The Colosseum (6 page)

There were other locations, to be sure, where the emperor could confront his people: in the Forum, for example, or in
the 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 appetite
for 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 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 joke
on 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 of
curly 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 translation puts it:

Beleeve a bull enioy’d the Cretan Queene;
Th’old fable verif’d we all have seene.
Let not old times, Caesar, selfe-praised bee;
Since what fame sings, the stage presents to thee.

How literally should we read this? Are we to take it that these opening celebrations of the Colosseum, under the admiring eye of the emperor Titus and of the massed ranks of Roman citizens, really featured sex between a woman and a bull? Possibly. There is other evidence for dramatic executions of criminals in the Roman arena along these lines (presumably the woman would not have survived the encounter, which we assume to have been some form of quasi-judicial
punishment). Condemned criminals were induced – again, it is difficult to see quite how – to take part in their own death scenes as if actors in a play. Later in
The Book of the Shows
Martial focuses on the crucifixion of a man, who seems to have re-enacted in the amphitheatre the punishment of a legendary Roman bandit called Laureolus, until he was put out of his misery by a bear imported from Scotland. He simultaneously reminded the audience of the myth of Prometheus, whose particular divine punishment was to have his liver continually devoured by vultures during the day and grow back again at night:

Just as Prometheus, bound tight on a Russian crag
Fed with his ever healing and regrowing heart
The bird that never tires of eating
So,
cast as
Laureolus, the bandit king, nailed to a cross – no stage
prop this –
A man offered his exposed guts to a Highland bear.
His shredded limbs clung onto life though
Their constituent parts gushed with blood;
No trace of body – but the body lived.
Finally he got the punishment he deserved …
Maybe he’d slit his master’s throat,
Maybe he’d robbed a temple’s treasury of gold,
Maybe he’d tried to burn our city, Rome.
That criminal had surpassed all ancient folklore’s crimes.
Through him what had been merely myth
Became real punishment.

This is also an aspect of games, that Tertullian – a late second-century Christian from North Africa, and a particularly strident religious ideologue – picks out when he complains that criminals in the amphitheatre take on the mythological roles of Attis (who castrated himself) or Hercules (burned alive). Even closer to Martial’s woman and the bull is an episode in Apuleius’ brilliant novel
The Golden Ass
, also a product of second-century North Africa. Apuleius recounts how a woman convicted of murder was condemned, before being eaten by a beast, to have intercourse in a local amphitheatre with an ass – in fact the human hero of the story, transformed into an ass by a magical accident. The brainy ass is not convinced that the lion will know the script, and fears that it might well eat him instead of the woman, so he scarpers before the performance.

On the other hand, we might be dealing with a rather different kind of charade. It is not so much a question of how feasible the intercourse described would be; historians have been predictably ingenious with their solutions to that problem, and have plenty of parallels from modern pornography to hand. More to the point is that there is nothing here to disprove the idea that the ‘bull’ was in fact a human being in fancy dress and that the ‘reality’ of the union was something injected by the poet. After all, the wonderfully fantastical
Golden Ass
and the tirades of Tertullian are hardly very strong evidence for standard practice in the arena. Martial’s contribution to the celebration, in other words, might have been to take a piece of play-acting in the Colosseum and to
make it real
(by treating it as such) in his verses.

Whatever reconstruction they prefer, most modern scholars have been keen to stress that Martial did not disapprove
of such spectacles. True enough. But by using approval or disapproval as the touchstone, this observation tends to miss what Martial so positively admires in the shows and spectacles that he evokes and recreates for his readers. In contrast to the common modern view of the crude sadism of the arena, Martial’s poems repeatedly emphasise – uncomfortable as this must be for us – the sophistication of what was on show at the Colosseum’s inauguration, its clever echoes of the cultural and mythological inheritance of the Roman world, and the wily thoughts about representation and reality (‘what had been merely myth became real punishment’) they prompt. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the Roman amphitheatre is not how to explain the violence and cruelty that took place there, but how to explain the way the Romans described and explained that violence.

In the other thirty or so poems that make up the celebratory collection for the Colosseum’s opening, Martial develops these themes. One playfully (and horribly) subverts the myth of Orpheus, the magician who could charm the animals: the Orpheus figure in this display works no such magic – he is torn apart by a bear. No fewer than three poems take as their subject a pregnant sow killed in one of the beast hunts: in a striking coincidence of birth and death, baby piglets emerged from the very wound made by the spear. Others reflect on the miraculous shifts engineered between water and dry land (so perhaps supporting Dio’s claims about the flooding) and on the paradoxes of the wild and the tame that were on show in the amphitheatre. A tigress, for example, scored a first by attacking a lion when she would have done no such thing in the wild: the truth was that domestication had actually increased her ferocity.
Conversely, an elephant that had just dispatched a bull spontaneously came and knelt as a suppliant in front of the emperor; so too did a deer, who in this way miraculously escaped the hounds chasing her. The message – all the stronger for being delivered in this mass gathering – was that even the animals recognised imperial power.

But what of the gladiators? Only one single poem in the whole
Book of the Shows
features a gladiatorial bout. We must assume that the hundred days of celebration saw combat after combat between the usual array of star fighters, hardened veterans and raw recruits. But here one encounter must stand for all. The fighters concerned were ‘Priscus’ and ‘Verus’, both (stage-)names with a ring: ‘Ancient’ and ‘True’. They were such an evenly matched pair that the crowd demanded their honourable discharge from gladiatorial service (their ‘mission’, as Killigrew’s translation has it) and in the end the fight had to be declared a draw. But, as so often, the eye of the poet (if not of the audience on the day; who knows?) was as much on the emperor as on the spectacle in the arena itself. It is Titus, we are told, who enforced the terms for the bout, Titus who sent them rich rewards for their valour, apparently while the fight was still in progress, and finally Titus who sent them the palms to mark their (joint) victory.