Forum

In a Roman city, the forum was a large, rectangular, centrally located, open space, usually surrounded by monumental public structures. These buildings typically included many of the principal political, religious, and commercial centers of the city. The forum was often the site of local markets, although as towns grew, this function was sometimes transferred to secondary fora, as at Rome. The forum was also the setting for a variety of spectacular urban rituals, such as aristocratic funerals, court trials, religious ceremonies, public assemblies, and popular entertainments. Due to the concentration of these essential structures and functions in and around the forum, to the Romans, this space was imbued with potent symbolic meaning as the core of the city and the repository of its most Roman qualities.

The main forum at Rome (the Forum Romanum), which subsequently became the model for all later fora in other Roman cities, was originally a seasonally swampy depression located at the foot of the Capitoline and Palatine Hills and close to a key ford of the Tiber River. Despite its marshy nature, this space was a natural crossroads, and the first major construction project in the history of the city of Rome was the digging of a drainage ditch from the Forum to the Tiber, accompanied by the dumping of many thousands of cubic meters of fill in the Forum to raise the ground level and render the area dry and habitable year-round. These transformations, which were accomplished by the kings of Rome during the seventh and sixth centuries BC, paved the way for the rapid development of the Forum in the centuries that followed.

By the middle of the Roman Republic (509–31 BC), the key structures that would define the space of the Forum were in place. Among these were the Temple of Vesta (where the sacred flame of the city was kept), the Curia (the usual meeting place of the Roman senate), the rostra (speakers' platform), and the temples of Castor, Saturn, and Concord. The Forum at this point was a rectangular open space roughly 150 meters long and 75 meters wide, with its long axis stretching out in a southeasterly direction from the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. The two long sides of the Forum were originally lined by shops and businesses, especially those involving financial transactions, but these were displaced over time by two enormous multistory colonnades, the Basilica Aemilia along the north side and the Basilica Julia along the south.

The open space of the Forum was the setting for many of the most dramatic public events of Roman history, including Cicero's fiery orations and Mark Antony's funeral speech for Julius Caesar, which ended in violent rioting and the impromptu cremation of Caesar's body in the Forum itself. Prior to the construction of the Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum) in the first century AD, many public entertainments such as wild beast hunts and gladiator games were held in the Forum.

During the empire (31 BC–AD 476), the Forum became progressively more crowded with shrines, statues, and other monuments. The emperors also constructed a series of new, huge, lavishly decorated imperial fora to the north of the old Forum, which assumed many of the day-to-day juridical and political functions of the original Forum. Even as its official roles declined, however, through out the Roman period, the Forum Romanum retained its symbolic identity as the heart of both the city and the empire. It was imitated in all other Roman towns, so that throughout the empire, the urban life of all Roman cities focused around [Page 280]a central forum and its attendant monumental buildings.

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