The Colosseum. Arena of blood and sand. Here, superstar gladiators would fight to the death in the ultimate action adventure. The largest amphitheater in the classical world, it stands as a monument to Roman engineering genius.
But it was much more. powerful tool for controlling the masses and a showcase for proclaiming Rome's domination of the world. The brainchild of an upstart Emperor, the story of the Colosseum's creation was as bloody and violent as the events staged within it. The beating heart of the Roman Empire.
Its rules stretched from Britain in the West to Syria in the East, making it the most powerful empire in the ancient world. The capital was home to more than a million people, a restless, volatile mob. To pacify them, One emperor would build the greatest arena the world had ever seen.
This is the Colosseum. Here the emperor staged the blockbuster entertainment of the day. But the Colosseum was about more than just gladiators.
The activities, the festivities, the music, the chants, the yells, the handouts of food and money, all of this would have just literally blown you away. It was the largest freestanding amphitheatre in the world, and the engineering required to build it was revolutionary. It took the genius of the Roman arch, and they used it on a colossal scale.
At the time of its building, it was seen as better than the pyramid. It was Rome's answer to the most wonderful building in the entire world. It pioneered the use of building materials still with us today and would prove the ultimate test of Roman ingenuity. There was no telling whether this building in fact would work as a building, but this shows the supreme confidence of the Romans. The story of the Colosseum's construction dates back 2,000 years.
AD 68. Infamous Emperor Nero, a cruel dictator, rules Rome and its empire. Against the advice of his senators, he levies huge tax increases on Rome's citizens. The money goes to build a huge palace in the heart of Rome.
Complete with a 36.5 meter tall bronze statue of Nero himself. But Nero's harsh tax regime angers people throughout the empire. And in Judea, it sparks a revolt.
He calls on a general who has long been out of favour, a man who made his name in the conquest of Britain. The general's name is Vespasian. Nero brings back Vespasian to put down the Jewish revolt.
reason that Vespasian isn't a rival. Dr Ray Lawrence from the University of Birmingham in the UK believes that Vespasian was a calculated choice. He's a humble person who's out of favour, therefore he's not seen as potentially dangerous. Vespasian marches into Judea and builds a huge wall around the city of Jerusalem. But one year later, Nero has lost his grip on power.
The Senate, knowing that Rome's population will back them, declares Nero an enemy of the state. Rather than face execution, he commits suicide. Rome is in crisis.
Three emperors come and go in a welter of blood. The empire desperately needs a strong and credible leader. Powerful legions in Italy decide that Vespasian is the man for the job.
The call spreads through Rome's provinces, from the Danube to Egypt, Syria, and finally reaches Vespasian in Judea. He held no ambition to be emperor, but now he answers the call. Vespasian enters Rome in triumph and the Senate declares him emperor.
But he must also win the hearts and minds of Rome's riotous mob. Most are unemployed and live on the handouts of a prosperous empire. He decides on a grand crowd-pleasing gesture. Where Nero's golden palace had once stood, he will build a great palace of the people, a massive sporting arena for all of Rome.
The symbolism wouldn't have been lost on anyone. Corey Brennan of Rutgers University is convinced that Vespasian's choice is no accident. He knocked down the theme park that Nero built for himself, the Domus Aurea, the Golden House, and built this magnificent amphitheater which was meant to be visible from all across Rome. Just like today, sports were hugely popular.
popular in the Roman world. None more so than gladiatorial games. But they played a much more fundamental role. They kept the idle mob happy and occupied. Bread and circuses was the Roman recipe for keeping the peace.
Gladiatorial arenas were the entertainment multiplexes of their day. Amphitheaters were found in Italy, France, Spain, on the Danube and Rhine frontiers, and in far-flung Britain, but Rome itself had no permanent arena. Previous ones had been made out of wood, but Vespasian's new stadium would be built out of stone. Rome was one of the largest cities in the world.
More than a million people filled its streets and tenements. If only one in twenty were sports fans, that would still require a stadium that held 50,000 people. So Vespasian needed to build the grandest gladiatorial arena ever conceived, or risk disappointing the very mob it was designed to appease. When he set out to build this, certainly he told his builders, this has got to be the biggest. the most magnificent.
