In the autumn of 55 BC Pompey the Nice, some of the highly effective generals of the Late Roman Republic, opened his model new theatre. It was the primary theatre ever to be constructed in historical Rome and marked the start of town’s more and more lavish leisure tradition. Positioned within the Campus Martius, simply behind the Capitoline Hill, the theatre was to be a monumental construction, a everlasting reminder of the extraordinary political and army achievements of Pompey’s profession – a palace of performative self-promotion.
Pompey was born in Picenum, on Italy’s east coast, on 29 September 106 BC. His father owned one of many largest personal estates in Italy. With the assistance of his household’s wealth, the younger Pompey started his political profession on the age of 24, successful a collection of fast and decisive army victories, first in Sicily in 82 BC after which in Numidia, in North Africa.
Over the subsequent 20 years, Pompey went from power to power in Rome, growing his political and monetary energy base. His most important victory got here in 62 BC when he defeated King Mithridates of Pontus (modern-day Turkey), returning to Rome to have a good time some of the wonderful triumphs town had seen. His warfare booty was carried by the streets and Pompey himself rode into Rome cheered on by huge crowds.
Again in Rome, Pompey wasted no time. With an enormous, hard-won fortune at his disposal, he set about designing and planning his new theatre. It was to be much more spectacular than any of the theatres already inbuilt Italy, 3 times larger than the big theatre at Pompeii. The sweeping auditorium might seat not less than 15,000 spectators. Instantly behind the stage was a towering, elaborately embellished set, three storeys excessive and embellished with brightly colored marble statuary. The define of the theatre can nonetheless be seen within the fashionable avenue plan (the Through di Grotta Pinta, for instance, follows the curve of the place the primary row of seats would have been).
Above the auditorium, on the high of the tiers of raked seating, was an unlimited temple to the goddess Venus with a bronze statue of the goddess herself perched on the roof. Within the different course, behind the theatre, stretched stunning gardens, surrounded by porticoed walkways and incorporating a model new senate home. Across the exterior of the theatre three tiers of crimson granite columns rose out of the shop-lined streets beneath. In between every of those columns, set into arched recesses, had been positioned newly carved marble statues, every representing the peoples Pompey had conquered throughout his army profession, whereas simply exterior the theatre was an enormous statue of Pompey himself.
In keeping with the calculations of the scholar Frank Sear in 2006, the constructing work alone price Pompey some 30 million sestertii, the equal of round £263 million in the present day. More cash nonetheless was required to furnish the stage, pay for the performers, produce the reveals, preserve the constructing, and organise the publicity. However with this monetary outlay, Pompey had purchased greater than only a theatre. He had established a centre for standard leisure in Rome over which he had full authority.
For the grand opening, Pompey organised per week of occasions. As Plutarch tells us in his biography of Pompey, he ‘held gymnastic and musical contests at [the theatre’s] dedication, and furnished combats of untamed beasts by which 5 hundred lions had been killed, and above all, an elephant battle, a most terrifying spectacle’. Pompey additionally supplied a collection of fastidiously chosen performs, that are described to us in a letter written by the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was current on the theatre on opening day.
The primary play carried out, based on Cicero, was Clytemnestra, written by the Latin playwright Accius. This play was a retelling of the traditional Greek mythological story, by which the nice Greek warrior King Agamemnon returns house from his conquest of Troy. Upon his return, he finds his scheming and untrue spouse, Clytemnestra, who plots along with her lover (the king’s brother) to homicide her husband. For a Roman viewers, it might have been a really well-known play, carried out on a wide range of different events not solely in Rome however within the quite a few theatres across the Italian peninsula throughout this era.
Cicero’s letter means that Pompey launched new parts to the play’s staging. Within the first act, Agamemnon makes a grand entrance onto the stage, to be greeted by his spouse. In Pompey’s model, this entrance appears to have been accompanied by an enormous procession. Cicero writes that there have been ‘600 mules’ carrying treasure and a ‘variegated show of cavalry and infantry gear’. This treasure was little question Pompey’s personal warfare booty, redisplayed earlier than the Roman folks.
The seated viewers would have witnessed a lavish restaging of an awesome hero’s triumphal return to his metropolis, with the victories of King Agamemnon mirroring the triumphs of Pompey and his return to Rome after the various victories of his army profession. With the show of treasures and shows of cavalry and infantry, Pompey reminded his captive viewers of the riches he had dropped at town and the lands he had introduced beneath the dominion of Rome. Pompey, like Agamemnon, was the conquering hero, to whom the Roman folks owed their prosperity.
Pompey’s resolution to assemble a theatre for the Roman folks can hardly be seen as an act of generosity. With the theatre, Pompey celebrated himself. Because the poet Horace lamented some hundred years later, the supply of ‘bread and circuses’ might be deeply detrimental to the Roman folks. How had been the folks to be politically energetic, he puzzled, once they had been being pacified with lavish entertainments paid for by the rich and highly effective members of the Roman elite? Even after Pompey’s loss of life some years later in 48 BC, his theatre would proceed to play a big function in political occasions, turning into the positioning of Julius Caesar’s notorious assassination in 44 BC.
Jessica Clarke is the creator of A New Historical past of Historic Roman Theatre (Liverpool College Press, forthcoming).
