I. Introduction
The competition between men and gods is impossible, impossible above all for us, the descendents of the Judeo-Christian tradition who inherited an idea of a God elevated to an otherworldly realm, distant and unreachable. But the competition was not impossible for the pagans who had a different sense of the divine, much less perfect and infallible than the almighty, omnipotent and omniscient God of the Old Testament. The Pagan concept of divinity allowed such an undertaking that, however much it may have been destined to failure, assumed a value in itself precisely as a surmounting of human limitations. In fact, for pagan culture, the gods, even though they were the indisputable inhabitants of the celestial spheres and of the constellations—in which our ancestors identified actual anthropomorphic figures—were present on the earth. They inhabited our world and with their presence, they animated it, suffusing it with that secret vital breath that makes it sensate, vibrant and meaningful. The invisible fury of the wind, the impetuous flowing of a river, the immensity of the sea, the movement of the planets, the flux of time and alternation of the seasons, love, justice, poetry, the darkness of death, and many other aspects of our reality, more or less mysterious, surprising, and not reducible to pure phenomenon, were interpreted as manifestations of the divine, as emanations of a divine presence. In sum, that same sense of wonder that guided the philosophers in an explanation of the world using the reason (logos) in Greek mythology was interpreted as an epiphany of a non-human nature, of a divine surplus irreducible to man. It took form in a multiplicity of gods from the various areas of the Greek world that were characterized by a series of supernatural capabilities and powers, as well as by a series of essentially human defects and weaknesses that in them were multiplied as divine features. The terrestrial and celestial activities of the gods, told by elders to children and by storytellers to crowds, were also transcribed in representations in the temples dedicated to them, and they were kept by the priests assigned to them and by the oracles chosen by them to reveal to men a vision of future events. The Greek myths, with their sense of an immanent divine, close and reachable, as well as with the multiplicity of visions they offered, favored the great season of thought and art in Greek culture. Some of these myths dealt with the audacious instances of men who dared even to challenge the gods in a heroic, but certainly irreverent, act. The story of Marsyas is an emblematic instance.
II. Marsyas and Apollo
The story of the phrygian satyr Marsyas begins far from him. It begins with the grief of the Gorgons (to which I cannot remain indifferent) for their sister Medusa who Perseus had horribly decapitated. But while Perseus continued his travels elsewhere with the living head of Medusa, the inconsolable lament of the Gorgons passed beyond the borders of mother earth to reach the celestial sphere where Athena, persuaded and perhaps moved by their devastating song, decided to capture the essence of it in an instrument, the aulos capable of reproducing the sound with a simple breath. I admit that I'd like to believe that in that way the grief of the Gorgons would not remain completely unheard (notwithstanding that they are disquieting figures and evil enchantresses) and that by perpetuating even a disquieting song, their suffering might find meaning and even ephemeral relief. In any case Athena is moved to action and with the intuition natural only to the gods (to which men nevertheless aspire and do all they can to achieve) she arms herself with inventiveness. So no sooner said than done, she tears two reeds from the bushes along a stream, she cuts them appropriately, binds them, sharpens them, tunes them, and plays the aulos/double flute. But as often happens with instruments, they evade the will of their creators and the song the flute sends forth over the earth and on Olympus is, to say the least, divine and unstoppable. The enthusiasm of Athena soon transformed however into regret, when the first public exhibition of her flute at the celestial banquet of the gods, unleashes scornful smiles from Hera and Aphrodite who laugh at her as they watch her play for Jupiter. The offended and sad goddess abandons the celestial gathering, leaves Olympus, and takes up residence on earth until one bright afternoon on the banks of a lake she discovers in her reflection that the breath that brings song to the flute swells her cheeks terribly and deforms her features. It is clear that Athena will have nothing further to do with such an instrument, capable of corrupting her divine beauty, and with disdain she throws it away. Not only does she curse the instrument and whoever will have the courage to ever make use of it again, she left it there without breaking it to pieces, to disseminate confusion and metamorphoses in the world. But who knows in the pagan world what curiosity animates even the gods, and we can imagine that sooner or later some inhabitant of the green earth would go rummaging around in the bushes. The unsuspecting one (fortunate or enterprising) is Marsyas, a phrygian satyr who found himself by chance passing through those parts. Marsyas sees the aulos, he takes it, handles it, blows into it and is stunned by the sound. He is so taken with it that he passes hours and hours playing it, bringing forth ever more persuasive and intriguing phrases, which day after day increasingly capture the attention of all who hear them. So the fame of Marsyas, expert flute player, grows beyond bounds until it reaches the gods. ''They say that there is a satyr on earth who plays with such skill as to enchant men'' was murmured among the gods, though the news was perhaps not to the liking of everyone. Meanwhile the audacity of Marsyas made him impertinent because, while the sources disagree on this point, it seems that it was actually he who launched the challenge to Apollo, supreme god of the arts and exceptional player of the lyre whose sweet melodies brought cosmos back to the harmony, that a jury might determine the most beautiful music. Apollo certainly does not demur and convoking the Muses as the supreme judges, the competition gets under way.
But as to this, which to me is one of the most incredible parts of the myth, the sources are silent and they tell us nothing about how the two confronted each other. I remain doubly curious. Curious to know how the recitations from antiquity dealt with this passage; curious to know how a god opposes himself to a satyr with nothing of the divine about him; curious to know how they perceive each other, how in a single arena a man and a god compete with one another. Unable to stop my imagination, I imagine. I imagine Apollo, handsome and composed, suave and gentle, holding the lyre lightly as he is seated on his divine throne, and with equal divine lightness sets free a song that is harmonious and sweet, clear and articulated, beautiful, so extremely beautiful as to captivate and enchant each of the nine Muses. Then I imagine the next exhibition: Marsyas. I imagine Marsyas standing in order to give force to his exhalation, holding his breath with puffed cheeks. Then, with extreme intensity, unleashing into the flute such a visceral vibration and passionate, disharmonious, vaguely melodious song, that is fleeting and sinuous, smooth and overwhelming so as to carry away the divine Muses on a mysterious rolling sea. The poor Muses—convoked for a task at bottom very far from their own arts, from their devotion to inspiration not to judgment— they really do not know what to say and which of the two to award. No, a winner they cannot name. Their music is so different—I add, inserting myself into the myth—one cannot choose a winner, music isn't made for that. ''But there must per force be a winner,'' says Apollo, indeed with divine certainty he affirms the absolute necessity and urgency of a winner. ''We will go on with other tests until the golden palm is awarded.'' And he suggests that each of the two accompany his music with his voice. ''Yes, that's it,'' he decides while the Muses keep silent, lowering their heads and preparing themselves to judge.
Here the myth seems decidedly to decline into meaningless shrewdness on the part of the god who, not knowing how to loose, or being unable to loose, must abase himself with an indecorous trap in order to take home a ridiculous trophy. But, perhaps with his banality the myth skims over the victory that Marsyas had already attained for those who knew how to listen to the story. Marsyas, strong only in his limitations and non-divine qualities, audacious, obstinate, creative we would say today, if certainly arrogant, he forthrightly handled the confrontation with his divine antagonist using pure effort. His study and passion equaled the divine. The golden palm that the Muses were not able to give him was already his, the difference between him and the divine that he bridged, automatically attributed it to him. The baseness of Apollo, the impossible challenge to which Marsyas could not adhere being unable to play his double-reeded flute and simultaneously sing, perhaps expresses precisely the derisory nature of his victory. Marsyas does not get punished for having lost nor for having won but only for having challenged the god, for having thought that his music might equal that of a god, for the vanity and pride with which he offended the god and perhaps music, too. Apollo is merciless and divinely brutal in condemning him. With a nod from the god a slave approaches Marsyas, binds his hands and feet and suspends him from a tall pine tree, making him hang like a beast ready for slaughter. Then he draws a knife from its sheath, sharpens it, heats it until the blade flashes in front of the terrified eyes of Marsyas (and maybe of the Muses, too, for we do not know whether they are still present). Finally he begins to flay the body of Marsyas like an unripe apple whose pulp clings to the peel and will not detach. He cuts the flesh, he tears out it and pulling with one hand that dead tissue he continues to flay Marsyas, uncovering the muscles, the veins, the nerves and the white tendons in the flow of blood that pours out and dies on the ground.
In Rome there are numerous works that represent the myth of Marsysas and Apollo but here I want to note the sarcophagus in the Palazzo dei Conservatori and above all the statue in red-violet pavonazzo marble also in the collection of the Capitoline Museums. This beautiful work of the first century AD probably was a copy of a part of a Hellenistic sculptural group, datable to III -II century BC. The vivid nature of the marble alone manages to restore the sense of the flayed and pained flesh. The face twisted with agony, the mouth distorted by the piercing cry, the muscles of the body contracted in the final desperate attempt of Marsyas to extract himself from immanent death all sublimely convey the agony of the satyr. At the time of its rediscovery in 1876 in Rome in the Gardens of Maceanas it caused a great stir, being the first statue in red marble to come to light and it was soon used as a model for numerous crucifixions. The other work I want to note is the fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura, a work not less inspired than those it accompanies, yet extremely insightful, I believe, in the provocation it silently insinuates. The iconographic program that puts together the two actions about to take place is simply ingenius: Apollo, sweetly complacent with his victory, with the lyre in his hands, is about to receive the laurels from a youth at his back in the center of the scene. The two figures together
occupy almost the entire painting, and flattened on the right are the elongated outline of Marsyas hanging and that of the slave with the knife already against the chest of the satyr who waits tormented for the inexorable nod from Apollo that will commence the flaying. The centrality of the two graceful and lovely figures in fact directs our attention toward Marsyas, practically pushed forcibly from the picture no less than from life, precisely in that narrow space left to him he stretches his body and his last breaths. A series of precious details enrich the scene. They include the background with a gilded mosaic and ivy that encircles, with the exclusion of Apollo, the remaining three figures belonging to the entourage of Dionysus. But with the torment of Marsyas nelle Stanze, Raphael makes other subtle references. Having celebrated the new values of the Renaissance and having reaffirmed man's capacity for art and beauty and that they are worthy of dignified placement alongside theological truth, supreme and absolute, Raphael probably wanted to evoke the conflict never definitively resolved between religion and art—a conflict that took on extreme tones in the Middle Ages. Who knows if the paintings including the one of Marsyas, if only by fortuitous chance, became witnesses under Paul III to the sentences of the court of Holy Office and of the eventual Segnatura Gratiae et Iustitiae with which the pope was able to pardon the condemned in the new intollerance of the times.
