Octavian’s building activity, both before and after he took the title Augustus, was prodigious. In his autobiography he boasts of restoring no less than eighty-two temples. He built many new ones besides, and embellished Rome, and his own glory, with his new Forum, a portico, his arch, his grandiose mausoleum, an Altar of Peace, and, in addition, arks and gardens, baths, theaters, a great library, markets, granaries, docks, and warehouses. Meanwhile he himself lived in ostentatious simplicity in a modest house on the Palatine, and encouraged the cult of antique austerity by restoring the hut of Romulus. At his death Rome was at last an Imperial metropolis: the city of brick had become a city of marble. Rome had gained grandeur and lost freedom in the process. Toward the assessment of the gains and losses, the excavators’ discoveries in Augustus’ Forum, at his arch, in his mausoleum, and particularly in the difficult and ingenious recovery and reconstruction of his Altar of Peace have made the most important contributions.
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Ever since 1911, Corrado Ricci had dreamed of excavating the site of Augustus’ Forum (see [Fig. 5.13]), known to lie to the northeast of and at right angles to Caesar’s, overlaid by modern construction. In 1924 Mussolini gave him his chance, and by 1932, when the Via dell’ Impero was opened with Fascist pomp (see [Fig. 5.12]), the Fora of Caesar, Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan had all yielded up secrets to the archaeologist’s spade.
Of Augustus’ Forum, when Ricci began to dig, the most conspicuous part was the firewall at the back, separating it from the fire-trap slums of the Subura, ancient Rome’s redlight district. The firewall is over 100 feet high, the exposed parts in travertine, the rest in peperino and sperone, the traditional Italic building stones, of the period. This use of local materials, combined, as Ricci was to discover, with marble, is the symbol of the compromise, the amalgam of Italic and Greek materials, methods, and forms, which is the hallmark of the Augustan Age.
Fig. 6.1 Rome, Forum of Augustus, model by I. Gismondi. (Mostra Augustea della Romanità, Catalogo, Pl. 35)
When the buildings cluttering the site had been cleared away, the plan ([Fig. 6.1]) was found to be based upon that of Caesar’s Forum: a rectangular portico with a temple at the back. But the rectangle was enriched at the sides with curves, as at Palestrina earlier and in Bernini’s portico in front of St. Peter’s later. Each of the hemicycles had, let into the walls on two levels, niches two feet deep, big enough to hold statues of half life size. Excavations in the area of the south hemicycle as early as 1889 had turned up fragments of drapery in Carrara marble, and bits of inscriptions which, in combination with literary evidence, gave to the great Italian epigraphist Attilio Degrassi the clue to the subjects of the statues. The inscriptions, called elogia, recorded the cursus honorum, or public career, of a set of heroes, triumphing generals, or others who had deserved well of the Republic. Three examples are Aulus Postumius, who, with the help of the Great Twin Brethren Castor and Pollux (the household gods of the Julian clan), beat the Latins at the battle of Lake Regillus in 496, and built his divine helpers a temple in the Forum; Appius Claudius the Blind, who built the Appian Way (312 B.C.) and an aqueduct; and Sulla—nabobs and builders all. But there was space in the two levels of hemicycle niches, and in others hypothetically restored in the portico’s rectilinear wall, for over fifty statues with elogia. So Degrassi made a search for other stones similarly inscribed, some of which turned up in the most unlikely places.
One had been used as a marble roof-tile of Hadrian’s Pantheon; it was in the Vatican collection. Another was found in a vineyard near Rome’s north gate, the Porta del Popolo. The former immortalized one Lucius Albinius, who took the Vestal Virgins in his wagon to Caere for safety when the Gauls were threatening Rome in 390 B.C. The latter was of Sulla’s great rival Marius, the friend of the people. The dimensions, letter-heights, and letter-styles of both made their origin in Augustus’ Forum extremely likely. A set of seven more had been known since the seventeenth century or earlier as coming from the site of the Forum of Arezzo, ancient Arretium, in Tuscany. The texts of some of these turned out to be copies of elogia from the Forum of Augustus. This justified the inference that in this matter of a Hall of Fame, provincial cities imitated the metropolis. Thus those elogia from Arezzo for which no Roman prototype had been found might yet give a clue to what the Roman collection had once contained. This inference enriches the list by the names of Manius Valerius Maximus, conciliator of class struggles, and Rome’s first dictator (494 B.C.); Lucius Aemilius Paullus, one of the greatest triumphatores of them all, who beat the Macedonians at Pydna in 168 B.C., and symbolized the union of Roman traditions with Hellenism, as Augustus aspired to do; Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, father of the reforming Gracchi; and Sulla’s lieutenant Lucius Licinius Lucullus, whose brother was responsible for the terraces and hemicycles at Palestrina.
The south hemicycle and portico, then, ingeniously connected Augustus’ name with a set of nabobs, builders, successful generals, philhellenes, and men remarkable for piety to the gods or popularity with the masses. What of the north hemicycle? Here Ricci discovered the elogium of Rome’s and Augustus’ legendary ancestor, pius Aeneas himself, who also appears on the Altar of Peace; a set of the Kings of Alba Longa; Romulus, also probably on the Altar of Peace; Caesar’s father; Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’ much beloved heir, whose untimely death Vergil movingly mourns in the Aeneid, and whose ashes lay in Augustus’ mausoleum; and Nero Claudius Drusus, Augustus’ stepson, who also is figured, like Aeneas and Romulus, on the Altar of Peace. It looks very much as though the Hall of Fame on this side of the portico was intended to connect the legendary Kings of Alba and Home with the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And the climax of it all was yet to come. At the end of the north portico Ricci excavated a square room with a pedestal at the back. On the pedestal he found a cutting for a colossal foot, seven times life size. Forty feet up the back wall were the put-holes for the struts of a huge statue. Whose? The Forum’s temple was dedicated to Mars, but the place for the god is in his temple. The most likely candidate is the Dux himself, Augustus, father of his country, in whom Roman history came, in more senses than one, to a full stop.
Medieval limekilns tell, as usual, how the rich marbles which decorated both portico and temple were broken up and melted down into whitewash, but three marble Corinthian columns sixty feet high give some idea of the temple’s grandeur. Its podium, lofty in the Italic fashion, was not solid marble, simply tufa revetted or veneered with thin marble slabs, an economical, and, some might say, dishonest way of making a city of marble of the desired Hellenic appearance. The statue-base at the back of the temple (which was apsidal to match the hemicycles in the porticoes) is too wide for a single figure. The cult statues must have been of Mars and Venus, another delicate reference to the ancestry of Augustus’ adoptive clan. The temple itself was vowed, the literary sources tell us, at the battle of Philippi (42 B.C.) to Mars Ultor, avenger of the murder of Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s sword was piously preserved as a relic in it. The Forum did not neglect the arts. Like Caesar’s, and like Pompey’s portico, it was a museum. It did service also for literature: we are told that lectures were delivered in the hemicycles. Begun in 37 B.C., the Forum took thirty-five years to finish. By 2 B.C. other propaganda devices—especially the arch, the Altar of Peace, Vergil’s epic, Livy’s history, and Horace’s lyric—had, as we shall see, given the desired respectability to Augustus, the Prince of Peace.