5
Nabobs as Builders: Sulla, Pompey, Caesar
The aftermath of Sulla’s second march on Rome in 83 B.C. was a spate of political murders and confiscations. The profits were enormous, and Sulla used them for the most ambitious building program in the history of the Republic. His motive was in part the desire to rival what he had seen in the cities of the Greek East, in part his understanding that massive building projects are the outward and visible sign of princely power. And so he monumentalized the same Forum in which he displayed the severed heads of his enemies, planning, in the Tabularium, or Records Office, a theatrical backdrop for the tragedy which in the ensuing years was to be played below. He settled 100,000 of his veterans in colonies in central and south Italy. He built or reinforced walls in Rome, Ostia, and Alba Fucens; theaters in Pompeii, Alba, Bovianum Vetus, and Faesulae; he built temples in Tibur, Cora, Tarracina, Pompeii and Paestum. And this is only a sample of his prodigious building activity. But by all odds the most grandiose of his completed projects took shape at Praeneste (nowadays Palestrina), a little over twenty miles east of Rome, where he sacked the town to punish it for taking the side of his enemy Marius. He then built or restored there the great, axially-symmetrical, terraced Sanctuary of Fortune, the most splendid monument in Italy of the Roman Republic.
In 1944 allied bombing sheared off the houses from the steep south-facing slope where the medieval and modern town was built, and revealed the plan of the Sanctuary. Now, after fourteen years of excavation and restoring (reinforcement with steel beams, injecting liquid concrete, loving reproduction of the craft of ancient masons), the plan is clearer than it has been at any time since antiquity. The finds are displayed to advantage in the Barberini Palace at the top of the Sanctuary, splendidly reconstructed as a museum. The site repays a visit perhaps more than any other in Latium.
The archaeological zone of Palestrina falls into an upper and a lower part. In the lower area exciting discoveries were made in 1958. Its southernmost retaining wall, and the monumental ramped entrance, the Propylaea—enlivened in antiquity with jets of water playing—was cleared. Between it and the buildings of the lower zone, excavation seventy years before had shown traces of pools and shaded porticoes. In 1958, also, the façade was removed from the cathedral in the center of the lower zone, revealing behind it an imposing Roman temple with a lofty arched entrance, its cella corresponding to the forward (south) part of the nave of the present church. To the left rear (northwest) of this temple was a natural cave, long known as the Antro delle Sorti, where, according to time-honored local lore, the lots were cast which gave this sanctuary of Luck its fame. The cave, the excavators discovered, had been monumentalized into the apse of a building (not shown in the plan), its floor paved with a mosaic representing the sea off Alexandria. The mosaic was sunk a couple of inches below floor level and sloped forward to allow a thin film of water to play over it, which brightens the colors and makes the mosaic fish extraordinarily realistic. The mosaic also portrays architectural elements—an altar, column, and capital—in what corresponds to the so-called Second Style at Pompeii, dated in the first half of the first century B.C.
Opposite this building in the plan is another with a grotto much like the natural cave on the left. It was from this apse, again at a level a couple of inches below the rest of the floor, that the famous Barberini mosaic ([Fig. 5.1]) came, a late Hellenistic copy of an original of the early Ptolemaic age in Egypt. It is now handsomely restored and displayed in the museum at the top of the Upper Sanctuary. The mosaic combines a zoological picture-book of the Egyptian Sudan—its real and fabulous monsters labelled in Greek—with a spirited scene of the Nile in flood, with farm-house, dove cote, a shipload of soldiers, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, an elegant awninged pavilion, a towered villa in a garden, a group of soldiers feasting in mixed company (after them, the deluge), more wine, women and song in an arbor nearby, behind the pavilion a temple with statues of Egyptian gods in front, before them a man riding, his servant following afoot with baggage; behind the arbor a straw hut, with ibises in flight above it; in the flood waters, canoes (one loaded with lotus blossoms) and two large Nile river craft with curving prows—altogether the most spirited essay which has come down to us in the art of the mosaic. Interest in Egypt is a striking feature of both Pompeian and Roman wall-painting of the last half-century of the Republic and the early Empire. Examples are the scene from Pompeii of pygmies fighting a rhinoceros and a crocodile, now in the Naples Museum, the cult scenes from the Hall of Isis under the Flavian Palace on the Palatine, and the frescoes of the Pharaoh Bocchoris in the Terme Museum from the villa under the Farnesina. Alexandria was then the intellectual and artistic capital of the world. The Lucullus who founded the Sullan colony at Praeneste appears from an inscription found in the lower area to be not the famous bon vivant (who had been in Alexandria, the first foreign general ever to be entertained by a Ptolemy in the palace) but his brother Marcus. Nevertheless the two brothers were very close, and the more famous of them may have supplied the mosaic, the mosaic-maker, or the idea of using Egyptian motifs.
Fig. 5.1 Palestrina, Museum. Barberini mosaic. (Museum photo)
M. Lucullus’ name was carved on a fallen epistyle, a marble block intended to connect two columns. Where did the block belong? Gullini, the excavator, connected it with a building which ran between the two apsidal halls in the lower area. What survives is a back wall, built in the technique called opus incertum, a strong lime and rubble wall, studded externally with fist-sized stones of irregular shape. This technique was standard in the age of Sulla. The wall was decorated at regular intervals with two stories of half-columns, ingeniously combining function with decoration: they mask drainage conduits. The pavement in front of the wall shows the marks of two column-bases in two different rows, enough to justify restoring on paper a whole forest of twenty-four columns. Two dimensions are known: the diameter of the bases and the height of the half-columns on the wall behind. Their proportionate relation is appropriate to Corinthian columns, and some Corinthian capitals of a size to fit were found in the area. Working from these finds, the architect Fasolo could restore on paper a two-story basilica ([Fig. 5.2], bottom) between the two apsidal halls (only one hall is shown in the reconstruction). The basilica is on a higher level than the newly-isolated temple to the south of it. The difference in level is made most clearly visible by sets of superimposed columns on the southwest side of the basilica (where the lower columns are below the basilica pavement level), by the pavement below the piazza of the modern town, and in the façade of the right-hand (eastern) apsidal hall, which is in opus incertum, while its lower level, the colony’s aerarium or treasury, heavily built of tufa blocks, had the difference in construction hidden by a portico with Doric columns.
Fig. 5.2