Arles Amphitheatre： The Colosseum of Ancient Gaul I SLICE HISTORY

Situated on a hillside, the Isle Amphitheatre is the city's most emblematic monument. With the Colosseum of Rome barely completed, Roman engineers were dispatched to Isle to construct a copy. Composed of two levels of arcades, each with 60 arches, and reaching a height of 21 meters, the amphitheatre was a specifically Roman structure, invented to host the gods of the stadia, the gladiators. The Isle Amphitheatre was among the most beautiful in the empire, and it owes this partly to Julius Caesar. In 49 BC, Caesar used Isle as his rear base in his war against Pompeii. In return, the city was granted the highly coveted status of Roman colony. It marked the beginning of a magnificent architectural story. While Caesar was undoubtedly the city's main benefactor, throughout antiquity, Isle enjoyed the favors of the most famous emperors of Rome. After Caesar, Augustus, Constantine, all of them wanted to leave their mark. But before becoming known as the Little Rome of the Gauls, how did it all start? The 6th century BC. Greek merchants sail up the Rhone River. 38 kilometers to the north of the Mediterranean coast, they discover a hill surrounded by wetlands, Lauture, inhabited by a small tribe. These people weren't Celts, and the Gauls had yet to arrive in the region. They were Ligurians, a people with a simple way of life, who had already occupied this site, which could be seen from distance. Archaeological digs have revealed homes with a large amount of Greek furniture, which suggests that the ancient Greeks probably established Isle as a trading base. And thus was born Arélate, meaning town by the marsh. Having already founded Marseille, these Greek merchants saw huge potential in this new site. Isle is an incredibly important geographical position, because it's at the access to the Mediterranean basin. And it's the first place where you can cross the Rhone, north from the sea. Beyond its strategic position on the Rhone, Isle also stood at the intersection of major thoroughfares, notably the main route from Italy to Spain. Over the coming centuries, its geographical location would be one of the new city's major assets. Something the Romans would also discover later. In the 3rd century BC, Isle was a major hub for Roman trade. And when, in 27 BC, Caesar's adopted son Augustus became emperor, he began his first great works in the city. Augustus's arrival was crucial, as he brought a definitive end to the civil war, which had gone on for 60 years, which was very important to the Romans. It didn't mean an end to the conquests. Augustus would be just as much of a conqueror as his father Caesar, so it was important for him to carry on his father's work. If you've inherited a vast territory, and you want to impose culture and civilization on the rest of the world, you have to build cities and ports and roads very quickly. So the Roman army became the tool for this. It was incredible. Never had there been such a need for urbanization and the construction of infrastructures as at that moment in time. Hundreds of thousands of legionnaires laid down their arms and took up the role of builders. And beyond providing labor, the army had all the top specialists. The architect was in the hire of the army, and had to carry out orders without any particular thanks. The only recognized architects were the very few who were directly approached by the emperor and his court, and there were only about ten of them. Among them was Vitruvius, a contemporary of Augustus. He was one of the few Roman architects whose name is still known today. He wrote a whole number of treaties on the architecture of his forebears, the great architects of ancient Greece. The first job of the Roman architects was to define the pomerium, the symbolic boundaries of Arles. It was a boundary that separated the world of the living on the inside from the world of the dead outside. Burial grounds were always outside this sacred boundary. People weren't entering any normal town. They were aware that they were stepping into something where Rome was present and determined to impose its presence. They entered Rome, a little Rome. On the boundary defined by the pomerium, the Romans constructed not symbolic walls, but in solid stone. These stretched across the left bank of the Rhone along with the first dwellings. The walls were very solid and about ten meters high. With battlements and embrasures, as if defense were an issue. There was no real defensive need. What's more, there were no more soldiers in southern Gaul. During Augustus' reign, his armies were positioned on the borders. So there were ramparts, but practically nobody to defend them. And of course, at the entry of the urban thoroughfares, monumental gates with a tower on each side and beautiful arches. It had a lot of allure. About one and a half kilometers long, the city's walls surrounded a surface of 45 hectares. Inside the walls, the Roman engineers began constructing a theater. The oldest in southern Gaul. At Arles, they were faced with a major problem. The steep slope of the chosen site. The theater in Arles, unlike the theater in Orange, isn't backed onto the hill. Which is what the Greeks did to save time and money. Here, the Romans wanted it on top of the hill. Standing as a monumental structure, with the seating above it, so you could see it from miles around. It was the city's brand image. They leveled the land all around it, so they could build on the flats. So you can see the facade all around it stretching upwards, as it's not backed onto the hillside. It has radiating walls with vaulting, which meant they could build all the artificial seating on top of it. For its foundations, the theater has a host of concentric galleries and radiating vaulted rooms. The semi-circular form allowed for an even projection of sound throughout the seating. And to perfect the acoustics, the rear of the stage was closed off with a vertical wall. The wall was intended to reverberate and amplify the sound. And this was calculated by experts in acoustics. I'm not making this up. They made scale models and measured the sound