The Colosseum Read Online Free PDF Page B

to have been a strong view at the time that the Golden House was monopolising, for the emperor’s private pleasure, space in the centre of the city that by rights belonged to the Roman people. ‘Citizens emigrate to Veii, Rome has become a single house’, as one squib put it at the time.

    6. A sculptured panel on Arch of Titus in Rome depicts the parade of booty from the sack of Jerusalem in the triumphal procession of AD 71. As this seventeenth-century engraving shows more clearly than the now eroded original sculpture, the menorah from the Temple was given pride of place among the spoils.

Figure 2. The Colosseum and its surroundings.
    Vespasian’s response was shrewd and practical. Part of the Golden House appears to have continued in imperial use (and there is a good case for suggesting that Titus had his residence there a good decade after Nero’s death). But on the site of that infamous private lake he founded what we now call the Colosseum, a pleasure palace for the people. It was a brilliantly calculated political gesture to obliterate Nero’smemory with a monument to public entertainment, and by giving back to popular use space that had been monopolised by private imperial luxury. And it was a theme harped on by Martial in the second poem of his celebratory volume, which marked the opening of the building almost ten years later, under Titus, in 80 (Vespasian himself did not live to see its final completion, dying in 79). To quote Killigrew’s translation again, which hails the emperor, as Martial’s original did, under the Latin title ‘Caesar’:
    Where the stupendious theatre’s vast Pile
Is rear’d, there Nero ’s Fish-ponds were e’er while …
    Rome ’s to it self restor’d; in Caesar ’s Reign
The Prince’s Pleasures now the People gain.
    But it was more than just a question of the return of the city’s space to popular use. In building the Colosseum Vespasian was dramatically making the point that the profits of Roman military success belonged, in part at least, to the common people of Rome; it was not only emperor and aristocracy who were to enrich themselves with the booty of empire. For, where did the money come from to build this vast monument? Some of it, almost certainly, from the mass of precious spoils that flowed into Rome with the suppression of the Jewish rebellion. In fact, it may even be that monumental inscriptions in the Colosseum emphasised exactly this point. Or so an ingenious recent discovery has been taken to suggest.
    A few years ago archaeologists minutely re-examined a large inscribed block of stone that had been known forcenturies; it once was lying around in the arena and made a convenient resting place for the weary Victorian tourist. The main text on this block was carved in the fifth century and commemorates a restoration of the Colosseum in that period. But it was noticed that the block had had an earlier use and had once carried a quite different text displayed in bronze letters – to judge from the dowel-holes which had fixed these letters and were still visible. Careful tracing and measurement of the holes allowed the original wording to be reconstructed. The Latin (illustration 7) means:
THE EMPEROR VESPASIAN ORDERED THIS NEW AMPHITHEATRE TO BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOOTY …
    7. Joining the dots? The dowel holes (above) reconstructed into the dedicatory inscription of the Colosseum (below).
    Whether this reconstruction is the result of a brilliant piece of academic detective work or the combination of vivid imagination and wishful thinking depends on your point of view. A sceptical reader is likely to feel (as we do) that there is an uncomfortably long distance between the scatter of holes and the suspiciously appropriate solution to ‘joining the dots’. Nonetheless, inscribed text or no inscribed text, the underlying point remains. The Roman Colosseum was the fruit of Roman victory over the Jews. It was, in effect, the Temple of Jerusalem transformed by