How Much Would it Cost to Build the Colosseum Today?

how much in modern dollars did the coliseum cost to build and how much would it cost to build an exact replica today we'll start with the first question the roman's record costs insistertee big brass coins worth a quarter of a denarius at the time the coliseum was built one cistertius could buy two loaves of bread four cups of cheap wine or a single cup of good wine a tunic cost about 15 sister d and rent for a decent department was probably between 300 and 500 to start ye each year the average annual wage for an unskilled laborer was around one thousand sister tea a marble mausoleum along the via apia could easily cost ten to twenty thousands to stir to eat a wealthy senator could spend three hundred thousand adding a private bath to his house simply finishing nero's golden house cost 50 millions of sturdy how did the coliseum compare since no literary source or inscription provides any clues we have to estimate on the basis of labor and material costs the first task of the coliseum's builders was to excavate the foundation trench as large as the building's footprint and more than 8 meters deep removing something like 170 000 cubic meters of earth and stone was an enormous task involving thousands of workers contrary to what you might assume few of them were slaves although the private contractors who built the coliseum had small permanent staffs of skilled slaves and freedmen most of the work was done by unskilled day laborers following an approach pioneered by janet delane a professor of roman archaeology at oxford iu's 19th century construction manual to estimate the labor required to clear the coliseum's foundations with hand tools if i did the math right something like 70 000 man days of labor would have been required to excavate and haul away 170 000 cubic meters of rocky soil but this does not account for the fact that the workman had cut into bedrock on the north side of the foundation trench and had to contend with the high water table throughout so let's say conservatively that 125 000 man days of labor were required i'll assume that the workman earned an average of four sister to e a day which seems to have been the going rate for a laborer in first century rome by that reckoning the cost of clearing the coliseum's foundation trench was in the neighborhood of 500 thousands of sturtee next the foundations were laid like the building above it the colosseum's foundation was a huge ellipse about 60 meters wide it consisted of two parts a lower foundation of solid concrete seven meters thick and a six meter thick upper foundation also concrete honeycombed with service passages roman concrete as i've discussed in some of my other videos was not poured like modern concrete but spread in courses first retaining walls of brick or stone were constructed as a sort of form a layer of coarse aggregate in the coliseum's case chunks of basalt and tufa was laid down between those walls and porcelana mortar was troweled over the rubble bed almost dry the mixture was then pounded firm with wooden mallets besides its strength and durability roman concrete had the great virtue of being cheap all the materials were available locally and unlike masonry a large concrete structure could be built largely with unskilled labor by my best estimate the upper and lower foundations together used roughly 250 000 cubic meters of rubble and concrete again following janet delane who wrote an article on the relative costs of different kinds of roman construction i estimate that each cubic meter of concrete costs the equivalent of 10 days wages for a laborer by our equation that gives a total of about 10 million to start to e for the foundation next work began on the superstructure although most large roman buildings were made of brick-faced concrete both the perimeter wall and the interior support columns of the coliseum were built with massive blocks of travertine cored in tivoli and fairy durome by barge the coliseum required about 100 000 cubic meters of travertine roughly 1 50th incidentally of all the travertine ever quarried by the romans the stone cut into blocks with an average weight of 4 tons was lifted into place by simple tread wheel cranes like the one pictured in this relief and clamped with 300 tons of iron travertine is a hard and heavy stone difficult to work and transport it was correspondingly expensive each cubic meter by delane's estimate cost the equivalent of 100 days wages for a laborer the basic cost would have been amplified by the fact that each block had to be lifted sometimes as much as 50 meters by muscle power iron was also much more expensive than it is now so let's say that building the travertine components of the coliseum cost 50 million to sturtee although the key structural elements of the coliseum were travertine the vaults and substructures under the seats used roughly 100 000 cubic meters of tufa and concrete tufa a soft volcanic stone was considerably less expensive than travertine and concrete as we've seen was cheaper still the relative economy of the materials however was partially offset by the complexity of constructing so many vaults ramps and passageways so i think that 20 millions of sturte is a reasonable guess for the cost of the substructures and passageways except for the uppermost tier which had wooden benches the seats of the coliseum were made of carrara marble although this was one of the least expensive varieties of marble it still cost far more than travertine perhaps the equivalent of 150 laborer days per cubic meter i've never seen any estimate for the amount of marble used in the coliseum the lowest tier of seats the senatorial podium was built entirely of marble the seats above had brick substructures faced with marble slabs on that basis i'll say more or less arbitrarily that 5000 cubic meters of marble were used throughout the building if that number is anything like correct the cost of the marble would have been around three millions of sturdy the corridors of the coliseum were plastered painted and equipped with lead pipes for water fountains more than 150 life-size statues stood in the arches of the upper stories and imposing quadriga groups crowned the main entrances the statues alone to judge from attested prices would have collectively cost well over a million sister t without attempting to estimate the expense of each component i think it's reasonable to suggest total finishing costs in the neighborhood of 2.5 million to sturdy so how much did it cost to build the coliseum 19 centuries ago adding up the estimates i've given to this point brings us to 86 million sister t this i suspect is still too low since basic estimates on the