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Transcript
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Everybody knows the Colosseum. And everyone
knows that this part of the Colosseum…looks
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a lot better than this part. So what happened?
How and why did half of the greatest Roman
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amphitheater vanish? Sounds like a job for…
Questions about Ancient Greece and Rome
0:19
(you were afraid to ask in school). As
usual, I’m Dr. Garrett Ryan. And today,
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I’ll be talking about the history of the
Colosseum during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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For almost 500 years, the Colosseum was
the Roman Empire’s most impressive arena.
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Emperor and emperor sponsored spectacles
to astonish and delight the Roman people.
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Exotic animals from the farthest reaches
of world were hunted with gilded spears.
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0:46
Criminals were devoured by bears
in elaborate mythological charades.
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The Empire’s greatest gladiators dueled
on bloodstained sands. And so on.
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Over its half-millennium of use, the Colosseum
underwent a long series of renovations.
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The most important took place in the early
third century, when a fire destroyed the
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entire upper deck of seating. It took the
emperors five years to restore the building,
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and signs of hasty repairs are still visible all
along the north wall. Later, over the course of
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the fifth century, a series of earthquakes caused
serious damage that was never fully repaired.
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The spectacles held in the Colosseum
also changed over the centuries.
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The most impressive spectacles, unsurprisingly,
were held during the Empire’s salad days.
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To celebrate his victory in Dacia, for example,
Trajan celebrated a whopping 123 days of games,
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in the course of which 5,000 pairs of gladiators
fought and 11,000 animals were killed.
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From the early mid-third century onward,
the quality of the games started to slip.
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The later Roman emperors were poorer and
more distracted than their predecessors,
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and tended to spend most of their time
and money far from the city of Rome.
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It also didn’t help that most
of the more exciting animals
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had been hunted to the point of scarcity, and
that the price of gladiators was always rising.
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Eventually, the gladiatorial combats stopped
altogether. According to a later legend,
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a monk leapt down to the arena, and tried to
stop a gladiator from killing his opponent.
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The enraged spectators then stoned the
monk to death. Upon learning of this,
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the emperors ended the combats. Or so the
legend goes. Reality was probably less dramatic.
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Although Christian disapproval was
one cause of the decline in combats,
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the fact that the emperors were no longer paying
for them seems to have been equally important.
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Whatever the reason, the last gladiators fought in
the Colosseum sometime in the early fifth century.
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The beast hunts, however, continued.
They lasted longer, in fact,
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than the Western Roman Empire itself. The last
hunts were sponsored by the barbarian kings
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who succeeded the emperors. These kings, however,
had little interest in the games, not least
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because it was difficult to justify staging
them for Rome’s steadily shrinking population.
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The final recorded hunts in the
Colosseum were held in the year 523.
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Within a few centuries, all understanding
of the Colosseum’s function was lost.
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Some claimed it had been a temple of the Sun, and
had originally been crowned by a vast golden dome.
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Others thought that it had been a
temple dedicated to all the gods,
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and that a gigantic statue of Jupiter
had originally stood in the Arena.
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The strangest legends revolved around the Roman
poet Virgil, whom medieval legend transformed
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into a great magician. Virgil, it was said, had
built the Colosseum with the help of his demons,
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and used it as a theater for necromancy.
Part of the confusion derived from the fact
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that the Colosseum was already half-ruined
at the beginning of the Middle Ages,
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and steadily fell apart over the course of
the next millennium. Earthquakes were the
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main natural cause. Like any tall masonry
structure, the Colosseum was susceptible to
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seismic damage. And thanks to a quirk of geology,
part of the building was especially vulnerable.
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The Colosseum’s massive concrete foundations
only go down to bedrock on the north side
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of the building. On the south side, the foundation
rests on waterlogged sediment. This unstable
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subsoil amplified seismic shocks, and gradually
brought about the collapse of half the building.
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The Colosseum’s greatest enemies,
however, were the Romans themselves.
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The building’s walls were built of
a fine limestone called travertine,
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and its seats were made of marble. Both
stones were attractive to medieval builders.
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Marble and travertine were not
only easy and attractive to re-use;
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they could also both be burnt in
kilns to make lime for mortar.
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Pillaging of the Colosseum’s stone began even
before the final games were staged in the arena,
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and continued on a massive scale
for more than a thousand years.
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The Colosseum wasn’t just a quarry. For much of
the Middle Ages, hundreds of people lived in the
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ruinous vaults and passageways. There were houses
complete with courtyards and little gardens.
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There were shops with wooden awnings
and storage lofts. There were stables,
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there were churches, and at one point there
was even a full-blown fortified palace.
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Remarkably, many of the Medieval
Colosseum’s inhabitants were lime-burners,
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who spent their days tearing apart the
building in which they were squatting.
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Thanks largely to their efforts, the Colosseum
became an increasingly inhospitable place to live.
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Finally, in 1349, an earthquake brought down the
entire south half of the Colosseum’s circuit wall,
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forming a colossal pile of rubble. Over
the next four centuries, this heap,
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colloquially called the Colosseum’s Thigh,
built half the churches of Renaissance Rome.
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In 1452, a single busy contractor carried
off more than 2,500 cartloads of stone
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After all these centuries of earthquakes and
pillaging, it might seem surprising that anything
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is left of the Colosseum. The reason so much
remains, remarkably, is that part of the building
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was protected. As mentioned earlier, the north
side of the Colosseum was always less susceptible
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to earthquake damage. It was kept from being
pulled apart by scavengers, however, by the popes.
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The north side of the Colosseum happened to face
the processional route connecting the Lateran
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Palace with the Vatican. The popes seems to have
deliberately preserved this part of the Colosseum
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as a monumental backdrop for their parades.
Not that every pope agreed; as late as the
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sixteenth century, Pius V proposed demolishing the
arena’s remains. But most pontiffs, fortunately,
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insisted on preserving this fragment
of Rome’s greatest ancient building.
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So, there you have it: we have half a Colosseum
because earthquakes and the popes spared it.
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If you’d like to learn more about the Colosseum,
I now offer virtual guided tours exploring the
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building and the Roman games. You can
visit toldinstone.com to learn more.
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In the meantime, as always, thanks for watching.
— end of transcript —
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