Ave Imperator, Morituri Te Salutant - Historical Source Material - Cultural Background

Cultural Background

Claudius, the fourth Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, ruled the Roman Empire following Caligula's death in AD 41 until his death in AD 54. According to Suetonius, Claudius was extraordinarily fond of the games. He is said to have risen with the crowd after gladiatorial matches and given unrestrained praise to the fighters, and he was criticized for not leaving the arena during the executions as was the custom among the noble classes.

Claudius also presided over many new and original events. Soon after coming into power, Claudius instituted games to be held in honor of his father, Nero Claudius Drusus, on the latter's birthday. Annual games were also held in honor of his accession, and took place at the Praetorian camp where Claudius had first been proclaimed emperor.

Claudius celebrated the Secular games—a religious festival that had been revived by Augustus—to mark the 800th anniversary of the founding of Rome. He also on at least one occasion participated in a wild animal hunt himself according to Pliny the Elder, setting out with the Praetorian cohorts to fight a killer whale which was trapped in the harbor of Ostia.

Public entertainments varied from combat between just two gladiators, to large-scale events with potentially thousands of deaths. The naumachia (also called navalia proelia by the Romans) was one of the latter, a large-scale and bloody spectacular combative event taking place on many ships and held in large lakes or flooded arenas. Prisoners of war and criminals condemned to die were tasked with enacting naval battles to the death for public entertainment. Those selected were known as naumachiarii.

Unlike gladiatorial combats, naumachiae were infrequently held—they were usually only called to celebrate notable events. Julius Caesar held an event with 6,000 naumachiarii in the lesser Codeta, a marshy area by the Tiber, to celebrate his fourth victory to be honored by triumph. Cassius Dio writes of two naumachiae that Titus held during the inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheater, including an event of 3,000 men enacting a battle between the Athenians and the Syracusans; and Domitian held a naumachia in which Dio reports "practically all the combatants and many of the spectators as well perished".

The naumachia called by Claudius celebrated the completion of a drainage work and agricultural land reclamation project at Italy's largest inland lake, Lake Fucino, an 11 mile (19 km) long crater lake in the Central Apennine mountain range located around 50 miles (80 km) from Rome. The project, which took eleven years to complete and employed 30,000 men, included the leveling of a hill top and the construction of a 3-mile (4.8 km) tunnel between the lake and the river Liri (Lat. Liris). The tunnel has been described as "the greatest Roman tunnel" (Encyclopedia Americana) despite initially only achieving partial success, and was the longest such tunnel until the construction of that of Mont Cenis in 1876. According to the Annals of Tacitus:

in order that the impressive character of the work might be viewed by a larger number of visitants, a naval battle was arranged upon the lake itself, on the model of an earlier spectacle given by Augustus – though with light vessels and a smaller force "

In a footnote to a 2008 publication of Tacitus' Annals, it is noted that "such an amount of criminals may probably represent the sweepings of the provinces as well as of Rome and Italy; but even on this supposition the number, as Friedländer remarks (ii, 324), is suggestive of iniquitous condemnations".