A few weeks ago, we announced the reopening of the House of Augustus on the Palatine. Today we bring you some great photos shot by Susan Sanders on a recent visit to this most extraordinary of archaeological attractions which includes a dining-room, bedroom, and an expansive reception hall at ground-level, as well as a small study on the first floor of a house belonging to Rome’s first emperor.
In Rome’s Republican Period (509 BC - 31 BC), the Palatine Hill was home to Rome’s rich and famous - so it should be no surprise that Augustus, the first emperor (27 BC - 14 AD), chose to make the hill his home as well. Even before he was given the title “Augustus” and the powers that effectively made him sole ruler of the Roman Empire, the emperor-to-be purchased several houses on the Palatine Hill and began a remodeling project that would unite them into a single residence.
There, we are told, the Emperor lived modestly - shunning the ostentatious lifestyle that had become so popular in the late Republic. Suetonius, a Roman historian of the 2nd century AD, tells us about Augustus’s house and the frugal life he lived (or - at least - the frugality he wanted the public to associate with him):
[Augustus] lived at first next to the Forum Romanum…in a residence which once belonged to the orator Calvus. Later (he lived) on the Palatine, but still in the modest house of Hortensius, neither remarkably large nor very elaborate in decoration; the porticos were of Alban stone and not lofty, without any marble decorated living rooms or tesselated pavements. He lived in the same cubiculum (bedroom) for forty years or more, winter and summer; he resided in the city in the winter, which was hardly good for his health. If he proposed to conduct some business in private or without interruption, he had a place, private and remote, which he called ‘Syracuse’; he used to go here or to some suburban villa of a freedman. But if he fell ill, he always took refuge in the mansion of his friend Maecenas’ . . . . Such was his dislike of all pretentious country mansions that he went so far as to demolish one built on too lavish a scale by his granddaughter Julia. His own were rather modest, and less remarkable for their statuary and pictures than for their landscape gardening and the rare antiques on display . . . . (73) How simply Augustus’ residence was furnished may be deduced by examining the couches and tables still preserved . . . . (Divus Augustus 72)
Why did Augustus make his home in the pretentious part of town when he wanted to be thought of as a nothing more than an extraordinary citizen helping to save his country? Rhetoric and symbolism were everything for this emperor and the Palatine was loaded with mythological and historical meanings that enabled his subtle claims to power.
Roman legend said that Romulus had founded the city on the Palatine and then had taken up residence there in a modest hut that had been preserved through the centuries. For Augustus, who cast himself as a re-founder of Rome, there could be no better place to live than aside that relic of the city’s ancient past, for the visual and spatial connection between the homes of Romulus and Augustus powerfully emphasized his point.
But what of the splendid paintings themselves? Excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, this is first time that they’ve been available for public viewing. Archaeologists agree that the frescoes were created about 30 BC and that they’re some of the finest paintings that remain from the ancient world. Painted in the Second Style of Roman painting, they’re illusionistic masterpieces, meant to convince the viewer that the walls of these rooms have disappeared and that they can extraordinary landscapes and architectural vistas in the far distance.
