The Colosseum (5 page)

Where the stupendious theatre’s vast Pile
Is rear’d, there
Nero
’s Fish-ponds were e’er while …

Rome
’s to it self restor’d; in
Caesar
’s Reign
The Prince’s Pleasures now the People gain.

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:

THE EMPEROR VESPASIAN ORDERED THIS NEW AMPHITHEATRE TO BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOOTY
…

7. Joining the dots? The dowel holes (above) reconstructed into the dedicatory inscription of the Colosseum (below).

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
amphi
theatre. 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.