The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Italy

Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

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When the buildings cluttering the site had been cleared away, the plan (Fig. 6.1) was found to be based upon that of Caesar’s Forum: a rectangular portico with a temple at the back. But the rectangle was enriched at the sides with curves, as at Palestrina earlier and in Bernini’s portico in front of St. Peter’s later. Each of the hemicycles had, let into the walls on two levels, niches two feet deep, big enough to hold statues of half life size. Excavations in the area of the south hemicycle as early as 1889 had turned up fragments of drapery in Carrara marble, and bits of inscriptions which, in combination with literary evidence, gave to the great Italian epigraphist Attilio Degrassi the clue to the subjects of the statues. The inscriptions, called _elogia_, recorded the _cursus honorum_, or public career, of a set of heroes, triumphing generals, or others who had deserved well of the Republic. Three examples are Aulus Postumius, who, with the help of the Great Twin Brethren Castor and Pollux (the household gods of the Julian clan), beat the Latins at the battle of Lake Regillus in 496, and built his divine helpers a temple in the Forum; Appius Claudius the Blind, who built the Appian Way (312 B.C.) and an aqueduct; and Sulla--nabobs and builders all. But there was space in the two levels of hemicycle niches, and in others hypothetically restored in the portico’s rectilinear wall, for over fifty statues with _elogia_. So Degrassi made a search for other stones similarly inscribed, some of which turned up in the most unlikely places.

One had been used as a marble roof-tile of Hadrian’s Pantheon; it was in the Vatican collection. Another was found in a vineyard near Rome’s north gate, the Porta del Popolo. The former immortalized one Lucius Albinius, who took the Vestal Virgins in his wagon to Caere for safety when the Gauls were threatening Rome in 390 B.C. The latter was of Sulla’s great rival Marius, the friend of the people. The dimensions, letter-heights, and letter-styles of both made their origin in Augustus’ Forum extremely likely. A set of seven more had been known since the seventeenth century or earlier as coming from the site of the Forum of Arezzo, ancient Arretium, in Tuscany. The texts of some of these turned out to be copies of _elogia_ from the Forum of Augustus. This justified the inference that in this matter of a Hall of Fame, provincial cities imitated the metropolis. Thus those _elogia_ from Arezzo for which no Roman prototype had been found might yet give a clue to what the Roman collection had once contained. This inference enriches the list by the names of Manius Valerius Maximus, conciliator of class struggles, and Rome’s first dictator (494 B.C.); Lucius Aemilius Paullus, one of the greatest _triumphatores_ of them all, who beat the Macedonians at Pydna in 168 B.C., and symbolized the union of Roman traditions with Hellenism, as Augustus aspired to do; Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, father of the reforming Gracchi; and Sulla’s lieutenant Lucius Licinius Lucullus, whose brother was responsible for the terraces and hemicycles at Palestrina.

The south hemicycle and portico, then, ingeniously connected Augustus’ name with a set of nabobs, builders, successful generals, philhellenes, and men remarkable for piety to the gods or popularity with the masses. What of the north hemicycle? Here Ricci discovered the _elogium_ of Rome’s and Augustus’ legendary ancestor, _pius Aeneas_ himself, who also appears on the Altar of Peace; a set of the Kings of Alba Longa; Romulus, also probably on the Altar of Peace; Caesar’s father; Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’ much beloved heir, whose untimely death Vergil movingly mourns in the _Aeneid_, and whose ashes lay in Augustus’ mausoleum; and Nero Claudius Drusus, Augustus’ stepson, who also is figured, like Aeneas and Romulus, on the Altar of Peace. It looks very much as though the Hall of Fame on this side of the portico was intended to connect the legendary Kings of Alba and Home with the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And the climax of it all was yet to come. At the end of the north portico Ricci excavated a square room with a pedestal at the back. On the pedestal he found a cutting for a colossal foot, seven times life size. Forty feet up the back wall were the put-holes for the struts of a huge statue. Whose? The Forum’s temple was dedicated to Mars, but the place for the god is in his temple. The most likely candidate is the _Dux_ himself, Augustus, father of his country, in whom Roman history came, in more senses than one, to a full stop.

Medieval limekilns tell, as usual, how the rich marbles which decorated both portico and temple were broken up and melted down into whitewash, but three marble Corinthian columns sixty feet high give some idea of the temple’s grandeur. Its podium, lofty in the Italic fashion, was not solid marble, simply tufa revetted or veneered with thin marble slabs, an economical, and, some might say, dishonest way of making a city of marble of the desired Hellenic appearance. The statue-base at the back of the temple (which was apsidal to match the hemicycles in the porticoes) is too wide for a single figure. The cult statues must have been of Mars and Venus, another delicate reference to the ancestry of Augustus’ adoptive clan. The temple itself was vowed, the literary sources tell us, at the battle of Philippi (42 B.C.) to Mars Ultor, avenger of the murder of Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s sword was piously preserved as a relic in it. The Forum did not neglect the arts. Like Caesar’s, and like Pompey’s portico, it was a museum. It did service also for literature: we are told that lectures were delivered in the hemicycles. Begun in 37 B.C., the Forum took thirty-five years to finish. By 2 B.C. other propaganda devices--especially the arch, the Altar of Peace, Vergil’s epic, Livy’s history, and Horace’s lyric--had, as we shall see, given the desired respectability to Augustus, the Prince of Peace.

