149150Chapter 8 Imperial Architecture

From ancient Egypt to the present day, the colossal size of buildings has been considered to reflect political power.1Close For Herodotus, architecture was an expression of dominion;2Close the Periclean monuments of Athens seemed visibly to encourage the Athenians to reclaim their Aegean-wide political ascendancy, since, as Isocrates remarked, ‘democracy had so adorned the city with temples and sacred images that even today visitors think it is worthy to rule not only the Greeks, but also all other peoples’.3Close The Circus Maximus, rebuilt by Trajan, was ‘a seat worthy of the nation that conquered the world’.4Close

The correspondence between Trajan and the younger Pliny, his appointed legate in Bithynia, reveals the ideological purpose of provincial architecture. Pliny pointed out such meanings, although Trajan himself modestly affected to address only practicalities. For instance, Pliny remarks that a proposed canal near Nicomedia was ‘worthy of your greatness and your concern’. Architecture was as important in constructing imperial ideology as an emperor’s portraits or the legends and images on his coins; it legitimated his regime by promoting a particular ideal that commanded respect.5Close It is generally agreed that buildings continued to play this role under Hadrian. The preceding discussion of Antonine buildings in the province of Asia now provides grounds to modify the view that, during the middle of the century, festivals or shows replaced public buildings as the major indicator of imperial ideology.6Close

One should, ofcourse, be wary of using modern labels like ‘message’, ‘persuasion’, ‘propaganda’, or ‘ideology’ to describe the purpose of ancient forms.7Close But in the present context the term ‘ideology’ seems particularly appropriate. As J. B. Thompson defines the concept, it highlights: the ways in which meaning is mobilized in the service of individuals and groups, that is, the ways in which the meaning constructed and conveyed by symbolic forms serves, in particular circumstances, to establish and sustain structured social relations from which some individuals and groups benefit more than others, and which some individuals and groups have an interest in preserving while others may seek to contest.8Close

The use of architecture in the cities of the Antonine Empire corresponds closely to this ‘critical’ understanding of ‘ideology’, implying its imposition by a dominant group. Provincial public buildings can be called ‘culture’ in several senses of that term. In the ‘anthropological’ conception, ‘the culture of a group or society is the array of beliefs, customs, ideas and values, as well as the material artefacts, objects and instruments, which are acquired by individuals as members of the group or society’.9Close In that sense buildings like the bouleuterion and gymnasium at Ephesus or the basilica stoa at Thera, or the theatres at Aphrodisias and Carthage, were settings for the practices of their societies and reflected their leading values. They also correspond to the symbolic conception of ‘culture’, held by Clifford Geertz and others, as ‘the pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms … by virtue of which individuals communicate with one another and share their experiences, conceptions and beliefs’.10Close Moreover, in expressing relations of power, such public buildings reflect a ‘structural conception’ of culture as the ‘social contextualization of symbolic forms’, the latter being ‘constructions which typically represent something, refer to something, say something about something’.11Close As Thompson’s work on modern culture considers ‘how symbolic forms serve, in specific circumstances, to establish and sustain relations of domination’,12Close so the present study illustrates that the forms of Roman architecture not only had ‘symbolic’ meanings, but were adopted by groups and individuals in provincial cities or the Roman administration to present the relationship of those cities to Rome. In the theatre at Miletus or the bouleuterion at Ephesus, as we have seen, this ‘symbolic culture’ was contested by others outside those groups. Finally, in understanding the buildings of the Antonine Empire, one must not neglect their cultural role according to the ‘classical conception’ of that term, namely in 'developing and ennobling the human faculties’.13Close Through their refined and stimulating decoration, they were designed to confirm and energize the spiritual well-being of the cultivated viewer.14Close

The symbolic forms of Roman architecture, then, established and sustained relations of domination between elites and non-elites or between the ruling dynasty of Rome and the cities of the Empire. But to what extent were the ‘ideologies’ represented by imperial architecture uniformly imposed in the sense, implied by Eric Wolf, of ‘unified schemes or configurations developed to underwrite or manifest power’?15Close In the three societies considered in Wolf’s study—the Kwakiutl, the Tenochka Aztecs, and National Socialist Germany—an extreme ideology had the specific function of responding to increasing stress or ‘tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises’.16Close In particular, the inclusion of cosmological aspects within their ideologies helped to ‘explain and justify the aspirations of particular claimants to power over society’.17Close

The politics of the Antonine age mirrors these structural tensions. The consolidation of the senatorial order around an artificially ‘dynastic’ conception of the family of the adoptive emperors and the enforcement of a rigid division between ‘honestiores' and ‘humiliores’ reflects in certain ways the insecurity of the highest echelons of Roman society at a time of great social change. The real military threats to the Empire on its borders, already evident in the final years ofPius’ reign and intensified under his successors, the unstable rivalries in urban architecture between the leading cities of Asia Minor, and the shift of economic power from Italy to Africa were developments that endangered the harmony ofEmpire. There was thus a need for the overriding rule and continuing validity of Roma aeterna to be reasserted within the political framework of the Antonine dynasty. The construction of Antoninus’ power according to a cosmological framework encouraged the use of certain architectural manifestations, such as the tetrastyle, the arch, and the dome, which suggest a ‘vision of cosmic order’ required ‘to organize power’, as in the societies considered by Wolf. Such functionalist explanations of symbolic architecture can never fully explain their complex meanings. But Pliny’s letters from Bithynia imply an interest in using provincial buildings to impose imperial ideologies that should be explored further.

To contemporaries, the uniformity of specific ‘Roman’ forms in different cities across the Empire was one of the most striking features of second-century public architecture. But to categorize this uniformity in terms ofhomogeneous ‘influence from the centre’, whether the centre was Rome or a provincial capital, is clearly an oversimplification. Prototypes from Rome itself or neighbouring cities certainly inspired builders, but the dissemination of Roman imperial architecture was no mechanical process of copying. Like the dissemination of imperial portraits, the spread of architectural forms was subject to provincial variation; in each case, the transmission of certain significant symbolic features was more important than producing a faithful mirror image.18Close There were varying reasons why the new forms appealed to the benefactors and population of cities in the outlying regions of the Empire, and individual buildings expressed the status of the builder and his city, as well as their affiliation to a common Roman heritage. Consequently, such buildings varied in many details. The forms now regarded as hallmarks of Roman culture were frequently established in the provincial cities themselves.

