It may be of interest to the Society if I submit to its notice some observations made last year, which render it necessary to re-write the history of one of the best known monuments of Rome.The monument, which for fifty-six years has been called the Column of Phocas, was formerly, when nothing but the pillar itself was seen above ground, the subject of much curiosity and speculation among the visitors of the Forum. The “nameless column with the buried base” was thought by some to be the sole relic of a great temple or other public building. By others it had been conjectured to be part of the famous bridge by which Caligula united his palace on the Palatine with the temple of Capitoline Jupiter. In the early years of the century, among other works of the same kind, it was resolved to clear away the soil and débris from the substructure of this column; and on the 13th of March, 1813, the inscription of its pedestal, which had remained for centuries a few feet below the level of the ground, was uncovered, and revealed the fact that it had supported a statue dedicated by the exarch Smaragdus to the honour of a Caesar, whose name had been erased, but who, by other indications, could be no other than Phocas, an emperor of evil reputation, but to whom Rome and the world owe some gratitude for having been instrumental in dedicating the Pantheon to Christian worship, and so preserving from ruin one of the noblest and most original architectural works of antiquity.
X.—A Revised History of the Column of Phocas in the Roman Forum
