Few voices from antiquity capture the sinister spectacle of the Roman amphitheatre quite like Tertullian. A North African Christian writing at the turn of the third century CE, Tertullian was a lawyer by training and a rhetorician by instinct, and when inveighing against pagan Rome’s moral decay, he poured full scorn on the amphitheatres’ “games”.
Every major city in the Roman Empire had its own amphitheatre, and Tertullian’s bustling city of Carthage was no exception. What remains of Carthage’s amphitheatre is impressive enough and offers a sense of scale that wowed visitors throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. Its capacity is estimated at 30,000: not as much as Rome’s Colosseum, which accommodated between 50,000 to 85,000, but still enough to serve a Premier League team (Molineux Stadium, home to my long-suffering Wolverhampton Wanderers, has a capacity of 31,750).
And yet while archaeology can give a sense of the scale of these games, it sheds little light on their content. For this, we must turn to visual sources, like mosaics, tombstone reliefs and graffiti, and textual sources like Tertullian. Tertullian’s words, still smouldering with outrage, preserve some of our most striking eyewitness glimpses of the games, and introduce two sinister, ritualised figures of death who would not look out of place in a modern-day horror film.
Tertullian’s first reference to these figures comes from the passage below (italics are my own).
“We have seen in our day a representation of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules. We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition, at Mercury examining the bodies of the dead with his hot iron; we have witnessed Jove’s brother, mallet in hand, dragging out the corpses of the gladiators.”
Tertullian, Apologies, 15.4-5
His description of a figure dressed as Mercury examining (examinantem) corpses with his cautery (cauterio) is disturbing stuff indeed. So too is this “brother of Jove” (Iovis fratem), mallet in hand, dragging away the cadavers of deceased gladiators. But the passage also leaves many questions.
Some of these Tertullian expands on in another text, Ad Nationes (Against the Nations):
“You are, of course, possessed of a more religious spirit in the show of your gladiators, when your gods dance, with equal zest, over the spilling of human blood, (and) over those filthy penalties which are at once their proof and plot for executing your criminals, or else (when) your criminals are punished personating the gods themselves. We have often witnessed, in a mutilated criminal, your god of Pessinum, Attis; a wretch burnt alive has personated Hercules. We have laughed at the sport of your midday game of the gods, when Dis Pater, Jove’s own brother, drags away, hammer in hand, the remains of the gladiators; when Mercury, with his winged cap and heated wand, tests with his cautery whether the bodies were really lifeless, or only feigning death.”
Tertullian, Ad Nationes, 1.10.48
Here, Tertullian not only specifies that Jove’s mallet-wielding brother is Dis Pater (Pluto, King of the Underworld). He also reveals why this Mercury figure probes the lifeless bodies of the gladiators with his hot iron — not to cauterise their wounds or prevent infection, but to check that they’re really dead and not just pretending (Mercurius… corpora exanimata iam mortemue simulantia e cauterio probat).
Tertullian’s is the only direct testimony we have of a ritualised figure of death appearing in the Roman amphitheatre. A performer dressed as the god of the underworld himself. Ancient Rome’s equivalent of the Grim Reaper. But who was this figure? How would the audience have understood him? And how did he find his way onto the arena sands?
Charun, the Etruscan Psychopomp
Long before Tertullian’s Dis Pater and Mercury stalked the sands of Carthage’s arena, there existed older, stranger, more primal figures who straddled the realm between life and death in popular imagination. The Etruscans, that enigmatic civilisation that ruled over much of Italy before the rise of Rome, recognised them as Charun Psychopompus and Vanth — two figures who acted as conductors of souls, conduits between worlds, and escorts of the dead.
Charun was no gentle guide. We’re not entirely sure what his role entailed, but the mallet he wielded indicates something sinister. I suspect it symbolised the blunt inevitability of death, but others have argued its purpose was to ward off evil spirits or even to seal tombs. No doubt his frightening physiognomy encapsulates the fear we feel around death.
Charun appears on tomb walls from Tarquinia, Cerveteri, and Orvieto with glaring eyes, wild hair, horns or pierced ears and a hooked or tusked nose. Here, on this relief from the Necropolis of Mercataccia in Tarquinia, he stands, ashen-blue skin and mallet in hand, across from his female counterpart, the winged figure of Vanth.
Vanth embodied more merciful, transitional aspects of death, and in some ways shares similarities with the Greek god Hermes and the Roman god Mercury. Death, for these ancient cultures, was not a clean division between life and eternity. It was a passage that demanded both force and guidance. Charun and Vanth were how the Etruscans personified the figures that provided this, but as conduits for the dead both belong to a much older and broader anthropological tradition.
Psychopomps across Cultures
Nearly every culture has its own psychopomp — a truly phenomenal word which means a figure whose role is to guide the soul from the realm of the living to that of the dead. The Greeks had Charon, the ferryman who steered souls down the River Styx or Acheron into Hades, and Hermes Psychopompos, the gentle escort who led shades to Hades and whose attributes the Romans recognised in their own god Mercury. The Egyptians revered the jackal-headed Anubis, who weighed the heart and opened the gates of the afterlife. In Norse myth, the Valkyries swept over battlefields to carry fallen warriors to Valhalla. Even across the Atlantic, the Aztecs told of Xolotl, the dog-god who ferried souls through the perilous underworld.
