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.

WORD COUNT: 502

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.

Hey, this is Darius Arya for Ancient Rome Live. Today from the vault, we want to talk about the riot of ’59, the riot of Pompeii in the amphitheater. So, check it out. From the vault, the riot of ’59. Okay, today we’re talking about Pompeii’s riot in AD ’59. And there is the painting that recalls, records this event. It’s something pretty striking, pretty unusual. Let’s dive in and get the context for this painting. So, here it is. Today, it is in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. We’ll be looking at a lot of the details, but what you can see is the amphitheater. There’s the velarium awning, the only awning of an amphitheater preserved in art. There are the unique staircases for the exterior of the amphitheater. This is a kind of pre-imperial early amphitheater, so it looks different from what eventually develops into being, you know, the Colosseum and whatnot, the kind of standard imperial types. And then we see the fighting taking place there. We can even see in the interior of this amphitheater the faux marble fresco work on the interior of the arena. We’ll get into these details shortly. But here it is on a wall in Naples. Taken from what was its original context, a house in Pompeii. So, what is going to be depicted, what is referred in the ancient sources, is a riot that breaks out between people fighting in representing the population of Pompeii and people representing or coming from the city of Nuceria, which as you can see is in close proximity to Pompeii. Those uh battles, those gladiatorial games take place in the amphitheater of Pompeii. Just a little context for where we are in Campania. The amphitheater dates to about 70 BC, about 135 by 104 m exterior. The arena floor is 66 by 35 m. There is no hypogeum. This is an early form of the amphitheater, although it did it hold about 20,000 people. It’s constructed kind of budding up against the city walls. And we have wonderful watercolors that preserve the now lost frescoes that would have decorated at one time those walls of the arena. So, here’s the exterior that we can see is delineated nicely in the painting with those exterior staircases. So, it’s a very accurate rendering. It’s a fresco that’s telling us it’s this particular amphitheater. To the right is the palestra. And then to the left and behind the amphitheater are the city walls. Here’s the interior of the amphitheater today. Again, 60 by about 35 m for the size of the arena, not that small. And those walls are blank, but they were once lined with frescoes. What were the frescoes depicting? Well, we have lots of details, including, as I point with the arrow here, some sections, some panels of faux marble. That we see depicted on the fresco of the amphitheater. We also have scenes of battles. We have scenes of wild animals. We have scenes of trophies. We have gladiators. We have herms. We have shields. And this one in particular on the top level is really exciting because we see here the referee in the middle with his stick. We have someone with a trumpet. We know there’s an announcement. Uh we have musical accompaniment at times in the gladiatorial battles. And we have assistants that are giving the gladiator his uh armor and weaponry. We also see a big part of the gladiatorial games include animal spectacles, in this case a bear tied to a bull, so they’re forced to fight. So, gladiatorial games, we call them munera, and they are typically you are obliged to the deceased. These are obviously for wealthy individuals. And an example we can take a look at for the kind of procession, the pageantry involved with sponsored games comes from a tomb relief of Naevius Allius Nigidius Mayus, a freedman. And they are found uh the the the they’re found in his tomb outside the city walls of Pompeii. We’ll also take a look at the gladiatorial helmets. They come from barracks uh in a portico system that’s made into the barracks of the gladiators by the theater. So, great examples that directly come from Pompeii that then can illustrate what gladiatorial games are like. And then we’ll jump into this issue of the riot in AD ’59. So, this is a wonderful, wonderful relief which is now on permanent display in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. And we see here a procession on the top, gladiatorial game in the middle, and animal hunts at the base. Here is that procession, the pompa. You have horses, you have music, you have the gladiators carrying their weaponry, their helmets. There are magistrates that are sponsoring the games. There are gods that are being carried on a litter and a lot of musical accompaniment. And then the main action, the games that are sponsored by the individual, are the highlight in the middle. And then we have those animal hunts at the base. So, this is your claim to fame as an official. Sponsoring the games are a big deal. And of course we can see here that we even have some gladiators striking mortal blows to the opponents. And then we also have scenes of animals being killed like this bull. Here’s some of the helmets. And because they’re so well decorated in part, we think these are probably part of the dress armor of the gladiators for the pompa, for the procession. They would not have been used in actual combat. So, here is our famous passage from Tacitus that records this event. A trifling beginning led to a frightful bloodshed between the inhabitants of Nuceria and Pompeii at a gladiatorial show. Gladiatorial spectaculo. So, not a munera, something a little bit different we think. Exhibited by Livineius Regulus, who had been, as I have related, expelled from the Senate. With the unruly spirit of townsfolk, they began with the abusive language of each other. So, think about, just like we have our supporting events, people taunting each other. Then they took up stones and at last weapons, the advantage resting with the populace of Pompeii, where the show was being exhibited. So, it’s basically like soccer hooliganism, but they it it went to stones and then finally weapons, swords. And so there were brought to Rome a number of the people of Nuceria with their bodies mutilated by wounds, and many lamented the deaths of children or of parents. The emperor entrusted the trial of the case to the Senate, the Senate to the consuls, and then again the matter was referred back to the senators. The inhabitants of Pompeii were forbidden from having any such public gathering for 10 years, and all associations, collegia, that had formed in defiance of the laws