Today's lecture I have called, as you can see,

"The Mother of All Forums: Civic Architecture in Rome

Under Trajan."

And I think you'll see what I mean when we look both at a

Trajanic bath building, and also the Forum of Trajan in

Rome, what I mean by 'Mother of all

Forums.'

These were gargantuan buildings, bigger than anything

that we have seen before, and interesting in all kinds of

ways.

We left off with Nerva, with the emperor Nerva.

And you'll recall that Nerva was old, and in fact also

relatively sickly, when he became emperor of Rome.

You'll also remember--and I remind you of his portrait on

the left-hand side of the screen--

you'll also recall that he was a member of the Senate,

and that he was chosen by the Senate,

one of their own, to become emperor of Rome,

the first emperor to come from the senatorial ranks in the

history of Rome, and he was very popular with

the Senate.

But Nerva recognized quite early on that,

although he was popular with the Senate and with the

aristocracy, he was not a favorite of the

army, and he realized that was not a good position to be in,

and so he wisely decided, very early on,

that he would select the most popular military man and the

most highly successful military man in Rome,

a man by the name of Trajan, as his heir.

And so Nerva adopts Trajan--and you see Trajan's portrait on the

right-hand side of the screen-- Nerva adopts Trajan in 97 A.D.,

so that in 98, when Nerva dies--because he

dies after only sixteen months in office--

when Nerva dies, Trajan succeeds him without

contest.

Trajan was an extraordinary emperor for Rome.

There are a number of important points about Trajan that should

be made that have an impact on our understanding and analysis

of his architecture.

One of those is he's the first Roman emperor to be born outside

of Italy.

He was born in Spain, the first emperor born in

Spain.

That's not to say that Spain was the boondocks,

by any stretch of the imagination.

Spain had already been colonized by Rome and was very

highly developed with regard to its civilization.

He also came to power as a relatively young man.

He was only 45 years of age--a couple of years younger than

Obama-- and consequently he was in--and

he was in very good physical shape,

and so he had the physical wherewithal to be the kind of

energetic emperor that Rome needed at this particular point.

He undertook many military campaigns,

and very successfully, and he was the emperor that

extended Rome to its furthest reaches,

to its greatest borders, to its most extensive borders,

during his reign.

And actually these were borders that were never gone beyond.

After this point, we'll see that the emperor

Hadrian consolidates the extent of the Empire,

as reached by Trajan, and no one ever takes it beyond

that.

So this is going to be the furthest extent of the Empire

that we'll see in the course of the semester.

And he was also extremely wise when it came to his choice of

the kinds of buildings that he wanted to put up,

because he followed in the footsteps of Vespasian and

Titus, by favoring major public

architecture in Rome, and by eschewing private

architecture.

He wanted, above all, to disassociate himself from

Nero, and from Domitian, who had favored palatial

architecture, as you'll recall.

And so he builds public architecture in Rome,

and allies himself in this regard to such earlier emperors

as Augustus and as Claudius and as the Flavian dynasts,

and we're going to see that in his building projects today.

Like so many other emperors, when he first came to power,

he looked around to see which buildings had fallen into

disrepair, and he decided to restore as

many of those as he could.

And he chose very carefully.

Again, he obviously did not choose buildings of Nero,

many of which had already been destroyed,

in any case, but rather looked back further,

in fact, dug deep into the Republic,

a time, a simpler time in many respects,

and a time prior to the shenanigans of the monarchically

minded emperors like Nero and Domitian,

and he restored buildings from the Republic and from the

Augustan period.

And he looked back, for example,

to the Forum of Caesar in Rome, the Forum Iulium,

which you all know well, and we've talked about it

before, and I'm not going to discuss it in any detail today.

Just to remind you that it began to be restored--

that is, the Forum of Julius Caesar--

under Domitian, and that that restoration was

completed by Trajan at some point during his reign,

between 98 and 117 A.D.

And I remind you of that here.

You'll recall its location, right next to the Victor

Emmanuel Monument in Rome.

You'll remember that even though it was restored by

Domitian and Trajan, it has fallen on hard times.

And if you look at the Temple of Venus Genetrix,

you see that all that survives, besides the podium and the

staircase, are three columns from that

restored version, by Trajan.

You see the same three columns over here,

and then you'll recall the great open space,

with colonnades on either side, and then the market area,

the shops or tabernae on the left.

I showed you this view as well, pointing out one of the

architectural blocks that belonged to the restored

building, the building under Trajan.

And you can see that Trajan continues this interest in

ornamentation that was characteristic of the Flavian

period: very ornamental architectural decoration,

very deeply carved, with a strong contrast between

light and dark.

