FROM THE REPUBLIC TO THE LATE EMPIRE

At the time that the Hellenistic kingdom of Pergamum became a province of the Roman republic in 133 BC, Rome itself was still a sprawl of timber and mudbrick buildings within walls of rugged local tufa. And so it would have remained if republican moralists had had their way: they prized simplicity, despised the opulence of Hellenistic kingdoms and deplored their autocratic governments. A change was initiated in 53 BC when Julius Caesar had a new strictly rectangular forum flanked by stoas built near the irregular Forum Romanum that for centuries had been the civic centre of the republic, with its Senate housed in a simple brick-built hall. Under his great-nephew Augustus (see p. 190) and successors, Rome was transformed from a republican to an imperial capital, both politically and visually, with fine new marble-clad buildings of unprecedented size and magnificence for public use, including the Colosseum (5,43; 44), built by Vespasian, Trajan's Forum with its great market (5,47; 48) and later the Baths of Pomoerium Diocletian and Caracalla (5,73; 74). These great buildings were, however, simply inserted in the urban fabric that had grown up over the centuries. The result was a fortuitous mixture of grandiose public buildings and plain or nondescript privately owned tenement blocks (insulae) on the narrow winding streets where the mass of the population lived (5,40). Nevertheless, there were pockets of systematic planning. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, broad streets were laid out on a grid plan over the area devastated in the great fire of Nero's reign in 64 AD. Surviving buildings at Ostia, the port of Rome, give some indication of what this Roman scheme must have looked like: wide streets lined with covered porticoes and small shops, and orderly insulae of brick-faced concrete up to five stories high, arranged around central courtyards.

Only in the provinces where new towns could be founded were Roman urban designers able to develop their ideas, with remarkable results. Indeed, the centralised power and unity of the

Roman empire was nowhere more strongly felt. Whether in Italy, north Africa, Palestine, France, the Rhineland or Britain, settlements were laid out in the same regular manner based on that of a military encampment (or castrum) - a square divided into equal quarters by two main streets crossing at right angles in the centre. One ran north-south (called the cardo), the other east-west (called the decumanus), and the forum, colonnaded and closed to traffic, was sited just off the crossing. The four quarters were subdivided into square blocks and all structures and open spaces were fitted into these areas or their multiples, as may still be seen at Timgad in Algeria, founded c. 100 AD (5.38; 39). The strict uniformity of this planning was a result and expression of Roman administrative efficiency, while also embodying the equality of all Roman citizens under the emperor. Yet the general effect at Timgad and other cities, notably Pompeii, is of homogeneity rather than monotony. For the public buildings were distributed throughout the city, among the private dwellings, rather than confined to a single district as had formerly been usual. The forum was only one, albeit the most important, of several focal points in the urban plan. From each of the gateways in the walls, visitors passed along colonnaded streets, through triumphal arches and past the entrances to public baths, temples and an amphitheatre or theatre, buildings of different heights creating a varied skyline. But the profusion of Corinthian and Composite columns that gave homogeneity to the urban fabric was also a ubiquitous reminder of Roman rule, especially on the frontiers where such towns were in striking contrast to the settlements of the indigenous population.

The remains of Pompeii, destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, reveal the sophistication of a Roman town of the early imperial period (see p. 198). Surrounded by walls punctuated by twelve towers, the town was laid out on an orthogonal plan with broad streets leading from the gates to the civic centre (3,41). The streets had high pavements on either side and stone blocks at the intersections to slow down traffic and enable pedestrians to cross with dry feet. The rectangular forum, which served as administrative, religious and civic centre, was dominated by the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter on its high podium and surrounded by two-story porticos that gave access to shrines, temples and offices, as well as to an aisled basilica, which housed law courts and public meetings, and to a covered market with porticoes and a central fountain. Bathhouses, theatres, amphitheatre and palaestrae completed the public buildings of the city. The sophistication of the hydraulic system at Pompeii, begun under Augustus, in which water was piped to private as well as public buildings and fountains, was rivalled only in Rome itself. The standard house type consisted of a range of rooms around an atrium, usually open to the sky, but the increasingly crowded conditions at the time of the city's destruction were causing many to be divided up into shops and lodgings, if not demolished altogether to make way for insulae.

New constructional techniques (see pp. 203-6) and the development of the arch and vault made it possible for Roman engineers and architects to make startling improvements to the urban infrastructure, building aqueducts, covered theatres, amphitheatres, bathhouses and bridges. Many of the great civic amenities in Rome were paid for by the emperors or their families, often to gain or retain popularity. The Flavians, for example, razed the Golden House of Nero, built on expropriated public land, to make way for the Colosseum and a park. In the provinces, private citizens eager to gain office might take on the expense of building a theatre, a library or a gate. Later, after the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century, interest turned to the construction of churches and baptisteries, which was to transform the physical character of cities. In Rome, the emperor Constantine built a ring of great churches outside the Aurelian walls on the sites of martyrdoms; later, as the new religion grew more secure, church building penetrated the centre of the city itself, pagan temples and shrines serving as quarries. Often only vast ruined walls, divested of their marble cladding, testify to the Roman taste for grandeur and the colossal that distinguished their towns. While Roman principles of planning were mainly derived from the Greeks, the layouts of individual complexes -bathhouses, fora and sanctuaries, such as the Baths of Caracalla (5,74) and Forum of Trajan in Rome, and the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck (5,72) -reveal a new emphasis on axial symmetry, geometric clarity and inventive but logical sequences of spaces, qualities that architects of the later Renaissance and Baroque were to exploit in their urban schemes. The Roman temple, like the Roman house, evolved by skilful and inventive blending of Etruscan and later Greek elements. The Maison Carre at Nimes (Roman Nemausus) in the south of France, which is the finest surviving example, might at first sight be taken for a peripteral temple set on a high Etruscan podium (5,57). It is, in fact, a new and typically Roman invention, partly dependent for its effect on illusionism - hence its technical description 'pseudoperipteraP - for the columns along the flanks are not free-standing, as they might seem to be, but engaged. They are purely decorative and have no supporting function. In this way Greek post-and-lintel construction was harmoniously combined with the wall architecture developed by the Romans. So perfect was the join that hardly any variations were introduced, except for increasing refinement of the non-figurative carved ornament, from the late second century BC (Temple of Fortuna Virilis, Rome) until Roman religion itself was suppressed.

