The Colosseum

COLOSSEUM BY MOONLIGHT

In 1843 the first edition of Murray’s Handbook to Central Italy, the essential pocketbook companion for the well-heeled Victorian tourist, enthusiastically recommended a visit to the Colosseum (or the ‘Coliseum’ as it was then regularly spelled). Many aspects of Rome, it warned, would prove inconvenient or disappointing. The Roman system of timekeeping was simply baffling for the punctual British visitor; its twenty-four-hour clock began an hour and a half after sunset, so times changed with the seasons. The local cuisine left a lot to be desired (‘A good restaurateur is still one of the desiderata of Rome’, moaned the Handbook, somewhat sniffily). Accommodation too could be difficult to find, especially for those with special requirements – the invalids who were recommended to search out rooms with ‘a southern aspect’, or the ‘nervous persons’ advised to ‘live in more open and elevated situations’. Yet the Colosseum was guaranteed not to disappoint. In fact, it was even more impressive in real life than its reputation might suggest: ‘There is no monument of ancient Rome which artists and engravers have made so familiar to readers of all classes… and there is certainly none of which the descriptions and drawings are so far surpassed by the reality.’ No need then to promote its virtues or guide the visitor’s response. ‘We shall not attempt to anticipate the feelings of the traveller,’ the Handbook continued, ‘or obtrude upon him a single word which may interfere with his own impressions, but simply supply him with such facts as may be useful in his examination of the ruin.’

A brisk account followed, with plenty of dry dates, dimensions and figures. Building work started under the emperor Vespasian in AD 72, with the opening ceremonies under his son Titus in 80; the last recorded wild beast show in the arena took place in the reign of Theodoric (who died in AD 526) – unless you count a bull-fight staged in 1332. The whole structure covered some 6 acres and was built of travertine stone (mixed with brick in the interior). Its outer elevation comprised four storeys, to a total of 157 English feet, with eighty arches on the ground floor giving an entrance to seats and arena. Inside, the arena measured 278 by 177 feet and was originally surrounded by seating in four separate tiers which could accommodate, according to one late Roman description, 87,000 spectators. And so on. But, in traditional guidebook style, the pill of these facts and figures was sugared by the occasional curious myth, anecdote or arcane piece of knowledge. Hence the reference to a story put about by the Church, in a fit of wishful thinking, that the architect of the Colosseum had actually been a Christian and a martyr by the name of Gaudentius; and hence the account of the plans of Pope Sixtus V in the sixteenth century to convert the whole building into a wool factory, with shops in the arcades – a scheme which, even though abandoned, came at enormous financial cost to the pontiff. There were also misconceptions to be corrected. Those puzzling little holes all over the building were not, as many people had said, where poles had been inserted to support the booths erected for the medieval fairs that took place there. They were instead (and this is still thought to be the correct explanation) where enterprising medieval hucksters had dug into the structure to remove and make off with the iron clamps which held the blocks together.

Helpful hints were offered too on how to make the most of a visit. The important thing, then as now, was to get as high up on the building as possible. For the Victorian visitor, a special staircase had been constructed to give access to the upper storeys ‘and thence as high as the parapet’. From here, where there was a view both into the Colosseum itself and out over such notable antiquities as the Arch of Constantine, the Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum, ‘the scene… is one of the most impressive in the world’. If this might seem perilously close to an ‘attempt to anticipate the feelings of the traveller’, then even more so was the insistence that the view was best at night, by the light of the moon. ‘There are few travellers who do not visit this spot by moonlight in order to realise the magnificent description in “Manfred”, the only description which has ever done justice to the wonders of the Coliseum.’ As if to underline the point, and to tell the visitor exactly how to react, a substantial chunk of Lord Byron’s ‘Manfred’ was quoted, with its famous comparison of the night-time impact of the standing – albeit ruined – Colosseum (‘the gladiators’ bloody Circus’) and the paltry and overgrown remains of what had once been the palace of the Roman emperors (‘Caesar’s chambers, and the Augustan halls’) on the Palatine:

Thanks in part, no doubt, to their appearance in the Handbook, these lines became one the most influential ways of ‘seeing’ the Colosseum, and were dramatically declaimed, or repeated sotto voce, by countless Victorian (and later) visitors to the monument.

