QVOI HOI QVI · HV[nc locum violaverit,
SAKROS ⁝ ESE manibus] SACER · SIT;
ED SORD ET SORD[ibus qui haec contaminet]
OKAFHAS OCA, FAS
RECEI ⁝ IO REGI, IV[dicio ei habito
EVAM adimere rem pr]EVAM ·
QVOS ⁝ RE QVOS · RE[x per hanc senserit
M ⁝ KALATO vehi via]M, KALATOREM,
REM HAB HAB[enis eorum, iubeto
TOD ⁝ IOVXMEN ilic]O · IVMENTA
TA ⁝ KAPAI ⁝ DOTAV · CAPIAT, VT · A V[ia statiM
M ⁝ I ⁝ TER PE · ITER PE[r aversum locum
M ⁝ QVOI HA pergant puru]M · QVI HA[c]
VELOD ⁝ NEQV VOLET, NEQV[e per purum
IOD ⁝ IOVESTOD perget, iudic]IO, IVSTA
LOIVQVIOD QO ⁝ LICITATIONE, CO[ndemnetur].
“Whosoever defiles this spot, let him be forfeit to the shades of the underworld, and whosoever contaminates this spot with refuse, it is right for the king, after due process of law, to confiscate his property. Whatsoever persons the king shall discover passing on this road, let him order the summoner to seize their draft animals by the reins, that they may turn out of the road forthwith and take the proper detour. Whosoever persists in traveling this road, and fails to take the proper detour, by due process of law let him be sold to the highest bidder.”
Obviously the inscription thus restored and interpreted, marks a spot which is taboo, its ill-omened nature being further emphasized by the later black marble pavement, which was fenced off by a balustrade of thin white marble slabs set on edge. Beside the stele is a U-shaped shrine or altar,[B] on a higher level and therefore of a later date than the inscription. Archaeology provides no clue to the purpose of this structure, but learned Romans believed it marked the tomb of Romulus, their first king. This would be a sacred spot indeed, not to be profaned by the feet of men or animals. From one edge of the shrine run the remains of a semicircular platform with steps (Figs. [3.6] and [3.7]), also later in date than the inscription. The platform was the Rostra, so called because of its decoration, after 338 B.C., with the bronze rostra or ramming-beaks of captured enemy war-galleys. The Rostra was in historical times the speakers’ platform; from it in one of its phases resounded the sonorous oratory of Cicero. But it was also the spot from which traditionally funeral orations were delivered, while modern men wearing, according to Roman custom, the death-masks of their ancestors sat behind the orators in curule chairs on the platform. To the logical Roman mind a platform beside the tomb of the first king would seem the appropriate place for funeral speeches.
[B] Professor Ferdinando Castagnoli and Dr. Lucos Cozza reported in 1959 the discovery, at Pratica di Mare, ancient Lavinium, sixteen miles south of Rome, of a series of thirteen such altars, together with an inscription on bronze, with lettering like that of the lapis niger stele. They date their finds in the late sixth century B.C.
Since American excavations at Rome’s Latin colony of Cosa in 1953 identified as a Comitium a circular, step-surrounded space in front of the local Senate House, it appears that the semicircular steps leading to the platform in Rome were Rome’s Comitium, and new excavations to prove or disprove this were started in 1957.
Fig. 3.7 Rome, Forum. Rostra, fifth phase (Sullan).
(E. Gjerstad, op. cit., p. 143)
Careful equations between the fifteen levels in the Comitium and the twenty-nine levels near the equestrian statue of Domitian prove the Comitium a monument of the Roman Republic: the first phase coincides with the Republic’s beginning, and its last with Caesar and Augustus, in the late first century B.C., when the Republic ends. Thereafter freedom of speech, and an arena for it, were but a memory. But the first Rostra rose where it did because the founders of the Roman Republic associated it with the first of Rome’s kings.
The lapis niger inscription, which refers twice to a king, rests on a base which cannot be older than the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C. (for the base is on the same level as the second of the Comitium pavements, laid over traces of a major fire, and the Gauls set Rome on fire). But an inscription of course is a movable monument, and the present location of the stele may not be where it was originally set up. Furthermore, letter styles so archaic are probably older than 390 B.C.: the alternatives, then, are either that the stele, of venerable antiquity, was reset, on a new platform, as a part of rearrangements after the fire, or that it is a deliberately archaizing copy of a much older original. The theory that the king (rex) referred to is not the temporal monarch, but the rex sacrorum, a Republican priest of later Republican times who inherited the king’s religious functions, is virtually ruled out by the letter-styles.