In Roman architecture, however, the temple was much less conspicuous than in the architecture of Greece or even of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Temples were not invariably the largest structures in a Roman city. Despite the Romans' love of magnitude, none of the temples they built before the second century AD exceeded in size the largest raised by the Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Even so, Cicero questioned the expenditure of public funds on them rather than on utilitarian structures - harbours, aqueducts or some other of'those works which are of service to the community'. The remark is a complete denial of the belief cherished by all earlier civilizations that no work could be of greater service to the community than a temple to its gods.

Politics played a greater part than religion in the development of Roman architecture. Rome of the early republic had been little more than a conglomeration of villages among the seven hills, rebuilt without plan after it had been sacked by the Gauls in the early fourth century BC. At the beginning of the second century the city itself was still a confused mass of mud-brick buildings divided by narrow winding streets, its forum an irregular space surrounded by both private and public buildings. In about 200 BC, so the historian Livy tells us, visitors from Macedon were shocked by its squalid appearance, for 'it was not yet made beautiful in either its public or its private quarters'. This began only in the first century BC with the greater public works and building programs initiated partly, if not mainly, for propaganda purposes by the succession of ambitious men (notably Sulla and Julius Caesar) who made bids for absolute power, plunging the republic into civil war, and then by Augustus and the early emperors. Julius Caesar planned a complete reorganization of the heart of the city and some new buildings were begun in his time (49-44 BC). But the transformation of Rome into a monumental imperial capital was left to his great-nephew and adopted son Octavius, who in 30 BC restored peace after 14 years of civil war. In 27 BC he was hailed by the Senate as Augustus (a word implying both divine appointment and individual ability) and thus became the first Roman emperor, ruling with undisputed authority until his death at the age of 76 in AD 14.

Augustus carried through the building program initiated by Julius Caesar and in addition gave Rome another new forum, several temples and other imposing buildings (5,40). Public works of a more utilitarian kind - such as a huge new warehouse, aqueducts and sewers - were sponsored by Augustus' right-hand man and, so to speak, political manager Marcus Agrippa, who also built a pantheon (see p. 206), a basilica and the first of the magnificent thermae or public baths, which were to be perhaps the most splendid and lavishly equipped of all the great public building types invented by the Romans. Even the poorest citizens could frequent them and enjoy their luxurious 'facilities' - cold baths, warm baths, hot baths, steam baths, dressing-rooms, recreation rooms, lecture halls, restaurants, libraries, gymnasiums and gardens.

Towards the end of his life Augustus claimed to have 'found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble'. For the Romans, marble was a symbol of magnificence. Vitruvius, who had been employed by Julius Caesar and dedicated his architectural treatise to Augustus, wrote of an early first-century temple in Rome: 'If it had been of marble, so that besides the refinement of art it had possessed the dignity which comes from magnificence and great outlay, it would be reckoned among the first and greatest works of architecture.' Extensive use of marble was made possible by the opening of quarries in the Apuan Alps a few miles inland on the north-west coast of Italy (near present-day Carrara), whence it could be easily transported by sea to Rome or indeed to any part of the empire. Colored types of marble imported from the colonies in Asia Minor, Egypt and north Africa were also used for the first time in Rome. Employed mainly for cladding and decorative purposes, to give a smooth clean surface to buildings constructed of concrete or brick, they transformed the drab, predominantly mud-brick and terracotta face of Rome. Nearly all this marble facing vanished during the Middle Ages and later. The interior of the Colosseum, for instance, was clad throughout in marble, none of which survives. In fact, the only large-scale surviving example is the interior of the Pantheon (see p. 206).

Far more important than marble, however, was concrete. The development of this building material by the Romans and especially their use of it in conjunction with the arch and vault revolutionized architecture. Neither concrete nor the arch and vault were Roman inventions. Numerous ancient Egyptian prototype arches and vaults in brick were available and it might seem rather surprising that the true arch (constructed of wedge-shaped stone voussoirs) was not developed earlier. It first appears in the fifth or fourth century BC. Etruscan arched city gateways, dating from shortly after 300 BC, survive at Perugia and Volterra and a few decades later the Romans were building neatly constructed semicircular arches, for example, the gateways in the city walls at Falerii Novi (present-day Maria di Fallen). The potentialities of arched construction were soon realized and put to use in causeways, bridges and aqueducts, of which none is more impressive than the Pont du Gard in the south of France (5,42), commissioned by Marcus Agrippa to carry water some 30 miles (48km) across the plain and valley of the river Gardon to Nimes. Built entirely of dressed stone, it is a remarkable feat of engineering by any standards ancient or modern, and has proved astonishingly durable. The graceful proportions of its seemingly light structure are eminently simple, the width of the arches at the top being multiplied six times for the total height, four times for the span of the great central arches, three times for those at either end. Its majestic simplicity is also due partly to the systematized construction methods adopted by the Romans. The Pont du Gard was substantially prefabricated, the huge voussoirs of the arches being fully dressed before erection, and it was to facilitate this that all measurements were made standard and all profiles strictly semicircular. (

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 726