The Roman Forum

Myth · Romulus’s Marsh

Legend says Romulus made peace with the Sabines in this marsh, fusing two peoples into one city.

The Forum began as a marshy hollow by the Tiber. Legend says the founder Romulus, having carried off the Sabine women, made peace with the Sabines here, and the two peoples became one — from the first day of its myth, Rome was a city fused together. His twin brother Remus died in the quarrel over the city’s founding.

Sources：Livy, History of Rome　·　Plutarch, Life of Romulus

↑ Because of the last layer：Precisely because this hollow had been the center of the city’s public life since its founding, the Republic’s power struggle was bound to reach its reckoning here.

Empire · Caesar’s Death and the Politics of the Forum

Here stood the Senate, the speakers’ platform, and the temples; after his murder Caesar’s body was burned in the Forum itself.

Every great drama from Republic to Empire played out here: Cicero declaiming from the rostra, Julius Caesar stabbed twenty-three times in the Senate house nearby. His body was cremated in the Forum, and Antony’s eulogy inflamed the crowd — driving straight toward the end of the Republic and the rise of his heir Octavian (Augustus) as the first emperor. The base of the "Temple of the Deified Caesar" still stands in the Forum — the Romans made a god of the dictator they had murdered.

Sources：Suetonius, Life of the Deified Julius　·　Plutarch, Life of Caesar

Today · From Forum to Cow-Field to Ruin

In the Middle Ages it fell to a cow pasture, the "Campo Vaccino," and was only dug back out in modern times.

After the empire fell, the Forum silted up and ran to weeds, and medieval Romans grazed cattle on this former center of the world, calling it the "cow field." The ground rose several metres above the ancient level. The tiers of broken columns you see today were dug back out, spadeful by spadeful, by archaeologists from the nineteenth century on — Rome’s greatness was first buried, then unearthed again.

Sources：19th-century excavation records of the Roman Forum