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ROMAN BUILDINGS
model of the Temple Forum of Augustus
Arch of Constantine (between the Colosseum and Palantine Hill) is the largest of ancient Rome's arches. Situated within the same traffic circle that contains the Colosseum, the 66-foot-high arch is one of the best preserved ancient Roman monuments in Rome. Resembling a decorated version of Paris's Arc de Triumph, it was built to honor Constantine's victory over his rival Maxentinus a the Battle of Milvian Bridge in A.D. 315.
Nero's Golden Palace (in a park on Esquiline Hill near the Colosseum Metro station) is where Nero built a sprawling palace "worthy of his greatness" that once covered much of Rome. It was completed in A.D. 68, the year Nero committed suicide during a revolt. Built more for carousing and relaxing than to live in, the Golden House (Domus Aura) is a ruin today but in Nero's time it was a magnificent pleasure garden decorated with gold, ivory and mother-of-pearl and statues gathered from Greece. Buildings were connected by long columned colonnades and surrounded by a vast expanse of gardens, parks and forests stock with animals from the far corners of his empire.
Column of Trajan (at Fori Imperiali) is a 125-five-foot structure with a spiraling scene from Dacian Wars in the Balkans that if unwound would be 656 feet long. Built and inscribed between A.D. 106-113, the column was once topped by a statue of an Trajan, whose ashes and those of his wife are buried underneath its base. Originally it was supposed to be topped by an eagle. The statue of Trajan was destroyed in the Middle Ages. To follow the narrative of the epic battle one has to walk around and around the column like a "circus horse" as one scholar put it. Even though the sculptures made at the top are bigger than those at the bottom, it is still hard to make them out. The figures were originally painted with bright colors and had metal weapons and the horse had metal harness.
There are a total of 150 separate scenes, the most interesting perhaps being the one that shows the Roman army crossing the Danube on a famous bridge. More attention is focused on the logistics of the battle than the actual fighting. The scenes show the interrogation of prisoners, the removal of booty, and finally the suicide of the Dacian chief while being pursued by the Roman cavalry. Dacian prisoners are treated decently after they have been captured, according to the images, while the Roman prisoners of war are tortured by Dacian women.
Pliny the Elder on the Great Buildings and Achievements of Rome
Pliny the Elder wrote in “Natural History” History XXXVI.xxiv.101-110: “In great buildings as well as in other things the rest of the world has been outdone by us Romans. If, indeed, all the buildings in our City are considered in the aggregate, and supposing them — so to say — all thrown together in one vast mass, the united grandeur of them would lead one to imagine that we were describing another world, accumulated in a single spot. [Source: Pliny the Elder (23/4-79 A.D.), “The Grandeur of Rome”, from Natural History, III.v.66-67, NH XXXVI.xxiv.101-110, NH XXXVI.xxiv.121-123. (A.D. c. 75) , William Stearns Davis, ed., “Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources,” 2 Vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), Vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 179-181, 232-237]
Temple Antoninus Faustina now connects with a church
“Not to mention among our great works the Circus Maximus, that was built by the Dictator Caesar — one stadium broad and three in length — and occupying with the adjacent buildings no less than four iugera [about 2 acres] with room for no less than 160,000 spectators seated — am I not, however, to include in the number of our magnificent structures the Basilica of Paulus with its admirable Phrygian columns [built also in Julius Caesar's day], the Forum of the late Emperor Augustus, the Temple of Peace erected by the Emperor Vespasian Augustus — some of the finest work the world has ever seen? [and many others].
“We behold with admiration pyramids that were built by kings, while the very ground alone that was purchased by the Dictator Caesar, for the construction of his Forum, cost 100,000,000 sesterces. If, too, an enormous expenditure has its attractions for any one whose mind is influenced by money matters, be it known that the house in which Clodius [Cicero's enemy] dwelt was purchased by him at a price of 14,800,000 sesterces — a thing which I for my part look upon as no less astonishing than the monstrous follies that have been displayed by kings.”
