The aftermath of Sulla’s second march on Rome in 83 B.C. was a spate of political murders and confiscations. The profits were enormous, and Sulla used them for the most ambitious building program in the history of the Republic. His motive was in part the desire to rival what he had seen in the cities of the Greek East, in part his understanding that massive building projects are the outward and visible sign of princely power. And so he monumentalized the same Forum in which he displayed the severed heads of his enemies, planning, in the Tabularium, or Records Office, a theatrical backdrop for the tragedy which in the ensuing years was to be played below. He settled 100,000 of his veterans in colonies in central and south Italy. He built or reinforced walls in Rome, Ostia, and Alba Fucens; theaters in Pompeii, Alba, Bovianum Vetus, and Faesulae; he built temples in Tibur, Cora, Tarracina, Pompeii and Paestum. And this is only a sample of his prodigious building activity. But by all odds the most grandiose of his completed projects took shape at Praeneste (nowadays Palestrina), a little over twenty miles east of Rome, where he sacked the town to punish it for taking the side of his enemy Marius. He then built or restored there the great, axially-symmetrical, terraced Sanctuary of Fortune, the most splendid monument in Italy of the Roman Republic.

In 1944 allied bombing sheared off the houses from the steep south-facing slope where the medieval and modern town was built, and revealed the plan of the Sanctuary. Now, after fourteen years of excavation and restoring (reinforcement with steel beams, injecting liquid concrete, loving reproduction of the craft of ancient masons), the plan is clearer than it has been at any time since antiquity. The finds are displayed to advantage in the Barberini Palace at the top of the Sanctuary, splendidly reconstructed as a museum. The site repays a visit perhaps more than any other in Latium.

The archaeological zone of Palestrina falls into an upper and a lower part. In the lower area exciting discoveries were made in 1958. Its southernmost retaining wall, and the monumental ramped entrance, the Propylaea—enlivened in antiquity with jets of water playing—was cleared. Between it and the buildings of the lower zone, excavation seventy years before had shown traces of pools and shaded porticoes. In 1958, also, the façade was removed from the cathedral in the center of the lower zone, revealing behind it an imposing Roman temple with a lofty arched entrance, its cella corresponding to the forward (south) part of the nave of the present church. To the left rear (northwest) of this temple was a natural cave, long known as the Antro delle Sorti, where, according to time-honored local lore, the lots were cast which gave this sanctuary of Luck its fame. The cave, the excavators discovered, had been monumentalized into the apse of a building (not shown in the plan), its floor paved with a mosaic representing the sea off Alexandria. The mosaic was sunk a couple of inches below floor level and sloped forward to allow a thin film of water to play over it, which brightens the colors and makes the mosaic fish extraordinarily realistic. The mosaic also portrays architectural elements—an altar, column, and capital—in what corresponds to the so-called Second Style at Pompeii, dated in the first half of the first century B.C.

Opposite this building in the plan is another with a grotto much like the natural cave on the left. It was from this apse, again at a level a couple of inches below the rest of the floor, that the famous Barberini mosaic (Fig. 5.1) came, a late Hellenistic copy of an original of the early Ptolemaic age in Egypt. It is now handsomely restored and displayed in the museum at the top of the Upper Sanctuary. The mosaic combines a zoological picture-book of the Egyptian Sudan—its real and fabulous monsters labelled in Greek—with a spirited scene of the Nile in flood, with farm-house, dove cote, a shipload of soldiers, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, an elegant awninged pavilion, a towered villa in a garden, a group of soldiers feasting in mixed company (after them, the deluge), more wine, women and song in an arbor nearby, behind the pavilion a temple with statues of Egyptian gods in front, before them a man riding, his servant following afoot with baggage; behind the arbor a straw hut, with ibises in flight above it; in the flood waters, canoes (one loaded with lotus blossoms) and two large Nile river craft with curving prows—altogether the most spirited essay which has come down to us in the art of the mosaic. Interest in Egypt is a striking feature of both Pompeian and Roman wall-painting of the last half-century of the Republic and the early Empire. Examples are the scene from Pompeii of pygmies fighting a rhinoceros and a crocodile, now in the Naples Museum, the cult scenes from the Hall of Isis under the Flavian Palace on the Palatine, and the frescoes of the Pharaoh Bocchoris in the Terme Museum from the villa under the Farnesina. Alexandria was then the intellectual and artistic capital of the world. The Lucullus who founded the Sullan colony at Praeneste appears from an inscription found in the lower area to be not the famous bon vivant (who had been in Alexandria, the first foreign general ever to be entertained by a Ptolemy in the palace) but his brother Marcus. Nevertheless the two brothers were very close, and the more famous of them may have supplied the mosaic, the mosaic-maker, or the idea of using Egyptian motifs.

M. Lucullus’ name was carved on a fallen epistyle, a marble block intended to connect two columns. Where did the block belong? Gullini, the excavator, connected it with a building which ran between the two apsidal halls in the lower area. What survives is a back wall, built in the technique called opus incertum, a strong lime and rubble wall, studded externally with fist-sized stones of irregular shape. This technique was standard in the age of Sulla. The wall was decorated at regular intervals with two stories of half-columns, ingeniously combining function with decoration: they mask drainage conduits. The pavement in front of the wall shows the marks of two column-bases in two different rows, enough to justify restoring on paper a whole forest of twenty-four columns. Two dimensions are known: the diameter of the bases and the height of the half-columns on the wall behind. Their proportionate relation is appropriate to Corinthian columns, and some Corinthian capitals of a size to fit were found in the area. Working from these finds, the architect Fasolo could restore on paper a two-story basilica (Fig. 5.2, bottom) between the two apsidal halls (only one hall is shown in the reconstruction). The basilica is on a higher level than the newly-isolated temple to the south of it. The difference in level is made most clearly visible by sets of superimposed columns on the southwest side of the basilica (where the lower columns are below the basilica pavement level), by the pavement below the piazza of the modern town, and in the façade of the right-hand (eastern) apsidal hall, which is in opus incertum, while its lower level, the colony’s aerarium or treasury, heavily built of tufa blocks, had the difference in construction hidden by a portico with Doric columns.

The terrace marking the transition between the lower area and the Upper Sanctuary used to be covered by houses and shops, all damaged or destroyed by the 1944 bombing. When the debris was cleared away, it was found that the modern buildings had rested on a two-level terrace (I and II in the reconstruction), and had backed against and protected from centuries of weathering 325 magnificent feet of polygonal wall. The wall gives an architectonic front to the cliff and is at the same time functional. Its top was the architect’s base line; on it he built his complex, a splendid series of superimposed terraces, which, now that the rubble from the bombing has been cleared away, is revealed in all its magnificence, of ramps (III), Hemicycle Terrace (IV), Terrace of Arches with Half-columns (V), and Cortina Terrace (VI), all leading up to the final stepped hemicycle (VII) with the circular tholos for the cult statue at the very top. A draped torso in blue Rhodian marble (now in the museum), of a size to fit the tholos—whose dimensions are preserved in the fabric of the Barberini Palace—may be the cult statue of the goddess Fortune: Lady Luck herself.

The next level is approached by a pair of imposing ramps running east and west, converging on an axis. Fasolo and Gullini found that the ramps were supported by a series of concrete vaults, concealed, all but one, by a facing of opus incertum (see p. 120). The exception is the central vault, which was left open, lined with waterproof concrete, and made into a fountain-house. The terrace in front of the ramps is beautifully paved with polygonal blocks. A room—perhaps priests’ quarters—at the bottom of the left ramp is decorated in the Pompeian First Style—embossed polychrome squares, red, buff, and green, with dado. Houses at Pompeii thus decorated are dated between 150 and 80 B.C., so that this decoration accords with a Sullan date. The decorated room is paved with waterproof cement with bits of white limestone imbedded in it. The technique, called lithostroton, was in vogue in Sulla’s time.

On the ramps were found three curious column capitals, which at first puzzled the excavators, and then gave the clue to the whole complex on top of the ramps. What is odd about the capitals is that they incline (Fig. 5.3) twenty-two degrees with respect to the axis of the columns. Since this slant corresponds to the grade of the ramp, the columns must have been intended to bear an inclined architrave or beam of stone. This poses a difficult problem in statics; that Sulla’s architect solved it is the wonder of his modern successors. The roadway up the ramp shows, on the outboard (south) side of a drain running up its middle, a stylobate (course of masonry on which columns rested) with cuttings for column bases. Reading these stones, Fasolo and Gullini concluded that the outboard half of the roadway up the ramp was roofed, while the inboard half was open to the sky. On the extreme outboard edge of the roadway are preserved the remains, about a yard high, of a wall in opus incertum, with the bottoms of half-columns, their fluting laid on in stucco, mortised into it at intervals corresponding to the cuttings in the stylobate. The half-round profile at the bottom of the wall suggests projecting the same profile all the way up. This involves restoring a blank windowless wall (windows would make it too weak to bear the weight of the roof) closing the entire south side of the porticoed roadway, blocking the breath-taking view across Latium to the sea, and forcing the eye upward to the top of the ramp. Architectural members designed to be clamped together in pairs, of a size to fit the tops of the inclined capitals, gave the answer to the question how the portico was roofed. One of the pairs supported a barrel vault, the other a vertical masonry wall designed to mask the spring of the vault. Other architectural members, with an oblique chamfer, found at the top and the bottom of the ramp, suggest that the ends of the vaults were masked with a pediment or gable end, and therefore that the whole vault was covered with a pitch roof. The two ramps debouch at the top in an open space paved in herringbone brick, a sort of balcony with—at last—a splendid view southward. To the north a stair led to the next level, the level of the Hemicycle Terrace.

The Hemicycle Terrace (IV) is planned, Fasolo and Gullini discovered, symmetrically to the axis of the whole composition, at this level marked by a central stair which has suffered a good deal from having had a modern house built on top of it. One can make out, however, that the stair was narrowed at one point (where there may have been a gate) by fountain niches on either side. The play of water is important at every level of the Sanctuary. Under the stair passes a vaulted corridor connecting the two axially symmetrical halves of the terrace. Closest to the stair on each side are four arches; beyond these, the monumental hemicycles which are the architectonic center of each wing. They have vaulted, coffered ceilings, and a concentric colonnade with Ionic-Italic (four-voluted) columns. Before they were restored, these were badly corroded, and covered with verdigris from the acid of the coppersmith’s shop which occupied the spot before the bombing. The epistyle carries an inscription, almost illegible, but apparently referring to building and restoring done on the initiative of the local Senate, presumably after the Sullan sack. The outer surface or extrados of the vaults is concealed—as it was on the porticoed ramp—by a story called an attic, in opus incertum, divided into rectangular panels by engaged columns with semicircular drums in tufa. At the back of each hemicycle runs a platform approached by two steps, with consoles on which planks could be placed to make more room; this suggests that it was intended for spectators to stand on. The pavement, as in the room at the foot of the ramp, is lithostroton; the likeness in the paving justifies the inference that the two terraces (III and IV) were built about the same time. On the far side of each hemicycle are four more arches. In front of the right-hand (eastern) hemicycle is a wishing well, with footings round it from which Fasolo and Gullini have been able to restore to the last detail, with the help of some architectural fragments, a small round well-house, with a high grille above its balustrade, now to be seen in the museum. Coins found in the well, whose heaviest concentration is in the mid-second century A.D., suggest that the well-house is much later in date than the terrace on which it stands. But the well-house stands on the central terrace of seven; it may have been the spot where, in the early days of the Sanctuary, the lots were cast. From either end of the Hemicycle Terrace ramps (Fig. 5.4) ascended to the Cortina Terrace (VI), the next but one above.

