What Roman gladiators did to captive women wasn’t just execution
In 177 AD, Roman guards dragged a 15-year-old slave girl named Blandina through the Colosseum’s underground tunnels. The smell of blood and animal waste choked the air. Above her, 50,000 Romans screamed for entertainment. What happened to her over the next 3 days would eventually help bring down the entire Roman Empire, but that’s not even the worst part.
For 2,000 years, historians buried the full truth about what happened to captive women in the arena. Your textbooks show you gladiator combat. Museum plaques talk about entertainment and spectacle, but they don’t tell you about the ritual that happened before every single game. They don’t explain why archaeologists stopped digging in 2019 when they found something so disturbing under the Colosseum that it made international headlines.
By the end of this video, you’ll understand three things that history class never taught you. First, the pre-game ritual that Roman law required, but that modern historians refused to discuss in detail. Second, the execution method so brutal it had its own legal classification, and it was specifically designed for women. And third, the 2019 archaeological discovery that proved the scale of this horror was 10 times worse than we thought.
If you’re ready for the darkest chapter of Roman history, hit subscribe now because this gets so much darker. And I promise you, stick with me until the 8-minute mark because I’m going to show you the graffiti inscription they literally tried to chisel off the walls. Let’s set the scene, >> [music] >> Rome 100 AD.
The city is marble and gold on the surface, but it’s built on an empire of human misery. Here’s the number that historians bury in footnotes, 60 million slaves. That’s one out of every three people in the Roman Empire, not servants, not employees, property. The Colosseum could hold 50,000 spectators. It had 28 elevators lifting wild animals from below.
It had a retractable awning operated by sailors. It even had a sophisticated drainage system for when they flooded the arena for naval battles. But you know what it also had? Holding cells, dozens of them. And here’s what your history teacher never mentioned, most of them didn’t hold gladiators.
Female captives filled these cells, war prisoners from Germania, Britannia, and North Africa. Criminals whose crimes included being Christian, refusing marriage, or simply being in the wrong place during a raid. Every single one of them was about to face something worse than death because death would have been mercy. For decades, historians focused on the gladiators, the fighters, the heroes of the arena.
They obsessed over which weapons they used, their training regimens, their diets. Meanwhile, they glossed over what happened in the tunnels below with one sanitized phrase, entertainment for the masses. But in 1952, an archaeologist named Giovanni Carbonara found something while restoring a collapsed section of the Colosseum’s hypogeum.
That’s the underground area. A piece of graffiti carved into the stone. Six Latin words that when translated read, they took her screaming. Mars forgive us. Mars was the god of war, not mercy, not forgiveness. War, what could be so horrifying that a Roman, a citizen of an empire that crucified thousands, felt the need to ask a war god for forgiveness? Stay with me because what I’m about to tell you isn’t speculation.
It’s recorded in legal documents, church records, and the journals of Roman writers who witnessed it firsthand. And here’s your first warning, you think you know where this is going, you don’t. The Romans had a term for it, damnatio ad lupana, literally condemnation to the brothel. But this wasn’t some separate building across town.
The brothel was the arena. Here’s how it worked. Before the main events, before the gladiator fights, before the animal hunts, the guards would bring out the female captives. [music] Roman law, specifically the Lex Julia de vi publica, classified certain women as infames, disgraced, without honor. And once you were labeled infames, you lost all legal protection.
All of it. The crowd knew what was about to happen. Vendors sold wine and honeyed dates. Families ate lunch. Children watched because this wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t shameful, it was scheduled entertainment. Now, you’re probably thinking, surely the historical record is vague about this. Surely we’re inferring.
No, we have names, we have accounts. Tertullian, an early Christian writer who lived in Carthage around 200 AD, wrote an entire treatise called De Spectaculis on the spectacles. He describes attending the games and being forced to watch as women were given to the gladiators as rewards for their victories.
But here’s what nobody tells you, this was legal entertainment. The Roman Senate didn’t just allow it, they regulated it. They had officials who scheduled it. They had specific days for it. The Ludi Romani, the great games held every September, always included what they called preliminary entertainments. The gladiators weren’t monsters.
