Swords, sandals and spectacle

The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (Profile Books, Pounds 15.99)

THROUGHOUT classical times, the Colosseum served as an icon of imperial might and state-sanctioned cruelty. Its stark, concentric arches suggest a modern industrial design, not a blood-soaked amphitheatre. Yet an estimated 8,000 gladiators were killed there each year for public entertainment.

Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, eminent classical historians, have written a superb new cultural history of the Colosseum. As well as documenting the variety of flowers that once grew wild among the ruins, they offer pithy and occasionally hilarious accounts of the three million tourists who descend on the monument each year.

Many of them are excited by stories of the bloody gladiators' circus, but find only a confusing mass of masonry.

Italian youths dressed as Roman centurions, meanwhile, hustle them for cash. In between shifts, these Felliniesque wideboys can be seen phoning their girlfriends or smoking cigarettes in the adjacent Metro station coffee bar, their plumed helmets resting on the counter.

The Amphitheatre (Colosseum is the mediaeval designation, that has stuck) was commissioned by emperor Vespasian and dedicated in AD 80 by his son Titus. Entrance was free, and free lunches (or "the ancient equivalent of a cheeseburger and Coke") were offered to the plebians seated in tiers above the senators and other bluebloods.

Gladiators were generally despised by Romans as social degenerates, recruited as they were from the criminal and slave classes. According to this scrupulously researched study, however, patrician Roman women often showed a "fondness for rough gladiatorial trade". Gladiators threatened to upstage the prowess of the emperor himself as he sat immobile in the imperial box, and this was part of the sexual danger of the contest.

Contrary to popular myth, there are no records of Christians being put to death in the Colosseum. Neither is there any evidence that gladiators greeted the emperor with the words: "Hail Caesar.

Those about to die salute you!"

The Colosseum was not simply a gladiatorial arena, but a political theatre, where imperial power was displayed and imposed on the populace.

Rhinoceroses and other exotica captured in sub-Saharan territories were pitted against marksmen as part of gory extravaganzas. The more sanguinary these entertainments, the more popular the emperor could hope to be.

Packs of ravening dogs devoured criminals while lions and other heavy beasts were winched up to the arena by means of counterweights and pulleys (rope burns are still visible in the stone edges of some of the lift wells).

The Colosseum could hold up to 50,000 spectators, and covered an area of six acres. It has become the monarch of all ruins - the greatest arena in the world.

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