The Roman Forum: how to understand the life in ancient Rome

THE ROMAN FORUM: HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME

Just beyond the temple of Vesta, is the House of the Vestals, built into the noth flank of the Palatine hill and the living quarters of the priestesses entrusted with the well-being of the Roman State. Now partially restored, this delightful place features a colonnaded courtyard with living and service quarters laid around it. A few battered statues of the vestals, excavated from the ruins, have been set up again along the edges of the courtyard.
The Christian emperor Theodosius, who closed Rome's temples in 394, also banished the last vestals from their house. We can only speculate on their emotions as they watched the flame die out on Vesta's altar, where it had burned for more than a thousand years, and faced a future in a world so different from their past.

Whatever we may think of their beliefs, there is something sad about Rome's last pagans, people who lived to witness their faith discredited and their gods dragged through the dust.

Further east along the Via Sacra, past the house of the Vestals and across to the north from a large, overgrown area that may have once included shops and warehouses, stands the so called Temple of Romulus, a structure of the early fourth century AD. Although once identified as a temple built by the emperor Maxentius in honor of his son Romulus, who died in 309 AD, more recent archaeological opinion identifies it as an imperial audience hall. It has an unusual shape: a circular room flanked by two rectangular rooms that terminate in apses. Its fourth century bronze doors, framed by dark red porphyry columns, are original. Like the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, this ancient building was saved by its conversion to Christian use; in the sixth century it became part of the church of SS Cosma and Damiano.

At the southeastern end of the Forum a monument comes into sight whose history resonates to the present day: the Arch of Titus. Built about 80 AD by Domitian to honor the victories of his brother Titus and their father, Vespasian, in the war against Judaea a decade earlier, it serves as the Forum's eastern entrance and exit. Almost all its exterior decoration is a nineteenth century reconstruction and the inscription on the side facing into the Forum records the restoration of the Arch by Pius VII in the early 1800s.
Although smaller and simpler than the Arch of Septimius Severus at the opposite end of the Forum, the event it records had much further reaching effects. The roman victory in their long and savage war with Judaea put an end to the Jewish state for nearly nineteen hundred years. On the walls inside the single arched opening are two sculptured panels celebrating Titus and Vespasian's victory, during which Jerusalem was looted and nearly destroyed. One panel show Titus riding in a four horse chariot with the Goddess Roma guiding his horses, while the Jubilant Citizens of Rome crowd around him. On the opposite side we see the start of the triumphal procession that must actually have passed this way, although before the arch was built. Soldiers carry the spoils of the war, which included the altar table, silver trumpets, and the great seven-branched gold candelabrum plundered from Hebrew temple in Jerusalem.

Among the other spoils of the Jewish war were thousands of captives. Many were put to work as slaves during the construction of the Colosseum ( begun a decade before the arch) and some may have also worked on the Arch of Titus. The arch became a potent symbol of jewish defeat, a place that the Jews of Rome avoided for centuries, refusing to walk under it to enter or leave the Forum.
All this changed on May 14, 1948, the day the State of Israel was founded. As radios announced the rebirth of their ancient homeland, the jews of Rome, some of them descendants of Titus's captives, spontaneously began pouring in from all over the city and converged on the Arch of Titus. As visitor passes through or around the Arch of Titus and looks east toward the nearby Colosseum, on the left is the medieval convent of S. Francesca Romana and further to the east the ruins of the twin Temple of Venus and Roma.The unusual plan of this temple was a design of the emperor Hadrian himself from about 135 AD, although what we see today is mostly from a reconstruction of about 300 AD. Instead of a single building with an apse, the temple is actually two temples, with their apses backed up against one another. The portion facing the Forum was dedicated to Venus; the part that looked east, toward the Colosseum, was dedicated to Roma, the goddess who personified the city. Today just the twin apses survive. The one facing the Colosseum is visible after one exits the Forum; the portion facing the Forum has been incorporated into the convent of santa Francesca Romana.

Hadrian chose to combine the sanctuaries to these two goddesses in part because he wished to celebrate the relatively new goddess Roma by associating her with the more venerable Venus, but perhaps also because their names create a wordplay some two thousands years old. Roma , read backward , is Amor, and Amor refers to Venus, the goddess of Love and the mother of Aeneas, the mythical ancestor of the founders of Rome.
After the visitor detours back around the convent of S. Francesca Romana, the largest structure in the Forum and the last to be built comes into view: the basilica begun by Maxentius and completed by Constantine in 330s AD. The structure forms the northeast corner of the Forum. In the renaissance its vast vaults impressed Bramante and Michelangelo, inspiring their designs for the new St. Peter's, a structure requiring such enormous amounts of stone that many of the buried buildings of the Forum were excavated and ransacked to provide it.
More than any other place in the city, The Forum reveals the vast sweep of Rome's history. It encompasses the city's prehistoric origins, its long, relentless rise to imperial power, its gradual decay, and its deliberate destruction. Perhaps most astonishing and moving of all, it documents survival. The Roman Forum is evidence that Rome has earned its status as the Eternal City.

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

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