The Roman Forum

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Another one from the History Hit archive! The Roman Forum, also known by its Latin name Forum Romanum (Italian: Foro Romano), is a rectangular forum (plaza) surrounded by the ruins of several important ancient government buildings at the centre of the city of Rome. Citizens of the ancient city referred to this space, originally a marketplace, as the Forum Magnum, or simply the Forum.

For centuries the Forum was the centre of day-to-day life in Rome: the site of triumphal processions and elections; the venue for public speeches, criminal trials, and gladiatorial matches; and the nucleus of commercial affairs. Here statues and monuments commemorated the city's great men. The teeming heart of ancient Rome, it has been called the most celebrated meeting place in the world, and in all history. Located in the small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, the Forum today is a sprawling ruin of architectural fragments and intermittent archaeological excavations attracting 4.5 million sightseers yearly.

This episode was first broadcast on Darius Arya Digs.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's podcast features the one and only Darius area. An archaeologist based in Rome,
0:09.0	how cool is that? And in this episode, Darius is going to take you on a tour of the ancient
0:15.0	heart of Rome, the Roman Forum. Enjoy!
0:20.0	A funny thing happened on the way to the fore. I'm standing on the Valleah Hill and I'm going to make my way down along the Via
0:37.0	Sathra to go to the Roman Forum, the heart in soul of ancient Rome. So let's go take a walk.
0:45.0	And there are so many different periods of history that we can contemplate because we're getting a lot of them at the same time.
0:51.0	I'm walking down the steps of the temple of Venus and Rome last rebuilt by the emperor, Maxentius. Of course, he's going to be killed by
1:01.0	Constantine at the Milvian bridge in 312. Walking down along the Via Sathra on the Augustan level,
1:12.0	I see around me a left and right, other various globs of foundation work for a higher elevated,
1:23.0	port-a-code walkway of the Via Sathra. So people come here from all over the world, what was in Perala Rome like,
1:32.0	what was it like going down the Via Sathra? Well, it was something extraordinary. It would have been a multicultural experience.
1:41.0	It would have been, you would have heard sites, you would have heard sounds of people from all over the empire.
1:47.0	You would have seen different forms of dress, different, just different rhythms, different smells, different worlds.
1:58.0	People are coming here to Rome to come to the Roman Forum. The Roman Forum is then the social epicenter of Rome.
2:08.0	It's the political epicenter. It's one of the religious epicenters.
2:14.0	And you just think about all this attention over time and the space, the space that is going to be built up over time,
2:25.0	reconstructed, even recycled over time. But it really is one of the most historical places in the entire ancient world.
2:37.0	And of course, if you're a student of Latin and Greek, you can say, hey, I know that there's a speech by Cisro or this declamation by...
2:48.0	Some emperor. And then of course it's hard to always be able to place every single moment in time because we're left with different periods better.
3:00.0	Or worse, in terms of preservation.
3:05.0	Some sites we refer to in the literary sources, they're totally blirated, or we're guessing with what we've got left behind.
3:11.0	So that's what makes the four-myxperience kind of a big puzzle.
	...

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