Colosseum, Rome

A hundred days of games

The Colosseum opened on a hundred-day inaugural festival in AD 80.

Emperor Titus, who completed the building begun by his father Vespasian, staged the most ambitious entertainment programme in Roman history: gladiatorial bouts, executions of condemned criminals, wild beast hunts, choreographed re-enactments of historical battles, and a sea battle (naumachia) with full-size ships fighting in a flooded arena.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio records that 9 000 wild animals were killed during the hundred days. Elephants, lions, crocodiles, ostriches, leopards, and unfortunately a hippopotamus that had been swum across the Mediterranean from Egypt.

Built on a hated palace

The Colosseum stands on what had been, fifteen years earlier, the artificial lake at the centre of Nero's Domus Aurea — the Golden House — the enormous palace Nero had built for himself after the Great Fire of AD 64 destroyed most of central Rome.

The Flavian emperors who overthrew Nero's dynasty deliberately chose his lake as the site for their new public amphitheatre. Returning the private pleasure-ground of a despised emperor to public use was a calculated political message.

The Colosseum was originally called the Amphitheatrum Flavium. The modern nickname comes from a 30-metre-tall bronze Colossus of Nero (rededicated to the sun god Sol after Nero's death) that stood next to the new amphitheatre until the eighth century.

Fifteen-minute throughput

The building seated about 50 000 spectators on three tiers of arcades plus a top attic gallery. Eighty entrance arches at ground level allowed the entire audience to enter or leave within fifteen minutes — a passenger throughput unmatched until twentieth-century sports stadiums.

A complex of underground passages and rooms — the hypogeum — was added later under Domitian to house wild animals, gladiators, stage machinery, trap-doors, and the elevators that lifted beasts and sets onto the arena floor. The wooden floor was covered in arena (Latin for sand), which gave the entire building type its modern name.

Did Christians really die here?

The popular belief that the Colosseum was a major site of Christian martyrdom rests on slim evidence.

No early Christian source — and the early Christians documented their martyrs in obsessive detail — identifies the Colosseum as a specific execution venue. Most Christian executions in Rome happened in the Circus Maximus, the Circus of Nero, or under the emperor's eye in private gardens.

The Colosseum's association with Christian martyrdom is a later medieval legend, formalised in the sixteenth century by Pope Pius V to encourage devotion. The legend saved the building. When Pope Benedict XIV consecrated the Colosseum as a Christian shrine in 1749, he ended six centuries of stone-quarrying that had already removed two-thirds of the outer wall for use in Renaissance churches.