The victims and their executions styles varied. With Roman criminals beheaded as that was the only allowed method for killing a Roman. Slaves were crucified and sometimes burnt alive once they were nailed up. Either way, the executions, though bloody, were a way for the people of Rome to be involved in its politics. Calling for the blood of those who went against the justice system encouraged harmony. By far the most famous games of the Colosseum were the gladiator battles of Rome.
There were three stages of Gladiator fights. Lightly armed, heavily armed and then gladiator-style fights. The event was always bloody, with dead or injured bodies dragged to the side once they were beaten. If a gladiator proved himself worthy in the fighting he could receive freedom and glory for fighting well.
This wan another way to glorify the Colosseum and its events, bribing glory in return for a good battle contest. When was the Colosseum built? Animal Displays and Hunts One of the most popular events held in the early days of the games were the animal games. Chariot racing The ancient racing match involved multiple horses drawing a heavy carriage fit for one standing driver. Executions and Tortures Group or individual executions were a common occurrence during the games.
The rubble was quickly used to build churches and palaces found across Rome. Important dignitaries used the south and north entrances. The two remaining gates were for the gladiators — but they served two very different purposes.
The Gate of Life was located on the eastern side of the Colosseum. This is where gladiators would enter before the spectacle began. The Gate of Death was located on the western side. This is where unlucky gladiators were carried out. If you were short of cash but enjoyed the blood and thunder of the Colosseum, you were in luck — provided you were Roman, that is. Emperors used the arena to promote their political policies, so entry to the games was free to all Romans. Foreigners were of no political use to the leaders, so they had to shell out a coin or two to watch the spectacle.
Imagine the bureaucracy! The Colosseum could sit an incredible 87, spectators, making it the largest amphitheater in the world, according to the Guinness World Records.
Every public amphitheater or stadium where people would have to sit out in the sun was tented with some kind of awnings. This was a pampered audience, and in the entire Mediterranean, people did not want to sit out in the hot sun. So there is evidence for awnings in most theaters, in almost all of the amphitheaters, and even in the stadium. Question: Did the Romans borrow construction techniques for the Colosseum from even more ancient cultures?
One doesn't go out and begin to say, "I'm going to do a building the size of the Colosseum," and have it come like Athena out of Zeus's head, full-blown. The arch had to be invented before the arched entrances could be designed. Certainly all of technology that had preceded it—the building of columns, the whole idea of brick work to face concrete—all of that had been done before the Colosseum was built. Question for Goldman: What made the Romans actually build the Colosseum?
First of all it was a propaganda ploy to return to the people land that Nero had usurped for the private lake in his private pleasure park on the ground of his Golden House. Vespasian was making the Flavian dynasty a name like the Windsors in England much beloved as the ruling house in this concern for the people.
Second, it was to show to the entire world the power and might and ability of the Roman workforce—its grandiose size and monumental shape and a symbol of Roman majesty. Third, it put to work an enormous labor force, solving vast unemployment problems.
Finally it kept the people happy and entertained. They already got free "bread"; now they got the circuses. It served its purpose well. Question for Goldman: How did they go about flooding it for mock sea battles? I think that after Domician added the substructures, which would be after he came to the throne in A. There never could have been, again, the flooding of the Colosseum. But before that substructure was added, the poet Martial says that the amphitheater could change from dry land to the sea very quickly, and we know that there were water courses which run through that valley because there is still water running under San Clemente today, so that very easily the engineers could have induced water into it, and they could have emptied the water by the same channels that took the original lake that was drained in order to install the Colosseum in the first place.
So yes, in the first two years there could have been sea battles there. Question for Roberts: It seems that either method needs further support beams closer to the stage area. Is there any evidence to support any more beams further down toward the center? As you will have seen, it's not necessary to have full cover over an arena. As long as about two-thirds of the arena is getting some shadow, it's adequate for the people who are watching there.
There was no evidence of support within the arena. Question for Roberts: Why couldn't the suspension system be used, but use the bottom ropes to suspend a series of ropes through the rings on the awning, allowing the awning to retract from the center to the edges?