The stair which divides the Hemicycle Terrace leads to the Terrace of the Arches with Half-columns (V), also symmetrically planned on the axis of the stair. There are nine deep arches on either side of the stair. Possibly these were stalls for the various guilds—wine merchants, wagoners, cooks, weavers, garland-makers, second-hand dealers, money-changers—who, as we know from inscriptions, made dedications to Fortune, and had a financial interest in her Sanctuary. Here again close observation has enabled the excavators to tell exactly how the façade of this terrace looked when it was new. The even-numbered arches are narrower and lower than the odd-numbered ones, are left rough within, and are floored with a pebble fill, from all of which it is inferred that they were not meant to be seen. Sills found in situ, and uprights, cornices, and volutes, found on the Hemicycle Terrace, where they do not fit into the architecture, and therefore must have fallen from above, can be restored as blind doors set in the walls which closed the even-numbered arches. Small travertine panels, with a molded surround, and a cornice above, found on this terrace, will have been set into the wall on either side of the blind doors, at lintel level. The same decorative motif was found in place on the back wall of the basilica area in the lower zone. The repetition of motif makes an aesthetic link between the two levels. The odd-numbered arches are mosaic-paved and plastered, and were therefore meant to be visible. Enough remains in place to show that the profile of the arch was set with tufa blocks supported on pilasters. These alternating open arches framed with pilasters and closed arches with blind doors all supported an epistyle and cornice which in turn supported the parapet of the Cortina Terrace above.

The Cortina Terrace (VI), nearly 400 feet deep, was a hollow square, open to the south except for a balustrade, closed to the east and west by a three-columned portico, connected at the back (north) with a lithostroton-paved vaulted corridor, called a cryptoporticus, which runs under the stair to the semicircular Terrace VII. Again, similarity of plan and décor ties the whole ensemble together. (Nowadays, the approach to Terrace VII is by a double-access stair, but this is of the seventeenth century.) At the back of the terrace, six arches, three on either side of the central stair, gave access to the cryptoporticus. At either end of the three-arch sequence is an arched projecting fountain house in appearance not unlike a Roman triumphal arch, with a pair of narrow windows in its back wall, opening on the cryptoporticus. Heavy deposits of lime on the back wall suggest an arrangement whereby persons passing through the cryptoporticus could look out through a thin sheet of water onto the Cortina Terrace. Enough traces remain to restore on paper the three-columned portico on the east and west. It was roofed with a pair of barrel vaults, coffered like the ones in the hemicycles of Terrace IV (another aesthetic link), and roofed like the great east-west ramps which connect Terraces III and IV. The portico’s outer walls were buttressed, and the north-south ramps from the Hemicycle Terrace also helped to counter the outward thrust.

And so we come to the exedra, the seventh of the superimposed terrace levels, a most holy place, where the priests could appear and offer sacrifice on an altar in full view of the faithful assembled on the semicircular steps. At the top of the exedra there now rises the splendid semicircle of the Barberini Palace, but plate glass let into the museum’s ground floor paving shows the tufa footings of a semicircular series of columns, which must have been the middle set of another double portico answering to the one on the Cortina Terrace below, and, like it, double-barrel-vaulted and pitch-roofed, but of course semicircular in plan instead of U-shaped. Access to the porticoes was not on the central axis of the whole complex, but by a short narrow stair at either end of the exedra. (We shall see how Hadrian, too, centuries later, liked these split-access arrangements.) But, though there is no direct approach, the distance between the columns on either side of the main axis is extra-wide, to give a better view of the circular building (tholos) above and behind, the culminating point of the whole plan, where the cult statue was placed.

Such is the careful plan of the complex, justifying this detailed treatment because it is a turning point in the history of Roman architecture, perhaps the most seminal architectural complex in the whole Roman world. Everything (Fig. 5.5) centers on an axis, everything rises, aspires to the apex at the cult-statue, embracing a superb and at each level more extensive view of the plain stretching away southward to the sea. The materials and technique with which this form is realized and supported are interesting in themselves and for what they contribute to the dating of the Sanctuary. The basic materials are tufa, limestone, and concrete; no marble is used except in statuary. Limestone, which in Roman architecture comes to predominance later than tufa, is used for the facing of polygonal walls and opus incertum, for décor (e.g., the Corinthian capitals of tufa columns), for pavements. The limestone spalls or chips left over from the facing of opus incertum were used in concrete cores and for fill. Tufa is used for footings, structure in squared blocks (e.g., caissons for concrete), the voussoirs, or wedge-shaped blocks, of arches, column drums, the core of stuccoed decorative elements, cornices, corners. Both materials are subordinate to concrete.