For the rest of the nineteenth century, succeeding editions of Murray’s Handbook continued to insist that moonlight was the prime time to appreciate the Colosseum and to give detailed instructions on whether special permission was needed and, if so, how to obtain it. By 1862 an even more atmospheric option was available for the most plutocratic of tourists, a private light show: ‘The lighting-up of the Coliseum with blue and red lights, a splendid sight, can be effected, having previously obtained the permission of the police, at an expense of about 150 scudi, everything included.’ One would hope that it was ‘all inclusive’; at the rate of exchange with the pound advertised in the Handbook, 150 scudi is not far short of an adult manual worker’s annual wage in England at the time. No surprise perhaps that, after Rome became capital of the united Italy in 1870, such an extravaganza was taken over by the public authorities. The 1881 edition of the Handbook advised that the ‘illumination of the Colosseum with white, green and red lights, a splendid sight, takes place generally once a year, on the Natale di Roma (21 April), or on the occasion of some royal persons visiting the Eternal City.’ Even if the moon failed, in other words, the Birthday of Rome would always offer a dramatically floodlit Colosseum.

ROMAN FEVER

Yet scratch the surface of this apparently up-beat image of nineteenth-century tourism to the Colosseum and some rather more uncomfortable aspects emerge. This was partly a question of Protestant anxieties about the Catholic ‘takeover’ of the monument. A cross in the middle of the arena and a series of shrines at the edges were one thing – appropriate commemoration of the Christian martyrs who had supposedly lost their lives there. The idea that, as the Handbook had it, kissing the cross bought ‘an indulgence of 200 days’ was quite another. Equally awkward (even if it offered a picturesque vignette of primitive piety) was the ‘rude pulpit’ near by, from where a monk preached every Friday. The best you could say was that it was ‘impossible not to be impressed with the solemnity of a Christian service in a scene so much identified with the early history of our common faith’ (though, even then, the phrase ‘our common faith’ must have been a hard-working euphemism).

There was also, predictably, the question of how far the romantic image of the lonely Colosseum by moonlight, so heavily advertised by the Handbook and other guides, was a self-defeating piece of propaganda. The impression we get elsewhere is that the Colosseum by night could be, by nineteenth-century standards at least, far too crowded and far too un-romantic for comfort. For example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860), set among a group of expatriate artists in Rome, a moonlit visit to the monument involves negotiating a host of other visitors, laughing and shrieking, flirting and playing peek-a-boo among the shadowy arcades. Hawthorne paints a vivid picture of mindless tourism. One party was singing (drunkenly, we are meant to imagine) on the steps of the central cross; another, English or American, following the instructions of the Handbook to the letter and ‘paying the inevitable visit by moonlight’, had climbed up to the parapet and were ‘exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron’s not their own’. No chance for silent contemplation of the wonders here.

At the same time, though, it was possible to feel frustrated that in some respects the commercial possibilities of the monument had not been sufficiently realised. One of the glories of the Colosseum, until it was aggressively weeded and tidied up in 1871, was the vast range of flower species that had colonised its nooks and crannies – well over 400 different types, according to the most systematic study (illustration 30, p. 179). Why on earth, wondered the Handbook in 1843, was not more done with these? ‘With such materials for a hortus siccus [a collection of dried flowers], it is surprising that the Romans do not make complete collections for sale, on the plan of the Swiss herbaria; we cannot imagine any memorial of the Coliseum which would be more acceptable to the traveller.’

But all these were side-issues compared with the central problem that faced any visitor who knew something of the history of the building. How could one reconcile the magnificence of the structure, the scale and impact of what remained, with its original function and the memories of bloody gladiatorial combat and Christian martyrdom that had taken place in its arena? The Handbook skirted the problem briefly but awkwardly – and without even pointing explicitly to the human carnage that had been wreaked in the Colosseum: ‘The gladiatorial spectacles of which it was the scene for nearly 400 years are matters of history, and it is not necessary to dwell upon them further than to state that at the dedication of the building by Titus, 5000 wild beasts were slain in the arena, and the games in honour of the event lasted for nearly 100 days.’

