Joe Grimwade
Friday 13th, an inauspicious day for some, brought a welcome announcement for lovers of both ancient history and Lego, with the confirmation that a Lego version of the Colosseum, a.k.a. the Flavian Amphitheatre, is to be released in two weeks’ time, to coincide with what the retailers like to call ‘Black Friday’. This year, I think LEGO Group should do as the Romans did, and mark November 27th on their fasti in red.
The set is appropriately colossal, including some 9036 individual bricks and weighing in at almost 8 kilograms, which makes it the largest single Lego set ever released. With an RRP of £449.99, it is also eye-wateringly expensive, at least to someone who hasn’t been watching the prices of Lego sets rise over the last decade or so. Forget marble or mosaic: if you really want to flaunt your wealth, you should line your floors with plastic studded tiles (and never walk barefoot again).
Of course, the Colosseum is aimed at the enthusiast consumer with disposable income, and the marketing is targeted accordingly. The set is wrapped in sleek black packaging, the tan-gold of the limestone-coloured Lego bricks glowing as if lit by a rising Mediterranean sun; the image of the Colosseum itself is replicated and reflected from every angle on the sides of the box. The promotional photos and videos are minimalist: dark woods, brass desk lamps, clean lines, grey walls. This is a premium product. This is a product for adults, for experts, for executives – for emperors, perhaps?
And the LEGO Group clearly sees a market for such a product. The overlap between the two most likely camps of consumers – people interested in ancient Rome and those enthusiastic enough about Lego to drop the best part of £500 on a single set – is indeed reasonably (and surprisingly?) large.
The worlds of Lego and Classics have collided and now thrive, most conspicuously online in numerous noteworthy corners of the net.
Take Brick to the Past, for example, which specialises in ‘creating massive, detailed and meticulously researched historically themed LEGO models’. Or Legonium, producer and supplier of some fantastic Lego-themed language resources for Latin beginners. Or the pseudonymous Latin-lovers in a thread on r/Latin, who marked the announcement of the Lego Colosseum by adapting a passage from Suetonius’ Life of Vespasian:
Vespasianus fecit item amphitheatrum ex lateribus plasticis urbe media, ut destinasse compererat Augustum.
Suet. Vesp. 9.1.
Vespasian also made an amphitheatre out of plastic bricks in the middle of the city, as he had ascertained was the intention of Augustus.
Indeed, my own predecessors – now alumni of the Classics Faculty here in Cambridge, Philip Boyes, Alina Kozlovski, and Michael Loy – have blogged about Lego/Classics crossovers on no fewer than three occasions, in 2014, ’16, and ’18. This seems, in fact, to have inadvertently become something of a biennial tradition.
So in that spirit, I once again ponder the question: what is it about recreating the past out of Lego that so captures the imagination? Maybe it’s the tangibility – you can touch, interact with, and move around a Lego creation in a way that you can’t with pictures on a page or digital reproductions, however faithful they may be. Maybe the process of planning out and reconstructing such an edifice brick-by-brick encourages us to rethink our understanding of the original. Maybe it’s simply the fun of recreating the past in miniature form, of appreciating the feats of ancient architecture, of reimagining a setting foreign in both time and place.
I confess I’m probably not the person to ask. I haven’t built a Lego set for a long, long time – and frankly, while I love the appeal of the Lego Colosseum, and (in a hypothetical world where I could afford it) I’d no doubt start out with the best of intentions, completing the thing would probably take me longer than the near-decade it took the Romans to build the original. The task requires patience and dedication: one early reviewer, Jay of Jay’s Brick Blog, despite obvious enthusiasm and love for the set, sums up the negative aspects of the experience with the words, “I never want to see a tan element again”. I imagine the labourers of Flavian Rome (some free, some enslaved) experienced similar feelings when Titus finally inaugurated the amphitheatre in 80/1 CE.
Other criticisms of the new Lego Colosseum seem, however, to focus on the fact that it represents the amphitheatre as it is now – a ruin. Why not recreate its former glory, with all its original features, its moving parts, reanimating its life and breath?
One valid reason is that such an aim would obviously require a lot of extra research – and elements of the reconstruction would of course remain speculative. Another – and this is why I like it how it is, thank you very much – is that everything we make, as individuals, as communities, as societies, as civilisations – it all falls apart. The wonder of the Colosseum is that it still stands. The wonder of the Colosseum is that, for such a very long time, it’s been falling apart, wracked by the vicissitudes of millennia, stripped by stone-hungry builders, eaten by acidic rain. Like the ‘colossal wreck’ of Shelley’s Ozymandias, it reminds us that our cities too will crumble.
This is why, in my eyes, Lego is the ideal fabric with which to recreate the edifices of the ancient world: Lego is built to be taken apart. If it’s not being built, played with, or admired, it’s gathering dust – and one day, the builder will raze it to the ground, or use its bricks in another model, or the cat will knock it over, and it will smash, and the pieces will get lost under sofas or embedded in carpets.
They will be stepped on, and ‘ye Mighty’ will despair.
Joe Grimwade
You can follow ‘Brick to the Past’ on Twitter, @bricktothepast
Likewise ‘Legonium’, @tutubuslatinus
‘Jays’ Brick Blog’: https://jaysbrickblog.com/
The LEGO Colosseum can be ordered online here: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/colosseum-10276