Keith Hopkins - The Colosseum

For all these differences, however, the old problem of how to react to a monument with such a bloodstained history remains. In fact, even more than it was a century and a half ago, the Colosseum has become for us the defining symbol of ancient Rome precisely because of (not despite) the fact that it raises so many of the questions and dilemmas that we face in any engagement with Roman culture. How different was their society from our own? What judgements of it are we entitled to make? Can we admire the magnificence and the technical accomplishments, while simultaneously deploring the cruelty and the violence? How far are we taking vicarious pleasure in the excesses of Roman luxury or bloodlust, at the same time as we lament them? Are some societies really more violent than others?

All modern responses to the Colosseum – this book inevitably included – turn out to be a combination of admiration, repulsion and a measure of insidious smugness. For it is an extraordinarily bravura feat of architecture and a marker of the indelibility of ancient Rome from the modern landscape, yet the scale of the human slaughter in the arena must revolt us, while simultaneously allowing us to take comfort in the belief that ‘our’ culture is not like that. Modern responses also tend to be a mixture of horror at the alien past and a cosy domestication of its strangeness, a convenient translation of their world into ours.

This translation takes various forms. It was the game played by Mark Twain as long ago as the 1860s when he burst the romantic bubble by rewriting the gladiatorial shows as Broadway theatre. Twain would no doubt have been pleased to know that the modern city authorities in Rome have actually used the Colosseum again as an ‘entertainment’ venue. In 2003 Paul McCartney played a charity concert inside the arena to a select audience of 400 who were paying up to £1000 a head for their tickets – before going on to give a more democratic, free show to 300,000 people outside the monument’s walls. ‘I think we’re the first band to play here since the Christians,’ he quipped. (Not quite: an acoustically disastrous concert had been staged in the arena by Rome’s opera company in 1951 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the composer Verdi).

But domestication is also what drives the lively tourist industry that has grown up on the pavements outside the Colosseum, where – for a price – visitors can have their photographs taken with burly young Italians dressed up as gladiators-cum-Roman-centurions. So intense was this trade that a few years ago a turf war broke out among the ‘gladiators’ fighting for the best pitches and, as a result, they must now be licensed (up to a maximum of fifty, no criminal records and plastic weapons only). But, street fighting and profiteering apart, the message is clear. Ancient gladiators were friendly kinds of guys; and, if they were with us today, they too would be phoning up their girlfriends on their mobiles between photos, or snatching a cigarette and a Peroni in the local bar. Or, alternatively, they would be snatching a Pepsi, as a notable television commercial in 2004 tried to convince us. Rumoured, at the time, to be the most expensive advertisement ever made, it featured Britney Spears, Beyoncé Knowles and a number of other A-list pop stars as female gladiators in the Colosseum who – thanks to the reverberations produced by their rousing chorus of ‘We will rock you’ – manage to open up the emperor’s private Pepsi supplies and provide free drinks for all.

Yet the domestication is never complete, and these attempts at translation always leave much rougher edges than the comfortable image of the modern lookalikes, with their mobile phones and fizzy drinks, might suggest. The Colosseum’s tantalising appeal still depends, in part, on the frisson that comes with the blood and the violence. It is this combination of the dangerous and the safe, of the funny and the frankly revolting, that accounts for its power in popular culture and the thrill (crowds, heat and a confusing mass of masonry notwithstanding) of a visit. There is still a sense of transgression in the paradox of taking pleasure in touring the site where Romans took their pleasure in state-sponsored mass murder; and – for the more reflective at least – in wondering quite where the similarities between the Romans and ourselves start, or stop.

It is hardly surprising that this power has been harnessed (and re-invigorated) by some of the biggest business interests in the world. It may finally come as a relief to know that it has also been harnessed by some more noble causes. One of the most moving recent developments in the long history of the ‘Colosseum by night’ is the floodlighting campaign launched in 1999, with the support of, among others, the Pope, Amnesty International and the Rome city council. With the slogan ‘The Colosseum lights up life’, the building is bathed in golden light each time a death sentence is commuted anywhere in the world, or when any state votes to suspend or abolish its use (illustration 3). It is a clever piece of propaganda and of re-appropriation. ‘I think all over the world the Colosseum is known as a place of death,’ explained the mayor of Rome. ‘Today we want to make a positive link between the Colosseum and life.’ Or, as the Egyptian news agency Al-Ahram put it more bluntly (unencumbered by the romantic image of the monument that still haunts most in the West), ‘This noxious landmark… this ancient killing ground has become a symbol of life and mercy.’

‘The Amphitheatre’ or ‘Hunting Theatre’, as it was then called (‘Colosseum’ or ‘Coliseum’ is the medieval sobriquet which has stuck), was no less renowned in the ancient world than it has become in the modern. We should not fall into the trap of imagining that Roman reactions to the building were anything like identical to ours. Some Romans would certainly have shared our ambivalence towards a monument constructed for the enjoyment of murder – in increasing numbers, as Christianity became a major religion in the ancient world; but that cannot have been the orthodox view among the inhabitants of Rome in the first two centuries AD. It is also the case that the Romans themselves had many other monuments to choose from if they wanted to select a building to symbolise their capital city and its culture. For us, the Colosseum is one of the few remains well enough preserved to make a powerful and memorable icon of ancient Rome (the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and the Pantheon are probably its only rivals). The Romans would have been spoiled for choice. The great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill or the vast complex of halls, shops and libraries known as Trajan’s Forum (the column was originally its centrepiece) would both have seemed more than equal to the Colosseum in magnificence and wealth of symbolic associations, while the great venue for chariot racing, the Circus Maximus, although today a deeply disappointing patch of grass, once held some 250,000 spectators, several times the capacity of the Colosseum.

Nonetheless, those archaeologists who rather loftily suggest that the fame of the Colosseum is a modern invention – a result of our own obsessions and not much to do with the Romans – must be wrong. Or at least they fly in the face of a good deal of evidence for the monument’s ancient renown. The most extravagant example of this is the slim book of verse specially composed by the Roman poet Martial to celebrate the inaugural games in the Colosseum, where no hype is spared in praising the building. The opening poem explicitly ranks it ahead of an international, and partly mythical, roster of ancient Wonders of the World: the pyramids, the city walls of Babylon, the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the altar made by the god Apollo on the island of Delos (from horns of deer that his sister Artemis had killed) and the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. To quote Henry Killigrew’s jaunty seventeenth-century translation: