Fora (Book Chapter)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Fora James F.D. Frakes Introduction The forum represents in effect the place where all the signs of municipal dignity are concentrated and around which successive generations … acquire or develop a self-consciousness of being part of a community. The concentration of religious and municipal buildings, as well as the commemorative monuments and honorific inscriptions in the open area, make the forum, in most western cities, a veritable monumentum in and of itself, a lieu de mémoire as we say today. (Gros 1996a: 207, author translation) The forum served as the heart of a Roman city. That this is obviously so should not prevent us from asking how, in the experience of Romans in the Latin West, it was so. The forum was the heart of the city in an administrative sense, of course, as a place where the institutions of civic government were clustered, as well as in a legal sense, as a place where public business, including law cases, was conducted. It also became the heart, typically, in terms of spatial layout, as the rectilinear culmination and seeming origin of the urban grid – as the center of an area of urban development to which all roads should lead. It was the heart, too, in terms of civic religion, as a stage for the rhythmic annual rituals that were thought to secure the city’s good relations to the gods. Often perhaps, the forum was considered the heart in an economic sense, for even if markets or shops were not uniformly present in all forum spaces, at least the administrative authority that regulated their activities was there. A Companion to Roman Architecture, First Edition. Edited by Roger B. Ulrich and Caroline K. Quenemoen. © 2014 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2014 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Fora 249 Finally, on some level, each city’s forum was a reference to the city of Rome itself, evoking with symbols and through ideological structures that heart of hearts, the umbilicus where imperium came continually into being. To inquire about any of these aspects of the forum space in a Roman city is to confront a set of overlapping ideas about centrality, authority, persuasiveness, and civic participation (see Chapter 20). The forum, as a result, although shaped as a physical space by its surrounding structures, was as much a social phenomenon as it was an architectural one. It was architecture’s task to manifest and, in some ways, to stabilize these abstractions, and different building types came not only to accommodate various practical functions, but also to give form to the larger framework of ideas that gave those functions meaning: basilicas, curias, podium temples, shops, and porticoes most commonly – with public halls, fountains, treasuries, prisons, and secondary temples sometimes added to the list. The collective idea of the forum found expression in the proximity of some or all of these buildings, and although their spatial relations were varied, several patterns emerged over time – the most common being a rectilinear plaza sometimes subdivided into two or three joined spaces and axially focused on a temple. To say that the forum served as the heart of the city leads one simultaneously to focus on that plaza, the open space that served as a symbolic container for these central ideals of civic life, as well as on the buildings that housed the civic functions and symbolically projected them into the forum space. As a result of decades of study and of the ongoing excavations of fora from throughout the Empire, we are able to recognize easily the typology and evolution of the standard forum. The typological patterns are mainly to be found in the western Latin Empire, as so many urban plazas in the eastern provinces had already fully established themselves in the Classical and Hellenistic eras. Even though these eastern agoras do come, by the first century CE, to house and to embody a similar set of civic ideas, the spatial and urban patterns of western fora are thought to have eastern counterparts mainly as imperial cult sanctuaries, physically separate from the agora proper, and without many of the legal and administrative functions a proper forum would house. For that matter, larger cities throughout the Empire had more than one open plaza, and often these plazas now go by the name of forum. In this chapter I will concern myself only with western patterns and examples, and for spaces with the overlapping types of centrality presented in the opening paragraph, following all of the main existing studies on the Roman forum spaces (WardPerkins 1970; Gros 1996a; and Paulus 2000 among them). Before setting out what we know of the physical layout of forum spaces, and looking more closely at specific examples, we will turn to the main surviving set of architectural and urban opinions on how a forum space should be conceived, that is, the architectural treatise of Vitruvius. 