The Colosseum
Fifty thousand spectators watch state-sponsored killing as public entertainment.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Opened in 80 CE, the Flavian Amphitheatre holds perhaps 50,000 people who enter and leave through eighty numbered arches in minutes, with an awning system and a basement of lifts and cages. Its games — beast hunts, executions, gladiatorial combat — are funded by emperors as political generosity. It was built with the spoils of the Jewish War, and partly by the labour of those it enslaved.