Main description (English)

A seven-letter inscription found on a column-drum from the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus and hypothetically dated to ca. 500 AD has, since its publication in 1996 by Roberto Meneghini and Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, been considered to show that the temple was largely in ruins and being dismantled for scrap by that date. Recently, however, the date of the inscription has been questioned, opening the possibility that the accepted chronology for the ruin of the Temple of Mars (and, by extension, of the Forum of Augustus as a whole) may be less certain than is generally assumed. Further, the inscription is only one element in a much larger constellation of evidence relevant to the early medieval phases of the Forum of Augustus, and more archaeological data have indeed emerged since Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani first made the inscribed column-drum central to their case for dating the destruction of the temple to the years around 500. The bulk of the available historical and archaeological evidence, I suggest, indicates that the Temple of Mars and its surroundings remained substantially intact for considerably longer, until at least the mid-9th century, when clear signs of widespread destruction and spoliation emerge. This chronology for the final destruction of the Temple of Mars would bring the early medieval trajectory of the Forum of Augustus into closer alignment with that of its neighboring forum-complexes (Caesar, Trajan, Nerva), which also remained largely intact into the 9th century, and might thus also prompt us to reconsider how and why this sector of Rome’s monumental center was de-monumentalized and ‘privatized’