THE AUGUSTEAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ART OF THE AUGUSTEAN AGE

I.

CHARACTERISTICS OF IMPERIAL ART

WITH Augustus Roman art definitely acquires an Imperial and universal value. In the Augustan programme the art of Rome, predestined capital of a new unified dominion, must primarily be Italic and Roman in character: the Italic tradition was now so deeply rooted in the national consciousness that the Emperor could fearlessly exalt it and complete its romanization. This is not to say that Hellenism was repudiated, far from it; but it was to be admitted only as an element deliberately accepted and absorbed. The question was no longer one of conflicting principles, but of complementary factors. What to Cato and his followers had appeared a peril to be avoided at all costs had now become a necessary and intrinsic part of the complex Roman fabric. The formation of Roman civilization and art was not the result of the simple combination of foreign elements, but of the combination of these with an element preponderant among them all, the Latin element itself.

Roman Imperial art was thus no sudden phenomenon. Its Italic origins are revealed in its themes which remain man and his doings; hence it excelled in portraiture and in the rendering of res gestae whether public or private. Its sphere was still the life of the city, of the camp and or the soil. For the Romans ideas had little value except in so far as they could be translated into actions; to them art was neither the expression of ideas nor the attainment of beauty, but a method of making actions known and of committing them to posterity. It was commemorative rather than historical, a record of contemporary events which only turned to the past or to legend when this seemed necessary to the enrichment of the present. A great representational art now came into existence, whase function was to enforce the lessons of Empire, and to glorify the doings of its rulers and its people.

II.

THE ARA PACIS AUGUSTAE AND KINDRED MONUMENTS

These characteristics come out forcibly in the famous reliefs from the enclosing wall of the Ara Pacis Augustae which was put up between 13 and 9 BC as symbol of the Pax Romana now established throughout the world by will of the Emperor. The occasion was a State thanksgiving for the safe return of Augustus from Gaul and Spain, in which the Emperor himself and his family, the priestly colleges, the Senate and the People appeared as participants. The altar was in the Campus Martius close to the Via Flaminia by which Augustus entered the city on his return and, like the earlier altar of Fortuna Redux at the Porta Capena, was served according to a ritual fixed by the Emperor himself. The inner and outer faces of the wall were divided horizontally into two zones. The lower zone of the outer face is covered by acanthus spirals; a ceremonial procession fills the longer sides of the upper frieze and allegories of Empire adorn the shorter panels on each side of the two entrances. The sculptured reliefs, though found at different times and scattered in various museums of Italy and Europe, have survived almost complete.

As a visible memorial of the home policy of Augustus the processional friezes have a value second only to the Emperor’s own account of his Principate—those Res Gestae Divi Augusti which were inscribed on tablets of bronze at the entrance to his Mausoleum. The first act of the pageant opens as the Emperor, surrounded by his bodyguard, halts to offer libation; immediately follow the religious orders, the Vestal virgins, the priestly colleges and the Pontifex Maximus himself. The religious organization of Augustus is here vividly portrayed in its two main manifestations—the liturgy, of which he showed himself a zealous observant, and the priesthoods, in which he himself held high office. A small boy who hangs on to the cloak of the Pontifex and looks back to the second part of the advancing procession, effects the needed shifting of the key from the religious solemnities to the animated couples who, accompanied by their children, represent the Imperial family and symbolize the dynastic continuity which Augustus believed to be interwoven with the life of the Empire. The entrances divide these august presences from the second part of the procession shown on the parallel wall. A long file of senators, draped in their ample togas, fills some two-thirds of the space. This prominence emphasizes the re-organization of the Senate, thrice purged by Augustus of alien or unworthy elements. If the ranks are a trifle monotonous they are at least impressive. As on the first frieze the mode changes gradually from grave to gay, and the pageant closes in a group of citizens with their wives and children. They stand for the Roman Populus whose racial purity Augustus strove to safeguard from foreign contaminations, and whom he raised to a new sense of national dignity and importance as chief mainstay and support of the State. The technique of these friezes is not exempt from as­perities, the movements often lack suppleness and ease, but the whole is harmoniously welded together by the unity of the pervading thought.

The representation of childhood on the balustrades of the Ara illustrates a purely Italic strain which has never died out of Western art. The children of the Imperial group, the little girl of the north frieze, who, holding a stiff nosegay, walks with childish self-importance6, the baby who totters along, all but lifted off his fat legs by the firm hand of his father—

dextrae se parvus lulus

inplicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis—

familiar types that may be studied any day in the streets of modern Italy. The child, so often admitted on sufferance into Greek art as complement of a story, as attribute or even mere ornament, acquires independence in Roman art, and takes its place as an integral part of the life of the family. This strong feeling for childhood was doubtless fostered by the dynastic hopes of Augustus, by his love for those children and grand­children who he proudly believed would succeed him, as also by his insistence on the fertility of the family as a first condition of national prosperity.

It is not so much with the majesty of Empire that the Ara Pacis strikes one as with that human and personal conception of the Principate which Augustus wished to stress. There is nothing monarchic about these friezes in the Oriental sense which places the monarch above his subjects, though the dynastic idea is manifest in the presence of the many descendants. Augustus, the central figure of the ceremony, remains closely connected with the action, thus maintaining his character of primus inter pares—the visible counterpart of his title princeps. He is placed in three-quarter view to the right1, as participant in the action, and there is no question as yet of giving him the frontal position which would bring him out of the picture and relate him to the spectator, while separating him from the other actors in the scene.

In the four panels on the entrance sides the subjects pass from the realities of contemporary ceremonial to allegory and mythology. The best preserved is the well-known relief in Florence of Terra Mater with her nurselings (a figure sometimes interpreted as Italia) flanked by the spirits of Air and Water. The goddess sits on a rock above a stream, which flows from a reed-fringed pool on the left, reminiscent of Virgil’s Mincio,—

Hic virides tenera praetexit arundine ripas

Mincius-—

while the cattle rest in the shade of the rock, and tall poppy-heads and more reeds give a background to the charming composition. Save in the accessories, the central group varies little from its compeer in the Louvre; both seem to derive from the same statuary composition set up possibly in some chapel or sanctuary of Tellus. Of the companion slab to the Terra Mater all we have is a few fragments apparently of Roma seated on a pile of armour, enough, however, to show that the power and glory of Rome as fountain-head of the new prosperity faces the fertility of the Orbis Terrarum under the Imperial rule.

The panel on the opposite side, representing the Arrival of Aeneas in Latium, affords a good instance of the Roman power of knitting the past with the present; this is effected in the person of Aeneas, who appears here both as founder of the race and as double of Augustus, in token of which, though only just landed in Latium, he performs his sacrifice in sight of a shrine of the Penates, whose cult Augustus had restored. The relief has something of the sylvan beauty of the Tellus slab: from a cave an attendant drives the sow to a rustic and garlanded altar, beside which stands a camillus carrying a jug and a cup piled with fruit; on the right, the commanding figure of Aeneas, bearded as befits an ancestor, accompanied by Achates and perhaps by lulus, looks benevolently on, as he pours his libation at the altar. The corresponding relief, on the right of the entrance, of which only the merest fragments remain, apparently represented the Nurture of the Twins within the Lupercal, a subject dear to Augustus, who had also restored this ancient shrine. The mythico-historical happenings of the west side, localized in Rome, combine with the more generalized allegories of the east side, to form a setting of cosmic significance for the Imperial processions.

The technique of these friezes retains much of the old Republican harshness: the figures appear carved rather than modelled and the folds of the drapery are rendered by means of sharp ridges which produce contrasts of black and white, with little attention to the rendering of texture or to surface transitions. The processional arrangement likewise has Italic traits, the serried ranks breaking up into groups of closely related figures who move, so to speak, in space as well as along the surface. The tridimensional principle had already made itself felt in Etruscan art3, but it was only with greater technical dexterity that it attained full expression. A century of effort was needed before sculptors produced the spatial illusion of the panels of the Arch of Titus.

The lower wall is richly decorated with an intricate pattern, composed of four systems of interlacing acanthus scrolls, each springing from a central stem. To cover the whole surface of a wall with carved reliefs as with a carpet or tapestry-hanging was a new and original device. A new sense of plasticity, lacking to the processional friezes, makes itself felt here: the swelling stalks, the petalled flowers, the opening buds, the rich foliage, the Apolline swans poised with spreading wings on slender stems, all these are modelled with minute attention to light and shade, and to plastic form. So delicate is the carving that the pattern enriches the wall-surface without detracting from its solidity. But there is no monotony in the huge design, if only because the acanthus stems appear grafted, as it were, with plants of another kind; clusters of ivy, pansies and poppies flower happily on an alien stem as if to illustrate the second Georgia. The scrolls them­selves became a typical Roman decoration; they were not only used as an architectural ornament, but often adorned furniture and small objects. A network of spirals similar to those of the Ara Pacis encircles a cup from Boscoreale in the Louvre and another in Berlin from the Treasure of Hildesheim. They could be infinitely varied; they were translated with equal effect into paint or mosaic and attained to a last splendid efflorescence in the art of Christianity.

