Roman Forum

The Roman Forum is the ruined civic heart of ancient Rome, a rectangular open square in the low valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills. For more than a thousand years it was where Romans voted, heard speeches, held trials, watched triumphal processions and did business, and it was lined with temples, basilicas, the Senate House and monuments to the city's leaders. Unlike the later imperial forums, it was never planned as a whole but grew piece by piece over many centuries.

The valley was originally a marshy hollow fed by water draining from the hills. Pottery shows that people lived on the surrounding heights in the Final Bronze Age, and in the tenth century BCE part of the future Forum was used as a cemetery, mostly for cremation burials, which seem to have stopped in the late ninth century. Archaeology points to a change from burial ground to public space in the eighth century BCE, and in the seventh century the area was drained by the first stages of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer emptying into the Tiber. Stone buildings replaced huts, and the earliest phases of the Regia, the House of the Vestals and the Comitium, the open assembly place, date from that period.

Roman tradition told a different story. It held that the valley was where Romulus's Romans on the Palatine and Titus Tatius's Sabines on the Capitol made peace, that King Numa founded the cult of Vesta and the Regia, and that Tarquinius Priscus first paved the square around 600 BCE. These accounts are legend rather than record, though excavation confirms that the area was being laid out at about that time.

Under the Roman Republic the Forum became the stage of political life. Its earliest securely dated temples are those of Saturn (497 BCE) and of Castor and Pollux (484 BCE). From 184 BCE great aisled halls called basilicas were added, beginning with Cato's, followed by the Basilica Fulvia, later called Aemilia, in 179 BCE. Popular assemblies moved into the Forum, and politics there could turn violent: the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was killed by senators in 133 BCE. Sulla raised and paved the square in marble in the 80s BCE, a surface that stayed largely in place for over a thousand years. In 63 BCE Cicero attacked the Catilinarian conspirators in the Temple of Concord nearby.

Julius Caesar reshaped the Forum with the Basilica Julia and a new Senate House. After his assassination in 44 BCE, Mark Antony gave his funeral speech from the new Rostra, and Caesar's body was burned in the square, where Augustus later built a temple to the deified Caesar. Augustus completed his great-uncle's projects and gave the Forum its final form.

Under the emperors, much legal and commercial business moved to larger new forums to the north, but monuments continued to be added: the Arch of Septimius Severus in 203 CE, the rebuilding of the Senate House and several temples by Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305, and the vast Basilica of Maxentius, completed under Constantine after 312. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the wars fought between Byzantines and Ostrogoths, Rome's population shrank and the city drew back towards the river. From the sixth century some buildings became churches. The Column of Phocas, put up in 608, was the last monument added. In 663 the emperor Constans II stripped metal roofs from the great buildings, and by the Middle Ages the ruins were buried under debris and known as the Campo Vaccino, the cattle field.

The Renaissance did grave harm. Papal licences allowed stone to be taken or burned for lime, and in the 1540s Pope Paul III gave the site to the builders of the new Saint Peter's, who dismantled the remains of the Temple of Caesar, the Regia and other monuments despite protests from the city's magistrates. Clearance began with Carlo Fea's work at the Arch of Septimius Severus in 1803, and systematic state excavations started in 1898, led by Giacomo Boni until 1925. Digging continues, and recent finds, such as a tuff wall dated to the eighth or ninth century BCE, have reopened the question of how old Rome really is. The Forum remains central to the study of ancient Rome, and millions of people visit its ruins each year.