The end of the period of ‘‘patrician austerity’’ came about in 367 with the Licinian-Sextian laws, both the more famous law granting the consulship to the plebeians and the agrarian law, much debated today, but certainly consistent with the new political framework. As in the archaic period, renewed building and artisanal activity at Rome took place in perfect synchrony with what was happening in the rest of Latium, in Etruria, and in Campania, by now under Italic control - that is, all the areas with which Rome once again starts to share cultural forms and artistic trends. We can observe a true rebirth of the culture of archaism and its triumphal rituals, but with a new impetus and innovative forms. This new culture, despite the inevitable differences between its various areas, can be considered substantially homogeneous on the Tyrrhenian side of the peninsula, from the gulf of Salerno to the mouth of the Arno, and is therefore usually defined as a koine or distinct cultural community. At Rome this cultural koine is now more than in the late archaic period clearly influenced by Magna Graecia and Sicily.11 It is visibly conservative, the concrete expression of the victory obtained over the patrician oligarchy by the plebeian leadership, a social group that, as often happens when subordinate classes rise to power, showed itself to be tenaciously linked to more archaic cultural forms used in preceding periods. It is no surprise that the culture of this middle-Republican koine, constituting the backbone of the Romanization of Italy, should happen in turn to be preserved by the dominant
Romano-Italic classes until the great change brought about by the Mediterranean expansion of Rome in the second century: even after the triumph of late Hellenism at the end of the Republic and the subsequent classicizing conformity under the Julio-Claudian emperors, the formal artistic language of the middle-Republican tradition, preserved at length by the marginal social classes, would undergo a revival in the culture of the ambitious freedmen in the early imperial period.12 Fundamental to our knowledge of middle-Republican culture in Rome is the discovery and archaeological exploration of the most important Latin colonies, which were responsible for the exportation of the culture of the koine to the entire peninsula well beyond the historical boundaries of its formation and development:13 Fregellae, Alba Fucens, Cosa and Paestum, founded respectively in 324, 303, and 273, retained in broad outlines the physical aspect Rome had assumed in the second half of the fourth century, an aspect that the continuous building history of the urbs has destroyed, leaving behind only a few traces in the literary sources (see Figure 4.1).
In a first phase that covers the first half of the fourth century, the recovery is led by Etruria, still the motor of major economic and cultural phenomena in Italy. However, from c.338 on, following the dissolution of the Latin League and the grant of rights of citizenship without the vote (civitas sine suffragio) to the powerful Capuan elite, leadership in the developmental processes of the architectural and visual arts would pass to Rome, which had by now become a formidable power that in the eyes of the Greek world extended well beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula itself. In this sense the Cista Ficoroni is instructive. This unquestioned masterpiece among a class of large bronze containers for feminine cosmetics found exclusively at Praeneste between the end of the fifth and the first half of the third century is finely decorated with incision and appliques of mythical and genre scenes derived from Italiote
Fig 4.1 Plan of Cosa (mid-2nd century) (Stambaugh 1988: 256; drawing by Elizabeth H. Riorden). Used with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press
Prototypes.14 The inscription (ROL 4: 198-9, no. 2b = ILS 8562 = ILLRP 1197) tells us that the Cista was made at Rome by one Novius Plautius, whose name identifies him as a Campanian client of an important gens from Praeneste that by 358 had entered the Senate of Rome.
The ruling class of the mid-Republic was then eager to reestablish many traditions belonging to the monarchical past, beginning with solemn triumphal celebrations and the building activity that accompanied those triumphs and, more generally, the political competition for magistracies. In consequence, the general character of the new architectural and artisanal culture that spread across Etruria, Latium, and Campania in the middle of the fourth century was one of a true revival of decorative traditions and artistic practices that had flourished until the first decades of the preceding century and then was silenced by a narrowly oligarchical patriciate. Temple decoration used once again the ancient syntax that had been introduced at the end of the sixth century under western Greek influences. Until the second century, the pedimental space would carry only the large mythological scenes applied to the plaques covering the roof’s ridge pole (columen) and side-beams (mutuli);15 after an initially blatant propagandistic phase referring to the victories of Rome and her allied cities, these scenes somewhat later (around the mid-third century), and in particular among the Italian allies, would fall back on representations that celebrated the mythical origins of the Roman People or the city.