Fine decorative effects are likewise provided by the swags of flowers, fruit and leafage which hang between bucrania, or ox­skulls, along the inner wall of the enclosure. We have already seen similar festoons painted between the columns of the White Room of the so-called House of Livia; they had also appeared at an earlier date carved on the tomb of Bibulus, later on that of Caecilia Metella; repeatedly and at all times along the friezes of tombs and temples—Roman art is almost unthinkable without them.

Fruit treated with the same rich naturalism as the swags of the Ara Pacis overflows from the numerous cornuacopiae symbolic of the fertility of the Empire, such as those held by the Genius Augusti in the Vatican, or carved on the altar of Carthage and on a relief in the Terme, while on the Ara Pacis itself the fruit in the cup held by the camillus in the Aeneas panel, and the delicate poppy-heads in the background of the Terra Mater panel show the same acute observation of natural forms. All these fruits and flowers were naturalistically coloured in the manner revived in the Renaissance by the Della Robbias and Crivelli. In time this naturalism became conventionalized and was replaced by the harder rendering of flower and plant forms already to be seen on the sarcophagus Caffarelli in Berlin which is datable to the Tiberian epoch.

In the dearth of monumental sculpture of the Augustan period besides the Ara Pacis, great importance attaches to the small altars set up in connection with the cult of the lares restored by Augustus. One of the most significant of these altars, datable to between 12 and 6 BC, is in the Vatican. It is primarily a record of the past and present claims to glory of Augustus. On the front face the Victory, who in Augustan policy appears as the pledge of perpetual victory to himself and his successors, hovers by the clipeus, which can be none other than the clipeus aureus granted to him in 27 BC by the Senate and hung on a pillar like a trophy. The group is framed by two laurel bushes, identified as those that flanked the entrance to the house of the Princeps. The doctrine of Victory inculcated on the front face is balanced on the back panel by that of Apotheosis; here Caesar, like Elijah, rises heavenward in a flaming chariot, within a cosmic setting defined by Sol, Caelus and the divine eagle in their midst, while members of the Imperial family look up from below. The shorter sides introduce us to scenes of more human and immediate interest; on the right, within a gar­landed precinct, the ceremony of the reconsecration of the lares takes place; on the opposite side the Mother of the lares, reading out of the prophetic scroll, presides over the prodigy of the Lauren tian sow, while Trojan Aeneas looks on. This mytho­logical episode connects in the Augustan manner the present with the legendary past. Apart from this significance, the altar is remarkable for its finish, for the purity of its linear style, and for a severity of composition characteristic of an early date; the figures grouped round the altar in the scene of sacrifice are intent on the business in hand, and no attempt is made to correlate them either by action or by glance with the spectator.

An altar in the Uffizi, dedicated by the vicomagistri of the Vicus Sandalarius (Cobblers’ Lane) in 2 BC, has on the front face Augustus, marked out by his staff as augur, an office which he held in the greatest honour, with Livia on his left and an Imperial prince on his right, all three apparently imitations of statues in the round, a common device of Augustan and Julio-Claudian art. At the back is the crown of oak, ob cives servatos, and a sacrificial patera to indicate the sanctity of the spot. Here the Augustan Victory appears on the right narrow side, balancing herself on a trophy, while on the left side are two lares. A third altar, in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, was dedicated in AD 1 by the magistri of the Vicus Aesculetus (Oak-tree Lane), who are shown on the front face offering sacrifice, two on each side of an altar. At the back are traces of an oak-wreath, and at the sides the Augustan lares. The personages show little variety of attitude as contrasted with the animated groups on the altar of Manlius, with which we may close the series of Lar altars. On the front face is carved a sacrificial scene within a garlanded precinct, and at the back, in place of the more usual Victory or wreath, a ceremony in honour of Fortuna, who sits on a high-backed throne raised on a rock. The lares are repeated, one on each of the shorter sides of the altar. The complicated composition both of the sacrificial scenes and of the ceremony, in which Fortuna appears almost frontally, shows a marked advance in tridimensional composition; it heralds the art of the Flavian age and the reliefs of the Arch of Titus. Like the relief of the Etruscan cities, altar of Manlius was found at Caere; it therefore probably belongs to the efflorescence of that city in the reign of Claudius, a date which would well accord with its style.

In the provinces the same influences were at work. Art with the Romans became an acknowledged system of religious and political propaganda; it was the beginning of that pictorial teaching afterwards so fecund in the early ages of Christianity. The Imperial creed was made clear to Italy and the provinces by the same means that inculcated it in Rome: the provincial monuments being often, though not invariably, copied, imitated or borrowed from monuments in the capital. The influence of the slabs of the Ara Pacis, for instance, may be detected in the fine altar of the Gens Augusta discovered not long ago at Carthage. It is a shortened catechism of the new doctrines: on the front face Roma, seated, holds the familiar pillar supporting the Augustan Victory, as she contemplates an altar on which are piled the Orb of the World, symbol of universal power, and the cornucopiae, symbol of plenty, the dominating ideas of the Tellus and Roma panels of the Ara Pacis being here condensed into one picture. At the back sits Apollo, the special protector of Augustus, holding out a laurel branch towards a tripod: on one short side is shown the flight of Aeneas from Troy: on the opposite side Augustus sacrifices to the Lares. These three panels further illustrate the desire of Augustus to associate the Roman cults with those gods and heroes who, like Apollo and Aeneas, stand for the Trojan ancestry of Rome. Further examples from Carthage itself are the relief representing the divinities of the temple of Mars Ultor—Mars, Venus and an Imperial prince, and the relief now in the Louvre which reproduces the Terra Mater motive of the Aha Pacis; two reliefs which belong, according to a theory which it is hard either to prove or to disprove, to one altar. Another altar, put up in honour of Augustus at Lugdunum in 12 BC, bears witness in its remaining long swag of oakleaves and acorns to the same inspiration as the Ara Pacis.

A number of Augustan and Julio-Claudian undated reliefs can be linked up with historical events. With Actium is connected a fragment representing a fully manned bireme, found at Praeneste, still Italic-Etruscan in composition and carved with the Republican harshness and stiffness. The visit of Germanicus to Actium in AD 18 seems recorded on a fragment found at Nola which shows the young prince before the Actian Apollo. Its fluid style and the attempt to stress space by placing the Apollo, for instance, in a three-quarter view, marks a great advance upon the stiffer composition of the Praenestine frieze. To the Pannonian triumph of AD 12, or else to that over the Sugambri in 7 BC, should probably be referred the two Rothschild silver cups representing, the one Tiberius as triumphator the other Augustus receiving the homage of the conquered people. No doubt the composition is inspired by some monumental frieze or picture, but the elaborate foreshortenings, the clear sense of tridimensional space, the complicated groupings, the swinging rhythm of the sacrificial scene, make it probable that the cups represent a later version of an Augustan theme, datable to the Claudian period, when enthusiasm for the Augustan past was fostered to the utmost.

To the earlier decades of the first century AD may be dated, on the grounds of style alone, the five della Valle-Medici reliefs, from a frieze of the same character and size as those of the Ara Pacis. Here again the subject is a procession; the officiating prince strongly resembles Claudius, but Claudius so young that the ceremony can only be referred to about AD 8 when he was invested with the office of Augur and could make his appearance as protagonist in a religious pageant. The date accords with the style: the compression of the groups, the introduction of onlookers amid the participants in the ceremony, the more nearly frontal pose of the sacrificing prince, the beauty of the sacrificial scene, no whit inferior to that on the Rothschild cup, show a grasp of artistic means far beyond anything attempted on the Augustan altar. The actual period of Tiberius should be credited, it is thought, with the frieze of the Suovetaurilia in the Louvre from some altar enclosure or triumphal arch1. As in the Ara Pacis the figures tend to fall into groups and to look towards one another without for all that interrupting the flow of the composition, which is unified and dominated by the tall, draped figure at the garlanded altars; his face is much mutilated but seems to resemble portraits of Tiberius, of whom the towering stature would be typical.

We are on safer ground with two works of art which are indubitably Tiberian. The first is the sword in the British Museum which is decorated with a scene—probably borrowed from a larger triumphal composition—recently interpreted as Germanicus giving homage to Tiberius after his victories of AD 15 and 16. The Emperor, identified by the inscription on the shield at his side (Felicitas Tiberii), sits enthroned, while behind him hovers Victory, holding the dynastic shield with the inscription Victoria Augusti. The second monument is the base in Naples erected in honour of Tiberius in AD 30 by the Augustales of Puteoli and almost certainly intended to carry the statue of the Emperor. It is adorned with allegorical figures in relief inscribed with the name of certain cities of Asia Minor restored by the generosity of Tiberius after the earthquake of AD 17. The types were evidently borrowed from the statues which once surrounded the colossal effigy of Tiberius, erected in Rome near the temple of Venus Genetrix, as record of the Emperor’s liberality. The individual figures are possibly inspired by Graeco-Asiatic originals to be seen in the restored cities, but their compressed arrangement in depth and frontal poses are essentially Roman. We have here again an interesting repetition made for a provincial city of a monument set up in Rome to commemorate an Imperial happening.

