In the name of the one true god.
What is he doing?
Stop him!
The colosseum is the roman empire
Distilled to its most basic essence.
It is a symbol of conquest.
It is a symbol of dominance.
It's a symbol of imperial power
Radiating throughout the roman world.
Now.
Any emperor had the colosseum at his disposal
To use as a tool to reassert his power and authority.
The message to the roman people
Is that life is a combat.
It was also a judicial warning.
Do not test the power of rome.
It was a death penalty offense.
If you live by the sword...
You die by the sword.
It demonstrates the power of the colosseum.
It made slaves into heroes
Upending the power structure of rome.
The colosseum would come to symbolize
The rise and fall of rome.
It's all there,
The blood, the glory, the magnificence,
And the flaws that made rome
The greatest empire that europe has ever seen.
401 a.D.
It's now more than 300 years since the inaugural games
Were held at the colosseum.
Both rome and the arena have changed.
At this point, the colosseum would have been
A somewhat sad reminder
Of a more glorious earlier age.
In a way, this is a reflection of what was happening
In rome's empire itself.
This is now a new era of roman history.
Rome is no longer what it was.
Rome is in decline.
The empire was beset on all sides
By barbarian invaders who sensed rome's weakness.
There were saxons in the north.
There were goths along the danube frontier,
Franks along the rhine, persians in the east.
Rome was under threat.
The once invincible roman army
Struggles to hold back the tide
Of enemies on multiple fronts.
In 395 a.D., the empire itself is split into halves,
Neither centered in rome.
It was simply too big for any one person to handle.
So each half of the roman empire is ruled
By one of the sons of theodosius,
The last man to rule a united roman empire.
The 16-year-old arcadius rules from constantinople
In the east, and the 15-year-old honorius
Rules from milan in the west.
They are very young.
They're very inexperienced.
And they're clearly not up to the job.
Neither of them ever visits rome.
This means that the city that is the
Ideological and spiritual heart of the empire
Is something of a backwater.
But one man wants to revive rome
By holding the most lavish games seen in the colosseum
For many years.
His name is symmachus.
This is all for you.
You're amazing, father.
This is a man who was highly literate,
Who produced a lot of writing over his lifetime,
And so we have a good record of who he was.
Through the letters that have survived,
Which have been collated by his son memmius,
Who was devoted to his father,
We get a real window into the life of this man
Who was desperately trying to preserve ancient rome.
Symmachus is a leader of the senate.
And in the absence of the emperor in rome,
He's one of the most powerful people in the city.
Symmachus in many ways is a throwback,
Someone who is bound by tradition.
He wants to maintain the old order
And the reverence for the old gods.
But there's a new god on the rise.
By the end of the 4th century c.E.,
We think possibly as many as 50% of the population
Had become christian.
Even both roman emperors are now christian.
For symmachus and his supporters,
Hosting games in the arena provides
The perfect opportunity to push back
At this new religion.
Symmachus and people like him
Would have seen the colosseum
And the games within them as absolutely essential
To roman life, to the greatness of rome as a city.
For symmachus, religion was transaction.
So when you refuse to hold games that honored the gods
And bad things happened to the roman empire,
It was easy for traditionalists like symmachus to say,
"if we want rome to be successful again,
Then we need to return to these old ways."
But curbing the influence of christianity gets harder
As many powerful roman senators convert.
Christians were not only occupying the throne,
But an increasing number of high-level aristocrats,
Including roman senators,
Were being drawn in its train.
And soon symmachus will face a threat
From a far more unpredictable christian power.
We must accept the world as it is, olybrius.
Then take your own advice.
Act like a good christian.
Say you're one of us.
Nobody cares if you actually believe it or not.
I know you have high hopes for your son,
But what chance does he have with christians
On the imperial throne and packing the senate?
What you believe in your heart is your business.
So I should follow your example?
It's the best solution for everybody.
The number of christians is growing,
And the number of people who are able to kind of hold out
Are shrinking daily.
However, he resists that, because he seems to be
Genuinely committed to the gods of the past.
The commitment becomes more dangerous as christians grow
More stridently anti-pagan.
We moved from a situation
In which the christians had been persecuted
Towards a situation in which
The christian emperors moved with greater
And greater certainty and strength against paganism.
Under the emperor theodosius
There's a whole set of anti-pagan legislation
Soon christian fanatics go to destructive extremes.
Pagan monuments,
Which were now regarded as idolatrous.
