The Republic

In 169 BCE, the Roman people elected as one of the two censors Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a distinguished member of the senatorial order, consul, conqueror of the Celtiberians in Spain and of the Sardi in Sardinia and, for these conquests, recipient of two triumphs. In that year, motivated by growth of the empire and the increase in the number of Roman citizens, the quaestors gave the censors half the state revenues for needed public improvements, and Sempronius used his money to build a basilica, on the south side of the Forum. The project also incidentally must have provided a rather handsome profit for Gracchus’ father-in-law, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage. Africanus’ house stood on a block bounded on the north by the Roman Forum, on the east by the Vicus Iugarius (General Plan.IV), on the west by the Vicus Tuscus (Gatefold 1), and to the south by a street whose name has not survived. Purchasing the house and the other the buildings on the block, the “old shops” on the Forum dating from 209 BCE, the butcher’s stalls close by, and “the shops adjacent,” Gracchus assembled a spacious plot for the new basilica he built between the Temples of Castor and Saturn.

Occupying the site of later Basilica Julia, Gracchus’ building, the Basilica Sempronia, named for Gracchus’ clan, lasted just over a century before Caesar replaced it with a new (and probably strikingly original) building. Dedicated in 46 BCE, it survived for only a few decades. In his autobiography, Augustus notes that Caesar’s basilica had burned and that, in 12, he had replaced it with a new structure named for his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius (Figs. 0.3, 1.4–5, 14.1–17, 21.21–26). For the next century, the new building was known as “the Porticus and Basilica of Gaius and Lucius” or the Porticus Julia (infra, p. 256).