Colosseum Myths: 6 Things Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
Reviewed 24 Aug 20269 min read
Almost everything most visitors think they know about the Colosseum arrives from somewhere other than the evidence — from Victorian paintings, Hollywood scripts, and devotional traditions invented centuries after the games ended. Some of it is wrong. Some of it is half right in a way that turns out to be more interesting than the myth. Here are six of the most persistent, checked against the archaeological record and the Parco archeologico del Colosseo’s own published material.
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Colosseum myths: the short answer
Christian martyrs: no ancient source names one, and the building is missing from the medieval pilgrim guides to martyr shrines.
Thumbs down: the direction was never recorded. The gesture we know comes from an 1872 painting.
Naval battles: real, but only in the first few years, and the underground made them impossible thereafter.
Fights to the death: roughly one gladiator in ten died per bout, not all of them.
The underground: stage machinery, not a dungeon.
The ruin: quarried for building stone, not simply weathered away.
Last updated 24 August 2026. Claims on this page are checked against the Parco archeologico del Colosseo, published academic work, and primary ancient sources rather than secondary travel writing.
Myth 1: Christians were thrown to the lions here
This is the most widely believed thing about the Colosseum, and there is no reliable evidence for it. No ancient source records a named Christian executed in the building. The strongest evidence is an absence: throughout the Middle Ages, when Rome’s martyr shrines were venerated and catalogued in detail, the Colosseum simply does not appear in the pilgrim itineraries that listed them. Those guides existed precisely to direct visitors to such places.
The point is conceded by the Catholic Church’s own reference work. Reporting the research of the Bollandist scholar Fr Hippolyte Delehaye, the Catholic Encyclopedia states that “there are no historical grounds for so regarding it”, and notes that in the Middle Ages “the Coliseum was completely neglected; its name never occurs in the itineraries, or guide-books, compiler for the use of pilgrims to the Eternal City.” Delehaye’s own position was carefully balanced: he did not wish to deny that there may have been martyrs of the Flavian amphitheatre, but neither, he wrote, do we know that there were.
The chronology also rules out the most familiar version of the story. Nero’s persecution took place in AD 64 and Nero died in AD 68 — both before construction of the Colosseum had even begun, around AD 70 to 72. Tacitus places Nero’s victims in the Vatican Circus and his own gardens.
What about the cross standing in the arena today? It is not ancient either. Benedict XIV consecrated the site to the Passion of Christ in 1749–50 and fourteen Stations of the Cross were installed. Those were removed again in February 1874 during the excavations of the new Italian state. The cross you see now was erected on 24 October 1926, and the park’s own account describes its return as a political gesture of the Fascist period, filmed by the state newsreel service three years before the Lateran Pacts.
None of which proves nobody ever died there for their faith. The building hosted public executions for centuries, and some of the condemned may well have been Christians. But the Colosseum as a martyrs’ shrine is an early modern idea, not an ancient one.
Myth 2: Thumbs down meant death
Nobody knows which way the thumb turned, because no Roman writer ever described the gesture. The phrase that survives is pollice verso — “with the thumb turned” — used by Juvenal in his third satire. Turned which way, he does not say. The counterpart phrase, pollices premere, “to press the thumbs”, signalled favour.
The leading scholarly reconstruction argues the modern version is exactly backwards. Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Latin at the University of Virginia, put it plainly: “Sparing is pressing the thumb to the top of the fist and death is a thumbs-up. In other words, it’s the opposite of what we think.” The only surviving ancient image of the moment, a terracotta medallion from Cavillargues dating to around AD 200, shows reprieve being granted with a closed fist and the thumb pressed down.
So where did our version come from? A painting. Jean-Léon Gérôme finished Pollice Verso in 1872, showing a crowd jabbing their thumbs downward, and it fixed the image in popular imagination for good. The Phoenix Art Museum, which has owned the canvas since 1968, is refreshingly direct about it on its own website: because pollice verso specifies neither up nor down, “we do not have a clear answer”, and the modern thumbs-down reading is “likely influenced by Ridley Scott’s feature film Gladiator” — adding that “there are no historical records that confirm this.”
