We are on the cusp of Valentine's Day.

So I thought it was appropriate for us all to tell Rome how much

we love--Rome or Roma--how much we love her.

And so I've done that here.

I've loved Rome for as long as--for a long time,

certainly from the age that you are now.

And I know that there are many of you in this class who feel

the same way, and I hope that those of you

who entered this class, without having those strong

feelings for Rome, have come to love the city and

its civilization as much as I do.

So this is a kind of Valentine lecture, for Rome.

And I think that the particular topic that it is,

is appropriate, in the sense that we are going

to be looking at a number of quite eclectic monuments today,

very different monuments, one from the next,

and they're full of surprises.

And Rome is always full of surprises;

Rome a city, of course, that you see layers

upon layer of civilization, that one peels back to get us

back to antiquity, but along the way experiences

some amazing things.

So I think that this particular lecture,

which will talk about the varied nature of Roman

architecture, especially architecture

commissioned by individual patrons to preserve their memory

for posterity, again is particularly

appropriate.

I've called today's lecture "Accessing Afterlife:

Tombs of Roman Aristocrats, Freedmen, and Slaves."

We spoke on Tuesday about public architecture commissioned

by the emperor Augustus, public architecture that we

noted was made primarily out of marble,

out of Luna or Carrara marble, that was quarried on the

northwest coast of Italy itself, and the objective of it being

to try to conjure up the relationship between the new

Golden Age of Augustus and the Golden Age,

fifth century B.C., of Periclean Athens.

Just as Julius Caesar had tried to create a kind of Alexandria

on the Tiber, we see Augustus trying to

recreate an Athens on the Tiber.

And Augustus was, of course, very much--

in his objectives was very much in keeping with other objectives

that we've been studying for some time: this Hellenization of

Roman architecture that we have addressed on a number of

occasions.

We spoke last time about the Forum of Augustus in Rome,

featuring the Temple of Mars Ultor,

that temple that Augustus vowed he would build if he could be

victorious over the assassins of Julius Caesar,

that is, Cassius and Brutus.

He was so, at the Battle of Philippi, and he built this

forum and he built this temple again as its centerpiece.

And you'll recall again that it was made, for the most part,

out of Carrara marble.

We see the columns of Carrara here, a wall,

the seventeen Carrara marble steps, and so on.

We also talked about the Ara Pacis Augustae,

the Altar of Augustan Peace, put up to the diplomatic

agreements or treaties that Augustus made with those in

Spain and Gaul: a monument that was put up near

his earlier mausoleum, a monument that was also made

out of Carrara marble, and in fact solid Carrara

marble.

And this monument too had precedents in the Greek period.

It looked back to a number of sources,

but one of those, as we noted on Tuesday,

was the Altar of the Twelve Gods, or the Altar of Pity,

a fifth-century B.C.

monument that was located in the marketplace of ancient

Greece.

So again, both of these buildings, looking back to Greek

prototypes in their general format,

and also, of course, in the material out of which

they were made, namely marble.

When we talked about the Ara Pacis,

we talked about the fact that it eventually ended up being

part of a kind of architectural complex,

that while this architectural complex may have not been

planned from the start, it grew up over time into

something where all of the buildings related to one another

in interesting ways, both in terms of their content

and also in terms of their architectural design.

The complex included the Mausoleum of Augustus,

the tomb of the emperor Augustus, which was the first

monument built on this site, and eventually the Ara Pacis,

which you'll recall was actually not located originally

where it is now.

It was located in an area a bit here to the upper right

originally, on the Via Flaminia that

Augustus took when he returned to Rome from Spain and Gaul,

but that it was moved, or the remains of it were moved

over to this location, next to the Tiber,

by Mussolini, because as we noted last time,

in the meantime a palace had been built on top of the

original location of the Ara Pacis,

and that area was no longer available for use.

But again, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the first building of

this complex.

You see in this aerial view from Google Earth that the

mausoleum ended up becoming the centerpiece of the Piazza

Augusto Imperatore, that piazza that Mussolini's

architects designed to commemorate Augustus and also to

commemorate Mussolini, because that inscription I

showed you last time is inserted into the building over here.

If we look at this aerial view of the Mausoleum of Augustus,

which you'll see from your Monument List was begun in 28

B.C.-- and in fact that should ring

some bells for you and we should say something about its genesis

in 28 B.C.

Because you'll recall that important date of 31;

31 the Battle of Actium when Augustus was victorious over

Antony and Cleopatra and became sole emperor,

or began his march to becoming sole emperor of the Roman world.