Darius Aria of the American Institute for Roman Culture is certain that scale was foremost in Vespasian's mind. Contemporary with the construction of this amphitheatre, there were other amphitheatres almost as large, so certainly Vespasian told his builders this had to be the biggest. But the Colosseum wasn't just for the people.
It would also help Vespasian's family, the Flavians, launch a new dynasty. Vespasian, I'm convinced, wanted a family dynastic monument that was going to really proclaim that his family, the Flavian dynasty, was here to stay. The emperor's agenda is clear in the Roman name of the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheater. Vespasian needed just under two and a half hectares of level ground for the foundations.
The eastern wing of Nero's golden palace was no good because it was on a slope, and to the south stood a great temple to the emperor Claudius. The only suitable area was filled with an ornamental lake. It looked as if Vespasian's plans were thwarted before he had even begun.
His solution was characteristically ambitious. He would simply remove the lake. You think of the entire building project, from designing it to implementing it. Then you have to erase a structure that was here previously. You've got to drain out the lake.
That's a Herculean effort. How could the Romans manage such a monumental task? Before Vespasian's engineers could even start building the Colosseum, they had to reclaim a lake the size of more than five football pitches. Archaeologists have discovered that the builders dug a vast trench nearly 50 meters wide around the lake, sinking it to six meters below the lake bed. They lined the trench with stone walls three meters thick and filled the space between them with a waterproof cement.
Finally, they drained the lake through an existing channel that funneled water into the river Tiber, more than a kilometer away. It was a massive undertaking, especially since the Romans had to do all the work without the aid of machines. Hundreds of tonnes of earth was hauled with ox and donkey carts. The Roman ox cart can take half a tonne of earth in it, and you would be taking that to the River Tiber to put it in a barge.
You would need in the region of 400,000 ox cart journeys just to remove the soil before you even bring in any building materials to the site. Music Yet even once the lake was empty, the challenge wasn't over. They had to find a way to stop rainwater flooding the arena. The solution?
A vast network of drains that would constantly channel water out of the structure as it was being built. To ensure an efficient flow of water, the Spasian's engineers had to slope the drains at a gradient of 2.5%. If the angle of the incline is too shallow, the water doesn't drain away.
If it is too great, it backs up and the water simply pools. The answer was ingenious, but simple. The engineers poured water into a grooved wooden board to make a rudimentary spirit level, called a corrobate.
Once they had a perfect horizontal line above ground, they simply measured down to work out the course of the drains below. The result? Drain pipes sloped at just the right angle. In this way, Vespasian's engineers created a system of drainage channels over 3 kilometers long, which funnels water from all over the Colosseum into four massive storm drains that flow out from the center. Conduits to collect water were arranged all around the Colosseum.
The water flushed out so quickly, it was 38 gallons a second, which is 60 bathtubs full. And all this would eventually end up in the great sewer of Rome, the Cloaca Maxima. With the foundation set, Vespasian could start building the stadium.
He needed two things on a scale never seen before. Manpower and money. But the extravagant Nero had bankrupted the empire and Vespasian's bid for the throne had drained his finances. Where could he turn?
The answer would enslave a people and bring a temple crashing down. Vespasian is at a crossroads. He desperately needs money to build his Colosseum, but raising taxes could turn ordinary Romans against him.
Luckily for him, his son Titus is still besieging Jerusalem, famous for its temple treasures. In September AD 70, Titus assaults the city. After a bitter resistance, Jerusalem falls. Much of it is burned to the ground. The legendary treasures of the Temple on the Mount are carted back to Rome.
The amount of money which comes from the sack of Jerusalem is enormous. We hear about in Vespasian's triumph that there is cart after cart of booty. There are wondrous things like candlesticks.
All the treasure of the taxes which the Jews had paid to the Temple are now in Vespasian's hands. Soldiers march tens of thousands of Jews back to Rome as slaves. There is a popular myth that they were forced to work on the Colosseum.
But the truth is more complex. So it's not really likely that you just bring over a huge workforce of 30,000 Jews and have them build the Colosseum. That would have taken too long.
