When the Crowd Turned: The Pompeii Amphitheater Riot of AD 59

In AD 59, verbal taunting between rival crowds, insults escalating to stones and stones to swords, ended in bloodshed serious enough to reach the Roman Senate. The riot between the townspeople of Pompeii and those of the neighboring colony of Nuceria is one of those rare moments when a local event left traces in both the literary record and the material one, allowing scholars to read each against the other with unusual precision.

The episode is recorded in Tacitus’s Annals (14.17). The historian describes how the confrontation escalated during a gladiatorial spectacle organized by a recently expelled senator, Livineius Regulus. The Pompeians, on home ground, came off better. Many Nucerians brought back to Rome had suffered severe wounds, and many mourned the deaths of children and parents. Nero referred the matter to the Senate, which delegated it to the consuls before referring it back. Pompeii was banned from hosting such gatherings for ten years, collegia (voluntary associations) that had organized in defiance of the law were dissolved, and Livineius was exiled.

The precise nature of the event matters. Tacitus uses spectaculo, a general term for a show or display, rather than munera, the standard designation for gladiatorial games held in honor of the dead, leading scholars to suggest that what took place was not a conventional gladiatorial tribute but a looser spectacle involving rival factional groups. The dissolved collegia appear to have been associated with these groupings rather than ordinary trade or burial clubs. A wall graffito from the House of the Augustales, reading “Campanians, in our victory you too perished, Nucerians,” hints at charged local identity politics. Scholars have suggested the Campani may refer to one of these illegal associations, possibly with roots in the Samnite population that predated Pompeii’s Roman colonization, though the identification remains uncertain.

The fresco recording the riot was found in a house known as the House of Actius Anicetus, and now hangs in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Painted from a bird’s-eye perspective, a compositional approach visible also on Trajan‘s Column, it depicts Pompeii’s amphitheater with considerable accuracy: the distinctive external staircases, the velarium awning (the only depiction of an amphitheater awning to survive in ancient art), and faux marble frescoes along the arena’s interior walls. Beyond the structure lies the adjacent palestra, or exercise ground, where figures go about their business apparently oblivious to the chaos unfolding above them.

The amphitheater, built around 70 BC and holding approximately 20,000 spectators, predates the Colosseum by over a century. It had no subterranean hypogeum, and its architecture, embedded against the city walls with distinctive exterior ramps, reflects an early, pre-imperial typology.

Why the fresco was commissioned remains open. Whether the owner was a participant, a sympathizer, or simply a Pompeian who regarded the riot as local history worth preserving, no one can say. What makes the fresco so compelling is precisely this convergence: a real event, recorded by a historian, rendered in paint with topographical accuracy by someone who had reason to remember it.

FURTHER READING

1. Welch, Katherine E. The Roman amphitheatre: from its origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
2. Jacobelli, L. “Gladiators at Pompeii, translated by Mary Becker.” Los Angeles: the J. Paul Getty Museum (2003).
3. Moeller, Walter O. “The Riot of A. D. 59 at Pompeii.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 19, no. 1, 1970, pp. 84–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4435118. Accessed 27 June 2026.
4. Benefiel, Rebecca R. “Traces of the Roman Army among the Graffiti of Pompeii.” Soldados, Armas y Batallas En Los Grafitos Históricos, edited by L. Alberto Polo Romero et al., Archaeopress, 2023, pp. 5–13. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1357307.4. Accessed 27 June 2026.
5. Wiedemann, Thomas. Emperors and gladiators. Routledge, 2002.