The Mysterious Crescent-Shaped Amphitheatre Weapon: A New Interpretation

Three Roman mosaics show a tool (a staff ending in a crescent) that has always been a mystery for researchers. Some of them make no comment at all about it when discussing those mosaics, limiting themselves to describing its shape. Others try to deduce what its function was, and propose it might be a symbol (of a corporation of venatores or of a god). A few suggest it could be a weapon for fighting the animals (bulls) that appear nearby. Here I propose that the tool might indeed be a weapon for fighting animals, especially bulls, during the venationes, its precise function being to cut the hamstring tendon of one of the hind legs of the animal. I base this hypothesis on the fact that that same tool was still used in sixteenth-century Spain for that task. Of course, this hypothesis implies accepting that the tool had continued in use in the Iberian peninsula for that same function from the times of the Romans until the sixteenth century, which seems likely, since bull fights and the breeding of bulls have been activities uninterrupted in the Iberian peninsula since the times of the Romans (as attested by evidence).