250 James F.D. Frakes 1. The Forum as Considered by Vitruvius In the much-studied De Architectura, dating from the architecturally exciting heyday of the Augustan regime, Vitruvius twice writes directly of the forum space: first, briefly, in his opening book at 1.7.1, and later, more extensively, in Book 5. Centuries of Vitruvian interpreters have sought in his principles an explanation for actual urban planning and architectural design decisions as they survive in physical remains (see Chapter 22). As Pierre Gros has put it (1996a: 207), the axioms of Vitruvius suffer many exceptions. Even if we sometimes do find a forum that obeys his recommendation, for example, of a proportional layout of 2:3, it seems as advisable nowadays to read Vitruvius for the ideas that animated him, ideas, we may reasonably suppose, that had common currency among urban planners and architectural patrons in his day, as perhaps among people generally. His first mention of the forum follows an explanation of the regular gridding of an ideal city’s streets, and he suggests that the placement of the forum depends on appropriateness, either in the center of the land-locked town or near the harbor in a town on the sea. This linking of the forum space to the city grid resonates more than in terms of practical spatial arrangement; there is in the forum a pervasive idea of linear order. Not only does the forum space generally conform to an oblong rectangle that emphasizes axial relationships, but the generous use of colonnaded facades, integrated or not, also creates a three-dimensional spatial grid that responds to the two-dimensional street layout. Often this axiality is present even when a perfect grid could not be realized. Vitruvius presents the mathematical logic of the transcription from the two-dimensional by suggesting the most satisfying relationships between column height and the width of walkways, as well as the depth of the intercolumnar bays (De Arch. 5.1.5), but a pedestrian did not need to know the math in order to apprehend the spatial matrix. Movement through a forum portico created a sequential framework for all of the possible activities taking place there and encouraged a sense of being on display and of regarding the displays of others. Seeing and being seen are the most important aspects of a forum space in the remainder of Vitruvius’s text. Whether he discusses gladiatorial games (De Arch. 5.1.1), the viewing needs of which he claims caused greater widths between columns as compared to typical Greek practice, or the ease of access to otherwise unsightly mercantile activities (cf. De Arch. 5.1.2 and 5.1.5), or else the sightlines between the shrine of Augustus in his basilica at Fanum and the axially placed temple to Jupiter across the square (De Arch. 5.1.7), Vitruvius makes it clear that appropriate viewing was to be given priority by the thoughtful urban planner. Finally, Vitruvius (again at De Arch. 5.1.1) is Fora 251 concerned that the overall effect of a forum plaza should be pleasing in that the whole complex should be built in a scale relative to the population so that there is both room to see everything and, simultaneously, enough there for everyone to see! Similarly, a forum’s appended buildings should exist in comfortable scale to the whole (as in De Arch. 5.2.1 for the curia, prison, and treasury). The curia should be of enough size to suggest a city’s dignity, but he gives pride of place more directly to the basilica, which, because he has built one, he hopes might be considered of the highest degree of elegance (De Arch. 5.1.6), and implicitly to the main temple. Whatever degree of use Vitruvius’s text may be to architectural historians in terms of proportional relationships and design principles, the importance of the basilica and temple determining in some way the overall spatial effect of the plaza can be easily recognized in most excavated western Roman fora. 2. The Development of the Western Forum The early development of the forum space (leaving the Forum Romanum aside as a rather more complex and unique case) is known mainly from the stratigraphic analysis of long-enduring forum complexes from pre-existing cities, such as Alba Fucens (304 BCE), Minturnae (296 BCE), or Pompeii (complexly, from the fourth century to 80 BCE), or else from the survival of republican colonial foundations, such as Cosa and Paestum (both 273 BCE). Even though each one of these differs from the others (for example, the forum at Cosa is not central to the city grid because the topography of its rugged outcrop suggested a better location for the open plaza slightly to the southeast), cumulatively they demonstrate a growing consistency for the ideas that opened this chapter: the preference for oblong rectangular plazas, the clustering of the appropriate buildings, and the relationship of the plaza to the expanding urban street network, whether a complete or a piecemeal grid system (see Chapter 21). William MacDonald divides the common spatial schemes into four types: (1) long and narrow: Assisi, Pompeii, Tarragona; (2) Vitruvian: Conimbriga, Timgad, Severan forum at Lepcis Magna; (3) nearly square: Paris, Thuburbo Maius; and (4) actually square: Doclea, Nicopolis at Istrum (MacDonald 1986: 52). The typological variation to be found in the layout of republican Italian fora has led to much discussion, mainly about whether or not the differences reflect diverse origins. For example, the overall plaza layout may be a reaction to correlative ideas about the proper form