The emperor strove, though without lasting success, to keep women aloof from the brutal boxing matches. If the populace wanted to see boxers he yielded to their wishes, but he appointed the early morning hours for the contest and forbade women to go to the theatre before ten o’clock in the morning.
More popular still were the wild-beast hunts, of which Augustus arranged six-and-twenty, in which thirty-five hundred African lions and other wild animals were slain. Great was the difficulty of capturing and transporting these rare and dangerous animals; but greater still, it may be, the amount of care and money expended on the elaboration of the scenery. The Spaniards regard their bull-fights as a direct continuation of the wild-beast shows of antiquity; the splendour of the mise en scène has survived to modern days, but the demands made by an ancient public in the matter of decoration and machinery were incomparably greater. In most cases gladiators were obliged to fight the dangerous animals, but occasionally criminals fell victims to them. Strabo, for example, saw the dreaded robber chieftain, Selurus, “the son of Etna,” hurled from a lofty scaffold that suddenly collapsed beneath him into the arena at Rome, where he fell straight into the lion’s cage that had been placed below.
The bloody battles of the gladiators on land found a counterpart in a tremendous sea fight which Augustus, following the example of the dictator, arranged quite close to Rome in the year 2. He caused a lake to be dug in the plain between the slopes of Janiculum and the bank of the Tiber, eighteen hundred feet long by twelve hundred wide, on which thirty large warships and many smaller ones, manned by three thousand (or possibly six thousand) gladiators, represented a sea fight of the time of the Persian wars. Ovid describes the gorgeous spectacle as an eye-witness:
“Then when Cæsar of late showed forth to the people
Ships of Persia and Athens, a type of the terrible sea fight,
Hither came youths from the two seas and hither came maidens,
And to the capital flocked all that dwelt in the earth.”
The lake was not supplied with water from the neighbouring Tiber, but Augustus built a special aqueduct (Aqua Augusta Alsietina) which brought water from the Alsietine and Sabatine lakes (Lago di Martignano and L. de Bracciano) to the Janiculum. The Romans were so spoiled by the beautiful spring-water of their aqueducts that Augustus never thought of carrying the water of these two lakes right across to the city on the other bank of the river, but the work was so substantial that it outlasted its original purpose. The emperor allowed the possessors of fields and gardens in the vicinity to make use of the water, which was not to be compared with that of the other aqueducts in the city.
The lake formed the centre of a little wood which the emperor presented to the Roman people in the name of his grandsons Lucius and Caius. Although he never arranged another sea fight on this lake, it was not filled up but was used by other emperors for maritime spectacles, in accordance with its original purpose.