Sometimes, reading about a site is not enough. Words on a page or even images in a book fail to get across the full experience of the place. A recent trip to Tarragona, Spain, with my daughter really highlighted this to me.
Tarragona is an beautiful, walled Roman town in the east of Spain, and its ancient remains are impressively in-tact. Much like today, it held a reputation for being a pleasant place to visit within the Roman Empire; according to Martial, Tarragona was known for its sunny shores and for wine that could rival the best in Tuscany. What’s not to like!
The town housed the central administration for the region and was built up in a suitably Roman fashion. The surviving circus where the chariot races took place is a particular highlight. But it was a different arena that really captured our imagination.
As you head downhill from the circus toward the sea, you find another beautiful site: the Roman amphitheater. A place where large crowds would come together and watch gladiatorial games, maybe catching a glimpse of exotic wild animals, and witnessing the public execution of criminals. This is a place that saw its fair share of bloodshed.
But that is for us to look at it through a modern lens. It is to experience the idea of the amphitheater as a modern person, with our own cultural sensibilities. In ancient Spain, a trip to the amphitheater would have been an absolute highlight for people. A real treat. Much like going to a local football match, or a boxing bout would be today.
Usually, when I am lucky enough to get to an ancient amphitheater, or even the Colosseum in Rome, I end up imagining the sounds of the games. The cheering of the crowd for their hero, or the jeering and yelling at things that displeased them. The excited chatter of friends and family walking to and from the arena. The business conversations going on between merchants and producers during the interludes of the action. The sounds of metal hitting metal, of pain and anguish from the fighters, and of triumph and victory.
But here on the Spanish coast, there is another sound that distracts me. We are so close to the sea that the sounds of the Mediterranean overwhelm. The hypnotic rhythm of the waves breaking against the coastline creates a calm that is eerily at odds with the history of the amphitheater. It makes me wonder if the crowd would have heard it as well. The senses are a difficult thing to reconstruct in history, but here on the Spanish coast the sounds and smells of the sea are ever present.
You can see in the photo that a church was later built in the center of the arena, to commemorate the executed Christians who died there as well. While the stories of Christians being fed to lions needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, many were killed in amphitheatres such as this one. Tarragona’s sun and the calming sounds of the sea would have brought little comfort to them in their final moments.