The amphitheatre was constructed at the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd century AD, to the west of the hill of Byrsa, in the Roman city that Julius Caesar had ordered rebuilt on the ashes of Punic Carthage. An inscription confirms it was in active use by 133-139 AD, and it was expanded during the 3rd century as the city's population and appetite for spectacle grew. The arena measured 64.66 meters by 36.70 meters, surrounded by a podium of cut stone 2.5 meters high. At its expanded peak, the major axis reached 156 meters with a width of 128 meters, giving it an estimated capacity of 30,000 seats. The amphitheatre was one of only three in Roman Africa built entirely on flat ground rather than cut into a hillside -- the others being El Jem and Thapsus.

In 1887, a cross was erected in the center of the arena to commemorate the martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, two early Christian women who tradition holds were executed in a Carthaginian amphitheatre on March 7, 203 AD. Whether this particular amphitheatre was the site of their deaths remains uncertain -- scholars now believe the execution may have occurred in a different, military amphitheatre whose location is unknown. Regardless, the association has shaped the site's identity for over a century. A modern chapel dedicated to the two saints was built nearby, though its construction disturbed the underground service chambers that once supported the arena's operations -- the rooms where animals were caged, machinery was stored, and condemned prisoners waited.

The amphitheatre's destruction was not sudden but glacial -- a thousand-year process of stone removal that left the structure progressively more skeletal. After the Arab conquest of 698 brought Carthage's era as a major city to a close, the amphitheatre joined every other monument on the site as a source of building material. Stone by stone, column by column, the upper tiers and facade that Al-Bakri and Al Idrissi had admired were dismantled and carted away. The metal clamps that held the stones together were pried out for their iron. By the end of the 19th century, when European archaeologists began documenting what remained, only the arena itself -- the sunken pit at the building's core -- survived, open to the sky in its grove of pines. The restored wall that visitors see today is a modern reconstruction, a gesture toward a structure whose original dimensions can only be estimated from the foundation traces.

What makes the Carthage Amphitheatre haunting is not what remains but what was described before it vanished. Al-Bakri's account of wind figures -- East smiling, West frowning -- suggests decorative programs that rivaled anything in Rome or Pompeii. Al Idrissi's description of fifty arches adorned with ships and humans speaks to a building that was not merely functional but ornamental, a showcase of Roman artistic ambition in Africa. The amphitheatre's 54 structural spans supported tiers of seating that rose high enough to be visible from across the surrounding plain. Standing in the arena today, surrounded by pine trees and the remains of the stone podium, the visitor must supply everything above eye level from imagination -- guided by the words of medieval travelers who saw it whole and were moved enough to write it down.