Original subtitles

The brainchild of the emperor Vespasian,

the Colosseum was his gift to the people of Rome.

If you want to mark a fresh start as a new emperor,

well, go no further.

It was a major statement of the fact that he was the new guy in charge.

The Colosseum opened its doors to the public in 80 CE.

It hosted 100 days of extravagant spectacles

organised by Vespasian's son Titus.

But, just ten years after those first games,

the Colosseum underwent an upgrade...

..adding an infrastructure

that would make new spectacles even more extraordinary.

So, not long after Titus opened the Colosseum

and there were the inaugural games,

he dies, and his brother Domitian takes over.

The Flavians have been in power for little over a decade.

And Domitian lacks the profile of his father Vespasian

or brother Titus.

He is keen to find a way to make his mark.

One of the things Domitian pays attention to is the Colosseum.

Domitian is thinking about developments he can make

to make the games more spectacular.

By throwing games that will keep the people entertained,

He's making sure that they also see him as a good emperor

and he remains popular.

He added a fourth tier,

which made room for over 10,000 more spectators.

And increased the coliseum's height from 35 to almost 50m,

the equivalent of a 15-floor building.

But Domitian didn't stop there.

Not only did he expand the Colosseum to new heights...

..he dug down,

creating a huge subterranean expanse beneath the arena floor...

..the hypogeum.

But how did this labyrinth of passages

help entertain the crowds?

Archaeologist Federica Rinaldi

descends into the belly of the Colosseum.

The hypogeum is a maze of 14 corridors

lined with 32 small chambers.

In many places, the floors are marked by mysterious holes.

Within the walls that surround the holes,

grooves and shapes in the stonework add to the mystery.

Archaeologists have decoded their purpose.

The bronze inlay once held a wooden column

that, when turned,

would hoist a caged animal or man

from a holding cell up to the arena floor.

Emperor Domitian had transformed the area below the Colosseum

into 12,000 square metres of high-tech stagecraft.

But the success of any games

still rested firmly on a perennial favourite...

..the Gladiators.

And there was more to this spectacle

than a simple fight to the death.

In Rome, Alexander Mariotti believes

the only way to truly understand a gladiator is to become one.

Experimental archaeology is an interesting way

to get another perspective that the sources don't give us.

Once you put on the armour, once you fight with the weapons,

you start to gain a physical knowledge and a physical memory.

You understand the hardships -

things as simple as the inability to breathe,

your perception of what you can actually see,

the weight of the helmet,

the tiredness that comes through the physical combat.

So it's a great way of sort of filling in the gaps that we have

through history.

The sport is entirely different than we've been led to believe.

What we have here is two examples of prime gladiators.

Iniziate!

Gladiators were the MMA fighters,

the mixed martial artists of their time.

Each discipline had its own style.

And this is part of the excitement of going to the games.

Because you're going to see what kind of strategies

that gladiators are going to use.

There were over 15 different classes of gladiator,

and each style was carefully curated to maximise the spectacle of combat.

And through their armour, through their weapons,

they have advantages and disadvantages,

strengths and weaknesses.

These strengths and weaknesses

meant each gladiator pairing provided its own fascinating contest,

keeping audiences enthralled.

One of the most popular battles was the retiarius versus the secutor.

This is a fan favourite. This is the retiarius.

He was the only one whose face you could see,

and that made him human.

The thing about gladiator helmets

is that they dehumanised the fighter.

He became more of a robot.

He didn't show expressions of pain.

Whereas the retiarius is us.

We can see him. We can see his expressions.

Many classes of gladiator

were derived from the ancient enemies of Rome,

a reminder of its historical triumphs.

But with no helmet, the retiarius was an everyman,

a simple fisherman.

So he has two weapons, which are pretty iconic.

He's got a trident over here, and a net.

The net is really a very dramatic piece of equipment.

You can imagine them swinging it in the middle of the arena,

the people loving it.

The retiarius has the advantage of mobility,

but has little protection,

unlike his opponent.

The secutor here is a tank.

He's got not only this massive helmet,

which, if you look at it objectively,

has a little bit of a fish-like quality -

small eye holes, a fin on the top.

And so we have a theme to the fight.

This is a fight of nature, man versus nature,

the fish against the fisherman.

Man versus nature.

Rome against its enemies.

Gladiator fights were more than sporting contests.

They played to themes the Romans held dear.

And it's the clash of these two - who's going to win,

that makes it exciting for the Roman audience.

