- [Steven] I'm with Dr. Bernie Frischer

and we're here to talk about the single-most famous monument

that has come down to us from Ancient Rome, the Colosseum.

- [Bernie] I think that the image

of the Coliseum in its decline,

in its ruin, blurs the awful brutality

of this abattoir, this place of death,

and makes us think about instead the death

of Roman civilization,

and as the Renaissance put it,

the very size of the ruins of Ancient Rome suggest

to us the grandeur of Ancient Rome,

but a grandeur that was always lost

and that left behind in later people

a sense of nostalgia and regret,

and almost sentimentality that, in a certain sense,

when you drill down and you study history,

you can see is really unwarranted because, at least for me,

the Coliseum has always been a horrific place

and not, in the end, my favorite building in ancient Rome.

This area was the center of a vast palace

that Nero built for himself

and where you now see this massive building,

there was an artificial lake that Nero had here.

So this big, heavy building

with a 100,000 blocks of travertine,

imagine the weight of that,

is sitting on what you might think is rather swampy ground.

- [Steven] When the Colosseum was built

by a later Roman emperor,

a Flavian emperor, it was, in a sense,

a gift back to the city.

- [Bernie] Yes, Nero was very unpopular.

He actually committed suicide in 68 AD.

If he hadn't done that,

he would have been brought back to Rome, tried and executed.

So, the very next emperor Vespasian,

the first Flavian emperor,

had the idea of giving this 100 to 250 acres

of prime land, right in the middle of the city,

back to the people of Rome.

And what better way to do that

than to create some public monuments

where the favorite spectacles of Rome could be enjoyed?

The Romans didn't call this the Coliseum.

- [Steven] No, they called it the Flavian Amphitheater.

And it only started to be called the Colosseum

in the middle ages.

- [Bernie] And that was because

there had been a colossal statue next to it.

- [Steven] A statue of the sun god

that the Emperor Hadrian moved right next

to the Coliseum.

It was about 100 feet tall.

So it was really massive.

Now the building is not in great condition,

the result of earthquakes and pillaging, in a sense,

later Romans saw all of the stone that was available

for building in their own houses,

but we can still make out some of the exterior decoration.

And certainly we can see that the Romans are thinking back

to the ancient Greek traditions.

- [Bernie] In fact, they kind of are summing up

the history of Greek architecture

by piling one order or style of architecture on top

of the other.

So at the very top, you have the Corinthian order,

actually the top two stories.

The second story is in the Ionic order

and the lower story might look to you like the Doric order,

but actually it's a Italic variation on that

that we call the Tuscan order.

- [Steven] The way that we would get inside is

to walk through one of these archways.

And we're seeing here one of the great innovations

of Roman architecture.

- [Bernie] The building is made

in the lower three stories of the arches,

for which the Romans are famous

and there's no greater example of that

than here at the Coliseum.

Almost every one of the 80 arches

on the entry level was numbered.

76 of the 80 were numbered.

The four axial entrances,

so the one on the west, the east, the south and the north,

they didn't have numbers.

Those were the main entrances over which

was probably the dedicatory inscription by Vespasian

saying that he had given this to the Roman people as a gift

from the spoils of the Jewish War.

We think the treasure that he found

in the captured temple of the Jews at Jerusalem pay

for this great structure.

- [Steven] All of these other gateways

were a direct entrances

and so your ticket presumably corresponded

to a particular entryway

that would lead you towards your seat.

- [Bernie] The 76 entrances that were numbered

were keyed to a number on the ticket

of the roughly 50,000 spectators who we think

could fit into the Coliseum.

So they knew which doorway to go into,

the majority had to go through a very dark

and low corridor on the second story of the building

on the way to their seats.

And this would've slowed them down.

- [Steven] And we can get a sense

of just how enclosed that space is

if we look at some of the interior barrel-vaulted rings

that surround the Coliseum.

- [Bernie] The Coliseum looks very simple on the outside,

but it has a very complex interior structure

of corridors and stairways

that eventually take you right to the level of your seat.

- [Steven] The cheaper seats are higher up,

away from the action.

- [Bernie] So the emperor, magistrates, and priests sat

in the lowest seats.

Behind them sat the senators,

behind them, the wealthy businessmen above them,

now we're getting pretty high up, the plebeians,

the common folk who didn't have that much money

and at the very top were the foreigners, slaves,

and, yes, the women.

