The Roman Forum

Center of the World for a thousand years . . .

By the end of the third century A.D., Rome administered fifty-five thousand miles of roads stretching to the limits of every horizon. All of them linked with four major highways entering the city from the points of the compass: the Via Flaminia from the north, the Via Appia from the south, the Via Salaria from the east, and the Via Aurelia from the west. Once through the gates, these arteries became thoroughfares which traversed the tragedy of high-rise housing schemes before emptying directly into the heart of the city – the urban nucleus – the Forum square. There, at the base of the Temple of Saturn stood the Golden Milestone, a squat column surmounted by a golden globe upon which were inscribed distances to the most important cities of the empire. A fragment of this milestone still exists, reminding us not only that all roads led to Rome, but that from the Roman Forum one could set out for the Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea, the Euphrates, Africa, Arabia and even India.

The Urbs had become the Orbs, the City had become the Universe. And a marshland at the base of several small hills – which was drained and cleared as a general purpose civic space a thousand years before – had become the administrative, financial, the legal and religious, center of the world. Never before and never again has there been such a place; neither Wall Street nor Trafalgar Square can compare – a showpiece where architecture, sculpture and painting made a collective statement about civilization, money, justice and truth, being parts of the same Roman whole.

But though that sense of eternity, that Romanitas, was architecturally unarguable, the throngs that passed through those arches, between those columns, past the equestrian statues of emperors and the beneath the pediments of the temples, were nothing if not diverse. Traders leading donkeys, merchants, mercenaries and adventurers, wandering philosophers and orators, businessmen and exiles, carried with them their hopes, hallowed by a variety of gods, in all directions. To serve their needs, the booths of the Jewish money-changers crammed the arcades of the Basilica Aemilia, their proprietors shouting and counting as they dealt with a mixed variety of humanity trying to exchange drachmas or gold pieces for denarii and sesterces. There were second-hand clothes for sale, laid out on blankets, leather goods and sandals hawked by Ethiopians in white robes, and shamans and amulet sellers all mingled together in the shadow-lands beneath the porticos.

The usual contingent of idlers wiled away their time drinking wine and shooting dice on game boards cut into the pavement with knives, while pigeon sellers hailed their wares to pilgrims making their way up the Via Sacra to the Capitoline to offer sacrifice. Vendors crouched in the shade of the triumphal arches opening baskets full of Chinese silk as one passed through the gauntlet of confusing sounds and colorful shapes where Arab jewelers and Greek weavers and British wool-sellers hailed them amidst the squeaking horns of Indian snake-charmers and the confusion of a dozen different languages.

With the drama of the space and the noise and the vitality all around us, and the heartbeat of the world welling up in our loins, no doubt a chill would have passed down our spines if we imagined the Forum as it is today around closing time – when the sun is setting, the gates being locked – a dead-still, dead-silent, abandoned ruin, half-submerged in the dirt and detritus of ages which have forgotten it.

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