Of all the things Augustus did, his most widely celebrated accomplishment was having found
Rome as a city of bricks and leaving it as a city of marble.
After the historian Suetonius put that quote in the first emperor’s mouth, nothing else
in his impressive and winding career emblazoned itself so thoroughly into the popular historical
conscience: not avenging his great uncle's assassination, not winning Rome's last*-ish
civil war, not even conquering Egypt from the formidable Cleopatra, and it also wasn't
transforming the Roman Republic into an empire or founding a royal dynasty (despite their
massive long-term implications).
Augustus himself would like us to remember him for "Restoring the Republic" and bringing
peace to the Mediterranean, as he made a very big deal about those two – but those may
well have been the groundwork for his lasting and most tangible achievement of giving Rome
its identity.
Now it's not as if the Roman people didn't have a district character to them already
– the previous five centuries had shown them to be calculating, devoted, opulent,
fiercely pragmatic, more fiercely militaristic, and mayhaps a tad narcissistic - but these
traits were understood conceptually, through old fables of great Romans demonstrating virtue
in the face of peril.
These ideas of Roman-ness or "Romanitas" had yet to take real physical form.
While Rome had its temples and one especially spiffy theater, Augustus saw an opportunity
to make the city itself into a monument to Roman excellence.
Now, there's a word for this, and that word is "Propaganda", but all his life Augustus
was really really freaking good at it, and his building program was a natural extension
of that weaselly talent.
But without a doubt, the centerpiece crowning his city of marble, his greatest accomplishment,
was a strikingly-humble building called the Ara Pacis Augustae: the Altar of Augustan
Peace.
To see why, Let's do some History.
So if we consider the city as Augustus would
have – namely: a canvas for imperial propaganda, we should appreciate just how blank it was
in the first century BC.
The city was situated among seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber river, it was protected
by the pre-republican-era Servian wall, and the legal scope of the city was defined by
a boundary called the Pomerium, supposedly the original course Romulus had plowed when
founding his city.
Everything inside the Pomerium was the true Rome, while everything outside the Pomerium
was just stuff that belonged to Rome.
But with trinkets like Athens, Ephesus, and Alexandria, Rome’s belongings were rather
more impressive than itself, because Rome in the Republican era was fully lacking in
the big-ticket megaworks that later came to define it: no Colosseum, no Pantheon, no palaces,
no massive baths, and only very recently had Caesar spent his dictatorial winnings on a
major Forum and upgrades to the Circus Maximus, which even still was an open racetrack with
wooden bleachers.
Pompey had earlier spent his campaign spoils on a new stone theater and meeting house for
the senate, and that was the single nicest building in Rome.
Which IS cool, but when Alexandria had temples with vending machines that gave out holy water
and the most magnificent library in the ancient world, it was time Rome stepped up its game.
So, what to build, and where?
Well, first things first: libraries.
Augustus built a library for Greek and Roman literature in a new temple to Apollo on the
Palatine hill, and another one in the Portico of his sister Octavia just outside the Pomerium.
At the same time, he built another structure further outside the Pomerium: an ornate mausoleum
for him and his family that signified his commitment to Rome by his intent to die there.
It’s a grand tholos-shaped tomb covered with trees, and it was also a giant middle-finger
to his rival Marcus Antonius, who allegedly wished to be buried in Alexandria rather than
Rome.
Scandale!
Now one bit of land between the hills and
the Tiber river has some special significance due to both geography and complex ancient
legalese.
See, one of the Pomerium’s quirks is that armies were forbidden to cross it and enter
the city.
History informs us that they did, with distressingly high frequency, but the point is they weren’t
supposed to.
So in the republican period, the military needed an easily-accessible place to train
and drill, and they dedicated this handy floodplain by the river to their god of war and made
it into the Field of Mars, or Campus Martius.
Various generals over the centuries had built a handful of temples with the spoils of successful
campaigns, but by the time of Augustus it was still pretty sparse, so it would make
the perfect place to commemorate his victories – not just because it was free real estate,
but also great symbolism.
Mars was the father of the twins Romulus and Remus and, by extension, the ancestor of Rome.
Augustus, meanwhile, traced his ancestry up to the hero Aeneas and his mother Venus, who
was notably a consort of Mars.
So this pairing of Mars and Venus is echoed down the generations by the match of their
descendants, Rome and Augustus.
Mythologically this is fun and cool, but the practical outcome was our favorite Princeps
making himself inextricable from the very concept of Rome.
That meant restoring dozens of temples and finishing political buildings like the Saepta
Julia, a vote-counting hall first commissioned by Caesar, so that way, even while he made
a big show of restoring the institutions of the republic, the very machinery of government
was associated with the patronage of Augustus.
Clever – Bastard – But clever.
Another structure was more cosmic in scope,
as Augustus put an Egyptian obelisk in the Campus Martius to work as a sundial meridian,
casting a shadow on a marble grid to track the days of the year according to Caesar’s
Julian Calendar.
This Solarium Augusti not only celebrated the subjugation of Egypt by flaunting an obelisk,
but it was dedicated 35 years after the Calendar reform, conveying the message that the Julio-Augustan
imperial family literally controls time.
And that’s not the only time he pulled this nonsense.
Back to the patronage thing, Augustus spent over a decade on a whole new forum, complete
with a temple to Mars Ultor, the Avenger, in celebration of his victory against Caesar’s
assassins.
This forum was not only another place where public business was conducted under the auspices
of the Princeps, but it had two statue galleries on either side: one of famous men from the
Republican era, and one tracing the lineage of the Julian family back up to Aeneas, both
of which culminated in our favorite boy.