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It was the victory of Actium (31 B.C.), over the combined fleets of Antony and Cleopatra, that enabled Octavian to pass as the Prince of Peace. In 1888–89, in the old Forum, between the Temples of the deified Julius and of Castor, were excavated the footings of an arch, originally with a single passageway, later enlarged to three. This arch was identified from literary sources as the one erected by Augustus to commemorate that victory, enlarged later when another occasion for propaganda arose. The arch itself is a routine affair, with plenty of precedent, though one might ponder the propriety of thus gloating over Antony, a former colleague and a Roman citizen. (Gamberini, the excavator, even found, in the bottom of square stone receptacles beside the arch, laurel seeds which suggest that the tree of victory was prominent in the landscaping of the arch.) But, given the Roman propensity in general, and Augustus’ in particular, for propagandizing in stone, the question naturally arose what opportunity for self-advertisement the arch offered. The answer was not given until Degrassi published another book in 1947.

For many years archaeologists had believed that on the walls of the nearby Regia had been engraved the _Fasti Consulares_ (lists of Roman consuls from the founding of the Republic and probably of the kings as well), and the _Fasti Triumphales_ (lists of triumphing generals from Romulus to 19 B.C. I have remarked in another book[D] how much one can learn of a people by what they make lists of: Greeks, of Olympic victors; Americans, of baseball averages; Romans, of statesmen and military heroes). But in 1935 a careful study of the Regia by the American F. E. Brown proved that the part of its wall where the _Fasti_ must have begun was masked in the rebuilding of 36 B.C. by another structure, and that the space available, carefully measured for the first time by Brown, did not fit the surviving _Fasti_, which were discovered in 1546 and are still preserved in the Conservatori Museum. Clearly the Regia was not the place where the _Fasti_ were inscribed. Since two-thirds of the extant fragments were found between the Temple of the Deified Julius and the Temple of Castor, and since their dimensions suited those of the footings of the Arch of Augustus, the inference was clear. It was on the arch (Fig. 6.2) that the consular _Fasti_ were carved, and this is now the universally accepted opinion. They were displayed on either side of the lateral passageway, where pedestrians could read them, the consular lists framed by pilasters with a pediment above (reconstructed in the museum by Michelangelo), the list of _triumphatores_ on the corner pilasters of the enlarged arch. The result of this display was again, as in Augustus’ Forum, to connect the upstart Octavian with a more respectable or heroic past. His name appears twice among the _triumphatores_ (the slab that referred to Actium is unfortunately missing) in a list that began with Romulus and contained the names of the greatest heroes of Roman history; in the consular lists his name figured twenty-four times. This collocation and repetition could do him no harm.

[D] _The Roman Mind at Work_ (Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1958).

In the consular lists the names of Mark Antony and his family have suffered _damnatio memoriae_; that is, they have been first inscribed and then chiselled out. In the list of _triumphatores_, on the contrary, Antony’s name is allowed to stand. What is the legitimate inference from this? Clearly it is that the two lists were inscribed at different times, and that on the first occasion our _condottiere_ felt a certain insecurity, which by the time of the second had disappeared. Literary sources date the second occasion in or shortly after 19 B.C., after the Roman standards disgracefully lost by Crassus at Carrhae had been recovered from the Parthians. In these eleven years or so the _condottiere_ Octavian had become Augustus, the Revered One, Expander of Empire, Father of his Country, Prince of Peace. Within those years Vergil’s _Georgics_ had cast an aura of beauty over Octavian’s resettlement of veterans on the land; the _Aeneid_ had connected this modern Aeneas, the pious one, the bearer of burdens, with his legendary ancestors; Horace’s Roman Odes had praised Augustus’ religious and moral reforms; and Livy’s history had put into Augustan prose the lays of ancient Rome. Augustus could afford to be magnanimous to his enemies: he had seen to it that most of them were dead.

FIG. 6.2 Rome, Forum. Arch of Augustus, reconstruction. (Fototeca)]

But it was not enough that the past be controlled and rewritten, and connected with the present on splendid monuments. Augustus must control the future, too; even after his death men must admire and worship him and his dynasty. To this end he began (literary sources tell us it was in 28 B.C.) in the Campus Martius a massive mausoleum (Fig. 6.3), which should be reminiscent in shape of the great Etruscan _tumuli_ of centuries before, and in mass of such wonders of the world as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the pyramids of Egypt. This monument, which through the centuries has been successively fortress, circus, park for fireworks displays, bull-ring, and concert-hall, was stripped to its gaunt core in 1935, as another part of the Fascists’ Augustan plan to attach themselves to the memory of Augustus. The excavators, Giglioli and Colini, found within the circular ring of the mausoleum’s vertical outer wall a series of concentric vaulted corridors (Fig. 6.4) in concrete, rising four stories or 143 feet, surrounding a central hollow cylinder where Augustus’ ashes were to lie. A statue of the great deceased would have surmounted the cylinder, and the whole massive structure would have been heaped with earth and planted with cypresses. Before the door stood the bronze tablets bearing Augustus’ autobiography--a calmly audacious fabrication of history, it has been justly called. In the corridor around the central cylinder were placed the marble containers for the urns of members of the dynasty. Some of the containers were found _in situ_, though their ashes--and, ironically, Augustus’ as well--had long ago disappeared.

