Rebecca Allen and Dr. Roger Macfarlane, Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature

The period of the late Roman Republic (ca. 80 B. C. to 44 B. C.) is the best documented of all the historical periods of Roman history. The age is characterized by intense struggles for political dominance among the leading politicians and generals of Rome, as well as a flowering of artistic and creative output. Cicero, the statesman and orator, provides much information about this period through his speeches and, more important, his letters to a variety of recipients. It is one of these letters where the research for this project began. In 55 B. C., Cicero wrote a letter to his friend Marcus Marius in which he described the recently completed games of Pompey.1 In celebration of his second consulship, one obtained not without difficulty, Pompey held a five-day celebration that included gladiatorial fights, beast hunts, and theatrical and musical performances. The crowning event of this party, for this was indeed one of the most expensive and elaborate celebrations Rome had ever seen, was the dedication of the new theater and its attached temple of Venus Victrix.

The theater of Pompey illustrates perfectly the complexities of the last generation of the Roman Republic. Its builder was Pompeius Magnus, a man who had begun a brilliant military career at an unusually young age and who had then used his military successes as the justification for a political career. When first he took office, he was certainly inexperienced politically, but he learned quickly enough the pitfalls of a political career founded on military success. But by 55 B. C., Pompey was an experienced statesman who had found himself standing in the shadow of another rising military and political figure, Julius Caesar. In 60 B. C., Pompey, Caesar, and another powerful Roman, Marcus Licinius Crassus, had formed what is now called the First Triumvirate, a political alliance aimed at achieving the specific goals of each member. Numerous political developments had led these men to renew the triumvirate in 55 B. C., and it is in this context that Pompey built his theater-temple. The timing of the games and the dedication was opportune: Caesar was in Gaul, and Crassus was preparing for his ill-fated expedition against the Parthians. In the absence of his rivals and fellow triumvirs, Pompey was truly the first man in Rome, and he capitalized on this opportunity to hold the games.

In Winter Semester 2001, I enrolled in Classical Civilizations 340R, entitled Greco-Roman Temples: Architecture and Contexts and team taught by Roger Macfarlane, Stephen Ricks, and Mark Johnson, and it is in this course that I began the initial research for the project. When I began research for this project, I formed the hypothesis that the theater-temple was built primarily for reasserting and reinforcing Pompey’s political position in Rome, while trumping the ace of Caesar’s successes in Gaul. I designed my research to focus primarily on the construction of the theater and the temple to Venus Victrix. However, during the course of my initial research, it quickly became clear that I could not fairly treat the theater-temple without discussing the other buildings that were also part of this new building complex: the portico and gardens, a new senate house for Rome, and a new house for Pompey. Indeed, the issues proved much more complex than I had expected, and I was compelled to expand significantly my hypothesis.

The Winter Semester course was the preparation for a study trip to Italy and Greece, largely funded by a Mentoring and Learning Environments Grant. Eleven students and three faculty members participated in the trip, which lasted three weeks, from May 1 to May 21. It is on this trip that I began truly to appreciate the magnificence of Pompey’s building achievement. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not only in Rome that I found rich information pertaining to my topic. In Greece, we visited several theater sites, which illustrated the genius of Roman theater architecture. The Greeks were compelled to construct theaters on hillsides, for improved acoustic quality but also for lack of engineering proficiency that allowed freestanding theaters. The best example of the Roman vaulting that allowed freestanding theaters and amphitheaters is found at Pozzuoli (anciently called Puteoli), a town on the Bay of Naples. The amphitheater’s sub-structure of vaults and ramps is the best preserved Roman specimen in the world, and visiting the site helped me envision how the support system of Pompey’s theater must have worked. In Rome, we visited the site of Pompey’s theater, in the present-day Campo dei Fiori, and though the theater itself no longer stands, the modern buildings preserve the curvature of the ancient theater’s cavea (visible in aerial photographs and in the shape of some apartment buildings). In the basements of some of these buildings are remains of the vaulted substructures of the theater. The most accessible basement site is found in Ristorante Pancrazio, where we dined and explored. For an example of what the exterior of the theater must have looked like, we visited the site of the Theater of Marcellus, which preserves the facade of a theater just one generation later than Pompey’s. Walking in the streets of Rome also helped me appreciate the ingenuity of Pompey’s selection of a site. By building in the Campus Martius, Pompey opened up a rich new area of Roman real estate development. The concentration of subsequent imperial buildings, some of Rome’s most renowned, in the area attest the importance of this site for Roman urban expansion.

The construction of these buildings in the Campus Martius provided a concentration of images associated with the name of Pompey, and it is precisely this concentration that made the building complex so effective. Not only did Pompey build a theater and a public park for Rome’s masses, he also attempted to display religious piety by building the temple of Venus Victrix. Furthermore, both his new residence and the new senate house allowed him to keep an eye on the political situation and to remind the Romans in power that he would be politically viable for years yet to come.

The paper that I finished upon return from Europe will be expanded and developed into an Honors Thesis. It is expected that research and composition of the thesis will be complete by the end of Summer Term and that a defense will be held within the first two weeks of Fall Semester. The conclusions raised in the initial paper are still valid, though inadequate for fully understanding Pompey’s motivations for building his theater complex. Instead of focusing research primarily upon the Theater of Pompey, I will also attempt to prove that the construction of the entire complex was part of a political program designed to reassert Pompey’s political primacy with the elite of the Senate and his popularity with the urban masses.