Statues, for example, of gods,
Or men who were regarded as gods,
Were being taken down, were being disfigured,
Were being dismantled.
The city of rome is filled with statues.
They decorate the entire front of the colosseum.
And to christians these statues present a huge affront,
Because they violate two of the commandments,
Thou shalt make no graven images,
And thou shalt have no gods aside from me.
The destruction of those statues was a way
Of remaking the landscape of the city itself
To reflect their beliefs.
The colosseum, as much as we think of it
As a space for entertainment, was also to some extent
A religious space.
For the christians I think this is
A very high-stakes battle.
They're acting like fanatics at this point.
They're really extremists,
And they get sort of this mania
For tearing down statues.
Don't! Don't! Stop!
Stop!
For somebody like symmachus, watching a christian mob
Destroy a statue,
That was a tremendous affront,
And it was deeply offensive to this traditionalist worldview.
As tensions continue to rise,
Symmachus can no longer sit idly by.
No!
Symmachus fights to protect rome's pagan monuments
From fanatical christians.
No!
Back! Go on! Get back!
These christians were coming from the lower social classes,
And they're thinking that finally
They have their moment.
It would have been horrifying for figures
Such as symmachus to see this,
Because he had seen, in fact,
The roman state religion as the guarantor
Of rome's security and safety.
But more than statues are at risk.
The colosseum sits empty and unused
For about 90% of the year.
It's a shell of what it had been.
What are we doing in this old place?
- We should leave. - This old place
Was once the beating heart of rome.
If we are to restore the city we love,
It has to be here.
In 399 a.D. He finds the perfect opportunity.
Symmachus' son memmius is appointed
To the praetorship, a highly prestigious post
Within the city of rome.
Holding celebratory games at the colosseum
Is now a privilege held by rome's senators,
But few are rich enough to afford them.
Symmachus is an incredibly wealthy person,
Wealthy in a way that's difficult
For us to understand.
He owns agricultural estates in sicily and north africa.
He owns villas in Italy around the bay of naples.
Symmachus' estimated annual income
Was 288,000 gold solidi.
That's about 1.5 tons of gold per year.
But this is his chance.
No expense will be spared here to celebrate
His son and his heir.
Symmachus has a year to get everything ready
For the games, but he faces obstacles
Unlike anyone before him.
He needs to get three things in place,
The venue, the human performers,
And the wild beasts necessary to make this a success.
But unlike the heyday of the colosseum,
He'll find each of these increasingly more difficult
To come by.
We are talking about a huge logistical undertaking.
The infrastructure that supported the games
In centuries past has mostly crumbled
By the time symmachus is trying to put his games on.
We're talking about much greater difficulty
In acquiring the kinds of entertainments
That are going to keep the people of rome
On the edges of their seats.
Those are much harder to get in 400 a.D.
Than they were at commodus' time two centuries earlier.
Even more challenging, in 399 a.D.,
Western emperor honorius
Shutters all gladiator training schools.
The closing of the gladiatorial schools
Had long been an ambition
Of christian bishops
Throughout the western mediterranean,
He's half barbarian.
His father was a vandal cavalry officer,
But he's also extremely well-connected.
He's married to the emperor's niece,
And as such he is absolutely at the heart of court life,
To such an extent that he is made guardian
Of the young emperor honorius.
Stilicho, he's also extraordinarily successful
On the battlefield
And recognized as a br brilliant illiant general.
And he is literally the man in charge of holding
The western empire together.
Symmachus' friendship with him
Is a doorway through which symmachus
Can ask all sorts of things.
Still have your fighting touch, I see.
If you don't keep your hand in, you lose it.
But you're not here to scout me for your games.
The emperor, in his wisdom,
Or someone close to him,
Has closed all the gladiatorial schools.
Any strong man I can lay my hands on
I'll be taking north with me.
You know I wouldn't ask for your fighting men, stilicho.
But prisoners?
With our resources stretched, we're not taking many lately.
I'll see what I can do.
Thank you, my old friend.
We know this because we have the letters that symmachus
Wrote to stilicho in which he puts in requests to have
Prisoners of war sent to him to fight and die
For the entertainment of the crowd.
Essentially, symmachus was pulling every string
That he had available to him
In order to pull these games off.
Stilicho soon marches his forces north
To confront a visigothic army
Under the warlord alaric that is pressing the border
Of the italian homeland.
