Augustus

The location was chosen with great care, for Octavian wanted his residence to signal and embody his role in the commonwealth. Near it stood a hut, built on the hill’s natural tufa and with a sloping thatched roof, its reed walls daubed in clay. This was said to be the home of Romulus, Rome’s founder, and was carefully preserved in his honor. By closely associating himself with Rome’s beginnings, Octavian was telling the Roman world that he stood for traditional values, for mos maiorum, the customs of ancestors.

There was no question about it in anyone’s mind: Rome did not look like the capital of a great empire. Over the centuries, the city had grown untidily and organically. There were no broad avenues and few open spaces, apart from the Forum and the forum boarium. Few streets were wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another and most of them were unpaved. (In the daytime there was no wheeled transport, for, in an attempt to eliminate daytime traffic jams, Julius Caesar had restricted it to the hours after dark; the night clattered with the cacophony of wooden carts.) Projecting balconies and upper rooms sometimes nearly touched one another.

The rich lived in houses with no outside windows, so that it was possible (as in traditional Arab town houses) to escape the urban hubbub; rooms were grouped around one or more open-air courtyards. The poor rented single rooms or crowded into multistory apartment blocks, or insulae. These were often jerry-built and liable to fire or collapse.

Shops lined many of the main streets, but they were usually no more than a ground-floor room with a masonry or wooden counter for selling goods and a space at the back for stock. All kinds of goods were on display—jewelry, clothing and fabrics, pots and pans, and books. There were numerous bars and restaurants, catering mainly to people from the lower classes, whose houses did not have properly equipped kitchens.

Rome was a city of horrible smells. Rubbish and sewage, even, occasionally, human corpses, were tipped into the street. Passersby were so often hit by the contents of chamber pots emptied from the second floor or the roof that laws were passed regulating the damages that could be claimed.

City life was made bearable only by the ready availability of water. Four aqueducts (the first of them built in the fourth century B.C.), high arcades, strode across the land, bringing fresh, clean water from springs and lakes miles away. The water was piped to fountains, some of them no more than stone troughs, in the small public squares that dotted Rome. The rich and famous could obtain the Senate’s permission to tap the pipes. Ordinary citizens collected water from the nearest fountain or had it delivered by a water seller.

This abundance of water made possible one of Rome’s most popular pastimes, going to the public baths. These received their own supply and were much like modern Turkish baths or hammams. The price of entry was so small that everyone except the poorest could afford it. Many Romans would go to the baths every day, often in the early afternoon, after work and before the evening meal. Here they could meet friends and exchange gossip.

In 33, Octavian and Agrippa were back in Rome from Illyricum. How could they give the regime legitimacy, they asked themselves, how persuade public opinion that, after the long years of division, bloodshed, and power politics, Octavian meant to govern in the people’s interest, not just his own?

They found an answer in their run-down megalopolis. Investment in public buildings and services would achieve three useful purposes. First, it would improve the city’s grandeur, making its appearance worthy of its role as the capital of the known world. Second, the quality of life of Rome’s volatile citizenry would be enhanced. Third, the refurbishment of the city’s architectural heritage would be the first concrete illustration of Octavian’s commitment to restoring Rome’s antique values. An appeal to the old ways was a powerful means of sweetening the revolutionary nature of the Triumvirate.

Octavian called on his generals to signal their successes in the field by restoring one or another Roman landmark at their personal expense. They embellished temples and basilicas, and on the Campus Martius the extremely competent commander Titus Statilius Taurus built Rome’s first stone amphitheater.

But a diet of visually splendid grands projets was not enough. The average inhabitant of Rome must feel some personal benefit from these public works.

In 33 B.C., Agrippa took up the post of aedile—an unusual step, even a self-demotion, for he had already served as consul, the state’s highest post.