Many others in the nineteenth century, however, visitors and writers alike, did feel a need to dwell on what had happened there and to debate the effect it must have on their appreciation of the monument. It is a theme that underlies Byron’s verses quoted earlier (how come that this monument of cruelty survives when the imperial palace has left such paltry traces?) and it was harped on too by Charles Dickens when he visited Italy in the 1840s (‘Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum… have moved one heart as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin!). But the debate is perhaps most sharply dramatised in Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne, when the exotic poetess who is the heroine of the book takes her Scottish admirer Lord Oswald Nelvil on a guided tour of the sights of Rome. The highlight of the day was the Colosseum, ‘the most beautiful ruin in Rome’, Corinne enthused. But Oswald (who was, frankly, rather a prig) ‘did not allow himself to share Corinne’s admiration. As he looked at the four galleries, the four structures, rising one above the other, at the mixture of pomp and decay which simultaneously arouses respect and pity, he could only see the masters’ luxury and the slaves’ blood.’ Despite her spirited defence of her position, Corinne signally failed to convince him that it was possible to appreciate the magnificence of the architecture separately from any disgust for the immoral purpose it had once served. ‘He was looking for a moral feeling everywhere and all the magic of the arts could never satisfy him’; nor in the end could the magic of Corinne.

In fact, the Colosseum repeatedly appears in nineteenth-century literature as a site of tragedy and an emblem of death, both ancient and modern. For memories of the slaughter of gladiators went hand in hand with the belief that the damp and chill evening air of the monument – romantic moonlit vista though it may have been – was a particularly virulent carrier of the potentially fatal malarial ‘Roman fever’. (This notorious danger of the Roman air is discussed in detail by the Handbook, in a section – significantly – placed directly after the description of the Protestant cemetery.) It was Roman fever that carried off Henry James’ Daisy Miller after she had flouted social convention to spend the evening in the Colosseum alone with her Italian admirer, Signor Giovanelli. ‘Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight… That’s one good thing’ she shouted defiantly, in what were almost her last words, to her other admirer, and critic, the ineffectual Mr Winterbourne (who was also lurking in the Colosseum, where he had been murmuring – what else? – ‘Byron’s famous lines out of Manfred’). The moonlit Colosseum proves only slightly less treacherous in Edith Wharton’s brilliantly satirical short story from the 1930s, ‘Roman Fever’, which exposes the shady past of two middleaged American matrons – Mrs Slade and Mrs Ansley – who are spending the afternoon together in a restaurant close to the Colosseum. In little more than a dozen pages, it comes to light that, years earlier, just before their respective marriages, Mrs Slade, suspicious of her fiancé’s interest in the other woman, had tricked Mrs Ansley into spending a perilous evening in the Colosseum. She had caught a nasty chill there, it is true. But, more to the point, as is revealed in the last line, she had also conceived her lovely daughter Barbara in its shadows – by Mr Slade. The Colosseum’s association with death and flirtation is here neatly rolled into one.

There were, however, other ways of discussing the gloomy or violent side of the monument. The hyperbole of Byron, Dickens and the like in conjuring the romantic image of a place of cruelty, sadness and transgression was hilariously subverted by Mark Twain in his 1860s tale of European travel, Innocents Abroad – a book which in his lifetime sold many more copies than Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. In some ways Twain was as enthusiastic an admirer of the Colosseum as anyone, dubbing it ‘the monarch of all European ruins’ and much enjoying the irony of seeing ‘lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor’. But his best joke was to pretend to have found in Rome a surviving ancient playbill for a gladiatorial show, as well as a review of the proceedings from The Roman Daily Battle-Ax. Both, unsurprisingly, were almost identical in style and tone to their late nineteenth-century Broadway equivalents. Top of the bill was ‘MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN! FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!!’ followed by ‘a GALAXY OF TALENT! such as has not been beheld in Rome before… The performance will commence this evening with a GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT! between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian gladiator… The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant GENERAL SLAUGHTER!’ The spoof review chimed in nicely:

It is not hard to see what kind of high emotional writing about the Colosseum and its gladiatorial games Twain had in his sights. Indeed he proudly declared that he was ‘the only free white man of mature age’ who had written about the monument since Byron without quoting that other Byronic catch-phrase on the Colosseum’s victims (this time from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) – ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday’. It ‘sounds well’, he explained, ‘for the first seventeen or eighteen thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome’. Twain obviously had a point. But changing the rhetoric of response does not make the problem go away. His own humorous modernising, his domestication of the gladiatorial games into modern Broadway entertainment, was in the end another way of emphasising the main dilemma of the nineteenth-century visitor: how to make sense of the murderous games that had once taken place within the magnificent walls of the Colosseum. Was it really like Broadway? Of course not.

