Temple of Peace, Rome

• 1. The Temple of Peace

  ›

  Inside the Temple of Peace in Rome, completed in 71 AD, stood a seven-branched menorah taken from the Jerusalem Temple only the year before. Alongside it rested the Table of Shewbread, another object of profound religious significance seized during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Emperor Vespasian had raised this complex to honor Pax, the Roman goddess of peace. Its contents posed a harder question: what kind of peace does a monument declare when it fills its halls with another people's holiest objects?

  The temple stood southeast of the Roman Forum, between the Via Sacra and the Carinae. From there, it looked toward the Velian Hill and stood within sight of the Colosseum. The structure was never used as a political forum. No evidence survives of it serving a civic function, so scholars classify it as a temple rather than a forum. That classification points to a deeper question: who truly built it, and what did its builders intend? A Roman poet named Statius left behind a claim about its authorship that has divided archaeologists ever since.

• 2. War and Monument

  ›

  Statius claimed that Emperor Domitian deserved most of the credit for completing the temple, not Vespasian. That attribution has remained controversial among archaeologists. What is less disputed is the source of the funds. Vespasian financed the construction through the sacking of Jerusalem during the Jewish-Roman wars. He was both a leading general and the emperor who emerged from that conflict, which gave the monument a personal weight beyond the ceremonial.

  The Temple of Peace forms part of the Imperial Fora. That designation describes a series of monumental public squares built over a span of one and a half centuries. The complex occupied the southeast side of the Argiletum, placing it at the heart of the ancient city. For Vespasian, such a monument made a public declaration: that his military victories had delivered peace and prosperity to the empire. Pliny the Elder recorded that artworks gathered by an earlier emperor for his private palace had also found their way to the complex.

• 3. Greek Masterworks

  ›

  Nero had gathered sculptures from Greece and Asia Minor for his Domus Aurea. Those works later came to reside inside the Temple of Peace. Among them were pieces attributed to five celebrated Greek sculptors: Polykleitos, Phidias, Naukydes of Argos, Myron, and Leochares.

  Two of these works left physical evidence that survives today. Stone bases from the Severan period name two specific sculptures: the Ganymede of Leochares and the Pythocles of Polykleitos. These inscribed bases are among the few tangible traces that document the temple's role as a home for notable works of Greek art. The Forma Urbis, a large marble map of Rome made in the 3rd century, was once displayed inside the temple itself. It is now the clearest window into how the complex was actually arranged.

• 4. The Marble Map

  ›

  According to the Forma Urbis, the complex contained an apse that opened onto a large portico. Columns separated the enclosed spaces from the central open ground. That ground was unpaved, unlike the paved floors found in most other Roman fora. The area likely held gardens, pools, and statues.

  The adjacent Basilica of Maxentius was long misidentified as the Temple of Peace. That error persisted until the 19th century, when the archaeologist Antonio Nibby made the correct attribution. What Nibby identified was a structure that had already seen fire, been rebuilt, and gone unrestored since Alaric I damaged it in 410 AD.

• 5. Decline and Ruin

  ›

  In February 192 AD, fire consumed the Temple of Peace. Septimius Severus began the rebuilding around 203 AD, working to restore a complex that had stood for more than a century. The halls were remodeled again roughly a hundred years after that.

  Emperor Constantius II visited Rome in 357 AD and took note of the complex's restored halls. Had the temple still been serving a religious function at that point, it would not have continued much longer. Christian emperors of the era were issuing edicts that banned all non-Christian worship and closed pagan sanctuaries.

  The historian Procopius wrote that Alaric departed Rome carrying emerald-encrusted treasures of Solomon. The scholar Robert Coates-Stephens concluded that those objects formed the main part of the Flavian dynasty's original booty. By that reading, they had been held inside the complex from the very day it opened its doors.