The use of concrete at Palestrina amounts to an architectural revolution, and, as often, the revolution in taste is combined with a revolution in materials and methods. This strong, cheap, immensely tough material enabled the architect to enclose space in any shape; henceforward architects could concentrate on interiors, and the day of the box-like temple was over. The architectural history that culminates in the Pantheon begins here. The architect was clearly more expert in the use of concrete than in the use of stone. Palestrina concrete is hydraulic, a combination of limestone chips and mortar made of pozzolana (volcanic sand) and lime. Concrete footings, Fasolo and Gullini found, go down to bedrock everywhere; e.g., each of the three rows of columns of the Cortina Terrace portico rests on a foundation wall of concrete based on bedrock, while the space between is hollow, to relieve weight. For the same reason the whole hollow square of the Cortina Terrace rests on a series of rectangular concrete coffers with a stone fill. The result of this use of concrete is that the whole Upper Sanctuary is structurally a single unit. Each level is planned as a step toward, and a retaining wall of, the level next above. The stresses, Fasolo reports, are never more than about three pounds per square yard for walls and eight pounds per square yard for columns; this in a structure which is in effect a skyscraper 400 feet high. There is repetition of motif throughout, not from paucity of imagination, or because it is the easy way, but of set aesthetic purpose, to emphasize the concealed structural unity and to use the functional parts of the complex to give architectonic unity to the whole. Thus the upper hemicycle stair repeats the two hemicycles of the lower terrace, and the relation between them is a triangle, which repeats in a different plane the triangle of the double converging ramp. The arches are treated as beams to bear the weight of stone construction, and the stone construction is a caisson for the concrete.

Fasolo and Gullini argue ingeniously for a date earlier than Sulla for the Sanctuary, but their arguments have not found general favor. The most that can be said is that certain inscriptions mentioning restoration, reconstruction, or dedications to Fortune earlier than 80 B.C. imply a previously existing and probably much simpler structure, centering on the east half of the Hemicycle Terrace, but nothing in the technique or materials now visible or inferred requires other than a Sullan date for any part of the Sanctuary.

In materials and methods, in massiveness and axial symmetry, the Sanctuary of Fortune bears a Roman stamp. But when we recall the experience of Sulla and his lieutenants, the Luculli, in the Creek East, Greek influence is very likely. Of the many Hellenistic Greek complexes available for comparison, the closest in spirit to Palestrina is the Sanctuary of Asclepius on the island of Kos in the Dodacanese, in the southeast Aegean Sea, where the major temple, built in the mid-second century B.C., is the focal point of a grandiose composition (Fig. 5.6). Placed on the highest of three terraces, it is framed by a three-sided colonnade like the Cortina Terrace at Palestrina, and approached by three successive monumental stairways leading up the lower terraces, which are arched as at Palestrina. A few standard architectural ingredients, arches, colonnades, monumental stairways, are grouped as a clearly defined composition, easy to grasp, simple, bold, plastic, the few standard elements firmly juxtaposed. Contrasts of scale, an elevated and central position, an axial approach, all make of the temple the focal, culminating point of the composition. It is exactly so at Palestrina, and in scores of other Hellenistic sanctuaries. Also noteworthy in both places is “the same outspoken taste for vista. Not only is the triple-terraced sanctuary visible from afar, not only is the crowning element, a temple, a beacon toward which visitor and worshipper alike are drawn by the now familiar devices of setting, frontality and access, but again, once we have reached the summit, a scene of breathtaking beauty, of unexpected amplitude, of mountain, sea and plain confronts us.” The words are those of Phyllis Lehmann, from whom the description of the site at Kos draws heavily, but they were reinforced by a visit made by the present writer to the island in September, 1956, expressly to compare the site with Palestrina. Mrs. Lehmann goes on, “Although many factors, notably the sanctity of a cult spot, were involved in the choice of such sites, their architectural treatment attests a keen awareness of landscape setting as a prime aesthetic ingredient in the total effect.” The unknown architect-genius who planned Palestrina probably knew the Greek Sanctuary at Kos; he was certainly in touch with the main movement of mind of his age. But the final impression of this dynamic, utterly functional, axially symmetric complex is not Greek but Roman, a great memorial façade to celebrate the end of a Civil War. Italy as well as Greece can provide ground-plans by which parts of the Sanctuary at Palestrina might have been inspired, notably one in Cagliari in Sardinia, and another at Gabii, near Rome.