And they sat only on temporary wooden seats.

- [Steven] As opposed to the more finished marble seats

that would've existed below this.

- [Bernie] The marble seats were inscribed

with the names of the categories of people

who were allowed to sit there.

- [Steven] But what did everybody come to see?

- [Bernie] Well, there were three things

that typically went on in the Coliseum

on a typical day when it was open for business, so to speak.

First, there were the animal hunts in the morning.

The Romans imported exotic, fearsome animals

like tigers and lions and elephants and rhinoceroses

from Africa and brought them to Rome

and slaughtered them in these animal hunts

in the Colosseum.

In the afternoon, it was the gladiatorial combats.

But before the gladiatorial combats, whenever appropriate,

you had the execution of prisoners,

sometimes in shockingly colorful and imaginative ways.

And the most remarkable thing

about these executions is precisely

that they took place at midday.

That is, at the lunch hour.

So you can imagine that the Romans were sitting there

enjoying their lunch while watching

these gruesome spectacles,

which even included people being burnt at the stake,

or being tied to the stake

and being mauled to death by animals.

- [Steven] You can see why in the later history

of this building, these earlier events were seen

by the church and by Christian pilgrims

as gruesome expressions of this pagan past.

- [Bernie] And later on,

there was the idea that many Christians suffered martyrdom

here in the Coliseum.

We do hear of a few, but very few Christians,

who were murdered in the Coliseum.

- [Steven] Nevertheless, this space did

become sanctified and became an important pilgrimage site.

- [Bernie] Even we who love Ancient Rome

and Roman civilization have to recognize

that the Coliseum was a kind of an abattoir.

It was a place of death, of slaughter,

whether of animals or people.

And of course not just the people who condemned to death,

but the gladiators themselves often ended up,

when they lost, being killed.

- [Steven] Even more uncomfortable,

I think for us in the 21st century, is the collision between

the idea of death and the idea of the theatrical.

- [Bernie] However, we too clearly love

to view acts of violence,

and we may not be as superior to the Romans

as we sometimes think.

- [Steven] So we're seeing a large flat plane,

but we're seeing areas below, in a sense,

the stage that we would not have seen

when this building was in use.

- [Bernie] We have to think of the Coliseum in a sense,

as a stage.

The word amphitheater means a double theater.

So, the very name of the Colosseum evokes its theatricality

and the arena floor was made up of wood planks.

These wood planks were punctuated every couple

of meters with a trap door

and those trap doors were the caps to elevators

which were operated manually by slaves

and were used to bring animals up to the floor level

for the animal hunts or the scenery and props

for the spectacles that went on here,

including the gladiatorial combats,

which sometimes were staged as, for example,

famous battles in history.

We have on record some incredible spectacles

that occurred here with the coronation of a new emperor.

There were the sacrifice of thousands of animals

in the hunts, of hundreds of gladiators.

These were very expensive spectacles

that occurred on very important occasions

and that required all the power

and resources of the empire to make happen.

- [Steven] So I can imagine myself,

a Roman citizen in the first century sitting here watching

these brutal events unfold,

but I'm also thinking about my physical comfort.

- [Bernie] We know that there was a detachment

of marines who had a camp right across the street

from the Colosseum and they manned the ropes

of this great awning that went right around the top

of the Coliseum.

We call it the velarium,

which just means the great awning.

And those ropes seem to have been supported

by very long planks,

perhaps 60 feet long, up at the top level of the Coliseum

and then they looped around

at the ground level through bollards,

a couple of which still surviving

and you can see when you visit the Colosseum today.

- [Steven] So it makes sense that the wealthiest

and most powerful Romans would be down close

to the action, but that also in a sense, endangers them.

- [Bernie] So the emperor himself had a tunnel

that went from the Caelian Hill,

right to his box in the Coliseum.

Taking his seat at the lowest level did make him subject

to possibly an angry gladiator.

These gladiators were slaves after all.

They had no reason to be particularly happy.

Why couldn't that gladiator take his spear

or his sword and just assassinate the emperor?

Well, he couldn't because netting protected

the spectators in the lowest seats.

As far as the animals go,

they were kept away from the spectators by a ditch

that was dug around the arena

and by stakes that kept them from crossing the ditch

and jumping up into the seats.

- [Steven] It's interesting to think about the way

that our archeological knowledge,

our knowledge of history,

sometimes is at odds with the more romantic notions