Built when the Roman Empire was at its peak in 80 a.d., the Colosseum represents Rome at its grandest. Its real name was the Flavian Amphitheater, an arena for gladiator contests and public spectacles. When killing became a spectator sport, the Romans wanted to share the fun with as many people as possible, so they stuck two semicircular theaters together to create a freestanding amphitheater, the biggest in the Empire.
The sheer size of the Colosseum is impressive! With four oversized stories, it's 160 feet high, nearly a third of a mile around, and makes an oval-shaped footprint that covers six acres.
Imagine the Colosseum in its glory days. The whole thing was a brilliant white, highlighted with brightly-painted trim. The top of the structure was studded with wooden beams sticking straight up, to hold an awning that shadedthe spectators inside. The stadium could accommodate 50,000 roaring fans. As Romans arrived for the games, they'd be greeted outside by a huge bronze statue of the emperor Nero, a hundred feet tall, gleaming in the sunlight, standing where the cypress trees stand today, between the Colosseum and the metro stop.
The three lower stories are nothing but open arches, framed by half-columns. The arches are stacked right on top of each other, and all the columns line up as well, drawing your eye upward. Each story forms a horizontal band that wraps around the structure. This combination makes the Colosseum appear firmly planted on the ground while reaching for the sky.
The Colosseum's facade says a lot about the Roman personality. The Romans were great engineers, not artists, and the decoration is borrowed from the more sophisticated Greeks. At ground level, you see thick columns with simple capitals (that is, the top part of the column). Moving up to the next story, the columns are thinner, with scroll-shaped capitals. On the third story, you'll find leafy capitals, and the top level has a fanciful mix of all three styles. These are the three so-called "orders" of classical Greece: sturdy Doric on the bottom, scroll-shaped Ionic, and leafy Corinthian.
"The Flavian Amphitheater" acquired a nickname, perhaps from the "colossus" of Nero that stood outside, or maybe just because it was so darn colossal, the wonder of its age. It became... the Colosseum. The Colosseum was started around 72 AD under the emperors of the Flavian family. Vespasian broke ground on it, his son Titus inaugurated it, and his younger son Domitian finished it. It took less than ten years, which is impressive considering the size of the project.
To start, they had to drain a lake here in this valley between three hills. Next they sunk concrete foundations 40 feet deep. Then they brought the stone here from Tivoli — it took 200 ox-drawn wagons shuttling back and forth every day for four years. The exterior is a skeleton made of heavy blocks of travertine, a hard white stone, like marble.
The Romans were the first to use the rounded arch, which is how they could build on this tremendous scale. Workers erected temporary scaffolding out of wood, then stacked the blocks, without using mortar, into the shape of an arch. When they got near the top they wedged an inverted stone, the keystone, into the peak of the arch.
The Colosseum is a marvel of engineering, playing one architectural force off another. It's a testament to how the enlightened Romans could conquer their barbarian neighbors — not just by brute military force but by brain power. Like many structures built by the pragmatic Romans, the Colosseum is more functional than beautiful. They loved good engineering.
Just like in modern stadiums, there's the playing surface in front of you, and that's surrounded by bleacher seats that slant up from the arena floor. The brick masses around you supported the first small tier of seats, and you can see two larger, slanted supports higher up.
50,000 fans looked down on the playing surface, shaped like an ellipse and lined up on an east-west axis. The arena is big, but not quite long enough or wide enough to play modern football or soccer on, but close. Overhead, the whole stadium could be covered with an enormous canvas awning that could be hoisted across by armies of sailors to provide shade for the spectators, the first domed stadium.
The original arena floor is missing. What we see today are the underground passages beneath the playing surface. Originally, the arena was covered with boards, then sprinkled with 9 inches of sand. (In fact, the Latin word for sand is arena ).
The games pitted animals against animals, men against animals, and in the main event professional warriors called gladiators squaring off in mortal combat. The battles were bloody, gruesome, and cruel, and ended with at least one of the combatants dead.
Gladiator games
The games began in the morning with a few warm-up acts. First came the animals, things like watching dogs bloody themselves attacking porcupines. Or you'd see hunters prowling through fake forests in search of prey. Or wild animals were sic-ed on exotic human "animals," like dark-skinned chieftains captured from the so-called “barbarian” lands. The Colosseum's menagerie of beasts came from all over the empire, and were a sight in themselves: lions, tigers, and bears (Oh my!), crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, and hippos.
The animals were kept in cages beneath the arena floor. Looking down, you can see the maze of passageways. This was like the "backstage" for the games. Here, workers prepared the animals, gladiators warmed up, and prisoners said their final prayers. It's also where stagehands readied the scenery, set pieces, weapons, and props for the elaborate spectacles.
At just the right moment, workers down below would hoist an animal up in an elevator, through a trap door in the arena floor. The animal would pop out from behind a blind into the arena — the hunter didn’t know where, when, or by what he’d be attacked. Nets ringed the arena to protect the crowd.
At lunchtime came Act Two. This is when criminals and p.o.w.'s were executed, often in creative ways. They might be thrown to the lions, naked and unarmed. Or they were dressed up like classical heroes and forced to star in a play featuring their own death. The arena would be decorated with fake scenery, buildings, or foliage, brought up from the passages below. Then the star wandered onstage, dressed as, say, Hercules or Adonis. There he was attacked by wild animals or by gladiators in costume, who'd kill him in the same way the legendary hero died.
