Colosseum (AD 70-80): Building Rome's Flavian Amphitheatre

The Colosseum, known in antiquity as the Flavian Amphitheatre, is the great stone arena built in the heart of Rome between about AD 70 and 80. Begun by the emperor Vespasian and inaugurated by his son Titus with 100 days of games, it held tens of thousands of spectators for gladiatorial combats, animal hunts and public executions. It was the largest amphitheatre of the Roman world and remains a symbol of both Roman engineering and Roman spectacle.

Background: a gift to the people of Rome

The Colosseum was a political project. Vespasian came to power after the civil war of the Year of the Four Emperors in AD 69, and he needed to show that the new Flavian dynasty served the Roman people. Before him, Rome had no permanent stone amphitheatre of any size: an earlier stone arena built by Statilius Taurus had burned in the Great Fire of AD 64.

Vespasian chose a striking site. After the fire, Nero had taken a huge area of central Rome for his private palace, the Domus Aurea or “Golden House”, with an artificial lake at its centre (see Domus Aurea). Vespasian drained the lake and placed the amphitheatre on its bed, returning land associated with a hated tyrant to public use. The Roman poet Martial celebrated exactly this change in his short book of poems on the opening spectacles.

The project was funded at least partly by the spoils of war. An inscription on a block found in the building, reconstructed by the epigrapher Géza Alföldy from the holes of its lost bronze letters, appears to record that Vespasian built the amphitheatre from the proceeds of booty. Most historians connect this with the treasure taken after the Siege of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Construction

Work probably began around AD 70–72. Vespasian died in June 79 with the building not quite finished, perhaps with three of its four storeys standing. Titus completed and dedicated it in AD 80, and Domitian added the top level of seating and the underground service area known as the hypogeum.

The amphitheatre is an ellipse about 189 metres long and 156 metres wide, and its outer wall rose to roughly 48 metres. Builders used travertine limestone for the outer walls and main piers, volcanic tuff for inner walls, and brick-faced Roman concrete for vaults and lighter parts. The travertine was quarried near Tivoli, some 30 kilometres away; modern estimates suggest around 100,000 cubic metres were used, held together in places with iron clamps.

Roman engineers set the building on a massive ring-shaped foundation of concrete, several metres deep, laid in the drained lakebed. This helped the structure to survive the soft ground and many earthquakes over the following centuries.

The workforce is not documented in detail. Historians assume it combined skilled professional builders with large numbers of labourers, and it is often suggested that enslaved prisoners from the Jewish war were among them, although direct evidence is limited.

How the building worked

The outer façade has three storeys of arches framed by half-columns in different styles: Tuscan (a simplified Doric) on the ground floor, Ionic on the second and Corinthian on the third. Above them is a solid attic storey decorated with flat Corinthian pilasters and small windows.

Eighty arches at ground level served as entrances. Seventy-six were numbered for the public, and spectators had tickets, probably tokens, indicating their entrance, staircase and section. Corridors and stairways known as vomitoria allowed the crowd to enter and leave quickly.

Seating reflected Roman social order. The emperor and the Vestal Virgins had boxes at the ends of the short axis, senators sat in the front rows, and higher tiers were assigned to other citizens, with women and the poor at the top, partly on wooden benches.

A huge canvas awning, the velarium, could be stretched over much of the seating to provide shade. It was handled by sailors of the imperial fleet, using masts fixed in stone brackets that are still visible near the top of the wall.

Beneath the wooden arena floor, covered with sand, lay the hypogeum: a two-level network of passages, cages and pens. Lifts and trapdoors could raise animals, fighters and scenery into the arena, so that beasts seemed to appear from nowhere.

The inaugural games of AD 80

Titus opened the Colosseum in AD 80 with games that lasted 100 days, according to Suetonius and Cassius Dio. Dio states that 9,000 wild and tame animals were killed during the celebrations, and Suetonius says 5,000 animals died in a single day. Such numbers may be exaggerated, but they reflect the scale of the event.

The programme included hunts, gladiator fights and, according to Dio, displays involving water, possibly including mock naval battles staged in the flooded arena. Whether the Colosseum itself was flooded or such events took place at another venue is still debated.

Use over four centuries

For the next four centuries the Colosseum was the main stage for the gladiatorial games of Rome. A typical day of games might begin with animal hunts (venationes) in the morning, continue with executions of condemned criminals at midday, and end with gladiator fights in the afternoon.

The building was damaged by fire after a lightning strike in AD 217 and repaired over many years. Gladiatorial combat declined in the late fourth and early fifth centuries as Christian emperors withdrew support for it; the last fights are usually dated to the early fifth century. Animal hunts continued for longer, and the last recorded games in the Colosseum took place in AD 523, under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric.

Later history

After antiquity the Colosseum was no longer used for spectacles. Parts were turned into housing, workshops and chapels, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the powerful Frangipani family made it part of a fortress.

Major earthquakes, particularly in 1349, caused the southern section of the outer wall to collapse. For centuries afterwards the ruins served as a quarry. Travertine was carted away for new buildings, and the iron clamps were dug out of the walls, leaving the many small holes still visible on the surface today.

Attitudes changed in the eighteenth century. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV declared the arena a sacred site in memory of Christian martyrs and had Stations of the Cross installed. In the early nineteenth century the architects Raffaele Stern and Giuseppe Valadier built large brick buttresses to stabilise the ends of the surviving outer ring.

Archaeological excavation of the hypogeum began in the nineteenth century and continued in the twentieth. Today the Colosseum is part of the Historic Centre of Rome UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 1980, and is one of the most visited monuments in the world. In 1964 Pope Paul VI revived the custom of leading the Good Friday Way of the Cross there, a tradition his successors have continued.

Myths and facts

• “Thumbs down meant death.” Ancient texts mention the crowd turning or pressing thumbs, but what gesture meant what is unclear. The modern image comes largely from a nineteenth-century painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.
• “Gladiators greeted the emperor with ‘We who are about to die salute you’.” Suetonius records a version of this greeting only once, at a mock naval battle on the Fucine Lake under Claudius in AD 52, decades before the Colosseum existed.
• “Thousands of Christians were thrown to the lions here.” Christians were executed in Roman arenas, but no reliable source places such martyrdoms in the Colosseum itself.
• “The name comes from its colossal size.” The name most likely derives from the nearby Colossus, a giant statue first made for Nero and later altered.

By the numbers

Timeline

• AD 64: the Great Fire of Rome; Nero later builds the Domus Aurea with its lake.
• c. AD 70–72: Vespasian begins the amphitheatre on the site of Nero’s lake.
• AD 79, June: Vespasian dies; Titus becomes emperor.
• AD 80: Titus inaugurates the Colosseum with 100 days of games.
• AD 81–96: Domitian completes the upper storey and the hypogeum.
• AD 217: fire caused by lightning damages the building.
• AD 523: the last recorded animal hunts are held.
• 1349: an earthquake brings down much of the southern outer wall.
• 1749: Pope Benedict XIV dedicates the Colosseum to the Christian martyrs.
• 1980: listed as part of the Historic Centre of Rome World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Colosseum shows how Roman emperors used architecture and entertainment to win public loyalty. Its engineering, from crowd circulation to the hidden machinery under the arena, influenced stadium design for centuries. It also stands as a reminder of the violence that ancient Romans watched for pleasure, which makes it one of the most powerful historical sites in Europe.