Theatre of Pompey

Pompey paid for the theatre to gain political popularity during his second consulship, and construction began around 61 BC. It was the first permanent theatre built in Rome. Stone theatres had until then been forbidden, so Pompey raised his in the Campus Martius, outside the pomerium that divided the city from the territory beyond, and had a temple of Venus Victrix built near the top of the seating. He then claimed to have built not a theatre but a temple of Venus to which he had added the steps of a theatre, a device Tertullian took for a way of avoiding censure, though probably made in jest.

The date of the dedication is given two ways. Pliny puts it in 55 BC, the year of Pompey's second consulship; a letter of Cicero's freedman Tiro, preserved by Gellius, places it in Pompey's third consulship in 52 BC. Different parts of the complex, the theatre proper, the scaena and the adjoining temple, may have been finished at different times. The opening show brought the tragic actor Clodius Aesopus out of retirement, and the staging of Accius' Clytemnestra let Pompey restage his triple triumph of 61 BC, presenting himself as both Alexander the Great and Agamemnon.

Pompey was defeated and then assassinated in 48 BC, during the civil war of 49 to 45 BC, and Caesar used his rival's theatre to celebrate the triumph over Pompeian forces in Africa. The Curia of Pompey, a hall for political meetings at the far end of the complex's gardens, was in use by the Senate while the Senate House itself was under renovation. There, during a session of the Senate on 15 March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and Cassius, at the foot of the monumental statue of Pompey. In 32 BC Octavian renovated the theatre and moved the statue at which Caesar had been killed from the curia to the scaena. The Curia itself was walled up under Augustus as a locus sceleratus.

For forty years it was Rome's only permanent theatre, until Lucius Cornelius Balbus the Younger built the Theatre of Balbus in the Campus Martius in 13 BC. It burned in AD 21; Tiberius rebuilt the destroyed portions, the work was completed under Caligula and dedicated by Claudius, who also rededicated the temple of Venus Victrix. Nero had gilding carried out for the visit of the Armenian king Tiridates in AD 66. The scaena burned in a great fire in AD 80 and was restored by Domitian, one account adding Titus to the work, and further restorations followed under Septimius Severus. Fire took the building again in AD 247; restorations are recorded after it under Diocletian and Maximian, under Honorius and Arcadius and later under Symmachus, though another tradition holds that after the last fires it was never restored again.

The theatre remained in use after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and under the Ostrogothic Kingdom it was renovated between 507 and 511, the last such work it received. After the Gothic War of 535 to 554 there was no need for a theatre of that size, the population of Rome having fallen sharply, and it was left to deteriorate. Its marble facing was taken during the early Middle Ages for the upkeep of other buildings, and standing near the Tiber it flooded regularly; even so the concrete core stood into the ninth century, when a pilgrims' guidebook still listed the site as a theatrum.

By the twelfth century buildings had begun to encroach on the remains, among them the churches of Santa Barbara and Santa Maria in Grotta Pinta, the latter probably raised over one of the theatre's access corridors. In 1150 Johannes de Ceca is reputed to have sold the round structure of the theatre curve to an ancestor of the Orsini, and in 1296 the Orsini turned the site into a fortress. Campo de' Fiori was laid out later in the Middle Ages and what was left was quarried for stone, much of it going into the Palazzo della Cancelleria. The theatre's remains were swallowed by the buildings between Campo de' Fiori and Largo di Torre Argentina. On the Largo di Torre Argentina itself the east side of the quadriporticus and three of the four temples of an earlier period often associated with the theatre were excavated by order of Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s.