We, “laudatores temporis acti,” are in the habit of seeing things rather idealized whenever we speak or think of bygone times, and we like to picture the Forum of Republican Rome as an august and mighty place, in which the destinies of the world were discussed and decided upon, where state trials were conducted, slaves tortured, and the bodies of state offenders, who had undergone capital punishment, exposed on the Gemonian steps, until the executioner would hook them to a chain and drag them across the pavement to one of the openings of the Cloaca Maxima. The two uses are so mixed up that it is difficult to say which was the principal one.
They were used not only for the administration of justice but also for exchanges, or places of meeting for merchants and men of business. The basilicæ are identified generally with our law-courts, but such was not their exclusive purpose. The institution became at once so popular that, before the end of the Republic, five more “regal halls” were built for the accommodation of the habitués of the Forum: the Sempronia in 169 on the line of the Tabernæ Veteres, the Opimia in 121 by the temple of Concord, the Fulvia in 179 by the Argiletum, the Æmilia in 54, and the Julia in 46 (rebuilt and enlarged by Augustus in the year 12). Porcius Cato the elder, under the name of Basilica Porcia. 27, 3, that the flames leapt directly from the public square upon the private houses around “because they were not screened, as they are now, by a belt of basilicæ.” In fact, the first edifice of this kind was erected only in 184 by M. under the consulship of Marcellus and Lævinus, Livy says, xxvi. SPEAKING of the fire which swept over the Forum in the year 210 B.C.
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