Between rounds, fans were treated to palate-cleansing gimmicks, like female gladiators fighting each other, or a dwarf battling a one-legged man. Clowns, jugglers, and circus performers provided more comic relief.
Finally, in the afternoon, came the main event, the gladiators. These warriors had their own martial specialties. Some carried swords, protected only with a shield and a heavy helmet. Some threw the javelin. Others represented fighting fishermen, with a net to snare opponents and a trident to spear them.
If a gladiator fell helpless to the ground, his opponent would approach the emperor’s box and ask: Should he live or should he die? Sometimes the emperor or master of ceremonies left the decision to the crowd, who would judge based on how valiantly the man had fought. They would make their decision, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The Romans thought nothing of condemning a coward to the death he deserved. After a gladiator was killed, a man dressed up like Charon, the Grim Reaper of Roman mythology, entered the arena and dragged the lifeless body away.
The Colosseum was inaugurated in 80 AD with a 100-day festival in which 2,000 men and 9,000 animals were killed. That's roughly one death every five minutes. Colosseum employees squirted perfumes around the stadium to mask the stench of blood.
Look in the middle of this picture. Men dress up as gladiators now and stand outside to allow you to take their picture for money...I'm cheap, I get the shot from far away!
Roman Brick and Concrete
While the Colosseum's exterior was built with big blocks of heavy travertine, the interior uses the other great Roman invention — brick and concrete. They built hollow shells of brick, then filled them in with concrete made of cement and light rocks. This brick-and-concrete technology was flexible, kind of like our rebar and concrete. Brick shells filled with concrete could be shaped into pillars and arches to support the bleacher seats, which radiated out and up from the arena. The bare brick we see today was once faced with sheets of ornamental marble and decorative columns. A few marble seats have been restored — you can see them at the far, east end of the arena.
9. The Upper Level — Roman Hierarchy
The Colosseum was strictly segregated. Down at ringside, the emperor, senators, Vestal Virgins, and VIPs sat on marble seats with their names carved on them. The next level up held those of noble status. Up at the very top, a hundred yards from the action, there once were wooden bleachers for the poorest people, for foreigners, slaves, and women.
The top story of the Colosseum is mostly ruined, but some of it remains, along the north side. This was not part of the original three-story structure but was added around 230 AD after a fire. The awning that could have been stretched across the top of the stadium. It was strung along horizontal beams that pointed inward toward the center. The awning only covered about a third of the stadium, so those at the top always enjoyed shade while many nobles down below roasted in the sun.
The elliptical-shaped arena is 280 feet long and 165 feet wide. The ratio of length to width is 5 to 3, often called the golden ratio. Since the days of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, artists considered that proportion to be ideal, with almost mystical properties. The Colosseum's architects apparently wanted their structure to embody the perfect 3 by 5 mathematical order they thought existed in nature.
Looking into the complex web of passageways beneath the arena, you can imagine how busy the backstage action was. Gladiators strolled down the central passageway, from their warm-up yard on the east end to where they entered on the west. Workers tended wild animals, while others prepared stage sets of fake buildings or trees that could transform the arena from an African jungle to a Greek temple in an instant. These were lifted up to arena level on eighty different elevator shafts fitted with a system of ropes and pulleys. Animals, warriors, and stage sets could all be made to magically appear from eighty different spots in the arena.
The Arch of Constantine
The Arch of Constantine marks one of the great turning points in history, the military coup that made Christianity mainstream. In 312 A.D., Emperor Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius in the crucial Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The night before, he'd seen a vision of a cross in the sky. Constantine, whose mother and sister were Christians, became sole emperor and legalized Christianity. With this one battle, a once-obscure Jewish sect with a handful of followers was now the state-sanctioned religion of the entire Western world. In A.D. 300, you could be killed for being a Christian; by A.D. 400 you could be killed for not being one. Church enrollment boomed.
With the coming of Christianity to Rome, the Colosseum and its deadly games slowly became politically incorrect. However, gladiator contests continued here sporadically until they were banned in 435 A.D. Animal hunts continued a few decades more. As Rome's Empire dwindled and the infrastructure crumbled, the stadium itself was neglected. Finally, around 523 AD, after nearly 500 hundred years of games, the last animal was slaughtered, and the Colosseum shut its doors.
For the next thousand years, the structure was inhabited by various squatters — used as makeshift apartments or shops; as a church, a cemetery, or as a place of refuge during civil disturbances. Over time, the Colosseum was eroded by wind, rain, and the strain of gravity. A series of earthquakes weakened the structure, and a powerful quake in 1349 toppled the south side.
More than anything, the Colosseum was dismantled by the Roman citizens themselves, who used it as a quarry throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They carted off pre-cut stones to be reused for palaces and churches, including St. Peter's. The marble was pulverized into mortar, and 300 tons of iron brackets were pried out and melted down, resulting in the pock-marking you see today.
Finally in the 16th century, a series of popes took pity on the pagan structure. They saw themselves as protectors of Rome's legacy and preservers of the memory of Christians who may have been martyred here (whether true or not). They shored up the south and west sides with bricks and placed the big cross on the north side of the arena.
Today, the Colosseum links Rome's past with its vital present. Major political demonstrations begin or end here, providing them an iconic backdrop for the TV cameras. On Good Fridays, the pope comes here to lead pilgrims as they follow the Stations of the Cross.
As a legend goes, so long as the Colosseum shall stand, the city of Rome shall stand too. For nearly 2,000 years, the Colosseum has been the enduring symbol of Rome, the Eternal City.
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