A fine example of Claudian sculpture in relief is afforded by the fragment of the Etruscan cities in the Lateran. Like the Puteoli base it is a record of gratitude towards an Imperial benefactor—in this instance Claudius who had restored the glories of the ancient Etruscan League. Since two of the cities stand on bases it is obvious that they were copied from statues in the round but instead of being stiffly aligned like the Augustan statues on the Lares altar in Florence, one of them at least is placed obliquely to the back­ground to accentuate the spatial content. The effect is further enhanced by the swaying movement from front to back of the putto who holds up the garland—a motive already introduced into the decoration of the monument of the Julii at St Remy. The fragment, found, like the altar of Manlius, at Etruscan Caere, may well have decorated the pedestal of a statue of Claudius, and would suit, for instance, the fine seated statue of this Emperor found at Caere itself.

III.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF AUGUSTAN ORNAMENT

The various patterns carved on altars and other monuments were rapidly elaborated and enriched; in the Augustan period festoons were simply suspended from ox-skulls or bucrania: under Tiberius and Gaius the ox-skulls were supplanted by an infinite variety of motives, including heads of Ammon as angle-supports for the wreaths, masks of Medusa as central apotropaic ornaments, heads and even groups of Eros and Psyche, and numerous animal designs, all used with evident protective intention. The heads of Ammon form an almost continuous series, and reappear carved against a rich foliated background in the centre of the imposing paterae which were added to the decoration of the Forum of Augustus during the Principate of Hadrian. With the increasing wealth of the State and of private individuals, ornament became more and more lavish, but an underlying religiosity, the old Roman sense of the sacredness attaching to inanimate things, a relic possibly of the cult of the indwelling numen, acted as a check to profane or vulgar excess. An example of this sobriety in luxury is offered by the bronzes belonging to the ships of Nemi, whose recovery has given us back a treasury of works of art. The ships, which date, it is believed, from the reign of Gaius and were designed as processional barges to parade the lake on the feast of the goddess, were adorned at vulnerable points by apotropaic heads of snake-haired Medusas, of lions with flaming manes, of spotted leopards and snarling wolves. No evil powers would dare to approach such guarding forces—they recall the series of the fictile figures that protected the ancient Italic temples. As examples may be taken two heads of wolves from the latest finds. The first with head as long as that of a greyhound, deep-set eyes that watch without terrorizing, tongue protruding to hide the lower teeth, recalls a good watch-dog rather than the more ferocious wolf. The wolf, with all that makes him still the terror of the Latin region, is represented by the other head with its fiercely open eyes, its snarling nose and its savage jaw showing the ravenous teeth. The workmanship of both is excellent: the skin round the jaws of the first wolf is rendered with mastery; so is the shaggy hair left standing in both beasts to frame the head while the smoother hair is indicated by short chisel-strokes on the bronze surface. This is animal sculpture of the first order such as the Romans always delighted in producing.

To the same class of apotropaic ornament belong the silver medallions from a military breastplate in Berlin, known as the Lauersfort phalerae from the place where they were found. The style is somewhat earlier than that of the Nemi bronzes and the technique more delicate, as appears if we compare the Medusa from Nemi with one of the two from Lauersfort. Yet the full facial forms have much in common and both are modelled with a force that recalls the Italo-Etruscan Gorgons from Veii. Greek motives also are borrowed, but become romanized by the religious use to which they are put, and by the unusual compression into a closed decorative space: such the charming Psyche resting her chin on her hand as she looks back to the pursuing Eros of another medallion. Likewise a bronze gladiatorial helmet at Naples, made for parade or as a votive offering, is richly embossed with groups taken with religious intent from the “Fall of Troy” (Cassandra, the Death of Priam and the like) to recall Rome’s function as avenger of Troy. The spirit is Augustan; the isolated groups seem borrowed from a larger composition; the actual date is uncertain.

This short survey may fittingly close with an example of Claudian decoration, interesting for its symbolism, and also as showing how, with a growing sense of tridimensional space, figures or objects were crowded up without fear of confusion. This is the relief at Mantua, dedicated, it would seem, to Juppiter, whose thunderbolt is flung across his heavily draped throne, while one end of the sceptre is seen on the ground on the right, and a large eagle issues forth from under the drapery on the left. It is difficult to imagine a more impressive condensation of the attributes of a divinity; the god is not present, and yet he is suggested in all his awful majesty.

IV.

 PORTRAITURE

The factors that were to contribute to the greatness of Roman portrait art had been fixed by the last century of the Republic, but the influences were still lacking which should check defects, such as the Italic angularity and harshness, induced perhaps by a too ardent pursuit of detail. The corrective was now provided by the portraiture of the Princeps. Precisely as altars and other monuments reminiscent of those of Rome were erected in Italy and the provinces to impress on them the Imperial creed, so also was the Imperial effigy set up for the same purpose and multiplied indefinitely. The portraiture of the man who ruled over the Orbis terrarum accordingly demanded new qualities that should contribute to its universal significance. To attain to this conception, it was necessary to clarify and purify the Imperial effigy itself till it should reach its maximum of expressiveness, less by the Greek method of ‘idealization’ than by heightening the reality— a process likewise responsible for the excellence of much of the portraiture of private individuals.

In the portraiture of Augustus the old Italic element made itself strongly felt, modified by Hellenistic currents. The portrait at Chiusi has already been mentioned for its distinctly Italic derivation. The bronze head in the Vatican again seems the direct descendant, allowing for differences of period, age and personality, of the ‘Brutus’ of the Conservatori. There is the same strong line of the cranium, modified in the Augustus by the more abundant hair. The serious concentration of gaze is combined, as in the Brutus, with an expression of strong will power, though the flexibility of the lips is free from Italic harshness. The Vatican head, which probably belonged to a statue, represents the Princeps at about the age of thirty. Of approximately the same date is the magnificent head in the Capitoline Museum with high cheek-bones, loose locks of hair, nervously closed mouth and severe scowling expression. These contrasting presentments of the Emperor show that different aspects of his personality were beginning to impose themselves upon art and to triumph over set traditions native or foreign.

In the celebrated statue of Prima Porta, one of the most imposing creations of European portrait art, Augustus is shown in the prime of manhood and of power. The features of the Emperor are delicate and refined: the clear ossature of the face shows beneath the firmly modelled flesh; the luminous eyes look steadily out into space; the mouth has the beauty of line familiar in portraits of the Julio-Claudians; the comparatively small chin is without weakness, the line of cranium and neck of incomparable harmony. On the richly embossed cuirass the protecting powers of the Empire appear in a grandiose composition which centres in the group representing a Parthian handing over the standards to the Roman Mars, who is accompanied by his dog. The surrender episode of 20 BC being certain, the statue, or its original, is commonly dated to about this time. On the other hand, the advanced technique, subtlety of modelling, careful gradations of light and shade, and the elaborate composition of the cuirass, in which certain figures appear fore-shortened, seem out of the question at a date ten years earlier than the Ara Pacis. It is therefore reasonable to look upon the Prima Porta Augustus as executed much later with the help of contemporary portraits. A style so much in advance of the purely Augustan and a view of the events of the Principate so comprehensive, would tally exactly with the more accomplished art of the Claudian age, and with that insistent glorification of Augustan policy that was encouraged by Claudius himself. By the side of this military statue of undoubted Roman origin it is interesting to set the famous bronze head of Augustus from Meroe which must likewise have belonged to a statue in armour. It is judged as a rule to be Hellenistic, which is not improbable considering its provenance. Certainly a Greek touch pervades it, working up individual features into an idealized presentment illumined by the flashing eyeballs of onyx which shine with all the majesty of greatness.

In contrast with these Imperial and military effigies of the Princeps, the statue from the Via Labicana, in the Terme, shows him at a more advanced age, togate and offering sacrifice. Head and body though of different marble are in perfect harmony; the slightly bent shoulders and solemn gait suit the pensive and poetic quality of the head. Once again another side of the Emperor’s personality has imposed itself upon the artist. The draperies superbly hold together the composition and show to what a degree of grave dignity the Roman toga had by now attained. With the head of the Via Labicana statue ranks one at Ancona, which—as the drapery drawn over the back of the head shows—also belonged to a statue of Augustus sacrificing4. It is an untouched original, only recently published, in which the features of the Emperor are rendered with evident precision: the nose is long and aquiline; the delicate nostrils and the full lips have a vivid line not weakened by convention or copying; the serious expression is heightened by the furrows round the mouth and by the clear-cut eyebrows beneath the richly modelled forehead.

The bulk of the portraits of Augustus belongs roughly—it would seem—to a period between Actium and the Ara Pacis. From the large number that have survived we can form some estimate of their multitude in antiquity. They still exist as single statues, both of marble and of bronze, as busts, in groups, carved in precious stones, like the charming turquoise head in Florence, engraved as intaglios or carved as cameos. The image of the Founder of the Empire was venerated throughout the Orbis Terrarum and the demand for reproductions of every kind was unending long after his death. Few of these, it is clear, could have been studied from the Emperor himself, though one or two direct likenesses certainly existed, upon which were based replicas, copies and innumerable adaptations. Among the most remarkable is the young Augustus shown at the age of about sixteen, though from its accomplished Augustan technique it can hardly be contemporary; it must have been executed at a later period, no doubt posthumously, when the growing cult of the Divus called for portraits of him at all periods of his life.

