(bright piano music)
- [Steven] I'm with Dr. Bernie Frischer
and we're here to talk about the single-most famous monument
that has come down to us from Ancient Rome, the Colosseum.
- [Bernie] I think that the image
of the Coliseum in its decline,
in its ruin, blurs the awful brutality
of this abattoir, this place of death,
and makes us think about instead the death
of Roman civilization,
and as the Renaissance put it,
the very size of the ruins of Ancient Rome suggest
to us the grandeur of Ancient Rome,
but a grandeur that was always lost
and that left behind in later people
a sense of nostalgia and regret,
and almost sentimentality that, in a certain sense,
when you drill down and you study history,
you can see is really unwarranted because, at least for me,
the Coliseum has always been a horrific place
and not, in the end, my favorite building in ancient Rome.
This area was the center of a vast palace
that Nero built for himself
and where you now see this massive building,
there was an artificial lake that Nero had here.
So this big, heavy building
with a 100,000 blocks of travertine,
imagine the weight of that,
is sitting on what you might think is rather swampy ground.
- [Steven] When the Colosseum was built
by a later Roman emperor,
a Flavian emperor, it was, in a sense,
a gift back to the city.
- [Bernie] Yes, Nero was very unpopular.
He actually committed suicide in 68 AD.
If he hadn't done that,
he would have been brought back to Rome, tried and executed.
So, the very next emperor Vespasian,
the first Flavian emperor,
had the idea of giving this 100 to 250 acres
of prime land, right in the middle of the city,
back to the people of Rome.
And what better way to do that
than to create some public monuments
where the favorite spectacles of Rome could be enjoyed?
The Romans didn't call this the Coliseum.
- [Steven] No, they called it the Flavian Amphitheater.
And it only started to be called the Colosseum
in the middle ages.
- [Bernie] And that was because
there had been a colossal statue next to it.
- [Steven] A statue of the sun god
that the Emperor Hadrian moved right next
to the Coliseum.
It was about 100 feet tall.
So it was really massive.
Now the building is not in great condition,
the result of earthquakes and pillaging, in a sense,
later Romans saw all of the stone that was available
for building in their own houses,
but we can still make out some of the exterior decoration.
And certainly we can see that the Romans are thinking back
to the ancient Greek traditions.
- [Bernie] In fact, they kind of are summing up
the history of Greek architecture
by piling one order or style of architecture on top
of the other.
So at the very top, you have the Corinthian order,
actually the top two stories.
The second story is in the Ionic order
and the lower story might look to you like the Doric order,
but actually it's a Italic variation on that
that we call the Tuscan order.
- [Steven] The way that we would get inside is
to walk through one of these archways.
And we're seeing here one of the great innovations
of Roman architecture.
- [Bernie] The building is made
in the lower three stories of the arches,
for which the Romans are famous
and there's no greater example of that
than here at the Coliseum.
Almost every one of the 80 arches
on the entry level was numbered.
76 of the 80 were numbered.
The four axial entrances,
so the one on the west, the east, the south and the north,
they didn't have numbers.
Those were the main entrances over which
was probably the dedicatory inscription by Vespasian
saying that he had given this to the Roman people as a gift
from the spoils of the Jewish War.
We think the treasure that he found
in the captured temple of the Jews at Jerusalem pay
for this great structure.
- [Steven] All of these other gateways
were a direct entrances
and so your ticket presumably corresponded
to a particular entryway
that would lead you towards your seat.
- [Bernie] The 76 entrances that were numbered
were keyed to a number on the ticket
of the roughly 50,000 spectators who we think
could fit into the Coliseum.
So they knew which doorway to go into,
the majority had to go through a very dark
and low corridor on the second story of the building
on the way to their seats.
And this would've slowed them down.
- [Steven] And we can get a sense
of just how enclosed that space is
if we look at some of the interior barrel-vaulted rings
that surround the Coliseum.
- [Bernie] The Coliseum looks very simple on the outside,
but it has a very complex interior structure
of corridors and stairways
that eventually take you right to the level of your seat.
- [Steven] The cheaper seats are higher up,
away from the action.
- [Bernie] So the emperor, magistrates, and priests sat
in the lowest seats.
Behind them sat the senators,
behind them, the wealthy businessmen above them,
now we're getting pretty high up, the plebeians,
the common folk who didn't have that much money
and at the very top were the foreigners, slaves,
and, yes, the women.
And they sat only on temporary wooden seats.
- [Steven] As opposed to the more finished marble seats
that would've existed below this.
