Ancient Rome Chapter 7 PDF

## THE ROMAN EMPIRE ### FRAMING THE ERA **The Roman Emperor as World Conqueror** The name "Rome" almost invariably conjures images of power and grandeur, of mighty armies and fearsome gladiators, of marble cities and far-flung roads. Indeed, at the death of the emperor Trajan in 117 CE, the eter...

## THE ROMAN EMPIRE ### FRAMING THE ERA **The Roman Emperor as World Conqueror** The name "Rome" almost invariably conjures images of power and grandeur, of mighty armies and fearsome gladiators, of marble cities and far-flung roads. Indeed, at the death of the emperor Trajan in 117 CE, the eternal city was the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known. For the first time in history, a single government ruled an empire extending from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Nile, from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the Rhine, Danube, Thames, and beyond. The Romans presided over prosperous cities and frontier outposts on three continents, ruling virtually all of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Trajan, perhaps Rome's greatest general, had led the imperial army to victory in both the East and West, bringing vast new territories under Roman dominion. To celebrate his successes at home as well as abroad-in an era long before newspapers, television, and the Internet, Trajan, like his predecessors and successors as emperor of Rome, marshaled the power of art and architecture to communicate his version of events to the citizenry. A case in point is the 128-foot-tall column that Trajan erected in Rome to commemorate the defeat of Dacia. Its distinguishing new feature was the 625-foot frieze that winds around the shaft 23 times from bottom to top and presents the emperor's two military campaigns against the Dacians in the manner of a modern documentary film. * **Three details are illustrated here:** 1. In the top section, a group of Roman soldiers storms a Dacian fortress with their shields raised and joined to form a turtle-shell umbrella to protect them. 2. To the right, the battle won, Trajan, flanked by two lieutenants, views the severed Dacian heads that his soldiers have brought to him as evidence of the successful completion of their mission. 3. The middle detail shows the Romans tending to their wounded after a battle-an admission that the Dacian victory did not come easily. Even if the record is sharply skewed to glorify Trajan and his men, it suggests to the viewer that this is a balanced pictorial record of the war. Also unexpected is the third detail showing the construction of a fort. Most of the scenes on the Column of Trajan do not depict battles, but the routine business of warfare, including the transportation of supplies and the building of roads and bridges. The common denominator, however, is the presence of Trajan almost everywhere. His personal direction of all aspects of the Dacian campaigns-and in expanding Rome's empire on all fronts-is one of the central messages of the Column of Trajan. ### **ROME, CAPUT MUNDI** Within its borders lived millions of people of numerous races, religions, languages, and cultures: Britons and Gauls, Greeks and Egyptians, Africans and Syrians, Jews and Christians, to name but a few. Of all early cultures, the Roman most closely approximated today's world in its multicultural character. Roman monuments of art and architecture are the most conspicuous and numerous remains of antiquity worldwide. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa today, Roman temples and basilicas have an afterlife as churches. The powerful concrete vaults of ancient Roman buildings form the cores of modern houses, stores, restaurants, factories, and museums. Bullfights, sports events, operas, and rock concerts are staged in Roman amphitheaters. Ships dock in what were once Roman ports, and Western Europe's highway system still closely follows the routes of Roman roads. Ancient Rome also lives on in the Western world in concepts of law and government, in languages, in the calendar-even in the coins used daily. The art of the ancient Romans speaks a language that almost every Western viewer today can readily understand. Indeed, the diversity and complexity of Roman art foreshadowed the art of the modern world. The Roman use of art, especially portraits and narrative reliefs, to manipulate public opinion is similar to the carefully crafted imagery of contemporary political campaigns. And the Roman mastery of concrete construction began an architectural revolution still felt today. The center of the far-flung Roman Empire was the city on the Tiber River that, according to legend, Romulus founded on April 21, 753 BCE. Hundreds of years later, it would become the `caput mundi`, the "head [capital] of the world," but