Jessica Clarke, "A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

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New Books Network

Episode: Jessica Clark, "A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Host: Morteza Hajizadeh

Guest: Dr. Jessica Clark

Date: March 13, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, host Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Dr. Jessica Clark about her groundbreaking new book, A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Dr. Clark, a historian and archaeologist specializing in Roman theatre and entertainment culture, offers a fresh, archaeology-driven perspective on the development and significance of theatre in ancient Italy and Rome. The conversation challenges familiar literary narratives, explores overlooked material evidence, and suggests a reframing of what should even be called "Roman" theatre.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Dr. Jessica Clark and the Book [01:45–04:39]

• Dr. Clark’s background as a historian and archaeologist focused on Roman theatre.
• Her journey from a primarily historical/literary approach to a more archaeological project for her PhD at UCL.
• The book grew directly from her PhD, emerging out of under-explored archaeological material.

Quote:

“When I started my PhD, I didn't know initially that it was going to become as archaeological as it did. But ... I realized just how much archaeological material there was that hasn't really been looked at and hadn't really been studied.” — Jessica Clark [02:48]

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2. A New Archaeological Approach [04:39–09:12]

• The classic scholarly focus has been on plays and scripts, yet little attention has been paid to the physical remains of theater buildings and related artifacts.
• Clark’s methodology combines two main categories: ruins of theater buildings and visual culture (figurines, masks, painted pottery, mosaics, frescoes).
• The book maps about 90 known theater buildings from the 4th century BCE to 1st century CE, analyzing when, where, and how they were built.
• An online digital resource catalogues nearly 1,000 artifacts related to Roman theatre from this period.
• Her main conclusion: Rome’s meaningful engagement with theatrical culture—both in building theatres and producing theatrical visual artifacts—emerges much later than the rest of Italy, challenging the routine use of “Roman” for all pre-imperial theatre.
• The book’s subtitle, “A New History,” refers both to the innovative source base and to the new narrative these sources produce.

Quote:

“Rome's involvement in theatrical culture looks actually to be a lot more limited than we had previously thought ... until about the first century.” — Jessica Clark [08:33]

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3. Uniqueness and Scope of Research [09:12–10:53]

• Existing scholarship typically catalogs theaters or artifacts geographically, not synchronically or for patterns of change.
• No prior work integrates all this material across such a long period or asks how theater in Italy developed before Rome’s primacy.

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4. Challenges of the Material [10:30–11:48]

• Amassing material wasn’t hard; interpreting it—organizing and mapping for patterns—was the challenge.
• The book’s maps visually represent how theater culture “creeps up Italy” over centuries.

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5. Rethinking Rome’s “Primacy” and The Role of Italian Towns [11:48–16:01]

Literary vs. Archaeological Evidence

• Traditional views center on Roman sources and play scripts (Plautus, Terence, Cicero, Livy), which reflect late Republic attitudes but little about earlier developments.
• Many anecdotes are written long after the periods they describe, possibly overstating Rome’s early cultural dominance.

Who Led Theatre Development?

• Key developments, especially theater-temples, took place in other powerful Italian towns, not Rome.
• The earliest theaters (“theatre-temples”) are built as religious complexes, combining performance spaces with temples (e.g., Praeneste’s massive theatre-temple to Fortuna).
• At least 7 of 16 third- and second-century Italian theaters are of this type, worshiping gods such as Fortuna, Juno, Apollo, and various local deities.

Quote:

“Theatre was pretty much inseparable from religion in the ancient world.” — Jessica Clark [16:03]

• Rome, conspicuously, did not build a permanent theater or a theater-temple during this phase, even when such opportunities arose.

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6. Social Change and Comic Characters: Slave & Cook Masks [19:59–26:49]

• Visual archaeology shows a mid-3rd-century surge in representations of slave characters—mirrored later in scripts (notably, Plautus).
• This reflects massive demographic and economic change as Italy's slave population grows (estimated by Scheidel at 1–1.5 million in Italy; 10% of Empire-wide population).
• The “slave mask” becomes the most popular, with the “cook mask” as an important sub-type (often bald).
• These trends in material culture predate and possibly prompt literary developments in the scripts:

“Maybe Plautus’s plays are actually reflecting broader changes rather than inventing them.” — Jessica Clark [22:50]

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7. Theater Buildings and Political Architecture: The Bouleuterion Connection [26:49–30:54]

• In Greek Sicily and Magna Graecia, earliest Italian theaters are often built adjacent to (or connected to) the council house (bouleuterion).
• Architecture reflects the intermingling of performance, politics, and religion; local elites sponsor/attend theater as displays of power and social standing.

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8. Is Theater Still Political? Ancient vs. Modern [30:54–34:06]

• Dr. Clark believes entertainment is “always politicized,” offering insight into contemporary society, both ancient and modern.
• In antiquity, the political and religious integration with theater was explicit and overt—politicians literally sat at the front, often controlled what was staged.

“If you want to know something about a society ... you look at its entertainment and it will tell you a huge amount about the priorities of that culture.” — Jessica Clark [32:35]

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9. From Theatre-Temples to Imperial Monuments: Architecture and Power [34:06–39:19]

• Rome’s first permanent theater (Theater of Pompey, 55 BCE) continues the Italian temple-theater tradition rather than copying Greek designs, contrary to some ancient sources.
• The scale is unprecedented—up to 15,000–16,000 seats, three times the size of prior Italian examples.
• Augustus (and Caesar before him) takes monumentalization further with the Theatre of Marcellus, whose architectural features and masks-in-marble are echoed in later imperial venues like the Colosseum.

