The Colosseum

‘ALL WORKS TO CAESAR’S THEATRE GIVE PLACE’

‘The Amphitheatre’ or ‘Hunting Theatre’, as it was then called (‘Colosseum’ or ‘Coliseum’ is the medieval sobriquet which has stuck), was no less renowned in the ancient world than it has become in the modern. We should not fall into the trap of imagining that Roman reactions to the building were anything like identical to ours. Some Romans would certainly have shared our ambivalence towards a monument constructed for the enjoyment of murder – in increasing numbers, as Christianity became a major religion in the ancient world; but that cannot have been the orthodox view among the inhabitants of Rome in the first two centuries AD. It is also the case that the Romans themselves had many other monuments to choose from if they wanted to select a building to symbolise their capital city and its culture. For us, the Colosseum is one of the few remains well enough preserved to make a powerful and memorable icon of ancient Rome (the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and the Pantheon are probably its only rivals). The Romans would have been spoiled for choice. The great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill or the vast complex of halls, shops and libraries known as Trajan’s Forum (the column was originally its centrepiece) would both have seemed more than equal to the Colosseum in magnificence and wealth of symbolic associations, while the great venue for chariot racing, the Circus Maximus, although today a deeply disappointing patch of grass, once held some 250,000 spectators, several times the capacity of the Colosseum.

Nonetheless, those archaeologists who rather loftily suggest that the fame of the Colosseum is a modern invention – a result of our own obsessions and not much to do with the Romans – must be wrong. Or at least they fly in the face of a good deal of evidence for the monument’s ancient renown. The most extravagant example of this is the slim book of verse specially composed by the Roman poet Martial to celebrate the inaugural games in the Colosseum, where no hype is spared in praising the building. The opening poem explicitly ranks it ahead of an international, and partly mythical, roster of ancient Wonders of the World: the pyramids, the city walls of Babylon, the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the altar made by the god Apollo on the island of Delos (from horns of deer that his sister Artemis had killed) and the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. To quote Henry Killigrew’s jaunty seventeenth-century translation:

Of course, Martial was not an impartial witness. As the in-house poet of the imperial court, one might argue, it was his job not simply to reflect the fame of the monument but to use his art to make it famous. If so, then he was strikingly successful, as a vivid account (by the late-Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus) of the visit of the emperor Constantius II to Rome in AD 357 suggests. Constantius had been emperor for twenty years but had never actually been to the capital before; most of his reign had been spent dealing with the Persians in the East and with rivals to his throne in other parts of the empire. Combining public business with some energetic sightseeing around the attractions of the city, he is said to have been very struck by the ‘huge bulk of the amphitheatre’. True, there were other monuments also reported to have caught his attention, and pride of place seems to have gone to Trajan’s Forum, where he stood ‘transfixed with astonishment’. But the Colosseum was not far behind, a building so tall that ‘the human eye can hardly reach its highest point’.

It was not just a matter of literary fame, however. Perhaps the clearest indication of the monument’s importance in the Roman world is the rash of imitations it spawned. Although there were several earlier stone amphitheatres, once the Colosseum had been built it seems to have become the model for many, if not most, of those that followed, both in Italy and in the provinces – well over two hundred by the end of the second century AD on current estimates. The façade of the Capua amphitheatre in southern Italy, for example, which seems to have had a succession of columns in the different architectural orders – Tuscan, Ionic and Corinthian – immediately evokes its predecessor in Rome. Further afield, the third-century amphitheatre at El Jem in modern Tunisia (which still dominates its modern town almost as dramatically as does the Colosseum) seems to have been designed so closely on the pattern of the Roman example as to be in effect ‘a shrunken Colosseum’. Exactly how the design was copied or what technical processes of architectural imitation were involved, we do not know. But somehow the Colosseum became an almost instant archetype, a marker of ‘Romanness’ across the empire.

