Colosseum Lift That Carried Wild Animals Into Arena Rebuilt

An anonymous reader writes: Archaeologists have built a replica of the lift that was used to move lions and other wild animals into the Colosseum 1,500 years ago. It is estimated that a million animals may have been killed in the history of the arena. It took a year and a half for the archaeologists and engineers to build the 23ft-high timber lift, using only materials that would have been available to the ancient Romans. Gary Glassman, a director who made a documentary about the project said, "One of the reasons we are attracted to the Colosseum is because of the incredible violence that went on here. The question it poses is, how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles? The Colosseum is a snapshot in stone, a physical embodiment of the culture of Rome."

Comments

think of advanced civilisations in fiction

[ihtoit]

the Triskelions in Star Trek - got off on blood sports.
The Running Man - Bread and Circuses for a collapsed US economy.
Rollerball - street hockey and motorcycles.
Death Race 2000 - Cannonball Run with real cannonballs.
Death Race - like the preceding, but laps around a prison island and the entire country's putting bets on. Kinda like The Running Man but with miniguns. And Tombstones. Gotta love those Tombstones.

The first King novel I ever read was his masterpiece "The Long Walk". Death Race 2000 but without the cars. Published as part of the Bachman anthology in 1985.

More recently, we have Battle Royale and its Hollywood ripoff, The Hunger Games.

See, the Romans had it right. Give the plebs just enough food to survive and keep them entertained, they stay compliant and content. Hence, "Bread and Circuses".

Stupid question

[viperidaenz]

how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles?

We're the dominant predator on the planet. We didn't get here by being friendly.
We don't have large teeth.
We don't have claws.
We're not overly big or strong.
We use our brains to figure out how to hunt and kill prey.

Pretty much all reasonably intelligent animal kill for entertainment.

Re:Let me answer this question:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, the question should be "how could a less advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles?"

All kinds of engineering talent, organizational expertise, a logistics and trade network that spanned the Mediterranean world; were necessary to run something like the Colosseum. Those loads of wild animals(some pretty exotic) and ample supplies of variously trained gladiators don't just deliver themselves, you know; nor is building that much stadium seating with rocks and manual labor exactly trivial.(Never mind the 'let's flood the place and have a lethal naval battle' days, those are a huge pain.)

Any mangy barbarian can enjoy drunken brawling, hunting, and the occasional duel or dog fight; but bloody spectacle is something best left to the experts.

Re:Let me answer this question:

[jellomizer]

While advanced culture, there is the human worry that they are not tough enough to handle the world. Watching gladiators kill lions and elephants is the same as use watching Zombie movies. Half of the interest is what is going on in your head, you try to figure out what you would do in their place.
Then the outcome will normally please you.
The gladiator dies, validating that your different approach is better
The animal dies when the gladiator does what you would do, validating your idea.
The animal died with a different method, then you learned a new survival idea.

The moral issue of human and animal life, can so easily be shoved away with propaganda (still today) that for most of the population it doesn't even occur to them.

Re:Let me answer this question:

[Bongo]

And however you doll up humanity today, it is merely an illusion that anything has changed since then.

Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a case that, however bad things look today, the past was much much more violent. Actually his book tries to ask why things have improved so much. Part of our modern feeling that today is terrible, is because we are more sensitive and more empathetic than we've ever been before, so we notice stuff more than we used to. Of course, caveats, not all the planet is living in the 21st Century today, but there is a trend. And we hope it continues. So yes, we are still pretty crappy as humans, but let's not start believing that we are irredeemable—we have made a lot of progress and that means we can make more progress in universal empathy and care and compassion.

Re:Still in sad condition

[Anonymous Coward]

You're completely uninformed. Firstly, Italy IS restoring the Colosseum, the arena in particular, recently they polished the external walls too, and I'm quite astonished that the /. article doesn't mention it:

http://roma.repubblica.it/cron...

Obviously you cannot rebuild it exactly as it was, not because of lack of money, which is not a problem for the Italians (see next paragraph), but because they should use the very same marble which was used by their Ancestors, and get it from the same mountains. It would cause an environmental disaster.

Secondly, Italy hasn't received any money from the EU or the IMF, actually its 10-year sovereign bonds yield LESS than the US treasuries with the same maturity, which means that markets technically consider the Italian debt less risky than the american, for how unbelievable it might seem to you:

http://www.marketwatch.com/

(click on "rates").

So they really don't need any "help", let alone from some random american internet billionaires whose main concern would be the wifi coverage rather than rebuilding the Colosseum as it was.

Re:Let me answer this question:

[CrimsonAvenger]

Rome needed big armies and needed a system that would integrate the less civilized people it subjugated into its society.

Umm, no. Rome had a miniscule army for most of its history, when compared to its population. That's the advantage of an Empire as opposed to a city-state or similar flyspeck "nation".