“You needed the might of a Roman Empire and a Roman emperor to pull off such a feat.” — Jessica Clark [38:41]

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10. Augustan Reforms and Theatres as Imperial Policy [39:19–42:45]

• Under Augustus, theater construction explodes: at least 40 new theaters in 20 years, both in Italy and the provinces.
• Theaters become tools for imperial messaging and visual dominance—decorated with imperial statues, spreading Roman cultural forms to provinces (e.g., Orange in France, new theaters in North Africa, Judea, Damascus).
• This marks the turning point where “Roman theatre” as a concept becomes historically justifiable.

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11. Rethinking Terminology: What Should We Call This Tradition? [42:52–45:41]

• Dr. Clark calls for using “Italian theatre/playwrights” for the third and second centuries BCE, reserving “Roman” for the late Republic and Empire.
• Overemphasis on Rome masks the diversity and richness of other Italian centers and their contributions.

Quote:

“I would suggest that the term Roman theatre isn’t really that useful until we get to ... the late republic and into Augustus ... for the third and second centuries, I think we ought to be thinking more along the lines of Italian theatre, Italian playwrights, Italian theatrical culture.” — Jessica Clark [43:26]

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12. Future Research [45:41–46:59]

• Clark is investigating the ~44 Italian theaters built just before Rome’s first permanent theater—who built them, for whom, and why.
• Her forthcoming popular book, Circus (Bloomsbury), will cover Roman entertainment at the time of Julius Caesar’s assassination.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “[The archaeological evidence] emancipates these stories that get lost in retrospective imperial narratives.” — Jessica Clark [43:29]
• “A successful theatre show could translate directly into political capital.” — Jessica Clark [29:37]
• “Rome doesn’t have a theatre temple at this time ... across Italy, these Italian centers are building very significant buildings, really big theaters, as part of how they are worshiping ... that’s a really interesting difference that draws our attention away from Rome.” [15:45]
• “Entertainment is always politicized in some way ... It will tell you a huge amount about the priorities of that culture.” — Jessica Clark [32:35]
• “You needed the might of a Roman Emperor to pull off such a feat [as the marble-masked Theatre of Marcellus].” — Jessica Clark [38:41]

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Timestamps for Key Sections

• Introduction & Dr. Clark’s Background – 01:45–04:39
• New Material/Lens for Theatre History – 04:39–09:12
• Methodological Novelty – 09:12–10:53
• Research & Source Challenges – 10:30–11:48
• Rome’s Limited Early Role & Theatre-Temples – 11:48–19:59
• Slave and Cook Masks: Societal Change – 19:59–26:49
• Theatre and Bouleuterion: Politics & Performance – 26:49–30:54
• Theater and Politics, Then and Now – 30:54–34:06
• Theatres of Pompey and Marcellus – Architectural Shifts – 34:06–39:19
• Augustan Reforms/Imperialization of Theatre – 39:19–42:45
• Naming, Framing, and Categorizing Theatre – 42:52–45:41
• Future Work and Closing – 45:41–47:07

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Tone and Language

Dr. Clark's explanations are accessible, nuanced, and often enthusiastic. The dialogue is rich with evidence yet avoids jargon, making it both scholarly and inviting for non-specialists. The host provides well-informed literary context and asks questions that bridge literature, archaeology, and social history.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a masterclass in how new archaeological evidence can reshape long-standing narratives about ancient culture. Dr. Jessica Clark’s research pushes listeners to challenge received ideas about Roman theatrical dominance and to recognize the diverse, innovative, and religiously integrated roots of theater across the Italian peninsula. Her work demonstrates the potential of interdisciplinary research to transform our understanding of the ancient world.

Transcript

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[D]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Jessica Clark about her most recent book. The book we are going to discuss today is called A New History of Ancient Roman Theater, which was published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. Dr. Jessica Clark is a historian and archaeologist specializing in ancient Roman theater and entertainment culture. She was awarded her PhD by University College London in 2024. Jessica welcome to New Books Network.

[A]

Thank you very much for having me.

[D]

Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and I'm really interested to know how you were drawn to archeology and more specifically the archaeology of Roman theater and the entertainment culture there.

[A]

Yeah, of course. So, as you said, it started as my PhD project, and I wanted to work on Roman theatre. I've always loved theater, and I really wanted to look at Roman theatre from a sort of new perspective. When I started my PhD, I didn't know initially that it was going to become as archaeological as it did. But as I increasingly became familiar with this material and realized just how much archaeological material there was that hasn't really been looked at and hadn't really been studied, I kind of got drawn more and more into it and realized that all sorts of new details, new facts could come out of this material. So that's how I ended up creating this book. It came straight out of my PhD project, which was sort of based between the History department and the Archaeology department at ucl, sort of had a supervisor in each department, and the new research came out of that.

