The Digital Companion to Roman Antiquity

The Campus Martius: Rome’s Field of Mars

Campus Martius in ancient Rome with soldiers training and citizens gathered, representing military and civic life.

For most of the Roman Republic, the Campus Martius was an open field outside the city’s sacred boundary where armies drilled, citizens voted, and the census was concluded with sacrifice. Then Augustus arrived, and within a single lifetime transformed it into the most monumental urban landscape the ancient world had ever produced.