This Roman classical masterpiece has, then, ancestors; what about its descendants? They are many: from the Sanctuary of Fortune contemporary and later architects learned much. An example of this influence is the Temple of Jupiter Anxur at Tarracina, above the Via Appia where it touches the coast sixty-seven miles south of Rome. Here the use of concrete, of opus incertum, of arch and vault, of setting and landscape, is in the unmistakable idiom of Sulla’s architect. It is an architectural complex and a seascape which mediates, as Palestrina does, between man and nature. It is designed to capture attention from the colony below, to become more impressive as one approaches, and to give a gradually widening view of the sea as one ascends. The temple was oriented north and south, with a portico behind (Fig. 5.8). It is set at an angle upon a tremendous concrete podium, with arched cryptoporticus as at Palestrina. On the seaward side the play of light and shadow on the podium arches is enormously impressive; on the side toward Sperlonga the sturdy blind buttress arches are again strongly reminiscent of what we have seen on the Terrace of the Half-columns. Within the cryptoporticus (the vaults under the Temple platform) the play of light and shadow is again very satisfying, and yet the structure is functional as well: the cryptoporticus lightens the huge weight of the concrete, and the sturdy concrete construction has stood the test of time.

Another Sullan descendant is the Tabularium (Public Records Office) in Rome (Fig. 5.9), finished in 78 B.C. by Quintus Lutatius Catulus, to whom Sulla’s veterans transferred their allegiance after Sulla’s death. It was a part of Sulla’s plan for monumentalizing the Forum, to provide, as it were, a scenic backdrop for it, which serves at the same time as a terrace-level to give order to the Capitoline Hill above. Its plan, its frontality, and its use of arch, vault and concrete is in the Palestrina tradition. There is a cryptoporticus in concrete, fronted by arches framed in half-columns placed at points in the wall which required extra strength. The upper levels of the Tabularium were removed by Michelangelo when he designed the Palazzo del Senatore, Rome’s city hall. Perhaps this may be taken as a symbol of the extent and the limits of the influence of Palestrina’s architect on Renaissance masters. One archeologist, Heinz Kähler, has argued, ingeniously but without carrying conviction, for an influence of the Cortina Terrace and the exedra above it upon the design of Pompey’s theater in Rome: one nabob borrowing architectural effects from another.

Finally, about the time of Cicero’s consulship (63 B.C.), Palestrina influenced the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor at Tivoli, well-known to many from Piranesi’s etching as the Villa of Maecenas. Like Kos and Palestrina (Cortina Terrace), it had a portico on three sides, and a temple against the back wall. Nowadays it houses a paper-mill, but forty years ago the portico was uncluttered. There was an approach by ramp and semicircular stair (Fig. 5.10), very theatrical, like Palestrina and the Tabularium; the material is again concrete faced with opus incertum. The podium is again supported on concrete vaults, and lightened by a complicated arrangement of subterranean rooms. A vast cryptoporticus pierces the whole podium to carry the Via Tiburtina, the main road from Rome to Tivoli. The famous terraced gardens of the Villa d’Este nearby, with their plays of water, felt the inspiration of Palestrina; their architect, Pirro Ligorio, has left sketches of our site made by him on the spot. Pietro da Cortona, Bramante, Raphael, Palladio and Bernini also knew and sketched Palestrina. Another successful terrace plan inspired by Palestrina is Valadier’s treatment in the 19th century of the steep slope up the Pincio from the Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

Palestrina inspired the architects of the Roman Empire, too: for example—one among many—it influenced to some extent (see also p. 267) the architect of Trajan’s Market in Rome, who uses terracing, concrete, and framed arches (but the arches are flat, the framing is pilasters instead of half-columns, and the façade is brick instead of opus incertum.) The inspiration does not stop here: it is to be found on the Palatine, in Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli, Diocletian’s Baths in Rome, and his palace at Spalato, and the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum.