From the beginning of the fourth century, with the end of Attic imported pottery, Falerii, along with the majority of the Etruscan cities and with several Campanian centers, started local pottery production both of red-figure, chiefly for funerary usage, and of black-glaze pottery, which instead became the standard fine tableware. In the beginning Rome, and the rest of the Latin world that was tied to her, did not participate in what was a lively competition between Etruscan and Campanian production centers; by the end of the century, however, Rome would take control of the pottery industry in the allied territories of Falerii and Caere (and perhaps also in the Latin colonies), producing a very particular class of small red-figure plates decorated with female heads of visible Italiote influence, the so-called ‘‘Genucilia plates.’’ The wide exportation of these plates makes them an actual ‘‘ceramic flag’’ of Roman expansion during the last decades of the fourth century. Alongside the Genucilia plates, the mass production of black-glaze pottery known as APE (shorthand for ‘‘Atelier des Petites Estampilles,’’ coined by J.-P. Morel), 6 with workshops in Rome and her dependent territories for most of the third century and also distributed across the entire peninsula and the western Mediterranean, became another ‘‘ceramic flag’’ of the military conquest of Italy and also of Roman commercial enterprise between 280 and 200, the first period of imperialistic Roman expansionism. Just as the conjunction between the Genucilia plates and the APE pottery distinguishes the oldest period of the Roman conquest of the peninsula, so too the apex of that period is mirrored in the association between APE and ‘‘Greco-Italic’’ type amphorae, the Romano-Campanian development of an originally Campanian amphora.17
Another seemingly typical product of the specifically Romano-Campanian and South Etruscan contexts of the koine is the anatomic votive material, a third ‘‘archaeological flag’’ of Roman peninsular expansion, spread in an often surprising quantity through the devotional practices of masses of colonists even in areas where the tradition was not known (see also Chapters 10 and 21).18 The oldest production, rare enough, but qualitatively excellent, is dated between the end of the fifth and midthird century, and includes - in addition to sporadic heads - actual statues, found in Latium in the sanctuaries of Madonnella and the Eastern Hill near Lavinium, in the Latin colony of Cales and in the Campanian cities of Capua and Teanum Sidicinum. Starting in the mid-fourth century, a mass production of hands, feet, legs, intestines, and in particular heads began and would continue until the end of the second century, when these votive dedications would be replaced by monetary offerings, a practice that actually started in the mid-third century. The votive heads, which are of great importance archaeologically and for religious history, also have an art-historical significance, and document the origins of the portrait in the Romano-Italic sphere, once again in the wake of both Italiote and Sicilian influences. Written sources mention as early as 338 honorary statues of the great Republican generals, such as an equestrian statue of the consul L. Furius Camillus (grandson of the more famous M. Camillus), and of his colleague, C. Maenius, or the bronze posthumous statue of the great Camillus on the rostra: then, one by one, other commemorative dedications followed, signaling the beginning of the practice of dedicating individual portraits as an exceptional sign of distinction permitted by law (ius imaginum) only to those who had held the magistracy, a use connected with the exhibition of individual funerary masks in the solemn aristocratic funerals described by Polybius (6.53; see also Chapters 17, 23, and 24).19 A precious example of the masterpieces produced by mid-Republican bronze sculptors is the head of the so-called Capitoline Brutus (dated to the second half of the fourth century) that finds parallels in some other bronze heads discovered in various places throughout the peninsula. Together with the votive heads, especially the not uncommon examples produced freehand and not in molds, these bronzes exemplify the diffusion of portraiture over the entire third century, characterized by stylistic similarities and a lively sense of formal artistic synthesis (see also Chapter 24).
Among these honorary and votive statues, particularly important was the bronze image of Marsyas, perhaps dated to 295, known to us through coins and through replicas from the Latin colonies of Alba Fucens and Paestum. Such statues were generally dedicated in the Forum to celebrate the glory of the new nobility ( nobilitas) especially in the decades of the conquest of the peninsula, and were influenced considerably by Italiote and Sicilian Greek art. The close relationship to Italiote and Sicilian Greek art was productive also within the sphere of painting, as one can deduce from the ‘‘compendiary’’ style used in the decoration of the so-called ‘‘pocola,’’ a typically Roman production consisting of black-glazed votive cups with overpainted figures and inscribed dedications to various divinities. The ‘‘compendiary’’ style is characterized by spots of color to indicate light, a technique derived from the great painting of the early Hellenistic period. But the same style was also used in the extraordinary painted tomb on the Esquiline, to be identified most likely with the tomb built at public expense for Q. Fabius Rullianus, ‘‘First Senator’’ (princeps senatus) and five times consul as well as victorious over the Samnites in 322 and 295 (Figures 24.19a and b; see also Chapter 24). The scenes of military events are perhaps copied from the paintings by C. Fabius Pictor, a relative of Rullianus (and an ancestor of the first Roman historian), in the temple dedicated by Rullianus in 302 to Salus on the Quirinal Hill. All of this demonstrates that the great tradition of Greek painting, obviously adapted to suit the particular needs of the given genre, was also seminal in the creation of the so-called triumphal paintings. These are an artistic expression long understood to be emblematic of the mentality and figurative tradition of Rome, and are also the source of the so-called historical reliefs which are well known from the late Republic to the Imperial age.20 Such paintings, commissioned by generals in order to be shown first to the Senate and then to the People on the occasion of a triumph, originate exactly in this period in the context of a revival of archaic triumphal ceremonies: with the exception of the paintings by Fabius Pictor, the first securely dated example of triumphal painting, soon followed by a series of other analogous works, is the Tabula Valeria dedicated by M. Valerius Messalla either inside or outside of the Curia to commemorate the naval victory of 263 over the Carthaginians and King Hiero of Syracuse (see also Chapter 24).
