Episode 3: Rome – The Colosseum

Buongiorno! I’m Dr. Rocky Ruggiero. Join me in rebuilding the renaissance and making art and history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding the Renaissance podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy from the glory of Rome to the magnificence of the Renaissance. And now here’s your host, Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

In our last podcast, we discussed the transformation of the Roman republic into an empire, and I think of all the monuments in Rome, none represents that idea of empire, more so than the Coliseum.

Now the world knows the building as the Coliseum. It’s the most visited monument in Italy, although technically Coliseum is a nickname. The proper name for that type of structure is amphitheater. Amphi-theater, and amphi is the Greek word for two. You all know what theaters are, and if you join two theaters at their open ends, you form what we call an amphitheater.

And it was a type of structure that was reserved exclusively for gladiatorial contests. Now, technically Coliseum, because it was the largest of its type in the entire Roman territory. And technically we should also refer to it as the Flavian amphitheater, because the Coliseum was built under the reign of three emperors, all of whom came from a single family named Flavia.

Construction on the Coliseum began in the year 72 A.D. under the reign of a Roman emperor named Vespasian. It continued then under the reign of his son Titus and the building was finally inaugurated in the year 80 A.D. under the reign of an emperor named Domitian. So if you run the numbers on that, the total time for the construction of the Coliseum was eight years. I repeat eight years.

Think about this, we’re talking about a building which is elliptical in plan. So if you’re looking down on the Coliseum, technically it has the form of an ellipse. Most people think it is an oval, but instead an ellipse is a geometric shape with two separate foci, which essentially allowed everyone inside the Coliseum to get a pretty good view of what was going on.

And on its longer axis, that ellipse measures 188 meters. On its shorter axis, the Coliseum measures 155 meters. In other words, 188 meters long, which is more or less the size of St. Peter’s Basilica, for those of you who’ve been to Rome, which is still the largest church in Christendom. And 155 meters across, which is more or less the size of Florence Cathedral.

But as opposed to the 121 years that it took to build St. Peter’s as opposed to the 172 years that it to build Florence Cathedral, the Coliseum I repeat was built in eight years.

Now I think that today in 2019 it would be difficult for us to complete the construction of such a massive building in less than a decade, and the fact that the Romans could do it 2,000 years ago is testimony to my belief that they were the greatest engineers that our species has ever produced.

Now let me just qualify this statement in a couple of ways. The first of which is that we’re talking about imperial patronage when it comes to the Coliseum. In other words, the emperors were supporting the bill and obviously we’re not going to run into financial issues or what have you.

And the second qualification I need to give to this brevity of construction is the fact that the Romans were of course employing slave labor. And the Romans very, very efficient in that sense because their slaves were not just general manual laborers. They actually specialized their slaves so that there were masonry slaves and there were domestic slaves and what have you.

So the idea is that the workers on the Coliseum were as skilled as a freelance mason might be, but they’re not going to call in sick. They’re not obviously going to go on strike. And all of this of course contributed then to the incredible speed and efficiency with which the Coliseum was built.

Now the construction material for the Coliseum is a type of stone known as travertine marble. In fact, one of my favorite things about Italy in general is that just about every city you visit in Italy, the architecture is characterized by local building materials.

Now, when I do my research on the economics of building it really fascinates me what goes into building these massive and extraordinary structures and consider that the greatest expense for any building project is transportation. In fact, it costs about 10 times more to transport building materials than it did to actually buy the material outright.

So there is this tendency for Italian cities, this is a logical thing to build with the most readily available building material. And so the travertine marble with which the Coliseum and St. Peter’s and so much of Rome is actually constructed is quarried about 12 miles outside the city at a place called Tivoli, so very close by.

If instead you’re in Sienna, you notice that the majority of the buildings are made of brick, because the earth around Sienna is very rich in clay, so they just scoop it up, bake it, and turn it into brick.

In Florence, everything is made of brownstone. Pietra forte as it’s called. Assisi, it’s all made of limestone. So this idea that the Italian cities are almost like geological extensions of what is underneath them, and I find that obviously is one of the more characteristic aspects of Italy.

Now, so the bill of material of the Coliseum is this travertine stone different from what Carrara marble is. You cannot build with Carrara marble while you can with travertine, and the reason is that travertine is porous, and it’s those pores that give it a structural integrity.