It would have taken too long to train them. And this is not about on-the-job training in the Colosseum. It was all about being efficient and fast and getting it done.
The real value of the slaves to Vespasian was money. 30,000 Jewish prisoners entered Rome in chains. They were put on public parade and auctioned. They were sold. And there was a ready market.
Slaves were an integral part of Roman life. A rich family might own several hundred. But even the average citizen could afford a house slave.
The Romans can't imagine a world without slaves. Slaves are part of their lives and it's part of their society. It's their expectation. If you sell 30,000 slaves, you get a huge amount of money.
It would buy the labour of a third of the population of Rome for a whole year. It is something which then he can cash in on. and Vespasian would need every penny to pay for his Colosseum. The Romans were consummately well organized.
Professor Michael Davis is an architectural historian from Mount Holyoke College in the United States. He is in no doubt about the manpower required. It's been estimated that perhaps as many as a quarter of the population of Rome was involved in some way or other.
Rome's engineers were accomplished builders, but this would be their greatest challenge. They needed an amphitheater big and strong enough to hold over 50,000 people without collapsing under its own weight. The solution lay in three key architectural innovations that form the secret of Rome's great monuments. The most important is the arch.
The arch is an almost perfect design for bearing heavy loads, and that design is so simple. A series of wedge-shaped blocks is assembled together in a semicircular form and supported on top of two pillars at the side. The weight of the building is absorbed by the keystone in the center of the building.
of the arch and distribute it evenly over the entire span of the arch and then down into the two side pillars. This allows the pillars to bear enormous loads and because the space in between the pillars is empty, this reduces the weight of the building even further. The arch would become a recurring theme throughout the building of the Colosseum. On the outer ring, 80 gigantic arches 7 meters high form a giant ring around the perimeter.
On top of these is set another 80 arches, on top of these is a third tier making 240 arches in all. The Colosseum really is nothing but arches. It's a symphony of arches.
The organization required to achieve this feat of engineering was phenomenal. But even here, Rome's engineers had a trick or two up their togas. For them, building was a business of mass production.
Standardization is key for the efficient building of the Colosseum. For example, the Romans used the arch, and the arch is repeated again and again and again by countless teams of builders. And that kind of standardization is very akin to what we have in an industrialized world today. So the breaking down of the building allows them to have lots of work gangs with not huge skills, they just have to simply build an arm. In this way, the thousands of labourers working on the Colosseum could be left to build their section with minimal supervision.
confident in the knowledge that their labours were being repeated all over the structure. You're going to have a lot of unskilled labourers. You're going to have a lot of bricklayers.
You're going to have a lot of people that have some sort of skill, but they're not going to be required. to know more than a whole lot. Then you're going to have a lot of skilled laborers, the people that are going to be carving the columns, the people that are going to be carving the statues that are going to go in the niches in the upper floors.
So you're going to have a lot of skilled craftsmen. You're going to have a lot of unskilled people participating in this very massive and important construction site. Just making sure that each work gang was in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing was a challenge in itself. Vespasian would need the help of the Craftsman's Guilds.
Powerful organizations a bit like labor unions today where craftsmen banded together to get the best price for their services. When we look into the inscriptional evidence for the guilds, for the collegia that are associated with building, we do see that they are managed and they are organized like the military. So there is a hierarchy that's involved, there are squadrons... There are teams, there are the sergeants and so forth.
The guilds alone had the power to organize labor in Rome. With their help, Vespasian's architects could break down the building plan into manageable chunks repeated all over the worksite. The concept of repetition was at the heart of the Colosseum's design.
Architects put two theaters back to back to create one giant theater in the round or Amphitheatros as the Greeks called it. This giant arena would require an outer ring of 80 arches. In this, the Spasians Engineers planned to further six concentric rings of arches, rippling into the center of the Colosseum.
The space between the central rings was bound together with rough blocks of volcanic tufa, a light but versatile building stone. These formed the base of the superstructure. But even building with arches would require an enormous amount of stone.
