Director Ridley Scott’s gladiators are back in the Colosseum, crossing swords in the sequel. A few weeks ago, I climbed the 296 steps to the top of the iconic bloodsport venue.
There is a Jewish story to tell about this place, so please lend me your ears.
The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 CE. Roman Emperor Vespasian paid for every part of the project with wealth looted from the Jews during Rome’s conquest of Judea. Worse yet, the arena was built primarily by Jewish slaves.
While other visitors imagine the sound of steel and the roar of antiquity’s largest crowd, our view of the Colosseum is different. It was a killing field for our people. Its walls and floors were stained with Jewish blood. Thousands of Jews died building it. Once the games began thousands more Jews were killed – often in beastly fashion – for no other purpose than Roman amusement.
The story of the construction of the Colosseum begins in 72 CE. It begins as the story of the vanquishing of Judea comes to an end.
Following the Roman conquest of Judea, the fall of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Rome enslaved large numbers of Jews. The Roman imperial economy was reliant upon slave labor and war booty. Rome’s supply of both was maintained through conquest. Prior to Judea’s defeat, Rome had gone decades without a large and fresh supply of captives.
The Roman-Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus was himself once a Jewish slave. He recorded that Rome took 97,000 Jewish captives. It is estimated that 50,000 men were sent to Rome as part of Emperor Vespasian’s personal contingent and assigned to public works.
For most slaves, the journey to Rome started at the port of Caesarea. It was a 30-day journey by sea to Rome aboard the crude wooden ships of the day. Conditions for the slaves were brutal, crowded, and unsanitary.
Of the 97,000 Jewish captives most were brought to Rome. Others were shipped to Roman provinces near and far.
The experience of Jewish women and girls was even worse. They were loaded onto different ships or moved by land caravans. If fortunate, they would be sold at slave markets and purchased as domestic servants. Unlucky ones were sent into sexual captivity.
The sheer volume of Jewish prisoners depressed the price of slaves throughout the Mediterranean rim. Rabbi Yohanan ben Nappaha said in Gittin 58a, “Four seahs of young men were sold for a sela, and four seahs of young women were sold for a sela. And there was no one to take them.”
At the time one sela was equal to one week’s wages for a farmhand.
Elsewhere it was written that “they sold a Jewish woman for the price of a jug of wine,” according to Midrash Eicha Rabbah (Lamentations Rabbah), Proem 33.
Following the fall of Jerusalem Vespasian was swimming in a sea of Jewish gold and silver. He ordered a new coin struck. It was called the “Judaea Capta.” The coin depicted a mourning Jewish woman under a palm tree representing the subjugation of Judaea.
Upon arrival of his slaves in Rome, Vespasian separated as many as 60,000 Jewish slaves who would be assigned to public works construction. An estimated 12,000 or more were assigned to the Colosseum project. The project would take eight years.
The slaves worked long, hard hours under severe conditions. The work in the Cava del Barco stone quarry in Tibur (modern day Tivoli) 18 miles away was the worst. Jewish slaves drilled, cut, moved and loaded travertine blocks, the primary building material of the Colosseum. It was oppressive, dangerous, and often deadly work.
Countless Jews also died on the main construction site and along the Aniene River, upon which the stone was transported by barrages. They died in accidents, from exhaustion, from dehydration, from drowning, from disease, from old age, and from sunstroke during Rome’s brutal summers.
Their names are forgotten to history. So, too, are their stories, their suffering, their long-lost wives and children, and details about their painfully short lives. We can imagine their despair and their broken hearts, but we will never know who they were.
Upon completion, a bronze inscription was bolted into the Colosseum at one of the main entrances. It read: “The Emperor Caesar Vespasian Augustus ordered the new amphitheater to be erected from his general’s share of the booty.”
“There is no doubt what war this was, the sack of Jerusalem,” said Cinzia Conti, the former director of surface restoration at the Colosseum.
When Vespasian became emperor, Rome was broke, explained Roman historian Suetonius in his book De Vita Caesarum. Jewish wealth turned a financially troubled Rome into a prosperous one almost overnight.
