IMPOSSIBLE FABLES · AD 80 · ROME
The beast in the Colosseum
During the hundred days of games that opened the Colosseum in AD 80, the animal hunters of the empire delivered one crate too old for any map. Through a fold in deep time, a subadult tyrannosaur reached the arena that was built to prove nothing alive outranked Rome. This is the fable of what Rome did when it met an animal it could not beat.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
AD 80 · OSTIA
No bridge of causes leads to the timeline recorded here. The atlas files it among the fables, where the question is not how but what then. Through a fold in deep time, a crate too old for any map came ashore at Ostia in the spring of AD 80. Rome was one hundred days into the games that opened the Flavian Amphitheatre, the arena we would come to call the Colosseum, and the emperor Titus had ordered the beasts of three continents killed for the crowd. The animal hunters had never packed a crate that breathed like this one. The dockworkers heard it wake. They set down their hooks. The busiest harbor in the world went silent.
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