아우구스투스 황제와 수도 로마

Abstract

That the city of Rome did not show the dignified image appropriate to its imperial stature was a generally accepted self-image of the Romans during the last century B.C., especially among the principes viri who had travelled to the Hellenistic metropoleis such as Alexandria and Pergamum. Thus Julius Caesar in his last few years as dictator envisioned the metamorphosis of the Urbs, developing a master plan, of which the most substantial ingredients were to adorn and enlarge the city: the plans de urbe ornanda et augenda. Octavian, when he survived as the final victor through the civil war ensuing the demise of Julius Caesar, felt the same responsibility concerning the Urbs as his adoptive father had as a autocratic ruler, of reshaping it with the perspective of urban planning. Thus he inherited Caesar's master plan, though not with the same publicity as when he completed as an heir the construction works his adoptive father had left unfinished. Yet, with the exception of the plan to divert the Tiber to the west edge of the mons Vaticanus, Augustan master plan was following the same trek as Caesar's plans de urbe ornanda et augenda. This paper traces in a chronological order the major public operations, for which Octavian/Augustus was responsible directly or indirectly during the final years of his triumvirate and the following decades of his reign as princeps. It can't be denied that all the architectural and monumental results converged to the effect of “finding a city of bricks and leaving a city of marble” (Suetonius, Augustus 28. 3) as he himself seemed to have boasted towards the end of his reign, thus forcing upon the posterity the illusion that to embellish the Urbs with the imperial dignity had been consistently a top priority agenda in making decisions on pubic works. Yet, the illusion need to be balanced by the ad hoc strategy of producing propagandistic images of his and the new regime called Principate. The images of power were the immediate consideration rather than the synthetical image of the Urbs as the world city. In this perspective, we could detect two stages during the period in consideration: firstly, the late 30 B.C. 's and early 20 B.C.'s building operations within and around the historic center of the Urbs (i.e. the Forum Romanum as well as Capitolium and Palatium); secondly, the public works during the following two decades (27~7 B.C.) concentrated on the Campus Martius, a suburban area on the Tiber's left bank. The year of 7 B.C. looms large as the watershed marking the end of the major construction works of Augustan age. It seems as a natural corollary that the same year witnessed the administrative reform: the Servian 4 regions were replaced by 14 regions with suburban areas incorporated within the city precinct such as the Campus Martius and the Transtevere, thus making the Urbs enlarged and unwalled, open center of the world. A couple of distinctions between the two stages are easily detected other than the shift of the scene. In the former, the principes viri could still, though seemingly with the encouragement of Octavian/Augustus, initiate the works of construction or restoration as they had done all along the republican past, while in the latter the initiative in the public works came to be monopolized by the princeps and his relatives. Another change that occurred in transition to the second was about the nature of the public works. Unlike in the first stage, when the operations had been mostly related with monuments and official buildings, those of the second stage's were, at least partly, intended as facilities for public amusement and relaxation. The most prominent figure initiating this shift was M. Agrippa, Augustus' old confidant and son-in-law. Yet despite these shifts and changes, there had been lingering always the invariable motivation and purpose behind the great and small constructions in the Urbs: that of impressing on the viewers the image of power and enhancing the legitimacy and greatness of the new ruler and his dynasty. The image of the world center shining with marble monuments and buildings could be, all in all, seen as the byproduct enabled by the longevity of the Augustan reign.