The Empty Forum

On Time

I stood on the Capitoline Hill in the early evening and looked out across the Forum.

There was no one there.

This was the time of Covid. Rome under lockdown, the world holding its breath. I had the Forum vista to myself.. something travellers have dreamed of for centuries and almost none have ever been given.

It takes a moment to understand how strange it was. This is a ground that has been crowded for the better part of three thousand years. Senators and slaves. Traders, priests, emperors, mobs. Pilgrims, then painters, then tourists in their millions. The Forum has never really been a place, it’s been a crowd with architecture around it.

And it stood empty. Void of human presence. Almost biblical.

But here’s what I understood, standing there in the warming light: the Forum had seen this before. Plague emptied these streets in the age of the Antonine emperors. Disease swept through Rome again and again across the centuries and each time the crowds thinned, the stones waited, and the crowds came back. What felt to us like the end of the world was, to this place, a familiar season.

I let my mind wander into it. The processions coming up the Sacred Way. The speeches, the verdicts, the triumphs. Voices in a language nobody speaks anymore, arguing about things that once mattered more than anything. All of it happened right there, on stones I could see holding the last of the day’s heat.

Empires are loud. That’s what you forget until you stand above one in silence. Rome was noise, law, money, power, argument. What’s left doesn’t argue. Broken columns, a triumphal arch, the floor plan of a civilisation that once believed itself eternal, standing in the quiet like furniture in a house everyone left.

The light did what light does at that hour. It warmed the stone and asked for nothing. It fell on the Forum exactly as it fell during the plagues of the second century, and exactly as it will fall when nobody remembers what a forum was.. or what a lockdown was.

We thought we were living through something unprecedented. The stones knew better. They’d waited out worse, and they’d wait out this, and the crowds would return, as they always had. As they since have.

Some places need people to mean something.

The great ones don’t.

Three thousand years looked back at me: nothing lasts, and everything counts. I had one evening. It was enough.