History

The momentous events that followed Caesar’s assassination (March 15, 44 BCE) inspired the construction of a temple dedicated to his divine spirit. As Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the Roman state, Caesar formally lived in the Regia, the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus. The slain dictator’s body was carried back to the Forum, and Mark Antony – then consul, Caesar’s friend, relative, and lieutenant – delivered a brilliant funeral oration. Standing on the Rostra in front of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, he called Caesar superhuman, inviolable, and a veritable god and lifted the dictator’s bloody robe on a spear. While the audience echoed his lamentations, he chanted the dictator’s honors and achievements, and, when an aide raised on high a life-sized wax image of Caesar clearly showing his many brutal wounds, the crowd rioted. Led (says Suetonius) by two divine spirits with swords, the spectators set fire to the bier, feeding the flames with nearby wooden benches. Soldiers threw in their weapons, and women, their jewels and amulets of their children. The frantic grief of the wild scene spread throughout the city as groups of foreigners ran through the streets bewailing Caesar’s death. To honor Caesar’s memory on the site of his funeral pyre, in front of the Regia about halfway between the front of the Basilica Aemilia and the Temple of Castor, the people set up an altar with a giallo antico column almost twenty Roman feet high (5.92 m) with the inscription PARENTI PATRIAE (to the father of his country).

Antiquity

When the emperor Vespasian died in 79 CE, his son, Titus, succeeded him. In the next year, the Senate canonized the deceased emperor, and shortly thereafter Titus began the temple for his father. After Titus’ premature death in 81, Domitian, his brother and successor, continued the project and finished it before 87. Despite its prominent location and rich decoration (Figs. 0.4, 1.3, 10.6–10; see pp. 192−195), during the reign of Domitian, only the poet Statius mentioned it briefly in a flowery composition that celebrates the emperor’s now long-lost equestrian statue in the Forum. Thereafter, we hear nothing of the temple until its restoration by Septimius Severus, an event commemorated by a grand dedication in gilt bronze letters on the front of the entablature (infra, pp. 192−193). References to the temple in late antiquity suggest that it still stood, although it may have been quite damaged by the fire in the reign of Carinus (283) or by the sacks of Alaric (410) and the Vandals (455 CE).

After Antiquity

Since the excavators of 1829 found layers of carbonized wood and fused metal on the podium, a fire (before 1000 CE?) must have burned the interior and the roof, but the cella’s marble pavement and fittings may have already disappeared. Some of its materials were probably used in later buildings like the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus built in the seventh century. The church is adjacent to the modern entrance to the Forum from the Via dei Fori Imperiali, but the apse of an outbuilding, its deaconate, stood close to the northeast corner of the temple. More of the temple may have disappeared when Pope Hadrian I (CE 772–795) rebuilt the church.

Tiberius (14–37 CE)

After Augustus’ death in 14, to commemorate the recovery of the military standards lost in Germany by the hapless Varus, Tiberius erected his own modestly proportioned arch (after 17). Tiberius’ architect(s) modeled its high rectangular form and general elevation after the center wing of Augustus’ Parthian Arch, which, standing across the west end of the south branch of the Via Sacra (Figs. 0.3, 1.2, 19.1), Tiberius’ monument faced (Figs. 0.1, 4, 1.3, 15.1, Gatefold 1). That location and its elevation showed the close conceptual relationship between the two. With their close proximity, one after the other, the arches, the facades of the Basilica Julia, and the Temple of Castor clearly emphasized the south block of the narrow Via Sacra (Figs. 0.1, 1.2, 18.1) as a well-defined border for the Forum. By decisively terminating the procession of monuments aligned with the Rostra, Tiberius’ Arch thus gave the Forum a new west end.

