Porticus Minucia

Celebrated portico in the S *Campus Martius, built in the last decade of the 2nd c. B.C. by M. Minucius Rufus (Vell. Pat. 2.8.3); its colonnade encircled the earlier Temple of the *Lares Permarini. The 4th-c. A.D. Regionary Catalogues list it in Regio IX: Circus Flaminius between the *Porticus Philippi and the *Crypta Balbi. The portico is shown in just that location on the Severan Marble Plan, where it is labeled MINI[CIA] (Cozza; Rodríguez Almeida, Forma pl. 26, frags. 35 dd, ee, ff [399, 337, 322]). Since scant archaeological remains of the portico have been recovered, competing architectural reconstructions have been advanced. Richardson proposes a roofed, inward-facing quadriporticus, with a double colonnade (316). Coarelli (LTUR; id. 1968, 1981), Manacorda, and Ziolkowski interpret the remains to suggest that the portico surrounded the *“Area Sacra” of Largo Argentina; this unsustainable theory, advanced to justify their location of the Lares Permarini temple in the “Area Sacra”, is refuted by the remains themselves, which face away from the buildings of the Area Sacra instead of enclosing them (Rickman, Zevi, Claridge, s.v. “Area Sacra”: Largo Argentina). Further, the “Area Sacra” would not have had sufficient open space to host the various activities attributed to the Porticus Minucia: public assemblies (Cic., Phil. 2.63, 84), and the games of June 4 for Hercules Custos (LVDI IN MINVCIA: Fast. Fil., in Degrassi, Inscr. Ital. 13.2, 249), whose bronze statue stood in the portico enclosure (SHA, Commod. 16.5). By the mid-1st c. A.D., a second Minucian portico had been constructed, the porticus Minucia Frumentaria, for the distribution of grain (hence, in modern scholarship, the Republican portico is commonly called the Porticus Minucia “Vetus”); however, the earliest evidence for this Imperial portico along the *Via Flaminia in the Campus Martius dates it to the reign of Claudius (CIL VI 10223; Richardson 315), whose concern for the annona is well-known (Suet., Claud. 18, 20.3).