Short and simple articles about the most famous highlights of Rome or the surface of the Eternal City
Colosseum legends and reality
“As long as there is the Colosseum, there will be Rome, if the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall, and if Rome falls, the world will fall,” wrote in Latin the venerable Bede, a scholar and historian at the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, now considered a saint and father of the Church. In his writings, he collected what must have been a well-established saying, since he never left his monastery at Wearmouth.
In 1812, his words were translated by Lord Byron in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The Colosseum thus entered the collective imagination of the world, which in more modern times became pop and thus consecrated by the cinema. In the eighties began its career as an archaeological park. It became the most visited site in the world after the Chinese Wall, not being as extensive and not having the contribution of a local population like the Chinese.
Today, almost all of us know that it was the place where the gladiatorial games took place in Rome, but the divergence between a “monument” and a kind of stadium for bloody fights prevents us from understanding the building in its birth and its existence. To understand it, we have to go back in time, to when the Eternal City was the first metropolis in history, in a world whose calculated population seems to have been between two hundred and three hundred million people, between a third and a fifth of what we have today. About a quarter of the world’s population lived in the Roman Empire, a fifth in the Italian peninsula and 12% in the capital: Rome. We will have to wait until the 19th century for another city in the world to reach such several inhabitants. We are talking about 1,200,000 people crammed into a tiny space compared to the current urban expansion: it is estimated a density fifteen times greater than the most populated areas of the city today.
Colosseum historical context
In particular, the project of the Colosseum was born after a real civil war that followed the suicide of the last member, Nero, of the first imperial dynasty: the Julio-Claudian. The year 69 A.D. Colosseum project was known as the year of the four emperors: it will be Vespasian, thanks to his talents as a military strategist and diplomat, to conquer permanently the imperial seat.
The conquest of the favor of all social classes was urgent, and the great imperial residence left by Nero offered an excellent opportunity. The artificial lake in the valley in the center of the residence was immediately drained and used to lay the foundations of the largest amphitheater in the empire and the first built of stone in the capital. The word amphitheater comes from the Greek and means “building that has places to look around”. It is estimated today that it could hold up to 75,000 people. It was built in eight years by four teams of architects, engineers, workers, and slaves with their machines. It is often erroneously said that in ancient times, people did not have machines, meaning engines, but in fact, the Romans had cranes, inclined planes, pulleys, gears, winches, complex systems of levers, and their combinations. Among the driving forces, they could count on animal and hydraulic, in addition to human. To finance this construction, Vespasian had to use all his cleverness.
He sent his son Titus to bring what the Romans considered peace to the rebellious province of Judea: the city of Jerusalem and the Second Temple were razed to the ground, the population deported, and the treasures kept in the Holy Temple stolen. But it was the Empire’s public baths that solved the problem. They sprang up all over the cities, offering a free service that guaranteed urban hygiene. The managers sold urine at a high price, a substance necessary for tanning hides and fixing dyes on fabrics. Vespasian taxed the baths with urine. Imagine the daily life of those times and the role leather played in a civilization without plastics or technical fabrics; imagine all the legionnaires’ uniforms, holders, flasks, straps, and so on. But, consider also that the rich ladies wanted their beloved tunics dyed in expensive colors of distant origin. Rome was the capital of the empire, where wealth and power were flaunted.
It is said that Titus was disturbed by his father’s association with urine and complained to his father, expressing his fear that he would go down in history as the emperor who owed his success to urine. It seems that it was then that Emperor Vespasian uttered the famous words that still echo around the world today: “Pecunia non olet” (Suetonius, De vita Caesarum VIII, 23), meaning “money has no smell, it leaves no trace of its origin”. If no one can blame the phrase itself, it must be admitted that history has left the name “vespasiano” to the Italian urinal.
A Colossus, wild animals hunting and executions
The news spread even in the most remote areas before the works were finished. There was no radio, television, or newspapers. The word of mouth and the imperial messengers exaggerated the capacity, and the coins showed on one side the stylized monument and on the other the head of the emperor. However, he did not see the end of the work, as he died of natural causes. The sources that praise him report that he died standing up, supported by those closest to him.
