Although beset with continuous crises over the succession, the years of the consolidation of power were consistently devoted to these exercises in sophisticated urban 'inlay', which in fact destroyed or radically transformed earlier meanings as surely as his settlement of the constitution. But these years were also devoted to the reorganization of the administrative structure and functioning of the city, one similar to and as necessary as that enforced by Agrippa in his cura aquarum. In addition to their use in the collection of customs and the control of public order, the ancient, fourth-century city walls came again to mark
25 Coarelli 1985 (e 19) n 21 iff; with Gros 1976 (f 397).
the boundary between city and country through the systemadc restoration of all the city gates (between a.d. 2 and 10), thus reaffirming the powerful symbolic value of both wall and gates which was to find a very special echo in the architecture and town planning of the Augustan cities of Italy and Gaul. In the years 8 and 7 B.C., the banks of the Tiber were set in order, the night watch (the cohortes vigilum) was established, and the city and the continentia tecta (the inhabited parts of the city and suburb) were divided into fourteen regions: together these completed in the organizational sphere the readjustment which Augustus had already begun between 12 and 7 B.C. in the religious sphere, with the institution of his personal cult in the sites of the compita, the shrines of the urban crossroads.26
In his Res Gestae Augustus placed great emphasis on his personal benefactions in the development of the city. Despite the customary official phrasing of the document, he goes far beyond the accepted practice of normal elogia and commentarii, not only in the boundless immensity of his achievements, but especially in the emphasis on the intensely urban character of his efforts, which did remain until the time of Domitian the grandest and most comprehensive in the history of the city: 'a city whose magnificence was not equal to the majesty of her empire, and which was exposed to floods and fires, he so improved that he might rightly boast that he left a city of marble which he had received made of brick' (Suet. Aug. 28). It is surprising then that the architectural expression of such a project should be essentially very limited and conventional. The great piazzas enclosed with porticoes and with temples at the end or in the centre, such as the Forum of Augustus and theporticus L,iviae (a.d. 7), or open with temple at the centre of porticoes on three sides, as in the temple of Apollo Paladnus and perhaps in the Pantheon, are the most common elements of the Augustan contribution to the city. Perhaps its most novel and experimental aspect remains the work of Agrippa in the Campus Martius, with its intentional confusion of public and private, of dwellings, public parks, recreational spaces, boulevards and reflecting pools, a confusion which would reappear explicidy only in Nero's grand creation of 'private' buildings with strong dynastic connotations, from his villa at Subiaco to his Golden House. The Alexandrian model - which would then spread in private life, from the architecture of tombs to the Egyptian imagery of the late Second and Third Styles — is not merely mannerist exoticism, comparable to the chinoiseries of eighteenth-century Europe. It is also a recognition of the deep affinity between the realities of life at Alexandria and at Rome, both social and cultural, and at the same time of their
24 F. Coarelli, in Kaiser Augustus 1988 (f 443) 7jff.
correspondingly deep diversity, which leads to the longing for, and the privadsadon of, the models derived from that particular variant of Hellenism.
On the other hand, the programme of restoradon required that the convicdons of 'western' and 'national' values be defended, consolidated and reasserted within the framework of a pervasive pietas. Thus can we account for the systematic use of conventional architectural forms — temples on a podium at the end of a porticoed square - which had been the patrimony of Roman culture for over a century and a half, and which were now stripped of the late Hellenistic effronteries to be found in the great Latin and Campanian buildings between 120 and 50 B.C., and clothed again in neo-Attic forms. From the sculptor Diogenes, who was responsible for the decoration of the first Pantheon, to the extremely skilful stone-cutters, who created the elegant architectural partitions for the many sacred and public buildings ordered by Augustus, it was Athenian craftsmen who were the leaders in the neoclassical 'purification' of architectural decoration.
The dominant models are, as in all art forms, those of high Classicism, with a special and understandable predilection for the prototypes of Periclean Athens. The caryatids of the Attic neoclassicist Diogenes are not preserved for us, although we may suspect a Classicizing sculpture, caryatids of the Cherchell-Tralles or Venice-Mantua type.27 But very clearly intended to evoke religious and revivalist memories are the copies of the korai from the portico of the Erechtheum in Athens, which were introduced into the upper storey of the Forum of Augustus and recopied in its replica at Emerita (Merida, in Spain): these maidens, who are better understood in their role as kanephoroi (basket-carriers), encircled the shrines (heroa) of the summiviri and of the nomen lulium, just as those at Athens are there to honour the tomb of the first king of Attica. All these architectural forms, from the mouldings of the temple podia to the Classical capitals, are crafted in a refined manner based on sharp and subtle lines, on a few projections from the representational plan which give a 'stiacciato' effect (that is, one of very low, flat surfaces) and on clear, undisturbed surfaces. The need for convictions, implicit in the search for the ideological models of Classicism, both shared and secure, asserts itself even in style, a style straining to evoke formal clarities and absolute definitions.