At the root of the revival of building activity and artistic production in the middle Republican period is the public celebration of the gens generated by the military and political successes of members of the nobility: the most important public monuments erected by various magistrates of the gens become, in effect, symbols of the fortunes of the family, which continues to see to the repairs, restoration, and reconstruction of these buildings - sometimes for centuries, as the case of the Basilica Aemilia illustrates (Tac. Ann. 3.72). On the other hand, in the private sphere, the scarcity of existing data proves that the old regulation of luxury in order to ensure equilibrium among the elite continued to function in some form. Although they remained severe and unadorned, only the aristocratic chamber tombs received attention as central sites for preservation of the memory of the group, as is shown by the first phase of the famous tomb of the Scipios whose progenitor, L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (consul in 298), is the only one to have had special treatment: a burial within a sarcophagus similar to a monumental altar of the Greek type (Figure 24.7; see also Chapter 24).22 As far as we know, houses continued to have modest dimensions and facades: nevertheless, by this period the typical Roman atrium house was well established and, according to some scholars, had an archaic origin, as did the villa type demonstrated by the example found near Rome at the Auditorium site (see also Chapters 16 and 24).
Evidence for public building is abundant and allows us to sketch a rather detailed picture of this crucial phase in the development of Roman art and architecture. For the fourth century, the sources are concentrated almost exclusively on the activity of M. Camillus, ‘‘father of his country and second founder of the city’’ (Livy 7.1.10). Camillus is responsible for the revived emphasis on triumphal ideology (recall that he is said to have celebrated an exceptional triumph by riding in a four-horse chariot: Plut. Cam. 7.1): he reconstructed the old sanctuary of Fortuna built by Servius Tullius at the Triumphal Gate (porta Triumphalis) and joined to it (or perhaps only restored) the temple of Mater Matuta. Of the complex there survives an impressive platform that supported two twin shrines. For the dedication of a temple to Concord, a personification embodying the harmonious relationship between patricians and plebeians that he had reinforced, Camillus chose the western end of the Forum, at the time still without any important temple buildings: that temple was situated at the center of a rational system of ideological and functional harmony between the Curia and the Comitium on the one side and the temple of Saturn on the other. The other significant moment is the year 318, when the plebeian C. Maenius, who after his victory at Antium in 338 had initiated considerable building activity in the Comitium, held the office of censor. He may have restored the Comitium with a circular set of steps, following a model inspired by Greek ekklesiasteria and then reproduced in all the Latin colonies of the fourth and third centuries from Fregellae to Cosa. In the same area he also restored ancient sanctuaries such as the Volcanal, adding the Maenian Column crowned by a statue of Minerva, which probably served as the center of celebrations for the important civic festival, the Quinquatrus?'4 In the following decades, the Comitium would become the privileged seat of important monumental dedications, from Marsyas to the she-wolf and the Ficus Ruminalis (a fig tree commemorating the arrival of the semi-divine twins on the Roman riverbank), all offered by plebeian magistrates (see also Chapter 6). Patrician opposition can perhaps be detected only in the consecration, possibly in the years 292-90, of the statues of Alcibiades and of Pythagoras, ‘‘the strongest and the wisest of the Greeks,’’ a formula echoed in the famous epitaph inscribed on the sarcophagus of the patrician Scipio Barbatus (ROL 4:2-3, nos. 1-2 = ILS 1 = ILLRP 309; see also Chapters 3, 17, and 22). With this and other contemporary modifications, the Forum lost its former, haphazardly defined character and assumed instead the aspect of completely regular rectangular square, thanks to the completion in 310 of the tabernae argentariae, the ‘‘moneychangers’ district,’’ which replaced the older and perhaps irregularly shaped tabernae lanienae, the ‘‘butchers’ shops.’’ These were moved in turn to the north of the Forum, thus opening up public spaces on the north and south sides of the square to the definitive and official arrival of trade in the Forum area. At the same time, together with the shops that we know were organized on two floors ( maeniana), private complexes made their appearance around the square built on the model of contemporary houses, i. e., a central atrium and other side rooms, but without a tablinum at the end of the atrium (cf. Figure 24.13). These buildings were thus called atria, often named after their owners (e. g., atrium Titium, atrium Maenium), and were used for various purposes - for auctions (atria Licinia) as well as religious ceremonies ( atrium Sutorium) .25 The perimeter of Cosa’s forum provides an idea of this building type, which was at that time very popular at Rome before it was replaced in the second century by other architectural forms such as basilicas and chalcidica (porticoed halls with sacred overtones). But the space for the hectic forum life so well described in the first years of the second century in the Curculio of Plautus (lines 287-94) was no longer sufficient. Here then, already in the course of the third century, to the northeast of the Forum, a market building ( macellum) was opened in place of the old fish market (forum piscarium), built according to the Carthaginian prototype (from which the name was borrowed) of a colonnaded square with circular buildings in the center.26 The new fish market appears to be ideally associated with the ancient market spaces to the west of the Forum, along the Tiber and close to the port. These were dedicated to the sale of specific goods, such as the Forum Boarium for cattle and the Forum Holitorium for vegetables, and which illustrate clearly by their very names that an important portion of the city center was destined for mercantile activity.
Public building at the time was dominated by the exceptional censorship of Appius Claudius in the years 312-10. In addition to placing under state control (publicatio) the popular cult of the ‘‘Great Altar of Hercules’’ (ara Maxima Herculis), which was formerly under the control of the Pinarian gens, Appius also completed the via Appia to the allied city of Capua and built the first aqueduct (see Map 7). The aqua Appia also had a ‘‘public pool’’ (piscina publico), the first communal space in the city for water distribution and for sports from swimming to gymnastics - the forerunner of an institution that Rome would know only at the end of the Republic in the baths of Agrippa. Appius’ example was quickly followed by one of the leaders of the nobility who were closest to the plebeians: in 272 M. Curius Dentatus brought to Rome the copious waters of the Anio with an aqueduct later called Anio Vetus (‘‘Old Anio’’), in order to distinguish it from the Anio Novus built by the emperor Claudius in ad 52. If we set aside a few other constructions, such as (in 329) the starting-gates for the chariot races in the Circus Maximus (carceres, or ‘‘cages’’), the city seems to be engaged above all in erecting temples, the results of votive dedications made by victorious magistrates during campaigns or of the ancient custom of evocatio, the magical practice by which a Roman general was able to evocare - ‘‘call over to his side’’ - the enemy’s own divinities in order to leave him without protection. Generals found the money for such constructions from booty stripped from the enemy (see also Chapters 10 and 24); the aediles used the profits from fines; the censors recovered the necessary funds from debtors who owed money to the public Treasury.
These buildings were erected in various parts of the city, often chosen in advance for ideological reasons in order to emphasize by the location certain religious or political values and messages. The southern area of the Campus Martius, flanked by a small tributary of the Tiber, the Stream of Petronius (amnis Petronia), became a new focus of development and would be splendidly built up by triumphant generals of the second and first centuries.27 Major public building in this zone was begun by M’. Curius Dentatus, in the context of his program of improving Rome’s water supply: in ca. 290, right beside the amnis Petronia, he built the temple of Feronia, a goddess associated with water who had been ‘‘called over’’ (evocata) from the conquered Sabines. Good arguments have been made for identifying this building as Temple C in the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina, which is in turn to be identified as the porticus Minucia built at the end of the second century by M. Minucius Rufus to surround this and three other sacred buildings (Figure 4.2). 8 This very temple and two others of the remaining temples built between the third and second centuries - Temple A of luturna, dedicated c.242 by C. Lutatius Catulus after the victory in the sea battle near the Aegates islands and Temple D dedicated to the Lares Permarini (tutelary gods of sea-voyages) built by M. Aemilius Lepidus in 179, the year of his censorship, to commemorate the naval victory of his relative, L. Aemilius Regillus, over Antiochus of Syria in 190 - all serve to characterize the area as the seat of cults linked to waters or to naval victories, which indicates why the area was in the first century AD transformed into a ‘‘Water Office’’ (statio aquarum), the office governing Rome’s water supply under the Empire. The titular divinity of the fourth temple (B: Figure
Fig. 4.2 The temples of the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina
24.6), Fortune of This Day (Fortuna huiusce diei), built there by reason of family tradition in so far as it was dedicated by another Lutatius Catulus in 101, explains the use ofthe portico for corn distributions, which were handed out to their recipients on a specific day of the year.29 They were later housed in the contiguous extension named the Minucian Portico for Corn Distribution (porticus Minucia frumentaria).
