Seats on every side
The word comes from Greek and means a theatre with seats all round, but the building itself is Italian. A Greek or Roman theatre is a half-circle of seats facing a stage, made for plays and speeches. An amphitheatre closes the circle into an oval, so the event happens in the middle and every spectator looks inwards. The floor of the middle was the arena, from the Latin word for sand, which covered it. The Romans built amphitheatres for the shows that needed space all round: gladiators, wild-animal hunts called venationes, executions.
Before there were amphitheatres, those shows were held in public squares. In republican times the Roman Forum itself was the scene of gladiatorial combats.
The first one: Pompeii, about 70 BCE
The oldest permanent amphitheatre known stands at Pompeii. It was built around 70 BCE, at the initiative of two local magistrates, Gaius Quinctius Valgus and Marcus Porcius, who paid for it themselves and gave the site to the colonists in perpetuity, as their dedication inscription says. That inscription doesn’t use the word amphitheatre, which had not been coined yet: it calls the building spectacula, “the shows”. It held about 20,000 people, many of them from the surrounding towns, and it was built at the edge of the town to make it easier for that crowd to arrive and leave.
Crowds, of course, could turn ugly. In 59 CE a show given by Livineius Regulus ended in a brawl between the people of Pompeii and their neighbours from Nuceria: according to the historian Tacitus, insults turned to stones and then to swords. The Roman Senate banned the Pompeians from holding such gatherings for ten years.
Standing on its own
Earlier amphitheatres were nearly all dug into hillsides, with the slope supporting the seats. The great step forward was to make the building stand free, carried entirely on its own structure. For that, Rome used what it knew best: vaults and arches, which carried the seats above and the corridors and stairs underneath.
The Colosseum, begun under Vespasian around 70-72 CE and dedicated by Titus in 80, is the full version of the idea. It measures 189 by 156 metres, stands free on a structure of travertine, tufa and concrete with barrel and groin vaults, and held some 50,000 spectators. Its three tiers of arcades are framed by Doric, Ionic and Corinthian half-columns.
A seating plan of Roman society
Where you sat depended on who you were. Augustus laid down the rules for public shows: the first row for senators, soldiers kept apart from civilians, special sections for married men of the common people and for boys with their tutors, and women allowed to watch the gladiators only from the upper seats. Passages called vomitoria let the crowd reach and leave the seats, which were divided by class. Many amphitheatres also had underground rooms under the arena for machinery and animals; the Colosseum’s are the best known, and you can read about them in the guide to inside the Colosseum.
The type spread across the empire, from Verona, Capua, Nîmes and Arles to Pula in Croatia and El Jem in Tunisia. Everywhere it served the same ends as in Rome, and what the Colosseum was for explains them: shows paid for by magistrates and emperors, watched by everyone, in seats that told each person their place.
Where to see it
The amphitheatre of Pompeii is inside the archaeological park. In Rome, the Colosseum is part of the Parco archeologico del Colosseo, with timed entry (see the Colosseum guides for prices and hours). Well-preserved amphitheatres also stand at Verona and Nîmes.
Sources
- Parco archeologico di Pompei (pompeiisites.org), “Amphitheatre”; dedication inscription CIL X 852.
- Tacitus, Annals 14.17 (trans. Church and Brodribb, LacusCurtius).
- Suetonius, Augustus 44 (trans. Rolfe, LacusCurtius).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Amphitheatre”; “Colosseum”; “Roman Forum”.
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