So he does continue this Flavian interest in very

elaborate architectural decoration.

You'll remember that the Temple of Venus Genetrix,

in the Forum of Julius Caesar, had a pediment that had in the

center of that pediment a scene depicting Venus rising from the

sea.

And there is other Venus imagery, and I show you a

detail-- and it's on your Monument

List--I show you a detail of part of a frieze that depicts

cupids-- chubby, winged babies,

as you can see here, cupids--who are carrying the

arms--you can see one of them with a sword sheath over here--

they are carrying the arms and armor of Mars:

Mars, of course, the consort of

Venus, and Mars making reference also to military victory.

This frieze, as far as we can tell,

does belong to the Trajanic renovation of the building,

but it probably does look back to an earlier Julian frieze that

decorated the original temple in Rome.

And I use that restoration of the Temple of Venus Genetrix,

in the Forum of Julius Caesar, as an example of the kind of

restoration work that Trajan embarked on,

at the beginning of his principate.

But much more important to us today are two buildings,

the first a bath, and the second a forum,

that are examples of the devotion that Trajan had to

public architecture during his reign.

And I show you a view here, in fact, a plan of the

so-called Baths of Trajan in Rome that were dedicated in A.D.

109.

As you can see from the Monument List,

we know the architect in this particular case.

It is Apollodorus of Damascus.

And his name says a lot about him: Apollodorus from Damascus,

modern Syria.

So it's very interesting.

We have an emperor from Spain and an architect from Syria,

who worked together.

This is a sign that things are beginning to change in the Roman

Empire, as the Romans--as Trajan extends those borders even

further.

It brings in even more multifaceted civilizations

around the world, and talent begins to pour into

Rome from all of those places.

Apollodorus of Damascus, as we'll see today,

was an extraordinary architect, right up there with Severus and

Celer, and with Rabirius:

in fact, one could argue even the equal of Rabirius.

And what's particularly interesting is that Apollodorus

of Damascus, like Severus and Celer before

him, appears to have been, above all, a great engineer.

He actually accompanied Trajan on Trajan's military campaigns,

and served as Trajan's military architect.

So his first commissions were building bridges--

I'm going to show you a reference to one today--

building bridges, or building forts and camps on

Trajan's military campaigns, and then using that expertise,

ingratiating himself with the emperor,

who sees that he is enormously talented--

because Trajan participated in these campaigns himself--

seeing how talented he was, and then putting him in charge

of his building projects in Rome,

which is really quite interesting.

And so these projects are not only aesthetically pleasing and

fascinating, but also show extraordinary

engineering skill on the part of the major designer,

namely Apollodorus of Damascus.

Now these Baths of Trajan are very interesting in all kinds of

ways.

You can already see, by looking at the plan,

their location.

They are located on the Esquiline Hill and part of the

Oppian Hill, which I don't think I've mentioned

before--O-p-p-i-a-n, the smaller Oppian Hill.

And the Baths of Titus--well let me remind you first that the

Domus Aurea of Nero was built, in part, on the Esquiline Hill.

And you'll recall the so-called Esquiline Wing,

which is the one wing of Nero's Domus Aurea that is still

preserved underground.

You'll recall that after Nero's damnatio memoriae,

and the coming to power of the Flavian dynasty,

that Vespasian and Titus, and even Domitian,

razed to the ground Nero's buildings--

Vespasian did that--and then he and Titus and Domitian built new

buildings, on top of those,

and chose to make those buildings the kind of public

buildings that the citizenry as a whole would enjoy;

from the Colosseum and amphitheater to the Baths of

Titus.

And you see again the Baths of Titus here, located right again

on top of this area that originally belonged to Nero's

Domus Aurea.

Trajan follows suit.

He not only is interested in public architecture,

like Vespasian and Titus before him,

but he follows their lead in building these buildings on top

of earlier structures, now destroyed, of Nero.

So it's again this same message, giving back to the

people the land that Nero had taken illegally from Rome during

his reign.

The Baths of Trajan are based, in large part,

on the plan of the Baths of Titus, with some additions.

But you can see the extraordinary difference in

scale.

The Baths of Titus were not small, and yet the Baths of

Trajan are at least three, if not four or more,

times the size of the Baths of Titus.

So this tells us something again about the grandiosity of

the vision of Trajan, about the funds that he had at

his disposal, and he got those funds,

in large part, because of all these military

victories in which he took all kinds of spoils and booty,

which he used to fund his building campaigns in Rome.

And it also tells us something about his ambitions.

Now I don't want you to get the impression that we never had big

buildings before.