of the basilica. The basilica’s origins may themselves be dual, in that some basilicas take up the form of the Greek stoa (the open colonnaded building) while others bear a greater resemblance to the Italic atrium house (see Chapter 18). From the “stoa” 252 James F.D. Frakes basilica came a forum-basilica with emphasized length and monumental decoration (e.g., Pompeii), while from the “atrium” basilica came a more modest forum-basilica with an axial entrance on the long side and a length closer in measure to its depth (e.g., Cosa) (Cavalieri 2002). On the other hand, the growing familiarity of Italian urban elites with Hellenistic sanctuaries, both in southern Italy and throughout the larger Mediterranean, may have caused a reassessment of how Italic civic institutions should be presented spatially and architecturally, even if the use of sanctuary plazas tended to demand smaller spaces than were called for by the civic centers of Roman towns. James Russell reached the sensible conclusions that the “wide and imaginative range of mutations” (1968: 336) to be observed among republican fora was governed very loosely by increasingly collective notions of symmetry, axiality, and frontality. These three organizing principles continued to mark the Roman forum in the western Empire, as in the waning years of the Republic it began to be exported and/or adopted in communities outside of Italy. The evolution of the so-called “tripartite forum” became typical, especially for the Gallic and Spanish provinces. The three elements included in the designation are a main temple, the civic basilica, and the rectangular forum plaza itself (Gros 1996a: 220). The connections among these three parts vary. For example, the basilica may be placed either alongside the length of the forum plaza (e.g., Ruscino) or closing one of the shorter ends (e.g., Augst). The temple, usually with axial emphasis, might stand attached to the closing porticoes at the other short end of the plaza, opposite the basilica (e.g., Bavay), or may float on its own podium at one of the long ends of the plaza (e.g., Feurs). The temple may be separated from other parts of the plaza by an intervening main street, either closed or opened to wheel traffic (e.g., Ostia), by a slight difference of level (e.g., Dougga), or even by a complete terrace separating it from a lower plaza (e.g., Nîmes). The porticoes might be built more or less at the level of the plaza, usually with unified orders for their entire length (except when a differentiating facade might distinguish the basilica), or else might be raised up on large cryptoporticus substructures. In Gaul, at least, the forum plaza was set within the larger grid of the city streets, as there were seldom pre-existing spaces to disrupt a linear city center (Frakes 2009: 49–56). Similarly, in Spain we see the wholesale installation of basilica-plazatemple complexes installed from the time of Augustus, even in places where Roman communities had been living without Italian-style forum complexes already for generations, as at Ampurias (Nünnerich-Asmus 1999; Gros 1996a: 221). At both Tarragona and Clunia the forum is linked to the formalization of the imperial cult, which inspired the installation of grand portico and basilica architecture (Nünnerich-Asmus 1994). Fora in Spain Fora 253 also provided more ample space for mercantile activity than was common elsewhere. The cities of Britannia, on the other hand, often built large basilica complexes on squarish forum plazas, while sometimes erecting temples to Jupiter or the imperial cult on a separate plaza, as at Saint Albans and Silchester (Frere 1975; Gros 1996a: 226). The forum pattern observable throughout Britannia has been linked to Roman military organization, particularly to the principium (headquarters) of an army camp (Gros and Torelli 2010: Chapter 5), and evidence for military use occurs in approximately one third of British towns (Burnham 1986). But doubts about programmatic military activity are raised by accumulating recent evidence of ritual deposits suggesting that town foundations followed an Italian model (Woodward and Woodward 2004) as well as in the recognition that the military camp itself already embodied ideas of Roman social order that correspond to forum spaces (Gros 1996a: 226). The tension that arises from the intersection of local character with Empire-wide patterns can also be seen in North Africa, much of which, like the Greek East, had long hosted a developed urban society. While the expected juxtapositions of buildings and functions exist in North African fora, the plans present the greatest variation, including gridded “colonial” square plazas (e.g., Timgad), plazas that echo monumental spaces in Rome (e.g., Lepcis Magna and Sabratha), and dense clusters of buildings and open spaces (e.g., Cuicul and Dougga), with the axial tripartite model being relatively rare. Pierre Gros sees this overall inconsistency as the result of major second-century renovation projects that have frequently obscured what may have been a greater early imperial commonality (1996a: 227). The Antonine and Severan periods, a time of great prosperity in North Africa, saw the eclipsing of more traditional administrative forum types by