Three types of games took place mainly inside the Colosseum. In the morning, there were hunts with wild animals imported from all corners of the empire: crocodiles, lions, bears, giraffes, elephants, gazelles, wolves, wild boars, tigers, vultures, etc. Imagine hunting these animals in their natural habitat, transporting them on boats for months, storing them somewhere in Rome, feeding and caring for them, and then killing them in the Colosseum. Those trained to meet, fight, hunt, and provoke the animals were called venatores or bestiarii, and their barracks was the Ludus Matutinus. At midday, the show changed, and there were executions. For example, they re-enacted the myth of Icarus, who was imprisoned with his father, Daedalus, inventor and architect, in the labyrinth he had just built for Minos. Daedalus made wings out of feathers, linen thread, and wax so that they could escape the monster. He advised his son to fly at half height so that the wings would not be weighed down by moisture and to let the sun melt the wax. The teenager floated and, ignoring his father’s words, rose higher and higher, allowing the sun’s heat to dissolve the ominous wings and crash to the ground. After being placed in a sort of labyrinth, with an actor playing the monster and another playing the father (who would fly away with a rope and a winch), the criminal was tied to some wax wings and then hoisted onto a catapult and launched into the air, sure of the fate that awaited him thanks to the force of gravity.
Titus inaugurated the Flavian Amphitheater, named after his family: the Flavians. The inauguration lasted one hundred days in 80 AD. The present name seems to have originated from a colossus, a gilded bronze statue about thirty-five meters high, originally depicting Nero, then transformed into the god of the sun. When it was cast is unknown, but every piece of metal was recycled, and most of it was used for military purposes. The bronze colossus left its name to the area and then to the colossal amphitheater that occupied the bottom of the valley, somehow keeping the memory of Nero, who had been condemned to oblivion.
Legionaries and gladiators
In the afternoon, there were the gladiatorial games, which, like the two previous events, reflected a military society where infant mortality was very high and where a man began his military career at fifteen. Between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine, most citizens joined the legions, but daily dangers were much more insidious than wars because of the poor development of medicine, and people easily died. A retired man would marry a 12-year-old girl who had to bear as many children as possible because most of them died. If a man lived an average of forty years, a woman lived only twenty because of childbirth.
The career of a Roman was called cursus honorum and was a series of political and military duties. The figure of the gladiator evolved from a simple slave to a trained fighter who received money for each victory, was freed after fifteen victories, and whose children became Roman citizens. He was the symbol of a society that believed in social mobility, courage, skill, and combat strategy. The gladiators in Rome were the property of the emperor, and their cost was paid for by the emperor himself. They were part of the machine that went down in history as “Panem et Circenses“, or bread and circuses, with which Caesar Augustus won the favor of the people.
Colosseum facilities
Along the north side, outside, you can still admire the shelves and the upper holes of the crown that ended the facade of the Colosseum: they were supporting elements for 280 poles that, with a complex system of ropes and pulleys, allowed the installation of a tent, the so-called velarium, to protect the public from the sun. Three hundred sailors came specially from the Cape of Miseno for a week to assemble it and for its correct orientation during the games. Inside the structure, the substructures of the stands, the seats, and the stairs remain. In the center of the elliptical structure, there was what we would call today the stage, but that bore the name of “arena”, probably from the Latin name of the sand that seems to have covered the wooden floor that disappeared, leaving some traces. From the second floor, you can admire the design of the underground passages that were under the arena. It is the best preserved part of the Colosseum because it was excavated only in the thirties and it reveals the presence of at least twenty-four original hoists (later about 60) connected to ropes, pulleys and cogwheels. They were part of a mechanism hidden from the public that lifted animals and gladiators who managed to open hatches in the floor, surprising the spectators. Instead, in the central underground corridor, the longest, several choreographies were lifted from below thanks to a system of inclined planes. And the sea battles? Perhaps one was staged at the time of the inauguration to impress the public before these underground structures were built.
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