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Seeing the Broncos and Cowboys take to the field at Suncorp Stadium was a triumph for all involved.
Just a month ago, the entire pitch was swamped with murky brown floodwater, looking like Australia’s biggest, dirtiest swimming pool.
To return the ground to a state worthy of top-flight rugby league was, one suspects, the result of weeks of hard work.
But the sight of an open-air stadium, with fifty thousand seats all surrounding a deep(ish) pool of standing water was reminiscent of a sport played thousands of years before the inception of today’s football codes.
Of all the bloodsports held by the Romans, the most extravagant was Naumachia. Naumachia is Latin for ‘naval combat’, the term referred to the sport of staged ship-to-ship warfare.
Purpose-built warships were manned with gladiators and death-row prisoners and pitted in combat against one another in lakes and purpose-built basins.
Held in thirty-to-fifty year intervals, the sport was often a fight-to-the-finish between prisoners of war, piloting flat-bottomed replicas of the warships of the day.
Perhaps the most significant naumachia was held for the inauguration of the Colosseum.
Using the aqueducts their society would become famous for, the Romans flooded the amphitheatre, and up to thirty triremes and biremes took to the field in a technically-awesome (if morally reprehensible) battle to the death.
The spectacle took place in a number of arenas around the Roman Empire. Historians question whether the water inside these stadia was deep enough for the ships to float, or if they were just props, sitting on the ground with a watery setting.
Regardless, the sight of a flooded Lang Park wouldn’t have been far from the Colosseum of the naumachia.
In amongst the tragedy of the Queensland floods, it offers at least an interesting pointer back to the formative days of organised sports.
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