The Flavians (69–96)

The great fire of the reign of Nero burned across the east end of the Forum in 64. It destroyed the Temple of Vesta, but left the rest of the Forum untouched. By the end of his reign in 68, Nero had begun reconstructing the temple (Fig. 20.2), and by 73 Vespasian had completed the work (Figs. 2.1, 20.3). Thereafter, the slightly enlarged structure had a standard Corinthian order (Figs. 2.1, 20.2–3). Occupied with imperial reform and construction projects throughout the city after the Neronian fire, Vespasian made no further changes in the Forum, but his sons, Titus and Domitian, added three striking new monuments. Since they had no connection with the major fire of 80 (which destroyed large parts of the Campus Martius and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill), all three, set down in a public space traditionally associated with the Senate, prominently displayed to the Senate and people the exalted imperial status of the new emperor and his family.

Antiquity

Antoninus Pius’ father was descended from a wealthy family in Trans-Alpine Gaul that had migrated to Rome, attaining the consulship in the days of Antoninus’ grandfather. His mother came from the upper echelons of the senatorial aristocracy in Rome. Born September 19, 86 CE, Antoninus was reared at a family estate at Lanuvium about ten miles west of Rome. His lofty family connections led to an official career that Antoninus – described in his ancient biography as a brilliant, handsome young man – carried out with notable success. His achievements attracted the attention of the emperor Hadrian, who appointed him chief judge of one of Italy’s four judicial districts (120). His later career was equally distinguished, and when the emperor became fatally ill early in 138, he adopted Antoninus as his successor. Dio Cassius reports the formal adoption in some detail:

Coming to the throne in middle age (he was 52) after long government service, Antoninus was, as Hadrian indicated, thoroughly trained for his new position, and his twenty-three-year reign was famously peaceful and prosperous. Yet, he had had some misfortunes. His two sons and his eldest daughter were dead before he ascended the throne, and in 141 his wife, Faustina, also died prematurely.

Why another book on the Roman Forum (Figs. 0.1–4, 1.2–6)? Surely, the many who have written on the site in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will have described it so thoroughly that they must have satisfied all possible future interest. Surprisingly, that is not the case. Works on the Forum fall into three general categories: archaeological reports, articles in learned journals and monographs, and guidebooks. For most readers in English, the archaeological reports and the articles, largely in foreign languages, usually Italian, German, and French (listed here roughly according to the volume of material available in each), are virtually incomprehensible. And should the casual reader live near a good university library and have the skills and interest necessary to access these essays, he/she will find simple descriptions of the topography of the site and objects found, with or without exegesis, and technical discussions of difficult, special problems.

While recent archaeological monographs may investigate a single building in detail, they do not necessarily reconstruct its original appearance. They include invaluable measured drawings of architectural elements and standing ruins, but they normally do not use these elements in measurable restored plans, elevations, and sections. They consider neither the relationship of their monument to its neighbors nor its conceptual part in the design of the whole Forum. Guidebooks in English are sometimes more helpful, but they also have their limitations. Their short sections usually do little more than identify and briefly characterize each monument, and even their longer entries present every structure either as an excavation or as a three-dimensional nexus for an essay on relevant historical sources. In other words, neither scholarly articles and specialized monographs nor guidebooks in English treat the Forum as an architectural entity.

The Early Republic

During the early Republic, butcher stalls (Tabernae Lanienae) occupied the north side of the Forum, but in the late fourth century, silversmiths’ shops (Tabernae Argentariae) replaced them. As Vitruvius’ famous description of a typical forum suggests, a colonnade may have shaded these shops while balconies and apartments (?) would have occupied the floor(s) above. Behind them stood an early basilica, built probably in 195–191 after a fire had burned through the area some years earlier (210). The fate of this earlier basilica is uncertain, but in 179 Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, one of the two censors (who, among other duties, took care of Rome’s public buildings), let a contract for a basilica “behind the new shops of the silversmiths.” Since Nobilior died the same year, his colleague, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, completed the structure, which was, therefore, subsequently known as the “Basilica Aemilia and Fulvia.”