Tacitus’ famous observation on the introduction of Roman architecture to Flavian Britain shows this subtle process of acculturation, which implies several of the notions of ideology and culture discussed above: The following winter was consumed by very salutary schemes, for, so that people dispersed and uncivilized and thus ready for war might grow used to peace and leisure through pleasures, [Agricola] encouraged them privately and assisted them publicly to build temples, fora, and houses, by praising those quick to respond and chiding the lethargic: thus in place of coercion there was competition for honour. Indeed, now he would train leaders' sons in liberal arts and prefer British talents to Gallic passions, so that those who recently used to reject the Roman tongue began to yearn for eloquence. After that even our dress was an honour and the toga was common, and gradually there was a regression to the attractions of vices: porticoes, baths, and the elegance of dinner parties. And among the ignorant this was called civilization (humanitas), though it was a part of subjection.19Close

The process described here by Tacitus indicates not only a ‘minimum standard of urbanization’,20Close but also the growth of Roman religious cults (templa), political institutions (fora), and private manners (domus). The pursuit of honour gradually led to a desire for porticoes and baths, hallmarks of humanitas. Two other points here are worth noticing: first, the rise of porticoes and baths is presented as a secondary feature, not so much of a town’s development, as of the mentality of its inhabitants; second, the Roman governor’s role, initially in the form of ‘help’ or ‘encouragement’, is soon overshadowed, as porticoes and baths are introduced by local elites. Yet this independent spirit is not entirely reflected in second-century benefactions.

In the early second century the procedures of public decisionmaking relating to the erection of public buildings across the Empire were generally similar to the pre-imperial system in the Greek East. Individual office-holders or benefactors announced voluntary contributions, as at Thera, at civic assemblies, which resulted in formal, recorded public statements and undertakings.21Close But these procedures were now closely scrutinized, either by the emperor himself or by the provincial governor and his staff, who kept an eye on cities’ accounts. Decrees passed by local councils in honour of a benefactor were brought to the attention of the emperor or governor, who would confirm the decree officially by means of a rescript or letter expressing approval of the project. The monument of Opramoas was adorned with twelve such rescripts from Antoninus Pius and eighteen letters from various governors, authorizing the decrees passed in Opramoas’ honour between 136 and 153 by the individual cities and collective federation (Koinon) of Lycia. The case of the Ephesian Vedius was passed on to the emperor himself, who intervened as a personal favour to his friend to override the Ephesians’ opposition.22Close

In the second century the main problem of the imperial government was to encourage the people of the Greek East not only to contribute to the well-being of their cities, including their architectural embellishment, but to be motivated in doing so not by local patriotism alone, but also by loyalty to Rome. The political reasons for this have been well studied.23Close But there were also particular architectural implications. As long as a benefactor was seen to be constructing a building on behalf of one city and out of pride for that city, his motivation might be perceived as parochial and negligent of his loyalties to the Roman state. By advancing the status of his own community, he appeared to challenge other communities within the province. But as a citizen both ofhis city and of Rome, he could have a loyalty to both which did not subvert the unity of the Empire. His buildings should not only be monuments of his city, but monuments of Rome. The major cities under Antoninus Pius were adorned with a recognizable ‘architecture of the Roman State’ reflecting this increasingly centralized control, buildings like the judicial basilica at Carthage and Antonine baths, or Vedius’ bouleu-terion and gymnasium at Ephesus.

In most evaluations of imperial Roman architecture the role of the emperor is understated. His influence on architectural taste is implicitly denied by those who see him as a distant figure in Roman provincial administration, little concerned with the particular projects of individual cities. The evidence of buildings financed by the imperial exchequer is sometimes belittled as exceptional. Fergus Millar, for instance, regarded imperial involvement in provincial building projects as ‘occasional’ in all spheres save the construction of aqueducts, and they are usually considered as objects of functional utility rather than as examples of architectural style.24Close

This laissez-faire image should be modified. First of all, the direct epigraphic evidence of projects bearing the emperor’s name does not represent the totality of imperial financial involvement. As the example of the ‘Vedius gymnasium’ at Ephesus shows, the emperor sometimes played an active role even when he was not mentioned as the agent in a building’s dedication. The mere absence from an inscription of a positive indication ofimperial finance is no proof that a project had not been supported by the imperial treasury.25Close The emperor was neither as able nor as inclined as local benefactors to insist that the source of finance was mentioned. Besides, emperors could influence the financing of a public building in much more indirect ways, whether by direct personal gift or by using imperial funds to help others to maintain their civic commitments.26Close On the other hand, the appearance of the emperor’s name in the nominative at the head of a building project is a statement of direct initiative by the Roman authorities, not simply the authorization of a project devised by others, which would not have been so expressed.27Close The true extent of imperial involvement in provincial architecture was probably much greater than is suggested by the epigraphic record. There is a clear disparity, for instance, between the unambiguous statements of the ancient historians that Hadrian ‘built some building in almost every city’ or ‘built innumerable public buildings in all places’ and the relatively paltry evidence of inscriptions.28Close

The increasing delegation of public building to officials such as the curatores reipublicae appears to be evidence for the reduction in direct imperial involvement in provincial public architecture. In fact, the creation of this institution in the second century reflects the wish of emperors to be more, not less, directly involved in local urban affairs. The curator rei publicae, found throughout the Empire from Trajan’s reign onwards, was an ad hoc appointment, made independently of the regular political cursus honorum and without regard to the social rank of the appointee. Without going fully here into the complex problem of its local responsibilities and the implications for relatively more centralized control of provincial finances, I should briefly stress the significance of this office for Roman architectural patronage.

The earliest known curator rei publicae of secure date is Curiatius Cosanus, who held this office at Caere in the reign of Trajan. An inscription records that the magistrates and decurions of this city wrote to Cosanus in 113 to ask his consent for the imperial freedman Marcus Ulpius Vesbinus’ project to build a phetrium for the augustales, probably a place of assembly, in the corner of the portico of the basilica.29Close As the site was unoccupied and unprofitable, the decurions themselves had already approved the proposal. The inscription records Cosanus’ reply: ‘It is my duty not only to consent to your intention, but also to congratulate anyone who adorns our respublica. And so I approve your motion not as curator, but as one from the ordo, since such honourable examples should be encouraged by honorific adornment.’ In this eloquent reply Cosanus adopted the posture of regarding Caere as his own community, approving the city’s public architecture as if he were one of its leading citizen members.30Close In fact, as curator he was an independent arbiter of the city’s activity, who owed his responsibilities not to municipal law, but to imperial appointment.31Close This was true for all curatores rei publicae, not just in Italy, but in all provinces.32Close That the benefactor at Caere, Vesbinus, was an imperial freedman hints that his explicitly political building project had imperial favour.33Close In the East too, curatores of cities appeared from the reign of Trajan, under the name of logistai or epimeletai,34Close likewise of both senatorial and equestrian rank.35Close Some were introduced from overseas to superintend building in a region, like Arrius Antoninus of Cirta in North Africa, who was appointed curator for Nola, Ariminum, and the cities along the Aemilia.36Close During the course of the century the office became less a special mission by a man of high status and more the everyday business of a functionary. Individual cities began to choose their own curatores, and selected men oflower social rank. The overall numbers of known curatores increased significantly in the second half of the century and the numbers of senators holding the office declined, especially in those inscriptions which indicate some form of activity which they carried out. These duties included responsibility for public building, making public property available for private building by the procedure of assigna- tio, dedicating buildings for public use, and ensuring that ruined buildings were repaired by their owners.37Close Such tasks correspond to the preoccupations of the emperors themselves.

By the middle of the century, however, the office of curator rei publicae was still not very widespread.38Close A large role in controlling provincial architecture and in overseeing the architectural projects of local elites was, therefore, played by provincial governors and their legates. The governor’s approval was needed for all important public buildings erected in the Roman Empire.39Close Governors were required to protect a donor’s name and to ensure that a public building bore only the name of its donor or the ruling emperor;40Close they insisted that promises were kept by donors, and their approval was required for important works.41CloseThe governor also had the power to ensure that benefactors of public buildings and their heirs were held to their undertakings. If an heir was bound to realize a public work, and the date of completion was not specified, the provincial governor had to fix a date for completion of the work, with interest payments mounting thereafter.42Close Inscriptions reveal their role in overseeing private projects; in public works they were even more visible as the dedicators of buildings.43Close

In Italy individual cases were referred to the senatorial iuridici appointed by Marcus Aurelius.44Close As iuridicus of Transpadane Italy, Caius Arrius Antoninus, a high-ranking senator at Rome and friend of the former emperor Pius, had to check that public building contracts were properly executed; one patron, Baburiana, bowed to his decision, rather obsequiously, as reflecting the senator’s humanitas.45Close Some years later Arrius Antoninus intervened again, with another senator, to ensure that a donor’s heirs executed a promised legacy for building a bath at Tifernum Tiberinum.46Close Intervention was also necessary in 166 to ensure the completion of a proscaenium promised by a benefactor at Gabii.47Close The difficulty in getting heirs to fulfil such testamentary promises suggests how closely the initial promise by a benefactor was linked to his own self-image and grandiose architectural aspirations, not necessarily shared by his heirs who had to face the financial reality.

The emperor had an overriding role in the patronage of public buildings, even where he was not directly responsible for initiating the project. The governors frequently referred to the emperor himself. Ennius Proculus, for instance, proconsular governor of Africa between 143 and 157, received a letter from Pius about immunities from munera, perhaps a response to a previous question to the emperor in regard to ensuring that public officials in provincial towns carried out their responsibilities in contributing to the funding of public buildings.48Close By the Antonine period public building in the Empire was strictly regulated. The erection of public buildings required the prior permission of the emperor. It was ‘not lawful for any other name to be inscribed on a public building in the Empire than that of the emperor or of the man by whose money it was built’.49Close Certain types of private project were forbidden, namely those buildings which were intended ‘in competition with another citizen’ or assembly buildings that might incite sedition, such as circuses, theatres, or amphitheatres. The construction of such buildings was, therefore, closely monitored by the emperor and his staff. It was the task of the proconsuls to ensure that a building by a private benefactor that met with imperial approval was carried through if there was local opposition.

A pragmatic approach to the issue of provincial imperial architecture has been offered by Ramsey MacMullen in a celebrated article.50Close MacMullen gathered a range of evidence from across the Empire for projects which he regarded as sponsored or authorized by the emperor, and interpreted this abundance as a sign of Roman military activity in the urban development of provincial cities. It is certainly likely that such large-scale building-works were made possible by the labour resources of the Roman army. However, MacMullen did not consider the explicitly architectural aspects of such projects, and neglected to comment on sources of design. The evidence of imperial finance of Roman public buildings often cannot be separated from the element of an emperor’s personal aesthetic choice. The younger Pliny, for example, mentioned Augustus' benefaction of a bath building at Hispellum (Spello) in Umbria as motivated by architectural aesthetics.51Close This imperial balineum was no mere functional ‘amenity’, but a manifestation ofwatery amoenitas offered by the Umbrian spring of Clitumnus.

Why did the construction of public architecture in provincial cities matter so much to the emperor at Rome? Cassius Dio, at the end of the century, provides part of the answer, in the speech he puts into the mouth of Maecenas, advising Augustus on the government of empire. Maecenas, referring to the Augustan renovation of Rome, argued that, because it was appropriate that the Romans as rulers of the world should exceed everyone in everything, their buildings ought to inspire ‘respect’ in their allies and, in their enemies, awe and ‘terror’ (kataplēxis).52Close This statement makes particular sense in a later second-century context, when the Roman frontiers were insecure and the need for allies’ loyalty and enemies’ intimidation greater than ever. It suggests that architecture helped to construct an extreme ideology based, in Wolf’s terms, on a desire for political domination resulting from economic and psychological tensions. The pattern is mirrored, above all, in the architecture of the National Socialist regime, where an ideal of ‘monumentality’ was used to reinforce its ideology. The emphasis on buildings of great size as supposedly reflecting the eternity of the regime seems to recall the ‘eternal buildings’ of Ephesus and Thera, notably the explicit planning of public buildings from the perspective ofhow they would look in a future ruined state.53Close But we should recognize the limits of this comparison.54Close The ideal of celebritas, ‘density’, did not always mean that the areas developed in imperial Roman cities were huge spaces for the gathering of crowds as in Nazi Germany. They were smaller, more focused, and often enclosed spaces. The second-century rebuilding of Agrippa’s Odeion at Athens, which halved its capacity, epitomized not, as at Nuremberg, the rallying of masses or the relation between ‘Führer’ and ‘Volk’, but the consolidation of the loyalty of a relatively small provincial elite to the Antonine dynasty.

Provincial cities were increasingly filled with signs of the emperors’ presence: statues, inscribed dedications, and simply civic coins, on which they were now often shown on both sides.55Close These signs did not mean that those emperors had personally visited the cities in question, but cities in the East in particular found it more and more necessary to include the personalities of the imperial family in their expressions of civic identity. Public buildings were a lasting token of an emperor’s one-time presence, whether on a personal visit or by official letter. City gates were built to receive an emperor on a state visit, and remained long afterwards as a record of the occasion. The Harbour Gate at Ephesus was built in association with the Harbour Baths to receive the emperor Domitian.56Close At Antalya, Phaselis, Perge, and Ephesus lavish gateways were built to welcome Hadrian on his visits in the 120s.57Close Imperial entry to a provincial city was accompanied by a ceremony in which leading officials and citizens received their imperial guest and his entourage in a lavish architectural setting, often newly built for the occasion.58Close As we will see in the next chapter, the renovation of a city’s public structures was one way of expressing the historic importance of an emperor’s reign. In the West too, the grand gateway into the forum at Sbeitla may have been designed to receive an official visit, if not of the emperor himself, Antoninus Pius, who never left Italy, perhaps of his representative, the governor based at Carthage.

This attention to grand ceremonial venues is paralleled by other formal settings which were designed to receive the Roman emperors in the event and privilege of an imperial visit. At Ephesus, one of the three metropoleis of Asia in the Antonine period, two sections of seats in the stadium, perhaps marked out by a canopy of Docimian marble columns, were provided by the prytanis Dionysius, with other columns assigned to the ‘Gymnasium Augustum’, perhaps the nearby Baths of Vedius (IEph. 66I). The structure, which may have looked similar to the tetrastyle at Bovillae, perhaps anticipated an imperial visit that never came to fruition.

The way in which the manifestations of central Roman imperial power were incorporated into the religious architecture of the cities of Asia Minor, through the reshaping of temples to local deities to include elements of the imperial cult, has been well studied and needs no reiteration here.59Close These temples occupied a variety of locations, but were always in prominent positions within civic space. They were built either in the centre of the city or on artificial terraces constructed at the edge of the central area, and their iconography was deliberately ambiguous, as for example at Cyzicus, where the Temple of Zeus was crowned with a pediment containing a statue of Hadrian directly beside the traditional image of Zeus.60Close The public precincts surrounding these temples were formalized with long ranges of porticoes in an attempt to regularize and control the previously looser space of the Greek city and insert its traditional local values into a general imperial and Roman context. Temples at Pergamon, Side, Sagalassus, and Ephesus were enclosed by expansive precincts. The intrusion of the emperor in the Greek city culminated in the erection of the Antonine Altar at Ephesus, with its openly dynastic and godlike associations.

These formal architectural settings were not always explicitly religious in function, in that they accommodated a sacred ritual, but were designed to show by their grandeur a city’s personal relation with the emperor himself. Yet in some cases the benefactor of the building concerned acted in his public office as priest of the imperial cult, and this role, perhaps reflected in the dress or posture of his full-length portrait erected in the building, must have been prominent during the public dedication ceremony. Here sacrifices were offered subsequently on important state occasions such as the emperor’s birthday.

The temples, forecourts, gates, and colonnades associated with the emperor were said to stand out above all other buildings in a city.61Close They did so especially because of their greater size. But their ideological purpose was also promoted by the display of imperial statues. A notable characteristic of several of the Antonine complexes discussed above is their decoration with statuary ensembles of portraits of the emperor and his family.62Close Similar, it seems, was the new bouleuterion of Lucius Flavius Sulpicianus Dorion at Hierapytna.63Close The curia at Timgad, dedicated after its renovation in 152, contained a similar ensemble, including a portrait of Lucius Verus wearing a cuirass. These buildings were thus ‘monuments’ to the Antonine dynasty. But in most of these cases individuals outside the imperial family also appear to have been represented: at Thera, Olympia, Nysa, and perhaps also at Ephesus and Hierapytna, statues of the donor and his family shared prominence with the figures of the imperial family. These imperial and aristocratic statues in the governmental buildings of provincial cities, framed within a stage-like aedicular architecture, celebrated not only the new Roman saeculum in 147/8 and the good fortune heralded by the Antonine dynasty, but also the emperors’ contract with the ruling class of provincial cities.

At Apollonia in Illyria, a public assembly building, consisting of an inner chamber with semicircular banks of seating around an orchestra, was erected by a civic official, Quintus Villius Crispinus Furius Proculus. He held the ranks of prytanis and agonothete, superintendent of the public games (Fig. 133a). The building looked across an open square, perhaps the civic agora, towards an earlier assembly building, the ‘odeum’. Its elegant temple front of Corinthian columns had architectural ornament of excellent workmanship (Figs. 133b-d). The finely cut inscription on the frieze and upper fascia of the architrave declared that the building was in memory of his brother, Villius Valentinus Furius Proculus. Togate statues found in the inner chamber and the front portico of the building may reasonably be inferred as representing the brothers. The decoration also included statuary of the imperial family. Again, the combination expressed the solidarity of imperial family and local elites.

The gymnasium and baths-building built at Miletus by Faustina Minor presents a variation on this formula (Fig. 134a). In the frigidarium the region’s local identity was celebrated by two huge prostrate statues of the river god Maeander.64Close In a room near the entrance, known as the ‘Hall of the Muses’, statues of the emperor Marcus, his wife Faustina, and probably other members of the imperial family formed a similar composition, arranged around the semicircular apse to the rear and flanked by five round headed niches above a dado with statues of the Muses and Apollo Citharodos (Fig. 134b).65Close The statues were set in a stage-like columnar architecture, as in the assembly buildings of Ephesus and Nysa discussed in the previous chapter, and in the following century achieved more prominence when set upon a raised stage.66Close An ideal female head looked down on the visitor from the keystone of the arched entrance to the room (Fig. 134c); her identity is unclear, but in her spatial position she metaphorically played the role of guarantor of harmony.67Close The integration of arched forms with columnar structures carried a clear ideological message: the architecture of the Roman East was a hybrid, combining both the traditional trabeated structures of the region and the newer forms of arch and vault introduced into such buildings under Roman rule.

The ‘Hall of the Muses’ in the Baths of Faustina at Miletus is one of a group of lavishly decorated rooms in the imperial bath-gymnasia of Asia Minor, which shares a particularly close association with the imperial family. One of the earliest appears in the ‘Harbour Baths’ at Ephesus, where two similar rooms faced each other across the palaestra (Fig. 120): the better-preserved northern one was separated from the court by a screen of marble piers with engaged double columns; its inner walls were adorned with superimposed marble columns and aediculae on a continuous high podium with smaller niches for statuary, and at the centre of the room a semi-domed apse sheltered the principal statue under a broken pediment. This room, which the excavators supposed to have had a wooden truss roof, bears the same relation to the palaestra as the ‘youth-rooms’ (ephēbeia) of earlier Greek gymnasia.68Close Likewise, in the East Baths, the western of two rooms on opposite sides of the palaestra was decorated with similar aedicular architecture.69Close Further examples occur in bath-gymnasia elsewhere in Asia Minor.70Close In Vedius Sabinianus’ gymnasium at Ephesus, and in the later ‘marble court’ of the Severan baths at Sardis, the formula is slightly varied, in that this room is placed on the side of the palaestra nearest to the baths complex and on the main axis of the whole building.71Close

In 1929 Josef Keil characterized this and similar rooms in bath-gymnasia in imperial Asia Minor as a ‘Kaisersaal’, a name followed by Yegül, who suggested that it should be taken ‘perhaps in the same sense as the famous Kaisersaal of the early eighteenth-century Episcopal Palace in Würzburg’.72Close This comparison is problematic. Whereas the ‘Kaisersaal’ at Würzburg is a huge space, designed as an audience chamber for the bishops of Würzburg, covered by a ceiling fresco by Tiepolo that made allusions to the Holy Roman emperors,73Close these Roman halls are small, enclosed spaces, focused on their statuary decoration, which may or may not have included imperial portraits.74Close They also differ from the Episcopal Palace in the presence of an explicitly religious element. In the room off the palaestra of the ‘Vedius gymnasium’ at Ephesus, an altar was set in front of the central apse (Fig. 123a–b).75Close Although this altar can no longer be regarded for certain as a location of the imperial cult,76Close the special attention that such rooms received was nonetheless due to the fact that they served a ritual function, even if it is a matter of dispute whether all such rooms formerly known as ‘Kaisersäle’ had an actual cultic purpose.

As testified by the large marble slab with moulded border, which was originally fixed on a pier on the right side of the Apodyterium (room IIIA, on fig. 123a), plain to all visitors as they entered, the gymnasium as a whole was dedicated to the Ephesian Artemis, the emperor Antoninus and his household, and the ‘twice neocorate’ city of Ephesus, ‘the first and greatest metropolis ofAsia’.77Close This kind of dedication is common for public buildings of all kinds in the cities of Asia Minor, which helps us to understand that even structures as profane to our own minds as a latrine, workshops, or the paving stones of a street were considered as objects worthy of association with the gods;78Close and those gods now included the imperial house of Rome. Of course, the fact that a building was dedicated, inter alia, to the imperial family cannot be considered proof that it served a directly religious function.79Close In Vedius’ gymnasium at Ephesus the original position of the imperial statues within the building is not certain, their character may not be devotional, and their relation to the purpose of the altar has been questioned.80Close Nonetheless, the specific arguments about the inscription and the imperial statues do not reduce the impression of the strongly religious character of this building and others like it. It is clear that the character of many Roman gymnasia and bath buildings under the Empire was profoundly religious. A wide variety of cults was celebrated there: those associated with gymnasia, such as Heracles and Hermes; those germane to baths, such as Asclepius and Hygieia; deities of general appeal, such as Tyche (Fortune); those with local sanctuaries such as Zeus, Artemis, or Apollo; but, in all cases, also the ruling imperial family.81Close The lavish architectural contexts of these so-called ‘imperial halls’ suited such sacral associations.

The statuary of the west hall of the East Baths included a male figure dressed as a priest, wearing a crown adorned with fifteen small busts (Fig. 135).82Close It was formerly identified with the benefactor Flavius Damianus,83Close but has recently been thought to be a member of the Vedii, perhaps even Vedius Antoninus Sabinianus, the builder of the bouleu- terion and the baths-gymnasium near the stadium,84Close although this identification too has been disputed.85Close The crown has been regarded as a distinctive feature of the imperial cult, although it is now believed that other priests and officials wore such crowns.86Close Whoever it actually represented and whatever his office, however, the figure reiterates the religious associations of the building, even if these were activated only on the occasion of a particular festival. The miniature busts on the crown appear to be images of the gods, among whom are included ruling or deified em- perors.87Close It can be compared to another head, now in the Art Museum at Princeton University, also wearing a crown and which also originated from Asia Minor; this head is dated stylistically to the second quarter of the second century (Fig. 136).88Close The crown is similar to the one from the Vedius gymnasium and has also been suggested to have represented a priest of the imperial cult. That interpretation is more likely in this case, since the small portrait busts around the crown, which are half-length figures and appear to be in Roman dress, most probably represent Roman emperors; moreover, they are placed in an architectural context, with each head set between two columns and beneath a segmental pediment. The whole portrait itself had belonged to an architectural context, as it is carved on the same block as an abacus and originally perhaps formed part of a caryatid pier.

In the ‘imperial hall’ of Sabinianus’ gymnasium at Ephesus the aedicular forms surrounding the statues were combined with architecture of a more Roman appearance. As in the Harbour Baths, the room was separated by a columnar screen of double engaged columns (Figs. 123a–c). The bulky piers used here suggest that, instead of a straight entablature, the columns were surmounted by rounded arches, at least at the central bay, to form a composition similar to the façade of Varius’ ‘Temple of Hadrian’ (Fig. 28) or Antoninus’ reservoir at Athens (Fig. 26b). The capitals of the half-columns set into either side of each pier did not belong to any of the Greek orders, even the most popular Corinthian or the locally important Ionic, but were composite capitals, themselves a hybrid of the Ionic volute and ovolo with the Corinthian acanthus leaves.

Affiliation to imperial Rome was expressed in provincial architecture not only through the dedication of a building in the name of the emperor and his family or the presence of their statues, but also through the building’s very structure and ornamentation. Architectural forms derived from Rome and Italy became associated with the emperor himself. In 154/5 a heliocaminus, such as we find in Pliny’s ingeniously conceived Laurentine villa and the gymnasium at Smyrna,89Close partly sponsored by the emperor Hadrian, was dedicated at Maeonia in Lydia to Antoninus Pius by the leading magistrate of that community.90Close A special aptness may have been seen in the dedication of a ‘sunfurnace’ to an emperor idealized at nearby Tralles as the Sun.91Close

Architectural ornament is usually regarded today as of secondary importance, simply offering archaeologists and historians a dating criterion in combination with inscriptions. Yet in the ancient world it was considered an integral part of classical architecture, which could be used to indicate the status and rank of the builder. Vitruvius' use of the term preserves its etymological sense (ornamentum from ornare = ordinare, equivalent to Greek kosmos), demonstrating famously in Book IV the structural aetiology of horizontal architectural elements. In the same way, military or political ornamenta played a metaphorical role in Roman society, as not simply ‘decorations’ in the modern sense, but defining ‘marks of rank’, discrimina ordinis. Architectural ornament is not only beautiful, but necessary: it shows not just ‘charm’ (venustas), but also ‘functionality’ (utilitas).92Close

The most conspicuous discrimen in architectural ornament was the capital. Vitruvius’ famous anthropomorphic characterization of the Doric and Ionic orders centres on the appearance of this element, the ‘head’ (caput) of the humanized column. The third order, the Corinthian, though not regarded as so anthropomorphic as the others, was the one most frequently used to distinguish sacred monuments, as its application in the Pantheon makes especially clear.93Close Under the early Empire, its characteristic decoration based on the acanthus plant was associated with Augustus himself and his patron deity Apollo.94Close But in the ‘imperial halls’ of the bath-gymnasia at Ephesus and Miletus a different form is used for the columnar screens set at their entrances, a composite capital combining Corinthian acanthus leaves with Ionic volutes, but, unlike western examples, with lotus leaves replacing the upper part of the calathus.95Close We have already seen it in the Library of Celsus at Ephesus (Fig. 5a); it also appears in the lower storey of the nearby Gate of Hadrian (Fig. 29). If this particular form was characteristic of architectural workshops in western Asia Minor, in conception the composite capital was an Italianate hybrid. Its origin is to be found in the Italo-Corinthian forms of central and southern Italy from the late Republic, for example the capitals adorning the round temple at the top of the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste.96Close The apparently Augustan composite capitals reused in the church of S Costanza at Rome have suggested that the first emperor adopted the form as an ‘Italic’ order.97Close As no individual Augustan buildings with this form are known, this hypothesis remains unproven. On the other hand, it was under the adoptive emperors of the second century that the composite order came into its own. It is used from the Flavian period in a programmatic way in the most important imperial arches of Italy, such as the Arch of Titus in Rome, the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, and, later, the Arch of Severus in Rome.

From the reign of Trajan the composite capital was adopted by individual wealthy aristocrats in provincial cities to adorn public buildings constructed in the imperial name in a Roman and ‘imperial’ style. These structures were not only dedicated to the reigning emperor. New structures such as the ‘Nymphaeum of Trajan’, dedicated by Aristio, the ‘imperial hall’ of the Harbour Baths, and, in its lower storey, the Library of Celsus (Fig. 5a), proclaimed the style of Rome by the composite orders adorning their façades.98Close Under Hadrian we find composite capitals placed at equally strategic locations, decorating the grand gateways possibly built to receive the emperor, at Antalya, Ephesus, and Miletus. In the West, the gateway and central temple of the forum at Sbeitla (Fig. 111) and the upper gallery of the basilica at Carthage (Fig. 127c) show that the capital, used as part of an order, had a comparable symbolic function in Antonine architecture.

Buildings dedicated to the emperors were made of superior materials and workmanship, reflecting the principle, familiar from monarchist literature, that a royal body might consist of the same matter as any other body, but made by a better artist.99Close The effect of the revolutionary changes in architectural style at the neocorate cities of Ephesus and Pergamon during the early years of the century was to make manifest this idea.100Close While the decoration ofgrand works erected under the Flavians in Ephesus and elsewhere had been exuberant, it seemed nonetheless ‘provincial’ and out-of-date by comparison with the developments in Rome. From the reign ofTrajan, the buildings of the capital became a formative stylistic influence on the great works of benefactors in the cities of Asia. Trajanic buildings in Ephesus, Pergamon, and other cities achieved an impact because of their novel and supposedly Roman appearance, influenced, in plan and ornamentation, by the imperial monuments of Rome.101Close When private buildings like Poleites’ stoa at Labraunda102Close shared this new visual culture, adherence to previous local conventions seemed stubborn, introspective, and parochial. This may have been an illusion, insofar as the sculptors and masons who produced such works were probably provincial, but the element of architectural choice came, not from these mostly anonymous figures, but from their Roman patrons.

The metropolitan influence on provincial architecture continued in the following reigns. The Traianeum at Pergamon, completed in 124, provided a model for subsequent buildings in both Rome and Asia Minor, in its distinctive architectural ornament and two-fascia architrave.103Close If the artists were provincial, their huge influence was the result of imperial Roman patronage.104Close It was retained by Antoninus, as a grand ‘State’ style, with new and highly decorated ornamental forms, both at Rome, in the Hadrianeum and Tomb of Hadrian, and in Asia Minor, in the ‘Gymnasium of Vedius’.105Close The most important public buildings erected in the provinces between 120 and 160, not only in Asia Minor but also in Greece and the Balkans, Italy, North Africa, and further west, show a remarkable homogeneity in their architectural decoration. Recent excavations in Turkey have provided information about great Antonine monuments previously little known. The Serapeum at Ephesus, excavated from 1991, was completed in the 140s and located high up on a terrace approached by an almost baroque sequence of stairways;106Close the Temple ofAntoninus Pius at Sagalassus, surveyed from 1986 and excavated since 1990, shows an exceptional finesse of ornament, which is similar to buildings elsewhere of the same period, such as the Baths of Gavius Maximus at Ostia, the basilica at Carthage, the temples and forum arch at Sbeitla, and even the ‘Hall of the Agonothetes’ at Apollonia.107Close Common to these buildings are their public role and intended grandeur in their communities and their connections, in dedication and statuary, with the imperial family. Such similarities over so wide an area are best explained as different manifestations of a desire among members of the senatorial order and provincial administration to express the ideology of imperial rule.

This architectural ornament was predominantly of marble. Marble decoration had a particular association with imperial power. Suetonius described Augustus' transformation of Rome from brick to marble as ‘in accordance with the majesty of the Empire’.108Close Scholars have recognized how the use of coloured marbles from across the Empire to decorate complexes such as the Forum Augustum, the Basilica Aemilia, and the Pantheon could symbolize Rome’s dominion and her rulers' imperial ideology.109Close In Ancient Egypt expensive materials regarded as imperishable were a medium of 'monumental image communication’.110Close The use of coloured marble was a similar determinant of monumentality in the eastern Empire. But what was valued even more highly in these buildings than their marble capitals and entablatures was their polychrome revetment.

The inscribed dedication of the Stoa of Verulanus at Ephesus referred not only to the building’s construction, around 130, but also to its sumptuous inlaid marble decoration, which it described by the term skoutlōsis.111Close This text was itself inscribed on slabs of coloured marble, which belonged to the surface of the building near the main entrance from the agora into the palaestra. The marble can be identified as the white marble with purple veins known as pavonazzetto (‘peacock-style’), which came from the Docimian quarries of Phrygia to the north-east of the city. In the past the term skoutlōsis has sometimes been interpreted as referring to mosaic decoration, because of the implication that the pieces of material are cut up into lozenge shapes or squares.112Close But technically the term denotes only the lozenge-like shape, into which revetments of marble were also cut.113Close The first occasion of its use was for a mosaic pavement commissioned for the great Capitoline Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Rome in 149 BC.114Close The building and the circumstances of its construction, at the start of the Third Punic War, suggest that the pattern was considered appropriate for the very highest religious authority and military power of Rome. Under the Empire, its translation from mosaic floors to marble walls continued these grand associations. In the Baths ofTitus, for example, there have been found pieces of marble revetment cut into diamond shapes of alternating red and green colour, which would originally have covered the interior walls of this grand imperial structure.115Close

It was thus an expression of the joint cult of the city deity and the Roman emperor to dress the walls of a building dedicated to them in such a shining and costly revetment. As well as the structure itself, its marble decoration too was an object of dedication. At Sagalassus, the walls of the Temple of Apollo Clarius and the Dii Augusti, originally constructed perhaps under Augustus, were clothed in this diamond patterning of marble slabs in the early years ofAntoninus Pius.116Close Such marble dressing was, where possible, total, covering both interior walls and floors. The rhomboid forms of the marble pavement of the new Capitolium at Ostia are recognizably a variety of the same skoutlōsis.117Close At Aphrodisias the stage-building of the theatre was decorated by Tiberius Claudius Zelus, in his official ceremonial role as high-priest of the state imperial cult and priest of the local city cult ofAphrodite. The recently rediscovered inscription described this decoration as including not only columns and entablatures, but also marble inlay on the walls.118Close The new stage-building of a theatre at Olbia in Pontus had similar decoration.119Close Likewise, an exedra off the stoa of the gymnasium at Stratoniceia was named after Antoninus and adorned with this skoutlōsis from floor to roof;120Close an exedra off the gymnasium at Myra, built by the benefactor Opramoas, probably before 153, and a hall in the Hadrianeum at Thyateira, called the oikobasilikos, were adorned with similar, lozenge-shaped marble revetment.121Close At Sardis one Aelius Theodorus was commemorated shortly after 212 for his contribution to the construction and skoutlōsis of the oikobasilikos; and at Termessus a building for the cult ofArtemis and the Dii Augusti was dedicated in the Antonine period, ‘with its kosmosand skoutlōsis .122CloseThe sacred and imperial meaning of these buildings depended as much on the patterning of their surface ornamentation as on their formal structures.123Close This material became a fundamental ingredient in the imperial meaning of the Graeco-Roman city, as at Ephesus, where Tiberius Claudius Secundus, an official in the imperial service who held the posts of viator tribunicius, accensus velatus, and lictor curiatius, yet is also described as a ‘lover of the Ephesians’ (philephesius), adorned the city with 'monumental works’ including the oikosr. the stoa leading to it was revetted with skoutl^-sis.124Close A statue was set up in his honour in the sanctuary ofArtemis.

The exact material used for this decoration is not usually specified by the inscriptions, but it seems to have been important that the marble was coloured and veined (poikilos).125Close Indeed, the Docimian marble used for Verulanus’ stoa may have been preferred. Its purple veins expressed an imperial meaning and suggested the ‘eternal’ endurance of the work. The purple dye brought back from Persia by Alexander caused amazement because it had retained its shine and freshness for nearly two centuries.126Close It was natural, then, that buildings in this colour should be considered a hallmark of an imperial architectural style. The association between purple clothing-dye and purple-veined marble is not fanciful. The lower order of the stage-building of the theatre at Hierapolis, dedicated to Severus and Caracalla, the city, and its patron deity, had a distinctive marble inlay.127Close The revetment was considered almost as important as the construction itself, as the dedication, inscribed on the lower fascia of the architrave, specifies it in detail: 653 feet of Docimian marble contributed by the corporation of purple- dyers for the soffits of the first and second storeys of the proscaenium. Here at least the purple streaks of this Docimian marble revetment were an explicit image for the real purple dye that expressed royal status. Like the emperor’s robes, the marble of his buildings was both an ornament and a discrimen, a statement of rank.