I'd thought of this when I was working on the idea in the first place, of using a pulley system attached to the underside of a suspending rope. The big problem with this is that we are using natural fibers, and even with well-organized systems, the natural fiber rope stretches and stretches and stretches, and you are in a situation where you could never get sufficient tension and keep sufficient tension for rope, which is harnessed underneath for moving the sails or the awnings to work decently.
The other problem is that you need to pull on the rope to draw a canopy in or out. You need to pull against something solid in order to change the direction of the rope to the sail, if you understand.
If the part of the block, the pulley that the rope is going through, is attached to a rope which also gives, you have a situation which is far too flexible for it to work properly. This might have worked if the Romans had had steel wire cable, which they did not, of course.
But if you have steel wire cable, you can then set up a very rigid system, and beneath that, you can then run a flexible awning system which you can draw it in and out. That's the reason why we didn't do that eventually. Question for Roberts: Is it a possibility that the Romans constructed a giant circular piece of cloth that was held taut over the Colosseum like a lid on a jar—no complicated system of ropes?
You cannot just float this in the air. You have to have a system which supports it. You also, of course, have to have a system which can close it off, because you get winds which would make the thing blow away over Rome somewhere, perhaps. It's not a system that can be controlled properly, and if you think of the Colosseum itself in particular, the size of it would be quite enormous and quite beyond controlling in this way.
The beauty of the system which we think was in use was that it worked in segments and could be in small pieces, like a ship having six or eight sails on each mast, and is then able to take in each sail in turn as is required. And I think this is the flexibility that was built into the system which we eventually devised, which we think was used. Question for Goldman: What does the word "Colosseum" mean? It was called the Flavian Amphitheater.
The word "Colosseum" means, as the English etymology would suggest, "very, very large. When the Emperor restored to the people of Rome the land and gave back to them this marvelous gift of the amphitheater, because it stood next to the colossal statue, now with the head of Nero removed and the head of the sun god Apollo put on instead, with rays coming out from the head, the name "colossal" that applied to the statue eventually was applied to the Colosseum.
But it wasn't called that until the writer Bede called it that in the eighth century, A. Before that, it was always called the Flavian Amphitheater. Question for Roberts: I think the idea of the booms is a good one, but could they have had a smaller set of awnings covering the important people?
It was known that people of importance would, in fact, have their own set of canopies set up over their important seats towards the front of the arena. The way it was set up generally would never, in fact, have covered all the arena, and probably the front row except with the sun at various angles all of the time. So those sitting at the front would have had their own canopies; yes, there is evidence for that.
Question for Goldman: The Romans are portrayed as leading lives of excess. Is this accurate? There were some who valued the old virtues of hard work and ethical conduct, but yes, during the Empire there was the same materialism that prevails today—people of a leisure class with too much money and time who required constant entertainment.
The Colosseum provided that kind of entertainment, repulsive as it seems to us today. Question for Goldman: Regarding the mast erected to support the sails, is there any evidence to suggest that they might have been metal-banded for increased strength or height?
There was iron metal. There was not the kind of steel that we have today. The iron would only have increased the weight of it. It might have made them more capable of holding the weight of the rope and the cloth attached to the rope, but I would not be able to answer that with any surety because no masts have been preserved. Question for Goldman: My main concern is once the canvas—what was the weight, i.
How was this avoided? These were sunscreen awnings. They were not intended as protection from the rain. They were retractable. We know that from the poets who tell us that when the days of wind came up, the awnings could not be put out, and we have evidence that there was a captain of the crew of sailors who read the winds from telltale signs—just the way one has little strips of cloth on the sheets, the lines of the ships to tell the wind direction—and the strength of the wind. And when there were windy days, the sails were not put out at all.
So there was no reason to have to deflect water. They were just not out for that purpose. They were sunscreen awnings, not rain screen awnings. The weight has been estimated at 24 tons at 1 pound per square yard of average-weight cloth. Question for Roberts: At the beginning of your program, the architect, Chris, had shown us a drawing of the Colosseum as it might have looked if the Romans had put a concrete roof on it using their system of arches.