The influence of the portraiture of the Princeps naturally affected that of the Imperial family, of the court, of the Emperor’s closer friends and to a less extent that of private individuals. In fact it dominated its epoch. The portraiture of even so strong a personality as Agrippa, minister, son-in-law, fellow-student and life-long friend of Augustus, was brought into the Augustan orbit. The likeness between the portraits of the two friends is difficult to define, but it is there: it has been well remarked that one or two ‘Agrippas’ only save their identity by the evidence of the inscriptions, and might otherwise pass for indifferent effigies of Augustus. Very different is the head found in the theatre of Butrinto (Buthrotum), which from the provenance we must believe to have been executed immediately after Actium—a portrait therefore of Agrippa in his prime and at the height of success. The broad forehead with eyebrows already meeting in a determined frown, the keen glance of the deep-set eyes, the finely shaped nose and lips and the powerful line of the jaw reveal the steadiness of purpose and moral strength of the man who was co-founder of the Empire. The same traits, accentuated by experience, recur in the best portraits of him in later life (Louvre, Florence and Capitol). In nearly all Agrippa’s portraits a certain sensuousness about the mouth befits one who was not only a great statesman and soldier, but also a lover of literature and of the arts, to whose liberality and good taste Rome owed much of her Imperial magnificence. From the double likeness to Agrippa and to Augustus it is easy to recognize in a bust of the Capitoline Museum, still misnamed Caligula, their son and grandson Gaius Caesar. The line of brow and jaw are those of Agrippa, while the profile is strongly Julian.

Tiberius, another strong, personality, like Agrippa with no blood-relationship to Augustus, and with whom, moreover, he had little in common, shows in his portraits so marked a resemblance to his stepfather that it is difficult at times to decide which of the two Emperors is intended. This assimilation of the effigy of one ruler to that of another is a common phenomenon of court portraiture; in reality the facial differences between the two Emperors were deep enough. The squarer face of Tiberius, the broader jaw, the mouth thin-lipped and pinched, the hair cut straight above the massive forehead, and tending to become a fringe, are essential points that distinguish him from Augustus. They are already patent in the lovely head of the young Tiberius in Boston, save that the mouth has a soft freshness retained in the earlier portraiture of his prime—for example, in the head from Veii in the Vatican, and in the beautiful head from Caere in the Lateran, which has fortunately never been separated from its body—but lost in the later portraits, such as the seated statue from Privernum in the Vatican, where the confidence of youth has vanished and his Imperial mien, largely borrowed from Augustus, is clouded by a bitter misanthropy. That Gaius, like Gaius Caesar, should resemble both Augustus and Agrippa might seem sufficiently accounted for by family relation­ship, and the likeness comes out clearly in the head at Ny Carlserg, probably the finest of his portraits, with features as yet untouched by religious or any other mania.

Many portraits of the Julian and Claudian eras easily come within the Augustus-Tiberius-Gaius group. They include what seems a well accredited portrait of Nero Drusus in armour at the Lateran—and a head wearing the corona civica in the Capitoline Museum, formerly known as Augustus, but from its resemblance to the head of the Lateran statue almost certainly Drusus. Both heads have the same energetic profile and both show a natural inbred melancholy, in contrast to the bitterness of the middle-life portraits of Tiberius, though the two brothers apparently in­herited much of the renowned beauty of their mother Livia, as we see her for instance in the lovely portrait at Pompeii.

Assimilation and repetition might have reduced Imperial portraiture to mere academism (as happened in too many instances) but for the appearance on the scenes of so original a personality as Claudius. What little assimilation there is here is subordinate to the Emperor’s strong individuality, though in both his standing and seated statues he carries his dignities as his hereditary right. It is perhaps the consciousness of the line of Emperors behind him that lends him an auctoritas dignitasque formae which even Suetonius grants him so long as he is still. Certainly in the seated portrait in the Lateran, wisdom and penetration are shown in the face, and majesty in the whole figure. The same thoughtful brow overhanging the deep-set eyes, the fine aquiline nose and sensitive mouth are seen in profile on the cameo at Windsor, and on the famous cameo of the Four Cornuacopiae in Vienna. Nor is this dignity absent from what is presumably the earliest of his possible portraits, that of the sacrificing prince on the Della Valle reliefs. Only in the posthumous statue of Claudius as Juppiter, in the Vatican Rotonda, is the dignity endangered by the absurdity—a common one in effigies of deified Imperial personages—of combining an aged head with the eternal youth of a godlike body. As we look through the portraiture of this learned and amiable Emperor, it becomes evident that Claudius, unlike Tiberius, had not allowed the maltreatment and neglect from which he suffered up to his accession to embitter his outlook on life. Whatever Claudius had endured, he forgot it in his veneration for the Julian family and especially for Augustus. Of this devotion we have an example in the Claudian frieze at Ravenna showing Augustus deified, in the attitude of the bronze Augustus as Juppiter at Naples, accompanied by Livia and two princes who are very variously interpreted, though the one in armour might well be Tiberius. The style is magnificently Claudian, as appears from the almost Flavian character of the sacrificial group at the left, and from the oblique pose of the female seated figure—perhaps a goddess—which recalls the seated Fortuna of the Manlius altar. Above the whole group towers the godlike personality of Augustus—an Augustus who has grown in stature as in prestige since the simpler presentation of him on the Ara Pacis.

Imperial portraiture acquires by a process of purgation something of the quality of great religious art. If it be a just reproach that the Roman genius was unequal to creating the image of a god, the answer must be that it created the image of the Imperator, though an elaboration of several centuries was needed before its full significance was made manifest in the Constantine of the Basilica Nova or the so-called Valentinian1 of Barletta. 

A more human and intimate quality which necessarily drops out of Imperial portraiture distinguishes that of private individuals. Three examples may be singled out, each characteristic of its period. The first is the admirable bronze in the Metropolitan Museum of a man in early middle age portrayed with that sure and tranquil mastery which brings out essential traits without over-accentuation or under-statement. The expression is calm but lit up by the eyes with inset eye-balls. A good portrait of the Tiberian epoch, though only recently recognized as non-Republican, is afforded by the bronze bust of the actor Norbanus Sorex from Pompeii (not to be confused with the actor Sorix of the time of Sulla). The face has none of the angularity of the Republican period to which it was once confidently attributed; the cut of the hair is surely Tiberian; the droll and ugly face with the pushed-up chin, the wide mouth with protruding underlip and long upper­lip, the wide-awake eyes and arrogant profile belong to the man of the people rather than to the patrician. On the other hand the third example, from the Claudian period, has a distant resemblance to the Claudian family itself. In a recent penetrating analysis the head has been likened to Dostoievsky’s ‘Idiot.’ It is a face in which inherited traits are shown in full decadence: the ex­pression is obstinate; the mouth discontented and weak; the eyes no longer keen but merely staring; the over-developed forehead fails to dominate the face but only overpowers it; the furrows at the base of the nose divide the face in two instead of contributing to its unity, while in the profile view, nose, mouth and receding chin seem to hang only loosely together. It is the degeneracy of a whole race. But there is no degeneracy of technique, which already has some of the subtlety of Flavian art.

Equestrian statues, always popular with the Romans, had long been granted as a sign of special honour to distinguished men. Under the Empire these statues became legion, but no examples survive, if we except the somewhat mediocre statues of the two Balbi father and son, at Naples, datable to the last quarter of the first century BC 1, and the numerous equestrian effigies of Imperial and other personages on coins. Of even greater importance were the quadrigae of the gods or of the triumphing Emperors (cf. the Tiberius cup from Boscoreale) drawn by a team of four horses, a type of monument to which many of the portraits we have been considering probably belonged. The magnificent horses of St Mark’s in Venice—a purely Augustan work—afford an idea of the splendour to which this statuary had attained under the early Empire. Their original function is uncertain: they may have belonged to an Imperial chariot or to the chariot of the Sun, have adorned a temple-pediment, or stood on a base as votive offerings, much like the quadriga erected in honour of Augustus in his forum in 2 BC.

The women of the Ara Pacis only give a very inadequate idea of the female portraiture of the Augustan period, so slightly are they individualized. Yet long before the Ara Pacis we find portraits full of vitality and promise dating from the late Republic or early Empire. Occasionally we come upon one of such originality that it is difficult to place it exactly: the bust of a girl in the Museo Torlonia, only a little earlier in date than the Octavia portraiture, is a case in point. This might be described in the words of a modern writer as possessing ‘the daintiness and intoxicating line of adolescence’ and some have felt inclined to attribute it to the Renaissance or to a modern chisel: the lovely sweep of shoulder and neck, best seen in the back view, and the dainty movement of the upper lip have a fragile beauty without exact parallel in ancient art, but the bust as a whole is essentially non-modern, while definite Italic traits come out in the strong architectural line of the head, accentuated by the severe Republican coiffure, with its heavy flattened chignon and bandeaux, left unchiselled as if to be covered by a plait. Probably the head had its compeers, if only we knew where to look for them. At Parma, for instance, is another delightful presentment of girlhood1; the lips are softly closed; the eyes were once made vivid by inset pupils; in front the hair was arranged over a raised pad; at the back it is severely combed and drawn into a pigtail such as is worn in more elaborate fashion by the ladies of the late Republic and of the early Empire.

