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National Geographic: Stories of Animals, Nature, and CultureThis illustration shows the almost-complete remains of a school for gladiators found at Carnuntum in eastern Austria.ILLUSTRATION COURTESY M. KLEIN/7REASONSGladiator School Discovery Reveals Hard Lives of Ancient WarriorsArchaeologists have mapped an ancient gladiator school, where the famed warriors lived, trained, and fought.BY DAN VERGANO, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICPUBLISHEDFEBRUARY 25, 2014ANCIENT ROME'S GLADIATORS lived and trained in fortress prisons, according to an international team of archaeologists who mapped a school for the famed fighters.Discovered at the site of Carnuntum outside Vienna, Austria, the gladiatorial school, or ludus gladiatorius, is the first one discovered outside the city of Rome. Now hidden beneath a pasture, the gladiator school was entirely mapped with noninvasive earth-sensing technologies. (See "Gladiator Training Camp.")The discovery, reported Tuesday evening by the journal Antiquity, makes clear what sort of lives these famous ancient warriors led during the second century A.D. in the Roman Empire."It was a prison; they were prisoners," says Wolfgang Neubauer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology who led the study team. "They lived in cells, in a fortress with only one gate out."The discovery shows that even outside Rome gladiators were "big business," Neubauer says. At least 80 gladiators, likely more, lived in the large, two-story facility equipped with a practice arena in its central courtyard. The site also included heated floors for winter training, baths, infirmaries, plumbing, and a nearby graveyard.Prisoners of RomeThe gladiators were clearly valued slaves, Neubauer says, kept apart and separate from the town of Carnuntum, which was founded on the Danube River by the Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 124 and later became a Roman stronghold."The find at Carnuntum gives us a vivid impression of what it was like to live and train as a gladiator on the chilly northern border of the Roman Empire," says gladiator expert Kathleen Coleman of Harvard, who was not part of the study team.Although more than 100 gladiator schools were built throughout the Roman Empire, the only known remnants are in Rome, Carnuntum, and Pompeii (which had small, private gladiatorial grounds). Within the 118,400-square-foot (11,000-square-meter) walled compound at the Austrian site, gladiators trained year-round for combat at a nearby public amphitheater."They weren't killed very often, they were too valuable," Neubauer says. "Lots of other people were likely killed at the amphitheater, people not trained to fight. And there was lots of bloodshed. But the combat between gladiators was the point of them performing, not them killing each other."This map of the gladiator school reveals that it was like a fortress or prison.ILLUSTRATION COURTESY ANTIQUITY PUBLICATIONS LTD.Tight QuartersThe gladiators slept in 32-square-foot (3-square-meter) cells, home to one or two people. Those cells were kept separate from a wing holding bigger rooms for their trainers, known as magistri, themselves retired survivors of gladiatorial combat who specialized in teaching one style of weaponry and fighting."The similarities show that gladiators were housed and trained in the provinces in the same way as in the metropolis [of Rome]," Coleman says. The one gate exiting the compound faced a road leading to the town's public amphitheater, reportedly the fourth largest in the empire.The fortress prison also undermines the image of gladiators as traveling from town to town in a circus-like setting, as seen in the movie Gladiator released in 2000. (Another film set in the ancient Roman era, Pompeii, is opening this week.)"They weren't a team," Neubauer says. "Each one was on his own, training to fight, and learning who they would combat at a central post we can see the remains of in our survey."Neubauer expects to continue aboveground mapping efforts at Carnuntum, which is proving to have been a surprisingly large town.Analysis of bones from a gladiator graveyard in Ephesus, Turkey, suggests that gladiators ate a largely vegetarian diet, Neubauer notes. The team hopes to eventually perform a similar analysis on bones from the gladiator graveyard in Carnuntum, in a further attempt to explore the real lives of these ancient warriors.National Geographic: Stories of Animals, Nature, and CultureSmithsonian Magazine | Smithsonian MagazineThe Discovery of a Roman Gladiator School Brings the Famed Fighters Back to LifeLocated in Austria, the archaeological site is providing rich new details about the lives and deaths of the arena combatantsWolfgang Neubauer (at Carnuntum’s center) estimates the population at 50,000.(Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)By Franz Lidz; Photographs by Luca LocatelliWolfgang Neubauer (at Carnuntum’s center) estimates the population at 50,000.(Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBEJULY 2016Wolfgang Neubauer stands in the grassy clearing and watches a drone soar low over distant stands of birch and white poplar, the leaves still speckled with overnight rain. Vast fields of wheat roll away north and south under a huge dome of sky. “I’m interested in what lies hidden beneath this landscape,” says the Austrian archaeologist. “I hunt for structures now invisible to the human eye.”On the edge of the meadow, two boys stand a long way apart, arms clenched by their sides, punting a soccer ball very slowly and carefully from one to the other. Neubauer studies them keenly. A professor at the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science, he’s an authority on the first games played on this ersatz pitch, a blood sport popular a couple of millennia ago. “You see a field,” he tells a visitor from the United States. “I see a gladiator school.”Way back in A.D. 6, during the expansion of the Roman Empire along the Danube and into present-day Germany, the future emperor Tiberius reached this spot and established a winter encampment. Carnuntum, as the camp would be called, flourished under the protection of the legions and became a center of the amber trade. The army and townspeople lived apart, but in symbiotic amity. “In the civilian city, large public buildings like temples, a forum and thermal baths were built,” says Neubauer. “The town had paved roads and an extensive sewage system.”During its second-century prime, Carnuntum was a key Roman capital of a province that spanned the landmass of what is now Austria and much of the Balkans. The frontier town boasted a burgeoning