open colonnaded sanctuaries, a trend with a typologically mutative effect (specifically, of eliminating or minimizing the basilica). But Gros surely goes too far when he characterizes the placement of administrative and temple buildings in North African fora as unregulated, incoherent, and disconcerting (1996a: 228). Such a characterization looks inwardly to an expected norm of tripartite axiality and ignores other evocative relationships. Long-term trends in North African urbanism show increased interest in high podium temples that have a commanding effect over, and a seeming architectural disjunction with, the plazas they dominate, as at the Temple of Minerva in Dougga (Eingartner 1992: 222–223). Another urban habit that may derive from the Punic period is a use of smaller, trapezoidal paved plazas – the continued effect of which may be seen at Lepcis Magna’s old forum (Ward-Perkins 1981: 371) or in Mactar’s “Punic forum.” At the close of this chapter, a close description of the forum at Dougga will assess how a North African “jumble” may have been experienced (see also Chapter 5). 254 James F.D. Frakes 3. The Forum Romanum as Symbolic Space Although there was no universal formula used to create ideological links between a city’s forum and the Forum Romanum itself, certain architectural and decorative references offered this connection. These include from the Middle Republic in Italy, the dedication of the main forum temple as a Capitolium after Rome’s Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva and/or the installation of a statue of Marsyas, which in Rome stood near the Rostra and was multiply symbolic of good governance (Veyne 1961; Wiseman 1988: 4). Similarly, during the reign of Augustus there was an Empire-wide proliferation of the Corinthian order and other visual codes of vegetal abundance that served the regime (Zanker 1988). The trapping of imperial cult also began at that point, and became increasingly present in forum spaces during subsequent dynasties. These took the form of dynastic statue groups (Rose 1997), of formalized priesthoods and their public honors (Fishwick 2002), and eventually of an Empire-wide monumental style of architecture (Thomas 2007b). Capitolia began to spring up in forum complexes throughout republican Italy in the mid-second century BCE, and those that survive tend to replicate features such as a high podium with frontal stairway, an axial position at the end of large plaza, and some sort of interior division into three parts (either as cellae, niches, or statue bases). Even in cases where a positive identification by inscription is lacking (as at Cosa), it has become standard to see temples with these diagnostic features as Capitolia (Barton 1982). Furthermore, a community with a Capitolium usually enjoyed colonial status, although at times such temples were built by cities merely aspiring to higher Roman legal status, and, especially as the Empire went on, jurisdictional distinctions were not strictly maintained. Many Italian examples survive, both in previously established spaces and in the many new forum plazas in the developing north, with probable examples in Brescia, Florence, and Trieste (Todd 1985: 61). During the reign of Augustus, Capitolia were built throughout the western Empire, although regional preference played a part in their designations. In Gaul, a temple to the new imperial cult was favored over a traditional Capitolium, which otherwise occurred only in cities with roles to play in provincial administration (in Narbonne certainly, in Lyon probably). In Africa, on the other hand, and continuing throughout the first three centuries of the Empire, Capitolium temples abounded (Eingartner 1992). In most of the known Italian and provincial examples the temple is architecturally inextricable from the spatial matrix of the forum, in spite of the fact that the Roman Capitolium neither attaches directly to nor even properly faces onto the Forum Romanum. The consistency of central placement for Capitolia is a sign of its symbolic role – that is, that the provincial forum, Fora 255 however much it might be an echo of that larger metropolis, could produce order more clearly than the imperial capital itself. That residents of provincial cities were thinking in a focused way about imperial order is demonstrated by the widespread tendency to adopt the visual vocabulary of the Augustan regime and its successors. Without going into the complex historiography of the Corinthian capital, suffice it here to say that it became an architectural staple of Roman imperial architecture generally from the time of Augustus and saw overwhelming use in public plazas throughout the Empire (Frakes 2009: 111–120; see Chapters 2, 3, and 11). Worth considering here and in the section to follow is how the furnishing of forum spaces – the portraits of imperial and local figures, the floral scrolls, the mosaic floors, and the public sculpture – also reflected the notion of ordered abundance implied by the Corinthian capital. Paul Zanker demonstrates the dissemination of Augustan visual modes throughout the Empire by pointing both to the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, as a typical example of the central imperial podium