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Pompey's Greatest Show on Earth
’s Greatest Show on Earth Rome’s first theatre was an enormous spectacle intended to glorify Pompey’s successes. Was it all bread and circuses? 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.
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. 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. 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’.
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