The Roman Forum in the Age of Augustus The political career of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, lasted nearly sixty years. It began in 44 BCE, when the future Augustus was a sickly boy of eighteen, known, if at all, as the great- nephew of Julius Caesar. By the time it ended, he was nearly eighty, and his name was known and respected from England to India. The imperial system he established over the course of his long reign set the pattern for the rest of Roman history, and profoundly influenced the evolution of Europe. Roman emperors would reign over some part of the Mediterranean world for an incredible fifteen centuries; when Constantine XI fell to a Janissary bullet in 1453, he died as emperor of the Romans, and a direct political heir of Augustus. It was here, in the Roman Forum, that the remarkable career and legacy of Augustus took shape. Using the extant ruins as points of reference, this tour will trace the first emperor’s story from its origins in the populist dictatorship of Julius Caesar to the grandiose funeral that marked its end. I. The Temple of Caesar Look toward the foundations of the Temple of Caesar. Imagine away the crowds of tourists and the sound of traffic. Line the Forum square behind you with colonnades seventy feet tall, crown the Palatine Hill to your right with shining stucco walls and red tile roofs, and pave with polished marble the dust beneath your feet. Imagine that it is a sunny, rather brisk day in March 44 BCE. A light breeze stings your skin, and assails your nostrils with the blended aromas of smoke, dung, and roast chickpeas. Standing on one of the wooden benches ranged along this side of the Forum, you can see over the heads of the crowd that fills the Forum square – gray-haired, black-haired, brunette, and bald, punctuated here and there by a prostitute’s blond wig. Most of these heads belong to commoners; but you can pick out a few senators, distinguished by their immaculate purple-striped togas and protective rings of slaves. About twenty feet ahead, Julius Caesar’s funeral couch is stuck in the crowd. Although the body is invisible from your vantage point, you can see Caesar’s cloak, carried on a pole to display the twenty-three bloody gashes left by the assassins’ daggers. You can also see the front ranks of the funeral procession, where the hired mourners wail and members of the Julian clan march behind the death masks of their ancestors. Suddenly, a brawl breaks out around the body. Guards stationed around the funeral couch rush into the crowd with raised clubs; but after a few minutes, they are pushed back. The purple-robed pallbearers panic, dropping the funeral couch on the pavement. In the confusion, someone sets a torch to Caesar’s funeral couch, and it bursts into flames. The crowd cheers, and begins ripping newly-budded branches off nearby trees to feed the fire. A group of men tears up the wooden benches of the tribunal and heaps them onto the makeshift pyre. Offerings begin to rain onto the flames from every side. The musicians from the funeral procession throw in their robes and instruments; Caesar’s veterans toss on pieces of their armor; women contribute their jewelry. Soon, the funeral couch disappears beneath a massive heap of half-burnt offerings, licked by lazy tongues of blue flame. And that is how Julius Caesar was cremated. The ceremony was supposed to take place in the Campus Martius, near the later site of the Pantheon; but the Roman people, who adored Caesar, spontaneously decided to honor him with a funeral in the Forum itself, with the results just described. A few years later, Caesar’s political heirs had the Senate declare him a god, and began to construct an imposing temple dedicated to Divus Iulius, the deified Julius, at the eastern end of the Forum square. The front of this temple’s podium was built around a circular altar marking the site of Caesar’s cremation. Part of this altar survives today, although the Temple itself is long gone. The remains are not especially impressive. But they mark the mark the place where the age of Augustus, and thus the Roman imperial era, began. II. The Curia You are standing in front of the Curia, the primary meeting place of the Roman Senate. The building you see is a third-century reconstruction of one begun by Julius Caesar shortly before his assassination. Though structurally intact, it’s rather plain now, having lost almost all of its decoration. Imagine the whole building wrapped in glittering marble and stucco, roofed with gilded shingles, and crowned by bronze statues, and you’ll have a fair idea of how ancient Romans saw it. As it stands, however, the story behind its construction is perhaps more interesting than the building itself. During the last week of January, 52 BCE, the old Curia burned to the ground in circumstances typical of the Roman Republic’s turbulent last years. A few days before, Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist politician, had encountered his enemy Titus Annius Milo on the Appian way just south of Rome. Clodius was accompanied by thirty armed slaves; Milo had a retinue of hired gladiators. As the two groups passed, one of Milo’s gladiators shoved one of Clodius’ slaves. A fight broke out, in which Clodius was struck by a javelin. Badly wounded, he retreated to a nearby inn, where Milo’s gladiators attacked and killed him. After Clodius’ mangled body was discovered by a passerby, it was carried into the Forum by a mob of Roman commoners, who decided – in a move that foreshadowed Caesar’s funeral eight years later – to cremate it in front of the Curia. Predictably, the Curia caught fire, and was reduced to rubble. By the time of Clodius’ murder, the Roman Republic was in terminal decline. The Republic was an oligarchy, centered on the council known as the Senate. In theory, the Senate’s three hundred (and later six hundred) members, who were chosen for life from Rome’s leading families, merely advised the elected officials. In reality, the Senate’s immense prestige gave it effective control of the state. Senators competed fiercely for political office. The chief magistrates were the two consuls, who led Rome’s armies and presided over meetings of the Senate during their joint one-year term. The consuls were aided by subordinate officials, who likewise served annual terms and shared their powers with colleagues. The whole system was designed to ensure that most, if not all, members of Rome’s leading families would have a chance to gain the all-important prestige conferred by high government office. The greatest prize was the consulship, both because it was the chief magistracy and because it afforded a chance to lead armies against Rome’s enemies. Victory in battle was the ultimate source of political and social capital – and as a result, campaigns were launched virtually every year. Thus, the Republic, driven to constantly seize territory by the dynamics of elite competition and the sheer profitability of conquest, expanded more or less continuously for most of its existence. The greatest successes came in the late third and early second centuries BCE, when Roman armies conquered much of the Mediterranean basin. In the years that followed, however, the Republic became increasingly unstable. The institutions of the Republic, which had evolved to govern a middle-sized city-state, were completely inadequate to the task of running a Mediterranean-spanning empire. And so, in the late second century BCE, the same dynamics that had brought so much territory under Roman control began to tear the state apart. Armies campaigned farther and farther from Italy, sometimes for years at a time, and soldiers came to be tied more closely to their commanders than to the government. The massive flood of wealth from Rome’s new provinces was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the senatorial elite; and since aristocrats tended to invest in colossal slave-worked estates, tens of thousands of farmers were forced from their lands and into the crowded slums of Rome, where they became easy prey for populist politicians. In the Senate itself, any semblance of consensus gave way to infighting between loose alliances centered on, or opposed to, exceptionally powerful generals and politicians. The clashes of these leading figures became increasingly bloody in the Republic’s final years, and culminated in the civil war between Sulla, a general who supported the traditional oligarchy, and the followers of Marius, his populist rival. After Sulla won the war, he declared himself dictator. Although he eventually restored the traditional system, this act set a fatal precedent. Every ambitious Roman now knew that, given the right circumstances and a willing army, the Republic was his for the taking. This was the world in which Julius Caesar came of age. III. Basilica Julia The plaza in front of you is the Forum proper, the open square that served for centuries as Rome’s most important place of political assembly. It was, of course, much more impressive in Caesar’s day. Then, the long sides were bounded by the two-story colonnades of colossal basilicas, the ends were crowned by the pediments of temples, and the whole space was filled with the glow of marble and the shimmer of bronze. On the evening of September 26, 46 BCE, both sides of the road you’re standing on were lined by men and women carrying lit torches.