[D]

And I'm sure I was talking about how I was drawn to this book because I love Roman theater, Greek and Roman theater. I thought it was a literary theater we were talking about. It's a literary history of Roman theater. Because I studied literature, I guess I was biased, but I was pleasantly surprised when I read that it was a completely different take. And I'll leave it to you to talk about this. I'm sure there are a lot of books on ancient Roman theater. How do you approach the book differently? And I'm really, really interested in your archaeological and historical approach towards the topic, especially your focus on the ruins of theater buildings and also the visual culture of Roman theater. Can you talk about what sets this book apart from other books on the same topic and talk about your research methodology?

[A]

Yeah, of course. So exactly as you say. Normally when you sort of mention Roman theater or Greek theater, the first thing that comes to people's minds is the plays. Is this of great literary tradition of, you know, the great Greek tragedies and, you know, maybe think of the Roman comedies. And these have all been studied sort of very extensively. We know a lot about them. We know a lot about these play scripts. But what's quite remarkable is how little we actually know about how theatre really developed in Italy over a long period of time, how it moved from being a Greek entertainment form, how it moved into Italy and then how it got to Rome. And it's also remarkable how little attention has really been paid to this archaeological evidence. So exactly as you say, there's sort of two categories of archaeology that I sort of deal with in the book. One of them is the ruins of the theatre buildings themselves. You know, some of them, we literally just have foundations of these theatres. Some you can only find just by using aerial photography. And then in some cases we've got ruins. Like, you know, we can see the steating or we can see the exterior walls. And sometimes these walls are kind of built into the fabric of Italian towns. And also in Rome, you can see some of these theaters built into the. The modern structures. But between the 4th century BC and the 1st century CE, so sort of over the course of the Republic and beginnings of the Roman Empire, We've got about 90 theater buildings, the ruins of 90 theater buildings to look at and explore. And my book, you know, really looks at mapping them, trying to find out when they were built. What patterns do we get across the geography of Italy when we start looking at these theaters? And then the second category of material is, as you say, the visual culture. So what I mean by visual culture is images of performers, performances, the accoutrements of performance, if you will. So sort of masks and props, and we get them represented on decorative, architectural and functional objects. So just, just to give a few examples, we've got, like, small figurines modeled in the shape of masked actors, you know, made of terracotta or of marble. We have replica masks made of, showing all sorts of different comic characters. We've got pottery vessels that are painted with theatrical scenes. We also have sort of mosaics and frescoes, antifixes from the top of Roman houses that are in the shape of masks, all of these kind of domestic images, sort of people decorating their floors with images of masks or having a picture painted on their wall of a little scene from a play. So all of this material is kind of brought together in my book and there's an online digital resource you can use as well. It's completely free. It's up on the Liverpool University website of all of the artifacts that relate to theatre from Italy in the period I'm talking about. And there's about 900 and I think 28 at the last count of these artefacts. And you can have a look at them. But from this source base, once it had all been amassed, what I argued is that Rome's involvement in theatrical culture looks actually to be a lot more limited than we had previously thought. It doesn't really seem to be that involved in theatrical culture, if we're just looking at the archaeology, until about the first century, so the late Republic through the third, second, early first century, Rome doesn't build a permanent theater. So of these permanent Theaters I've been talking about, Rome doesn't have one until very late in the game. And then also, Rome doesn't really get that involved in the production or the importation of this theatrical visual culture either, especially when you compare it to the rest of Italy, where you've got this flourishing of theatre buildings, this flourishing of all these images of theatre all over different Italian homes. So this archaeological evidence shows that really Rome's involvement doesn't really change until about the late Republican period and then the beginning of the empire, when you get the Emperor Augustus, who does build many, many more theaters in Italy and across the empire. And also new theatrical visual culture can be seen to sort of flourish under this new Roman involvement. So really what my book's questioning is whether or not Roman theatre is a term we should apply unilaterally, especially to these early phases of theatre in Italy, when really we seem to have a much more complex development going on than normally is given credit for. And this is really why it's called a new history. It's both new in terms of the sources that I'm trying to hopefully get more people to look at and get involved with, and then also the argument that is emerging from these sources.

[D]

It's fascinating. It's in terms of the novelty of the approach. And as far as I know, I don't think there are the existing literature. Am I right? There's any other existing literature that looks at this topic from this. From this methodology, am I right?

[A]

Yeah, it's very. There isn't really any work that tries to bring all of this material together and look at it over this long period of time and try and understand this development. You know, there are some really great archaeological studies of the theatre buildings. There's some really important catalogs, but they tend to group the theaters just sort of geographically. They really are catalogues then. So they're very valuable works, but they're not trying to pull out patterns, trying to find continuities, trying to find out when things change. And the same for the visual culture as well. There's a really great catalog that was produced in 1995, actually. So it's been a long time. And it, you know, it catalogs lots and lots of visual material, and it's a really valuable source if you're studying the period. But again, it is really just a catalog. And there's so much more you can get out of this material. And hopefully lots of other people are going to start looking at it as well. And

[D]

to do this research for PhD project, it was very brave of you, I must say, to do that, because I normally students try to go do something for which there is a lot of, not a lot of. There is some substantial evidence. So did you have any difficulty finding, apart from the sources you mentioned, was it in general easy to find resources for this project?