in the eighth century BCE, Rome consisted only of small huts clustered together on the Palatine Hill overlooking what was then uninhabited marshland. In the Archaic period, Rome was essentially an Etruscan city, both politically and culturally. Its first great shrine, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Best and Greatest) on the Capitoline Hill, was built by an Etruscan king, designed by an Etruscan architect, made of wood and mud brick in the Etruscan manner, and ### Art and Society **Who's Who in the Roman World** * **MONARCHY (753-509 BCE)** Latin and Etruscan kings ruled Rome from the city's founding by Romulus, its first king, until the revolt against Tarquinius Superbus (exact dates of rule unreliable). * **REPUBLIC (509-27 BCE)** The Republic lasted from the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus until the bestowing of the title of Augustus on Octavian, the grandnephew of Julius Caesar and victor over Mark Antony in the civil war that ended the Republic. * Marcellus, b. 268(?), d. 208 BCE; consul * Marius, b. 157, d. 86 BCE; consul * Sulla, b. 138, d. 79 BCE; consul and dictator * Pompey, b. 106, d. 48 BCE; consul * Julius Caesar, b. 100, d. 44 BCE; consul and dictator * Mark Antony, b. 83, d. 30 BCE; consul * **EARLY EMPIRE (27 BCE-96 CE)** The Early Empire began with the rule of Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors and continued until the end of the Flavian dynasty. * Augustus (Livia), r. 27 BCE-14 CE * Tiberius, r. 14-37 * Caligula, r. 37-41 * Claudius (Agrippina the Younger), r. 41-54 * Nero, r. 54-68 * Vespasian, r. 69-79 * Titus, r. 79-81 * Domitian, r. 81- 96 * **HIGH EMPIRE (96-192 CE)** The High Empire began with the rule of Nerva and the Spanish emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, and ended with the last emperor of the Antonine dynasty. * Nerva, r. 96-98 * Trajan (Plotina), r. 98-117 * Hadrian (Sabina), r. 117-138 * Antoninus Pius (Faustina the Elder), r. 138-161 * Marcus Aurelius (Faustina the Younger), r. 161-180 * Lucius Verus, coemperor with Marcus Aurelius, r. 161-169 * Commodus, r. 180-192 * **LATE EMPIRE (193-337 CE)** The Late Empire began with the Severan dynasty and included the so-called soldier emperors of the third century; the tetrarchs; and Constantine, the first Christian emperor. * Septimius Severus (Julia Domna), r. 193-211 * Caracalla (Plautilla), r. 211-217 * Severus Alexander, r. 222-235 * Philip the Arabian, r. 244-249 * Trajan Decius, r. 249-251 * Trebonianus Gallus, r. 251-253 * Aurelian, r. 270-275 * Diocletian, r. 284-305 * Constantine I, r. 306-337 **Architecture** The year 211 BCE was a turning point both for Rome and for Roman art. Breaking with precedent, Marcellus, conqueror of the fabulously wealthy Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse, brought back to Rome not only the usual spoils of war-captured arms and armor, gold and silver coins, and the like-but also the city's artistic patrimony. Thus began, in the words of the historian Livy, “the craze for works of Greek art”. Exposure to Greek sculpture and painting and to the splendid marble temples of the Greek gods increased as the Romans expanded their conquests beyond Italy. Greece became a Roman province in 146 BCE, and in 133 BCE the last king of Pergamon willed his kingdom to Rome. Nevertheless, although the Romans developed a virtually insatiable taste for Greek "antiques," the influence of Etruscan art and architecture persisted. The artists and architects of the Roman Republic drew on both Greek and Etruscan traditions for their paintings, sculptures, and buildings. **Temple of Portunus**: The mixing of Greek and Etruscan forms is the primary characteristic of the Republican-era Temple of Portunus, **Roman Concrete Construction** * **Barrel Vaults**: Also called the tunnel vault, the barrel vault is an extension of a simple arch, creating a semicylindrical ceiling over parallel walls. * **Groin Vaults**: A groin (or cross) vault is formed by the intersection at right angles of two barrel vaults of equal size. Besides appearing lighter than the barrel vault, the groin vault needs less buttressing. * **Hemispherical Domes**: The largest domed space in the ancient world for more than a millennium was the corbeled, beehive-shaped tholos of the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. **Roman Ancestor Portraits** In Republican Rome, ancestor portraits separated the old patrician families not only from the plebeian middle and lower classes of working citizens and former slaves but also from the newly wealthy and powerful of more modest origins. The case of Marius, a renowned Republican general who lacked a long and distinguished genealogy, is revealing. When his patrician colleagues in the Senate ridiculed him as a man who had no