Back to Rome today, back to Rome,

which was beginning to emerge as the world's,

or the ancient world's, greatest superpower,

an emergence that we're going to see had a profound impact on

Roman architecture.

And we'll also see that there were a number of men who

effected this superstardom for Rome,

and they're men that I'm going to talk about with you today.

These included Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great,

Mark Antony, and Octavian Augustus,

especially Octavian Augustus: Augustus,

first emperor of Rome, and it's the reason that I have

decided to call this lecture today "From Brick to

Marble: Augustus Assembles Rome."

You see on the left-hand side of the screen a portrait of

Julius Caesar.

It's a green diabase portrait of Caesar.

It's now in Berlin, and I believe actually that it

is a portrait that was commissioned by Cleopatra

herself.

She commissioned it for a building that she and Caesar

were putting up in Alexandria, called the Caesareum that

honored Caesar, and you can see that he is

represented as he was-- it's a quite realistic portrait

with the lines and wrinkles, with his receding hairline and

so on accentuated in this portrait.

On the right hand-side of the screen we see an image of Pompey

the Great, a marble portrait that is now in the Ny Carlsberg

Glyptotek, in Copenhagen.

And a portrait that shows that Pompey the Great very much

wanted to ally himself with Alexander the Great,

because if you look at his very full head of hair,

you can see that he wears it in the center,

pushed up in a kind of pompadour, which is a reference

to the same kind of upsweep that was worn by Alexander the Great.

I want to give you a little bit of information about Caesar,

about his life, about some of his

accomplishments, because these are going to have

an impact on the architecture, on our discussion of the

architecture that he commissioned in Rome.

We know that Caesar was elected consul, in 59 B.C.

He then joined with Pompey the Great, and with a man by the

name of Crassus, to form what is known as the

First Triumvirate.

The result of that First Triumvirate was in part that

Caesar received a consulship in Gaul.

But despite all good intentions, just a few years

later, in 54 B.C., the Triumvirate fell apart.

Difficult times were the case in Rome between 53 and 50 B.C.

There were food shortages and riots in the city,

and the Senate was very concerned that these uprisings

would lead to a takeover by the populace of the city.

Pompey took charge.

He took control of the Senate and he restored order,

and his reward for so doing is that the Senate was willing to

work with him to try to overthrow his rival,

that is, Julius Caesar.

Crassus, the other member of the Triumvirate,

had since died.

But Caesar got the upper hand, at the end of the day,

and it was Caesar who defeated Pompey the Great at a very

famous battle, the Battle of Pharsalos,

which took place in 48 B.C.

After the Battle of Pharsalos and his defeat by Julius Caesar,

Pompey fled to Egypt where he was murdered,

and in fact the Egyptians slit Pompey's head,

put it on a plate and presented it to Caesar.

Now you'd think Caesar would have been happy about that.

He wasn't, because although he was thrilled to have defeated

Pompey the Great, he did not like seeing the head

of a fellow Roman delivered to him on a plate.

Caesar, at that point, despite his victory,

what was foremost in his mind was his affair with Cleopatra,

and he stayed in Egypt with Cleopatra for a period of time.

But in 45 B.C., by 45 B.C., he had returned to

Rome.

He was acclaimed Dictator in that year,

in 45, and after that he pursued fiscal reforms for Rome,

and also he commissioned a number of very important public

works, and that's where Roman

architecture obviously comes into play.

Despite the fact that he initiated those reforms and

built buildings and built up the city in interesting ways,

the aristocrats in Rome considered Caesar a tyrant.

They considered him a tyrant because they felt that the

influence of Cleopatra had rubbed off too much on him and

his ambitions were too monarchical,

and the aristocrats encouraged his murder.

And he was assassinated, as all of you know,

by Cassius and Brutus in the year 44 B.C.,

on the Ides of March, and he was divinized by the

Senate, he was made a god by the

Senate, in the year 42 B.C.

In his biography of Julius Caesar,

the writer Suetonius, who was a secretary and a

biographer to the emperor Hadrian in the second century

A.D., Suetonius wrote a biography of

the Twelve Caesars, a very famous biography that

many of you may know served as the basis for Robert Graves'

very well-known Claudius, which also accentuates again

the biographies of those first Twelve Caesars.

And although Caesar himself was dictator, not emperor,

he is the first of the Caesars who is covered by Suetonius.

And in Suetonius' biography of Julius Caesar,

he tells us about some of these major architectural commissions

that Caesar embarked on in Rome.

And it's interesting to read about these because we'll see

that all of them seem to have been the best and the greatest.

And I think one of the explanations for this is the

time that Caesar spent in Alexandria, in Egypt,

with Cleopatra.

She wanted to show him the sites, and in fact they went on

a very famous barge trip together,

down the Nile, in which she showed him the

pyramids and the sphinxes that were there to be seen.

And he was extremely impressed by what he saw in Egypt,

and decided that one of the most important things that he

could do, that he could contribute to

posterity vis-à-vis Rome, was to make Rome into a city

that was the equal of Alexandria,

that had similar large-scale buildings and impressive

monuments, the way Alexandria did.

So he came back to Rome, he undertook this major

building project, and Suetonius tells us that he

built-- he wanted to build,

he started to build a Temple to Mars that Suetonius describes as

the biggest in the world.

Why?

To compete with the buildings of Alexandria.

A vast--not just a theater--a vast theater.

Greek and Latin public libraries.

We know, of course, that the greatest library in

the ancient world at this particular time was the Library

at Alexandria.

So he wanted libraries in Rome that could compete with the

great Library of Alexandria.

And he was also particularly interested in engineering

marvels.

He built, or he began to build, a highway from the Adriatic,

across the Apennines, to the Tiber,

and then most famously a canal cut through the Isthmus of

Corinth.

That was, in large part, achieved, and one can still see

that canal, if one visits Corinth in Greece today.

So he had vast ambitions.

But many of these ambitions were cut short by his

assassination in 44 B.C.

He was not able to achieve architecturally all that he had

hoped.

One building that he was able to complete, or almost complete,

was a forum in Rome.

The Forum Iulium, I-u-l-i-u-m,

which is after his family name Iulius.

The Forum Iulium, or as we usually call it the

Forum of Julius Caesar in Rome was a building that he was able

to begin in the year 52 B.C., and then it was inaugurated in

46 B.C., which is a couple of years

before his assassination.

It wasn't quite finished at the time of its inauguration and it

was left to Caesar's follower, Augustus, first emperor of

Rome, to actually complete some of the details of the forum.

But for all intents and purposes it was done by 46.

I show you a Google Earth aerial view of the Roman Forum,

as you see it here--we've looked at this before--

the Roman Forum, the Colosseum,

just for you to get your bearings,

the Circus Maximus, the Palatine Hill,

the Capitoline Hill, the Victor Emmanuel Monument

here, Mussolini's Via dei Fori

Imperiali here, the so-called Imperial Fora,

of which Augustus' forum, which we're also going to talk

about today is a part.