To understand the Colosseum we have to go down. Deep down beneath the arena’s floor, to the underground hypogeum where starving beasts rattled their cages and gladiators anxiously awaited their curtain calls to the most spectacular ancient show on earth. This was the macabre backstage to history’s most gruesome theatre, a must to discover on a Colosseum Underground Tour.
In this complex two-level warren of cells and tunnels hidden from the sight of the 50,000 spectators ringing the arena above, the whole great bloody spectacle was made possible. It was here that thousands of exotic and deadly animals captured from all corners of the globe at unimaginable cost and effort were held in their pens. African lions and elephants, Asian tigers, bears from the Scottish highlands, all driven mad from lack of food and the strange environment roared, growled and bellowed. When their time came to maul criminals to death and be butchered in their turn, they were laboriously winched up to the Colosseum’s floor in elevators operated by massive pulleys. At the top they sprang through trapdoors as if by magic, appearing enraged in great clouds of sand. Turning the capstans below was backbreaking work for the legions of slaves to whom this thankless task fell, 4 men per elevator on both levels.
It was not only the animals who made this fatal journey upwards. The gladiators too trudged sombrely from a nearby barracks through underground tunnels to the feared hypogeum. In the gladiator school, the Ludus Magnus, they had trained only with wooden weapons to ensure they wouldn’t revolt, or kill themselves out of desperation. Here they were given the real things for the first time, razor-sharp swords, vicious spears and tridents, before being hauled up onto the sand. Awaiting their turn in the arena, one can only imagine what went through their minds as they heard the crowd cheer and gasp above at the latest disembowelment, the tortured screams of their maimed colleagues and the howls of the animals fighting desperately for their lives. Another tunnel led outwards, through the arched Porta Libitina. This was the one way out no-one wanted to take: only the dead and dying made their way through here, their corpses dragged out on stretchers to the awaiting spolarium, where their lifeless bodies were stripped of armour, clothing and weapons to be re-used by the latest recruits to the deadly games.
It was stiflingly hot down here, stinking from the sweat of slaves and the excrement of the beasts, and deafeningly loud from the screams, cheers and drumbeats above. The humid walls were smeared with the collected grime of a thousand oil lamps, their flickering light the only illumination of these claustrophobic underground tunnels. On game days it was also packed, a swirling chaos of thousands of bodies – gladiators, trainers, animal handlers, criminals awaiting execution, and above all the countless slaves working in desperate conditions making sure the elaborate organism functioned smoothly.
It’s a cause for horror as well as wonder that such incredible ingenuity could be put to so brutal a purpose. The great engineering minds that brought us aqueducts, concrete and sanitation spent much of their professional lives devising the complex systems and machines that made mass-slaughter on the floor of the arena possible. And all for the entertainment of the populace, fed by the emperors on a sickening diet of gore. The Hypogeum made the games possible, but it was also a hell on earth.
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