Word.ws English Dictionary

cavea

cavea noun: the seating section of a Greek or Roman theatre or amphitheatre.

cavea: the seating section of a Greek or Roman theatre or amphitheatre
Image: File:Bosra, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cavea (plural caveae or caveas)

  1. The seating section of a Greek or Roman theatre or amphitheatre.
    • Vitruvius, in writing that colonnades are desirable above theatres, is thinking of late Asiatic and Roman caveas; […]1895, The Annual of the British School at Athens, number 45, page 42
    • Between (1) and the foot of the Cavea (7), there was built a rectangular Podium (5), situated right in the middle of the orchestra, which effectively rules out any possibility that the Hellenistic and Roman caveas could have been used for theatrical performances.1986, Albert Schachter, Cults of Boiotia: Herakles to Poseidon, London: Institute of Classical Studies, →ISBN, page 82

Examples of cavea in a sentence

  • No rib foundation appears ever to have been designed for subterranean vaulting like that commonly found elsewhere in Roman caveas to support seating.1989, Hesperia, volume 58, page 35:
  • As the entrances near the caveas provide access to the theatres, such an additional arrangement seems to have been superfluous.2005, Orhan Bingöl, translated by Ayşe Çalık Ross, Theatron: Magnesia on the Meander, Homer Kitabevi, →ISBN, page 64:
  • Thus the term ‘theatre’ (theatron), which had originally denoted only the spectator area, came to be used of the whole complex of koilon (or cavea), orchestra, and skene.2006, Frederick E. Winter, Studies in Hellenistic Architecture, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, →ISBN, page 98, column 1:
  • There the caveas are employed in a different manner.2013, Andreas J. M. Kropp, Images and Monuments of Near Eastern Dynasts, 100 bc–ad 100, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page...

Forms of cavea

pluralcaveae
pluralcaveas

Origin of cavea

Learned borrowing from Latin cavea. Doublet of cage.

Questions about cavea

What does cavea mean?
Cavea means the seating section of a Greek or Roman theatre or amphitheatre.
How do you use cavea in a sentence?
No rib foundation appears ever to have been designed for subterranean vaulting like that commonly found elsewhere in Roman caveas to support seating.
What part of speech is cavea?
Cavea is a noun.
What is the plural of cavea?
The plural of cavea is caveae.

Words near cavea in the dictionary

  1. cave swiftlets
  2. cave-in
  3. cave-ins
  4. cave-painting
  5. cave-paintings
  6. cavea
  7. caveach
  8. caveached
  9. caveaching
  10. caveae
  11. caveas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cavea (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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