Pliny the Elder wrote in “Natural History” XXXVI.xxiv.121-123: “Passing to the dwellings of the city, in the consulship of Lepidus and Catulus [78 B.C.] we learn on good authority there was not in all Rome a finer house than that belonging to Lepidus himself, but yet — by Hercules! — within twenty-five years the very same house did not hold the hundredth rank simply in the City! Let anybody calculate — if he please — considering this fact, the vast masses of marble, the productions of painters, the regal treasures that must have been expended in bringing these hundred mansions to vie with one that in its day had been the most sumptuous and celebrated in all the City; and then let him reflect that, since then and down to the present, these houses had all of them been surpassed by others without number. There can be no doubt that the great fires are a punishment inflicted upon us for our luxury; but such are our habits, that in spite of such warnings, we cannot be made to understand that there are things in existence more perishable than even man himself.”
Buildings in Rome
Palatine Hill (near the Arch of Titus, overlooking the Forum) is a plateau with a 75-acre park with the remains of palaces belonging to many Roman emperors and important Roman citizens such as such as Cicero, Crassus, Mark Antony and Augustus. The word palace and “palazzo” come from the name "Palantine." According to legend Palatine Hill is where Romulus and Remus were suckled by their she wolf mother and where Rome was founded in the 8th century B.C., when Romulus killed Remus there. Augustus was born on Palantine Hill and lived in a modest house there that was recently excavated, revealing extraordinary frescoes that mostly likely came from Egypt after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.
Most of the great imperial Roman palaces have been reduced to foundations and walls but are still impressive, if for no other reason than their immense size. One of the largest and best preserved complexes is the ruined Palace of Domitian which shares the top of hill with a garden and is divided into an official palace, private residence and stadium. The walls are so high, archaeologists are still unsure how the roof was put one without making the walls collapse. In the House of Livia (August's wife) you can still the remnants of wall paintings and black and white mosaics. Next to the Domus Flavia is the ruin of a small private stadium and fountain so large it occupies an entire square.
Model of the area around Fori-imperiali in ancient Rome
Fori Imperiali (across Via dei Fori Imperiali from the Forum) is a collections of temples, basilicas and other buildings dating back to the A.D. 1st and 2nd centuries. Established by Caesar, it contains the Forum of Caesar, the Forum of Trajan, the Markets of Trajan, the Templeto Venis Gentex, Forum of Augustus, Forum Transitorium, and Vespasian's Forum (now part of the Church of Santo Cosma e Damiano).
Hadrian's Tomb (on the east side of the Tiber River, not far from Piazza Navona) was built in the A.D. 2nd century. The fortress-like impregnability of this massive round block has made it useful for more than just entombing bodies. It has also been used as a palace, prison and fortress for Popes and rival nobles. It now houses military and art museums. Mausoleum of Augustus (adjacent to the Altar of Peace) is a circular brick mound. It once housed the funerary urns of the Roman emperor and his family.
The Ara Pacis (near the Ponte Cavour on the Tiber River) contains some of the finest bas reliefs from the Roman period. Dedicated in A.D. 9 and housed in a glass case, this beautiful box shrine is decorated on the outside with reliefs of Roman myths, families and toga-clad children enjoying processions and celebrations. On the inside is a simple altar with a set of stairs. There are ornamental and allegorical panels more reminiscent of something you would find decorating a mosque or a manuscript not a Roman shrine, which is dedicated to the period of peace after the Roman victories in Gaul and Spain. “Ara Pacis” means the “Altar of Peace.”
The Palestrina is the home of the majestic Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, a massive complex built in the first century B.C. with six different levels organized like steps. The first consists of a broad road hidden from view by a sloping triangular wall. The second two levels are formed by a series of ramps that are supported by arched colonnades. The fort level consists of a courtyard surrounded by buildings and capped by a the fifth level, a long tower.
Other Roman Ruins include the massive ruined arches of a bridge on the island of Tiber; the Bath of Diocletian near the Train Station; the remnants of the Aurelian Wall; 83-foot-tall embellished Column of Marcus Aurelius (built after his death to honor his military victories); and a portion of the base of Milliarium Aureum (the "golden milestone"), the gilded bronze column raised in 20 B.C. by Augustus that listed the mileage between Rome and her principal cities.
