Diane Favro

Pater urbis: Augustus as City Father of Rome

Rome in the mid-first century B. C. projected an unattractive image. The urban infrastructure had long been mismanaged. Even public temples showed the effects of neglect. Focusing on immediate solutions solvable in a single term in office, Republican magistrates could not deal effectively with problems of urban care. Rather than enforcing extant regulations, the state relied inefficiently on private efforts and civil suits to maintain and protect the built environment. As a result, legal restrictions only marginally curbed poor construction and speculation. At the end of the millennium, Augustus assumed the role of pater patriae. As benevolent father, he exerted control over the Roman people at every level. Using a skillful combination of carrot and stick, he intervened in all aspects of the urban environment, building and repairing structures and reshaping legal and administrative provisions for urban care. For maximum efficiency, he redefined existing offices and established a clear hierarchy of responsibility. Exploiting the office of curator, he made appointments for lengthy terms and created permanent bureaucratic staffs. He involved every class in the care of the capital and made sure that all officeholders owed their allegiance to him personally. His efforts coalesced in 7 B. C. with the establishment of fourteen new administrative regions. Seen in totality, Augustus9s seemingly ad hoc provisions for fire fighting, water distribution, building maintenance, and urban safety reflect a consistent policy of social control. His efforts to create a functional, attractive, and enduring urban environment were both paternal and calculated.

Meaning and Experience: Urban History from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

U jrban History is contested territory. Architectural historians, sociologists, historians, geographers, economists, and archaeologists, among others, lay claim to this field. While interdisciplinarity is generally touted and praised, the realities of American university evaluation systems, the confining grasp of historical periodicity, and the focused mission statements of many journals have often hindered crossover work. The traditional distinction has been between urban historians trained in the broad dis-

Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ

ABSTRACT The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, exploited architecture to convey his sophisticated propaganda. He famously boasted to have found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble. This claim has been considered an apt metaphor for the establishment of an imperial state, though the quantitative, physical veracity of the boast has never been fully interrogated. A team from UCLA mapped and modeled the marble projects added to Rome in the decades of Augustan power, using rule-based procedural modeling to generate numerous 3D, interactive, geo-temporal simulations of the entire cityscape with each marble intervention placed in situ topographically and chronologically. Broad, pan-urban views of the city’s evolution revealed that Augustan marble projects were neither overwhelming in number nor readily visible. Examination of the urban experience over time and space, however, revealed that marble construction had a constant and pervasive impact. Daily urban residents found their movements blocked by marble transports and their senses bombarded by the noisy, dusty work at construction sites. Thus, it was not the rhetoric conveyed by architecture that justified Augustus’ claim, but the rhetoric of the building act that spoke loudly and persuasively in situ.