They were slaves themselves, forced to participate in a system that dehumanized everyone. Records from the Spartacus revolt in 73 BC mentioned that one of the rebels’ demands was an end to the woman rewards, suggesting this practice had been going on for over a century before the Colosseum was even built.
Imagine you’re there. You’re chained in a cell that smells like death. You can hear the crowd roaring above. You know exactly what’s coming, and you know that in Rome’s eyes, you legally qualify as less than human. You have no rights, no protections, no hope of appeal. One woman refused. Her name is lost to history, but Tertullian records her story.
When the guards came for her, she fought. She injured two guards badly enough that they needed medical attention. So the arena officials made a decision. They would make an example of her using Rome’s most infamous execution method. Don’t click away yet because what happened to her next reveals the true genius, and I use that word loosely, of Roman cruelty.
They didn’t just kill people, they turned murder into mythology. That execution method had a name, damnatio ad bestias, condemnation to the beasts. But that phrase doesn’t capture the theatrical horror of what actually happened because the Romans didn’t just throw people to wild animals. They staged elaborate productions where reality and myth became the same nightmare.
The Romans loved their mythology, Hercules, Perseus, the gods and their victims, but they had a twisted innovation. What if we made the myths real? They created fatal charades, theatrical reenactments of mythological scenes where the violence was genuine and the victim actually died. And female captives were the preferred cast members for specific myths, myths involving violation and violence.
Here is a recorded case that will make your blood run cold. The Roman poet Martial, writing around 80 AD during the inauguration of the Colosseum, describes a performance of the myth of Pasiphae, a queen who, according to legend, was cursed to mate with a bull. In Martial’s account, they dressed a female prisoner in the costume and brought [music] out an actual bull.
You think that’s metaphorical. But maybe I’m reading too much into ancient poetry. Josephus, the Jewish historian who witnessed the games held by Emperor Titus, confirms it. He writes about watching a woman in the role of Dirce, a mythological character who was tied to a bull and dragged to death. Josephus specifies the woman’s cries were genuine as was her death.
But here’s what made my jaw drop when I researched this. The Colosseum had a pulley system specifically designed for these performances. Archaeologists have mapped out the underground machinery. There were platforms that could lift set pieces and people from the hypogeum to the arena floor.
There were trapdoors that could release animals at precisely timed moments. This wasn’t crude barbarity. This was engineered spectacle. They had stage managers. Set designers, costume departments. One inscription found near the Colosseum lists job titles including bestiarius, animal handler, editor, game producer, and this is the chilling one, captor, which scholars believe means costume specialist for fatal performances.
The woman who refused the preliminary ritual. They dressed her as Prometheus. You know that myth, right? Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle ate his liver every day for eternity. The Romans recreated it. They chained her to a post, and they released a trained eagle.
It didn’t kill her quickly. That was the point. Tertullian writes that she endured three attacks before finally succumbing. The crowd watched for hours. They ate, they cheered. They placed bets on how long she’d last. Here’s the detail that haunts me. They trained the animals. The Romans had professional animal trainers who taught bears, lions, and even bulls to attack in specific ways that would prolong the spectacle.
There are training manuals that survived, actual instruction guides on how to condition a leopard to wound but not immediately kill. You know what? I need to pause here. If you’re still watching this, you’re clearly someone who believes we need to confront history’s darkest truths instead of sanitizing them. Make sure you’re subscribed because next week I’m covering something even more buried, what Roman soldiers did to conquered cities that modern textbooks describe with the phrase standard military occupation. It’s not standard, it’s
nightmare fuel. Now, you might be thinking, okay, this is horrific, but at least it’s ancient history. At least we have the full record. That’s what I thought, too, until archaeologists started digging in 2019 and found something that proved we didn’t know the half of it. The Colosseum has been studied for centuries.
It’s been measured, mapped, and analyzed by hundreds of scholars. So when the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage announced in 2019 that they’d found an unexpected burial site during routine maintenance, nobody expected it to rewrite what we knew about the arena’s victims. In March 2019, workers were repairing a collapsed section of the Colosseum’s foundation on the eastern side, the side that’s usually off-limits to tourists.
