With Il Templum Pacis, Roberto Meneghini has produced a definitive study, able to stand alongside the magisterial volumes of Pier Luigi Tucci,[1] of one of Imperial Rome’s most fascinating building complexes. Roberto Meneghini is firmly established as a leading authority on the city’s imperial fora, as evidenced by 2007’s revelatory and beautifully illustrated I Fori Imperiali: Gli scavi del Comune di Roma (1991-2007), coauthored with Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani. In the volume under review here, Meneghini begins his story with a survey of the key literary and documentary sources for the Templum Pacis, or, as it was also known in antiquity, the Forum of Vespasian. To this end, and in order to establish the complex’s contemporary fame as splendid repository of art and historical memorabilia, including the great Severan marble plan of the city, the forma Urbis Romae (FUR), Meneghini enlists the support of Martial, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, Cassius Dio, and Procopius, among others. A full accounting of these sources, with complete texts, is also offered in the “Repertorio delle fonti” which serves as the volume’s first appendix (221-4). Following this initial source prospectus, Meneghini presents the excavation and reconstruction history of the site in copiously detailed essays spread across two-thirds of the volume (5-165). From the sixteenth century, when spade work in what was then green space and semirural land owned by the Conti family began to reveal a trove of architectural marbles and the first mysterious piece of the marble plan, through season after season and phase by phase, the Templum gradually emerged from obscurity and uncertainty to become the monument fully revealed at last in the work sponsored between 2004 and 2019 by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali and Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma. This enlightening “Storia degli studi e degli scavi del monumento” is related by lucid text, ample archival images, and newly prepared as well as historical plans. Cumulatively, it convincingly demonstrates the power of archeology conducted in the archives not just to finetune appreciation and understanding of a site but also to illuminate the kinds of questions and methods that in different moments animated research.
Nevertheless, some readers may hasten on to the volume’s final and briefer section: “Topografia e architettura del Templum Pacis” (165-220). Although summaries have been offered along the way, it is in these pages that the Templum’s character both as a dazzling monumental center in its own right and as a paradigm of Rome’s urban image as it evolved from the early Imperial to the Late Antique city emerges quite clearly. Begun by Vespasian in 71 CE to celebrate the restoration of peace after several years of civil war and the conclusion of first “Jewish War,” which entailed the sack of Jerusalem and the historically pivotal destruction of the Second Temple, Vespasian’s Templum and Forum arose in central Rome in an area which prior to the fire of 64 had been home to a macellum and after 64 to a large building with pilasters. (fig. 3.1-3.3). By the sixth century the Templum housed Felix IV’s stunning church of Cosmas and Damian and was also functioning as a burial ground.
Yet the Templum was hardly a stagnate entity between these early Imperial and Late Antique bookends, as it provided a series of wage-labor projects that helped “sostenere la plebe urbana.” (169) Meneghini documents the changes brought about by the ambitions of successive emperors. Work, destructive as well constructive, on their own fora by Domitian and Nerva in the open area between the Forum of Augustus and the Templum Pacis required modification to the western façade of the latter as well as demolition of the northeastern hemicycle of the former. Moreover, as Meneghini emphasizes, it is largely thanks to the recent archaeological work that the nature of Domitian’s short-lived Forum Palladium and associated Temple of Minerva have become clear (168-9). So too, the effort expended on the juncture point of the Templum and the northeastern end of the Forum of Nerva and the modifications to adjoining porticos, streets, and sewers this required is now better understood and is explicated with photographs, drawings, and meticulous plans (169-76). Nevertheless, although the Severan intervention, which included installation of the FUR, “comportò il quasi totale rifacimento del complesso,” (217), the details of this work remain cloudy.
In the final pages of his topographical and architectural digest, Meneghini considers the piazza of the Templum and what can be learned about the early imperial complex from the walls and design of the monastery and sixth-century basilica of Cosmas and Damian, which were inserted into the Templum’s fabric. Here especially the excavations of the early 2000s have provided significant evidence for the life of the complex in Late Antiquity when the Forum’s piazza was enlivened with garden plantings and commercial activity. Moreover, the pages of this section are distinguished by enticing digital and artistic illustrations that bring the Templum to life while populating the rooms and spaces of the complex with people. This is especially the case for Meneghini’s presentation of the complex’s piazza, its library, its “aula di culto di Pax,” and its “aula” of the FUR (e.g., fig. 3.26, 3.30, 3.34).
The volume rounds out this section with recognition of the Templum’s role as a “luogo della memoria” (209) for diaspora Jews because of its assembly of Jerusalem spoils and an assessment of its changing functions in Late Antiquity, which included the incorporation of workshops (213) and its role as a necropolis.. Finally, a selection of “osservazioni conclusive” (215-20) precedes four appendices. The latter, including the aforementioned “Repertorio delle fonti,” otherwise focus on geological analysis of the Templum’s building materials and new fragments of the FUR. In sum, Roberto Meneghini’s Il Templum Pacis is not only an informative reading experience but also a pleasurable one, pleasures that are considerably enhanced by the volume’s rich array of archival photographs, meticulous plans, and artful reconstructions.
Notes
[1] The Temple of Peace in Rome. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 2017.