Roman Forum

Vesta's hearth, Saturn's store

The Forum is Rome's civic floor: the Temple of Vesta and the Vestals' fire, the Temple of Saturn and the state treasury, the Rostra, the Curia. Ovid's Fasti walks the calendar through these stones. Livy fills the same ground with kings and consuls. It is not a mythic otherworld. The myths (Tarpeia, the Sabine women, Saturn's hiding) are etiologies for buildings and rites already in use. Treat the Forum as ritual infrastructure the poems annotate.