at scale to see how it would function. The reverberation increased the volume of the sound. This 35 meter high wall was opulently decorated, with marble columns and grandiose sculptures of the emperor and deities. Because the theater wasn't just for entertainment. Anything that could serve Roman ideology was thrust right in the face of the audience. They couldn't ignore it. It was there all through the play. Before this backdrop, plays mixed politics, comedy and ribaldry. The serious plays were a bit like the Commedia dell'arte, with characters similar to Alecchino and Pulcinella. And the audience criticized the theater directors for that. They wanted raunchy plays, if not pure porn, ladles of it. It was notably a meeting place for citizens, which had a whole hierarchy. The lower down you sat, the higher up the social ladder you were, and vice versa. It was a place for shows, so people showed themselves and looked at who was there so they could check what rung of the ladder they were on. Not far from this vast construction site, the Romans embarked on another giant feat of engineering, the forum. There's a high probability that the two sites ran at the same time, and that the same architects and masons worked on them both. Located 150 meters from the theater, once again the Romans had to deal with the slope. The engineers were faced with a huge technological challenge. Remember, before the Romans built on this site, it was a hillside sloping down northwards to the Rhône. So to make a horizontal forum, they dug this gallery in the rock. The rock of the hill is just a few centimeters beneath our feet, and halfway up the windows was the forum's ground level with people walking around and so on. With the slope of the hill, there was no naturally flat land for the forum, so they first had to construct two 90-meter long underground galleries connected to a third one of 54 meters long. These three galleries, forming a horseshoe, are 4 meters high and 8.5 meters wide. They're known as cryptoporticoes, the foundations of the forum. All three galleries have vaulted ceilings. There are arched vaults, so you have to imagine the builders setting up rounded wooden scaffolding, around which they laid the stones and then gradually poured in mortar. Then they gradually moved along until they had completed the full 90 meters. The semi-circular arched vault was generally formed with cut stones, with one in the center serving as the keystone. The height and width of the vault were limited, otherwise the lateral thrust would have been too strong to keep the structure standing. So here, the Romans erected vaults in which the cut stones were replaced by a mixture of mortar and gravel. They invented something that would set, and once it had set, hey presto, they had a monolith. That was the great thing. The Romans invented concrete, a mixture of sand, water and lime. It was easy to make, and of an even better quality than our cement today. So it was used not only for the vaults, but for walls as well. What the Romans invented was the opus incertum, walls of uncut stone with gravel and mortar cement poured into the gaps, which then set. It was the concrete that gave the strength and cohesion to the wall. The big advantage was having a monolithic structure, with no cracks. With an overall surface area of about 3,000 square meters, the Forum appears to comprise two distinct esplanades, one surrounded by an 8-meter-high, 100-meter-long colonnade, and the other, lower down, probably used as a marketplace. This is the north side of the Forum, where there were originally 11 shops. They undoubtedly had awnings. So you have to imagine the sloping roof, with rainwater running down into the gutter over there. None of this was underground like it is today. It was all in the open air. This part of the Cryptoportico, now underground, once looked out onto the marketplace. Every Roman city had its Forum. It was the site of cultural and religious activities. And it was usually where the temple for emperor worship was. So it was a very federating place for the different peoples who made up the empire. There was also the Basilica, a public building that contained the law courts. There were stores, all types of craftsmen, market stores, people coming and going. It was the political center, too, where the Curia gathered, a group of men who acted as a small local senate to discuss political issues. Begun in 25 BC, the Forum took about 15 years to be completed. On the death of Augustus barely two decades later, Arles was already bestowed with two founding monuments of Roman culture, the Forum and the Theatre. To construct these two ensembles, the Arlesians benefited from an essential raw material located nearby. The limestone quarries are very close to Arles, in the Alpi Massif. This is a region of stone, and limestone was the easiest to extract and cut for the construction of the large monuments that required a lot of blocks. Other than being available in large quantities, limestone has many advantages for construction. Limestone doesn't have many defects. It might crack in freezing temperatures, but that's about it. The part of a monument that might deteriorate is the base of the walls, which can be affected by seasonal variations. With so much available limestone, the Arlesians began constructing the city's most emblematic monument, the Amphitheatre. The Arles Amphitheatre was one of the biggest in the empire and is now listed as a World Heritage Site. There was nothing like the Amphitheatre in any other ancient civilizations. It was a purely Roman invention built in an oval shape. For an ideal view, you need curves. It has to be all enveloping so your eye can see everything, every movement in the arena. There are no blind spots, so your eyes can sweep over the space and take everything in. The only limit is the scope of the human eye, which is about 50 meters. Any further than that and the show would lose all its emotion. 