More than 200,000 tons of limestone would be used to build the Colosseum. Luckily, there was a ready source practically on Rome's doorstep. In the quarries of Tivoli, 35 kilometers from Rome.
away. Here lay a bed of natural limestone known as travertine, which could be cut in situ and carted to Rome. The abundance of local stone is one of the great secret weapons of Roman architecture. The thing about using local materials is you're reducing cost.
You're not having to bring it long distances. You're not using lots of coloured imported marbles, let's say, from Egypt or from the eastern Mediterranean. You're bringing material which is local to the area, involving a lot of local labour. And when you're talking about so much stone, that's important.
The material has to be coming into the city constantly, day in and day out, rows and rows of oxen. carts full of travertine stone that are going to be carved by the hundreds and hundreds of stone carvers. In fact, it is estimated that 200 carts making daily trips would take six whole years to transport the stone to the site.
Stone arches made a building like the Colosseum possible. But it was so huge that the builders still faced the unthinkable. If it was made entirely out of stone, Vespasian's grand arena could simply crumble under its own weight.
D-75. The Colosseum has been under construction for five years, and now the scale of the project is becoming clear. But a building is only as good as the material that binds it together.
Ancient mortar was notoriously weak and vulnerable to the elements. But Roman ingenuity solved the problem with a mix of volcanic sand and lime that beat mortar hands down. They called it opus signium.
We call it concrete. The use of concrete really revolutionized Roman architecture. So what you have is this material that can be shaped into an arch or a vault.
So it's very fluid and can take on a variety of shapes. And this is, I think, again, what lends such a distinctive quality to Roman architecture. Its main advantage was versatility. Concrete was much stronger than traditional mortar.
It was fast setting and waterproof, and much lighter than stone. It allowed the Romans to create a lightweight version of the arch, ideal for spanning larger spaces, like those between the crucial structural rings. Concrete was also used to create the superstructure on which the seating was laid.
And it allowed the seating to be raked at the optimum angle for the spectators. So on the lower tiers, they slope at an angle of 30 degrees, rising to 35 degrees at the third tier. That meant spectators at the back got a clear view over the people in front of them to the arena below. But the seating plan had another purpose.
The seating in the Colosseum, like the seating of every entertainment building in the Roman world, has a hierarchy of where you go. At the very front of the stadium was the podium, where Rome's senators had reserved seats. Behind them, on nine terraces of marble seats, would sit the equestrians, Rome's business class. These aristocrats had chosen not to enter politics so they could concentrate on the business of making money. Most belong to the families of the senators in front of them.
On two tiers above sat the ordinary citizens of Rome packed together along 20 or 30 terraces. This is the Roman Catholic Church. probable limit of Vespasian's original amphitheater, but his sons added a fifth tier of wooden terraces to which the poorest members of Roman society were relegated.
So the Colosseum would be much more than just a sporting arena. It would be a microcosm of Roman society. Now as you go up, you say, who am I in all of this? Where do I fit in? Where you sat spelled out your precise position in the hierarchy.
Everyone could see right around them and to see the whole populace of Rome sitting where they were supposed to. But with the build still in its infancy, Vespasian's engineers were wrestling with more fundamental matters. Concrete wasn't suitable for every structural job. They still needed a lightweight alternative that would be as strong as stone. What they turned to is so mundane, so common to our everyday lives, that we no longer even notice it.
Yet it would revolutionize the way that buildings were made. The Romans invented the red brick. The Romans had traditionally used terracotta.
A red clay found throughout the Mediterranean to make roofing tiles. Then they started experimenting. What Romans do is they take the tiles off the roof and use them as a facing material or in vaults in architecture. And this leads them into new possibilities of ways of building that haven't existed before.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Colosseum. Brick is everywhere. And when combined with concrete, it gave the ever-present arch, which was so important to the Colosseum, a whole new lease of life. The Romans skillfully combined different materials to build structures that were very large and high.
On the ground floor, they built heavy stone arches to support the weight of the structure above. Using the lighter materials of brick and concrete, they built a second level of arches above that and then a third level of arches above that. They could pile tier upon tier of arches to build structures that were higher and lighter than any that had been built before. But building at heights of up to 50 meters would create yet another challenge. No crane existed that could lift building materials so high.
