Cicero - Anthony Everitt [32]
Plan of the Roman Forum, Cicero’s workplace as a lawyer, as it was from the mid-second to the mid-first century BC. The positioning of buildings indicated by broken lines is different from that of the present day. Trials were held in the open air with the presiding judge on a platform and jury seated nearby.
Speculative plan of the Senate House. The presiding Consul chaired meetings from the dais opposite the main door. Former Consuls sat in the front rows.
A reconstruction of the main features of the Roman Forum in Cicero’s day. It was crowded with statues, an altar here and a shrine there, historical paintings near the Assembly Ground, a stone lawyers’ platform, and the impedimenta of temporary stands and notice boards.
It was not only the Forum that was sacred but also most of the activities that were conducted there. Political and indeed private life was governed by a web of religious rules and procedures, predictions and omens. Religion was not so much a set of personal beliefs as precisely laid-down ways of living in harmony with the expectations of the gods. In fact, by the end of the Republic educated men believed less in the literal truth of the apparatus of religious doctrine than in a vaguer notion of the validity of tradition.
The basic proposition was that no human enterprise could be undertaken without divine sanction. This applied to domestic households as well as to state affairs. The gods worked through natural phenomena to reveal their wishes or intentions. Signs included the flight or songs of birds, the activities of animals and thunder and lightning. It was also possible to attach significance to words or phrases casually spoken.
The College of Augurs had the sole right of interpreting the auspices. (Like the College of Pontiffs, it comprised leading personalities of the Roman establishment and Cicero became a member towards the end of his career.) An Augur would mark off a rectangular space, called a templum (the origin of the word “temple”), from which he would conduct his observations. In some places permanent templa were identified, one of which was on the citadel on the Capitol Hill. Signs from the east (usually on the Augur’s left) were held to be favorable and those from the west unfavorable. In addition, Etruscan soothsayers, or haruspices, were often called to Rome to explain apparently supernatural events and gave judgments based on an examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals.
Sanctity permeated the annual calendar, which controlled political and legal processes according to a religious framework. The calendar was divided into twelve columns and each day was marked with an F or an N, depending on whether it was fastus or nefastus—lucky or unlucky, lawful or unlawful. On the former days, business could be conducted, the law courts could sit, farmers could begin plowing or harvesting crops. Especially fortunate days were marked with a C (for comitialis), which meant that popular assemblies could meet. Some days were thought to be so unlucky that it was not even permissible to hold religious ceremonies: these included the days following the Kalends (first of a month), Nones (the ninth day before the Ides), the Ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month) and the anniversaries