Roman Theaters: Spectacle as Civic Duty
The Roman theater had Greek ancestors and Roman ambitions, which meant it was grander, more permanent, and more politically charged than the tradition it inherited. Greek theaters were cut into hillsides; Roman theaters were freestanding structures built anywhere the politics and patronage required, carrying their own support in the massive substructures that allowed them to be erected on flat ground without natural topography to exploit. The technical capacity to build a freestanding theater — requiring vaulted concrete substructure at a scale that Hellenistic builders had not attempted — was itself a statement about Roman engineering ambition, and the theaters that survive from across the empire, from Orange in France to Aspendos in Turkey, demonstrate that the ambition was fulfilled consistently.
The Theater of Pompey in Rome, completed in 55 BC, was the first permanent stone theater in the city and was built by exploiting a constitutional technicality. The Senate had periodically prohibited permanent stone theaters on the grounds that they would encourage idleness and moral degradation among the Roman population — a position that sounds like straightforward elite anxiety about popular entertainment but also reflected genuine concerns about how to manage large assembled crowds in a city where popular gatherings had political dimensions. Pompey circumvented the prohibition by building a temple to Venus Victrix at the top of the cavea — the seating area — so that the seats were technically the temple’s steps rather than a theater’s seating. The legal fiction was transparent enough to be reported in ancient sources with what reads as wry admiration for Pompey’s ingenuity.
The theatrical form that Romans actually preferred was not the tragic drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Roman tragedy existed and was composed by serious writers — Seneca’s tragedies are the surviving examples — but it was probably more often read than performed. The popular theatrical entertainment of the Roman world was mime and pantomime: mime being comic performance with speech, pantomime being a solo dancer performing narrative stories drawn from mythology to musical accompaniment without speaking. Pantomime was the dominant performance art of the high Empire, its leading performers the equivalent of modern celebrities, whose partisans formed the same kind of passionate competing factions as the circus racing teams. The theater’s popular culture was closer to musical theater and dance performance than to the literary drama that modern classical education associates with the ancient stage.
The Atellan farce — fabula Atellana — was an older Italian comic tradition featuring stock characters with fixed masks: Maccus the fool, Bucco the braggart, Dossenus the hunchback, Pappus the old man. These characters preceded Roman comedy’s adaptation of Greek New Comedy and persisted alongside it as a specifically Italian tradition that appealed to audiences who found Greek-derived comedy insufficiently coarse. The Atellan farce’s surviving fragments suggest jokes about bodily functions, domestic violence, and social pretension that have equivalents in every popular comic tradition at every social level. The Roman popular stage was not refined.
The physical organization of the theater expressed social hierarchy as precisely as the Colosseum. Front rows were reserved for senators, then equestrians, then the organized categories of Roman civic life — married men, unmarried men, soldiers, boys and their tutors — in a seating arrangement that reproduced the census categories in spatial form. Women, if they attended, were in the upper sections near the back. The architecture that enabled this organization — the fixed stone seating with its spatial hierarchy from the orchestra to the summa cavea — was not merely convenient; it was the physical expression of the Roman social order assembled for its own entertainment. A Roman entering the theater sat exactly where his status placed him, surrounded by people of the same status, looking down at those below and up at those above, which is what Roman social life required him to do every day in every context.
The theater also served as a venue for political communication between the emperor and the urban population in ways that the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum also provided. An emperor who attended the theater, who sat in his conspicuous box, who responded to the crowd’s demonstrations — of approval or displeasure — was participating in a form of public accountability that had no formal constitutional standing but considerable practical significance. Emperors who refused to attend public entertainments lost the opportunity to be seen and to gauge popular sentiment in real time; those who attended skillfully could manage their public image and respond to popular pressure in the moment. The theater was entertainment, architecture, social organization, and politics simultaneously, which is what most Roman public institutions were.