Curia of Pompey

Listen first. Engines idle at the traffic lights. A tram bell rings somewhere behind you. Below the railing, a few metres beneath the modern street, lies a sunken square of pale stone, broken columns and patchy grass. A cat stretches out on a fallen block of marble and closes its eyes. This is Largo di Torre Argentina, in the heart of Rome. Somewhere in this pit of ruins stood the hall where Julius Caesar was killed.

The building was called the Curia of Pompey. A curia was a meeting hall, a place where the Roman Senate could gather to debate and vote. This one was not an independent building. It was part of a much larger complex built by Pompey the Great, one of the most powerful generals of the late Roman Republic. That complex was dedicated in 55 BCE, and its centrepiece was a theatre.

That theatre was a political statement. Before Pompey, Rome had no permanent stone theatre. Conservative senators distrusted them and thought they encouraged idleness. Pompey found a clever way around the objection. He placed a temple to Venus at the top of the seating, so the steps could be presented as a grand approach to a shrine. Behind the stage, a long garden with covered walkways stretched east. At the far end of those walkways stood the curia.

So picture the scene in early 44 BCE. The usual Senate house in the Forum was being rebuilt, so senators met here instead. The hall held a statue of Pompey himself. By then Pompey was already dead. He had fought a civil war against Caesar, lost, and been murdered in Egypt. Caesar had won, and he now held the title of dictator. Many senators feared he would never give that power back.

On the Ides of March, the fifteenth of the month, Caesar came to this hall. A group of senators surrounded him, among them Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius. They drew daggers and stabbed him many times. The Roman biographer Suetonius, writing more than a century later, says Caesar fell at the base of Pompey's statue. It is a hard image to forget. The dictator died at the feet of the rival he had defeated.

Here is the first surprise. The famous last words, "Et tu, Brute?", do not come from any ancient source. They are William Shakespeare's line, written about sixteen centuries later. Suetonius reports two versions. In one, Caesar said nothing at all. In the other, some said he spoke in Greek to Brutus, words usually translated as "You too, child?" Suetonius himself presents this as a story people told, not as certain fact.

After the murder, the hall carried a heavy shadow. Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian, later known as Augustus, eventually took control of Rome. According to Suetonius, the curia was closed off, and the Ides of March was declared an unlucky day, a day on which the Senate should never meet. Pompey's statue was moved elsewhere. A place of government had become a place nobody wanted to use.

Now look down into the square itself. Most of what you see is older than the curia. Four temples from the Republican era stand side by side, labelled by archaeologists with the letters A, B, C and D. Their original dedications are still debated, which is why they carry letters instead of names. The round temple, Temple B, is the easiest to spot. Its circle of column stumps stands out clearly among the rectangular platforms.

The remains of the curia lie behind Temples B and C, toward the western side of the site. Do not expect a grand hall. What survives is mostly a low foundation of tufa, a soft volcanic stone used widely in early Rome, along with concrete. Part of the structure still runs underneath the modern road beside you. In the 2010s, a team of Spanish researchers studied a concrete structure here. They suggested it may have been placed later to mark or seal the place where Caesar fell.

The second surprise is how recently all of this came back into view. For centuries, these ruins lay buried under houses, churches and narrow lanes. In the late 1920s, the area was cleared as part of a large rebuilding programme under the Fascist government. Workers found the temples as they demolished the old buildings. Plans for new construction were dropped, and the ruins were left open, sitting below the level of the modern city.

The square's name carries its own small story. "Argentina" has nothing to do with the country in South America. It comes from Argentoratum, the Latin name for the city of Strasbourg. A papal official from Strasbourg, Johannes Burckard, lived here around the year 1500 and built a tower attached to his house. The tower took his home city's Latin name, and the whole square inherited it.

And then there are the cats. For decades, Rome's stray cats have made this site their home. Today a volunteer-run cat sanctuary works at one corner of the square, feeding the animals and caring for them. You will likely see cats sleeping on column bases and walking along ancient walls. In recent years, walkways have also been built down among the ruins, so visitors can now move through the site instead of only looking down from the street.

Before you leave, stand still at the railing for one more moment. Find the round temple, then let your eyes drift behind it, toward the low line of stone near the road. That modest foundation marks one of the most famous moments in Western history. Around it, buses pass, people wait for trams, and a cat yawns in the sun. Rome has simply kept on living around the spot. As you walk on, notice how close the street is to that edge of the past.