The female portraiture of the time of the Second Triumvirate is characterized by the wavy bandeaux, the cushion of hair over the forehead, and the little chignon worn low on the nape of the early portraits of Octavia, the finest of which is in the Louvre. This austere coiffure was soon exchanged for the flattened wavelets of hair which gradually grew into deep hot-iron waves with tiny curls peering from under the bandeaux, such as came into fashion in the Principate of Augustus. The Imperial ladies brought in complicated and interesting styles, used with excellent effect by their portraitists to emphasize character or mood. The ageing beauty of the Livia at Ny Carlsberg is framed in a setting of waves and curls which add to her Imperial mien. In the head of the elder Agrippina recently discovered in Cyrene, the harsh regularity of the hair waves bring out the severity of the features. In the portrait at Ny Carlsberg, said to be of the sorrowing Agrippina, the parted hair pulled over the forehead enhances the grief of the tear-stained face.

The coiffure in superimposed ringlets distinctive of the Claudian period is seen in the portraits of the younger Agrippina best represented in a tragic head recently found in Rome. It is likewise familiar from the so-called portraits of Messallina, the third wife of Claudius, though in the famous Paris cameo where she appears with her two children her coiffure assumes a simpler style. Varieties of mode were innumerable: hair curled up at the sides into bunches of ringlets as in the charming portrait of Minatia Polla at the Terme or twisted into corkscrew curls that entirely cover the head. We are far yet from the tower-like erections of Flavian and Trajanic hairdressing; yet these Julio-Claudian court ladies already might justify the saying of Apuleius, that ‘there is such a dignity in the hair, that whatsoever she be, though she be never so bravely attired with gold, silks, precious stones, and other rich and gorgeous ornaments, yet if her hair be not curiously set forth, she cannot seem fair.

As already appears from the Ara Pacis the portraiture of children strongly attracted Augustan artists. A new understanding of infancy inspires the rendering of the tiny Cupid who so gallantly rides the ancestral dolphin by the side of the Augustus of Prima Porta. That this is a real infant, neither little man nor conventional putto, appears from the soft still formless nose and chin, the bulging forehead, the uncertain line of the skull which has not yet hardened. This picture of healthy babyhood may be contrasted with the admirable head in the Munich Glyptothek— also of the Augustan period—of a sick infant. Boyhood too, was represented in its many moods; for example the jolly little head of a laughing child in the Museum of Toulouse—from the perfection of its technique probably an Imperial princeling, or again the portrait with alert determined expression in the Museo Barracco, doubtless another princeling since it was found in the Imperial Villa of Prima Porta. No less attractive than these representations of infancy or early childhood are those of adolescence, of that touching age of transition from boy to man, of which we have an admirable rendering in the bronze statue in New York of a young Julio-Claudian prince, portrayed in serious meditative mood.

The tombstones which show several members or several generations of one family stiffly aligned within an architectural frame deserve a passing mention, if only because they afford incomparable matter for the study of popular Roman portraiture. They had made a first appearance in the closing decades of the Republic and continued to be the favourite form of tombstone down to the period of Trajan. Their numbers are legion. For the period of the Second Triumvirate a good example is provided by the stele of the Furii in the Lateran; for the period of Augustus by that of Ampudius in the British Museum. These severe, mostly frontal, figures that face the spectator as if to demand homage in perpetuum, have a further significance as symbols of the Roman belief in the solidarity of the family and in the sacredness of family ties. The informing con­ception is that which governs the Imperial groups on the Ara Pacis Augustae.

V.

PAINTING

Little remains of Augustan painting in Rome. No trace survives of the mural decorations that covered the walls of porticoes or of temples; we can little more than guess their style or how far Pompeii can be accepted as the measure of what was produced in the capital. The second or ‘architectural’ style known from the so-called House of Livia presumably continued in fashion, being gradually transformed into the fantastic ‘architectures’ of the fourth style which in Rome made their appearance in Nero’s Golden House. Between the second and the fourth styles, or perhaps parallel to them, intervened a system of wall decoration known as the third style. It represented an effort to assert the value of the wall as flat surface, by substituting for the vistas and prospects disclosed through openings in the wall, framed picture panels, or aediculae, affixed to the surface in imitation of real pictures. The history of Roman mural painting is one of conflict between the decorative element which strives for the illusion of space beyond the wall, and resistance offered by the mechanical forces of the wall itself. The story is repeated in the mural paintings of the Italian Seicento.

All this would be difficult to illustrate fully in Rome. For the gap of nearly one hundred years between the pictorial triumphs of the House of Livia and those of the Golden House of Nero, examples in Rome are comparatively few. To about 38 BC and to the second Pompeian style belongs a masterpiece of Roman illusionism—the garden enclosure painted on the walls of a room in the Villa of the Empress Livia at Prima Porta. The conquest of the ‘space beyond’ is here an accomplished fact—the sense of the confining wall is annulled; it is as if the closed door, beyond which in certain Pompeian paintings we see trees waving and birds flitting, had suddenly burst open and we had entered the enchanted garden. It is an hortus inclusus of purest delight, where the flowers bloom, the birds sing and the butterflies flutter, without intrusion of any human element. In the Prima Porta fresco it is no longer the wall that encloses the room, but the garden itself that defines the space by means of a well-trimmed path running between two railings, the innermost of which breaks now and again into exedrae adorned by tall conifers. So also in the ‘Casa dell’ Efebo’ at Pompeii, the lovely fragment of a pomegranate garden has an exedra with fountains surmounted by a majestic bronze peacock1. The same type of decoration carried out in mosaic appears in the charming fountain niche of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. This ‘garden painting’ hangs together with the flower and fruit pieces already noted as characteristic of Augustan reliefs; of the brilliancy of the original colouring we may form a notion from the basket of flowers in mosaic found in the second-century ‘Villa dei Quintilii,’ obviously from its extreme naturalism the copy of an Augustan model.

Columbarium painting, though overlooked and neglected because of its humble character, can throw much light on mural decoration. Of special interest are the friezes running between the rows of loculi in a columbarium of the ancient Via Aurelia which is dated to the first years of the Empire. The mythological episodes, copied from larger compositions for their symbolic value, are, it is true, ineffective as art, but the painter’s light and rapid touch is admirably suited to the rendering of the numerous landscape scenes. These include farmyards, poultry yards, duckponds, the ‘wayfarer’ theme, and a series of sacred and sepulchral enclosures marked by trees and statues raised on high pillars, within which women tend the tombs and deck the altars; all this belongs to the same school of miniature landscape as the gold-brown frieze in the House of Livia, the style of which has been traced back to the topiaria opera of the landscape painter Studius who ‘introduced a delightful style of decorating walls with representations of villas, porticoes, landscape-gardens, sacred groves, woods, hills, fishponds, straits, streams and shores: any scene, in short, that took the fancy’. Next in order of time comes the decoration in stucco and colour of the Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas, near the Porta Latina, datable to the time of Tiberius5. The central niche is decorated with a number of mystical subjects; the conch of the apse and the vaulted ceilings are covered by a delicate network of flowering vine tendrils, enlivened by symbolic figures and birds: a grim chamber of death sunk several feet below the ground is thus transformed into a gay and flowering arbour. Fragments of wall-paintings from a house of Claudian date on the Quirinal show kindred motives of Erotes clambering among cherry branches where fruit and leaves are represented with botanical precision1.

Stucco decoration, so closely connected with painting that the two are all but interchangeable, was likewise extensively used for the patterning of walls and ceilings. To the period of Caesar belong the stuccoes from a vaulted ceiling in the Villa Farnesina; scarcely later are the remains of a stuccoed vault in the garden room of the Prima Porta Villa; the magnificent series in the recently destroyed Tomb of the Arruntii is datable to about 10 BC. Finally to the Claudian period may be assigned the stuccoes that entirely cover the walls and vaults of the hypogeum of the basilica of Porta Maggiore. The transformation here is of an underground chamber into an Elysian hall, against the white translucency of which are silhouetted scenes and figures of the Soul’s adventures in her quest after Immortality.

Painting, no less than sculpture, must have been called upon to commemorate the res gestae of the Augustan period, and to give expression to its dynastic aspirations. The pictures are lost, but from cameos and metal-work one may catch at least some echo of their style. The famous Gemma Augustea in Vienna, for instance, held to represent an incident in a triumph of Tiberius, is essentially pictorial in its well-knit composition—in the flow of the lines which unite the chariot group on the left and the allegorical figures on the right with the central group of Roma and Augustus —pictorial also is the frieze of the captive prisoners, though sharply divided off from the principal scene. In the ‘Grand Camée de France’ the whole composition is still harmoniously blended: the seated group of Tiberius and Livia forms the focal point of interest; on either side are grouped the living princes of their house; soaring figures of dead and deified Julian heroes unite the personages of the central zone with the Divus Augustus who, supported by a figure who may be the ancestral lulus, looks protectingly from heaven on his descendants; the frieze of captive barbarians of the lower zone, less completely isolated than in the Vienna Cameo, seems worked into the body of the picture—all Pompeii has scarcely left us a more compact and purely pictorial design. The original models for both cameos may well have been mural paintings or else large panels made to be carried, banner-like, in procession on solemn occasions and exhibited in public places to stimulate enthusiasm for the Imperial dynasty. They are the counterpart of the triumphal pictures of the Republican period and presuppose the same principles of design as on the ‘Grand Camée,’ a central figure, or a group, surrounded by attendant personages and above a protecting divinity. The formula reappears in the ‘allegory of conquest’ of the cuirass of the Prima Porta Augustus1, and in the ‘allegory of the fecundity of the Empire’ on the silver patera from Aquileia, both compositions being of triumphal character and originally displayed, we may imagine, on a larger canvas. The Four Cornuacopiae Cameo in Vienna; the Paris Cornucopiae Cameo of Messallina and her children; the lovely fragment in the British Museum of Livia enthroned amid the fruits of a cornucopiae, seem likewise to derive from pictorial compositions which exalted the Imperial family as source of all prosperity to the State.

