The Colosseum Read Free Page A

thing’ she shouted defiantly, in what were almost her last words, to her other admirer, and critic, the ineffectual Mr Winterbourne (who was also lurking in the Colosseum, where he had been murmuring – what else? – ‘Byron’s famous lines out of Manfred ’). The moonlit Colosseum proves only slightly less treacherous in Edith Wharton’s brilliantly satirical short story from the 1930s, ‘Roman Fever’, which exposes the shady past of two middleaged American matrons – Mrs Slade and Mrs Ansley – who are spending the afternoon together in a restaurant close to the Colosseum. In little more than a dozen pages, it comes to light that, years earlier, just before their respective marriages, Mrs Slade, suspicious of her fiancé’s interest in the other woman, had tricked Mrs Ansley into spending a perilous evening in the Colosseum. She had caught a nasty chill there, it is true. But, more to the point, as is revealed in the last line, she had also conceived her lovely daughter Barbara in its shadows – by Mr Slade. The Colosseum’s association with death and flirtation is here neatly rolled into one.
    There were, however, other ways of discussing the gloomy or violent side of the monument. The hyperbole of Byron, Dickens and the like in conjuring the romantic image of a place of cruelty, sadness and transgression was hilariously subverted by Mark Twain in his 1860s tale of European travel, Innocents Abroad – a book which in his lifetime sold many more copies than Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn . In some ways Twain was as enthusiastic an admirer of theColosseum as anyone, dubbing it ‘the monarch of all European ruins’ and much enjoying the irony of seeing ‘lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor’. But his best joke was to pretend to have found in Rome a surviving ancient playbill for a gladiatorial show, as well as a review of the proceedings from The Roman Daily Battle-Ax . Both, unsurprisingly, were almost identical in style and tone to their late nineteenth-century Broadway equivalents. Top of the bill was ‘MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN! FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!!’ followed by ‘a GALAXY OF TALENT! such as has not been beheld in Rome before … The performance will commence this evening with a GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT! between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian gladiator … The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant GENERAL SLAUGHTER!’ The spoof review chimed in nicely:
The opening scene last night … was very fine. The elder of the two young gentlemen handled his weapon with a grace that marked the possession of extraordinary talent. His feint of thrusting, followed instantly by a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received with hearty applause. He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded stroke, but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect. However he was killed. His sisters, who were present, expressed considerable regret. His mother left the Coliseum … The general slaughter was rendered with a faithfulness to detail which reflects the highest credit upon the late participants in it .
    It is not hard to see what kind of high emotional writing about the Colosseum and its gladiatorial games Twain had in his sights. Indeed he proudly declared that he was ‘the only free white man of mature age’ who had written about the monument since Byron without quoting that other Byronic catch-phrase on the Colosseum’s victims (this time from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ) – ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday’. It ‘sounds well’, he explained, ‘for the first seventeen or eighteen thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome’. Twain obviously had a point. But changing the rhetoric of response does not make the problem go away. His own humorous modernising, his domestication of the gladiatorial games into modern Broadway