temple type preferred by the regime (1988: 322), and to the Temple of Augustus and Roma at Pola (1988: 312–313), as an example of how the Ara Pacis served as a template for the adornment of public spaces. The widespread use of colonnade architecture provided another fundamental sameness to forum spaces, which was experiential as well as visual. The sequence of columnar bays gave material form not only to the linear order of the city grid, as mentioned earlier, but to the ideological goals valued by the center: prosperity, civic pride as an expression of imperial power, and local selfplacement in the larger Roman world. Yet the furnishing of these transitional spaces allowed scope for local narratives as well, in the shaping of landscape that might enrich an established topography such as the framing embrace of the ancient Gallic healing sanctuary of Glanum, or in the installation of new relationships, as in the descending forum porticoes of Vienne (France) that connected the hillside of le Pipet with the river harbor below. It was in these spaces that the portrait statues of local priests and benefactors began to stand in the vicinity of those of the imperial family (Fejfer 2008). 4. Forum Plazas in the West: Case Studies of Architectural Experience In this final section are descriptions of three different forum spaces, each selected for the clarity of its topographical context, for the richness of its material remains, and for its ability to bring out the themes presented in the earlier sections of this chapter. In addition, they are selected here because I have been able to visit each of them and thus have a bodily sense of spatial and topographical relationships. Despite many similarities among the three, each study 256 James F.D. Frakes allows for different emphasis. In Ostia we see how the constraints of an older urban model were eventually made, in the absence of a thriving donor class, to accommodate a grand rectilinear forum dominated on one end by Jupiter and on the other by the imperial cult. At Nîmes, in spite of its comparatively restricted excavated area, we encounter a provincial space, built from scratch as part of an expanding urban grid and decoratively linked to the Augustan regime’s visual agenda. Finally, at the forum of Dougga, we navigate the “jumbled” spaces and read its accumulation in terms of local family rivalries and of skillful visual staging on the changing slope of the city’s hillside. Although building activity on the site of Ostia is attested from the fourth century BCE, and in its first phases was organized as a castrum (military camp), the city remained without a rectilinear forum space throughout the Republic. It had instead a nucleus of small temples (one of which may have been an early Capitolium) near the crossing of an old military camp’s main cardo and decumanus. Early attention was first given, rather, to the large marketplace that came to serve as the postscaenium plaza of the theater, outside of the densely built settlement of Ostia proper – an attention that followed easily from the city’s main reason for existence, as a service port to Rome (WardPerkins 1981: 143). The center of the town was thus constituted as a crossroads with two small temples and a small open area that may have included the land that later came to host a Flavian basilica, which seems from its stratigraphy to have been previously unoccupied (Kockel 1992: 101). During the reign of Augustus, following his establishment of the cult of the Lares Augusti in Rome, a spot was chosen opposite the main decumanus from the larger temple and near to where that street opened up into the small plaza there, like a kind of crossroads altar (compital), as the organizational center of a slowly expanding new imperial forum. Later, under Claudius when the Ostian lares cult was founded, a marble-clad circular shrine was placed here, which, because of its suggestive effect as a kind of umbilicus, made obvious the growing axiality of the plaza. Yet this central point had earlier been used to center Ostia’s new Temple of Roma and Augustus, built either under Augustus or Tiberius in the first true renovating phases of the forum (Schalles 1992: 192; Geremia Nucci 2005: 556). This temple was set back from the central intersection in such a way that a rectangular plaza came into existence between it and the now off-centered larger republican temple (Bloch 1962), and the arrangement of its podium, which seems not to have accommodated a large frontal stairway, probably included a rostra (speaker’s platform), the use of which would have given added meaning to the new plaza space (Ulrich 1994: 216). Yet attention to this area was intermittent, and adornment with porticoes and buildings slow to come. The modest Claudian circular shrine was followed, in the reign of Domitian, by a new basilica that came to define the western side of the Fora 257 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 1. Capitolium 2. Curia 3. decumanus maximus 4. Monument of the lares augusti 5. Basilica 6. Forum Plaza 7. Temple of Roma and Augustus 8. Rostrum 7 0 20 m Figure 13.1 The forum of Ostia. Source: Andrew Blackwell after Ulrich 1996 and Paulus 2000. 