(G. Lugli, _Mon. Ant._, 3, p. 197)]

It was Augustus’ fate to outlive his lieutenants, his relatives (see the family tree, Fig. 6.5), and all his favorite candidates for the succession. There lay, for example, the ashes of his stepson Drusus, his nephew, the young Marcellus, and his grandchildren, Lucius and Gaius; his lieutenant Agrippa; his sister Octavia, once given in a dynastic marriage to Mark Antony; his stepson Tiberius’ one-time wife Agrippina, divorced to give place to Augustus’ daughter. Agrippina survived Augustus; who knows what palace intrigue brought her ashes here? Her one-time husband’s ashes rested here, too, and those of Germanicus, Tiberius’ adopted son, also those of the mad Emperor Caligula, of Claudius, Vespasian, Nerva, and Septimius Severus’ consort Julia Domna (for the Severan dynasty, too, had need of respectability).

In stripping the mausoleum to its core, and building a deplorable neo-Fascist _piazza_ on one side of it, an equally deplorable concrete shed for the reconstructed Altar of Peace on the other, the archaeologists of the ’30s stripped Augustus, too, of his pretensions. Yet the decayed grandeur, the disappointed hopes, the inevitable passing of régimes, strike their own note of pathos and mortality:

“_My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair._”

However unfortunate the building that protects it may be, the reconstructed Altar of Peace in the Field of Mars must be recognized as one of the great triumphs of Italian archaeology. Sculptured reliefs from this structure were first discovered, though not recognized as such, as long ago as 1568, in the underpinnings of what is now the Palazzo Fiano, on the Corso, Rome’s _cardo_, which overlies the ancient Great North Road, the Via Flaminia. Other soundings were made in 1859 and 1903, and the reliefs were first recognized as belonging to the altar in 1879. But it was not until 1937–38 that G. Moretti carried through the incredibly ingenious and patient work which led to the almost complete recovery and reconstruction of the altar and the historic sculptured frieze surrounding it.

NOTICE that Julius Caesar left no descendants, but adopted his great-nephew Augustus. Connections with Augustus were later traced by descent from his daughter Julia, his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, or his sister Octavia. The names of emperors are in capitals. Numerals in parentheses show the order of marriages. Single lines indicate blood relationship; double lines, marriage; the dotted line, that the Cn. Domitius is the same person.

NOTE 1. A daughter of Drusus II and Julia IV married Rubellius Blandus; their son, Rubellius Plautus, was executed by Nero. NOTE 2. Julia III had a daughter who married Junius Silanus; several of their descendants were executed by Nero. NOTE 3. After the death of Messallina Claudius married his niece Agrippina II; there were no children.

FIG. 6.5 Family tree of the Julio-Claudians.

(P. MacKendrick and H. Howe, _Classics in Translation_, 2, p. 370)]

A colossal engineering problem arose because the Palazzo Fiano rested upon wooden piles driven into the water which in this part of Rome underlies most of the buildings. These piles, and reinforcements to them, pinned down some of the marble blocks of the altar itself. To get the blocks out by ordinary methods, even if the water level had made it possible, would have caused the collapse of the building. Previous excavators had resorted to driving narrow, damp, dark tunnels, with incomplete results. Moretti resolved on more heroic measures; the solution is a credit to modern Italian engineering. The weightiest and worst-supported part of the palace lay directly over the altar; there were deep splits in the palace walls; only the extraordinary tenacity of the _pozzolana_ mortar held them together. With infinite capacity for taking pains, the damaged parts of the walls were taken down and, by injection of liquid concrete, restored segment by segment, brick by brick. (The Italians call this process _cuci e scuci_, sew and unsew.) The subsoil was so uneven in profile and so soaking wet that a new masonry substructure was impossible. Moretti, in consultation with his engineers, determined to shift the weight of the palace wall onto a sort of enormous sawhorse or _cavaletto_ (Fig. 6.6) of reinforced concrete. Holes were drilled sixty-five feet to a firm footing and filled with concrete; on this were built concrete piers to support the legs of the sawhorse. Between each pier and the corresponding leg was inserted a hydraulic jack (_martinetto_) adjustable to suit the various stresses exerted by the bearing walls. A grid of steel girders ran from pier to pier for reinforcement.

Once the corner of the building was supported by the concrete sawhorse, the problem was only half-solved, for water covered the altar up to the top of the outside steps. Pumping was labor in vain; it would only have weakened the substructure of the palace and adjoining buildings. What were needed were dikes, to keep the water out while the area inside them was emptied. But a cement dike was impossible, because of the maze of water, gas, and sewer mains, heat, power, and light conduits which, at all levels and in all directions, crisscrossed the subsoil of this busy part of modern Rome. A trench about five feet wide was dug, with a 230-foot perimeter. From a horizontal pipe laid in it, fifty-five three-inch pipes ran down vertically at equal intervals to a depth of twenty-four feet. Into these pipes was pumped carbon dioxide under a pressure of eighty atmospheres. Radiation from the refrigerant in the vertical pipes froze the surrounding muddy earth, and the impenetrable dike was a reality. The water inside covering the altar was then pumped out, and all the architectural blocks and fragments could be removed. Thus succeeded one of the most difficult and delicate excavations ever made. All was finished to meet a deadline, the bimillennary of Augustus’ birth, September 23, 1938.

What Moretti now had to work with in his reconstruction was not only the slabs and fragments he had just extracted, but also the finds from previous excavations going back to 1568 (Fig. 6.7). Over the intervening years these had been scattered. Most of the 1568 finds had been sawn into three lengthwise (for the slabs were over two feet thick, too heavy for easy transport) and shipped to Florence to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who then owned the Palazzo Fiano site in Rome. One slab was in the Vatican Museum, another in the Villa Medici (seat of the French Academy in Rome), still another in the Louvre. The finds from the 1859 dig had also been kept unrestored in the palace, and then transferred to Rome’s Terme Museum. One slab was found in re-use face down as a cover for a tomb in Rome’s Church of the Gesù.

