Pomœrium

Under the ancient Rome, the Latin pomerium ─ in pomœrium ─ is the crowned enclosure of a city, and more especially the limit of the Roman city than Romulus, as a rex , étymologiquement “gunner of feature” (“French king”) traced of a furrow at the time of the Fondation of Rome in 753 front J. - C.

It constitutes the limit of the city, and corresponds more or less to Rome with the wall of Servius Tullius. However, the enclosing wall of the city does not mark the limit of the pomerium , whose layout is announced by Cippe S. Its character crowned is very strong, equivalent to that of the crowned ground of a Temple ─ templum ─, and the territory of the city is devoted to Jupiter. When Remus, by derision, violated this limit while jumping above the furrow, Romulus killed it, the act being indeed Sacrilège. There exists a pomerium for each ancient city.

It is inside the pomerium that take place the civic activities which differentiate for Old the man from the animal. They are the civic worships (in particular the Triade capitoline), of the political activities (deliberations, vote on the forum), of justice. It is also inside the pomerium that are established the institutions necessary to the good walk of the city: courts, treasure, files.

This crowned character excludes death and all from it that points out death. The corpses, skins and weapons are thus banished by it: the field of Mars, parade ground military where each year the conscription takes place, in this respect is located outside the limits of the city and the cemeteries are established at the exits of the Roman cities (the Christian Catacombes will follow this tradition and will be thus out of the pomerium ). The capital executions, in Rome, took place on the Roche Tarpéienne, which was with the foot of cliff of Capitole. Condemned top of this cliff was precipitated. The limit of the pomerium passing on this cliff, condemned died outside. Also, it in the theater of Is pumped, outside the pomerium , that César was assassinated. Trajan is the only emperor whose ashes were preserved inside the pomerium , in the column which bears its name.

The religious interdict related to the pomerium led to notable facts:

a Triomphe was to make pass the triumphant victor with his army by the pomerium , along the Via Sacra . However, no holder of the Imperium ─ capacity related to dead the ─ could penetrate thus in the pomerium : the general ─ or the Promagistrat ─ concerned was to wait outside the pomerium until the Roman Sénat raises it of sound imperium throughout ceremony.
at the end of the Republic, the body of the demagog Clodius Pulcher was incinerated on the forum, that of Jules César also. In both cases, this act was a sacrilege, clerk voluntarily by their partisans to attract the anger of the gods on the assassins of the two late ones.

The emperor Aurélien pushed back the limits in of them 273 by the construction of the Mur of Aurélien.

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