But they were only theater, not reality. The headiest stuff of Roman spectacle, barbaric and frightful and (to us) incomprehensible as it was, were the munera, the spectacle of men slaughtering other men in gladiatorial combat in an arena built for that specific purpose. Virtuously, we recoil from the very thought of these dreadful entertainments. We cannot imagine (we say) queuing up to see them. They represent an idea of the value of human life so totally opposed to our own—or what we would like to claim as our own—as to extinguish all comparison between ourselves and the ancient Romans. We good and gentle people do not have such sadistic voyeurism simmering beneath our skins—so we would prefer to think.
But if the existence and popularity of the munera are an indication, it is that civilized men (and women, too) can and will do almost anything, however strange and terrible, if they see others doing it and are persuaded of its normality, necessity, and entertainment value. Moreover, Romans took the munera as a lavish gift from the Caesars to themselves. A succession of autocrats, starting with Augustus himself and continuing onward through Pompey and Julius Caesar, treated them as the greatest imperial show of all, and hence a great public gift. In his Res gestae, list of the things he had done for the state, Augustus recounted, “I gave a gladiatorial show three times in my own name, and five times in the names of my sons or grandsons; at these shows about 10,000 fought.… Twenty-six times I provided for the people … hunting spectacles of African wild beasts in the circus or in the Forum or in the amphitheaters; in these exhibitions about 3,500 animals were killed.” Not to have attended such bloody extravaganzas, not to immerse oneself in the entertainment, would be a sign of base ingratitude. Not that the emperor up in his pulvinar (royal box) would have noticed; but your fellow Romans well might, and treat you with derision and contempt for it.
The Romans attributed ancient origins to the munera. Many thought they had begun with the foundation of the city, when such duels had supposedly been fought in honor of the god Consus, one of the primitive forms of Neptune. Probably the first “games” of this kind, albeit on a modest scale, were fought between gladiators in the Forum Boarium (cattle market) in Rome. They soon became extremely popular, and were rapidly enlarged: at the funeral games of the pontifex maximus Publius Licinius Crassus Dives in 183 B.C.E., sixty pairs of gladiators fought to the death. A variant on these man-to-man combats was the man-to-beast encounter in which criminals suffered the particular humiliation of damnatio ad bestias, condemned to destruction by wild animals. The first example of this practice is supposed to have happened the year after the consul Aemilius Paullus’ military victory at Pydna in 168 B.C.E. over the Macedonian King Perseus, when Paullus had his deserters crushed to death by his war elephants.
Amphitheaters appeared wherever cities grew. By the second century C.E., seventy-two were to be found in Gaul, twenty-eight along the towns of Rome’s Northern frontier, nineteen in Britannia—a total of some 186 sites throughout the Roman world. By far the largest, and the best known, of these was the Colosseum in Rome.
The Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater, the largest example of a type of building peculiar to imperial Rome, used for spectacles and gladiatorial contests in which thousand of men and beasts struggled and died for the entertainment of a mass audience.
The earliest of these amphitheaters dated from 53 B.C.E., and stood in the Forum Boarium, where early “games” had been held in honor of Decius Brutus Scaeva some two centuries before—a link to the gloomy and chthonic ceremonies of Etruscan death. Little is known about either its architecture or the gladiatorial shows it staged. It was presently replaced by the Amphitheatrum Castrense, a three-story oval structure built not far from the present site of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, a broad oval in plan, with a long axis of eighty-eight meters. At first the Castrense was the only amphitheater in Rome.
But this building, though impressive in size, was completely dwarfed by the arena, which came to be known to all and sundry as the Colosseum. The name does not mean “gigantic building”—it means “the place of the Colossus,” a necessary distinction, because the “colossus” in question was an actual statue. It was a portrait of the Emperor Nero, cast in bronze by the Greek sculptor Zenodorus, nude and some 120 Roman feet high (according to Suetonius), which stood at the entrance to Nero’s prodigy of extravagance the Domus Aurea or Golden House, on the side of the Velian Hill. This monster of imperial narcissism hardly outlived its subject. After Nero died, his eventual successor, the Emperor Vespasian, who understandably did not want to be overshadowed by the largest effigy of another monarch in the Roman world, had his artists and engineers convert it into an image of Sol, the sun god, by equipping it with a radiant head-dress, something like the Statue of Liberty’s, with seven rays, each twenty-three Roman feet long. In 128 C.E., the Emperor Hadrian had the whole thing moved to a site just northwest of the Colosseum—a square in the street surface, seven meters on a side, marks the spot. Hadrian was no stranger to huge engineering projects—this was, after all, the man who built the Pantheon and his own magnificent villa at Tivoli—but the transfer of Nero’s statue was one of his largest. The statue was moved standing up vertically, hauled by twenty-four elephants. This was done around 128 C.E., but after Hadrian died, in 138 C.E., a successor, the deranged, dissolute Commodus, had the head of the Colossus removed and replaced by a portrait of himself, glaring across the city. (There was a strong relation between the arena of the Colosseum and the fantasies of Commodus, who identified with Hercules and was obsessed with being a gladiator. He had been known, among other proofs of skill, to ride around the arena lopping off the heads of terrified ostriches, like some madman in a park decapitating tulips with swings of his walking stick.)
In due course, the attributes of Commodus were stripped from the Colossus, and it became Sol once more. The frequent rituals held to venerate it gradually petered out, and by the end of the eighth century, it was no longer being mentioned, so presumably it had been demolished and melted down for its bronze. It left behind it a famous cliché. The English monk and chronicler (672–735) known as the Venerable Bede, who had never actually been to Italy, wrote, “Quamdiu stabit Coliseus stabit et Roma; quando cadet Coliseus, cadet et Roma; quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus”—“As long as the Colossus stands, Rome will stand; when it falls, Rome will fall, too; when Rome falls, so will the world.” This was echoed by many a later English writer, most memorably by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, transferring the supposedly eternal endurance of the statue to the arena itself:
“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the World.” From our own land
Thus spake the pilgrims o’er this mighty wall
In Saxon times.…
This enormous oval arena stood on a portion—though only a small one—of the site of Nero’s Domus Aurea. Its design, like that of the Golden House itself, was accomplished after the Great Fire. It may be that Nero’s architects, of whom little is known beyond their names, meant to produce a cavea, or internal space, with some eighty regular arched openings, framed by engaged Tuscan, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. It had begun as an ornamental lake, which had been turned into a series of fountains and grottoes, ringed by the Velian, Oppian, and Caelian hills. The idea was to build the largest and most beautiful of all amphitheaters, but it was too grand and time-consuming a project to be carried out by any single emperor. The floor plan was an ellipse, the long axis eighty-six meters long, the short fifty-four meters.