The whole secret to the construction of the Coliseum resides in the fact that we have four main stories. So we can see right over here that we have the first story with a series of arches. Then when we have the people standing, we're up into the second story.
And there's a big work platform. And that's where you hoist up your cranes and more building material, and you're working on that level, building up the next layer. To move all this material, the Romans needed gigantic cranes operated by large tread wheels. These used an ingenious block and tackle system, depicted in a carving from the time, to raise the heavy blocks onto the platforms. And from that platform you're doing the same thing.
You're hoisting up your cranes, you're hoisting up your building materials, and you're working on that third layer. Finally you're able to work on the top floor, and at that point they're getting quite high up. There are more than a million bricks in the Colosseum. To keep the project on track, the Romans needed to produce bricks at a terrific rate.
Once again, their solution is something we can all recognize today. The Romans produced their bricks in factories all over the city. These were called fabriquet.
2,000 years before Henry Ford, the Romans had devised the production line. The building of the Colosseum ran like a well-oiled machine. So you can imagine that as this goes up in its stories, you've got things that are still going on in the lower floors, like decoration of the vaults, the painting and the stuccoing and so forth. This is going on for years and years and years. The Colosseum project would consume the whole of Rome for more than a decade, and ultimately outlive its creator.
In AD 79, the Emperor Vespasian, the man whose vision had made the dream a reality, dies. As Rome mourns the loss of its popular emperor, his son Titus takes the throne. He decrees that his father's great amphitheater will open one year later.
The new emperor has just set his workers an impossible deadline. The builders of the Colosseum are racing to complete the stadium in time for its inaugural games. They have only partly succeeded.
As this tombstone from the time shows, it's still missing its entire fourth level. True to Roman tradition, this building probably wasn't even totally finished. So you have many inaugurations, many dates in which the people show up, and you still have the scaffolding up like the scaffolding behind me. It's 80 AD, just 11 years since the builders laid the first stones. Now Rome's Colosseum opens for business.
What must it have been like to be a spectator on that day? What really grabbed everyone's attention was the scale. Marble, gleaming white, no one's been here before, you're inaugurating this place. All of this would have been an incredible spectacle.
Every sports fan in Rome is clamouring to see the inaugural games, and tens of thousands of people crowd outside the stadium. Channeling these people safely and quickly to their seats will be a mammoth task. But the Colosseum's builders have cracked the problem.
On the north-western corner, there are five bollards embedded into the pavement. All that remains are the ancient crowd control system. This is to keep people back prior to entry. This is where you can check the people going in, that they're the right people.
And also they can be directed towards the right numbers. gateway in the arch of the Colosseum. Just like a modern spectator today, every Roman coming to the Games was issued with a ticket, known as a tabella.
The tabella number told you which of the 76 six stadium entrances to use. You can still see many of the entry numbers carved into the stone above the entrances today. And the emperor may have used a crafty trick to up the excitement.
I think that the seating was deliberately restricted. It was a tough ticket to get, especially for the big games. Each entrance was dedicated to a certain sector of Roman society.
And the more important you were, the easier it was to get to your seat. The emperor entered through a richly decorated gate on the south side, which was later replaced by an underground passageway direct to his palace. Another grand entrance opposite allowed Rome's official magistrates to walk straight to their box, right next to the arena.
This entrance was shared by the senators. They were the next step down in the pecking order, but they also enjoyed ringside views. In each quarter of the stadium, three gates were reserved for equestrians.
An inner corridor and a short flight of stairs brought them out to their seats. The ordinary citizens of Rome had to let them pass before using the remaining 14 gates to spiral up several flights of stairs onto the terraces. Meanwhile, the poorer citizens slogged up 138 steps to get to the wooden benches high above.
So if you're a pleb, and a pleb without money even, or even a slave on the day off, you're going up to the nosebleed seats. There are no elevators. You're going to have to hoof it all the way up there, and your view's not going to be that good either. This extremely efficient system maintained a constant flow of people and eliminated choke points as much as possible.
It's been estimated that the 50 or 55,000 people that would fill the Colosseum could exit within a half an hour. That kind of practical, efficient planning really hasn't been surpassed today and in many ways still provides a kind of model for modern stadium design. The walls inside the Colosseum are bare now. But when it was first opened, they would have been painted in gaudy colors, designed to enhance the sense of brightness and space. within the building.