Meanwhile, in rome, another enemy arrives, famine.
The resources of the roman empire are stretched
Defending the borders against hordes
Of marauding barbarians.
Any disruption to the food supply
Was a huge threat to the very survival of the city of rome.
You were talking about potentially tens of thousands
Of people who could starve to death.
With war raging throughout the mediterranean
Famines in the city of rome are now a fact of life.
And when people starve, obviously they get angry.
They get upset.
They're looking for people to blame.
Symmachus' immense investment
In putting on the great games at a time when the empire
Was under pressure from all sides
And hunger stalked the land,
It seems like an odd sort of set of priorities
To spend your money for that rather than feeding the romans.
There's nothing like the absence of food
To highlight the inequalities between the haves
And the have-nots.
And things start to shift and become
Very much like a tinderbox.
Symmachus is at one point singled out
By the mob in the city.
This is because he's a prominent citizen,
But it's also probably because he remains a pagan
In an increasingly christian city.
For symmachus, it's starting to feel ugly.
With his standing under threat,
Symmachus must remind rome's citizens
That he's on their side before it's too late.
Despite the unrest in rome,
On the front line general stilicho
Is working to find suitable captives
To fight for symmachus in the arena.
Sword.
Prisoners of war belonged to the general
Who had ultimately captured them.
Sometimes they were executed on the spot.
Often they were sold as slaves.
Rise.
But sometimes prisoners of war could be sent back
To rome to fight and die in the colosseum.
Good.
You can fight.
Rise.
We know from the letters that symmachus manages
To procure a group of saxon prisoners of war
To serve as the gladiators at his games.
Rise.
Saxons are renowned fighters, and he thinks,
"ooh, this is fantastic.
"we'll bring them in, and they can be
My elite fighting force."
Send the ones I selected back to rome.
Make sure senator symmachus receives them.
He has great hopes for these warriors.
Execute the rest.
In addition to gladiators,
Symmachus also needs animals for the beast hunts,
But sourcing them is going to be a challenge.
They're running out of wild animals.
The habitats have disappeared.
They've been hunted to near extinction.
And they've become incredibly costly.
For example, we know that a single lion could cost
Up to 600,000 sesterces,
Which is well north of a million dollars
In today's terms.
Even though symmachus is a very rich man,
We're talking astronomical sums.
He writes to his contacts requesting wolfhounds
From britain, bears from the balkans,
Crocodiles from the nile, horses from Spain,
And from africa, antelopes, gazelles, leopards, and lions.
It's pretty clear from symmachus' letters
That he's trying to leverage the resources--
Such as they existed-- of the entire empire.
He writes to all kinds of influential people,
Statesmen, local governors,
And if they don't answer, he just keeps on writing.
To help close the deal,
Symmachus showers his fellow senators with gifts.
People living at that echelon of roman society
Were expected to be very generous with their wealth.
They were expected to make gifts, to make donations.
It was part of the job.
Gifts never went awry in trying to convince people
To do the thing that symmachus wanted them to do.
So we have to imagine him pulling on
All of these strings of his network,
Asking for favors, cajoling, bribing,
Sending gifts trying to get people to provide the things
That he needs to put these games on.
Symmachus has to spend a fortune.
They are figures that are absolutely
Shocking to contemporaries that he'd spend
This much money for the games.
He may have spent something like a ton of gold,
Perhaps in today's dollars
$40 million to throw a party.
It's enough to feed 20,000 families for a year.
For symmachus this is an all-or-nothing gamble.
Even for someone as wealthy as him
It was going to be an enormous chunk of change.
Symmachus had seen in the last really 25 years
His political influence waning.
And he felt that his own personal power and influence
Was slipping away, and so this was a very,
Very big gamble on his part.
He was going to use these games not just to remind the romans
Of their own past but also to assert
His own personal family preeminence.
So symmachus really needs these games
To succeed, especially if he wants to have
A political future in rome.
Do you really believe it will work?
My son, a great set of games will revive this whole city
And bring the family who presented them immortality.
Even if it works,
Is it worth losing our family's fortune?
The final task is restoring the colosseum itself.
An earthquake and a fire in the 3rd century
Followed by decades of neglect have all taken their toll.
It was also, as a result of the movement of the emperors
From the city of rome to northern Italy,
No longer the object of the kind of wealth
And patronage that the emperors were capable
Of bringing to bear upon it.
It was becoming derelict and certainly underused.