They were drilling to install support beams when the ground gave way. Beneath the foundation, they found a chamber, a hidden chamber, and inside that chamber were human remains, lots of them. The Italian archaeological team, led by Dr. Alessandro Giovanni, carefully excavated the site over 8 months. What they found shocked even veteran forensic anthropologists.
173 skeletons, all female, all showing signs of trauma, and all dating to the Colosseum’s active period between 80 and 300 AD. But here’s what made the research team stop digging, [music] and this is a direct quote from Dr. Giovanni’s report, “The patterns of skeletal damage suggested repeated systematic trauma over extended periods.
These women didn’t die in single events. They were held long-term. Bone analysis reveals three horrifying details. First, evidence of malnutrition, not starvation, malnutrition. They were fed, but barely enough to keep them alive. Second, healed fractures, broken bones that had mended, suggesting they survived previous injuries and were kept alive for future use.
Third, specific trauma patterns consistent with restraints. Wrist and ankle bones showed grooves worn by shackles. DNA analysis added another layer of horror. These women weren’t Roman. They came from across the empire, Germania, North Africa, the Middle East, and Britannia. The age range, 12 to 30 years old.
” 12, but wait. Remember I promised you three things the DNA revealed? Here they are. Number three, disease markers. Almost every skeleton showed signs of infections that Rome had treatments for, meaning these women were denied basic medical care. Number two, dietary isotope analysis revealed something bizarre.
Their last meals were elaborate. Fish, imported fruits, wine. Why would captives eat luxury food right before death? Because Romans believed that sacrificial victims should be purified through specific diets. They weren’t just killing these women. They were ritualistically preparing them. And number one, this is the detail that made international headlines and then mysteriously disappeared from the news cycle within a week.
Evidence of pregnancy. Multiple skeletons showed pelvic changes consistent with childbirth or late-term pregnancy. The implications are unspeakable. There was a breeding program, or worse, women were kept alive through pregnancies and then used in the games afterward. Dr. Giovanni’s team published their findings in the Journal of Roman Archaeology in October 2019.
Within 2 months, the Italian government classified the burial site and suspended public access for preservation purposes. The full report was supposed to be released in 2020. It still hasn’t been published. Draw your own conclusions about why. But here’s the detail that keeps me up at night. One of the skeletons, labeled subject 47, had something clutched in her hand.
Bone fibers showed she’d been holding it so tightly when she died that her hand had fused around it. It took forensic specialists 3 weeks to carefully separate the bones without destroying the [music] object. It was a small wooden cross, roughly carved, about 2 in tall. Carbon dating confirmed it was approximately 1,850 years old, the same age as the skeleton, which means this woman died holding a symbol of a religion that Rome was actively trying to exterminate.
She died as a Christian martyr, and that brings us to the one woman whose name survived history, the woman who changed Rome itself. You remember Blandina, the 15-year-old girl I mentioned at the start, the one dragged through the Colosseum’s tunnels in 177 AD. Here’s what history forgot to tell you. She didn’t just die.
She won. Blandina was a slave in Lugdunum, modern-day Lyon, France. She was Christian, which in 177 AD made her criminal. When Emperor Marcus Aurelius cracked down on Christian communities, she was arrested along with dozens of others and transporting to Rome for execution during the games. The detailed account of what happened comes from a letter written by surviving Christians in Lugdunum to Christian communities in Asia Minor.
It was preserved by Eusebius, a church historian writing in the 4th century, and the details are so specific, so brutal that for centuries scholars assumed it was exaggerated until the 2019 discovery suggested it probably wasn’t. First day of the games, they brought Blandina out and bound her to a post. They released animals.
But here’s what sources describe. The animals wouldn’t touch her. Lions, bears, even a trained bull refused [music] to approach. Roman sources confirm this did happen occasionally. Animals, especially if well-fed before performances, sometimes wouldn’t attack. The crowd viewed it as a divine sign. The games editor, furious, had her taken back to the cells.
Second day, they tried damnatio ad bestias. The letter describes her being offered to the gladiators, but again, something unusual happened. A gladiator named Marcus, himself a slave, refused. He was executed on the spot for disobedience. His refusal inspired two other gladiators to refuse as well. The games descended into chaos.
