Scaurus.
The meaning of the word Scaurus is “club-footed,” and no doubt the first member of the family had that peculiar formation of the foot; but this family was a branch of the great Gens Æmilia, one member of that family built the Basilica Æmilia in the Forum Romanum, and another was one of the second Triumvirate. The Scaurus who built this great amphitheatre was a man of enormous wealth, and a great builder; he is mentioned by several of his contemporaries, of whom one was Cicero; he was an ædile, and was noted for his great liberality in his ædileship. His father was an orator, and was consul in the year of Rome 688 (B.C. 35); his mother, when a widow, married Sylla the dictator. Pliny mentions him several times in his Natural History[237]; he calls his buildings insane works, on account of the enormous sum expended upon them, which must have exceeded the equivalent of two millions sterling of our money. The temporary amphitheatre which he built would hold 80,000 persons, it was three storeys high, and had 360 marble columns in it; these were on the ground-floor, and it is mentioned that those on the first floor were of glass[238], a luxury before unheard of (and apparently not repeated), on the upper storey they were of gilt wood. Pliny thus describes this building of Scaurus:—
“Mosaic pavements were first introduced in the time of Sylla; at all events, there is still in existence a pavement[239], formed of small segments, which he ordered to be laid down in the Temple of Fortune, at Præneste. Since his time, these mosaics have left the ground for the arched roofs of houses, and they are now made of glass. This, however, is but a recent invention; for there can be no doubt that, when Agrippa ordered the earthenware walls of the hot baths, in the thermæ which he was building at Rome, to be painted in encaustic, and had the other parts coated with pargetting, he would have had the arches decorated with mosaic in glass, if the use of them had been known; or, at all events, if from the walls of the theatre of Scaurus, where it figured, as already stated, glass had by that time come to be used for the arched roofs of apartments. It will be as well, therefore, to give some account also of glass[240].”
“It may possibly be observed, that this was because marble was not then introduced. Such, however, is not the fact; for in the ædileship of M. Scaurus, three hundred and sixty columns were to be seen imported, for the decorations of a temporary theatre, too, one that was destined to be in use for barely a single month. And yet the laws were silent thereon, in a spirit of indulgence for the amusements of the public, no doubt. But then, why such indulgence? or how do vices more insidiously steal upon us than under the plea of serving the public? By what other way, in fact, did ivory, gold, and precious stones, first come into use with private individuals?
“Can we say that there is now anything that we have reserved for the exclusive use of the gods? However, be it so, let us admit of this indulgence for the amusements of the public; but still, why did the laws maintain their silence when the largest of these columns, pillars of Lucullan marble, as much as eight-and-thirty feet in height, were erected in the atrium of Scaurus? a thing, too, that was not done privately, or in secret; for the contractor for the public sewers compelled him to give security for the possible damage that might be done in the carriage of them to the Palace.... Already had L. Crassus, the orator, he who was the first to possess pillars of foreign marble, and in this same Palatium too, received from M. Brutus, on the occasion of a dispute, the nickname of the ‘Palatine Venus,’ for his indulgence in this kind of luxury. The material, I should remark, was Hymetian marble, and the pillars were but six in number, and not exceeding some twelve feet in height.... These particulars, and others in the sequel, will shew that we are so far improved; for who is there at the present day that has, in his atrium, any such massive columns as these of Scaurus[241]?” ...
“I will not permit, however, these two Caiuses, or two Neros, to enjoy this glory even, such as it is; for I will prove that these extravagant follies of theirs have been surpassed, in the use that was made of his wealth by M. Scaurus, a private citizen. Indeed, I am by no means certain that it was not the ædileship of this personage that inflicted the first great blow upon the public manners, and that Sylla was not guilty of a greater crime in giving such unlimited power to his step-son, than in the proscription of so many thousands. During his ædileship, and only for the temporary purposes of a few days, Scaurus executed the greatest work that has ever been made by the hands of man, even when intended to be of everlasting duration; his theatre, I mean. This building consisted of three storeys, supported upon three hundred and sixty columns; and this, too, in a city which had not allowed without some censure one of its greatest citizens to erect six pillars of Hymetian marble. The ground-storey was of marble, the second of glass, a species of luxury which ever since that time has been quite unheard of, and the highest of gilded wood. The lowermost columns, as previously stated, were eight-and-thirty feet in height; and, placed between these columns, as already mentioned, were bronze statues, three thousand in number. The area of this theatre afforded accommodation for eighty thousand spectators; and yet the theatre of Pompey, after the city had so greatly increased, and the inhabitants had become so vastly more numerous, was considered abundantly large, with its sittings for forty thousand only. The rest of the fittings of it, what with Attalic vestments, pictures, and the other stage properties, were of such enormous value that, after Scaurus had conveyed to his Tusculan villa such parts thereof as were not required for the enjoyment of his daily luxuries, the loss was no less than three hundred millions of sesterces, when the villa was burnt by his servants in a spirit of revenge.... C. Curio, who died during the civil wars, fighting on the side of Cæsar, found, to his dismay, that he could not, when celebrating the funeral games in honour of his father, surpass the riches and magnificence of Scaurus—for where, in fact, was to be found such a step-sire as Sylla, and such a mother as Metella, that bidder at all auctions for the property of the proscribed? Where, too, was he to find for his father, M. Scaurus, so long the principal man in the city, and one who had acted, in his alliance with Marius, as a receptacle for the plunder of whole provinces? Indeed, Scaurus himself was now no longer able to rival himself; and it was at least one advantage which he derived from this destruction by fire of so many objects brought from all parts of the earth, that no one could ever after be his equal in this species of folly. Curio, consequently, found himself compelled to fall back upon his own resources, and to think of some new device of his own.”
The points on which this account agrees with the Colosseum are so remarkable, that there can hardly be a doubt that the enormous building of Scaurus was on this site, and the old tufa walls of the substructure must have belonged to his building. This was the earliest amphitheatre, and in none of the other amphitheatres built in imitation of it do we find similar old tufa walls, although in other respects some are exact copies of the Colosseum.