III. The city and the gods, politics and religion in republican Rome
But the aspect that I want to deal with here is that of the competition of spaces and representations between the gods and men that characterizes the history of the urban development of Rome since the end of the IV century BC. Rome, like all ancient cities was a place inhabited by gods and by men, a space consecrated to the gods in which men, under the benevolence and protection of these gods, lived peacefully sharing certain civil and religious values. The laws that are respected, the authorities that they recognize, the political and religious rituals that they celebrate create the citizens of Rome and the city itself, they anchor the community and they unite it. Aristotle affirms that ''he who is not adapted to participate in the life of the citizen or who does not have need of it, may not even properly call himself a man, but rather a beast or a god.'' Every ancient city was designed not just for the simple cohabitation of many people on the summit of the same hill, nor for the diversification of labor and the interdependence it brought with it, but the city was founded on the sharing and defense of a series of human, civil, and social values that the citizen recognized as his own, to which he was educated and belonged. Such a community has its representatives, which in the case of republican Rome were elected from the aristocracy with the discreet participation of the people through a solid political system that made Rome's fortune and guaranteed it its government for almost five centuries. The self-made community nevertheless lives by the respect of divine will, by the execution of rituals, feasts and sacrifices offered to the gods, who participate in the life of the city. They occupy the temples and sanctuaries reserved for them and they protect the city, keeping away the plagues, favoring the harvests, and leading the armies to victory over enemy populations. Obviously it was the priests and the auguries—carefully selected to question and interpret the will of the gods using the precise signs they sent—who perpetuated the alliance between the Romans and their gods. To exemplify the bond between the divinities and their places, I want to give you two examples. Tito Livio attributes to Furio Camillo, the man behind the expulsion of the Gauls from Rome in 390 BC, the following affirmations pronounced in a closed address of the senate against the proposal advanced by the plebeians to abandon the city devastated by the sacking and to rebuild it near Veio: '' There is no place in the city that is not full of the observance of the gods and of the presence of the gods. The solemn sacrifices have not only fixed days but also precise locations in which they must be celebrated. . . Could it be that in the banquet of Jupiter the pulvinar can be set up in a place other than the Campidoglio?. . And what must we say of the priests? Don't think about what sacrilege is committed?'' Something similar is written in the eighth book of the Aeneid with regard to the voyage of Aeneas in the places where the city was subsequently founded and which at the time had a settlement of Greeks from Arcadia. Virgil says that on the hill of the Campidoglio there were not yet the venerated temples but the place was permeated by such a religious force as to arouse fear in the population who for good reason maintained that none other than a god could reside there, that in those dense and luxurious woods from the beginning of time a god had placed his invisible residence. He who passed would not have seen it but would have been prostrated by the sacred feeling emanating from the place.
Turning back to the government of the city, the various political and religious interactions work on the one hand to guarantee the protection by the gods for the inhabitants and the location where the city rises, and on the other, to maintain the unity and the consensus among the citizens. Both these interactions take place in specific places determined and obviously preferred by the gods. Whether the celebrations were religious or political, both contribute to this end and often they are side by side, they overlap and they mutually reinforce one another without ever being disjointed given that one of the goals of politics, the good of the city, cannot be actuated without the concord of the gods, and paradoxically even the reverse is true. Though obviously both the politics and the religion evolve over the course of the centuries, they do so in a profoundly different manner. In fact with regard to religion, the rituals evolved and concomitant with territorial expansion new cults proliferated, but very little changed fundamentally in the character and substance of the religion. Religious festivals multiplied and new gods took their places alongside the existing ones, but they did not substantially change the places, the meanings, and the social and political valences that these celebrations contained. It is only at the end of the V century when Christianity and the catholic church dominated that radical changes to the panorama of civic values of the late antique city occurred. By contrast, the evolution of the political spaces and their meanings will arrive at a crucial unraveling precisely at the passage from republic to empire. But we will proceed in order
IV. The spaces of political life
From the founding of the republic the political and civil life of Rome took shape around the three poles of the popular assemblies, the sessions of the senate and of the magistrates who, in the fullness of their power, convene the people and convoke the senators after having questioned the gods and having received assent to their proposals. The voting of the laws, the election of the consuls, of the censors and the praetors, the penal trials prepared against the citizens are only some of the political events that regulate the civil and political life of republican Rome and that take place in particular spaces deputized to them whether on the inside or the outside of the city. In fact, the political space of the city is divided by the pomerium—held to be the sacred boundary of the city traced by Romulus, then extended by the kings and coincident in the republican era with the servian walls —into two areas very distinct in meaning and function. The space within the city is pacific, therefore war and death are banned. Inhumation and cremation of the dead are not allowed, neither is the entrance of soldiers in arms, except in the particular circumstances of triumph. Similarly the acts that the senate and the people are called to accomplish are different in the two areas. Only outside the city can the people as a military entity be convened and organized into classes and Centuria, and only outside can the senate convene to listen to a magistrate who after having consulted the omens for carrying out war cannot again cross the pomerium without loosing his authority.
