal trappers had beaters and men on horseback who would stampede animals toward a row of nets. And indeed, Skre describes the archaeological evidence for similar pitfall traps for elk in the north.

Once an animal was entangled, it could be shackled, goaded, or dragged into a crate. The Romans had to use wooden boxes that were reinforced with iron rather than metal cages with bars on them that might break the animal’s teeth, Kulikowski adds—putting them at risk of becoming damaged goods.

There’s evidence that as beast fights in arenas grew in popularity, the military got involved in the procurement process. Christopher Epplett, a professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada and expert on Rome’s games, has shown that soldiers in the imperial army were sometimes exempted from regular duties to supply animals. We know of soldier-specialists who hunted bears on the German frontier and lion experts among the soldiers stationed at Dura-Europos in modern Syria.

What we don’t know is how far north a Roman animal trader would have traveled to secure his wares. Sami people likely acted as intermediaries, but we have to assume, Kulikowski says, that Roman traders would have developed “a whole industry that was dedicated to shipping beasts to Rome.” This would have been very specialized work: “You go to a guy, let’s call him Caecilius, who is known for having the best bears. He has a network, he knows people to talk to: the right chieftains in Scandinavia, who know the right Sami herdsmen and hunters in the far north.”

The animals then would have been transported down to the mouth of the Rhine in the present-day Netherlands, then down the Rhône Valley and along the Italian coast, says Kulikowski. Upon the beasts’ arrival in Rome, wealthy elites might have provided enclosures as a kind of private zoo, but the army also supplied temporary housing for animals. Bear and bison bones found at a Roman fortress in Bulgaria suggest that animals were held there before being moved to an arena. Polar bears may well have found themselves in similar surroundings.

It was hard to keep animals alive on the way to Rome. Bond says that heat and food became an issue over long journeys, and many animals suffered. The late fourth-century statesman Symmachus lamented in a letter that a shipment of 50 crocodiles had gone on hunger strike, making them considerably less fearsome. (Crocodiles get depressed when they are boxed in.)

Animals also had to be trained, through fear or starvation, to fight in the arena. When called upon to fight, animals were dragged out of their cages and driven through corridors into waiting areas. At the Colosseum, Bond says, “there was a whole underground area with cages and ‘elevators’ that created a zoo-like labyrinth—visible to this day—underneath the sand and floorboards.”

While thousands of animals were sometimes killed over the course of a single set of games—9,000 apparently died in the inaugural games at the Colosseum in A.D. 81—the point was to impress the audience. And that meant keeping the most fearsome predators alive, at least for a time. “You are not going to kill your star man-eater,” says Kulikowski.

This is why polar bears would have squared off against seals in the arena. It wasn’t a fair fight, but taking animals out of their habitat from the farthest reaches of the empire and bringing them to the capital made a statement about Rome’s power and distracted the audience from their everyday woes. Nandini Pandey, who specializes in Roman history at Johns Hopkins, tells me that “the whole spectacle testified to Rome’s imperial domination over life, space, and nature itself.” The crowds had favorite animals, and the names of some big cats are preserved in mosaics and inscriptions. If you kept a predator in good condition, Kulikowski adds, it could probably live to fight for at least a year. Their opponents were not just other animals but also human beast fighters and criminals who had been condemned to death in the arena.

After the fight, surviving animals would be prodded back into their pens by enslaved people who wielded torches and spears and made a lot of noise. “It was very dangerous work, obviously,” says Kulikowski, for humans as well as animals. For those in charge, the money made the risk worthwhile. Many beast fighters would not have had a choice about their profession, but the fame of working in the arena might have been preferable to serving as an auxiliary soldier. Funerary inscriptions reveal that beast fighters were local celebrities. Perhaps, like Roman gladiators, the beast trainers got all the girls. “Who’s to say it’s a bad trade-off?” says Kulikowski.

A New (Ancient) Fragment of The Odyssey

As if a blockbuster movie wasn’t enough Odyssey news for one year, a researcher in the Netherlands has stumbled across an ancient fragment of Homer’s epic tale buried in a collection of early Christian manuscripts. While this is not one of the earliest fragments of The Odyssey ever discovered, classicist Joel Christensen, provost of CUNY graduate center and editor of The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey, tells me “it does provide insight into the importance of Homer in late antiquity.”

Mark de Kreij of Radboud University discovered the parchment—previously believed to be a seventh-century writing of no importance—hidden in a collection of manuscripts purchased by Utrecht University from the German scholar Carl Schmidt. De Kreij recognized some typical Homeric phrases and realized that it was from a third- or fourth-century A.D. pocket-size edition of The Odyssey. We now know the original owner hailed from the Fayum oasis in Egypt and that the passage comes from Book 12, when the sun god Helios found out that Odysseus’s crew had slaughtered and eaten his sacred cows. This particular passage attracted a lot of interest from later philosophical readers of the story, Christensen says, adding that it “may have been especially interesting to Christians because it showed how Odysseus’s companions attracted divine punishment.”

Does This Ring Belong to Pontius Pilate? Not Exactly

Back in the 1960s, scientists discovered a small copper-alloy ring from Herodium, an ancient military fortress just outside of Jerusalem, bearing the Greek inscription Pilato, or “belonging to Pilate.” The find caused quite a stir. Did the ring belong to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus of Nazareth to die? Scholars were divided. A new article published in Palestine Exploration Quarterly by UCLA professor Catherine Bonesho offers a solution. She explained to us how the ring both is and is not connected to the infamous governor of Judea.

The Mystery of Hermes on the Silk Road May Have Been Solved

In 1914, Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born British explorer and archaeologist, unearthed a second-century tapestry of the Greek god Hermes at a grave pit in Loulan, in China’s Xinjiang Province. As one of the few textiles to survive from antiquity, this gorgeous representation of the wide-eyed god with a caduceus, his signature winged staff, quickly became the poster child for the Silk Road.

But it wasn’t clear, even apart from Hermes’ mythic ability to travel over great distances, how the textile ended up in this major city in a vassal state of the Han dynasty. And even though the image of Hermes went on to adorn the cover of numerous history books, the tapestry was never studied in detail—until, that is, a new article by Oxford University professor Peter Stewart appeared this month in the journal Silk Roads and Heritage.

Drawing upon research conducted by Chinese archaeologists in the late 1970s, including radiocarbon dates for graves that yielded similar textile finds, Stewart shows that the piece was a luxury Roman import probably intended to be hung or draped on display. Stewart unravels the story behind his discovery in Peter Frankopan’s newsletter Global Textiles.