Annotated view of the approximate location of the Curia of Pompey's Theatre in the Lago di Torre Argentina, Rome
On a visit to Rome in September, 2018, I passed several times by the Lago di Torre Argentina: a city-block-sized excavation ordered by Mussolini in 1926. It contains the remains of four temples dating from the 4th to the 1st century BCE that backed-onto the Theater of Pompey.
Pompey ('The Great'), returned to Rome in 61 BCE from an outstanding series of military conquests in Asia only to face the suspicion and political opposition of the "Optimates" (nobles) in the Republican Senate. They shut him out of the top public office and dithered over the the land-settlements he needed to reward his former troops. The opposition of the noble families drove Pompey over the next few years into an alliance with his former political opponent Julius Caesar and with Rome's wealthiest man, the ever-ambitious Marcus Crassus.
Meanwhile, Pompey built a massive and beautiful amphitheater joined to a large 'cloistered' garden (a 'porticus') as a gift to Rome, and to remind everyone of his military victories in the East (see these models and images of the theatre). It was just the sort of gesture that Emperors in the following centuries would use to display their power and wealth. At the time when Pompey proposed it, there was a ban on massive civic construction inside the City, so he built it just outside the walls. To give his theatre a 'sacred' character the theatre/porticus complex incorporated both a new temple to "Victorious Venus", perched high at the back of the theatre's hemicycle, and some older temples located on a street that abutted the far end of the porticus.
At this same end of the porticus — accessible from the road where the old temples were located — Pompey constructed a "Curia"; a tall, rectangular building suitable for meetings, specifically, meetings of the Roman Senate. It turned out that the Senate did need to use this Curia after their own meeting house in the Roman Forum was burned down by an angry crowd in 58 BCE. So it was at this spot (above), on 15 March, 44 BCE (the Ides of March) — five years after Pompey had been killed fleeing from military defeat by Caesar — that the plotters stabbed an unwary Julius Caesar to death, at the foot of a huge statue of Pompey that stood on one side of the room.
Alas, all of the wonderful buildings that formed part of Pompey's theatre have long-since disappeared. But the ancient temples that adjoined them survived, more or less, to be rediscovered after Mussolini's engineers — preparing the way for part of the Dictators monumental reconstructions in Rome — dug them up in 1926 and (reluctantly) left them in place.
I have annotated the image of the Lago di Torre Argentina to indicate the approximate location of the Curia --- destroyed by fire in ancient times and by demolition in the centuries since . Here's a wider view of the area.
I have annotated the image of the Lago di Torre Argentina to indicate the approximate location of the Curia --- destroyed by fire in ancient times and by demolition in the centuries since . Here's a wider view of the area.