V. Campidoglio and Forum
Inside the city the spaces given to politics are the Campidoglio and the Forum. The grand open space in front of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter is a space fundamental to the political life of Rome. Here were held the Comitia in electoral assemblies at least until the end of the II century BC when space constraints and frequent overcrowdings determined the transfer of voting operations to the Campo Marzio. Here at the temple of Jupiter the senators hold the first sessions of the year when the newly-elected magistrates take their office, here are held the meetings for decisions, depending on the order of the day, of war or important resolutions regarding critical moments in the life of the city. The proximity of the deity guarantees the authority of the decisions. And of course it is precisely here in front of the temple of Jupiter that the triumphal processions conclude, having departed from the Campo Marzio and crossing the forum, culminating in the sacrificial offerings to the father of the gods and in the tributes to the glory of the victorious military chief.
But it is the Comitium, a series of buildings in the north-east corner of the grand piazza of the Forum, that is the nerve center of Roman politics and of the city itself at least until the middle of the II century BC. Not far away from the Mundus— the site of connection with the nether-worlds, on the side of the Via Sacra with the oldest and most venerated temples including those of Saturn, Vesta and the twins Castor and Pollux—the Comitium is also the area where the triumphal processions took place, where funerals of the great families were held, and where there were gladiator games. Here the citizens daily converged maybe stopping only for a moment coming from one of the markets of the area, and no small number of aristocratic residences were here, above all along the Via Sacra. In the Comitium, at the foot of the Campidoglio, converged the seats of the principle magistratures, the curia—where the senators hold the majority of their sessions—and a small piazza where the people come together on certain occasions. One of these buildings is the headquarters of the urban praetor who is responsible for keeping order in the city. He publishes the edicts in which the law gets defined, and he oversees the judicial controversies among citizens. In addition he retains the imperium and has supreme authority in Rome in the cases when the consuls are absent or at war. From 290 BC onward he is supported in his police functions and penal repressions by other magistrates of lesser rank, the triumvir capitales who were responsible for arrests and executions. Also in the Comitium the plebeian tribunal has its headquarters. From this privileged position they can exercise two of their principle functions: to follow the sessions of the senate before 287 BC, the year in which the law gave them the right to participate directly, and to affirm the ius ausilii, the right of veto against coercive actions taken by another magistrate against a free citizen. These same magistrates convene the citizens in the Comitium for the Contiones, calling them to vote on a law or to decide the fate of an accused citizen. The complex of buildings (orientated according to the cardinal points) thus concentrated in a well-defined space the interaction among the three political units of the city in an efficient, rapid, and strongly symbolic manner. To highlight the central role of this space we need only recall that it was here that the official time of the city was regulated: a public functionary reading the alignment of the sun along certain predefined lines (an archaic sun dial) announced the beginning, middle, and the end of the day. The political and juridical activities unfolded likewise with these hours. The political heart and pulse of the city thus affirms civic time, time of man as citizen, the time around which revolved the reading of a sentence, the proclamation of a war, the news of a distant war already in progress. Here begins the delineation of time in which natural time, associated with the rhythms of nature, is separated from that which is cultural, politico-civic time, which for us today is the only sort. Over half the people on the globalized planet today live in a single globalized time that unfolds with the rhythms of work, of television newscasts, of regulated time that the clocks consume for us unknowingly.
A statue of Marsyas was erected in the Comitium at the seat of the urban praetor at the beginning of the III century BC. It stood as a symbol of the liberation of the plebeians from enslavement for debt, which occurred following a new laws designed to protect them. The statue was accompanied by a small shrine dedicated to concordia to underline both the importance of the magistrates in guaranteeing the rights of all citizens, and the social harmony between patricians and plebeians.
VI. Campo Marzio
The Campo Marzio is the other location where the political activities of the city are concentrated. It is the large space that lies between the Campidoglio and the Tiber and it is certainly no less relevant in the history and politics of Rome. Made up of broad swampy areas and lying beneath the level of the Tiber, it is a valley more or less in the area of the existing Teatro Valle (hence the name), the Pantheon, and the Palus Caprae—?a real swamp?. Here one sees the terrible high water levels documented on the facades of the churches of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and Sant'Eustachio caused by the floods of the Tiber. The last great flood occurred in September 1870 and subsequently in 1888 the huge retaining walls were erected. Because of the relative lack of archeological remains in comparison to what is left in the Forum (ruins that were liberated from the successive layers of building primarily in the years of Fascism) we often forget the importance, the extreme monumentality, and certainly the beauty that was already here by the last centuries of the republic. Imagine that those who walked there could also admire the impetuousness of the river along side the splendid architecture of man. The discrepancy is not difficult to explain and goes back to the first great demographic collapse of the Roman population after the Gothic wars when the surviving residents progressively concentrated their habitations in the areas near the Tiber, abandoning entire central zones of the ancient city. Though certainly we cannot exclude that the character of the area was in part plebeian since it was historically tied to their democratic demands. However the activities of the Campo Marzio are numerous and by no means of a second order given that it is here that the people as military entity convened at certain fundamental moments of republican life, including the assemblies of the Comitia Centuriata, the election of consuls, censors, and praetors. From the last decades of the II century BC even the assemblies of the Comitia Tributa gathered here for the election of the tribunes, the Edili and the Questori. In both cases the voting operations had to take place in large spaces since the voting entities, the Centuriae (or tribes) had to vote as a group, not as individuals—a strategy that allowed the aristocracy to maintain their control over society for centuries, given that they enrolled vast portions of the free population in one single centuria—and the various centurie are called together to express their vote simultaneously in the case of the Comitia Centuriata. Individuals wait in line according to the centuria they belong to and, arriving in front of the tribunal they declare their vote, which is registered on the appropriate tablets. Beginning in 139 BC, with the introduction of the secret vote, they deposit a ballot into an urn. The space itself was a huge open area of c. 300 meters in length by 100 meters in width, situated a few steps away from the Pantheon in the direction of Largo Torre Argentina. It was called a pen or Saepta (meaning enclosed) since it is obviously necessary to circumscribe and control the operations. This structure was flanked by others including the Diribitorium, designated for the counting of the votes, and there was above all the Villa Publica where the censors conducted the operations of the census, organizing the people into classes, centurie, and tribes, interrogating them about their property, and entering the data in the appropriate registers.
