When you think of gladiators, you probably picture men with swords. But in Roman arenas, the opponents gladiators faced weren’t always human. Sometimes they were wild animals dragged from the forests and forced to fight for the crowd’s pleasure.
Now, a shattered skull from Serbia tells the chilling story of one such combatant: a brown bear who lived, suffered, and died in the amphitheater of Viminacium about 1,700 years ago.
The skull, unearthed in 2016 near the entrance to the ancient arena, belonged to a six-year-old male bear. Its battered bones preserve the marks of captivity and combat in vivid detail. “We cannot say with certainty whether the bear died directly in the arena, but the evidence suggests the trauma occurred during spectacles and the subsequent infection likely contributed significantly to its death,” said Nemanja Marković, senior research associate at the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade, in an interview with Live Science.
Combat Bears
Viminacium, once a bustling Roman military base and city along the Danube frontier, had an amphitheater that could seat as many as 7,000 spectators. Like the Colosseum in Rome, its schedule was relentless: morning animal hunts, midday executions, afternoon gladiator duels. Bears were probably regular attractions, pitted against specialized fighters called venatores (Latin for “hunters”) or bestiarii, against other animals, or even against condemned prisoners. The bestiarii formed a separate category of gladiators who almost exclusively engaged with wild animals. They had little training in combat and were much more expendable than the expensive, trained gladiators that fought each other.
Archaeologists have long suspected that brown bears played starring roles in these spectacles. We know this from ancient mosaics and texts describing them as arena fighters and executioners. But until this discovery, no one had found the bones to prove it. That’s where this bear skull comes in.
Radiological scans revealed a massive blow to the forehead, likely from a spear. The wound had begun to heal, but infection set in, spreading through the bone. That tells us the bear survived at least one bloody encounter in the arena, only to die later from disease.
Its teeth add another layer to the story. The canines were abnormally worn down, with signs of gum disease. This wasn’t from its diet in the wild. It was from chewing the iron or wooden bars of a cage, a stress response still seen in captive animals today. “This bear was likely kept in captivity for years, not just weeks,” Marković explained to Live Science.
The Economy of Spectacle
Ancient texts show that bears meant for arenas were transported from regions including Lucania, Caledonia, North Africa, and the Balkans to participate in games across the empire. But the DNA of the skull revealed something else: this bear wasn’t imported from distant lands. It was local, captured from the forests of the Balkans.
That matters because it shows how Rome’s demand for blood sport shaped the environment. Instead of shipping animals across the empire, Viminacium’s organizers tapped into nearby wildlife. A supply chain of capture, confinement, and slaughter grew up around the games.
Yet sometimes, even Viminacium hosted exotic beasts for sport. Archaeologists also found the remains of a leopard near the same spot, confirming that many animals were brought here, killed, and butchered for distribution. Previously, archaeologists found the remains of a 1,800-year-old man in Roman Britain, who bore the uncanny bite marks of a lion on the pelvis. Researchers believe the man was a gladiator in an arena in Roman York, who fought lions and perhaps other beasts.
The new findings appeared in the journal Antiquity.
