Dismembering the Comitium to preserve the res publica: a Gramscian readingof the transformations in the north of the Roman Forum in the late 1st century B.C..

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the transformations that took place in the Comitium of the Roman Forum during the period consecrated as the last century of the Republic from a Gramscian perspective of politics and of memory in relation to space. To this end, we mobilized the concept of organism, formulated by Gramsci, to comprehend the development of the Forum’s spatiality – and especially of the Comitium, the most nuclear site of political relations during the Republic – in interaction with the class dynamics cultivated there. This historical process conceived a space designed to welcome conflict and resolve it, within a hierarchical structure that visually dictated the role of each class in this action, and indexed in the materiality past experiences of these conflicts/resolutions that forged a very particular collective memory of that place. However, the accumulation of contradictions resulting from the mismatch between the new material conditions of the nascent empire and the old structure of the res publica placed the Comitium in an impasse of dialectical nature, in which the space came to be instrumentalized in favor of the escalation of the political violence that threatened the res publica, at the same time as it could not be abandoned under the risk of undermining the organic republican bases gestated there. Resorting to the reconstitutions proposed by the Atlas of Ancient Rome (2017), organized by Carandini and Carafa, we seek to demonstrate that the emptying of the Comitium was accompanied by the reconstruction of its structures elsewhere in the Forum, both to preserve the res publica as a materially coproduced memorial process and to disconnect the direct interaction of the classes, placing between them the mediating figure of those who would later be seen as emperors.