Transcript for:
Overview of Roman Art and Society

okay we're moving on now to rome and uh when we talk about the art of rome we're talking about basically three periods or some people uh take the final two and they group them together and just call them two periods they call the final two imperial but we're going to break it up into three uh because there's enough difference between the early and the late empire that it's worth noting because art changes pretty significantly uh during that time so the republican period 509 to 27 bce what happens to 27 bc is that there is a new political office known as an emperor and it begins the imperial period and that goes until the end of rome's existence until 376. um during this period in rome uh these are not the only periods in rome i should state uh there's about a 250 year period before the republican period when rome was ruled by a series of kings and in some instances was an extension of the etruscans who lived all around the romans as we'll see in a minute so the main learning objectives for the roman chapter is to understand how engineering and architecture can be used as forms of political propaganda and were used to recognize the differences between sculpture that's created the republican and the imperial periods to identify the major roman emperors and i'll have a list of them coming up uh just a few of them don't worry and the monuments created for them and then to explain the religious and political shifts between the early and late empires and how that impacted the visual arts as i just mentioned a minute ago okay so this is our map of the etruscan area and it is the italian peninsula where the country of italy is today and what you see is rome down towards the bottom there in the light green area and then all of these etruscan cities to the north and ultimately the etruscans expanded into this area of latin speakers who lived in rome but they they didn't quite take it over rome began to in fact assimilate them and they took on a lot of etruscan characteristics there's a great little video that i've posted in the roman module that talks about uh 20 minutes of roman history and it kind of goes through this kind of well quickly but gives you a good sense of it shows you that to the south the greeks lived below them so rome was situated between these two great powers the etruscans and the greeks and rome kind of took on characteristics of both of them and this map shows you how much the city of rome expanded into the roman empire so here the pink parts where it says the senatorial provinces that is the extent of the land as it existed during the republican period when the senate was in charge once the emperor took over that's what the imperial provinces uh indicate so expanded into this entire green territory so that by 117 ce we use rather than a.d the territory incorporated all of this area and you can see in this map how the romans subdivide each is each of these this area into individual states or territories that were then controlled by a local governor that answered to the emperor back in rome so what it encompasses is really all of north africa all of egypt that we've already been to the ancient near east this whole region between the tigris and the euphrates rivers and then the entire area of the greek mainland that we've also been to as well as all the way up to the north of in england what is now known as england today so a huge expanse and it really shaped this area so roman legend tells us that aeneas was the founding figure who brought latins to this land of the etruscans and that in fact he was a trojan his mother was aphrodite the greek goddess and he leaves troy with the shipload of men and his family in this greek pot that you see on the left he's actually carrying his father on his back and the ship has many adventures as recounted in the aeneid and you can see the pathway in the little map that is provided on the right they have a series of adventures and they ultimately end up in this region around where rome is while aeneas might have founded what would become rome it was his descendants remus and romulus uh two twin twin boys who actually founded the city of rome from which everything would come and the story of remus and romulus is that they were twins born to a virginal mother who was visited by either mars the god of war or some virgins say it was hercules who impregnated her and when her father found out about this he had an oracle done and found out that these boys would be responsible for his downfall and so as in all good myths he has the boys taken out and uh thrown into the river so or well sat down beside the river so that they could die uh while they're there instead of dying they're discovered by a she-wolf and this she-wolf nurses them back to health and that's usually the imagery you see associated with these two little twin boys uh it's of a wolf mother uh you can see in the carving on the left from the roman period these two boys uh being nursed by the she-wolf and then the work on the right is actually a floor mosaic where you've also got this great like a happy-looking wolf nursing these two tiny little boys the reason woody the woodpecker's there is because uh the she-wolf was not alone in raising these boys there was a woodpecker who brought food for them to eat once they were able to start eating solid food the woodpecker is usually not illustrated so i've included it here ultimately a shepherd discovers these boys and raises them uh as his own it's got a very kind of walt disney quality to this story doesn't it when they grew to manhood they decided they were going to found a great city uh but then they argued about it they couldn't decide where to put it and uh according to most versions of the story um remus was killed by his brother romulus as a result of this conflict over where to found the city of rome in some other versions it was an accidental death or there's even a couple versions where he is killed because he jumps over the wall of of the city that they'd found it anyway romulus won so it's known as rome not ream and the rest is history as they say like other cultures we've seen this semester rome was divided into different social classes uh they were quite strict about it as well the romans had essentially four categories for being in a class the patricians were at the top and i'm going to show you a slide coming up next that kind of puts it into a pyramid scheme type of situation and the patricians were those people who could uh trace their lineage to the founding fathers of rome so they had connections kind of to the mythical past to these ideas of remus and romulus and aeneas um and to the founding of this place and so they they maintained control they were able to serve in the government they owned land they maintained wealth and each of these classes had things associated with them certain rights but visible signs of class as well so for example togas are something that could only be worn by members of the patrician class if you're lower than that you weren't allowed to wear certain things and it was a way to visually mark you as uh classed within the society now one thing that's important to note here is that the color of your skin did not note denote your class per se so today you know in the united states when we think about slavery we think about african americans who were enslaved and that was not the case with the romans the romans didn't see color as a market of class in in really any way and we'll talk a little bit more about this as we go along but anyway uh so the art that we're going to see mostly comes from the patrician class because the people who have the extra wealth can afford to pay artists to create things but there is an example of plebeian art that we will look at as well one of the sources for conflict and struggle within the roman empire was this idea of class and particularly the plebeian class was always trying to gain more rights within the system and the republican period in particular has a lot of clashes there is a plebeian revolt that occurs right around 500 and it allows them to gain more power and that will continue really throughout the empire this idea of assigning people citizenship of people being free there is a system within the roman social class system of slaves being freed by their owners or slaves saving up money and able to purchase their freedom so that's what that class of freeman is i didn't note that before but you can read some of the categories in what the blue slide you show it shows uh what things were like before one of these major slave revolts and then after not slave revolts but plebeian revolts um and then after in 494 what you see and basically it's trying to get land trying to get ownership trying to gain political power uh and things like that to be able to consider oneself oneself a citizen of rome was important to people people wanted to be a part of this empire in particular one of the tools the plebeians had at their disposal one of their strengths is that they served as the soldiers in the armies of rome if you remember the patrician class you would be expected to be a soldier as well but you served as a um as an officer as a leader uh you had a horse plebeians didn't weren't allowed to be equestrians at the beginning of the empire but the bulk of labor fell upon the plebeian class to provide soldiers for the expansion of rome and very early on rome was militaristic uh it had to scrap and maintain its independence from the etruscans early on and then they just took that kind of aggression and continued to expand their empire as i showed in those earlier slides when you see it move just from one city into this vast empire it was this kind of roman condition of needing to expand and get larger at least for the first half of their existence or first two-thirds of their existence i suppose so uh because they had uh clout as soldiers they were able to demand certain rights and so that provided a an aspect into the uh the enfranchisement i should say uh you didn't often see plebeians become patricians early on because they didn't have those ancestral connections but you got to a certain point where patricians could marry into the plebeian class and there was a little bit of flexibility and social standing as time went by one of the things that marked the land of this whole region that relates to this militarism is the road system so as as soldiers left rome and they expanded the territories they built roads engineers uh and workers accompanied soldiers soldiers became workers and they laid down an incredibly intricate network of roads that are still in use today modern european nations have used them for highways and for road systems still so they are our roads literally been used for you know almost 2 000 years at this point it was also another way to kind of stamp the land as a roman land to have this new road system allow people ease of travel is really important and it showed what the romans could bring to these local populations roman expansion is interesting because they expanded into these territories and they they expected the people to submit to rome to pay taxes to rome to follow certain procedures to adopt roman gods and some roman religious practices that we'll talk about later but they allow people to keep their religions as well they allow people to speak their languages uh they were uh interested in the territory but they weren't interested in mind control they weren't trying to create you know some kind of uh fascist state they were interested instead in uh expanding roman influence throughout this whole region it wasn't only roads though that the romans built but bridges and aqueducts as well and these are still standing across europe to this day so let's take a look particularly at the aqueduct which is in our textbook and see exactly how they they did these things so the purpose of an aqueduct is to bring water into a city and the romans perfected this technology pretty early on during their um expansion into different territories and it was another way to impress people you know uh to the citizens of neem uh the people that had lived there even before the romans came it was a difficult location in order to get water you had to trek down to the river and you had to carry your buckets and then suddenly within 15 years which is what how long it's estimated that it took the romans to build this you had water that came from over 31 miles away piped into the city it was delivered into the center of the city it it was saved in cisterns it supplied fountains it supplied bath houses uh it was a remarkable achievement and made the quality of life so much better for the citizens of this particular place in neem uh so what we're looking at is three different levels of the um aqueduct and this particular portion is the most famous because it's very beautiful and it serves as a bridge over this river and so uh tourists flock to it as you can see in these photographs the lower level serves as a bridge for regular traffic and then up on the very top that's what you see the image on the right you can see the channel that the water came through so they used gravity uh so there's a slight um incline as they were building it to these this mountain source of water and then water just barreled through that center central channel they covered the top because they didn't want the water getting all gross with you know leaves and dirt and bird poop and stuff like that so the water would come into the city uh relatively clean and it would go to a variety of sources on the canvas module site there is a a video by david mccauley about the roman city and they talk about this and it's worth watching that just so you can see all the different uses for the water and what what they did but it was remarkable achievement and it really made life so much better for people and that was the point the reason for the ability of the romans to create these large public works in such a short period of time is they really were masters of concrete it was a roman staple in their building arsenal it's a material it's a method of creating uh stone-like hardness through chemistry basically it's something that was uh used in the ancient near east and in uh egypt the greeks knew about it but none of these uh cultures really took advantage of it uh to the extent the romans did uh it was actually known by the mayans too in mexico and central america uh they also invented concrete so it's a global thing but the romans like i said uh really perfected it and they experimented with it uh they were able to add volcanic ash to it and allow it to set underwater uh they really were uh geniuses when it came to concrete so they used it extensively it allowed them to build um large expanses of of bridges of aqueducts it allowed them to build buildings quickly but they didn't like the way it looked so in this particular slide they had different categories of what they called concrete based upon the veneer that they put around it they didn't like just plain concrete so they would often do a facing with stone uh that so that it appeared as it was made out of stone but it wasn't it was made out of concrete and it was a remarkably durable concrete that they used you could still find traces of it all over europe and uh and in the ancient world places where the romans used it for mortar for walls for roadways for bridges etc they used it for everything and what concrete is is it's a combination of things like rocks ceramic tile brick rubble you know leftover things in some cases from earlier constructions and then you mix that with a binder mixed with water a binder known as a mortar so the mortar was often gypsum or lime mineral not the fruit that you put in your margarita and volcanic ash could be used for the mortar as well and what this allowed the engineers and the builders to do is to work very quickly they were able to build much more cheaply with concrete than if you had had to hire stone masons to car to you know carve every brick of everything would have been very costly and very time consuming you have to excavate the stone and then you have to shape it and then you have to set it and concrete cuts all of that out here's just some more information about concrete construction just because it is so crucial to roman building um you know something to note here is that uh what you do in order to set concrete i don't know if anybody's ever done it but you pour it into molds and once it's dry you remove the molds and you've got it it's set it's stone and then it was covered with stucco or marble and they could do all kinds of different shapes that wasn't possible before because really remember up to now we've only been talking about post and lentil architecture uh these these columns and then these lintels that go across and that does not allow you to create an architecture of space and that's exactly what the romans wanted to do is to create an architecture of space and in particular an architecture of interior space so all the monuments we've seen before even grand egyptian ones and the grand parthenon they all had very small interior spaces it wasn't meant for crowds it was meant for just a few select people but the romans changed that when they started to experiment with concrete and create these large buildings that were meant to hold you know hundreds thousands and thousands of people the architectural forms that this use of concrete took is in the extensive use that the romans made of the arch the barrow vault and the groin vault and together they created what i've labeled here as an architecture of the interior now again the romans didn't invent these things the egyptians knew of them the greeks knew of them but they didn't like this form they preferred the post and lentil uh the aesthetics of it how it looked uh and they preferred to keep people out of their buildings basically uh and so the romans were very different than that they had a different mindset in terms of uh what that um was like so you can see on the left this is an arch and then a barrel vault is simply as if you like grabbed hold of that arch and stretched it it's like a tunnel what we think of as a tunnel and then the groin vault is if you take two of these barrel vaults and you just put them perpendicular to each other you know crisscross applesauce it and then you've got this great space that opens up as a result and what you can do is you can put these groin vaults one after another and you create this large vast interior space as you'll see in the next slide so this is how it appears from the exterior in sort of 3d modeling um the barrel vault the groin vault and then right there is that sequence of groin vaults that i was just talking about and you can see how because it's supported on all four sides that if they can expand the space and it's known as a fenestrated sequence of groin vaults if you want to get technical about it but the other thing that you can do is you can take this groin ball and you can basically uh create what is known as a domed space a hemispherical dome and that's also something that the romans didn't invent but they really perfected while they could the largest of the roman buildings in a roman city was uh usually a basilica form and the roman basilica was usually used for administrative centers like city hall basically is what we think of it today it was located usually in the center of the roman city and it was one of these fenestrated sequences of groin vaults that created this vast interior i'll show you the plan in a second so you can see what i'm talking about but it created large interior space that allowed for literally hundreds and hundreds of people to be in this building both working and citizens coming to do things like pay taxes or you know get their driver's license or whatever they needed to do in order to maintain their status as a good citizen here you can see that interior space from the plan form that i was just talking about that large central rectangular space that allowed people to congregate so it's congregational the basilica was the entrances was on the side so you can see on the top of the slide in the middle that's the major entrance uh there are also sometimes other smaller entrances uh but the entrances were on the longer half of these buildings so a person would walk in through that basilicas are still being made they're still used particularly for civic buildings and what you see the romans establishing is a architectural vocabulary that's still in use today they build on the the greek orders and the greek example but they expand on it and they add to it all of the architectural and engineering geniuses of the romans came together when they constructed their cities and uh the romans would construct these cities throughout the empire uh to serve as centers of authority to the seats as seats of government for these different regions all with ties back to rome and one of the distinctive features of a roman city is it was laid out on a grid pattern uh it wasn't only always just a square like you see in the plan on the left it related to the local topography so sometimes it was uh you know quite quite a strange shape from the sky but the grid pattern was important uh because it it set a standard for what a roman city would be and it was unlike a lot of other cities that were not quite laid out in recognizable grid patterns in this sense if you think about the way stores are laid out today if you think about how you can go in a walmart anywhere in this country or a target anywhere in this country and you know where the different places will be because they all conform to the same thing this sort of same pattern the same design the same layout so it gives you a sense of comfort a sense of ease you know you're in familiar setting knowing that you're in you know a walmart even though you might be in a a city you've never been to before so that's kind of the same idea it sort of establishes this roman pattern that uh was recognizable no matter what part of the empire you might be in at the time so it's on this uh this gridded system there was an aqueduct that brought water to the city uh you had uh the usually the um major administrative buildings right in the very center of the city where the major thoroughfares intersected so it created a centralized authority for all your political needs there oftentimes there was an amphitheater a place for people to uh to be entertained sometimes this was within the city wall sometimes it was outside the city walls uh city walls also were something that were important sometimes there was a fortified walls sometimes there was a ditch dug around it for protective purposes depending upon where it was again i would direct you to the video the roman city that's in the module if you want to learn more about this particular function of the roman city which is really fascinating here are two more examples and artists renderings of two different roman cities again in both of these you can see the walled fortifications the ditch dug as a protective feature and also in both these cases you'll see that the amphitheater is located outside the city walls these two slides show little models that try to capture a sense of roman cities you can probably watch the history channel get a better sense than these i recognize that but anyway uh streets were often um lined with stone as you can see here there were sidewalks for people to walk on so that they could be above the street level um you often had uh cities were a place of you know hustle and bustle and commerce uh the romans loved being in the city it was something that was kind of uh similar to the enthusiasm that the sumerians had for cities the romans really loved being city dwellers in the city you often had these shops and places for to purchase things storefronts down below and then usually the the uh plebeians or the freed people would live in apartment complexes above the typical apartment complex would be three to five stories first four would be you know zoned for commercial use basically is what we would say and then the apartments would be above that generally the larger apartments were the second story and then the smaller ones were above it and even though there's differences in size they're generally about two rooms was typical of an apartment in um in ancient roman times and about 30 to 50 people might live in one of these complexes so not we're not talking a huge apartment complex for the most part uh later on you would find large statues of politicians that would line the streets uh as you can see in the example on the left and uh generally it was a place of of kind of you know hustle and bustle the sculpture that's associated with republican period in rome is really a unique one uh because it's a sculpture that emphasizes old age and uh the term that's often used to describe it is roman verism where these sculptors tried to be as accurate as possible to make these individuals look the way they looked with big noses with wrinkles with warts it's not the um idealism that we're used to seeing from greece or from egypt but instead it's a really intense focus on depicting people the way they looked and it's really interesting because it arises out of a tradition of ancestor veneration and so it's related to the patrician class so the patrician class is all about your family right you inherited your wealth you inherited your status you inherited your name uh from your your ed your predecessor from your father and from your grandfather etc and a way to establish that is to create these um these masks these death masks that were created at the death of the the head of the family and they were collected and they were kept in a shrine in your home and this represented your you know the legacy from which you came this represented the male family line all these old men that you descended from and over time these these wax death masks they get they're kind of fragile so they don't last for a long time so they would you know remake them over the years but then ultimately they became translated into marvel which is much more durable and lasts longer so you have these marble busts which is also a uniquely roman art form a bust is simply the head the neck and maybe the upper half of the torso it's something the greeks would have probably hated because they were all very much about depicting the whole body but the emphasis here is on the head on the character of the individual on the age of the individual because the romans associated age with wisdom and with maturity and with all these valuable traits that also the greeks would have hated the greeks you know made fun of old people in their hellenistic sculpture whereas the romans venerated them because they were linked to a family line so the verism that was found in these death masks from the patricians were literally realistic because the dead faces would have hot wax poured on them to literally get a cast of the features of the dead now none of these have survived you're looking at some wax wax masks on the left that are contemporary masks but the practice was for important funerals public events that members of the family would put these masks on their faces and appear at important family gatherings as all of the ancestors together and there was also an important day in roman the roman calendar that was meant to celebrate your legacy uh of your family and so people would families would parade in the streets with these death masks uh and even later on once um marble busts were created they would parade carrying these busts in the streets with them and that's what you see the figure on the right doing he has two of these these busts that are being um held by him and it's a um a commemoration of a family line right there or at least three members of this family line to give you a sense of uh this roman attitude about aging i wanted to read you a passage it's about a page uh from this uh work by a roman lawyer and political figure named cicero who wrote about this idea of aging uh he is writing as if he's an elder of the age of about 80 something and it's a passage called cato the elder on old age and this is what he writes when i think about old age i can find four reasons why this is regarded as an unhappy time first because it takes us away from active work second because it weakens the body third because it deprives us of practically all physical pleasures and fourth because it is not far from death if you like we'll go over the reasons one by one and we see much how much truth there is in each of them first one old age takes us away from active work but from what sort of work presumably from the sort of work which needs youth and strength but surely there are also occupations fitted for old men's minds and brains even when their bodies are and firm infirm all right so second people who declare that there are no activities for old age are speaking beside the point it is like saying that the pilot has nothing to do with sailing a ship because he leaves others to climb the masts and run along the gangways and work the pumps while he himself sits quietly in the stern holding the rudder he may not be doing what the younger man is doing but his contribution is much more significant and valuable than theirs great deeds are not done by strength or speed or physique they are the products of thought and character and judgment and far from diminishing such qualities actually increase with age nowadays i do not miss the powers of youth that was the second point about the failings of old age any more than when i was young i felt the lack of a bowl strength or an elephant a man should use what he has and in all of his doings accommodate himself to his strength so that's really you know a polar opposite of the greek few next we come to the third allegation about old age this was its deficiency in sensual pleasures but if age really frees us from youth's most dangerous failing then we are receiving a most blessed gift there now we must consider the fourth objection to being old one which might be thought well calculated to worry and distress a man of my years i refer to the nearness of death when a man is old there can obviously be no doubt that it is near yet if during his long life he has failed to grasp that death is of no account he is unfortunate indeed there are two alternatives either death completely destroys human souls in which case it is negligible or it removes the soul to some place of eternal life in which case its coming is greatly to be desired there can be no third possibility if then after death i shall either lack unhappiness or even be positively happy i have nothing whatsoever to fear to be respected is the crowning glory of old age and the authority which belongs to old age especially when enhanced by a distinguished record is more precious than all the pleasures of youth so that kind of sums up in a nutshell what the republican period really thinks about this idea of of age being associated with wisdom and all these positive attributes one of the places for men to demonstrate their wisdom was uh when they were elected to the roman senate the romans were one of these cultures that instituted a republican form of government democratic dem government uh in which people were elected to serve they were elected only from the patrician class but they also had to had an age limit you had to or age minimum i should say you had to be 32 years old to serve in the senate uh so you had to have acquired life's experiences you couldn't be in your 20s you needed to have a little bit of wisdom under your belt before you could serve in the senate and then usually these men were continued to be elected uh until they were old and uh quite quite um aged so senate portraiture is another form of this veristic portraiture uh you started to see busts of senators that were created that really stressed this with this age because with age came wisdom and came uh you know a great deal of um foresight and hindsight and ability to understand history and understand the world people lived in so senate portraiture carried on this baristic idea senate portraits were were kept in in the senate building itself it was also something you might find in the basilica in rome and over and over you see wrinkles and gaunt cheeks and big noses because noses continue to grow the cartilage in your nose as you age so people often get larger noses and ears are emphasized and all of these things that mark people as old some people suggest that uh these might not actually be as barristic or truthful as we think that uh some people might have been uh encouraged the sculptors to emphasize these age aspects more than they actually had in real life