Hellenistic theatre leads without a break into Roman. As the Romans took over more and more of the Eastern Mediterranean they found themselves occupying countries with highly advanced theatrical techniques and these naturally percolated back to the mother country. In the two generations following Menander, Plautus and Terence successfully adapted the New Comedy to Latin taste. Plautus relies almost entirely on plot. Terence is interested in the way characters react to plot. Both rely absolutely on Greek plays, and both remain tied to the stock New Comedy situations. Young men fall in love with slave-girls only to discover, after complicated conspiracies to abduct them, that they are really free-born Athenians after all; clever servants weave webs of deception in which they only just avoid snaring themselves; fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and guardians scold, bully and grumble but forgive everything in the end.

There must have been a theatrical tradition in Italy before Greek plays became fashionable, and indeed this seems to have continued side by side with them, but no examples survive. From literary sources and (with less certainty) vase-paintings, it is judged to have consisted of crude farces, and a good case can be made out for tracing Punch and Judy back through the Commedia delT Ane and the popular entertainments of the Middle Ages to these very ancient Roman entertainments. They were called togatae because they were played in Roman costume, i.e. togas. Plays adapted from the Greek New Comedy were called palliatae (‘cloaked’) because the actors wore cloaks in the Greek style. There were also a few plays drawn from Roman history about which one would like to know more, because they must have been quite independent of the Greek models. One play at­tributed to Seneca, Octavia, may reflect this old type.

Acting conditions in the days of Plautus and Terence have to be reconstructed from literary evidence. Performances were no longer di­rectly related to a religious cult, but they continued to coincide with religious festivals. As in Greece, they were public occasions, paid for by the state or by wealthy individuals anxious for prestige. One result of this was that plays normally formed only part of a more varied entertainment which included races, wild-beast fights and so on. It is in Rome that we first encounter the theatrical businessman, the impresario-producer who negotiated with the officials on the one hand and the dramatists on the other. The first step to success for any playwright was to gain the ear of one of these men. Actors were professionals, organized into companies. Early Roman theatres were made of wood, often without seats for the bulk of the audience, but they could nevertheless be extremely ornate. Pliny describes one built by Aemilius Scaurus in ^8 bc which held 80,000 and had a stage background of marble, glass(!) and gilded wood. Audiences were rowdy, their attention spasmodic but (contrary to the custom in Greece) it was considered ill-bred to take refreshments into the theatre. Augustus once rebuked someone for this, saying: ‘When I want a drink, I go home.’ ‘Yes’, said the culprit, ‘but the Emperor is not afraid of losing his place.’

The general layout was similar to that of a Hellenistic theatre, except that the orchestra was smaller. The wooden stage was raised a few feet from the ground, and behind it was the skene (or in Latin, the scaenae fons), also of wood and probably painted, containing the three doors. Projecting side buildings, used as dressing-rooms, also had a door each, so that there were five doors altogether. Every play had a street setting. The three centre doors represented houses, as in the Hellenistic theatre, the two side ones standing for the different directions of the street.

By the end of the first century bc, the typical Roman theatre was of stone and had the following characteristics distinguishing it from the Hellenistic: it was built on level ground in the centre of a city, the seats being raised on arches rather than cut into a slope; the scaenae frons rose to the full height of the auditorium and joined it at the sides, so that the whole space was enclosed and cut off from the outside world in a way that the Greek theatre was not; the audience entered from the back instead of coming in at orchestra level and walking up to their seats.

We are well informed about Roman theatres from about the beginning of the Christian era onwards. Not only do dozens of them survive in moderately good preservation all over the Empire, but we also have a lengthy description by Vitruvius which, while not always easy to reconcile with the remains on the ground, tells us a great deal which we might not otherwise suspect. Theatres, he says, should be built on solid foundations, on healthy sites, and designed so that everybody has a good view and is able to hear. To aid the acoustics he recommends that bronze jars should be set in niches between the seats to give resonance, according to the laws of harmony. In his rules for the layout of seats and stage Vitruvius is extremely precise and geometrical, obviously giving an ideal prescription rather than describing actual examples, but his account tallies in general with what was actually built.

The theatre occupied a place in Roman civic life hardly inferior to that of the temple, the forum, the public baths and the amphitheatre. One realizes this very clearly on the briefest visit to Pompeii or Ostia, or even better to one of the ruined cities of North Africa.

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Every province of the Roman Empire, however, had its notable theatres. In areas where Greek influence was still strong (and where the audience and the architect were still probably Greek) they were often hollowed out of the hillside on sites commanding superb views, for example at Taormina in Sicily. This illustrates, too, the practice of finishing off the back of the auditorium with a curved colonnade (a feature that has vanished at Sabratha), corresponding to the top of the scaenae frons. The wooden roof over the stage, useful acoustically, also became standard.

In the Old World—Asia Minor, Egypt, the Near East—the Romans often adapted Greek theatres to their own more grandiose taste, as we have already seen them doing at Athens. The most complete idea of such a transformation can be seen at Aspendos, now in Turkey [Pi. 18]. Here, the auditorium is not raised on a substructure but is partly hollowed out of the slope in the Greek manner. The whole height of both the scaenae frons and the auditorium still remains, the latter crowned by a colonnade which meets the side buildings of the stage at each end. On the exterior can still be seen the brackets where masts were fixed to hold the sailcloth that covered the audience. The stage and its background are now shorn of ornament; but, complete with its superimposed columns (at least forty, Ionic and Corinthian), its statues in niches or above the pediments (probably over thirty), its sculptured friezes and painted decoration, it must have been of a slightly distracting grandeur to any playgoer. The whole area, indeed, is rich in ruins of the very highest architectural quality.

