Naumachia

A naumachia (in Latin naumachia, from the Ancient Greek ναυμαχία/naumachía, literally "naval combat") was a mock naval battle staged as mass entertainment by the Ancient Romans. The staging would typically occur in a specially-dug basin, also known as a naumachia.

The first known naumachia was given by Julius Caesar in Rome in 46 BC on occasion of his quadruple triumph. After having a basin dug near the Tiber, capable of holding actual biremes, triremes and quinqueremes, he made 2,000 combatants and 4,000 rowers, all prisoners of war, fight. In 2 BC for the inauguration of the Temple of Mars Ultor ("Mars the Avenger"), Augustus gave a grander naumachia based on Caesar's model. This naumachia depicted a battle between the Greeks and the Persians and required a basin that was 365 by 550 meters, which was created straddling the Tiber. Res Gestæ (§ 23) claimed that 3000 men, not counting rowers, fought in 30 vessels with rams and several smaller boats.

In 52 AD, Claudius gave what was possibly the most "epic" of these on a natural body of water, Fucine Lake, to celebrate the completion of drainage work and tunneling on the site. It included one hundred ships and 19,000 combatants, all of whom were prisoners who had been condemned to death. Suetonius' account, written many years after the event, has them salute the emperor with the phrase "morituri te salutant" ("those who are about to die salute you"). There is no evidence that this form of address was used on any occasion other than this single naumachia.

The naumachia was thus a bloodier show than gladiatorial combat, which consisted of smaller engagements and where the combat did not necessarily end with the death of the losers. More exactly, the appearance of naumachia is closely tied and only slightly earlier than that other spectacle, "group combat", which did not pit single combatants against one another, but rather used two small armies. There again, the combatants were frequently those sentenced to death and lacked the specialized training of true gladiators. Caesar, creator of the naumachia, simply had to transpose the same principle to another environment.

Through the choreography of the combat, the naumachia had the ability to represent historical or pseudo-historical themes. Each of the fleets participating represented a maritime power of Ancient Greece or the Hellenistic east: Egyptians and the Tyrians for Caesar's naumachia, Persians and Athenians for that of Augustus, Sicilians and Rhodeans for that of Claudius. It required significantly greater resources than other such entertainments, and as such these spectacles were reserved for exceptional occasions, closely tied to celebrations of the emperor, his victories and his monuments. The specific nature of the spectacle as well as the historical themes borrowed from the Greek world are closely tied to the term naumachia. This word, a phonetic transcription of the Greek word for a naval battle (ναυμαχία/naumakhía), has since come to also refer to the large artificial basins created for them.

Caesar's naumachia was probably a simple basin dug into the low-lying ground on the northern or southern banks of the Tiber, and fed by its waters; the exact location is unknown; most likely Trastevere or the Campus Martius. The naumachia of Augustus is better known: in his Res Gestæ (23) Augustus himself indicates that the basin measured 1800 × 1200 Roman feet (approximately 533 × 355 meters). Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 16, 200), describes an island formed in the center, probably rectangular and connected to the shore by a bridge where the privileged spectators likely sat.

Taking into consideration the size of the basin and the dimensions of a trireme (approximately 35 × 4.90 meters), the thirty vessels used would hardly be able to manoeuvre. Knowing that the crew of a Roman trireme was approximately 170 rowers and 50 to 60 soldiers, a simple calculation allows us to see that to achieve the number of 3000 men the vessels of Augustus' fleet would have to have held more combatants than an actual fleet. The spectacle thus focused less on the movement of the vessels, and more on their actual presence in the artificial basin and the hand-to-hand combat which developed.

It was different for Claudius' naumachia. The two fleets each consisted of 50 vessels, which corresponds to the number of vessels in each of the two military fleets based at Misenum and at Ravenna. Lake Fucino was large enough that only part of it was needed, surrounded by pontoons, and there was room enough for the vessels to manoeuvre and ram each other. The naumachia of Claudius therefore truly reproduced naval combat.