Curia of Pompey

Pompey the Great returned from the East in 62 BC as Rome’s most successful general, having annexed Syria and reorganized the eastern Mediterranean, and spent part of the proceeds on a theater complex in the Campus Martius. The Senate had barred permanent theaters since the 150’s BC, holding that seated audiences bred idleness and gave crowds a place to gather, so Pompey crowned the seating with a temple of Venus Victrix and the rows could pass as its steps. The whole complex was dedicated to her in 55 BC. A colonnaded garden portico ran behind the stage, closed at its eastern end by a hall built to house the Senate: the Curia Pompei, or curia Pompeiana. The Senate could lawfully meet in any building that had been ritually inaugurated, and a hall outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city, let returning generals attend without crossing the line that ended their military command.

Use of the hall grew after 52 BC, when supporters of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist politician killed in a roadside brawl, cremated his body inside the Curia Hostilia and burned the building down. Faustus Cornelius Sulla restored it as the Curia Cornelia, but Caesar demolished that building in 44 BC to make room for his own Curia Julia. That left Rome without a senate house, and the Senate met in temples and in Pompey’s hall.

Senators reached the hall past art taken in the East and fourteen statues of the nations Pompey had defeated, and sat beneath his portrait statue. On March 15, 44 BC, the Senate met there and Caesar was killed. Cicero, writing within months, places the killing in Pompey’s curia, and later writers report that Caesar fell at the foot of that statue. Suetonius adds that the body lay there until three slaves carried it home on a litter.

Mourners at Caesar’s funeral set fire to the hall. In 42 BC the triumvirs walled the room up, leaving it as a memorial to the killing, while the statue of Pompey was moved to a marble arch facing the theater’s main entrance. Dio adds that the sealed room was later turned into a public latrine. The hall became a locus sceleratus, a place polluted by crime, and under Augustus it stood charred and sealed, no longer a senate house.

The building has been identified with remains of squared tufa blocks, roughly 20 by 24 meters, behind the Temple of Fortuna Huiusce Diei in the Area Sacra at Largo Argentina, uncovered during demolition work in the 1920s.

Excavation and chemical analysis of thirteen mortar samples sorted the masonry into three phases: Pompey’s building of around 55 BC, work under Augustus around 19 BC, and early medieval construction, when the ruins were taken into new structures and the ground rose above them. What survives is the room the triumvirs sealed, at its ancient level below the modern street.

FURTHER READING

1. Gagliardo, Maria C., and James E. Packer. “A New Look at Pompey’s Theater: History, Documentation, and Recent Excavation.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 110, no. 1, 2006, pp. 93–122. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026361. Accessed 27 July 2026.
2. Packer, James E., et al. “Looking Again at Pompey’s Theater: The 2005 Excavation Season.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 111, no. 3, 2007, pp. 505–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027081. Accessed 27 July 2026.
3. Marra, F., D’Ambrosio, E., Gaeta, M., & Monterroso-Checa, A. (2022). “Petrographical and geochemical criteria for a chronology of Roman mortars between the first century bce and the second century ce: The Curia of Pompey the Great.” Archaeometry, 64(3), 2022, pp. 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.12740