VII. Innovations in urban development
Up to this point we have entered into the city and we have tried to participate in the salient moments of its political life. Now we will try to go over the salient moments of the introduction of new construction techniques and innovations in urban planning as well as for the new forms of self-representation that from time to time determined significant changes in the urban and cultural landscape of Rome.
In 378 BC in Rome, just over a decade after the fire of 390 BC by the Gauls, construction began on the new defense walls. Roughly 11 kilometers in length, the new wall incorporated for the first time the Aventine Hill, which had remained on the margins of the city's history until 456 when a senate law entrusted it to the plebeians. An important occurrence marks the history of Rome in 338. In addition to the bronze rails from the Volscian ships captured at Anzio being affixed to the tribune of the Comitium the first bronze statues of Alcibiades and Pythagoras were erected at the sides of the curia. The Greek figures, synonymous respectively with the courageous man and the wise man, not only highlight the very strong influence of Greek culture in the Roman territories, they indicate a fundamental historical passage. Until that time the only statues representing men in the urban panorama were those posted on the tribune of the Comitium at the top of the Twelve Tables, representing the ambassadors of Rome who died in foreign lands at enemy hands. They were the heroes of the city fallen in the line of duty entrusted to them by the city. No one else was worthy of such an honor, no one else deserved to be elevated from the dust of oblivion to emerge in the political heart of the city. Of course there were gigantic statues of the gods on the summits of the temples, there were the great terracotta images of the myths of Hercules and of the gods of Olympus, but they were precisely that—gods, sovereigns of the cosmos, of time, and of death.
Returning to the innovations in urban development, this same period saw the removal of the market from the forum to the area contiguous with the Macellum, the slaughterhouse and the realization of the first fixed Carceres for the Circus Maximus. Toward the end of the century (312 BC) we also find first aquaduct, the construction of the first tract of the Via Appia (which implies systems of planning, of plotting the straight track, of drainage and pavement). From this time we also see the figure of Appius Claudius the Blind, consul and representative of a great Roman family, the first figure mentioned in Roman historiography, lifted out of oblivion and restored to us by way of a series of biographical data and salient actions that characterized his life. The oldest surviving portrait of the Roman era, the Capitoline Brutus, is also dated to the same period, though it has been improperly identified with the portrait of Junius Brutus, the founder of the republic. Anyway numerous ancient sources affirm that a statue of Junius Brutus, present in the piazza in front of the temple of Jupiter on the Campidoglio, was the first to be erected in the public urban space to the memory of a man. These two events from the same period certainly are no coincidence and they indicate an important turn in the cultural panorama of the epoch: the memory of man, the value of certain men and families were worthy of being remembered, worthy of tributes of glory outside of time, worthy of effigies that perpetuated their human features within a congregation of men who raised them to the center of the city in the Pantheon of their heroes.
But it is the III century BC, with the progressive expansion of Rome across the peninsula, that saw the enrichment of urban spaces with the spoils of war:
The colossal bronzes of Hercules and Jupiter from Taranto are put together in front of temple of Jupiter on Campidoglio, above which the first bronze quadriga takes the place in 296 of the Etruscan Vulcan. In 260 the first honorary column (rostrata), is set up and dedicated to Duilio.
Profound transformations to the urban fabric changed the ancient aspect of the city the after the Punic wars when Rome prepared to highlight its role as ruler of the Mediterranean appropriating the experiences of the greek world and primarily of the hellenistic rulers who, in their unscrupulous competitions for power had diverged from and dramatized the content of classical art. The revolutionary introduction of opus caementitium (concrete), the systematic application of the arch and vault, the development of representation spaces and buildings both public and private, and the introduction of the porticus and basilica brought about systematic restructuring and rebuilding of the temples and other buildings on the Campidoglio, in the Forum, and in the Campo Marzio. Similarly a domus of a new typology with atrium and peristile multiplies, principally on the Palatine, Quirinal, and Viminal hills. During these years, characterized by signficant population growth, new quarters rise up and probably the first apartments, the insulae, are constructed. Meanwhile the edges of the Pincio and Trastevere are enriched with first sumptuous gardens and luxury villas. The Temple of Juno Regina in the Campo Marzio and that of Hercules Victorious in Forum Boarium are both reconstructed at this time, and with the documented substitution of materials: the tufo is replaced by the much more precious marble.
