§364. Other Shows in the Amphitheater.--Of other games that were sometimes given in the amphitheaters something has been said in connection with the circus (§343). The most important were the _vēnātiōnēs_, hunts of wild beasts. These were sometimes killed by men trained to hunt them, sometimes made to kill each other. As the amphitheater was primarily intended for the butchery of men, the _vēnātiōnēs_ given in it gradually but surely took the form of man-hunts. The victims were condemned criminals, some of them guilty of crimes that deserved death, some of them sentenced on trumped up charges, some of them (and among these were women and children) condemned "to the lions" for political or religious convictions. Sometimes they were supplied with weapons, sometimes they were exposed unarmed, even fettered or bound to stakes, sometimes the ingenuity of their executioners found additional torments for them by making them play the parts of the sufferers in the tragedies of mythology. The arena was well adapted, too, for the maneuvering of boats, when it had been flooded with water (§357), and naval battles (_naumachiae_) were often fought within the coliseum as desperate and as bloody as some of those that have given a new turn to the history of the world. The earliest exhibitions of this sort were given in artificial lakes, also called _naumachiae_. The first of these was dug by Caesar, for a single exhibition, in 46 B.C. Augustus had a permanent basin constructed in 2 B.C., measuring 1,800 by 1,200 feet, and four others at least were built by later emperors. [Illustration: FIGURE 169. HALL IN THERMAE OF CARACALLA]