During the cricket World Cup there was a nice article in another newspaper about Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. For this tournament the shell and stands had been completely rebuilt. After the building material was finally moved off the pitch, the groundsmen began the race to perfect the playing surface.
The reporter spoke to a groundsman who sounded like just the kind of level-headed man required for such a delicate enterprise. He shared no trade secrets but confessed that, having provided a high-quality pitch, he could not bear to watch the match played on it.
But the Wankhede pitch is traditional, and the stands nothing pioneering. Only the lavish “hospitality boxes” drew attention. Corporations, builders and diamond merchants got the boxes on sale; the rest, presumably, are for politicians. The price (up to Rs 5 crore, reportedly) will be worth it, because of the pace at which cricket is now played; World Cup done, the players have gone straight into IPL. Never a dull moment.
It’s difficult to avoid comparisons with imperial Rome. A weeks-long tournament for mass audiences — for the entire citizenry — in which thousands of professionals and workers participate, into which immense sums of money go and from which fortunes are made, upon which hinges political success or failure, without which there's nothing for ordinary people to talk about, where the stadium has boxes for the ruling class... What’s to differentiate a Roman games from the IPL?
The blood, perhaps. The losers do live.
Also, complexity. Modern spectaculars do require intensive work behind the scenes, but this is slight in comparison with the terrible perfection of a Roman games. Take the Colosseum, Rome’s premier venue. What you see from the outside, the four tiers of masonry, hides a world of surpassing complexity.
The key is in the hypogeum ("underground" in Greek). The oval of blood-spattered sand you see in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is not solid ground. Beneath it was a crowded, airless, torch-lit, two-storey world of levers, lifts, winches, cages, trapdoors, pens, enclosures and so on, all of which had to work to split-second timing, through the racket and reek of the fights and crowd cacophony overhead.
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Thousands of slaves had to get the right animals, prisoners, gladiators, performers, stagehands and props onto the surface at the right place at the right time, day after day, week after week. At the height of the empire there were games for 120 days a year.
The Colosseum’s technical secrets are only now being revealed, thanks to years of work by archaeologist Heinz-Jürgen Beste. Read “Secrets of the Colosseum” in the January edition of Smithsonian magazine.
But that’s history. To learn what life at ground level and below was like, read Daniel P Mannix’s Those about to Die. The title is based on the (probably apocryphal) salute made by gladiators to the emperor, “Morituri te salutant!” or “Those about to die salute you!” Mannix published the book in 1958, so some details are not now unimpeachable, but he is very good at conveying the intricacy, scale and brutality of the games.
What is worrying is that it all seems so modern, if not in technological inventiveness then in terms of the crowd's passion for diversion, the brilliance of the marketing — product endorsements, fan clubs, celebrity memoirs by gladiators with ghostwriters — and the way in which politics merge with entertainment.
Drawing the historical lesson, one fears not the barbarians at the border but the short-sightedness of ruling class and citizens. Constant entertainment amounts to brainwashing, which serves only the rulers' interests. And think about this: in the Colosseum, nets kept the audience safe from the wild animals and condemned fighters in the ring; in our cricket stadia, the nets protect those on the pitch from the audience.