imagines (portrait masks) in his home, he resorted to defending himself by saying that his battle scars were his masks, the proof of his nobility. Patrician pride in genealogy was unquestionably the motivation for a unique portrait statue, datable to the late first century BCE, in which a man wearing a toga, the badge of Roman citizenship, holds in each hand a bust of one of his male forebears. The two heads he holds, which are probably likenesses of his father and grandfather, are characteristic examples of Republican portraiture of the first century BCE. The heads may be reproductions of wax or terracotta portraits. Marble or bronze heads would have been too heavy to support with one hand. They are not, however, wax imagines, because they are sculptures in the round, not masks. The statue nonetheless would have had the same effect on the observer as the spectacle of parading ancestral portraits at a patrician funeral. **Sculpture** The patrons of Republican temples and sanctuaries were in almost all cases men from old and distinguished families. Often they were victorious generals, like Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse, who used the spoils of war to finance public works. These aristocratic patricians were fiercely proud of their lineage. They kept likenesses of their ancestors in wood cupboards in their homes and paraded them at the funerals of prominent relatives. Portraiture was one way that the patrician class celebrated its elevated position in society. **Art for Freed Slaves** Historians and art historians alike tend to focus on the lives and monuments of famous individuals, but some of the most interesting remains of ancient Roman civilization are the artworks that ordinary people commissioned, especially former slaves - freedmen and freedwomen. Slavery was common in the Roman world. Indeed, at the end of the Republic, there were approximately two million slaves in Italy - roughly one slave for every three citizens. The very rich might own hundreds of slaves, but slaves could also be found in all but the poorest households. The practice was so much a part of Roman society that even slaves often became slave owners when their former masters freed them. Some gained freedom in return for meritorious service, others as bequests in their masters' wills. Most slaves died as slaves in service to their original or new owners. The most noteworthy artworks that Roman freedmen and freedwomen commissioned are the stone reliefs that regularly adorned their tomb facades. One of these reliefs depicts two men and a woman, all named Gessius or Gessia. At the left is Gessia Fausta and at the right, Gessius Primus. Both are the freed slaves of Publius Gessius, the freeborn citizen in the center, shown wearing a soldier's cuirass and portrayed in the standard Republican superrealistic fashion. As slaves, this couple had no legal standing. They were the property of Publius Gessius. According to Roman law, however, after gaining freedom the ex-slaves became people (though they still could not serve in the Roman army). These stern frontal portraits proclaim their new status as members of Roman society and their gratitude to Publius Gessius for granting them their freedom. As was the custom, the ex-slaves bear their patron's name. Therefore, whether they are sister and brother, wife and husband, or unrelated is unclear. The inscriptions on the relief, however, explicitly state that Gessius Primus provided the funds for the monument in his will and that Gessia Fausta, the only survivor of the three, directed the work. The relief thus depicts the living and the dead side by side, indistinguishable without the accompanying inscriptions. This theme is common in Roman art and proclaims that death does not break the bonds formed in life and that families will be reunited in the afterlife, as the emperor Antoninus Pius and an anonymous circus official expected to rejoin their wives after they too died. **Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius** On August 24, 79 CE (according to Pliny the Younger, but more likely a month or two later, based on new archaeological evidence), Mount Vesuvius, a long-dormant volcano, suddenly erupted. Many prosperous towns around the Bay of Naples (the ancient Greek city of Neapolis), among them Pompeii, were buried in a single day. The eruption was a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the Vesuvian cities, but a boon for archaeologists and art historians. When researchers first systematically explored the buried cities in the 18th century, the ruins had lain largely undisturbed for nearly 1,700 years, enabling a reconstruction of the art and life of Roman towns of the Late Republic and Early Empire to a degree impossible anywhere else. **Civic Architecture** Walking