The Lost Porticus Octavia in Rome and the Origins of the Imperial Fora

摘要

The porticus, a Roman architectural type adapted from the Greek stoa, was a building block of Republican and Imperial urbanism. An early and especially significant example of this type is the Porticus Octavia. It was built outside Rome's sacred core (the pomerium) by Gnaeus Octavius, leader of the victorious naval fleet at the battle of Pydna which ended the Third Macedonian War in 168 BCE. The earliest colonnaded portico to be built in Rome by a victorious commander as a monument to his triumph, the Porticus Octavia initiated the development of an architectural type whose evolving form and meaning both reflected and shaped Rome's transitions from the Middle Republic (264-133 BCE) to the height of the Empire in the second century CE. The building campaigns of this period transformed the city into a sequence of porticoed enclosures, stretching from the periphery to the Imperial fora of the urban center (Figure 1).