On hot days in the Roman Amphitheatre, the audience was believed to have enjoyed ‘sparsiones’, essentially a cool and refreshing water mist scented with balsam or saffron.

On hot days in the Roman Amphitheatre, the audience was believed to have enjoyed ‘sparsiones’, essentially a cool and refreshing water mist scented with balsam or saffron.

Mentioned in numerous literary sources and usually translated as ‘sprinklings’, sparsiones refers to perfumed liquids that were somehow sprayed over the audience in amphitheatres and theatres. This idea of simultaneously refreshing the crowd and covering up the stench of people, animals, blood and death has been reiterated by other scholars. Mahoney explains the practice as ‘sprinkling of scented water on the sand and on the crowd, to make people cooler and to cover up the smell of blood’

‘…but it combines remarkably well with wine, sweet wine in particular. Reduced to a powder, it is used to perfume the theatres’ Pliny the Elder The Natural History 21.17

The references to liquid sparsiones occur in poetry to letters to histories, but always in relation to events in Rome. Chronologically, they span the first century BCE to the early second century CE, although there are infrequent later references also, such as in the Historia Augusta. Unsurprisingly, this timeframe parallels the development of permanent buildings for dramatic productions and gladiatorial games in Rome, as well as the increasing prominence of munera and venationes amongst the city’s entertainments.

The debate around sparsiones is vast and authors such as Luciana Jacobelli points to the fact that no machine or device capable of producing this amenity has been found in the amphitheatre. The aforementioned authors alongside others have suggested that it was not diffusion of perfumed water, but the distribution of other types of favours such as fruit, coins, etc.