The archæology of Rome, Part 7 — Background and Themes

Excavation as Revelation

Parker’s argument rests on physical evidence uncovered below the arena floor. He reports that the original pavement was found 21 feet below the level that had been called the ground, floor, or arena. The space between was filled with walls, passages, dens for wild beasts, lifts for men and animals, and canals for water. He describes a boarded floor covered with sand—the arena proper—that could be moved and replaced quickly at the emperor’s command. Large corbels projecting from the wall below the podium served to store the boards out of sight. Parker’s language is precise and technical, but he also conveys a sense of discovery: “no one had any idea” of these arrangements before the excavations.

The Language of Doors and Staircases

Parker devotes careful attention to the names and functions of the amphitheater’s gates and passages. He discusses the Porta Libitinensis, through which the bodies of the killed were carried out on a special bier called a sandapila, citing Lampridius, Juvenal, and the old scholiast. He notes that the name is sometimes written sanavivaria in the Acta Martyrum Felicitatis et Perpetuae. He also tackles the puzzling term cochlea (literally “snail”), which commentators had struggled to explain. Parker identifies it as a medieval Latin term for a winding or newel staircase, pointing to two such staircases leading from the substructures to the arena level at the southeast end of the central passage. He supports this with the parallel of Trajan’s Column, frequently called columna cochlea because of its internal spiral staircase.

The Spectacle of the Games

Parker assembles a series of ancient testimonies to convey the intensity of Roman public amusements. He quotes Suetonius on Caligula’s all-day attendance and the people assembling at midnight for free shows; Claudius going to the amphitheater at daybreak to feed the wild beasts; and Petronius on two old negroes sprinkling the arena with scents from small bottles. Tacitus is cited for his own account of the secular games under Claudius. Parker’s method is to let the ancient authors speak, but he frames their words with a modern sense of wonder: “The importance attached to the public amusements, both by the people and by the emperors, appears extraordinary to modern ideas.” The pace here shifts from archaeological description to a more anecdotal, almost ethnographic mode.

Parker’s work is best read as a polemical intervention in a long-running scholarly debate. He writes with the authority of a museum keeper who has examined the fabric of the building firsthand, and his footnotes bristle with references to classical texts and earlier commentators. Readers should attend to the way he uses architectural detail—corbels, staircases, gate names—as evidence for a revised chronology, and to his habit of dismissing received opinion as mere tradition. The book rewards those who follow his arguments closely, even where the evidence is fragmentary.

I remember how Parker’s spade, clawing beneath the Colosseum’s sand, found older stones than Rome had claimed—buried truths, quietly patient. It made me think of another city’s buried layers, where the old capital whispers beneath a newer sky. That same tender archaeology of memory fills Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire — Context and Discussion, each brick a kept secret, each foundation a lingering heartbeat. Strange, how two distant places can share one hushed, enduring soul.