The II century BC demonstrates the systematic employment of the new architectonic forms with constructions such as the new port on the Tiber and the enormous storehouse, the Porticus Aemilia, nerve center of the new quarter of Emporium, with the first bridge to the valley of the Tiber Island, the Pons Aemilius of 179 BC. In addition two new aquaducts are built, there is more pavement of streets, and new triumphal arches are created on the Campidoglio: for Stertinio in 196 and Scipione Africano in 190. Other massive constructions include the giant quadriporitcus (vast piazzas enclosed with colonnades): that of Ottavio in 168 and Metello in 146, the great basilicas (of Porcia, Fulvia, Aemilia, Sempronia) between 184-121, all in typical form of the grand rectangular hall divided into naves by columns, and with a peripteral colonnade forming the exterior. Rising in the principle political space of the Republic, these basilicas are eloquent symbols of the glory and predominance of some of the families of the Roman aristocracy.
Though individual innovations may be initially isolated and seem insignificant, the city as a whole often will show a decisive change in its urban and suburban landscape as a result of their diffuse and large-scale application. Consequently the Roman citizen who inhabits, traverses, and lives the city, would find himself, over the course of just a few generations, immersed not only in a social and cultural dimension of great ferment and profoundly colored by Greek and Hellenistic culture, but also in an urban space completely remodeled artistically and architectonically with respect to that of their fathers.
VIII. The transformations of the spaces of politics
The number of Roman citizens went from about 150,000 at the beginning of the IV century to about 300,000 at the middle of the II century, to around 400,000 in the age of Sulla. Clearly such a drastic increase has profound consequences for the political life of the city. First of all, the assemblies of the people, particularly in the cases where the law required a massive mobilization of the electors, became difficult to control in the relatively small spaces, as happened for example in 133 BC during the institutional crisis generated by the proposals of tribuno Tiberio Gracco in favor of the plebeians. Under the pressure of such exigencies, the forum was transformed and from the beginning of the II century BC some notable personalities belonging to the greatest families of the aristocracy (among them the Semproni and the Emili) substituted the atria—which had been porticoed previously by these same families in order to shelter the crowd from the rain—with much more imposing and functional basilicas, the monumental beauty of which reaffirmed the political hegemony of that family in the public space. Contemporaneously the number of magistrates and their duties increase: Among the most significant changes are the institution of a permanent tribunal for judging provincial governors for embezzlement (quaestio de reputandis), 149 BC, and other tribunals appeared at the end of the II century to adjudicate electoral crimes (de ambitu), appropriations of public goods (de peculatu), abuses of power (de maiestate), the constitution of armed bands and attempted poisoning (de sicariis ed veneficiis). These give a sense of the crises, and the attempted defenses, of the heavily threatened republican institutions, of the extensive economic interests in play, of the corruption of the decidedly unscrupulous political sphere. Certain expansions and relocations occurred such as the expansion of the political activities of the Comitium to the entire Forum, and the transferal by Licinio Crasso in 145 of the legislative operations of the Comitia Tributa to the temple of Castor and Pollux, reconstructed by the Consul Cecelio Metello Dalmatico in 117. In the first years of the I century an anonymous praetor decided to move his seat to the Regia from the far other end of the Forum. Thus the Forum, and no longer just the part of the Comitium, is by now entirely pervaded by electoral, political, and religious functions; in it unfold the fundamental interactions, decisions, and symbols of the life of the city. The magistrates address themselves to the people either from the Rostri or the temple of Castor and Pollux; the senate holds its meetings in the Curia or the temple of Castor and Pollux, while the tribunals occupy the central space. Thus the entire Forum is transformed into the beating heart of the city's political life and the people who invade it for the various political occasions, the actual masses of tumultuous citizens in this huge space end up becoming a new, unpredicted, and dangerous subject of political action. To them, here, or in the arenas of the amphitheaters, and in the circuses the emperors turned for popular--and not institutional-- legitimization of their power.
At this point I want also to underline another aspect of political life: the consul, who in leaving for war at the head of the troops, participates in the sacrifices and rituals and expresses his vow to dedicate a new temple to a certain divinity, and after victory has the permission of the senate to celebrate a triumph and erect the temple. In thus preserving his memory he also leaves the indelible mark of his family on the public spaces of the city because in virtue of carrying out a divine will, his works gets the reflected glory and the temple that expresses veneration to the god gives tribute no less to immortal greatness. But with the political competition between the various families becoming fierce, and with the emergence of certain political personalities, the multiplicity of references, of representations, and of political figures tend to be annulled by the singular and crushing imprint of an individual who stands out from all the others in the recurrence of the representations, in the founding of temples and basilicas, and from every other moment in the public and political life of the city. It is precisely this that happens from Sulla onward.
