The Roman Amphitheatre of El Jem – Recollections of a Visit

Driving through the drab and dusty streets of the modest Tunisian town of El Jem, sat on a featureless plateau, nothing prepares you for the sight of a massive Roman amphitheatre looming up over the mostly single-story modern buildings. It sits there like a relic from a long gone era plonked down in the midst of a modern North African town. An anachronism. There are no other excavated ruins visible beside it, nothing to tell one that this was once the arena of the prosperous Roman city of Thysdrus.

Indeed, so starkly alone is the building that antiquarians believed it to be an amphitheatre built in the desert, thinking it the whim of a mad emperor. But modern excavations have revealed the outlines of a fair sized city with a forum and villas of the wealthy, though these excavations have been backfilled and aren’t available for the visitor to see.

Figure 1: view down onto the arena floor from an upper gallery

So when visiting El Jem it is important to remember its context: that this vast building was just one of the civic buildings of a thriving Roman North African city, one that grew wealthy on the olive oil trade, especially in its heyday of the second and early third centuries AD. And it wasn’t the only such city either. North Africa was an important province of the Roman Empire, something that many people don’t appreciate nowadays.

Just as the Arab El Jem sits on top of Roman Thysdrus, so that city sits on a much smaller Carthaginian town. The Carthaginian economy was based on coastal trading ports, the towns in the interior never really amounting to much. Even after the Roman conquest it remained small until the insatiable appetite of the cities of Roman Europe for olive oil outstripped what could be produced in Europe, especially after economic crisis and civil war. Nowadays it is hard to imagine arid North Africa covered in olive groves, but the climate was slightly less dry then. And Thysdrus was ideally suited as a marketplace for this produce, for selling it on to wholesalers to transport by road to the ports on the coast.

The amphitheatre is grand, even by Roman standards. It is 138 metres long and 114 metres wide, making it a little over two thirds the size of the Coliseum in Rome. It was probably built in the first few decades of the third century AD.

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