Overall         3 *** important site, impressive scale and great setting

Display         2 ** site remains excellently consolidated, little information on site

Access           3 *** you can park in adjacent rugby club car park unless a match is on

Atmosphere 2 ** great impression, but far too pleasant for its original purpose!

Other             3 *** best amphitheatre in Britannia!

This is the only fully visible Legionary Amphitheatre in Britannia, and is another Mortimer Wheeler production, excavated in 1926-7.

It was constructed in cAD90 outside the South-West Gate of the Fortress on the Via Principalis, now called Broadway  It is c80m by c65m in size and elliptical in shape.  Its surviving lower part was made of stone and earth, with an upper part constructed of timber, forming a grandstand with tiers of wooden seating.  It is calculated that it could hold the full 6,000-man complement of Legio II Augusta.

There are two processional entries facing each other on the long axis, and two other entrances with waiting rooms for gladiators, prisoners and beasts, facing each other on the short axis.  The legionary stonemasons included inscribed stones with the name of the centurion of the Century that had built that section, sometimes with the Capricorn badge of II Augusta.  The originals are now in the Legion Museum, but replicas have been put in place and can be spotted.

There is a niche on the East with a shrine to Nemesis, which was identified by a curse tablet found nearby.  This added in 212-22, dated by brick work dating to Caracalla when Leg II Augusta held the title of Antonina.

Together with the vast Baths Complex, the Amphitheatre gives you an insight into the daily world of a Roman Legionary – certainly, in the late 1st and 2nd Centuries, not a humble ‘grunt’ but an accomplished professional military engineer, probably literate, well-paid and forming the sinews that held the Empire together.  A grateful Emperor and Respublica would provide him with all the comforts that could be built – not just bread and circuses, but baths and regular donatives of cash on special occasions.  As Septimius Severus said to his sons on his deathbed, ‘Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn everybody else’.

Most Roman amphitheatres have a thoroughly miserable and acutely depressing atmosphere; you only have to think of what happened in them.  However, at Caerleon, where the grass is frequented by picnicking families and boys kicking footballs, it is actually quite cheerful.

Unlike the rest of Caerleon, on site the information provided is meagre, so you need Cadw’s well-illustrated guide to the Fortress.