The seats are arranged in three semicircular sections. The lowest, ima cavea (4), next to the orchestra, contains four broad ledges on which, as well as in the orchestra itself, the members of the city council, the decurions, could place their chairs, the 'seats of double width.'

Fig. 64.—Plan of the Large Theatre.
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The middle section, media cavea (5), was much deeper, extending from the ima cavea to the vaulted corridor. It contained twenty rows of marble seats arranged like steps, of which only a small portion is preserved. On a part of one of these, individual places, a little less than 16 inches wide, are marked off by vertical lines in front, and numbered; they probably belonged to some corporation which found it necessary, in order to avoid confusion, to assign places to its members by number. In Rome the fourteen rows nearest the bottom were reserved for the knights. Whether a similar arrangement prevailed in the municipalities and the colonies is not known, but if so the number reserved here must have been smaller.

The upper section, summa cavea (6), supported by the vault over the corridor, was too narrow to have contained more than four rows of seats.

The ima cavea was entered from the orchestra. The media cavea could be entered on the lower side from the passage (diazoma, praecinctio) between it and the ima cavea, which at the ends was connected by short flights of steps with the parodoi leading outside; on the upper side six doors opened into the media cavea from the corridor, from which flights of steps descended dividing the seats into five wedgelike blocks, cunei, with a small oblong block in addition on either side near the end of the stage.

The corridor was accessible by four doors, one from the Forum Triangulare, another from the open space between this and the rounded exterior of the Theatre, a third at the end of an alley east of the temple of Isis, and a fourth opening from a steep passage leading up from Stabian Street. The summa cavea, which for convenience we may call the gallery, was entered by several doors (the exact number is uncertain) from a narrow vaulted passage along the outside. This passage, however, did not extend the whole length of the gallery, but stopped where the outer wall of the Theatre joined that of the Forum Triangulare. Here a stairway led to it; there was a second stairway at the rear of the Palaestra, and a third leading from the alley east of the temple of Isis; the three are shown on [Plan III]. At the edge of the Forum Triangulare, a narrow stairway, built in the thick wall, led directly to the gallery ([Fig. 64]).

The outer wall back of the gallery rose to a considerable height above the last row of seats. On the inside near the top were projecting blocks of basalt (seen in [Fig. 65]), containing round holes in which strong wooden masts were set; from these the great awning, velum, was stretched over the cavea and orchestra to the roof of the stage, protecting the spectators from the sun. This sort of covering for the theatre was a Campanian invention, and here, where the cavea opened toward the south, was especially necessary. In the Coliseum, and the well preserved theatre at Orange, the arrangements for fastening the masts are on the outside of the wall. The upper part of the wall of our Theatre has been rebuilt in modern times, and it has been doubted whether the blocks of basalt and the pieces of cornice above with corresponding incisions are ancient; the latter surely are not modern, and their slightly wedged shape shows that from the beginning they must have been on the inside of the wall.