These were all decorative elements. Under the Palazzo Fiano still remain the tufa footings and some of the travertine pavement (Fig. 6.8). These, though they were not removed, made it possible to visualize and reconstruct the plan. The altar itself, in the center of its enclosed platform, proved to be U-shaped, with the open end of the U facing west, toward the Campus Martius, and approached by a flight of steps. The whole was fenced off by a marble wall about thirty feet square and sixteen feet high, with wide doorways on east and west. Since the pavement sloped, and there was provision for drainage, the inference was warranted that the altar was originally open to the sky. Each face of the enclosure wall bore two wide horizontal decorative bands separated by narrower bands, on the outer face of meanders, on the inner, of palmettes. On the outer face the wide upper band bore a frieze with over 100 figures; the lower one motifs from nature: acanthus scrolls, bunches of grapes, the swans of Augustus’ patron Apollo, and a lively population of small animals. The inner face carried, above, a motif of swags of fruit festooned between ox-skulls (_bucrania_); below, a series of long, narrow, recessed, vertical panels, giving the effect, in marble, of a wooden fence. Many of the Slabs were found where they fell and were easily fitted into their proper place in the reconstruction (Fig. 6.9). Of the slabs in museums casts were taken. Thanks to careful observation of joins, repeats of floral motifs, the identity of historic figures, veins in the marble, and treatment of unexposed surfaces, these slabs, too, found their proper places. The job was done in the workrooms of the Terme Museum, with twenty-four large cases of fragments to work with, plus the full slabs and casts. The altar was finally rebuilt on the banks of the Tiber next to Augustus’ mausoleum.

The result was worth the effort, for the Altar of Peace is universally acknowledged to be the greatest artistic masterpiece of the Augustan Age, blending Roman spirit with Greek forms, occupying in Roman art the same exalted position as the Parthenon frieze in Greek, and destined to inspire, as we shall see, many monuments with historic subjects in the following decades and centuries.

The figured upper panels on the enclosure’s outer face are the most interesting part of the monument. On the north and south faces a procession moves westward. It is imagined as turning the corner of the enclosure and entering the west doorway to sacrifice at the altar. The heads on the north side were heavily restored in the Renaissance, but the fasces, the laurel crowns, the senatorial shoes and rings, the cult objects carried make it clear that the procession is of magistrates and priests. The south side, which faced the city, must have been considered the most important half, and here, indeed, many historical figures of Augustus’ family and court have been identified. It is noteworthy how the division of the friezes into dynastic and non-dynastic halves parallels the arrangement of the Hall of Fame in Augustus’ Forum.

The face in the upper right corner of the fragmentary left panel in Fig. 6.10, though cracked badly across the eye (for the whole weight of the Palazzo Fiano rested upon it for centuries), is recognizable from other portraits, from what remains of the profile, and from the treatment of the hair, as Augustus himself. The figures in the spiked caps to the far right are _flamines_, priests of Jupiter and Mars. The figure second to the left of the first _flamen_, all by himself in the background, is a spectator, the very type of the old Republican Roman. Lictors with the fasces precede the figure to the spectator’s left of Augustus. This figure, then, must be the consul of the year, with the other consul on the other side of the Emperor.

But of which year? The consuls of the year 13 B.C., when the building of the altar was officially decreed, were Varus (who fell in the Teutoberg forest twenty-two years later) and Tiberius. Those of the year 9 B.C., when the altar was consecrated, were Drusus and Quinctius Crispinus. Now the slab pictured in Fig. 6.11 contains on its left edge, on either side of the veiled background figure with her finger on her lips (who is Augustus’ sister Octavia) a family group. This has been almost certainly identified as Drusus (in uniform, with short tunic), and his wife, Antonia Minor, holding their son Germanicus by the hand. Drusus can hardly be in two places at once. Therefore the consuls on the earlier slab are those of 13 B.C., and the whole procession is imagined as that of the altar’s _constitutio_, when the marble version was not yet finished, not yet, perhaps, even begun. This hypothesis explains the treatment of the enclosure’s inner face, where the recessed panels represent a temporary wooden fence. The swags in marble relief, of barley, grapes, olives, figs, apples, pears, plums, cherries, pine cones, nuts, oak leaves, ivy, laurel, and poppy--all the riches of a fertile Italy at peace--were originally painted, like Della Robbia terracottas, against a blue background. They must have been intended to render the natural festoons swinging in the open air against the blue sky. The _paterae_, or sacrificial bowls, in two alternating patterns of gilded marble, which hang above the swags, must be imagined as suspended from an upper crossbar.

The persons in Fig. 6.12 are of the greatest historical interest. The tall man with a fold of his toga over his head, whose careworn face and pronounced Roman nose make a recognizable portrait, can be identified from other likenesses as Augustus’ lieutenant Agrippa, acting as Pontifex Maximus. The child clinging to his toga is then one of his sons, Gaius or Lucius. Gaius, the elder, born in 20 B.C., would have been, in 13, of the age represented here; a modern symbol of Aeneas’ son Ascanius, or Romulus, the son of Mars. The woman in the background with her hand on his head would then be Gaius’ mother Julia, Augustus’ daughter, whom he was later to banish for her immoral conduct. The older woman in the foreground, the most carefully wrought female figure in either frieze, would then be Julia’s stepmother, the redoubtable Empress Livia.

