In decorative painting Tiberian Classicism carries on the Augustan heritage, especially in the obliteration of all use of the old Second Style, in order to achieve an air of maiestas and gravitas in individual reception areas. The old conception which linked the function of an area with the form and quality of its decoration gives way to a Third Style generalization and to the proliferation of copies of Classical paintings at the centre of walls. But, as in the developments which we have seen in architecture and sculpture, in the midst of uniform tapestries barely edged with extremely fragile friezes in the Augustan tradition, there spring up in the high Tiberian period extravagant architectural fantasies, filiform, theatrical wings, and almost metaphysical perspectives made of cande- labras: between the end of the reign of Tiberius and the first years of Claudius, these prepare for the birth of the Fourth Style, an expression of the baroque renaissance in the field of decorative paindng.[1149] The Fourth Style in fact represents a conscious and deliberate revival of the great architectural paintings and dramatic views of the Second Style; but the revival manifests itself not as a restoration of the realistic values longed for by Vitruvius more than half a century earlier, but as a further accentuation of fantastic, non-realistic, theatrical effects, truly and properly surreal landscapes, in which room is found for candelabras and large paintings, together with figures leaning out which draw attention to and enliven the many superimposed stage-scenes.
The Fourth Style, which revives and mixes themes, elements and languages of the Second and Third Styles, is a 'pictorial asianism', in every way worthy to illustrate the verses of Seneca and Lucan, the coherent formulation of a taste which longed to surpass and to subsume the golden classicism of Augustus.
The nature of this phenomenon of the transformation of taste should be sought not so much in a regular, abstract swing between neoclassical and neobaroque periods in the figurative arts of Rome, although that dialectic did indeed exist, and not only in the Julio-Claudian age. It is rather to be found above all in the deep crisis within the historical bloc of tota Italia which had arisen around Augustus.[1150] This bloc essentially found its expression in what Bianchi Bandinelli very rightly termed 'the art of the centre of power',74 the neoclassicism which gave shape to the accomplishments of the emperor and the upper and middle classes and to the more powerful works commissioned by them, which were closely ded to the workshops or to the architectural and technical models of the capital. But the unity showed cracks from the beginning. While the Augustan programme reached its fulfilment at Rome in the last two decades of the first century B.C., in the cities of northern and central Italy and in the more Romanized provinces of the West (Narbonensis, Baedca, and the eastern coasts of Spain) the old tradition - Hellenistic, baroque, pictorial and full of pathos - remained of central interest to important local patrons:[1151] they continued to employ it in their own self- glorifying monuments and to mix it promiscuously with some of the Classicizing and courtly models from the capital. With the age of Tiberius the separation increases, as the old Hellenistic models of the Italian and provincial periphery lose their Hellenistic patina to reveal a schematic framework of Italic tradition. The 'plebeian' artistic tendencies of local workshops take on substance,[1152] giving voice in a simple and often shapeless language, reminiscent of ancient, central-Italian experiences, to aspirations which were no longer those of the ruling classes of municipal Italy — they were already fully co-opted by 'the centre of power', or else extinct - but which were cherished by wealthy freedmen, now honoured as augustales - a concrete artistic counterpart to Trimal- chio in Petronius' Satiricon. In their eyes this 'plebeian' art served to express aspirations of social ascent and political recognition.
In truth, this very conception of co-optation, which was inherent in the social structure by ordines in imperial Rome, undermined the apparently rocklike solidity of the historical Augustan bloc, which tried to model the portrait features of its members on those of the princeps and other, members of the imperial house, and which meant with the assurance of Classicism to leave behind the uncertainties and the anguish of the overturning of ordines which was provoked by luxuria, by lucrum (avarice), and by the civil wars. With the age of Claudius the erosion of Augustus' social and economic order is quite clear, and the whole framework of the traditional society of ordines is in flux, as is shown by the beginning of the rapid decline of the economy and social structure of Italian towns, and by the correspondingly rapid ascent of the provincial governing classes of Gaul and Spain. To this great turnover of governing classes is connected a dual and related phenomenon, that is, the rediscovery of formal baroque values in the culture of the court, both literary and artistic, and the formal birth of municipal 'plebeian' art, which lay in its turn at the roots of later provincial art. The cultural background of this new ruling class of Italian and provincial origin was in fact largely to be sought in the ancient formal experiences of its more remote origins, in the baroque and Asian artistic culture still dominant in their areas of origin two generations before, that is, in the world of Caesar and the triumvirs, a world which survived up to the early years of the first century a.d. and was not erased by the 'normalization' imposed by Augustus, as we can see in the art which spread quickly through Cisalpine Italy and Narbonensis in the first centuries b.c. and a.d.[1153] At the same time, there were vacuums of power and of culture left behind by these former provincials in their swift social rise under Augustus and Tiberius, the local representatives of the historical bloc which was the base of the new Principate. These vacuums were filled by lower social classes, which were essentially of freedmen origin and which caused to flourish again even more remote conceptual, ideological and formal experiences, those of the artistic culture of the Romano-Italic koine, which expressed better than any other gesture the elements of affirmation of status which were necessary to the self-glorification of the new and powerful Trimalchios.
Therefore, the two greatest historians of Roman art in our century, G. Rodenwaldt and R. Bianchi Bandinelli, spoke rightly of the essentially bipolar nature of art at Rome. To the eternal formal bipolarity between Classicism and the baroque, within which was played out the Augustan experience of official, programmatic art and its crisis in the age of Claudius and Nero, there corresponds the no less eternal bipolarity of mentalities and idioms between 'art of the centre of power' and 'plebeian art'.
EARLY CLASSICAL PRIVATE LAW
bruce w. frier
With the establishment of the Augustan Principate, Roman private law enters its 'classical' period.1 During the largely tranquil centuries that followed, Rome's jurists articulated and developed a body of law that is beyond doubt the most conspicuous and influential Roman contribution to Western civilization.2 This chapter does not describe the system of Roman law itself,3 but instead concentrates on the jurists and the Roman judicial system during the Julio-Claudian and Flavian eras.
i. the jurists and the principate
Classical Roman law is based upon a distinctive procedural system, called formulary procedure.4 Formulary procedure, like most other well- developed procedural systems, distinguishes between justiciability (iur- isdictio), the judicial determination that a plaintiff is stating a legally acceptable cause of action, and adjudication (iudicatio), the hearing and resolution of the plaintiff's claim. However, formulary procedure radicalizes this distinction: the trial is divided into two stages decided by separate persons.