Praetorium

PRAETORIUM. - Etymologically, it is the place where the Roman praetor established the office of judge.

Originally, in mobile camps, it was the tent of the commander-in-chief; later, in garrisons, a complex of buildings, with two or more courtyards, where the residence or habitation of the praetor with the military, civil and judicial offices. The necessary furnishings were: the tribunal (βῆμα), a kind of semicircular platform of considerable size but such that it could be transported and set up in a suitable place, and the curule seat, placed at the center of the platform. The Roman official, seated on the seat and surrounded by his advisers, placed at the sides of the semicircle, directed the trial, having before him the accused, the accusers, the witnesses and the defenders. No special building was therefore required for the judgment; the praetorium was the permanent or temporary place where the Roman official set up the tribunal.

The Evangelists, narrating the trial of Jesus before the tribunal of Pilate, specify only that the sentence was pronounced from the tribunal or βῆμα placed on the lithostratos (v.). When the procurator, who resided at Caesarea in the Palace of Herod (πρωταγόριον Ἡρώβου, Acts 25:5), went to Jerusalem, he took up residence in the Palace built by Herod in the upper city, to the west of the present Jaffa Gate (cf. Philo, Legatio ad Caium, 38; Flavius Josephus, Bell. Iud., II, 14, 8; XX, 5, 3), and exceptionally in the lower city, in the Antonia fortress (v.), dominating from the north the Temple esplanade (Antiq. Iud., I, 4, 3; Acts 21:47).

The primitive Christian tradition, however, does not seem to have adopted either the one or the other place, fixing the praetorium instead in the valley of the Tyropoeon which separates the two cities (cf. Pilgrim of Bordeaux, of the year 333), where in the 5th century the "church of Pilate" was erected (Peter the Iberian, ca. 500), later called in the 6th century the "church of St. Sophia" (Theodosius, ca. 530). In the Middle Ages the memories, at first fluctuating and divided between Mount Zion and the vicinity of the Temple, ended up fixing themselves in the 13th century at the Antonia near the arch of the Ecce Homo (v.), in whose vicinity a large pavement was discovered believed to be the lithostratos where Our Lord was judged and from which the Way of the Cross begins.

Donato Baldi