#cavea

The Theatre of Pompey was the first permanent theatrum lapideum in Rome, but not in Italy. During the Samnite period, a large concrete and stone theatre had been built in Pompeii and a second smaller odeon was built after the Roman annexation. In the capitol, however, permanent theatres were proscribed, due to the republic's long-standing doubts about their morality.

In 155 BC, acting on the motion of the consul Scipio Nasica, the senate ordered the demolition of a stone theatre nearing construction in Rome. Velleius Paterculus ascribes this decision to “the exceptional austerity (severitas) of character of the populace" at that time. A new law was also passed, banning seating in temporary wooden theatres erected for religious festivals within the pomerium. According to Valerius Maximus, the new law aimed to protect Roman virilitas, which was fortified by standing and would be diminished by sitting down. This notion was still current two centuries later, when Tacitus condemned the idea of sitting during a theatrical performance as another deplorable Greek habit that would corrupt the morals of Roman youth.

Pompey urgently needed to complete the theatre quickly in order to benefit from the anticipated public support it would engender before he stood for consul again. The senatorial ban was the only real impediment. Tertullian states that Pompey added the Temple of Venus Victrix to the theatre in order to define the building as a temple with a cavea-shaped staircase, and thus skirt the ban on permanent theatres. This semantic ploy allowed the senate to save face while acquiescing to an complete reversal of a long-held policy and avoid a direct confrontation with Pompey. Following the official cues, most Roman writers referred to he building as a temple. The label on the Severan forma urbis, however, emphatically reads THEATRUM.

The seating ban was neutralized by locating Pompeys’s theatre on the Campus Martius, which lay outside the pomerium. There were probably more compelling reasons than respect for the seating ban that motivated Pompey’s choice of locations. Building within the pomerium imposed restrictions: provincial promagistrates and generals lost their imperium, soldiers were immediately demobilized and returned to civilian status, and weapons prohibited in the pomerium. On the other hand, the curia pompeia’s location allowed senators who were proscribed from entering the pomerium to participate in senate business. As a general and the provincial governor who had attained his position of power by military force, Pompey was unlikely to have built a theatre in a zone that would have automatically neutralized his sources of power should he enter it. Thus one can assume that Pompey always intended the build outside the pomerium and that the only real obstacle his project faced was the ban on permanence.

During the senate debate in 155, Scipio Nasaica cited a non-moral reason for banning theatres. Large assemblies of citizens could easily be incited to acts of seditious. This anxiety proved prescient: Pompey had planned to use his theatre as a venue for addressing the public directly, without senatorial interference. Fear the this type of subversive use of a theatre had caused the senate to make the drastic decision to destroy the theatre in 155 BC. There was no thought of resisting Pompey 100 years later.

Pompey’s concluded his architectural campaign to reduce the senate by building the curia in the porticus. Having the senate meet in a building he owned sent a clear message to the Roman world that a new political order was coming into being. The face of the new order, however was neither Pompey, who was assassinated in 48 BC nor his rival, Julius Caesar, who met the same fate in the curia pompeia four years later.

The Theatre of Pompey was considered the principal theatre in Rome and meticulously maintained for centuries. Recognizing its propagandistic value, Augustus and Tiberius carried out extensive renovations. The emperors entertained foreign dignitaries there, who were duly awestruck. Pliny the Elder notes that Nero “covered the theatre of Pompey with gold for one day’s purpose, when he was to display it to Tiridates King of Armenia.”

The theatre outlived the western empire. The Romanized Goths renovated the structure thoroughly for the last time in the early 6th century. As the city’s population declined, it fell into disrepair. Like the Colosseum, it served as a quarry in the dark ages, but enough of the concrete substructure survived for the site to be identified as a theatre in the 12thc. pilgrim's guide to Rome. Much of the marble revetment facing the Cancelleria was taken from the site in the 15th century.