A variety of factors combined to give the Colosseum this iconic status in ancient Rome. As the reaction of Constantius implies, size was certainly important. It was, by a considerable margin, the biggest amphitheatre in the empire; in fact some of the more modest structures, such as those at Chester or Caerleon in Britain, would have fitted comfortably into the space of the Colosseum’s central arena. But size was not everything. The strong association of both the form and function of the building with specifically Roman culture also played a part. Many individual elements of the design certainly derived from Greek architectural precedents, but the form as a whole was, unusually, something distinctively Roman – as were the activities that went on within it (even if gladiatorial spectacles were later enthusiastically taken up in the Greek world). A key factor too was the role of the Colosseum in Roman history and politics. For it not only signalled the pleasures of popular entertainment, it also symbolised a particular style of interaction between the Roman emperor and the people of Rome. It stood at the very heart of the delicate balance between Roman autocracy and popular power, an object lesson in Roman imperial statecraft. This is clear from the very moment of its foundation: its origins are embedded in an exemplary tale of dynastic change, imperial transgression, and competition for control of the city of Rome itself.

‘ROME’S TO IT SELF RESTOR’D’

The history of the Colosseum goes back to the year AD 68, when after a flamboyant reign the emperor Nero committed suicide. The senate had passed the ancient equivalent of a vote of no confidence, his staff and bodyguards were rapidly deserting him. So the emperor made for the out-of-town villa of one of his remaining servants and (with a little help) stabbed himself in the throat – reputedly uttering his famous boast, ‘What an artist dies in me!’ (‘Qualis artifex pereo’), interspersed with appropriately poignant quotes from Homer’s Iliad. Eighteen months of civil war followed. The year 69 is often now given the euphemistic title ‘Year of the Four Emperors’, as four aristocrats, each with the support of one of the regional armies (Spain, Danube, Rhine and Syria) competed for succession to the throne – wrecking the centre of Rome in the process and burning down the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. But the end result was the victory of a coalition backing Titus Flavius Vespasianus, now usually known simply as ‘Vespasian’.

Vespasian was the general in charge of the Roman army suppressing the Jewish rebellion which had erupted in 66. After a long siege and huge loss of life, Jerusalem was captured and ransacked under the immediate command of Vespasian’s son, Titus, in 70. Scurrilous Jewish stories, preserved in the Talmud, told how Titus had desecrated the Holy of Holies by having sex with a prostitute on the holy scriptures (a sacrilege avenged by the good God who sent a flea which penetrated Titus’ brain, drummed mercilessly inside his skull and – as was revealed by autopsy – caused a tumour which eventually killed him). Some Roman stories were hardly less fantastic. It was said that while still in the East Vespasian, as newly declared emperor, legitimated his rule by a series of miracles (curing the lame with his foot and the blind with the spittle from his lips). In fact, more prosaically, the emperor and prince spent a leisurely time in the rich eastern provinces raising taxes to repair the damage to state finances caused by Nero’s extravagances. They returned to Rome – first Vespasian, then Titus – to celebrate a joint triumph over the Jews in 71.

This triumphal procession proclaimed the end of civil war, the supreme power of the Roman state and popular hopes for future happiness; or so we are told by a writer who may well have witnessed the ceremony, the historian Josephus, once himself a rebel Jewish commander, now a turncoat favourite at the Roman court. The two generals, dressed in ceremonial purple costume, travelling in a chariot drawn by white horses, made their way through the streets of Rome. In the procession, the conquering soldiers displayed a selection of their prisoners (apparently Titus had specially chosen the handsome ones) and their booty to cheering crowds: a mass of silver, gold, ivory and precious gems. Large wagons, like floats in a modern carnival, were decorated with huge pictures of the war: a once prosperous countryside devastated, rebels slaughtered, towns destroyed or on fire, prisoners praying for mercy. And from the Temple of Jerusalem itself there came curtains ripped from the sanctuary (and destined to decorate Vespasian’s palace), a scroll containing the Jewish Law, a solid-gold table and the seven-branched candelabra, the Menorah, whose image still clearly stands out on the triumphal arch in honour of Titus at the east end of the Forum (illustration 6). On the ruined Capitoline hill, the procession halted in front of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. Only after Simon son of Gioras, the defeated Jewish general, had been executed did Vespasian and Titus say prayers and sacrifice; the people cheered and feasted at public expense. Rome’s imperial regime was safely restored.

