Fig. 5.13 Rome, Imperial Fora, plan, showing actual and hypothetical coincidence of axes. (P. von Blanckenhagen, Journ. Soc. Arch. Hist., 13.4 [Dec., 1954], Fig. 2)
Caesar’s Forum has left more impressive remains. It cost him a fortune, since his enemies, owners of the expropriated houses, charged him 100,000,000 sesterces, five million uninflated dollars, for the land. Its excavation was begun in 1930, and finished in three years, by Corrado Ricci, as a part of Mussolini’s ([Fig. 5.12]) grandiose plan for systematizing the center of the city and restoring the ancient dictator’s Forum to set off a modern dictator’s monument, a new street, the Via dell’ Impero, driven through slums and ancient monuments to connect the Coliseum with his headquarters in the Palazzo Venezia. The excavation exposed the southern two-thirds of Caesar’s Forum; the rest lies under the new street. The Forum as revealed by Ricci is another example of axial symmetry ([Fig. 5.13]), a narrow porticoed rectangle, over twice as long as it was wide, with a temple set in the Italic fashion on a high podium at the back. Working with great patience and delicacy, Ricci set up three of the temple’s fallen columns ([Fig. 5.14]), with their architrave, frieze, and cornice. Some of the architectural blocks leave between the dentils—a row of projecting tooth-like rectangular members below the cornice—two small distinctive marble disks side by side like a pair of spectacles. This is the “signature” of Domitian’s architect Rabirius, and prove that a restoration of the temple was planned during his reign (A.D. 81–96). There are Cupids in the interior frieze, which prove that the temple was dedicated to Venus, Caesar’s ancestor. To have gods for ancestors lent distinction to a Roman clan, though Caesar knew as well as any skeptic what it really meant. He knew his pedigree back to an ever-so-great grandfather, and God knew who his ancestor was. In the gens Iulia the line was traced back to Iulus the son of Aeneas, who was the son of Anchises and Venus.
The portico, like that behind Pompey’s theater, was an art museum. Ancient authors mention a golden statue of Cleopatra (one of the dictator’s few sentimental gestures?), a golden breastplate set with British pearls, and a bronze equestrian statue of Caesar on his famous horse which had human front feet!
The ground to the south of the Forum rises over fifty feet to the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. This difference in level was filled with three setback stories of luxury shops in massive rectangular blocks of peperino. The Street of the Silversmiths, the Clivus Argentarius, ran above and behind the shops at the Forum level. This whole complex survives.
Fig. 5.14 Rome, Forum of Caesar. (Fototeca)
Three men on horseback, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, subdued East and West for Rome, and used part of the profits to change the face of Rome in forty years. They would have said that they did it out of what the Romans called pietas, a threefold loyalty to family, state, and gods. Each, to reflect credit on his family which ruled the state, on the gods his ancestors, and on the state his perquisite, erected great public buildings in the city to be his monument. Sulla’s dramatic revamping of the old Forum, Pompey’s theater and portico, and Caesar’s new Forum made of a shabby civic center a metropolis almost worthy to vie with the cities of the Greek East. Almost, but not quite, for the building material was still local stone, stuccoed tufa or the handsome limestone from Tivoli called travertine, which weathers to a fine gold, and has ever since been Rome’s characteristic building material. It was considered worthy in the Renaissance to build the fabric of St. Peter’s. For its next transformation, this time into a city of marble, Rome had to wait for the rise to power of the greatest nabob of them all, Caesar’s adopted son and successor, Octavian-Augustus.
6
Augustus: Buildings as Propaganda
In 1922, after the success of the Fascist march on Rome, Benito Mussolini felt acutely the need for an aura of respectability to surround his upstart régime. Another swashbuckling condottiere, 1965 years earlier, Caesar’s heir Octavian, had felt the same need. Both resorted to the same method: an ambitious building program, and a vigorous propaganda campaign designed to substitute for dubious antecedents a set of more or less spurious links with the heroes of the glorious past. About Fascist architecture the less said the better; the other point will be the subject of this chapter. In fourteen years (1924–38) Italian archaeologists changed the face of central Rome, and in the process of glorifying Il Duce, added more to our knowledge of Augustan Rome than the previous fourteen centuries had provided.