The Rostra: Focal point of crowd behaviour during the transformation of the Roman Republic to the Principate.
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2015-06-15
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en
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In the last hundred years of the dying Republic, many important political moments took place near or on the Rostra at the Forum Romanum. Great men such as Tiberius Gracchus, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar, Clodius and Milo used this speaker’s platform as a place to express their political believes. It was the common place from which people were addressed. This mainly during the many times the Roman citizens needed to vote or participated in hearing a contio of an important political figure. In the last two decades of the crumbling Republic we can see that the Rostra also became a strategic place on the Forum during the many political clashes between different mobs of political figures. It was in these decades and during the dictatorship of Caesar that the Rostra was directed to another place near the west end on the Forum, away from the senate house. Once Octavian came to power, this monument underwent another transformation and was renamed the Rostra Augusti.
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Faculteit der Letteren