The Flavian Amphitheater
The most famous construction of the Flavians, the one everyone associates with ancient Rome itself, is the Flavian Amphitheater. Today it is known as the “Colosseum.”
The original inscription over its entrance read, "The Emperor Vespasian ordered this new amphitheater to be erected from his general's share of the booty [from the Jewish War]."
The Colosseum derived its popular name from the gigantic statue that had been erected in front of it:
Colossus Neronis: a colossal bronze statue of Nero, 120 feet high, the work of Zenodorus, a Greek, erected by Nero himself in the vestibule of the Domus Aurea [Golden House] on the summit of the Velia [citation], but after the death of that emperor changed by Vespasian into a statue of the Sun… (12)
A trident flanked by two dolphins, like that seen in one of the earliest Christian catacombs and on pagan temples (including one built by the Flavians), also appears on one of the Colosseum’s few surviving marble architectural details:
Marble fragments from the Flavian Amphitheater, including a keystone with dolphin-and-trident motif
Such nautical imagery adorning the Colosseum, a reference to Neptune, is unsurprising considering the mock naval battles performed in that notorious amphitheater. However, one must wonder: if Christians were being fed to the lions in the Colosseum, how is it that a pagan symbol from the Colosseum is being employed to represent Christians in their oldest catacombs only a few miles away?
Fish-and-Trident symbol, 2nd Century Christian catacombs
Meanwhile, the long-lost colossus of the sun god that gave the Colosseum its name towered over that section of the city during the Flavians’ rule. It must have looked something like this:
Sol/Helios/Apollo
We have already seen that the dolphin-and-anchor motif was first used to represent Apollo. One of the earliest depictions of Jesus Christ made by Christians, one that predates most portraits showing him with a beard, is this 3rd Century mosaic in which a beardless Jesus resembles the sun god, Sol or Helios or Apollo, with a radiant crown:
Jesus, 3rd Century mosaic
For comparison, here is an ancient Hellenistic representation of Alexander the Great as the sun god:
Alexander as Helios, 2nd Century BCE
In the Gospel of John, Jesus famously describes himself with the title of the Sun god, “the Light of the World.” (13) And, like the sun itself, his resurrection is at dawn, according to all four Gospels. (The placing of halos around the heads of saints in Christian art probably originates from the light-rays artistically depicted around the heads of solar deities like Apollo, Helios and Sol Invictus.)
In addition to using dolphin-and-anchor and dolphin-and-trident symbols, Roman emperors also employed dolphin-over-tripod symbols. The tripod was closely associated with the Oracle at Delphi, Apollo’s oracle, in which the priestess, the Pythia, sat upon a tripod to deliver her prophecies. Here are examples of both a Vitellius and a Titus coin depicting a dolphin over a tripod:
Pre-Flavian Vitellius coin
Titus coin
According to one old source on Roman coinage:
The dolphin was consecrated to Apollo, who, according to Homer, had transformed himself into one. Hence we see a Delphic tripod with a dolphin upon it, on a silver coin of Vitellius, that emperor having, as the inscription teaches us, been one of the [officials] appointed to the care of sacrificial ceremonies. A similar type appears on a denarius of Titus, but not with the same legend. (14)
This same source also claims that “[t]he Dolphin, entwined round an anchor, was at one time a symbol of Augustus—it is also seen on coins struck by princes of the Flavia family, sons of Vespasian.” (15) However, one contemporary editor of a numismatic forum corrects this:
The emblem of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor appears on the reverse of silver denarii produced by the Rome mint during the reigns of the Flavian emperors Titus and Domitian between AD 79 and the early 80s. (So far as I am aware, it does not appear on the coins of Augustus, pace the Dictionary of Roman Coins text above [though there is an Augustus denarius with the reverse showing a dolphin wrapped around a trident…]) (16)
Here is that Augustus coin with the dolphin-and-trident motif:
Augustus coin with dolphin-and-trident motif
So, it seems that while dolphin and even anchor imagery had been used by other emperors, the only Roman emperors to ever use the dolphin-entwined-anchor motif on coins were the Flavian emperors Titus and Domitian, although the latter seems to have dropped the image very quickly after Titus’s death, and Hadrian, who would finish Titus’s war 35 years later, in a limited edition after Christians had publicly adopted it.
One can see many advantages for Titus employing the dolphin-and-anchor symbolism. Since the anchor had been commonly stamped on coins of Seleucid and Jewish kings for centuries, its use by Titus further associated him with both Hellenistic and Jewish monarchs of the east. This would not have been lost upon Titus’s propagandists after he had conquered Judea, as this triumph was one of his family’s chief claims to the throne. However, to depict fish or dolphin figures with an anchor would have been blasphemy to the Jews. So the pairing of these figures in Flavian symbology—as Christians would also do—is therefore exclusively pagan.
Of course, the purely political use of the anchor on Jewish coins surprisingly becomes a religious symbol for early Christians, as it is on the coins of Titus—something that was expressly forbidden by Jews. And the same family of symbols so often used by the Flavians—fish, anchors and tridents—was also Christianity’s predominant symbology for its first three centuries.
A symbol from Roman imperial political propaganda used in the late 1st Century was adopted by Christians within three or four decades, even at their gravesites, in the city of Rome itself. We must ask again: why do we have such a paradoxical coincidence of symbols from supposedly antagonistic groups almost perfectly overlapping each other in both time and place?
The dolphin-and-anchor motif is one of the most commonly used on the coins of the Emperor Titus. This makes it awkward enough as an appropriate Christian symbol by the conventional understanding. Adding to the paradox, Titus happens to have sacked Jerusalem and destroyed its famous Temple, just as Jesus predicted would happen within the time frame of his Second Coming.
In the oldest archeological evidence of Christians in the catacombs, as we have seen, Christians depicted fish and anchors juxtaposing each other to represent their affiliation. Let us now consider this mosaic, which was once at the bottom of an Olympic-sized pool in a public works in the city of Herculaneum buried in 79 CE by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius during the reign of the Emperor Titus. And remember that it predates by more than two decades any accepted archeological evidence of Christianity (17):
Herculaneum, pre-80 CE
Both dolphins and people are swimming toward a cruciform anchor, the universal symbol of safety. Fish are directly equated with people. What deity the anchor represents is not clear, but what is striking about this mosaic is that the devotees of Apollo, Titus, or Jesus Christ could all have designed it with equal plausibility. The family of symbols, and their meaning, is identical to that employed by Christians in the earliest catacombs. And yet this mosaic predates all accepted archeological evidence for Christianity.