THE NEWLY WALLED CITY WAS A RAGGED THOUSAND-ACRE QUILT OF medium-density development patched about by sacred groves, sanctuaries, and tracts of suburban farms that would later be absorbed into horti, great aristocratic garden estates (see Chapter 11). Most of its area, hosting perhaps 40,000 residents in all, was subdivided into four large regions, each corresponding to an urban tribe of citizens: Subura, Esquilina, Collina, Palatina. Westward lay the lonely extramural expanse of the Campus Martius – “Field of Mars.” Its only man-made precinct was the Villa Publica, where at a venerable altar of the war god, the Ara Martis, the general census was periodically taken and soldiers were conscribed. In time, the magistrates overseeing these duties, the censors, would also come to dominate secular construction in Rome.

The fourth century B.C.E. witnessed profound changes in Roman social and political life, mostly along two intertwined paths: proletarization and militarization. Against fierce patrician opposition, the plebeians won the right to hold Rome's premier magistracy, the consulship, in 367. To mark the uneasy class realignment a new goddess was contrived in the abstract, allegorical manner characteristic of the Greeks: Concordia. Her temple was built on the Forum's northwestern rise, perched watchfully over the people's Comitium and the Curia, or Senate house, adjoining it (Fig. 11). Henceforth former consuls of both classes would erect temples at Rome. As military commanders, they conventionally vowed a new temple to a tutelary god while on campaign. If victorious, they fulfilled the vow (votum) at Rome afterward from the proceeds of war spoils. Temples of this sort are called votive.

Roman success in the Samnite Wars of the second half of the fourth century precipitated a flurry of victory temples back home. By 270 Rome controlled peninsular Italy, and the consequent influx of slaves had swelled the city's population to as much as 200,000. The dedication of votive temples was in full spate (Fig. 12). New kinds of war monuments emerged as well. In 338, the conqueror of the Latins, the plebeian Gaius Maenius, celebrated Rome's first naval victory by mounting a speaker's platform on one side of the Comitium. Perhaps from the very start it bristled with the bronze battering rams of ships Maenius had conquered. Called the Rostra (“beaks”), this platform and later imitations would become fixtures of Roman forensic politics.