And then he also built a new Theater to honor his dead nephew Marcellus, but he specifically
made it bigger than Pompey’s theater.
There’s a whole dynastic angle to this, but frankly I just find this one petty, which,
granted, is less obnoxious than proclaiming yourself the ruler of time.
Luckily, he wasn’t quite so pompous as to
take all the credit, and was happy to let his badass right-hand man Marcus Agrippa show
off as well.
Most famously, he made the first draft of the as-of-yet tragically-domeless Pantheon,
but he also built the first major public baths in the city of Rome, supplied by water from
his new Aqua Virgo – one of two aqueducts overseen by Agrippa out of three built during
the reign of Augustus, the third of which was used to fill the Naumachia, an arena across
the river that staged whole-ass naval battles.
The Romans are among the rare few who could make something so basic as water into something
so immensely hardcore.
So with all that built, we come to 13 BC,
when Augustus returned from campaigns in the west and the Senate voted to build an Altar
of Augustan Peace on the Campus Martius, finished and consecrated a few years later in 9 BC.
Unlike, say, the temple of Mars Ultor, this wasn’t a temple, it’s a sacrificial altar.
It’s raised on a podium with one staircase leading in and walls on all 4 sides, but there’s
no roof!
Roman state religion was a public affair, and many sacrifices were done outdoors.
But since this was part of the Augustan program, it was another vehicle for, of course, Propaganda!
And even by the standards of what he did so far, the Ara Pacis was thick with symbolism,
much of it self-serving.
The inside walls are decorated with bountiful fruit garlands and ox skulls in the traditional
style, and the bottom of the outside walls have ornate floral patterns of Acanthus leaves
and some 50 other species of plants and animals.
And as with all classical sculpture-work, it would have been painted, so every leaf,
vine, & figure were brightly-colored and gilded to really sell the natural beauty and the
idea of a new Golden Age that Augustus had created for Rome.
Looking upwards now toward the business portion
of the frieze, we find a selection of four panels depicting mythological scenes.
The figures are a smidge dubious to identify, as some panels are quite thoroughly trashed,
but we can make some educated guesses.
On the front-left of the altar is the scene of baby Romulus and Remus with their wolf-mom
and probably Mars looking over them; While on the right side is a scene of sacrifices
made by probably Rome’s Second King Numa Pompilius, who has strong associations with
peace and piety, but people used to say he’s Aeneas, so ehhhh?
The back right panel has the goddess Roma armored up and sitting on a pile of either
her own weapons or ones she confiscated.
unclear.
And finally, there’s the real splash panel of anyone from Pax to Roma again to Mother
Earth to maybe Venus Genetrix, holding two children that likely symbolize the people
of Rome, surrounded by the bounty of the lands on one side and the sea on the other.
Exact figures notwithstanding, the combined effect is pretty clear: front panels show
“here’s what we came from” & the back panels say “look at us, we did it, Golden
Age ahoy”.
And lastly, the long ends of the altar have
paired processional friezes, possibly in reference to the ones on the Parthenon, but here depicting
a religious procession from around 13 BC when the altar was commissioned.
One side shows politicians and the senatorial elite, while the other shows the extended
imperial family, as a representation of The Senate and People of Rome, except here the
People is Augustus’ people, rendered so specifically that we can actually pick out
individuals like the Princeps and his wife Livia, Agrippa and Julia, and even some royal
kiddos – One kid is shown being visibly bored and pulling on Agrippa’s toga so that
he can see better, which is pretty adorable, especially by the standards of, again, vigorous
propaganda.
The intermingled imagery of deities and royals, celebrations of a plentiful Golden Age, and
the triumph of peace are all supporting Augustan political power and pushing this concept of
the Princeps as a divine patron of Rome’s success.
And by putting all this on the Field of Mars, it creates a causal chain between Roman power,
the Pax Romana, and natural prosperity, of which our boy the Time King guarantees all
three.
The design of the Ara Pacis is so elegant, and the sculpture-work is absolutely exquisite;
it’s in no small part because of powerful iconography like this that Romans were willing
to put up with monarchs again, because the results spoke for themselves and it all just
seemed to fit.
Perhaps the symbolism is too powerful, as the Ara Pacis was the focal-point of the most
consequential moment of Classical reception in the 1900s: Fascism.
After fragments had been re-identified in 1903, the altar was reconstructed adjacent
to the Mausoleum in 1938 by Benito Mussolini, as part of his propaganda campaign tying himself
to Augustus on the 2,000th anniversary of his birth.
This helped proclaim the glory of the new Roman Empire and justify all the totalitarianism.
But whatever subtlety was possessed by the Divine Son of the Deified Julius Caesar, the
lord of time, Imperator Caesar Augustus, that subtlety was fully lacking in Il Duce Mussolini,
so the already fiercely propagandistic iconography of Augustan Rome was flipped on Turbo and
used by Italian and German fascists as an excuse for, y’know, atrocities.
So it’s rather important that historians and audiences alike be careful to not blindly
glorify any civilization.
We should celebrate the Nice and criticize the Yikes, because neither exists in a vacuum.
Augustus was endlessly clever ­­– he was also a lying, weaselly rascal and I f***ing
hate him.
The Ara Pacis is spectacular, Augustan Rome is magnificent; but, what did it cost the
Romans, and what would it later cost Europe?
Thank you for watching.
I had originally planned to focus in on the Ara Pacis in particular, but I think the effect
is far more complete when we look at the full Augustan building program.
And even as I say that, this was Just the city of Rome and Just the physical projects.
As ever, there is pleeenty more to talk about, so I’ll see you in the next video.