population and a gladiator school whose size and scale was said to rival the Ludus Magnus, the great training center immediately to the east of the Colosseum in Rome. Toward the end of the glory days of the Roman realm, the emperor Marcus Aurelius held sway from Carnuntum and made war on Germanic tribes known as the Marcomanni. There, too, his 11-year-old son, Commodus, likely first witnessed the gladiatorial contests that would become his ruling passion.After a series of barbarian invasions, Carnuntum was completely abandoned early in the fifth century A.D. Eventually, the buildings collapsed, too, and merged into the landscape. Though archaeologists have been digging and theorizing at the 1,600-acre site on and off since the 1850s, only remnants survive—a bath complex, a palace, a temple of Diana, the foundations of two amphitheaters (one capable of holding 13,000 spectators) and a monumental arch known as the Heidentor (Heathens’ Gate) that looms in battered splendor at the edge of town.Stretching for nearly three miles between the modern-day villages of Petronell-Carnuntum and Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, Carnuntum is one of the largest preserved archaeological parks of its kind in Europe. For the last two decades Neubauer has quarterbacked a series of excavations at the site with noninvasive techniques. Using remote-sensing and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to peer through layers of earth, the researchers have located and identified the forum; the garrison of the governor’s guard; an extensive network of shops and meeting halls; and, in 2011, the storied gladiator school—the most complete ludus found outside Rome and Pompeii.“Never before had archaeologists made such important discoveries without excavation,” says Neubauer, who is also director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI ArchPro). His work is the subject of a new Smithsonian Channel documentary, Lost City of Gladiators. With the aid of three-dimensional computer modeling, his team has reimagined what the ludus looked like.The subterranean surveys and a limited traditional dig, Neubauer says, have revealed a transfixing, mysterious underworld— the ludus is teeming with unseen buildings, graves, armaments and other relics. “Our understanding of the schools has been totally reshaped,” he says. “Until now, we knew very little about them because we never looked inside.”The discoveries—slow, careful, uncinematic—are not the stuff Hollywood movies are made of. Digital archaeology isn’t drama, but a gradual accretion of detail. By systematically mapping the terrain, Neubauer’s researchers have provided a more detailed and vivid picture of the lives (and deaths) of the gladiators than was ever before available—and deepened our understanding of the terrifying power of Imperial Rome.Neubauer is 52—a bit thickening around the middle, a bit graying at the temples. A rumpled figure with hair parted down the middle and eyebrows like small hedges, he’s a pioneer in remote sensing and geophysical prospection—noninvasive techniques that make it possible to identify structures and anomalies underground without disturbing a site. “Most of the Middle European archaeological heritage is under a massive threat of destruction,” he says. “That threat has been dramatically accelerated by intensive farming and industrial transformation of landscapes.”One of the challenges of traditional excavation is that archaeologists can focus only on isolated sections and that once they start poking around, the site is demolished and the possibility of further study eliminated. “Even when excavation is conducted with care, it’s still destruction,” says Neubauer. “The geophysical prospection we use at LBI ArchPro covers large expanses and leaves what is buried intact.”Neubauer grew up at a time when an archaeologist’s toolkit consisted of a spade, a shovel and a toothbrush. (“No, I never used a divining rod,” he says.) He was born in the Swiss market town of Altstätten, near the border of Austria. Hiking in the Rhine Valley piqued young Wolfgang’s interest in Bronze Age peoples and their cultures. At the precocious age of 15, he went on his first dig.Wolfgang drew early inspiration from the village of Hallstatt, a ribbon of land squeezed between a lake and mountains, where, in 1734, the Man in the Salt—a preserved body—was found. “Hallstatt was one of the earliest European settlements,” he says. “Its salt mine has been continuously worked since 1000 B.C.”Because space is at a premium in Hallstatt, for centuries the crammed cemetery gained new ground by burying and then exhuming bodies. The graves were reused, says Neubauer, and disinterred skulls cleaned and exposed to the sun until they were bleached white. “Then they were arranged in a Beinhaus, or bone house,” he reports. Inside that little ossuary—piled with the neatly stacked remains of generations of Hallstatters—are more than 1,200 skulls, many gaily painted with the names of the former owners and the dates on which they died. Neubauer delights in the motifs that adorn them: roses, oak and laurel leaves, trailing ivy and sometimes snakes.His unusual mixture of meticulous organization and free-ranging imagination proved invaluable at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology, where he dabbled in archaeology, archaeo­metry, mathematics and computer science. By age 21, Neubauer was developing his own prospection methods in Hallstatt. He spent a year and a half excavating the tunnels in the salt mine. Over the last three decades Neubauer has been field director of more than 200 geophysical surveys.LBI ArchPro was launched in 2010 to conduct large-scale landscape archaeology projects in Europe. At Stonehenge, the most comprehensive underground analysis yet undertaken of the Neolithic site found evidence of 17 previously unknown wooden or stone shrines and dozens of massive prehistoric pits, some of which seem to form astronomic alignments (Smithsonian, September 2014). “Stonehenge is more or less at the bottom of a really big national arena,” Neubauer says. “Along the horizon, dozens of burial mounds look down at the stones.”He got involved with Carnuntum in the late 1990s through the University of Vienna’s Institute for Archaeological Science. “The park is unique in that, unlike almost every other Roman site, it’s mainly countryside that has never been built over,” he says. Indeed, by the 19th century the ruins were still so well conserved that Carnuntum was called “Pompeii at the gates of Vienna.” Despite subsequent looting by treasure hunters and deep plowing for vineyards, Neubauer says, the land is “ideal for exploration.”Aerial photography identified intriguing forms in a field outside the ancient civilian town, west of the municipal amphitheater that had been built in the first half of the second century and excavated from 1923 to 1930. Anomalies in the field (soil, vegetation) suggested structures below. In 2000, a magnetic survey found traces of the foundations of a large building complex, replete with an aqueduct. Based on the magnetometer’s 2-D images, the site was then scanned using a novel multi-antenna GPR developed by Neubauer’s university team.Only a few remnants of the ancient city of Carnumtum remain, including the foundations of two amphitheaters. Pictured is the civilian amphitheater. