Theater and drama flourished for centuries in Classical Greece, giving immortal works of comedy and tragedy to the world from the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

The theater of Ephesus below was originally constructed during the reign of Lysimachus around 300 BC, a few decades after the death of Alexander the Great.

Even then, there were already Greek theaters dotted around the Aegean that were centuries older.

The Romans, by contrast, were highly suspicious of theater and drama.

Historian Tom Holland explains, “To many citizens, this remained a source of pride, an emphatic demonstration of republican virtue and a guarantee of that ‘peculiar manliness which has always distinguished the Roman people’.”

It was not until 50 BC when the highly successful general and politician Gnaeus Pompey Magnus commissioned a permanent stone theater in Rome’s vicinity, but even then, it was built on the Field of Mars - technically outside the city’s jurisdiction.

The theater, still under construction, was the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination just a few years later in 44 BC.