The Colosseum (13 page)

The fact is that there are no genuine records of any Christians being put to death in the Colosseum. It was only later (as we shall see in
Chapter 6
) that Christian writers invested heavily in the Colosseum as a shrine of the martyrs. No accounts of martyrdoms there are earlier than the fifth century
AD
, by which time Christianity had become the official religion of Rome; they look back to the conflicts between Christians and the Roman authorities centuries earlier. It is likely that Christians
were
put to death there and that those said to have been martyred ‘in Rome’ actually died in the Colosseum. But, despite what we are often told, that is only a guess.

One of the possible candidates for martyrdom in the
Colosseum is St Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch (in Syria) at the beginning of the second century
AD
, who was ‘condemned to the beasts’ at Rome. His writings, and those of other Christians describing death in the arena, not only offer a different perspective on the amphitheatre from the point of view of the victim, but also show how important that ideology of victimhood was in the community of the early church. Of course, we know next to nothing of the actual death experience of Christian martyrs, but Ignatius’ letters, apparently written to the community of Christians in Rome on the journey to the city for his death, are full of highly charged, and blood-curdling, anticipations of the moment. He was going to his death voluntarily:

Let me be fodder for the wild beasts; that is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ … What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts which are ready for me … I hope that they will make short work of me. I shall coax them to eat me up at once, and not hesitate, as sometimes happens, through fear. Forgive me, I know what is good for me … Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil, only let me get to Jesus Christ.

What is astonishing in Ignatius’ letter is the degree to which he and his intended audience internalised ‘pagan’ ideals about death in the arena and subverted them to their own ends. The cruelty and suffering of the arena are now idealised as instruments of believers’ salvation.

St Ignatius’ letter is not an isolated example of Christian
fixation with the arena. From the second century onwards Christians created a new genre of literature, known as ‘Martyr Acts’, which celebrated the capture and trial (often before a capricious pagan judge) of a steadfast Christian who was willing to suffer terrible tortures and death rather than give up his or her faith. Hugely embellished no doubt, they acted as a kind of sacred pornography of cruelty, tying the Christian message to gruesome and gory death at the hands of the Roman authorities. One of the most vivid and shocking is the account of the martyrdom of two female saints, Perpetua and Felicity, at the beginning of the third century
AD
in Carthage. After the narrative of their trial and imprisonment, the story turns to their final moments in the amphitheatre. They were brought out, at first naked and tied up in nets, to face ‘a mad heifer which the Devil had prepared’; their male friends had faced leopards, bears and boars. But, apparently, even the crowd was horrified at the sight of the two young women, one of whom – Felicity – had just given birth, her breasts still visibly dripping milk. So they were taken off, dressed again in tunics and sent back to the arena. Tossed and crushed, they nevertheless remained alive, until the crowd demanded their execution in full view. Perpetua’s killer was a novice, and – despite the agony caused by his mishits – she guided his sword to her throat. ‘O most valiant and blessed martyrs. Truly you are chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus our Lord.’

How far this and other such accounts are in any sense eye-witness description is a moot point. They claim to ‘tell it how it was’, but almost every element in the depiction is tinged with Christian symbolism and a Christian message. The bloodshed is treated as a second baptism; Perpetua (as
a good modest Christian woman) does not forget to pull down her tunic when the heifer has lifted it to expose her thigh; and so forth. What is certain is that the Martyr Acts are at once an apparent rebuttal of Roman savage sadism, yet at the same time they exploit its seductive appeal. Vulnerable young women, cruelty and wild animals were as much weapons in the triumph of Christianity as in the attempt to suppress it. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the amphitheatre was the setting for dreadful violence inflicted on innocents; but it may have been a more cheapskate, tawdry, even (if this is possible) amateurish kind of violence. Our modern image of the larger-than-life cruelty of the arena is, in part at least, a product of two very different types of investment in such a picture: the boastful exaggeration by Roman emperors and the boastful denunciation by Roman Christians.

THE PEOPLE ON PARADE

It is the first rule of any spectacle that the audience is as important an element as the display itself: we go not only to watch, but to watch other people watching, and to be seen watching ourselves. The audience is part of the show. In the case of the Colosseum, the biggest amphitheatre in the Roman world, the role of the audience was even more loaded than usual. As many recent studies have insisted, the serried ranks of the Roman people, seated in hierarchical ranks according to status, were in effect a microcosm of the Roman citizen body. This was much more extreme than the social segregation of modern spectacles, where the front seats go to those who can (and choose to) pay for them, but may equally
well include those who have saved up for months for a special treat as those who would never sit anywhere else. The basic, official rule in Rome, at least by the end of the first century
AD
, was that civic status determined where you sat. Senators sat closest to the arena in the front rows; behind them the next official status rank of Roman society, the ‘knights’; and so on up to the top of the seating area (what in a British theatre would be called ‘the gods’) reserved for slaves, noncitizens – and women, apart from the state priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins, who sat with the senators in the front. The senators, and maybe the knights too, sat on movable seats; the rest were on fixed benches of either brick faced in marble or, at the very top, in wood. Relegating the women to the back probably ensured that, amongst the elite at least, the audience was overwhelmingly male: no woman of any social pretensions was likely to relish sharing this distant viewpoint with the great unwashed.