[A]

Well, sort of. Oddly, what the thing. It wasn't particularly difficult to find the, you know, I'd say I had these catalogues and sort of was looking at them. And so actually finding the material wasn't that difficult. What was quite difficult is, as you say, because it hadn't really been looked at very extensively. I almost had so much to try and contend with. And so trying to work out what to do with all of this material, how to start grouping things, how to start mapping it, that was really difficult. And you know, the. There are maps in the book showing distribution patterns and there's a really lovely pattern you can see emerging of theatre buildings kind of creeping up Italy slowly through the centuries, which looks really kind of neat and tidy, but took me a very long time to get to that. It took a long time to have the material kind of to organize it in that way. So, yeah, that was definitely very challenging.

[D]

Another part of the book is that's where you sort of interrogate the primacy of Rome and you do that by kind of historicizing a republican text. And there are many examples of that. Cicero, for example. I'll let you talk about that. But I'm curious, if Rome wasn't really leading, then who was? And all these theater temples, what do they tell us about the way Italians, you know, performed. Have those performances. Perform those ritualized performances.

[A]

Yeah, so sort of the two different parts of your question there. I'll talk about the, the literature and first, the. These kind of well known late republican texts like Cicero and there's. Yeah. So in the book I do talk about the kind of traditional way that these, these theater has been approached. And it does tend to be from this textual basis. Often, as I mentioned, it's looking at the play scripts and you know, we have some fragments of the really early Latin plays. We've got, you know, the plays of Livius, Andronicus, for example. We also have 21 complete comic plays by Portus and six plays by Terence from the second century. And then much later we've got some tragedies by Seneca. But that's like 200 years later. What the problem I found was that if you're trying to. So if these play scripts are fantastic sources for a specific moment in Roman history and in Latin drama. But they do pose quite a substantial barrier to trying to study theatre in Italy over a broad geographical and temporal frame. You know, the fragmentary works of Leo Sandronicus provide evidence for theatre performance at a very specific moment in time. Same with Balton and Terence. But if you want to extrapolate broader conclusions about the character of Latin drama beyond those plays, you start not really being able to substantiate your conclusions very far. And this is also the case for the texts such as, as you mentioned, you get in texts like Cicero, Livy, Appian, Pliny, Tacitus, Plutarch, they all have these little anecdotes about theatre. They mention theatre performances they've been to, or their opinions of theatre. Maybe they talk about a theater building they've seen. But again, these are all anecdotes that were written primarily in the late Republic and early Empire. So they all are written many, many years later than the early period of theater in Italy many years later. So they're very valuable sources for contemporary attitudes to theater in the late Republic and the early Empire, but they're not really that helpful if you're trying to understand Rome in the early period. And there's a recent line of scholarship that's pointed out that it is very important to foreground authorial intent and what those writers were trying to do in the late republic. And, you know, you really need to contend against retrospective interpretations of those Roman historians who might be trying to make Rome seem slightly more important than maybe it was in its earliest phases. Obviously, Rome does become an incredibly powerful and dominant force later by the late republic. And the writing that is done during that time period does seem to tend to want to make Rome seem like it was always dominant, always running all the cultural aspects of Italy and the empire. But we should be very careful of taking that too much at face value, I think. And I could give various examples of these literary sources being a little bit. A little bit questionable in some of the points that they make or some of the numbers that they use, for example. But to answer your second question, which is, if it's not Rome in this early phase, then who is it? I think really we want to look out to the other Italian towns, to these other civic centers, these very powerful civic centers in Italy who are building these theaters for themselves. I mean, you mentioned theatre temples, for example, in Italy. Would you like me to speak a little bit about that?

[D]

Yeah, absolutely.

[A]

So theatre was pretty much inseparable from religion in the ancient world. I mean, today we tend to Think of theatre as a very. It was almost like a secular performance. Like you'd go to theater, you watch a performance. But in the ancient world, performances were staged as part of religious festivals. They're offerings to the gods alongside sacrifices and processions. They are, you know, to attend the theatre is not just to watch played, is also to participate in a ritual. In the ancient world, you know, performance, ritual, politics, they're not really separate domains in either ancient Greece or ancient Rome. They're overlapping aspects of public life. So the very, very first theatres that are built in central Italy are what has been termed theatre temples. And I sort of do that in quote marks. But that's a term that was coined by a scholar called John Hanson. And it's just kind of become the standard way to refer to these buildings where you have theatre. But it's usually situated either underneath a temple or it's in an adjacent building within the same kind of compound as a temple. And based on my research that I've done, I found that at least seven of the 16 theaters that are built in central Italy in the third and second centuries are theater temples. So they are religious theaters. Essentially one of the largest, and some. Some listeners might already know, this one is the theatre that's built at a town called Praeneste, which is just south of Rome. And it was this enormous temple that was constructed on the top of a hill and it's got these spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. You know, if you sit in the theatre, you look out across this magnificent view and that was a huge temple to the goddess Fortuna. And based on the location of the theatre seating, we can assume that these performances were held in honour of the goddess Fortuna. It's a kind of a method of pleasing the goddess with a. The, you know, we know that it's probably quite likely that at a performance for a deity that, you know, a chair sometimes might be set out next to sort of denoting where the deity would theoretically be sat so they can enjoy the performance as well. So across Italy, we get. There's Praeneste, there's some others as well. We get theatre temples at Gabi, Tinam, Sidicum, Iuvannon, Pietro Pom, Dante, Sarno. And these are all theater temples, probably linked to gods and goddesses like Fortun, Juno, Apollo, in the case of Sarno, probably the God of the river Sarno, which is quite specific. This is really important because at the same time, these theaters are all being built whilst Rome doesn't build its own theater. Rome doesn't have a theater temple at this time. Yes, Rome is starting to incorporate theatre into their religious festivals at this moment in time. But this really highlights something that's really important and that's. So, for example, according to Livy, the Temple of Flora in Rome. So the goddess Flora is constructed on the Aventine hill towards the end of the third century. And it's around the time that new temple is built that apparently stage shows are also starting to being added to how Flora is being celebrated at her festivals. But it's very significant that the theatre, the temple that's built, doesn't include a theater at that time. And it really seems to show that Rome doesn't have this inclination interest in building a theater at this moment, because that would have been a very good opportunity. Whereas across Italy, these Italian centers are building very significant buildings, really big theaters, as part of how they are writing their gods, how they're worshiping, and they're representing that in their architecture. And I think that's a really important and really interesting difference that really draws our attention away from Rome to what's going on in different areas of Italy.

