Good morning, everyone. Back, back to Rome today. Back to Rome, which was beginning to emerge as the world's or the ancient world's greatest super power. 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 affected this super stardom for Rome. And they're men that I'm going to talk about and, and talk about with you today. These included Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Mark Anthony, and Octavian Augustus, especially Octavian Augustus. Augustus first emperor of Rome. And it's the reason that I've 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 few, 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 BC. 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 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 BC, the triumvirate fell apart. Difficult times were the case in Rome between 53 and 50 BC. There were food shortages and riots in the city and the Senate was very concerned that these uprisings would leave, 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 Pharsalus which took place in 48 BC. After the Battle of Pharsalus 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, he did not like seeing a, 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 BC, by 45 BC 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 you know, built up the, 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 BC on the Ides of March. And he was divinized by the Senate. He was made a god by the Senate in the year 42 BC. In his biography of Julius Caesar, the the writer Suetonius, who was a secretary and a biographer to the emperor Hadrian in the second century AD, 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 I 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, 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 world, 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 BC. He was not able to achieve architecturally all that he had hoped.