through Pompeii today is an unforgettable experience. The streets, with their heavy flagstone pavements and sidewalks, are still there, as are the stepping-stones pedestrians used to cross the streets without having to step in puddles. Ingeniously, the city planners placed these stones in such a way that vehicle wheels could straddle them, enabling supplies to be brought directly to the shops, taverns, and bakeries. Tourists still can visit the impressive concrete-vaulted rooms of Pompeii's public baths, sit in the seats of its theater and amphitheater, enter private homes with statue-filled gardens and dining- and bedrooms with elaborate frescoes, even walk among the tombs outside the city's walls. Pompeii is an archaeological time capsule and has been called the living city of the dead for good reason. **Forum**: The center of civic life in any Roman town was its forum (plural, fora), or public square. Usually located at the city's geographical center at the intersection of the main north-south street, the cardo, and the main east-west avenue, the decumanus, as at Timgad, the forum was nevertheless generally closed to all but pedestrian traffic. Pompeii's forum lies in the southwest corner of the expanded Roman city, but at the heart of the original town. The forum, originally just an open area, took on monumental form only after the town became a Roman colony in 80 BCE. Inspired by Hellenistic architecture, the Romans erected two-story colonnades on three sides of the long and narrow plaza. At the north end they constructed a Capitolium- a temple honoring the three chief Roman gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Pompeii's Capitolium is of standard Republican type, constructed of tufa covered with fine white stucco and combining an Etruscan plan with Corinthian columns. It faces into the civic square, dominating the area, which contrasts with the siting of Greek temples which stood in isolation and could be approached and viewed from all sides, like colossal statues on giant stepped pedestals. Roman fora, like Etrusco-Roman temples, have a chief side, a focus of attention. The area within the porticos of the forum at Pompeii was empty, except for statues portraying local dignitaries and, later, Roman emperors. This is where the citizens conducted daily commerce and held festivities. All around the square, behind the colonnades, were secular and religious structures, including the towns administrative offices. Most important was the basilica at the southwest corner. It is the earliest well-preserved building of its kind. Also constructed by the Roman colonists, the basilica was Pompeii's law court and chief administrative building. In plan, it resembled the forum itself: long and narrow, with two stories of internal columns dividing the space into a central nave and flanking aisles. This scheme had a long afterlife in architectural history and will be familiar to anyone who has ever entered a church. **Amphiteater**: Shorty after the Romans took control of Pompeii, two of the town's officials, Quinctius Valgus and Marcus Porcius, used their own funds (a common expectation of wealthy magistrates) to erect a large amphitheater at the southeastern end of town. The earliest permanent amphitheater known, it could seat some 20,000 spectators - more than the entire population of the town even a century and a half after its construction. The donors would have had choice reserved seats in the new entertainment center. In fact, seating was by civic and military rank. The Roman social hierarchy was therefore on display at every event. The word amphitheater means "double theater" and Roman amphitheaters resemble two Greek theaters put together. Amphitheaters nonetheless stand in sharp contrast, both architecturally and functionally, to Greco-Roman theaters, where actors performed comedies and tragedies. Amphitheaters were where the Romans staged bloody gladiatorial combats and wild animal hunts. Greek theaters were always on natural hillsides, but supporting an amphitheaters continuous elliptical cavea required building an artificial mountain. Only concrete, unknown to the Greeks, could easily meet that challenge. In the Pompeii amphitheater, shallow concrete barrel vaults form a giant retaining wall holding up the earthen mound and stone seats. Barrel vaults running all the way through the elliptical mountain of earth form the tunnels leading to the arena, the central area where the violent contests took place. (Arena is Latin for "sand," which soaked up the blood of the wounded and killed.) **Domestic Architecture** The evidence from Pompeii regarding Roman domestic architecture is unparalleled anywhere else and is the most precious byproduct of the volcanic eruption of 79 CE. **House of the Vettii**: One of the best preserved