Worth adding to your Rome itinerary
Other Rome experiences to explore
If the history behind the Colosseum interests you, the sites around it repay a visit for the same reasons. The Roman Forum and Palatine Hill come included with every Colosseum ticket and put the amphitheatre in its political context. The Capitoline Museums hold the finest collection of ancient Roman sculpture anywhere, much of it excavated from the Forum below. For the layer of Rome beneath the Rome you can see, the Basilica of San Clemente a short walk up Via Labicana stacks a twelfth-century church over a fourth-century basilica over a Mithraic temple, and the Catacombs on the Appian Way are where Rome’s early Christians actually were buried.
Myth 3: They flooded the arena for mock sea battles
This one is true, briefly, and then becomes impossible — and the reason it became impossible is the most interesting part. Cassius Dio describes Titus filling the amphitheatre with water and staging a sea fight between crews impersonating Corcyreans and Corinthians. Martial and Suetonius refer to water spectacles too. These were staged in shallow water, roughly a metre deep, with scaled-down warships rather than real ones.
But those shows belong only to the building’s first years. In its original form the substructure beneath the arena was built in wood. Under Domitian, who reigned from AD 81 to 96, it was rebuilt in permanent masonry — and the moment there were solid walls roughly six metres below the sand, filling the arena with water was no longer possible. The park’s own account of the underground notes that its converging tunnels had served as docks for the naumachiae, and that when the wooden arena was replaced with masonry, water shows were no longer held. None are recorded afterwards.
So the hypogeum you walk through today is itself the evidence. Its existence is the reason the naval battles stopped.
Myth 4: Every gladiator fight was to the death
Most were not. The classic study of the epigraphic record, by the French historian Georges Ville, found roughly 19 deaths per 100 participants in the first century AD. Because every bout involves two fighters, that works out at about one gladiator in ten dying per bout — or put another way, roughly one bout in five producing a fatality. The risk to the loser specifically rose over time, from about one in five to one in four, as reprieve appears to have been granted less freely in the later Empire.
The economics explain the restraint better than mercy does. Gladiators were expensive to train, feed and lease, and an organiser who got one killed unexpectedly owed the owner compensation far exceeding the rental price. In AD 177 the Senate went as far as legislating to cap gladiator prices.
The bones agree. At the gladiator cemetery excavated at Ephesus, researchers from the Medical University of Vienna examined the remains of around 67 individuals, nearly all under 30. Eleven of them — about 16 per cent — carried well-healed skull injuries. These were men who took a serious head wound, received competent medical care, recovered, and fought again.
One honest caveat: this is not the same as saying the arena was not lethal. Low per-bout mortality among trained gladiators sat alongside the mass killing of condemned prisoners and beast-hunt victims, who were not gladiators and whose deaths were the point.
Myth 5: The underground was a dungeon for prisoners
The hypogeum was backstage, not a jail. It held winches, lift shafts, cages, ramps and pre-assembled scenery, operated by crews who never saw the crowd. The park’s own description of the space covers the preparations made before each show and does not mention prisoners at all.
The scale of the machinery is what tends to surprise people. In its earlier Flavian phase the underground ran 28 windlasses lifting 28 freight elevators along a curved corridor, plus 20 mobile platforms in the central passage. The park’s figure for operating all 28 at once is blunt: “a team of 224 people was necessary.” By the Severan period that arrangement had been replaced by 60 smaller lifts in the straight corridors. The two figures often quoted in conflict — 28 and 60 — are not a contradiction at all. They are two different centuries.
Heinz-Jürgen Beste, the German Archaeological Institute archaeologist whose survey from 1996 established most of what is known about the mechanism, described the point of it: “The hypogeum allowed the organizers of the games to create surprises and build suspense. A hunter in the arena wouldn’t know where the next lion would appear, or whether two or three lions might emerge instead of just one.”
Conditions below were genuinely grim, but for the workers rather than for imagined prisoners. Beste again: “It was as hot as a boiler room in the summer, humid and cold in winter, and filled all year round with strong smells, from the smoke, the sweating workmen packed in the narrow corridors, the reek of the wild animals.” The animals themselves were not kept down there permanently — they were held at vivaria outside the building and brought in for the day.