Other areas built up by the victorious generals are the traditional sites of temples, sometimes vested with specific connotations. The Palatine, the Velia, and the Carinae remained the seats of early cults or of traditional Olympian gods; the plebeian spirit is obvious in the Aventine, while the Quirinal, dear to the Fabii, was the ‘‘Sabine’’ Hill par excellence. With these dedications, triumphant generals of the period outlined their own programs, their future aspirations, and declared their affiliation to political groups.30 Of great importance for building policies were also the collective tensions arising from military or political events, which could create new cult places. In this specific period we have a number of serious plagues, like that of 293 which was the precipitating event behind the dramatic arrival of the cult of Asclepius on the Tiber Island, but also an atmosphere of popular distress created by the events of the Second Punic War, when, after the consultation of the Sibylline books, two important dedications were made in highly significant areas of the city: first, the unusual dedication of twin temples on the Capitoline to Mens (‘‘Mind’’) and Venus Erycina (‘‘of Eryx’’ in Sicily), possibly as an expiation for the emergency enlistment of slaves; then, perhaps prompted by the Attalids, the introduction to the Palatine of Megale Thed (Greek ‘‘Great Goddess’’), the Magna Mater (‘‘Great Mother’’), one of the Trojan goddesses venerated with bloody rituals and the popular games called the Ludi Megalenses (see also Chapter 22).
But the dedication of sanctuaries, temples, and shrines does not give a complete picture of the enormous building activity that followed the end of the patrician - plebeian conflict, a contest not only about political rights but also about Rome’s very survival as a city after the Gallic fire. The building effort included also the restoration of the city walls originally built by Servius Tullius, carried out intermittently between 377 and 353 (Livy 6.32.1; 7.20.9), possibly with the help of Syracusan engineers. Thereafter, the wall would be repaired only sporadically and partially. More than half a millennium would pass before Rome had to face again the problem of creating a defensive wall.
Luxuria Asiatica
In 182, in the eyes of members of the Macedonian court, Rome still had ‘‘the aspect of a city not yet made beautiful either in its public or private spaces’’ (Livy 40.5.7). The ponderous and archaic character of mid-Republican public architecture, which was nothing more than an updating of sixth-century models, the absence of marble monuments, the urbanistic system lacking unifying porticoes, were the principal elements that must have struck a second-century Greek accustomed to new and glittering Hellenistic capitals with a sophisticated level of urban architecture that was light-years distant from the Etrusco-Italic city made of tufa, wood, and garishly colored terracotta decoration.
At the beginning of the second century, starting with T. Flamininus, the victor over King Philip V of Macedon, the more open-minded members of the nobility developed close contacts with Greece. This, together with an enormous flood of money and slaves - further increased by the rising volume of Italian agricultural exports in the East as well as the West - provided opportunities to the more enterprising sectors of the Roman ruling class and the Italian allies to transform radically the appearance of their cities. Simultaneously, these groups were able to adopt the most elaborate and sophisticated forms of Hellenistic figurative culture, which were considered by many to be an indispensable tool with which to construct a new political image for themselves and for their social class. And there began a flood, with ever increasing intensity, of architects, sculptors, and painters, no longer just from Magna Graecia, as had been the case previously, but now directly emanating from the great Hellenistic capitals. Archaeological research has brought to light several artists who disseminated a Hellenistic figurative culture, sometimes in a baroque style, at other times clearly classicizing, including sculptors of large cult statues such as Timarchides or Scopas Minor and architects, the creators ofimportant temples such as Hermodorus ofSalamis, who created a real Romano-Italic variant of Hellenistic architecture, strongly influenced by the classicizing canon of Hermogenes.32 The taste for luxury then moved on to private dwellings, even the less opulent ones; workshops producing metal vases multiplied, the production of silver vases being concentrated perhaps in Rome while that of bronze was in Campania.33 In the age of Caesar, at Arezzo (Arretium), a long-standing production center for black-glazed pottery, the production of elegant ‘‘Arretine ware’’ began which was modeled on the famous Pergamene pottery that imitated metal vases and would become the ‘‘ceramic flag’’ of the early empire.
