The Origin and Development of Republican Forums

UNTIL LITTLE over a generation ago most discussion of Republican forums depended on two sites, the Forum Romanum and the forum at Pompeii. Yet in neither case had much extensive excavation of a scientific character been undertaken to determine the evolution of the site from its first use as a public centre until it finally crystallized in substantially the form in which it survives today, some time in the last decades of the first century B.C.1 This lack of evidence, however, did not discourage scholars from formulating theories of the origin and development of the forum. At first, attempts to reconstruct its early appearance took the form of fanciful reconstructions based largely on Vitruvius' general comments on the Italian forum and other more specific literary evidence,2 while more recently scholars have introduced comparative material derived from Hellenistic agoras in Greece and Asia Minor to elucidate certain features of the forum. But the basic weakness of all such studies still lay in the lack of clear archaeological evidence from a number of sites.3 As a result, all conclusions on the development of the early forum were largely speculative and seriously defective. Fortunately this weakness no longer obtains to quite the same degree, for during the last few decades an enormous amount of research has been conducted on a number of forums of Republican date in Italy. In the two long familiar sites of Rome and Pompeii the work of Gjerstad,4 Lugli,6 Maiuri,6 and others7 has shed important new light on their early history while excavations elsewhere in Italy have revealed equally valuable information from forums hitherto unknown. The most significant of these new sites are the four colonies of Alba