258 James F.D. Frakes forum. The basilica, expanding from the decumanus down to the Temple of Roma and Augustus, also opened on its western facade to a second plaza, thereby remedying some of the space constriction that remained a feature of this forum (Kockel 1992: 110). Contemporary with the basilica, and across the decumanus from its northern end, rose a small curia building, a sign that the city was aspiring to the urban identity implied by the forumbasilica complex. The makeup of Ostia’s governing class is striking in that it seems to lack a competitive set of wealthy donor families otherwise found readily throughout the Empire, such that many of its public works were completed by memberships of guilds and priestly colleges. Even so, Ostia finally did get its grand Capitolium during the reign of Hadrian, and most likely as a result directly of imperial attention. Perhaps the temple project was undertaken to remedy the persistent “lack” of axial symmetry in the forum, but it certainly arose in connection with the massive reconfiguration of northern Ostia as it expanded to the Tiber (Kockel 1992: 112). The two republican temples were demolished, the plaza was raised and set back northward to create an expanded axial response to the plaza in front of the Temple of Roma and Augustus, and the Capitolium rose to provide authoritative weight to what was finally an oblong rectilinear plaza. In the end, the plaza, framed by its two axial temples, ran approximately 130 × 40 m. This linearity was made abundantly obvious by the contemporary establishment of porticoes running fully down both long sides of the new plaza, the colonnades making the forum a culmination of the city’s thoroughfares (MacDonald 1986: 51). As if to make this connection manifest, porticoes were built contemporarily and subsequently on all of the major streets of Ostia so that the linear effect of the forum radiated outward in all directions (Kockel 1992: 112). Nîmes was given Latin colonial status at some point late in the career of Julius Caesar (Frakes 2009: 46), and its forum is dated by both stratigraphy and architectural style to the early years of the first century CE (Amy and Gros 1979: 188). The forum, centrally located within the comprehensive city grid, was a rectangular plaza (of ca. 140 × 70 m) dominated on its southern end by a podium-temple (known today as the Maison Carrée) and flanked to the east and west by double-aisled porticoes. Behind the temple, the plaza was closed with a slightly curved blind wall of Corinthian pilasters, the visual effect of which was probably meant to suggest a full quadriporticus. The northern end was bounded by the military Via Domitia, which entered the city through one of Nîmes’ impressive gates and rooted the forum in the administrative force of the Empire. The linearity of this highway, as it passed east to west through the city, formed the principal physical and symbolic connection between the ancient sacred spring on a hillside not far to the west of the new forum and the new civic center. Fora 259 5 4 3 3 2 1. Forum Temple (Maison Carrée) 2. Temple Platform 3. Lateral Porticoes 4. Forum Plaza 5. Curia (?) 1 0 20 m Figure 13.2 The forum of Nîmes. Source: Andrew Blackwell after Balty 1960 and Célié and Monteil 2009. The forum’s interior also articulated a set of linear arrangements. Perhaps most noticeably, the plaza was divided in two, each section on its own level. The pavement around the temple was elevated more than a meter higher than the forum pavement to the north and reached by a large central stairway, rising on axis with the temple, and two smaller flanking lateral stairways. Sacrificial altars stood at the head of the two smaller stairways, marking the sanctity of the higher space and emphasizing the open width of the central stairway. This division through elevation was not only visually striking but gave the pedestrian a bodily awareness of passage from one half of the forum to the other. To counterbalance this effect and to underscore spatial unity, the surrounding porticoes ran at the same level around the entire plaza, which may have created the impression that 260 James F.D. Frakes the northern half of the forum was sunken rather than the southern elevated. The northern portico fronted a stately building, perhaps a curia, which was paved in gray, rose, white, and green marbles and yellow revetment, its doorway bordered by white marble pilasters that mirrored those of the Maison Carrée across the plaza. The lateral porticoes opened centrally onto the exterior street-grid, the interruptions marked by corniced marble pediments that created, in spite of their mirrored form, two facing porticus triplices. The forum thus took on the common western tripartite form, counting the curia for now as the administrative “third” of this formula (as yet no basilica has been recognized at the site). The garland frieze of the Maison Carrée, dedicated (if the tortured remains of its inscription can rightly be deciphered) as a temple to the divinized grandsons of Augustus as “Princes of Youth,” has already been mentioned as a provincial manifestation of the Augustan visual vocabulary of floral abundance. The fragmentary remains of the surrounding porticoes indicate that the entire complex was saturated with the