so in other words they were paying to look older than they were another aspect of roman art that's different from greek art is that the sculptors that made these great images of these old men are mostly unknown actually they're entirely unknown i should say their names were not recorded they didn't become famous like greek sculptors became instead they were workers whose identities were less important than the subjects that they were creating so the people who were being created were more important than the people doing the creating in these two instances you have uh work on the left which is marble and most of the roman sculptures will be marbled they preferred marble because bronze was something that was used for armor and for weapons and in a culture that was so militaristic they didn't want to waste bronze on art objects but so this is a rare object on the right where you see this old senator's head that's done in bronze and you know again there's just wonderful detail and characteristics of you know these men with these bumps on their noses and these saggy eyes and saggy baggy cheeks they're very compelling they're like everybody's grandfather one of the interesting sculptural traditions that was happening at the same time as these uh veristic portraits were being done is uh plebians wanted their likenesses captured as well and they also had a funerary context so while these busts were originally associated with home altars and being carried in the streets for the patrician class because they really wanted to stress and emphasize their family connections in the plebeian class they wanted funerary markers to mark their grave you know like like stone markers that we still have today in our cemeteries and they wanted their likeness carved there as well so what's interesting is there's two different artistic styles because for the patrician class uh they wanted really accurate lifelike details they wanted these old craggy men all these old grandfathers and at the beginning during the republican period it was mostly men you don't see women until the very end of the republican period into the imperial period being carved in patrician sculpture but plebeian funerary sculpture the artists weren't as fully trained as the ones that were working for the patricians uh so plebeian sculptures are probably done by people who maybe did it as a side hustle maybe they were you know plumbers during the day and then at night they like to carve in their garage uh they're mostly untrained it seems uh and their work is very awkward and strange you'll notice these two examples the guys have really big heads and they're strange discrepancies in scale like you've got these fully grown people standing next to the person who's lying on that couch and that's the dead person who's being honored in the work on the left you've got these two small figures those could be children of his those could be slaves that he owned i'm not particularly sure in this instance in these two instances actually uh the context from for them the work on the right you can see a woman on the very left of the image that's most likely his wife and again notice how small her scale is they're not all um of the same size so they're the most important figure the use of hierarchic scale is again being used or hierarchical scale and they also crowd a lot of stuff into these compositions you know you've got the details of the table and of the different types of containers that are there bottles and and cups and things like that so it's really a great uh glimpse into everyday life now usually you don't see these people don't talk about plebeian sculpture but for the entire time that we're going to be looking at roman art you should be aware that there's also this kind of uh practice this art practice that's being done by the common people so it wasn't just that art was for the wealthy that's just what we focus on and that's something that's starting to be addressed and changed a little bit more in the way we look at roman art but this tradition goes up the entire scope of the roman empire and we're going to return to it in the late empire because something very interesting with it happens so just a reminder this is the official portraiture of the republican period these old veristic men but there's an also that underground kind of tradition we don't often see so but things began to change by the end of the republican period even for these figures you started to see what was essentially a generational challenge as uh youth began to challenge the authority of the older generation and one of the most interesting things about sculpture towards the end of the republican period is that it really mirrors what's happening politically in the empire itself so what you started to see what started to happen is you had these young generals who were in charge of all of these men these members of the patrician class and they were the ones doing the fighting they were on the front lines they were at the front engaged in all of these different uh expeditions to expand the territory of rome to put down rebellions to do all this the work of of the empire and after a while these younger these younger generals and officers started to feel resentment towards the old men in the senate these older men who were sort of safely tucked away in rome who weren't putting their lives on the line and they started disagreeing with some of their decisions and they started standing up to them and what you're going to see this comes to is the the end of the republic as the rise of individual strong men kind of takes hold and really breaks the democratic principles on which rome was founded some people look at the imperial period as this great kind of glorious moment for rome but in many ways it was a tragedy because this culture that was really founded on democratic principles and this idea of consensus ruling uh came to an end and it came to kind of a cataclysmic end and a lot of the rulers that were associated with the imperial rule ended up being pretty bad for rome and probably led to well definitely led to the end of rome as we'll ultimately see but here at the beginning of it all what you start to see is these generals will have uh portraits of themselves done that are very different than the ones that are done of these old men you start to see youthful appearing muscular young generals and it's almost like there's a public dialogue between the youthful appeal of a general and the old craggy appearance of of these old politicians another way this played itself out in the sculptures of the end of the republican early imperial period is that these generals often were depicted as full figures to really emphasize their youth their strength their musculature it's a return to that heroic nudity that we saw as part of greece so this idealism of youth the strength of youth against these busts of these old wise men now romans aren't a group of people that will will typically exalt nudity in the way that the greeks did they're a little bit more modest in that way so oftentimes when you see a nude statue of from rome it will often be a god and sometimes it will be done as a portrait of a general or portrait of the emperor as a god so the kind of the godliness puts a little veneer of modesty on the display of this body it's understood this is not the body of the individual it's a body of a god and it's kind of a merger of those two ideas so you won't often see nudity in roman sculpture because there's there's a reluctance to go there in the uh unlike the greeks who really embraced the idea of nude bodies but still you do see it here at this moment uh as this again an emphasis in how different this is in response you start to see figures of elder statesmen that become full figures the entire body being depicted such as the old senator that you see on the right who is uh depicted as if he's speaking in the senate he's got his uh toga on that's associated with that but then you'll also have youthful figures as well like you see on the left uh appearing as a senator with this same type of oratory pose like as a speaking pose is what that oratory pose is but still the most significant sculptural shift occurred in displaying the body of these young athletic uh generals that were starting to challenge the authority of the old guard and this led to some strange accommodations um some strange kind of ways to uh meet this challenge of this new sculpture so this is the head of an older senator you can see you know the craggy uh lines of his face the droopy cheeks again the wrinkles around his eyes and this is the body that they attached to that head uh a youthful body on an old man's head it's kind of like you know um photoshopping uh you know photoshopping and tinder or grinder or some dating app like that uh where you've got this this person who is uh just trying to hold on to their youth in some way it kind of is uh you know something we think of as very contemporary but look the romans were doing it uh here 2 000 years ago as they are trying to hang on to power it's pretty funny i know that sculpture always puts me in mind of the 2008 presidential election in this country when john mccain and barack obama were the candidates and that presented the youthfulness of obama with the age and wisdom of john mccain and it played itself out in the election this type of uh this you know hope for a new generation versus uh the old way of john mccain and in this instance the youth won and uh one of the things that uh was so funny back in 2008 is this image on the right that placed john mccain's head on the body of barack obama and it always reminds me of that sculpture that we saw you know in the previous slide and you think something like this is just kind of funny and goofy but then you realize it's this it's a real issue that's been played out in politics for 2 000 years already youth versus wisdom of age strength youth smarts age who are you gonna go with ultimately it's julius caesar who is the general who ends up really resting control away from the senate to make himself the uh the emperor although his title isn't reflective of that yet uh and he only lasts a short period of time uh in this role as the conqueror of rome or really the conqueror of the senate in in reality he's assassinated only five years later and then ultimately what happens is more general's come to compete for this title because once he's established this idea of having control over the senate and the senate serving his purposes it's an idea that won't go away the three generals that emerge as competitors for uh this new title are mark anthony uh this guy by the name of octavian and lepidus and those three all battle each other and ultimately it is octavian who comes out on top uh it comes down to mark anthony and octavian uh mark anthony is most well known today as being a great lover of cleopatra who by this time is the queen of a much diminished egypt egypt is no longer an empire it's become a basically a a broken state but she was in control at the time and uh she was kind of casting her fortunes with a variety of roman people including julius caesar and octavian and then ultimately mark anthony on the right is a classic movie uh with with elizabeth taylor playing a uh cleopatra when octavian becomes emperor he assumes the title of augustus and is emperor for life and uh the role of the senate is diminished to an advisory capacity essentially under octavian and octavian has a whole sort of idea of what he wants for the roman empire and he sets about to do it he's a man of action and achievement and uh he really takes charge and shapes the empire into what he wants it to be so when we start seeing images of augustus you know that we've turned into the imperial period or the early empire as we've broken it down here this is the most famous image of augustus that exists it's known as augusta prima porta that refers to this statue alone not to him they didn't call him augusta prima porta they just called him augustus so what you see here is an image that comes from later in his life some people believe it was even made after he died but you'll notice that he's a young man and with augustus you've got this complete switch to idealized imagery you're not going to see any of the emperors depicted as old and wise at least not for a while uh instead it's the the um the success of youth it's the strength of youth and you've got this sense of vigor and of authority from this young muscular body so you always see augustus depicted in the prime of his life just as we saw the egyptian kings and we saw the greeks time after time like this he's depicted in his army uniform his military uniform he's depicted as if he's addressing his troops his arm is raised known as the oratory gesture and uh he's barefoot which indicates to some people that this uh happened after he had died so uh the taking off of the shoes still a symbol of being in the heavens of being godlike something we've seen since the ancient since the egyptians the ancient egyptians when we saw the image of narmer with his sandals off if you remember that there's a lot of symbolism in this image as well which we'll talk about a little bit in a couple slides so let's get into it just a reminder that this would have been a painted statue and in fact all of these marvel statues that you see in rome would have been painted just as the greek ones would have been painted as well they did not prefer white marble this is a copy this is a plaster copy of the marble statue that shows what it would be like painted and i would keep showing you plaster copies if they were the same quality but they're not so i will go back to the statues that have their paint taken off of them as i've done this whole semester but it's really worth noticing and and remembering that paint paint paint was important to uh both the greeks and the romans and they never would have considered a statue finished until it had its painting done and the painting was done not by the sculptor by by a different person altogether so it was a sort of separate duty that you see here with them thing to notice right away is that the this image of augustus prima porta uh is modeled after the derivaris this ancient statue from the greeks that was so well-known and so famous in the ancient world there were lots of roman copies of this as well and you can see that it's the same type of contrapposto where he's got his right leg bearing the weight and his left leg is uh is relaxed and you've got this arm up and it's not bearing any weight and then you've got his other arm down his left arm down and it is bearing weight and so you've got a shift of weight in a very similar fashion to the derivatives now it's not exact of course obviously but it's something that uh that educated people would have picked up on that knowledgeable appreciators of the arts and of history especially maybe even more than art would have acknowledged so one of the things that seems odd about the statue is that just next to him is a little chubby kid with wings and he is on top of a dolphin and uh so these have meanings they also have a function because this is a marble statue and it would break at the legs because the legs are weak and supporting the weight so they always add something extra like a tree trunk or something of that nature to support it and in this case they incorporated some of the iconography or the symbolism into the story of augustus that would contribute to really proclaiming how important he was and so what you see here is the symbolism of two things so you've got a dolphin that references the ocean and this could be a symbol of the naval battle that augustus was victorious over mark antony in it was mark antony's defeat at this famous battle at sea that led him to commit suicide and so uh caesar or excuse me so augustus emerged as the sole heir to julius caesar so that's what the dolphin can reference here and then the image of the little chubby kid is cupid and so you know today we think of cupid as the god of love and we associate him with valentine's day but importantly he was the son of venus and that's important uh for for a significant reason uh so two reasons really so let me flip to the next slide and talk about that so what cupid represents here is a an association of a lineage he is a stand-in for the image of aeneas uh so the reason