The various excavations of the amphitheatre have not turned up anything that can be used to date the structure with certainty. Nevertheless, it was probably built prior to the end of the 1st century. The cavea could have been arranged in several different ways, and there may have been various phases of embellishment.
The amphitheatre had to have been abandoned in the early 4th century, since blocks from it were found in the city wall. Another clue that it was abandoned in late Antiquity was the discovery of a small necropolis in the arena, in which were found tombs containing items dating from the 5th and 6th centuries. Under these conditions, the theory that the arena was reused during the Merovingian period is somewhat problematic.
When Gregoire de Tours states that Chilperic (561-584) organised games in a circus in Paris, there is no proof that it was in this structure, even through some rare Merovingian objects were found there, including a belt buckle and a bronze pin.
Even in ruins and stripped of its opus quadratus, the structure nevertheless left its mark on the Paris landscape, as shown by the persistence of the toponym up to the Middle Ages. We know that it served as a quarry for the construction of the wall of Philippe Auguste, particularly for smaller stones.