The family group to the right of Drusus in Fig. 6.11 is also pregnant with history. The shapely woman with her hand on the small boy’s shoulder is identified as Antonia Major, Mark Antony’s daughter by Octavia. The small boy grasping a fold of his uncle Drusus’ cloak grew up to father the Emperor Nero. The girl to the spectator’s right of the small boy is his sister Domitia; her father, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, later commander of the Roman army in Germany, has his hand raised over her head. The elderly background figure with the kindly, lined face is perhaps Maecenas, Augustus’ secretary of state for propaganda, the patron of Vergil and Horace.

The whole atmosphere of the procession is very Italian, quite intimate and informal, without central focus. Its members face in all directions, and are so incorrigibly chatty that Octavia must command silence, finger to lips. Here, in these realistic groups, are the living likenesses of some of the men and women whose ashes later lay in Augustus’ mausoleum, of some of the men and women who made a Golden Age. Here are the pages of history made flesh, and here are all the basic ideas of the Augustan program: the pretense of the revived Republic, in the consuls and lictors; the emphasis on religion, in the _flamines_ and the veiled Pontifex; the dynastic hopes, in little Gaius; the subvention of literature, in Maecenas.

The east and west ends of the enclosure each contain, on either side of the doorways, a figured panel, four in all, of which two are well preserved. The one to the right of the main (west) entrance portrays a grave, bearded figure (Fig. 6.13) offering sacrifices, with the aid of two acolytes, upon a rustic altar before a small temple containing tiny figures of the Penates as Castor and Pollux, whose connection with the _gens Iulia_ we have already noted. The sow in the lower left corner is the famous one with the thirty piglets, whose discovery was to tell Aeneas where to found his city. (What purported to be the original sow and all the piglets, pickled in brine, was on display in a Latin town in Augustus’ age.) From the sow the inference is that the bearded figure is Aeneas; he symbolized the past of Rome, and the ancestry of Augustus.

The panel to the left of the east entrance (Fig. 6.14) has as its central figure a full-breasted woman, whose face closely resembles the Livia of the south frieze. She has fruits in her lap, chubby naked babies in her arms, a miniature cow and a sheep at her feet, grain and poppies behind her. She is flanked by obviously allegorical figures of Air (riding a swan), and Water (riding a sea monster). Fresh water gushes from an amphora in the lower left corner; a saltwater harbor (indicated by waves, and perhaps the arch in the background) is at the lower right. Surely this is _Saturnia Tellus_, the fruitful earth of an Italy at peace, that Vergil sang of in the _Georgics_, rich in crops, flocks, and herds, but fruitful most of all in _men_. Of the two fragmentary panels, the west one is restored as a scene of Mars, the Shepherd, the wolf, and the twins Romulus and Remus. (The Mars was acquired from a private owner in Vienna, whose Roman art dealer had told him it came from the Palazzo Fiano.) The east one, the least well preserved of all, probably represented the goddess Roma seated upon a trophy of arms, like Britannia on an English penny. Thus one pair of end panels is symbolical, while the other is mythological; the processional frieze deals with contemporary history. The whole makes a tripartite arrangement which is artistically very satisfying. At the same time, victorious Rome, fruitful Italy, the remote founder, and the first king, are all symbolically related here, as in other Augustan monuments, to the contemporary scene and the fortunes of the dynasty.

After the grandeur of the enclosure, the decoration of the altar itself seems modest and unpretentious, perhaps deliberately so. Winged sphinxes support rich volutes, the graceful S-curves which bound the altar table on either side. Beneath, there is a sacrificial scene, with the six Vestal Virgins neatly arranged in order of size. In the sacrificial scene itself, the victims are a steer, a heifer, and a fleecy sheep. The attendants carry the sacrificial knives, platters, pitchers, and other paraphernalia. One twists the horns of the steer, another the tail of the heifer, to keep them moving. Altar and enclosure together provide our most complete visual record of a Roman state religious ceremony. And the whole complex, with its religiosity and historicity, is prolific of descendants: the Arch of Titus, the Cancelleria reliefs (to be discussed in Chapter IX), Trajan’s Column (to be discussed in Chapter X), his arch at Beneventum, the Arch of Constantine, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Arch of Septimius Severus. It is the prototype of them all, and the most masterly: tranquil, unpretentious, stately yet intimate, delighting in nature, perfectly balanced between country and city, perfectly symbolizing the Augustan Peace, when men would beat their swords into plowshares, and study war no more. But within 100 years the altar began to be neglected. Perhaps, looking behind the façade, some old Republicans were moved to ask, “Where is the Altar of Liberty?”

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A Forum, an arch, a tomb, an altar: taken together, as recent archaeology has revealed them to us, they epitomize the Augustan Age. In the Forum and the arch, the past recaptured, and pressed into the service of the régime. In the altar, the heroic and warlike past implicit in the orderly and peaceful present. In the tomb, posterity, the future generations, invited to marvel at the dynasty and what it has wrought. Behind all this, we can see that Augustus, the most ruthless power politician of them all, was simply continuing the careers of the great captains and dynasts of the past, like Caesar, Pompey, and Sulla. The refulgence of the monuments but reflects his monolithic control of the state, his cracking open of the seams of the old régime. In the history of art and architecture, Augustus’ contribution is the applying of a standardized scheme of décor, as he applied a standardized scheme of administration, to the whole Empire. Henceforward Rome is the producer. She crystallized the styles and re-exported them to the world that lay at her feet. Next we shall see how the Julio-Claudian Emperors, from Tiberius to Nero, exploited what Augustus had begun.

