Forum

a Latin word meaning an open place. It corresponds to the Greek agora and to the English marketplace. The most celebrated forum is that of ancient Rome. It was originally a marshy valley lying between the principal hills of the city. When the era of city improvement arrived, it was leveled off and drained into the Tiber by an underground arched sewer known as the Cloaca Maxima. The Forum proper occupied between four and five acres. It was bounded by four straight lines. It had the shape of the lower half of a slender letter "A." It was several times as long as wide. The early tribes met here to consider public business. Questions of life and death, of peace and war, were determined here. For centuries venders of meat, fish, and vegetables displayed their wares in the Forum. In later days special marketplaces were provided for them. The bankers and moneychangers transacted their business in halls adjoining the Forum. Political speakers harangued the populace from a platform known as the rostra, in the rear of which a space was reserved for voting. In time the Forum was surrounded by temples and other public buildings, in the porticoes of which the population might stroll and shelter themselves from the sun or rain.

The Roman Forum is probably the most celebrated open air place of meeting in the world. As Rome was the center of civilization, the Forum was the business, religious, and political center of the city. Political issues that make up the history of Rome were decided here. The tumultuous elections of which we read were carried on in the Forum. Mark Antony delivered his famous oration over the dead body of Caesar here. Cleopatra, the famous queen of Egypt committed suicide rather than be led in triumph through the Roman Forum. In the bloody days of the Triumvirates, the heads of political enemies were displayed from the rostra.

According to the historians the Forum suffered little from the invasion of the Goths and other modern tribes. In fact its buildings stood intact until the time of the civil wars that followed the disintegration of Charlemagne's empire. The site of the Forum then became covered with a mass of ruins and rubbish over which goats strayed and browsed. During the latter half of the nineteenth century extensive excavations were undertaken, so that the visitor may now have some adequate idea of the Forum as it once existed.

See Rome

--Byron, Childe Harold.