Gladiators battled lions and other wild animals in the arenas of the Roman Empire. But for all the tales of glorious combat depicted in ancient texts, marble reliefs and mosaics and then retold in movies and other modern media, archaeologists have never found direct physical evidence, like the skeletons of gladiators bearing animal-induced wounds.
At last, proof of classical combat between man and beast has been found in the form of a skeleton from a Roman settlement in Britain. It is the first direct evidence of a gladiator mauled by a lion.
The skeleton was discovered 20 years ago, in an excavation spurred by a couple hoping to renovate the yard of their home in the English city of York. An initial survey turned up evidence of an ancient cemetery, halting the construction plans.
“Britain is rich with Roman archaeology,” said Tim Thompson, an anthropologist at Maynooth University in Ireland and an author of a paper published Wednesday that describes the discovery in the journal PLOS One. “You pretty much can’t shove a spade in the ground without hitting something ancient and archaeological.”
The larger site contained the buried remains of more than 80 individuals. Nearly all of them were young men, and many of their bodies showed signs of trauma. The demographics of the deceased, the types of injuries in their bones and the manner in which they were interred suggested that they had fought as gladiators around 1,800 years ago, when what is now York was an outpost of the Roman Empire.
One skeleton in particular, identified by researchers as 6DT19, had unusual wounds: small indentations in the hip bones.
Other researchers had noted that these notches looked like bite marks from a large animal, perhaps a lion. However, nobody had definitively proved their origin. When Dr. Thompson set out to do so, he learned that 6DT19’s injuries might be a discovery of outsize importance within the world of Roman archaeology.
“What we hadn’t realized when we started was that there was no physical evidence for gladiators fighting big cats in the world,” Dr. Thompson said.
To determine if the indentations of 6DT19’s hip really were bite marks, Dr. Thompson and his colleagues first had to collect data on what the bite marks of large mammals look like. For that, they made a somewhat unusual request of several British zoos: a chance to examine their lions’ leftovers.
“We took the carcasses that the animals have been eating and then we analyzed the bite marks on them,” Dr. Thompson said. “We looked at cheetahs and lions and tigers and all sorts of things like that.”
By shining a grid of light on the bones gnawed on by zoo animals, the researchers created a map of the dimensions and depth of the animals’ bites. They then created a similar map of 6DT19’s hip bones and compared the bite marks left by the different animals with the indentations on the ancient skeleton. Sure enough, the Roman combatant’s injuries were best explained by a lion’s bite.
However, the hip bite probably isn’t what killed 6DT19. “We think the individual was incapacitated in some way, and then the animal came along, bit and dragged the body away,” Dr. Thompson said.
Kathryn Marklein, an anthropologist at the University of Louisville who was not involved with the study, said that this lion bite mark revealed more than just what had happened to one unlucky man nearly two millenniums ago; it provides evidence of life and culture in the far reaches of the Roman Empire, particularly how state violence was performed.
“The amount of resources — animal, human — that went into these spectacles to reinforce what it meant to be a Roman, and to be a good Roman, is staggering,” Dr. Marklein said.
Public gladiatorial games, especially those involving animals like lions brought from thousands of miles away, served as entertainment, a show of Roman might and a warning.
“You can imagine just being there and seeing this and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, when the tax collector comes around, I’m going to pay up, I’m going to be a very good Roman citizen,’” Dr. Marklein said. “‘Be very good, so that I don’t end up here.’”
