Colosseum

This guide to the Colosseum in Rome sets you inside its opening games in the year eighty, a hundred-day spectacle staged by Emperor Titus for a city still shaken by plague and the eruption of Vesuvius. It follows two veteran gladiators, Priscus and Verus, so evenly matched that neither could land the finishing blow, and the tens of thousands of spectators who rose to demand they both be spared. Listen for what the poet Martial, watching from the stands, said had never happened under any emperor before.