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It was the victory of Actium (31 B.C.), over the combined fleets of Antony and Cleopatra, that enabled Octavian to pass as the Prince of Peace. In 1888–89, in the old Forum, between the Temples of the deified Julius and of Castor, were excavated the footings of an arch, originally with a single passageway, later enlarged to three. This arch was identified from literary sources as the one erected by Augustus to commemorate that victory, enlarged later when another occasion for propaganda arose. The arch itself is a routine affair, with plenty of precedent, though one might ponder the propriety of thus gloating over Antony, a former colleague and a Roman citizen. (Gamberini, the excavator, even found, in the bottom of square stone receptacles beside the arch, laurel seeds which suggest that the tree of victory was prominent in the landscaping of the arch.) But, given the Roman propensity in general, and Augustus’ in particular, for propagandizing in stone, the question naturally arose what opportunity for self-advertisement the arch offered. The answer was not given until Degrassi published another book in 1947.
For many years archaeologists had believed that on the walls of the nearby Regia had been engraved the Fasti Consulares (lists of Roman consuls from the founding of the Republic and probably of the kings as well), and the Fasti Triumphales (lists of triumphing generals from Romulus to 19 B.C. I have remarked in another book[D] how much one can learn of a people by what they make lists of: Greeks, of Olympic victors; Americans, of baseball averages; Romans, of statesmen and military heroes). But in 1935 a careful study of the Regia by the American F. E. Brown proved that the part of its wall where the Fasti must have begun was masked in the rebuilding of 36 B.C. by another structure, and that the space available, carefully measured for the first time by Brown, did not fit the surviving Fasti, which were discovered in 1546 and are still preserved in the Conservatori Museum. Clearly the Regia was not the place where the Fasti were inscribed. Since two-thirds of the extant fragments were found between the Temple of the Deified Julius and the Temple of Castor, and since their dimensions suited those of the footings of the Arch of Augustus, the inference was clear. It was on the arch ([Fig. 6.2]) that the consular Fasti were carved, and this is now the universally accepted opinion. They were displayed on either side of the lateral passageway, where pedestrians could read them, the consular lists framed by pilasters with a pediment above (reconstructed in the museum by Michelangelo), the list of triumphatores on the corner pilasters of the enlarged arch. The result of this display was again, as in Augustus’ Forum, to connect the upstart Octavian with a more respectable or heroic past. His name appears twice among the triumphatores (the slab that referred to Actium is unfortunately missing) in a list that began with Romulus and contained the names of the greatest heroes of Roman history; in the consular lists his name figured twenty-four times. This collocation and repetition could do him no harm.
[D] The Roman Mind at Work (Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1958).
In the consular lists the names of Mark Antony and his family have suffered damnatio memoriae; that is, they have been first inscribed and then chiselled out. In the list of triumphatores, on the contrary, Antony’s name is allowed to stand. What is the legitimate inference from this? Clearly it is that the two lists were inscribed at different times, and that on the first occasion our condottiere felt a certain insecurity, which by the time of the second had disappeared. Literary sources date the second occasion in or shortly after 19 B.C., after the Roman standards disgracefully lost by Crassus at Carrhae had been recovered from the Parthians. In these eleven years or so the condottiere Octavian had become Augustus, the Revered One, Expander of Empire, Father of his Country, Prince of Peace. Within those years Vergil’s Georgics had cast an aura of beauty over Octavian’s resettlement of veterans on the land; the Aeneid had connected this modern Aeneas, the pious one, the bearer of burdens, with his legendary ancestors; Horace’s Roman Odes had praised Augustus’ religious and moral reforms; and Livy’s history had put into Augustan prose the lays of ancient Rome. Augustus could afford to be magnanimous to his enemies: he had seen to it that most of them were dead.
ARCO DI AUGUSTO NEL FORO ROMANO
Fig. 6.2 Rome, Forum. Arch of Augustus, reconstruction. (Fototeca)
But it was not enough that the past be controlled and rewritten, and connected with the present on splendid monuments. Augustus must control the future, too; even after his death men must admire and worship him and his dynasty. To this end he began (literary sources tell us it was in 28 B.C.) in the Campus Martius a massive mausoleum ([Fig. 6.3]), which should be reminiscent in shape of the great Etruscan tumuli of centuries before, and in mass of such wonders of the world as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the pyramids of Egypt. This monument, which through the centuries has been successively fortress, circus, park for fireworks displays, bull-ring, and concert-hall, was stripped to its gaunt core in 1935, as another part of the Fascists’ Augustan plan to attach themselves to the memory of Augustus. The excavators, Giglioli and Colini, found within the circular ring of the mausoleum’s vertical outer wall a series of concentric vaulted corridors ([Fig. 6.4]) in concrete, rising four stories or 143 feet, surrounding a central hollow cylinder where Augustus’ ashes were to lie. A statue of the great deceased would have surmounted the cylinder, and the whole massive structure would have been heaped with earth and planted with cypresses. Before the door stood the bronze tablets bearing Augustus’ autobiography—a calmly audacious fabrication of history, it has been justly called. In the corridor around the central cylinder were placed the marble containers for the urns of members of the dynasty. Some of the containers were found in situ, though their ashes—and, ironically, Augustus’ as well—had long ago disappeared.
