The Forum Romanum was the place for public communication between politicians/rulers and the citizenry in ancient Rome. Court speeches and speeches addressing the people and the Senate were given there, sometimes in tumultuous conditions or interrupted by heckling or other actions aimed at disrupting them.

In work on this test topics, researchers will examine examples of speech situations of this kind and attempt to determine whether or rather to what extent and how specifically conflict situations like these can be reconstructed and analysed, with the help of cutting-edge technologies, to shed light on archaeological, philological and historical questions.

The test topic complements the ongoing research on the acoustics of public squares in Antiquity being conducted at the Winckelmann Institute of the HU Berlin.