Naumachia
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This was the Aqua Alsietina aqueduct, remains of which have been found on the slopes of Janiculum (the "8th hill of Rome") below the monastery of San Cosimato.
There are several theories as to the precise location of the site; the latest of which places it between Via Aurelia in the north and the church of San Francesco a Ripa in the southeast, in the loop of the Tiber.
Suetonius (Nero, XII, 1) and Dio Cassius (Roman History, LXI, 9, 5) speak of such a spectacle in 57 AD in a wooden amphitheatre inaugurated by the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
For the inauguration of the Colosseum in 80 AD, Titus gave two naumachiae, one in the Augustinian basin, again using several thousand men, and the other in the new amphitheatre (Dio Cassius, LXVI, 25, 1–4).
One can imagine a confrontation between the crews of several reproductions of warships, potentially life-size or reasonably close to it, but actual maneuvers or even floating seems doubtful.
It is known that stage-props were used to represent ships, sometimes with mechanisms to simulate shipwrecks, both on stage and in the arena (Tacitus, Annales, XIV, 6, 1; Dio Cassius LXI, 12,2).
This leads one to conclude that, even assuming that the Colosseum had a similar basin before construction of the hypogeum (underground complex), naumachiae would have been performed on only a shallow layer of water covering the surface of the arena, the minimum required to float the ships.
Apart from a mention in the Augustan History, a late source of limited reliability, only the town records (fastia) of Ostia tells us that in 109 Trajan inaugurated a naumachia basin.
Nevertheless, if late Roman Empire sources and persistence into the Middle Ages in terms of the toponymy of naumachia and dalmachia at the site are taken into consideration, it still existed into the 5th century.
In the provinces, the influence of Roman naumachiae is easily discernible, but limited and reduced to local and innocuous naval games and re-enactments.
A naumachia was part of the festivities of Wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici and Christina of Lorraine held in the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1589.
[4] A naumachia was held in Valencia between the Bridges of the Turia river, on the occasion of the centenary of the canonization of Saint Vincent Ferrer in 1755.
A seat was built for her at Canon's Marsh near the Bristol Cathedral, where on 7 June she watched a staged battle at the confluence of the Avon and Frome rivers, fought between an English ship and two Turkish galleys.
The entertainment at Bristol was described in verse by Robert Naile, who mentions the Turks were played by sailors, "worthy brutes, who oft have seen their habit, form and guise".
[9] In Georgian-era Britain, Naumachia were staged in private parks and gardens, consciously recreating them based on the Roman pattern, though on a smaller scale.
