Forum of Ostia

Forum Ostiense

ForumItalia · Ostia Antica, ItalyBuilt 100 BCE

About

The civic and religious center of Ostia, at the crossing of the Decumanus Maximus and Cardo, in use since the late Republic and continuously monumentalized under the early Empire (Tiberius built the Temple of Rome and Augustus here; a Republican-era predecessor temple to the Capitoline triad also stood at the forum's north end). By 117 CE the forum was a fully developed civic square, though its most famous surviving monument -- the great brick Capitolium -- was still a few years from completion under Hadrian (see separate entry). Point marks the forum's approximate center.

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 XIV 375, honorific/building inscription late 1st c. BCE
The local benefactor Publius Lucilius Gamala records paving a street beside the Forum in stone and funding repairs to its temples and a marble tribunal there; the original stone is lost, the text preserved through 16th-century antiquarian copies.