Entertainment
The rich women with no household chores and with maids to wait on them would shop, go out and eat with friends, watch gladiators and also go to see chariot races. Many people would play board games with dice and counters. Theatrical shows were another, calmer form of popular entertainment. Pompeii’s theatre was an old one. It was built in the second century BC in the Greek style and then enlarged and restructured in the Augustan period to make it more like a typical Roman theatre. Comedies and rustic farces were performed there, as well as mimed re-enactments of mythological scenes. The dramas of ancient Greece must also have been common, judging from the wall paintings depicting the famous Greek playwright Menander. A small roofed odeum, or concert hall, was built next to the theatre in about 75 BC to offer an extra venue for musical entertainment.