The Forum & Public Buildings
The Forum: Where Roman Life Happened
If you wanted to understand what Roman civic life meant, you would start at the forum. Every Roman city of any significance had one. The forum was at once a marketplace, a law court, a political meeting place, and a religious precinct. It was where magistrates announced decisions, where merchants haggled over prices, where orators addressed crowds, and where temples dominated the skyline. To enter the forum was to be reminded of everything that made a city Roman — order, law, commerce, and the goodwill of the gods. The forum of Pompeii is one of the best-preserved examples, and it repays close study as evidence for how these spaces were designed and used.
The Layout of the Forum at Pompeii
The forum at Pompeii was a large rectangular open space, roughly 38 metres wide and 157 metres long, oriented north to south. It was paved with limestone and surrounded on three sides — east, west and south — by a double-storey colonnade. This colonnade served a practical purpose: it gave shade in the Mediterranean heat and provided a sheltered space for business and conversation. At the north end rose the Temple of Jupiter on a high podium, its columns and steps visible from the length of the forum, emphasising both the importance of the chief Roman god and the god’s oversight of civic life.
Around the other sides of the forum stood a series of civic buildings. The basilica, located at the south-west corner, was the largest building in Pompeii. It measured roughly 24 by 55 metres and consisted of a tall central nave flanked by lower side aisles, separated by rows of brick columns. A raised platform at one end provided a dais from which judges could preside over legal proceedings. The basilica was not only a court but also a venue for commercial negotiations: major contracts were drawn up and witnessed under its roof. The building type would later be adopted by early Christians as a model for their churches, giving the basilica an extraordinary afterlife that the original Roman designers could not have imagined.
Around the Pompeii forum stood: the Temple of Jupiter (religious worship, north end), the basilica (law court and business, south-west), the comitium (voting and assembly), and the offices of magistrates. Each building served a distinct civic function, showing that the forum was the hub of all public life.
Temples in the City
Temples were not confined to the forum. They were scattered throughout Roman cities, dedicated to a wide variety of gods. In Pompeii, the Temple of Apollo stood on the western boundary of the forum precinct, enclosed within a colonnaded portico of 48 Ionic columns surrounding the temple on its podium. Apollo was associated with music, prophecy, light and healing, and his temple at Pompeii was one of the oldest in the city; the building was already several centuries old by the time of the eruption in AD 79. A bronze statue of Apollo — found in the precinct and now in Naples — showed the god in the archer pose (Apollo Saettante), his arm extended forward as if releasing an arrow. The statue’s high quality indicates the wealth and civic pride that Pompeians invested in their gods.
Elsewhere in Pompeii, the Temple of Isis stood near the large theatre in the south-east of the city. This was dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose cult spread through the Roman world from the first century BC onwards. The presence of an Isis temple in a medium-sized Italian town demonstrates how Roman cities absorbed religions from across the empire, and how the religious landscape of a Roman city was far more diverse than a simple list of the traditional Roman gods would suggest. The Isis temple was rebuilt after the earthquake of AD 62 and was decorated with vivid wall paintings depicting the myths of Isis and Osiris.
One of the most valuable types of evidence from Pompeii is its inscriptions. Hundreds of painted notices — called programmata — survive on the walls of the city, many of them near the forum. These include electoral notices endorsing candidates for the positions of aedile (who maintained public buildings and ran markets) and duumvir (the two chief magistrates of the town). One inscription preserved by Cooley and Cooley in their Pompeii: A Sourcebook reads: “The fruit sellers, together with Helvius Vestalis, urge you to elect Marcus Holconius Priscus as duumvir for the administration of justice.” This shows the involvement of tradespeople in civic politics and the competitive nature of local elections. The forum’s public face was covered in political advertising, turning the walls themselves into a kind of ancient noticeboard.
Markets and Commerce
The forum was not the only commercial space in a Roman city. Dedicated market buildings called macella provided a sheltered environment for buying and selling food and goods. In Pompeii, the macellum stood at the north-east corner of the forum. It consisted of an open courtyard with a central tholos — a small circular structure with a tiled roof supported on columns, possibly used for selling fish — surrounded by shops. Remains of fish scales and animal bones found here confirm its function. The macellum separated the messier business of food retail from the more formal civic activities at the centre of the forum.
Beyond the forum, the streets of Pompeii were lined with the premises of bakers, fullers (cloth cleaners), smiths, wine sellers and many other trades. The largest bakery discovered at Pompeii contained four stone mills (turned by donkeys or slaves), a wood-fired oven, and carbonised loaves of bread still on the shelves when the eruption came. These physical remains make it possible to reconstruct the working day of a Roman baker in extraordinary detail, and remind us that behind the grand civic architecture of the forum lay a city full of ordinary commercial and industrial activity.
The macellum (covered food market) at Pompeii was located immediately beside the forum, at the north-east corner. Its central tholos structure and surrounding shops show that even food trading in a Roman city was organised and architecturally formalised, not simply done from carts in the street.
The forum was not designed to be merely functional. Its buildings, statues and inscriptions worked together to communicate Roman civic ideology. The Temple of Jupiter at the head of the forum placed the chief god in symbolic authority over all the commerce, law and politics that took place beneath him. Statues of emperors and local benefactors reminded citizens of the hierarchy of power and the expectation of public generosity. When a wealthy citizen funded the restoration of a public building, an inscription recording the donation was prominently displayed, cementing both the donor’s reputation and the idea that civic prosperity was the responsibility of the wealthy. The inscription on the Tomb of Naevoleia Tyche at Pompeii, for example, records how a freedwoman funded the construction of a tomb and paid for public games, demonstrating that even those of modest legal status could gain honour through public benefaction. The forum was therefore a space where Roman values of order, piety, generosity and ambition were displayed, competed over, and reinforced.