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Only a few remnants of the ancient city of Carnumtum remain, including the foundations of two amphitheaters. Pictured is the civilian amphitheater. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Archaeologist Geert Verhoeven uses drones to survey the site of an amphitheater.(Reiner Riedler / AnzenbergerEncompassing 1,600 acres, the Carnuntum Archaeological Park is the largest park of its kind in Europe. Attractions include this reconstructed urban villa. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Carnuntum was founded by the Romans in A.D. 6 as a military camp. Sepulchral steles greet visitors to the park. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)In Carnuntum’s recreated gladiator ring, visitors try their hand at ancient combat.(Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Gladiator re-enactors clash in the recreated ring. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Ground radar has been evolving for decades. Like its predecessors, Neubauer’s “geo-radar” sent pulses of electromagnetic waves through the earth that generated details about depth, shape and location. Unlike them, the high-resolution device covered about ten times as much surface area in the same amount of time, enabling researchers to speed up the search process significantly.The resulting 3-D images laid bare a sprawling forum. “We had discovered the main building of the city quarter of Carnuntum’s military camp,” says Neubauer. A computer analysis revealed foundations, roads and sewers, even walls, stairs and floors, as well as a cityscape whose landmarks included shops, baths, a basilica, the tribunal, and a curia, the center of local government.“The amount of detail was incredible,” Neubauer recalls. “You could see inscriptions, you could see the bases of statues in the great courtyard and the pillars inside rooms, and you could see whether floors were wood or stone—and if there had been central heating.” Three-dimensional virtual modeling allowed the team to reconstruct what the forum—all 99,458 square feet of it—might have looked like.In the spring of 2011, another search of the Carnuntum underground was attempted by a team of archaeologists, geophysicists, soil scientists and techies from the latest iteration of Neubauer’s organization, LBI ArchPro, with its international partners. Enhancements to sensors had increased their speed, resolution and capabilities. Strides had been made in electromagnetic induction (EMI), a method by which magnetic fields are transmitted into soil to measure its electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility. At Carnuntum, the soundings told researchers whether the earth underneath had ever been heated, revealing the location of, say, bricks made by firing clay.Neubauer had been intrigued by aerial shots of the amphitheater just beyond the walls of the civilian city. On the eastern side of the arena was the outline of buildings he now reckons were a kind of outdoor shopping mall. This plaza featured a bakery, shops, a food court, bars—pretty much everything except a J. Crew and a Chipotle.To the west of the amphitheater, amid groves of birches, oaks and white poplar, was a “white spot” that looked suspicious to Neubauer. Close inspection revealed traces of a closed quadrangle of edifices. “The contours were typical of a gladiator school,” Neubauer says.The layout spanned 30,000 square feet and conformed to a marble fragment showing the Ludus Magnus, found in 1562 on one of the ancient slabs incised with Rome’s city plan. Fortunately for Neubauer’s team, the Romans tended to construct new settlements in Rome’s image. “Roman society built complex and very recognizable cityscapes with the global goal to realize outstanding symbolic and visual models of civitas and urbanitas,” says Maurizio Forte, a Duke University classics professor who has written widely on digital archaeology. “Civitas concerns the Roman view of ‘citizenship’ and ways to export worldwide the Roman civilization, society and culture. Urbanitas is how a city can fit the pattern of the Roman central power.”From the empire’s rise in 27 B.C. until its fall in A.D. 476, the Romans erected 100 or so gladiator schools, all of which were intensely stylized and most of which have been destroyed or built over. Radar scans showed that, like the Ludus Magnus, the Carnuntum complex had two levels of colonnaded galleries that enclosed a courtyard. The central feature inside the courtyard was a free-standing circular structure, which the researchers interpreted as a training arena that would have been surrounded by wooden spectator stands set on stone foundations. Within the arena was a walled ring that may have held wild beasts. Galleries along the southern and western wings not designated as infirmaries, armories or administrative offices would have been set aside for barracks. Neubauer figures that about 75 gladiators could have lodged at the school. “Uncomfortably,” he says. The tiny (32-square-foot) sleeping cells were barely big enough to hold a man and his dreams, much less a bunkmate.Neubauer deduced that other rooms—more spacious and perhaps with tiled floors—were living quarters for high-ranking gladiators, instructors or the school’s owner (lanista). A sunken cell, not far from the main entrance, seems to have been a brig for unruly fighters. The cramped chamber had no access to daylight and a ceiling so low that standing was impossible.The school’s northern wing, the bathhouse, was centrally heated. During cold European winters—temperatures could fall to minus-13 degrees—the building was warmed by funneling heat from a wood-burning furnace through gaps in the floor and walls and then out roof openings. Archaeologists detected a chamber that they believe may have been a training room: they were able to see a hollow space, or hypocaust, under the floor, where heat was conducted to warm the paving stones underfoot. The bathhouse, with its thermal pools, was fitted