Inside the Colosseum
The majestic ruins of the Amphitheatrum Flavium could inspire dark moods in the minds of 18th and 19th century travelers. Let's take a walk among them with Goethe, Melville, Twain and many others
I always feel a bit awkward when it comes to the Colosseum. The Amphitheatrum Flavium is now a distinctive symbol for Rome and for Italy, but I can’t help thinking that once it was a place of terror and death. Gladiators, slaves, animals and many first Christians died here in such a horrible way… the Colosseum is also a symbol for the brutality of ancient times. This may be a naive way to look at history, but I noticed that many 18th and 19th century travelers could be affected by dark moods while visiting the Colosseum.
It is worth saying that the Colosseum was not then as we see it today. For one thing, it was not in the centre of Rome, in fact it was on the edge of the city. All the Forum area was in a state of abandon and it could be a dangerous place, especially if you visited it by night, as the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg did on 1866 New Year’s Eve:
The impact of the Colosseum is indescribable. The French watchmen who guard all the entrances1 were just in process of using lanterns to inspect all the passages and arches. The reddish light reflecting off the old arches and shining in among the ruins created an eerie contrast to the strange half-darkness produced by the blue-green light of the moon and made the whole scene even more ghostly.
We walked through the triumphal arches of Constantine and Titus toward the Forum. A profound stillness prevailed everywhere. The moon shone so pale and cold, our imagination began to play tricks on us, and we hurried as fast as we could away from this admittedly poetic but scary world where assaults are anything but rare.2
Nearly a century earlier, in 1787, Goethe had taken the same night stroll across the Forum. It was his last night in Rome and it’s the last scene of his Italian Journey3. I drawn this page some months ago for my graphic novel.
Scary, isn’t it? However majestic and impressive, the Colosseum was in total decay. This is how the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley described it in 1818:
The Coliseum is unlike any work of human hands I ever saw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and the arches built of massy stones are piled on one another, and jut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. It has been changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and. the fig-tree, and threaded by little paths, which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries: the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet. The arena is covered with grass, and pierces like the skirts of a natural plain, the chasms of the broken arches around.4
Shelley’s description matches perfectly with this 1823 painting by the German artist Ludwig Van Catel.
Nowadays it’s difficult to see the Colosseum as “an amphitheatre of rocky hills”, yet Herman Melville used the same image as Shelley: the ruins even recalled him of Mount Greylock, in Massachusetts, as he wrote in his journal in 1850.
Coliseum like great hollow among hills. Hopper of Greylock. Slope of concentric ruins overgrown, mountainous.5
Weeds, flowers, animals and insects still inhabited the ruins in 1867, when Mark Twain visited it. This is his description from the book The Innocents Abroad:
An impressive silence broods over the monstrous structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in other days. The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago and the lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the emperor. More vividly than all the written histories the Coliseum tells, the story of Rome’s grandeur and Rome’s decay.6
We usually despise the way the Popes and the Roman people looked after the Colosseum during the Middle Ages. Let’s do a brief recap: the amphitheater was inaugurated in 80 d.C. and it was active for almost four centuries. Later on it was dismissed and assigned to other uses: a cemetery, a small chapel and buildings of various kinds were built in its interior. Stones and marbles were removed and used to build churches and palaces in the city. Famously, stones from the Colosseum were used to build Palazzo Barberini in 1625-1633. Barberini were a powerful family in Rome (Pope Urban VII was one of them) and there is a well-known quote about them: “What barbarians didn’t destroy, the Barberini did”.
But who were the real barbarians? Continuing on his walk in Rome in 1850, Melville visited the Capitoline Museums, where he came across the Dying Gaul, a statue from 220-230 b.C.
He wrote in his journal:
Dying Gladiator. Shows that humanity existed amid the barbarians of the Roman time, as it now among Christian barbarians.
Today we are able to admire the Colosseum for its architectonical value, but probably it wasn’t always the case. Let’s try to imagine a world where everybody is deeply Christian, as Rome must have been in the first centuries of the Middle Ages: for them the Colosseum was probably a symbol of oppression. Plundering it and destroying it maybe wasn’t so crazy for them. Most of all, it was the place where many of the first Christians suffered martyrdom. So it became holy ground. In 19th century paintings we can see a chapel and the Stations of the Cross standing in the arena. Look at this painting by the Danish artist Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg.
18th and 19th century travelers were affected by the horrors they knew took place inside the Colosseum, but they were not as much concerned about slavery in ancient times. In a letter written from Rome in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote:
The ruins are filled with galley slaves at work - They are propping the Coliseum & making deep excavations in the forum.7
I don’t know if these galley slaves were actual slaves or rather convicts. But it seems meaningful to me that forced labor was now used to restore a place where so many slaves had found an horrible death.
Anyway the restoration of the Colosseum went slowly on for most of the 19th century. One of the most difficult tasks was to eradicate the vegetation that had overgrown inside the Colosseum over the centuries. Birds and other animals had found a house there, and this (finally) brings us to the drawings I’m currently working on for my graphic novel.