This is partly why the Colosseum is so famous today — it was an essential part of ancient Roman society and similar amphitheatres have also been discovered. The buried city of Pompeii, for example, has the oldest amphitheatre to date which was found during 19th-century excavations of the lost city.
Why was entertainment so important to the Romans? Well, like today, entertainment was a great way to escape the trivialities of everyday life, which for the average Roman meant a lot of work for little reward. This also worked well for the Senate and high ranking officials, because if the people were enjoying their weekly entertainment and taking their frustrations out on the various spectacles before them, they were less likely to focus their energy on things like social reform or revolt.
One of the most popular events held in the early days of the games were the animal games. Where exotic, wild animals were displayed, hunted and fought against by gladiators. The display of the animals was the first event, as commentators described their region and danger. The animals would be patrolled out on the arena, often chained to one another to cause a ruckus and expose their animal instincts. Animal fights also occurred, where the best gladiators would fight one on one with the most dangerous animals, usually tigers or leopards.
The ancient racing match involved multiple horses drawing a heavy carriage fit for one standing driver. The race was notoriously bloody, with a large majority of horses and riders dying or sustaining severe injuries.
Prior to the Colosseum chariot racing usually took place in a circus a large open-air venue , and the emperor would drop a cloth known as a mappa to signal the beginning of the race. Group or individual executions were a common occurrence during the games.
The victims and their executions styles varied. The walls and the floor bear numerous slots, grooves and abrasions, obviously made with great care, but for purposes that you can only guess. The groove, he added, created room for the four arms of a cross-shaped, vertical winch called a capstan, which men would push as they walked in a circle.
The capstan post rested in a hole that Beste indicated with his toe. Nothing bigger than a lion would have fit. The footfalls were surprisingly loud. Beste glanced up, then smiled. Today, many people can imagine this for themselves. Trained as an architect specializing in historic buildings and knowledgeable about Greek and Roman archaeology, Beste might be best described as a forensic engineer. Its complexity was downright horrifying. The disarray reflected some 1, years of neglect and haphazard construction projects, layered one upon another.
After the last gladiatorial spectacles were held in the sixth century, Romans quarried stones from the Colosseum, which slowly succumbed to earthquakes and gravity.
Down through the centuries, people filled the hypogeum with dirt and rubble, planted vegetable gardens, stored hay and dumped animal dung. In the amphitheater above, the enormous vaulted passages sheltered cobblers, blacksmiths, priests, glue-makers and money-changers, not to mention a fortress of the Frangipane, 12th-century warlords.
Necromancers went there at night to summon demons. In the late 16th century, Pope Sixtus V, the builder of Renaissance Rome, tried to transform the Colosseum into a wool factory, with workshops on the arena floor and living quarters in the upper stories. But owing to the tremendous cost, the project was abandoned after he died in In the years that followed, the Colosseum became a popular destination for botanists due to the variety of plant life that had taken root among the ruins.
As early as , naturalists began compiling detailed catalogs of the flora, listing different species. In and , archaeological excavations attempting to reach it were stymied by flooding groundwater. Beste and his colleagues spent four years using measuring tapes, plumb lines, spirit levels and generous quantities of paper and pencils to produce technical drawings of the entire hypogeum.
Gradually, as you work, the image of how things were takes shape in your subconscious. Colosseum architects made some changes to allow new methods of stagecraft. Other changes were accidental; a fire sparked by lightning in A. Beste also began to decipher the odd marks and incisions in the masonry, having had a solid grounding in Roman mechanical engineering from excavations in southern Italy, where he learned about catapults and other Roman war machines.
He also studied the cranes that the Romans used to move large objects, such as foot-tall marble blocks. Paired vertical channels that he found in certain walls, for example, seemed likely to be tracks for guiding cages or other compartments between the hypogeum and the arena. By the 20th century, nearly two-thirds of the original building had been destroyed. Nevertheless, a restoration project began in the s to repair the Colosseum.
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Others say that Aeneas and some of his followers escaped the fall of Troy and established the town. Regardless of which of the many myths one prefers, no one can doubt the impact of ancient Rome on western civilization.
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