In 82 Sulla imposes his will on the city and undertakes a profound transformation of the urban plan in the political heart of the city. His power had already permitted him to double the number of senators and add to the number of qaestiones perpetuae, the permanent tribunals in penal matters, and to reform the constitution. Sulla also tried to reorganize the civic space in such a way as to inscribe the architectonic and decorative aspects of the Forum with his success and that of his supporters in a univocal manner, elevating himself above all the others. The program he develops tended to unify and close the forum both physically and symbolically: His construction of the tabularium in 78 BC, destined to house the enormous engraved bronze tablets of the State Archives, creates an imposing edifice (that initiated the use of the arch inserted into the architectural orders and became the model for many subsequent porticoes) that serves as a gigantic architectonic backdrop for the Forum. It defines an orientation and it frames the perspective in addition to ensuring the connection between the Forum and Temple of Jupiter, likewise restored. Sulla also had the curia entirely, reconstructed, enlarging it at the expense of the Comitium, the relevance of which was visibly reduced. At the other end of the forum, next to the Regia and the Temple of Vesta, he constructed the Tribunal Aurelium for the urban praetor who had already moved his seat here. In brief the political heart of the city becomes a faithful and eloquent testimony to the political and urban re-founding of the city that the dictator after the civil war carries forward. But even though he got rid of some monuments that celebrated his adversaries, Sulla did not yet achieve a monopoly over the symbolic use of the urban space. He didn't succeed in that even after he had erected in the forum, probably on the rostra, an equestrian statue that depicted and immortalized his military and political achievements.
This explains the new direction that first Pompey took and then Caesar, that of creating from the ground an enormous closed space that affirms and glorifies only one individual in its decorative program, monopolizing the references, canceling adversaries visually and symbolically, and transferring to that space as many of the political functions of the city as possible. Thus Pompey makes use of his war proceeds to build a monumental complex in two parts in the Campo Marzio. The first part is an immense theatre, whose cavea is crowned with a sactuary dedicated to Venus Victrix, who had protected him in his campaigns. The second part is a very large three-armed portico, one arm of which houses a curia. The inside of the curia is adorned with a statue of Pompey represented in the typical nudity of the Greek heroes. This is where Julius Caesar fell, ironically, as if he were symbolically struck by the vendetta of Pompey. Though the work is certainly imposing and it succeeds in impressing the superiority of Pompey in the Campo Marzio, the vast majority of political acts continue to occur elsewhere, in the forum and on the Campidoglio.
Julius Caesar thus had to go even further so he decides to construct from the ground up a new forum that, in addition to resolving the problem of congestion in the original forum, would be able to accommodate all the civic functions, which can move their headquarters to the new site, while simultaneously subordinating them to the indisputable authority defined symbolically by that space. Though we know the work was begun in 54, it was not yet completed at the time of Caesar's assassination. The structure is composed of an enormous piazza at the foot of the Campidoglio and dominated by the temple of Venus Genitrice. It is surrounded on all sides by a portico that closes off the perspective, ensuring visual and spatial unity and homogeneity, conveying the celebration of Caesar in all the representations and narrative decorations. At the center of the piazza rises an equestrian statue. In addition he bought various aristocratic houses, for which we have new evidence from recent archeological finds, in order to facilitate his urban redesign program. For the better part of his life Caesar had not only audacity and insight, but also good fortune—he was after all protected by Venus. Thanks to the fact that the old Curia and Comitium were devastated by fire in 52, he undertook to reconstruct the Curia and he repositions it to align with his forum, cancelling the Comitium almost completely. In short, he who crosses the Roman Forum perceives a convergence of the perspective lines of the Curia and of the entire area of the oldest part of the forum toward the forum of Julius Caesar, so that the ancient forum appears subordinate to the latter. The ambition of Julius Caesar is clearly that of affirming his own political power without further need of dialog or concord, even symbolically, with the other aristocratic families. Obviously this violates that principle of parity among equals that defined the oligarchy of Rome. One episode relayed by the ancient authors is extremely illuminating with regard to the discord that his power and the forms with which he represented it aroused a good portion of the Roman aristocracy. In 45 Caesar, by then at the height of power, gathers the members of the senate in the tribune erected on the podium of the temple of Venus Genitrice. The place, with its overt connotations of Caesar's power, the spatial connection it makes with the goddess whose temple is directly above, and Caesar's own comportment at the time all made evident claims for his divine ascendancy. The vast majority of the senators were outraged and perhaps they determine there the final solution. In any case when in 44 Caesar gets killed he had already constrained the institutions and placed himself above them. Indeed, not only did he concentrate in himself numerous duties that had been considered incompatible until that time, he also centered the law, the rituals, the religion, and the politics around himself. Thus as in his self-representation he surpassed the heroic boundaries of Pompey to reach divinity, and in it, the conquest of all aspects of the life of the city.
At this threshold prematurely cast into the abyss, the way is paved for the work of Augustus, who is perhaps more subtle in the introduction of a monarchy more respectful of the old republic and capable of dialoguing (at least formally) with it. The affirmation of his legitimate right to power, however, is no less pervasive in its invasion of all political and juridical spaces. Vipsanio Agrippa, friend and future son-in-law of the prince, carries out from 27 onward a vast program of construction in the Campo Marzio that includes the construction of the original Pantheon and the redoing of the Saepta—which were opportunely circumscribed by large porticoes and adorned with marble rails, monumentalizing them precisely in the moment when they become private and their political role is reduced to that of a formal and celebratory monument. In fact the massive increase in the number of Roman citizens coming with the integration of the Italic peoples following the social war made practically impossible the assemblies and the voting operations for which the space was destined. It is not by chance that the will of the people in this new monarchical contest was no longer expressed in the assemblies and in the republican institutions designed for that purpose, but instead it is manifested in occasion of the games, in the arenas of the amphitheatres, and in the stands of the circuses in a sort of acclamation of the emperor and his will.
