INTERIOR OF THE COLOSSEUM ON A FÊTE DAY
The dedication in 80 A. D. was accompanied with games lasting through a hundred days. A Roman “game” involved a contest; and those offered by Titus at the dedication included the baiting and slaughter of savage beasts, fights of gladiators, and a sham naval battle, the arena being flooded for the purpose. It is difficult to understand how a ruler such as Titus, who abhorred bloodshed and would condemn no man to death during his administration, provided the city populace with this bloody, brutalizing sport. But love of popularity has always been a powerful motive among men; and some emperors and patriotic citizens tried to excuse the sport on the foolish supposition that it fostered the military spirit. As a matter of fact, the populace who attended these shows grew more and more unwilling and unfit to defend their country and homes against invading barbarians.
THE BASILICA JULIA
A drawing showing the reconstructed interior of this building, which formerly stood in the Forum.
It was not till some years after Titus that the spectators began to experience a new kind of pleasure in seeing Christians thrown living to the wild beasts of the arena. Many thus perished as witnesses of a better faith and a higher morality. When, however, Christianity triumphed and became the religion of the empire, an effort was instituted, first by Constantine, to stop the degrading shows. But the people were so frantically addicted to them that they were scarcely abated by government edicts till Emperor Honorius succeeded in abolishing gladiatorial fights in 404. Long afterward the hunting of wild beasts continued. The massive structure remained scarcely impaired by time till about the middle of the fourteenth century, when the greater part of the southern half collapsed, probably through an earthquake. The ruin piled up a “mountain of stone,” which for the next five centuries served the Roman nobles as a quarry.
THE GRANDEUR OF THE COLOSSEUM
Some of the most imposing palaces which lend dignity to the modern city have been built with this material. Although fully half the stone has been thus removed, the part of the structure which still remains is the most impressive of all the ruins of the city—a monument of the grandeur and of the moral degradation of Rome. It is an especially rich experience to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, where, seated on a stone at the edge of the arena, we may in imagination, with the aid of the tranquil light, reconstruct the vast interior and repeople it with a Roman multitude breathlessly awaiting the opening of the games or exulting over the triumph of a popular favorite. On certain nights the municipal authorities illuminate the interior with colored lights, whose weird spell awakens the imagination to sights of bloody conflict amid a yelling, savage mob.
THE BASILICA OF TRAJAN