with plumbing that conveyed hot and cold water. Looking at the bath complex, Neubauer says, “confirmed for the first time that gladiators could recover from harsh, demanding training in a fully equipped Roman bath.”Envisioning CarnuntumArchaeologists’ high-tech tools, including drone overflights and geo-radar imaging, have produced a detailed virtual reconstruction of the 30,000-square-foot gladiator academy. Hover over the red icons below to discover its areas and structures. (By 5W Infographics. Research by Nona Yates) Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher-king who, despite the border battles raging during his administration, was inclined toward peace. The third book of his Meditations—philosophical conversations with himself in Greek—may have been written in Carnuntum’s main amphitheater, where circuses featured savage treatment of criminals. One could envision the emperor attending these brutal entertainments and turning aside to jot down his lofty thoughts. Generally, though, he was not a big fan of the mutual butchery of gladiators.Nowadays, Marcus Aurelius is remembered less for his philosophizing than for being smothered by young Commodus at the start of the swords-and-sandals epic Gladiator. In reality, he succumbed to a devastating plague—most likely smallpox—that wiped out as many as ten million people across the empire. The film hewed closer to received history in its depiction of Commodus, an antisocial Darwinist whose idea of culture was to slaughter giraffes and elephants and take up crescent-headed arrows to shoot the heads off ostriches. True, he actually wasn’t stabbed to death in the ring by a hunky gladiator, but his demise was no less theatrical: Commodus’ dissolute reign was cut short in A.D. 192 when, after several botched assassination attempts, he was strangled in the bath by his personal trainer, a wrestler named Narcissus.Commodus was a gladiator manqué who may have acquired his taste for the sport during a period in his youth (A.D. 171 to 173), some of which was misspent in Carnuntum. During the latest round of excavations, Neubauer concluded that the popularity of gladiating there necessitated two amphitheaters. “Nearly every other Roman outpost had a single arena,” he says. “In Carnuntum, one belonged to the military camp and served the legionnaires. The other, next to the school, belonged to the civil city and satisfied the desires of ordinary citizens.”The gladiator era was a time of strict law and order, when a family outing consisted of scrambling for a seat in the bleachers to watch people be sliced apart. “The circuses were a brutal, disgusting activity,” says LBI ArchPro senior researcher Christian Gugl (“No relation to the search engine”). “But I suppose spectators enjoyed the blood, cruelty and violence for a lot of the same reasons we now tune in to ‘Game of Thrones.’”Rome’s throne games gave the public a chance, regularly taken, to vent its anonymous derision when crops failed or emperors fell out of favor. Inside the ring, civilization confronted intractable nature. In Marcus Aurelius: A Life, biographer Frank McLynn proposed that the beastly spectacles “symbolized the triumph of order over chaos, culture over biology....Ultimately, gladiatorial games played the key consolatory role of all religion, since Rome triumphing over the barbarians could be read as an allegory of the triumph of immortality over death.”Neubauer likens the school in Carnuntum to a penitentiary. Under the Republic (509 B.C. to 27 B.C.), the “students” tended to be convicted criminals, prisoners of war or slaves bought solely for the purpose of gladiatorial combat by the lanista, who trained them to fight and then rented them out for shows—if they had the right qualities. Their ranks also included free men who volunteered as gladiators. Under the Empire (27 B.C. to A.D. 476), gladiators, while still made up of social outcasts, also included not only free men, but noblemen and even women who willingly risked their legal and social standing by taking part in the sport.A modern-day gladiator in Rome readies for a staged battle in historic regalia.(Luca Locatelli / INSTITUTE)A modern-day gladiator in Rome readies for a staged battle in historic regalia.(Luca Locatelli / INSTITUTE)A re-enactor with the Latin name Macrino is a Signifer, a standard bearer that carried a signum of the Roman legions. (Luca Locatelli / INSTITUTE)The Gruppo Storico Romano was founded 15 years ago and today has about 200 members. Right, a re-enactor dressed for battle. (Luca Locatelli / INSTITUTE)Ariel-a Pizzati, 39 and a real estate consultant, assumes the character of a gladiator type called a Provocator. (Luca Locatelli / INSTITUTE)It’s doubtful that many fighters-in-training were killed at Carnuntum’s school. The gladiators represented a substantial investment for the lanista, who trained, housed and fed combatants, and then leased them out. Contrary to Hollywood mythmaking, slaying half the participants in any given match wouldn’t have been cost-effective. Ancient fight records suggest that while amateurs almost always died in the ring or were so badly maimed that waiting executioners finished them off with one merciful blow, around 90 percent of trained gladiators survived their fights.The mock arena at the heart of the Carnuntum school was ringed by tiers of wooden seats and the terrace of the chief lanista. (A replica was recently built on the site of the original, an exercise in reconstruction archaeology deliberately limited to the use of tools and raw materials known to have existed during the Empire years.) In 2011, GPR detected the hole in the middle of the practice ring that secured a palus, the wooden post that recruits hacked at hour after hour. Until now it had been assumed that the palus was a thick log. But LBI ArchPro’s most recent survey indicated that the cavity at Carnuntum was only a few inches thick. “A thin post would not have been meant just for strength and stamina,” Neubauer argues. “Precision and technical finesse were equally important. To injure or kill an opponent, a gladiator had to land very accurate blows.”Every fighter was a specialist with his own particular equipment. The murmillo was outfitted with a narrow sword, a tall, oblong shield and a crested helmet. He was often pitted against a thraex, who protected himself with sheathing covering the legs to the groin and broad-rimmed headgear, and brandished a small shield and a small, curved sword, or sica. The retiarius tried to snare his opponent in a net and spear his legs with a trident. In 2014, a traditional dig in Carnuntum’s ludus turned up a metal plate that probably came from the scale armor of a