[D]

And this question actually comes from my literature side. Let's say in your book you also talk about the slave and cook, how these two become sort of the signature faces of Italian comedy. And I kind of found it, I fancy slave and cook. What do they have to do with one another? Why is it that? And can you tell us about. But maybe the broader social changes in that society that these new faces, let's say slave and cook, indicate or show us? What kind of broader social changes do they show us happening and what's specific about these two?

[A]

Yeah, it sounds like a slightly strange pairing, but yeah. So this is kind of a pivot away from the first category of material we've been talking about, which is the theatre buildings. This is now looking really at the visual culture of. Of theatre. So just for a bit of context, I suppose Roman comedy functions with stock character types. So each character has a specific mask, and you can identify the character by the mask that they're wearing, which is very useful if you're looking at an image of a piece of performance, because as a historian, you can start identifying which characters are being represented by which masks. You can see. Also what you can do is you can start tabulating how many times a certain character appears in visual culture. And that's what I do in. In chapter three of the book, I start, you know, I work out which characters are the most popular to represent across Italy. You know, in Figurines and mosaics in frescoes. And what became very clear very quickly is that the slave character, who has a very distinctive mask, becomes much, much more popular than any other character type from the middle of the third century. And I'll speak about the cook in a moment, just as another example, but the slave character becoming massively popular. This also happens not just in the visual culture, but it also happens in the scripts as well. But in terms of the broader social changes, it's very interesting that that change, that increased interest in the slave comic character happens at around the time that the demography of the peninsula starts to change. So at that time, so middle of the third century, there is a big influx of enslaved peoples into Italy. The exact number is sort of the subject of quite intense debate among scholars. But, you know, everyone's got a slightly different estimate, a slightly different demographic model. But to use Walter Scheadel's numbers and his work's very influence on the topic, very influential on the topic. He estimates that about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire, so about 6 million out of 60 million, were slaves. And in a later work, he sort of looks at regional estimates, and he estimates that In Italy, about 1 to 1.5 million people were slaves out of about 5 or 6 million of a population that's by the late first century. And obviously, this influx of slave is going to have a huge impact on the economic and social dynamics of Italy. And lots of. There's been some really excellent work in recent years by scholars looking at what these impacts were. But if you kind of return to the visual record, what I argue is that this increased popularity of the slave character is very closely linked to these demographic changes. You've got a population becoming much more interested in what it means to be a slave, the status of a slave. And you can see this being reflected in entertainment and in visual culture. So, for example, in the plays that we have, which come from the kind of late third century into the second century, are by Plautus and Terence. And scholarship has long noticed that in the plays of Plautus, for example, the comic character is also much more popular than he was in the early Greek plays. So approximately 44% of all the monologues in the plays of Plautus belong to slave characters, which outstrips the next character in order of requesty by quite a margin. You know, the slave characters orchestrate plots, they manipulate freeborn characters, they scheme against villains. You know, they work to obtain their freedom. They're really important characters. By this time and again, this is probably linked to what's going on in Italy at the time. But what's not been previously pointed out is that this is also happening in the visual culture as well. And that's really important because these changes in the visual culture are happening earlier than the plays of Plautus. Often scholars have credited Plautus of being sort of the inventor of the slave characters in new importance. But really, if we recontextualise Plautus's scripts within the visual record, actually it doesn't look as if Plautus is necessarily being that original. The slave character was already becoming very popular. So maybe Portis plays are actually reflecting broader changes rather than inventing them. They're a record rather than sort of this new original thing that he's doing. And again, this kind of leads us back to the question of should, you know, is Porter's doing anything specifically Roman in his plays or is he actually reflective of a much broader Italian culture of theatre? Is his work, and particularly what he does with his slaves and his slave characters, is it actually happening across Italy? And it's not necessarily romantic. Oh, and sorry, just to answer your question about the cook as well, because I'm sure it sounds very strange to refer to a cook. And so a cook mask was a type of slave mask. So we call it the cook mask sort of for ease. But really it was a mask that be worn by sort of any miscellaneous low status slave character. So you might get it worn by maybe by some a sailor who was part of the plot or maybe an out of town slave who, you know, you needed this mask to kind of represent their low stat. So the cook mask is a slave mask. It's like a little division of the slave mask category. And you can tell it's a cook mask because he's bald a lot of the time. So the main slave characters have got big kind of lots and lots of red hair and then the slave cook masks are bald. So nice and easy to notice. But again, that particular slave mask gets really popular around the middle of the second century when there's this big influx of enslaved people. It's also a character that gets much more porton in the plays of Plautus. Plautus, you know, gives his cook his slave cook characters sort of longer scenes and slightly more importance in the plots. So again, you know, maybe Plautus was expanding the slave cook character because also there's a much bigger interest in this low status character. These people who are kind of starting to prop up the Italian economy around this time. And it's kind of coming out in the entertainment and in the visual culture of that entertainment as well.

