There were 36 trapdoors in the floor of the Colosseum. Cage elevators allowed workers behind the scenes to lift wild animals up to the arena without them escaping. Wild beast fights usually took place just before fights between gladiators.
Construction was finished under his two sons, Emperors Titus and Domitian. The actual building was done largely by Jewish slaves, overseen by Roman engineers and craftsmen. They were transported back to Rome and it is estimated that 60, to , were employed in the construction of the Colosseum. Construction of the Colosseum was completed in the year 80 AD, making the building 1, years old. After the great fire of 64 AD, in which a substantial portion of the city burned, Emperor Nero ordered the construction of a magnificent palace for himself in the area that had been devastated.
The palace was the Domus Aurea which today is being excavated and can be visited. The Colosseum was to become a grand amphitheater where all Roman citizens could seek entertainment. The Colosseum was originally known as the Flavian Amphitheater, because it was built by Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, successors to Nero of the Flavian dynasty. This statue was itself modeled on the Colossus of Rhodes. The Colosseum is oval shaped.
It is meters long, meters wide, and 48,5 meters tall. At the end of the day, the emperor would distribute the meat from the dead animals to the public according to precise rules, says Rea. The emperor himself would always get the elephant tusks, the senators and officials the choice meats, and the leftovers were left for the plebes. Much as in a modern baseball stadium, there were merchants selling food and drink, and archeologists have even found small cooking stoves that must have been used to prepare meals, says Rea.
Also being opened to visitors this summer is a section of the third tier of the amphitheater, the highest section still standing.
It offers a different perspective on the cavea, or pit of the arena, as well as spectacular views over the Palatine and the Forum all the way down to Piazza Venezia, where, with construction materials quarried for the Colosseum, the Palazzo Venezia was built in the 15th century.
This is where the middle class sat, says Rea, with the emperors and senators in the best ground-level seats and the plebeians in the peanut gallery on top. On the way to the third level visitors will be able to admire the only original vaulted passageway leading to the seats that is still standing. In June the Italian government named a special commissioner and provided him with emergency funds for urgent repair to the ancient monuments in Rome , many of which are in a sorry state of conservation.
After the last gladiatorial spectacles were held in the sixth century, Romans quarried stones from the Colosseum, which slowly succumbed to earthquakes and gravity. Down through the centuries, people filled the hypogeum with dirt and rubble, planted vegetable gardens, stored hay and dumped animal dung.
In the amphitheater above, the enormous vaulted passages sheltered cobblers, blacksmiths, priests, glue-makers and money-changers, not to mention a fortress of the Frangipane, 12th-century warlords.
Necromancers went there at night to summon demons. In the late 16th century, Pope Sixtus V, the builder of Renaissance Rome, tried to transform the Colosseum into a wool factory, with workshops on the arena floor and living quarters in the upper stories.
But owing to the tremendous cost, the project was abandoned after he died in In the years that followed, the Colosseum became a popular destination for botanists due to the variety of plant life that had taken root among the ruins.
As early as , naturalists began compiling detailed catalogs of the flora, listing different species. In and , archaeological excavations attempting to reach it were stymied by flooding groundwater. Beste and his colleagues spent four years using measuring tapes, plumb lines, spirit levels and generous quantities of paper and pencils to produce technical drawings of the entire hypogeum.
Gradually, as you work, the image of how things were takes shape in your subconscious. Colosseum architects made some changes to allow new methods of stagecraft. Other changes were accidental; a fire sparked by lightning in A. Beste also began to decipher the odd marks and incisions in the masonry, having had a solid grounding in Roman mechanical engineering from excavations in southern Italy, where he learned about catapults and other Roman war machines.
He also studied the cranes that the Romans used to move large objects, such as foot-tall marble blocks. Paired vertical channels that he found in certain walls, for example, seemed likely to be tracks for guiding cages or other compartments between the hypogeum and the arena.
Then other archaeological elements fell into place, such as the holes in the floor, some with smooth bronze collars, for the capstan shafts, and the diagonal indentations for ramps. There were also square mortises that had held horizontal beams, which supported both the capstans and the flooring between the upper and lower stories of the hypogeum.
To test his ideas, Beste built three scale models.
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