the Colosseum
BEING APPOINTED PARTY PLANNER IN ancient Rome for a simulated naval battle, or naumachia, would be a nightmare. Consider the logistics behind staging one of these manic events in a lake, arena, or artificially constructed basin: flooding and then draining the water, organizing all the condemned criminals and prisoners of war, procuring the right weapons, managing the spectators, arranging the boats (biremes, triremes, and even quinqueremes), orchestrating the fighting, overseeing security, importing sea creatures, keeping tabs on brothels, and of course, pleasing the emperor.If you messed up the head honcho’s celebration, he might just throw you into the cess pool and cheer you on as you fend for your life.Naumachiae are thought to date back to the third century BC, and appear to have taken place only four or five times in history. The term itself, which translates to “naval combat,” can signify both the event itself and the place where it took place. As massive ordeals requiring far more resources than your average Roman spectacle, naumachiae were only orchestrated for exceptionally celebratory occasions. You can think of a naumachia kind of as gladiator battle scaled up and tossed into an enormous pool, with competing fleets of oarsmen and fighters loosely reenacting a historical battle, or simply improvising their brutality. (Men already awaiting execution sometimes needed to be goaded into killing each other for the sake of mass entertainment. Oh, ancient Rome.)
