An enquiry into the multiplicity of relations with an “emblem of imperial Rome”
Cecelia Feldman Weiss

(Google earth image)
Where is the Colosseum?
The answer to this question seems obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable icon for the “Roman past-as-glorious,” for “Roman present-as-tourist destination,” the Colosseum is a prominent feature both on the Roman cityscape and in the contemporary collective imagination. Given the attention lavished on this structure in both academic scholarship and popular media, it might seem trite or indulgent to ask a question as simple as where it is located.
But indulge briefly: since its construction, the Colosseum has been translated in to numerous media (books, photographs, video games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena, as mere representations of an “original.” However, another argument treats media as modes which translate something of the material world, the Colosseum, and thereby are able to circulate it at a distance (Law 2002, Witmore 2006). If we extend this understanding of the Colosseum as distributed through media then the prospect of identifying any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more complicated. It would be more appropriate to recognize the Colosseum as always occupying many places in the plural.

Routledge (2004) critiques the concept of “thingness” in relation to the concretization of the state as “thing” with its own agency. If we keep with Routledge’s rejection of a thing as something concrete, following in the sizeable footsteps of Bruno Latour (1986, 2005) (along with other proponents of actor-network-theory, particularly as applicable to archaeology: Olsen 2003, Witmore 2004) then, even though as a building-in-itself we seem to be dealing with a singular entity, a bounded object, the Colosseum is also a heterogeneous ensemble (Callon and Law 1992). It is implicated in a complex network of materials, interactions, actions, pasts, and presents. It is a gathering of relations and materials (Heidegger 1996: der ding an sich). Moreover, not only is the building a multiplicity, but through its translation in various media, the possible modes of accessing and engaging with it become exponential in scope. From this perspective, the ever-increasing collection of media that address and translate some aspect of the Colosseum play as active a role in shaping it as do the limestone blocks, bricks, and concrete standing in a valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills. Therefore, I would argue that the breadth of media in which the Colosseum is translated allows for it to be in Rome and in many other places simultaneously (Latour 1986). It is on the self in libraries, on the screen in movie theaters, printed on propaganda posters, pasted in photo albums, projected in lectures or redeployed in the design of sports stadiums. In this way, different aspects of the Colosseum are widely and variously disseminated beyond the building-in-itself.
The same multiplicity in relation to its spatial diversity also holds true for the temporal realities of the Colosseum. “Modernist” (or, post-Enlightenment) thought champions the belief that there is a distinct separation between the past and the present, such that present time is divided from the past by ‘Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past survives in them…’ (Latour, 1993: 68; these are also core tenants of symmetrical archaeology). In this conception, the flow of time is unflaggingly unidirectional—time moves from one monolithic moment to the next in which pasts are neither simultaneous nor blended with the present (Serres with Latour 1995, Witmore 2006). Yet, the city of Rome is a polychronic, mixed ensemble of times where vestiges of the past are nonetheless mixed into the contemporary fabric of the city (Serres with Latour 1995). As a complex feature of the Roman cityscape, the Colosseum is also an entanglement of pasts and presents. In a contrasting conception of post-Enlightenment metaphysics, in which there is a tacit understanding that the beginning of an engagement with the past must necessarily begin from a contemporary perspective, then there is always an aspect of the present implicated in the past that we seek to access. The past is neither distant nor distinct from the present, but rather there is always something of the past that “percolates” into our contemporary interactions with it (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2006, 2007).
Because it is always through our immediate engagements that we approach the material past, it is best to begin in medias res (Latour 2005)—in the middle of the matter and in the middle of our relations with the thing. The following examples highlight the distributed nature of the Colosseum through its diverse translations and relationships:
Propaganda, Mussolini, and Steven Dyson
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 8:00 pm: Stephen Dyson, a professor of Archaeology at SUNY Buffalo, gives the inaugural R. Ross Holloway lecture at Brown University.
The topic of discussion was archaeology and ideology in nineteenth and twentieth century Rome. Dyson focused his attention on the role that Fascist ideology championed by “Il Duce”, Benito Mussolini, had on the treatment and use of ancient monuments in the Roman cityscape. Integral to the Fascist ideological message was an identification with ancient Rome and the use of ancient Roman art and archaeology to create a new sense of “discipline, militarism, and order in post-World War I Italy” (Dyson 2006: 175). One way in which this was accomplished was by what Mussolini referred to as “la parola al piccono” (the word of the pickaxe) in which both Roman monuments (and Christian churches) were cleared of the architectural elements that had gradually accreted over time, and were restored to their original, “pristine” condition.
The Fascist relationship with Roman antiquities was not limited to excavation and isolation, but also included building projects that coordinated archaeology with new construction. One such project was the creation of the parade route, the via dell’Impero (Street of the Empire), now called Via dei Fori Imperali. The route ran between Mussolini’s residence in the Palazzo Venezia and the Colosseum. The ancient monuments in the fora of Augustus, Julius Caesar, and Trajan—monuments that had been buried by centuries of building and occupation but were cleared down to their imperial levels—provided a grand stage for large-scale state spectacle (Dyson 2006).

