Attendance at the games was a rare honor, although one did not have to pay

Building the world’s largest amphitheater in the place where there used to be a lake would be quite a challenge even today. But the imperial engineers were used to grand scale. Thousands of meters of pipes and gutters began to grow like roots pushing through the damp earth of the valley. The lake was drained, and then in its place, a 6-meter-deep, oval-shaped, 50-meter-wide and 200-meter-long pit was dug in the clay of the lake’s bottom. For many months, the sleep of the Romans was disturbed by construction works and the extraction of spoil from the trench, which was transported at night. to the port on the Tiber.

The bottom of the lake was then poured with concrete: a Roman innovation that, within two or three centuries of perfecting the technique, changed all ancient architecture. Roman concrete is fired limestone or marble that forms lime, and this mixed with pozzolana – pozzolana, or volcanic ash from the Gulf of Naples – hardened in moist conditions, even under water, so that the concrete could provide buildings with a degree of structural integrity unthinkable using ordinary brick or stone.

So while Greek architecture, through all its centuries of sophistication, was forced by physics to stick to the straight lines of pillars and lintels, the Romans began to experiment with increasingly bold arrangements of concrete curves. The concrete could stretch into a straight arch, and if deepened, it created a “barrel vault” (in the shape of a barrel cut in half from end to end). Two barrel vaults – in the shape of a barrel cut in half lengthwise – can intersect at right angles, creating a groin vault. But you can also try something more spectacular and place a whole group of such arches intersecting in one central point, creating a hemispherical dome.

These techniques opened up exciting new possibilities for Roman architects in terms of enclosing space. The incredible strength of curved concrete meant that buildings could be larger and higher than before, level by level, built on vaults upon vaults. The Greeks took advantage of the natural terrain when constructing auditoriums in their ancient theaters, carving a curved auditorium depression on the top or slope of some convenient hill. The Romans could build theaters without mountains; in a sense, they created their own mountains, shaping them into graceful arches of carefully poured cement*.

Colosseum Photo Sławomir Mielnik / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

A project on the scale of the Colosseum required cutting-edge Roman engineering. Its precision is truly extraordinary. It is impossible not to admire the care taken in the subsequent rows of seats, one is located at an angle of thirty degrees from the horizontal, the other behind it at an angle of thirty-five degrees; the mathematical precision with which the eighty wedge-shaped entrance corridors pierce the oval outline of the building; the extraordinary uniformity of the enormous annular corridor that runs around the outer façade of the structure, the width of which varies by less than one percent along its entire circumference.

Centuries of experience were needed to reach the level of development of construction art that made such a building possible. It took ten years of work and huge amounts of looted wealth from all over the world to make the emperor’s vision come true. And although buildings modeled on the Colosseum began to be built almost immediately in various places, no amphitheater was ever built to compare with it**.

Is there a people, Caesar, so distant and so barbarous that no one has come from them to your city?

It’s Martialis again, writing these words on the occasion of the inaugural show of the Colosseum in the year 80. “The Rhodope Mountains is an inhabitant of the Orphean Hem / and there also came a Sarmatian fed with horse blood; / and he who drinks water from the very springs of the Nile, / and who is beaten by the northern Thetis with his wave; / the Arab came in haste, the Sabeans hurried, / the Cilician was soaked here like a mist; the Sigambri, who tie their hair in buns, and the Ethiopians, whose hair is twisted, become one / everyone calls you the true father of the homeland.

This year, the Roman Empire was just shy of reaching the apogee of development, both in terms of population and territorial scope. Titus Caesar may have called himself the lord of 50 or 60 million people, as many as a million of whom may have lived in Rome alone.

Middle-class poets like Marcjalis tread carefully through dirty and crowded streets where bottles hung on chains from pillars in front of wine shops; where barbers “drawn their razors blindly” amidst the pressing crowd; where “dirty snack stands lined the entire road,” sending clouds of steam and stench into the smoky air, attracting lines of busy workers with the promise of hot bean stew or lentil soup with a flat round loaf of bread; perhaps a strip of salty fish or a dish of fried onions.

