Introduction

Hello.

I'm Matthew Nicholls from the Department of Classics

at the University of Reading, and in this session,

I want to talk about the buildings of Augustan Rome.

Augustus for 10 years tells us best

that he found Rome a city of brick

and left it a city of marble.

That is he was highly invested in spectacular public

monumental building projects.

Why was that?

Why was building so important to Augustus?

Well, it was one way of showing his care

for the city of Rome, a city that

had been ravaged by civil war.

He of course was himself partly you might say largely

responsible for that civil war.

So by taking on a broken city and mending it,

he was showing care, diligence, fatherly concern

for his fellow citizens, and perhaps also

the continued primacy, the importance of Rome

as a capital city.

Marc Anthony, remember, had wanted

to shift the center of gravity of the empire

east to Alexandria.

Augustus, by monumental easing and magnifying Rome,

was presenting himself as a continuity candidate.

He also was justifying the unprecedented concentration

of wealth and resources in his own hands

at the end of that civil war.

Through confiscation, through exile,

through bequests, through all sorts of means,

he'd acquired unprecedented levels of wealth, power, land,

money, statues.

He have to do something with all this stuff.

And what he wanted to do was to build up the city of Rome

and give to the people of Rome a monumental architecture

and environment worthy of their standing as a new world

capital.

So that was one reason.

He also found that through architecture, he

could encode a whole series of messages,

build up an ideology of what it meant to be a citizen of Rome,

a member of the Roman Empire, a subject of the new princep.

Buildings through their location, their name,

their function, their architectural style,

their decoration, all of these things

send a message or a series of encoded messages

that for Augustus, he found he could deploy them

as a tool, a visual tool of meaning and of symbolism.

And historians like me have been interested in that

for the last few decades now.

For example, Paul Zanker's book, The Power

of Images in the Age of Augustus,

showed us how we can read Augustan art and architecture,

coins, sculptures as a complex set of interactions

between historical events and the presentation

of those events, the way that Augustus

wanted to create a discourse about what he was doing

and how.

And so by studying these buildings

we can try and read out some of those messages.

I don't think it's right just to call them propaganda.

I think that's a bit of a weak term.

Of course, they're telling us what Augustus and his circle

wanted us to hear.

But as we see when we look at some of these buildings,

we also have to think about the audiences, the users

of those buildings, and what messages they picked up,

what meanings they read into the structure.

So a dialogue, if you like, between the rules

and the subject--

the ruler in the subject in Augustan Rome.

And finally, remember that they were

going to be talking about finished buildings.

In fact, you need to think of these buildings for a long time

as work in progress.

Many of them took years to build.

The Forum Augustum that we'll look at

took nearly 40 years to build.

So for a long time, we're thinking about scaffolding

and the sound of hammer falling on stone and dust and ox carts

rumbling through the narrow streets of Rome

laden with stone for the building site.

And this is important in a city after civil war when

demobilized soldiers are unemployed and maybe with time

on their hands could be making trouble if they're not

given something to do.

So this is about caring for the city in a different way

as well, about employment and the idea of progress

and Renaissance in a damaged and war ravaged capital.

We're going to be looking at the city through various means,

through photographs and also through a large digital model

of the city that I've built. That model

is dated in the early fourth century.

That's about 300 years after the time of Augustus.

But for these purposes, it doesn't matter.

The Augustine buildings that we're going to look at

are all present in the model and I've portrayed them all as

they were when they were new.

So we can go and look at those buildings,

and for the most part, we'll see them

as they existed in Augustan Rome.

Here is a picture of that digital model

of Rome seen from above from a bird's eye view like a map.

If we fade it out a bit, these ringed in red

are the buildings that I'm going to be talking about mostly

in the rest of this session.

You can see at the top, the north of the map,

the Mausoleum of Augustus is a great tomb.

And then coming down towards the city center,

the Ara Pacis or altar of peace.

Further down the forum, the heartland of Rome

where its political buildings were,

and by that Augustus's own extension,

the Forum of Augustus or Forum Augustum.

And the rest of the ring buildings

there are a series of structures for leisure and entertainment

that Augustus or his associates built

to give the city not just beautiful spaces

for public business, but also beautiful

spaces for leisure and entertainment,

the bread and circuses side of Roman rule.

For some idea of the scale and range of Augustus' building

projects in the city of Rome, we can turn to his Res Gestae.

This is a text that some of you no doubt will have seen.

It's the long inscription his CV if you

like that He put up outside the tomb

that we're going to look at a bit later on

to record for posterity all the many things he'd

done in his long and busy life.

And he devotes a large section of this text.

What you see on the screen here is a modern reconstruction

or replica of the text.

He devotes a large section to his building projects

in the city of Rome.

Since surviving copies of this Res Gestae come not from Rome

but from sites in the Roman Empire like copies in Turkey,

this is a boast that went out right across the empire telling

everybody under the Roman aegis what he had done in the capital

city, clearly something he wanted everybody to know about.

And this is the section where he talks

in particular about his building projects.

Whether or not you know Latin, you

might be able to pick out of that some words that have

to do with building types.

You might see basilica there, which is a sort of law court.

You might see the word forum, the word porticum or portico,

the word theatrum for theater.

That occurs a couple of times.

And there are other words, there that

tell us about the types of buildings that he constructed.

For example, he says he built or rebuilt 82 temples

across the city of Rome.

That in itself is an enormous building project,

and that's besides all the theaters,

circuses, aqueducts, bathhouses that he also

mentions in this long list.

So Augustus was not only building,

he was taking care to list and detail

and boast about that building to as wide an audience as

possible.

And what we see here is a huge citywide transformational

project that ran right across his 4 and 1/2 decades in power

at Rome.