COLOSSEUM TODAY

The experience of the early twenty-first-century tourists is both like and unlike that of their counterparts of 150 years ago. Once again there is at least the occasional opportunity for moonlight access, but no private floodlighting on request. A modernist lift has replaced the old staircase giving access to the upper floors and October 2010 saw the opening of the topmost level of the building, for a limited period. In general visitors must make do with what is still a fabulous view, but from short of half the way up. The Christian additions have also been down-played. Gone is the dominant central cross, indulgences and the Friday sermon; though a cross does remain to one side of the arena (placed there under the Fascist regime in 1926 – illustration 29, p. 176), the Pope still visits every year to perform the rituals of Good Friday and the continued insistence on the stories of Christian martyrdom makes the building a powerful point of intersection between the modern religious world and the ancient. There is even less peace and quiet now than there ever was. If a moonlit walk through the arena was a popular pastime in the nineteenth century, the numbers certainly did not match the almost four and a half million people who currently visit each year. And they are served by a tourist industry which may not offer the dried flowers that the Handbook considered such an appropriate souvenir of the Colosseum, but which does provide mementoes of the monument in almost every other conceivable form – from illuminated plastic to candy and fridge-magnets.

One way of seeing the changes over the last century or so is as a shift from romantic ruin to archaeological site. Some of the building’s impact has remained more or less the same through that transition. There are very few visitors who have failed to be struck by the vast size of the Colosseum. (Ironically the man to whom the building owes a good deal of its fame in modern popular culture, Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator, is one of the handful to remain unimpressed; he is said to have found the actual building rather ‘small’ and to have preferred a mock-up built in Malta and digitally enhanced.) But the rigorous cleaning of the surviving remains, the removal of plants and flowers and the exposure of the complicated foundations and substructures have all combined not only to preserve the building and to yield all sorts of new technical information about its construction and chronology; they have also made the Colosseum seem, to all but the most specialist of visitors, more desolate, more baffling in its layout and considerably more difficult to navigate.

Any visitor will almost certainly be amazed by the overpowering bulk of the outside walls; but when they cross the threshold, (queue up to) buy a ticket and peek into the arena, they are confronted by what is likely to seem at best a confusing mass of masonry, at worst a jumble of dilapidated stone and rubble. In fact, there is hardly any surface of the arena to walk on. What was left at the centre of the Colosseum after the archaeological work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a maze of foundation walls and industrial supports for the machinery that would have brought up the animals into the arena to face the waiting crowd. Gone is the earth that once covered all this, and allowed the Victorian traveller to wander at will. In its place, and only recently installed (for most of the twentieth century the centre of the Colosseum was a gaping hole), is a small section of wooden flooring – on the model of what is believed was the Roman original. Not only is this no place for flirtation, still less conception; it is also very difficult for the mind’s eye to flesh out the brutal skeleton of the building now on display, and to recapture a living environment from its dead and battered frame. It is predictable perhaps that an elderly Italian architect should recently have come up with a scheme for forgetting about the ruin and simply rebuilding the whole lot, as new. (‘It would be a good thing for someone like Coca-Cola to fund…’ he suggested. ‘They could tell the whole world that they had completed the Colosseum.’) This fantasy is perhaps coming truer than he could have hoped – as one of the ways of funding a major restoration project, due to begin in 2011, at a cost of 25 million euros, is to be commercial sponsorship. At the time of writing, it appears that an Italian show manufacturer will be footing the bill.

For all these differences, however, the old problem of how to react to a monument with such a bloodstained history remains. In fact, even more than it was a century and a half ago, the Colosseum has become for us the defining symbol of ancient Rome precisely because of (not despite) the fact that it raises so many of the questions and dilemmas that we face in any engagement with Roman culture. How different was their society from our own? What judgements of it are we entitled to make? Can we admire the magnificence and the technical accomplishments, while simultaneously deploring the cruelty and the violence? How far are we taking vicarious pleasure in the excesses of Roman luxury or bloodlust, at the same time as we lament them? Are some societies really more violent than others?

All modern responses to the Colosseum – this book inevitably included – turn out to be a combination of admiration, repulsion and a measure of insidious smugness. For it is an extraordinarily bravura feat of architecture and a marker of the indelibility of ancient Rome from the modern landscape, yet the scale of the human slaughter in the arena must revolt us, while simultaneously allowing us to take comfort in the belief that ‘our’ culture is not like that. Modern responses also tend to be a mixture of horror at the alien past and a cosy domestication of its strangeness, a convenient translation of their world into ours.

This translation takes various forms. It was the game played by Mark Twain as long ago as the 1860s when he burst the romantic bubble by rewriting the gladiatorial shows as Broadway theatre. Twain would no doubt have been pleased to know that the modern city authorities in Rome have actually used the Colosseum again as an ‘entertainment’ venue. In 2003 Paul McCartney played a charity concert inside the arena to a select audience of 400 who were paying up to £1000 a head for their tickets – before going on to give a more democratic, free show to 300,000 people outside the monument’s walls. ‘I think we’re the first band to play here since the Christians,’ he quipped. (Not quite: an acoustically disastrous concert had been staged in the arena by Rome’s opera company in 1951 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the composer Verdi).

But domestication is also what drives the lively tourist industry that has grown up on the pavements outside the Colosseum, where – for a price – visitors can have their photographs taken with burly young Italians dressed up as gladiators-cum-Roman-centurions. So intense was this trade that a few years ago a turf war broke out among the ‘gladiators’ fighting for the best pitches and, as a result, they must now be licensed (up to a maximum of fifty, no criminal records and plastic weapons only). But, street fighting and profiteering apart, the message is clear. Ancient gladiators were friendly kinds of guys; and, if they were with us today, they too would be phoning up their girlfriends on their mobiles between photos, or snatching a cigarette and a Peroni in the local bar. Or, alternatively, they would be snatching a Pepsi, as a notable television commercial in 2004 tried to convince us. Rumoured, at the time, to be the most expensive advertisement ever made, it featured Britney Spears, Beyoncé Knowles and a number of other A-list pop stars as female gladiators in the Colosseum who – thanks to the reverberations produced by their rousing chorus of ‘We will rock you’ – manage to open up the emperor’s private Pepsi supplies and provide free drinks for all.

Yet the domestication is never complete, and these attempts at translation always leave much rougher edges than the comfortable image of the modern lookalikes, with their mobile phones and fizzy drinks, might suggest. The Colosseum’s tantalising appeal still depends, in part, on the frisson that comes with the blood and the violence. It is this combination of the dangerous and the safe, of the funny and the frankly revolting, that accounts for its power in popular culture and the thrill (crowds, heat and a confusing mass of masonry notwithstanding) of a visit. There is still a sense of transgression in the paradox of taking pleasure in touring the site where Romans took their pleasure in state-sponsored mass murder; and – for the more reflective at least – in wondering quite where the similarities between the Romans and ourselves start, or stop.

It is hardly surprising that this power has been harnessed (and re-invigorated) by some of the biggest business interests in the world. It may finally come as a relief to know that it has also been harnessed by some more noble causes. One of the most moving recent developments in the long history of the ‘Colosseum by night’ is the floodlighting campaign launched in 1999, with the support of, among others, the Pope, Amnesty International and the Rome city council. With the slogan ‘The Colosseum lights up life’, the building is bathed in golden light each time a death sentence is commuted anywhere in the world, or when any state votes to suspend or abolish its use (illustration 3). It is a clever piece of propaganda and of re-appropriation. ‘I think all over the world the Colosseum is known as a place of death,’ explained the mayor of Rome. ‘Today we want to make a positive link between the Colosseum and life.’ Or, as the Egyptian news agency Al-Ahram put it more bluntly (unencumbered by the romantic image of the monument that still haunts most in the West), ‘This noxious landmark… this ancient killing ground has become a symbol of life and mercy.’