Amphitheater of Statilius Taurus

In 29 B.C., Rome acquired something it had never had before: a permanent stone amphitheater. The man responsible was Titus Statilius Taurus, one of Augustus’s most effective military commanders, who funded and dedicated the structure in the Campus Martius following his triumph over Africa in 34 B.C. Cassius Dio records the dedication; Suetonius mentions it among the private constructions that distinguished the Augustan building program. It stood for less than a century. When fire destroyed it in A.D. 64, it left behind no confirmed remains and a topographical question that scholars have not yet resolved.

Statilius Taurus built at a moment when the Campus Martius was being transformed. The open field northwest of the city center, long used for military exercises and public assemblies, was acquiring permanent monuments at an accelerating pace. Pompey’s theater complex had already anchored the southwestern Campus; the theaters of Balbus and Marcellus would follow. Into this landscape Statilius Taurus inserted Rome’s first stone amphitheater, a building type that until then had relied on temporary wooden structures erected for individual events and dismantled afterward. The gesture was significant: it made gladiatorial and wild beast spectacles a fixed feature of the city’s architectural identity for the first time.

Yet the amphitheater appears to have been modest by the standards it helped establish. It was regularly passed over for major imperial spectacles, which gravitated toward larger or more accessible venues. The fire of A.D. 64 — part of the broader catastrophe that devastated Rome under Nero, described by Tacitus in the Annals — burned it thoroughly enough to suggest that timber formed a substantial part of its structure, despite its classification as a stone building.

The question of where it stood has generated three main hypotheses. The most important surviving clue comes from Strabo, a Greek geographer writing in the Augustan period, who describes an area of the Campus Martius containing colonnades, sacred precincts, three theaters, and an amphitheater in close proximity. The three theaters are identified without dispute as those of Pompey, Balbus, and Marcellus, all in the southwestern Campus near the Circus Flaminius. The passage strongly implies the amphitheater shared their neighborhood.

The hypothesis with the most support places the structure near Monte dei Cenci, west of a small watercourse known as the Petronia Amnis. Its appeal is partly grounded in an eighteenth-century record: the architect and engraver Piranesi noted remains of what appeared to be a curved cavea beneath the Palazzo Cenci during survey work in 1762, though the evidence remains indirect. A second proposal associates the amphitheater with Monte Giordano in the northwestern Campus, but this site sits too far from the southwestern theaters to match Strabo’s description, and its geology has been reinterpreted as alluvial accumulation rather than collapsed masonry. A third approach reads Tacitus’s fire narrative against Strabo, arguing that the amphitheater’s destruction places it in the southeastern Campus. However, the passage is ambiguous and the proposed location falls outside the Circus Flaminius zone entirely.

The Monte dei Cenci site remains the working assumption, but the amphitheater of Statilius Taurus is, for now, a building we know more about from what happened to it than from anything it left behind.

Further reading:

1. Wiseman, T. P. “The Circus Flaminius.” Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 42, 1974, pp. 3–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40310726. Accessed 15 July 2026.
2. Welch, Katherine E. The Roman amphitheatre: from its origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
3. Fear, A. T. “Status Symbol or Leisure Pursuit ? Amphitheatres in the Roman World.” Latomus, vol. 59, no. 1, 2000, pp. 82–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41542060. Accessed 15 July 2026.
4. Coleman, Kathleen. “Entertaining Rome.” Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City, edited by John Coulston and Hazel Dodge, Oxbow Books, 2000, pp. 210–58. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh1dk0c.13. Accessed 15 July 2026.
5. BOATWRIGHT, MARY TALIAFERRO. “THE CAMPUS MARTIUS.” Hadrian and the City of Rome, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 33–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18zhd8v.9. Accessed 15 July 2026.

Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri: an amphitheatre built of stone by L. Statilius Taurus in 29 B.C., probably in the southern part of the campus Martius (Cass. Dio li. 23; Suet. Aug. 29; Cal. 18; Tac. Ann. iii. 72; Stabo, v. 3. 8, p. 236: CIL vi. 6226-6228). It was burned in 64 A.D. (Cass. Dio lxii. 18), and Nero built another (q.v.) on the same site (HJ 496; cf. 595, HCh 197 for the church of S. Angeli de domo Egidii a Poco, not de Rota, as Lanciani (Forma 14) and Armellini 363 believed).