#pomerium

In the Roman pagan tradition, the founding of a city played a role greater than mere agriculture or the cold marking out of boundaries. It was a mysterious act in which a person, by lifting the plow, consecrated the land. Rome was born out of the liturgy of the boundary: first a circle was marked out, then a center was established, and only then did the possibility arise for a life that would be orderly, lawful, and visible to the gods. Lucius Mestrius Plutarch relates: when the city was founded, Etruscan experts in sacred rites were invited, who taught Romulus how to establish the city as a religious rite. First, a circular ditch called mundus—a name also given to the sky—was dug near the Comitia; into it were placed the first fruits and soil brought by each of the future citizens from their homelands. This spot was designated as the center, and they laid out the city around it.

The city of Rome begins with sacrifice and remembrance. In the Roman pagan tradition, the earth must be reconciled with humanity through ritual, sanctified by an offering, marked with a sign, and made habitable through religion. Lucius Mestrius Plutarch states: the first fruits of what was recognized as good and necessary were laid upon the mundus. Thus Rome acquired its soul, creating a space in which the community could live as a unified whole.

Romulus, having fitted the plow with a bronze plowshare, harnessed a bull and a cow to it and plowed a deep furrow around the future city walls. Those who followed him were to turn the clods of earth inward, toward the city, so that none of them would fall outward. Marcus Terentius Varro states: this rite is of Etruscan origin, for cities in Latium were often founded in this manner “on a sacred day,” with a team of a bull and a cow. Nothing is cast outward; everything sacred is returned inward; the city is assembled, as if a vessel filled and sealed with a blessing.

This furrow serves as a religious boundary. Marcus Terentius Varro states: in this way the pomerium was defined, and its stone markers served as the boundary of the city’s auspices. Lucius Mestrius Plutarch states: the line was called pomerium, since this word means “behind the wall” or “beyond the wall,” and in places where gates were to be erected, the plow was lifted, leaving a free opening in the line for them. In the Roman pagan tradition, the sacred boundary must be intact; it separates the city. Gates are an exception, for life must be able to enter and exit. The city takes on the form of a sacred distinction: within, its own order; outside, a different space that is bounded.

The entire ritual expresses the fundamental truth that any community exists only when it acknowledges the supreme law of the city above itself. Publius Ovidius Naso recounts: before plowing the furrow, Romulus offers a sacrificial pledge to the earth, erects an altar, kindles a new fire, and then calls upon Jupiter, Mars, and Vesta to support the city’s foundation. The city is built as an object of the deities’ care, built under their auspicia. Publius Ovidius Naso recounts: the plow was drawn by a white cow and a snow-white bull, on a day associated with the Paralia, which the Romans later celebrated as the birthday of Rome. The city is born of purity, ritual, and the invocation of the heavenly canopy.

The boundary of the city of Rome was a religious demarcation, within which space became a moral reality. Marcus Terentius Varro states: pomerium marked the limit of the city’s auspices; on one side of the line, the city already stood in a special relationship with the deities; on the other, it did not yet. In the Roman pagan tradition, the city boundary ushered citizens into a way of life marked by responsibility. Not all space is the same; there is consecrated space and unconsecrated space, there is order and disorder, there is the city as a form of human harmony with the heavenly law, and there is the external world, which must yet be brought into proper measure. The founding of Rome is a sacred-anthropological act: a person becomes different because they enter into a consecrated order.

In Roman tradition, the city’s first boundary is linked to the tragedy of Remus. Lucius Mestrius Plutarch recounts: Romulus, upon seeing a furrow in the earth, began to mock his brother’s work and even leaped over it, for which he was killed. Publius Ovidius Naso recounts: the brother who crossed the line perished, and Romulus declared that this would be the fate of anyone who dared to cross its walls. The city’s boundary is so sacred that violating it is not a mere technical infraction but a sacrilegious crime. Sacred space tolerates no mockery, for mockery is the beginning of the disintegration of form.

But the Roman rite was not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It asserts that the world is habitable only when there is a boundary, and a boundary is effective only when it is recognized as sacred. The Roman wall is the external form of internal harmony, a visible sign that the community is gathered together. That is why the plow serves as an instrument of consecration: it furrows the space for citizenship. That is why clods of earth are turned inward: everything that rises from the depths must be brought into the heart of the city so that urban order may emerge as a sense of unity. Rome conceives of itself in advance as a sacred form of the human multitude, where place and law, earth and worship, memory and power are united in a single act of foundation.

An immense stone that defined the sacred city limits of ancient Rome almost 2,000 years ago has been unearthed by construction workers in the historic center of the city.

