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While he was arguing for the ratification of this law, his behavior was observed to show in many respects unusual earnestness, and whereas other popular leaders had always hitherto, when speaking, turned their faces towards the senate house, and the place called the comitium, he, on the contrary, was the first man that in his harangue to the people turned himself the other way, towards them, and continued after that time to do so.
When they were opened the one which ought to have contained the body was empty, in the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven books; the one set of seven was written in Latin and treated of pontifical law, the other consisted of philosophical writings. They were examined, found to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and were accordingly burned in the Comitium.
The last descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a woman who had loved him.
This year it is recorded that the Comitium was covered, and that the Roman games were repeated once by the curule aediles, Quintus Metellus and Caius Servilius; and that the plebeian games were repeated twice by Quintus Mamilius and Marcus Caecilius Metellus, plebeian aediles.
The forum was twice the size of the present piazza, which occupies part of its site, and had twin temples at one end, with the comitium between them, of which one remains in good preservation, and a portion of the back part of the other.
As the afternoon advances, they summon the servant and bid him make enquiries on the Comitium, as to what has occurred in the Forum, who has spoken in favour of or against the new project of law, what tribes have voted for and what against it. At length they go themselves to the judgment-seat, just early enough not to bring the process down on their own neck.
As the irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy of Greek influence, had brought back from Sardinia with him the poet Ennius, and at about the time when the false books of Numa were burning in the Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin translation of the Sacred History of the Greek Euhemerus.
Lucrine oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which, accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of his father by poison. The Comitium had become an exchange, the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen.
Of the same family was that other C. Licinius who, when he was tribune of the people, 365 years after the expulsion of the Kings, first transferred the Sovereign function of law making from the Comitium to the Forum, thus as it were constituting that area the 'farm' of the entire people. The other whom I see come hither is Cn.
It did not always coincide with the line of the walls, but was extended from time to time. Foreign generals captured in war were only strangled. Altogether, the Roman indifference to suffering was very marked as compared with the humanity of the Greeks. It was at the northwest corner of the forum, northeast of the comitium. The patricians alone controlled or were taught in religious matters.
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