Ancient Impossible - First Season

Rome was the greatest empire the world has ever known.

Why are Roman arenas engineering

triumphs as well as celebrations of total violence?

Imagine 25,000 spectators are crammed in here and they're all

looking for blood.

Did the Romans create a mobile and deadly

armored weapon, the world's first tank?

Wow.

That is one impressive machine

and how was this ancient empire able to build a

massive wall, straight across Britain, in record time?

They were ancient geniuses.

What they achieved is truly extraordinary.

Monuments more colossal than our own, ancient

super weapons as mighty as today's, technology so precise,

it defies reinvention.

The ancient world was not primitive.

Their marvels are so advanced, we still use them now.

Travel to a world closer than we imagine, an ancient age

where nothing was impossible.

The Roman Empire became super sized through great

feats of impossible engineering.

Aqueducts bringing fresh water thousands of miles...

Super weapons that enabled the formidable Roman army to win

against impossible odds

but nothing sums up the power,

violence, and glory of Rome like

these massive arenas that were

scattered throughout the empire

and the greatest example is here in Rome, Italy.

There are many facets of

Roman society that we've copied in part

but what's remarkable about the

Colosseum is we've copied all of it.

We’ve copied the entirety of it.

It is perfect.

The Emperor Vespasian commissioned the

Colosseum for the people of Rome

but this was no ordinary gift.

Vespasian knew that the arena was the perfect way to control a

difficult population.

If your people are fed and entertained, they're less likely

to revolt and here, they were entertained and more.

In arenas like the Colosseum, extreme violence was

the most popular entertainment.

The expectations of the people when they came into the

amphitheater is they expect blood.

They expect death.

Thousands of people died every year in arenas all

over the Roman Empire.

It was so effective in keeping Roman citizens content that

almost every town had one.

To modern stadium architects, the achievement of building huge

arenas like the Colosseum seems impossible.

It was effectively two

amphitheaters back to back, welded together.

The construction is superbly efficient in the sense that they

took the same section and repeated it into the oval of the

complete shape you see today.

So there's a great deal of repetition, which is a very

modern construction technique.

The scale of Roman arenas was impossibly ambitious,

even for modern buildings.

Over 600 feet long, 500 feet wide, with a central area

equivalent to a modern football field.

The Colosseum, Rome’s largest

arena, may have held crowds up to 80,000.

We would take two to three years to build that.

To think that the Romans built the Colosseum in about 8 years,

a truly remarkable feat.

To understand how Roman amphitheaters worked,

we've come to Nimes, southern France.

Unlike the Colosseum in Rome, this arena has survived intact.

I’m in Nimes and this has one of the most amazingly

well preserved amphitheaters in the ancient world.

You don't need to reconstruct this.

It’s all here before you, 360 degrees.

Modern entertainments or sporting

events, usually last just a few

hours but the Roman games would go on for weeks.

The contests honoring the Emperor Vespasian involved 9,000

animals and 2,000 gladiators over the course of 100 days.

The typical activities that took place in the amphitheater

in Nimes would be killing animals in the morning.

You had the bestiary, the gladiators trained to fight and

kill or be killed by wild animals.

At noontime, you could have the execution of criminals, or you

can go off and have a nice lunch and return afterwards.

The main event, though, was

gladiators man against man in the afternoon.

Beneath the arena was technology that no modern

stadium can compete with.

Today, sports teams enter their arena through a simple tunnel

but in the Roman arenas, gladiators and their opponents

made their entrances in high style.

We’re in the hypogeum.

We’re beneath the arena floor.

This is where the gladiators and animals would wait and then,

with the given signal, they'd be hoisted up by slaves using

capstans and pulleys.

There’s a lot of tech that's involved in the hypogeum area

because you don't have people behind a curtain and the

curtain opens up and then there's the performance.

You have them popping up

and this is about as sophisticated as it gets in a

performance in the ancient world.

Experimental model maker Richard Windley is

investigating the backstage magic that made the blood and

gore of the arena possible.

We know from existing bronze bearings in the remains of the

Colosseum now that some kind of

winch system was used, possibly a windlass which is a kind of

winding mechanism, basically.

So I’ve showed one of those here and this works through a

series of ropes and pulleys to actually lift the cages.

Now, we do know that very large animals were sometimes used in

these shows, even elephants, so

some of these devices would have

had to have been very, very hefty.

Richard has calculated that up to 8 men

would operate this windlass and

under the Colosseum, there would have been up to 80 of these

elevators, an amazing feat that

has no comparison in our modern world.

I’ve built a trapdoor and a simple operating mechanism to

open and close it.

It’s still quite a feat to think that the complexity of this

whole project could be undertaken such a long time ago.

To entertain the masses, Roman engineers used

their ingenuity to create even

more events we'd think impossible today.

In the Colosseum in Rome, they were reputed to even be

able to flood it with water to be able to stage naval battles

for the entertainment of the crowd.

Did Roman

engineers really achieve this impossible feat?

We know that the city of Rome

was served by hundreds of miles of aqueducts

but how did the Romans get the water to the Colosseum?

It started with an extraordinary

piece of hydraulic engineering called a castellum.

It’s not just the aqueduct bridge and the channel bringing

the water to a city.

How does it get distributed throughout the entire city?

You come here to the castellum

to understand the sophistication

of distribution in a Roman city.

This was civilization.

Structures like these distributed more water per

head to the people of Rome 2,000

years ago than New Yorkers get today.

It comes out right here into this large tank and then the

water is distributed in 20 pipes.

There were two lead pipes for every one of these holes here.

There are 10 holes total

and it is an amazing enterprise.

The thing is, every aqueduct had a castellum

and there's another intriguing clue to how they did

it beneath the Colosseum itself.

The site of this mighty arena

was once a lake created for the Emperor Nero.

Archaeologists have found the

water channels that fed the lake.

Could they have been used to flood the Colosseum, too?

They did it by diverting an aqueduct into underground

channels, which then flooded the entire arena

but the most remarkable thing was they could then open up

sluices and drain and dry out the arena in exactly the same

time it took to fill it up to

stage dry events the very next day.

Staggering.

The Roman arena is

more modern than we could ever imagine.

This was the epitome of entertainment.

It all built on the foundations

of the perfect technical infrastructure.

Forget television.

2,000 years ago this is the greatest show on earth.

Coming up, were the Romans the first to build

stadiums with opening roofs? And later, the Emperor Hadrian

tames Rome’s wild frontier with the empire's greatest build.

We believe that nothing could be as advanced as

what we build today

but 2,000 years ago, Roman engineers made the blueprint for

what we think are modern buildings sports stadiums.

If we look at the Colosseum as a template for a modern

stadium, then it's embarrassing

really as a stadium architect to

think that we can't really improve on it.

Stadium architect Andy Simons has discovered that

much of his work today was already done by Roman engineers.

Roman arenas, like this one at

Nimes, France, look identical to

modern stadiums all over the world

and incredibly, the geometry used is identical as well.

This arena is 290x180 feet, a ratio of 5:3.

By repeating this ratio of 5:3

in the angle of the seats, every spectator has a perfect view.

Everyone had a great view of the action, which is an

astonishing feat of engineering and geometry for the day.