In the Arena

The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
Harvard, 224 pp., $19.95

Even if you have never been anywhere near it, you feel like Rome's ancient Colosseum is an old friend. And like every tourist attraction, it has a story all its own, which we always vaguely feel is just out of reach. What this story might be is the subject of The Colosseum by the late Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, an idiosyncratic little book that describes the prism through which we view the monument. It is the latest installment in an attractive new series of which Beard is the general editor, Wonders of the World, and in which she wrote the very first book (on the Parthenon). If you are looking for fresh approaches to overdone locales, this is a promising series, and should prove a rich source of gifts for all the travelers, armchair and otherwise, on your list.

The odd resistance that the Colosseum offers to an "authentic" experience is hardly new. Hopkins and Beard note how Victorian guidebooks urged sightseers to visit the Colosseum on a moonlit night and recite the relevant passages of Byron's "Manfred" to heighten the mood. What a sight that must have been, the old ruin packed with gentlemen in waistcoats and ladies in bustles, all murmuring away from the "Manfreds," which they could only read by moonlight. Such, in fact, was the scene Hawthorne depicted in The Marble Faun--writing, a little ruefully, of parties of American and British expatriates, all posing on the parapets, "exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron's, not their own."

Of his own first encounter, Mark Twain boasted in The Innocents Abroad, "I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used the phrase 'butchered to make a Roman holiday.' I am the only free white man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression." Not that it's a bad expression, of course, and it "sounds well for the first seventeen or eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome." (Of course, Twain and his friends were in an impish mood by the time they had reached Italy, and they would end up amusing themselves at the expense of the tour guide showing off Christopher Columbus's autograph with this observation: "Why, I have seen boys in America only 14 years old that could write better than that. . . . If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out!")

Still, Twain's point is hard to deny. To say something new about the Colosseum, just as to see something new in it, is damnably difficult, no matter how much we might sigh with Hawthorne or laugh with Twain about it. Even to see anything old in such a place is a strain on the imagination. The alienation felt at tourist attractions was an issue perceptively raised a half-century ago by Walker Percy. "Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon . . . and see it for what it is?" he asked in his 1954 essay, "The Loss of the Creature." With characteristic insight, he answered:

It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind. . . . the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, "Why, it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!"

Much of Hopkins and Beard's book is dedicated to sketching out this "symbolic complex" that surrounds the Colosseum. For 19th-century visitors, the monument was experienced primarily as a ruin, an exotic remnant from a time long ago. In our day and age--thanks to Ridley Scott's Gladiator, HBO's Rome, and PlayStation 2's "Colosseum: Road To Freedom," themselves all informed by older "sword-and-sandal" flicks--we look at the Colosseum in the present tense, as a place where crowds would cheer on sporting events not unlike our own. Indeed, any number of sports arenas built in the 20th century are called "coliseums" and were deliberately modeled after the ancient prototype. Furthermore, up until the Games in Athens, the façade of the Colosseum always featured on the Olympic medals, although the Games had been Greek and the building was Roman. No matter that the image was historically inaccurate, the International Olympic Committee replied to complaints in 2000, "What's important is that it's a stadium."

A stadium, yes--well, no, it's an amphitheater, but never mind--though the sorts of thing to be seen in it were strictly of the blood sport variety. What can we say with any accuracy of these games and the building that housed them? Those looking for a sober and honest account of what we know will be grateful to Hopkins and Beard, who remind us that the Colosseum was paid for from the booty of the brutal sack of Jerusalem. Not far from the Colosseum stands the Arch of Titus, on which the triumphant Roman soldiers can still be seen carrying off the Menorah. It is no coincidence that Harvard's other recent offering in the Wonders of the World series is The Temple of Jerusalem. The fates of the Colosseum and the Temple are inextricably linked.

At the Colosseum's grand opening, something like 9,000 animals were killed, and certainly very many gladiators died. What the fighting actually looked like is not entirely clear, of course, though it was surely deadly, and most of the epitaphs we have are of young men. The most obscene things to take place, however, were what the classicist Katherine Coleman has called "fatal charades," in which living tableaux of classical myths were viciously presented. The poet Martial recounts (with admiration for the ingenuity, mind you) how a prisoner had his guts torn out by a bear as a re-enactment of the punishment of Prometheus. This was nothing compared to the woman who was forced to have sex with a bull, in a crowd-pleasing performance of the legend of Pasiphaë, mother of the Minotaur.

This wasn't an entirely new form of entertainment. A decade-and-a-half before we read in Tacitus that Nero needed a scapegoat for the terrible fire which had ravaged the city, and so chose the universally despised Christians as his victims. In the gardens located where St. Peter's now stands, these ancient Christians were dressed in wild animal skins to resemble the ancient hunter Actaeon, who had been transformed into a deer. They were then attacked by dogs and, at nightfall, set on fire while Nero, pretending to be a charioteer, mugged for the audience. Whether the games did anything but satisfy a culture-wide blood thirst is hard to say. What we know comes from fairly scanty evidence: some literary allusions, a number of epitaphs, graffiti from Pompeii, things like that. The image that emerges from these sources depends largely on the tastes of the audience for which the historian is writing.

As a matter of comparison, imagine trying to write a book about Yankee Stadium some two millennia hence, with data consisting only of the script for Pride of the Yankees, a handful of baseball cards, and a recording of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Our 41st-century scholars would have two options: Sift the evidence carefully, separating out the reliable bits of information, to present a collection of careful suggestions--"Just how many players died of diseases named for them is uncertain, although the 'designated hitter rule' seems to have played a part, as did peanuts and Cracker Jacks"--or they could spice up the incomplete picture by making colorful, if unlikely, connections: "Many were the Gehrigs who fell that day, as the bloodthirsty crowd urged on the 'designated hitter' with, 'Root Root Root!'"

Neither of those reconstructions is accurate, of course, nor could they ever hope to be. In similar fashion, what we make of the Colosseum has much to do with what we are allowed to make of it, as Hopkins and Beard indicate. In part, the evidence of antiquity is too slim to provide a comprehensive picture. And then there are those who package it for us: Overly helpful guidebooks, seductively vivid poems and movies, moralizing sermons, boring old classicists. Before we realize it, our mental image of the place has already been drafted according to ideas pre-programmed by Lord Byron, Hollywood, church historians, and others. And then we tailor all of it to get the show we've already decided we want to see. Cheering crowds? Yes. Moonlight and verses from Byron? Probably not. Delete. Forced sex with a bull? Delete. Deadly competition? Definitely accept. Persecuted religious minorities set on fire? Um--go back to cheering crowds. I'm not sure about the other stuff, but the cheering crowds I like.

Christopher McDonough is associate professor of classics at the University of the South (Sewanee).