The crowd rioted. The emperor’s representative had to intervene. Third day, they scourged her. 40 lashes with a flagrum, a whip embedded with metal and bone designed to flay skin. Then they placed her in a red-hot iron chair. Then finally, they put her in a net and exposed her to a bull, which gored her to death.
But here’s what history forgot. Blandina’s defiance and the gladiators’ refusal created a political crisis. The games were supposed to demonstrate Roman power and divine favor. Instead, they’d shown that Rome’s entertainment required unwilling participants, both victims and executioners. It raised uncomfortable questions about the system itself.
Within 25 years, something remarkable happened. Septimius Severus, who became emperor in 193 AD, issued reforms in 202 AD specifically addressing arena practices. The reforms, documented in the Theodosian Code, included restrictions on the use of female criminals in preliminary entertainments and the first legal recognition that damnatio ad bestias constituted cruel and unusual punishment. It wasn’t enough.
The practices continued, but Blandina’s story spread. It was copied, translated, and shared across Christian communities. She became one of the most celebrated martyrs in early Christianity. Churches were named after her. Her feast day, June 2nd, is still observed in Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
And here’s the historical irony. The very system designed to erase Christianity, the spectacle deaths meant to intimidate and terrorize, [music] actually preserved Christian texts. The letters describing martyrs’ deaths were copied obsessively. They’re some of the most detailed [music] historical documents we have from this period.
In trying to destroy Christianity through public execution, Rome accidentally created its most powerful propaganda. By 325 AD, Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and banned munera sine missione, games without mercy. The fatal charades ended. Animal executions were phased out. The Colosseum, once Rome’s greatest symbol of power, became a symbol of everything Christianity opposed.
But let’s be clear. This didn’t happen because Romans suddenly developed empathy. It happened because the empire was collapsing. The cost of importing animals was crippling. The slave supply was dwindling, and Christianity had become too powerful to suppress. The women in those arenas didn’t die for nothing.
Their deaths literally helped topple pagan Rome. But they also shouldn’t have had to die at all. The last recorded damnatio ad bestias happened in 404 AD. A monk named Telemachus jumped into the arena to stop a gladiator fight. The crowd stoned him to death, but Emperor Honorius, horrified by the incident, permanently banned gladiatorial combat 3 days later.
173 women in a mass grave. Blandina and countless others whose names will never know. And finally, one monk who said enough. So [snorts] here’s what we know. The Colosseum wasn’t just an arena for gladiator combat. It was a systematic execution facility where female captives faced something historians can barely bring themselves to describe in textbooks.
It was legal. It was scheduled. It was entertainment for families. And we have the receipts, legal documents, eyewitness accounts, skeletal evidence, and even the tools they used, preserved in museums that still struggle with how to display them. The suffering of these women accidentally preserved the early Christian texts that described their martyrdom.
Those texts, copied and spread across the empire, helped Christianity grow from a persecuted sect to the dominant religion of Europe. History is weird like that. Sometimes the worst atrocities create unexpected consequences. Today, UNESCO protects multiple burial sites around the Colosseum as human rights memorials. There’s a plaque on the eastern wall, added in 2020 after the 2019 discovery, that reads, “In memory of the nameless victims whose suffering is written in these stones.
The Italian government still hasn’t released the full archaeological report. Make of that what you will. Here’s my question for you, and I want you to really think about this before answering in the comments. Should modern Rome, both the city and the Catholic Church, which is headquartered there, officially apologize for what happened in these arenas? Some argue that modern Italians aren’t responsible for ancient Romans.
Others say acknowledgement matters regardless of temporal distance. What do you think? Let me know below. If this video disturbed you, and it should have, you’re going to want to see what I’ve uncovered about Roman military tactics in conquered territories. Your textbooks call it Romanization. The archaeological evidence calls it something much darker.
That video drops next Tuesday, and I’ve already gotten warnings from academic colleagues that it’s too controversial, which means it’s exactly what needs to be told. Click that subscribe button, hit the notification bell, and watch this video next. It’s about what we found when we analyzed the skeletal remains of children in Pompeii, because Rome’s darkness didn’t stop with adults.
History isn’t comfortable, but it’s necessary. I’ll see you in the next one.
