Fig. 6.3 Rome, Mausoleum of Augustus. (Fototeca)
Fig. 6.4 Rome, Mausoleum of Augustus, plan and elevation.
(G. Lugli, Mon. Ant., 3, p. 197)
It was Augustus’ fate to outlive his lieutenants, his relatives (see the family tree, [Fig. 6.5]), and all his favorite candidates for the succession. There lay, for example, the ashes of his stepson Drusus, his nephew, the young Marcellus, and his grandchildren, Lucius and Gaius; his lieutenant Agrippa; his sister Octavia, once given in a dynastic marriage to Mark Antony; his stepson Tiberius’ one-time wife Agrippina, divorced to give place to Augustus’ daughter. Agrippina survived Augustus; who knows what palace intrigue brought her ashes here? Her one-time husband’s ashes rested here, too, and those of Germanicus, Tiberius’ adopted son, also those of the mad Emperor Caligula, of Claudius, Vespasian, Nerva, and Septimius Severus’ consort Julia Domna (for the Severan dynasty, too, had need of respectability).
In stripping the mausoleum to its core, and building a deplorable neo-Fascist piazza on one side of it, an equally deplorable concrete shed for the reconstructed Altar of Peace on the other, the archaeologists of the ’30s stripped Augustus, too, of his pretensions. Yet the decayed grandeur, the disappointed hopes, the inevitable passing of régimes, strike their own note of pathos and mortality:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
However unfortunate the building that protects it may be, the reconstructed Altar of Peace in the Field of Mars must be recognized as one of the great triumphs of Italian archaeology. Sculptured reliefs from this structure were first discovered, though not recognized as such, as long ago as 1568, in the underpinnings of what is now the Palazzo Fiano, on the Corso, Rome’s cardo, which overlies the ancient Great North Road, the Via Flaminia. Other soundings were made in 1859 and 1903, and the reliefs were first recognized as belonging to the altar in 1879. But it was not until 1937–38 that G. Moretti carried through the incredibly ingenious and patient work which led to the almost complete recovery and reconstruction of the altar and the historic sculptured frieze surrounding it.
Fig. 6.5 Genealogical Table of the Julio-Claudian Caesars