that he is standing for the image of aeneas is that augustus who you see on the upper left was adopted formally by julius caesar before julius caesar died as his heir and that helped to legitimize his authority and his rule and uh he was actually his like grand nephew so there was some relationship but um uh julius caesar solidified it by adopting him so the figure next to julius caesar or excuse me the next to augustus is julius caesar well julius caesar traced his lineage as a member of a patrician family to aeneas so next to julius caesar as we're moving to the right is a wall painting of aeneas from the roman period and aeneas is famously the son of venus and that's the figure all the way over to the right of the screen well venus is also the mother of cupid so cupid there is superimposed and because there's not really an uh functional way to put a little miniaturized aeneas at the leg of augustus that wouldn't have worked but cupid would work because cupid is uh you know a small little figure and so cupid is meant as a stand-in to the son of venus and people would have recognized the relationship to aeneas so it's all this kind of six degrees of kevin bacon if you know that that kind of story like we're all separated by six people and this is something that again people would have been um would have understood would have appreciated that he is speaking to his lineage and he's also speaking to his uh his right to rule like he comes from this line of rulers from julius caesar from aeneas who was uh responsible for the founding of rome ultimately because he brought these latin population to the shores and he's also claiming that he's a deity that he is linked to the the god-like heritage of venus and one of the things that happened to uh emperors is that once they died they were deified by the roman senate the senate decreed them to be holy and to be come gods and so the barefooted nature of um augustus and the statue indicates that and then it's a rightful place for him because he's hearkening all the way back to venus so it's really kind of complicated but easy at the same time once you understand that the other area where you see quite a bit of symbolism is on the breastplate that augustus is wearing and on this breastplate it's supposed to represent uh what's known as the pox romana which is this period of peace that augustus ushered in with his rule he ruled with diplomacy he preferred diplomacy over military might during the second half of his career his first half was really dedicated to military activity to uh battles fought and wars won and people subjugated but the second half was one where he wanted to establish peace and he did and it's known as the pox romana it outlasted him it lasted for about 200 years and it was a period where there were relatively few disputes it wasn't totally peaceful there were some uh areas of unrest that the romans had to go out and deal with but for the most part it wasn't this constant military aggression that had become so much a part of roman life over the centuries preceding augustus so he established this idea of using diplomacy where you could rather than military authority and one of his greatest accomplishments was when through diplomacy he was able to have returned to the romans the standard that had law been lost in battle by generals earlier in roman history in fact it was mark antony who lost this battle to a group of people known as the parthians and they took the roman standard which was this stick with an eagle on it and what you see here in the very middle is this roman soldier with his hand extended and the leader of the parthians is returning the standard to rome and then all around the center of this brass plate you've got gods you've got representations of the sky god at the top and of the sun and the moon and this idea of constant uh you know repetition of the cycle of life as the sun rises and sets and the moon does the same and then around the center of it you've got representations of other roman gods you've got apollo you've got diana his sister you've got the earth goddess down below who is uh surrounded with the with uh plants and animals of life and you've also got two representations of subjugated people pre tribute tributaries people who give tributes to the romans uh so it emphasizes just this kind of cycle of life the way things should be in essence if this sounds familiar to any of you it could be because about 10 years ago there was a movie titled the eagle which was all about this uh incident it was kind of based historically on this incident but the story was mostly fictional but it was about roman soldiers trying to militarily go around getting back the standard it started channing tatum when he was much younger and was was kind of full of lots of historical inaccuracies but some people like the movie their image of the breastplate just so you can see it with a little bit more shadow and make out some of the details better um but all in all this was a really important statue and chock full of imagery that uh once you understand that makes it fully a complete image about not just um augustus as an emperor but him as a ruler and him as a man and him as a god he is addressing his troops he's talking to them rather than being you know shown with a spear and being militarily aggressive so that whole idea of him his oration his speaking to his men kind of goes along with this idea of him using diplomacy to solve problems it relates to the image in the center of the breastplate it rent it represents the restoration of rome which is something that he was very fascinated with he really wanted rome to um reflect this glorious past he had a very keen eye towards the past and wanting to uh what he felt was restore rome's reputation which he felt had declined somewhat and you know then you've got the uh the reference to his divine lineage as well so it everything kind of uh coalesces in this one statue of him a variation of this idea of augustus being exalted and deified after his death can be found in this very small brooch it's just like seven inches it's known as the gamma augustea and it's divided into two different um registers on the top is augustus himself and he is the figure who is shown seated and he is shirtless and he's holding the staff in one hand and that wreath is being placed on his head a aretha victory and he's surrounded by different personifications of deities and zodiac signs and figures and then down below him is a image of romans being victorious and erecting a victory monument they're also aided by a couple of gods down below and then you've got captives who are shown bound up and kind of looking despairingly so this even in a small little brooch like this it really exalts augustus as uh now among the gods and this is something that you'll see continuously and as an iconography as iconography of rulership with the rest of the emperors who will follow augustus i'll show you an example and just next slide so here we go this is a similar brooch it's not clear exactly who it's exalting though there seems to be uh some uh confusion about the figure that is uh that this was carved for it's not clearly known uh but you can see augustus in the sky so there are three levels of imagery here in the sky augustus is the figure who's got the um toga draped over his head and he's holding on to a staff again and then there are figures all around him so that's augustus in the heavens who is still looking over the emperor's below the emperor below is the one who's seated also has his shirt off and he's holding that staff it may be who was the very next emperor or it could have been one of the later emperors people again just aren't sure and then down below on the third tier again people who have been subjugated by the romans once the romans establish certain types of ways of representing the emperor they stick with it as we'll see they kind of continue to depict them in similar fashion over time one of the duties that augustus took very solemnly was his role as the head of the state religion and he had himself depicted as a high priest the image on the left shows him in that role with his toga going over his head in this way and he was also depicted frequently as a god not only as a deified augustus but during his lifetime statues were made of him impersonating other gods so on the right you see augustus as jupiter the king of the gods sitting on his throne holding his staff and his orb of power and this really just reflects his close association with religion with religion as a state religion now there's no separation of church and state in ancient rome and also augustus's association with divinity on this slide in the next one i want to just uh bullet point some major and basic ideas about roman religion roman religion is something that was adapted early on from their geographical positions so there's a lot of influence from etruscan religious traditions and the magic of the etruscans and their practices of augury or or fortune telling and there's also a lot of influence from greece um you know as anybody who ever grew up reading the percy jackson books might know you know the differences between the greeks and roman gods something that are kind of detailed in that book series by rick riordan um but uh basically these next two slides will just emphasize a couple of ideas roman religion was one that was based on home worship primarily of family gods of individual local deities there are many many roman gods that were believed in but it also had a public component of state gods and that's where public religious services were for another idea to keep in mind is that roman religion was syncretic which means that they were open to outside influence and the romans adopted and adapted to all kinds of different religions as they moved into different areas of the world they did not outlaw religious practices they allowed religious practices religious traditions in all the various parts of the empire unless it was something that was completely repugnant to the romans like human sacrifice they found to be disgusting and so they they wouldn't allow for that if a religious practice had some component of that but for the most part it was very open and adaptable and some religious figures were adapted into the major major cults within the entire roman empire they believed that proper rituals was a way to keep them into the correct relationship with the gods and that the gods would favor them for doing that and that's why there were so many private rituals inside one's home a father of a household and a mother of a household would have specific religious duties that were part of their um everyday activities they also had a very active religious calendar with worship for major gods on certain days and even minor gods on other days one of the things that augustus did as ruler is he revived traditions he reinvigorated religious festivals he helped to recreate rebuild temples and major shrines he he had new ones constructed within the city of rome and elsewhere and he really focused his energy on major gods like jupiter juno mars minerva those roman aspects of greek gods that were really particularly important to augustus also as i've already talked about with the augustus freedom of porta the idea of emperors becoming gods at their death is something that relates to augustus and to his rule and that's where this whole idea of denying state religious practices becomes treasonous enters into the picture of rome and later on with the rise of christianity you'll see some christians who are going to refuse to worship the emperor as a deity and the emperor as the head of religion and that's where christianity will run afoul of roman law and will cause some problems mostly what the textbooks show you are these large sculptures of gods and goddesses that are associated with the public temples and the places of worship but it's important to keep in mind that every household had little altars and shrines in them and they had small little sculptures of different gods again local gods some public you know major gods and they would be kept on an altar maybe just a table top or if it was a wealthier family they could have a shrine that would be embedded into the wall the work on the right is a reconstruction of what one of those would have looked like a little offering cup you see there to leave offerings for the gods maybe burn some incense or something else of that nature so people very religious within their homes uh and they all had individualized family gods like connections uh to uh you know family members that go back in time with different places that families might come from these gods could have a really a real variety of origins a major contrast between these small household altars and shrines would be something larger and more grand like this sebastian which was a building or temple that was dedicated to the imperial cult that was dedicated just to these former emperors who are now gods and the best preserved one we have is uh one that was actually found in this area of southwestern turkey in a little city known as bubon and some huge sculptures came from there uh this is early on it's not exactly clear when these sculptures were made but they're an example of rare bronze works again like i mentioned earlier usually romans preferred marble using bronze for weapons and things like that but in this temple or this building this sebastian what you found is a whole group of statues dedicated to a group of emperors and the people who lived at bubon were undoubtedly doing this in order to show the um the emperor back in rome what dedicated um uh sort of people they were what dedicated how dedicated they were to roman authority and to perpetuating the idea of roman authority so on the left is one of these figures again it's unidentified but it was most likely an emperor who is depicted here in the guise of a god it is a nude statue people believe he may have been clothed in real clothing while he was being worshipped the slide on the right is an excavation shot of this sebastian in the reconstruction view on the left what you see is an altar table that's set up and then the current emperor or would be placed in this position on a pedestal and then along that wall where you see the other images lined up those would all be former emperors so former emperors probably within the same lineage that marked this entire dynasty of emperors and one of those figures that would have been lined up you can see on the right again this one's missing its head just like the first one is missing its head and here are some of the heads that are missing and one of the bronze statues that was uncovered here at this one site that uh retained it had its head to this day so it's a really rich discovery when it was uh unearthed in the 1960s that shows one of these these temples fully dedicated to roman authority one of the great projects that augustus embarked on once he became emperor was to basically recreate rome he felt like rome was in the city itself uh not the concept of rome but the city of rome he felt was not nearly as spectacular as monumental as august as it could be that to be the center of a huge empire as it was he felt like it was crowded and messy and uh that it was a an unworthy city to be the capital of such a great empire and so he began the work of recreating it of renovating it of tearing down lots of old buildings and really reconstructing it made mainly in marble although it was actually in concrete and then just faced with marble but there had been a lot of brick buildings before and he did not find that to be appealing visually and so one of his great achievements is this renovation of rome he was so um proud of the fact that he had rebuilt rome that supposedly on his deathbed his dying words were behold i found rome a city of clay and leave to leave her to you of marble whether that's true or not or just a fictional romantic writing it's not fully clear but it does give you a sense if true on the profound impact that recreating rome had for him now of course as we look at this image and the image i just showed you these are reconstructions of rome as they looked but again they are imagined from this modern perspective where people believe rome to have been white and it would not have looked like this at all the buildings would have been painted