That painting was made a means of propagating the new creeds is evident even at Pompeii, a provincial town outside the sphere of great political or religious happenings. The many episodes from the ‘Taking of Troy’ must, like the second book of the Aeneid, have been inspired by a reawakened interest in the Trojan ancestry of the Romans; the pictures of the loves of Mars and Venus recall the honour in which these patron gods of the Julian race were held in Rome; two paintings recently discovered show the one the group of Aeneas with Anchises and lulus, the other Romulus shouldering the spoils of Acron, both evident copies of the statues in the Forum of Augustus described by Ovid; ornamental details, the tripods and other Apolline emblems, the dolphins and the ships so profusely introduced among the ‘fantasies’ of the Pompeian Fourth Style, obviously refer to the Augustan cult of Apollo and the naval victories of Actium. Still another Pompeian picture—a landscape of the ‘Third Style’— offers a glorified version of the Romulean legend of the Palatine exalted by Augustus. The Palatine Lupercal which is seen in the foreground is also represented, with its inmates and protectors, on the interesting marble intarsia (opus sectile) in the Palazzo Colonna found in the neighbourhood of Rome.

In the Augustan and in other periods examples of portrait painting are surprisingly few in comparison with the overwhelming number of portraits in stone or bronze still extant. This is partly due to the perishable nature of the material and also to negligence on the part of a bygone generation of excavators. In Pompeii alone many more portraits were found than is generally known, but precious examples were allowed to perish at a time when only pictures with mythological subjects were valued. Of what little remains one of the best is the portrait-group of a young couple1 in the Naples Museum, which from the coiffure of the lady may be assigned to the Claudian period; these are simple and straightforward transcripts of the face, lifted however above commonplace likeness by the luminous glance of the large eyes—a trait noted in early Italic heads and familiar at a later date from the long series of Fayum portraits. We are again in the Italic tradition with the portrait of Virgil seated between Two Muses on the celebrated mosaic in the Bardo. The theme of seated poet or philosopher is of the commonest and doubtless Hellenistic in origin, but in the Virgil it is transposed to a Roman key; the differences between the Hellenistic and Roman handling of the motive is evident if we compare the strong taut silhouette, the stiff angular draperies and the intense glance of the Virgil with the soft and sinuous lines and dreamy expression of the portrait of Menander, recently discovered at Pompeii.

Of Imperial portrait groups something has already been said in connection with the triumphal pictures of which the effigies of the Imperator and his family formed an integral part. Of the more intimate family group—at all times a favourite subject of portrait painting—we can gain some idea from the pictorial composition of certain cameos and glass pastes—for example, the well-known blue paste in Vienna of Germanicus or a Julio-Claudian prince with three young sons4, a charming type of composition which persists with slight modifications and variations down to the period of Constantine.

VI.

THE ROME OF AUGUSTUS AND OF HIS IMMEDIATE SUCCESSORS

Rome after the murder of Caesar was long pictured as a city of dreadful night where, in the general turmoil of the Civil Wars, monuments were allowed to fall into decay till such time as the Pax Augusta made possible the emergence of a city of marble out of the ruinous material. This dramatic contrast, inspired by the laudatory poetry of the Augustan age, is no longer true to fact. Excavations and a more careful reading of the texts show, for instance, that during the closing years of the Republic victorious generals continued, like their predecessors, to erect or restore temples on the occasion of their triumphs and, as will appear, much else was done besides. What is true, however, is that after the death of Caesar, any systematic legislation for the improvement of the City had been swept aside and that before the town­planning policy introduced by Augustus when still Octavian, edifices were erected at haphazard without concerted plan. When Augustus took matters in hand he came forward as upholder of the old Italic and Republican traditions. The very year of his three­fold triumph he decreed the restoration of the fallen temples—in his Res Gestae he himself gives the number as eighty-two—an act of piety towards the gods of the State, on a par with the rest of his religious policy. He combined his own schemes within the limits of the possible with those of Caesar but here he proceeded cautiously. Loth to impose too heavy a burden on the newly re-organized finances of the State, he took upon himself a large proportion of the colossal building expenditure, paying for it out of his own fortune. Opposition to his schemes on the ground of cost was thus disposed of, while the monuments erected appeared as Imperial benefactions which redounded to the glory of himself and the Julian dynasty.

The aims of Augustus in the replanning of Rome are clearly brought out in the Campus Martius. Without going the length of Caesar who had projected to deflect the course of the Tiber, so as to extend the Campus up to the Monte Mario, Augustus applied himself to its neglected northern region which he transformed from an unkempt swamp into a splendid monumental zone—largely aided in this by the liberality of his co-adjutor Agrippa, like himself possessed of great wealth. At its upper end, between Tiber and Via Lata, Augustus began to erect as early as 28 BC—the year of his consulship with Agrippa—the Mausoleum which was to be the memorial of himself and the dynasty. It was characteristic of him that he chose for his family tomb the circular drum with conical tumulus of Italic-Etruscan origin rather than borrow from the splendours of foreign architecture. The huge mound which was crowned by the statue of Augustus, contained on the ground level a comparatively small sepulchral chamber divided into niches for the ash urns of the Imperial family—the earliest to be placed here being that of Marcellus, nephew and son-in-law of Augustus, the first flower of the dynasty to be cut off. The Mausoleum was representative rather than unique. It had its Republican prototypes and was itself only a more splendid example among other circular tombs of the period such as those of Munatius Plancus at Gaeta, of Caecilia Metella and of Lucilius Paetus just outside Rome, to which we may add the cenotaph of Nero Drusus at Mainz and the Tropaeum Augusti in Provence, the latter a record of victory the shape of which recalls the Mausoleum. The small park surrounding the Mausoleum con­tained the crematory chapel of the Imperial family; nearby stood the Ara Pacis Augustae as witness to the blessings of peace brought about by the Imperial rule; and nearby again rose the obelisk from Heliopolis, erected by Augustus in 9 BC as needle of a great sundial inlaid with bronze.

Agrippa opened out, east of the Via Lata, a park known as the Campus Agrippae which was at once promenade and field for military manoeuvres; it was crossed by the Aqua Virgo, also a work of Agrippa’s and the first Imperial aqueduct of Rome, while a portico, completed after his death by Agrippa’s sister Polla, contained the famous map of the Orbis Terrarum based on the notes and plans of Agrippa himself. Farther down, on the west side of the Via, Agrippa built in 25 BC a large portico in thanksgiving for ‘the naval victories,’ i.e. Actium and his own in Sicilian waters, appropriately decorating it with a picture of the ‘Expedition of the Argonauts,’ after which the portico was named. Farther down again, on the same side, he completed, in homage it is said to Augustus, the huge Saepta ‘Julia planned by Caesar to be carried out wholly in marble. Somewhat to the west, close to the tomb of the Dictator, Agrippa, again desiring to honour the Julian house of which he had become a member by his marriage with Marcella, put up in 27 BC, according to the still extant inscription, the first Pantheon. It contained statues of Venus and Mars, divine ancestors of the Julian House, and one of Caesar—the Triad later venerated with even greater splendour in the Augustan temple of Mars Ultor, while statues of Augustus and of Agrippa himself were placed at each side of the entrance to guard the shrine which stood, it has been well said, as ‘true symbol of the house of Augustus and its future.’ This Agrippan Pantheon which was later obliterated under Hadrian’s rotunda, is generally held to have been of rectangular shape, occupying a little less than the space of the actual Hadrianic vestibule. It is a moot question however, whether like its successor it too may not have been of circular shape, conceived as pendant to the Mausoleum, on the model of the earlier round temple with rectangular porch of the Largo Argentina. Of the architectural splendours of the Augustan Pantheon nothing survives, nor can the Baths of Agrippa, erected south of it in 9 BC, be perfectly made out; what remains is of paramount importance, these being the earliest of those huge public baths which are reckoned among the typical achievements of Roman Imperial architecture. To the west of the Baths stretched another park with portico, and a canal known as the Euripus. An Agrippan complex which centred in the Pantheon thus balanced the Augustan Mausoleum and its surroundings.

