The Roman Forum: The Square That Ran an Empire

Most people walk into the Roman Forum expecting a museum and find what looks like a quarry: broken columns, cracked paving, a scatter of arches and stumps with no obvious plan. The trick to reading it is to stop seeing ruins and start seeing a square. For more than a thousand years this low ground between the hills was the working center of Roman public life, the place where the business of a republic and then an empire was done in the open air, out loud, in front of the crowd.

A working square, not a monument

Everything that mattered in Roman public life happened here. Elections were held in this space. Trials were argued in it. Triumphs paraded through it. Speeches were made, deals were struck, and the daily buying and selling of a huge city filled it with noise. It was the political and commercial heart of Rome for over a thousand years, and it stayed in use across the whole arc from the early Republic to the late Empire. When you stand in it, you are standing in what was less a set of temples than a floor: a public room the size of a city block where Rome talked to itself.

The road that ran through it

The spine of the Forum is the Via Sacra, the Sacred Way. This was the processional route, the road a victorious Roman general marched along in triumph, circling the Palatine Hill and then descending into the Forum below with his army, his captives and his plunder trailing behind him. If you are down on the ancient paving, look at the stones underfoot: worn smooth and dipped by centuries of feet, cartwheels and marching. The road itself is one of the oldest things you can touch here, and it is the thread the whole square is strung along.

What to actually look for

Two features anchor the ruins and turn them back into a place.

The first is the row of tall standing columns off to one side. Eight of them belong to the Temple of Saturn, first built in the year 497 BC. That temple did double duty: it was also the state treasury, the place where Rome kept its reserves of gold and silver. The most sober business of the state ran out of a temple, which is very Roman.

The second is the Rostra, the raised speakers' platform from which orators addressed the crowd. It was from the new Rostra that Mark Antony delivered the funeral oration for Julius Caesar. And Caesar's story is written into this ground in an even more direct way. He was cremated opposite the Rostra, and on that exact spot the Romans later dedicated a temple to him as the deified Caesar, in the year 29 BC. The place where a murdered politician's body burned became a temple to a god. In the Forum, the distance between a street corner and a shrine could be a single generation.

How to read it on the ground

Pick a spot with a clear view across the whole hollow, either down on the paving or from the free overlook on the Via dei Fori Imperiali or the Capitoline terrace, and give the noise back to the place. Picture a contested election, the shouting and the crush. Picture the hush before a famous speech from the Rostra. Picture the smoke of Caesar's pyre. The Forum is not impressive because it is old; it is impressive because it was the room where the Republic argued with itself, and you can still stand in the middle of the argument.

The Forum sits inside the paid archaeological park that it shares with the Colosseum and the Palatine on a single combined ticket, but you can see a great deal of it, and understand all of it, from the free viewpoints above. Wear shoes with grip, because the ancient paving is genuinely uneven, and carry water and sun protection, because the open floor has almost no shade in the middle of the day.

This square is the middle stop on a walk that follows the whole spine of ancient Rome, from the arena to the capitol. If you want the full picture, read how the Colosseum sits on a drained imperial lake just up the Sacred Way, browse the complete set of Rome walking tours, or plan a visit to Rome around it. Come back to the Forum seeing a square instead of a quarry, and the stones start speaking.

Sources

• Roman Forum, Wikipedia. Overview of the Forum as the civic and commercial center of Rome, its use across the Republic and Empire, and its principal monuments.
• Via Sacra, Wikipedia. The Sacred Way as the processional route of Roman triumphs down into the Forum.
• Temple of Saturn, Wikipedia. The 497 BC founding date and the temple's role as the Roman state treasury.
• Rostra and the Temple of Caesar, encyclopedic reference. Mark Antony's funeral oration for Julius Caesar, Caesar's cremation opposite the Rostra, and the 29 BC dedication of the Temple of the Deified Caesar on that spot.
• Roamer tour transcript, "Colosseum and the Forum" (rome-colosseum-forum), fact-audited stop 3.