The Colosseum by Mary Beard, Keith Hopkins Read Free Book Online

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 inthe 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.

3
THE KILLING FIELDS
    AD 80: OPENING EVENTS
    The Colosseum was officially opened under the new emperor Titus in AD 80, in an extravaganza of fighting, beast hunts and bloodshed that is said to have lasted a hundred days. The scale of the slaughter is hard to estimate. We have no figures at all for deaths among the gladiators, but Titus’ biographer, Suetonius, claims that during these celebrations (though not necessarily in the Colosseum itself) ‘on a single day’ 5000 animals were killed – a claim that has been boldly re-interpreted by a few modern scholars to mean ‘on every single day’ of the performance, so giving a vast, and frankly implausible, total of half a million animal casualties. One of the fullest accounts of the proceedings, by the historian Dio writing in the third century, is rather more modest in its estimates: he reckons that 9000 animals were slain in all. But elsewhere, discussing games given by Julius Caesar in 46 BC , Dio reflects on the difficulty of calculating the correct tally of fighters or victims. ‘If anyone wanted to record their number,’ he complains, ‘they would have trouble finding out and it would not necessarily be an accurate account. For all things of this sort get exaggerated and hyped.’ The Roman audience’s appetitefor slaughter was presumably well matched by the capacity for boasting on the part of those who put on the shows.
    Many of the practical arrangements are also tricky to reconstruct. One question that has puzzled archaeologists and historians for centuries is whether or not the central arena was flooded during these opening games. Dio writes confidently of how ‘Titus suddenly filled the arena with water and brought in horses and bulls and other domesticated animals which had been taught to swim’ (if ‘swimming’ is what Dio means when he says, literally, ‘had been taught to behave in liquid just as they did on dry land’). And he goes on to