A chasm split the Forum floor thirty feet from where you stand, and would not close.
Last reviewed 10 September 2026 · A three-minute read · 1000 BC–608
The short answer
The Rostra ad Divi Iulii marks ground in the Roman Forum where, in 362 BC, a soldier named Marcus Curtius was said to have ridden into a chasm that priests claimed only Rome's greatest strength could close. The same spot, the Lacus Curtius, later stood near the Temple of Divus Iulius, built where Julius Caesar's body was burned in 44 BC.
Inscription in the Roman Forum, dedicated by Lucius Valerius Septimius Bassus, praefectus orbi of Rome in 379 or 383 — 2009 · Bruce McAdam · CC BY-SA 2.0
362 BC
A soldier rode into the hole Rome could not fill
Rome was in danger. A great chasm had opened in the middle of the Roman Forum. Nothing the city threw into it made any difference. Baskets of earth went in and vanished. Priests were called. They asked the gods what it would take to close the ground back up.
The answer came back strange. Rome would have to give up whatever it valued most. It had to drop that into the hole.
People tried anyway. They threw in fruit, coins, and small offerings. The kind of things a city could spare. The chasm stayed open.
Then a young soldier named Marcus Curtius worked out what the oracle actually meant. Rome's greatest strength wasn't a possession. It was the courage of its own men.
The ground closed over him. A crowd had gathered to watch. They threw fruit and small offerings in after him. These were the same gifts that hadn't worked before. Now they fell into ground that had already sealed itself shut.
What was left afterward was a shallow basin in the Forum floor. It was a patch of ground that never quite behaved like the pavement around it. Romans kept the spot marked for centuries. Even they weren't entirely sure what it meant.
He put on his armor, mounted his horse, and rode into the pit that had swallowed everything else.
8th century BC and before
A Sabine horseman was nearly swallowed by the same mud
Before there was a Forum, there was a marsh. The valley between the hills stayed wet and unstable. People started building on the slopes above it long after. One story about the pit is older than Marcus Curtius by centuries.
It comes from a war that followed the Rape of the Sabine Women. Sabine and Roman forces fought in the valley that would become the Forum. A Sabine champion named Mettius Curtius rode into the same soft ground during the fighting. His horse got stuck in the mud. He barely escaped with his life.
The Romans later gave the name Curtius to the spot either way. Two men, centuries apart in the telling, both nearly lost to the same patch of unstable earth. One walked away. The other, in the version Rome preferred to remember, rode in on purpose and never came back out.
1st century BC, before the marsh was fully closed
The dead were buried here before the Forum existed
Long before the chasm and long before any temple stood over it, this ground was already a place for the dead. Diggers working the Via Sacra in the twentieth century found an old cemetery buried under the road itself. Archaeologists call it the Sepulcretum. Whole generations were buried there in the Iron Age, before anyone thought to hold assemblies or build a forum on top of them.
The graves came first. The politics, the temples, and the chasm story all came after. They were laid over ground that had already been used to bury people for centuries. Nobody planned the Forum on top of a cemetery. It simply grew there, because that was already where people put their dead.
A cemetery lay under the Sacred Way long before it was sacred to anyone but the families who buried there.
March 15, 44 BC
Caesar's body was burned a few steps from the chasm
Julius Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Senate, away from the Forum itself. His body was carried back here, to the Via Sacra, and set down near the old royal house called the Regia.
A crowd had gathered, furious and grieving. They didn't wait for a formal funeral. They tore up nearby shops and stalls for wood, benches, anything that would burn, and built a pyre right there on the spot. Caesar was cremated where he fell, on ground a few dozen steps from where the chasm was said to have closed four centuries earlier.
The spot became sacred almost immediately. Within years, Romans built the Temple of Divus Iulius over the place where the fire had burned. The emperor who came after Caesar needed somewhere to stand. He needed somewhere to be worshipped as a god. The temple gave him that place.
The temple built for Caesar's ashes would host one more body before its story was finished.
14 AD
Augustus lay in state where Caesar had burned
Caesar's heir, Augustus, died far from Rome, in the town of Nola. His body was carried back to the city and brought to the temple built on his adoptive father's funeral pyre.
Augustus was laid out on a bier at the Temple of Caesar. Tiberius, his successor, stood over the body and gave the funeral oration there, in front of the crowd gathered in the Forum. Only after that did the procession carry him on to the Campus Martius, where he was finally burned.
Twice in sixty years, an emperor's body rested on this stretch of the Via Sacra before Rome would let him go. The temple that held Augustus that day still has fragments standing, a short walk from the basin where Marcus Curtius was said to have vanished.
The basin is still there in the paving, a shallow dip nobody has ever quite explained, and you are standing beside it.
Open this place in Strata
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.
Sourced records, high and medium confidence. Era background is marked as such.
Prehistoric
Iron Age, before the Forum
Long before the Forum existed, an Iron Age necropolis called the Sepulcretum lay along this stretch of the Via Sacra, uncovered by excavators Giacomo Boni and Einar Gjerstad.
A patch of black marble paving nearby marks the Lapis Niger, one of the only surviving traces of the ancient Comitium, thought to sit over a 7th- or 8th-century BC cult site.
A short walk east, the Temple of Vesta housed a fire tended by the Vestal Virgins, believed to protect Rome's safety since the days of King Numa Pompilius.
A few steps from where you stand, a mysterious pit called the Lacus Curtius survived as a sacred spot even after the marsh that once covered the Forum was drained.
The Romans credited a victory at Lake Regillus in 495 BC to the divine twins Castor and Pollux and built this temple in thanks, just west of where you stand.
Julius Caesar began this basilica, Augustus finished it, and for centuries it housed the centumviri, the court that judged inheritance disputes, until fire destroyed it in 283 AD.
Radiocarbon samples pulled from the Forum Romanum near here date to between 44 BC and 205 AD, confirming intensive use of the ground through the early Empire.
Augustus later raised the Temple of Divus Iulius on this exact site to deify his adoptive father, and the altar there still draws visitors leaving flowers.
The Column of Phocas, the last monument added to the Forum, went up when Rome was under Byzantine rule, honoring an emperor reviled elsewhere in the empire.
Before the Forum existed, the valley was an unstable marsh, and an Iron Age cemetery called the Sepulcretum lay along the future line of the Via Sacra, uncovered later by excavators Boni and Gjerstad.
What happened at the Lacus Curtius?
A chasm opened in the Forum floor and resisted every offering thrown into it, until, according to the story Rome preferred, the young soldier Marcus Curtius rode his horse into the pit, after which the ground closed.
Where was Julius Caesar cremated?
Caesar's body was carried to the Via Sacra near the old Regia, where a crowd built a pyre from looted shop timber and benches and burned him on the spot, a few dozen steps from the Lacus Curtius.
Why was the Temple of Divus Iulius built?
Augustus raised the Temple of Divus Iulius over the exact spot where Caesar's body had been cremated, to deify his adoptive father and to give himself, as Caesar's heir, a sanctioned place from which to be worshipped.
What happened to Augustus's body after he died?
After Augustus died in Nola in 14 AD, his body was brought to Rome and laid on a bier at the Temple of Caesar, where Tiberius delivered the funeral oration before the procession carried him on to the Campus Martius for cremation.
Who was Mettius Curtius?
Mettius Curtius was a Sabine champion said to have ridden into the soft, marshy ground of the future Forum during the war that followed the Rape of the Sabine Women, getting his horse stuck but escaping alive, in a story older than that of Marcus Curtius.
