With regard to transforming Rome into a marble city, now that Carrara marble was available at a fairly low cost compared to the importation of Greek marbles, Augustus begins to build his marble city. And I'm going to show you two major commissions of Augustus today. The first of these is the Forum of Augustus in Rome. A forum or the Forum Augustum in Rome that, that was very much in Augustus's mind from the beginning of his rise to power. In fact, there, it, it's Suetonius who tells us that the reason that Augustus built a forum in Rome was because even though there were already two forums in Rome, that includes the Roman Forum and the Forum of Julius Caesar, even though those two existed and were both being used, that the population Suetonius tells us that the population was growing by leaps and bounds, as were the need to try judicial cases. And that the plead, the spaces in the forums of, the Roman forum and in the forum of Julius Caesar did not allow for the needs of the populuce or for these, the needs of these judicial cases, and that they needed to build another forum. Well, that's a good story, but the likelihood is, it had pretty much nothing to do with that. It may have had something to do with that, but not a lot to do with that. Because Augustus had ulterior motives. Augustus, it was at the Battle Of Philippi, that battle of 42 B.C. when Marc Antony and Octavian joined forces to defeat the assassins of Julius Caesar, it was at, right before that battle that Augustus vowed that if he won, if he were successful that he would build a temple to Mars the Avenger, Mars Ultor. Mars Ultor. Mars the Avenger, in gratitude for helping him avenge the death of Julius Caesar, the murder of Julius Caesar, the assassination of Julius Caesar. And so when he was successful, he said, I will build that temple, and that temple needed an environment, and as we've seen, Romans often built temples inside complexes, whether it was sanctuaries or forums and so he had a good excuse to build a major forum in Rome as a domicile for the temple of Mars Ultor. He didn't get around to it for a while, again, the Battle of Philippi, 42, but he had a lot of other things to contend with, namely Mark Antony and Cleopatra. It wasn't until after the Battle of Actium, when he got rid of the two of them, that he had time to build this temple to Mars Ultor, and we see it beginning to go up in 28 B.C., so considerably later than the original battle, 28 B.C., and it was dedicated in Rome in a very important, on a very important date, the date of A.D., of 2 B.C., excuse me, of 2 B.C. So, begun in 28 BC and dedicated in 2 B.C., and that's the date that I've given you on the monument list, the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor and the forum of Augustus in 2 BC. We see its plan here. We will see momentarily that it is, was built in very close approximation, in fact right next to, the forum of Julius Caesar, why? Because of course, Augustus wanted to associate himself with his divine adoptive father, Caesar, so he puts his own forum right next to Caesar's. We see the forum of Augustus here, we can see that it follows, in the main, the plan of the Forum of Julius Caesar. It is a rectangular space, open to the sky, with colonnades on either side, with a temple in the center, pushed up against the back wall, and dominating the space in front of it. The only change here is the addition of these hemicycles, one on either side looking very much like the hemicycles that we looked at from the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina. These embracing arms that serve to accentuate architecturally and visually the temple in the center, and that also served as a place there, niches on either side where they could put statuary. And the light seen through the columns, as you can see here, the temple of Mars Ultor itself, again very similar to temples, early Roman temples, that we've been talking about using the Etruscan plan. Facade orientation, single staircase, deep porch, free-standing columns in that porch, free-standing columns on either side, but yet like an Etruscan temple, a flat back wall, as you can see here. Some columns inside decorating the cella of the temple, and then a single niche for the cult statue inside. And note here also the base I'll say something about the statue that stood on that base later. Here is a Google Earth view of this part of Rome showing the connection between, this is, you can see here, the forum of Julius Caesar as it looks today. This is the entrance we're moving back toward the Capitoline hill. These are those three columns that I showed you before, are still preserved, as well as the columns of the colonnade on the left side that entered into the shops. Here's the modern Via dei Fori Imperiali built by Mussolini, what Mis, Mussolini did was slice the Roman forum and Julian forum from the so-called Imperial Fora to which they were originally attached. And any of you who've been in Rome recently know that this entire area is being excavated. The plan is, the street is still there now, but the plan is eventually, we'll see whether this really