What Really Happened to Christians Condemned to the Beasts in Rome?

PART 2:

  One of these punishments had a technical name: Damnatio Adias, condemnation to the beasts, one of the most severe in Roman law.  And it wasn’t created for Christians.  Long before, Rome had already handed over wild beasts, deserters, bandits, murderers, and slaves. Strabo recounts seeing a bandit leader fall from a platform in the Roman forum, designed to collapse onto cages of wild animals.

   It was never just about killing, it was about staging a death so that no one in the audience would forget who was in charge and who was obeying.  For our convict, after the  sentence, came prison. Dark, stuffy, and overcrowded cells, where one could wait for weeks for . Perpetua, a young Christian woman imprisoned in Carthage in 203, describes in an account attributed to her the stifling heat and darkness of the prison.

  Why so long?  Because the execution followed the calendar of the festivities, and the condemned person waited for the next performance.  This is where he separates himself from the gladiator.   The gladiator was an expensive investment, trained and fed by an owner who wanted to see him fight again.  The convict cost little and received no training.

His death was not a risk to the spectacle, it was the spectacle itself.  A Roman legal text prohibited governors from releasing these convicts simply because the crowd demanded it.  The sentence belonged  to the state and the beast on the other side of the fence.  She also made a long journey, many times longer than that of the condemned man himself.

  If you enjoy delving into history this way, leave a like, because it keeps the Bible in ruins, reconstructing these paths. Lions and leopards came mainly from North Africa, and bears from European forests.   Bulls and wild boars could be captured much closer.  Ancient mosaics and texts show what the capture was like, with nets, torches, and horsemen pushing the animals into traps.

  Then came the wooden cages on carts, the roads to the port, and the ships across the Mediterranean.  A dead animal on the road was money lost.  Even Cicero, when he governed Celicia, received insistent letters from a friend asking for panthers for the games he was organizing in Rome.  The reason is that exotic animals were used as political currency.

Those who offered rare animals to the people displayed wealth, connections, and power.  Jeon Cássio claims that the inauguration of the Colosseum consumed 9,000 animals.  It’s a difficult number to verify, but it reveals the scale. In Rome, animals waited in enclosures, with contractors in charge of keeping them alive, strong, and ready for the appointed day.

  This mechanism wasn’t only in operation in Rome.  Hundreds of amphitheaters were scattered throughout the empire, from Britain to North Africa.  Carthage, Lyon, and Tarragona had their own.  In many cities, the amphitheater was one of the largest buildings visible from afar.  The one in Rome became the symbol for all of them.

  It was built over the lake of Nero’s Palace, on imperial land returned to the people as a political gift.  It could hold around 50,000 people, each with their own place [to listen to music].  The senators stayed near the sand, and the women and the poor were up on the higher ground.  And beneath it all was the sand.  In Latin, arena, the word that gave us  the name arena.

  In the Colosseum, the secret lay beneath the sand.  It was the Ipogeum,  an underground labyrinth added by Domitian a few years after the inauguration. There, amidst torches and stone corridors, workers carried cages to dozens of wooden elevators moved by ropes and winches. When the trapdoors opened, an animal seemed to sprout from the ground in the middle of the arena.

Paral, the audience was almost magical.  In the provinces, many amphitheaters were simpler, with  cells next to the arena and heavy gates, like the one in front of our condemned man.  And who paid for all of this?  In Rome, it was usually the emperor.  In the provinces,  magistrates and priests of the imperial cult displayed their generosity there.

The day  followed a script.  In the morning came the venationes, in which armed hunters  faced wild beasts and exotic animals paraded before the public.  In the afternoon came the highlight, the gladiators, but during the intermission, around noon, the program changed completely.  It was execution time.

  Cênca, who witnessed one of them, wrote with disgust that there was no combat there, only death.  The condemned person could be displayed around the arena with a plaque.  In Lon, the plaque on Attalus simply read: “This Attalus, the Christian.” Convicts could be tied to posts or pushed in small carts to the beasts.

  A mosaic found in Libya depicts this scene. In certain performances, the execution turned into theater.  The condemned were dressed as characters from myths, and death was staged as the ending of a legend.  In Carthage, they wanted to dress Perpetua and her companions as priests of Roman gods.

  According to the report, they refused and the demand was dropped. Why so much effort?  Because the arena was a message.  Anyone who broke Roman order would be exposed and destroyed in front of everyone.  And the audience was not passive. In Smyrna, the crowd even demanded a lion against the old bishop Polycarp, but the person in charge of the games refused, because the shows with wild animals had already ended.

  According to the Christian account, Polycarp  died at the stake.  So what do we know about Christians facing wild beasts?  There are well- documented cases, but they are fewer than popular tradition suggests.  Most cases were local.  Orders on an imperial scale only emerged in the 1st century with Decius and Valerian, and later with Diocletian.

   In Lyon, in the year 177, a letter from that time preserved by Eusebius describes the Blandine slave girl tied to a post in front of wild animals. According to the letter, no animal touched her that day.  The Christians  saw a sign there.  In practice, those who survived the wild beasts usually died by the sword.

  In Carthage, during the games celebrating the birthday of one of the emperor’s sons, Perpetua’s account mentions a leopard, a bear, a boar, and a wild cow, but no lion.  Ignatius of Antioch, taken prisoner to Rome in the 2nd century, wrote that he would face the beasts.  The details of his death , however, only appear in later texts.  And the Colosseum.

   It is possible that Christians died there, but no ancient text definitively confirms a known martyr  in that arena.  For these communities, the arena meant something else .  In Greek, martyr means witness, someone who publicly confirms their faith .  Therefore, the day of death came to be remembered as a birthday in heaven, and the accounts were read at Christian gatherings.

  In Carthage, the apologist Tertullian recounts that the crowd shouted: “Christians to the lion! At every disaster!” that that  blood was seed. For Rome, that was the humiliation of a hardened criminal.  For Christians, it was the victory of one witness, same sand, two stories.  Over time, this memory [of the music] grew. Later accounts added miracles that historians read with caution.

  And in 1749, the Colosseum was dedicated to the memory of the martyrs.  The hallway remains dark, the same bars, the same strips of light, the same dust falling with every scream.  But now we know what lies behind that man’s  .  An accusation, a rejected altar, and a sentence meant to be witnessed.

  We know about the cell, the waiting for the calendar, the beast that crossed the sea in a cage, and the handler who kept it alive.  And we know because the stands  are full.  Someone paid for that show, and the message was meant for every single person sitting there.  Then, the ropes creak, the railing begins to rise, light floods the corridor, and for the first time the arena appears in its entirety.

  What happens  next?  The old sources tell the story in just a few lines.  Here, all it takes is the shadow of a man entering the light.  Rome built the arena to decide, before thousands of musicians, how that man would be remembered.  But whoever preserved the memory of the  chose to tell a different story.  In Lyon.

  The ashes of the martyrs were thrown into the Rhône to erase even the memory of them. Subscribe, because in the next video we’re going down into the catacombs, where Christians did exactly the opposite.