"[507] Whether this
extraordinary decree, of which the legality might 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.
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