The new emperor Vespasian’s first task was to reconstruct the ceremonial centre of Rome, to stamp his own identity on the city and to wipe away the memory of Nero. He rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter and constructed a vast new Temple of ‘Peace’, a celebration of Rome’s military success (‘Pacification’ might be a better title) as much as its civilising mission. The obvious problem, however, was what to do with the most notorious of Nero’s building schemes: his vast palace known as the Golden House, whose parkland had taken over a substantial swathe of the city centre, up to 120 hectares (300 acres) in some modern (and probably exaggerated) estimates. The surviving wing of this architectural extravaganza amounts to some 150 rooms preserved in the foundation of the later Baths of Trajan. These were opened again to the public for a few years in the early 2000s, but are now closed once more because of the dangerous condition of the building (in any case, the famous painted decoration is sadly dilapidated and nothing to compare with what Raphael and his friends saw when they rediscovered the site in the sixteenth century). Originally the Golden House’s highlights were said to have included a state-of-the-art dining room with revolving ceiling, a colossal bronze statue, more than likely representing Nero himself, some 30 metres tall, and a private lake – ‘more like a sea than a lake’, according to Nero’s Roman biographer, Suetonius – surrounded by buildings made to represent cities. Much of the ancient report of this palace is overblown. Recent excavation on the site of the lake, for example, has suggested that far from being ‘more like a sea’, with all the images of wild nature that implies, it was a relatively small, rather formal affair. And there is no good reason to suppose, as was alleged soon after, that Nero had himself started the great fire of Rome in 64, simply in order to get his hands on vacant building land (even if he took advantage of the trail of emptiness and devastation the fire had left in bringing his grandiose schemes to fruition). Nonetheless there seems to have been a strong view at the time that the Golden House was monopolising, for the emperor’s private pleasure, space in the centre of the city that by rights belonged to the Roman people. ‘Citizens emigrate to Veii, Rome has become a single house’, as one squib put it at the time.

Vespasian’s response was shrewd and practical. Part of the Golden House appears to have continued in imperial use (and there is a good case for suggesting that Titus had his residence there a good decade after Nero’s death). But on the site of that infamous private lake he founded what we now call the Colosseum, a pleasure palace for the people. It was a brilliantly calculated political gesture to obliterate Nero’s memory with a monument to public entertainment, and by giving back to popular use space that had been monopolised by private imperial luxury. And it was a theme harped on by Martial in the second poem of his celebratory volume, which marked the opening of the building almost ten years later, under Titus, in 80 (Vespasian himself did not live to see its final completion, dying in 79). To quote Killigrew’s translation again, which hails the emperor, as Martial’s original did, under the Latin title ‘Caesar’:

But it was more than just a question of the return of the city’s space to popular use. In building the Colosseum Vespasian was dramatically making the point that the profits of Roman military success belonged, in part at least, to the common people of Rome; it was not only emperor and aristocracy who were to enrich themselves with the booty of empire. For, where did the money come from to build this vast monument? Some of it, almost certainly, from the mass of precious spoils that flowed into Rome with the suppression of the Jewish rebellion. In fact, it may even be that monumental inscriptions in the Colosseum emphasised exactly this point. Or so an ingenious recent discovery has been taken to suggest.