And so what the Romans would do is actually to quarry the materials at Tivoli and to actually mark the block, so when the block showed up onto the building site for the Coliseum, workers knew exactly where those blocks were supposed to go. And as those blocks were assembled one on top of each other, they were actually pirned together. So imagine drilling a hole into the top of a block, slipping in iron rod or pirn inside of it, and then slipping another marble block over it so that they were actually fastened right there, actually secured one into each other. And those marble blocks form the distinct shape of the exterior of the Coliseum.

Now consider that when you’re looking at the outside, what you see are a series of three super imposed arcades, or a series of arches, and the interesting thing is that the columns which are engaged, they’re stuck to the wall between those arches actually employ all three of the classical orders. In other words, the columns on the ground floor of the Coliseum are Doric in order. The middle level is instead Ionic, and then the upper level is the Corinthian order that you see. And so we refer to this as the super imposition of the classical orders, seeing all three on one building.

The top level of the Coliseum is what we call the attic level and that attic, in fact this is where we get the modern term today for the upper floors of most American homes, the attic room. And the attic room on the Coliseum was very, very important because it was essentially the sort of base upon which a structure known as the velarium was raised.

One of the great points of discussion still today about the Coliseum is whether or not in fact the Romans were able to dome the great structure. Velarium, this is the word used in ancient texts and that word still echoes in modern Italian as vela, which means sail.

In other words, it’s been proposed that essentially the Romans were able to extend a series of horizontal sails over the entire cavea or seating area of the Coliseum. So that if the weather was iffy, it was raining outside, they would extend these sails as a velarium over the people sitting and they would be protected. If it was a particularly hot day and the sun was blaring down, they could open up the velarium and obviously offer the spectator shade.

There have been many attempts at reconstructing this dome technically over the Coliseum, most of which have actually failed but interesting if you ever get one of these overlay books or what have you, and you’ll see these reconstructions of a very complex structure that was maneuvered by sailors, believe it or not. In fact, a whole series of pulleys hooked up to these massive wooden posts which were like masts on a ship and then sailors turning winches down below to then extend or retract the sails, however need be at the time.

And consider that all of the arches on the ground floor of the Coliseum are numbered, but those numbers are represented as letters. In fact, what I think is one of the coolest things you can experience is actually reading Roman numerals in Rome, the place where they were invented. And there are 80 arches running the entire circumference of the ellipse and they are numbered so that a spectator would know exactly which archway they would use to get inside.

Four of those archways were instead what we would call VIP entrances. One for the emperor on the northern side. On the southern instead the senatorial entrance, and then the performers themselves would enter through the archways on the eastern and western extremities of the ellipse.

Now consider that capacity for the Coliseum. Now there’s some debate as to exactly how many people could fit inside. Conservative estimates put the capacity of the Coliseum at about 50,000 people, but on big performance or big spectacle day, we’re told that as many as 80,000 people would actually try to cram themselves in, which is a pretty extraordinary thing.

Now consider that the largest soccer stadium in the world today is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Maracanã Stadium, which was enlarged for the recent World Cup that was hosted there and consider that that stadium holds about 98,000 people. And the fact that two millennium ago, the Romans were able to build a structure that could hold more or less the same, is simply astounding.

Now we’re also told by Roman chroniclers that they were able to fill and empty the entire Coliseum in the equivalent of 20 modern minutes. Now consider that the Romans used essentially a water clock, something called the clepsydra to measure time and supposedly with one turn of this clepsydra which was the equivalent of 20 minutes, they could fill and empty the structure, which is probably hyperbole, but the fact that the Romans would even consider to propose this statistic of the efficiency or what have you, has a lot to do with the way it’s organized.

As I mentioned, a spectator would actually have the equivalent of a ticket which essentially was a bone chip upon which the entrance number was indicated that they should use. Once they’d go inside, they would then walk through one of the two co-centric barrel vaulted passageways which are known as a vomitorium.

And if you’re fans of the old Saturday Night Live series, I still remember the skit they used to perform where essentially they recreated what they called the Roman vomitorium, which was a place where ancient Romans would go to self-induce after overindulging at a meal, and I think it was bill Murray who would actually, his job was to hand out feathers to the people who would attend and they would use the feather to self-induce. That is not what a vomitorium is. A vomitorium is the idea of expelling, of moving, so passageways that allowed people to get inside and outside of the Coliseum efficiently as well.

And you know, then you were essentially moved to a specific section of the Coliseum, to a row and to a specific seat number as well, and really only one way to get to and from your seat. And so it forced people to move through the Coliseum in a very specific way and may essentially be the moral here of this seemingly exaggerated statistic of only 20 minutes to fill and/or empty the structure.