- [Bernie] The marble seats were inscribed
with the names of the categories of people
who were allowed to sit there.
- [Steven] But what did everybody come to see?
- [Bernie] Well, there were three things
that typically went on in the Coliseum
on a typical day when it was open for business, so to speak.
First, there were the animal hunts in the morning.
The Romans imported exotic, fearsome animals
like tigers and lions and elephants and rhinoceroses
from Africa and brought them to Rome
and slaughtered them in these animal hunts
in the Colosseum.
In the afternoon, it was the gladiatorial combats.
But before the gladiatorial combats, whenever appropriate,
you had the execution of prisoners,
sometimes in shockingly colorful and imaginative ways.
And the most remarkable thing
about these executions is precisely
that they took place at midday.
That is, at the lunch hour.
So you can imagine that the Romans were sitting there
enjoying their lunch while watching
these gruesome spectacles,
which even included people being burnt at the stake,
or being tied to the stake
and being mauled to death by animals.
- [Steven] You can see why in the later history
of this building, these earlier events were seen
by the church and by Christian pilgrims
as gruesome expressions of this pagan past.
- [Bernie] And later on,
there was the idea that many Christians suffered martyrdom
here in the Coliseum.
We do hear of a few, but very few Christians,
who were murdered in the Coliseum.
- [Steven] Nevertheless, this space did
become sanctified and became an important pilgrimage site.
- [Bernie] Even we who love Ancient Rome
and Roman civilization have to recognize
that the Coliseum was a kind of an abattoir.
It was a place of death, of slaughter,
whether of animals or people.
And of course not just the people who condemned to death,
but the gladiators themselves often ended up,
when they lost, being killed.
- [Steven] Even more uncomfortable,
I think for us in the 21st century, is the collision between
the idea of death and the idea of the theatrical.
- [Bernie] However, we too clearly love
to view acts of violence,
and we may not be as superior to the Romans
as we sometimes think.
- [Steven] So we're seeing a large flat plane,
but we're seeing areas below, in a sense,
the stage that we would not have seen
when this building was in use.
- [Bernie] We have to think of the Coliseum in a sense,
as a stage.
The word amphitheater means a double theater.
So, the very name of the Colosseum evokes its theatricality
and the arena floor was made up of wood planks.
These wood planks were punctuated every couple
of meters with a trap door
and those trap doors were the caps to elevators
which were operated manually by slaves
and were used to bring animals up to the floor level
for the animal hunts or the scenery and props
for the spectacles that went on here,
including the gladiatorial combats,
which sometimes were staged as, for example,
famous battles in history.
We have on record some incredible spectacles
that occurred here with the coronation of a new emperor.
There were the sacrifice of thousands of animals
in the hunts, of hundreds of gladiators.
These were very expensive spectacles
that occurred on very important occasions
and that required all the power
and resources of the empire to make happen.
- [Steven] So I can imagine myself,
a Roman citizen in the first century sitting here watching
these brutal events unfold,
but I'm also thinking about my physical comfort.
- [Bernie] We know that there was a detachment
of marines who had a camp right across the street
from the Colosseum and they manned the ropes
of this great awning that went right around the top
of the Coliseum.
We call it the velarium,
which just means the great awning.
And those ropes seem to have been supported
by very long planks,
perhaps 60 feet long, up at the top level of the Coliseum
and then they looped around
at the ground level through bollards,
a couple of which still surviving
and you can see when you visit the Colosseum today.
- [Steven] So it makes sense that the wealthiest
and most powerful Romans would be down close
to the action, but that also in a sense, endangers them.
- [Bernie] So the emperor himself had a tunnel
that went from the Caelian Hill,
right to his box in the Coliseum.
Taking his seat at the lowest level did make him subject
to possibly an angry gladiator.
These gladiators were slaves after all.
They had no reason to be particularly happy.
Why couldn't that gladiator take his spear
or his sword and just assassinate the emperor?
Well, he couldn't because netting protected
the spectators in the lowest seats.
As far as the animals go,
they were kept away from the spectators by a ditch
that was dug around the arena
and by stakes that kept them from crossing the ditch
and jumping up into the seats.
- [Steven] It's interesting to think about the way
that our archeological knowledge,
our knowledge of history,
sometimes is at odds with the more romantic notions
that come, for instance,
from 19th century paintings of the Coliseum,
the ideas that come out
of our religious traditions regarding this.
This is a building that has captured her imagination
since its construction and continues
to be this symbol of Rome's power, of Rome's brilliance,
but also its despotism.
(bright jazzy music)