The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum.

In her introduction Welch sets out her intentions—to examine the amphitheatre in architectural and historical terms during the critical middle and late Republican periods (4). Many previous studies of this building type concentrate on the imperial period; some have ventured into its political and cultural aspects (e.g., Keith Hopkins’s Death and Renewal, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Jean-Claude Golvin’s L’Amphithéâtre romain. Essai sur la théorisation de sa forme et de ses fonctions (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1988), the most comprehensive study of the amphitheatre, devotes only three chapters to its origins. The majority of his study examines the amphitheatre’s typologies, chronology, and function during the empire. Welch’s study is the first to explore thoroughly the development of the amphitheatre building type and its place in Roman Republican and Early Imperial culture.

Welch’s book is organized into two parts—six chapters that address the creation and development of the amphitheatre and a lengthy appendix that provides a catalogue of Republican amphitheatres. In chapter 1, she examines the institution of public games during the Roman Republic and reviews the literary and archaeological evidence for the origins of gladiatorial combat. She addresses possible Osco-Samnite and Etruscan precedents and notes that even the Romans were unsure as to the exact origins of arena games (17). Welch argues that these games were connected to funerary and military rituals, and gradually incorporated other violent acts including the damnatio ad bestias (execution of a prisoner of war or criminal by a wild beast). In chapter 2, Welch examines the origins of amphitheatre architecture in the Roman Republic and proposes a series of arena arrangements in the Forum Romanum. These include the maeniana, or balconies, that were used in the Middle Republic for viewing gladiatorial combat (32–35). Most of the chapter is dedicated to exploring the vexed issue of seating for the games in the Forum Romanum and the form of the structures around the arena floor. Provocative sketches by Phil Stinson illustrate a possible sequence of forms for the forum’s temporary wooden amphitheatres. In chapter 3, Welch explores the emergence of masonry construction for amphitheatres in the Republican period. She examines the transition from wooden to stone structures and studies the well-preserved example in Pompeii in great detail.

In chapter 4, probably the book’s most intriguing, Welch posits the Amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus as the “missing link” between the early stone examples, such as the one at Pompeii, and the great imperial amphitheatres. As opposed to the well-preserved amphitheatre in Pompeii, the traces of the amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus are minimal—a notoriously thorny problem in the reconstruction of the topography of Augustan Rome. Welch nimbly works her way through the evidence and offers a plausible interpretation of Taurus’s amphitheatre. Based on comparisons with amphitheatres in Augustan colonies, an assessment of the literary sources, and an etching from Piranesi, she convincingly places the amphitheatre at the Monte de’ Cenci in the southern Campus Martius. Not only is she able to situate the structure within the physical fabric of the city, she positions the amphitheatre as a new monumental building type for the Augustan city of Rome. She posits that the prominence of Taurus’s amphitheatre helps explain the building type’s proliferation from that point forward.

Chapter 5, also particularly strong, analyzes the Colosseum and its context in Flavian Rome. Welch avoids the complex archaeological and structural territory already exhaustively explored by Rossella Rea and Lynne Lancaster. Instead, she initially focuses on the architectural orders on the Colosseum’s façade, and notes that the Colosseum was the first known amphitheatre to have Greek architectural orders on its façade (138–139); earlier stone amphitheatres had used the Tuscan order. Welch then offers an analysis of the building’s literary sources. One of the greatest strengths of Welch’s book is her fresh interpretation of the famed passages from Martial and Suetonius. These authors celebrate the Colosseum as a building for public spectacles and as a restoration to the people of Rome of the land that Nero had seized to construct his Domus Aurea. When one places these passages alongside the archaeological data, a different picture emerges. Welch ably demonstrates that this central area of Rome could not, in fact, have been walled off, private space that Nero reserved for himself and his guests; on the contrary, the data suggest that the major roads that ran through the area continued to be accessible throughout his reign. If people and goods moved freely through the area of the Domus Aurea, then it is a mistake to think of it as an enclosed imperial palace. In addition, Welch cites further archaeological evidence that wealthy individuals owned residences and warehouses in this area. Thus, she concludes that the wealthy, not the poor of Rome, were probably the ones who were upset with Nero’s famed residence since it impinged on their land, and they were the ones whose views are represented in the ancient sources.

Chapter 6 offers a brief analysis of the reception of the amphitheatre in the Greek world with Corinth and Athens as case studies. Welch concludes her text with a detailed appendix of the nearly twenty amphitheatres constructed during the Roman Republic. In Athens, the Theatre of Dionysus held the gladiatorial games, while in Corinth the amphitheatre was placed on the edge of the city. Athens seems to have been the first Greek city to renovate its theatre to house gladiatorial spectacles, and accomplished this by converting the orchestra into a small arena. Ancient authors, such as Dio Chrysostom and Lucian, did not view this conversion in a positive light. Interestingly, very few amphitheatres were constructed in the Greek world, but Welch notes that these were often found in Roman colonies or provincial capitals. Corinth is a particularly good example of this.

Problems with Welch’s text are few. In her discussion of the origins of the amphitheatre’s form in the Forum Romanum, Welch details the complex construction process (and hypothetical sequence) of these temporary wooden structures. It is only when one reads endnote eighty-three that one learns that, “the entire construction scenario discussed here is largely the work of [Philip] Stinson” (283). If this is the case, Stinson should, at the very least, have been given fuller credit for his ideas, and not just for his draftsmanship, in the actual text.

In addition, in chapter 4 as she lists reasons why Taurus would sponsor an amphitheatre, she states that, “Augustus built temples; Agrippa and Taurus less elevated, more functional structures” (118). While this sounds convincing, it is an oversimplification and only addresses part of the archaeological record. For example, Agrippa’s built works were wide-ranging and included “elevated” structures, such as one very prominent temple, the Pantheon. Further, while the color plates were a pleasant addition at the end of the text, it is surprising that the images were not cleaned when they were scanned. The scratches and dirt on the original slides are, sadly, still visible on numerous plates.

Overall, Welch should be commended for providing such a provocative study of the origins of the Roman amphitheatre. She addressed a challenging topic, and with clear argumentation and prose offers a remarkable contribution to the architectural and cultural studies of the amphitheatre. Welch’s book, now available in paperback, will be required reading not only for all students of Roman architecture, but also for anyone interested in the cultural context of the arena games from the middle Republic through the early Empire.