The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Italy - Paul Lachlan MacKendrick

Notice that Julius Caesar left no descendants, but adopted his great-nephew Augustus. Connections with Augustus were later traced by descent from his daughter Julia, his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, or his sister Octavia. The names of emperors are in capitals. Numerals in parentheses show the order of marriages. Single lines indicate blood relationship; double lines, marriage; the dotted line, that the Cn. Domitius is the same person.

Note 1. A daughter of Drusus II and Julia IV married Rubellius Blandus; their son, Rubellius Plautus, was executed by Nero. Note 2. Julia III had a daughter who married Junius Silanus; several of their descendants were executed by Nero. Note 3. After the death of Messallina Claudius married his niece Agrippina II; there were no children.

Fig. 6.5 Family tree of the Julio-Claudians.

(P. MacKendrick and H. Howe, Classics in Translation, 2, p. 370)

A colossal engineering problem arose because the Palazzo Fiano rested upon wooden piles driven into the water which in this part of Rome underlies most of the buildings. These piles, and reinforcements to them, pinned down some of the marble blocks of the altar itself. To get the blocks out by ordinary methods, even if the water level had made it possible, would have caused the collapse of the building. Previous excavators had resorted to driving narrow, damp, dark tunnels, with incomplete results. Moretti resolved on more heroic measures; the solution is a credit to modern Italian engineering. The weightiest and worst-supported part of the palace lay directly over the altar; there were deep splits in the palace walls; only the extraordinary tenacity of the pozzolana mortar held them together. With infinite capacity for taking pains, the damaged parts of the walls were taken down and, by injection of liquid concrete, restored segment by segment, brick by brick. (The Italians call this process cuci e scuci, sew and unsew.) The subsoil was so uneven in profile and so soaking wet that a new masonry substructure was impossible. Moretti, in consultation with his engineers, determined to shift the weight of the palace wall onto a sort of enormous sawhorse or cavaletto ([Fig. 6.6]) of reinforced concrete. Holes were drilled sixty-five feet to a firm footing and filled with concrete; on this were built concrete piers to support the legs of the sawhorse. Between each pier and the corresponding leg was inserted a hydraulic jack (martinetto) adjustable to suit the various stresses exerted by the bearing walls. A grid of steel girders ran from pier to pier for reinforcement.

Fig. 6.6 Rome, Altar of Peace. Plan showing how corner of Palazzo Fiano was supported and a dike frozen around the remains of the altar. (G. Moretti, Ara Pacis Augustae, Pl. 36)

Once the corner of the building was supported by the concrete sawhorse, the problem was only half-solved, for water covered the altar up to the top of the outside steps. Pumping was labor in vain; it would only have weakened the substructure of the palace and adjoining buildings. What were needed were dikes, to keep the water out while the area inside them was emptied. But a cement dike was impossible, because of the maze of water, gas, and sewer mains, heat, power, and light conduits which, at all levels and in all directions, crisscrossed the subsoil of this busy part of modern Rome. A trench about five feet wide was dug, with a 230-foot perimeter. From a horizontal pipe laid in it, fifty-five three-inch pipes ran down vertically at equal intervals to a depth of twenty-four feet. Into these pipes was pumped carbon dioxide under a pressure of eighty atmospheres. Radiation from the refrigerant in the vertical pipes froze the surrounding muddy earth, and the impenetrable dike was a reality. The water inside covering the altar was then pumped out, and all the architectural blocks and fragments could be removed. Thus succeeded one of the most difficult and delicate excavations ever made. All was finished to meet a deadline, the bimillennary of Augustus’ birth, September 23, 1938.

What Moretti now had to work with in his reconstruction was not only the slabs and fragments he had just extracted, but also the finds from previous excavations going back to 1568 ([Fig. 6.7]). Over the intervening years these had been scattered. Most of the 1568 finds had been sawn into three lengthwise (for the slabs were over two feet thick, too heavy for easy transport) and shipped to Florence to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who then owned the Palazzo Fiano site in Rome. One slab was in the Vatican Museum, another in the Villa Medici (seat of the French Academy in Rome), still another in the Louvre. The finds from the 1859 dig had also been kept unrestored in the palace, and then transferred to Rome’s Terme Museum. One slab was found in re-use face down as a cover for a tomb in Rome’s Church of the Gesù.