ideology of Augustan prosperity. The porticoes rose with monolithic limestone columns (probably given a hard stucco coating with fluting, perhaps imitating marble) to crowning Corinthian capitals. The limestone entablature ran in two levels and was decorated on both its exterior and interior sides – garland swags inside and a frieze of heavy garlands facing outward upon the temple, offering bundles of figs, pomegranates, acorns, and pine cones, as well as laurel, oak, and wheat leaves, which were “fixed” in place with carved nails and fluttering stone ribbons. The cornices above this frieze sported lions that on sunny days peered down upon the square and on rainy ones poured forth lancing streams of runoff into smoothly outfitted drainage channels. The lions and garlands, though taking different formal appearances, mirrored those on the temple. Inside, the porticoes were divided by an interior order that held up the sloping woodwork of the slate-covered roof, while the spatial rhythm of the covered walkway was completed by pilasters fronting the blind back walls. Bound by pilaster and columns, as by mosaic floor patterns, these shaded bays were nevertheless permeable and invited free movement in and among them. The multi-colored marble revetment added to this dynamic effect and, to the occupant educated in the origins and connotations of different stones, would have described in a purely symbolic way the power and comprehensiveness of the Roman world (Isserlin 1998). Taken altogether, the visual program of the Forum of Nîmes was very like that of the lavish Forum Augustum in Rome itself, a provincial manifestation of imperial grandeur (see Chapters 3 and 11). Abundant remains demonstrate that the citizens of Nîmes placed themselves both literally and symbolically within the forum’s verdant and lavish Augustan order. Foremost, public honorific statuary installed their personae amongst the columns. Albisia Secunda, daughter of Gnaeus, was commemorated on a statue base found fallen into the space of the forum plaza, but certainly once placed before the colonnade (CIL 12.3394). In the eastern portico stood a dedication Fora 261 3 5 10 1 2 9 4 8 7 6 1. Massinissa Monument 2. Forum Plaza 3. Forum Portico (Gabinii) 4. Curia (?) 5. Capitolium (Marcii) 6. area ante capitolium 7. Rostrum (and shrine?) 8. area macelli (Pacuvii) 9. Windrose 10. Temple of Mercury (Pacuvil) 11. Market (Licinii) Figure 13.3 11 0 20 m The forum of Dougga. Source: Andrew Blackwell after Poinssot 1958. (perhaps of an artwork) by Marcus Adrastius Secundus (CIL 12.3136), while nearby was placed a funerary commemoration of Bucconia Sige (CIL 12.3480). Also in the eastern portico was found the laureled bust of a young emperor wearing a gorgon cuirass. A headless male in a toga (togatus), carved in limestone, wears a distinctive amulet (bulla), most likely a boy standing in the presence of the divine youths presiding in the temple, while another male wears a tunic and mantle. Women and men, living and dead, togati and tunic-wearers, those honored and those honoring: these sculptural works are the results of public actions taken by people whose lives and goals were ephemeral, yet all obtained a permanent space among the columns they experienced more fleetingly while living. Dougga’s settlement dates back to at least the early second century BCE, when it was patronized by the Numidian royal family. The famous funerary monument of Prince Ateban still stands as a reminder of the city’s pre-Roman past, and the location of the city’s center, which would evolve into the forum, was similarly marked by a shrine to King Massinissa, built in 138 BCE during the reign of Micipsa. This shrine, only recently recognized as more than a forum fountain, was commemorated in both Libyan and Punic, and its preservation at the base of the city’s Capitolium made it a precursor both to Roman civic government and to other honorific monuments in the forum porticoes. This Capitolium has often suffered the critique that it was imposed upon the space in an insensitive, even incoherent, way (Gros 1996a: 229, for example, describes it as a désinvolture). 262 James F.D. Frakes The residents of Dougga, rather, were careful to build up their civic spaces while preserving references to the past, and the several connected spaces that together formed the forum offered Dougga a means to interpret that general past as well as the different leading roles played by prominent local families. A sort of accretive effect, it was noted earlier, is in any case typical of North African public spaces, and Dougga’s forum makes elegant use of this regional preference. During the civil wars that ended the Republic, Dougga was attached to Africa Proconsularis, and although its development in the Augustan period is obscure, stratigraphy and epigraphy together suggest that the Tiberian forum included its stone pavement, an altar to Augustus, a shrine to Saturn, and a temple to the imperial cult that may have stood where the later Capitolium was built. This first forum, although much transformed by projects during the Antonine reigns (not to mention its rebuilding as a Byzantine Fort!), can be reconstructed as a longish rectangle running west to east on a sloping hillside