137 meters long and 107 meters wide, this is the city's most beautiful monument. But to obtain a flat surface of 11,500 square meters, the builders had to carry out considerable leveling work. On one side they basically cut into the hillside, and on the other they created a terrace. Underground is a completely structured terrace, a man-made platform on which to build the Amphitheatre. As for the Forum, the Romans constructed underground galleries for the building's foundations. This gallery compensates for the slope of the hill. The Romans were very good at adapting the topography for their construction sites. This structure served as the base for the cut stone seating above, which reaches up to the top of the monument. Work began in 90 A.D., ten years after the inauguration of the Colosseum in Rome. The Isle Amphitheatre is a slightly smaller copy. 21 meters high, it is composed of two levels of arcades, each with 60 arches. Like at the Colosseum, a new construction technique invented by the Romans was employed, the hollow structure. Rather than backing the monument onto a hillside, which would create a full structure on which to lay the seating, they built everything artificially with a system of radiating walls, linked together by vaults. And the seating was laid on these vaults. This is known as hollow structure. The seating served the purpose of a roof, as rainwater could run off of it. Inside, they built staircases and galleries to allow the public to move around smoothly and enter and exit rapidly through the vomitorium. Like subway exits, vomitoria were the wide vaulted passageways used by the spectators. The amphitheatre could be filled and emptied in a matter of minutes. If the building backed onto the hill, that wouldn't be possible. People would have to walk around the outside, as there would be fewer access points and more restricted circulation. With its 10 stories and 188 passageways, the amphitheatre could seat 23,000 spectators. They came in numbers for the biggest form of entertainment in the empire, gladiator fights. Like the theatre, the amphitheatre was a place of social cohesion. There was a shared sense of belonging. We are civilization. Barbarity, with its violence, is down there, before our eyes, for our entertainment. So we clearly dominate it. The combats were highly technical and extremely violent. After only a few minutes of fighting, one of the gladiators, either wounded or simply exhausted, would throw in the towel. The death of the vanquished would rarely be pronounced. This doorway is the Porta Libertina, through which they carried out the odd dead gladiator, because not all of them died. This marks the original level of the arena, which gradually sank. So what you see now was the basement during antiquity. The original arena was two meters higher than the present-day one. Underground, the basements were teeming with gladiators, show workers and wild beasts. To make the shows even more spectacular, the Romans added elevators. Two wheels were turned by slaves, which powered a hoist linked to ropes that raised the platform. The elevators could bring in the wild beasts directly on their caged trailers. They were raised to arena level, the animals were released, and the trailer would disappear back down the elevator shaft. Then the show could begin. It created a real wow effect when a wild beast suddenly appeared from the depths of the amphitheater. In this gallery, someone left their mark 2,000 years ago. One of the things that tell what went on in these galleries is the graffiti carved on the walls. Many of them, and this is the case for many amphitheaters, are erect penises, which were good luck charms to ward off the evil eye. Phalluses were everywhere during the Roman period. We find them at intersections, on fountains, and on the walls of entertainment venues. People wore them around their necks, too. It was very common to wear a bronze, silver or even gold phallus as a pendant. The construction of this monument demanded a colossal amount of work. To finance it and to preserve the phalluses, Arlesians benefited from the generosity of the city's wealthiest families. Here is an inscription in big letters, which may have been painted red to make it more visible. It's a very precious inscription because it mentions a certain Priscus. Priscus didn't pay for the whole amphitheater, only a part of it, notably this podium. The podium is the long wall that runs all around the arena. Gaius Lunius Priscus was the city's first magistrate. He was a high priest. He was one of the wealthiest donators to the city, helping with the construction of several public buildings. This was the principle of Eurigitism. Eurigitism was common practice in Roman cities. I'm rich, I have lots of money, I don't have to pay taxes, so I'll voluntarily give back some of it to my hometown, maybe by paying for part of the amphitheater. In Arles, like in all Roman cities, in Arlesians, Eurigitism was an election campaign device. This is why Priscus had the list of his donations carved onto the podium. He used the podium to say, look at all I've given you, so vote for me. Basically, this was just like an election campaign poster. Arles was so wealthy that in 150 A.D., it could afford to bestow itself with a very rare monument, a circus. Arles was one of the few cities in Gaul to have a monumental circus in stone. So it was among the elite cities which had the capacity to construct a monument that was usually only seen in very large Roman cities like Carthage, Constantinople, and Rome. Beyond the prestige of the monument, the Arles Circus was also a technological feat. Constructed on marshland on the banks of the Rhone, vast work was carried out to prepare the ground. They had to solidify the soil, so they drove in piles to create artificial density, better than the natural density of the lands, a huge number of juxtaposed piles, on top of which, once the ground was solid, they planned to build walls. They needed to drive thousands and thousands of these piles into the ground. It was a long trail to drive it in. It was a very long job, and whole forests were sacrificed. The Romans were always ready to take on even the hardest challenges posed by the land. Now gone, the circus was one of only three that existed in Gaul. So Arles was given the most beautiful monuments of Roman civilization.