have been questioned a generation later, had any permanent effect, we do not know; certainly the senators, and after the time of Gaius Gracchus the equites, sat on seats appropriated to them.  But Rome continued to be without a stone theatre until Pompey, in the year of his second consulship, 55 B.C., built one on a grand scale, capable of holding 40,000 people.  Even he, we are told, could not accomplish this without some criticism from the old and old-fashioned,—­so lasting was the prejudice against anything that might seem to be turning Rome into a Greek city.[508] There was a story too, of which it is difficult to make out the real origin, that he was compelled by popular feeling to conceal his design by building, immediately behind the theatre, a temple of Venus Victrix, the steps of which were in some way connected with his auditorium.[509] The theatre was placed in the Campus Martius, and its shape is fairly well known to us from fragments of the Capitoline plan of the city;[510] adjoining it Pompey also built a magnificent porticus for the convenience of the audience, and a curia, in which the senate could meet, and where, eleven years later, the great Dictator was murdered at the feet of Pompey’s statue.

In spite of the magnificence of this building, it was by no means destined to revive the earlier prosperity of the tragic and comic drama.  Even at the opening of it the signs of degeneracy are apparent.  Luckily for us Cicero was in Rome at the time, and in a letter to a friend in the country he congratulates him on being too unwell to come to Rome and see the spoiling of old tragedies by over-display.[511] “The ludi,” he says, “had not even that charm which games on a moderate scale generally have; the spectacle was so elaborate as to leave no room for cheerful enjoyment, and I think you need feel no regret at having missed it.  What is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the Clytemnestra (of Accius), or three thousand bowls (craterae) in the Trojan Horse (of Livius), or gay-coloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some mimic battle?  These things roused the admiration of the vulgar:  to you they would have brought no delight.”  This ostentatious stage-display finds its counterpart to some extent at the present day, and may remind us also of the huge orchestras of blaring sound which are the delight of the modern composer and the modern musical audience.  And the plays were by no means the only part of the show.  There were displays of athletes; but these never seem to have greatly interested a Roman audience, and Cicero says that Pompey confessed that they were a failure; but to make up for that there were wild-beast shows for five whole days (venationes)—­“magnificent,” the letter goes on, “no one denies it, yet what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when a weak man is torn by a very powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting-spear? ...  The last day was that of the elephants, about which there