shelf. This area lay approximately one third of the way down Dougga’s impressive hill, and although some construction spread upwards to make the forum more central than it now appears, the major neighborhoods grew downhill in loose rings of terracing that allowed the forum rather grandly to preside. Dougga’s topography allowed for great visibility – both of the monuments as they rose in the urban fabric and of the expansive valley below. In this environment, competitive elite practices of building and self-display cannot surprise. The families known to have adorned the forum in a competitive/cooperative evolution include the Gabinii, Licinii, Marcii, and Pacuvii (Rives 1995: 100–172). The paved area was expanded under Claudius by Marcus Licinius Rufus, who appended a market with a statue of Mercury to the forum’s eastern end, on a terrace above lower neighborhoods. The forum porticoes were installed by Gabinius Felix Faustinianus during the reign of Antoninus Pius and given mosaic floors, red-veined column shafts, and white marble Corinthian capitals. The imposing Capitolium was built by Lucius Marcius Simplex in the years after Antoninus’s death, perhaps atop an earlier temple that had been dedicated to the imperial cult. The portion of the forum to the east of this new temple, called the area macelli in ancient times but now known as the Plaza of the Windrose for the large sundial and wind compass inscribed on its pavement, was formalized under Commodus. Quintus Pacuvius Saturus and his wife, Nahania Victoria, here donated a temple to Mercury and porticoes to match the earlier Gabinian branches nearby, including the elegant hemicycle that closed the forum to the east. In the end, the irregularly composed plaza expanded to approximately 90 × 30 m in size. Excavation indicates that the exuberant inscribing of names on the forum buildings was matched by the numerous statue bases dedicated to gods, to emperors, and to local donors, creating an assembly of honors corresponding basically to that discussed for Nîmes (Poinssot 1958: 40). Fora 263 No certain location for a curia or basilica has been identified, although the open space called the area ante capitolium may have served some administrative function, as may a columned hall immediately attached to it and fronted in 205 CE by a bronze-railed speaker’s platform. The overall effect could be described as choppy, but the dislike of this effect (e.g., Schalles 1992: 209; Gros 1996a: 228; and even Poinssot 1958: 39) arises mainly, I submit, from the startlingly massive Byzantine wall that now overlies the area. Looking rather to the positive response noted generally in North Africa to massive podium stairways, and to the topographical prompts of the site itself, we may easily imagine a sense of additive continuity and of layered significance that was pleasing to its ancient users and that allowed for the rich establishment of all those ideas recognized as proper to a Roman forum. The forum space occupied not only a central place in the urban layout of Roman cities in the western Empire; it also occupied a central place in Roman thought about city life, about ritual practice, about economic and social exchange, and about spectacle and visibility. Local citizens, intent on creating a smaller version of the Roman forum itself, installed the necessary buildings (temples, basilicas, curias, and porticoes) while simultaneously adapting to local topography and producing local political and ritual narratives. The decoration and outfitting of this essential Roman public space thus allowed for urban residents throughout the western world to be Roman in differently nuanced ways (see Chapter 20). GUIDE TO FURTHER READING The chapter on fora in Gros (1996a) is the most recent treatment of the subject, and its extensive bibliography is the best place to begin a project that looks into forum spaces generally. Although now nearly 50 years old, Ward-Perkins (1970) remains an excellent summary of the development of Roman forum architecture in its earliest phases, and a quick consultation of the bibliography in Cavalieri (2002) provides a good supplement for much of the archaeological bibliography since. MacDonald’s second volume of Architecture of the Roman Empire (1986) also explores the spatial logic of Roman plazas, while Martin (1972) inquires into the role played by Greek architecture in the development of Roman practice. For continuously updating bibliography on the Forum Romanum itself, consult UCLA’s website, the Digital Roman Forum. Because “the forum” is less an architectural type than it is a phenomenon of urban planning, there are numerous studies available that, while they may not directly address forum architecture, have much to offer those thinking about the role of the forum space in Roman life and culture. Some of these include the monograph of Wilson Jones (2000b) for its analysis of architectural practice generally; Kellum (1999) for its interpretation of Pompeii’s performative public spaces; and the study of Roman-period Ephesus by Rogers (1991), both for its exploration of public space in a Greek city (not treated in this chapter) as well as for its presentation of civic pageantry for which the forum plaza served as stage.