In the Year AD 80 the Colosseum opened with quite the longest and most
nauseating organized mass orgy in history. It was a mammoth celebration
on the grandest scale, a fitting inauguration for an arena built to
epitomize all the majesty and power of the Roman Empire, a building
which also held the seeds of that Empire's decay and destruction. As
well as his vivid account of the erection of the Colosseum, Mr Pearson
discusses the origins of death spectacles and their evolution into
highly organized games intended to enhance imperial prestige and provide
the populace with an effective substitute for politics and war.
'Butchered to make a Roman holiday', the victims of this lust for
slaughter were slaves and criminals, the human surplus of their day,
coached for an almost certain death. One chapter highlights the
perverted death-wish of many early would-be martyrs and decisively
establishes that there is no evidence for the death of a single
Christian martyr in the Colosseum. The audiobook concludes with a brief
survey of the building's subsequent history; looted and despoiled yet
still the embodiment of Rome's spirit and greatness, it became a sublime
romantic ruin, now exposed by slum-clearance as a gigantic traffic
island.
Mr Pearson is acutely aware of the violence that was endemic in Roman
society, and in his shrewd analysis he draws disturbing parallels with
the twentieth-century situation. John Pearson became interested in the
Colosseum and the whole nature of Roman violence when researching his
book The Profession of Violence-an account of recent gangsterism in
London's East End. An experienced journalist and winner of the Author's
Club award for the best first novel of 1963 Gone to Timbuctoo, he has
also written The Life of Ian Fleming and Bluebird and the Dead
Lake.
