The Roman forum: the heart of ancient Rome

THE ROMAN FORUM: THE HEART OF ANCIENT ROME

A visit to the roman forum offers emotional experience few other sites can match. For this reason alone it is an excellent place to begin a journey through the city's monuments. So many characters in Rome's history once walked here that the whole area sometimes seems thronged with the ghosts of gods and heroes, priests and priestesses, orators and emperors.
In latin the name "forum" means " a place out of doors" and comes from the root foras, meaning outside. The roman forum began as an outdoord meeting place, something like a village of commons, where people from the various tribes who occupied Rome's seven hills in prehistoric times met to talk and tade, to discuss matters relating to the common good, and later to worship their gods and bury their dead. Its location is a low, shallow valley between the Palatine, Capitoline, and Esquiline Hill. Fed by the springs and close to the Tiber river, much of the area was swampy.

The early history of the Forum is so mixed with myths that it can no longer be fully sorted out, but some stories have a factual basis. Legends credits several early kings of Rome, the Tarquins, with draining the swampy portions of the area in the seventh century BC, by building a gigantic sewer called the Cloaca Maxima. Whether or not the Tarquins actually built it, the sewer still exists and is still in use, and the archaeologists confirm that it dates from the seventh century BC.
Once the area ceased to be a swamp, the Forum expanded rapidly. The Tarquins gave it trapezoidal shape it still has, divided the borders into lots for shops, set apart an open area, the Comitium, for public meetings and another, the Curia or Senatus, for assemblies of the city's elders. At the time of the founding of the Roman republic, acording to the history of Rome in 509 BC with the overthrow of the last Tarquin king, the Forum was already the site for various governmental assemblies and communal activities of the Romans.

The remains of the Forum are today so few that people is always asking :" how did it get into such terrible condition?"

From the early fifth century through the first century BC the Forum expanded. As Rome's conquests brought in vast amounts of wealth, the temples, the shrines, sanctuaries and law courts all proliferated. Older ones were torn down to make room for new ones and structures destroyed in fires were replaced by even finer buildings. But by the middle of the first century BC the Roman Forum was providing inadequate for imperial ambitions and a rapidly growing population, so the rulers of Rome built their own forum: the Imperial forums. The Forum of Augustus, Nerva, Vespasian and Trajan, they were larger and grander in some cases than the Roman Forum and were built close to it. With the completion of the Forum of Trajan in the early second century AD, the totla area covered by all the forums was about twenty five acres. The zone included thirteen temples and three law courts( most of them faced with white marble and roofed with gilt bronze tiles), eight triumphal arches, the senate House, the state archives, morre than a mile of porticoes supported by well bronze capitals), public libraries.

But the construction of the Imperial forums diminished the role of the older Roman Forum. A fire in 283 AD did severe damages and although the emperor Diocletian ordered extensive repairs about twenty years later, the old forum area began to reflect the general decline of Rome itself. When Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinopole in 330 AD, the fate of the forum was sealed. Although subsequent emperors tried to keep it in repair, they did not have sufficient funds, materials or skilled labor. Invasions in the fifth century AD did further damage to the buildings already undermined by earthquakes and neglect.

Another factor in the ruin of the Forum was the abolition of pagan worship under the Christian emperors. After Constantine's Edict of Toleration, issued in 313, the authority of the Church expanded rapidly and all but of the subsequent emperors were Christians. In 383 Gratian eliminated the privileges of the city's temples and their priests, as well as confiscating their revenues and in 392 valentinian II and Theodosius prohibited sacrifices to the ancient Gods. In 394 he ordered all temples closed, and although a few pagan cult centers continued to operate, most of the statues of the gods were removed from the deserted temples in the Forum and elsewhere.

After the sisxt century, Popes and emperors helped themselves to preserve whatever the barbarians left behind. The sack of the city by the troops of Robert Guiscard completed the destruction of the Forum. Since it was in a low lying area and the Cloaca maxima had ceased to function, the accumulation of dirt reached such a height that the remains of most of the buildings disappeared. As the medieval city deteriorated into near anarchy, noble families claimed areas around the fragments of the Forum that stuill protruded from the gound and made them the foundations fo defensive towers. Modern archaological exploration of the Forum began in the eighteenth century, and excavations continue. Those who visit the forum annually are always intrigued by the changes, as old excavations are completed and new ones begun.

>>>Learn how to walk properly in the Roman Forum

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