This book on the comitium has been greatly anticipated. At least, I have been anticipating it for some time. I remember when, midway through my doctoral research on Republican Rome, the northwest corner of the forum closed down. The glass and cement stucture covering the comitium, created in the early 1960s, had never adequately protected the monument. In 2009, the Superintendency decided to replace it. By 2010, the site was encased in scaffolding. I read the major publications as closely as I could, but the comitium itself became inaccessible.
To be fair, I’m not sure how much a visit would have helped. The comitium is among the city’s most complicated archaeological sites. There is no questioning its historical importance: as the space of popular assemblies, this was the Republican political monument. It was also an assembly place much earlier, even before the putative foundation of Rome itself. But for all its fame, the comitium’s archaeology has remained difficult to untangle. The deeply stratified site contains a complex array of structures—a stepped platform, altar, inscribed cippus, open piazza, and other components. The assemblage firmly resists classification. This was not a temple, although it was a templum; it was not a tomb, despite association by Roman antiquarians with Romulus’ burial. Its form appears in many ways distinct from other assembly places in Italy and beyond. These unique qualities do not yield easily to the analogical thinking we normally use to interpret Rome’s monuments.
We have also been hindered until now by a poor state of publication. From 1898-1901, the comitium was first uncovered by Giacomo Boni who left detailed notes and drawings but only published preliminary reports in the Notizie degli Scavi. From 1956-196, it was explored again by Pietro Romanelli and Maria Floriani Squarciapino, who once more managed only preliminary reports. All told, these campaigns opened 43 trenches, in some cases carrying down several meters into geological strata. The contrast between the quantities of material recovered and the scant record of this work is confounding. There have been several attempts to make sense of what has existed. Einar Gjerstad tried to synthesize Boni’s work in 1941; there are major works by Filippo Coarelli and Paolo Carafa.[1] But these and other studies, profoundly important as they remain, are ultimately works of synthesis, presenting selections of archival material.
This has been the state of things: the comitium ranks high among Rome’s important monuments but has remained obscure for several reasons. Now, our state of knowledge is placed on a whole new level by this book with its 505 pages of large format text and hundreds of illustrations, most in color. There are four large format plans in a folder at the end of the volume. These are supplemented with an impressive digital profile of online plans, images, and reconstruction videos accessed by QR codes throughout the book. I have complained before in the BMCR about the cost of academic books, but this hefty volume makes a decent argument for its price tag.
The physically monumental book also displays a monumental effort. Those previous excavations have required very substantial archival work. Fortini’s team also undertook further excavations from 2012-2022. In some cases, this meant scraping the sides of old trenches in hopes of finding new material (and in several cases this produced good results). In turn, a mass of new and old data needed to be collected, analyzed, and integrated, and that is what the Fortini, Russo, and their team has done over more than a decade.
The central product of these efforts are three long chapters by Francesca Cesari and Arianna Santelli laying out the archaeological evidence from the Bronze Age to the Late Republic. These chapters are painstaking and data-heavy and do not make for easy reading. They do not make a complex monument less complex, but they do make the site’s complexity accessible. Presentation is bolstered for earlier phases by another chapter by Francesco Quondam on ceramics. All told, these sections provide a brand-new basis for exploring the site’s archaeology.
I try to synthesize the site’s ten phases and eight pavements. Both tallies and corresponding chronologies (in following, all dates BCE) are slightly different than previous literature. Readers should consult a handy phasing chart on p. 251.
Ceramic material starts in the Eneolithic but becomes abundant in the Final Bronze Age, when it is first associated with occupation layers. The site occupied the lowermost slopes of the Capitoline, at the source of a thermal spring identified with the Spinon of Cicero Nat. Deor. 3.52. Giacomo Pardini’s technical presentation by of geochemical traces of heavy metal and other elements in soils associated with Early Iron Age burials from the neighboring Equus Domitiani suggests the Spinon’s thermal qualities remained active into the early urban period.
A fascinating early feature of the earliest site is a large, regularly shaped basin—Romanelli’s Grande Bacino—excavated more than 3 m into natural gravels to collect the Spinon’s waters. The effort to create this basin suggests this was an early meeting point in Rome’s landscape. This basin’s lowermost fills contain pottery of the Final Bronze Age (13th-11th centuries). The same period saw initial signs of stable occupation on the Capitoline, where an artisanal area emerged, and below the Forum of Caesar with huts on the ridge leading to the Quirinal. The basin gathered together people from Rome’s earliest communities to make use of the Spinon’s waters. There is thus a remarkable story about primordial patterns of movement and congregation across this landscape, which over time crystalized into a formal place of assembly.
Otherwise, the first structures of the Early Iron Age (10th-early-8th century) mainly comprised a stone wall terracing the Capitoline slopes to create a level area (Phase 1). In the late 8th century, the structure was covered by a thick layer of colluvium (Phase 2), whose deposition seems contemporary with the end of thermal activity.
The first comitium was built upon this colluvium (Phase 3) in the early 7th century. (Not, it should be noted, in the time of Romulus.) It included a central piazza paved (Pavement 1) with cobbles and clayey earth. Along its southern edge, scant traces of parallel walls made a sort of staircase. Later in that century, a new pavement was made (Pavement 2) with further stairs along its southern margin. (Generally, much of the early site’s northern and western extents are inaccessible or destroyed beneath the later Arch of Septimius Severus and Curia Iulia.) After a destructive fire, the stepped structure was rebuilt (Phase 4), and a new low wall of unworked stones around the very edge of the site perhaps traced the outer limit of the comitium’s precinct.
