Forum colonnades of Cuicul (Djemila), Algeria · Wikimedia Commons

Old Forum of Cuicul

Forum Vetus Cuiculi

ForumNumidia · Djemila, AlgeriaBuilt 100 CE

About

This roughly 2,000-square-meter square sat at the crossing of the cardo and decumanus and served as the sole civic heart of Cuicul for its first century, laid out as essential founding infrastructure alongside the town's ramparts and earliest temples. Colonnaded walks and regular paving framed a space built for a walled town of barely 7 hectares, planned on a scale that fifty years of prosperity would soon outgrow. A monumental altar and further sculptural embellishment were added here more than a century later, but the pavement and portico lines a visitor walks today trace the square that Nerva's colonists actually used. It stands now as the oldest surviving public space of Roman Djemila, humbler and more compact than the grand Severan forum built beside it.

What happened here

Business starts at first light. The magistrates' tribunal opens, cases are called, and the crowd that gathers to listen is half the point of coming. Money-changers work from tables under the porticoes, weighing coin from a dozen mints against the local rate. Notices are painted on the walls and whitewashed over when they go stale: elections, gladiator shows, a lost slave, a house to let. By the sixth hour the heat empties the open square and the arcades fill instead. Statues of the town's benefactors stand between the columns, and the men who paid for them expect to be greeted by name. Public slaves sweep at dusk. The forum is where a Roman town keeps its records, its gossip and its self-regard in the same place.