The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard

Author:Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard [Hopkins, Keith & Beard, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2005-06-25T23:00:00+00:00

THE PEOPLE ON PARADE

It is the first rule of any spectacle that the audience is as important an element as the display itself: we go not only to watch, but to watch other people watching, and to be seen watching ourselves. The audience is part of the show. In the case of the Colosseum, the biggest amphitheatre in the Roman world, the role of the audience was even more loaded than usual. As many recent studies have insisted, the serried ranks of the Roman people, seated in hierarchical ranks according to status, were in effect a microcosm of the Roman citizen body. This was much more extreme than the social segregation of modern spectacles, where the front seats go to those who can (and choose to) pay for them, but may equally well include those who have saved up for months for a special treat as those who would never sit anywhere else. The basic, official rule in Rome, at least by the end of the first century AD, was that civic status determined where you sat. Senators sat closest to the arena in the front rows; behind them the next official status rank of Roman society, the ‘knights’; and so on up to the top of the seating area (what in a British theatre would be called ‘the gods’) reserved for slaves, noncitizens – and women, apart from the state priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins, who sat with the senators in the front. The senators, and maybe the knights too, sat on movable seats; the rest were on fixed benches of either brick faced in marble or, at the very top, in wood. Relegating the women to the back probably ensured that, amongst the elite at least, the audience was overwhelmingly male: no woman of any social pretensions was likely to relish sharing this distant viewpoint with the great unwashed.

Exactly how and when this detailed stratification of the audience had developed is hard to pin down (though it was certainly mirrored in other Roman entertainment venues, such as the theatre). Nor is it certain how carefully it was policed. But ancient writers certainly tell warning – or salacious – stories of what was likely to develop if this kind of segregation was not in place. One of the most bloodthirsty dynasts of the first century BC, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, was reputed to have picked up (or to have been picked up by) his wife Valeria at a gladiatorial spectacle, ‘when the seating was not yet separated’. It is a tale rather reminiscent of the modern story of brushing up against a would-be partner in a row of cramped cinema seats. According to his biographer Plutarch, she walked behind the place where Sulla was sitting, as she made her way to her own; resting her hand on his shoulder, she removed a piece of fluff from his cloak and followed this up with some witty flirtation when he looked a bit taken aback. After the predictable collusive glances, longing

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