Why Some of the Temples Are Still Standing

Imperial legislation at the end of the fourth century closed the temples and ended public sacrifice, and the Forum's cults stopped. What happened next determined what survives. A temple left empty in a city short of building stone is a quarry, and most of the Forum was quarried, burnt for lime, or built over. The buildings that came through are largely the ones that were converted to Christian use, because a church has a roof, a congregation and someone responsible for it. The senate house became a church and survives nearly complete for that reason. Others were absorbed into churches whose later facades conceal Roman walls behind them.

Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price treat this as the last phase of a long Roman habit rather than a break with it, since the Forum's religious buildings had been rebuilt, rededicated and repurposed by Romans for centuries before any Christian did it. The excavation of the Forum from the eighteenth century onward reversed some of that, clearing medieval and later structures to expose the classical level, which was itself a decision about which past the site should display. The Lapis Niger, a black paved shrine that Romans of the classical period already regarded as very ancient and could not confidently explain, is a reminder that the site was layered long before any of this.