“Thumbs up or thumbs down?” Marilyn from Tacoma, Washington, perched on the edge of the bleachers, raised her sunglasses, adjusted her tank top, and struck an aristocratic pose.
“We’ll do one of both,” said her friend, standing two rows down with her cell phone. “Move your butt to the left so I can get the archway in the shot.”
When you’re sitting in the upper rows of a Roman amphitheater, surveying the flat, dusty arena, it’s easy to picture yourself as a toga-clad patrician, relaxing in the contemporary equivalent of the stadium directors’ box and summarily deciding the fate of gladiators with a single, simple thumb movement. Yes, Marilyn held Russell Crowe’s fate literally in her hand.
We chatted a little. Marilyn and two friends were on what she called the “girls’ trip” to Croatia. “Our husbands didn’t want to travel—they were too scared.”
“COVID?”
“No, the Russians.” It was May 2022, two months after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
I pointed out that in Pula on the Adriatic coast we were more than 1,000 miles from Kyiv. The whole of Croatia and Hungary and a good slice of Slovakia lay between us and Ukraine’s western border. “I don’t think we’re within missile range,” I said, somewhat facetiously.
“Well, I don’t care anyway because we’re having a great time. I had no idea the wine would be so good.”
Marilyn’s group departed for lunch and a bottle of plavac mali. I continued to survey the impressive amphitheater. At 435 feet long and 345 feet wide, it was the sixth largest in the Roman Empire. Over the past two millennia, many stone blocks that provided the original tiered seating have been removed, but the façade with its arches and towers is mostly intact.
Pula is strategically situated at the southern tip of Istria, the wedge-shaped peninsula in the northern Adriatic. After the Roman conquest in 177 BCE, it became an important port, and by the time of Julius Caesar had a population of around 30,000. The oval-shaped amphitheater was built over several decades in the first century CE during the reigns of emperors Augustus, Claudius, and Vesapian. It was located close to the harbor where boats unloaded limestone blocks from a nearby quarry. It was completed around AD 80, about the same time as the Colosseum in Rome.
The amphitheater, with seating for up to 25,000, was built into the gentle slope of a hill, an economical design that saved on the quantity of stone needed and provided a natural foundation for the upper seating. Four rectangular towers along the façade housed wooden staircases, like the ramps of modern stadiums. The crowds could take a break from the blood sports for a quick drink or snack before being summoned back for the next fight.
“Let’s have a big Roman roar for Flavius the Ferocious. Flavius hails from Gaul, and this is his second year on the circuit. He’s fought Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and Saxons. You saw him last year when he took down that gladiator from Macedonia. He’s undefeated but today is his greatest challenge—he’ll be fighting a lion. Drink up. Onstage in five.”
For the Romans, concerned about keeping control in their vast empire, gladiator fights offered an exciting and bloody diversion for locals who might otherwise be griping about taxes and military conscription or plotting rebellion. All social classes could attend because admission was cheap or free.
Each amphitheater had an underground area, where gladiators suited up and wild animals were quartered, ready to be released into the arena. Some gladiators were criminals, but most were prisoners of war, who dressed and used weapons from their tribe of origin. Travel writer Rick Steves brilliantly evokes the scene: “When the fight began, gladiators would charge up a chute and burst into the arena, like football players being introduced at the Super Bowl.” The spectacle began with a parade around the arena and some sham fighting. Compared to the life of a soldier, writes Steves, being a gladiator “wasn’t such a bad gig.” They “were often better paid than soldiers, enjoyed terrific celebrity (both in life and in death), and only had to fight a few times each year.”
The Pula amphitheater remained in use until the beginning of the 5th century when gladiatorial fights were banned. With the main attraction gone, and the empire in decline, there wasn’t much reason to keep up regular maintenance. Builders plundered the amphitheater for ready-cut stone to build the foundations and walls of public buildings in Pula, and shipped some blocks to Venice to build palaces. In the 16th century, after the Venetians took control of the Istrian peninsula, they hatched a plan to take the amphitheater apart, stone by stone, and reassemble it on the island of Lido in the Venetian lagoon. One cost-conscious Venetian senator killed the project, and the amphitheater remained.
Today, it hosts rock concerts, festivals and weekly gladiator shows. It was the location for the opening and closing scenes of the 1999 movie Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. The adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus used scenes, costumes, and imagery from many periods of history, including Mussolini's Italy, to give the impression of a Roman Empire that survived into the modern era.
There are smaller Roman architectural remains all over Pula, now an important industrial center with a shipbuilding industry. On one side of the Forum, the main square, is the first-century Temple of Augustus with its Corinthian columns, one of three temples that once lined the square. Medieval buildings such as the Town Hall incorporate parts of temples and other Roman-era buildings. The Arch of the Sergii, erected around 27 BCE, commemorates three brothers who fought in the naval battle of Actium in 31 BCE where the future emperor Augustus defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra. After World War II, locals removing unexploded bombs uncovered an elaborate third-century mosaic floor. Who knows what other Roman treasures lie beneath Pula’s streets?