Myth 6: The Colosseum crumbled away with age
It was taken apart. For centuries after the games ended the building served as a quarry, and the park records that stone from it went into the construction of St Peter’s Basilica, among other projects. It also did duty as a fortress, workshops, housing and a source of lime.
The pockmarks covering the exterior are not weathering. They are the holes left where medieval scavengers prised out the iron clamps that held the travertine blocks together, stripping roughly 300 tonnes of metal from the structure. That is why the earthquake of 1349 brought the southern wall down while the northern side still stands: the building had already been structurally gutted.
An old Roman saying about a later phase of the same habit runs “Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini” — what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.
What archaeologists actually found down there in 2022
The most recent evidence is also the least mythologised. In 2022 the park reopened the Colosseum’s ancient drainage system — blocked since roughly AD 523, the year of the last recorded animal hunt — using wire-guided robots to explore fifteen centuries of sealed deposit.
What came out was the residue of an audience. Figs, grapes, melons, olives, peaches, cherries, plums, walnuts, hazelnuts and pine nuts, alongside pig and chicken bones. Federica Rinaldi, the park’s lead archaeologist, summarised why that mattered: “The only places where such discoveries can be made are the sewers.”
The dig also recovered the bones of very small dogs, under 30 centimetres tall. Alfonsina Russo, then director of the park, suggested they “may have been used to perform acrobatic tricks, just as you would see in a circus today” — before adding the sentence that separates archaeology from myth-making: “We don’t know for sure.”
Seeing it for yourself
The underground is the part of the Colosseum where the difference between the story and the evidence is easiest to see, because the machinery is still legible in the brickwork — capstan sockets, lift shafts, the vertical grooves the platforms ran in. It is not included in the standard €18 ticket; reaching it requires either the official Full Experience Underground and Arena ticket or a licensed guided tour. Our complete guide to the hypogeum covers what you see and how the machinery worked, and the underground tour guide covers tickets, booking and timing.
Frequently asked questions
There is no reliable evidence that they were. No ancient source records a named Christian executed in the Colosseum, and the building is absent from the medieval pilgrim guides that catalogued Rome's martyr shrines. The Catholic Encyclopedia itself states there are no historical grounds for treating the Colosseum as a martyrs' site. Some Christians may have died there, since the building hosted public executions for centuries, but the martyrs' shrine tradition is early modern rather than ancient.
Nobody knows, because no Roman writer ever described which way the thumb turned. The Latin phrase is pollice verso, meaning simply with the thumb turned. The leading scholarly reconstruction argues the modern version is inverted, with a thumb pressed into the fist signalling mercy. The thumbs-down gesture we recognise comes from an 1872 painting by Jean-Leon Gerome, and the museum that owns it says there are no historical records confirming that reading.
Yes, but only briefly and only at the very beginning. Cassius Dio, Martial and Suetonius all describe water spectacles in the building's first years, staged in water only about a metre deep. Once the wooden substructure beneath the arena was rebuilt in masonry under Domitian, flooding became structurally impossible and no further water shows are recorded.
No. The classic epigraphic study by Georges Ville found roughly 19 deaths per 100 participants in the first century AD, which works out at about one gladiator in ten dying per bout. Gladiators were expensive to train and lease, so killing one carried a heavy financial penalty. Skeletons from the gladiator cemetery at Ephesus include men with well-healed skull wounds who clearly fought again afterwards.
No. The hypogeum was stage machinery and show logistics, not a holding cell. It contained lift shafts, winches, animal cages, ramps and pre-assembled scenery, worked by crews who never saw the crowd. The park's own description covers only the preparations made before each show and never mentions prisoners. Animals were kept at vivaria outside the building and brought in for the day.
It was quarried, not simply worn away. For centuries the building served as a source of building materials, with stone from it going into the construction of St Peter's Basilica among other projects. Looters also prised out the iron clamps holding the outer wall together, leaving the pockmarks visible today, and that weakening is why the earthquake of 1349 brought the southern wall down.
