Aphrodisias South Agora
About
Also called the Portico of Tiberius, this was Aphrodisias's second public square, laid out in the early 1st century CE under Tiberius. Recent excavation found it functioned as an urban park rather than a bare marketplace, with a long ornamental pool, fountains, and rows of planted trees behind its colonnades. It was already nearly a century old by the time Hadrian took the throne.
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.
Sources
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