|
XX. THE COLOSSEUM, FROM A DISTANCE
During the afternoon hours you visit the ceremonial center of Rome, the hallowed Forum Romanum, and then drift into what was long a go a lake at the center of the city. Now sitting there is the Flavian Amphitheater, which most people think of as the Colosseum (after a huge statue Nero built beside this arena). At the beginning of the 4th Century, as in the 21st Century, the Colosseum looks very imposing. It was built in three short years and inaugurated in 80 under Titus. He was the second emperor in the Flavian dynasty, the same rascal who in 70 destroyed Jerusalem. That event is commemorated in the Arch of Titus at the southeast end of the Roman Forum—you see reliefs of soldiers carrying a seven-armed candelabrum on one of the arch’s inside faces. That candelabrum will be carried off and melted down to make buttons or who knows what, by the West Goths (Visigoths) and Vandal allies who sack Rome in 410. Now you see where vandals get their name. On whose watch did this happen? The eastern (Arcadius) and western (Honorius) augusti were practically children, and brothers. Ironically, Flavius Stilicho, the best Roman general of the day, who held back the Visigoths for about ten years through his victories at Pollenta (402) and Verona (403) was a half-Roman, half-Vandal court official. Honorius has him executed for allegedly getting too friendly with his Vandal tribal pals.
You could alone spend a week ogling the blood-soaked mass of marble and concrete that is the Colosseum, but you have time for only a few observations. It’s huge, obviously. It is actually constructed of several concentric rings of concrete, a building material made popular by the Romans. The Colosseum is so named, not because it’s colossal—it is—but because at one time Nero erected a huge 80 foot statue of himself as a living god nearby. After Nero was murdered by the citizenry whom he had tormented in his madness, the statue’s head was knocked off. Other rulers placed replicas of their own heads on the statue.
Stone ribs connect the barrel vaults of the Colosseum, a genre of architecture you still see in modern stadia. It’s a quick, sturdy way to build enormous buildings, and it was copied throughout the empire. Some of the finest examples of such buildings are found in North Africa and in southern France. In the arcades (vomitoria, because crowds flowed out of here after the day’s games) around the bottom of this structure you find gamblers, prostitutes, food vendors, men hawking fight bills, you name it. The government employs special units of sailors to man a huge awning that keeps the crowd from being baked while they enjoy the grisly fun.
Today, you only get a peek of the action before you must go on. Truth is, you don’t have the stomach to watch. You glimpse enough: the sand is dotted with purplish spots containing the blood, brains, viscera, and other body parts of men, women, and children violently torn apart. The killers might be professional gladiators (sword fighters) but more likely are slaves who are executioners by trade. The crowd also loves to see wild animals, especially prepared by experts—starved, angered, frightened—who do what comes natural to animals. You glimpse armored men in scary garb—guys with steel globes with eye holes in them, guys with all kinds of odd looking outfits meant to evoke scenes from mythology. For example, those guys with the big helmets with the fin on top—those are fighters in the myrmillo or fish style, which explains the other guys with the nets and tridents. The Romans can’t get enough of this faux mythology fare. The last shred of an excuse about Etruscan religious games is long gone. This isn’t piety, but a strange ritual killing for fun. It’s almost like a serial killing done by millions of people, including the emperor, Vestal Virgins, and priests of various cults. The scum and the cream of society, though they sit in different areas of the arenas, shout themselves hoarse as the trident rises and falls. As a modern, even with the genocides of your century, you’ll be more frightened by the crowd than by the horrors taking place on the sand. That’s because, although you can imagine yourself as a hapless victim on the sand, you even more readily picture yourself as one of those shouting themselves hoarse in the stands. It makes you ashamed to be human. You glimpse complex elevators rising and falling, disgorging fighters or wild animals. You see scared men, women, and children huddling together in the face of cruelty, ridicule, and death. This scene is so alien to modern sensibility that you are shaken to your very core. You never expected to see anything like this, because it is simply unimaginable to the modern mind. The modern human understands grim realities of genocide, world wars, terrorist attacks, even serial killings on a larger scale—but mass murder for fun, practiced by an entire society? Mitigating evidence suggests that, if you compare the seating in the Circus Maximus versus that in the Colosseum, the largest circus held between five and ten times as many spectators. Games in the circus were not likely to be as bloody as those in the Colosseum. So if the seating in the Colosseum was engineered to fill a carefully gauged demand, then the population at the Colosseum on any given day was at most two percent of the city's population—meaning, those were the hardcore sadists and violence freaks who couldn't get enough of their daily gore. It would not be surprising if attendance at such venues in modern times would be about the same, if such venues were available. Overall, life was short and brutish, and justice swift and harsh, and for the most part people shrugged and suggested that if you ended up on the sand (arena) it was most likely a fate you deserved.
