Roman Forum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Roman Forum sits in a shallow valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, and for much of its long life it was simply called the Forum Magnum - the great forum. Centuries before the word "Rome" carried any weight beyond a cluster of hill settlements, people were burying their dead in that low ground, placing funeral urns inside earthenware jars beneath capstones in the soil. The Forum began as a cemetery. It would become, in time, the most celebrated meeting place in the world and in all history. How does a graveyard become the beating heart of an empire? What forces turned a marshy valley into the stage for triumphal processions, criminal trials, and the burning of Julius Caesar's body? And how does all of that end up as a sprawling field of architectural rubble, grazed by cattle and known simply as the Campo Vaccino - the cow field? Today the Forum attracts roughly four and a half million visitors a year. The questions worth asking are about what they are actually looking at.

• 2. From Marsh to Marketplace

  ›

  Pottery deposits found in the Forum, on the Palatine, and on the Capitoline Hills place human activity there as far back as the Final Bronze Age, roughly 1200 to 975 BC. By the 10th century BC, a section of the valley near the later site of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina was functioning as a cemetery, likely used by communities settled on both hills. The burials were mostly cremations: ashes sealed inside urns, placed inside larger earthenware jars with grave goods, then lowered into cavities cut into the earth and covered with capstones. There were a small number of inhumation burials as well. Burial activity in the Forum appears to have ceased by the late 9th century BC, when the Esquiline Necropolis took over that role.

  What followed the cemetery was a kind of sacred claiming of the ground. The earliest finds at the Comitium and Vulcanal sites are votive offerings, indicating religious dedication rather than civic planning. By the 7th century BC, the Forum's chronic drainage problem was being addressed. The valley had always been a collecting point for runoff from the surrounding hills, sitting atop what had once been a marshy lake. The solution was the Cloaca Maxima, a large covered sewer that emptied into the Tiber. As drainage improved, ground levels were raised with fill to provide a stable foundation, and by the middle of the 7th century BC, the thatch-and-timber huts along the route of the Via Sacra were being demolished and replaced with rectangular stone buildings.

  Roman tradition attributed the Forum's earliest political meaning to an act of peace. Romulus, controlling the Palatine, and Titus Tatius, holding the Capitoline, were enemies until the Sabine women intervened, halting combat with their prayers and cries. The valley between their two settlements became the designated place for the two peoples to meet. At the Vulcanal, according to that tradition, both parties laid down their weapons. The Forum began as neutral ground.

• 3. The Republic Takes Shape

  ›

  Rome's second king, Numa Pompilius, who ruled from approximately 715 to 673 BC, is credited with founding the cult of Vesta, building both the Temple of Vesta and the Regia as the city's first royal palace. His successor, Tullus Hostilius, ruling from approximately 673 to 642 BC, enclosed the Comitium around an old Etruscan building and is said to have converted it into the Curia Hostilia - the first Senate house - close to where senators had previously met in an Etruscan hut. In 600 BC, Tarquinius Priscus ordered the Forum paved for the first time.

  When Rome became a republic, the Comitium remained the nerve center of political and judicial life. The Senate enlarged the open area adjacent to it by purchasing and demolishing private homes. Two of the Forum's oldest temples with confirmed construction dates went up during the 5th century BC: the Temple of Saturn in 497 BC and the Temple of Castor and Pollux in 484 BC. The Temple of Concord was added the following century, possibly by Marcus Furius Camillus, soldier and statesman.

  The physical arrangement of the Rostra - the elevated speakers' platform - carried its own political message. Originally it faced north toward the Senate House, placing the orator's back to the ordinary citizens gathered in the Forum behind him. A tribune named Caius Licinius, consul in 361 BC, is said to have been the first speaker to turn away from the elite and address the people directly. Two centuries later, Gaius Gracchus repeated that gesture, an act his opponents characterized as a violation of the mos maiorum - the custom of the ancestors. From that turn came the tradition of locus popularis, in which even young nobles were expected to address the people from the Rostra.

  The Forum's first basilicas arrived in 184 BC, introduced by Marcus Porcius Cato. These large aisled halls were not churches in any modern sense; they were multipurpose civic buildings for legal and commercial proceedings. The Basilica Fulvia was dedicated on the north side of the Forum square in 179 BC and would be rebuilt and renamed several times, eventually known as the Basilica Aemilia. Nine years later, the Basilica Sempronia was dedicated on the south side. In 78 BC, the enormous Tabularium - the Records Hall - was built at the Capitoline end of the Forum by order of the consuls M. Aemilius Lepidus and Q. Lutatius Catulus, giving Rome a permanent home for its state archives.

• 4. Caesar, Augustus, and Final Form

  ›

  In 63 BC, Cicero delivered his famous speech denouncing the companions of the conspirator Catiline in the Temple of Concord, whose spacious hall senators sometimes used as a meeting room. The condemned were led afterward to the Tullianum, the only known state prison of the ancient Romans. Julius Caesar, before his assassination in 44 BC, had already begun reshaping the Forum, building the Basilica Julia on the south side and constructing the new Curia Julia to reposition both the judicial offices and the Senate itself.

  The year of Caesar's death produced two of the Forum's most famous scenes. Marc Antony delivered his funeral oration for Caesar from the partially completed New Rostra - the speech later immortalized in Shakespeare's play. Caesar's body was publicly burned on a site directly across from the Rostra. Almost two years later, Antony added a grimmer footnote to the Rostra's history by displaying the severed head and right hand of his former ally Cicero there.

