Colosseum, the new BBC series on the ancient amphitheatre, really should have an exclamation mark after it. It’s just so – exclamationy! A rollicking journey through 300 years of Roman history, via the construction of the enormous monument and the bloody games within, it could not be a more appealing introduction to the subject.
Ideally, you will be new not just to the Romans, but also to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator aesthetic of the Roman empire that has dominated since Russell “Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the north, general of the Felix legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife” Crowe stepped forward and asked if we were not entertained.
Hopefully, too, you will not flinch at, but instead embrace with wide-eyed innocence, actors recreating pivotal tableaux when every penny has gone on CGI recreations of the architecture and not on the scripts. There are many enthusiastic talking heads – mostly from the US, which one suspects is the intended market for this prestigious primer. However, we are fielding Prof Bettany Hughes and Simon Sebag Montefiore on the home team. Stiffen the sinews and take your tablets and you can still enjoy the eight-episode round.
We start in AD80 with – but of course! – the gladiators. The eight years of building work are complete and Rome’s new emperor, Titus, who has inherited the throne from his father, Vespasian (inaugurator of the Flavian dynasty), but still counts as an upstart and needs to secure his popular and political position as soon as possible, is about to open the venue for 100 days of sanguinary games. From mortal combat to executions of criminals in brutally innovative ways and animal hunts (venationes, coming to you in detail in episode three), the wobbly second rung of the Flavian dynasty was keen to see you got your lead token’s worth. And so is BBC Four, which follows the template laid down by the Starz network’s series Spartacus: Blood and Sand. If arterial spray is not your thing, please avert your eyes whenever someone starts swinging his gladius.
Central to the grand opening of the Colosseum was the fight, recorded by the poet Martial, between the gladiators Verus and Priscus. According to the re-enactment casting, at least, Priscus was a lad who had been swept up in a raid and enslaved during a gap year in Germania. Titus had promised the heaving, volatile crowd an opening fight to the death, but Verus and Priscus were so well matched that each fought to exhaustion and surrendered, leaving the crowd agape and Titus in something of a cleft stick. I hope everyone who has seen the programme enjoys what an excellent, excellent joke I’ve just made. I will give you a moment to marvel at it. Thank you.
The second episode concentrates on the building of the Colosseum – a subject that, perhaps more than any other, could have been, and hopefully will be, the focus of a series of its own. The scale of it, with only manual labour available, is mindboggling: 220,000 tonnes of dirt dug out for nine-metre-deep foundations; 99,000 cubic metres of travertine stone removed and transported from nine miles away; 300 tonnes of iron clamps; 1m bricks. All to the glory of Rome (the Flavians, more specifically).
In AD81, the tyrannical Domitian became emperor after his brother died – of absolutely and completely natural causes, as emperors with tyrannical brothers waiting in the wings always did, so don’t look at me like that. He immediately ordered the master builder Haterius to build a hypogeum (a network of tunnels) and lifts beneath the amphitheatre to enable warriors, animals and scenery to emerge from the ground and blow the common people’s tiny minds. He gave him 18 months to do it. The year AD81 was the first and last time anyone felt sorry for a builder.
Although the episodes feel remarkably effortless, they manage to impart the darnedest amount of information. The series comprises instalments about a female gladiator, a beast master, the martyred bishop Ignatius of Antioch, the gladiators’ doctor Galen (yes, that Galen) and the Colosseum’s final games, as the empire began to decline. By the time you reach the end of it, you will have learned a lot (if young) or remembered a surprising amount of what you had forgotten (if not) about the politics and sociology of the time, the advent of Christianity, the state of ancient medicine and the tentacular reach of Rome, plus its brutalities, its civilities and its influence over just about every field of human endeavour.
Maximus Decimus Meridius, I was entertained. And more than a little educated, too.
• Colosseum aired on BBC Four and is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and is available on SBS On Demand in Australia
