The inhabitants of Rome lived with the reality of legal courts scattered throughout the public and private spaces of the city, and perhaps even came to resent, on occasion, the impact such courts made on traffic flow during the busy hours of the day.

One can imagine that on many occasions passers-by with spare time stopped to listen to court proceedings. What did the scene look like? How were the different participants positioned within the space? In Chapter One we considered where courts were located within the city landscape; now we will narrow our focus to investigate the courtroom arrangement and the physical interactions between the various participants.

The greatest obstacle to such a reconstruction is the diversity of court types with their varying number of participants. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, courts consisted of a single presiding magistrate with or without a panel of judges or assessors; in addition, we must remember that these com­binations corresponded not only to the nature of the court but also to the phase of the hearing. There are enough common features, however, to make a reconstruction of the standard courtroom a rewarding undertaking, even though we must distinguish between different court types.

The vocabulary used by the ancient authors does, however, complicate such an examination. The problem stems from the identical term, iudex, being used both for a judge hearing a case alone and for a member of a panel of judges hearing the same case. Quintilian, for instance, advises that “ne ambulantes aver­tamur a iudmbus", “when we walk we should not turn our backs to the judges”.¹ There are two possible interpretations of this sentence. With a defi­nite article before “judges”, Quintilian is referring to a panel of judges; without a definite article, he is making a generalized statement about iudices, and this sentence would then be applicable to either a single judge or a panel of judges. There is also a further problem. Most single judges — including, for example, the emperor and thepraefectus urbi — heard cases with assessores.

Quintilian rarely states that a specific piece of advice concerning a method of argument or a physical movement is applicable only to one type of court (a silence which suggests that he saw little difference for an advocate arguing a case in one type of court or another). However, most of his attention is given to public cases — which would be held either in one of the quaestiones perpetuae or before the emperor or the praefectus urbi — and important private cases such as those held in the centumviral court. This is a natural choice, for while the bulk of private litigation went before a single judge, the unus iudex, cases in the public courts carried with them the harshest penalties and the most pub­licity, and thus demanded the most from advocates.

This chapter, then, will follow Quintilian’s lead and reconstruct a court­room in which a public case or an important private case, such as those heard by the centumviri, would have been heard. First, I categorize the types of people who were typically present at a hearing and so must be included in the recon­struction. Next, I arrange these participants within the courtroom, using surviving evidence of physical contact between the participants and their movement within the courtroom. Finally, I consider in what ways other courts of Rome differed from this reconstructed courtroom; some of the variances are known and require comment. As a second part to the chapter, I examine in more detail the physical arrangement of the four tribunals that made up one of the most famous courts of Rome, the centumviral court, which was housed during this period in the Basilica Iulia. Evidence about this court and its envi­rons is uncommonly extensive and therefore warrants special attention.