And the stadium corridors weren't just lined with paint. Everywhere you went, you would be harangued by booths of hawkers selling every kind of merchandise. Souvenirs, fast food, betting, sex.
You name it, they've got it. And the biggest... seller of all was the gladiators. Just as with modern sports stars, there is merchandising of gladiators. We find gladiators appearing on Roman lamps, we find gladiators on charms, we find little soldier-like gladiator toys.
And these were extremely popular, these are great souvenirs, and you think that when these people were the superstars of their day, they're being recognized for it in so many ways, including the merchandising. Now for the first time, the spectator steps out into the stadium and is hit by a wall of sound. This superdome dominates the Roman skyline.
Emperor Vespasian's vision has become the most spectacular amphitheatre the world has ever seen. Upwards of 50,000 people could crowd into the Colosseum seats. According to one source, up to 87,000 might be packed in. That's more than most superdomes today. Modern sports stadia are a lot less claustrophobic than the Roman Colosseum would have been, with very little seating space for each person.
They were packed quite literally cheek by jowl. And it could get unbearably hot on the terraces during the summer months, up to 40 degrees Celsius. Hot mobs are unhappy mobs, and unhappy mobs are prone to riot, as this wall painting of a stadium riot in Pompeii graphically shows. The emperor's engineers would have to come up with a way of shading the audience from the sun.
The top corner of the Pompeii picture shows the ingenious solution the Romans devised, a canvas awning called a valerian. The Colosseum had a huge velarium suspended from 240 masts set in brackets all around the top of the stadium. No one knows quite how it worked, but if the Pompeii Velarium is typical, it was suspended from poles or ropes, held together by a rope in the centre, which formed a hole through which the sun shone on the arena.
The whole system was operated by a thousand sailors drafted in from the Roman fleets of Mycenaeum and Ravenna. No one would see a retractable roof like this again for two thousand years. But nobody had come here to marvel at the architecture.
It is the first day of the inaugural games and the Colosseum is packed with excited spectators waiting for one thing. Vespasian's Amphitheatre is about to be christened in blood. The time of the gladiators has arrived. AD 80. One year after Titus has become emperor, he officially opens the Colosseum. His father Vespasian won the throne.
Titus has simply inherited it. He needs to gain the loyalty of the people. Seizing the moment, he decrees a set of inaugural games so spectacular they would inspire poets. An epic verse by the poet Marshall captures the excitement of the occasion. Friskus and Verus while with equal might, Prolonged an obstinate and a doubtful fight, Both fought alike and both alike gave ground, In end however the strife was equal found.
The inauguration of the Colosseum was unbelievable without parallel because you had 100 days straight of games. In one single blood-soaked day, 5,000 people were killed in the Colosseum. The Colosseum was the first in the world to have a Colosseum.
The Colosseum was the first in the world to have a Colosseum. A thousand animals were slaughtered and hundreds of defenseless criminals put to death. And this was just an appetizer to the main feature. Fights to the death between hundreds of gladiators, armed to the teeth. To modern eyes, it's a bloodthirsty spectacle.
To the Romans, it was top quality entertainment. The inaugural games reached new heights of extravagance. Some sources suggested that Titus even had the Colosseum flooded to stage a naval battle.
And the evidence for it is eyewitness accounts that are written down in a book. This is Marshall. poet who's describing these things and for a long time people didn't believe they actually happened but we know they did and there's also the evidence for the drainage system and the hydraulic system the coliseum's drainage network designed to empty the old lake could have been reversed to flood the arena but the theory remains controversial to achieve water deep enough to float ships would have meant waterproofing a huge area you And skeptics point out that no evidence of waterproofing has been found.
What is certain is that once the Colosseum was an established venue, the appetite for ever grander spectacles grew and grew. The task of keeping Rome's crowds happy and easy to govern would require constant innovation. Five years after the Colosseum opened, it was completely remodeled by Vespasian's second son, Domitian, to create an underground complex on a scale never seen before. This was the Hippogium.
