The forum’s 1000 years of history were the focus of today’s discussions. Taking us into the forum was an experience wherein we were exposed to various threads of history. One thread took us back into the Republican period and demanded that we imagine this space as it were around the birth of Christ and before. The other asked us to consider the buildings within the forum and the forms they took on as Christianity became legal under Constantine. For instance, in the second case the basic shape of the basilica, which had been used for a law court, was converted to a space for Christian worship. The space where the magistrates sat was replaced by an altar with representations of Jesus and his divinity. All of the aspects of the state religion in Rome were, as in the case of a language, slowly evolved into some sort of aspect of Christianity. As Doug has noted in almost all of his lectures so far in Rome, Christianity had an underground influence at the same time as the height of the Roman Empire, and is simply a wonder how it subverted this once dominant civilization and took its place among the foremost cultural practices still in use today.
One of the concepts the he has tried to emphasize with us is the sweeping narrative that covers all the centuries of history which we can both see in the material record and read in the written record. For instance, in the material record we have found places where both inhumation and cremation have been found in the same grave. This can tell us any number of things about the Romans, most notably that they were a conglomerate and mixture of different cultures, from the Sabines, to the Latins, to the Etruscans. Each of these cultures had somewhat of an impact on the conception of the Roman world, and it is this acceptance and melding of different cultures that places this civilization, in the middle of the Italian peninsula, among the most influential to have ever walked the earth.
Among the ruins of the material record, we find evidence of a structure called the House of Vestals, which was both the repository of wills for the Roman people and the place where the sacred fire of Vesta, the symbolic hearth of the united Roman people, was kept and never extinguished. This practice, to me, is a signal of what lengths humans will go to create symbols of civilization and maintain them for long periods of time. If the fire were ever to extinguish, this would possibly signify a character flaw in the Roman people, and would also displease the Gods. Because the Romans entrusted this symbolic act to women shows a shift in thinking between the conceptions of them in the Greek world with the conception of them in the Roman world. In the Greek world, women were not even allowed in public spaces such as the Agora, where in Rome women were allowed into the forum at their leisure. At the same time that women’s rights in Greece were heavily restricted, women in Rome, while they could not hold office, could own property, divorce their husbands, and even own businesses. We have small pieces of evidence such as these that society was evolving into a more accepting, lawful, and progressive state of existence. The Romans were more accepting of the roles of women, the various numbers of religions that were legal to practice, and the importance placed on getting a commodity such as water in and out of the city, something I think our society takes heavily for granted today.
One cannot speak of the role of women in society without discussing the role of men in society, for they are the ones who put in place the overall social structure and its hierarchy of accountability and deference. The Pater Familias was the head of the Roman household. All women and children were in effect in bonded servitude to him and his word was law. He both ran the domestic affairs of his immediate family as well as acting as a patron for any clients who would require his services. As the influence of the head of the household grew, he would eventually retain more clients, gain more respect in society, and his status was ultimately due in large part to this system of favors for favors.
The Romans shared 3 common core values among its male population that were, upon loss of respect and status, inviolable:
1. Fidelity – loyalty to your fellow man and to the state
2. Piety – faithfulness, sacrificing for the good of the whole, and keeping your word as your bond
3. Liberty – the benefit of the 1st two obligations
It is interesting to ask yourself where these values and moral obligations come from. There are those who believe that morals are divinely inspired; that without these guidelines to stick to coming from some omnipresent, Omni prescient source, the world is simply a series of random chaotic events that have no grounds on which to stand. Although I could be misjudging the Romans’ source for morality, I believe that part of the root cause and derivation of these values comes simply by looking at society and trying to decipher how to conduct yourself in a way that would be mutually beneficial to everyone. The Romans were polytheistic, and thus could not have gained their moral compass from one single source. I do hold the position that since they were one of the first societies to implement a democratic republic as a form of government, they held the belief that reciprocal benefit of each person acting toward the gain of the whole was the best way for such a large empire to operate, flourish, and progress.
We also have from the material record a number of structures remaining in the forum that have survived in part into the modern world. Such structures include: the Altar of Saturn, which is a group of 3 columns with part of an entablature inscribed with the ubiquitous Latin phrase:
S E N A T V U S P O P V L V S Q V E R O M A N V S
Translated as “The Senate and People of Rome”, this phrase appears on a variety of surfaces from souvenirs, manhole covers, buildings, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. The ubiquitousness of this phrase in Rome and throughout the extent of the Roman Empire is but one of many vehicles the Romans used to tie their vast empire together. It was important for the Romans to be able to have consistency when establishing themselves throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East. One of the other methods they used was the process of town creation they used when either conquering an existing civilization or establishing a city from nothing. A more detailed description of this process can be found in the Ostia entry, but it was important for me to understand this process first in the Roman forum so I could then follow their logic when they applied it to other cities, such as Ostia.
Further along in the material record we find other structures such as the Arch of Septimus Severus, built in 200 AD eponymously commemorating the emperor’s victory over the Parthians; the Arch of Augustus, a smaller version of the one dedicated to Severus; the Curia Julia, the Senate house built by Julius Cesar and rebuilt by Diocletian; the Forum Necropolis, dedicated to the emperor Antoninus Pius’ wife Faustina; the Basilica of Maxentius, an enormous structure completed by Constantine whose 3 remaining side aisle vaults still dwarf many of the other remaining ruins in the forum; and the Arch of Titus, which bears the record of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In addition to the formal qualities that these structures represent, they usually all have some story attached to them via actual carvings attached to facades, mosaic tile work, statues, etc. Compare this typology of classical architecture to modern architecture and we find a strikingly similar conception of the use of architectural elements. Classical architecture featured a plethora of cornice details, entablature decorations, pediment presentations, and capital styles all designed to be able to be used in any part of the world and for a variety of reasons. Modern architecture, similarly, exhibits these same qualities of portability and universal applicability but in an entirely new skin. The International Style, made famous by architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius was trying to reconceptualize the notion of universal transferability. It seems to be true that the more things change, the more they stay the same. We have here two completely different visual aesthetics in terms of decoration vs. sparseness, yet are confronted internally with the same reliance on exquisite detailing, classical proportions, and natural inspiration.
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