The Fascist relationship with Roman antiquities was greatly influenced by Napleonic policies regarding Rome’s classical heritage (Dyson 2006). With Napoleon there was a shift in attitude during the nineteenth century from one that focused on quarrying the monuments of antiquity for building material to conservation and consolidation. One of the previous popes, Pope Alexander VII (1655-67), was more concerned with glorifying the Papacy than preserving the Imperial Roman past. He commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design and execute the Piazza of Saint Peter’s Church. Bernini conceived of the piazza so that it resembles two curving arms extending from the church as if to welcome visitors with a warm embrace. The square is 240 meters across, surrounded by a colonnade composed of 284 columns and 88 pilasters. Bernini was able to complete this task in an unprecedented amount of time, most likely because most of the limestone he used for the colonnade had been pre-quarried—it had previously been part of the Colosseum (Masson 2003). The Colosseum, here is translated into a quarry; its former pieces are now performing in other relationships.

Other places in which the Colosseum can be encountered beyond blocks of stone, metal clamps, marble, and concrete:
• Tourbooks: Rome: Past and Present, Eyewitness Rome, Blue Guide for Rome, Oxford Archaeological Guide to Rome.
• Internet: Google, blogs, online Newsletters, Google Earth.
• Libraries: Brown University Rockefeller Library 1-size DG68.1.C6513 2001 (Coarelli, Filippo, A. Gabucci (ed.), translated by M. Becker. 2001. The Colosseum. J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Coins: Sestertius of Titus (c.a. 80 C.E.), Sigillo of Federico I Barbarossa (1154 C.E.), Euro 5 cent coin (2002 C.E.).
• Maps (in multiple media): A. Tempesta, Veduta di Roma (1593), G.B. Nolli, Veduta di Roma (1748). Movies: Gladiator, The Way of the Dragon, Colosseum: A Gladiator’s Story.
• Art (in multiple media): Colosseum from the Esqueline by Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1822), The Flagellation of Saint Bibiana by Pietro de Cortona, The Sepulcher of the Haterii, photographs, posters.
• Poetry: Edgar Allen Poe “The Coliseum,” Lord Byron “Childe Harold.”
• Board Games: Colosseum Days of Wonder.
• Video Games: Colosseum Road to Freedom, Pokemon Colosseum.
• Architecture: Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, Harvard University Football Stadium, architectural drawings of Carlo Fontana.
These translations are also things and demand our engagement with them as such—their material qualities play a role in the way in which we engage with them, how they mediate between the world and our understanding of it, how they translate the world into various forms. Media are not merely vessels with which we are able to transport ourselves to different times and places. John Law (2002) suggests that telling stories about the world actively helps to perform that world. In writing about the Colosseum, this text along with all these texts, images, lectures, movies, etc. participate in the shaping of the Colosseum itself. This writing performance then renders the thing more “obdurate, more solid, more real than it might otherwise have been (Law 2002: 6)” and thus carries something of the present into the future. This perspective suggests that we are all mixed up in the things we are describing; there is no innocent act of description but that all means of description of the world are, by nature, acts of participation in that world. The works that describe the Colosseum not only perform the reality of the Colosseum, but also alter it.
In this, perhaps it is more appropriate to ask where are the Colosseums?

References
Callon, M. and J. Law 1997. “After the individual in society: lessons on collectivity from science, technology and society.” Canadian Journal of Sociology. 22(2) 165-82.
Dyson, S. 2006. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts. New Haven: Yale University Press
González-Ruibal, A. 2006. “The past is tomorrow: towards and archaeology of the vanishing present.” Norwegian Archaeological Review, 39(2): 110-25.
Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press
Latour, B., 1986: Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands, in H. Kuklick, and E. Long (eds), Knowledge and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present Vol. 6, 1-40
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. (trans. C. Porter), , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2005: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Duke Univeristy Press
Masson, G. (revised by J. Fort) 2003 (1965). The Companion Guide to Rome. The Society of Authors
Olsen, B., 2003: “Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review” 36(2), 87-104
Routledge, B. 2004. “The thingness of the state” in Moab in the Iron Age: hegemony, polity, archaeology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Serres, M. with Latour, B. 1995. Conversations of Science, Culture, and Time (trans. R. Lapidus). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Witmore, C.L. 2004. “On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece,” Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64
Witmore, C.L. 2006. ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time. Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World.’ Journal of Material Culture 11(3), pp. 267-292
Witmore, C.L. 2007. “Landscape, time, topology: An archaeological account to the southern Argolid, Greece” In Hicks, D., Fariclough, G. and McAtackney, L. (eds.), Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. One World Archaeology, 194-225.