Adventures in Venueland, a podcast series for the live entertainment industry, usually focuses on what is big today, but聽recently, the presenters Dave聽Redelberger and Paul Hooper decided to go retro and invited one of 91吃瓜's professors to help them. They wanted to explore what went on in that most iconic Roman entertainment venue, the amphitheater, and they invited Valerie Higgins, Program Director for the MA in Cultural Heritage, onto the program to fill them in.
The name 鈥渁mphitheater鈥� has been adopted worldwide for entertainment venues of many types, but for the Romans, it was the venue for a very specific and brutal type of entertainment.
The Amphitheatre of Capua was a Roman amphitheatre in the city of Capua (modern Santa Maria Capua Vetere), second only to the Colosseum in size and probably the model for it. Probably built in the 1st century BC, it was restored many times in the following centuries. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the amphitheatre was damaged by the Vandals and later destroyed, along with most of the city of Capua, by the Saracens.聽
Later the ruins of the amphitheatre were used as a quarry of marble for the construction of the new Duomo and the Lombard Castle, but also many other buildings in the new nearby town established after the destruction of Capua. Only during the 18th century, the amphitheatre was declared a national monument and the depredation stopped.
The amphitheatre was also the site of the first and most famous gladiator school. Here in 73 BC, the famous rebellion of Spartacus took place, with over 70 slave-gladiators escaping from the school and later defeating the Roman army sent to capture them. This event sparked a two-year war between the rebel slaves and gladiators, that gathered an army of 120,000 men, and the Roman Republic. Ultimately the rebellious army was defeated, but the events of the war influenced Roman politics for centuries.
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