houses at Pompeii, partially rebuilt by the Italian excavators, is the House of the Vettii, an old second-century BCE house remodeled and repainted after the earthquake of 62 CE. A photograph taken in the fauces shows the impluvium in the center of the atrium; the opening in the roof above; and, in the background, the peristyle garden with its marble tables and splendid mural paintings dating to the last years of the Vesuvian city. At that time, two brothers, Aulus Vettius Restitutus and Aulus Vettius Conviva, owned the house. They were freedmen who probably had made their fortune as merchants. Their wealth enabled them to purchase and furnished the kind of fashionable townhouse that in an earlier era only patricians could have acquired. **Painting and Mosaic** The houses of Pompeii and neighboring cities and the villas in the countryside around Mount Vesuvius have yielded a treasure trove of mural paintings - the most complete record of the changing fashions in interior decoration found anywhere in the ancient world. The sheer quantity of these paintings tells a great deal about both the prosperity and the tastes of the times. How many homes today, even of the very wealthy, have custom-painted murals in nearly every room? Roman wall paintings were true frescoes. First, the painter prepared the wall by using a trowel to apply several layers of plaster (mixed with marble dust if the patron could afford it). Only then could painting begin. Finally, when the painter completed work and the surface dried, an assistant polished the wall to achieve a lustrous finish. In the early years of exploration at Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, interest in Roman wall paintings focused almost exclusively on the figural panels that formed part of the overall mural designs, especially those depicting Greek myths. The excavators cut the panels out of the walls and transferred them to the royal collection in Naples. In time, more enlightened archaeologists put an end to the practice of cutting pieces out of the walls and began to give serious attention to the mural designs as a whole. Toward the end of the 19th century, August Mau turned scholars' attention to the overall compositions of the Roman wall paintings. He divided the various mural painting schemes into four "Pompeian Styles". Mau's classification system, although later refined and modified in detail; was an important contribution to the study of Roman art and still serves as the basis for describing Roman frescoes. * **First Style**: In Mau's First Style, the decorator's aim was to imitate costly marble panels using painted stucco relief. * **Second Style**: After 80 BCE, a new approach to mural design became more popular. * **Third Style**: After 15 BCE, Roman painters introduced the Third Style. Second Style painters did not aim to create the illusion of an elegant marble wall, as First Style painters sought to do. * **Fourth Style**: A taste for illusionism returned in the Fourth Style of mural painting which became popular in the 50s CE. Characterized by the reintroduction of architectural vistas seen through the painted walls, the Fourth Style nonetheless cannot be confused with the Second Style. **Roman Ancestor Portraits** In Republican Rome, ancestor portraits separated the old patrician families not only from the plebeian middle and lower classes of working citizens and former slaves but also from the newly wealthy and powerful of more modest origins. The case of Marius, a renowned Republican general who lacked a long and distinguished genealogy, is revealing. When his patrician colleagues in the Senate ridiculed him as a man who had no imagines (portrait masks) in his home, he resorted to defending himself by saying that his battle scars were his masks, the proof of his nobility. Patrician pride in genealogy was unquestionably the motivation for a unique portrait statue, datable to the late first century BCE, in which a man wearing a toga, the badge of Roman citizenship, holds in each hand a bust of one of his male forebears. The two heads he holds, which are probably likenesses of his father and grandfather, are characteristic examples of Republican portraiture of the first century BCE. The heads may be reproductions of wax or terracotta portraits. Marble or bronze heads would have been to heavy to support with one hand. They are not, however, wax imagines, because they are sculptures in the round, not masks. The statue nonetheless would have had the same effect on the observer as the spectacle of parading ancestral portraits at a patrician funeral. **Sculpture** The patrons of Republican temples and sanctuaries were in almost all cases men from old and distinguished families. Often they were victorious generals, like Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse, who