Synchronized swimming dates back to ancient Rome.
When most people think of synchronized swimming, they picture Esther Williams’ glittering “aquamusicals” in the 1940s and ’50s, or the sport’s 1984 Olympic debut. But the idea of choreographed aquatic performance actually dates back nearly two millennia — to the flooded amphitheaters of ancient Rome.
Roman rulers were obsessed with turning water into spectacle. Julius Caesar and his successors staged naumachiae — mock naval battles fought by prisoners in specially dug lakes or even within the Colosseum in Rome, which could be flooded for the occasion. These violent dramas overshadowed a quieter but no less dazzling aquatic art: an early forerunner of synchronized swimming.
The Roman poet Martial, writing in the first century CE, described a performance in which women portraying Nereids, or sea nymphs, dove and swam in formation across the Colosseum’s waters. Their bodies, likely nude to match the mythological roles, gleamed in torchlight as they created patterns on the waves — shapes of anchors, tridents, even ships with billowing sails. Martial was so enchanted that he suggested Thetis herself, queen of the sea nymphs, must have taught them their art.
These displays were more than entertainment; they showed off Rome’s engineering might through its ability to summon rivers into stone theaters, transforming the spaces into watery stages. Across the Roman Empire, smaller “Thetis-mimes” featured swimmers pantomiming mythic tales in waterproofed orchestra pits, a kind of water ballet that echoed through Europe centuries later in 19th-century “aqua dramas.”
Though early Christian leaders denounced these spectacles as indecent, their watery choreography survives in today’s sport. Modern synchronized swimming — now called artistic swimming — owes its roots not just to Hollywood glamour but also to ancient Rome, where the first water ballets shimmered beneath the torchlight of the Colosseum.