Yet in the old forum the real and symbolic presence of the prince and his predominance over all the crucial activities of the city makes itself strongly felt. In the location of the funeral pyre that Julius Caesar's partisans built for him at the foot of the temple of Castor and Pollux, a temple to Divus Iulius is raised and dedicated to the glorification of his by then recognized divine nature. Thanks to the two latest fires, in 14 and 9 BC, all the ancient monuments, basilicas, and temples from the history of the republic get redone by Augustus's most faithful allies or by members of the families allied to him. Two arches are added to close off access to this area and a portico is constructed to connect the various buildings and to give unity to the space and convert into a kind of gigantic sanctuary for the glorification of Caesar, his descendents, and the new monarchy. Of course the work that Julius Caesar had undertaken with his forum is adopted by Augustus and matched with the construction of a new forum, dominated by Mars Ultore (vindicator), the deity that had brought him success against the assassins of his adoptive father. From the representations on the great facade of the temple to the decorations of the two lateral porticoes, to the statues that adorn the spaces, all converge in an extensive, rich, and ingenuously rendered iconographic program for the celebration of the clan and prosperity of the reign of Augustus. To complete his project he needs to channel into his new forum some of the most important juridical activities of the city as well as a great number of religious, political, and social rituals. The first to leave the old forum for the new one is the urban praetor who sets himself up in a room contiguous with the end of one of the porticoes, and he remains there even when, after the death of Augustus a colossal statue to the founder of the empire is raised in the center of his forum. Other magistrates shortly moved their seats and their activities to this area as well. Augustus succeeds in other ways as well: he succeeds in making the triumphant generals to deposit the insignias of power at the temple of Mars Ultore after the completion of the traditional ceremony. He also makes the Roman cavaliers bring their procession through his forum, and he transferred even the operations of the census of young citizens entering into adulthood.
The emperor had become the most important civic unit with whom lay the concrete responsibility of governing but he could act only if he were recognized by the people and by the senatorial aristocracy. Thus all acts of civic life had to be subordinated to the acceptance of his power. From the multiplicity of historical personalities represented and celebrated, we pass to unification and the ideological closure typical of dictatorships. All the great characters from the history of Rome that are still present in the Forum of Augustus are posted by now in subordinate functions, they represent important moments of a history that fulfills itself only with the prince, that in the prince it finds its supreme and definitive legitimization. They serve as steps on a stairway to god, to the figure elevated from the humanity of the divine emperor. The Aeneid, though in the marvelous literary quality that animates it, also plays its part in the ideological program that celebrates a mythical past of the progenitors of Rome.
The work that perfectly summarizes the divine dimension of the figure of Augustus in the history of Rome and in the society of time is the system formed the Ara Pacis and the Horologium Augusti. Located in the Campo Marzio, together they form a gigantic meridian in which earth and heaven—celebration of man and the divine Augustus—converge in the revelation of the movement of the stars, in the measurement of time, and in the proclamation of the indisputable divine superiority of Ottaviano.
IX. The too small gods
We began with a small city motivated by the republican institutions of an oligarchy that held power yet was in dialogue with, and at times even ceded to the requests of the plebeians. We began with a city where men were men and gods gods. Though in pagan mythology extreme competitions were possible, no one would dream of proclaiming that he had a divine nature. We began far away, with a city where honors were paid to the gods that were due only to them, where thanks and glory were rendered to them for victories, for keeping plagues at bay, for the wellbeing of the city; and only for the gods was it conceivable to raise a colossal statue, bronze quadriga, or enormous temple from which men kept their distance, staying in the background, below. We saw the city emancipate itself in its architectonic forms, in the ideas, in the culture. Slowly men, the builders of the temples, the intermediaries in the victories, the arbiters of political consensus, redeemed by their humanity raised themselves up—at least on a symbolic level. They claimed or attributed to themselves colossal statues and splendors previously only destined for the gods. They embodied and amassed powers carefully separated and entrusted to multiple subjects by the republican institutions. They lithely played an underhand competition with the gods, taking their authoritative status and their spaces, emptying the divine representations. Because if a man in as much as he wishes to be heroic, audacious, kissed by the gods, but nevertheless is mortal and vulnerable to the knife of his assassins, gets elevated to a god, that same divinity will be lowered. And if, on the one hand the divinized emperor raises himself from the people, the aristocracy, and the earth to ascend to the Pantheon of the gods and legitimate his power, then on the other hand divinity suffers, it is made small, it gets diminished.
We began with grand gods and small men, we conclude with grand men and small gods. As a purely literary reflection it comes to mind that after more than three centuries of such practice some emperor might even take it into his head to replace the figure of God to his high place, distant, in an otherworldly space, absolute and omnipotent, and to bathe himself in the blessed waters of the river that runs along the shores of the biblical God, to postpone his own eventual divine nature in order to raise up God, and even the power of he whom that absolute and single, untouchable God had chosen to reign, had designated as the elect—man yet touched by God.
In the competition with men the gods lost. The laurels awaited, and await, Marsyas. |
