CURIA AETHERMARCHENSIS
The Senate House · Building / Landmark · Regio Senatus, Nova Romae
"The Curia is where Rome argues with itself. The arguments are, on balance, an improvement on the alternatives. I have sat in the public galleries perhaps forty times over sixty years. I have never left without learning something, though not always something about the subject under debate."
The Curia Aethermarchensis is the senate chamber of the Roman Empire: the rectangular building of white marble and dark timber at the heart of the Senate Quarter where six hundred senators assemble on the first, tenth, and twentieth day of each month to argue about what Rome should do. It is the grandest secular building in Nova Romae. It is also, in 1200 A.P., the building where something is about to happen that most of the people inside it do not know is coming.
The Curia has been the seat of Roman legislative authority since 89 A.P. It has been rebuilt twice and renovated continuously, but it has never moved. The site is as old as the institution, and the institution is as old as the Empire’s settled form. Twelve centuries of Roman legislative history have happened in this room. The twentieth of Martius will add to that history in ways that several of its participants are about to find highly inconvenient.
Purpose / Function
The Curia houses the Senate in session and the administrative machinery that makes those sessions possible. The chamber itself occupies the building’s central volume; the surrounding structure contains committee rooms, the offices of the Quaestor Publicus who administers the building, the Tabularium entrance in the northern basement, and the public gallery approaches on the upper level. The Quaestor’s office handles gallery passes, session administration, and the considerable logistical work of moving six hundred senators in and out of a building three times a month with sufficient ceremony and efficiency that neither function is visibly sacrificed for the other.
The Senate’s five committees meet in the committee rooms on the Curia’s western wing: the Comitia Externa chaired by Corvinus, the Comitia Provincialis chaired by Aquila, the Comitia Militaris, the Comitia Iuridica, and the Comitia Sacra. Real senatorial power operates through these committees more than through the full chamber. The chairman who controls a committee’s agenda controls what reaches the floor and when. Corvinus has chaired the Comitia Externa for fourteen years. He controls the agenda. He does not yet know what is about to appear on it.
Design
The chamber is rectangular: sixty metres long, thirty wide, the long axis running east-west with the presiding magistrate’s dais at the western end and the main entrance at the eastern. Senators sit on tiered benches running the length of the chamber on both sides, rising toward the walls, with the central floor reserved for speakers presenting at the dais. The three-hundred-seat public gallery runs along the upper level, accessible from the stairways at the building’s northeast and southeast corners.
The floor is the chamber’s most discussed feature: a map of the known world in coloured stone, accurate as of 600 A.P. and not updated since. Red porphyry for the Roman provinces, grey granite for the frontier territories, white marble for the roads, and a band of lapis along the edges marking the world’s borders as understood six centuries ago. Provincia Campi, the youngest Roman province, is not on it. The three peoples who arrived after 600 A.P. are not on it. The scholars who maintain the map complaint have been maintaining it for four centuries and have not yet found anyone with the authority, inclination, and political capital to update the floor simultaneously. The current Quaestor Publicus considers this a problem for someone else.
Entries
The main entrance at the eastern end opens through a colonnade of four columns onto the chamber floor: triple-arched, wide enough for the full senatorial procession that opens each session. Senators enter through the central arch in order of seniority; staff and officials through the flanking arches. The public gallery is accessed from the stairways at the northeast and southeast corners of the building, managed by the Quaestor’s doorkeepers, who check passes.
The committee room wing on the western face has its own entrance from the street that does not require gallery passes and that functions as the Curia’s working entrance for the considerable traffic of petitioners, lobbyists, and officials conducting business in the committee rooms rather than the chamber. The Quaestor’s office maintains a separate pass system for committee access, which is harder to obtain and easier to abuse than the gallery system, a combination the Quaestor has been meaning to address for several years.
Sensory & Appearance
The Curia on a full session day: the low continuous sound of six hundred people finding their seats, a sound that is specific to legislative chambers and unlike any other kind of crowd. The smell of lamp oil from the sconces along the gallery level and old wood from the ceiling beams, a combination that the chamber has had for twelve centuries and that every senator who has served more than a decade associates permanently with the experience of being about to vote on something consequential. The floor map in morning light, when the eastern doors are open, is spectacular — the lapis border catches the angle and glows in a way that makes the world look like something that was made rather than something that happened.