happens, because it's going to be a traffic nightmare, but the plan is to take that, that Mussolini street down eventually and reunite all of these forums in some great archaeological park someday. It would be exciting if that were to happen. So, the modern street. But initially, the Forum of Caesar would have stood exactly next to the Forum of Augustus. We see that here. And if you look carefully, you can see the remains of the Temple of Mars Ultor, as well as a precinct wall. That is preserved, it was a 115 foot precinct wall protecting the forum from just the area we were talking about before, that question about housing for the well-to-do and the less well-to-do in ancient Rome. Protecting the forum from the so-called Subura, which was that area of Rome in which all of those rickety, wooden tenement houses were located, and which were constantly going up in fires, to protect the temple, because marble can burn, to protect the temple of Mars Ultor from all of that stuff that was back there in the Subura. Here's another view from Google Earth taken from the other side. Showing the remains of the temple of Mars Ultor, pushed up against the back wall, and then that precinct wall that is very well preserved snaking its way around, dividing the forum proper, the sacred space, from the residential area called the Subura that was behind. Here's a view of the the precinct wall as it looks from the outside of the forum today. There are some additions that were made in later times, you know, medieval looking windows and the like. But for the most part, it's preserved as it was. You can see we're dealing with ashlar blocks made out of peperino stone. We've talked about peperino before. It's a form of tufa, a stone that was used here with ashlar blocks for the encircling precinct wall. You can see the coloration of those peperino blocks, grayish brownish color here, and you can see the difference between that and the temple, the remains of the temple, the columns, the steps of the temple, as well as some other decoration and also some of the walls, were made out of Luna or Carrara marble. Luna or carrara marble for this temple. This is a view of the Temple of Mars Ultor as it looks today. It's in ruinous state, but enough is preserved for us to get very good sense of what it originally looked like. You can see that the podium is tall, you can see that it is made out of tufa. You can see that the steps are sheathed in Carrara marble brought from those quarries that we discussed before. You can see that the columns were also made out of solid Carrara marble. We see that here, we see a wall in Carrara marble, and we see the distinction between that and the peperino walls. You can also see in this very good view, a, a, one of the hemicycles on the left-hand side, and you can see those niches that I mentioned before, that would have held statuary that you could see through the columns. This is a restored view in the Ward-Perkins textbook, which shows you what the temple would have looked like in antiquity, when it was in its final form. And you can see the the, everything we've described. The tall podium, single staircase, facade orientation. You can see also that there was sculpture in the pediment, and we know something about that. You can see the columns on either side, and you can see in the second story, and you can barely make them out, but take my word, those are instead of columns, they are figures of women that we're going to say something about and you can see those again on both sides, so this gives you a sense of what the temple would have looked like in its heyday. The favored capital, column type and capital of the Romans, the Corinthian, is what is used here. You can see a preserved capital and how beautifully rendered they were, very high quality capitals done out of Luna or Carrara marble. We can see the characteristic triple row of acanthus leaves. The spiral volutes growing out of those. The central flower that we see always in the Corinthian order. For the columns that were used for the temple and for most of the side columns on the first story as well. But in some cases, those columns were replaced with others that have, instead of the spiral volutes growing out of the acanthus leaves, pegasi, winged horses. And I show you a detail of one of those pegasi here. To, a capital with an animal that, replacing the spirals, is called a zoomorphic, zoomorphic capital. And it's interesting to note that we see similar zoomorphic capitals in Greece a bit earlier than this structure at a gateway that I'm going to show you at a place called Eleusis. We'll return to this when we discuss Roman Greece later in this semester. And these have, instead of Pegasi, these have bull protomes, the tops of bulls emanating out of the acanthus leaves. But I show it to you to make one point, and that is that is seems very likely that there was some interesting architectural exchange, ideas, architects and so on, going on between Athens and Rome in the late Republican period in the time of Julius Caesar and into the age of Augustus, and it's an issue that we'll return to in the future.