Two earthen pavements mark different 6th-century phases. The first (Phase 5, Pavement 3) marks the creation and placement of the famous inscribed cippus dated to 580-550. At the end of the monarchic period (Phase 6), the cippus was encased in a stone base and the ground level was raised (Pavement 4).
Boni first differentiated two Republican comitia, an early rectilinear structure and a later curvilinear one, both of ashlar masonry. The first, a large trapezoidal platform with steps on its north bounding an earthen pavement (Pavement 5), was perhaps the structure upon which the XII Tables were displayed (Phase 7). By this date, the site became increasingly encumbered by smaller structures, including an altar and the Graecostasis, the platform for foreign dignitaries, represented by a rough tuff wall below the Arch of Septimius Severus. Construction is well-dated to the early-5th century by materials including a newly found Roma-Veii-Velletri tile. This rectilinear comitium was raised in the mid-4th century and provided with a new earthen pavement (Pavement 6).
Afterwards, the comitium was remade with a curved platform made of the Grotta Oscura tuff typical of Middle Republican construction (Phase 9). This transformation included a new pavement (Pavement 7) of earth and cobbles; while some have suggested a pavement of tuff slabs, no traces remains. No stratigraphic material dates this change, which the authors place in the early 3rd century following the historical arguments made some time ago by Coarelli.
The curvilinear comitium remained in use until Sulla’s expansion of the curia prompted a rehaul of the site. This is when the black stone pavement (Pavement 8) was laid atop the earlier complex. Between these stone pavers and earlier structures below was the famous “stratum of sacrifice” excavated by Boni. This layer, presumably in secondary deposition, full of ash and bones, included several famous objects, including an Attic black figure sherd depicting Dionysius and a bronze figurine of an augur holding a lituus.
This briefly summarizes a richer (and denser) discussion. The archaeological presentation is supplemented by other contributions. A lengthy, well-illustrated introduction by Fortini describes the project’s history and related conservation efforts. Anna De Santis gives a good contextual overview of the Roman settlement from the later Bronze to Early Iron Ages. I especially enjoyed Carlo Rosa’s excellent account of the underlying geology of this part of the forum basin.
Two papers concern the inscribed lapis niger cippus. Of course, this is the earliest Roman legal text and perhaps the most important of all Archaic Latin inscriptions. In 2016, the project produced laser-scans of the stone, and Giovanna Rocca’s chapter on these results largely condenses a recent monograph.[2] Highlights include discovery of punctuation on one face of the cippus sometimes thought to have been inscribed later but now convincingly unified to the rest. Research otherwise confirms some variant letters, and Rocca provides a full text.
The second study of the inscription is a historical chapter by Christopher J. Smith and Elena Tassi Scandone. Smith considers what ancient sources say about the comitium’s earliest function. He notes that an inaugurated templum could not have been a place of burial, refuting ancient associations of the comitium with the tomb of Romulus. Instead, the comitium was associated from its earliest instantiation with the curiae, early tribal or topographical social units, who came together there to meet as a community. By interacting with the curiae at assemblies, the rex of the cippus affirmed his political power over these diverse social units. The comitium thus formed an engine of civic community in Archaic Rome. In turn, Tassi Scandone thinks carefully about how the cippus functioned. It was a boundary marker, but this makes it unusual that it carried a legal text, and she notes several peculiarities compared to other Republican leges arae. Perhaps it formed part of a system of markers delimiting the comitium’s augural space. Following this, she wonders whether the clause sakros es[ed] relates not to the sanction of a sacer homo as often thought, but to the consecration of the space of the comitium itself by the rex and kalator mentioned by the text.
Beyond this chapter, the volume puts archaeology first and shows a very light touch with historical debates. The relationship of archaeological phases to historical events is rarely discussed, and some debates go unmentioned. The phase of colluvium, for example, has been understood by some as a deliberate infilling of the forum basin but is presented here as natural without comment. One also finds little of the sharp debate over the Republican comitium’s form. In passing, Cesari and Santelli note that the curvilinear platform’s line cannot have carried all the way around the piazza, which would militate against some previous attempts to see a fully circular Middle Republican comitium as imitative of Greek ekklesiasteria. The related question of the monument’s influence on colonial comitia in the same period is not raised. Equipped with what we now know, these topics would repay fresh study.
The book’s scope is not these debates, however. It is to present a major archaeological project on a bewilderingly complex site, and to publish its findings. In this, it does a superb job and forms a real accomplishment. We can be very grateful to the authors for providing, at last, the proper tools to do serious work on the history of this essential Roman monument.
Notes
[1] Einar Gjerstad. “Il Comizio romano dell’età repubblicana,” Opuscula archaeologica 2.2 (1941): 97–158; Filippo Coarelli. Il foro romano. Vol. I. Il periodo arcaico. Rome: Quasar, 1983; id. Il foro romano. Vol. II. Periodo repubblicano e augusteo. Roma: Quasar, 1985; Paolo Carafa. Il Comizio di Roma dalle origini all’età di Augusto. Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1998.
[2] Giovanna Rocca, Giulia Sarullo. Il Cippo del Foro: Nuove letture e prospettive euristiche. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.