The Colosseum

The lilting of flutes . . . the rustling of tambourines . . . the sound of a million branches . . . swaying in the wind . . . .

By the third century A.D., two hundred thousand of Rome’s million inhabitants were on welfare. This class was the Mob, a dangerous and powerful animal whose sensibility extended well beyond the fifth of the city’s population it composed, effecting the freedmen, bondsmen, slaves and servants, and a great part of the upper classes as well. Depression, loneliness, and the meaninglessness of their existence had caught up with them in the high-rise apartment anonymity of living in a city of a million people. The economic tangle of cheap foreign labor had rendered them unemployed, and on welfare for the last six generations. Their inherited lack of self-worth was medicated by cheap sensual thrills, and their subconscious feeling of insecurity toward the System – a feeling of precariousness coupled with the gnawing realization of their inability to do anything about it – had translated itself into their collective desire to see other people get debased and hurt.

In a huge square half a mile from the Forum stood the Flavian Amphitheatre, its weathered white travertine jagged with sunlight and shadow. Statues of gods, heroes and athletes lined its second and third-story arcades, and its attic story was staged with bronze ornamental shields. On any given day, throngs of people packed its entrances and spilled out into the surrounding square, where the colossal bronze statue of Helios stood one hundred and twenty feet into the cerulean blue, seagulls cruising playfully about its head. But what would they really have come to watch? By 200 A.D., it would have been much more than merely gladiators in loincloths. With the ‘Games’ the only emotional outlet for the people, their thirst for sadistic novelties had mounted through the years to the extent that what had once been real exhibitions of courage and skill staged to inspire the manly virtue necessary to a budding civilization which had to fight to survive and propagate itself, had become excuses for cruelty and perversion exhibited to appease the morally exhausted mob.

Armies of five thousand men fought. Criminals were crucified around the perimeter wall, doused in pitch and lit on fire to provide lighting for the games to go on after dark. The arena could be flooded, and girls were thrown to crocodiles and hippos or dragged around naked by bulls. In one day, a thousand stags, a thousand ostriches, a hundred tigers and three hundred bears were slaughtered, not to mention the human loss. Roman civilization was turning inward upon itself. Feats of strength and skill no longer pleased. Death and sex were the only emotions the Mob could grasp anymore.

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