In the one hundred years between A.D.

98 and A.D.

192, Rome had five emperors: Trajan,

Hadrian, Antonius Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus --

six if we count Lucius Verus, who was co-emperor with Marcus

Aurelius for several years.

In the fifty years following the death of the last of the

Severan emperors, a young man by the name of

Alexander Severus, who died in 235 A.D.,

Rome had twenty acknowledged emperors,

and many more pretenders to imperial power.

Rarely did anyone hold onto power for more than a few years,

and some of them lasted only a matter of months.

I like to think of the emperors as changing as quickly as the

seasons, in the third century A.D.

Any wrong move led to assassination and replacement,

not by the Senate, but by the provincial armies,

by the provincial armies.

Civil wars were extremely commonplace in the third century

A.D., and it was a very bad time for

the Roman emperors, who could literally be stabbed

in the back at any moment; and many of them were.

The Roman frontiers were in danger,

the economy was in shambles, and the vast bureaucracy was

also suffering significantly in the third century A.D.,

largely because of a lack of central control.

In view of this chaotic situation, there was very little

time to build buildings, which is obviously what's

significant to us, in the context of this course.

In many ways I think one can describe, vis-à-vis

architecture, the third century A.D.

as essentially a wasteland, an architectural wasteland.

There were no forums in the third century A.D.

There were no basilicas and there were no baths.

We will see that the major project in the third century

A.D.

was not unexpectedly, given this situation,

a major defensive wall.

That was the main architectural commission in the third century

A.D., and it's with that wall that I

want to begin today, the so-called Aurelian Walls.

Before I do, I just want to give you a

glimpse of two of those twenty acknowledged emperors who made

their way through the third century A.D.:

the boy emperor, Gordian III,

on the left-hand side of the screen,

and the more mature emperor, Pupienus,

who was co-emperor with a man by the name of Balbinus,

for a very short time.

And, in fact, just to give you a sense of the

flavor of the third century, both of them were dragged from

the palace, not too long after they had

ascended to imperial power, murdered and their bodies

tossed in the Tiber River.

If you look at these two portraits,

one of the boy emperor and one of the more mature emperor,

even though many, many years separate them in

chronological age, I think you will see,

if you look at the way in which these portraitists represented

their eyes, in the likenesses of these two

individuals, in these official portraits of

Gordion and of Pupienus, I think you'll see,

if you look at those eyes, that those eyes reveal the

concern that these emperors had for the state of the Empire

during the third century A.D.: a concern that was extremely

warranted, obviously.

So again I want to begin with the only significant

architectural project in the third century A.D.

in Rome, and that is this great defensive wall system called the

Aurelian Walls.

The Aurelian Walls were built for two main reasons:

one, because the earlier walls,

the so-called Servian Walls, which we studied at the very

beginning of the semester, which date to the Republic--378

B.C.

is when they were dedicated; so way, way back in the

beginning of our discussion of Roman architecture--

you'll remember that those Servian Walls--

and I can show it to you with this plan here of the walls

during ancient Roman times-- the Servian Walls encircled

just the Seven Hills of Rome.

So this central area here, where we see the Palatine,

the Capitoline, the Caelian,

the Quirinal Hill, that was the location of that

original Servian Wall.

As the city grew, as the population grew,

as more people were brought back to Rome,

through the various wars and through the enslavement of large

numbers of people, the city grew significantly in

size.

And so by this time, by the third century,

the Servian Wall was essentially useless to protect

Rome from those barbarians that were literally at the gates at

this particular point in Roman history,

so they needed to build that wall to protect the city.

But the other reason was because of what was going on,

on the frontiers, because Rome was more in danger

than it had ever been before.

Because of the kind of political and economic situation

in Rome that I've just described,

there was a need for further stability and the need to build

this second set of walls: again,

the so-called Aurelian Walls.

And this plan shows you how much further out they went than

the Servian Walls, all the way to the Tiber River.

It didn't encompass the area across the Tiber,

where Hadrian's tomb, Hadrian's mausoleum,

the Castel Sant'Angelo is located, but for the most part

it did cover the main of the city.

And you can see, it went far enough out that it

even encompassed some of the major city roads,

or the beginnings of some of those major city roads.

A view of the Aurelian Walls itself,

very well preserved, here on the right-hand side of

the screen, and a comparison of them with

the Servian Walls, on the left.

With regard to the Aurelian Walls, they are named for the

emperor Aurelian, who was emperor of Rome between

270 and 275 A.D.

We believe that Aurelian began the walls, either in 270 or 271.