scissor, a type of gladiator sometimes paired with a retiarius. What distinguished the scissor was the hollow steel tube into which his forearm and fist fitted. The tube was capped: At the business end was a crescent-shaped blade meant to cut through the retiarius’ net in the event of entanglement.One of the most surprising new finds was a chicken bone unearthed from where the grandstand would have been. Surprising, because in 2014 Austrian forensic anthropologists Fabian Kanz and Karl Grossschmidt established that gladiators were almost entirely vegetarians. They conducted tests on bones uncovered at a mass gladiator graveyard in Ephesus, Turkey, showing that the fighters’ diets consisted of barley and beans; the standard beverage was a concoction of vinegar and ash—the precursor of sports drinks. Neubauer’s educated guess: “The chicken bone corroborates that private displays were staged in the training arena, and rich spectators were provided with food during the fights.”Outside the ludus walls, segregated from Carnuntum’s civilian cemetery, Team Neubauer turned up a burial field crammed with gravestones, sarcophagi and elaborate tombs. Neubauer is convinced that a gold-plated brooch unearthed during the chicken-bone dig belonged to a politician or prosperous merchant. “Or a celebrity,” he allows. “For instance, a famous gladiator who had died in the arena.” The man fascinated by the Hallstatt charnel house may have located a gladiator necropolis.Top gladiators were folk heroes with nicknames, fan clubs and adoring groupies. The story goes that Annia Galeria Faustina, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, was smitten with a gladiator she saw on parade and took him as a lover. Soothsayers advised the cuckolded emperor that he should have the gladiator killed, and that Faustina should bathe in his blood and immediately lie down with her husband. If the never reliable Scriptores Historiae Augustae is to be believed, Commodus’ obsession with gladiators stemmed from the fact that the murdered gladiator was his real dad.Following in the (rumored) tradition of the emperors Caligula, Hadrian and Lucius Verus—and to the contempt of the patrician elite—Commodus often competed in the arena. He once awarded himself a fee of a million sestertii (brass coins) for a performance, straining the Roman treasury.According to Frank McLynn, Commodus performed “to enhance his claim to be able to conquer death, already implicit in his self-deification as the god Hercules.” Wrapped in lion skins and shouldering a club, the mad ruler would galumph around the ring à la Fred Flintstone. At one point, citizens who had lost a foot through accident or disease were tethered for Commodus to flog to death while he pretended they were giants. He chose for his opponents members of the audience who were given only wooden swords. Not surprisingly, he always won.Enduring his wrath was only marginally less injurious to health than standing in the path of an oncoming chariot. On pain of death, knights and senators were compelled to watch Commodus do battle and to chant hymns to him. It’s a safe bet that if Commodus had enrolled in Carnuntum’s gladiator school, he would have graduated summa cum laude.LBI ArchPro is housed in a nondescript building in a nondescript part of Vienna, 25 miles west of Carnuntum. Next to the parking lot is a shed that opens like Aladdin’s cave. Among the treasures are drones, a prop plane and what appears to be the love child of a lawn mower and a lunar rover. Rigged onto the back of the quad bikes (motorized quadricycles) is a battery of instruments—lasers, GPR, magnetometers, electromagnetic induction sensors.LBI ArchPro goes over one of the amphitheaters at Carnuntum with a motorized ground-penetrating radar array. (Reiner Riedler / Anzenberger Agency)Many of these gadgets are designed to be dragged across a field like futuristic farm equipment. “These devices allow us to identify structures several yards below ground,” says Gugl, the researcher. “The way the latest radar arrays can slice through soil is kind of Star Treky, though it lacks that Hollywood clarity.”No terrain seems inaccessible to Neubauer’s explorers. Your eyes linger on a rubber raft suspended from the ceiling. You imagine the Indiana Jones-like possibilities. You ask, “Is the raft used for plumbing the depths of the Nile?”“No, no, no,” Gugl protests. “We’re just letting some guy store it here.”He leads you on a tour of the offices. On the first floor, the common room is painted some institutional shade unknown to any spectrum. There’s an air of scruffiness in the occupants—jeans, T-shirts, running shoes; young researchers chat near a floor-to-ceiling photo of Carnuntum’s topography or gaze at animated video presentations, which track the development of the town in two and three dimensions.On a desktop monitor, a specialist in virtual archaeology, Juan Torrejón Valdelomar, and computer scientist Joachim Brandtner boot up a 3-D animation of LBI ArchPro’s surprising new discovery at Carnuntum—the real purpose of the Heidentor. Built in the fourth century during the reign of Emperor Constantius II, the solitary relic was originally 66 feet high, comprising four pillars and a cross vault. During the Middle Ages, it was thought to be a pagan giant’s tomb. Ancient sources indicate that Constantius II had it erected in tribute to his military triumphs.But a radar scan of the area provides evidence that the Heidentor was surrounded by bivouacs of legionnaires, soldiers massed by the tens of thousands. Like a time-lapse cartoon of a flower unfolding, the LBI ArchPro graphic shows Roman campsites slowly shooting up around the memorial. “This monumental arch,” says Neubauer, “towered above the soldiers, always reminding them of their allegiance to Rome.”Now that LBI ArchPro has digitally leveled the playing field, what’s next at Carnuntum? “Primarily, we hope to find building structures that we can clearly interpret and date,” says archaeologist Eduard Pollhammer. “We don’t expect chariots, wild animal cages or remains inside the school.”Within another walled compound that adjoins the ludus is an extended open campus that may contain all of the above. Years ago a dig inside a Carnuntum amphitheater turned up the carcasses of bears and lions.The ongoing reconstructions have convinced Neubauer that his team has solved some of the city’s enduring mysteries. At the least, they show how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting history. It’s been said the farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see. In Book VII of his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it another way: “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too ,”Smithsonian.com: Shop, Read, Watch and Travel:

