The Colosseum Becomes a Wonder
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
July 7, 2007. In a dramatic ceremony featuring pop stars, fireworks, and smoke canons, the Colosseum is named one of the seven new wonders of the world. It’s an appropriately over-the-top blowout for an arena which, centuries before, was home to its own lavish events. How did spectacles once unfold on the floor of this ancient arena? And how did the Romans use games to entertain people, and to control them?
Special thanks to our guests, Alison Futrell, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, and Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | History this week, July 7, 2007. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:11.0 | In Lisbon, Portugal, a giant globe rises from the floor of the Benfica Stadium. |
| 0:18.0 | The Music |
| 0:26.0 | Dancers hover in the air around it, waving strips of white fabric like butterfly wings. |
| 0:33.0 | Inside the globe are more dancers, dressed in full-on metallic silver bodysuits. |
| 0:39.0 | The music is tense and dissonant, and then it resolves into something soaring. |
| 0:45.0 | The butterfly dancers flutter downwards, the silver dancers move as one. |
| 0:51.0 | It is a lot, with even more to come. |
| 0:56.0 | Famous tenor José Carreras performs and pop star Jennifer Lopez. |
| 1:04.0 | And then on the floor of the stadium, a giant replica of a laptop opens as break dancers perform in front of it and smoke cannons shoot off behind. |
| 1:14.0 | The illuminated screen reminds everyone of the date, 7-7-07. |
| 1:20.0 | Now, two of the spectacle's hosts, actors Hilary Swank and Ben Kingsley, stand on stage to kick off the real heart of the show. |
| 1:29.0 | The time has come, Hilary, to announce the results of the global vote. |
| 1:37.0 | In the random order, the new 7 wonders of the world. |
| 1:48.0 | There were once 7 wonders of the ancient world, but by 2007 only one, the pyramids of Giza, still stands. |
| 1:56.0 | We need an updated list of wonders. |
| 1:59.0 | So says Bernard Weber, the impresario and self-proclaimed adventurer behind all of this. He says his organization sifted through 100 million online votes to find the world's most exalted human-built places. |
| 2:14.0 | Not everyone is pleased with all this, especially not UNESCO, a United Nations agency devoted to identifying and preserving world heritage sites. |
| 2:23.0 | In the statement, the agency sniffs that this stadium show is little more than mediatized entertainment. |
| 2:30.0 | But Weber is not backing off. This ceremony is the highlight of his mediatized campaign. And finally, it's time to announce the winners. |
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