A Wonder From Any Angle
By JAMES GARDNER
What does it take to rank as one of the seven wonders of the world? As a species, we delight in making lists, which is what drove Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Callimachus of Cyrene a century later to enumerate the seven wonders in the first place. With the single exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza, all of their marvels have been felled by time. But what seems to have united these monuments was a combination of staggering massiveness, inspired engineering and an iconic simplicity that rendered them instantly legible and rich in symbolic resonance.
For many centuries, the Colosseum in Rome has been on everyone's list of seven wonders, and it effortlessly meets the three requirements mentioned above. No matter how big you expect the Colosseum to be, in reality it proves to be even bigger. Shaped like a nearly perfect cylindrical drum, it is one of the very first things to amaze the newcomer to Rome, and it richly supplies one of the greatest delights of modern tourism: physical, touchable propinquity to what, before that instant, we had known our entire lives but only through the mediation of images and words. Seen from some distance along the Via dei Fori Imperiali—which Mussolini created in the 1930s to open up such a vista—it stands before you like an incarnated postcard.
That is how most visitors first experience the Colosseum in person. And usually it is the only way they see it, before they actually enter the site. But there is another way, as I learned by accident last summer. I had roused myself at the crack of dawn to visit a noble and undeservedly neglected ruin at the summit of the Esquiline hill, known as the Nymphaeum or Temple of Minerva Medica. It stands on Via Giolitti, next to the squalid railyards of Stazione Termini, Rome's answer to Penn Station. Today most of the Esquiline is off the tourist track, but it holds sundry charms. From the Nymphaeum, on the ancient site of the Gardens of Licinius, you pass through the Piazza Vittorio into the Gardens of Maecenas on the lower Esquiline, where you see the ruins of the Baths of Titus.
It was at this point, as I began to descend the Esquiline's steep southern spur, the Oppian Hill, that I saw in the distance a flash of marble or, more precisely, travertine. I thought nothing of it at first, since Rome abounds in marble-clad piles, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But as I continued, this length of bright stone, coming into focus as a catenary of composite pilasters, began to expand laterally, until it assumed an awesome, even monstrous size. For a moment it looked to be scarcely more than one story tall. It was only as I continued my descent in the hazy morning light that the structure gradually acquired additional stories beneath those composite pilasters, until my dawning intuition was triumphantly confirmed: I was standing over the Colosseum, looking down at it from an Olympian height nearly parallel to its summit. I was now seeing the Colosseum in an entirely new way.
Terrible things, surely, once happened here, from gladiatorial slaughter to the persecution of early Christians. But that must not obscure the fact that the Colosseum stands for much of what was best in the Roman state.
The location of the Colosseum, built by the Flavian emperor Vespasian and his sons and successors Titus and Domitian between A.D. 70 and 80, was as polemically important as its size and shape. For it rose over an artificial lake that the unbalanced Nero, their imperial predecessor, had ordered to be built in his private residence, the infamous Domus Aurea. To build it, Nero had seized, in the very center of the city, a parcel of land roughly two-thirds the size of Central Park. And beside the lake he erected an enormous statue of himself, a colossus, from which the new stadium would subsequently take its name. Thus in building the Colosseum, also known as the Flavian Amphitheater, Vespasian gave back to the people of Rome what Nero had taken from them. In the process, a symbol of high-handed autocratic excess under the last of the Julio-Claudians became a monument to Rome itself, built by the new dynasty.
In size, beauty of architectural detail and state of preservation, none of the empire's 250 other amphitheaters, whatever their present or former state, can compare with the Colosseum. Even though, for centuries, it had been plundered and stripped for raw materials; even though it has done duty as a fortress and a church; even though half of it was nearly sheered off by a sequence of earthquakes (largely restored by Raffaele Stern and then Giuseppe Valadier early in the 1800s)—the Colosseum still presents itself to contemporary viewers much as it did to their ancient predecessors.
In addition to much else, the Colosseum is the tallest structure to survive from classical antiquity. At 157 feet, it is roughly the height of an early skyscraper, a fact concealed by its great elliptical girth, ranging between 510 and 615 feet. Despite the fact that the Colosseum served a function as pedestrian as Madison Square Garden's, its external ornamentation is so refined, and yet so restrained, as to reflect credit upon the civilization and the dynasty that created it. The three stacked arcades—which rise from Doric to Ionic and Corinthian before concluding in a walled summit with composite pilasters—unfurl with the greatest delicacy and tact. The Colosseum could have been overbearing, but it is not. It could have been fussy and maladroit, but it is not. It is so perfectly balanced, so definitive, that one risks taking it for granted.
That sense of equipoise, so Roman in its restrained practicality, presages the rationalism and functionalism of modern architecture. But, in the U.S. at least, architectural vision is all too rarely expended on sports arenas. And as for the Colosseum's closest structural parallel in New York, Madison Square Garden, the less said the better.
—Mr. Gardner is a critic based in New York.
