The first idea of building such a magnificent theatre seems to have been suggested to Pompey by his visit to the theatre at Mitylene, whither he went after the Mithridatic war to be present at a contest of rival poets held in his honour. Only one attempt had before been made to build a permanent theatre in Rome. The Censor C. Cassius Longinus in the year B.C. 154 had entered into a contract for the construction of a stone theatre near the Lupercal, but the senate, by the advice of Scipio Nasica, a rigid Puritan of the old Roman school, and jealous of the introduction of Greek luxury, ordered it when half finished to be demolished, and the materials sold. The same decree inflicted penalties on any one who should, either in the city or within a mile of its wails, venture to place any seats for spectators at the games, or sit down while looking on at them. Tacitus states that even in Pompey’s time the conservative Romans retained the same dread lest indolence and luxury should be promoted by the construction of permanent theatres.[88] In carrying out this grand design Pompey was assisted by his freedman Demetrius, who had amassed immense riches during his master’s campaigns, and took this opportunity of paying his acknowledgments to the author of his wealth. The capabilities of the theatre must have been very great; nor need we be surprised to hear that it contained 40,000 seats, for the remaining fragments show that it comprehended the whole space between the Via de’ Chiavari which corresponds nearly to the line of the scena, the Via di Giubbonari, the Campo di Fiore and the Via del Paradiso. Eastwards from the Via de’ Chiavari stretched the long ranges of colonnades of which the Capitoline plan gives the outline, and beyond them the Curia and a temple, with a variety of offices and shops, as far as the Via di Torre Argentina, including the modern Teatro Argentina within their compass. In this theatre Nero gave the grand entertainment to Tiridates, on which occasion not only the scena but the whole interior of the theatre and its furniture was covered with gilding, and a purple velarium stretched over it, upon which Nero himself was represented driving his chariot in the character of the Sun God, with golden stars glittering around him. The scena was burnt in the great fire in A.D. 80, but restored again by Vespasian. Two other conflagrations and restorations are recorded in the first half of the third century, one in the reign of Philippus in A.D. 249, and a second in that of Diocletian.[89] An inscription was found in the Via de’ Chiavari in 1551, which commemorates the restoration of one of the colonnades under the name of Jovius, a title which Diocletian often assumed, and in the time of Ammianus Marcellinus the theatre could still be reckoned among the Mirabilia Urbis.[90] Another inscription given by the anonymous writer of the Einsiedlen MS. records a rebuilding by Arcadius and Honorius about A.D. 395.