In addition to the problems of handling the animals, the arena might in the course of a day's show be flooded for a sea fight and then planted to represent a forest. This might be followed by the erection of an artificial mountain complete with streams, bushes and growing flowers, which then had to be cleared for chariot races and immediately afterwards a gigantic fight might be staged representing Hannibal's attack on Rome—including elephants and catapults plus a mock city defended by condemned legionnaires. Thousands of slaves must have been employed in these great spectacles and every last one of them trained to split-second timing. The sailors from the fleet were used to raise and lower the great awning as these were the only men with sufficient training to handle vast spreads of cloth. The places where the awning lines chafed the stone walls still show.
CHAPTER FIVE
By the time the Colosseum was built, wild animal shows were an important part of the games. Wild beasts had always appeared in the shows from the earliest days, either in the form of trained animal acts or for hunts in which deer, wild goats and antelopes were turned loose in the arena and killed by experienced hunters. Later, dangerous animals such as lions, leopards, wild boars and tigers were introduced and gladiators sent out to kill them. Augustus had a bandit named Selurus dropped into a cage of wild beasts, and this sight made such a hit that the execution of condemned prisoners by wild animals became a regular part of the shows. So many elaborate and ingenious uses were made of wild animals (which were particularly popular with the mob, while the upper-classes preferred the gladiatorial contests) that a special class of men called bestiarii were created to handle the animal turns. These men had their own school as did the gladiators, and had their own traditions, professional slang and uniform.
One of the bestiarii was named Carpophorus. We know of him because the poet Martial wrote enthusiastically, "Carpophorus could have handled the hydra, the chimaera and the fire-eating bulls at the same time." That's all we know about Carpophorus. Let's describe a top bestiarii during the reign of the Emperor Domitain, shortly after the building of the Colosseum. We'll call our hero Carpophorus for convenience's sake.
Carpophorus, we'll suppose was a freeman. He was the son of freed slaves who had died, leaving the boy destitute. As his parents had been freed, the boy was also free but as the son of former slaves, he was regarded with contempt by the Roman mob. Because of this prejudice, finding a job was even harder for him than for most people of his time, and at an early age the boy took to hanging around the Circus Maximus, the Circus Flarninius, the Circus Neronis, and all the other big and little circuses in Rome of the period, including travelling shows that set up wherever they could find an open spot and featured a few worn-out gladiators and some moth-eaten lions. Little Carpophorus carried water for the elephants, cleaned the cages, polished the gladiators' armour and ran errands for a few copper pieces and his meals.
At night he slept under the arches of the Circus Maximus. There were hundreds of these arches supporting the tiers of seats above and they formed a maze of interlocking passages, holes, runways, and narrow slits where only a boy could crawl. Carpophorus learned to know the whole tangle blindfolded. This "under the stands" was a world of its own inhabited by fortune-tellers, astrologers, fruit and souvenir sellers, sausage and hamburger vendors, and prostitutes. All these people formed a close-knit fraternity of their own and made their living out of the crowds going to see the shows. People in the stands who got bored with the games would leave their seats and stroll down to this underground world where they could buy special dishes at the various stands, get a skin of wine, watch Syrian and Moorish women do obscene dances to the music of drums, cymbals and castanets, or engage the services of the plump, highly painted little boys who went around with their smocks hitched up above buttocks.
In this world, Carpophorus grew up. although he had dreamed at one time of being a famous gladiator and at another of being a great charioteer, his real talent was always with animals. He picked up a couple of stray dogs in die street and taught them to dance on their hind legs, walk a tightrope, howl dismally when asked, "What do you think of the Red, White, and Blue teams?" and bark enthusiastically when asked, "What do you think of the Greens?" This, of course, if the onlooker was wearing a green flower or scarf. As the dogs obeyed secret hand signals rather than the words, they could be made to bark or whine on whatever colour Carpophorus wished.
The boy grew up with few illusions about his job, the Roman mob, or the emperor himself. On one occasion, he carried wine and bread for the arena carpenters while they worked on a magnificent galley so cleverly contrived that by pulling a single dowel the entire ship would fall to pieces. It was supposed that this galley was for one of the shows—in fact, such a galley had been employed in a spectacle only a few weeks before and the Emperor Nero had been deeply interested in it—but on completion the galley was taken to the port of Baiae. A month later it was learned that the queen mother, Agrippina, had been given a splendid new galley by her devoted son, the emperor, which had unaccountably come to pieces in the middle of the bay. Some of the stage carpenters who gossiped ended in the arena. Carpophorus kept his mouth shut, but this incident confirmed the boy's belief that the entire world was like the arena—a place without justice or mercy, where only the smart and ruthless could survive.
Later, Carpophorus got a job as helper to some of the bestiarii in the circus and learned their techniques of handling dangerous wild animals. Once when a bestiarius was trying to drive a bear from the arena, using a sort of cat-o'-nine tails with lead balls on the ends of the lashes, the bear had turned on him and grabbed the man by the shoulder. Young Carpophorus ran into the arena with a twist of blazing straw snatched from the hand of an arena slave and drove the bear off. Rumours of this feat reached one of the instructors at the School of Bestiarii and he had a talk with the boy. He agreed to sent Carpophorus through the school if the boy would agree to serve him as a slave for the next ten years. Carpophorus accepted this offer and so became an auctorati (bound over). He spent two years at the school, learning how to handle animals ranging in size from foxes to elephants.
Although everyone at the school admired the tough young man's uncanny ability with animals, Carpophorus was extremely unpopular, and not even the most farsighted of his instructors imagined that the quiet, rather sullen youth would some day be the top bestiarius in Rome. The boy was short, dark, heavy set, and if not actually clumsy, at least not graceful. A good bestiarius was supposed to be slender and agile like a modern matador. The boy was not a good mixer. His early life had made him suspicious of people—one of the reason why he had turned to animals with such a passionate intensity—and he had cultivated a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude which his fellow students resented. Carpophorus, on the other hand, regarded them as a lot of amateurs. Most of them had never been in an arena with a wild animal before they came to the school while Carpophorus had been handling wild stock since he was a kid. He didn't think much of his instructors, either. They put too much emphasis on book-learning, always quoting Aristotle and Pliny. Neither of these two learned gentlemen, as far as Carpophorus was concerned, knew beans about animals. They thought a mare could conceive if a south wind blew under her tail. Carpophorus knew better than that.