In 159, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, then also censor, installed a water clock in the building, and in 78 the consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus decorated its facade with portrait shields (imagines clupeorum). In commemoration of that gift, his son, Lepidus, issued a silver denarius in 61. Since it omits the south shops, it shows either the north facade of the building facing the Macellum (Fig. 5.2) or the interior. The shields in this design appear as decorated frames around portrait busts. To emphasize their importance, they are quite large, completely covering the entablature of the lower order. Judging by the proportions of the later basilica’s decorations, however, they were actually no higher than the frieze. The building on the denarius is two stories high. The lower colonnade is Ionic or Doric/Tuscan, and that above, Ionic (and one-third the size of the colonnade below). Between the columns of both orders, rows of Ionic columns are visible. Upstairs, the larger (outer) colonnade probably stood at the back of a terrace that, on the front facade, overlooked the Forum, and on that in back, the space between the Basilica and the Macellum. The smaller, upper columns on the denarius would thus indicate a second story colonnade around the nave.

Antiquity

The seven large-scale pedestals that border the north side of the Via Sacra in front of the Basilica Julia (plans: Figs. 0.1, 17.2) originally supported honorary columns and statues (Figs. 0.3–4, 1.4–5, 17.1–6, 21.15–16, 24–26). Identical designs and spacing suggest a single construction project in the reign of Diocletian. The pedestals and their columns survived for two centuries after Diocletian’s death (311 CE). But, by the early sixth century, although some of the honorary columns may have still stood, most of the bases, stripped of their decorative marble revetments, supported primitive wood-and-masonry huts that housed workshops. Some huts were attached to the bases. For others, the builders removed parts of the bases and partially occupied their interiors. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the deep fill that covered most of the central area in the Forum hid the remains of the pedestals, the huts, and the neighboring rostra.

Excavations

With the excavation of the adjacent Column of Phocas in 1817 or 1818, the first two of the bases (labeled 15F, G) reappeared. They had, the excavators noted, supported red granite shafts, the fragments of which may still be seen today adjacent to bases 15E and F (Fig. 17.4). During the construction of the walls that buttressed the fill around the Column of Phocas in 1835, the third base appeared. When the next four bases were cleared (1872–1874), the attached medieval huts were also revealed and, “to return the forum to its ancient appearance,” removed. A contemporary photograph shows that parts of the exteriors of the two east bases (15A, B) still stood. The next five (15C–G) were only partially preserved, but brick stamps found near several date them to the reign of Diocletian.

The Republic

Located on the Clivus Capitolinus (Figs. 0.1, 4, 12.1–13), the Portico of the Dei Consentes perpetuated the name of a Greek cult introduced into Rome during the the late third century BCE while the Romans were fighting the Second Punic War. In 217, with a beachhead in Italy, Hannibal had just defeated the Romans at Lake Trasimene some 141 km northeast of Rome. The Roman commander, the consul, Gaius Flaminius, had been killed. Fifteen thousand Romans died with him, and ten thousand fled. To calm Rome’s terrified citizens, the Senate gave command of the war against Hannibal to the distinguished conservative, Quintus Fabius Maximus, naming him dictator and propitiating the gods:

This was the first appearance in Rome of the Olympian deities who formed an advisory council for Jupiter, the “Dei Consentes,”

Crassus in Parthia

On May 6, 53 BCE, Marcus Licinius Crassus, triumvir with Pompey and Caesar, consul in 55 BCE, arrived near Carrhae, a small town near the Balihu River, a tributary of the Euphrates in northwest Mesopotamia. He was marching to the western Parthian capital of Seleucia with seven legions of heavily armed troops, 4,000 cavalry, and 4,000 light-armed soldiers, a massive expeditionary force totaling between 42,000 and 50,000 men. If all went according to plan, he would capture Seleucia and conquer Parthia, an achievement that would provide him with a military reputation equal to that of his fellow triumvirs. Unfortunately, he had neither the military ability of Pompey nor the genius of Caesar, and his Parthian campaign had been unpopular when proposed in Rome. Had Crassus not been ambitious, wrote Cicero later, he would never have crossed the Euphrates. A tribune, Gaius Ateius Capito, and a large band of his adherents opposed the departure of the expedition on the grounds that “anyone should go out to wage war on men who had done the state no wrong, but were in treaty relations with it.” Yet, since Pompey accompanied the troops out of the city, when they (Ateius’ followers) saw

This was the first of many evil omens.