Decimus Junius Juvenal, the famous Roman satirist, also complained about city crowds. He was over twenty years old when Titus opened the Colosseum, but we can imagine that he was already exhausted by the noise and crowds. “There are a lot of people suffering from insomnia here,” he wrote.

Food causes nausea when it starts burning / In the stomach. Is it possible to fall asleep soundly on someone else’s bed? / A rich man, even in Rome, snores like a butchered man. / And I have a headache. – Well, the cart will drive into the corners of the streets and creak, and there the carter will swear sternly, / that both Drusus and the walruses may get excited.

It wasn’t any better during the day. Here is a patrician in his litter cutting through the crowd like a warship cutting through the waves. Sam is dozing, but the breathless slaves are carrying the litter confidently. From behind the cover, the world may seem calm: “But it will be in front of me. Because when I’m in a hurry, large crowds disturb me in a dense crowd: / This one will push him with an elbow, this one will hit him with a board, this one will hit him with a beam / Straight on the head, this one will hit him with a bucket, this one will hit him with a bottle “/They will be splashed up to your waist with mud, someone will kick you with a boot./The soldier pierces your finger with a nail.”

Carts loaded with construction materials posed a deadly threat. “Let the axis that carries the Ligurian rocks break, / Let just one large boulder fall into the crowd, / What will be left of the people? – No flesh, no bones! / The pulp from the corpses will disappear like ghosts in the darkness.”

Rome was a city that could swallow, chew and spit out anyone. As the crowds poured out of the narrow alleys into the open square in front of the Colosseum, the new experience must have been accompanied by a sense of relief.

As they lined up to get beyond the barriers surrounding the open space, spectators had time to admire the building that rose before them in all its glory: four stories rising arc by arc, 48 meters into the sky above Rome.

The great curved walls gleamed with limestone cladding; the pillars continued along the arches, each layer in a different style, first with simple Doric capitals, then scrolls of the Ionic order, then ornate Corinthian ones, rising higher and higher. Marble statues looked down from the upper arches; gilded bronze eagles perched above them, and over the main entrances to the building were carved chariots drawn by four horses, glaring wildly at the impatient crowd.

Attending the Games was a rare distinction. You didn’t have to pay for them – the emperor made sure of that – but you still had to find a free place, because they were limited. According to contemporary estimates, the Colosseum could accommodate about 50,000 people. The result seems impressive, but it was still not enough to accommodate nearly a million residents of Rome and guests. Securing a seat in the audience was easier if you had a powerful patron or belonged to one of the more prosperous merchant guilds.

Precious tokens in the hands of impatient spectators led them to designated seats on different levels of the amphitheater. First, it was necessary to find the correct entrance among the eighty numbered arches that led to the honeycomb interior. The interior walls of the building were painted in various colors and richly decorated with frescoes in which nymphs and satyrs peered between the curling leaves of stylized acanthus, directing viewers to their seats.

The staircases going up echoed with discussions about the day’s program. The Games of Titus, the inaugural games of the new amphitheater, were to last for months. The Romans later boasted that in that one year they celebrated for a hundred days, and the games were accompanied by various events taking place throughout the city, including in the Colosseum itself. One never knew what macabre novelty would appear on the sand in the spotlight – called harena – which covered the ground of the amphitheater.

The higher you climbed, the less important people you had as companions. The Senators had their own entrances that led straight to padded seats at the edge of the arena. The nobles, representing the richest layer of the Roman middle class, occupied eight or nine rows directly behind the senators. Next, a huge crowd of ordinary Roman citizens were seated, each of them jostling to take their allotted 40 centimeters of limestone bench.

However, if you were a low-status slave or freedman, you had to climb the entire height of the building because your assigned seats were on the fourth floor. Here, with Rome stretching out behind you and the large crowd of Roman citizens below, you squeezed your way to the steep wooden benches placed on the crown of the amphitheater.

* The first free-standing stone theater of this type was the Pompey theater, built in 55 AD. by the great leader and opponent Julius Caesar. Little of this structure remains today, but the curved outline of the auditorium is still visible in the streets east of Campo dei Fiori.

** For the first millennium of its existence, the Colosseum was known only as the Flavian amphitheater – in accordance with the will of the originators of its construction, Titus and Vespasian from the Flavian dynasty. Nearby stood a colossal statue of the sun god

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