[D]

Right. For my next question, I actually had to check the dictionary. I did not know the meaning of. And I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly. Bulletaria. Is it like the Greek city council?

[A]

Yeah, absolutely.

[D]

Yeah. Okay. That may be easier for the listeners like me. Layman. So in your book, you sort of pair or compare the theater buildings with this Bulletaria, or the Greek city council, let's say, or Greek council. I'm keen to know, how does this pairing of these two. Why did you decide to pair these two buildings together? And how does it change our picture or our understanding of Greek Sicilian theater?

[A]

Yes, this is. Wow. It's a really interesting question. So this is to rewind slightly. So going back, sort of reversing back from Plautus and Terence, who were in the second century in central Italy, if we go back to fifth and fourth century Sicily and Greece. So these are the very first theaters that are built in Italy at all. And actually the earliest theater in the south of Italy is actually probably from the seventh century. And they are built in Greek colonies. So it's Greek settlers coming to the south of Italy and Sicily. And this is where we first get theater buildings. So there's a very clear connection between the very, very beginnings of theatre in Italy and the Greek mainland. What's quite interesting, and as you say, I highlight this in the first chapter of the book, is that quite a few of these early theatres in Sicily are built right next to and sometimes are physically connected to the council house. So the main meeting place of the town council. And these council houses, they actually look a little bit like theatres. They kind of have a ring of seats, sometimes a polygon of seats, and they face a sort of small raised platform where the speaker, you know, the person giving the speech would withstand. You can identify them because they're often. They're a lot smaller than theatres and often they have a roof as well. But it is really interesting that you have them being built next to each other. So Salantum, for example, which is on the north coast of the island, about 10 km from Palermo, also at Morgantina, which is in sort of east center of Sicily, not far from Mount Etna. But my personal favorite and the one I'm most interested in is the theatre at Acre, sort of on the southeast of the island, built in the third century. And it is not only adjacent to the town council house, but it's actually got a Rock cut passageway, a sort of tunnel that from the top of the seating of the theatre to the top of the seating of the council house. Now this, the presence of this passageway, you know, it suggests all sorts of questions. Is that so that meetings of the council could be scheduled before or after a performance and allow, you know, the senior members of the political elite to pass from one building to the other. But really it shows us this connection between the theatrical and the political, and it's being formalized in the architecture of these two buildings. It's a really good reminder that as I was talking about, with the theatre and religion being entirely connected, theatre and politics are also deeply connected. In the ancient world, theatre is highly political. Local magistrates usually are the ones who sponsor performances as a way of kind of displaying their generosity and to cultivate their popularity. And they use theatre to advertise their wealth and their taste. You know, a successful theatre show could translate directly into political capital and it's quite a good mechanism to improve your social standing if you're trying to get elected in a local election, for example. So theater is a very politicized entity in the ancient world. And this connection between literally the theatre and the council house being built right next to each other in the Greek world and in the south of Italy is a really nice representation of that.

[D]

Just out of curiosity, because this has been sort of mentioned twice, do you think, and I know this is not within the remit of your. The scope of your research and this. What I'm keen to know your thoughts, do you think today, to be honest, I don't know anything about the modern Greek or Italian theater. I absolutely have no idea. I know a little bit about American theater and also British theater, but in general, do you think that theater has lost that political side of it these days and has turned into mere entertainment? There have been, of course, some plays, especially in England, which were inspired by. By war and they were obviously or remake of Shakespeare plays with a modern touch. But do you think that in general we have stepped away from that tradition of Greek theater, sorry, Greek or Roman theater, which had that either religious or very political aspect to it?

[A]

That's. Yeah, that's such an interesting question. My personal opinion is that entertainment is always politicized in some way. There's always a message, there's always some kind of. There is always something that's relevant to the contemporary world that creates a piece of entertainment. So as you mentioned, Shakespeare plays that are put on now in London, West End, that can be reinterpreted for the modern Day. And I do think that entertainment, if you want to know something about a society or a culture, be it ancient or modern, I think you should look at its entertainment and it will tell you a huge amount about the priorities of that culture, what it cares about, how it's structured politically. It will give you all of this information, even without even looking at the culture itself. You just look at the entertainment and it will tell you. And I think that applies to today, you know, and what theater we have on. And I. I would say that applies not. It's not just theater today, obviously. We've got all sorts of different medium for commute, for entertainment, and that definitely applies. The thing that I think is slightly different about the ancient world is that they fully acknowledge this integration that politicians, you know, sit at the theatre on the front rows and they're very present, they're in control of the entertainment. That's put on a lot of the time, especially in Rome in the later periods. By the late Republic, theatre is a very politicized entity. And also it's the main way of communicating with, you know, it's one of the only times that you get the full. That you get so many people gathered in one space, from the, you know, the most important politicians all the way to the, you know, the poorest members of the society. If we're talking about Italy and Rome, that is slightly different in Greece, but it's this. It's almost like the most. It's like the most popular medium of entertainment. A bit like TV today, really, rather than theater today. So. So yeah, to answer your question, yes, I think today it is just as politicized, it is just as important. But I think the ancients have a very different way of acknowledging it. And they just put the political and religious and the theatre, it's all the same thing. It's all there and all much more overt in how connected they all are.

