Lost City of Gladiators

The peaceful pastures of the Danube,

2,000 years ago...

until the Romans came...

And tried to crush the German barbarians.

They built a great double city here for their legions

and for 60,000 civilians,

to defend this northern border of the Roman empire.

Nothing remains today but two vast arenas

and a great, mysterious imperial arch.

The rest of the city is still there, under the ground,

waiting to be revealed.

A complete sunken Metropolis,

impossible to excavate in a thousand years!

But non-invasive, high-tech archaeology can give us answers.

Scanners today transform cornfields

into streets, baths and temples.

And in an amazing discovery,

into a place where men trained, fought and died...

right here in Carnuntum...

the lost city of gladiators.

A high-tech camera plane leaves Vienna,

flying 40 miles to the east.

On board, Wolfgang Neubauer is leader

of a new breed of archaeologists.

These people don't just dig...

they look, from above,

with ultra high resolution cameras and scanners,

and then on the ground with radar and magnetometers.

There's little to see for the naked eye...

just fields and forests in a flat landscape.

And then you see it...

the clear remains of a huge oval construction,

where the Romans amused themselves

with their cruel entertainments on the edge of their empire.

And just a few miles further on, in the same sunken city,

another giant arena,

built for an audience of thousands.

Between these lonely ruins,

the archaeologist can see, in his mind's eye,

a lost Metropolis, three miles across...

A Garrison, a port, an administrative center,

and a giant city.

Set away to one side,

the great arena and the mystery it hides.

All the naked eye can see from the air

is green fields.

But an aerial photograph from 1981 was really puzzling.

The smudgy, old photo, long forgotten,

showed a dark spot next to the arena.

Nothing else.

Only when Neubauer was given the task of scanning the whole city

did it re-emerge.

A color change means the rain is draining differently.

That means something is different under the ground.

But what?

So Neubauer rerouted his plane away from the main city

to the spot next to the arena.

Maybe there'd be nothing.

But 30 more years of plowing, drying and climate change

and a new generation of cameras might turn up something new.

And it did.

Time to analyze the results.

This is from the 1980s,

and it clearly shows this large spot here.

Yeah.

We were not sure

if this is due to geological structures

or if there is really archaeology below.

And if I turn on now the new aerials from the last years,

it's the first time that we can also see

in the aerials, the walls.

So, especially here, the entrance.

Here, the walls going up for the big building complex.

It's too big for a villa.

Too small for, say, a prison.

And why did they build it so close to the arena?

A city with two great arenas would need gladiators.

And they would need to be found.

And they must be trained.

Starting as raw recruits...

from all over the empire they would come,

some as prisoners, some as slaves,

some even as volunteers.

Like one we'll call Atticus, from north Africa.

An ex-soldier looking for adventure

and a last chance to get ahead.

Young, fit and hungry.

That would be how every one of them started.

But how can archaeologists really know what went on here?

At Vienna's Ludwig Boltzmann institute

the scientists have developed electronic scanners

that can survey acres at a time

without the need for slow and expensive digs.

Find something interesting, and they can zero right in.

The scans gather data that build to a three-dimensional map

of the landscape beneath the surface.

First, magnetometers measure variations

in the earth's magnetic field,

perhaps where rocks or earth have been moved.

Every scan is recorded and stored as raw data

with a precise GPS location.

Next, ground-penetrating radar looks deeper

to create a three-dimensional image of walls and foundations

still in place.

This is mapping the past.

Guided by GPS, the scans are merged

with the new aerial photos to show every detail

of the freshly discovered complex.

The combination of images reveals

one final, vital element.

Can we compare this to the magnetic results?

Yeah, look here, you can see much more detail.

The building gets much more complete.

So we have all the outer walls very detailed now,

so there's much more information.

But the most important, of course,

is the circular structure in the courtyard.

A circular structure that only showed up when radar,

magnetometer scans and photographs were merged...

Neubauer recognized at once what he had discovered.

Another arena in Carnuntum!

A training arena in the center of a gladiator school...

the first complete gladiator school

ever found outside Rome.

Rome's Colosseum, the world famous, iconic mother

of all the empire's arenas.

Right next to it, the ruins of a gladiator school.

You can quite clearly see the cells the gladiators lived in,

the tunnel to the arena.

Enough to tell an archaeologist what to look for...

And to visualize it exactly, where it once stood.

The large heated training hall.

The house where the owner of the school lived, the lanista.

The gladiator cells.

And here, in the corner of the courtyard,

the training arena.

This is where Atticus would spend

the next years of his life...

...if he impressed the school's owner, the lanista.

The training arena and the walls of the gladiator school

confined the lives of several dozen men.

Historians don't agree whether the school was run like a jail

or whether the fighters could come and go at will.

But even as a jail, it offered considerable comfort.

The men had to be kept in good shape.

The spectators wanted muscle as well as skill,

and the lanista knew it.

The training would be relentless...

speed, accuracy, stamina...

And the occasional trick.

All to win the approval of the lanista.

Even a high-tech archaeologist

of this lost Roman city

will want to see hard evidence.

Because even the most detailed scans

can only get down to three inches square.

To get in closer, you'll have to dig.

And thanks to the scans,

Neubauer's team knows exactly where to dig.

Once the topsoil has been mechanically removed,

the more sensitive work begins.

The soil is sifted for tiny artifacts,

by hand, for hours on end.

One of Wolfgang's students finds a small metal object.

It's a single scale from a gladiator's breastplate.

And there's more.

Below the stands we found a huge amount

of animal bones, especially from poultry.

It looks like centurion's fried chicken

wasn't just the snack of choice at modern games.

As they strip away the arena's foundations,

the team finds the last crucial piece of evidence...

a hole for the practice pole called the palus.

It worked something like a boxer's punching bag.

The point of the palus was to encourage absolute precision,

through endless practice,

without the need for an opponent.

Here in this pit was the palus.

The inner ring was marked by pebbles set in mortar,

and the outermost circle formed a boundary between the arena

and the spectators' stands.

And just when Atticus might think

he'd mastered all the skills, the coach, a retired gladiator,

would invite him for a mock fight.

Actually, it was a compliment.

This was a rite of passage.

It was a sign that the coach and the lanista

were beginning to take their new recruit seriously.

Atticus was moving toward his goal, as a sporting idol,

a profit center, and as a killer.

The social status of a gladiator

was a very ambiguous one.

On the one hand, he was an outcast,

living outside of the normal civil order.

On the other hand, he could live the life of a star

and had his fans and his own manner of honor and distinction

and make a fortune.

But until he made his oath of absolute obedience

to the lanista, none of this could happen.

Atticus must swear to accept his fate, whatever it might be.