Certainly for two centuries, possibly for a longer period, the people of
Arausio maintained and enjoyed their theatre. The beautiful little city
of which it was a part was altogether charming: abounding in comforts
and luxuries and rich in works of art. From the hill-top where now
stands the statue of the Virgin was to be seen in those days a miniature
Rome. Directly at the base of the hill was the theatre, and beyond it
were the circus and the baths; to the left, the Coliseum; to the right,
the Field of Mars; in front--just within the enclosing ramparts, serving
as the chief entrance to the town--the noble triumphal arch that remains
almost perfect even until this present day. Only the theatre and the
arch are left now; but the vanished elegance of it all is testified to
by the fragments of carved walls and of mosaic pavements which still
continue to be unearthed from time to time. Surrounding that opulent
little city were farms and vineyards and olive-orchards--a gentle
wilderness interset with garden-hidden villas whereto the citizens
retired to take their ease; and more widely about it was the broad Rhone
Valley, then as now a rich store-house of corn and wine and oil.
No wonder that the lean barbarians of the North came down in hungry
hordes and seized upon that fatness as Roman strength decayed; and no
wonder, being barbarians, that the invaders wrecked much of the beauty
which they could neither use nor understand. After the second German
invasion, in the year 406 of our era, there was little left in Gaul of
Roman civilization; and after the coming of the Visigoths, four years
later, Roman civilization was at an end.
Yet during that period of disintegration the theatre was not injured
materially; and it actually remained almost intact--although variously
misused and perverted--nearly down to our own day. The Lords of Baux,
in the twelfth century, made the building the outguard of their fortress
on the hill-top in its rear; and from their time onward little dwellings
were erected within it--the creation of which nibbled away its
magnificent substance to be used in the making of pygmy walls. But the
actual wholesale destruction of the interior did not begin until the
year 1622: when Prince Maurice of Nassau and Orange, in manner most
unprincely, used the building as a quarry from which to draw material
for the system of fortifications devised for his little capital by his
Dutch engineers. And this piece of vandalism was as useless as it was
iniquitous. Only half a century later--during the temporary occupation
of Orange by the French--Prince Maurice's fortifications, built of such
precious material, were razed.
In later times quarrying was carried on in the theatre on a smaller
scale; but, practically, all that this most outrageous Prince left
standing of it still stands: the majestic facade, together with the
rooms in the rear of the stage; the huge wings, which look like, and
have done duty as, the towers of a feudal fortress; the major portion
of the side walls; most of the substructure, and even a little of the
superstructure, of the tiers which completed the semi-circles of seats
hollowed out of the hill-side; and above these the broken and weathered
remains of the higher tiers cut in the living rock. But the colonnade
which crowned the enclosing walls of the auditorium is gone, and many of
the upper courses of the walls with it; the stage is gone; the wall at
the rear of the stage, seamed and scarred, retains only a few fragments
of the columns and pilasters and cornices and mosaics which once made it
beautiful; the carvings and sculptures have disappeared; the royal
portal, once so magnificent, is but a jagged gap in the masonry; the
niche above it, once a fit resting place for a god's image, is shapeless
and bare. And until the work of restoration began the whole interior was
infested with mean little dwellings which choked it like offensive
weeds--while rain and frost steadily were eating into the unprotected
masonry and hastening the general decay.