GRAECO´STASIS
GRAECO´STASIS
the station of the Greeks, was a place in the Roman forum
where ambassadors stood to hear the debates, and had their
προεδρία or post of honour at the public
spectacles anciently held in it. It thus, as Niebuhr remarks (
R.
I. vol. ii., n. 116), resembled. the privileged seats in the hall of
a parliamentary assembly. It was so called because the first envoys thus
honoured were the Greeks of Massilia (Justin,
43.5.10); the privilege was afterwards extended to foreign
ambassadors in general. The
Stationes
Municipiorum may, according to Niebuhr, have been places allotted
to municipals for the same purpose; but the .allusion in Pliny (
Plin. Nat. 16.236) is too vague to warrant
any inference. The Graecostasis, like the Rostra which it adjoined, seems to
have occupied a different site before and after the reconstruction of the
Forum under Julius Caesar. The older one is described by Varro (
L.
L. 5.155) as a stone platform (
locus
substructus) to the right of the Senate-house (i. e. the Curia
Hostilia) on the side of the Comitium. It is to this site that the
statements in Pliny refer, that when the sun was seen from the Curia coming
out between the Rostra and the Graecostasis, it was mid-day; and an accensus
of the consul proclaimed the time with a clear loud voice (
H.
N. 7.212); and that the brazen shrine (
aedicula) of Concord, erected by Cn. Flavius, curule aedile in
B.C. 303, was placed on the Graecostasis, “quae tune supra comitium
erat” (33.19), implying that in his own time it had been removed.
Cicero speaks of it as a vantage-ground from which the debates could be
interrupted by disorderly persons (
ad Q. Fr, 2.1). The later
site of the Rostra was to the south-west of their original position, i. e.
further from the Comitium and more towards the open part of the Forum: the
remains of the Rostra of Julius have within the last few years been
excavated and identified beyond a doubt, and a curved platform adjoining
them is conjectured with great probability (though without direct evidence)
to have been the later Graecostasis, transferred together with the Rostra.
The
Graecostadium of one of the regionary
catalogues, the
Curiosum, is no doubt identical
with this later Graecostasis. (Compare Burn,
Rome and the
Campagna, pp. 84, 123, with plans pp. 74, 107; Middleton,
Anc. Rome in 1885, pp. 148, 163, with plan p. 158.)
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