Passing down the street on our right, a left half-turn will bring us to the old entrance of
THE TABULARIUM.
(Public Record Office.)
Open every day from 10 till 3; fee, half lira.
We have now to speak of a building, the vast remains of which impress us with the grandeur of the later republic. In the year of the city 675 (B.C. 78) a building was erected against the Capitoline Hill, and facing the Forum, to contain the public records, which were engraved on bronze plates. Before that time they had been kept in various temples.
"A decree was made by the senate that the records should be kept in the Temple of Ceres with the public ædiles"—A.U.C. 306—(Livy, iii. 55).
"Treaties (such as between Pyrrhus and Rome) were then usual, and the ædiles had them in their keeping in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, engraved on plates of copper" (Polybius, iii.).
That this was the usual way of keeping the records we learn from the same author, who saw and copied those which "Hannibal left at Lacinium—engraved tablets or records on copper of the events of his stay in Italy."
"The censors went up immediately to the Temple of Liberty, where they sealed the books of the public records, shut up the office, and dismissed the clerks, affirming that they should do no kind of public business until the judgment of the people was passed on them"—A.U.C. 686—(Livy, xliii. 16).
We have no mention in classic history as to when this building was erected, but fortunately an inscription has been handed down to us, in which Quintus Lutatius Catulus (who dedicated the temple to Jupiter Capitolinus) is expressly named, not only as the founder of the Tabularium, but also of the substructions, the most difficult portion of the whole, and which claim our fullest admiration.