Forum Romanum
About
The civic, religious, and commercial heart of Rome since the archaic period; by 117 CE it was ringed by the Curia, basilicas, temples, and the Rostra. Point marks the representative centroid of the forum valley between the Capitoline and Palatine.
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.
Sources
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 →