The study, authored by Rosa María Carreño Sánchez, a researcher at the Lucio Anneo Séneca Institute of Classical Studies at UC3M, was published in the Revista General de Derecho Romano. Rather than relying on literary sources or artistic depictions, which typically capture only the dramatic climax inside the arena, Carreño Sánchez turned to the legal record itself. Her analysis centers on two imperial constitutions from the Late Empire preserved in the Theodosian Code, the great compilation of Roman law issued under Emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century, and later carried forward into the Justinian Code. These legal texts, she argues, open a window onto everything that happened behind the scenes: the management of resources, the territorial conflicts between communities, and the enormous logistical effort required to keep one of antiquity’s most beloved entertainments running.

Among the most striking findings is evidence of what the researcher describes as a possible state monopoly on lions in late antiquity. As the population of big cats dwindled across the Empire’s territories, imperial authorities moved to guarantee supply for the emperor’s own spectacles and to shut out private competitors. In practical terms, this meant that all lions belonged to the emperor. The implication is remarkable: an animal that had once been hunted freely across North Africa and the Near East became, by law, an imperial asset, its capture and movement regulated with the same seriousness as taxation or military provisioning. The monopoly reflects both the growing scarcity of the animals and the political value the court placed on displaying them, since a spectacular hunt in the arena was a direct statement of the emperor’s power over nature itself.

Enforcing such a monopoly required manpower, and here the study highlights the surprising role of the Roman army. The military did not merely defend frontiers; it also fielded highly specialized units dedicated to the tracking, capture, and guarding of wild beasts along the Empire’s borders. Soldiers designated ad leones, literally assigned to lions, worked alongside specialists known as ursuarii, who handled bears, and vestigiatores, trackers whose job was to follow the spoor of exotic animals through difficult terrain. These designations, preserved in the legal and administrative record, reveal a professionalized hunting service embedded within the military structure, one that turned the Empire’s borderlands into a supply zone for the arenas of Rome and other great cities.

Capturing the animals, however, was only the first stage of a journey that could stretch across thousands of kilometers. Transporting lions, bears, leopards, and other creatures to the capital or to imperial menageries created significant logistical and economic challenges, and it is here that the two imperial constitutions examined in the study become especially revealing. The provinces were required to supply the transport personnel, and the costs were to be borne by local coffers. This arrangement placed a heavy burden on municipal budgets and, predictably, invited abuse. The legal texts document fraudulent practices in which communities or officials imposed undue delays on the transport convoys. Such delays were not merely bureaucratic friction; they could ruin the cities financially, and worse, they could conceal the fraudulent diversion of the animals to unauthorized private spectacles, effectively stealing imperial property for someone else’s show.

The imperial response was characteristically severe. To curb these abuses, the administration imposed heavy fines, payable in gold, on military commanders who failed to comply with the regulations governing animal transport. The penalty structure is significant for what it tells us about how the Empire viewed the trade in exotic beasts: the officers responsible for moving the animals were held personally and financially accountable, and the currency of punishment was the same precious metal that underpinned the late imperial fiscal system. In other words, the movement of a lion from a frontier province to an amphitheater was treated as a matter of state, policed by law, financed by provinces, and enforced against soldiers with monetary sanctions.

Understanding why the Empire invested so much in this system requires appreciating the cultural weight of the venationes. Unlike gladiatorial combat, which gradually died out under the combined pressure of Christian moral condemnation and the enormous cost of organizing fights, the animal hunts proved remarkably durable, surviving for centuries after other forms of arena entertainment had faded. The study frames their longevity in terms of what they symbolized: displays of human dominion over nature and of the grandeur of imperial power. Every beast paraded and dispatched in the sand was a living trophy of the Empire’s reach, evidence that its armies and administrators could extract wonders from the farthest provinces and deliver them to the crowd. That symbolism kept the venationes at the heart of public entertainment long after the gladiator had become a memory.

The phenomenon was not confined to the capital. The study emphasizes that this massive spectacle industry spread throughout the Roman Empire, including Hispania, the Iberian Peninsula that remains one of the richest archaeological landscapes for Roman arena culture. A prime example is the colossal amphitheater at Italica, near modern Santiponce in the province of Seville, one of the largest such structures in the entire Empire. Its sheer scale is astonishing given its setting: the building was capable of hosting the full range of gladiatorial spectacles, including venationes, in a city of barely 8,000 inhabitants. That a modest urban community could support an arena of such magnitude underscores how deeply the appetite for animal spectacles penetrated provincial society, and how far the supply network of captured beasts had to extend to satisfy it.

Methodologically, the research is a literature review grounded in legal history, and its central claim is about what the law can reveal where other sources fall silent. Literary accounts and cinematic reconstructions show audiences only the final outcome in the arena, Carreño Sánchez notes, whereas an analysis of Roman law makes it possible to understand what went on behind the scenes: the management of resources, the territorial conflicts, and the enormous logistical effort required by one of the most popular spectacles of antiquity. The two constitutions of the Theodosian Code at the heart of the study, examined in her article De venatione ferarum, function as snapshots of an entire industry, capturing in legal language the soldiers, trackers, provincial treasurers, transport convoys, and commanders whose coordinated work made the games possible.

The broader significance of the work lies in reframing Roman entertainment as an administrative and ecological enterprise. The decline of big cat populations in late antiquity, the imperial monopoly established in response, the militarization of wildlife capture, and the fiscal strains of long-distance animal transport together sketch a picture of an empire managing a natural resource to exhaustion. The venationes, in this reading, were not simply cruelty staged as spectacle; they were the visible tip of a system that connected frontier ecology, military logistics, provincial finance, and imperial ideology. By reading the legal codes closely, the UC3M study recovers the voices of the clerks, commanders, and communities who paid for the lions, moved them, and answered for them in gold, offering historians a far richer account of how Rome put wild beasts in the sand than any arena fresco or Hollywood epic ever could.

Subject of Research: Legal and logistical regulation of wild animal capture and transport for public spectacles in the Roman Empire

Article Title: A UC3M study reveals the military apparatus and laws that made it possible for wild beasts to be brought into the amphitheaters

Article References: A UC3M study reveals the military apparatus and laws that made it possible for wild beasts to be brought into the amphitheaters. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Roman Empire, venationes, Roman law, Theodosian Code, amphitheaters, lions, Roman army, imperial monopoly, animal transport, Hispania, Italica, late antiquity