A few years ago archaeologists minutely re-examined a large inscribed block of stone that had been known for centuries; it once was lying around in the arena and made a convenient resting place for the weary Victorian tourist. The main text on this block was carved in the fifth century and commemorates a restoration of the Colosseum in that period. But it was noticed that the block had had an earlier use and had once carried a quite different text displayed in bronze letters – to judge from the dowel-holes which had fixed these letters and were still visible. Careful tracing and measurement of the holes allowed the original wording to be reconstructed. The Latin (illustration 7) means:

Whether this reconstruction is the result of a brilliant piece of academic detective work or the combination of vivid imagination and wishful thinking depends on your point of view. A sceptical reader is likely to feel (as we do) that there is an uncomfortably long distance between the scatter of holes and the suspiciously appropriate solution to ‘joining the dots’. Nonetheless, inscribed text or no inscribed text, the underlying point remains. The Roman Colosseum was the fruit of Roman victory over the Jews. It was, in effect, the Temple of Jerusalem transformed by Roman culture, rebuilt for popular pleasure and the ostentatious display of imperial power.

There is, however, a sting in the tail of this story of the amphitheatre’s construction and its original message. For if part of Vespasian’s intention was to dislodge Nero from Rome’s ‘sites of memory’, he notably failed. For by the Middle Ages the building had taken on the name by which we now know it: Colosseum. This was not simply because it was very big; though sheer size must have been one factor in explaining why what was originally a nickname has so firmly stuck. The most likely derivation is from the colossal statue of Nero (the ‘Colossus’) that stood near by, commissioned by him for his Golden House. There have been all kinds of modern disputes about this statue. Was it actually completed before Nero’s death? Was it meant to stand in the vestibule of the Golden House, as many people (but not all) have taken Suetonius’ biography of Nero to suggest? Did it represent Nero or the Sun God, or Nero as the Sun God? And how, anyway, would you tell the difference? Whatever the answer to these questions, it is clear enough that it long outlasted Nero’s palace itself, albeit with a series of alterations to its facial features (down-playing the Neronian characteristics) to bring it more acceptably into line with the changing imperial regimes, and with a wholesale shift of site under the emperor Hadrian – with the help of an architect and twenty-four elephants. There is evidence that it was still standing in the fourth century, on a base near the Colosseum which was destroyed only in the 1930s, when Mussolini had the area ‘cleaned up’ to make way for his new road, the modern Via dei Fori Imperiali. And it may well be that the famous slogan quoted in a collection (wrongly) attributed to the eighth-century scholar Bede, ‘So long as the Colisaeus stands, Rome also stands, when the Colisaeus falls, Rome will fall too’, refers to the statue and not, as it is usually taken (partly because it makes a better prediction), to the amphitheatre.

The irony is, then, that the standard modern name for Vespasian’s great amphitheatre is one that makes it more of a memorial to Nero than to the dynasty that replaced him. So much so that popular imagination often sees it as a Neronian monument and films (from Cecil B. DeMille’s Sign of the Cross to Mervyn Le Roy’s Quo Vadis) have blithely envisaged Nero presiding over the massacre of Christians there – almost two decades before it would in fact have been built. For us the Colosseum must offer more than a political message about the Roman people’s stake in the city and its empire. It embodies an important lesson in the ambiguities of memory, obliteration and amnesia. Wiping an emperor out of the landscape was more difficult than it may seem; as always, the harder you try, the more you risk drawing the attention of history to what you are trying to remove. Even without its Neronian-medieval name, Vespasian’s amphitheatre was always likely to be remembered as the monument which stood on the site of Nero’s lake.

EMPEROR AND PEOPLE

The symbolic power of the Colosseum in ancient Rome depended also on political issues that went far beyond the immediate circumstances of its construction. It came to be seen as one of the most important arenas (in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense) in which the emperor came face to face with his people – and to stand as a symbol of the encounter between autocrat and those he ruled. To understand how and why this was so, we need to consider briefly the wider context of the history of Roman politics – and the history of amphitheatres.