used the spoils of war to finance public works. These aristocratic patricians were fiercely proud of their lineage. They kept likenesses of their ancestors in wood cupboards in their homes and paraded them at the funerals of prominent relatives. Portraiture was one way that the patrician class celebrated its elevated position in society. **Art for Freed Slaves** Historians and art historians alike tend to focus on the lives and monuments of famous individuals, but some of the most interesting remains of ancient Roman civilization are the artworks that ordinary people commissioned, especially former slaves - freedmen and freedwomen. Slavery was common in the Roman world. Indeed, at the end of the Republic, there were approximately two million slaves in Italy - roughly one slave for every three citizens. The very rich might own hundreds of slaves, but slaves could also be found in all but the poorest households. The practice was so much a part of Roman society that even slaves often became slave owners when their former masters freed them. Some gained freedom in return for meritorious service, others as bequests in their masters' wills. Most slaves died as slaves in service to their original or new owners. The most noteworthy artworks that Roman freedmen and freedwomen commissioned are the stone reliefs that regularly adorned their tomb facades. One of these reliefs depicts two men and a woman, all named Gessius or Gessia. At the left is Gessia Fausta and at the right, Gessius Primus. Both are the freed slaves of Publius Gessius, the freeborn citizen in the center, shown wearing a soldier's cuirass and portrayed in the standard Republican superrealistic fashion. As slaves, this couple had no legal standing. They were the property of Publius Gessius. According to Roman law, however, after gaining freedom the ex-slaves became people (though they still could not serve in the Roman army). These stern frontal portraits proclaim their new status as members of Roman society and their gratitude to Publius Gessius for granting them their freedom. As was the custom, the ex-slaves bear their patron's name. Therefore, whether they are sister and brother, wife and husband, or unrelated is unclear. The inscriptions on the relief, however, explicitly state that Gessius Primus provided the funds for the monument in his will and that Gessia Fausta, the only survivor of the three, directed the work. The relief thus depicts the living and the dead side by side, indistinguishable without the accompanying inscriptions. This theme is common in Roman art and proclaims that death does not break the bonds formed in life and that families will be reunited in the afterlife, as the emperor Antoninus Pius and an anonymous circus official expected to rejoin their wives after they too died. **Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius** On August 24, 79 CE (according to Pliny the Younger, but more likely a month or two later, based on new archaeological evidence), Mount Vesuvius, a long-dormant volcano, suddenly erupted. Many prosperous towns around the Bay of Naples (the ancient Greek city of Neapolis), among them Pompeii, were buried in a single day. The eruption was a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the Vesuvian cities, but a boon for archaeologists and art historians. When researchers first systematically explored the buried cities in the 18th century, the ruins had lain largely undisturbed for nearly 1,700 years, enabling a reconstruction of the art and life of Roman towns of the Late Republic and Early Empire to a degree impossible anywhere else. **Civic Architecture ** Walking through Pompeii today is an unforgettable experience. The streets, with their heavy flagstone pavements and sidewalks, are still there, as are the stepping-stones pedestrians used to cross the streets without having to step in puddles. Ingeniously, the city planners placed these stones in such a way that vehicle wheels could straddle them, enabling supplies to be brought directly to the shops, taverns, and bakeries. Tourists still can visit the impressive concrete-vaulted rooms of Pompeii's public baths, sit in the seats of its theater and amphitheater, enter private homes with statue-filled gardens and dining- and bedrooms with elaborate frescoes, even walk among the tombs outside the city's walls. Pompeii is an archaeological time capsule and has been called the living city of the dead for good reason. **Forum**: The center of civic life in any Roman town was its forum (plural, fora), or public square. Usually located at the city's geographical center at the intersection of the main north-south street, the cardo, and the main east-west avenue, the decumanus, as at Timgad, the forum was nevertheless generally closed to all