The new Augustan-Agrippan zone formed the northern extension of the area laid out in the southern part of the Campus by the great Republican town-planners. With vast spaces still unoccupied and numerous monuments needing repair or enlargement, it had continued to afford a field for the building energies of victorious generals and others between the death of Caesar and the Principate. Thus in 34 BC Statilius Taurus had built in this region a stone amphitheatre; Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, at a date which is still uncertain, built or rebuilt the Temple of Neptune in circo Flamini of and about 32 BC, after his Jewish triumph, C. Sosius rebuilt, apparently from its foundations, the ancient temple of Apollo which though frequently restored dated back to 433 BC. Even before the Principate Octavian took a leading part in the improvement of the Campus. In 32 BC he had seen to the total restoration of the Theatre of Pompey. The ancient precincts and porticoes south of the theatre were refashioned or improved by his care and that of his friends. He rebuilt the old porticus Octavia, allowing the name of the first owner of the site to be retained. His step-cousin L. Marcius Philippus added a portico round the temple of Hercules Musarum. The old porticus Metelli was likewise rebuilt and renamed after restoration porticus Octaviae in honour of his sister, who had enriched it with a library in memory of Marcellus, her son and the son-in-law of Augustus. Close by, a large theatre, rival of that of Pompey, originally decreed by Caesar, was constructed by Augustus and dedicated by him in 13 BC to the memory of the same Marcellus, thus completing a dynastic group of buildings, evidently planned by Augustus on the southern end of the Campus to correspond with the Mausoleum and the new buildings on the north.

The recent clearance of the Theatre of Marcellus has revealed the full beauty of the arcaded facade of the cavea in which the combination of Roman arch and Hellenistic column, since the Tabularium a canonical form of wall decoration, breaks the inert mass of the wall, multiplies its latent vertical forces, and gives life to the huge pile. The site chosen for the Theatre of Marcellus was no doubt largely determined by the neighbouring temple of Apollo, long a centre of the liberal arts, including theatrical performances and recitations. With the accession to power of the Julian house, the cult of Apollo, protector of the ancestral Trojans in their struggle against the Greeks, and Lord of the Sibylline books, continued in the ascendant, and the god himself was soon chosen as religious centre of the Augustan programme. As early as 36 BC Octavian had vowed to Apollo—till then kept as a foreign divinity outside the Pomerium—a temple on the Palatine, which was dedicated in 29, the year of the threefold triumph, in thanksgiving for the victory of Actium won by the grace of the god. Above the pediment Apollo as Sol rode in his chariot illuminating the Orbis Romanus with his rays. Within the temple the divine Triad—Apollo between Latona and Diana, with the Sibyl at their feet—stood for the new spiritual forces of the Empire, the logical counterpart of that older Triad that held sway on the Capitoline hill opposite. But of the Palatine temple, one of the most significant of the religious foundations of Augustus, nothing remains, beyond the description of its splendours by the poets; even its location is uncertain. The balance of evidence is in favour of placing both the temple and the house of Augustus on the western summit of the Palatine overlooking the Velabrum, Augustus as ‘new Romulus’ undoubtedly coveting for his Palatine edifices a site traditionally associated with the founder of the city, whose cult it was part of his policy to erect into a State dogma.

The holy places of the Palatine Augustus made his special care. In 3 BC he restored after a fire the Temple of the Magna Mater which was situated on the Cermalus side of the hill, and he adorned as a nymphaeum the ancient Lupercal at the foot of the Scalae Caci. Within the actual grotto might be seen, as in some pagan praesepe, the wolf with her divine nurslings, Faustulus keeping watch and the shepherds looking on in amazement, while a statue of Nero Drusus linked the dynasty with the most sacred traditions of the City’s foundation.

The Augustan programme proved itself not one of destruction but of fulfilment. If Apollo ruled over the Augustan Palatine, Juppiter Capitolinus, still supreme god of the Roman State, was not forgotten. Besides restoring the god’s chief temple, Augustus rebuilt c. 31 BC the ancient Capitoline shrine of Juppiter Feretrius and erected one to him as Tonans in 22. In 20 BC he erected close to these Capitoline sanctuaries a round temple to Mars Ultor for the temporary custody of the standards recovered from the Parthians, adopting for the war god, who was also a primitive agrarian divinity, the circular form of temple reserved as a rule for cults of great antiquity.

The Roman Forum, already carefully replanned by Caesar, received under Augustus the configuration which it retained throughout the Empire with but few changes. The great centre of civic life had grown irregularly without definite plan, and by the time of Caesar had become a mere agglomeration of temples needing repair, of shops and small basilicas. Already under the Second Triumvirate much had been done to remedy this state of affairs, but it was the Principate that set its mark on the whole. The temple to the deified Caesar decreed by the Senate in 42 and dedicated by Augustus in 29 BC, the year of the threefold triumph, formed the dominant element of a new plan. It was placed as nearly as possible on the long axis of the Forum, facing the Tabularium, and being raised on a double podium produced a commanding effect, well seized by Ovid as he prays that the god Julius may continue to protect Forum and Capitol from his lofty shrine:

Fac iubar, ut semper Capitolia nostra forumque

Divus ab excelsa prospectet lulius aede!

The low platform, prolonged to form an orator’s tribune, con­tained the altar. The upper structure—a shallow Ionic cella with six-columned vestibules, the decorative detail of which is not free from the stiffness and angularity of Republican work—was of marble from the newly discovered quarries of Carrara.

Monuments built or restored between the death of Caesar and that of Augustus enclosed the temple of the Divus as within a sacred precinct. At the back was the ancient Regia, or public office of the Pontifex Maximus, as rebuilt in marble by Domitius Calvinus in 36 BC. The three-passage arch over the Via Sacra, on the left of the temple of Caesar, which is probably identical with that erected by Augustus in 19 BC in honour of the surrender of the Parthian standards, balanced the old Arch of Fabius, north of the temple. The same architectural scheme of temple between two arches was thus obtained which we get in the Forum of Pompeii and in the later Forum of Augustus. Beyond the arch rose on its high podium the ancient temple of the Castores, restored in marble with soaring columns and with a vestibule modelled on that of Mars Ultor—a magnificence due to Tiberius, who rebuilt the temple in AD 6, inscribing it with his own name and that of his dead brother Nero Drusus. Farther north, on the same side, stood the Basilica Julia begun by Caesar and dedicated by him before completion, but rebuilt in marble by Augustus after a fire and renamed by him after his grandsons. Beyond the Vicus Jugarius rose, again on a high podium, the ancient temple of Saturn which had been restored as early as 43 BC by L. Munatius Plancus. Immediately below the Tabularium might be seen the historic temple of Concord, restored on a magnificent scale in AD 10 by Tiberius, who dedicated it to the Concordia Augusta in the name, once more, of himself and of his dead brother. Coins show the temple pediment crowned in Italic fashion by three upstanding figures with arms interlocked as symbol of concord, and splendid fragments survive of the architectural decoration.

The line of monuments was continued on the east side by the Senate house planned by Caesar and completed by Augustus. Though repeatedly restored—what we now see is mainly as late as Diocletian—the main lines of the Augustan structure seem to have been respected, including the actual Curia with the stepped tiers that supported the wooden Senatorial benches. Next came the ancient Basilica Aemilia restored in 14 BC to correspond to the Basilica Julia; it was fronted by a long portico ending on the south in a sacrarium or chapel dedicated in honour of the two young princes, Gaius and Lucius, that the dynasty might once more be emphasized. This brings us back to the Arch of Fabius and completes the zone encircling the Temple of Caesar. Finally, at the north-west end of the Forum area rose the Rostra, transferred here from the old Comitium by Caesar and dedicated by Octavian in 42 BC, the year of Philippi, though the incurving steps were added later. The essential features of the Forum were now fixed; new monuments were repeatedly introduced, but the main lines were never substantially altered.

Augustus was no more able than Caesar before him to remedy the congestion of the old Forum, save by building auxiliary fora. He completed that of Caesar and opened a second and more spacious Forum as forecourt to the temple vowed at Philippi to Mars, Avenger of Caesar. The site, which was scooped out of a densely populated spur of the Quirinal, cost the Imperial purse vast sums, though, even so, the new forum does not appear to have been of the large proportions originally intended by the Emperor. But the site was preordained: obviously the temple, vowed at Philippi to the Avenger, must be in close proximity to the temple vowed to the Genetrix at Pharsalus, and the Forum of Augustus must be made to appear the complement of that of Caesar.

In the Forum Augusti the Italic conception of forum as temple enclosure is carried out in perfection: here the temple apse abuts against the back wall of the huge court, whence it dominates the whole emplacement, while on each long side the enclosing wall itself curved out into deep semicircular exedrae as if to give lungs to the space about the temple and to afford extra protection from a crowded neighbourhood. The straight regular lines of the older porticoes are here abandoned, apse and exedrae forming in plan an harmonious trefoil pattern, a remarkable advance on anything hitherto attempted. The scheme is already that of the colonnade of St Peter’s.

The temple, which was Corinthian octostyle, followed the Italic norm; high podium and steps only in front, no columns at the back; the broad cella had a deep vestibule, later imitated in the Temple of Castor in the Forum. The apse of the spacious nave contained a long base which supported the statue of the Avenger brandishing his sword, between Venus Genetrix, divine ancestress of the Julian race, on his right and on his left Caesar, marked out by the Julian star. This dynastic triad, which raised to a higher key an already familiar motive, appeared as fresh assertion of the perpetual renewing of the spiritual forces of the Empire. It was under the shadow of these divine presences that the cult of the deified Augustus found shelter till the templum Divi Augusti, begun by Tiberius and Livia and consecrated by Gaius in AD 37, was ready to receive it.

