How many people did the Colosseum hold?

The numbers

The Colosseum is the largest amphitheater the Romans ever built: an ellipse 189 meters long and 156 meters wide (620 by 512 feet), ringed by an outer wall 48 meters (157 feet) high, about the height of a fifteen-story building. A survey of Rome’s fourteen districts in the Chronograph of 354 credits it with 87,000 places. Modern scholars think that is too many. Most use about 50,000, and estimates run up to 80,000.

Rome had bigger venues. The Circus Maximus, for chariot races, held several times as many people. But nothing else was built like this: a free-standing bowl of travertine, concrete and tuff in the middle of the city.

Who sat where

Seats followed rank, as Augustus had ordered for every show. Suetonius says he even sent women to the upper seats at gladiator fights, where men and women had once sat together. In the Colosseum the emperor and the Vestal Virgins had boxes at the north and south ends, with the best view. Senators sat on a broad platform just above the arena, on chairs they brought themselves; names of some fifth-century senators are still carved in the stone. Behind them came the knights, then ordinary citizens, the better-off below and the poor above. At the very top, in the gallery Domitian added, stood or perched the poorest, slaves and women, on steep wooden benches or none at all.

Getting 50,000 people in and out

The architects solved the crowd problem the way stadiums still do. Eighty arches ring the ground floor, and 76 of them were numbered public entrances; the surviving ones, numbered 23 to 54, still carry their numerals. A spectator’s token pointed to an entrance, a section and a row. Passages called vomitoria opened onto the tiers from below and behind, and could empty the stands in minutes. The name comes from the Latin vomere, to spew out. Despite the myth, a vomitorium was never a room for vomiting.

Overhead, sailors from the navy’s base at Misenum worked the velarium, a vast awning of canvas and rope rigged from 240 masts around the top of the wall, to shade the crowd.

What the crowd came to see

A day at the games usually ran from beast hunts in the morning, through executions at midday, to gladiators in the afternoon. Forget the movies. Trained gladiators were expensive, and many bouts ended with the loser alive. Even the famous thumbs down is a guess: Juvenal writes of a “turned thumb,” pollice verso, without saying which way, and the image owes a lot to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting of 1872.

Shows could be enormous. After his Dacian victory, Cassius Dio says, Trajan gave games on 123 days, at which some 11,000 animals were killed and 10,000 gladiators fought. Paul, writing to Corinth years before the Colosseum existed, reached for an image many readers take from the arena:

For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last of all, like men sentenced to death. For we are made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and men.

They hear in it the arena’s condemned, put on show for the crowd before they died.