Then there is the half-time show. More killings, accompanied by music and dance. But first, the arena must be cleared, and the sand cleansed. A group of slaves carrying long-handled iron meat hooks would enter quickly from a special disposal gate. The removal of the bodies involved a bit of macabre spectacle that must have sent chills through even the Romans. A ghastly looking figure, made out to resemble the Etruscan god Charon, would enter the arena carrying a silver hammer. He might be accompanied by other ritual figures, like Hermes, carrying a red-hot poker in the shape of his caduceus (the staff with the snake around it, that modern doctors and other medical staff wear as emblems of their profession). Charon, the boatman who ferries the dead across the River Styx into Avernus, leans down and smacks the prostrate figure on the forehead and asks him if he is alive or dead. If Hermes (Mercury) comes along, he’ll do the same test by touching the glowing brand to some sensitive body part. If there’s no sign of life, in go the hooks, out goes the guy.
Incidentally, when Popes die in your modern age, the Vatican camerlengo (chamberlain) enters the bedroom with—you guessed it—a silver hammer and taps the Pontiff on the forehead three times, asking if he is still among the living. If not, the entire centuries-old complex of rituals begins, including the immediate removal and smashing of the Pope’s personal signature ring, to end his power to loose or bind all things on Earth and in Heaven (from Matthew 16:19). They don’t, however, use hooks to remove him from the premises by his heels.
Back to the arena: it’s hot, and the sand is filled with human body parts, internal organs, and clotting blood by the hundreds of gallons. What to do? The whole mess starts to stink. Clever Romans, out comes the half-time crowd, men hopping in tights, ladies strumming harps, clowns tumbling about, condemned criminals too weak or stupid to fight being executed in one corner. Meanwhile an army of slaves come out with scoops, as if cleaning a giant cat litter pail; others run about strewing fresh sand, or removing clots of utterly soaked sand. Finally, to cleanse the air, the Romans burn incense and pine cones to drive the stench away and pull in fresh air through the concrete drums supporting the bleachers. Meanwhile, overhead, a shadow descends as hundreds of specially trained sailors from the navy climb out into the rigging and pull the giant velarium (‘awning’) through the air way up over the highest stands.
You ask: "But wait a minute. What if the ancient gladiator responds somehow when Charon taps his forehead with the silver hammer?" Well, you know, the show must go on. Most likely, if Charon taps the guy on the skull and asks: "Anyone home?" if the guy mutters "Yes" or "Vero," Charon probably taps him again and again until the gentleman stops responding to the question. It’s a scripted show. In fact, the advertisers won’t sponsor the particular producers again if they flub things like this. Yes, the games were sponsored by wealthy men and companies who wanted to show off to the general public, and like today’s companies sponsoring endless bloodbaths of pretend-killing on television, they were hot to trot about ratings. So nothing ever changes as much as you might think. If the crowd roars for an answer to the question "Is he alive or dead?" a referee steps out and say "Hoc habet," which means "He's had it." Nobody in modern times knows for sure, by the way, what the hand signals are—what thumb up, thumb down, thumb sideways in a stabbing or hooking motion, or thumb across the throat precisely means.
What cruelty, in any case! You recall the persecution of the Christians. Nero, over two centuries earlier, used this obscure dissident Jewish sect as a scapegoat for the fires he is rumored to have started in order to rebuild Rome. They say he found it a city of wood and left it a city of marble. He burned Christians alive on poles as human torches at his garden parties. Like the games with their religious origins, the burning of Christians did have a historical basis: it was the preferred method of dispatching religious heretics against the Roman religion and state (which were one), and so it continued to be Christianity's preferred method of doing the same until the early modern age (the 1600s, when the last witches were burned alive). Nero, it should be added, like most of his ilk, died a trembling coward hiding behind a column in his garden. Too scared to commit suicide, he begged a slave to run him through before the mob could reach him and tear him limb from limb. What’s even more pathetic in a way is what happened to his great palace. Nero built the greatest palace of all time, the Domus Aureus or Golden House—Nero’s madhouse, so to speak. To create his monstrosity, he leveled much of the Esquiline Hill near the center of the city. He looted and plundered the world to bring riches of every kind here. He employed hordes of painters, sculptors, architects, and gardeners. The place was riddled with underground tunnels where he practiced every imaginable vice, often at the expense of many innocents, in specially hollowed out grottoes lit by flickering torches and decorated with magnificent artworks. And he was so hated that, when he died, it was all simply paved over. Nobody bothered sorting through the paintings, statuary, and other treasures, amazingly enough. The emperor Trajan built his enormous baths on the site. Consequently, in the Renaissance, when people began to rediscover the wonders of that lost ancient world, when the likes of Bernini, Michelangelo, and da Vinci were designing a new city for the popes and cardinals, excavators stumbled on these underground treasure chambers and marveled. It was, in fact, the birth of a new art form, the grotesque, named after the grottoes created for Nero in his horrific marriage of madness, cruelty, and art.
|