Now when you go inside of the Coliseum today, it’s very hard to make heads or tails out of what you see. And the reason is because much of what you see is simply what’s left or reconstruction of the original architecture that was there.

And consider that one of the major logistical issues with an amphitheater is that there is no backstage, and that for the efficient running of a theatrical event, backstage is very, very important for dressing rooms and for storage and for props and things like this as well.

So the Romans actually solved that problem by building an under stage. In other words, when you go into the Coliseum today, there’s the sort of pit space at the very center of the ellipse inside of which do you see a series of walls. It almost looks like a labyrinth or a maze or what have you.

Well, that was the under stage that the Romans had created, about two and a half stories of subterranean dressing rooms and animal cages and storage facilities and what have you as well. And the entirety of that under stage was covered in a wooden platform. The wooden platform in turn covered with sand and now consider that the Latin word for sand is harena, which is where we get the modern term arena.

So that when the Romans were saying that the gladiators were fighting in the arena, they were being literal. They were fighting in the sands of the Coliseum, and so this is where obviously the meaning of the modern sports arena comes from. A place where there is antagonistic events that are taking place.

It is on that sand that essentially the gladiators or the animals or whatever it might be performing that day would fight. And if you look at the Coliseum, what you’ll notice is that there actually is a brick wall that wraps around the entirety of that space. In fact, this begins a whole series of modern sports analogies that I like to make and consider that if any of you are hockey fans out there. You go to a hockey game, you want to sit right up on the plexiglass, you want to see that hockey player checked up against that board and see his face smear and the blood and the snot and feel like you’re part of the action.

And so too held true for the Roman. In other words, if you were at the Coliseum, you wanted to feel like you were part of the action. Years ago I was a fanatical boxing fan and if I couldn’t actually go to a boxing match in person and sit up close, where boxer’s blood and sweat would fall on my shirt and I would take that shirt home and frame it marking that particular contest or what have you, then I’d watch it on Pay-per-view. I would want to feel like I was part of the action.

Well, the Roman did as well, so they stayed very close and that wall that separated the spectator from the spectacle was only 12 feet tall, and I think everyone has a vague idea of what went on inside of the Coliseum and consider that if the contest involved something like a tiger, which could easily leap over that particular height, or let’s say an elephant whose back would clear the distance.

In other words, putting yourself so close to the action in the Coliseum was putting yourself in peril, putting yourself in danger. But the Romans protected themselves by having a series of upturned elephant tusks wrapping around the entire circumference of the Coliseum. So that any animal trying to get out of the pit would either hurt itself or kill itself in the process. So stay close, but stay safe at the same time.

Now the actual seating area, and this is really the most difficult thing I think to explain when you’re in the Coliseum. Try to imagine the entirety of the interior part of the Coliseum as being white, just this homogenous white color because the entire thing was dressed in marble and essentially a series of bleacher seats. Co-centric running the entire circumference of the ellipse, row upon row upon row of bleacher seat, essentially on an incline from the very bottom all the way to the very top, broken up into three distinct sections. 20 rows at the bottom, 16 at the center, and then 16 above it as well.

And where you sat inside of the Coliseum was a direct reflection of your social status in Rome at the time. In other words, it wasn’t just how close you could get, it was also how close you could get to the spectacle and to the main seats. So if you go to a football game today, obviously the best seats in the house are those by the 50 yard line.

And so too held true at the Coliseum where essentially the imperial box was located at the 50 yard line of one of the short sides of the ellipse, and the senatorial box was located on the other. So the idea is yes, front row seats, but also how close those front row seats were to where the emperor or to where the senate would actually sit inside.

And so Rome’s crème de la crème, the noble aristocratic class would be sitting down in those lower seats, obviously with the best view, and then the middle section of the Coliseum was reserved for what I like to call the season ticket holders. So this would be sort of Rome’s middle class. Not aristocratic, but you know, socially speaking and economically speaking probably well to do. And then up top of course you’d have seats reserved for the plebes, for those lower classes. And then at the very, very top standing room only and what I call the nosebleed seats as well.

But one of the most extraordinary things about the Coliseum is that when you’re there, what you realize is that it doesn’t matter where you are, your view is incredibly efficient, incredibly good in terms of what you could see. And what you could see inside the Coliseum of course, is the stuff of legend.

So stay tuned for our next podcast where we’ll actually get into the Coliseum and discuss just what it was that happened inside of the structure.

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