There have been thousands of people, from every generation, who have uttered these same very words, since the beginning of time. The next thing that they will utter is:“No, this time that we are living in now is different”No, it is not.If you were living in Europe between 1938 to 1945, with no knowledge of the future outcome of WWII, but seeing millions of people being exterminated - would you not think at that time (even more so than now) that “the end times are near”?Well, they weren’t any different. We are all still here. Folks that said or thought that during that time, had a lot more justification to do so.Don’t try to tell me that today is somehow “different” and yes, I have read both Revelation as well as the complete works and quatrains of Nostrodomas.The world is filling with Marshall Applegates and Jim Jones, and there is no shortage of Johannesburg Kool-aid for everyone to have a glass if you want to drink it.Perhaps someone pontificated this “end times” sermon to you, just as 90% of all churches have done as part of their fear-based playbook - for the last 2,000 years - and now you are parroting your rhetoric.Let’s take a walk together down “Doomsday Memory Lane” Predictions Throughout History:Bishop and theologian Hilary of PoitiersWikipedia's W.svg predicted the world would end in 365 CEHilary's disciple, the popular saint, cloak-wearer, and hammerer Martin of ToursWikipedia's W.svg predicted the end would be around 400 CE.6 Apr 793 Beatus of Liébana This Spanish monk prophesied the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world on that day in front of a large crowd of people.847 Thiota This Christian declared in 847 that the world would end that year, though later confessed the prediction was fraudulent and was publicly flogged.1504: Painter Sandro Botticelli believed he was living during the End Times/TribulationWikipedia's W.svg, according to an inscription on his painting The Mystical Nativity.1719: Jacob Bernoulli: a comet seen in 1680 would return and collide with the Earth.Said comet hasn't been seen since.The "Great Disappointment": William Miller predicts the end would come in 1843... then 1844... oh. His many thousands of followers reacted in different ways to his utter failure: some wised up and gave up on his predictions, while others became Seventh Day Adventists. They're still waiting. Still others became the Jehovah's Witlesses, who badly retconned Miller's prediction so they could claim it actually did happen, just not the way he predicted.1865: predicted by Edward Bishop Elliott, a Victorian Biblical scholar; he later revised this to 1941.1867: John Cumming, a popular anti-Catholic clergyman who preached in Covent Garden, London, in the mid-19th century and wrote about 180 books, interpreted Biblical prophecies to predict the glorious end days would come around 1867.1873: One of several predictions by the Adventist Jonas Wendell (1815-1873); this date was contained in his 1870 book The Present Truth, or Meat in Due Season; he had previously predicted the second coming in 18681881: according to an 1862 edition of the prophecies of Mother Shipton, who allegedly wrote "The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one." (Seems she was no better at poetry than she was at prediction.)1914: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.] Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Bible Student movement which evolved into the Jehovah's Witnesses, predicted the destruction of all world governments in October 1914 (he believed Jesus had secretly returned and had been ruling the world since 1874)1941: Victorian scholar Edward Bishop Elliott, based on his interpretation of the Book of Revelation, came up with this date after his earlier predictions in the 1860s proved untrue1977: William Branham: Destruction of the U.S., termination of all governments into a world government, Second Coming.1977: Pyramidologist Adam Rutherford: Beginning of the Millennium.1978: Jim Jones took his cult with him.1980: Pat Robertson: "A year of sorrow and bloodshed that will have no end soon, for the world is being torn apart, and my kingdom shall rise from the ruins of it."1981: Hal Lindsey: Pre-tribulational rapture.1982: Pat Robertson: Great Tribulation.1982: R.E. McMaster: World War III and/or economic depression, based on cyclical theory.1985: Pat Robertson: Worldwide economic collapse.1988: Hal Lindsey: Second Coming.September 11-13, 1988: Edgar Whisenant: Second Coming.1988: Colin Deal: Second Coming.1989: Edgar Whisenant: Second Second Coming.1990: Elizabeth Clare Prophet: Global thermonuclear war.1991: Louis Farrakhan: The looming Gulf War would be the "War of Armageddon which is the final war."1992 (September 28): Rollen Stewart: Second Coming.1992: Mission for the Coming Days: Second Coming1992: First end of the world prediction from collision with the Pleiades star cluster (a.k.a., "photon belt")1994: Harold Camping: Second Coming.1994: Some Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.1997: Heaven's Gate: Earth changes and a UFO abduction coinciding with the Hale-Bopp comet. Mass suicide in the hopes of hitching a ride on said UFOs.1997: Jehovah's Witnesses: Armageddon.1998: The Church of the SubGenius: the Rupture. Every year on July 5th, they meet and party in reverence, certain that it will happen this year. (Recent writings have inverted the year to "8661.")1999: according to some interpretations of Nostradamus1999:A now little-known collision with Planet XAugust 18, 1999: Armageddon, according to Jeron "The Amazing Criswell" King1999-2000: David Wilkerson: Worldwide economic depression.May 5, 2000: Cataclysmic crust displacement predicted by Richard W. Noone2000: Y2K: Collapse of civilisation. Christian preachers in Papua New Guinea predicted the end.Hal Lindsey failed on this one again.2001: Cataclysmic crust displacement predicted by William Hutton.2002 (December 8th): Survivalist Bruce Beach (of Ark Two fame) predicted it on a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode that was not aired until 2003.2003: Mary 2003 was supposed to have Earth cataclysmically smash into Nibiru/Planet X, according to ZetaTalk.2005-2026: William Strauss and Neil Howe — a crisis period in the U.S. comparable in effect to the American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression/WWII.2007: Hal Lindsey — the Second Second Coming.2007: Pat Robertson — the Great Tribulation.2008 (whenever she dies): Sarah Palin believes she is of the "Final Generation" and will see the End Times during her lifetime.