Pantheon
Roman Forum
The Roman Forum (between the Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Capitoline Hill) is a huge jumble of weathered arches, fallen columns, broken pedestals, stone blocks and buildings still in the process of being restored. Set up like a big park, it is a good place to stroll around admire Roman architecture and watch cats fight. Situated in a long green valley that was originally a swamp, it was used by the predecessors of the Etruscans to bury their dead. The Etruscans and Greeks set up a market there. The early Romans established a village where Romulus held a meeting on 753 B.C. that led to the rape of the Sabine women. In Imperial Rome, , the Forum was sort of like New York's Park Avenue and Washington D.C.'s Mall all rolled into one. It was the political and economic center of Rome and the main gathering place for Rome's people.
The Forum consists of a vast esplanade more than one hundred meters long and over eighty meters wide. In the middle rises a temple of Annona Augusta, the Divinity of Imperial Supplies. Along the side which faces the entrance to the sanctuary runs a portico supported on columns of cipollino, which backs on to the stage of the town's theater, and in its shade the spectators of long ago were wont to stretch their legs. The three other sides were enclosed by a wall fronted by a double colonnade of brick faced with stucco, onto which opened a series of sixty-one small rooms separated from each other by a wooden partition resting on a foundation of masonry. From their uniform appearance and identical dimensions (approximately four meters by four) these little rooms all served one and the same purpose. What this purpose was has been revealed by the series of mosaics black cubes on a white ground which paved the colonnade in front of each. These mosaics with their figures and inscriptions introduce us into the corresponding rooms and assign them to one or another of the various professional associations which were installed there by permission of the Roman authorities. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]
People came to the forum to chat and gossip with their friends; to listen to orators and politicians, who stood on podiums pontificating about the issues of the day; to worship and make sacrifices to their pagan Gods; and to shop for foodstuffs and items brought in from as far as Africa and Persia. Emperors and noblemen built their palaces on the hills surrounding the Forum.
For 500 years, until the middle of the 5th century when Rome was sacked, every emperor raised new monuments in the Forum. After Rome was claimed by Barbarian tribes, the Forum was abandoned and ignored. When archeologists began excavating it in the 19th century it was covered by 20 feet of soil and cattle grazed on the grass above it.
The Forum today is divided into the Civic Forum (Capitoline Hill side of the Forum), Market Quare, the Lower Forum, the Upper Forum (Colosseum-side entrance of the Forum), the Velia and Palantine Hill. As is true with the Colosseum, most of the buildings are the brick superstructures of the originals, whose marble facades were dismantled and carted away and used to make other building in Rome such as St. Peter's Basilica. Some of the pieces of stone have numbers on them to identify their position. The Temple of Mars Ultor (mars the Avenger) is dedicated to the god of war for avenging Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar.
Buildings in the Roman Forum
Forum area Sacred Way is a stone-paved walkway that runs from Titus's Arch to the Arch of Septimius Severus near Capitoline Hill. The oldest street in Rome and the main thoroughfare of the Forum, it is where chariot-borne emperors rode past worshipping crowds and where victorious Roman generals once paraded their troops. Most of the main buildings of the Forum face the Sacred Way.
Buildings in the Roman Forum included the Arch of Septimius Severus (Capitoline Hill side of the Forum), erected in A.D. 203 to commemorate Severus's victories in the Middle East; Civic Forum, the home of the some of most important buildings in the Forum: the Basilica Aemilia, curia and commitium; Basilica Aemilia (next to the Arch of Septimius Severus), a large structure built in 179 B.C. for money changers to operate (remains of melted bronze coins can be seen in the pavement); and the Basilica Julia (next to the Temple of Saturn), an ancient courthouse. Today it consists mostly of the pedestals and the remains of foundations.
the Curia (next to the Basilica Aemilia) is a partially restored brick structure that once housed the Roman Senate. In front of the curia is the “commitium” , an open space where representatives of the plebeians (ordinary people) met and the Twelve Tablets, inscribed bronze tablets on which the first codified laws of the Roman Republic were kept. The large brick platform on the edge of the commitium is the Rostrum. Erected by Caesar shortly before his death on 44 B.C., it was used for giving speeches.
Market Square (below the Civic Forum) is where you can find the Lapis Niger, a black marble slab that reputedly marks the tomb of Romulus, the legendary, wolf-reared founder and first king of Rome. It contains the oldest known Latin inscription (a warning not desecrate the shrine). In the middle of square the Three Sacred Trees of Rome (olive, fig and grape ) have been replanted. Nearby is a well-preserved single column that was built in honor of Phocas, a 7th century Byzantine emperor.