Each of these psychopomps reflects elements of the culture from which they come. Anubis being portrayed with the head of a jackal is explicable from the fact that jackals scavenged around tombs and cemeteries. The Aztecs channelled their respect for dogs, and regard for them as guides and companions, through Xolotl (though something that seems less respectful to us that they often buried the dead with a dog — either real or clay). And why did the Norse myths depict Valkyries as winged women? Because it was women and vultures would clean up the aftermath of a battle, stripping the corpses or feasting on the carrion.
At least to my mind, the Etruscan Charun is distinctive in his brutality. Charun is not a comforter but an enforcer, who ensures the passage happens whether the soul is ready or not. In the richly painted chambers of Etruscan tombs, he lurks among banquets and dancers: a grim counterpoint to joy and a reminder that every feast ends in silence.
Charun’s Romanisation and the Birth of Dis Pater
As the Romans absorbed Etruscan territory, so too did they absorb their approach to death, and perhaps Rome’s most famous import of choreographed death from Etruria was none other than the gladiatorial games. Many Romans believed that these games evolved from Etruscan funeral contests designed to honour the dead. Nicolaus of Damascus, writing in the first century BCE, was the first to establish the tradition as Etruscan. But so too did the Greek writer Atheneus during the reigns of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (late 2nd / early 3rd century CE):
“The Romans put on competitions in which gladiators fought… a custom they borrowed from the Etruscans”
Atheneus, The Deipnosophists, 39
It’s easy to see how Charun found an afterlife in the Roman amphitheatre, overseeing transitions from life to death. Public games were, by their very nature, spectacular. The Latin word spectaculi carried a plurality of meanings, referring not only to shows, sights or public entertainment but also signifying a “spectacle” to behold. What could be more dramatic in the aftermath of a public execution than seeing the figures associated with the victim’s death appear in the arena and play the part of their infernal companions.
Yet in Tertullian’s scornful prose, these figures are not Charun and Vanth, but Dis Pater — the Roman god of the underworld and a chthonic deity equated with Pluto (Hades) and Orcus — and Mercury. This is more than pagan theatre. It is the ghost of a primal idea reborn, reimagined and performed before a baying Roman crowd.
Striking Similarities
The mallet borne by Tertullian’s Dis Pater also manifests itself across cultures as an instrument ensuring that death’s boundary is cleanly and swiftly crossed. Anyone who has seen Midsommar (2019), will remember the chilling Ättestupa scene, where the elders of the community, having reached an age where their existence becomes a burden, voluntarily commit suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff. The man who lands feet first and is not killed by the fall receives the coup de grâce by three people wielding a large wooden mallet.
Cult horror films make for poor anthropological source material. But where cult horror falls short, the Catholic Church can bridge the gap. Another ritual that has permeated the popular imagination is the image of a Cardinal Camerlengo gently tapping the forehead of the lifeless Pope with a silver hammer, and calling his name three times to confirm his passing.
This scene is often repeated in articles, documentaries, and whispers of Vatican lore. But, as careful historians and journalists have shown — there is no evidence that this ritual ever truly existed. The oft-cited Apostolic Constitution Apostólica Universi Dominici Gregis (1996), issued by Pope John Paul II, makes no mention of any hammer. Nor do earlier papal decrees or eyewitness accounts from modern papal transitions. And yet the endurance of this myth as a cultural afterimage is telling.
Even without historical grounding, the hammer remains symbolically irresistible.
The Reaper’s Role in the Roman Amphitheatre
Tertullian tells us that it was the bodies of fallen gladiators who were subject to the hot iron and the mallet. If we delve deeper, however, it seems that things were not so simple. As Donald G. Kyle writes in Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (p.157), “For Tertullian, arena victims were either martyrs or gladiators, either virtuous, passive Christians with the hope of salvation, or vulgar, combative heathens damned by their depravity. The context here is clearly executions in meridiani, the midday games with noxii, not gladiatorial combats.”
This distinction might seem semantic, but for our purposes it’s crucial. The costumed figures of Dis Pater and Mercury were not going around delivering the coup de grâce to professional gladiators who could still fight for their freedom. As anyone who’s seen the historical documentary film Gladiator will know, the task of despatching a defeated gladiator was usually left to the victor, who would respond to the crowd’s demands and the pollice verso (“turning of the thumb”) through which they were channelled.
Instead, Dis Pater and Mercury were finishing off noxii — poor condemned souls without any hope of salvation.
Did these Figures Appear in the Colosseum?
Put simply, we have no evidence that they did — and no evidence that they did not. Roman mosaics, such as those from Villa Dar Buc Ammera in modern-day Tripoli, Libya, depict attendants among gladiators, wild-animal hunters, and the condemned noxii. But none of these figures match Tertullian’s description.
This absence of proof does not mean that Dis Pater and Mercury did not stalk the sands of the Colosseum, as they did in the amphitheatre of Carthage in the early third century CE. It means that, until we recover another voice like Tertullian’s — or a long-buried mosaic or sculptural scene that corroborates their presence — they must remain, for now, beyond the pale.