were dissolved. Livineius and the others who had excited the disturbance were punished with exile. So, we’re not talking, we think in the end, exactly about the munera that are uh held in the honor of someone who is deceased, but rather some sort of gladiatorial spectacle in general. And it’s gladiators from Pompeii against gladiators from the opposing team, from another town, Nuceria. So, it’s something a little bit different. So, those groups that were punished, those collegia, seems to have been not your standard associations associated maybe with part of some sort of uh profession, but rather some sort of grouping probably associated around the actual gladiatorial uh professionals that are then employed by and representing the city. Here is a related uh graffito from the House of the Augustales. Campanians in our victory you perish, the Nucerians. So, here, who are these Campanians? And the scholars, the scholarship publications have surmised, have suggested these Campani, these might be one of those illegal associations, these collegia that are loosely formed. Maybe even they’re Samnites within the um within the populace of of Pompeii, something like that. We’re not exactly sure. Uh but there is something going on here that’s going beyond the normal collegia. They’re not being abolished through the through the decree from the Roman Senate. It’s a particular grouping that let’s say were illegally organized, that are banned. The games are not banned in Pompeii for 10 years. Just these particular kind of games with these particular kind of associations, these collegia. Now, let’s take a look at the painting. The painting was found in the so-called House of Actius and Negatius. And the thing is it’s so-called because the name of this house depends upon a number of graffiti. So, it may or may not belong to that individual. But what we have depicted, we’ll take a look at the details now. The amphitheater, the velarium with that awning, the only one depicted in art, the city walls, shops, palestra, that’s next door to the amphitheater. And then there’s even an inscription in Latin and Greek that are uh preserved. So, here’s our awning and we see groupings of people kind of clumped together in the seats. And then we can see down below fighting is taking place in the arena itself. And there is that faux marble paneling that we saw partially preserved in the watercolors of Morelli from the 19th century. So, we have a lot of accuracy, we think, in the depiction of this amphitheater. It’s actually quite wonderful. Kind of zooming in then to the awning. And then zooming out for this total picture as we see the violence spilling out through the city. There is the inscription we can see in the palestra to the right. We’re looking at the top right-hand corner. We have the city walls. We have a gate. And we can see then on the edge of the of the amphitheater on the right, we have people on the edge, we have people down below at the foot of the portion of wall. Some people have fallen down, some people are running away. Here’s a close-up then of the fighting in the actual arena. Think about that, 60 by 35 m. And then off to the side, up in the in the higher ramparts, I’d say the upper echelons of the theater, they have people that are fighting there on the edge. Right there. So, there’s a lot of movement, a lot of violence on the part of these individuals. And of course, we can also see there’s a little squiggly lines there belong to a tree. So, we think about this city of Pompeii was obviously lined with trees and landscaped. Here’s that staircase. People going up, people going down the staircase, but those are the exterior stairs that we have that are really the most interesting, unique characteristic of the amphitheater of Pompeii. And then we’re moving over to the palestra. The palestra exists and now is used to accommodate exhibitions. And we can see on the front wall at the base the Latin and Greek inscriptions of elected officials. As bad as realistic in a depiction as possible. We have some temporary stands with some awnings that are set up. It looks like it’s game day. I’m going to show up and I’m going to set up you know, in the parking lot and sell food or drink. You know, I’m going to make a buck off this event. And this structure is a little more permanent. But we want to think about what happens, what’s the economic value of games. And a big part of it is providing services and goods to the public at large. Again, we see a lot of trees here. We see some people taking advantage of that shade. People down below, uh looks like there’s some women as well. Don’t and even children don’t seem to know what’s going on at this particular moment at the base of the of the fresco. Violence is spilling down into the city above them, but they’re not yet, it seems, aware cuz no one’s running away. Someone Someone looks like he’s carrying a a box of goods. And they were off to the left. See someone’s fallen, that person looks like he might be dead. It’s quite a violent scene. Here we have the other portion of the walls with another tower. And we have a lot of these towers preserved in the Pompeii wall circuit still today. There’s the awning again. So, I will actually take it back. What is going on here? Why is this fresco Why is this accuracy being depicted? So, then we talk about the motivation of the owner. Is it a violent act that they want to remember? Were they a participant? Were they a member of the association? Were they some sort of beneficiary of of the result at the end of the in the punishment? Is it an act of defiance that’s being recorded here? So, in the end we can speculate, we can ask and we really don’t know. But what we do know is we have this very impressive bird’s-eye view which is one of these great characteristics of a lot of Roman art, which we get in say the Column of Trajan and the Column of Marcus Aurelius. You get this great bird’s-eye view into an event, a real historic event, an event that’s recorded in Tacitus with great detail in the text that has been matched with the actual scene that records real the real locations and the real characteristics of the amphitheater. It truly is a stunning artifact from Pompeii, from Roman life, and from uh you know, that that uh that characteristic in in Roman art of trying to capture and preserve and show reality, action, drama, and history. Thanks for watching Ancient Rome Live. Thanks for liking this video and subscribing. And of course, get our newsletter for free lecture links. Also, think about supporting us. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Thanks for watching.