One of Martial's poems (1.117) offers evidence that in AD 85 or 86 the new forum had not yet been built there. This passage is taken as a terminus post quem for Domitian’s intervention.
What Domitian decided to do was to monumentalize the
Argiletum where it passed between the Forum Augusti, Forum Iulium, and Templum
of Pacis. He would build a new forum
there, with a temple dedicated to Minerva, his patron
goddess. The forum was still under
construction at the time of his assassination in AD 96 and was completed by his
successor Nerva in AD 97: hence it is also known as the Forum Nervae. But others call it the Forum Transitorium or Forum
Pervium, to emphasize its continued use as the main thoroughfare between the
Subura and the old Forum. Just what name
Domitian would have given his new forum will never be known, for the name was erased
along with all other public mentions of his existence when the Senate officially
condemned his memory in a damnatio memoriae.
The new forum was about 120 meters long but only 45
meters wide. On its long sides it shared
walls with the adjacent Forum Iulium, Forum Augusti, and Templum Pacis, and on each
of its crescent-shaped short sides there was a gate, for this forum was to
remain a thoroughfare. Wheel ruts in the
paving in front of the gate next to the temple may go back to antiquity. If it was the smallest of the imperial fora,
it was perhaps also the most frequently trodden. A semicircular portico, the Porticus Absidata, was added behind the temple to serve as a grand entrance into the new forum from the side of the Subura.
At its northeast end stood a small temple to Minerva. It was still in good shape in the seventeenth
century, when it was removed to be reused elsewhere. But the Marble Plan shows that it was
hexastyle prostyle. There was an apse at
the rear of the cella for the cult statue of the goddess.
The narrowness of the space meant that there was no room
for covered colonnades. The Forum Iulium
and the Forum Augusti and the Templum Pacis (with the exception of its
northwest wall--a point to which we shall return) all had covered colonnades. No room here for those, so the architect had
a problem. The solution was to set the
columns close to the wall, with the entablature and attic projecting out from
the wall over each of them. The
colonnade thus created cannot said to be “engaged” in the proper sense, since the
column itself is not so attached to the wall that a part of its circumference
is cut off by the line of the wall; instead, the column stands free but is
attached to the wall by the entablature and the attic acting as a sort of
bracket.
This is the first example of
this bracketing in the extant remains of Roman architecture. There is evidence for this development that’s
a bit earlier in a painting, in Cubiculum 16 of the Pompeian Villa of the Mysteries,
which of course must have been produced before AD 79, shown in the picture
above.
Along each long side slender Corinthian columns of
Phrygian purple marble created bays. About
eleven meters of the wall and two columns have been preserved. The photo shows how much lower the ground was
two millennia ago. This ruin is known today rather unflatteringly as Le Colonnacce, “those ugly columns.”
The wall is tufa (peperino), with some of the marble
lining still in place. On the projecting
entablatures above the columns and continuing along the wall between the
columns is a frieze, poorly preserved, and a cornice. Above the entablature is an Attic, some 4.4
meters tall, itself topped with a cornice.
In the single surviving bay there is a recess with a large relief panel showing
a female figure. We have to imagine a
line of such bracketed columns all along the lateral walls of the forum,
perhaps some twenty per side, producing some 38 bays, with recessed relief
panels in each. Holes in the front
surfaces of the attic projections and on top of the attic cornices suggest that
something was affixed to the front of, and on top of, each projection. If we add all this up--meters and meters of
frieze, relief panels in each bay, objects attached to the front and top of the
projections--we end up with, well, a lot.
It was once thought that the attic figure was Minerva,
repeated in each bay. That would mean as many as 38 Minervas!
Then in 1996 H. Wiegartz showed that the
relief has a parallel in an inscribed stele found at Aphrodisias in Turkey
representing the personification of the ethnos of the Piroustae, a people of Pannonia. Both figures carry a helmet with a plume, a small
round shield, a long cinched garment, a cloak secured at the right shoulder,
and a broad belt. The belts are nearly
identical, right down to the little spur that is turned downward on the Roman
relief, upward on the one from Turkey.
Wiegartz and others since have concluded that the attic figure preserved from the Forum Transitorium is non other than the personification of the ethnic group called the Piroustae.
It may be, then, that the Forum Transitorium featured in each bay a
different personified people (ethnos) over whom the Romans claimed to hold sway. A monument that gathered many ethne was in effect a display of Roman of the breadth of Rome's conquests. The whole point was to show a
great number of peoples. Servius (ad Aen.
8.721) reports that “Augustus made a portico in which he assembled images of
all peoples [simulacra omnium gentium], on which account it is called the
Porticus ad Nationes." This
monument is lost, but the Temple of Aphrodite Prometor (i.e., Venus Genetrix) at
Aphrodisias, excavated 1979-81, offers an analogue: it featured the sculpted representations of some
50 conquered peoples in its portico, some of which have been preserved.
If the female attic figures represented were simulacra
gentium, then it is possible that the reference was to Domitian’s Dacian
campaigns in AD 86-88, for which he celebrated a double triumph in AD 89. The metal objects affixed to the attic may
have included the spoils from that war. This may be guesswork, but its reasonable guesswork.
So we have a plausible explanation for a part of the
sculptural program--the attic reliefs. But
what about the frieze? And the decoration
of the temple? We hope to return to
these questions in a future post.
[For those who cannot not accept the hypothesis that Domitian
built the Forum Transitorium to commemorate his Dacian triumph in AD 89, there
is always the explanation offered by James Anderson in 1982, which which we began: that Domitian’s aim was to
close the Argiletum to commercial traffic. Anderson argues that to that end Domitian moved the
northwest wall of his father’s Templum Pacis, eliminating its covered colonnade
to make room for his own project. This has the advantage of explaining the asymmetrical layout of the Templum Pacis, whose rear wall does not have a covered portico to match that of the other three walls.]
- Anderson, James. “Domitian, the Argiletum an the Temple of Peace.” American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982) 101-110.
- Claridge, Amanda. Rome. An Oxford Archaeological Guide. 2010.
- Kleiner, Diana. Open Yale Courses. Lecture 13, chapter 6.
- Kleiner, Diana. Roman Sculpture. 1992.
- Sear, Frank. Roman Architecture. 1982.
- Ward-Perkins, J. B. Roman Imperial Architecture. 1981.
- Wiegartz, H. “Simulacra gentium auf dem Forum Romanum.” Boreas 19 (1996) 171-179.
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