Pompey’s Greatest Show on Earth

In the autumn of 55 BC Pompey the Great, one of the most powerful generals of the Late Roman Republic, opened his brand new theatre. It was the first theatre ever to be constructed in ancient Rome and marked the beginning of the city’s increasingly lavish entertainment culture. Located in the Campus Martius, just behind the Capitoline Hill, the theatre was to be a monumental structure, a permanent reminder of the extraordinary political and military achievements of Pompey’s career – 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 the largest private estates in Italy. With the help of his family’s wealth, the young Pompey began his political career at the age of 24, winning a series of quick and decisive military victories, first in Sicily in 82 BC and then in Numidia, in North Africa.

Over the next 20 years, Pompey went from strength to strength in Rome, increasing his political and financial power base. His most significant victory came in 62 BC when he defeated King Mithridates of Pontus (modern-day Turkey), returning to Rome to celebrate one of the most glorious triumphs the city had seen. His war booty was carried through the streets and Pompey himself rode into Rome cheered on by vast crowds.

Back in Rome, Pompey wasted no time. With a huge, hard-won fortune at his disposal, he set about designing and planning his new theatre. It was to be far more impressive than any of the theatres already built in Italy, three times bigger than the large theatre at Pompeii. The sweeping auditorium could seat at least 15,000 spectators. Directly behind the stage was a towering, elaborately decorated set, three storeys high and decorated with brightly coloured marble statuary. The outline of the theatre can still be seen in the modern street plan (the Via di Grotta Pinta, for example, follows the curve of where the first row of seats would have been).

Above the auditorium, at the top of the tiers of raked seating, was a vast temple to the goddess Venus with a bronze statue of the goddess herself perched on the roof. In the other direction, behind the theatre, stretched beautiful gardens, surrounded by porticoed walkways and incorporating a brand new senate house. Around the outside of the theatre three tiers of red granite columns rose out of the shop-lined streets below. In between each of these columns, set into arched recesses, were placed newly carved marble statues, each representing the peoples Pompey had conquered during his military career, while just outside the theatre was a huge statue of Pompey himself.

According to the calculations of the scholar Frank Sear in 2006, the building work alone cost Pompey some 30 million sestertii, the equivalent of around £263 million today. More money still was required to furnish the stage, pay for the performers, produce the shows, maintain the building, and organise the publicity. But with this financial outlay, Pompey had bought more than just a theatre. He had established a centre for popular entertainment in Rome over which he had complete authority.

For the grand opening, Pompey organised a week of events. As Plutarch tells us in his biography of Pompey, he ‘held gymnastic and musical contests at [the theatre’s] dedication, and furnished combats of wild beasts in which five hundred lions were killed, and above all, an elephant fight, a most terrifying spectacle’. Pompey also provided a series of carefully selected plays, which are described to us in a letter written by the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was present at the theatre on opening day.

The first play performed, according to Cicero, was Clytemnestra, written by the Latin playwright Accius. This play was a retelling of the ancient Greek mythological story, in which the great Greek warrior King Agamemnon returns home from his conquest of Troy. Upon his return, he finds his scheming and unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra, who plots with her lover (the king’s brother) to murder her husband. For a Roman audience, it would have been a very well-known play, performed on a variety of other occasions not only in Rome but in the numerous theatres around the Italian peninsula during this period.

Cicero’s letter suggests that Pompey introduced new elements to the play’s staging. In the first act, Agamemnon makes a grand entrance onto the stage, to be greeted by his wife. In Pompey’s version, this entrance seems to have been accompanied by a huge procession. Cicero writes that there were ‘six hundred mules’ carrying treasure and a ‘variegated display of cavalry and infantry equipment’. This treasure was no doubt Pompey’s own war booty, redisplayed before the Roman people.

The seated audience would have witnessed a lavish restaging of a great hero’s triumphal return to his city, with the victories of King Agamemnon mirroring the triumphs of Pompey and his return to Rome after the many victories of his military career. With the display of treasures and displays of cavalry and infantry, Pompey reminded his captive audience of the riches he had brought to the city and the lands he had brought under the dominion of Rome. Pompey, like Agamemnon, was the conquering hero, to whom the Roman people owed their prosperity.

Pompey’s decision to construct a theatre for the Roman people can hardly be seen as an act of generosity. With the theatre, Pompey celebrated himself. As the poet Horace lamented some hundred years later, the provision of ‘bread and circuses’ could be deeply detrimental to the Roman people. How were the people to be politically active, he wondered, when they were being pacified with lavish entertainments paid for by the wealthy and powerful members of the Roman elite? Even after Pompey’s death some years later in 48 BC, his theatre would continue to play a significant role in political events, becoming the site of Julius Caesar’s infamous assassination in 44 BC.

Jessica Clarke is the author of A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).