When was the Colosseum built?

From Nero’s lake to the people’s arena

The story starts with a fire. After the Great Fire of AD 64, Nero took a wide stretch of burned land in the middle of Rome for his Golden House, a palace with parks, pavilions and an artificial lake in the valley between the Palatine, Caelian and Esquiline hills. A colossal bronze statue of Nero stood at its entrance.

Nero died in 68. After a year of civil war the general Vespasian took power, and he made a point of handing the land back. He filled in Nero’s lake and, Suetonius says, began an amphitheater in the heart of the city, a plan he had learned Augustus once cherished. The poet Martial, writing for the opening, rejoiced that the people now enjoyed what had been a tyrant’s pleasure ground.

Paid for by a war

It was built fast and lavishly. A dedication stone found in the arena, read from the holes left by its lost bronze letters, says Vespasian ordered the new amphitheater built from his general’s share of the spoils. Most historians take that to mean the spoils of the Jewish War. In AD 70 Vespasian’s son Titus had captured Jerusalem and destroyed its Temple, and the Arch of Titus, a short walk from the Colosseum, still shows Roman soldiers carrying off the Temple’s menorah. The Gospels remember a warning about that Temple:

As he went out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Teacher, see what kind of stones and what kind of buildings!” Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone on another, which will not be thrown down.”

It is often assumed that prisoners from that war labored on the building, alongside skilled Roman builders, engineers and painters.

Opening day, AD 80

Vespasian died in June 79, with the building finished up to the third story. Titus completed it and opened it in AD 80. Cassius Dio says the games lasted a hundred days, that 9,000 animals were killed, and that Titus even flooded the arena for horses and bulls trained to swim. Titus’s younger brother Domitian, emperor from 81, added the hypogeum, a maze of tunnels, cages and lifts under the arena floor, and a top gallery to squeeze in more spectators. How many it held is a story of its own.

The name, and the centuries since

Romans called it simply the amphitheater. “Flavian Amphitheater,” after the family name of Vespasian and his sons, is a modern label. “Colosseum” is medieval, and most likely comes from the Colossus, the giant statue of Nero that Hadrian moved to stand beside it.

Honorius banned gladiator fights in 399 and again in 404, and they are last mentioned around 435, though beast hunts went on until at least 523. An earthquake in 1349 brought down the south side, and the fallen stone was carted off for palaces and churches. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV consecrated the ruin to Christ’s Passion and the memory of the martyrs, and ended the quarrying. No ancient source clearly places a Christian martyrdom inside it, though Christians did die in other Roman arenas. Opened in AD 80, it turns 2,000 in 2080.