Silvia Orlandi (Università La Sapienza, Rome)
The Colosseum is one of the most famous monuments in the world, but it has been rarely considered as “a container of inscriptions”, although it was originally full of epigraphic messages of many different kinds: carved, scratched, painted, erased and re-written in many different parts of the building and with many different purposes. Within this framework, the paper will focus on the five monumental inscriptions that were displayed – not all at the same time – inside the Colosseum, in different positions, but all with the same characteristics: long texts written with block letters in one single line, carved on marble blocks all around the arena, repeated twice in order to be read by the spectators of both parts of the amphitheatre. Since the discovery of the hundreds of fragments belonging to these inscriptions, and their publication in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, most of the attention has been paid to their content, related to restoration works made during the fourth and above all the fifth century AD: one of the inscriptions, for example, can be dated to the reign of Honorius and Theodosius II, while two others mention the emperor Valentinian III. But many interesting pieces of information about the different phases of life of the monument can be gleaned thanks to the observation of apparently less significant details: how and where the text was written, which technical details can be observed beside the letters (holes, traces of reuse, measures, quality of marble), how we can imagine the original position of these inscriptions within the architectural structure of the monument, and so on. Taking into account this data that is generally not considered, we can make some hypothesis about the possible reconstruction not only of their content, but also of the “communication strategy” that lies behind them, despite the extremely fragmentary condition of these texts. Moreover, looking at the format of these inscriptions, we can infer that at the end of its life as amphitheatre, the Colosseum had probably already partially collapsed, but it nevertheless remained in use, with a choice of “living with the ruins” that in late antique Rome was much more widespread than one would imagine. Once again, asking about an inscription “how does it work?” rather than “what does it say?” can give us a more correct idea of the way in which the epigraphic message, together with the monumental context where it was displayed, expressed its whole communication potential, made of verbal as well of non-verbal elements.