The public gallery during a significant debate: two hundred people in complete silence watching the chamber below, the specific silence of people who are not permitted to speak and are working very hard at it. Gallery passes are difficult to obtain on session days when the subject is known in advance to be significant. For the twentieth of Martius, no passes have been withdrawn and no subject has been publicly announced. The gallery will be full. Most of the people in it will not understand, until the session begins, what they are watching.
Denizens
The Quaestor Publicus — see separate article — manages the building’s day-to-day operation from an office on the northern face. His staff of twelve includes four doorkeepers, two session administrators, three archive clerks with Tabularium access, and a small maintenance crew whose most significant function is keeping the floor map’s stone from cracking in the temperature changes between winter sessions and summer ones.
On session days, the chamber contains the full Senate: six hundred senators ranging from Corvinus at ninety-one (the oldest member, whose presence in his seat on the conservative benches is the first thing most senators look for when entering) to the most recently elevated members, several of whom are not yet thirty. The gallery holds its two hundred observers. The chamber floor’s non-senator population on session days includes the session administrators, the presiding consul’s staff, and two Via Obscura operatives whose covers within the Quaestor’s administrative staff have been maintained for eleven years.
Valuables
The floor map is irreplaceable as an artefact. The stone itself is not extraordinary, but the craft of its laying — the precise cutting, the consistent jointing, the six centuries of careful maintenance — makes it the most significant decorative floor in Nova Romae. Several of the stone types used are from quarries that have since been exhausted; the lapis border band cannot be replicated at the current world’s lapis supply rates.
The Tabularium below houses the Senate’s institutional archive: twelve centuries of session records, committee minutes, treaty texts, legal precedents, and the correspondence of the Senate’s administrative officers. The archive is not the most accessible collection in the city but is the most authoritative for questions of institutional Roman history. The Tabularium article covers the archive’s contents in detail.
Architecture
The Curia’s exterior is white Lunense marble on a stone foundation that, in its deepest sections, is original first-century construction. The dark timber of the interior — the ceiling beams, the gallery railings, the panelling behind the presiding dais — is a deliberate contrast to the marble: warm where the exterior is cold, organic where the exterior is geometric. The combination produces an interior that feels, to people who notice such things, simultaneously grand and inhabited. The chamber is built for six hundred people and sounds correct at that number; the acoustics at partial occupancy produce a slightly desolate quality that committee meetings on slow legislative days develop and that experienced senators have learned to read as a measure of what is actually at stake.
The building’s western face, where the committee rooms and the Quaestor’s office cluster, is architecturally plain compared to the chamber’s main facade. The Tabularium entrance in the northern basement is unmarked from the exterior. The sealed passage connecting the Tabularium to the Old City’s records office runs beneath the Forum Novum; its existence is in the official infrastructure documents and is not a secret in any meaningful sense, though very few people ever have reason to use it.
History
The Curia was established in 89 A.P. as the first dedicated legislative chamber of the new Empire — before that date, the Senate had met in a repurposed building from the original town. The first Curia was modest by current standards: the current building dates substantially from the third-century reconstruction that followed a fire, with the fourth-century modifications that added the committee wing and the current gallery configuration. The floor map was begun in the second century and completed in its current form around 600 A.P.
The chamber has hosted twelve imperial investitures (the senators formally ratifying the succession), forty-seven treaty ratifications, one formal senatorial censure of an emperor (the eighth, in 890 A.P., in a confrontation that lasted one session and resolved with a compromise that satisfied no one and prevented a civil war), and the vote, in 1050 A.P., that established the non-citizen scholarship restrictions at the Imperial Academy — a vote that Senator Aquila’s reform faction has been trying to reverse for twenty years.
See: Annales Mundi for full chronological detail.
Tourism
The public galleries are open on session days to holders of Quaestor’s passes, obtainable from the office on the northern face with sufficient persistence. On non-session days, the building is open to visitors in the committee wing only; the chamber floor is not accessible to the public. The gallery view of the floor map — the only angle from which the full map is visible in a single glance — is among the most sought-after views in Nova Romae and is the reason approximately a third of gallery pass applicants give for wanting access.
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