[citation needed]2008 (whenever it shuts down): The Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world with black holes, strangelets, or something similarly scary and science-y.(You can keep up to date with whether this has happened yet here.)2009: David Wilkerson — Earth-shattering calamity engulfing the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America experiencing riots and blazing fires.2011: Harold Camping tries again — Third Second coming/rapture. May 21st, to be precise.[49] He put up billboards![50] Later postponed to October 21st, but again nothing came of it. Camping might hold on to the money people sent him if he weren't dead now, though he evidently blew a bundle on billboard advertisements.[51] though followers were encouraged to drain their savings for Camping's campaign funds and many are deeply disappointed.2011: Ronald Weinland: Second Coming on the 29th of September. Strike one!2012: But of course! Un-naturally failed apocalypse, NASA pushed away space rock expected to hit in series of attempts to bombard asteroids in previous years.[53] (They even did this to the moon!) The following trail fell to/passed Earth in early 2013. ;)2012: Ronald Weinland — Second Coming on the 27th of May. Strike two!2012: Last known end of the world prediction from collision with the Pleiades star cluster2012 (December 21st): Eastern Lightning cult predicted the end of the world.2013: 2012 was just a warm up, the real bad stuff starts 2013 or something and it seems Isaac Newton predicted it.2013: Ronald Weinland — Second Coming on the 9th of May. Strike three, you're out! (see 2019 for strike 4)2014 (February 22nd): Ragnarok — the end of the present world according to Norse mythology.2014 (March 21st): Asteroid?2014: World War III, resurrected Nostradamus prophecy of a fire in the North for the reference of the end of the age of the fifth sun, believed to be a specific Northern region of a country, current speculation is North Korea, as relative to the resolution of a Pope prediction. Oh, and the Rapture. And a giant asteroid hitting the Caribbean.Between April 2014 and October 2015: A tetrad of lunar eclipses (or blood moons) will signal the start of the end times, according to megachurch pastor John Hagee.Unspecified time during the reign of Pope Francis, the pope succeeding Benedict XVI. Mediaeval Saint Malachy supposedly predicted Peter the Roman (Petrus Romanus) would be the last pope, Rome would be destroyed and a terrible judge would judge his people, The end. Doomsayers have already started shoehorning the new pope into the prediction.2015: Solar flare.2015 (September 23rd): (some references give a margin of September 18th to September 25th) Asteroid.2015 (October 7th): eBible Fellowship, an organization vaguely related to the late-Harold Camping, is confident they've got the date right this time.2016: Tom Wattkins: He had a vision of the Great tribulation claiming to have met the beast of revelation, etc. Turns out the same day is a solar eclipse., though of course he'll mention that.2016 (April 6th): Warren Jeffs, in no way due to a contemporaneous arrangement.2016 (May 16th): Pastor Richardo Salazar was allegedly told by God that an asteroid fully made of ice, with a 9km diameter, traveling at 30,000km per hour would strike earth killing 1,200 million people. As you probably can tell, that definitely happened and those totally dead 1,200 million people will be forever missed.2016 (June 3-4): Modern scholars got the Mayan date wrong. It was never 2012, rather it was June 2016 and there are plenty of numbers involved.2016 (June 14th-August 19th): According to this super reliable, super honest, super definitely-NOT-bullshiting "NASA scientist", there was meant to be a magnetic reversal between June and August which would cause the Van Allen belt to fall killing 80% of life on Earth. He got this information from aliens via HAARP. Yup, aliens told our good 'ol uncle Dr. Sal that the sky is falling.2016 (October 31st): Walid Shoebat alleges that the world is "100% certain" to end on this exact arbitrary nutjob date. As the basis for this claim, he refers to his own science of "Futurology 101".2016 (Fall): Bible student and computer scientist Nora Roth on The Mark of the Beast claims as much through a lot of numerology surrounding seventy "sevens".2016 (December): Bible student and computer scientist Nora Roth subsequently revised her claim to December.September 23, 2017: Nibiru/Planet X will again collide with Earth, the second prediction by David Meade.]. Plus a rare constellation alignment will start the RaptureOctober 2017: Initial forecast made by David MeadeOctober 15, 2017: The third time's a charm by David Meade.November 19, 2017: The fourth time is not so charming, David Meade.2017: Various Christians say we'll be chipped, and the Great Tribulation will begin.2017 to 2113: Asteroids.2018: 23th of April, David Meade strikes back... and fails again2018: The Bible guarantees May 20, 2018 Pentecost, or your money back.2018: 24th of June, obscure crank Mathieu Jean-Marc Joseph Rodrigue ensures that doom is upon us, based on some middle school math.2018: Hal Lindsey — the Third Second Coming.2019: Ronald Weinland, a serial doomsday crackpot who incorrectly predicted the world would end in 2011, 2012, and then 2013, now says it will definitely happen on June 9, 2019.2020: self-acclaimed psychic and astrologer Jeane Dixon has predicted the world will end in 2020. She previously said it would end in 1962. No doubt the 2020 date seemed distant enough back then that no one would notice it was bollocks.2026: More asteroids.2028: Fred Clark — a tongue-in-cheek offer guaranteeing 15 years of Bible-prophecy hucksterism for four easy payments of $39.99.2030: Approximate date of a mass extinction event predicted by Bob Geldof. Myles Allen of Oxford University claims "Competing hyperbole" are unhelpful in understanding real climate change.2031:World's end by way of irreversible climate change if there is insufficient mitigation, according to a United Nations report by climate scientists.2035: Even more asteroids.2036: Yet more asteroids.2037: Hal Lindsey — First Third Coming.2038: Deterioration of the fundamental older technology that still underlies the most crucial systems today.2039: End of life, the universe and everything. Also known as the Ascension.2040: Still more asteroids. This seems to be a fan favourite.2041: March 35th (sic) Not another asteroid.2048: Salt-Water Fish Extinction.2085: The original prediction for Nibiru's collision with Earth, later deprecated to 2012 for more profits prophets.2106: Asteroids never seem to stop and on this particular date 50 billion asteroids will hit the earth.2525 A couple of