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THE COLOSSEUM

EDWARD HUTTON

LMOST all the beauty which had in the time of our

grandfathers made of the Colosseum the most mysterious and the most astounding ruin in Rome, contriving out of its mere size something monstrous, spellbound, has departed from it, perhaps forever, since it has come within the radius of action, so unfortunately wide, of the improver and the restorer of ruins. With the destruction of those trees that grew along the broken arches, waving "dark in the blue midnight," and with the passing of the flowers, the Flavian Amphitheatre has become almost absurd in its rueful nakedness; a sort of inadequate monstrosity, a mighty heap of patched and ordered débris on the verge of the brickfield of the Forum and the slums of the lower slopes of the Esquiline Hill. Stripped and ashamed, with all its wounds exposed, to say nothing of the horrible patchwork of the archæologists, it is now just a vast and empty shell, that indeed scarcely impresses us, mere size being after all but a poor claim upon our notice. Yet of old it seems to have been the most wonderful thing in the City. Colysaus, stet et Roma," sang the pilgrims. the Colosseum Rome shall stand, when falls the Colosseum Rome shall fall, and when Rome falls-the world. Well,

Quamdiu stet While stands

perhaps it too may serve as a symbol of the City. Its condition, full of modern improvement, neat, and almost orderly in its decay, decked for the tourist, is certainly indicative of the condition of modern Rome. She, too, has prepared herself, patched her streets, destroyed her gardens, emptied her convents for the sake of the tourist and the extraordinary crowd of people from Piedmont who, like another army of Huns, have descended upon her for spoil. The Colosseum is but an indication. Look at any picture of the place as it was even so recently as the Eighteenth Century, in the work of Turner, or Claude, or the careful paintings of Poussin, the prints of Piranesi, and you will realize at once what we have lost, what has been wantonly destroyed by the same gang of vandals who have lately turned the Cappella Rucellai in S. Maria Novella in Florence into a museum, and are now being led by a Jew who doubtless remembers the whips of Titus in destroying the Aurelian Wall. Yet one might think that the Colosseum should have deserved a better fate, from the Romans at least, however we of the north may regard it. For, as Martial is eager to remind us, it was built for their enjoyment after the death of Nero, that that which had been the delight of one man might now serve the pleasure of all. And indeed it fulfilled this purpose throughout the imperial age. Begun by Vespasian in the Gardens of the Golden House, on the site of the lake in which, like Narcissus, the son of Agrippina had adored his own beauty, it was finished by Titus, his son, and is really, like the Pyramids, the work

of the Jews, whose lives here too were "bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick"; for since the whole structure was completed within three years, doubtless "all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour." Who the architect may have been we know not; but his work was finished in the year 50 and the Flavian Amphitheatre, as it was called, opened with a great spectacle.

An amphitheatre, that at Capua as this in Rome, was generally an oval building surrounding an ellipse covered with a floor of planks resting on deep subterranean walls among which the machinery and the cages of the beasts were placed. Within, the walls were lined with seats tier above tier, and without were arcades one above another, the lowest admitting to a corridor which ran round the building and from which a staircase led up to the different rows of seats. Here, in the Colosseum, there were four arcades the first of Doric, the second of Ionic and the third of Corinthian columns, while the fourth was a wall decorated with Corinthian pilasters and pierced with windows. Within, immediately round the arena, a high and massive wall was built, within which were caves and vaults for animals. Above this, and protected by it, was the podium, where the seats of honour were placed for the Emperor and his family, for the Vestal Virgins and the great officers of the State. Above the podium rose, in terrace after terrace, the seats for the Senators, for the magistrates and military knights, and then for the male citizens, while the women sat in the highest part of the building under a