That's what it is. It's a show.

Across the empire, gladiators were the headline act.

It's estimated that at any one time

over 16,000 of these skilled fighters

were needed to serve in the empire's amphitheatres.

But how did Rome produce these specialist fighters?

Over 700km from Rome

lay the border town of Carnuntum...

..in what today is Austria.

Nearly all that's visible now

are the remains of two amphitheatres,

over 3km apart.

Professor Wolfgang Neubauer

has been working at the site for over 30 years.

Carnuntum was a really important town.

It is one of the hotspots

of the Roman Empire

in the second and third century.

Located on the banks of the Danube river,

Carnuntum was a thriving centre of commerce

and home to 50,000 citizens.

And it still lies here, untouched,

under farmland and pristine countryside.

Carnuntum is very special because it has never been overbuilt.

All the remains are still preserved in the ground.

So it's all there!

The town is about 10 square kilometres.

It's absolutely impossible to excavate something like this.

But there is another way to do archaeology.

Wolfgang and his team are pioneers of non-invasive archaeology.

They combine LiDAR,

ground penetrating radar, and magnetometry

to create detailed models of the structures below the surface.

Wolfgang survey reveals the sprawling infrastructure

around the bigger of the two amphitheatres

for the first time.

You can actually really walk into this data

and see all the different details.

And one mysterious building catches his eye.

The scans show four stone walls

surrounding a round wooden structure inside,

around 20m in diameter.

The most amazing thing was a circular structure.

And, when we look closer to this circular structure,

it looked like a small amphitheatre.

And in the centre of this circular feature

was one individual hole, a post hole.

We realised that this might be the foundation of a palus.

Roman sources describe the palus

as a wooden post gladiators used to practice their sword blows,

like a timber punchbag.

And one place you would find a palus

is inside a gladiator school.

We had to verify this.

So we made an excavation and we found the foundation of the palus

in the centre of the training arena.

And this made it clear that

we really found a school of gladiators in Carnuntum.

This gladiator school has remained preserved beneath the ground

for almost 2,000 years.

It's the first of its kind to be found outside Italy...

..and helps explain the nature of another structure back in Rome...

..discovered in the 1930s,

during construction work a stone's throw from the Colosseum.

Here, in the shadow of the Colosseum,

is this large, sprawling complex.

You can actually see quite clearly there's a massive curved wall.

This structure is an amphitheatre.

But what is another arena doing right next to the Colosseum?

This structure is known as the Ludus Magnus.

And that means, in Latin, the 'big school'.

So this is really the epitome of gladiator schools

throughout the Roman Empire - this is number-one.

Evidence of its lost grandeur is still apparent.

Take a look right here. Alright.

So what you have here is a marble plug.

And then, right next to it's a little piece of a metal pin.

That's part of the attachment system

to which you would adhere panels of marble.

Those panels of marble have been stripped away,

but this tells us they were there,

which means that this gladiator school was beautifully decorated.

Because the emperors owned this, it means money is no object.

This is just imperial magnificence.

You can imagine the emperor coming to watch some of the performances

in this practice arena.

That's the prestige of the Ludus Magnus.

The barracks were at least two, even three storeys high,

so hundreds and hundreds of gladiators.

Every day, they're practising, they're training,

getting ready for the main event in the Colosseum.

We want to think about it being like coming to Madison Square Garden.

You've made it. You've established yourself.

You're coming from all over the Empire,

and now you're going to the great big show.

The remains of the gladiator school

hint at how far the Romans went to provide the best entertainment.

But is there a way to learn more about the gladiators themselves?

Vienna, Austria -

home to the lab of forensic anthropologist Fabian Kanz,

an expert in human remains.

For us, as humans, everything we do leaves traces in our skeleton.

It's exciting to see a skeleton for the first time.

There is always a story behind this individual.

You have to try to find clues about the life of this person.

Fabian and his team were called in to examine the remains

of more than 60 bodies

found buried in a mass grave

over 1,000km from the Colosseum...

..in a Roman cemetery in Ephesus, Turkey.

All bar one turned out to be male.

Then, we start finding injuries.

It was just overwhelming how many injuries we found.

There are just two options -

maybe there have been soldiers or they have been gladiators.

What is really impressive on this skull

is a really massive, sharp-force wound.

And there is kind of tearing,

which means this must be caused by a barbed instrument.

The only weapon that could tear bones in this way

was the barbed tip of a trident.

