Forum Thamugadis
About
Trajan founded Timgad in 100 CE as a colony for army veterans, laying the city out as a nearly perfect grid centered on its forum. Porticoes and rows of shops framed the paved square, with the curia and a basilica standing at its heart and a small temple to Victory tucked into one corner. Retired soldiers of the Third Augustan Legion walked its colonnades to conduct civic business and hear public announcements. A dedicatory tablet found near the forum commemorated the emperor's foundation of the colony and the legionary legate who oversaw the work. Seventeen years old in 117 CE, the forum still smelled of new-cut stone from a city built at Trajan's order in the empty steppe.
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
- CIL VIII 2355, dedicatory inscription 100 CE
A fragmentary tabula found near the forum and west gate commemorated Trajan's founding of the colony of Thamugadi, carried out through his legate and the Third Augustan Legion; scholarship places it tentatively in this area rather than on any specific standing arch.
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 →