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4.4 Pompeii’s Entertainment District: The Amphitheater, Theater, and Music Hall
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
Civic Life interrupted: Nightmare and Destiny on August 24, A.D. 79
Civic, commercial, and religious buildings of Pompeii buried by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and later rediscovered. Daily life in Pompeii is illustrated through its bakeries and fast food stands and a moving account dramatizes what happened when disaster struck.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
One of the greatest buildings, without any question, at
Pompeii and one that everyone flocks to see and if
you had never been to Pompeii, let me just
note that it is a little bit further out than
some of the other structures, but it is a
nut, to not be missed monument and in fact I
know at least one of you has already spoken
to me about an upcoming trip to Rome and Pompeii.
And consequently, I just say,
that you absolutely need, I mean, you could spend days at Pompeii,
but you must have a full day, full day for Pompeii, because
in order to get to the, and not just to see the
forum and what's in the center and a few of the houses.
To get out, it doesn't take that long.
It's a nice walk, it's not a big, not, not a huge distance.
But people forget to do it because it's on the outskirts.
But you, you really must get to the
two end points are the amphitheater and the Villa
of the Mysteries.
Both of them absolutely incredible to see and, and too often missed by tourists.
But two of the greatest sites at the city of Pompeii.
This is the amphitheater as it looks today from the air.
The amphitheater is one of several buildings that were begun immediately
upon the Romans making Pompeii a Roman colony in 80 B.C..
You can only imagine those veterans as army veterans of
war who had just been settled in their new homes, clamoring from day one,
for the amphitheater, a place where they
could go for gladiatorial and animal combat.
This is what they wanted to see and
consequently no local magistrate or emperor worth their salt
would allow the city to continue without, there were
no, there was no emperor in 80 BC, but.
would, would allow the the city to be to,
to go on without an amphitheater.
So that was one of the first orders of business.
This amphitheater at Pompeii which dates, we believe, to 80 to 70 BC
is one, is an incredibly important
building for the history of Roman architecture.
Because it is our first preserved stone amphitheater.
And all the amphitheaters that come later, including
the great Colosseum in Rome, are based on
buildings like this one.
This was a great experiment in amphitheater
design already in 80 to 70 BC.
How did they go about building this amphitheater.
What they seem to have done is to to excavate the central area.
The earth of the central area to create a
space for the oval arena which you see here.
And I put the terms on the monument list
for you. The arena which you see here.
So they've excavated that central space, placed the arena there.
Then they have piled up earth, it's essentially
an earthen bowl is what they've created here.
An earthen bowl with the excavated space for the arena and then piled
up the earth on the outside to support the seats, to support the seats.
To serve as a support for the seats, there was no natural hill here so they
had to do this on their own. So they build up the earth.
They place the seats.
They line that earthen bowl with seats, stone seats.
And they create the cavea of the amphitheater, because we use the same
term for the seats of an amphitheater as for the seats of a theater.
The cavea, or cavea, the cavea or the seats of the amphitheater.
And you can also see here light in, in,
indicated.
The wedge-shaped sections of the seats just as in the theater, they are called
the same thing, the cuneus, cuneus or in the plural cunei, cunei.
So these wedge-shaped individual sections, the cuneus, all of them together,
cunei, the cunei or wedge-shaped sections of the seats apparant here.
The exits and entrances,
and there are a couple of major ones on
either side, those have a colorful and unforgetable name.
I guarantee you will remember this name for the rest of your lives.
Those exits and entrances are called vomitoria.
Which means they literally spit forth spectators.
Vomitoria.
These exits, these entrances and exits to the amphitheater.
Let me also note that the outer ring, and the outer ring is extremely important
because it buttresses the earthen bowl. That outer ring is made of concrete.
Concrete that we'll see is faced with Opus Incertum work.
And the entire structure is encircled by a, an annular vault.
One of these ring vaults that encircles the entire structure that is
made out of concrete.
So another early example of the of, of the, the, the masterful use of concrete.
I show you a Google Earth image of
this, which gives you a very good sense of the oval shape of the original structure.