Exactly how and when this detailed stratification of the audience had developed is hard to pin down (though it was certainly mirrored in other Roman entertainment venues, such as the theatre). Nor is it certain how carefully it was policed. But ancient writers certainly tell warning – or salacious – stories of what was likely to develop if this kind of segregation was not in place. One of the most bloodthirsty dynasts of the first century
BC
, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, was reputed to have picked up (or to have been picked up by) his wife Valeria at a gladiatorial spectacle, ‘when the seating was not yet separated’. It is a tale rather reminiscent of the modern story of brushing up against a would-be partner in a row of cramped cinema seats. According to his biographer Plutarch, she walked behind the place where Sulla was
sitting, as she made her way to her own; resting her hand on his shoulder, she removed a piece of fluff from his cloak and followed this up with some witty flirtation when he looked a bit taken aback. After the predictable collusive glances, longing looks and knowing smiles, a proposal of marriage followed: ‘he was seduced’ carps Plutarch, ‘by looks and languishing airs, through which the most disgraceful and shameful passions are naturally excited’. But all that was officially off the menu once the regulations were introduced.

An idea of the complexity surrounding the question of who sat where comes from an extraordinary set of Roman priestly documents. A prestigious Roman priesthood, the Arval Brethren (‘the Fraternity of the Fields’), over centuries of the Roman empire kept a record, inscribed in stone, of their activities, decisions and privileges. It is a unique and sometimes surprising document of what Roman priests did and what Roman religious ritual entailed; in
AD
80 it included a record of the seats allocated to the priesthood and their various dependants in the newly opened Colosseum. The allocation specifies the particular block (accessed by one of the corresponding seventy-six numbered public entranceways into the amphitheatre, still numbered on the monument), the level of the seating from the front and the row number. The priests were not allocated numbered seats, but roughly 130 Roman feet of seat space in all (the Roman measure was a little shorter than the modern one). Different ranks among the priests and their hangers-on would presumably have occupied places at different levels in the building. So, for example, the allocation specified 42.5 Roman feet spread over eight rows of level one, in block 12; and almost 64 feet in block 53 of the top tier, spread over 11 rows.

No entrance tickets to the Colosseum survive, but we have examples from elsewhere and they must have existed: small tokens of wood, bone or lead, specifying (to judge from the details of the Arvals’ seating) the block or entranceway, level and row number. So far as we know spectators did not pay for their tickets; attendance was one of the perks of citizenship. But how they were distributed is not clear. Given that everything in ancient Rome, ‘free’ or not, had its price, then we should probably imagine that people paid for membership of clubs and societies to which free tickets were issued. Or men of influence, powerful patrons, distributed tickets to their dependants and clients. When they arrived at the Colosseum, spectators would find that the entrance and exit routes for different classes of seating were planned (as we shall see in the next chapter) in a complex pattern so that citizens of different status were kept rigidly separate. Roman snobs did not like to rub shoulders with the less privileged, even if they were squashed side by side with their equals.

Squashed they sometimes were, at least behind the ranks of the elite on the front rows, with their much more ample individual seating. We know from lines etched into the stone benches in other Roman amphitheatres that the average space allocated to ancient spectators was only 40 cm. This is less than the space given to economy passengers on a cheap airline. We also know from elsewhere (no seats survive in the Colosseum itself) that the seatback-to-seatback leg-room averaged 70 cm. Probably Romans were on average slimmer than modern couch-potatoes; they were certainly shorter (adult males on average only 165 cm, or about 5 feet 5 inches). Even so, if the Colosseum broadly followed the space allocations known elsewhere, when it was full most spectators must
have been close packed together. It was perhaps this overclose proximity that made the audience a volatile group – as when a riot broke out in the amphitheatre in Pompeii between the home crowd and the people of the neighbouring town of Nuceria and prompted the authorities in Rome to ban gladiatorial shows there for ten years.

Modern writers – ourselves included – have often laid enormous stress on the political stratification and collective identities paraded in the Colosseum audience. The spectators were a microcosm of properly regulated Roman society, sitting in their official Roman costume (the emperor Augustus, a stickler for restoring or inventing traditions, had insisted that all citizens attend shows in a toga), with the highest ranks occupying the best seats in the front and so on up to the slaves and women at the back. They acted out the social order in a ‘political theatre’. This is true – up to a point. But it can be over-stated. For in other ways the audience in the Colosseum displayed the ambivalences of Roman political status and the impossibility of fitting the messy realities of the Roman population into neatly ranked status groups. Part of this is the universal problem that it is always impossible to decide which the best seats in the house really are. The senators may have had a premier ringside position. But, that said, the oval shape and the steep raking of the amphitheatre gave everyone a goodish view, provided that the fight did not end up against the wall of the arena. Besides, if shade and a view of the audience below was what you most valued, then the upper seats might seem much more attractive. For the awnings that were spread over the building to keep off the fiercest heat of the sun only protected the top half of the seats when the sun was at its zenith;
the largest area they could possibly have covered given a structure of linen, ropes and wooden ribbing is around 10,000 square metres, roughly half the auditorium. Unless they brought their own parasols or wide-brimmed hats, prestige at the ringside carried a price in sweat and sunburn.

But Roman society did not fit as easily as we often like to imagine into straightforward vertical status groups and the seating in the Colosseum probably blurred the legal distinctions as much as reinforcing them. Was it only the senators who sat in the ringside seats? Or could they bring guests and clients? Did some slaves actually sit at the front with their elite masters, or did the senators pay for their exclusivity by having to do without their everyday attendants at the ringside? We do not know the exact area of the senatorial seating (there is no precise archaeological indication of how far it extended), but the best guess would suggest that it offered space for 2000 spectators, assuming that they had twice as much space as the people in the squashed rows behind. There were only about 600 senators, and many of those would have been out of Rome at any one time (commanding the army, governing the empire). We are left with one of two conclusions. Either senators in practice occupied about eight times as much space as the ordinary citizen, which even by Roman standards of inequality seems extreme. Or seating in this area was in practice socially mixed, not just senatorial sons, but friends and contacts too.