It's interesting to see him building this massive mausoleum

only three years after the Battle of Actium;

that's really quite striking.

Why did he do that?

Well the reason that he seems to have done that is despite the

fact that he lived until 76-years-old,

which was very old in ancient Roman times,

as I mentioned last time--despite the fact that he

lived to that ripe old age, he was not in terribly good

health, even as a young man,

and he was very concerned about his own longevity.

How long was he going to live?

He knew he had accomplished a lot already by this victory over

Antony and Cleopatra, and by some of his other

military victories, but he wasn't actually sure how

long he was going to last, and so he begins to build this

gigantic tomb eventually to hold his own remains.

And he completes that tomb in five years.

It's built between 28 B.C.

and 23 B.C.

And you'll recall the date of the Ara Pacis is considerably

later; 13 to 9 B.C.

So the Ara Pacis was only added to this complex later,

and at that point the whole thing was orchestrated with the

addition of the obelisk, and we talked about how the

obelisk cast a shadow on the Ara Pacis on Augustus' birthday,

and so on and so forth.

With regard to the tomb itself, we're going to see something

quite striking today, and that is that the tomb is

architecturally very different from the Ara Pacis Augustae,

and indeed from the Forum of Augustus.

And it's a good example of the eccentricity,

as we'll characterize today, of Roman tomb architecture in

general.

Keep in mind that Roman tomb architecture is the most

personal of any form of Roman architecture,

which makes it particularly interesting to study,

because the only practical requirement for a tomb was that

it be able to hold the remains of the deceased.

That's all it needed to do, whereas other buildings had to

do all kinds of other things: have running water through

them, and so on and so forth.

But that was not the case here.

So that the patron and the architect could come together to

create buildings that were unique to that individual and

again were eccentric to a certain degree,

and that is indeed what we will see,

and that is the case also in the Mausoleum of Augustus.

As we look down on the Mausoleum of Augustus,

in this aerial view, we see the general plan of it.

We see that there was a central burial chamber;

that there was a hollow drum, and around that hollow drum--

and all of this is made of concrete construction--

around that hollow drum a series of concentric rings,

a series of concentric rings, as you can see them here,

again made out of concrete.

And then the outer wall--which you can also see in this

view--the outer wall was faced with travertine,

which is also interesting; not Luna marble,

travertine blocks.

And let me show you another somewhat closer view,

also from Google Earth, to show you the structure.

So again the central burial chamber;

the hollow drum; the concentric rings around

that; the travertine wall around that.

But, of course, you're looking essentially at

the core.

This is not what the original entire monument looked like.

And what it was, was in fact there was an

earthen tumulus, or an earthen mound,

that was placed on top of these concentric rings,

and then at the very apex of that earthen mound was a

gleaming bronze statue of the emperor Augustus himself.

I think I can make this clearer by showing you a plan of the

Mausoleum of Augustus.

And we see all the features I've already described:

the central burial chamber, the hollow drum,

again all made out of concrete construction,

and the concentric rings around that.

And then the cross-section at the top is particularly helpful

I think because you can see the way in which the concrete has

been built up by means obviously of annular vaults,

the annular vaults that ultimately support the gleaming

bronze statue of Augustus, at the apex.

And you can also see in this cross-section the earthen mound,

the way in which the earthen mound is piled up on top of that

substructure, that concrete substructure,

to create the dome-like shape of the mausoleum on its own.

Now scholars who believe--and we all believe in fact--that

again Augustus was a philhellene, that he had a

particular penchant for things Greek.

So you look at something like this and you ask yourselves,

"Well, what's Greek about this?

Why didn't he, when he came to make the

decision about his last resting place, why did he not want to be

laid to rest in the manner of the Greeks?

Why doesn't this--why wasn't this tomb made in the form,

for example, of a Greek temple,

or something like that?

Why did he choose this particular form?"

So scholars have debated for quite some time whether there

are any tombs like this in Greece,

or in Asia Minor--what kind of tomb was Alexander the Great

buried in, for example?

Well we don't know exactly for sure, but that's one

possibility, that it might have something to do with Alexander's

tomb.

Others--because Aeneas came from burning Troy--

others have suggested perhaps--and that's in Asia

Minor-- perhaps the way the Trojans

were buried might have something to do with this selection.

But I think the model is much closer at hand.

I think the model--myself, I believe that the model comes

from Italy, and that it's a very

interesting choice on the part of Augustus,

because I think what it tells us is that Augustus may have

wanted to build public buildings in Rome that conjured up ancient

Athens, but when it came to deciding

about how he wanted to be buried,