I think it's important to compare the exterior
of the amphitheater of Pompeii, which is extremely well preserved,
as you can see here, with the experiment at the much
earlier sanctuary of fortin, Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina,
where we also saw this use of concrete, faced with opus incertum work.
If we look at the facade of the
amphitheater at Pompeii, we'll see, first of all,
how exceedingly well-preserved it was.
We also see the, this, this unique staircase here with
a stairs, and I'll show you a side view in a moment where you can see those stairs.
Stairs leading up, on both sides, to the apex, and then a series
of arches in diminishing size, larger in the center, and diminishing in size
as they go down the ramp to correspond to the
shape of the ramp, and then additional arcades over here.
These are what are called blind arcades because you'll
see that they have a wall in the back.
You can't walk in these arcades and get into the amphitheater.
There are only two barrel vaulted corridors, and you saw them
in the general view, one on either long side of the oval,
that you can actually walk in and out of the, of the amphitheater from them.
But you can go up the staircase and enter the amphitheater as well, from the cavea.
Go up to the top, and then just go at the uppermost
top part of the steps, and walk down to your seats that way.
So the blind arcades we can see here, we can see that once again,
just as we saw in some of the other buildings we looked at last time,
the way in which they'd used opus incertum for most of
the wall, the facing for the concrete for most of the wall.
But they have used stone both blocks of stone
and these voussoir blocks, wedge-shaped blocks to articulate the arcades.
To make them more prominent.
And also to give the building a, an, a, additional stability.
What's interesting here, and one of the reasons
I also bring back the sanctuary of Fortuna Primagenia
is the fact that the Romans, again, are giving you
some options in terms of how you get into this building.
You can get in through the barrel vaulted corridors or, or you can climb up this
distinctive staircase, and by the way, we have
no other, this is truly a unique staircase.
We have no other one like it. In the history of Roman architecture.
So you, you have those options.
But again, they are still pre-determinining the way in which you go.
I mean, they give
you a few options but within that scheme it's clearly a pre-determined path up
the staircase over here and then through only those two barrel vaulted corridors.
And we've talked about that at the Fortuna at Primigenia Sanctuary.
Up the ramps, and then up the stair case in the center.
A very similar way of thinking about getting people
from one place to another in an orderly way.
The staircase is so distinctive that and here I show you a
side view of that where you can actually see the steps leading up.
And if, you know,if you go visit there you should try both options.
I mean, go down the corridor but also it's a lot
of fun to go up the steps and into the cavia.
But it's so distinctive and, and never to be repeated that
when we look, there's a painting that survives from a Pompeiian house.
We'll look at it in more detail
later in the semester, but I wanted to just show it to you now.
Because it is so apparent that it is a
representation of the amphitheater at Pompeii, which is not
surprising, since this is a house in Pompeii, but
you see that distinctive staircase here with the steps.
The way in which you can enter into the cavei.
You get a sense of the cavei, and the
kind of goings on that one, that, that happened in.
This Pompeii amphitheater but you can also
see, this is a very important detail that that is, and this
is the only place where we actually have a representation of it.
You can see that at the uppermost part of the cavia,
there is an awning called a velarium, and I've put that
word on the monument list for you, an awning that was
supported by poles that were located on brackets at the uppermost part.
Of the amphitheater.
And that awning, the purpose of that awning, the Pompeiians
seemed to have a thing for protecting, the
Romans in general, for protecting people in inclement weather.
So they put these awnings up when it rained.
They put these awnings up to protect those who were there
to see a gladiatorial combat, to protect them from that rain.
One last view of the amphitheater of Pompeii.
We are looking at it's bowl shaped
arena as you can see here.
And the seats that do survive to get a sense of the interior.
Here you can see very well the two
barrel vaulted entrances and exits, one on either side.
And that's the only way, again, those blind arcades, you can't
get in that way, and you can see that very well here.
Those are the only entrance or exits into the theater besides the staircase.
And in the introductory lecture I made the point, and I'll just bring it back
home again.
That the Yale Bowl here in New Haven is based on the amphitheater in Pompeii.
There's no question about that.
