Even if there wasn’t a death, they would always end in some sort of severe injury or dismemberment. Now you know where the gladiators fought, but the more interesting question might be why did they fight? After all, many gladiatorial bouts would often end in death. But once the Colosseum was finally finished, there was no better place to hold the games.Īnd the rest is history. And since the Colosseum was not built during his lifetime, the fighters would be forced to fight one another at ad-hoc arenas all around the city.

During his heyday as Rome’s ruler, Julius Caesar pushed for gladiator fights to become more and more common. These fights would then happen wherever the funeral was taking place, not just an impressive arena.Īs the fights began to evolve, so too did the locations at which the gladiators would go into battle. As you’ll soon learn, gladiator fights were originally created as funeral rituals as ways to honor someone of high nobility or royalty that recently passed. In fact, by the time the construction of the impressive arena had been completed in 80 AD, gladiator fights had already been going on for hundreds of years. But the Roman Colosseum is not the only place that gladiators fought in the early days of the region. The arena was built for bringing people together for spectacles of games and gore, and it delivered in every way possible. The most famous arena in Roman history (and even world history) for gladiators to fight one another was undoubtedly the Roman Colosseum.

Roman colosseum lions called