On the right, the Senate House and the Assembly Ground (Comitium) provided the setting for political activity. A Speakers’ Platform stood on the outer edge of the Comitium. It was decorated with ships’ prows captured in a sea battle in 338 and their name in Latin, Rostra, was applied to the platform as a whole.
The long sides of the square were bordered by two colonnaded halls, the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia and the Basilica Sempronia. Maintained and refurbished by the great families that had had them built, they contained shops and meeting rooms. Farther down just past the Basilica Sempronia, the Temple of Castor and Pollux (or Temple of the Castors) stood on a high podium under which were two rows of moneylenders’ booths—the nearest equivalents to modern banks. The building, which had a large speaker’s platform in front of the temple porch, also served as a political meeting place and the Senate was often convened there. Nearby, judicial proceedings were held at the Tribunal Aurelium, a stone dais surrounded by steps from the top of which Cicero was to harangue juries. Cases were conducted out-of-doors in various parts of the Forum and advocates had to speak in rain or shine, summer heat or winter cold.
Underneath the flagstones of the square itself was (and still is) a network of underground tunnels. These were where gladiators waited before emerging to fight in a temporary wooden arena where various kinds of spectacle were staged during festivals and on holidays.
The Forum was closed at its far end by a group of religious buildings—among them the circular Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Here an eternal flame was tended by a team of six free-born women dedicated to chastity, the Vestal Virgins, who lived in a large house beyond the Temple. They were appointed between the ages of six and ten and served for thirty years. If they broke their vows (happily, a rare event), they were buried alive outside the pomoerium, and their lovers were whipped to death on the Assembly Ground. The Vestal Virgins were symbolically married to the Chief Pontiff (pontifex maximus, a title later expropriated by the pope).
The Chief Pontiff chaired the highest religious council, the College of Pontiffs, and was responsible for the organization of the state religion. The College in turn was in charge of the calendar and decided the dates of festivals and public holidays. It also kept a record of the principal events of each year, the Annals. Overall, its task was to regulate the relations between gods and men. The Chief Pontiff lived next door to the Vestal Virgins in the State House (domus publica). Nearby was the somewhat extravagantly named Palace (regia), a poky little structure built centuries before, when kings still ruled the city. It contained a variety of sacred objects and housed the Annals and the official calendar.
Politics in the late Republic was grounded in a profound sense of what it was to be a Roman, a commitment to the mos maiorum, ancestral customs. This sense was, quite literally, embodied in the Forum’s layout and structures. There was hardly a spot that had not been the scene of some great event in the city’s legendary past as well as more recent, historical times.
At the center of the Forum a low wall surrounded a water hole near a cluster of three plants: a vine, a fig tree and an olive bush. This was the Pool of Curtius, where in Rome’s early years a chasm had suddenly appeared. The prophetic Sibylline Books, an antique collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameters which the Romans consulted in times of national crisis, advised that the gap in the ground would close only when it received what the Roman people valued most highly. From that day forward the earth would produce an abundance of what it had taken in. People threw cakes and silver into the hole, but it stayed open. Then a young cavalryman, one Marcus Curtius, told the Senate that he had worked out the answer to the riddle: it was its soldiers’ courage that Rome held most dear. Fully armed astride his warhorse, he galloped down into the chasm and the crowd hurled animals, precious fabrics and other valuables after him. Finally, the earth closed. According to another version, Curtius was an enemy Sabine whose horse drowned in what was then a swamp. The most plausible (and least exotic) account claimed that a Consul named Curtius fenced the Pool off and consecrated it after the area had been struck by lightning. But for the average Roman, the historical truth was neither here nor there. What mattered was that the Pool was a holy emblem of the city’s past.
Beside the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia stood a little shrine to Venus Cloacina, just above the spot where a great subterranean drain, the Cloaca Maxima, ran beneath the Forum (the Cloaca survives to this day). Here in the dim past Roman and Sabine soldiers, about to do battle, had laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle: they had quarreled after the Romans, facing a population crisis, had kidnapped some women of the neighboring Sabine tribe to provide themselves with more wives. A few yards away was the Navel of the city (umbilicus Romae); this was considered to be the center of the city and the point at which the living world was in contact, through a deep cleft in the ground, with the underworld. The site that combined the historical and the sacred at their most vital was the Black Stone (niger lapis) next to the Assembly Ground. This was a sanctuary of great antiquity dedicated to the god Vulcan and nearby was the legendary site of the assassination of Rome’s founder, Romulus.
Plan of the Roman Forum, Cicero’s workplace as a lawyer, as it was from the mid-second to the mid-first century BC. The positioning of buildings indicated by broken lines is different from that of the present day. Trials were held in the open air with the presiding judge on a platform and jury seated nearby.
Speculative plan of the Senate House. The presiding Consul chaired meetings from the dais opposite the main door. Former Consuls sat in the front rows.
A reconstruction of the main features of the Roman Forum in Cicero’s day. It was crowded with statues, an altar here and a shrine there, historical paintings near the Assembly Ground, a stone lawyers’ platform, and the impedimenta of temporary stands and notice boards.
It was not only the Forum that was sacred but also most of the activities that were conducted there. Political and indeed private life was governed by a web of religious rules and procedures, predictions and omens. Religion was not so much a set of personal beliefs as precisely laid-down ways of living in harmony with the expectations of the gods. In fact, by the end of the Republic educated men believed less in the literal truth of the apparatus of religious doctrine than in a vaguer notion of the validity of tradition.
The basic proposition was that no human enterprise could be undertaken without divine sanction. This applied to domestic households as well as to state affairs. The gods worked through natural phenomena to reveal their wishes or intentions. Signs included the flight or songs of birds, the activities of animals and thunder and lightning. It was also possible to attach significance to words or phrases casually spoken.
The College of Augurs had the sole right of interpreting the auspices. (Like the College of Pontiffs, it comprised leading personalities of the Roman establishment and Cicero became a member towards the end of his career.) An Augur would mark off a rectangular space, called a templum (the origin of the word “temple”), from which he would conduct his observations. In some places permanent templa were identified, one of which was on the citadel on the Capitol Hill. Signs from the east (usually on the Augur’s left) were held to be favorable and those from the west unfavorable. In addition, Etruscan soothsayers, or haruspices, were often called to Rome to explain apparently supernatural events and gave judgments based on an examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals.