Da Vinci's Ghost (4 page)

Romans now encountered the name and image of Augustus everywhere in his growing sphere of influence: on coins and statues, on milestones and monuments and temples, in the names of roads and towns and colonies. In the middle of Rome—at the center of the world—he placed the
milliarium aureum
(“golden milestone”), the starting point for all roads leading out of the city. Naturally, it bore his name. Similarly, the place where a road reached its end at the outer limits of Roman territory sometimes bore his name: the
terminus Augusti
.

Something remarkable was taking place. At its center and circumference, and everywhere in between, Augustus was beginning to embody Rome—a metamorphosis that the Roman historian Florus, writing in the following century, claimed was his defining achievement.
“By his wisdom and skill
,” Florus wrote, “he set in order the body of empire, which was all overturned and thrown into confusion, and would certainly never have been able to attain coherence and harmony unless it were ruled by the nod of a single protector: its soul, as it were, and its mind.”

The body of empire
. The very concept was an Augustan innovation. Before Augustus the Latin word
imperium
(“empire”)
had signified an abstract power—a right of command held temporarily by an elected official or military commander. Many people had been able to possess this power at once, much as today many people can be said to possess media “empires.” The related term
imperator
(“emperor”) described nothing more than a commander’s fleeting status as a victor and could be used only between the time of a great victory and a return home in triumph. To claim it after that, he had to return to the battlefield and earn it again.

Augustus changed all that. By the time he took power Romans had already begun to imagine that their
imperium
, won year after year on the battlefield with the help of the gods, might allow them to become masters of the world. But they hadn’t thought of this
imperium
as something innately geographical or physical—as a world body, that is, made up of different member provinces, all set permanently in their rightful place and controlled by a single head of state. But that’s exactly what Augustus wanted Rome to become: a perfect body—
his perfect body—of empire
.

A
S A PHYSICAL
specimen, Augustus fell considerably short of anybody’s ideal.

Small and lame
, with bad teeth, a crooked nose, and eyebrows that had grown together, he suffered from kidney stones and bladder trouble. Spots, birthmarks, and ringworm scars covered his body. Coins struck early in his career, when he still called himself Octavius, probably preserve the best surviving image of what he actually looked like—and they appear to depict a real
person, imperfections and all (
Figure 4
). But coins struck after he renamed himself Augustus, in 27
B.C
., present him with a bold new look (
Figure 5
).

Figures 4 and 5. Left:
Octavius, the individual, before 27
B.C
.
Right:
Caesar Augustus, the ideal, after 27
B.C
.

It was all part of his larger campaign of transformation. He had succeeded in bringing an end to civil war because, the story went, he was
divi filius:
the son of a god. The title derived from his uncle Julius Caesar, who, two years after having been murdered in 44
B.C
., had been the only Roman other than Romulus ever to be officially deified by the Roman Senate. Not long before his death, Caesar had secretly adopted Octavius as his rightful heir, which in the eyes of the law did indeed make him the son of a god—and after consolidating power Augustus seems to have decided he should look the part.

Coins offered Augustus a way of introducing himself to Romans all over the world, literally by putting his new image into the hands of the people. A mint, it’s easy to forget, was an early version of the printing press, and it made possible for Augustus a feat that Johannes Gutenberg often is mistakenly
given credit for: the cheap and easy distribution of the exactly repeatable image. Coins, Augustus and his supporters realized, were a powerful means of broadcasting his new look and all that it symbolized. As citizens carried his likeness all over the Roman world, they would spread the message that prosperity and increase derived from one source alone: Caesar Augustus. No longer would the forces of ugliness, imperfection, disease, and disorder tear Rome apart. Just as Octavius had remade his own body in an august new form, he would now remake his body of empire. And its coherence and harmony would derive from one source above all: the ideal human form.

Augustus turned to the art of ancient Greece to find models of that ideal.
“He was interested in Greek studies
,” his biographer Suetonius wrote, “and in these he excelled greatly. … There was nothing for which he looked so carefully as precepts and examples instructive to the public or to individuals.” The most celebrated model appeared in the work of the sculptor Polykleitos, revered by the Greeks and Romans alike as one of the greatest artists ever to have lived. Some four centuries earlier, Polykleitos had written a book titled the
Canon
, now lost, in which he laid out the mathematical—that is, “canonical”—proportions of the perfect human figure. Needless to say, it was male.

Polykleitos had done more than codify those proportions in writing. He had embodied them in a statue. Also called the
Canon
, the statue took the form of a nude athlete holding a spear and resting his weight on one foot, in a position of perfect equipoise: a pose designed to suggest a combination of tranquility and strength, motion and rest (
Figure 6
).

The
Spear Bearer
of Polykleitos, copied again and again in
antiquity, was a timeless classical ideal. Romans knew it well.
Cicero described it as an exemplar
of the beautiful, to be emulated and learned from. The first-century authority Quintilian described it as
“full of dignity and holiness
”—the very traits embedded in the name Augustus. The great Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder weighed in, too. “
Polyclitus
,” he wrote, “made a statue that artists call the Canon, and from which they derive the principles of their art, as if from a law of some kind. And he alone of men is deemed to have rendered art itself in a work of art.”

Figures 6 and 7. Left:
Roman copy of Polykleitos’s
Spear Bearer
, embodying the ideal proportions of the human form.
Right:
The
Prima Porta
statue of Augustus, based on the model of the
Spear Bearer
(c. 19
B.C
.).

Few people outside elite circles in Rome ever had a chance
to see Augustus in person. So somebody—perhaps Augustus himself, or perhaps a sculptor commissioned to make a statue of him—had a brilliant idea. The familiarity of the
Spear Bearer
as an icon made it a potentially powerful propaganda tool. Why not make the bodies of the
Spear Bearer
and Augustus one and the same? Why not, with the help of sculptors throughout the empire, erase Augustus’s imperfections and instead demonstrate to the Roman world that he incorporated a timeless ideal?

Statues of Augustus cast in this new mold began to proliferate all over the Roman world after 27
B.C
. Along with the coins minted after that date, they defined him visually to a degree that’s hard to appreciate today, when political leaders are on constant public display in the media, warts and all. And nothing defined him more fully than the statue known as
Augustus of Prima Porta
, a work often copied in Roman times that is well worth pondering as an expression of the Augustan ideal (
Figure 7
).

In the statue Augustus poses as an emperor in triumph, clad in military regalia. With his right arm raised in the pose of an orator, he addresses the world, a pose that, in the language of classical sculpture, suggests an aura of divinity. Superficially, the statue looks quite different from the
Spear Bearer
—but in fact the resemblances are numerous and would have been obvious to educated Romans. The two statues correspond very closely in size and proportion; both have hair cropped symmetrically, in the classical Greek style; both have soft, idealized facial features; both possess a peaceful, remote look that conveys a sense of power calmly restrained; and both are cast in that characteristic one-footed stance. The message would have been hard to miss: Augustus embodies the Polykleitan ideal.

There’s more. Unlike the Spear Bearer, Augustus wears clothes, including a glorious breastplate depicting an event that justifies his pose as temporary emperor: his recent victory of the Romans over the Parthians, in modern-day Iran. The breastplate shows not only the Parthians in the east but also other peoples and provinces in the south, west, and north. It’s an allegorical world map, in other words, made an official part of the Roman body of empire.

The statue also has cosmic dimensions. A number of classical deities appear on the breastplate, among them, at the top, the twins Apollo and Diana, the gods of the sun and the moon. Romans looking at the statue would have understood the symbolism: Augustus and his body of empire mirror the divine perfection of the cosmic order.

Based on the ideal human form, reaching out in all directions to encompass the known world, and aligned with the cosmic order, Augustus in the
Prima Porta
statue sets in stone a powerful new Roman ideology of empire. His perfect form embodies Rome—and Rome’s perfect form, in turn, embodies the world. This was an idea that would animate Roman political thought for generations. Seneca would capture it best, in an address to the emperor Nero.
“Your spirit will spread
little by little through the whole great body of empire,” he declared, “joining all things in the shape of your likeness.”

A
UGUSTUS, SOME SCHOLARS
claim, had
a special fondness for style guides
and rule books, works that wove disparate strands of information into a
corpus
, or complete body of knowledge. This was precisely
what Cicero had just done
for the art of
oratory, in
On Rhetoric
, and what Varro had just done for Latin grammar, in
On the Latin Language
. But when Augustus took power and began rebuilding Rome, no such guide existed for architecture. Even the idea of the field as a theoretical discipline, rather than as just a manual craft, had only begun to emerge.
The term
architectura
itself
—a Latin coinage probably derived from Greek roots—dates only to the 40s
B.C
. or so.