colosseum tickets

The boss was saying today that the Romans had a better system of distributing tickets to the Colosseum than we have for selling Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets.

So I searched for "colosseum tickets" but that only showed me pages for modern day ticket sales to the Colosseum, then searched for "colosseum" only which brings up the Wikipedia page first. from there I navigated to http://the-colosseum.net/ but did not find the information there either.

Then a colleague was reading from the article he found by searching for "how did the ancient romans sell tickets for the colosseum in 80 AD" which is where I found the following information.

• The games held at the Colosseum were free, but you would have to have a ticket to gain entrance.
• Tickets were pre-manufactured and distributed to various organisations and groups, which would then distribute them to their members.
• If you did not get a ticket beforehand you would have to have taken your chances by standing in a queue on the day of the event.
• There were never enough tickets for the events at the Colosseum and it is speculated that there was a large black market for tickets.
• Tickets to the tiers were assigned according to status (determined by the clothes you wore or who you were with)
• Tickets were marked with the Section, Row and Seat number but not with a date and were probably discarded after each event, which ran over several days.
• When you arrived at the correct entrance (one of 76 to 80) you handed your ticket to an usher who would then let you in.

So pretty much nothing has changed in 2000 years except that they didn't facebook where you could voice your discontent in a public forum :-)

Source:
http://www.roman-colosseum.info/colosseum/tickets-to-the-colosseum.htm
http://the-colosseum.net/around/essay_lyes.htm