The Early Capitoline Hill

In its original form, the Capitoline Hill consisted of two low rises separated by a narrow, sloping, saddle-shaped depression. The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus/Jupiter Optimus Maximus occupied the Capitol, the south rise. Rome’s citadel fortified the higher north elevation, the Arx. The depression between the peaks was called in antiquity “inter duos lucos,” “between the two groves,” although by the early first century BCE, the groves had long since disappeared. Overlooking the Forum, however, the depression was an important site. In the early first century BCE, it was occupied by a substantial structure of externally rusticated tufa blocks. A major fire destroyed that building in 83, but its partially preserved remains survive as foundations visible today from the interior of the arcade on the third floor of the Tabularium.

The Republic

In 169 BCE, the Roman people elected as one of the two censors Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a distinguished member of the senatorial order, consul, conqueror of the Celtiberians in Spain and of the Sardi in Sardinia and, for these conquests, recipient of two triumphs. In that year, motivated by growth of the empire and the increase in the number of Roman citizens, the quaestors gave the censors half the state revenues for needed public improvements, and Sempronius used his money to build a basilica, on the south side of the Forum. The project also incidentally must have provided a rather handsome profit for Gracchus’ father-in-law, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage. Africanus’ house stood on a block bounded on the north by the Roman Forum, on the east by the Vicus Iugarius (General Plan.IV), on the west by the Vicus Tuscus (Gatefold 1), and to the south by a street whose name has not survived. Purchasing the house and the other the buildings on the block, the “old shops” on the Forum dating from 209 BCE, the butcher’s stalls close by, and “the shops adjacent,” Gracchus assembled a spacious plot for the new basilica he built between the Temples of Castor and Saturn.

Occupying the site of later Basilica Julia, Gracchus’ building, the Basilica Sempronia, named for Gracchus’ clan, lasted just over a century before Caesar replaced it with a new (and probably strikingly original) building. Dedicated in 46 BCE, it survived for only a few decades. In his autobiography, Augustus notes that Caesar’s basilica had burned and that, in 12, he had replaced it with a new structure named for his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius (Figs. 0.3, 1.4–5, 14.1–17, 21.21–26). For the next century, the new building was known as “the Porticus and Basilica of Gaius and Lucius” or the Porticus Julia (infra, p. 256).

Foundation

The Temple of Vesta (Figs. 0.1, 3, 20.1–19), one of the oldest sacred buildings in the Roman Forum, was first built by Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king (715–673 BCE) and founder of the order of Vestals. As Romulus had shaped the military and political character of the early Roman state, so, says Plutarch, Numa, an austere religious man, gave Roman religion its earliest form. He established state priests (the pontifices or those who build bridges between the human and divine) and became their chief, the Pontifex Maximus. As a pious ruler concerned about the relations between his subjects and their gods, Numa was particularly interested in the cult of Vesta, believed to be a sister of Jupiter and patron of the domestic hearth. As a symbol of the goddess’ close association with the state, her temple was set up at the southeast side of the Forum, near the Fountain of Juturna and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, just across from the Regia, traditionally supposed to be the palace of the kings and, after the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE, the ceremonial “office” for the Pontifex Maximus (Figs. 0.1, 1.5, 13–14). Never formally considered a temple, Vesta’s shrine was unconsecrated. Indeed, it lacked a cult statue, and the representation of the goddess stood nearby in the Aedicula Vestae, a small tabernacle next to the entrance to the house of the Vestal Virgins