From his building, from which the history of Roman architecture really begins, we can reconstruct the personality of the architect. It makes the whole history of Roman architecture come alive, when we really know one complex. The architect was a master of the manipulation of surface, of light and shade, of counterthrust, controlled views, the unitary plan, of space both full and empty. For him, organic function is also decorative; the stylistic fact is the constructive solution; his organization is clear, his use of the classical “orders” of Graeco-Roman architecture, Tuscan and Ionic, in stone as bearing walls is classical in its combination of beauty and function. The plan of his Sanctuary imposed itself as well on the secular plan of the colony below. He is a real genius, one of the greatest architects of all time. He achieves his magnificent results by creative imitation of earlier models, and in this he is Roman. Because his imitation is creative, it does not peter out in formalism, but has a seminal effect upon other architects of the Republic, the Empire, the Renaissance. A detailed study of his masterpiece not only leaves us profoundly impressed with the patience, thoroughness and imagination of Italian archaeologists; it reinforces again the lesson of the continuity of history and the cultural importance for the whole western world of the Roman Republic.

Sulla went into voluntary retirement and—a rare achievement in his time—died in bed. The next nabob to equal him in stature, violence, and unconstitutionality was a man who had begun his career as Sulla’s lieutenant, Pompey the Great. Victories in Sicily and Africa, against slaves, pirates, and Mithridates, brought him enormous spoils; he too turned his mind to buildings to monumentalize his glory. The result was Rome’s first stone theater, in the Campus Martius, dedicated in his third consulship (52 B.C.) but begun in his second (55 B.C.), in a great show involving 500 lions and seventeen to twenty elephants. What survives of it is little more than a curve in a Roman street, some blocks of tufa beneath a Roman square, and a memory. Beneath the curve of the Via di Grotta Pinta, which perpetuates the outline of its cavea, one may visit today, in the lower regions of a Roman restaurant, the underpinnings of the great building, which once held 12,000 spectators. The technique of these vaults, a development of incertum called opus reticulatum, involves setting pyramidal bricks, point inward, in a lozenge pattern into a cement core. But though the entire superstructure has disappeared, an ancient plan survives. In the late second century A.D. the Emperor Septimius Severus caused to be placed on the wall of the library in Vespasian’s Forum of Peace a marble Plan of Rome, the Forma Urbis, which has come down to us in over 1000 fragments. The ingenuity with which these have been pieced together (work still going on in 1959) would make a story in itself, but for our present purpose only four fragments (Fig. 5.11) are relevant. The two parallel walls to the right (which is west; north is at the bottom) give a fascinating insight into the puritanical Roman mind at work. Straitlaced Romans objected to theaters as immoral. Pompey’s architect therefore designed at the top of the theater’s cavea a temple of Venus Victrix, represented by the two parallel walls in the plan. The theater seats might then pass as a hemicycle approach to a temple (compare the hemicycle approach to the tholos at Palestrina). Puritanism was appeased.

Behind the stage the marble plan shows a great rectangular portico, with a double garden-plot in the middle, where we may restore in imagination trees planted, fountains playing, and works of art displayed. At a Senate meeting in a building associated with the portico, on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar fell at the base of Pompey’s statue, pierced by twenty-three daggers. What may be the tufa blocks of this very building are visible today through a sheet of plate glass in a pedestrian underpass in the Largo Argentina. (Temples A and B of the Largo Argentina appear to the left in the plan.)

Caesar was a greater man than Pompey. His spoils of victory, after eight years in Gaul, were richer, and so was his building program. The most impressive surviving evidence of it is the ground plan of his basilica, the Basilica Julia in the Republican Forum, and, north of the old Forum, which Rome and his own grandeur had outgrown, a grandiose new one, the prototype of an Imperial series.

