The Comitium (Italian: Comizio) was the original open-air public meeting space of Ancient Rome, and had major religious and prophetic significance.

[2] The Comitium location at the northwest corner of the Roman Forum was later[vague] lost in the city's growth and development, but was rediscovered and excavated by archaeologists at the turn of the twentieth century.

[citation needed] Some of Rome's earliest monuments, including the speaking platform known as the Rostra, the Columna Maenia, the Graecostasis, and the Tabula Valeria, were part of or associated with the Comitium.

[5] As part of the forum, where temples, commerce, judicial, and city buildings were located, the Comitium was the center of political activity.

[6] The earliest use of the Comitium as a political assembly area, along with the beginnings of Rome itself, is blurred between legend and archaeological discovery.

Both were closely related to the God Vulcan, played a role in organizing the comitia, and were depicted as founders of Rome.

[12] In his 1912 study, Francis Macdonald Cornford explains that the Roman Comitium was inaugurated as a temple, shaped like a square and oriented to the four corners of the sky.

But Plutarch describes a circular site traced by Romulus at the founding of Rome using divination, after he had sent for men of Etruria who taught him the necessary sacred rites.

A circular trench was cut into the ground and votive offerings and samples of earth from each man's native lands were placed within.

[14] The senate council probably began meeting within an old Etruscan temple on the north side of the Comitium identified as belonging to the Curia Hostilia from the seventh century BC.

It is believed that the tradition of speaking to crowds from an elevated platform for political purposes may have begun as early as the first king of Rome.

On January 2, 52 BC, Clodius died at the hands of the opponents near Bovillae, setting off a riot as his followers carried the body to the Comitium and cremated it on a funeral pyre improvised with the senatorial seating from the Curia Hostilia.

A tree planted near the Temple of Saturn was removed when its root system began undermining a valued statue.

Verrius Flaccus, Pliny and Tacitus state that a third tree stood in the Comitium near the statue of the augur Attus Navia who, legend says, split a wet stone with a razor in the Comitium and transferred the Ficus ruminalis or its sacred importance from the base of the Palatine hill to the assembly area.

In 338 BC, Consul Gaius Maenius erected a column that some historians believe to be from the atrium of his home which was sold to Cato and Flaccus[which?]

[27] Pliny states that the accensus consulum announced the supremam horam, the time when the sun had moved downward from the Columna Maenia to the Carcer.

In 263 BC, Consul Manius Valerius Maximus Corvinus Messalla placed a painting of his victory over Heiro and the Carthaginians in Sicily, on the side of the ancient curia.

Samuel Ball Platner states in his book, The topography and monuments of ancient Rome (1911): A more probable explanation is that the Tabula Valeria was an inscription in bronze or marble, containing the provisions of the famous Valerio-Horatian laws concerning the office of tribune.

It began with the first curia for the senate in 600 BC and a shrine that was added 20 years later[32] where, it is said, miraculous events occurred of milk and blood raining down from the heavens.

In them,[citation needed] he attacked Mark Antony as the greatest threat to republican government after Caesar's death.

[38] He wrote of the libertas or freedoms that the citizens of Rome had forfeited under Julius Caesar and violently denounced Mark Antony.

Formal archaeology in Rome only began in the 19th century with the foundation of the Instituto di Corrispondenza and the work of Edward Gerhard.

[41] A number of German archaeologists joined Gerhard to map out the city of Rome, the forum and the Comitium being of great importance as the topographical center.

[42] He was joined by Chevalier Bunsen, Earnst Platner, Wilhelm Röstell, B. G. Niebuhr and Friedrich Hoffmann in writing the book Beschreibung der Stadt Rom in 1817, which was published in 1832.

In his book, A dictionary of Greek and Roman geography published in 1854, Sir William Smith remarked: The German views respecting the Capitol, the Comitium, and several other important points, have found many followers; but to the writer of the present article they appear for the most part not to be proved; and he has endeavoured in the preceding pages to give his reasons for that opinion.No major excavation of the Comitium was undertaken until the turn of the century.

[46] In the American Journal of Archaeology, second series, volume 4 1900, a letter from Samuel Ball Platner was published dated July 1, 1899.

The Comitium is paved with blocks of travertine and extends to and around the lapis niger, which, although on the same level, is protected on at least two sides by a sort of curb.

Part of the Comitium had evidently been built over at a late period in something the same way as the Basilica Aemilia.In 1953 an American excavation at the Roman Latin colony of Cosa, 138 kilometres (86 mi) northwest of Rome, along the coast of Italy, in modern Tuscany, identified the remains of the city's Comitium and found rounded amphitheatre steps directly in front of the local senate house.

30 BC) contains the following statement: In Sparta, paintings have been taken out of certain walls by cutting through the bricks, then have been placed in wooden frames, and so brought to the Comitium to adorn the aedileship of [C. Visellius] Varro and [C. Licinius] Murena.

London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., LTD.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Platner, Bunsen, Gerhard, Röstell, Urlichs, Niebuhr, Hoffmann, Ernest Zacharias, Christian Karl Josias, Eduard, Wilhelm, Ludwig von, Barthold Georg, Friedrich (January 1, 1832).