With the economic and military position of the empire too hopelessly complicated for the crowd to comprehend, they turned more and more toward the only thing that they could understand—the arena. The name of a great general or a brilliant statesman meant no more to the Roman mob than the name of a great scientist does to us today. But the average Roman could tell you every detail of the last games, just as today the average man can tell you all about a movie star's marriages but has only the foggiest idea what NATO is doing or what steps are being taken to fight inflation.
For an ambitious man to get anywhere in public life, he had to establish a tie-in with the games. The Emperor Vitellius had been a groom for the Blues. As a result, he was made governor of Germany by a politician who was a Blue. After Vitellius became Emperor, he had anyone killed who booed the Blues. The Emperor Commodus went to gladiator's school and used to fight in the arena to win popular support. The Emperor Macrinus had been a professional gladiator. Even finding victims enough to be killed in the arena became a serious drain on the empire. "We are sacrificing the living to feed the dead," protested Caracalla, referring to the fact that the games were supposedly given to appease the souls of the departed. Yet the games kept on. Without them, the mob could not be controlled, and by now the entire national economy was tied up with the great spectacles. To have stopped them would have caused as serious a crisis as if our government suddenly abandoned dams, farm relief, and military spending.
Yet the end could not be postponed for ever. Rome began to be overrun by foreigners. Thousands of Gauls, Germans, and Parthians were living in the city, brought there to bolster the weakening empire. These "barbarians" had no interest in the games which, after all, required a rather special taste to appreciate. A Parthian prince left the circus in disgust, remarking, "It's no fun seeing people killed who haven't a chance." The crowd yelled, "Burr-head! Why doncha go back to Parthia where ya belong?" but the savages gradually obtained the balance of power. After all, the emperors depended on these foreign auxiliaries for support and placating the Roman mob became less and less important.
The Christian church was growing in power and did everything possible to stop the games. In 325 a.d., Constantine tried to put an end to the games but they still continued. Then in 365 a.d., Valentinian forbade sacrificing victims to wild beasts. He was able to make bis edict stick, and that took all the fun out of the spectacles. In 399 a.d. the gladiatorial schools had to close for want of pupils.
Then in 404 a.d., a monk named Telemachus leaped into the arena and appealed to the people to stop the fights. Telemachus was promptly stoned to death by the angry mob but his death ended the spectacles. The Emperor Honorius was so furious at Telemachus' lynching that he closed the arenas. They were never reopened. The last chariot race was held after the fall of Rome by Tolila, a Goth, in 549 a.d. He was merely curious to see what the business looked like.
Yet so deeply had the games entered into the national consciousness that people still considered themselves as supporting the Red, White, Green or Blue faction—although many of these people had no idea what the colours meant. In 532 a.d., riots broke out between the Blues and the Greens that threatened to wreck what remained of the empire. The Emperor Justinian had to call out troops to restore peace, and in the fighting over thirty thousand people were killed.
The only remaining relics of these titanic spectacles are some crude pictures scratched on the walls of gladiator barracks, a few cracked tombstones, references in the literature of the times and, here and there, the ruins of the amphitheatres. The games followed the legionnaires as chewing gum follows American GIs, and wherever the legions were stationed there was sure to be a circus. Roman governors built stadiums as soon as they arrived in their province, confident that this was the only way to keep the population contented. Many of their letters express amazement that the Greeks, Gauls and Britons seemed more interested in having enough to eat than in watching the games.
Establishing these amphitheatres was a difficult job. The Greeks fought them to the last (Plutarch describes the games as "bloody and brutal"), but in other countries the games slowly gained a following, although they never enjoyed anything like the popularity they had in Rome. Egypt held out against them for a long time but at last had to yield— in every nation there is always a certain proportion of people who enjoy such sights. So all over the Roman world great amphitheatres appeared, hardly less magnificent than the ones in Rome itself: at Capus, Pompeii, Pozzuoli and Verona in Italy; at Aries and Nimes in France; at Seville in Spain; at Antioch in Palestine; at Alexandria in Egypt; at Silchester in Britain; at El Dien in Tunisia.
Many of these amphitheatres still remain. You can sit in the "maeniana" (stands) with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine and speculate out of which door the animals were released, where the inner barrier ran, and how they got the lions out of the "cavea" (interior) into the arena. As your guess is probably as good as anyone's, it's an interesting way to spend an afternoon.
The largest amphitheatre remaining is, of course, the Colosseum. Although the prodigious structure has been used as a quarry for a thousand years and a large part of Mediaeval Rome was built with stone taken from it, much still remains. Byron wrote:
A ruin! Yet what ruin! from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,
And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd.
You can crawl through the "enormous skeleton" with a copy of J. H. Middleton's The Remains of Ancient Rome and go nuts trying to find all the places he mentioned. You can see the huge traventine blocks used in the construction, some seven feet long, and held together with iron clamps as mere mortar couldn't carry the fantastic strain put on them. In the Middle Ages when iron was desperately needed, people dug thousands of these clamps out of the stone, a murderously laborious job. Although as late as 1756, a French archaeologist computed that there was still 17,000,000 francs worth of marble remaining in the Colosseum, almost all of it is now gone. However, you can still see many of the carved marble curule chairs used by the patricians on the podium. They're in Italian churches being used as episcopal thrones.
Next to the Colosseum, the largest of the remaining amphitheatres is in Verona, Italy. It is 502 feet long by 401 feet wide and 98 feet high. It held about thirty thousand people and is still used for the mild Italian bullfights. The next largest remaining circus is in Nimes, France. It measures 435 by 345 feet and held about twenty thousand people. It is two stories high with 124 entrances. The Pompeian amphitheatre is comparatively small but interesting because it is so well preserved and the gladiator barracks are nearby.
In the Middle Ages these amphitheatres were regarded with superstitious awe. People living in Pola, Italy, thought the amphitheatre there must have been built by supernatural beings as no mortal man could accomplish such a task. They claimed that the stadium was a fairy palace, built in a single night. They explained the fact that the building had no roof by saying that a cock was awakened by the hammering and crew: the fairies thought it was daybreak and left without finishing the job.