Would it be possible to use the same concept, but instead of using concrete maybe the Romans could have constructed an arched wooden structure and then put canvas over that? The wooden structure as such would have been enormous. I don't know if wooden arches of that size you would require to laminate timber of that size, and the laminating would be done by fastening through a number of timbers which were shaped to curve.
It's a colossal job that's being asked, and I think, frankly, that it would never have been attempted because of the practical difficulties in this. Having then put an arch up, you put a canvas cover over that, which again would be an enormous quantity of cloth. It would flap, it would fray, it would really need to have a means of furling it.
I have no idea what system could be used with a permanent wooden framework in place in the shape of an arch. I don't think this is really a line that should be pursued, to be honest. Question for Goldman: Weren't there structures outside the Colosseum to which block and tackle were thought to be used to raise the sail roof from outside the Colosseum? They ring the entire Colosseum, and there has always been controversy over whether these were part of a crowd control mechanism or whether they were involved in the raising of the ropes on which the sails would be extended.
I always thought that because they are gouged so that some kind of windlass or winding device could have been installed on the surface that faces the Colosseum, this argued for them being involved in the mechanism to raise the ropes, and I really still like that argument even though it has been argued that they are not deeply sunk enough to counterbalance the enormous pull that would be required to make them taut.
One of them has been excavated, and it was found that they were not deeply set into the ground. That would argue for them being part of crowd control and not part of raising the awning mechanism, even though I argued for that in my article in "Archaeology" magazine. Question for Roberts: Could a wooden circle with pulley attachments have been raised by ropes from outside the structure through the tops of the masts, lifting the wooden circle from the center floor to the center near the opening, and then sails pulled along these ropes?
Like the spider web theory, the roof would have sloped down and in toward the center. This is making the system more rigid, isn't it? If you could invent a wooden circle perhaps about the same band as the area where the activity was taking place, and suspended that, you might then have been able to work a system of drilling can drawing canopies in and out.
We come back to the problem, that we are dealing here with natural fiber ropes, and the constant weight of a wooden circle, however light you tried to make it, would in fact have been putting a constant tension on these ropes. Natural fiber ropes, hemp, stretch; they continue to stretch; and you have to keep adjusting them, and you're into a constant battle on this one. And frankly, I don't think a system this requires a great deal of ropes is supported like that is really a good way to go around this.
Question for Roberts: Was the sailcloth back then a similar fabric to the type you used in the experiment? Evidence suggests that it came in rectangular pieces which needed joining, which is why the scams on the ancient sails stand out and in some cases have a patch-work appearance. For the experiment cotton was used.
The construction of each awning, due to a misunderstanding by the sailmakers, did not include the typical Roman edge and panel reinforcement specified by me. Both for the strength and for visual effect this was a disappointment. Question for Goldman: How were the Vestal Virgins chosen? Probably the Vestals themselves would have suggested names of novices, but the Pontifax Maximus would have had to make the final decision.
The work of the Vestals was to tend the sacred fire of the hearth, symbolic of the home. They also had to prepare sacred ground grain for sacrificial rituals and to function as models of moral behavior, since they had to remain virgins for their 30 years of service. After that time they could marry, but few did. For breaking their vow of devotion to the order, they could be buried alive. They lived in palatial quarters in the Forum behind the round Temple to Vesta where the sacred fire was kept.
They had their own box at the Colosseum, and witnessed from their ring-side seats these abhorrent "games", along with the rest of the audience. Question for Goldman: How long was the Colosseum in use, and why did people stop using it? The gladiatorial games, which became abhorrent to Christian conscience, disappeared in the year This was the last time there were gladiatorial games, although the staged animal hunts went on for another 50, 60 years.
They really died out from lack of money to keep them going. It was an enormous expense to import animals from Africa. These poor beasts were deadly sick as they were transported across the sea, and then nursed back to health, but deliberately starved before they would go into the amphitheater to fight against each other or against gladiators. Tremendous expense, and the money just gave out.
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