Rome

the Roman Empire, which could bring any kind of stone from anywhere in the conquered world, from Asia, the Near East, and all over the Mediterranean. Pink marble came from the Greek island of Chios; a greeny-blue marble known as cipollino from Euboea; yellow from North Africa. There were many others, though not as many as would be exploited by late-imperial designers or, at the extreme, by those of Baroque Rome. The discreet use of bands and veneers of these stones enlivened what might otherwise have been a certain monotony of surface in Augustan buildings.

The best thing about Luna marble, apart from consistency of color, was its firm crystalline structure. This made for an even “grain” in the stone, which in turn favored crispness and depth of detail. And some details of Augustan buildings were very elaborate. The principal architect and theorist of the Augustan Age was Vitruvius Pollio, who wrote the fundamental text on classical Roman building, the ten-volume De Architectura (25–23 B.C.E.)—the only treatise on fine building to survive from ancient Rome. He discussed not only architecture but also town planning, water supply, engineering, and war engines, but his views on architecture, set forth in great detail, lay at the core of European practice for the best part of a thousand years. No actual buildings by him have survived, and practically nothing is known about his life, except that he served Augustus’ army as an artillery engineer, designing ballistae and siege engines.

Vitruvius was intensely alert not only to the practical aspects of building, but also to its metaphorical content. Thus his disquisitions on the “orders” of architecture and their meanings. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan—each one had its human and divine significance:

The temples of Minerva, Mars, and Hercules will be Doric, since the virile strength of these gods makes daintiness entirely unsuitable to their houses. In temples to Venus, Flora, Proserpine, Spring Water and the Nymphs, the Corinthian order will be found to have special significance, because these are delicate divinities, and so its rather slender outlines, its flowers, leaves, and ornamental volutes will lend propriety where it is due. The construction of temples of the Ionic order to Juno, Diana and Bacchus … will be in keeping with the middle position which they occupy: for such buildings will be an appropriate combination of the severity of the Doric and the delicacy of the Corinthian.

The most prominent of the Augustan “orders” was a new type of capital, known as “Composite,” which combined the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order with the volutes of the Ionic. This hybrid became one of the typical forms of Augustan architecture, but it required rather more skill to carve successfully than most Roman stonemasons had. Greek marble-cutters had to be imported, because Greece trained better stonemasons than Rome in the first century B.C.E.

These Greek workmen did more than carve architectural details. They did statues, too; someone had to churn out all those effigies of the Princeps and his family. This helps account for the fact that the portraiture of the imperial period tends to lack the realistic, sometimes sharply frank likenesses of earlier Roman portraiture. The carvers had never set eyes on Augustus and so had no firsthand idea of what he “really” looked like, and of course no conception of his personality other than the one diffused by imperial propaganda. But Augustus was a god, and Greek sculptors were well used to depicting gods. This also helps account for a certain sameness in the representations of Augustus throughout his reign and across the Empire.

But more than flood the culture with numberless coins, busts, and statues, the Greeks had a profound and lasting influence on the physical city. Two monuments in Rome itself which clearly showed the continuing Greek influence on Roman art and architecture were the Forum of Augustus, finished around 2 B.C.E., and the Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in 9 B.C.E.

In layout, the Forum is entirely Roman, as it should be: a rectangular open space lined with porticoes, in which people met and business was done. One end was closed by a large temple on a high podium, that inheritance from more ancient Etruscan conventions; and there were statues of heroes of the state, including, of course, Augustus himself. But Greek details understandably insinuate themselves. The capitals of its columns are Corinthian; the presence of a line of Caryatids (load-bearing, columnar figures of women) in the upper story of the colonnades is a direct reminiscence of those on the porch of the Erechtheum in Athens.² The scale of the whole complex was immense. The columns of the temple were some eighteen meters high, made of the gleaming white Luna marble from the quarries of Carrara that was Augustus’ architectural signature. The flooring of the colonnades, by contrast, which survives only as fragments, was done with the most highly colored marbles in the Empire: Phrygian purple (pavonazzetto) from Turkey, Numidian yellow (giallo antico) from Tunisia, red-and-black africano.

The Ara Pacis Augustae, or Altar of Augustan Peace, is an even more direct quotation from Greek norms and forms. Its purpose is to celebrate the end of conflict and dissension—the settling of the Roman state by its great uniter, Augustus, who is seen as presiding over a Rome that has been reborn from the dissent that finished off the Republic. The altar rises on steps, themselves contained within high screen walls of Luna marble with open entrances on the east and the west sides. On either side of each entrance are mythological panels of carved stone. They depict the spiritual and material benefits of Augustus’ reign, and are clearly by Greek artists. One of them, for instance, promises the return of the Golden Age. Here, enthroned at the center of the panel, is Natura naturans, Nature being Nature—Mother Earth in her sweetest and most fertile guise, with two infants sporting in her arms. Fruit and flowers surround her, a cow and a sheep lie contentedly at her feet, and she is flanked by two benign nature spirits, representing Ocean and Water. The mood and content are those of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, in which the poet tells of the coming age of Apollo:

??????Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy:

??????Born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries

??????Begins. Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age

??????Returns, and its first-born comes down from heaven above.

??????Look kindly, chaste Lucina, upon this infant’s birth,

??????For with him shall hearts of iron cease, and hearts of gold

??????Inherit the whole earth—yes, Apollo reigns now.

??????And it’s while you are consul—you, Pollio—that this glorious

??????Age shall dawn.…

Who is this firstborn child “from heaven above”? It is still a mystery. Christian interpreters after Virgil’s death had no doubt that it was the infant Jesus, but the wish was certainly father to the thought: Virgil was not writing Christian prophecy, although many people have wished he was.

Elsewhere on the carved walls of the Ara Pacis, we see Augustus as Aeneas making sacrifice, in his fundamental guise as the peace bringer, establishing the city of Rome, having at last transcended the dreadful conflict and loss of Troy. The lesson is not to be avoided: there is a savior before us, a savior who repeats the primal act of foundation by establishing the Roman state for the future in accordance with its ancient laws and pieties. What is more, the savior’s family is and always will be the metaphor of the good state. Such is the