The Colosseum (18 page)

Transport the remainder of the spoil (about 100,000 m
³
) one hour trucking distance; include price for disposal.

Include provisional sums for cost of cement, sand, stone, timber shuttering, brick.

This is less detailed information than a modern quantity surveyor would normally require. But the provisional estimate we received, which included no drainage work, no professional fees, no VAT, nothing whatsoever above ground – not to mention those elements in the building scheme of which we are unaware or have forgotten to include – was £28.5 million. Of course there is much that cannot be compared (the use of slave rather than wage labour, for a start). None the less, this figure does give a baseline for thinking about the scale of the ancient Roman enterprise.

6
LIFE AFTER DEATH

THE END OF THE GLADIATORS

Modern visitors to the Colosseum may feel a sense of frustration in discovering that it is not possible to identify the great architect who designed it. Not so their medieval counterparts, some of whom at least thought they knew exactly who had been responsible for the design. For there was a strong popular tradition that the architect had been none other than Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, who was supposed to have combined his literary skills with a talent for such arts as magic, necromancy and architecture. This was a fascinating attempt to incorporate a major Roman figure into the history of a surviving monument; and it was entirely fanciful, of course – if for no other reason than that Virgil had in fact died decades before the Colosseum was built.

Not that in this tradition Virgil was supposed to have used his design skills for building an arena of deadly combat, gladiators and animal hunts. The standard medieval view was that the Colosseum was a Temple of the Sun, originally roofed with a gilded dome, and the home of all kinds of demons; and one of the favourite medieval etymologies of ‘Coliseum’ derived the title conveniently from the Latin word for ‘to worship’ (
colo, colere
). This is how
The Wonders of Rome
saw it, a pilgrim-guide originally written soon after
1000 (though this quotation is taken from a later, more elaborate edition):

The Colosseum was the temple of the Sun, of marvellous greatness and beauty, disposed with many diverse vaulted chambers, and all covered with a heaven of gilded bronze where thunders and lightnings and glittering fires were made, and where rain was shed through silver tubes.

In the middle there was supposed to have been a huge statue of Jupiter or Apollo (perhaps a reminiscence of the Colossus) symbolising Roman power. The story went that when Pope Sylvester in the early fourth century had this temple of idolatry destroyed, he had the head and the hands of this statue displayed in front of what was then the principal Christian church in Rome, St John Lateran.

There were other variant medieval theories about the Colosseum. A twelfth-century English traveller known as ‘Master Gregory’ reported that it had been the palace of Vespasian and Titus (a brave attempt presumably to make sense of a remembered connection with those emperors). But it was not until the Italian renaissance humanists got down to work on classical texts, from the fifteenth century onwards, that the building became generally recognised again for the amphitheatre that it had originally been. Even so the connections with magic and demons did not disappear. In the sixteenth century Benvenuto Cellini, the brilliant Florentine jeweller (even if appalling self-promoter and thug), went to the Colosseum on at least two occasions by night in the company of a Sicilian priest (and part-time necromancer) in order to use the black arts to recapture his girlfriend. On the second occasion this proved a rather too successful experiment in summoning the spirits and the necromancers terrified the wits out of themselves. As Cellini explains in his
Autobiography
, no fumigations seemed effective in persuading the demons to leave – until one of the party in panic ‘let fly such a volley from his breech’ as John Addington Symonds’ delicate translation puts it (‘gave such a blast of a fart accompanied by a vast quantity of shit’ is closer to the demotic Italian) that the evil spirits took to flight. In the morning Cellini and his friends made for home, not entirely certain they had escaped scot-free. In fact, a little boy in the group ‘all the while … kept saying that two of the devils he had seen in the Colosseum were gambolling in front of us, skipping now along the roof and now upon the ground’.

24. This sixteenth-century painting by M. Van Heemskerck offers a glimpse of the different associations of the Colosseum, on which it is clearly based: bull-fights; a quack doctor selling his wares (bottom right); preachers; and in the centre a statue of Jupiter.

For us, it is hardly possible to imagine the Colosseum being thought of as anything other than an arena of gladiatorial display and animal hunts. But by the eleventh century the connection of the ruined monument with its original function was a distant one. It had not been used for such spectacles for centuries: the last clear record of gladiatorial combat there is in the mid 430s; animal hunts are known to have continued for a century or so more. As late as 523 the Roman senator and bureaucrat Cassiodorus drafted a letter to a consul (responsible for staging hunts in the Colosseum) on behalf of his master, the then ruler of Rome, the Gothic King Theodoric. In it Cassiodorus deplores the cruelty and excesses of the spectacles, while lingering on their details: ‘The first hunter, trusting to a brittle pole, runs on the mouths of the beasts, and seems, in the eagerness of his charge, to desire the death he hopes to avoid … The man’s bent limbs are tossed into the air like flimsy cloths by a lofty
spring of his body’; and so on. But Cassiodorus also makes clear that such shows were still extremely popular (even if, as usual in such accounts, there is a trace of the snobbish assumption that the populace will flock to see what their betters rightly disdain); and more to the point he drafts what is effectively Theodoric’s formal authorisation of the shows, urging the consul, as sponsor, to be generous. How much later this continued, however, is anyone’s guess.