but pedestrian traffic. Pompeii's forum lies in the southwest corner of the expanded Roman city, but at the heart of the original town. The forum, originally just an open area, took on monumental form only after the town became a Roman colony in 80 BCE. Inspired by Hellenistic architecture, the Romans erected two-story colonnades on three sides of the long and narrow plaza. At the north end, they constructed a Captiolium - a temple honoring the three chief Roman gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Pompeii's Capitolium is of standard Republican type, constructed of tufa covered with fine white stucco and combining an Etruscan plan with Corinthian columns. It faces into the civic square, dominating the are, which contrasts with the siting of Greek temples which stood in isolation and could be approached and viewed from all sides, like colossal statues on giant stepped pedestals. Roman fora, like Etrusco-Roman temples, have a chief side, a focus of attention. The area within the porticos of the forum at Pompeii was empty, except for statues portraying local dignitaries and, later, Roman emperors. This is where the citizens conducted daily commerce and held festivities. All around the square, behind the colonnades, were secular and religious structures, including the towns administrative offices. Most important was the basilica at the southwest corner. It is the earliest well-preserved building of its kind. Also constructed by the Roman colonists, the basilica was Pompeii's law court and chief administrative building. In plan, it resembled the forum itself: long and narrow, with two stories of internal columns dividing the space into a central nave and flanking aisles. This scheme had a long afterlife in architectural history and will be familiar to anyone who has ever entered a church. **Amphiteater**: Shortly after the Romans took control of Pompeii, two of the town's officials, Quinctius Valgus and Marcus Porcius, used their own funds (a common expectation of wealthy magistrates) to erect a large amphitheater at the southeastern end of town. The earliest permanent amphitheater known, it could seat some 20,000 spectators - more than the entire population of the town even a century and a half after its construction. The donors would have had choice reserved seats in the new entertainment center. In fact, seating was by civic and military rank. The Roman social hierarchy was therefore on display at every event. The word amphitheater means "double theater" and Roman amphitheaters resemble two Greek theaters put together. Amphitheaters nonetheless stand in sharp contrast, both architecturally and functionally, to Greco-Roman theaters, where actors performed comedies and tragedies. Amphitheaters were where the Romans staged bloody gladiatorial combats and wild animal hunts. Greek theaters were always on natural hillsides, but supporting an amphitheaters continuous elliptical cavea required building an artificial mountain. Only concrete, unknown to the Greeks, could easily meet that challenge. In the Pompeii amphitheater, shallow concrete barrel vaults form a giant retaining wall holding up the earthen mound and stone seats. Barrel vaults running all the way through the elliptical mountain of earth form the tunnels leading to the arena, the central area where the violent contests took place. (Arena is Latin for "sand," which soaked up the blood of the wounded and killed.) **Domestic Architecure ** The evidence from Pompeii regarding Roman domestic architecture is unparalleled anywhere else and is the most precious byproduct of the volcanic eruption of 79 CE. **House of the Vettii**: One of the best preserved houses at Pompeii, partially rebuilt by the Italian excavators, is the *House of the Vettii*, an old second-century BCE house remodeled and repainted after the earthquake of 62 CE. A photograph taken in the fauces shows the impluvium in the center of the atrium; the opening in the roof above; and, in the background, the peristyle garden with its marble tables and splendid mural paintings dating to the last years of the Vesuvian city. At that time, two brothers, Aulus Vettius Restitutus and Aulus Vettius Conviva, owned the house. They were freedmen who probably had made their fortune as merchants. Their wealth enabled them to purchase and furnished the kind of fashionable townhouse that in an earlier era only patricians could have acquired. **Painting and Mosaic** The houses of Pompeii and neighboring cities and the villas in the countryside around Mount Vesuvius have yielded a treasure trove of mural paintings - the most complete record of the changing fashions in interior decoration found anywhere in the ancient world. The sheer quantity of these paintings tells a great deal about both the prosperity and the tastes