The monumentality of Antonine architecture, then, lay not only in its imposing bulk, but also in its shiny marble surface. Without this ornament it was formless and defaced. In this respect, the great buildings dedicated to emperor and city god were no exception to the general rule. On a tomb of this period at Athens the builder, Antonia Socratica, added the familiar curse against those defilers of her husband’s tomb who might ‘strip the building of its kosmos or skoutlōsis or disturb it in any way whatever’.128Close The same lozenged patterning in purple-veined marble was adopted for private tombs of the later Empire, as for example at Ephesus, where the ‘buildings’ (oikēmata) around a tomb and the sarcophagus within are described as revetted with ‘Synnadic skoutlōsis, indicating again the use of Docimian marble from Synnas.129Close

Such diamond forms (scutuli) are attested on the opus sectile pavements and wall revetments of imperial buildings.130Close The wall revetments are certainly much rarer survivals from ancient architecture than the floors, as one might expect, but they are still visible in exceptional and restored cases like the Pantheon in Rome and in the inherited forms of Byzantine buildings, such as Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.131Close The earliest official buildings of Roman Christianity, such as the church of S Andrea, adapted from the basilica of Junius Bassus on the Esquiline in Rome, reproduce similar patterned decorations, which directly influenced the interior walls of later buildings at Constantinople and Ravenna. Indeed, inscriptions recording the much later renovation of older buildings dedicated to the emperors continued to emphasize their skoutlōsis, as, for instance, in the fifth-or sixth-century re-dedication of the ‘Marble Court’ of the bath-gymnasium at Sardis.132Close A fourth-century building outside the Porta Marina at Ostia provides a parallel for how the distinctive rhomboid forms of skoutlōsis might originally have appeared (Fig. 137a–c).133Close Jewish inscriptions from the late antique Greek East reveal a similar concern, as at Sardis, where it seems to have resulted from Roman imperial influence and the pattern’s overwhelming visual power.134Close

Following Ward-Perkins’ view that the ‘marble style’ and the construction of vaulted buildings with a concrete rubble aggregate were both local features of the architecture of imperial Asia Minor,135Close others have played down the influence of Rome on the design of buildings on this region as ‘only one of many’.136Close It is certainly true that the availability of local materials was an important factor in shaping the evolution of architectural form; one cannot say that Roman forms were simply imported wholesale.137Close A large part of the ‘Roman contribution’ to provincial architecture lay in the ‘distribution’ of forms originating in one region to another: thus we find a barrel-vault of cut stone, a feature of the eastern Mediterranean,138Close in the ‘Temple of Diana’ at Nîmes (Fig. 42), or a ‘convex frieze’, typical of Syria and Asia Minor, in both the Temple of Hadrian at Rome and the ‘Gymnasium’ theatre-temple complex at Syracuse, of the later Antonine period.139Close But it goes too far to claim that ‘there was no conscious attempt to “adapt” a western standard ofbuilding form’, or that ‘Rome and the West had ceased to be the overarching architectural reference for the cities of Asia’.140Close The use of the convex frieze visible in, for example, the Temple of Zeus Lepsynus at Euromus in Caria gained its relevance and effectiveness because of its high profile and exemplary employment in the Hadrianeum at Rome,141Close just as the stone-cut barrel-vault at Nîmes, in a complex associated with the imperial cult, was a meaningful form because of its use in the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek.142Close In the same way, the facing of opus reticulatum, formerly introduced from Italy to regions as far apart as Sicily and Cilicia or the Levant, was used, not in provincial building generally, but in projects—the amphitheatre at Syracuse, the baths at Elaioussa-Sebaste ‘given’ by Augustus to the Cappadocian king, Antiochus I, and Herod’s palace at Jericho143Close—associated with the very nerve-centre of Roman power. The ‘marble style’ and vaulted buildings only gained favour in East and West because they were associated with Rome itself.144Close

Certain visual features of Antonine buildings associated with the Roman emperors characterized them as ‘imperial architecture’.

A royal and palatial stage architecture, adorned with statues of both ruling dynasty and local elites, distinguished not only the new ceremonial settings of theatres, but also political assembly buildings and halls in bath-gymnasia associated with the ruler cult. This essentially trabeate style was combined with Roman arcuated elements to produce a cultural hybrid, which reflected the integration of Roman culture and Hellenism. In the crowns of the imperial priests and the arched façades of the imperial halls, focused on the emperor’s image within a semi-domed apse, this curvilinear architecture highlighted the divinity of the first man of the Empire and ofhis family. The composite capitals on this screen façade announced that the space within was imperial and Roman. Imperial buildings were dressed in a revetment of geometrical patterns and coloured marble, especially with purple veins, that proclaimed a royal appearance. The origin of these forms is often associated with Hadrian, regarded as ‘the emperor who did most in the second century to give places of the imperial cult their dignity and splendour’.145Close Yet, in the light of this evidence of Antonine attention to imperial buildings, that view should be reevaluated. Such features showed the wealth and cultivation of the ruling family to whom the principal buildings of the cities owed their inspiration, and seemed to contemporaries to augur the beginning of an eternal prosperity.

Modern architectural theorists stress the need for diversity and individuality in the architecture of the city. In the Roman Empire, however, monuments by individual benefactors risked compromising a city’s potential organicity. Cities, therefore, emphasized structures and symbolic forms, like the Tyche figures with crowns ofwalls, which enhanced the completeness of a city as a monumental artefact. Public buildings not only promoted the honour of the families that built them, but also represented the community as a whole. They also disseminated imperial values: in the East, Roman architectural forms were integrated with Hellenic ones; in the West, symbolic statuary and building types showed new colonies and municipia as embedded in Roman culture and modelled on the archetype of Rome. In the West provincial and military governors played a decisive role in implementing this process of acculturation; the reconstruction of Carthage was symbolically important to Antoninus Pius. In the East there was opposition to the new architecture, which was resolved by an active involvement of the Roman imperial administration, sometimes the emperor himself, and a process of negotiation with local elites sympathetic to Rome.

Comparative studies of ideological expression in architecture in other cultures may suggest why such values were promoted. They reflect not so much real prosperity as assertions of unity and stability at times of conflict or crisis. The Empire was threatened by unrest on many sides; the great cities ofAsia were engulfed by internecine rivalries and overwhelmed by natural disasters; even the pre-eminence of Italy over its provinces seemed questioned. In such contexts, monumental architecture encouraged a belief that the stability and unity of the Empire had been enhanced by a new prosperity under the divine Antoninus Pius. That seemed reflected in its dazzling ornamentation. Proconnesian marble, used in the temples of Venus and Rome and of Hadrian at Rome, marked provincial works like the new basilica and baths at Carthage or the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus at Olympia.

This architecture did not simply refer to the present time. Its monumentality emerged more strongly because it was viewed in a long-term chronological context. The ideological importance of imperial architecture depended on its use ofhistory: on the one hand, its revival of the past; on the other, an expectation that the new buildings of the reign would be monuments of the future. This dual perspective, characteristic of the architecture and culture of the Antonine age, is the subject of the following section.