Obviously the inscription thus restored and interpreted, marks a spot which is taboo, its ill-omened nature being further emphasized by the later black marble pavement, which was fenced off by a balustrade of thin white marble slabs set on edge. Beside the stele is a U-shaped shrine or altar,[B] on a higher level and therefore of a later date than the inscription. Archaeology provides no clue to the purpose of this structure, but learned Romans believed it marked the tomb of Romulus, their first king. This would be a sacred spot indeed, not to be profaned by the feet of men or animals. From one edge of the shrine run the remains of a semicircular platform with steps (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7), also later in date than the inscription. The platform was the Rostra, so called because of its decoration, after 338 B.C., with the bronze _rostra_ or ramming-beaks of captured enemy war-galleys. The Rostra was in historical times the speakers’ platform; from it in one of its phases resounded the sonorous oratory of Cicero. But it was also the spot from which traditionally funeral orations were delivered, while modern men wearing, according to Roman custom, the death-masks of their ancestors sat behind the orators in curule chairs on the platform. To the logical Roman mind a platform beside the tomb of the first king would seem the appropriate place for funeral speeches. [B] Professor Ferdinando Castagnoli and Dr. Lucos Cozza reported in 1959 the discovery, at Pratica di Mare, ancient Lavinium, sixteen miles south of Rome, of a series of thirteen such altars, together with an inscription on bronze, with lettering like that of the _lapis niger_ stele. They date their finds in the late sixth century B.C. Since American excavations at Rome’s Latin colony of Cosa in 1953 identified as a Comitium a circular, step-surrounded space in front of the local Senate House, it appears that the semicircular steps leading to the platform in Rome were Rome’s Comitium, and new excavations to prove or disprove this were started in 1957. [Illustration: FIG. 3.7 Rome, Forum. Rostra, fifth phase (Sullan). (E. Gjerstad, _op. cit._, p. 143)] Careful equations between the fifteen levels in the Comitium and the twenty-nine levels near the equestrian statue of Domitian prove the Comitium a monument of the Roman Republic: the first phase coincides with the Republic’s beginning, and its last with Caesar and Augustus, in the late first century B.C., when the Republic ends. Thereafter freedom of speech, and an arena for it, were but a memory. But the first Rostra rose where it did because the founders of the Roman Republic associated it with the first of Rome’s kings.