Perhaps no building of ancient Rome is so strikingly characteristic of the builder, and the age in which he lived as the Flavian amphitheatre. Vespasian is described by historians, and represented on coins, and in extant sculptures, as a thick-set, square-shouldered man, with a short neck, small eyes, strongly marked but coarse features wearing an expression of effort. He cared little for the elegancies of life, and was plebeian in his tastes, and regardless of appearances, but set a high value on manliness and obstinate, unflinching endurance. During his reign the prevalent feeling in the Roman nation was that of a worn-out and repentant prodigal. Sick of the frivolity and wanton debauchery of the Neronian age, yet unable to return to the ascetic simplicity of primitive times, men adored, for want of a better idol, the blunt honesty and coarse strength of the Flavians. What if their emperor wished that his courtiers should smell of garlic rather than of perfumery, if in his contempt for speculative genius he dubbed the agitating philosophers of his day “barking curs.”[72] Yet he stood before them as a proof that the stern old vigour of the national character was not yet extinct, and that the profligate effeminacy of the previous generation had not yet rotted the Roman character to its core. The same massive power of endurance, yet ponderous and vulgar character, belongs to the architecture of the Coliseum. It exhibits a neglect, almost a contempt for elegance of proportion. The upper tiers are as heavy and solid as the lower. Its arcades are massive, practical, built to last for ages; the full, elaborate details of the Ionic and Corinthian orders, in which an artistic eye usually finds so much pleasure, are merely hinted at as superfluous. Doubtless as we now see it, the ruin is far more effective than the complete building can ever have been. For when complete the appearance of the Coliseum must have been heavy and oppressive. The enormous unrelieved, flat surface of the upper wall must have seemed ready to topple over or to crush the arcade below. But now that earthquakes and barbarous hands have made such ghastly rents in its sides, the outline has become more varied, and the base more proportioned to the superstructure, so that although we can still recognise the flavour of a somewhat vulgar and material age, yet all that would have offended the eye has been removed, and the historical memories which cluster around its walls, of mighty emperors and blood-thirsty mobs, of screams of death or triumph, of gorgeous pageants and heroic martyrdoms, combine to render the Coliseum in its decay the most imposing ruin in the whole world.