The Colosseum Read Free

Colosseum, until it was aggressively weeded and tidied up in 1871, was the vast range of flowerspecies that had colonised its nooks and crannies – well over 400 different types, according to the most systematic study (illustration 30, p. 179 ). Why on earth, wondered the Handbook in 1843, was not more done with these? ‘With such materials for a hortus siccus [a collection of dried flowers], it is surprising that the Romans do not make complete collections for sale, on the plan of the Swiss herbaria; we cannot imagine any memorial of the Coliseum which would be more acceptable to the traveller.’
    But all these were side-issues compared with the central problem that faced any visitor who knew something of the history of the building. How could one reconcile the magnificence of the structure, the scale and impact of what remained, with its original function and the memories of bloody gladiatorial combat and Christian martyrdom that had taken place in its arena? The Handbook skirted the problem briefly but awkwardly – and without even pointing explicitly to the human carnage that had been wreaked in the Colosseum: ‘The gladiatorial spectacles of which it was the scene for nearly 400 years are matters of history, and it is not necessary to dwell upon them further than to state that at the dedication of the building by Titus, 5000 wild beasts were slain in the arena, and the games in honour of the event lasted for nearly 100 days.’
    Many others in the nineteenth century, however, visitors and writers alike, did feel a need to dwell on what had happened there and to debate the effect it must have on their appreciation of the monument. It is a theme that underlies Byron’s verses quoted earlier (how come that this monument of cruelty survives when the imperial palace has left such paltry traces?) and it was harped on too by Charles Dickenswhen he visited Italy in the 1840s (‘Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum … have moved one heart as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin!). But the debate is perhaps most sharply dramatised in Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne , when the exotic poetess who is the heroine of the book takes her Scottish admirer Lord Oswald Nelvil on a guided tour of the sights of Rome. The highlight of the day was the Colosseum, ‘the most beautiful ruin in Rome’, Corinne enthused. But Oswald (who was, frankly, rather a prig) ‘did not allow himself to share Corinne’s admiration. As he looked at the four galleries, the four structures, rising one above the other, at the mixture of pomp and decay which simultaneously arouses respect and pity, he could only see the masters’ luxury and the slaves’ blood.’ Despite her spirited defence of her position, Corinne signally failed to convince him that it was possible to appreciate the magnificence of the architecture separately from any disgust for the immoral purpose it had once served. ‘He was looking for a moral feeling everywhere and all the magic of the arts could never satisfy him’; nor in the end could the magic of Corinne.
    In fact, the Colosseum repeatedly appears in nineteenth-century literature as a site of tragedy and an emblem of death, both ancient and modern. For memories of the slaughter of gladiators went hand in hand with the belief that the damp and chill evening air of the monument – romantic moonlit vista though it may have been – was a particularly virulent carrier of the potentially fatal malarial ‘Roman fever’. (This notorious danger of the Roman air is discussed in detail by the Handbook , in a section – significantly – placed directly after the description of the Protestant cemetery.) Itwas Roman fever that carried off Henry James’ Daisy Miller after she had flouted social convention to spend the evening in the Colosseum alone with her Italian admirer, Signor Giovanelli. ‘Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight … That’s one good