The so-called pomerial stone or "cippus," is more than 6 feet (nearly 2 meters) tall and made of fine limestone called travertine. Workers discovered it in June while installing new sewers in the plaza around the recently-restored Mausoleum of Augustus, which opened as a museum earlier this year.

Roman Calendar - 3 June, Festival of Bellona

Roman goddess of war, whose temple was erected on the 3rd of June in 296 BCE by consul Appius Claudius. During Republican era the temple, that located outside Servian wall, was  an especially important place in Roman politics. Victorious generals waiting for their triumph came here, foreign envoys who were not allowed within pomerium were received here by the Senate and wars against foreign nations were declared here. Part of this area was regarded as a foreign territory and a special “column bellica” stood there. During the declaration ceremony a spear was hurled towards this column. And as we can see nowadays there is not much left of the temple...just a little rubble and walls near the columns of temple of Apollo.

The Theatre of Pompey was the first permanent theatrum lapideum in Rome, but not in Italy. During the Samnite period, a large concrete and stone theatre had been built in Pompeii and a second smaller odeon was built after the Roman annexation. In the capitol, however, permanent theatres were proscribed, due to the republic's long-standing doubts about their morality.

In 155 BC, acting on the motion of the consul Scipio Nasica, the senate ordered the demolition of a stone theatre nearing construction in Rome. Velleius Paterculus ascribes this decision to “the exceptional austerity (severitas) of character of the populace" at that time. A new law was also passed, banning seating in temporary wooden theatres erected for religious festivals within the pomerium. According to Valerius Maximus, the new law aimed to protect Roman virilitas, which was fortified by standing and would be diminished by sitting down. This notion was still current two centuries later, when Tacitus condemned the idea of sitting during a theatrical performance as another deplorable Greek habit that would corrupt the morals of Roman youth.

Pompey urgently needed to complete the theatre quickly in order to benefit from the anticipated public support it would engender before he stood for consul again. The senatorial ban was the only real impediment. Tertullian states that Pompey added the Temple of Venus Victrix to the theatre in order to define the building as a temple with a cavea-shaped staircase, and thus skirt the ban on permanent theatres. This semantic ploy allowed the senate to save face while acquiescing to an complete reversal of a long-held policy and avoid a direct confrontation with Pompey. Following the official cues, most Roman writers referred to he building as a temple. The label on the Severan forma urbis, however, emphatically reads THEATRUM.

The seating ban was neutralized by locating Pompeys’s theatre on the Campus Martius, which lay outside the pomerium. There were probably more compelling reasons than respect for the seating ban that motivated Pompey’s choice of locations. Building within the pomerium imposed restrictions: provincial promagistrates and generals lost their imperium, soldiers were immediately demobilized and returned to civilian status, and weapons prohibited in the pomerium. On the other hand, the curia pompeia’s location allowed senators who were proscribed from entering the pomerium to participate in senate business. As a general and the provincial governor who had attained his position of power by military force, Pompey was unlikely to have built a theatre in a zone that would have automatically neutralized his sources of power should he enter it. Thus one can assume that Pompey always intended the build outside the pomerium and that the only real obstacle his project faced was the ban on permanence.

During the senate debate in 155, Scipio Nasaica cited a non-moral reason for banning theatres. Large assemblies of citizens could easily be incited to acts of seditious. This anxiety proved prescient: Pompey had planned to use his theatre as a venue for addressing the public directly, without senatorial interference. Fear the this type of subversive use of a theatre had caused the senate to make the drastic decision to destroy the theatre in 155 BC. There was no thought of resisting Pompey 100 years later.

Pompey’s concluded his architectural campaign to reduce the senate by building the curia in the porticus. Having the senate meet in a building he owned sent a clear message to the Roman world that a new political order was coming into being. The face of the new order, however was neither Pompey, who was assassinated in 48 BC nor his rival, Julius Caesar, who met the same fate in the curia pompeia four years later.

The Theatre of Pompey was considered the principal theatre in Rome and meticulously maintained for centuries. Recognizing its propagandistic value, Augustus and Tiberius carried out extensive renovations. The emperors entertained foreign dignitaries there, who were duly awestruck. Pliny the Elder notes that Nero “covered the theatre of Pompey with gold for one day’s purpose, when he was to display it to Tiridates King of Armenia.”

The theatre outlived the western empire. The Romanized Goths renovated the structure thoroughly for the last time in the early 6th century. As the city’s population declined, it fell into disrepair. Like the Colosseum, it served as a quarry in the dark ages, but enough of the concrete substructure survived for the site to be identified as a theatre in the 12thc. pilgrim's guide to Rome. Much of the marble revetment facing the Cancelleria was taken from the site in the 15th century.

Knapp daneben