  Augustus finished the work his great-uncle had begun. In 29 BC he constructed both the Temple of Caesar and the Arch of Augustus at the southeastern end of the plaza, placing the temple between Caesar's funeral pyre and the Regia. The Forum's final form was essentially set. The open rectangle at the Forum's heart measured roughly 130 by 50 meters by the Imperial period, with the Basilica Aemilia defining its northern long side and the Basilica Julia its southern one. Its final travertine paving, still visible in the ruins today, dates from Augustus's reign.

  The Forum witnessed at least one imperial assassination. In 69 AD, the Emperor Galba set out from the palace to confront a rebellion but was so feeble he had to be carried in a litter. Near the Lacus Curtius, inside the Forum itself, he was met by cavalry loyal to his rival Otho and killed there.

• 5. Later Emperors and the Last Monuments

  ›

  Trajan's Forum, completed in 110 AD, drew much of the Forum Romanum's economic and judicial activity northward to the Basilica Ulpia. The political center of gravity was shifting, but the old Forum was not finished as a building site. In 203 AD, a white marble triumphal arch was dedicated at the northwest end of the Forum, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, to commemorate the Parthian victories of Emperor Septimius Severus and his sons against Pescennius Niger. It remains one of the most visible landmarks in the Forum today, and along with the Arch of Augustus it is the only triumphal arch in the complex.

  Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305 AD, was the last of the great builders of Rome's city infrastructure, and he turned his attention to a Forum that had become cluttered with honorific memorials. He refurbished and reorganized the space, rebuilding the Temple of Saturn, the Temple of Vesta, and the Curia Julia. The Curia Julia as Diocletian rebuilt it survives as the best-preserved building from the tetrarchic period in Rome. He also reconstructed the rostra at each end of the Forum and added columns.

  The reign of Constantine the Great produced the last significant expansion of the Forum complex. The Basilica of Maxentius was completed in 312 AD, a structure of a scale that restored much of the Forum's political centrality until the fall of the Western Roman Empire. On the 1st of August 608, a Roman monumental column - the Column of Phocas - was erected before the Rostra and dedicated to the Eastern Roman Emperor Phocas. It was the last monumental addition ever made to the Forum.

• 6. Ruin, Quarry, and Campo Vaccino

  ›

  After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Rome's population collapsed from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. The inhabited areas of the city contracted toward the river, largely abandoning the Forum. In the 6th century, some of the old structures within the Forum began converting to Christian churches. The emperor Constans II visited the city in 663 AD and stripped the lead roofs from the Forum's monumental buildings, exposing them directly to the weather and accelerating their deterioration. By the 8th century, the whole space was surrounded by Christian churches where abandoned temples had once stood.

  An anonymous Einsiedeln Itinerary from the 8th century reports the Forum already falling apart. During the Middle Ages its location was redesignated the Campo Vaccino - the cattle field - sitting between the Capitoline Hill and the Colosseum. After the 8th century, structures were dismantled and rearranged to build towers and castles locally. By the 13th century, even those rearranged structures were torn down, and the site became a dumping ground.

  The Italian Renaissance inflicted some of the worst damage. Pope Paul III in 1540 revoked all existing excavation licenses and placed the Forum exclusively under the control of the Deputies of the Fabric of the new Saint Peter's Basilica, who mined it systematically for stone and marble. Among the monuments reduced or destroyed in the following decade were the remains of the Arch of Augustus, the Temple of Caesar, parts of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Temple of Vesta, the steps and foundation of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and the Regia. The Conservators of Rome protested the destruction repeatedly; on one occasion they applied to Pope Gregory XIII, who held office between 1572 and 1585, asking him to revoke all foraging licenses including the one granted to Saint Peter's. The appeal was fruitless.

  Just a few years before Paul III's most aggressive exploitation, in 1536, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V held a triumph in Rome following his conquest of Tunis in North Africa. Papal authorities demolished roughly 200 houses and several churches to clear a processional route through the Forum, intending to evoke the pageantry of ancient Roman triumphs. The demolitions inadvertently exposed some ancient foundations, an unintended preview of what systematic excavation would later reveal.

• 7. Excavation and Ongoing Discovery

  ›

  Carlo Fea began clearing debris from the Arch of Septimius Severus in 1803, marking the first modern clearing effort at the Forum. Official excavations began in 1898 under the Italian government, directed by the Minister of Public Instruction, Dr. Baccelli. The program had three stated objectives: to restore fragmented columns, bases, and cornices to their original Forum locations; to reach the lowest possible excavation level without damaging existing structures; and to identify partially excavated structures including the Senate house and Basilica Aemilia. Dr. Giacomo Boni led these state-funded excavations from their start until his death in 1925, with a brief interruption during World War I.

  Modern excavations have continued to revise the story. Discoveries by archaeologists working in the Forum since 2009 have raised questions about Rome's exact age. A tuff wall near the Lapis Niger, used to channel water from nearby aquifers, was dated by surrounding pottery remains and food scraps to the 8th or 9th century BC - more than a century before Rome's traditional founding date. The deepest level yet excavated sits 3.60 meters above sea level; carbonized wood found there confirms human activity at that depth.

  In 2008, heavy rains caused structural damage to the modern concrete covering holding the Black Stone marble together over the Lapis Niger. In 2020, Italian archaeologists discovered a sarcophagus and a circular altar dating to the 6th century BC near the site. Experts remain divided over whether these are associated with a memorial tomb to Rome's legendary founder, Romulus. The Forum is still, in this sense, under construction - or at least under excavation - and the ground beneath it has not finished yielding answers.