---
title: "Study Pushes Doclea’s Monumental Center Back to Two Centuries Before Diocletian"
description: "The forum and basilica of Doclea, near modern Podgorica in Montenegro, belong to the first century, not the emperor’s rebuilding."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-10-01T11:15:18Z
modified: 2026-10-02T04:15:48Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/study-pushes-doclea-s-monumental-center-back-to-two-centurie-5f00b6
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "rome", "architecture", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Study Pushes Doclea’s Monumental Center Back to Two Centuries Before Diocletian

*The forum and basilica of Doclea, near modern Podgorica in Montenegro, belong to the first century, not the emperor’s rebuilding.*

By rews desk · October 1, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/study-pushes-doclea-s-monumental-center-back-to-two-centurie-5f00b6

## In brief

- A study in the Journal of Roman Archaeology dates Doclea’s forum and basilica to the first century
- Doclea stood near modern Podgorica; only a little more than 20% of its 25 hectares has been excavated
- The city honored Marcus Flavius Balbinus, dead at 15, with an equestrian statue, per an inscription
- Under Diocletian, builders remodeled rather than founded the complex, adding a brick wall and colonnade
- No inscription links the forum-basilica complex to Diocletian, despite the local Carski dvor legend

The forum and basilica of Doclea, a Roman city whose ruins lie near modern Podgorica in Montenegro, rose in the first century, roughly two centuries before the rebuilding long credited to Emperor Diocletian, according to a new study in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Doclea stood where the Moraca and Zeta rivers meet, on routes joining the Adriatic coast to the inland Balkans, and grew into one of the most important cities of Roman Dalmatia. Archaeologists have dug only a little more than 20 percent of its 25 hectares. To reconstruct its history, the researchers combined standing walls with old excavation records, archival photographs and hundreds of displaced architectural fragments.

The forum measured about 66.6 by 55.5 meters, ringed on three sides by buildings, with a long apsidal basilica along its western edge. Porticoes, public rooms and monumental entrances faced the city’s main east-west street.

Architectural decoration, the way walls abut one another and the surviving fragments place the main building phase in the Julio-Claudian period or, more probably, under the Flavian emperors. That slots Doclea into a wave of Roman town-building across Dalmatia that also gave monumental public centers to Zadar, Asseria and Aequum.

One inscription gives that building age a family story. The municipal authorities honored Marcus Flavius Balbinus, dead at 15, with an equestrian statue; his parents, Marcus Flavius Fronto and Flavia Tertulla, were prominent locally. Earlier scholars thought the family might even have paid for the forum and basilica itself. The new study is cooler on that: the inscription, it says, records the statue, not the construction of the buildings.

The plan looked west. A rectangular forum with a basilica down one side was a standard from Italy to the western provinces, and the researchers single out the early first-century basilica at Veleia, in northern Italy, as the closest parallel. The ornament kept looking east: some cornices and capitals carry Augustan and Julio-Claudian habits, while other details track work from Asia Minor, with comparisons at Miletus and Ancyra, modern Ankara. Those influences likely arrived through Greek cities farther south, the study says.

Builders used what they had. Rather than shipping in costly white marble, they cut local limestone, and raised a civic center that still spoke the architecture of the wider Roman world.

Around the late third and early fourth centuries, Doclea changed again. The basilica’s forum-facing facade got a new brick wall and a colonnaded front, with piers and arches that echo the Palace of Diocletian at Split. Baths, city walls and other monuments were built or restored in the same years.

The study’s point is sequence. Diocletian’s builders were remodeling, not founding; the civic center they dressed in Late Roman dress had stood for about two centuries.

Local legend filled in the gap. Early researchers recorded that people nearby called the forum area Carski dvor, ‘imperial palace,’ and tied it to Car Dukljanin, a folk figure identified with Diocletian. Construction did happen under the Tetrarchy, and the basilica may have carried imperial statues and dedications. But no surviving inscription links the forum and basilica to Diocletian or the Tetrarchs.

Centuries of scavenging blurred the rest. Blocks from the forum and basilica went into nearby buildings; cornices and architraves ended up as thresholds and doorposts. By the 19th century, parts of the complex may have been gathered to burn for lime.

What remains is shards. From them, the study reads a city that was already monumental generations before the emperor whose name stuck to it.