Hypocrite, Madman, Fool, and Knave

Roman historians branded the Julio-Claudian successors of Augustus--Tiberius (A.D. 14–37), Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54) and Nero (54–68)--as a hypocrite, a madman, a fool, and a knave. The hypocrite spent millions rehabilitating Asia Minor after an earthquake, the madman provided Ostia with a splendid aqueduct, the fool built for the same city a great artificial harbor, the knave rebuilt Rome--after burning it down first, his enemies said--with a new and intelligent city plan. But it would be easy to interpret the Julio-Claudian age as one of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste: there were many who fiddled before Rome ever burned. Thus both Tiberius and Caligula built on the Palatine grandiose palaces, and Nero’s Golden House, as we shall see, outdid them all. Tiberius’ monstrous barracks at the city wall for the praetorian guard introduces a sinister note. Claudius’ Altar of Piety, modelled on Augustus’ Altar of Peace, shows how derivative official art can be. Out of the complexity of this half-century, as archaeology reveals it to us, I have chosen four examples, one from each reign: a stately pleasure-dome of Tiberius by the sea at Sperlonga; a pair of extraordinary houseboats, probably Caligula’s, from the Lake of Nemi; the curious subterranean basilica at the Porta Maggiore in Rome, which flourished briefly and mysteriously in the reign of Claudius; and Nero’s fabulous Golden House.

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In August, 1957, road improvements near Sperlonga, on the coast, about sixty-six miles southeast of Rome, offered G. Iacopi of the Terme Museum the opportunity for partially restoring, and closely examining, the ruins of a well-known villa there, commonly called the Villa of Tiberius. Making soundings near the villa in a wide, lofty cave fronting on the beach (Fig. 7.1), partly filled with sea-water, Iacopi discovered that the natural cave had been made over into a _nymphaeum_ or _vivarium_, a round artificial fish-pool, with a large pedestal for statuary in the middle, and artificial grottoes opening behind (Fig. 7.2). In the pool and the grottoes, buried under masses of fallen rock, Iacopi and his assistants found an enormous quantity--at last accounts over 5500 fragments--of statuary. The fallen rock gave a clue for dating at least one phase of the cave’s existence, and a possible confirmation of the popular name for the adjoining villa. For the historian Tacitus mentions that in A.D. 26, Tiberius, dining in a natural cave at his villa at Spelunca, was saved from being crushed under falling rock by the heroism of his prefect of the praetorian guard, Sejanus, who protected him with his own body. This is very likely the actual cave which Iacopi explored, though his discoveries suggest that there were additions after Tiberius’ time.

The exploration was carried on under difficulties of several kinds. The Italian budget for archaeology is notoriously inadequate; the cave was subject to flooding from springs, and lashing by winter storms; and it contained a dangerous quantity of ammunition and explosives stored there in World War II. The first difficulty was temporarily overcome by the generosity of the engineer in charge of the road-building nearby; the second by installing three pumps and building a dike; the third by keeping an ordnance expert constantly on duty.

When the finds from the cave were first reported in the press, great excitement was caused by the announcement--premature, as it turned out--that among the fragments of sculpture were some resembling the Laocoön group. The original Laocoön group had been described by Pliny the Elder as carved out of a single block, probably with the sculptors’ names on the base, whereas the famous Vatican Laocoön is not monolithic and is unsigned. Among the Sperlonga finds, on the other hand, were fragments of a Greek inscription giving the names of the three Rhodian sculptors mentioned by Pliny (but not in the precise form transcribed by him: in the Sperlonga inscriptions, their fathers’ names are recorded, in Pliny not), plus some colossal pieces (the central figure would have been nineteen feet eight inches tall) including parts of two snake-like monsters, presumably the serpents sent by Athena to punish Laocoön and his sons for resisting the proposal to drag the Wooden Horse within the walls of Troy. This great group, much larger, earlier (according to Iacopi, on the somewhat doubtful evidence of the letter-styles of the Greek inscription, which he would date in the second or first century B.C.) than the Vatican version, and different in conception, fits the pedestal in the middle of the circular pool.

Another inscription goes some way to explain both the quantity and the arrangement of the sculpture in the grotto. In ten lines of Latin verse it describes how a certain Faustinus adorned the cave with sculpture for the pleasure of his Imperial masters, choosing subjects which, Vergil himself would admit, outdid his own poetry. One of the subjects mentioned is Scylla, the fabulous cave-dwelling sea-monster, with a girdle of dogs’ heads about her loins, who guarded the straits of Messina. Now in the cave, carved in the living rock, at the right of the entrance, is the prow of a ship, set with blue, green, yellow, and red mosaic, and presenting some evidence of having once had a marble superstructure. To this ship Iacopi would assign some of his key figures: a bearded Ulysses in a seaman’s cap, his face expressing horror; a lovely archaic statuette of Athena (Fig. 7.3), grasped by a huge hand (Athena might be the figurehead); Scylla’s gigantic hand seizing a seaman by the hair, and a terrified mariner who has taken refuge from Scylla at the ship’s prow. A niche carved in the rock above the ship would be an appropriate vantage-point for Scylla herself; in one fragment one of her dog’s heads has bitten deep into a sailor’s shoulder. It is true that the mosaic names the ship _Argo_, but Iacopi explains this as a generic name for a ship, not necessarily referring to the one that bore the Argonauts.

