Theatrum Mogontiacensium

After I spent a semester studying Roman architecture and ruins, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Germany. They picked me up at the airport and didn’t tell me where I was going until we arrived here. Then they asked me to tell them all about the amphitheater they were excavating there. Pretty exciting.

Throughout the Roman Empire thermal baths and amphitheaters were to be found even in the smallest cities, both physical health and hygiene and arts and entertainment being accorded high value and a necessity for civilized life.

Mainz, known as Mogontiacum, Rome’s most important city in Germania, was no exception. In fact, the stage and auditorium of the Mainz theater was the largest anywhere north of the Alps. More than 10,000 audience members could be accommodated. The theater proportions were gigantic: The stage measured 42 meters – 136.5-feet – wide. The audience area was 116 meters—377-feet –in width : one-and-a-half football fields!

(That’s two-and-a-half times larger than the Metropolitan Opera House, and ten times larger than the Mainz Staatstheater, the city’s principal theater.)

The theater site was only first discovered at the beginning of the 20th Century below the Citadel location at the Mainz-South Rail Station. The theater’s dimensions, based on the size of the beams supporting the structure, allowed engineers to approximate the astonishing proportions of the structure: they dwarfed the imagination!

see: http://www.mainz.de/WGAPublisher/online/html/default/hthn-5ttjhv.en.html