Jews wealth and Jewish slaves also contributed to other projects during the same period, including aqueducts and Roman roads. Jews also were forced to help build several pagan temples. One was the Porticus of the Temple of Peace (Forum Pacis). It was used to display Roman spoils of war, including treasures from the Temple in Jerusalem.
The completion of construction at the Colosseum is unfortunately not the end of the story of Jewish suffering in the arena. Since Jewish slaves continued to form the biggest group of captives in Rome and in Roman provinces, Jewish slaves were the source of human flesh to feed Rome’s insatiable bloodlust when the games began.
When the Colosseum opened to the public in the spring of 80 CE, Vespasian’s son, Titus, celebrated with 100 days of games. Thousands of men, including Jewish slaves were killed for sport. Over 9,000 animals died as well.
Jewish slaves were corralled into the Hypogeum. That is a two-level underground prison, tunnel network, and system of cages under the Colosseum. It even had a crude mechanical elevator. It was used to house captives, animals, gladiators, equipment, and everything else needed for the games.
In the popular event, damnati ad bestias (“condemned to the beasts”), Jewish slaves and runaways were tied to poles in the arenas. Handlers then released lions, leopards, bears, wild boars, hyenas, crocodiles, wolves or other exotic predators from their underground cages.
Jews were also forced to take part in theatrical venationes (beast hunts). They were given crude weapons and forced to face off against predators.
There were also reenactments of myths and battles called ludi scaenici. A condemned Jew or group of Jewish captives would be dressed as a figure from Roman mythology and forced to act out gruesome pagan myths that ended in death.
Most notoriously thousands of Jews were forced into armed combat with professional gladiators or against each other.
It is heartbreaking to imagine the Jewish slaves. They are 2,000 kilometers from their homes. Most have been captive for many years. They are corralled like cattle from the depths of the Hypogeum. They are brought into the daylight of the arena, to the thunder of the ancient world’s largest audience.
They are handed gladius swords, the short, double-edged weapons most often used in the Colosseum and by Rome’s legionnaires. Their captors likely gave them basic instruction on handling a gladius. The training was to enhance the crowd’s experience, not to enhance the odds of their survival.
Slaves were rarely given shields or armor. They would usually fight chained, limiting their mobility.
It is hardly a fair fight. Most of the Jewish men are captives, not combatants. When the gladiators appear in the arena it is always a bloodbath as trained killers prey upon slaves. If there were occasional episodes where outnumbered and outmatched Jewish underdogs rose up and defeated professional gladiators, they have been lost to history.
While the Romans occasionally killed Christians in the Colosseum in later years, the number of Jews thrown to the lions, murdered by gladiators, or simply executed was far greater. When it came to quenching Rome’s voracious thirst for blood, war captives were the biggest supply.
Once its Jewish builders finished their task the slaughter of innocent men in the Colosseum continued for 324 years. As many as 400,000 would perish for the sake of entertainment.
The legal murder of innocent people in the Colosseum and other Roman venues slowed, but did not stop, in 404 CE. Rome banned Gladiatorial combat. Yet animal hunts continued.
It was, however, several centuries too late for reflection. A morally weak Rome had finally become a militarily weak Rome. Within six years the Visigoths entered and sacked the city.
Returning to Vespasian, like so many of his Jewish slaves he did not live to see the Colosseum’s opening day. He had died eight months earlier. His son, Emperor Titus, died a short time later at age 41. Vespasian’s other son, Emperor Domitian, also died young, age 44, assassinated by one of his slaves and his own wife. Domitian’s death ended the short-lived Flavian dynasty.
As Jews, we are blessed with Civilization’s deepest store of knowledge and experience. Yet deep insight into the past often ruins an otherwise casual walk through Roman history and as I look down into the arena, I reflect upon the horror, absurdity, and sorrow of requiring Jewish lovers of life to build Rome’s biggest pagan monument to death.
Yet nearly 2,000 years after our people helped to build the Colosseum, I note that there are no Roman emperors. There is no Roman empire. There are no more games in the arena. Just this stiff-necked Jewish writer alive to tell the story to his favorite Jewish readers.
Rami Chris Robbins focuses on Middle East issues and foreign policy.