the sculptures would have been painted so take that into consideration always when you see things like this that it was not this pristine white surface that contemporary people would have you believe one of the rules that augustus ordered architects should follow is that they should use the corinthian order in their recreation of rome and the corinthian order was basically the ionic order except for the capitals were these capitals that depict these acanthus leaves and these are these beautiful sprouts that sprout out in the spring time and he wanted this idea this metaphor that rome was eternally in bloom that it was the springtime of of uh rome permanently that it was always in that first blush of warm weather and you've survived uh the winter and it's this reawakening and he loved that idea for rome itself the most well-known monument that dates from augustus's rule is known as the arapakas or it's also called the altar of augustine peace and it celebrates the pox romana it celebrates the rebirth of rome it celebrates rome's history and everything that it could be it takes the form of a public altar and it was used as a public altar it was placed in a square where people could have seen it and on the inside is an altar table where there would have been sacrificial animals slaughtered to commemorate important uh holy holidays the cutaway view to give you a sense of how it would have been used with the altar table in the front and the two two uh burners on either side of it all around the exterior of the arapacas there are carvings that really speak to this history of rome but also speak to the contemporary nature of this monument so on the western side where the entryway is you've got these images that depict remus and romulus on the one side and then on the other side an image of aeneas now unfortunately there's been a lot of damage on these uh two areas and so there's not a lot of imagery left so that's unfortunate but then on the north and the south side as you go around the building you've got depictions of a parade of people that include contemporary people including augustus including his wife livia including marcus agrippa who was his major general and including his wife's children from another marriage as you move around to the east side of it you've got a personification of rome known as roma who was a deity in a in and of herself and then you've got this image of the earth mother of this great goddess associated with the harvest and with the seasons and she's appeared on some other monuments as well the one you've seen is the um the shield or the breastplate of the augustus prima porta so let's look at some of the images that we have left on the sides of the aura pockets to get a sense of this unfortunately there's nothing left of remus and romulus and the reason that people know that he they were depicted is through historic descriptions of this monument so remus and romulus on one side but the other side depicts uh aeneas historically it's been identified as aeneas although about 20 25 years ago scholars proposed that it actually represents the second king of rome his name was pneuma pompilius he ruled directly after romulus ruled and he's responsible for starting a lot of traditions of rome uh and he was deified later on so it could be pneuma pompillious or it could be aeneas either one it kind of what it shows you is that there's still this idea of the history and the uh founding of this great place in this image it shows uh the male figure whoever he is in the act of getting ready to sacrifice a great hog so he's sacrificing uh an animal in the same way that people would be coming to sacrifice an animal here at this particular place down below what you can see is a whole bunch of of these fresh vegetations bringing to life so again this kind of idea of new life in rome if you go to the top of those engaged columns what you see is that the capitals are corinthian order so again it's this life springing forth on the eastern side just like on the western side the roma has been destroyed but the um image depicting telus mater or mother earth or perhaps it's even cirrus the goddess of the harvest is still intact and you can see that she's represented as this mother figure she's got these two young children in her lap again sort of equating bounty with her role and then you've got this scene where she is surrounded by animals and she's surrounded by grain and it's an image that's meant to evoke kind of just this the constant harvest associated with the um the success of rome it's bountiful you never want for anything on the north and south sides of the arapakas you've got these carvings that represent the important citizens of rome you've got members of augustus's family you've got augustus himself here he is at the head of this particular panel unfortunately he's been cut off so he's lost some of his body there but he's at the very front of the line and then you've got soldiers you've got wives you've got children in the next panel you'll see and these people are doing things that are very naturalistic to people so again you've got this roman sense of realism uh the figures might be idealized they might be youthful but you've also got the sense that they are engaged in real life activities they're talking with each other they're looking around you know they're not just standing in a row representing being in a line they're not these boring individuals but each one has been uh kind of personalized by by actions or by reactions facial expressions things like that this panel is probably the most famous one because it's got a range of children in it and these children are really kind of adorable they're doing things like children do they fidget they're like why are we standing here how much more how much longer do we have to be here and you've got adults patting their head and holding on to their hands and they too are engaged with people around them at the head of this section of the procession is the figure known as marcus agrippa and he was the son-in-law of augustus he actually was the person that augustus had designated as his heir to take over the role of emperor when he died unfortunately marcus agrippa died before augustus did so he never became emperor but he's at the very head here where he's got the toga over his head again kind of almost like he is ready to take on the role of a high priest of rome next to him is his son and behind that kid is julia who is the only child of augustus and she was married to marcus agrippa so you've got some historic figures here as well as people that have not been yet identified but could very well represent specific known individuals this slide kind of identifies some of the ones that are known although some of them are incorrect as well so where it says livia that's actually now considered to be julia but then some other possibilities of figures behind them that have been identified by roman historians the sense of realism and the actual actions and emotions of people standing in line is really remarkably different if you compare it with something like the freeze from the acropolis where you've got these idealized figures that just represent citizens of athens right they're not you know sam watson from athens they're just these unidentified figures whereas in rome you've got people who are identifiable and you've got things like i love that kid at top like hugging the mother's leg it's like mommy and she's trying to ignore him but of course you can't it's just these these sort of slice of life things that make these these uh roman images really some seem to still speak to contemporary audiences even today you can understand what that kid is feeling and you can understand what that mother is feeling and the men just ignore it where the aripakis was placed was important as well because it was in a large courtyard or open plaza that contained a an egyptian obelisk that commemorated the victory of augustus again over mark antony but also of his alliance with egypt so it had actually been brought from egypt and placed here in rome and it served as a sundial on this plaza that had been marked with the mausoleum excuse me with the arapakus on one side and then if you look in the background if you see that round building that was the mausoleum that augustus had uh designed and built for his tomb so this is where augustus was buried so this whole area is this kind of commemorative site for the greatness of augustus the peace that he brought to the empire and this idea of of his glorification if you go to rome today uh the our pockets has its own museum that's been built or kind of a um a shelter really not an entire museum but it looks like this protected from the elements while augustus was emperor he had by his side his wife livia who became known ultimately over time as the mother of the roman empire and she was allotted and celebrated in her own way just as augustus was she was given a title augusta which was very unusual for any later uh wives of emperors to be given she's somebody that really set the stage for being uh humble and for being not ostentatious she was publicly a very devout woman and religious and pious and she uh embodied sort of the sense of modesty that augustus did as well they never lived a lavish lifestyle they were they continued to live in this sort of modest house so the trappings of success aren't something that they embodied even though they were really fabulously wealthy but it was this idea that they wanted to be seen as citizens of rome and she was a really trusted advisor to him in many ways she's somebody that was particularly concerned about the morals of the city and she helped him to craft legislation because in one instance she was worried about the divorce rate among the patrician class and so they passed laws to make it more difficult to get divorced they also passed some tax legislation that encouraged members of the patrician class to have children giving them tax breaks for that so that the patrician class wouldn't be swallowed up by the plebeians there was a fear of livia and others that the patrician class wasn't having children at the same rate as the lower classes were and so in order to encourage that and to encourage marriages to stay together she helped pass this kind of domestic agenda to shore up the patrician class she's somebody that also her presence sort of normalized the tradition of female portraiture augustus first dedicated a public sculpture to her she was the first woman to ever have a public sculpture dedicated and that became more and more of a norm within roman households after the um the precedent set by images of livia still today there are many images of her that still exist just as there are many images of augustus himself one of the titles that livia held was she was considered to be a honorary head of the vestal virgins and she's depicted several times in this role here as here are two of them actually on the left she's depicted as vesta herself vesta is the goddess of the hearth and was one of the very important goddesses of rome she was had a fire that burned for her continually and this fire was something that was tended to by the vestal virgins the virgins were a group of women who had been selected for their good character and they took a vow of chastity and they essentially became like nuns except they were exalted within the city they were honored they couldn't be touched they were considered to be sacred embodiments of this idea of rome itself and so they were really venerated and honored throughout their lifetime and so livia was associated with that as well so obviously will not be able to go through every roman emperor that ever existed because that would take us much too long but we're going to just focus on those who have important works of art that were dedicated to them or that they had done to preserve their legacy or to continue their legacy so in the early empire augustus really starts us off he's part of what's known as the julia claudian line that was begun by julius caesar and then handed down to augustus and then tiberius who was the son of libya from a previous marriage and then caligula claudius and nero none of these followers of augustus were nearly as significant as he was they are all kind of you know disappointments in a sense because they didn't seem to have the same great character as augustus and in fact some of them aren't known for being particularly um harsh caligula is an example you're looking at here known for his great cruelty and also for his excessive lifestyle so is nero nero considered to be one of the great um uh scandalous characters who again lived a lavish lifestyle and didn't wasn't concerned about the regular citizens of rome whatsoever the most impressive of any of the emperor's projects from the list that i just showed you the julia claudia line was probably nero's golden house the final emperor in that line and it is this monument to his ego it was a monstrously large palatial estate with woods surrounding it where he would go hunting he uh commandeered a whole section of rome for himself and uh destroyed buildings and other things that were already there in order to convert this massive area into his own private emperor's delight emperor's palace there was a massive sculpture of himself 120 feet tall that was placed in the central courtyard you can see it if you look there in the middle there was a huge lake that he had instilled an artificial lake there was over 300 rooms that were for guests to do things in although not sleep because they were not fit outfitted with beds it was just a tribute to his own kind of megalomania under this domed section here was where nero liked to have large dinner parties and uh his guests would look up to the ceiling and the ceiling was rotating because slaves were pushing it and on top of the ceiling there were paintings of stars and there were mosaics of constellations there were also pipes that came out and perfume would be sprayed below on the guests below and sometimes uh flower petals would would fall down from these pipes at uh specific moments so it was a lush and really lavish lavish lifestyle that nero had created for himself at the expense of the citizens of rome luckily he died and he killed himself and then there because he had no heirs then because he died basically in shame it was the beginning of a new line a new line of emperors and this was going to be a different type of emperor these emperors were known as the flavian line and there were three of them vespasian his son titus and titus's brother domitian so i've put the monument that each is associated with in parentheses after their name vespasian had the coliseum built in the middle of rome we'll talk about that titus uh dedicated the coliseum because unfortunately vespasian died before it was completed and then titus also died so his brother domitian created a monument in his memory the arch of titus so those are the two monuments we'll look at with the flavian line the coliseum was a major undertaking on the part of vestibation and there was a real uh political reason for the construction of the colosseum so after nero died and it was determined that vespasian would become the next emperor he wanted to do something to distinguish himself from the julio claudian line and particularly from nero especially because nero was not well liked in rome he had seized all of this public land in the center of rome and made it his private land so what vespasian did is he gave that land back to the city of rome he did not keep the golden house as his own palace he [Music] instead tore down parts of it and on one section of it he built this great coliseum and it was his gift to the people of rome and it was meant to be a great entertainment center so the people could um come to the site and be witness to all kinds of spectacular things and so the idea was that i am not the same type of ruler as nero i listen to the people i care about the people i'm not going to hoard wealth for myself in fact he spent a lot of his own wealth on constructing the coliseum it was considered his gift literally to the people of rome so let's look a little bit more at the structure this is of course the ruins of the coliseum as they exist today one feature that uh vespasian had kept from the excessive display of nero is he had the statue of nero kept