of the times. How many homes today, even of the very wealthy, have custom-painted murals in nearly every room? Roman wall paintings were true frescoes. First, the painter prepared the wall by using a trowel to apply several layers of plaster (mixed with marble dust if the patron could afford it). Only then could painting begin. Finally, when the painter completed work and the surface dried, an assistant polished the wall to achieve a lustrous finish. In the early years of exploration at Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, interest in Roman wall paintings focused almost exclusively on the figural panels that formed part of the overall mural designs, especially those depicting Greek myths. The excavators cut the panels out of the walls and transferred them to the royal collection in Naples. In time, more enlightened archaeologists put an end to the practice of cutting pieces out of the walls and began to give serious attention to the mural designs as a whole. Toward the end of the 19th century, August Mau turned scholars' attention to the overall compositions of the Roman wall paintings. He divided the various mural painting schemes into four "Pompeian Styles". Mau's classification system, although later refined and modified in detail, was an important contribution to the study of Roman art and still serves as the basis for describing Roman frescoes. * **First Style**: In Mau's First Style, the decorator's aim was to imitate costly marble panels using painted stucco relief. * **Second Style**: After 80 BCE, a new approach to mural design became more popular. * **Third Style**: After 15 BCE, Roman painters introduced the Third Style. Second Style painters did not aim to create the illusion of an elegant marble wall, as First Style painters sought to do. * **Fourth Style**: A taste for illusionism returned in the Fourth Style of mural painting which became popular in the 50s CE. Characterized by the reintroduction of architectural vistas seen through the painted walls, the Fourth Style nonetheless cannot be confused with the Second Style. **Roman Ancestor Portraits** In Republican Rome, ancestor portraits separated the old patrician families not only from the plebeian middle and lower classes of working citizens and former slaves but also from the newly wealthy and powerful of more modest origins. The case of Marius, a renowned Republican general who lacked a long and distinguished genealogy, is revealing. When his patrician colleagues in the Senate ridiculed him as a man who had no imagines (portrait masks) in his home, he resorted to defending himself by saying that his battle scars were his masks, the proof of his nobility. Patrician pride in genealogy was unquestionably the motivation for a unique portrait statue, datable to the late first century BCE, in which a man wearing a toga, the badge of Roman citizenship, holds in each hand a bust of one of his male forebears. The two heads he holds, which are probably likenesses of his father and grandfather, are characteristic examples of Republican portraiture of the first century BCE. The heads may be reproductions of wax or terracotta portraits. Marble or bronze heads would have been too heavy to support with one hand. They are not, however, wax imagines, because they are sculptures in the round, not masks. The statue nonetheless would have had the same effect on the observer as the spectacle of parading ancestral portraits at a patrician funeral. **Sculpture** The patrons of Republican temples and sanctuaries were in almost all cases men from old and distinguished families. Often they were victorious generals, like Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse, who used the spoils of war to finance public works. These aristocratic patricians were fiercely proud of their lineage. They kept likenesses of their ancestors in wood cupboards in their homes and paraded them at the funerals of prominent relatives. Portraiture was one way that the patrician class celebrated its elevated position in society. * **Verism**:The subjects of these portraits were almost exclusively men (and, occasionally, women) of advanced age, for generally only elders held power in the Republic. **Art for Freed Slaves** Historians and art historians alike tend to focus on the lives and monuments of famous individuals, but some of the most interesting remains of ancient Roman civilization are the artworks that ordinary people commissioned, especially former slaves - freedmen and freedwomen. Slavery was common in the Roman world. Indeed, at the end of the Republic, there were approximately two million slaves in Italy - roughly one slave for every three citizens. The very rich might own hundreds of slaves, but slaves could also be found in all but the poorest households. The practice was