Roman Forum of Butrint
About
Augustus's veteran colonists paved over Butrint's Hellenistic agora to lay out this forum, a roughly 20-by-72-meter plaza — the only excavated forum known from ancient Epirus. Julius Caesar had first eyed the site for settlement in the 40s BCE, a plan Cicero's letters show his friend Atticus fought to keep off his own nearby land. By 117 CE the forum anchored a thriving colonia in the freshly created province of Epirus.
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.
In ancient writing
- Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum Book 16, the "Buthrotine dossier" letters
Cicero writes repeatedly to his friend Atticus about Atticus's estate near Buthrotum, lobbying against Julius Caesar's plan to plant a veteran colony there that threatened to confiscate Atticus's land.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →