Introduction

Civic life is one of the features of classical antiquity which, since the Renaissance, the west has sought to emulate. Involvement in civic affairs is assumed by the writers of the literary texts which survive from classical antiquity, and the organization of the participatory civic community dominates the epigraphic record. Classical archaeology has, to a great extent, concentrated its excavations on city centers, and the agora of the Greek and the forum of the Roman town are among the best-known and best-understood ingredients of the human landscape of classical antiquity. After the iconic temples of the Parthenon and Pantheon, it is the Forum at Rome and the Agora at Athens that tourists most readily call to mind.

The familiarity of the modern visitor (real or virtual) with the civic centers of Greek and Roman towns and cities can easily obscure, however, the peculiarity of these places. Their modern equivalents readily separate buildings for national or local decision-making (town halls, parliament buildings) from buildings for the judiciary, and separate both from religious buildings and from commemorative monuments. However, the Greek and Roman civic center not only concentrated into the same space council chambers, law courts, temples, and commemorative monuments (statues of benefactors, monuments celebrating military victories), but also often made that space the center of its commercial transactions, petty as well as major. The ancient civic center was indeed a center: a place around which all aspects of community life revolved. That physical proximity of activities which we would regard as distinct and even disparate both reflected and enabled intensive links between politics and religion, public deliberation and private initiative.

Greek and Roman civic centers were neither identical to one another, nor were they unchanging. Various distinctive building types were developed (like the Roman

Basilica) or adapted (like the Greek stoa) for civic activities. Areas which had been left free to enable flexible use in Archaic and classical Greek communities came to be illed with permanent monuments of deined function. In Rome itself, the very size of the city, and the ambition of emperors, caused the Republican Forum to be multiply duplicated in the imperial period, its functions divided between different fora in the imperial capital, while Rome’s much more centralized political arrangements led to the development of a particular style of center, whose empire-wide replication was politically required. Even if there was no identikit model of what a Roman forum should look like, there were very clear expectations of what would be found there. Thus the coniguration of civic space varied considerably from town to town and over time.

All these developments, however, should not be seen either as merely the chance products of particular local decisions or as the result of some natural evolution. As urban spaces altered, so what was done and what could be done in those spaces altered also; conversely, as what was done in the spaces was transformed, so too was their coniguration. The archaeological challenge which this chapter addresses is not merely to trace the ever-changing history of these lively foci of human encounters but the history of changing ways of conceiving the ancient world.