What they are
The Grand Théâtre was built into the slope of Fourvière early in the Empire, possibly under Augustus, and enlarged at the end of the first century or the start of the second, when it could hold up to 10,000 people.
Beside it stands the Odéon, a smaller roofed hall of the late first or early second century, for up to about 3,000 — music, readings, meetings. A theatre and an odeon together are rare anywhere in the Roman world; in Gaul only Vienne, down the Rhône, has the same pair.
Lost and found
After Rome, both were used as quarries, stripped of their stone and finally buried; by the Middle Ages they had been forgotten. The theatre was identified by chance at the end of the nineteenth century and cleared and restored from 1933.
Getting it right
The theatres still work. In summer they hold the Nuits de Fourvière festival, and watching anything from those stone seats is the reason to plan ahead — see Booking Ahead.
The site is part of the Lugdunum museum, built into the hill right beside it.
When it was built, and why nobody is sure
No document or inscription records when the theater was built, so archaeologists date it from its materials and construction methods, and they disagree. The first theater, set against the hillside below the Fourvière plateau, had two banks of seats under a semicircular colonnade and held at most 5,700 people. Amable Audin, one of the archaeologists who cleared it, dated it to Augustus's stays in Lugdunum in 16 to 14 BC, which would make it one of the first theaters in Roman Gaul, alongside Arles; others accept only that it belongs to the Julio-Claudian period.
It was later rebuilt and a third bank of seats added at the top, raising its capacity to an estimated 10,000 and making it the second largest in Gaul after Autun's. The date of that enlargement is also disputed: the old attribution to the reign of Hadrian rested on brickwork and on a head once identified as his portrait, and both arguments have since been rejected.
What was performed
Almost nothing is recorded about the shows. Suetonius says the emperor Caligula held games in Lugdunum, including a contest of Greek and Latin oratory, which may have taken place here because the odeon did not yet exist. A fragment of Cassius Dio mentions the theater's audience in the early third century, when a dancing master expelled from Rome by Caracalla came to Lyon and charmed the locals, rising from slave and dancer to general and prefect. Elsewhere in the Roman world, local notables paid for performances to thank voters, and pantomime, a musical and danced form that developed under Augustus, opened theater to provincial audiences who understood little Latin.
From the fourth century the rise of Christianity brought the theater's decline: church writers condemned the stage as idolatrous and immodest. By the end of the third century and into the fourth, the Fourvière hill was gradually abandoned in favor of the lower town along the Saône.
Quarried, buried, misidentified
In the twelfth century the ruins were used as a quarry for the great building projects of the day, the bridges over the Saône and the Rhône and the cathedral of Saint-Jean. The limestone facing was stripped and the stage wall leveled to its foundations; the marble decoration ended in lime kilns, one of them set up in a staircase of the neighboring odeon. Landslides from the unstable slope above then buried what was left under several meters of stones, gravel and mud, which protected it. By the late Middle Ages the site was covered with terraced vineyards.
In 1887 a Professor Lafon, puzzled by the curved shape of the garden he had bought on Rue Cléberg, uncovered the tops of curved walls and decided he had found the amphitheater where the martyrs of Lyon died. The historian André Steyert argued instead that the remains were semicircular, a theater, and measurements in 1914 agreed with him, but the land was private and the amphitheater theory stayed official into the 1920s.
Brought back to the stage
Excavation finally began on April 25, 1933, with the support of Mayor Édouard Herriot, who created a municipal excavation service for it. As soon as the lower rows of seats were cleared down to the orchestra, it was clear this was a theater. The city kept going, bought the surrounding land, and the dig became the largest in Lyon, employing up to 120 workers in 1940, led by Pierre Wuilleumier and then Amable Audin. Restoration began in 1941, and in 1946 the theater was back in use, with a public performance of Aeschylus's The Persians.
The plan is classic Roman: three semicircular banks of seats on radiating substructures, an orchestra paved in its center with colored marble, and a tall stage wall with three recesses.
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