The Colosseum looks smaller in person than in photographs and movies. At least, it did to me. But that in no way negated the power of seeing the real thing in front of me, in broad daylight. Gazing at the impressive structure struck me as no photograph or illustration of it ever could.
The building looks much the way it would have two millennia ago, except that today a portion of the structure is missing, as though some colossal creature took a massive bite out of it.
What countless tragedies and glories played out beneath the silent watch of those stones? I wondered as my eye passed over the building’s weathered blocks. For thousands of poor souls, this sight I’m seeing was among their last. They looked up at those same arches and saw through them the dawning of eternity. They walked this same avenue toward the great amphitheater with hearts thumping, adrenaline pumping, to face glory, misery, and death.
Unthinkable butchery took place in the Colosseum. Though not every gladiator fight ended in death, many did. Executions would also take place there for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty Roman mob. As Jerome Carcopino tells us in “Daily Life in Ancient Rome,” sometimes a pair of doomed men would be introduced to the arena, one armed, one unarmed. After the armed man killed his hapless companion, he would, in turn, be disarmed, and forced to face a newcomer with a weapon. The sequence would continue until all the condemned men were dead. Another favorite form of execution was to set wild animals on unarmed prisoners – men and women alike – to be torn to be pieces. The Romans even forced women into combat against each other, although this was a rarity.
It’s thought that as many as 400,000 people – slaves, gladiators, convicts, prisoners – perished within the walls of the Colosseum over the 350 years that it was used for bloody spectacles. Some were Christian martyrs, though evidence suggests more Christians were killed in the Circus Maximus than the Colosseum.
“In memory of these martyrs a cross now rises in the Colosseum in silent protest against the barbarism which cost so many of them their lives before the spirit of Christianity succeeded in abolishing it,” Carcopino notes.
Walking around the Colosseum, I saw the plaque installed by Pope Benedict XIV in 1750. “The Flavian Amphitheatre, distinguished by triumphs and spectacles, dedicated to the gods of the heathen in unholy reverence, purified of unclean superstition by the blood of martyrs,” it reads in part. It adds that the memorial has been established “lest memory of their courage should lapse.”
Every Good Friday evening, the “Via Crucis,” or “Way of the Cross,” takes place at the Colosseum. In a torchlit procession, the Pope leads this traditional prayer reenacting Jesus’s journey to the cross. In this way, the Christian martyrs of the early centuries are identified with Christ’s own sacrifice, right at this great symbol of Roman oppression. It speaks to the quiet triumph of the cross; the Romans may have killed defenseless Christians, yet Christianity now flourishes here, while the powerful Roman Empire long ago faded into history.
All this passed through my mind as I looked on the exact same sights that so many doomed and desperate men and women looked upon.
What’s my point in all this explanation? Simply this: Seeing a photograph of the Colosseum is not remotely the same experience because the photograph does not give you the visceral connection to the past and those whose feet tread (with trembling) where yours now tread, whose eyes took in the same objects yours do.
History is real. It happened to real people, in real physical places. That is why monuments and ruins matter. Because places like the Colosseum are so famous and so often depicted, they become familiar and routine, losing, from our perspective, something of their substance. They risk becoming abstractions.
But the real student of history must never let the subject of his or her study lose its grounding in reality – in time and space, in the hearts and flesh of human beings who really lived and breathed and suffered and prayed as we do.
What I say here might sound obvious. Of course history is real. Yet it’s often the obvious things we most easily miss. In fact, the word “obvious” derives from the Latin “obvius,” meaning “commonplace.” It also means “in the way,” the type of thing you might stumble over because you don’t notice it. Like an ancient stone.
It is worth “stumbling over” the stones of the Colosseum to be reminded that the great sites and stories of history are not abstractions, nor bedtime tales, nor slogans, nor tourist photo opportunities. They’re substantial realities that involved real life or death stakes for people much like us. And that also means the witness and courage of our forebears was real, too, hammered out in the forge of living experience, the shock of the real tragic situation. The present moment was once their moment. Many of them made a triumph of it. And we can too.
Prior to becoming a writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy. His writing has appeared in over a dozen outlets, including The Hemingway Review, The Epoch Times, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, Hologram and Song of Spheres.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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