Читать книгу Rambles in Rome - S. Russell Forbes - Страница 89

The original Rostra was first called the Suggestum or Pulpit, but in A.U.C. 416 the name was changed into Rostra (beaks).

"The prows from the six ships captured from the Antiates were ordered to be placed as decorations on the Suggestum in the Forum, which was hence called Rostra" (Livy, viii. 14; Florus, i. 11; Pliny, xxiv. 11).

"The Rostra stood on the Comitium in front of the Curia" (Varro), from which the orators harangued the people assembled in the open air; and it was evidently only a temporary structure, probably of wood, and not a building like the other two Rostra. It stood upon a circular basement, but the top was square; on the outside were fixed the brazen beaks which belonged to the captive vessels of the Antiates. About the Rostra were placed the statues of the ambassadors put to death by Lar Tolumnius, king of Veii, and others who suffered on similar occasions; the three Fates, Horatius Cocles, Camillus, Hercules, the father of Vitellius, and others who deserved well of their country.

"When Caius Gracchus brought in his bill to regulate the courts of judicature, there was one thing very remarkable: whereas the orators before him, in all addresses to the people, stood with their faces towards the Senate House and the Comitium, he then, for the first time, turned the other way—that is to say, towards the Forum—and continued to speak in that position ever after. By this he intimated that the people ought to be addressed, and not the senate" (Plutarch).

Suetonius tells us that on the death of Augustus "two funeral orations were pronounced in his praise, one before the Temple of Julius by Tiberius, and the other before the Rostra, under the old shops, by Drusus." Some read this passage, "from the old Rostra;" but our rendering is more correct, though in either case he is referring to the Rostra that stood in front of the Curia.

The first time Cicero spoke from the Rostra was when he delivered his oration for the Manilian Law, A.U.C. 687, when in his forty-first year. After his assassination, the head and hands of Cicero were placed upon this Rostra, from where he had so often addressed the Romans—"that very Rostra, which he had made his own; nor was there a less concourse to see him there than had formerly been to hear him" (Florus, iv. 6). "That everybody might see them in the very place where he had formerly harangued with so much vehemence" (Dion Cassius, "Augustus").

THE ROSTRA.

The form of this Rostra is preserved to us, being represented on a coin.

There is an important passage in Pliny which shows the exact site of the Rostra, as it was used to mark the hour of noon. When the summoner caught sight of the sun passing the edge of the Rostra, he declared the hour of noon. A man standing on this site will roughly represent the Rostra, and as the gun fires at mid-day the edge of the sun can be seen coming past him by a person standing by the pedestal at the bank in front of S. Adriano, who will roughly represent the summoner. We have tried this numerous times with our audience, and it is the only spot on the Forum where it answers.

"The accensus of the consuls proclaiming mid-day aloud, as soon as, from the Senate House, he caught sight of the sun between the Rostra and the Græcostasis: he also proclaimed the last hour, when the sun had gone off the Mænian Column to the Prison" (Pliny, vii. 60).