Arena crowd simulation

Hi all,

I have a Roman Arena asset, that I would like to populate with crowds. The crowd should be of lower quality as it’s a far background thing. But I would ideally like to use a few characters and populate the sitting area and have them move on random using premade animations.

I was wondering if there is a simple way to do this?
Like using foliage tool to populate an area with characters? Or maybe a Niagra thing to make many many characters and so it does not kill the performance. I was thinking around a few hundred to a few thousand charactes if possible.

Or is there like an existing plugin for this?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!
Gasper