The Theater was built under the patronage of Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law, between 16 and 15 BC, when the Colony was promoted as the provincial capital of Lusitania. Like the adjoining Amphitheater building, the Theater was partially built on the side of a hill, which substantially lowered the costs of its factory. The rest were built in concrete lined with ashlars.
Although the Romans were not very fond of the theater, a prestigious city could not fail to have a building for stage games. Augusta Emerita's was especially generous in its capacity: about six thousand spectators. These were distributed from bottom to top according to their social rank in three sectors of stands, caveas summa, media and ima , separated by corridors and barriers. All the stands were easily accessed from ladders distributed radially by the caveas. Through corridors you reached the access doors or vomitories.
The deteriorated upper tier or summa cavea was the only thing that emerged from the building before the beginning of its excavation in 1910. As the access vaults were ruined since ancient times, only the seven bodies of its tiers remained standing, which gave rise to that the people of Mérida baptized these ruins as the Seven Chairs.
The cavea ima, where the knights of the city were accommodated, was modified in the time of Trajan, erecting in its center a sacred space surrounded by a marble railing. In front of the cavea ima we see three wider and lower tiers, where the magistrates and priests of the city enjoyed the spectacle seated on mobile chairs. Those accessed their seats from the large side doors located at both ends. Above these doors were the stands of the magistrates who paid for the show.
The semicircular space where the choir, the orchestra was located , has a marble floor, the result of a late reform. Behind the orchestra rises the wall of the proscenium, of circular and rectangular exedras. Above her the scene unfolded. Originally it was a wooden deck under which all the gizmos of the stage were distributed.
The scene closes with a thirty meter high wall, the frons scaenae, structured in two bodies of columns between which we can see statues of deified emperors and gods of the underworld. Everything rises on a podium decorated with rich marbles. On the stage front there are three openings through which the actors entered the stage. The central one, the royal valve, ends in a lintel on which the seated statue of the goddess Ceres (or Livia, the wife of Augustus, deified) sits. From the crowning of the scenic front a wooden canopy would hang to improve the acoustics of the venue, already excellent.
Behind the wall of the scenic front there is a large porticoed garden enclosed by walls with niches that were decorated with statues of members of the imperial family. In the axis of this portico, in line with the valva regia and the sacred space of the ima cavea , is the aula sacra, a small sacred space with an altar table where the figure of the divine Augustus was honored.
House-Basilica of the Theater
At the west end of the portico of the Theater we can see this house whose excavator, José Ramón Mélida, believed that the rooms equipped with apses with windows in their heads were part of a church where one of the first Christian communities met, hence denominate it House-Basilica.
The entrance to the house is to the west and opens onto a driveway made with diorite slabs, which runs from east to west. The jaws of the house open onto a series of rooms that are articulated around a patio that was porticoed and in the center of which you can still see the remains of a pond. Some rooms retain remains of mosaics decorated with geometric themes and plant loops.
At the end of the patio are the apsidated rooms, which invade areas that were previously part of the Theater's portico. The rooms must have been covered with a barrel vault and, in the apses, they would end in a hemispherical cap. The walls, plastered with paintings, in what is preserved are decorated with imitations of marble inlays in the baseboards and, in the apse area, on pedestals, the lower third of characters is preserved, perhaps some servants, dressed in colored tunics and decorated with brocades.
Except for the floor of the apse area, which was possibly paved with marble, the rest of the room was decorated with a mosaic in which the presence of a crater inscribed in a square stands out.
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