It would be comforting if the end of arena spectacles could be pinned directly to the triumph of Christianity. But in fact, when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, came to power at the beginning of the fourth century, his legislation against gladiatorial shows seems to have had about as much visible effect as a thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit at the outskirts of a British town. Besides, Constantine’s policy was not one of outright banning; we have evidence, for example, in an inscription from the central Italian town of Hispellum (modern Spello) that he gave specific permission in the 330s for the local people to hold annual gladiatorial shows there, apparently so that they would not have to make the difficult journey to those in the town of Volsinii. Some laws were certainly passed through the fourth and into the fifth century prohibiting various aspects of arena culture (senators, for example, were banned from using gladiators as bodyguards). But as with the edicts which during the same period outlawed paganism, the reaction was presumably a mixture of obedience, evasion and complete flouting.

In the end it was not so much the legislation (high-minded, religiously driven or not) that put a stop to the bloody spectacles in the Colosseum and elsewhere. Rather, repeated civil
wars and barbarian invasions limited the capacity of the state and individuals to sponsor shows, to procure wild animals and (in the case of the Colosseum itself) to keep up a costly, high-maintenance monument. Behind the series of inscriptions which commemorate restorations of the Colosseum at this time probably lie a series of much more amateurish ‘patchingsup’ of an already decaying, down-at-heel, half-abandoned building than we usually imagine (and almost certainly on a smaller scale than these boastful commemorations try to suggest). In parts the building was probably already being quarried for stone in the final stages of its life as an amphitheatre. The Colosseum and its traditional activities were beyond what the resources of Rome in the fifth century could sustain. Constantine had, after all, transferred the principal capital of the empire to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), with all the funding and infrastructure that went with it. And so weakened had Rome itself been by wars, invasions and natural disasters, that the Byzantine historian Procopius estimated that (aristocrats apart) there were only 500 people there when the Gothic KingTotila invaded in 545. Of course, the terrible decline of the late antique city is almost as much a cliché as the overwhelming grandeur of the imperial capital. We should not take Procopius’ figure as a good guide to the usual population of the city at the time (in addition to his likely exaggeration, many inhabitants with means and sense surely left town – as Procopius implies – in advance of Totila’s arrival). Nonetheless this was not a community with either the human or material resources to keep up a monument on this scale even in mothballs, let alone in working order.

It is perhaps no surprise then that when, on 3 September 1332, a bullfight was supposedly held in the Colosseum’s arena
in honour of the visit of Ludwig of Bavaria, people at the time do not seem to have made the link with the activities that had taken place there in antiquity. To us, the resemblances are uncanny: we have some more or less contemporary descriptions of bulls maddened by the blows of their human combatants, and striking out fatally at those who had wounded them; the final death toll is said to have been eleven animals and eighteen humans. To most of those watching, the connection between beast hunts and the ancient Colosseum had been forgotten.

THE COLOSSEUM REMEMBERED

The story of the lifting of this collective amnesia and of the rediscovery (or reinvention) of the monument as a tourist shrine to gladiatorial combat extends over centuries of the modern history of the city of Rome: from the feudal warfare of the medieval town, through dynastic rivalries of popes and cardinals, repeated invasions (of foreign travellers and pilgrims as much as of hostile armies), to the re-creation of the city in the late nineteenth century as the capital of a newly reunited Italy. Throughout this time, while the imperial palace on the Palatine crumbled, as Byron noted, into insignificance, while the Roman Forum gently sank under what was aptly called a ‘cow pasture’ (‘
Campo Vaccino’
), the Colosseum still stood reasonably proud. Albeit half buried in earth itself, on a more or less greenfield site as Rome’s builtup area contracted, and sometimes flagrantly misunderstood (at least by our standards), it remained one of the most striking ancient monuments of the city – rivalled only by the great columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.

25. A romantic ruin or an overgrown squatter city? This late-eighteenthcentury drawing gives some idea of the build up of earth in and around what we think of as the lower levels of the Colosseum.

We may now be thankful that some of the more breathtaking schemes for its preservation or re-use did not get off the ground. In the sixteenth century, for example, Pope Sixtus V, as
Murray’s Handbook
observed in 1843, had planned the conversion of the Colosseum into a wool factory. It was a project somewhat reminiscent of those of the more enlightened British nineteenth-century industrialists and was, in fact, linked to a much bigger scheme of what we would call ‘regeneration’ of the area around the building. The plans drawn up by Sixtus’ architect, Domenico Fontana, sited the industrial plant on the ground floor of the monument, with attached housing for the workmen on the upper levels. But the immense cost of the proposals meant that they were abandoned after the Pope’s death; instead, in 1594, a small glue factory moved in. Radical as it seems, in the long term such a conversion might inadvertently have contributed to the Colosseum’s better preservation (that is certainly what the French scholar Mabillon thought, when he wrote some years later that ‘If Sixtus had lived, we would now have that amazing amphitheatre intact’). Not so the earlier version of Sixtus’ plans, which seem to have envisaged the total demolition of the building in a major road scheme. This proposed obliteration rather exceeds the rapaciousness of later English grand tourists. ‘If the Colosseum were portable, the English would carry it away’ was one eighteenth-century joke. They presumably often returned home with a fragment of souvenir masonry in their pockets.