The surrounding Forum matched the Temple in magnificence: the pavements were resplendent in coloured marbles; its exedrae were curtained by columns of precious marble, and adorned with niches containing statues of the Roman triumphatores from Aeneas founder of the gens and Romulus founder of the City down to Caesar founder of the Empire. The two first statues, one showing Aeneas with Anchises and lulus, the other Romulus bearing away the spoils of Acron, are known from the coin representing the templum Divi Augusti, and from two Pompeian paintings. Between the exedrae and the central area ran long colonnaded porticoes which were later linked to the temple of Mars by the two small arches put up by Tiberius in AD 19 in honour of the younger Drusus and Germanicus whose statues they bore. These arches completed the architectural scheme at the temple end of the Forum on the model already known from the Forum of Pompeii and possibly from that of Caesar.

The arch as monumental entrance to a defined area is common in Italy and the provinces, where numerous arches of Augustan date functioned as ornamental screens to city gates, or else were worked into the town wall as city gates themselves. Fine examples are to be seen at Fano, Rimini, Pola, Aosta, Susa and Orange1. They were of the so-called ‘triumphal’ type and carried statues or chariot groups, their facades being often, though by no means invariably, adorned with reliefs or statue niches. Honorary arches of Augustan date have disappeared in Rome, save for one or two ground plans, but there still stands a charming aqueduct arch of the period, which spanned the old Via Tiburtina. Under Augustus the arch continued to develop in the service of engineering, showing its great adaptability to the most exacting problems of bridge construction, whether in the soaring arches of Narni or in the low arcaded bridges of Rimini and of Merida. Again, the superposed tiers of the Pont du Gard in Provence—generally referred to the Augustan period and to Agrippa, though the date is still uncertain—are not only a great piece of engineering, but a notable architectural achievement which owes its beauty of effect to the variations in the size of the arches and of their piers.

After the death of Agrippa in 12 BC, Augustus had received loyal support from Tiberius in all his building projects; whatever their other discords, both princes worked harmoniously together for the improvement of Rome and of the cities of the Empire. Among other collaborators were Asinius Pollio who remodelled the old Atrium Libertatis and fitted it with Greek and Latin libraries, and Maecenas who converted the Esquiline, a malarial district covered with disused cemeteries, decaying houses and refuse heaps, into a fine park and gardens as counterpart to the work of sanitation and improvement carried out by Augustus and Agrippa in the Campus Martius. Besides the public baths, the theatres and the libraries, numerous works of public utility were erected in the Rome of Augustus, which bore the same witness to the new economic prosperity of the Empire, that the temples did to its renewed spiritual life. Market places were built for the disposal of wares from all parts of the world; granaries to receive the produce of a revived agriculture; docks to meet the increase in shipping; immense horrea or warehouses for the products of the new industrialism. But to discuss these is impossible within the brief space at our disposal. What was accomplished in the Campus Martius and in the heart of the City sufficiently illustrates the principles upon which Augustus remodelled Rome, and justifies his boast that he had found it of brick and left it of marble. The glittering white material from the rich quarries of Carrara contributed to the new aspect of the city; the crude brilliance was happily tempered by the retention for the older buildings of rose­brown travertine and of tufa faced with softly glowing stucco— while the whiteness of the newer edifices was itself relieved by the introduction of coloured marbles for floors and revetments. The scale of buildings was enlarged and tall columns rose from the high Italic podium in obedience to the Roman love of verticalism. The heavy entablatures and pediments of Italic architecture were reduced to lighter proportions at the greater height. The open Italic pediment of the old tufa and terra cotta temples disappeared, and pediments in the Greek manner became the rule. Greek also, as often as not, were the architectural trimmings and refinements, though coins show that pedimental cornices continued to be crowned in Italic fashion with tall upstanding figures which caught up the vertical movement of the columns and carried it upwards into infinite space. The Italic-Roman type of temple was adopted throughout the Empire—witness among many others Nimes, Vienne, Pola and Ancyra, all still standing on their Italic podia.

In one respect Augustus’ neat epigram as to his city of marble needs correction. It applied doubtless to the civic edifices, the temples and temple areas but it glided over the question of the big blocks of tenement houses built of sun-dried bricks and wood—the many-storeyed insulae set in a network of crooked narrow streets. Regular planning was limited, as under the Republic, to certain monumental areas, but there was no thought as yet of cutting Imperial roadways through densely populated quarters, or of running streets from one monument to another to obtain a vista. The omission of any street-planning effort or housing reform in the building policy of Augustus is all the stranger in that he showed himself most zealous in planning the new Imperial cities of Italy such as Aosta, and of the provinces on the regular system derived from the castrum. In Rome the hills certainly formed an obstacle then as now, yet the level Campus Martius offered an opportunity for wider streets which was neglected and so did the parts south of the Forum, afterwards laid out by Nero in long porticoed avenues leading to the Golden House. The Via Lata, a piece of the Flaminian road accidentally drawn within the city, was there to show the fine effect of a roadway bordered by monuments, but the hint was only taken later.

The building policy of Augustus was taken up by his Julio-Claudian successors. To the Principate of Tiberius belong, besides a number of minor works, two buildings of outstanding importance—the temple of the god Augustus at the foot of the Palatine which was begun under his auspices, though not dedicated till after his death, and the Castra Praetoria, the great military fortress erected in AD 21—22, for the concentration of the Praetorian troops into one vast city camp; often though the Castra were restored traces may still be made out of the original brick and concrete walls with their battlements, gates and chain of turrets1. While following as a rule in the steps of Augustus, Tiberius in one noteworthy instance abandoned his predecessor’s example; by erecting on the Palatine the first of those sumptuous Imperial residences for which the hill afterwards became famous—a contrast to the ‘modest house’ of Augustus ‘without marble decoration or handsome marble pavements,’ praised by Suetonius, and it was Tiberius likewise who enlarged Augustus’ pleasant villa at Capri into a splendid country-seat whose elegant porticoes and sunny terraces are now being scientifically explored.

Few traces remain of the buildings put up by Gaius. The private circus which he erected on the right bank of the Tiber, in the gardens inherited from his mother Agrippina, were destined to be the scene of the earliest Christian martyrdoms and to be eventually absorbed in the great basilica of Saint Peter. On the Palatine he enlarged the imperial residence, projecting, it is said, to connect it with the Capitol by means of a bridge, but the addition, if ever it existed, has disappeared. His name however remains honourably connected with the dedication in AD 37 of the Templum Divi Augusti, as recorded on a fine contemporary bronze. The coin shows the young Emperor in front of a six-columned Ionic temple, garlanded for the occasion. Within the pediment Romulus, prototype of the now deified New Romulus, stands between Venus Genetrix and Mars Ultor, an assemblage of Julian divinities which is completed by the acroterial figures of the cornice. Here the flaming chariot of the apotheosis, symbol of the new god, appears in the centre, flanked by two crown-bearing Victories, between Romulus on the left bearing away the spoils of Acron and the group of Aeneas with Anchises and lulus on the right—evident imitations these of the Romulus and Aeneas of the Forum of Augustus1.

Claudius was the first emperor to devote his building energies almost exclusively to works of engineering and public utility: the reclaiming and drainage of land, the creation of harbours, and the extension of the aqueduct system which he brought up to the same level of efficiency as that of the roads. Under Claudius the simpler aqueduct arch was elaborated: magnificent twin arches of rusticate masonry carried two aqueduct channels across the fork of the Via Praenestina and Via Labicana (modern Porta Maggiore), while the triumphal arch erected across the Via Lata in AD 46 to commemorate Claudius’ conquest of Britain was in reality but the monumental transformation of an arch of the Aqua Virgo which spanned the road at this point. That fresh architectural forces were stirring under Claudius is evident from the new and striking use of vaulted and arched construction that makes its appearance in the now famous hypogeum near the Porta Maggiore. This hall, dedicated to a mystery religion—unless it be merely the meeting place of some funerary college—is composed of barrel-vaulted nave and aisles separated by two rows of pilasters connected not by a straight trabeation but by arcading; the nave is preceded by a pronaos with coved ceiling and arched doorway, and ends in an apse with the indication of the officiant’s seat. We thus have at this comparatively early date, and in the service of a pagan cult, a building on the same principle—ante-chapel or narthex, nave, aisles and tribune with throne—as the later Christian basilica.

In essentials the Rome of the Julio-Claudians is one with the Rome of Augustus. New temples, arches, civic halls and palaces might be built, but no substantial change had occurred in the general outlay of the city itself. Its housing system, save for the palaces and homes of the wealthy, remained mean and ugly, its streets narrow and congested. The time was at hand when some improvement must be seriously contemplated. The great fire and the undoubted town-planning abilities of Nero were soon to make possible the desired changes, but the forma aedificiorum urbis nova for which Tacitus praises Nero belongs to another chapter of this history.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF AUGUSTUS