The Roman Colosseum

In his chapter on the Colosseum, Edward Hutton described how that huge open air theater, originally an arena for contests between professional gladiators, degenerated into savage brutality and cruelty that eventually led to the transformation of the Roman world.

Almost all the beauty which had in the time of our grandfathers made of the Colosseum the most mysterious and the most astounding ruin in Rome, contriving out of its mere size something monstrous, spellbound, has departed from it, perhaps for ever, since it has come within the radius of action, so unfortunately wide, of the improver and the restorer of ruins. While the destruction of those trees that grew along the broken arches, waving ‘dark in the blue midnight’, and with the passing of the flowers, the Flavian Amphitheatre has become almost absurd in it rueful nakedness; a sort of inadequate monstrosity, a mighty heap of patched and ordered debris on the lower slopes of the Esquiline Hill. Stripped and ashamed, with all its wounds exposed, to say nothing of the horrible patchwork of the archaeologist, it is now just a vast and empty shell, that indeed scarcely impresses us, mere size being, after all but a poor claim upon our notice.… (66)

It was this monstrous colossus that overthrew paganism and the empire and served as the stage on which Christianity was at last to meet them both in combat and defeat them.

It might seem that no people save the Romans…have made of agony and death a spectacle to amuse the populace. They alone were ignorant of pity…. Beginning, perhaps, with a genuine indifference to suffering, a certain hardness that was part of their strength, little by little this insensibility to suffering…encroached on the soul, till cruelty, a kind of joy in speculating on the endurance of others, less indifferent certainly, put to the most dreadful of tests, came to be with them  a kind of delight, which secretly at first, but altogether openly at last, involved all their pleasures, their public entertainments in its marvelous horror….

It was there in the awful din and horror, under the cruel eyes of those who had failed to understand, that our soul was born, that soul which was to make such a spectacle as that forever impossible….

All the fate of the world was decided in the arena of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was Rome who stood there at the tribunal of humanity and heard the verdict—guilty. In passing through the Forum, or among the ruins of the Palatine Hill, and remembering the disastrous story of her days since then, we may well ask—for are we not of her company—is her punishment harder than she can bear?

Yes; it was on the bloody floor of the Colosseum that Rome contrived her own slavery and our freedom. It was there that Christianity met the world and overthrew it, there the martyrs won for Christ His kingdom in the hearts of men—and certain poor folk, almost nameless, men, women, and children, weak too, weeping and afraid overthrew forever the despotism of Rome. (73-74).

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 66-74