Rome at this period is almost completely
Unrecognizable from the way that it was in its heyday.
They simply don't have the money
To replace the civic infrastructure,
And it's a pretty dark time.
A lot of things have been torn away.
A lot of the stones and rocks have been carried away
To build buildings elsewhere.
So he has to do a lot of renovations of the colosseum
Before he can even hope to stage any games there,
And it's a massive undertaking.
It's a huge building.
For symmachus, the colosseum is still a powerful symbol.
So keeping the colosseum intact was an important way
For symmachus and the other patricians
To maintain the image of rome.
We have a problem.
Now just weeks from the first day of his games,
Symmachus faces a devastating setback.
They say they wouldn't eat on the journey here.
Egyptian crocodiles starved to death.
And the bears?
The 300 bears?
We have three, all cubs.
There's an entire infrastructure necessary
To put on these games, procure these animals,
Transport them to rome,
Keep them alive
Under the stresses of the fourth and fifth century
Have just fallen away.
But somehow symmachus procures enough wild animals
To proceed with his games.
The captured saxon prisoners of war also finally arrive.
Well, symmachus looking at these saxon warriors
Is thinking, "these are perfect colosseum fodder for my games."
They're like wild beasts. They're like objects.
These are all of the building blocks
That he requires for a dramatic games in the arena.
But the prisoners refuse to act as symmachus expects.
What's going on here?
On your feet now.
I said on your feet.
Fight.
Fight!
Why are they not fighting?
Maybe they don't see the point.
Symmachus needs these saxons,
People with this fearsome reputation,
Prisoners of war,
Who could meet his demand for people to fight
And die for the entertainment of the crowd.
If you all fight for me,
I promise you will all be rewarded...
Handsomely.
Come up.
Despite challenges, the day symmachus
Has yearned for approaches.
But not everyone in rome is excited.
The radical christians really wanted to eradicate
And do away with the gladiatorial games,
Not only because those things were full of religion
That they didn't agree with, but also because
They were a glorification of violence.
These men have long felt that blood sport,
That death for entertainment
Was a blight on the religious health
Of the people and an affront to christian values.
But the games also remained popular with the people,
With everyday christians
Sometimes attending church
Before going to the games in the afternoon.
For symmachus, the day of the opening of the games
Is the culmination of everything
That he's worked for for a really long time.
This is for him his attempt to turn back the clock,
To honor the gods in the way that he's capable of doing,
And return some of rome's previous prosperity too.
People of rome,
It is my honor to introduce our greatest prefect of rome,
Symmachus memmius!
All this is for you.
You're amazing, father.
On opening day, when symmachus looked around,
There was more than a bit of excitement.
In some respects the colosseum would have looked like
The rome of old.
I can imagine him sitting there
With a sense of pride at what he had accomplished,
But inside nagging at him, always aware
At his consciousness is,
This is a world that is coming to an end.
Those fears soon prove justified.
Things go very wrong with the saxon fighters.
Symmachus' games are finally underway.
But as they proceed, his prized saxon warriors decide
To choose their own fate.
These saxon fighters, nobody's really watching them,
And they take advantage of this moment.
Rather than submit to the indignity and terror
Of fighting in gladiatorial games,
These saxons kill each other.
Symmachus is absolutely furious.
He's lost his elite fighting force.
Symmachus had nothing but contempt for the saxons,
Called them, "this bunch of slaves more worthless
Than spartacus," which is, from the perspective
Of an elite roman, about the most
Damning thing you can say.
So this moment is really kind of emblematic of where we are
At this point in the empire.
It's nothing.
If you can't even force prisoners of war
To fight and die for you anymore,
Then what is the roman empire?
This is something they've been doing for centuries.
To not be able to force this group
To fight and die in the arena says a lot about how far
Roman power had fallen.
Despite this loss of the saxons the games do not stop.
Even christian senators attend.
The simple idea of staging games
Was an unsettling one to christian senators,
But it wasn't necessarily something that they absolutely
Thought could not happen.
There's no question that christian senators
Would have attended symmachus' games,
Because more than anything else,
This is a huge social event for rome's elite.
And even though some members of rome's elite
Remained pagan, others had converted
To christianity, what tied them together
Far more than faith was the fact that they were
Members of rome's elite.
But then there's a second unwelcome surprise.
His name is telemachus, a fanatical monk
Fiercely opposed to rome's old ways.