This subterranean labyrinth worked as a backstage area, allowing the games to be mounted on an even grander scale. As the crowds bayed for blood, hundreds of gladiators hurried to take their positions. Armourers prepared weapons, prop masters moved scenery, and arena slaves went about the thousands of tasks that kept the show moving in the blood-soaked sands above.
These sands were called Harina in Latin, which is where we get the name arena from. And it's not just gladiators who inhabit this torch-lit underworld. It's also home to thousands of exotic animals imported from all over the Empire to be killed for sport.
These fights were intense and you do have these animals that are goaded along plus you have the beast masters, the bestiarii, people trained to fight and kill wild animals. They show up in here, they have to fight, they're expected to fight so they could just go in and engage the animal. But the beast fights served a function beyond sheer entertainment.
The attraction seems to have been having animals from far-flung locales brought into Rome, and it really was an expression of imperial greatness, that you could see Nubian hippopotami and North African elephants and ostriches and panthers from the Roman East all brought together into the Roman arena. Most of the animals were kept in sturdy pens in the basement and were transported up to the arena using an ingenious elevator system. Beast handlers herded animals into elevators, dotted along every corridor.
They cranked them up a level, then goaded them up a gangplank, through a trapdoor, and into the arena. And that wasn't all. In the remains of the Hippogium you can still see dozens of elevator shafts separated by arches.
These could hold wooden platforms operated by winches that could lift both animals and gladiators. The system held more than 60 trapdoors and 30 elevators. Now men and animals could emerge all over the Colosseum. You don't know when they're going to come, how many are going to come, how frequently they're going to come out. That's part of the experience.
If you don't have the Hippogam, then you don't really have the Colosseum. And it was all designed to spice up the main event. Gladiatorial combat.
It's not hard to understand the appeal of the gladiators. The term gladiator is a term that The tutorial resonates with heroic confrontation. But for the Romans, these fights to the death went deeper than mere competition. They were also symbolic. The names of the gladiators, for instance, the Samnites, the Thracian, the Mumilo, they are all names either of Rome's enemies or mythological characters.
So some gladiators were dressed and armed as ancient enemies to reenact epic battles. Others acted out mythological stories. It was all designed to make the Romans feel good about their imperial status and power. The Mermelon was a heavily armed swordsman with a large shield.
His helmet represents the sea creature from which he gets his name. He was regularly pitted against the Retiarius, who was armed like a fisherman, with a trident and a net. The Thracian evoked the famous barbarian warriors who fought against Rome.
The Samnite was another old enemy of Rome. These lightly armed hill tribesmen had been a thorn in the side of the Republic when Rome had expanded across Italy. The symbolism of others like the feared Secutor has been lost over time.
He was the most heavily armed of them all, but to compensate, his helmet was specially designed to limit his vision. Each of these types was paired against specific opponents that guaranteed a supposedly even fight. All gladiators were officially slaves.
Most were condemned criminals or prisoners of war. They fought until they died, or they were granted their freedom after a successful career. Despite their slave status, they were the superstar celebrities of their day. In graffiti, found at Pompeii, fans recorded their heroes'victories just like a football fan might today. Behind the heroic glamour, the gladiator's role was simple.
To die of entertainment. The Romans aren't really revolted by the games in the same way that many people aren't revolted by horror movies today. It's something they enjoy watching. They clearly keep going. The Colosseum doesn't fall out of use for hundreds of years.
And this is what they do. The games were an integral part of Roman society. They dispensed justice, cemented the social structure, and reaffirmed Rome's mastery of the world.
But to the ordinary Roman, they were just a great day out. You know, in the end, when you go to a sporting event today, or you go to a movie theatre, you want to be entertained. And you knew, ultimately, that when you came to the Colosseum, for the several hundred years in which it was in use, that you truly were entertained.
The Colosseum remains one of the grandest and most spectacular engineering achievements of the ancient world. It would become the blueprint for Stadia not just throughout the Roman Empire, but throughout history. In fact, many would argue its basic design has never been better.
It has survived more than 2,000 years to stand as a magnificent testament to the ambition and ingenuity of the Roman Empire.