Roman PantheonSacred Site
Roman Forum
The center of Roman public life, containing major temples including the Temple of Vesta and Temple of Saturn.
About 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.
On the map
Roman Forum among other places of the Roman Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Ovid, Fasti 6
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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