Colosseum and the Funerary Cult

The Colosseum was built in the first century CE under Emperor Vespasian, on the site of Nero’s Golden House, partly to wipe away the memory of the previous ruler. One of its main attractions was the gladiatorial games.

The first recorded fights took place in the third century BCE, when the sons of an aristocratic politician staged gladiator combats at their father’s funeral to honor him. This form of paying tribute to the dead grew out of a funerary cult that the Romans adopted from the Etruscans.

The Etruscans were a highly developed civilization, contemporaries of ancient Greece. They lived in what is now central and northern Italy, Tuscany today and Etruria then, during the first millennium BCE.

One rite of the funerary cult involved “games” held at the graveside. Homeric-age Greeks also had funeral games with a martial character. In Rome these contests first moved into the circus, which was closer to a racetrack than to a modern circus, and later evolved into the bloody gladiatorial shows that became one of the most popular public spectacles at the Colosseum. By the imperial period the commemorative meaning had faded, and the bouts were instead tied to religious festivals.

Gladiatorial combat could even serve as a path upward. Free citizens fought alongside enslaved people, and a victorious enslaved gladiator could be granted freedom. Politicians also used the games to win favor and votes. In 65 BCE, Caesar staged lavish spectacles with 320 pairs of gladiators.