In fact, is one goes back in the literature on the bowl, and it's
original construction, it is even mentioned in
original artcles that the architects were looking back.
And I'm not making this up, the architects were actually looking back.
At the Pompeii ampetheatre as a model, and you can see the
relationship when you look at the bowl from the air, you can see
it is a bowl, it's kind of a bowl
shape, almost, exactly like the shape of the Pompeii ampitheatre.
This aerial view, by the way, was taken at the time of the
hundredth game, between Yale and Harvard, and you can see the stands were packed.
The major difference between these two amphitheaters is the fact
that the one in Pompeii was made to hold 20,000 people.
The one in Yale can hold up to as many as 78,000
people, so we have a larger, amphitheater, so to speak, here,
than they did, and do, in the, in the city of Pompeii.
I want to move from the amphitheater to the other great entertainment
district of Pompeii and that was the theater and the music hall.
The theatre and the music hall, and I want to show those two fairly quickly.
We see them here in plan.
The theatre in red and the music hall here in a kind of.
Under the short [UNKNOWN].
As you can see, it dates to 80 to70 B.C., so another example of a
building that was added when the Romans gain ascendance of this part of the world.
And a couple of terms again. We can see if we look at the theatre.
We can see the the back of
the theater is semi circular in shape or the cavea is semi circular in shape.
We can see the wedge shaped cunei up there.
We can also see that the orchestra is also semi circular in shape, not round
and there's a scena, scena or the scena franz as I called it the last time.
A stage building at the front.
There is also a space over here which we call the porticus.
And again, I'll put that on the monument
list for you, the porticus. What was the porticus?
The poticus was an open rectangular space with covered colonnades on either side.
The purpose of the porticus was to have
a place where people could go during intermission.
To to stretch their legs during the intermission of
the comedy or tragedy that they were there to see.
And there were little shops along the way.
A little spaces along the way. Some of them served at shops
for playbills and other souvenirs from the evening's experience.
But also that served as spaces where props and you know, scenery and, and costumes
and all sorts of things that were needed
in the theater-, theatrical performances could be kept.
So that's the porticus.
Then over here, we see the music hall.
It's a smaller version of the theater, but it's designed in exactly the same
way, with a semicircular orchestra, the
semicircular cavia, the division into cunei.
As you can see here, a small, much less elaborate scena in the front.
The major difference between the two, and we see this not just
in Pompeii but throughout Roman architecture, is not just the scale that
the theater is always much bigger than the music hall, but that
the theater was open to the sky and the music hall was had
a roof. And that roof that roof.
The reason for the roof in the smaller musical and the
reason for the smaller size was to be, to make the acoustics
as good as they could possibly be and that was easier to
do in a roofed building and in a building of smaller scale.
A Google Earth view of the theater and music hall as
they look today and you can see they're quite well preserved.
You can see the exact shapes.
If you looked at in
plan over, over there, here's our porticus for example.
[COUGH] And we get a sense of how pleasant
that might be able to be during intermission time.
What this view also gives you a sense of however, is the way
in which these two buildings are embedded in the rest of the city.
That they are, they do make up an entertainment district.
But at the same time they are very close to the
city streets that have on along them houses and shops and
so on and so forth.
So very closely embedded into the life,
into the commercial life and the residential life.
Of the city even though this was intended again
as a great entertainment area for those ho lived there.
And I've made this point before but I'll make it quickly again.
That while Roman theaters like the theater at Pompeii
are based on Greek prototypes there are some differences.
The two theaters, this is the Greek theater at Epidaurus of the mid-4th
century BC.
They both have these stone seats, they both
have, which is called the cavia, they both have
these wedge-shaped sections of seats, they both have a
stage building, although the Greek one is much simpler.
And they also, the, the, but major differences between the two is that
the Greek theater has a circular orchestra whereas the Roman theater has a.
And this is the theater of Pompeii, has a semi-circular orchestra.
And the other major difference, the most significant one is the Greeks built
their theaters on the hill side as you can see it at the doors.
The Romans built their theaters, and this is the
case in Pompeii, on a hill made out of concrete.
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