All of these circumstances quickly set in motion a process of which the ancients themselves were aware, expressed in the famous aphorism, ‘‘conquered Greece conquered her brutish victor,’’ a claim that has generated much debate and led many modern scholars to identify this moment as the first Hellenization of Rome. In reality, while sources, materials, and figurative culture tell us that the city had consciously chosen Greek cultural models in one form or another as early as the eighth century, the phrase derives instead from a conservative stereotype of the city of the past as a simple community untouched by the corruption associated with luxuria, the unrestrained opulence of the late Republic that in the name of very precise political goals had abandoned the old ‘‘national’’ middle Republican culture.35 The gradual abandonment of the ‘‘national’’ culture occurred slowly at times and at others with surprising speed, steering between the fierce resistance of the more conservative elite that, like Cato, did not have an aversion to Greek culture but rather a deep fear of the destructive character of many Hellenistic models born within the courts of Alexander’s successors and standing in obvious contradiction with the old aristocratic equilibrium that was the basis of Republican institutions. In order to illustrate the contradictory nature of the process, it will suffice to note that in the 70s of the first century Pompey, a figure indubitably given to behavior of an eastern dynastic type, dedicated a building to Hercules ‘‘in the Etruscan style’’ (tuscanico more: Vitr. De arch. 3.3.5), that is, of a middle Republican type. This was to propose a monumental ‘‘national’’ architecture that obviously contrasted with that of late Hellenism, which had now been well established in Rome since the middle of the previous century.
For the entire second century only a few individuals such as Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemilianus seem to have adapted themselves to a political style and private life that followed the new models of Hellenistic sophistication. In any event, beginning with the last decades of the second century, the entire governing class in Rome and in Italy started to accelerate its adoption of forms of public building and monument construction that were characterized by display and types of political behavior as well as lifestyle that were now fully informed by what the sources refer as luxuria without qualification, labeling it Asiatica with obvious reference to its Hellenistic sources. After the well-known socioeconomic and political conflicts between the various classes of the capital and with the other Italic allies, from the war of Fregellae (125) to the Gracchan episodes (133, 123-21), these models with strong Hellenistic dynastic overtones became the property of all, perhaps more emphatically among the Italian allies than at Rome itself, where a residual social control kept dangerous excesses at bay at least until the Social War. Typical of this phase is the behavior of a rich oil merchant of Tibur, M. Octavius Herrenus (or Hersenus). In the closing years of the second century, in the great sanctuary of the Great Altar of Hercules (ara maxima) in Rome, he dedicated a temple that is certainly to be identified with the so-called ‘‘Temple of Vesta’’ in the Forum Boarium (Figure 24.5; see also Chapter 24). This was a Hellenistic round temple (tholos) made of Greek marble without the typical national podium (which is found instead in the contemporary Temple B [Figure 24.6] in the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina), vying with a second tholos also offered to Hercules a few meters away dedicated by Scipio Aemilianus during his censorship of 142. On the other hand, between the end of the second and the beginning of the first century, not only all generals who had celebrated a triumph, whether or not they belonged to the nobility, but also the governing classes of the allied cities became involved in grandiose construction of a political nature. Especially in the Italian cities these buildings give the impression of making a kind of display capable of rivaling the capital city; yet at the same time they give the sense of a need to embrace the traditions and cults of their cities’ past in the midst of the ideological storms of those years. All of this is the basis for an impressive building frenzy of extraordinary sanctuaries across all of Tyrrhenian Italy from Latium and Campania, such as that of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste (Figures 24.1a and 24.1b), of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina, of Hercules at Tibur (Tivoli) (see also Chapters 24 and 28).36
With the progressive destruction of national values and thus also of the traditions of the gentes, a style of strong self-representation by individuals ultimately prevailed, often involving people of more modest rank as well. During the second century houses began to manifest ever more evident luxurious elements, such as stuccoes and mosaics, but above all painted decorations imitating precious marbles following Hellenistic models well known at Delos, a style that would be surpassed in the last century of the Republic by a new fashion defined as the ‘‘Second Style’’ according to the traditional classification of Pompeian painting (see also Chapter 24 and Figures 24.22-24.25).37 The Second Style employed internal decorative schemes that were directly inspired by the palaces of the Hellenistic rulers, embellished with the facades of theatrical stage-buildings (scaenae frons) and overflowing with glass, silver, and gold objects. Some exceptional residences, like the House of the Faun at Pompeii and the Pompeian villas of Boscoreale and that of the Mysteries (Figure 24.16) offer painted or mosaic replicas of famous Hellenistic paintings with a significant political or ideological content (cf. Figure 24.26). 