Pomerium

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Pomerium is the Latin abbreviation of post moerium (behind the wall). It was an ancient term for the boundary between the actual urban area and the surrounding area. Special regulations applied within, for example the ban on funerals. The establishment of this limit as the ritual end of the founding of a city goes back to the Etruscans .

The pomerium was not a wall, but a legally and above all religiously defined line marked by white stones ( cippi ), sometimes the border (e.g. with a plow) was drawn as a line in the ground, the rest by no means The entire area of ​​the city comprised: The Palatine was inside, the Aventine outside the Pomerium , the Hostilia Curia and the Comitia fountain in the Roman Forum , two particularly important places of the city's government, were inside, the temple of the goddess of war Bellona and the Mars Field ( Campus Martius ) outside. In the last two cases, this was due to the fact that everything connected with war normally had to stay outside the pomerium . Likewise, the Twelve Tables Act had already stipulated that no dead were allowed to be buried within the Pomerium . This was followed (with a few exceptions like Trajan ) until the High Imperial Era.

Rome

The Roman pomerium , the sacred border of the city of Rome, was of particular importance . From a legal point of view - more precisely: from a religious point of view - Rome existed only within the Pomerium , and everything outside was simply land that belonged to Rome. According to legend, the pomerium was established by King Servius Tullius , although it did not follow the line of the Servian walls , which was also ascribed to him , so that his participation in it is unlikely anyway.

The pomerium apparently remained until Sulla's dictatorship , around 80 BC. Chr., Unchanged. Some boundary stones from Emperor Claudius (AD 41 to 54), who had the pomerium expanded, were found in situ (ie at the original location), some away from their original position. These stones marked the limits and relative dimensions of the extent of the Pomerium under Claudius, as recorded by Tacitus and the Lex de imperio Vespasiani . Aulus Gellius (Noct. Att. 13,14,1–4) also reports on extensions by the emperors Augustus , Nero , and Trajan , for which there are no further literary or archaeological references. Extensions of the pomerium were evidently justified with extensions of the territory of the Roman people.

meaning

Religious and political constraints forbade crowned (foreign) rulers from entering the pomerium , with the result that embarrassment could arise during state visits; Cleopatra, for example , never entered the "actual" city when she visited Caesar in Rome.

Furthermore, the promagistrates and generals were forbidden to cross the border in their function, so that they automatically resigned their empire at the moment of crossing and entered the city as private individuals (mostly in toga ). As a result, a general who had come to celebrate a triumphal procession had to wait outside the pomerium for it to begin. Only in the context of a triumph was the general in arms and with his soldiers allowed to cross the pomerium in order to sacrifice to the gods. The Comitia Centuriata , who represented the Roman people in arms, had to meet on Campus Martius outside the pomerium (see above). The theater of Pompeius , in which Caesar was murdered, was also outside and contained a senate room ( curia Pompeia ), where the senate could meet individual magistrates who were forbidden for the reasons mentioned from breaking the pomerium without their imperium to forfeit, and which therefore could not be received in the Hostilia Curia .

During the imperial era, many of the old regulations were handled with increasing ease; the imperium of the emperors did not in fact expire when the pomerium was crossed , and armed soldiers were soon stationed in the city in the form of the Praetorian Guard . On the other hand, Septimius Severus demonstratively put on the toga before he crossed the pomerium for the first time as emperor and emperor in 193 . The Aurelian city wall, built around 275, enclosed a great deal of area that traditionally lay outside the pomerium , although it is unclear whether Emperor Aurelian might have had the Pomerium expanded for the last time on this occasion, as the Historia Augusta (Vit. Aurel. 21) suggests . With the Christianization of the empire in late antiquity (approx. 300 to 600), the pomerium soon lost all meaning, even if the poet Claudian mentions it again in 404 in connection with the triumphal procession of the emperor Flavius ​​Honorius .

literature