And the only people who used a trident in combat...

..were gladiators.

There was a moment where we put all these clues together.

We have this group with just males in it.

We have this very high amount of healed and unhealed trauma.

These, all together, fitted very well

that these are the remains of gladiators.

These are the first gladiator bones ever to be found,

let alone studied in this kind of detail.

It makes it possible to prove what they ate,

how they lived, how they trained.

So it was just super exciting.

Signs of damage to one of the skulls catches Fabian's eye.

He zooms in to inspect the wound more closely.

This is the frontal bone of the skull.

And as you can see here, there's a massive, sharp-force trauma.

The chance to survive this is very low.

But you can see all the borders of the injury are smooth.

This means it was professionally treated,

all the little bones, splints and everything picked out.

Therefore, it recovered nearly perfectly.

It's evidence that gladiators received the best medical care,

like a prize athlete today.

We know from the books that

gladiators have the best medical treatment at that time.

But now we have the physical evidence to prove this.

But did the special treatment of gladiators

go further than emergency medicine?

Fabian cuts a bone sample...

..and freeze-dries the fragment with liquid nitrogen...

..before grinding it into powder

and mixing it into a solution.

A flame spectrometer

can reveal the presence of different elements in a liquid

to analyse its chemical composition.

Fabian tests the bone solution for any unusual elements.

The flame burns bright red.

And do you see? It's very intense.

It's evidence of the element strontium,

normally only found in trace amounts.

Strontium strengthens bones.

But these gladiator bones contain unusually large amounts.

It was not just a little bit more.

They had double the amount than normal people at that time.

So, what were gladiators eating to raise their strontium levels?

Ancient texts talk about a special brew

made from burned bones or plants.

Burning bones, leaves, wood or bark to ash

concentrates natural strontium levels.

Drinking this mixture boosted the gladiators' intake.

Fabian believes this could explain

the superhuman levels of strontium in the skeletons.

You have to think about this ash drink

like we drink nowadays after sports these fizzy tablets.

And this was pretty much the same.

From training halls made of marble to strontium supplements,

nothing was spared in pursuit of the ultimate warrior...

..a phenomenal fighter who could provide a bloody spectacle

head-to-head with another gladiator on the Colosseum floor.

And for the gladiators, there were only two ways out of the Colosseum.

To the west lay the Porta Triumphalis,

the Gate of Triumph.

To the east, the Porta Libitinaria,

the Gate of the Undertaker.

But is it true that the price of failure was death?

Don't get me wrong -

gladiatorial combat is a VERY dangerous sport.

But, far from what we commonly have believed,

gladiator fights were not just a free-for-all brawl to the death.

Death was hugely uncommon.

We have this belief that gladiators died consistently,

but they didn't.

Death was present in anything from about 5-9% of fights,

and, most of the time, that comes from injuries.

You have referees who have rules.

So it's a very regulated fight, and it had to ,

be because there's a lot of money involved in this.

Gladiators are not disposable.

They were superstars.

It's about avoiding death.

It's about facing death with strength and courage

and laughing at death's face.

And what is more inspiring than that?

Throughout the second century CE,

the Colosseum showcased the most lavish shows ever seen in Rome

that mirrored the greatness of the empire.

A golden age of peace and prosperity.

But hidden beneath the modern paving

that surrounds the Colosseum today

are finds that hint at a turning point in Rome's fortunes.

It's a coin. It's a Roman coin.

It's too dirty, so we really don't have any idea

of which period it is.

It's coin probably lost by a spectator.

Specialist cleaning and analysis is needed

before the coin gives up its story.

But late-second century coins recently discovered here

reveal a puzzle.

They contain less gold or silver than earlier Roman coins...

..evidence the economy is struggling.

The empire extends from Syria in the east

to Spain in the west.

Why are its finances so stretched?

It is difficult to place precisely

when things really start to take a turn for the worse.

But there were plenty of signs of crisis,

of deep-seated problems coming to the fore

at the tail end of the second century.

A huge empire means distant borders to protect.

And here, the latest technology can provide clues

that point to a moment of crisis for the empire.

At the border town of Carnuntum in Austria...

..archaeologist Mario Wallner

is using ground penetrating radar to expose its secrets.

With these motorised GPS systems,

we have really made a very big step forward.

We are really able to see into the ground.

We are even able to see

a stone this size

in a depth of 2-2.5m.

This powerful technology

has revealed the hidden city in unprecedented detail.