8 Luxury villas appear now also, combining the traditional atrium house model with large Hellenistic peristyle courts; they aspire to create an atmosphere of illusion, with idyllic landscapes and ever larger gardens, crowded with copies of Greek statues inspiring meditation and cultured debate as the appropriate setting for the literary dialogues of the age such as those of Cicero (see also Chapter 24). At the end of the second century at Rome monumental individual tombs appeared which were imitations of Hellenistic dynastic mausoleums; throughout the first century the fashion was picked up by local elites across all of Italy (24.724.10). The traditional legal restrictions being long forgotten, the practice of erecting portrait statues became widespread among the nouveaux riches - so extensively that during his attempt to restore the Republic Sulla was forced to dust off the old regulations of the law (but, as we know, with ephemeral results). The deep tension of the moment is well expressed by the very style of both sculpture and painting, split between replicas of late-Hellenistic baroque models from Asia Minor and respect for the classicizing canons. The dense moralizing pages of Sallust illustrate perfectly the climate created by luxuria between the end of the second and the mid-first century, the age of the Social War and of civil conflict, the tragic backdrop to the height of late Republican luxury.
The new Hellenistic culture in Rome and in Italy was able to benefit from some very important technological innovations. Already in the third century it seems that opus signinum had been discovered, an impermeable type of plaster (and pavement) derived from Carthaginian models; the material was of extraordinary importance for bath buildings, cisterns, and so forth. At the beginning of the second century a new era began thanks to the discovery of opus caementicium (i. e., cement), a mixture of lime and lapis puteolanus, the ‘‘Puteoli stone’’ or ‘‘pozzolana,’’ a construction technique that supplied late Republican and Imperial engineers and architects with a practical and economic tool allowing the creation of walls of great strength and especially arches and vaulted roofs - the source of the most important innovations in Roman architecture from this moment on.39 Between 60 and 50, first at Rome and then in Central Italy, opus reticulatum was used for luxurious buildings, a refinement of opus caementicium in which the surfaces of the concrete walls were faced with a netlike pattern of small blocks.40
Temples dedicated by victorious generals would continue to be built in ever-greater numbers and splendor, using the same ideological messages and standing in the same places as in the preceding centuries, but the most favored spot was the Campus Martius.41 Once the space of the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina was quickly filled, this expanse destined for the grandiose constructions of the Imperial period began to be taken over, with a special emphasis on the area around the Circus inaugurated by C. Flaminius in 221. At the end of the Republic the entire area would be surrounded by sanctuaries, with a sequence of temple buildings flanking the triumphal route intended, here as in other areas such as the Forum Holitorium, to create a solemn effect for the processional route. (See Map 9 and Chapter 23.) The majority of these temples were still of the traditional type; nonetheless a few, like the unique temple of Hercules Musarum (‘‘of the Muses’’) of 187 (Figure 24.4), took unusual forms derived from Greek prototypes, with porticoes, fountains, and exedras while others lacked the characteristic ‘‘national’’ podium, like the temple of Mars in the Circus Flaminius built in 138 completely of marble. Nine years earlier, within the context of his portico (the porticus Metelli), Q. Metellus Macedonicus had dedicated to Jupiter Stator and to Juno Regina the first temples in Rome to show the typical building material of Hellenistic sacred architecture. In 197, L. Stertinius, an unlucky general who had not won a triumph, inaugurated in compensation a new type of monument destined to enjoy great success in future centuries: the triumphal arch (see also Chapters 16 and 24). Not coincidentally, six years later his example was imitated by Scipio Africanus along the ascent to the Capitol (clivus Capitolinus), the traditional triumphal route. Very rarely, victors dedicated monuments without a specific sacred building. An isolated example is provided by the case of Cn. Octavius, who in 168 dedicated in the Campus Martius a portico with bronze capitals (the Porticus Octavia: Pliny HN 34.13). His example was imitated only after the end of the Republic, with the construction in the Imperial period of many porticoes containing no specific cult places as had been customary. On the other hand, the need for large porticoes to house the increasingly complex activities demanded by public life found a new start with the ‘‘invention’’ of the basilica in 184, when during his censorship M. Porcius Cato built the Basilica Porcia. His example was immediately followed by other members of the aristocracy and created a fashion imitated in the following centuries by all the cities of the Roman Empire.
