Visiting the Roman Forum

The Forum is a huge site that can wear you out, moving from building to building – but slow down a bit and enjoy some of the fascinating history that can be seen in the smaller details at each stop.

Notably, many of those details involve Julius Caesar.

After the fall of the Empire, the Roman Forum fell into disrepair over 400 years, and many of its monuments were either plundered for foundation stone and marble, or buried under debris from other constructions.

Eventually, this neglected piece of land became pasture for livestock and earned the nickname Campo Vaccino, or Cow Field.

It was only much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries that the site was formally excavated and the true scale of the buildings, like Caesar’s Temple, were recognized.

Caesar in the Senate

The Curia Julia is one of the best preserved monuments in the Forum.

What we are seeing is the original third Senate House, built by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and was rebuilt after the great fire of 283 AD.

It was later converted into a Christian church during the 7th Century, and finally extensively reconstructed in the 1930s.

It was constructed as a temple to accommodate the Roman Senate inside where the consuls, tribunes and praetors made their administrative decisions about the running of the Republic and later, the Empire. Unfortunately, the construction was interrupted by his murder in the theater of Pompey that year. It was completed by his son and successor Caesar Augustus in 29 BC.

If you look very closely at the steps of the Basilica Julia next to the Curia Julia, you might even spot the grooves, grids and circles of board games carved into the marble where ancient Romans used to sit and play board and dice games while waiting and socializing. This is an example of the little intricacies that breathe life back into our bookish view of the ancient Romans.

The Temple of the Divine Caesar

From the Colosseum, take a stroll south through the mammoth Arch of Constantine and follow the signs.

Then, walk down the Via Sacra, the main road of the forum.

Behind the columns of the Temple of Vesta and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, you’ll see a small metal roof and the remains of a tan stone wall facing northwest.

This modest hut is your target.

This is the cremation site of the murdered Julius Caesar.

Beside and behind the tin-roof building, the Temple of the Divine Caesar sits as an unimpressive ruin of reddish foundation stones with marble strewn about in disarray.

This is the ruin of the Temple of the Divine Caesar, built in 42 BC after the politician’s assassination near the steps of the Theater of Pompey across town.

It’s often referred to as the site of Caesar’s grave, but is really the spot where he was cremated according to Roman custom in 44 BC.

Most of what we see is the foundation that was built with Roman concrete, or opus cementicium.

This rather ordinary material supported the elevated rostrum that stood in front of the building.

My picture here from ground level shows it to scale with people around it and the large stones that look like hay bales.

Anyway, under the metal roof and behind the large stones, you’ll see what looks like a pile of rocks and dirt. These are the remains of an altar that the Senate placed in front of the temple, which originally contained Caesar’s ashes.

But the confusion doesn’t matter to most visitors from around the world. Caesar’s grave is still a popular, if obscure, place of pilgrimage in Rome.

Almost every day, someone brings flowers to put on the grave.

The Temple of the Divine Caesar was built by his son Augustus, after his death, in a small area near the center of the Forum to honor him as a person – plus elevate him to a deity worthy of worship.

Elevated on a podium substructure, the facade featured six columns that elevated the temple above a rostrum, or speakers platform set behind a low railing.

It was lavishly embellished with marble, as Julius would have expected.

This 3D rendering is the accepted historical design as of 2020.

The image below is one of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina – not Julius Caesar.

They are often mixed up in pictures since they are located close to each other and each has 6 columns and an elevated rostrum.

The giveaway is the difference in the top ornamentation.

After 12 centuries, the triangular pediment was removed and it was adapted to become the 17th century church of San Lorenzo in Miranda, surrounded by dusty unpaved streets. At the time, the land was also regraded to cover the entry steps and bring the church down to the level of the street.

What happened to his temple?

For 5 centuries the Forum was the center of day-to-day life in Rome: the teeming heart of ancient Rome and it has been called the most celebrated meeting place in all history. Many of the oldest and most important structures of the ancient city were located on or near the Forum.

The Temple of Caesar was built in a small area of the forum, but elevated on a podium substructure that would have made the temple seem towering – plus it was lavishly embellished with marble.

Historians don’t know what happened to the temple after the Christians took over in the 4th century, but it was possibly converted into something practical as a snub to their fading pagan history. The exact dates of this deterioration are subject to debate within the scholarship. It is generally assumed that the reason for this was a desire to gain distance from all the Caesars and particularly the Julius cult.

A number of historical circumstances could have caused such a desire for dissociation. But the Forum eventually fell into total decline, and was occasionally used only for ceremonial purposes, following the move from the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople in 330 AD.

But much later, in the early sixteenth Century, like most of the ancient buildings, the Temple was looted for new Papal building materials. They needed stone blocks, steps, bronze ornaments, and even columns – and the extra marble was burned in the lime kilns to make cement.

This resulted in it becoming unsound and probably falling during Rome’s later earthquakes. You can see some of the fractured ornamental marble laying on the ground with broken edges.

The Forum continues today as a sprawling ruin of architectural fragments and intermittent archeological excavations that come after 1000 years of renovation and reuse that is still revered by the world.