For us, the Colosseum is such a well-known part of the Roman skyline that it is easy to forget that, in the AD 70s, the construction of a huge stone amphitheatre in the centre of the city constituted a break with tradition. To be sure, other Italian and provincial cities in the Roman empire had long had amphitheatres of their own: for example, Pompeii (the earliest surviving amphitheatre from about 70 BC), Verona and Milan in Italy, Lyon in France, Merida in Spain and Carthage in Tunisia. And many more were to come as far afield as Jerusalem and London (where remains of the structure roughly contemporary with the Colosseum were discovered under the Guildhall in 1988). In Rome, however, before the Colosseum was built, people had generally watched gladiatorial shows in temporary structures. True, a Roman aristocrat in the reign of the emperor Augustus (31 BC to AD 14) had built a smallish amphitheatre at least partly in stone. But this was hardly grand enough for big shows (certainly the emperor Caligula is reported to have looked down his nose at it) and, in any case, like so much else in the capital, it had been burnt down in Nero’s great fire of 64. Standard practice was to build a wooden amphitheatre and take it down when the shows were over, or to make use of public buildings designed with other purposes in mind. Massive shows were occasionally given in the Circus Maximus, where chariot races were held, or in the so-called Voting Pens (or ‘Saepta’, the vast structure designed to accommodate mass voting by Roman citizens); but both venues were too large for normal displays. More often the gladiators performed in the Forum itself, the audience watching from wooden benches, which would have been dismantled at the end of the day.

Some of these temporary structures, and their fittings, were impressive enough in their own right. Pliny, the insufferable polymath and moraliser who was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, claims that the vast awning which Julius Caesar on one occasion used to cover the whole of the Forum, from one end to the other, was thought more ‘amazing’ than the gladiatorial show itself. And he tells in gleeful horror of a ‘mad fantasy in wood’ constructed by one of Cicero’s friends in the first century BC. This consisted in two adjacent semicircular wooden theatres, mounted on revolving pivots, which could be swivelled together to make a completely enclosed amphitheatre. Apparently, rather like coupling a train with the passengers on board, the whole operation of joining the two halves could be carried out with the spectators in their seats. Pliny was appalled: ‘Just imagine the people who have conquered the earth and have subdued the whole world, who govern tribes and kingdoms, who give their laws to the outside world, who are, you might say, a part of heaven on earth – just imagine them balanced on the contraption and applauding their own danger!’ Many more Romans, we suspect, would have been impressed at the splendid ingenuity of the device. Certainly, a poet in the reign of Nero imagines two rustics visiting the city overwhelmed by the sight of the emperor’s new wooden amphitheatre (even without the mechanical sophistication). They stand ‘rooted to the spot, mouth agape’ and (in terms reminiscent of Constantius’ reported reactions to the Colosseum) they reckon that it is almost as high as the Capitoline hill itself.

Of course, it was not – even if, as Pliny claimed, the largest tree ever seen at Rome, a vast larch that produced a log 40 metres long, was used in its construction. However extravagantly these earlier structures might be written up, in the late first century the Colosseum was something new for the city of Rome itself, in scale and permanence. Why did the innovation of a permanent amphitheatre take so long?

Traditionally, the Roman elite had always been chary of building in Rome a permanent monument to pleasure. It smacked too much of the luxury and decadence that Romans were anxious simultaneously to embrace and to avoid. More importantly yet, in the period of the Republic (conventionally dated from around 500 to 31 BC), when Rome was governed by elected officials or ‘magistrates’ and by a Senate made up largely of ex-magistrates – all of them wealthy aristocrats – senators may have been realistically afraid of providing a venue where the mass of citizens could express their views collectively and vociferously. It did not matter much to the Senate what citizens in Pompeii or Bologna thought or did (though a riot in the amphitheatre at Pompeii under the emperor Nero in AD 59 was severely punished by a ten-year ban on gladiator shows). But in Rome itself under the Republic, citizens had a much more direct influence over the passage of laws and the election of senators to further offices. At the same time, citizen voters were also then, potentially at least, soldiers. Their power to vote was a reflection of their power to fight, and vice versa. Mass gatherings, even if apparently for pleasure, must have seemed a dangerous commodity in the eyes of the elite.