The real novelty was generated by the urgent demands of the urban population of Rome which depended on corn distribution and by the new building techniques, which together served to open up a new chapter in the development of the city. Starting in 193, the censors set to work on the old Tiber port, rebuilding jetties, adding barriers and access ramps to the river. The most spectacular enterprise of this movement was the colossal Porticus Aemilia: inspired by the third-century ‘‘Hypo-style Hall’’ of Delos, the building had fifty naves roofed by barrel vaults and measured 487 m. long and 90 m deep, serving in its turn as the prototype of all the great mercantile warehouses (horrea) which became more and more numerous at Rome and at Ostia in the late Republican period. The radical social and economic transformations of the age brought about major changes in the form of the city: starting from 102, corn distribution took place in the Minucian Portico, near the archive located by the censors in the temple of the Nymphs, where the lists of those entitled to the subsidy were kept. In 123 C. Gracchus changed the direction in which orators delivered speeches to the People (contiones) so that they no longer faced the Comi-tium but the center of the Forum (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.3), where the multiplication of law courts scattered about the entire area had already created congestion in the third
42
Century.
This congestion was the cause of certain urban changes brought about by Pompey and Caesar whose political purposes very clearly anticipate the building programs of the Empire (see also Chapter 16). His booty-laden eastern triumph permitted Pom-pey in 55 to carry out a grandiose series of buildings in the Campus Martius, the first real dynastic complex in the Hellenistic mold to be seen at Rome (Figure 24.12).43 The center of the project was the theater crowned by the formal justification for the construction of the Theater of Pompey: a temple of Venus, the ancestor of Romulus, and thus, in a sense, of all Romans (Lucr. 1.1; see also Chapter 24). Although this was not the first theater of the city (the temples of Apollo and Magna Mater both had steps for spectators of the dramas that attended their festivals, as did a number of sanctuaries in Latium), Pompey’s theater was the first to have a permanent stage. Behind the stage sumptuous porticoes were created that, like the theater, were decorated with statues organized according to an ambitious iconological program with a literary background.44 These porticoes were linked to the Porticus Minucia in order to associate the theater-complex with the area of corn distribution, a fundamental source of electoral consensus. Yet in the portico Pompey also set up the new Curia for meetings of the Senate (where Caesar would be assassinated), linked to the porticoes ad Nationes (‘‘By the Nations’’) or Lentulorum (‘‘of the Lentuli’’), built by Pompey’s supporters to host foreign embassies. The ultimate aim of the project was to move the city’s political center from the Forum to the area where grain was distributed and to the Saepta (Voting Enclosure), the location of electoral assemblies. The real model at the heart of this project can be found in the world of the Hellenistic kings and in particular of the Ptolemies, as is shown by the linkage (over a small stream) of the Pompeian complex to the urban villa of the great general on the Pincian Hill. to the booty from the Gallic wars and with the help of Cicero himself (Att. 4.16.8), Caesar was able in 54 to start an ambitious program, but one not coincidentally in a vein contrary to Pompey’s projects: Caesar preserved for the
Forum area its historical centrality, enlarging the square to include land bought by Caesar for 60 million sesterces to create a new forum dominated by a temple of Venus, whom he claimed as the ancestor not only of the Roman People but of his gens as well. After his victory in the civil war, the dictator conceived of other projects for the monumental complex which were only partially completed owing to his assassination. Still within the square of the Forum, which Caesar repaved, he dedicated in 46 the Basilica Iulia, constructed on the site of the old Basilica Sempronia which had been built in 170 against the ‘‘old shops’’ (tabernae veteres) (Liv. 44.16), and in 44 he rebuilt the Curia (also named lulia) and the Rostra, the speaker’s platform. Other equally ambitious projects remained in the planning stages, and were taken up only in part by Augustus: for example, the diversion of the Tiber in the area of the Vatican, which in his plans would take on the role of the Campus Martius and where he intended to reconstruct the Saepta, which was at that time still fenced only in wood; or the transformation of the cavea in front of the temple of Apollo into a fixed theater, at a spot where later the theater of Marcellus would be built; or the construction of an artificial lake for naval battles (naumachia) and a library, to be organized by Varro - a plan realized instead by his officer, C. Asinius Pollio. These were projects that called for a dynasty. A few years later Rome would have one, although with an urban policy of a somewhat different sort in the person of Caesar’s adopted son, Augustus.
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