As much thought went into the scaenaefrons of Ephesus [PI. 19], say, as into the Temple of Venus at Baalbek. Roman theatres offered much greater opportunities to the architect than did those of Greece and the best of them can rank among the highest achievements of Roman art.

It seems certain that, for some types of entertainment at least, a curtain was used—not lowered from above but raised on a line from the floor. Long recesses, or slots, running along the edges of some surviving stages (e.g. Vaison in France) are thought to have been to hold this curtain while the play or mime was in progress. At the end of it, the curtain would be raised again and, according to a passage in Ovid, the figures embroidered on it seemed to be standing on the edge of the stage. There was probably some mechanical device for doing this quickly. Some slightly later literary evidence also suggests that a curtain was introduced which worked in the opposite way (like a modern curtain), but this raises questions which archaeology cannot answer. It may conceivably have been connected with the roof over the stage.

Vitruvius implies that scenery of an elaborate kind was in use in his day: ‘There are three types of scenery, one of which is called tragic, a second comic, the third satyric. Now the subjects of these differ severally from one another. The tragic ones are designed with columns, pediments and statues, and other royal surroundings, the comic have the appearance of private buildings and balconies and projections with windows made to imitate reality, after the fashion of ordinary buildings; the satyric settings are painted with trees, caves, mountains and other country features, designed to imitate landscape.’ This is all very circumstantial, but has given rise to extreme perplexity. No trace of such scenery has survived and it is.

difficult—even more difficult than with Pollux’s periaktoi—to see how it could have been used in the theatres as they have come down to us. As we shall see, this description by Vitruvius was to have important consequences in the Renaissance.

From Apuleius, writing a good deal later, we have a description of an even more elaborate set, ‘a mountain of wood planted with shrubs and living trees’, ‘a stream’, etc. But this was more of a pantomime spectacle than a play. We know that for special shows in the arena the Romans equalled Hollywood in expense and surpassed it in realism.

In Italy and the western parts of the Empire, theatres were at first an exotic importation. It is unlucky that no examples survive from Britain (the outline of a theatre in the earth at Verulamium, St. Albans, is poor consolation), but there are fine buildings in Spain (Merida) and France (Aries, Orange, Lyons).

In these western areas it was usual for the Romans to erect two buildings for public entertainment in every large town—the theatre for plays, recitations and recitals, and the amphitheatre for gladiatorial conflicts and animal fights. But in the formerly Greek colonies, popular enthusiasm for these latter spectacles was limited, so the two functions were often combined in the same building. It has been found in several theatres in Asia Minor that the front of the stage has small doors for animals to enter the orchestra, which must therefore have been convertible into an arena (one is again reminded of the Royal Albert Hall, which can be converted into a boxing arena). This would also account for the stone screens which surround the orchestra in many theatres and which would have served to protect the spectators. It seems likely also that gladiators sometimes fought on the stage itself.

This leads to one of the big problems of Roman drama. What plays were actually performed in these huge theatres whose ruins are so impressive? Plautus and Terence both lived at the dawn of Latin culture, before any stone theatre existed in Rome. Plautus was a success in his lifetime and managed to win audiences away from the clowns, acrobats and conjurors who competed for attention, but only just. Roman audiences, in fact, must have been pretty impossible. Terence puts this speech into the mouth of the producer of his play The Mother-in-Law. ‘At the first perfor­mance, the fame of some boxers, as well as the rumour that a tight-rope walker would appear, the mob of their supporters’ shouting and women’s screaming forced me off the stage before the end. I put it on a second time. The first part was doing well when news arrived that there was to be a gladiators’ show. Off rushed my audience, pushing, shouting, jostling for a place . . .’

Terence left Rome in disgust and probably died in an accident abroad. He was twenty-five. His plays [Pi. 20] and those of Plautus, for all we know to the contrary, continued to be acted as long as the Roman Empire lasted, names of a few are known) relied just as heavily on Greek originals, except in the ‘togata comedies which made no great claim to dramatic merit. The only surviving tragedies, those of Seneca, were probably not meant to be acted in public theatres at all [Pi. 21]. Popular favour went to the farces and the mimes (which were not necessarily acted in theatres) and to the bloody spectacles of the arena. We read of performances in which men were actually killed on the stage. Seneca’s plays, exercises on Greek themes in which physical horror stifles every other emotion, are symbolic of the predicament of the Roman playwright. It is as if the conventions necessary for stage representation had been crashed by a brutal and meaningless

literalism.

Perhaps because of the bad reputation acquired by the public theatres, small, more exclusive indoor theatres seem to have enjoyed a certain popularity, and one would like to know more about them. How far they were used for real plays and how far for recitation or music only is an open question. The fact that some had a scaenae frons, which was apparently painted, points towards drama. One of the earliest of all surviving Roman theatres, the small theatre at Pompeii (c. 7$ bc) was of this kind. It held about i,£00 spectators and was fitted into a rectangular plan in a way that anticipates Palladio. The prototype of such buildings was probably the Greek odeum or pillared hall, which goes back at least to the time of Pericles. Interesting examples are to be seen at Taormina and Athens—the Odeum of Agrippa [Pis. 2 2, 2 3].

Greek theatres had been integrated into complexes of temples and sacred precincts. Roman theatres were integrated into complexes of secular buildings and, in keeping with the Roman genius, this integration was more formal and systematic than the Greek had been. At Ostia (dating from the beginning of the Empire), the theatre forms one side of the forum.