The Basilica of Maxentius (in the Velia area, near the Arch of Titus on the Colosseum-side entrance of the Forum) is one of the largest Forum monuments. Also known as Basilica of Constantine, it is an A.D. fifth-century structure with towering brick walls and three huge barrel-vaulted arches. The design of the basilica reportedly inspired St. Peter's basilica. Parts of the gigantic statue that were once inside are now kept in the Palazzo die Conservatori on Capatoline Hill). Nearby is the Forum Antiquarium, a small museum with a display of funeral urns and skeletons from the necropolis.
Temples in the Roman Forum
The Lower Forum (below Palantine Hill on the Capitoline Hill side of the Forum) is the home of the Temple of Saturn, Temple of Castor and Pollux, the Arch of Augustus and the Temple of Deified Julius. Temple of Saturn (below Palantine Hill on the Capitoline Hill side of the Forum) is a structure with eight standing columns where wild orgies honoring the god Saturn were held.
House of the Vestals The Temple of Castor and Pollux (next to the Basilica Julia) honors the Gemini twins, the equivalent of patron saints for armies and commanders. According legend they appeared at the Basin of Juturna at the temple and helped the Romans defeat the Etruscans at a pivotal battle in 496 B.C. The most noticeable part of the temple is a group of three connected columns.
Down the road from the Temple of Castor and Pollux is the Arch of Augustus and the Temple of Deified Julius, which Augustus built to honor his father. Behind the Temple of Deified Julius is the Upper Forum.
Upper Forum (Colosseum-side entrance of the Forum) contains the House of Vestal Virgins, the Temple of Antonius and Fustina (near the Basilica of Maxentius. The House of Vestal Virgins (near Palantine Hill, next to the Temple of Castor and Pollux) is a sprawling 55-room complex with statues of virgin priestess. The statue whose name has been scratched is believed to belong to a virgin who converted to Christianity. The Temple of the Vestal Virgins is a restored circular buildings where vestal virgins performed rituals and tended Rome's eternal flame for more than a thousand years. Across the square fromm the temple is the Regia, where Rome's highest priest had his office.
The Temple of Antonius and Fustina (left of the Basilica of Maxentius) contains a firm foundation and well-preserved ceiling lattice work. Nearby is an ancient necropolis with graves that date back to the 8th century and an ancient drainage sewer that is still in use. The Temple of Romulus contains its original A.D. 4th century bronze doors, which still have a working lock.
Insula in Rome
There are two types of insula (apartments) in Rome. In the more luxurious, the ground floor or most of it was let as a whole to one tenant. This floor had the prestige and the advantages of a private house and was often dignified by the name of domus in contrast to the flats or cenacula of the upper stories. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]
Superficially compared with its descendant of the Third Italy, the insula of Imperial Rome displays a more delicate taste and a more studied elegance, and in truth the ancient building gives the more modern impression. Here wood and rubble are ingeniously combined in its facings and there bricks are disposed with cunning skill, all harmonised with a perfection of art which has been forgotten among us since the Norman mansions and the castles of Louis XIII. Its doorways and its windows were no less numerous and often larger. Its row of shops was usually protected and screened with the line of a portico. In the wider streets its stories were relieved by a picturesque variety either of loggias (pergulae) resting on the porticos or of balconies (maeniana). Some were of wood, and the beams that once supported them may be found still embedded in the masonry; others were brick, sometimes thrown out on pendentives whose lines of horizontal impost are the parents of the parallel extrados, sometimes based on a series of cradle-vaults supported by large travertine consoles firmly embedded in the masonry of the prolonged lateral walls.