If Iacopi is right about this group, it was a baroque or even rococo effect that Faustinus arranged for his Imperial masters. But the Laocoön and Scylla groups by no means exhausted his fancy or his pocketbook: there was Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, Ganymede borne to heaven by an eagle (carved so as to be seen to best effect from below, and therefore possibly belonging to a pedimental treatment of the cave façade). There are heads of gods and heroes, satyrs and fauns, a charming Cupid trying on a satyr’s mask, a delightful head of a baby with ringlets over the ears--all in the fanciful, complex, sometimes tortured baroque style of Hellenistic Pergamum and Rhodes. These are all of fine crystalline Greek island marble, so that they may be Greek originals. The soapy native Carrara stone is normally used in Roman copies--and in too much modern American church sculpture.

At the present writing the Sperlonga cave cannot be said to have yielded up all its secrets. It is not even certain that the equipping of Tiberius’ outdoor dining-room as a lavish baroque museum took place in Tiberius’ lifetime, for the donor, Faustinus, may be the rich villa-owner of that name who was a friend of the poet Martial, and therefore of Domitianic date. The residents of Sperlonga want the sculpture kept where it was found, to entice tourists; the archaeologists want to take it to Rome for analysis and reconstruction. Meanwhile, definitive conclusions are impossible. But one thing is certain: the bizarre taste of the place, whether Tiberius’ or Domitian’s, is characteristic of the first century of the Empire, and reflects the gap between the ostentatious rich and the church-mouse poor which was one day to contribute to the Empire’s fall.

* * * * *

The same fantastic extravagance marks our next finds. Seventeen miles southeast of Rome, cupped in green volcanic hills, lies the beautiful deep blue Lake of Nemi, the mirror of Diana. Here divers, as long ago as 1446, reported, lying on the bottom in from sixteen to sixty-nine feet of water, two ships, presumably ancient Roman. A descent was made in a diving bell in 1535. Another attempt in 1827 used a large raft with hoists and grappling irons, and an art dealer tried again in 1895, but all three efforts were chiefly successful in damaging the hulls, tearing away great chunks without being able to raise the Ships to the surface. The 1895 attempt did, however, produce a mass of tantalizing fragments (Fig. 7.4): beams; lead water-pipe; ball-bearings; a number of objects in bronze, including animal heads holding rings in their teeth, a Medusa, and a large flat hand; terracotta revetment plaques, a quantity of rails and spikes, and a large piece of decking in mosaic. This treasure-trove, displayed in the Terme Museum, naturally whetted appetites, not least Mussolini’s. He determined to get at the ships by lowering the level of the lake, a colossal task undertaken eagerly by civil and naval engineers enthusiastic about classical civilization. The job was made easier, but no less expensive, because there existed an ancient artificial outlet, a tunnel a mile long, dating from the reign of Claudius, which could be used to carry off the overflow. The pumps were started on October 20, 1928, in the presence of the _Duce_. After various vicissitudes over a space of four years, the lake level was lowered seventy-two feet, and by November, 1932, the first ship was installed in a hangar on the shore, and the second (Fig. 7.5) lay exposed in the mud.

The ships proved to be enormous by ancient standards, of very shallow draft, very broad in the beam (one was sixty-six feet wide, the other seventy-eight) and respectively 234 and 239 feet long (Fig. 7.6). They were larger than some of the early Atlantic liners. Their 1100 tons burden gave them ten times the tonnage of Columbus’ largest ship.

The task of freeing the ships of mud and debris, recording the finds level by level, reinforcing the hulls with iron, shoring them up, raising and transporting them to the special museum built for them on the lake shore proved in its way to be as great a challenge to Italian patience and ingenuity as the job of excavating the slabs and fragments of the Altar of Peace from under the Palazzo Fiano. There was always the danger of the ships’ settling in the mud in a convex curve, springing the beams. The excavating tools used were made entirely of wood; iron would have damaged the ancient timbers. As each section of the hull emerged from the water that had covered it for so many centuries, it was covered with wet canvas to keep it from deteriorating.

(Ucelli, _op. cit._, p. 97)]

(Ucelli, _op. cit._, p. 29)]

The hulls proved to be full of flat tiles set in mortar. These overlaid the oak decking, and over these again was a pavement in polychrome marble and mosaic. Fluted marble columns were found in the second ship, suggesting a rich and heavy superstructure (Fig. 7.7). A round pine timber from the first ship, thirty-seven feet long and sixteen inches in diameter, with a bronze cap ornamented with a lion holding a ring in its teeth, proved to be a sweep rudder, one of a pair. It showed that these enormously heavy vessels (the decking material alone must have weighed 600 or 700 metric tons) were actually intended to be practicable, and to move about in the waters of the lake.

Clay tubes, flanged like sewer-pipe to fit into each other, were arranged in pairs to make an air-space between one level of deck and another. This suggests radiant or hypocaust heating, as in a Roman bath: these floating palaces, or temples, or whatever they were--perhaps both--had bathing facilities. Wooden shutters warrant the inference that the ships were provided with private cabins. A length of lead water-pipe stamped with the name of Caligula has been used to date the ships to that reign (and indeed in some ways they accord well with Caligula’s reputation for madness), but of course there is nothing to prevent lead pipe of Caligula’s short reign (A.D. 37–41) from being used in Claudius’, and many scholars, on the evidence of the art objects found, would date the ships in the latter reign.