You can clearly see the roads.

And then, next to it, you see the houses.

So it looks like they have small shops and taverns.

With all these details, you can really tell everything

about the layout of the city.

You really get an idea

of how impressive the city once must have looked like.

Carnuntum has been the capital of a peaceful Roman border province

for nearly a century.

But the archaeology reveals that in the 170s, everything changes.

Just recently, we made a very important discovery here.

We found this dark line here.

It looks like they really erased a couple of structures

and then built this dark linear structure right above it.

The remains of a huge defensive wall,

built around the end of the second century.

This area here doesn't look like very interesting,

but we are now standing here,

exactly where we are,

on a Roman town wall,

which was more than 1m wide and up to 9m high.

The wall towered over houses and shops in Carnuntum.

What was it for?

So, usually when you build a wall, you feel threatened.

Carnuntum lay on the south bank of the mighty Danube River.

To the north - the land of the barbarians,

peaceful neighbours for over a century.

But by the mid-second century,

peoples from the north were encroaching on their territories.

Under pressure, the barbarians pushed south, across the Danube.

The Roman wall was built to repel the threat.

Near Carnuntum, they ambush a 20,000-strong Roman garrison,

slaughtering them.

They take Carnuntum with ease,

then drive into the heart of the Empire.

The Pax Romana was no more.

It was a very dire strait.

Rome and the empire hadn't seen anything of the like

in...nearly three centuries.

New strategies had to be devised in order to address challenges

that could potentially be existential for the empire itself.

And at an amphitheatre in Rome,

less than 2km from the Colosseum,

there's evidence of another, more immediate threat to empire.

Look at this! This is really impressive.

You've got this curved structure here,

and you have two storeys.

And look, it's all made out of brick.

We see some pilasters. We see engaged columns, even capitals.

This is a really beautiful work of art.

This amphitheatre,

built for displays of military might for a select imperial audience,

has been drastically recast.

What's going on here?

What happens to it is that it gets bricked in,

it gets repurposed.

It's been converted into a wall.

Only a few decades after the barbarian attacks on Carnuntum,

this amphitheatre has been integrated into a huge, 20km-long wall

built to defend the city.

Why would you build a wall?

Because it was necessary. There was a panic.

The Germanic peoples, tribes, hordes of barbarian soldiers

were descending into Italy.

By the middle of the third century,

Rome is no longer interested in offence...

..only defence.

The wall is a response to this new reality.

Rome hadn't built a wall circuit to protect its inhabitants

for almost 700 years.

Those glory days of the high empire -

Trajan and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius -

they're long gone.

This is a low point for the history of the Roman Empire.

The empire is close to collapse.

But in the 270s, it gets a second chance.

A new emperor, Aurelian,

secures major victories against the barbarians

and brings peace to Rome once again.

But inside the borders of the Empire,

there's another growing threat

that could shake the very foundations of what it means to be Roman.

Over 175km from El Jem

lies the Carthage Amphitheatre.

In this dark and humid tunnel...

..the prisoners did their last walk towards death,

hearing the noise of 43,000 spectators...

..the roaring of wild beasts,

their smell.

That must have been very terrifying.

Records tell of an execution here

early in the third century.

The victim - Perpetua.

Her crime - to be Christian.

They were, in fact, two women and four men.

They refused to deny their faith, to the last minute.

So they were exposed to wild beasts.

It's really terrifying...

..people happy seeing the bloodshed.

In the third century,

Christianity was gaining followers.

But for an empire struggling for unity,

Christians were a problem.

Christians rejected much of the Roman culture.

They refused to worship the deities,

to consider the emperors as divine,

to serve in the army,

to attend the theatres, the circuses, the amphitheatres.

They behaved differently.

By refusing to take part in rituals,

you are threatening the social and political fabric of society.

When societies have problems...

..authorities will invent a scapegoat.

And the Christians were the good scapegoat.

And most of the public agreed.

Perpetua would become a famous martyr.

But she was far from alone.

Throughout the third century,

Christians were slaughtered in amphitheatres

across the empire.

But what of the Colosseum?

Today, a memorial first erected by the Catholic Church

is still standing.

Since medieval times, the Church has claimed

Christians were fed to the beasts here.

But is there any evidence?

The written record is scarce.

We have some historical sources that point toward

the persecution of Christians in all kinds of horrific ways.