He is an eastern ascetic monk,
Someone who has renounced all worldly pleasure
In his search for christian god.
He comes to rome from the east,
And because of that looks with terrible eyes
Upon the things that were happening in the colosseum.
He's a man who wants to see that world view
Come to an end.
He's the exact opposite of a roman pleasure-seeker.
In the name of the one true god.
He was on a collision course
With the powers that be in rome,
And his beliefs are at complete odds
With pagan beliefs.
In the name of the one true god.
What is he doing?
As far as he's concerned,
What's happening in the amphitheater
Had to be stopped.
Stop him!
He wants to end these games.
In the name of our true god, stop, stop.
This is against god's teachings.
Take him from here now!
- Leave. - Leave now, or face his wrath.
What telemachus did was unprecedented
And was shocking.
It really was the first time in close to 600 years
That anyone had tried to stop a gladiatorial fight.
At any event where there's going to be bloodshed,
The crowd has an expectation of violence.
The bloodshed pulled the crowd in
And kind of enraptured them.
The people of rome were always capable
Of exploding into violence.
The crowd became so outraged
At having its entertainment interrupted
That they threw stones at telemachus.
Our lord, the one true god protects me.
After years of preparation,
Symmachus faces disaster.
His lavish games are disrupted by a christian,
Who is then stoned to death.
So to have a christian monk come in and disrupt the game,
It's like stepping right into the cultural fault line
That's dividing people right at the heart of rome.
The traditional values of rome, then it's a complete failure.
Roman society had moved on.
Word of telemachus' death in the colosseum
Reaches the emperor in milan.
Horrified by the violence, he orders
A total ban on gladiatorial combat throughout the empire.
Things were never going to be the same.
Nobody was ever going to spend the amount of money
That symmachus did.
Nobody was ever going to go back in time
And make rome the center of the universe again.
Crushed by the failure of his games,
Symmachus retires to his villa...
And in the winter of 402 a.D. Falls ill.
Father, you should rest.
Memmius, I'm fine.
Get on with your work, my son.
This is my legacy.
Symmachus is the last of his kind,
The last of his breed.
He's a little bit of a tragic figure for those of us
Who have some sympathies for the glory that was rome.
Symmachus died less than a year after his games.
His last letter is to stilicho and complains
That he has not recovered from an illness.
Perhaps he died a broken man.
The battles that he fights over the course of his life
On behalf of rome's pagan past symbolize
The turning of the guard, the changing of an era.
Soon after, the borders of rome's western empire
Collapse, and in 408 a.D.
Stilicho is beheaded on emperor honorius' orders
During a bloody purge of the army.
Two years later, rome itself is sacked by visigothic armies
Commanded by his nemesis, alaric.
Finally, in 476,
The last western roman emperor is deposed.
A century after symmachus' games,
The city of rome would have shrunk
To a tenth of its former size.
Maybe 100,000 people living there instead of a million.
The city would have been filled with crumbling buildings,
With weeds growing in the streets.
It was a shell of its former self.
You can't have a colosseum without an empire
To sustain it, to bring in the wealth,
And the network of supplies to make it work.
When all those things are gone there's no real rationale
For the colosseum.
The great christian scholar the venerable bede said,
"as long as the colosseum stands, rome shall stand.
"when the colosseum falls, rome will fall.
And when rome falls, the whole world will fall."
The colosseum is abandoned.
It becomes a ruin, and later on it becomes a quarry.
In the medieval period, when they're trying to build
A christian rome, they take its stone
And use it for buildings such as st. Peter's in the vatican.
It's ironic that this place which had always been
So anti-christian should end up at the heart
Of the christian faith.
To come face-to-face with the colosseum today
Is to confront some of our most complex emotions
About ancient empire.
On the one hand, it is in fact exquisitely beautiful.
But then you remember what they did there.
Built on the backs of slaves,
It represents the blood lust,
The decadence, the violence, the glory, and depravity
Of the roman empire.
The colosseum is the place where romans became romans.
When they saw foreign prisoners of war,
When they saw criminals executed,
When they saw exotic beasts,
When they saw gladiators fighting on their behalf,
It defined them as a people
In terms of blood and violence and power.
All of these things were at the heart
Of how the roman empire was built
And how it sustained itself.
The colosseum tells us a lot about the romans.
It tells us about the importance of a monument
Of prestige, of magnificence.
It tells us about their love of scale, the vision.
And all of these things are represented
In this magnificent building that still stands today.