Boards in the bottom of the hold were removable to facilitate cleaning out the bilge. This was done with an endless belt of buckets, some of which were found, and are on display, restored, in the museum. Over the ribs of the hull was pine planking, then a thin coating of plaster, then a layer of wool treated with tar or pitch, finally lead sheathing clinched with large-headed copper nails.

The second ship had outriggers supporting a platform for the oarsmen, and a bronze taffrail decorated with herms--miniature busts tapering into square shafts. A number of mechanical devices of great technical interest was found: pump-pistons; pulleys; wooden platforms (use unknown), one mounted on ball-bearings, another on roller-bearings; a double-action bronze stem-valve (perhaps for use in pumping out the bilge), which had been welded at a high temperature (1800° Fahrenheit); anchors, one with the knot tied by a Roman sailor still intact, another with a moveable stock, anticipating by over 1800 years a similar model patented by the British Admiralty in 1851. Its use is to cant the anchor, giving it a better bite in the mud.

In 1944 the retreating Germans wantonly burned the ships in their museum. Their gear, stored in a safe place, survived. From careful drawings made at the time the ships were raised, models were made to one-fifth scale. They are now on display in the restored museum.

The ships did not contain within themselves clear evidence about what they were used for. Whether they had some religious purpose in connection with the nearby Temple of Diana, or were used as pleasure-craft, or both, they reflect, like the cave at Sperlonga, the mad extravagance which increasingly characterized the Roman Empire on its road to absolutism.

* * * * *

In 1917, on Rome’s birthday, April 21, a landslip beside the Rome-Naples railway line outside the Porta Maggiore revealed, forty-two feet beneath the tracks, a hitherto unsuspected and most remarkable underground, vaulted, stucco-ornamented room, the so-called “basilica,” which will serve as a third example of archaeology’s contribution to our knowledge of the Julio-Claudian age. To protect the basilica against damage from seepage and vibration from trains--240 a day pass directly above it--it was enclosed in 1951–52, at a cost of over $500,000, in a great box of waterproof reinforced concrete with footings anchored nearly twenty-four feet beneath the level of the basilica pavement.

(Fototeca)]

One entered the chamber in antiquity--it was always underground--down a long vaulted ramp which made a right-angle turn and emerged in a little square vestibule, whose skylight provided the basilica’s only natural light. Beyond the vestibule was a vaulted nave (Fig. 7.8) ending in an apse, and two side aisles. The profiles of the piers upholding the vaults, and of the arches connecting the nave with the side aisles, are irregular; and the piers are set at eccentric angles (Fig. 7.9): this suggests a curious method of construction. A trench must have been dug through the surface tufa corresponding to the desired perimeter of the building. Then six square pits were dug, one for each pier, and the outline of the arches and doorways formed in the virgin soil. Then mortar was poured in. When it had set, the entrance corridor was dug and the interior of the basilica emptied of earth through the skylight in the vestibule. Then vault, piers, and walls were stuccoed. In the late Republic and after, Roman artisans showed great skill in ornamental stucco-work, a far cry from the wattle-and-daub, in the primitive huts, which is the remote ancestor of the refined work in the basilica, and a symbol of how far on the road to sophistication Rome had traveled from her humble beginnings.

(_Legacy of Rome_, p. 407)]

In the basilica the stucco-work is divided by moldings into squares, rectangles, and lozenges, filled with figures in low relief of great delicacy and elegance. Some are simple scenes of daily life, and many others are part of the standard repertory of Roman art, but the key motifs will bear, as we shall see, a single, serious interpretation. The apse, the focal point of the whole structure, was reserved for a special scene of central importance.

The central panel of the central vault shows a naked human figure, a pitcher in his hand, carried off by a winged creature. (The interior of the figure is eaten out; this is due not to vandalism but to the depredations of a parasitic insect related to the termite.) In the four surrounding panels are four other motifs. A hero wearing a lion’s skin shoots with a bow a monster guarding a maiden chained to a rock. A beautiful, seated, half-naked woman cradles a statuette in her left arm; a bearded middle-aged man stands before her. A young man in a short tunic, carrying a leafy branch or a shepherd’s crook, leads off a woman by the hand. A veiled female figure takes from a tree guarded by a serpent a fleecy object to give to a man kneeling on a table nearby. How are these scenes to be interpreted? Do they share a common motif? According to the French Professor Jérome Carcopino, they do.

The central subject is Ganymede borne heavenward to be Jupiter’s cup bearer. The hero with the lion’s skin is Hercules rescuing Hesione. The woman with the statuette is Helen with the Palladium, the ancient image on which Troy’s safety depended; the wise Ulysses stands before her. Or it might be Iphigenia, in faraway Tauris, about to bear past the Thracian King Thoas the statuette of Artemis which will release her brother Orestes from torment by the Furies. In the next panel, if the young man is carrying a branch, he is Orpheus bringing Eurydice back from Hades; if he is carrying a shepherd’s crook, he is Paris kidnaping Helen. The veiled female is of course Medea getting the Golden Fleece for Jason. The common theme is deliverance. Ganymede, liberated from earthly ties, is borne on wings to the bliss of Heaven. Hercules can free Hesione because, according to some versions of the myth, he has been initiated into the mysteries. The statue, whether of Athena or of Artemis, guarantees the safety of the city or person who possesses it. Helen, in some accounts, can read the future and assuage men’s pain; or, if the theme is Orpheus and Eurydice we may recall that in an early version of the myth the ending was happy. Jason and Medea are freed from fear of the dragon through rites of magic initiation.

(Fototeca)]

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The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in ItalyChapter V: Front Matter (5)

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