A ninth-century religious source

documents the martyrdom of two Christian Persians -

Abdon and Sennen,

butchered by gladiators at the Colosseum

in the mid-third century

for refusing to denounce their faith.

Whether or not Christians were ever put to death here,

the Colosseum has become a symbol of religious persecution,

a clear sign Rome's beliefs and values were under attack.

But then, in 404, it receives a body blow.

It is stripped of its most popular attraction.

Gladiator fights are banned

by the new emperor of Rome, Honorius...

..himself a Christian.

The imperial elite

has quite comprehensively Christianised by this point.

And that's a very swift transition that occurs in less than a century.

Once, violence and bloodletting united an empire.

Now the Roman elite looked to Christianity

to do the same job...

..as Honorius bans gladiator fights across the empire...

..leaving amphitheatres the venue for little more than animal hunts.

The Colosseum is becoming less of a strategic asset

to the imperial power than had previously been the case.

Rome is the symbolic centre of the empire,

but the battles that the empire has to face

in order to secure its survival are elsewhere.

The decree that put an effective ban on gladiatorial games

was really not the end, but the beginning of the end.

The Colosseum has suffered a blow to its status.

But bigger shocks are to come.

Amidst rubble excavated in the 19th century

from one of the Colosseum entrances

is the remains of a memorial inscription

that reveals momentous events.

This and other inscriptions reveal that,

just 40 years after gladiators are banned,

the Colosseum is struck by major earthquakes.

The colonnades of the upper levels collapse.

Stands crumble.

The arena floor splinters.

The hypogeum fills with rubble.

Despite makeshift repairs,

it will never reclaim its former glory.

Once, the Colosseum would have been rebuilt.

But not this time.

Why?

The answer lies with calamities that have overtaken the empire.

By the early fifth century,

the Empire's defences are once more stretched.

They are unable to withstand the continued barbarian threat.

Hordes sweep through the Italian peninsula.

In 410, they reach Rome.

The barbarians are literally at the gates of Rome.

They're right here.

The wall circuit, in and of itself, is formidable.

But the walls aren't enough.

You need the manpower to go along with it.

They don't have the people.

The bottom line is, there's no great fight.

Rome falls. It was a shot heard around the world.

It was over.

The empire's epicentre is no more.

As a military force, it is spent.

When, later in the century, Rome is sacked again,

it signals the end of the empire in Italy.

Rome remains an important city.

The Colosseum remains an important time-honoured monument

in the city of Rome.

But the empire is no more.

In the east, at Constantinople, you still have a Roman emperor.

But the Roman Empire comes to an end in the West.

Without the Empire,

Rome can no longer afford the luxury of the Colosseum.

Written accounts reveal animal hunts and acrobatic displays

were performed here in 523.

After that, the record is silent.

But was this really the end?

Amidst the ancient rubbish excavated from the Colosseum sewers,

the archaeologists make a discovery.

It's a finely crafted ring of almost pure gold.

But the golden ring presents a puzzle.

Records state the games at the Colosseum ended

by the early sixth century.

But if this ring was crafted later,

a person of wealth was in the Colosseum

long after the games finished.

Why were they there?

What were they watching?

It's one for future archaeologists to solve.

The Colosseum had hosted bloody entertainments

for almost half a millennium.

Built in the Golden Age of the Roman Empire,

it had shared in its rise,

but also its fall.

And, without the empire to support it,

this once-great venue was abandoned.

Over the coming centuries, Rome herself would move on,

returning to greatness as the centre of Western Christianity.

And this new Rome found a way to repurpose the ancient monument.

I'm standing in front of Saint Peter's Basilica.

This is the most famous church of the Roman Catholic world.

If you take a look at the balcony,

and then the rest of the facade,

we see these beautifully articulated architectural features.

It's all the same creamy white limestone,

called travertine,

and it should look familiar.

We've got written documentation in the renaissance

of thousands of cartloads of travertine stone

brought directly from the Colosseum

to build St Peter's Basilica.

The ultimate irony -

if we think about the Colosseum and its bloodshed and its violence,

and we have that grand arena for gladiatorial bouts living on,

transformed, to construct this monument of peace,

its stones transformed and reused

as part of the heart of the new spiritual empire,

the heart of the Catholic Church here in St Peter's.

Not every stone was taken.

What remains is the ruin we see today.

Still standing almost 2,000 years later,

it's a potent reminder

of ancient Rome's bravado and brilliance,

evidence of its cruel and callous culture,

but an enduring symbol of an empire that once transformed the world.