Climbing plants clung round the pillars of the loggias and the railing of the balconies, while most of the windows boasted miniature gardens formed of pots of flowers such as the elder Pliny has described. In the most stifling corners of the great city these flowers assuaged somewhat the homesickness for the countryside which lay heavy on the humble town dweller sprung from a long line of peasant ancestors. We know that at the end of the fourth century the host of a modest inn at Ostia, like that in which Saint Augustine set his gentle and memorable discourse with Saint Monica, always surrounded his guest house with green and shady trees. The Casa dei Dipinti, considerably older still, seems to have been completely festooned with flowers, and the highly plausible reconstruction of it which MM. Calza and Gismondi have made suggests a garden city in every respect like the most attractive ones that enlightened building societies and philanthropic associations are putting up today for the workmen and lower middle classes of our great towns.
area around Circus Maximus and Colosseum
Unfortunately for this insula, the most luxurious of those to which archaeology has so far introduced us, its external appearance belied its comforts. The architects had indeed neglected nothing in its outward embellishment. They had paved it with tiles and mosaics. By long and costly processes they had clothed it with colors as fresh and living in their day as those of the frescoes of Pompeii, though now three parts obliterated. To these it owes the name by which learned Italians call it, Casa dei Dipinti, the House of Paintings. I dare not assert that it was equipped with laquearia enamelled on movable plaques of arbor vitae or carved ivory, such as wealthy upstarts like Trimalchio fixed above their dining-tables and worked by machinery to rain down flowers or perfume or tiny valuable gifts on their surprised and delighted guests, but it is not improbable that the ceilings of the rooms were covered with the gilded stucco which the elder Pliny's contemporaries admired. Be that as it may, all this luxury had its price, and the most opulent of the insulae suffered from the fragility of their construction, the scantiness of their furniture, insufficient light and heat, and absence of sanitation.
Roman Highrises
Cicero's Rome was, as it were, borne aloft and suspended in the air on the tiers of its apartment houses: "Romam cenaculis sublatum atque suspensam." The Rome of Augustus towered even higher. In his day, as Vitruvius records, "the majesty of the city and the considerable increase in its population have compelled an extraordinary extension of the dwelling houses, and circumstances have constrained men to take refuge in increasing the height of the edifices. " This remedy proved so perilous that the emperor, alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings, was forced to regulate it and to forbid private individuals to erect any building more than 20 meters high. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]
It followed that avaricious and bold owners and contractors vied with each other in exploiting to the full the freedom still left them under this decree. Proofs abound to show that during the empire period the buildings attained a height which for that epoch was almost incredible. In describing Tyre at the beginning of the Christian Era, Strabo notes with surprise that the houses of this famous oriental seaport were almost higher than those of Imperial Rome. ir> A hundred years later, Juvenal ridicules this aerial Rome which rests only on beams as long and thin as flutes. Fifty years later Aulus Gellius complains of stiff, multiple-storied houses ("multis arduisque tabtdatis"); and the orator Aelius Aristides calculates in all seriousness that if the dwellings of the city were all reduced to one story they would stretch as far as Hadria on the upper Adriatic.
Trajan in vain renewed the restrictions imposed by Augustus and even made them more severe by imposing a limit of eighteen meters on the height of private houses. Necessity, however, knows no law: and in the fourth century the sights of the city included that giant apartment house, the Insula of Felicula, besides the Pantheon and the Column of Marcus Aurelius. It must have been erected a century and a half before, for at the beginning of the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211) its fame had already spread across the seas. When Tertullian sought to convince his African compatriots of the absurdity of the heretical Valentinians, who filled the infinite space which separates the Creator from his creatures with mediators and intermediaries, he rallied the heretics on having "transformed the universe into a large, furnished apartment house, in whose attics they have planted their god under the tiles ("ad summas tegulas") and accuses them of "rearing to the sky as many stories as we see in the Insula of Felicula in Rome."
insula
Despite the edicts of Augustus and Trajan, the audacity of the builders had redoubled and the Insula of Felicula towered above the Rome of the Antonines like a sky-scraper. Even if this particular building remained an exception, an unusually monstrous specimen, we know from the records that all around it rose buildings of five and six stories. Martial was fortunate in having to climb only to the third floor of his quarters on the Quirinal, for many other tenants of the house were worse lodged. In Martial's insula and in the neighbouring blocks of flats there were many dwellers perched much higher up, and in the cruel picture Juvenal paints of a fire in Rome, he seemed to be addressing one unfortunate who, like the god of the Valentinians, lived under the tiles: "Smoke is pouring out of your third floor attic, but you know nothing of it; if the alarm begins on the ground floor, the last man to burn will be he who has nothing to shelter him from the rain but the tiles, where the gentle doves lay their eggs."
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.
Last updated October 2024