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

describe Titus producing ships and staging a mock seabattle, apparently recreating one of the famous naval encounters of fifth-century BC Greece, between the forces of the cities of Corcyra and Corinth. This extraordinary spectacle would certainly not be possible in the building as it survives today, for there is no way that the basement of the arena (with its intricate set of lifts and other contraptions for hoisting animals) could be waterproofed. Maybe when the amphitheatre was first built, before the insertion of all that clever machinery, it had ingeniously allowed for the option of flooding. Or maybe Dio was mistaken. Suetonius, in his account, certainly suggests that the water displays took place in a quite different purpose-built location. Even Dio himself, in describing the spectacles that must have spread widely over the city during the hundred days, has some of the water sports – including another mock naval battle, this time apparently involving 3000 men – staged in a special facility constructed by the first emperor Augustus.
    Whether or not the Colosseum was miraculously converted back into a lake (which would have been a neat jokeon Nero’s private lake that the public amphitheatre had replaced), the range of displays put on for the building’s inauguration were the most lavish that Roman money and imperial power could buy. Dio again refers tantalisingly to fights staged between elephants and between cranes – though exactly how they made these birds fight each other is hard (or awful) to imagine. He also mentions that women were involved in the wild beast hunts, while being at pains to reassure us that these were not women ‘of social distinction’. But the most vivid recreations of these spectacular events are found in Martial’s book of poems ( The Book of the Shows ) which was written to commemorate the opening of the amphitheatre. Exaggerated flattery of his imperial patron Titus, these verses may have been. There is no doubt a good deal of wishful thinking and poetic licence in the details of the spectacles described. Nonetheless, this book is one of the very rare cases where we can bring together a work of ancient literature, a specific ancient building and what happened in it on one particular occasion. The poems help us to glimpse not only what might have taken place there, but what a sophisticated Roman audience might have found to admire in these horrible, bloodthirsty performances. They bring us face to face with the (in Roman terms) exquisite inventiveness of cruelty.
    Martial starts by praising the building (‘All Works to Caesar ’s Theatre give place’) and then stops briefly to highlight the exotic, polyglot crowd which has turned up for the greatest show on earth: a wonderful combination of farmers from the wilds of northern Greece, the weird Sarmatians from the Danube who drink their horses’ blood, and Germans and Ethiopians, each sporting a different style ofcurly hair. The first ‘act’ he celebrates is one that modern readers must find most shocking. It is not from what we now imagine to be the standard repertoire of these shows: gladiators and wild beast hunts (or alternatively the execution of criminals by animals, as in ‘Christians versus lions’). Instead, it is a strange ‘charade’, re-enacting a story from mythology – for the Romans a no less important and distinctive genre of displays in the amphitheatre. In this case the story played out is that of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete whom the god Poseidon (in order to punish her husband) made fall in love with a bull: the famous half-bull/half-human Minotaur was the result of the union. Martial’s poem appears to claim that this event was acted out before the audience in the amphitheatre, between a woman and a live animal, while praising the capacity of the show to ‘make real’ such ancient (even to the Romans) mythological tales. As Thomas May’s, rather too gleeful, seventeenth-century