basis of material failed to account for the many challenges of constructing a building on the coliseum scale so let's say just to have a nice round figure we can work with that construction cost something on the order of 100 millions of sturdy this was a lot of money the average annual income for a roman laborer was around a thousand sister tea imperial roman senators who were required to own property worth at least one million sister tee were very wealthy men the two richest romans known to us were worth 400 million sister tea four times the estimated cost of the coliseum but if my estimate is anything like correct the coliseum was far from the most expensive building project in rome the mission reportedly spent nearly 300 millions of star to e just gilding the roof and doors of the vast temple of jupiter on the capitoline hill in the aqua claudia and aqua anio novus the two greatest aqueducts of the imperial city cost 350 million sister tea to complete even these were dwarfed by the form of trajan whose costs may have approached a billion sister tea it is impossible to convert romance astartee to modern currency with any accuracy but if we assume on the basis of comparative prices that an early imperial cistertius had the purchasing power of twenty dollars the coliseum cost the equivalent of two billion about as much in other words is a very expensive modern stadium now it's time to tackle our second question how much would it cost to build an exact replica of the coliseum initially i thought about trying to estimate the cost of doing everything from coring the stone to laying the concrete the same way it was done 19 centuries ago this however proved impossible since most ancient tools and techniques no longer exist speaking only of transport for example you would need to build hundreds of heavy wooden carts purchase and maintain a herd of oxen to draw them and train a battalion of ox drivers and if the work were done entirely by artisans using hand tools many of whom would have to be specially trained the cost of labor alone would be astronomical so i decided instead to estimate the cost of building a replica of the coliseum made with the original materials but using modern machines and construction methods the site i decided would be in america on a plot of land already owned by the builder and in an area with easy access to both a large labor pool and the raw materials i did not specify the region in which the replica would be built or whether construction would be done by unionized workers then i tried to find an expert who could help me i emailed several classicists a half dozen professors of civil engineering the international union of bricklayers and allied craft workers in a limestone quarry in indiana among many others nobody responded finally i put up a community post here on youtube asking anyone with experience estimating the cost of large masonry structures to send me a message to my profound relief several subscribers heroically volunteered to undertake the task the first of the three detailed estimates i received was submitted by subscriber with the username magnificus an architectural project manager with the use of computer-aided design and estimating software he proceeded level by level expensing by material and finishes thus he assessed the cost of a senatorial podium with its lavish use of marble at nearly 27 million but assigned the uppermost tier of seating with its wooden benches a cost of only 3.5 million he believed that the 160 marble statues perched in the upper arcades could be made for a cool 4 million with cnc stone carving machines the entire coliseum he estimated could be replicated for as little as 150 million dollars this he acknowledged seemed low but he pointed out that the coliseum had no modern amenities was made for materials that could be easily sourced and was decorated in a relatively straightforward and repetitive manner the next estimate was submitted by tim wilkinson an engineer in his experience reinforced concrete for a high-rise structure costs about fifteen hundred dollars per yard applying this metric to the coliseum would give a figure of 450 million for the foundations alone though tim thinks the actual expense would be much lower thanks to economies of scale still when factoring in the huge quantities of material needed for the seating bowl and circuit wall he believes that the total cost of replica built with the best modern materials would exceed a billion dollars the last and most detailed estimate was submitted by jim williams a retired architect with a background in engineering jim estimated total material costs of about 400 million including 250 million dollars worth of travertine and 100 million dollars of marble the equipment required 20 bulldozers 10 concrete pumps and a total of 30 cranes would cost about 25 million about 1100 workers would be needed including 75 skilled stone carvers and 40 fresco artists assuming a two-year construction time labor costs would be just under 450 million once construction management costs permit fees and all other expenses were accounted for the total price tag would be just under a billion dollars since i lack the expertise to assess these estimates in any meaningful way i'm most intrigued by the differences between them which reflect the fact that there is no single answer to the question of how much it would cost to build a replica of the coliseum the only way to answer that question would be to actually build a replica and even then you would have only one possible answer contingent on a unique set of local circumstances in the first part of this video i estimated that the original coliseum cost something like 100 million sister tea which i equated more or less arbitrarily with 2 billion if as it seems the cost of producing a modern replica would be half that figure or even less the difference is a testimony to modern construction technology whose efficiencies counter balance the vastly higher costs of modern labor i won't pretend that the figures thrown around in this video have any real validity these are estimates piled on assumptions the turrets and battlements of a castle in the air but the exercise is intriguing in itself and hopefully illuminates something about the ways and means of building an ancient wonder if you enjoyed this video please consider supporting told and stone on patreon you might also enjoy my book naked statues fat gladiators and war elephants a special thanks to magnificus tim wilkinson and jim williams and thanks to all of you for watching you

Channel: toldinstone

Views: 1,058,337

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Id: _rlPMJaQx4A

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022