When was the Roman forum built? In the 7th century BC.
The beginning of the Roman forum is difficult to get a grip on because the Romans liked to embellish the legend of the formation of Rome. The legend is that Rome was founded by the brothers Romulus and Remus in 753 BC. The brothers ended up fighting and Romulus killed Remus, before naming Rome after himself and becoming the first king of Rome. Romulus then started a war with Titus Tatius, the ruler of the Capitoline Hill. When the two were able to come to peace terms, the area directly between then was designated as a place for the two peoples to meet in peace and air their differences. This is how the legend claims the forum began.
Archaeology finds show that the area has been in use since the late Bronze Age, in about 1200 to 975 BC. In the beginning of the Iron Age, the place that would become the forum was used as a cemetery where the urns of cremated people would be interred. Further finds show that the forum was transformed from a cemetery into a public site and some parts of the ground were paved over. The forum is built on a swamp that had to be drained first. This was quite a project. They had to build a drainage canal as well as raise the level of the land. The River Tiber often breached its banks and the forum area was prone to flooding. Using gravel and earth, the early Romans raised the forum above the flood line.
In the early days, the forum served as a marketplace. It was pretty much in the middle of the seven hills that were the beginnings of Rome. The legend of the fight between Romulus and Titus might not be true, but the fact that Rome was formed out of seven settlements on each of seven hills is true. Different groups of people lived on each of the hills and the forum was a place where they could shop and meet.
Over time, the marketplace became a place where people could make political speeches, appeal to the people, and civil trials were carried out. Government work started to take up more space and the market was pushed out. As Rome formed and grew, different markets arose to cater to the people who lived in different areas, and the forum market was no longer needed.
The early kings of Rome exerted more power, but Rome became a Republic in 509 BC. Various consuls expanded the square that the Forum is built on by buying up and demolishing private houses. The first temples were built in this era and the forum gradually turned into the center of Rome. One building on the northwest side of the forum was the house of the Roman senate. It was called the Curia. The meetings in the Curia would be away from the public eye, but there was an open aired space outside called the Comitium where public assemblies could gather.
When Rome became an empire, successive consuls arranged for grandeur monuments and buildings, but it was when the first Emperors started to rule Rome that it really took off. The forum reached its final form during the reign of Augustus. Most of the empire’s business was controlled from within the buildings around the forum and all new nobles had to make speeches from the forum. Cicero gave some of his most famous speeches here and Julius Caesar was assassinated and cremated here.
The center of power moved away from the forum over the first two centuries AD, but Emperor Constantine made the last great expansion to the forum and brought it back as the center of government until the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. After the fall, a lot of the large buildings in the forum became churches. By the end of the 8th century, the whole forum had been filled with smaller Christian churches and the Roman buildings were beginning to fall down. The forum became known as campo vaccino, which means “cattle field”.
The once great forum that had been the center of power for the entire Roman Empire, had become forgotten and buried in rubble. In 1540, Pope Paul III knocked down many of the remaining ruins to use as building materials for Saint Peter’s Basilica. Over the next few centuries, more buildings were knocked down for their stone and marble.
In 1803, an Italian archeologist called Carlo Fea started to clean the forum. In 1898, the Italian government ordered excavations of the site and it is now a protected archeological site. It is easy to think that it was unfortunate so many people destroyed buildings for their material, but preserving the past is a relatively modern thing.
So, the Roman forum started in the 7th century and lasted as a working center of government until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. The forum as a structure was mostly destroyed for its building material in the 14th to 17th centuries. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.quora.com/Was-Romulus-a-real-person-or-a-myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum
https://www.rome-museum.com/roman-forum.php
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/roman-forum
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/ancient-rome
https://romeandvaticanpass.com/en-us/blog/history-of-the-roman-forum