The Basilica Julia was planned and executed at Caesar’s direction between 54 and 46 B.C., to balance the second-century Basilica Aemilia opposite. All that remains is pavement and piers, but the size of the piers is enough to show that the building had two stories, presumably with a balcony to afford a view of spectacles in the open space of the Forum below. Time and man have dealt harshly with the basilica. When it was excavated, in the 1840’s, a medieval limekiln was found on the pavement. This, plus the knowledge that its stone was sold by the oxcart load in the Middle Ages for the benefit of a hospital which rose on the site, explains what happened to the superstructure. Scratched on the pavement are rough sketches, done by ancient idlers, of statues which once adorned the building or the Forum adjacent, and over eighty “gaming-boards,” scratched circles divided into six segments on which dice were thrown and counters moved. Lawyers’ speeches apparently did not always hold the full attention of the Forum hangers-on.

Caesar’s Forum has left more impressive remains. It cost him a fortune, since his enemies, owners of the expropriated houses, charged him 100,000,000 sesterces, five million uninflated dollars, for the land. Its excavation was begun in 1930, and finished in three years, by Corrado Ricci, as a part of Mussolini’s (Fig. 5.12) grandiose plan for systematizing the center of the city and restoring the ancient dictator’s Forum to set off a modern dictator’s monument, a new street, the Via dell’ Impero, driven through slums and ancient monuments to connect the Coliseum with his headquarters in the Palazzo Venezia. The excavation exposed the southern two-thirds of Caesar’s Forum; the rest lies under the new street. The Forum as revealed by Ricci is another example of axial symmetry (Fig. 5.13), a narrow porticoed rectangle, over twice as long as it was wide, with a temple set in the Italic fashion on a high podium at the back. Working with great patience and delicacy, Ricci set up three of the temple’s fallen columns (Fig. 5.14), with their architrave, frieze, and cornice. Some of the architectural blocks leave between the dentils—a row of projecting tooth-like rectangular members below the cornice—two small distinctive marble disks side by side like a pair of spectacles. This is the “signature” of Domitian’s architect Rabirius, and prove that a restoration of the temple was planned during his reign (A.D. 81–96). There are Cupids in the interior frieze, which prove that the temple was dedicated to Venus, Caesar’s ancestor. To have gods for ancestors lent distinction to a Roman clan, though Caesar knew as well as any skeptic what it really meant. He knew his pedigree back to an ever-so-great grandfather, and God knew who his ancestor was. In the gens Iulia the line was traced back to Iulus the son of Aeneas, who was the son of Anchises and Venus.

The portico, like that behind Pompey’s theater, was an art museum. Ancient authors mention a golden statue of Cleopatra (one of the dictator’s few sentimental gestures?), a golden breastplate set with British pearls, and a bronze equestrian statue of Caesar on his famous horse which had human front feet!

The ground to the south of the Forum rises over fifty feet to the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. This difference in level was filled with three setback stories of luxury shops in massive rectangular blocks of peperino. The Street of the Silversmiths, the Clivus Argentarius, ran above and behind the shops at the Forum level. This whole complex survives.

Three men on horseback, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, subdued East and West for Rome, and used part of the profits to change the face of Rome in forty years. They would have said that they did it out of what the Romans called pietas, a threefold loyalty to family, state, and gods. Each, to reflect credit on his family which ruled the state, on the gods his ancestors, and on the state his perquisite, erected great public buildings in the city to be his monument. Sulla’s dramatic revamping of the old Forum, Pompey’s theater and portico, and Caesar’s new Forum made of a shabby civic center a metropolis almost worthy to vie with the cities of the Greek East. Almost, but not quite, for the building material was still local stone, stuccoed tufa or the handsome limestone from Tivoli called travertine, which weathers to a fine gold, and has ever since been Rome’s characteristic building material. It was considered worthy in the Renaissance to build the fabric of St. Peter’s. For its next transformation, this time into a city of marble, Rome had to wait for the rise to power of the greatest nabob of them all, Caesar’s adopted son and successor, Octavian-Augustus.