the statue of nero was altered by vespasian though and it no longer had the likeness of nero on it but instead became an image of the sun god soul sol so this great image of the sun stood outside the colosseum as this great gift to the people of rome and again it's 120 foot tall statue so it was this massive construction because some people believe that the reason the coliseum got its name wasn't because of the size of the amphitheater but because of the size of the statue that was referred to as the coliseum or the colossal and that gave the name to the coliseum itself facts associated with the coliseum is that it did take 10 years to build unfortunately vespasian didn't live to see its completion he died before it was completed and before it was dedicated but like i said he did pay for it in fact he paid for it because he um his portion of the spoils from the um defeat of the jews in jerusalem when they sacked the temple they brought back great wealth to rome and the emperor was allowed a certain percentage of whatever booty got brought back and so what vespasian did is he took his portion and he funneled it to the coliseum so it took about 10 years to to build completely it could hold 50 to 80 000 spectators it's estimated that an average was 65 the exterior rises to a height of 157 feet so that's 37 feet above the statue of the sun that was next to it as you go up each of the arches is framed by columns and they're different columns they start with the doric then they go to the ionic and then the corinthian at the top originally the upper arches were framed or they framed sculptures of gods i'll show you that in a reconstruction coming up in a minute there were 80 different entrances at ground level one of them was for the emperor himself three of them were four members of the senate and then 76 were for all the rest of the people members of the patrician class plebeians freedmen etc seating inside was based on social ranking class so there was a section for example for plebeians where the wealthy plebeians got to sit a little bit lower and then the poorer plebeians had to sit above them and also there was a retractable roof that was used when it got particularly sunny so that they could shade people and also used somewhat in the rain although it was a canvas roof and so you know it wasn't completely waterproof this reconstruction of the coliseum shows you some of primarily the roof the roof that would have been pulled out it also wasn't a roof that completely enclosed the entire amphitheater but it protected the spectators that was the important idea there was also a box that was specially reserved for the emperor and another box here that was specially reserved for the vestal virgins so two places that were considered to be holy basically in this reconstruction it can it shows you the statues that were inside the arches uh on the upper two levels also if you look close you can see the doric order is on the bottom and then the middle level the second level is the um ionic and then the top level is the corinthian orders the coliseum was intended to be used for all sorts of different types of activities that were related to public entertainment one thing that they did was they put on these large dramas like theatrical dramas that were based on roman mythology they also uh did of course gladiator contests what it's most famous for today these are kind of professional level fighting events they reenacted famous battles on more than one occasion they flooded the entire first half of the coliseum and they had mock sea battles in there they hunted animals and they also executed enemies of the state in the coliseum so a whole range of things were considered entertainment at that time in order to facilitate this underneath the floor of the coliseum there were all kinds of uh narrow passageways and chambers there were uh basically cages where animals were kept there were also jails where prisoners were kept before they were going to be executed on the floor of the coliseum there were ramps that opened up and sometimes they opened up in dramatic fashion so the crowd was really uh thrilled by the fact that suddenly the floor moved away and you had this lion standing in the center of the um the arena today when we think about the gladiator contests which are the most famously known that were held at the coliseum we think of the movie gladiator and that it was this bloody spectacle with death after death after death and it could be very bloody at times uh sort of the public appetite for blood and death seemed to wane and wax over time so sometimes it was more bloody than others but there was a large contingent of gladiator games that never ended in death these were contests that were regulated there was a what we would consider a referee down there and they were meant to really highlight the skilled gladiator contests of people who became enormously popular and they were like you know wrestling figures today or sports figures boxing figures there were also kind of sham gladiator contests where criminals would be placed in the ring and against seasoned gladiators who would kill them and so it just depended on the time that we're talking about when these types of gladiator contests occurred much of that also depended upon the taste of the emperor sometimes emperors craved more blood and wanted to stage more bloody spectacles than others nero particularly staged bloody executions of christians and the people of rome didn't like that so much they kind of were repelled by it now of course nero didn't use this stage the coliseum he used another venue for that because this wasn't built until after his role but um once this was open there was a spectacular 100 days of animal fast or excuse me animal hunts and gladiator contests that did see a lot of bloodshed quite a number of people as well as animals were killed all of this bloodshed at various times had led people to complain against it probably the most famous was this writer known as seneca who wrote this piece called on the games and it was in these moral letters that he had written and here's what he said he's kind of snarky as he writes about this he says nothing is as ruinous to the character as sitting away one's time at a show for it is then through the medium of entertainment that vices creep into one with more than usual ease what do you take me to mean that i go home more selfish more self-seeking and more self-indulgent yes and what is more a person crueler and less humane through having been in contact with human beings i happened to go to one of these shows at the time of the lunch hour interlude expecting there to be some light and witty entertainment then some rest for the purpose of affording people's eyes a break from human blood far from it all the earlier contests were charity in comparison the nonsense is dispensed with now what we have is murder pure and simple the combatants have nothing to protect them their whole bodies are exposed to the blows every thrust they launch gets home a great many spectators prefer this to the ordinary matches and even to the special popular demand ones and quite naturally there are no helmets and no shields repelling the weapons what is the point of armor or of skill all that sort of thing just makes the death slower in coming in the morning men are thrown to the lions and the bears but it is the spectators they are thrown to in the lunch hour the spectators insist that each on killing his man shall be thrown against another to be killed in his turn and the eventual victor is reserved by them for some other form of butchery the only exit for the contestants is death fire and steel keep the slaughter going and all this happens while the arena is virtually empty but he was a highwayman a highway robber he killed a man they say and what of it granted that as a murderer he deserved this punishment what have you done you poor wretched fellow to deserve to watch it kill him flog him burn him why does he run at the other man's weapon in such a cowardly way why isn't he less half-hearted about killing why isn't he a bit more enthusiastic about dying whip him forward to get his wounds make them each offer the other a bare breast and trade blow for blow on them and then there is an interval in the show let's have some throats cut in the meantime so that there's something happening so you know being kind of snarky and ironic there at the end but he's really lambasting the idea that this is bad for one's character is to sit around and become cruel and hard-hearted at the suffering of others and it's a argument that's still made you know people have throughout the 20th century blamed different things in the mass media for children's violence whether it's comic books in the 1950s or rock music in the 1970s and 80s was considered this uh this bad influence that led kids astray or you know video games arcade games whether you know it's in the 80s arcade games or today's games that kids play at home so it's all these these ideas that the more you're exposed to violence the more prone you are to violence yourself so some things you know are kind of universal the arch of titus is the other major monument that remains from the flavian line it was uh dedicated to titus who was the son of the spatian who dedicated the coliseum upon his father's death unfortunately he didn't last for very long and uh so upon his death his brother domitian had constructed for him the arch of titus and the arch of titus is really a significant arch because it's got some important symbolism as you look at it today it's missing a lot of things over the years uh statues that were on it got torn down people reused stone for different things that's why the coliseum is partly in such bad shape as people need need stone to finish their backyard patio and so they would pull things off of old monuments that were just sitting around nobody was using so it's kind of in rough shape comparatively today they would have had full statues like on the upper edges of the the tight the arch of titus sometimes even on top of the arches you would find statues as well so it at one point it would have been much more grandiose and of course painted as well one of the important things about the arctic titus is that it's one of the earliest surviving monumental arches known as triumphal arches and these were interesting forms that are kind of a combination of architecture and sculpture and they were dedicated to a god that was uniquely roman god by the name of janus and janus was depicted as having two head two faces looking out on either side of his head and he's associated with having the ability to tell the future and also having a very clear understanding of the past so he looks forward and he also looks backward he was a god that you [Music] dedicated the beginning of any new venture you made an offering to janus and particularly he was associated with uh new war expeditions new military expeditions that were leaving rome and early on in the republican period they built these temples to janus that were very unique and interesting looking temples here's one of the oldest surviving temples of janus it's two different views but it's the same structure and what you can see particularly if you look at the image on the left it's like a cube and there are two there are four i should say great big doorways that are on the north south east and west sides of it and at one time these doorways had very large wooden doors on them and these temples were dedicated to janus but when the roman army left the city the doors would remain open depending upon with if they went north and south or east west and the doors would remain open until the army returned and that was considered to be an important uh sign of good luck uh to keep the doors open until the uh army returned well over time this is a rather large and kind of awkward and bulky structure so over time it kind of got condensed and shrank into the triumphal arch form that you see with the arch of titus so this is a condensation of that temple of janus it's just one archway and it only goes in one direction rather than having the four directional thing that we just saw so the arch of titus was dedicated to the triumph of titus when he was a general and he's the son of vespasian and he was in charge of the troops that went to jerusalem to put down that rebellion in jerusalem and ended up stacking the great temple at jerusalem and stealing all kinds of great treasures that were kept in that city and bringing them back to rome and so this would have had an inscription on it marking the occasion and the importance of titus and like i said before it would have had a lot of additional sculptures on the exterior but they've been taken down over the years there are two sculptures that survive on the arch of titus and both are inside the archway uh here you can see one and you can see it in as part of the arch so it's rather large image and the figures are large and what it depicts is that sack of the temple at jerusalem the great temple um as uh different things are being taken by roman soldiers and uh as kind of the will of the nation is destroyed by the romans at this point doing such a terrible act is desecrating the most holy site in all of judaism so it's a pretty terrible scene actually but it's one that was one of the most important events that titus himself was responsible for and so here you see it coming to life opposite the scene on the other wall what you have is a scene of titus after his death so he has uh gotten into a chariot and chariots led by these four horses and uh he is having a wreath placed on his head by uh the personification of victory there the woman with the wings she's winged victory she's associated with um uh with minerva and with victory in battle and so this is the death and the ascension to the heavens of titus he's going to join his father as a god up with the other gods when domitian died he was the last in the flavian line and he was not particularly well liked in fact he was murdered and that brought about the end of the flavians on the same day he was murdered though the senate uh catapulted his successor into the office the successor was named known as nerva and that's his image over on the right nerva was basically an administrator he had worked for vespasian he'd worked in domitian's administration and he was you know loyal to a lot of people in rome he wasn't such a great emperor though and he only lasted 15 months before he died he was actually 66 when they uh elected him to be the emperor however he made a very wise decision in selecting trajan who was a very popular general in the army as his successor and so what you had is this decision that emperors should not pass on the emperorship to their children but should select their successors before they die and so that's what you have in the new um the good emperors so-called good emperors the nerva antonine line they're not actually blood relatives but they uh the the idea was to select the best person for the job rather than a kid who might not be well suited for the job and uh these lasted for about a hundred years these uh these emperors after nerva uh who didn't make it for too long so we'll look at trajan who uh was again a great general and who was pretty successful emperor he constructed trajan's column and also the forum of trajan that we'll look at then the next emperor was hadrian who did quite a bit we'll talk about hadrian for a while then antinus pius doesn't do much there's no images that we'll see with him marcus aurelius only has a portrait statue of himself that survived and we'll talk a little bit about him and lucius ferris who were co-emperors and then the very last emperor of the so-called good emperor line was a man by the name of commodus who himself was not very good uh in fact he was the end of the early empire things really fell apart after commodus so those are the last ones that we'll talk about from the early empire so as i mentioned trajan was the first of these good emperors and he had a very successful rule he expanded the borders of the empire until it reached its height underneath him uh it was the largest it would ever be he had a rule of about 20 years just a little shy of 20 years and he was generally very successful well liked and scandal free here is one of the many images of trajan the many sculptures