[D]

I wish I had that I had asked that question at the end of the interview would have been a perfect. But I still have a few more questions to ask. Speaking of the architecture of theaters, I was really interested in chapter four. So that's the chapter where you talk about when Rome was finally built in stones and you talk about Pompeii theater and how the Pompeii's complex fits with the idea of theater temple lineage. And then Augustus comes in and there's this theater of Marthalus. And you compare these two. So that's the Pompeii complex. And Marcellus, if I'm pronouncing it again, correctly in the early Italian theater temples. Can you tell us how this. This comparison or this transition, let's say, how does it recast the meaning of Roman theater architecture?

[A]

Yeah, I think it's a really important moment when Rome finally builds itself a theater. So we've had many theaters in Italy. You know, central Italy by the. Has got at least 44 theatres before Rome builds itself one. And it's under Pompey the Great. And it's a really interesting theater because the Pompey's Theatre has the seating, but it has a temple at the top. So it is essentially in the long tradition of Italian theatre temples that, you know, have been dominating Italy for at least 100 years by that point. What's quite interesting is that often Pompey's Theatre is regarded as being kind of a legacy of being inspired by a Greek theatre. And the person sort of culpable for that is Plutarch, who, in his biography of Pompey, he says that Pompey. This is, you know, sort of a broad quote. He says Pompey was inspired by the theater at Mytilene, which is in Greece, and he asked architects to copy down the theater so that he could go back to Rome and build something in the same, same style. The problem with that is that Pompey's Theatre and the theatre at Mytilene, which, you know, the ruins of, which you can still see, have completely different architectural designs. They're not similar in any way. You know, Mytilene is a very typical Greek theatre. It's got a bank supporting its seating. The shape of the orchestra is circular, which is very typical for a Greek theatre. The stage building is connected to the seating. Pompey's Theatre. Oh, sorry. The stage building is not connected to the seating in Pompey's Theatre. The. The stage and the seating is connected. The orchestra is a sort of semicircle. It's got a very different design. What it is most similar to is the theater temples that had been built in Italy for so many years beforehand. And that's something that you only really get to foreground and really get to highlight. If you track these theatre buildings over a long period of time, if you just followed what Plutarch said, if you just followed the literary, you get quite a misleading picture of what might have inspired this theatre. The thing that is different about Pompey's Theat or the other Italian ones is its size. It can seat about 15,000 to 16,000 spectators. So it is enormous in terms of what's been built previously. That's about three times the size of the theater that was built at Pompeii about a hundred years earlier. So it's a really good example of Rome finally absorbing theater. And in the process of absorbing it, magnifying it, monumentalizing it, you know, really making it this big statement of power. And then that's really continued by Rome. As you know, Augustus, the first emperor, comes to power. He builds, as you said, the Theatre of Marcellus. That theatre was actually started by Julius Caesar, but Julius Caesar didn't get to finish it before he was assassinated. So Augustus finishes it. And the Theatre of Marsalis is really also very important for later buildings that are built under the Empire. There are aspects of that theatre, in terms of its architect can then see mirrored in buildings like the Circus Maximus and then also later the Coliseum. It's got, especially in things like the facade, which actually you can still see if you go to Rome, a part of the Theater Marcellus facade is still there and it's got some medieval houses added on the top, but it's. It's really worth seeing. But that facade is kind of echoed by the Colosseum, as is the approaches to the building, the way the circulation within the building works, the space per seat, the sight lines, all of these things really kind of stage for what will become Rome's kind of imperial architecture of entertainment. And also the Theatre Marceus has this brand new way of decorating, and it has these huge marble masks all the way around the edge of the building. So as you approach it, you're looking at these huge marble masks of comic and tragic faces, which would have been quite an extraordinary visual at the time and unprecedented as well. Nothing like that had ever been done in terms of decoration. You needed. You needed the might of a Roman Empire and a Roman emperor to pull off such a feat. So these buildings were really important. And you can see it then being echoed much later.

[D]

And let's talk about Augustine policy reforms. And again, it kind of picks up on what you just said. What were some of the policy reforms yet? And how did it transform theater from simply become being a cultic amenity into the signature or sign of that imperial power?

