Sulla went into voluntary retirement and--a rare achievement in his time--died in bed. The next nabob to equal him in stature, violence, and unconstitutionality was a man who had begun his career as Sulla’s lieutenant, Pompey the Great. Victories in Sicily and Africa, against slaves, pirates, and Mithridates, brought him enormous spoils; he too turned his mind to buildings to monumentalize his glory. The result was Rome’s first stone theater, in the Campus Martius, dedicated in his third consulship (52 B.C.) but begun in his second (55 B.C.), in a great show involving 500 lions and seventeen to twenty elephants. What survives of it is little more than a curve in a Roman street, some blocks of tufa beneath a Roman square, and a memory. Beneath the curve of the Via di Grotta Pinta, which perpetuates the outline of its _cavea_, one may visit today, in the lower regions of a Roman restaurant, the underpinnings of the great building, which once held 12,000 spectators. The technique of these vaults, a development of _incertum_ called _opus reticulatum_, involves setting pyramidal bricks, point inward, in a lozenge pattern into a cement core. But though the entire superstructure has disappeared, an ancient plan survives. In the late second century A.D. the Emperor Septimius Severus caused to be placed on the wall of the library in Vespasian’s Forum of Peace a marble Plan of Rome, the _Forma Urbis_, which has come down to us in over 1000 fragments. The ingenuity with which these have been pieced together (work still going on in 1959) would make a story in itself, but for our present purpose only four fragments (Fig. 5.11) are relevant. The two parallel walls to the right (which is west; north is at the bottom) give a fascinating insight into the puritanical Roman mind at work. Straitlaced Romans objected to theaters as immoral. Pompey’s architect therefore designed at the top of the theater’s _cavea_ a temple of Venus Victrix, represented by the two parallel walls in the plan. The theater seats might then pass as a hemicycle approach to a temple (compare the hemicycle approach to the _tholos_ at Palestrina). Puritanism was appeased. [Illustration: FIG. 5.11 Rome, Pompey’s theater and portico, from _Forma Urbis_. (G. Lugli, _Mon. Ant._, 3, p. 79)] Behind the stage the marble plan shows a great rectangular portico, with a double garden-plot in the middle, where we may restore in imagination trees planted, fountains playing, and works of art displayed. At a Senate meeting in a building associated with the portico, on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar fell at the base of Pompey’s statue, pierced by twenty-three daggers. What may be the tufa blocks of this very building are visible today through a sheet of plate glass in a pedestrian underpass in the Largo Argentina. (Temples A and B of the Largo Argentina appear to the left in the plan.)