of him and you see that he's barefoot and he's in his military outfit with his armor on and his hand is raised in an oratory gesture where have we seen that before so at this point it's been about 80 years since the death of augustus and really the empire's been through a lot honestly in these almost hundred years and so people are starting to look back to the rule of augustus as this great emperor and they want to be seen as following in his footsteps so already we've got trajan copying the pose of this most famous statue of augustus the augustus prima porta and uh trying to get some of that luster of augustus associated with himself a great public project that trajan worked on during his reign is the creation of the form of trajan it was an area that domitian had actually started work on but then was killed before he really achieved anything on this and by now one of the things that has become a kind of crucial part of each emperor's rule is they kind of start to remake areas of rome in their own image they will start big construction projects through which they hope to glorify their own name and live on through history and certainly that's what trajan was attempting here and he succeeded he created this very large project basically that's known as the forum you've got these two long porches or porticos that frame a plaza that originally had an equestrian statue of trajan which no longer exists to enter into the whole thing you once went through a triumphal arch that also was dedicated to trajan and then you go into this a big courtyard and there's a large structure in front of you that's known as the basilica opia uh and it was the administrative center under the rule of trajan's that's labeled number four on this slide and then on the back side of it you've got this a smaller courtyard where there's another sculpture known as the column of trajan that we'll look at in a minute and the column of trajan is flanked on either side where those numeral threes are and those are both libraries one was a greek library containing greek scrolls and the other was a roman library containing scrolls written in latin and then what's labeled number one here in this slide was a temple and it was a temple that would have been dedicated to trajan once he died and so it would have been once he's been deified this would be where you would go to uh sacrifice to him and to leave him offerings so it was a large complex and it was going to put his stamp on rome and it did the major monument left standing is trajan's column it's a unique monument form it's this freestanding column it has carvings all the way up starting at the bottom and it goes all the way to the top it's 125 feet tall at the bottom there is a compartment where the ashes of trajan and his wife were placed after they died the romans liked to be cremated so this was where their urns were kept and then on the top of this column there was a sculpture of trajan which has now been destroyed and no longer exists on the right you can see the entry to the mausoleum that would have kept the ashes of trajan and then on the top there's currently a sculpture of saint peter that was placed there in the 1500s during the renaissance so i think peter is up there now not trajan but originally it would have been trajan who was depicted here as kind of the capstone of this large monument in the center of the form of trajan as you can see in this reconstruction and from the plan that i showed you earlier the trajan's the column of trajan is placed inside a smaller courtyard and it's flanked by four different buildings the temple the basilica and the two libraries and there was a second story area where people could stand and congregate in order to look at the sculptures or the relief carvings that were on the column so one of the things that's interesting is that it is a chronological um history of the expedition that trajan led to go and conquer the dacians a group of people who are roughly where romania is today they're up to the north and to the west and uh in the latin library they they kept the scrolls of the history of this expedition and some people believe that the whole uh column of trajan is a reference to the scrolls because the images kind of wind their way up just as you would have a scroll if you unscrolled it and wrapped it around a column that's what it would look like so it's kind of intriguing that that was the conception for this large monument the first of its kind in the roman empire and what you have at the very bottom is you've got the soldiers leaving rome and then all of these different series of events that occurred as they made their way to dacia as they encountered different people as they had to build bridges as they had different battles in their attempt to conquest the dacians so it's a real history that is illustrated for the viewers who are looking at it and it was of course painted like everything and the paint helped different elements stand out so people could read it from further below also as you got to the top the images became bigger so that they were easier to see there are hundreds and hundreds of figures carved on this um history of the dacian expedition like i said starts at the bottom it winds its way up to the top in chronological order and you've got all kinds of incidents and details that have fascinated historians ever since people looked to this monument to see different hairstyles to see what people were wearing the different types of clothing that would have been a part of a soldier's accessories what the different type of battle gear it is that they used because the romans were really committed to giving lifelike details in their images so it's become a rich source of history for a lot of different areas of historical inquiry there are scenes of them crossing different rivers and boats like you can see on the left there are battle scenes as they encounter different groups of dacians as you see on the right and they wind their way up in these registers that go all the way to the top they kind of remind you of a syrian relief carving because there's such a military focus here and there's so many different figures and characters and there's lots of different details about the surroundings about the landscape and about the different areas that they have to march through battles comprise a lot of the scenes as as you might expect and also the aftermath of battles speaking of assyrians look at these soldiers presenting heads to trajan to uh you know know have the the heads of his enemies after a battle kind of looks like a mean joke women are not often depicted on roman monuments unless they are uh goddesses but uh on the column of trajan there are four women in particular that are depicted this is the same scene just seen in different lights you get a different sense of kind of the drama of it i suppose and these are desi and women who are shown torturing male captives and it's probably meant to communicate how barbaric the destinations are that they would involve women in something as brutal and horrific as um torture and war so it's meant to further demonize the destians in the eyes of the romans in rome after trajan's death he had adopted hadrian uh to be his successor and hadrian ruled for about 21 years a little bit longer than trajan did hadrian wasn't quite as beloved as trajan he kind of had an adversarial relationship with the senate and maybe as a result as the reason he traveled a lot hadrian is the emperor who was gone from rome for about half of the time that he was the emperor he insisted on traveling to all different corners of the empire he wanted to see what rome was made of and hit a great curiosity about many things he's more of an intellectual than a general in many senses he was fascinated with greece and had a real love of all greek things in fact he grew up a beard because that was the greek manor and so he's the first emperor to have a beard and you see it in all the portraits of hadrian a bearded emperor um he was particularly interested in architecture he kind of thought of himself as an amateur architect architect and he built had a lot of things built while he was the emperor of the kingdom his reign was relatively peaceful there were a couple of uh um sort of civil wars that he had to put down but not too many and uh so he really spent his time uh honestly learning about the world once again uh you can see in this uh public statue of hadrian he is reflecting back on the reign of augustus so in the same way that trajan did he is aligning himself with the great rule of augustus and in many ways it was a very good role that he had despite his issues with the senate as i said he had a fascination with all things greek and so nudity was not something that he was personally ashamed of so there are a number of statues of hadrian depicted as gods as different gods where he is shown in the nude and of course if you're depicted as something else then the nudity does not reflect your own personal nudity and so it was seen as more acceptable at the time it's you know the nudity of mars of the nudity of jupiter here's two instances of statues like that that reflect his you know preoccupation with the divine he had a particular love for athens and he visited athens another a number of times during his reign and when i say visited he would go and you know it took a long time to get to these places he would spend months and months and months there so he'd be gone for a year year and a half then go back to rome for six months then he would go again he really was somebody who was on the move so this is just an example of how fascinated he was by greek history in particular and so there was this temple the temple of zeus that had been in ruins for over 500 years and he wanted to see it rebuilt and so he reconstructed the temple of zeus at athens um and this is what it would have looked like at the time when the reconstruction was finished so even though the heyday of greece had long since passed he was still uh insistent on preserving it and to um kind of revitalize greece and one way he thought he could do that was through architecture if you go to greece now this is all that's left of it and you'll notice that corinthian columns the favorite column of the romans is are used here in the background you can see part of the acropolis so it's up there at the temple of zeus was not part of the acropolis complex and so this is all that remains of hadrian's reconstruction of a temple that had originally been there back in the days of classical greece the greatest building that was constructed under hadrian is the pantheon in rome and the pantheon was again an attempt to go back to the reign of augustus and to show that the reign of hadrian was closely allied with the original great emperor because the pantheon was built on the site of a temple that augustus had built to commemorate marcus agrippa the man who was going to succeed him but unfortunately died before him now that temple had been destroyed by a fire earlier in the century and so it became the task of hadrian to rebuild it and he wanted to rebuild it in this grand fashion and you can see that all along the front of the of the pantheon itself in the architrave you can see that the um inscription still has the inscription that it originally did dedicating the building to marcus agrippa um so anyway when hadrian wanted to rebuild it his idea was that he was going to create something that was kind of a model of the ancient greek world and the new world of the romans he wanted to blend these two eras and so what the architects came up with is this porch that looks for all the world like a typical greek temple style of the corinthian order once again in keeping with augustus's theme but then he created on the back of it this rotunda that was made out of concrete well the whole thing was made out of concrete and then covered in marble and then painted but um so he marries this uh the innovation of rome creating arches and using domes and he uh still had a nod to the past in the way that the the front facade looked and so it turned into really a spectacular building and one for the ages if we compare the way it looks now on the left to a reconstruction drawing on the right you'll see a couple things have changed primarily the sculpture is gone from it there was sculpture in the pediment area as well as along the roof line uh above the pediment and in front of the the drum that holds up the dome and it also had stairs leading up to it and over time the area around the pantheon got filled in so there's no longer that the stairs that originally were there but for the most part it is pretty much intact as it was originally conceived one thing to be sure that you don't do is to confuse the parthenon with the pantheon and a lot of students do that and it's understandable they're very similar spellings and in fact uh hadrian when he was designing the pantheon there are reports that he was interested in sort of uh achieving for the city of rome what the parthenon was for the city of athens he wanted something that really ultimately um symbolized the strength the innovation the genius of roman technology in the same way that the parthenon did with all the features that the parthenon uh used to really display the genius of mankind of humanism and uh it was it was the um the intent of hadrian that he could do the same thing with this new building that the same type of innovation and the same type of human achievement could be created in the roman empire just as it had been in athens and he did the primary area of achievement for the pantheon is the dome the dome structure was unrivaled in the ancient world and even today it still remains the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome so today of course they use steel and rebar and all kinds of metallic materials to reinforce concrete so that it stays up but they didn't have those materials back in the days of the romans so this is pure engineering ingenuity to get this dome to stand up and not fall and to be stable the diameter of the dome itself is 142 feet it's 142 feet from the ground to the top of the dome and you can see that this uh this little circle fits into that space a perfect 142 foot diameter circle it is uh reinf it's it's stable because the base of the dome is 21 feet thick 21 feet thick concrete okay and then it's tapers up to the top so at the very top it's about a little under four feet thick so it's still pretty thick but one of the things that the engineers and the architects need to do is to lighten the load of the concrete by using coffers and those coffers are those square indentations that you see they were created by molds molding the concrete around them and that's all empty space it recesses into the ceiling and it creates a great pattern but it also lightens the load of the concrete also uh you'll see there's an oculus at the top the oculus is an eye it's open to the sky that also keeps it light a light lighter concrete lighter ceiling but also lets light in and it also lets water in they've never covered it so when it rains obviously it gets wet inside the pantheon but the floor has an incline of 12 inches so the water can drain off to the sides so it's really genius the way that they constructed this building here you can see that oculus oculus is how it's spelled um in the sky that's left in light and rain and and pigeons and whatever else is in the sky and uh you can see a reconstruction drawing there over on the right so the reason it's called the pantheon is because it's a temple that's dedicated not just to one god not just to marcus agrippa but it's dedicated to all of the gods so it's this kind of pantheistic space so pantheon is the name of it you can still go into the pantheon it still has not been reinforced the ceiling and it stood firm all these many years if you look up you see the sky you see the light and as the light changes throughout the day the interior of the pantheon changes and so it creates these dramatic shifts of light and mood the coffers on the ceiling if you look up you can see the pattern that they create uh these indentations in the ceiling that uh make it even more kind of effective because you can see the shadows changing and then um if you look on the right and you see that there's these niches and they're shrines and these shrines would have