Stand in Rome today, just east of the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum rises as a battered ellipse of travertine and brick. Its north side still holds, but the rest is broken open by earthquakes and by stone robbers who carried off its marble. Even ruined, it is the largest standing amphitheatre in the world, and on Good Friday the Pope still begins a torchlit Way of the Cross in the area around it.

It began with a political act. After the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, Nero seized the valley between the Caelian, Esquiline and Palatine Hills for his Domus Aurea, complete with an artificial lake and the giant bronze Colossus of Nero. Vespasian, emperor from 69 to 79, filled in that lake and ordered a new amphitheatre on the site in about 70 to 72 AD, funded from the spoils of the Jewish Temple after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70. It was a gift of the Flavian dynasty to the people of Rome.

The work moved quickly. Vespasian died in 79 with the third storey finished, Titus completed the top level in 80, and the inaugural games followed in 80 or 81. Dio Cassius says more than 9,000 wild animals were killed in those opening spectacles. Domitian, Titus’s younger brother, then added the hypogeum, the underground tunnels and cages, and a higher gallery for more seats. The building could hold about 50,000 to 80,000 spectators, and its 80 entrances and numbered tickets let the crowd pour in and out within minutes.

What happened there was Roman power made visible. Gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, public executions, dramas from Roman mythology, and even brief mock sea battles filled the arena. Trajan is said to have staged contests in 107 with 11,000 animals and 10,000 gladiators over 123 days. The seating told its own story too: the Emperor and the Vestal Virgins had special boxes, senators sat on the podium, knights above them, and by Domitian’s time poor citizens, slaves and women were pushed to the top gallery.

By the early medieval era, the purpose had changed. Gladiatorial fights were banned by Honorius in 399 and 404, and the arena was later used for housing, workshops, a cemetery, a fortress for the Frangipani family, and even a quarry. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV declared it sacred to Christian martyrs and forbade quarrying, while restoration work in the 19th and 20th centuries stabilised the walls and exposed the hypogeum. Today visitors look through the arches and down into those underground passages, where the machinery of spectacle still lies open beneath the sky.

Its story ends, for now, in endurance. The Colosseum was listed as one of the New 7 Wonders of the World, receives millions of visitors each year, and in November 2012 it was lit in gold after Connecticut abolished capital punishment. What remains of the arena is not the place where Rome came to play, but the place where Rome still comes to remember.

The Eternal Arena