guys from Nebraska speculated that the human race may already be extinct by this date. And also that it might limp on for another 7,475 years.8661: Updated end of the world date for the Church of the SubGenius (from the original 1998).11103: The Doomsday argument, first stated in 1983, predicts that there is a 95% chance that the human species will go extinct within 9120 years.] N.B., the nature means that every year that passes without a doomsday advances the estimated doom ahead by 2 years.History has countless examples of people who have proclaimed that the return of Jesus Christ is imminent, but perhaps there has never been a stranger messenger than a hen in the English town of Leeds in 1806. It seems that a hen began laying eggs on which the phrase "Christ is coming" was written. As news of this miracle spread, many people became convinced that doomsday was at hand — until a curious local actually watched the hen laying one of the prophetic eggs and discovered someone had hatched a hoax.The Millerites, April 23, 1843A New England farmer named William Miller, after several years of very careful study of his Bible, concluded that God's chosen time to destroy the world could be divined from a strict literal interpretation of scripture. As he explained to anyone who would listen, the world would end some time between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. He preached and published enough to eventually lead thousands of followers (known as Millerites) who decided that the actual date was April 23, 1843. Many sold or gave away their possessions, assuming they would not be needed; though when April 23 arrived (but Jesus didn't) the group eventually disbanded—some of them forming what is now the Seventh Day Adventists.Mormon Armageddon, 1891 or earlierJoseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, called a meeting of his church leaders in February 1835 to tell them that he had spoken to God recently, and during their conversation he learned that Jesus would return within the next 56 years, after which the End Times would begin promptly.Halley's Comet, 1910In 1881, an astronomer discovered through spectral analysis that comet tails include a deadly gas called cyanogen (related, as the name imples, to cyanide). This was of only passing interest until someone realized that Earth would pass through the tail of Halley's comet in 1910. Would everyone on the planet be bathed in deadly toxic gas? That was the speculation reprinted on the front pages of "The New York Times" and other newspapers, resulting in a widespread panic across the United States and abroad. Finally even-headed scientists explained that there was nothing to fear.Pat Robertson, 1982In May 1980, televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson startled and alarmed many when — contrary to Matthew 24:36 ("No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven...") he informed his "700 Club" TV show audience around the world that he knew when the world would end. "I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world," Robertson said.Heaven's Gate, 1997When comet Hale-Bopp appeared in 1997, rumors surfaced that an alien spacecraft was following the comet — covered up, of course, by NASA and the astronomical community. Though the claim was refuted by astronomers (and could be refuted by anyone with a good telescope), the rumors were publicized on Art Bell's paranormal radio talk show "Coast to Coast AM." These claims inspired a San Diego UFO cult named Heaven's Gate to conclude that the world would end soon. The world did indeed end for 39 of the cult members, who committed suicide on March 26, 1997.Nostradamus, August 1999The heavily obfuscated and metaphorical writings of Michel de Nostrdame have intrigued people for over 400 years. His writings, the accuracy of which relies heavily upon very flexible interpretations, have been translated and re-translated in dozens of different versions. One of the most famous quatrains read, "The year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come great king of terror." Many Nostradamus devotees grew concerned that this was the famed prognosticator's vision of Armageddon.Y2K, Jan. 1, 2000As the last century drew to a close, many people grew concerned that computers might bring about doomsday. The problem, first noted in the early 1970s, was that many computers would not be able to tell the difference between 2000 and 1900 dates. No one was really sure what that would do, but many suggested catastrophic problems ranging from vast blackouts to nuclear holocaust. Gun sales jumped and survivalists prepared to live in bunkers, but the new millennium began with only a few glitches.May 5, 2000In case the Y2K bug didn't do us in, global catastrophe was assured by Richard Noone, author of the 1997 book "5/5/2000 Ice: the Ultimate Disaster." According to Noone, the Antarctic ice mass would be three miles thick by May 5, 2000 — a date in which the planets would be aligned in the heavens, somehow resulting in a global icy death (or at least a lot of book sales). Perhaps global warming kept the ice age at bay.God's Church Ministry, Fall 2008According to God's Church minister Ronald Weinland, the end times are upon us-- again. His 2006 book "2008: God's Final Witness" states that hundreds of millions of people will die, and by the end of 2006, "there will be a maximum time of two years remaining before the world will be plunged into the worst time of all human history. By the fall of 2008, the United States will have collapsed as a world power, and no longer exist as an independent nation." As the book notes, "Ronald Weinland places his reputation on the line as the end-time prophet of God."—-Can you say, “Zero-Percent Success Rate”?How about “Charlatan”?For even more:Unfulfilled Christian religious predictions - WikipediaAnyone can force-fit their logic of “signs” to fit any pre-conceived notion.That logic would have been more understandable to embrace during The Civil War, World War II or even 1968 - but not 2019.There is a much larger psychological construct here at work than your worn-out End Of Days ideology, not least of which is that someone or some group of people are doing a great job at manipulating you into a fear-based spirituality and likely foot-soldier in their ideological culture war.You are burning a lot of emotional energy for nothing, only playing into the classic End Of Days fears as bait, that is not new to your generation or any generation before now.Tell your church to ‘go have an original thought’, End Of Days is just another spiritual weapon out of the fear-based toolkit of church recruitment and obedience training as a church puppet.