They were not finished by his death in 275,

and they were completed by his successor, a man by the name of

Probus, P-r-o-b-u-s; Probus completed the Aurelian

Walls, and dedicated them right after Aurelian's death,

in 275 A.D.

The Aurelian Walls had a twelve-mile circuit around the

city of Rome.

They were originally 25 and one half feet tall,

and there were eighteen major gateways in the Aurelian Walls;

eighteen major gateways.

I think you can see from this view on the right-hand side of

the screen that the building materials were concrete faced

with brick -- brick-faced concrete.

You see that very clearly here.

And, of course, it's important to keep in mind

that that is different than what the original Republican walls

were made out of.

Those were made out of cut-stone, ashlar blocks.

You see them here in this section of the Servian Walls,

that I show you once again, blocks that are laid in the

scheme of headers and stretchers,

that we talked about at the very beginning of the semester,

when we discussed early Roman wall building,

both in Rome and in the early colonies.

And here again the Aurelian Walls, with their up-to-date

concrete faced with brick.

But it's a sign of the times that scholars who have examined

these bricks have determined that they were not all new

bricks, that many of them were re-used

bricks from earlier periods, from the previous century in

particular.

And the reason for that probably has to do with the fact

that again because there was so little architectural activity

during this period there was simply no need to make bricks in

large numbers, and when they needed them for

this particular project, they reached back and used some

that had been lying around of earlier manufacture.

So I think again that underscores the incertitude of

this particular period of time.

Here's another very good view of the Aurelian Walls,

as they look today, brick-faced concrete

construction once again.

And what's impressive about the Aurelian Walls is how much of

them are preserved.

When I showed you the Servian Walls,

we could only look at bits and pieces of those walls,

preserved in different parts of Rome,

especially near the Rome train station.

But in the case of the Aurelian Walls,

we have a very large extent of those walls still preserved

today, which is a tribute to how well

they were built, that they have stood the test

of time.

And, in fact, when one visits Rome,

when you come into Rome from Leonardo da Vinci Airport,

the first things that you see of the city are the walls.

You go through those walls and it announces to you,

of course, that you are in fact about to enter the city of Rome.

I mentioned that the Aurelian Walls had eighteen gateways.

Some of them are still preserved, and I want to show

you one of them here, just to give you a sense of

what these gateways were like.

This is the so-called Porta Appia.

It also dates to the same time as the walls,

275 A.D.; called the Porta Appia because it is at the exact

location of the Via Appia, or the Appian Way in Rome.

The gate--I'm going to show you how the gate looked in the time,

in 275, and then how it was altered somewhat later.

You can see from the Monument List that although it was built

originally in 275, it was restored by two

Byzantine emperors by the name of Honorius and Arcadius,

so this is in the post-Roman period,

and they did that in A.D.

401 to 402.

And the gate, as you see it today,

extremely well preserved, is the gate of the restoration

of the fifth century A.D.; whereas this view,

this restored view from Ward-Perkins,

shows you what the gate would've looked like in 275.

In 275 it had two arcuated entranceways,

as you can see well here.

It had rounded towers, rounded towers.

It had small windows with arcuations at the top,

as you can also see, curvature at the top.

And then Ward-Perkins believes--there's some

controversy about this--but he believes it was already

crenulated in the third century A.D.

If you compare that to the gate as restored by Honorius and

Arcadius, you can see that they have removed one of the

entranceways.

There's a single arcuated entranceway now in the center of

the gate, and they have also encased the

rounded towers in these square blocks,

as you can see here, they've left the uppermost part

rounded but not the bottom part.

So they have changed it somewhat, but I think it still

gives you, again, a very good sense of

what this gate, and many of the other gates

that were part of this very important defensive wall system,

built in the third century, looked like.

What we see happening toward the end of the third century

A.D.

is the return of a centralized, of a strong,

centralized government to Rome and to the Roman Empire,

after the bloody third century A.D.

and its numerous fly-by-night emperors, as I call them here.

And the vehicle of this return of a stable government was the

foundation of what we call the Tetrarchy;

the Tetrarchy, which means literally four-man

rule.

The Tetrarchy was the brainchild of a man by the name

of Diocletian.

Diocletian was a Dalmatian; not a dog, but somebody who

came from ancient Dalmatia, now Croatia,

from Dalmatia.

He was an imperial bodyguard who rose to great heights and

eventually became emperor of Rome.

He began his own rise to power in 283 A.D.; 283 A.D.

But it was in 293, after ten years into trying to