York's ancient residents suffered at the jaws of lions
Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for public decency, was so outraged by the depiction of a sexual assault by a Roman centurion in a 1980 National Theatre production that she launched a private prosecution against its director. This week we learn that such brutality by Britain's ancient occupiers was not merely the figment of artistic imagination. Residents of York should spare a thought for an ancient forebear who likely met his untimely end at the hands of a lion.
Two decades ago, archaeologists digging in York — known as Eboracum to the Romans — uncovered a male skeleton with nasty damage to its pelvic bone. Only now, however, have advanced 3D scans revealed the man's cause of death. Not only was he bitten just before death,
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York's ancient residents suffered at the jaws of lions
Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for public decency, was so outraged by the depiction of a sexual assault by a Roman centurion in a 1980 National Theatre production that she launched a private prosecution against its director. This week we learn that such brutality by Britain's ancient occupiers was not merely the figment of artistic imagination. Residents of York should spare a thought for an ancient forebear who likely met his untimely end at the hands of a lion. Two decades ago, archaeologists digging in York — known as Eboracum to the Romans — uncovered a male skeleton with nasty damage to its pelvic bone. Only now, however, have advanced 3D scans revealed the man's cause of death. Not only was he bitten just before death,
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York skeleton is ‘first evidence of Roman gladiator battling a lion'
What brought this particular man — possibly a condemned criminal or a captured rebel — to fight in the arena, we will never know. Nor can we say whether his final performance drew applause, gasps or the weary indifference of a toga-clad crowd. However, 1,800 years after an especially gruesome demise, his bones have provided an astonishing glimpse of Roman Britain — and what appears to be the first forensic evidence found anywhere of a gladiator being pitted against a wild animal. His skeleton, excavated from a site in York — formerly the Roman city of Eboracum — has deep puncture wounds on a pelvic bone that match with unsettling precision the bite radius of a large cat, almost certainly a lion. • Room where