originally held statues of different gods uh that could be worshipped you could leave an offering there uh maybe burn some incense or something at the foot of the statue just below the oculus inside the center of the pantheon there is a very small little shallow pool so that water can gather just a little bit and it's like a reflection pool and then the water will drain off to the sides once that fills up but the whole idea is that this was considered to be the dome was like the dome of heaven you look upwards and your eyes are elevated and you even see past the hole and you go out into the sky and it's this idea of sending your prayers upwards to the heavens where the gods live and so the dome really came to symbolize this idea of a space that's both earthly but heavenly at the same time and that's important because later on christians are going to use dome instructions constructions in their churches and it's a similar idea they take this roman idea that was really pagan and they adopted and it becomes a christian concept another aspect of hadrian's life and his legacy is that he's responsible for establishing the cult of antinas and having all kinds of sculptures created to celebrate the life of antinas and so antinas was a greek uh young man and hadrian fell in love with him uh basically hadrian is what we would consider to be a gay man today um he was married to the daughter of trajan but apparently it was an affectionless marriage and um he met antinas when he was 40 about 46 or 47 and apparently fell head over heels in love with this young man and so uh that presented problems for an emperor to a degree because while it was acceptable for men to have male lovers on the side it was not considered appropriate for a male to be in love with another male you could have sex nobody talked about it but you couldn't be affectionate to another male and antinas became a companion on hadrian's trips and so he was his companion and you know his staff kind of looked the other way and um some people believe that this became a problem because people were going to talk about hadrian and antinas and the affection they shared however other people believe that might not be the case it's a complicated story because there's really very little known about antinas and um uh it's kind of shrouded in mystery because people didn't talk about homosexuality and oftentimes documents related to homosexuality got destroyed particularly by early christians so it becomes difficult to piece things together what is known though is that antinas died tragically and when he died tragically that's when hadrian was inconsolable he was beside himself with grief and he created a cult to antinus anti has died in egypt he actually drowned in the nile and it was under circumstances that people still don't understand some people suggest that he killed himself some people believe that he was murdered maybe by members of hadrian's staff some people believe that he willingly sacrificed himself because they were in egypt and there was a great osiris celebration at the time and one belief was that you could sacrifice yourself to improve the health of a loved one and for several years hadrian had been suffering from a whole bunch of health problems so some people have speculated that antinas killed himself hoping that it would restore the health of hadrian some people are more diabolical and they suggest that he was a sacrificial victim and that hadrian didn't have control of it or perhaps even knew about it but whatever the whatever happened uh we'll probably never know the full story but there's a lot of speculation about it out there like i said um once this happened hadrian was just devastated by the loss and he immediately ordered that um antinus become a god he deified him uh right then he stayed on in egypt and had his body mummified and he went through all the stages of mummification as they understood it at the time he um ordered busts and statues created of antinas he had temples built to antinas at the time as well perhaps the most significant thing he did at least it would seem like to us is he established a city that he named antinopolis and it was a city that was constructed on the banks of the nile uh where antinas died and it was uh you know it became a pretty well populated city although it was ultimately abandoned later on in history but it was known particularly while it was a city as being a mysterious city one that was associated with magic and one that was associated with all types of kind of mystical energy and it was a place that people went to seek answers and to seek magical cures and solutions so that kind of adds to the mystery of antinas these are two images of antinas they're two images i just showed you before were also of him his appearance changes because the cult spreads the cult is established in egypt but then it takes hold in greece it takes hold in the ancient near east it takes hold in other parts of the empire as far north as um not quite around germany the the borders of germany it goes up into that region but it was strongest in the mediterranean region and his appearance changes based upon where he is so here he is wearing the headdress associated with egyptian rulers here's another bust with him um depicted on the left and one of the features of antinas sculptures and of antinas as a person is he had this very big curly hair and so his curly hair often pops out from underneath caps and things that he's wearing this is an obelisk that hadrian had erected back in rome in honor of antinas and the cult of antinas it's likely that there were thousands of images of antinas constructed while he was celebrated as a cult figure he had private um altars devoted to him in people's households as well as public temples built to him he became a very popular god among a lot of different people he was considered a god of death and rebirth to many people and one that would come and aid people because he was human originally so he had a lot of compassion for people and he wanted to help people and so he became somebody that you could pray to in times of need and he would hear your prayers two more sculptures of antinas really got often done in classical greek style uh heroic nudity he is um one of the he's the third most prevalent sculpture still today of a roman citizen so there's more sculptures of him than almost every single emperor that ever existed except for two augustus is the top one and i forget who the number two is but uh antinas is the third most prevalent sculpture so there were so many of them that they still exist to this day and this is saying a lot too because once christians came to power in the 300s and 400s they particularly disliked uh antinas because he was associated with pagan also probably because there was this homosexual aspect to who he was and to his story and so they took particular um pleasure i suppose in destroying his temples and smashing his statues so there was a lot of idolatry kind of directed at images of antinas later on in history about 300 years later so the fact that so many survived really indicates that it was a very popular cult that he had now of course there are lots of popular cults at the same time i'll talk a little bit about that in a couple of lectures forward from here in the early christian period we'll talk about all the different cults that were popular but definitely he was one of the more popular ones like i said he appears as different figures in different areas so on the left he kind of looks like hermes or mercury dressed as a messenger god over on the right he's more like dressed as apollo in the ancient near east he took on aspects of an adventure hero uh associated sometimes with mithra who was the um the hero of a cult of mithra it just appears in a wide variety of different guises different things associated with him throughout the whole uh roman empire well the southern roman empire i should say hadrian even had a coin issued with his likeness on both sides so this is uh an antinus coin when hadrian did get back home he was reluctant to stay in rome itself he wasn't thrilled with the palace in rome and so he had himself constructed a villa that was about 20 miles away it is um typical of emperors ever since um the flavian dynasty to have built um villas outside of rome just to relax and to kind of take vacations but uh for hadrian he sort of made it the the center of his administrative life he had constructed this large villa and the section that is kind of um in the foreground here of this image was his private residence and then those buildings you see in the background were more administrative and helped run his um his government but it was interspersed with beautiful gardens with pools it had um three different types of baths hot baths cold baths and mineral baths it was you know we would consider it a resort uh any of us if we were there but it was imperial living at its best for hadrian and for the people who live there the servants the number of folks that stayed there full time what's interesting about hadrian's villa that people didn't realize at first is that there's a whole network of underground tunnels that reach uh from the administrative center to the private residence of hadrian and that it's quite a network of them and quite an engineering feat this is a detail of his kind of main getaway where he had this really lovely pool or lake um that was constructed it was surrounded by four walls so it was very private it was where he um you know went to relax it had a number of sculptures hit a really magnificent sculpture collection fascinated by greek sculptures of course as we've already noticed but also roman sculptures not only roman copies of greek sculptures but roman sculptures themselves and also he collected egyptian sculptures undoubtedly as a memento of hadrian in fact excuse me of antinas in fact after antinas's death he had a small miniature nile river constructed here at the um villa where he lived and it's believed that it's possible that the um the tomb of antinas might be somewhere on the grounds of hadrian's villa not yet discovered they've never discovered it anywhere and the only well a clue is that they found an inscription that suggested that he was buried in back in rome in hadrian's villa or perhaps in hadrian's villa so something for scholars to still find for archaeologists to poke around and look for is the tomb of antinas go there today you still see uh remnants of the architecture around this great pool as well as copies of statues that would have originally been there when it was first excavated in the 1800s a lot of the sculptures went to the vatican but a lot of them also went to private collectors they were sold so these are three that were there there were at least 12 sculptures of antinas that are known to have been there when um when it was excavated but other things like a copy of the discobolis by myron on the left or a crouching sculpture of venus from the hellenistic period was also there so he had really great collections of things and really good taste another feature of the villa at tivoli where hadrian was was that it featured great mosaics all kinds of different mosaics that decorated different areas of the um of the complex there were um abstract mosaics such as this one you see over on the right and then this great narrative one that shows centaurs that are battling these cats um in this kind of dramatic scene fight to the finish as this tiger is chomping on one and another is about to throw a big old rock on him the mosaic featuring the um drama masks on the left also was found at hadrian's villa the work on the right is titled the unswept floor and it's actually not from the villa but it's was created during the time of hadrian and probably my favorite mosaic because it depicts uh an unswept floor it's this very clever um image that shows a floor that's dirty with you know a chicken bone and a chicken foot and there's even a mouse there getting a snack gives you a sense of you know just sometimes it's hard to keep everything clean the last monument associated with hadrian is far to the north it is the what's known as hadrian's wall and it was a great big long wall that was created to separate britannia from the the pagan people to the to the north the barbarians to the north and to create a um a real barrier to uh not just for the people on the other side but many people believe that hadrian had this wall constructed because he felt like it was foolish for rome to continue to expand he felt like if you kept expanding you were ultimately going to fail you'd spread your resources to too far and so he wanted to establish a border that would say look this is it we're not going any further so it's just as much for the people to the south as it was for keeping people out it was to keep people in in a way to halt expansion or at least that's what a lot of scholars are thinking now that that was the impetus for his decision to construct a wall because although you know there were skirmishes between roman troops that were stationed up in britannia and uh the various groups to the north it wasn't as if it was a um a vital threat it wasn't as if it was something that really necessitated this drastic action another theory for the wall and it still exists it's 73 miles long so it was a it was an undertaking for the men to construct this wall another theory for why it was constructed is simply to impress the local inhabitants of the construction skills and the engineering skills of the romans that's kind of an excuse for any roman construction project as it all was about propaganda in terms of impressing uh conquered peoples there's also a theory that there was a large garrison that was stationed here a large group of soldiers that had been stationed here because it was a border area in britannia northern portion of the empire and there wasn't a lot of for these soldiers to do and so oftentimes they would get into trouble and they drank a lot and some people believed that this whole exercise was a way to get soldiers to do something to put them to work to have a significant project to engage with not that this would have been the sole reason but this perhaps was a contributing factor to the construction of a 73 mile long wall which really could not have kept anybody out if anybody wanted to either go around it or go over it they also split the men up so that every five miles there was a small fort that was maintained by a small group of soldiers so uh without having all the soldiers clustered together it separated them into these uh smaller more manageable groups and so that too could have played into that idea of keeping the soldiers out of trouble and uh and no longer being a nuisance to the locals if that is in case part of the reason that this was constructed after hadrian died he was succeeded by a man named antoninus pirate pius who ruled for over 35 years long rule and um he really had no major monuments that people still speak of in a survey class so we kind of just skip him so give a nod to antines pious he was succeeded by two co-rulers marcus aurelius and lucius varus uh lucius varus uh is the figure over on the right and uh he unfortunately died after only eight years of rule leaving marcus aurelius to rule the empire by himself marcus aurelius is known as kind of a philosopher emperor and really a wise man and the only artwork that's really associated him today is this great equestrian portrait of him it's done in bronze and it is one of the rare bronze statues to survive particularly when the christians came to power they melted down lots of bronze statues and if it was an emperor they just knocked it down anyway because they didn't want to be reminded of emperors but they thought that this one was constantine who was the first christian emperor so it was saved and spared and it still exists to this day and it shows marcus aurelius on horseback out visiting his troops uh as general and as emperor so that's gonna do it for this uh early empire uh the next the next um powerpoint will be much shorter than this one and we'll just focus on the end of the empire starting with marcus to realize his son uh commodus will uh stick him with the the decline of the empire because really he is the beginning of the end for um for the roman empire so we'll end this here and stay tuned for the next one