[A]

Imperial monuments, yeah, Augustus, obviously. Augustus sets up a political system that will be the structure of the Roman Empire for many years. He's an incredibly important and influential figure in Roman history, but he also does something very important with theater and with entertainment. And there is an explosion of theater buildings under Augustus. There's about so far, as far as my research found, so far, there's at least 40 theaters that are built in Italy within the space of about 20 years while Augustus is emperor. And you can see the similarities between the theatre of Marcellus and these theaters that are built across Italy. You know, you could. For example, there's a theatre at Orange in France which you can still visit today. They still have performances there today. It seats about 8,000 spectators. And it's this beautiful building. It's really worth going to visit or if you can, watching a performance there. And the facade would have been decorated with imperial statues representing the imperial family, as would a lot of the other theatres built in Italy by this time. Augustus also pays for a huge amount of restoration work of old theatres as well. My book obviously is very much focused on Italy, but. But this is also happening across the empire under Augustus as well. There are theatres built, for example, by client kings under Augustus. So King Juba II in Mauritania, he builds a theater and a new capital. So that's in North Africa. Herod in Judea builds. Well, he builds a whole new city which he fills with a theatre, an amphitheater, a racetrack. New theatre start to appear in Sidon, Damascus, Jerusalem. We get a theater in Beirut a little bit later as well. So it's not just happening in Italy. This is a huge expansion of theatre buildings and entertainment venues across. Across the empire. And really, you can see that this is. It's a really good way of winning favor of Rome to build a theater if you're in the provinces. And it shows just how important entertainment and controlling entertainment becomes by the time we get into the Roman Empire. So, you know, Augustus's motivation is to promote himself and the power of Rome, and theatre becomes this new vessel for the communication and spread of Roman power. And this is kind of the point where my book stops, where we get this change. We also see in visual culture as well. There are some very important visual culture changes around this same period as well. We get much more monumental styles. We get, you know, comic actors being represented in these big marble statues. We get beautiful frescoes, all sorts of new types of visual culture which kind of are linked to a change in the wealth of the Italian peninsula at this time. So big changes under Augustus and. Yeah, that's where my book stops, kind of tracking into the very beginning of the early empire.

[D]

That sounds like the beginning of a new project, but I'll ask you about that later on.

[A]

Exactly. Yes.

[D]

In. You know, I. As a student of literature, when I read a play, I sometimes get confused. And to be honest, I sometimes don't really mind or let's say, don't care whether it's a Greek play or a Roman play. But we are all obsessed with all these categories. Now in your book, if we adopt your chronology and map, let's say, what is it that we should stop calling Roman? And what is a new category of labor or name that we can adopt to use?

[A]

I'd say, yeah, I think it's important to. Once you foreground this archaeology and you start to use these new sources, you can really start to see the rest of Italy as playing a much more important part in the development of theatre than has really been given the credit for. We've sort of overemphasized Rome, especially in the early phases of cultural development. So really, what archaeology is letting you do, kind of emancipate these stories that get lost in retrospective imperial narratives. It's a really important thing, I think. And I would suggest that the term Roman theatre isn't really that useful until we get to around the theatre of the late republic and into Augustus. That's when Rome is becoming a very significant factor in the development of theatrical culture, at least as far as the archaeology shows us. But for the third and second centuries, I think we ought to be thinking more along the lines of Italian theatre, Italian playwrights, Italian theatrical culture. You re centering the importance of these different Italian towns. You know, just because Rome will come to dominate the known world, you know, doesn't mean that its dominance is consistent or neat. You know, there's a lot more going on outside Rome than we previously thought. And, you know, this is very much an avenue for further research as well. But hopefully this. This isn't just a matter of, you know, as you say, categorization that can be slightly, you know, sometimes like, well, why is it helpful to just talk about categories or terminology? But I think in some cases, what, you know, if you just refer everything as Roman, you're actually obscuring a lot of very important nuance, a lot of very important, you know, local traditions, indigenous traditions and, you know, big cultural movements that were taking place in a much more, you know, the picture is much messier. It's much more interesting as well. So, you know, hopefully this will also prompt lots of new questions, you know, lots of new research. So, you know, if Italy, if was, you know, had a lot more going on culturally than we might have thought, you know, what. What other questions might we need to ask else might we be able to readdress from a new archaeological standpoint if we're not so reliant on contested, fragmentary, and sometimes quite ideologically flawed sources. So what answers might we get if we approach things from new perspectives?

[D]

And I can ask that question now. Is there any other project you think? I know that you've recently finished this book and writing a book is not really an easy task, but do you have any other future projects to work on or are you thinking of maybe continuing this project from where you stop?

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. What, what I'm working on at the moment, and I'm actually just about to go to Rome to work on this at the British School at Rome. I really want to have a look at these, the theaters that are built in Italy and around Italy just before Pompey's Theatre gets built. There's about 44 of them and I really want to have a look at them in more detail and try and get as much information as possible about these Italian towns and maybe try and find out, you know, who built these theaters, why were they built, really focus in on that very specific period of time. Obviously, this book takes quite a broad view. It's looking at long term development and I really want to zero in on what was happening before Rome gets its theater and what are these other theaters telling us. So that's a really important part of my research. And I also have a book coming out next year as well which is for a much broader audience. It's with Bloomsbury, it's called Circus, and that's about Roman entertainment at the time when Julius Caesar was assassinated. And that's a slightly more. A slightly for a broader audience as well. So hopefully that will be something of interest to people.

[D]

Well, fantastic. I hope to be able to speak to you about your new book sometime next year as well.

[A]

That'll be fantastic.

[D]

Yeah. So I'm really looking forward to reading your new book as well. Dr. Jessica Clark, I'd like to thank you for your time on new books to speak with us about your book on New Books Network. The book we just discussed was called A New History of Ancient Roman Theater, published by Liverpool University Press. Thank you so much for your time.

[A]

Thank you so much for having me.