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Sulla went into voluntary retirement and—a rare achievement in his time—died in bed. The next nabob to equal him in stature, violence, and unconstitutionality was a man who had begun his career as Sulla’s lieutenant, Pompey the Great. Victories in Sicily and Africa, against slaves, pirates, and Mithridates, brought him enormous spoils; he too turned his mind to buildings to monumentalize his glory. The result was Rome’s first stone theater, in the Campus Martius, dedicated in his third consulship (52 B.C.) but begun in his second (55 B.C.), in a great show involving 500 lions and seventeen to twenty elephants. What survives of it is little more than a curve in a Roman street, some blocks of tufa beneath a Roman square, and a memory. Beneath the curve of the Via di Grotta Pinta, which perpetuates the outline of its cavea, one may visit today, in the lower regions of a Roman restaurant, the underpinnings of the great building, which once held 12,000 spectators. The technique of these vaults, a development of incertum called opus reticulatum, involves setting pyramidal bricks, point inward, in a lozenge pattern into a cement core. But though the entire superstructure has disappeared, an ancient plan survives. In the late second century A.D. the Emperor Septimius Severus caused to be placed on the wall of the library in Vespasian’s Forum of Peace a marble Plan of Rome, the Forma Urbis, which has come down to us in over 1000 fragments. The ingenuity with which these have been pieced together (work still going on in 1959) would make a story in itself, but for our present purpose only four fragments ([Fig. 5.11]) are relevant. The two parallel walls to the right (which is west; north is at the bottom) give a fascinating insight into the puritanical Roman mind at work. Straitlaced Romans objected to theaters as immoral. Pompey’s architect therefore designed at the top of the theater’s cavea a temple of Venus Victrix, represented by the two parallel walls in the plan. The theater seats might then pass as a hemicycle approach to a temple (compare the hemicycle approach to the tholos at Palestrina). Puritanism was appeased.
Fig. 5.11 Rome, Pompey’s theater and portico, from Forma Urbis. (G. Lugli, Mon. Ant., 3, p. 79)
Behind the stage the marble plan shows a great rectangular portico, with a double garden-plot in the middle, where we may restore in imagination trees planted, fountains playing, and works of art displayed. At a Senate meeting in a building associated with the portico, on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar fell at the base of Pompey’s statue, pierced by twenty-three daggers. What may be the tufa blocks of this very building are visible today through a sheet of plate glass in a pedestrian underpass in the Largo Argentina. (Temples A and B of the Largo Argentina appear to the left in the plan.)
Caesar was a greater man than Pompey. His spoils of victory, after eight years in Gaul, were richer, and so was his building program. The most impressive surviving evidence of it is the ground plan of his basilica, the Basilica Julia in the Republican Forum, and, north of the old Forum, which Rome and his own grandeur had outgrown, a grandiose new one, the prototype of an Imperial series.
The Basilica Julia was planned and executed at Caesar’s direction between 54 and 46 B.C., to balance the second-century Basilica Aemilia opposite. All that remains is pavement and piers, but the size of the piers is enough to show that the building had two stories, presumably with a balcony to afford a view of spectacles in the open space of the Forum below. Time and man have dealt harshly with the basilica. When it was excavated, in the 1840’s, a medieval limekiln was found on the pavement. This, plus the knowledge that its stone was sold by the oxcart load in the Middle Ages for the benefit of a hospital which rose on the site, explains what happened to the superstructure. Scratched on the pavement are rough sketches, done by ancient idlers, of statues which once adorned the building or the Forum adjacent, and over eighty “gaming-boards,” scratched circles divided into six segments on which dice were thrown and counters moved. Lawyers’ speeches apparently did not always hold the full attention of the Forum hangers-on.
Fig. 5.12 Rome, Via dell’ Impero, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini, 1932. (University of Wisconsin Classics Dept. photo)
