Curia Paestana
About
Three parallel naves divided this rectangular hall on the forum's north side, where the colony's magistrates kept their archives and heard petitions. It stood beside the comitium as part of one continuous complex, built within a generation of Rome founding its Latin colony at Paestum in 273 BCE. A row of decurions sat here to run local government the same way the Senate ran Rome, just at a fraction of the scale. The building remained the seat of that local government through the reign of Trajan.
What happened here
The doors stand open during a session, so the crowd outside can hear. Inside, the order of speaking is the order of rank, and a man's whole career is measured by how early his name is called. Members sit on tiered benches facing each other rather than a chair, which makes the room argumentative by design. Business is read out by a clerk: letters from governors, embassies waiting in the corridor, requests for temple money, permission for a town to build. Voting is done with the feet, one side of the room against the other. Nothing said inside leaves formally, and everything said inside is repeated by evening. In a provincial town the local council does the same work in a smaller room, and cares about it just as much.
Sources
Nearby
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