Roman Forum from Palatine Hill · Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

Roman Forum

Forum Romanum

ForumItalia · Rome, ItalyBuilt 700 BCE

About

The valley between the Capitoline and the Palatine has been the centre of Roman public life for eight hundred years, and by 117 CE it is built up to its edges. The Senate meets in the Curia at the north end. Magistrates speak from the Rostra, its platform studded with the bronze rams of captured warships. Temples of Saturn, of Concord, of Castor and Pollux and of the deified Caesar ring the open ground, and the state treasury sits in the vaults under Saturn's podium. Two basilicas take the law courts and the bankers indoors. Triumphs end here and funerals pass through.

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

Varro, De lingua Latina 5.145–156
Walks the Forum naming its parts and arguing where each name came from — the Comitium, the Rostra, the Lacus Curtius, the streets running off it.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 3.67–68
Credits Tarquin with draining the valley into the Cloaca Maxima and laying out the Forum as the city's meeting place.