That changed in significant ways with the advent of the Roman emperors. By the mid first century BC the Republican system of government had imploded. Out of a series of civil wars, juntas and dictatorships (culminating in the one-man rule and assassination in 44 BC of Julius Caesar), a more-or-less hereditary monarchy emerged, under the first emperor or ‘princeps’, Augustus. Under the emperors, the bulk of the army was dispersed along distant frontiers and soldiers were recruited predominantly from provincials. The citizens of Italy, with the vital exception of the Palace Guard, were effectively disarmed. And so it became practicable for the emperors to disenfranchise citizens living in Rome. Soon (even if not immediately with the advent of monarchy) elections were transferred from people to Senate. The once warlike ‘masters of the [Western] world’, as the Roman poet Virgil called them, were – to give it the most cynical spin – gratefully bribed with monthly distributions of free wheat and with frequent shows. This disenfranchisement of the Roman people was probably not part of a magnificently conceived master plan. But, however it evolved, it significantly increased monarchical power. The process is nicely symbolised by the history of the Voting Pens. The emperor Augustus, in honour of Rome’s long tradition of popular participation in politics, had erected these to upgrade the old Republican voting enclosure. They were the largest covered building in Rome. If initially citizen voting continued, however, by the end of the first century AD these Pens were no longer used for voting. Instead they had become a venue for large shows, as we have seen, and a giant supermarket for antiques. Democracy, in the traditional sense, was almost dead.

By the time the Colosseum was inaugurated in AD 80, monarchy was so firmly entrenched that emperors could readily risk, even periodically enjoy, confronting their citizen-subjects collectively. More than that, it was essential to their power-base that they should see, and – even more crucially – be seen by, the people at large. Whatever the harsher realities, there was always the ideal or myth that citizens had the right of access to the emperor, to ask a favour, to correct an injustice, to hand in a petition. One illusion on which the Roman monarchy was founded was that the emperor was only the first aristocrat among equals, and one of the emperor’s titles right from the beginning cast him in the role of Tribune (or Protector) of the People. No other ancient monarchy, whether in Persia, Egypt, India or China, ever staged such regular meetings between ruler and subjects. In fact, an ancient Chinese visitor to the Roman empire thought the public accessibility of the emperor quite extraordinary: ‘When the king goes out he usually gets one of his suite to follow him with a leather bag, into which petitioners throw a statement of their case; on arrival at the palace, the king examines the merits of each case.’

Of course, the Roman people had their fond illusions too: they thought that they could, occasionally at least, collectively influence what the emperor did by letting their rhythmically chanted views be heard.

There were other locations, to be sure, where the emperor could confront his people: in the Forum, for example, or in the Circus Maximus. But the Forum was small by comparison, and the Circus was if anything too huge to concentrate the popular voice. The Colosseum was a brilliantly constructed and enclosed world, which packed emperor, elite and subjects together, like sardines in a tin. Its steeply serried ranks of spectator-participants, watching and being watched, hierarchically ordered by status (by rule, the higher ranks sat near the front, the masses at the back), faced each other across the arena in the round. It was a magnificent setting for a ruler to parade his power before his citizen-subjects; and for those subjects to show – or at least fantasise about showing – their collective muscle in front of the emperor.

The Colosseum was very much more than a sports venue. It was a political theatre in which each stratum of Roman society played out its role (ideally at least; there were times, as we shall see in Chapter 4, that this – like all political theatre – went horribly and subversively wrong). The emperor knew he was emperor best when cheered by the ovations of an enthusiastic crowd who were seduced by the prospect of violent death (whether of animals or humans), by the gifts the emperor would occasionally have showered amongst the spectators and by the sheer excitement of being there. The Roman elite in the front seats would have paraded their status, nodding to their friends: this surely was where business contracts, promotion, alliances, marriages were first mentioned or followed up. The crowd, usually grateful and compliant, sometimes chanted for the end of a war or for more shows – seeing their power as the Roman people all round the arena. It was a vital part of Roman political life to be there, to be seen to be there and to watch the others. Hence the building’s iconic status for the Romans, as well as for us.