This book focuses primarily on the built environment – the buildings and spaces themselves, their materials, and the words and images that covered them – but it is important to recognize that material buildings are always in dialogue with wider cultural practices. Individual architectural specimens are in conversation (if not always in alignment) with broad cultural ideals shaped and expressed by other media as well, such as literature, coinage, and honorific inscriptions, each of which operates according to the rules and expectations of its own genre as inflected “locally” by its form, circulation, and audience. In this chapter, I set up some of the ways in which decisions and rhetoric about rebuilding operated within this larger cultural milieu. In particular, we will see how rebuilding projects tapped into and manipulated cultural values and ideals associated with time: retrospective piety and forward-looking role-modeling (and obligations) for future generations.

Euergetism, Rebuilding, and Discourses of Honor: Four Vignettes

Most studies of architectural patronage in the Roman world focus on new construction and the social capital that such civic benefaction could convey. The system, known by the modern term euergetism (from the ancient Greek for civic benefactor, εὐεργέτης/euergetēs), was a kind of social contract between wealthy patrons, sometimes as part of compulsory financial obligations (summae honoriae) of holders of certain civic offices or priesthoods, and the larger community.Footnote ¹ Sponsoring games, theatrical performances, sacrifices, and other public celebrations, along with the public distributions of food that could accompany them, was widely lauded and came to be expected of the elite of a community across the empire, especially outside the city of Rome where the emperor’s patronage dominated.Footnote ²

While the forms and language of this mode of civic patronage have roots in the Hellenistic world, they shifted and dramatically expanded and intensified under Augustus.Footnote ³ Rather than a unidirectional donation of resources from wealthy individuals to their communities, the Roman euergetistic system is best understood as a form of exchange, with social codes that structured the forms and expectations of both donors and recipients, of civic benefactions presented and honors returned.Footnote ⁴ In their lifetimes, wealthy benefactors could be rewarded with permanent front-row seats in the city’s highly stratified social space of the theater;Footnote ⁵ they received thanks in the form of honorific decrees – often committed to stone in a conspicuous place in the city – and could receive honorary titles and acclamations from fellow citizens; their city councils could vote and pay for their life-sized portraits to be fashioned of bronze or marble and set up in prominent public spaces atop pedestals inscribed with a glowing record of their virtues and deeds.Footnote ⁶ After a patron’s death, his or her generosity could continue to fuel the prominence of descendants and the status of the family name. Benefactors’ funerals could draw officeholders and other mourners from across the community;Footnote ⁷ their tombs could be situated in privileged locations and receive special attention; their birthdays could be celebrated as local holidays;Footnote ⁸ and of course their statues and inscribed honors, whether erected in their lifetimes or posthumously, continued to commemorate both individual donors and, by either direct or indirect association, their families.Footnote ⁹ In addition, recent work on Roman euergetism has stressed how honors conferred upon benefactors amounted to a powerful form of civic approbation – of official, public recognition and consent by citizens and town councils – of the benefactors’ elite status and, by implication, their model-worthy high moral standing.Footnote ¹⁰

Of all the forms that Roman euergetism could take, architectural construction was perhaps the most prestigious.Footnote ¹¹ This was due in no small part to the oversized role that buildings collectively, as “ornament” of the cities in which they resided, played in defining and promoting cultural values of civic harmony and beauty.Footnote ¹² Constructing public buildings was a terrifically expensive and potentially complicated and time-intensive enterprise, requiring as it did both immense funds for materials and labor as well as the acquisition of land on which to build and the follow-through of numerous entities, from city councils to contractors.Footnote ¹³ Both epigraphic and legal sources make it clear that many architectural projects promised or started by patrons were left incomplete, due, for example, to rising costs or the benefactor’s default or death.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite the hurdles, pouring resources into buildings brought elite benefactors significant reward. The visible, material presence of architecture, as well as its continued use and reengagement with both familiar and new audiences over time, made it an extremely valuable vehicle for the declaration and continued memorialization of a patron’s status and civic-minded generosity.

Indeed, those whose civic benefactions took the form of public architecture had the structures themselves to carry on the family name in the form of grand building inscriptions oriented to the public eye. Patrons capitalized on this mechanism to secure civic visibility and prominence in different ways and to different degrees as economic and political circumstances allowed, but over the course of the imperial period, especially outside of Rome itself, elite civic benefaction was a fundamental driver of the quintessential forms of urban space and the temporal rhythms of urban experience across the Mediterranean.

So much, so clear for new building projects, blank slates of image-shaping, but where does re-building come in? Given all the advantages of starting with a tabula rasa, why would a patron opt to invest in a preexisting structure? We have tended to approach the sponsorship of rebuilding in the Roman world with the assumption that a new structure was preferential to reworking an existing one. In support of this view, scholars have pointed, for example, to various sources that seem to indicate that it occasionally took imperial arm-twisting to encourage private investment in rebuilding projects over new construction, and that in addition to such soft-power “carrots,” legal “sticks” were also deployed to channel private funds toward repair of urban fabrics.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, when benefactors did choose reconstruction, scholars have generally viewed it as a decision primarily driven by pragmatism, on the logic that reworking an old building was less expensive, and less complicated in terms of acquiring land, materials, and manpower than erecting a new structure. Oftentimes that was likely true, but pure expediency cannot account for many projects – as, for example, when the rebuilding was on such a grand scale that new construction could have been achieved – and in any case, solutions that are pragmatic can also be otherwise desirable too.

More importantly, a closer look at the evidence demonstrates a situation more nuanced than an either-or contest between new construction vs. rebuilding. Many patrons directed their euergetistic energies into multiple forms of civic benefaction, including both from-scratch projects and those that improved, expanded, and/or restored preexisting ones, and they clearly thought the combination was to their, and their community’s, benefit. What is more, being known as a civic rebuilder brought to the fore desirable qualities and values gained through the manipulation of time. Looking back to rebuild and restore was regularly cast as a virtue in itself, and it was a quality that contributed to a patron’s public persona far beyond the physical location of the building site.

To see how this played out on the ground, this chapter revolves around a collection of specific examples, which I introduce here through a quartet of brief vignettes:

1. 1. An aged ruler of a vast empire pens a first-person account of his accomplishments to be inscribed in bronze at his tomb in the capital, additional copies of which would, after his death, come to be translated into local vernacular and inscribed in stone in corners of his empire over 1,700 km (1,000 miles) away. The ruler was of course Augustus, known as the first of the Roman emperors. At the same time, however, that he calibrated his public image to usher in a new golden age, he sought to anchor it in venerable, Republican tradition. Among the feats and achievements included in his self-promoting text, the Res Gestae, is an abundant roster of buildings that he constructed in the capital, and even more that he repaired or restored, including a boast of having rebuilt a remarkable eighty-two temples in a single year in the city of Rome.

2. 2. Over a century later, in Gabii, a lakeside city about ten miles east of the capital, a portico of a temple was in serious need of repair. A priestess of the temple, a wealthy woman named Agusia Priscilla, promised to donate her own money to the restoration, and in thanks for her generosity, the town councillors (decurions) decreed that a portrait statue of her be made and set up in town. On the statue base the councillors inscribed words of praise for Agusia for “following the example of illustrious women,” for committing funds to the temple restoration project, and for sponsoring public games in honor of the emperor and his descendants.

3. 3. At about the same time, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean in what is now Turkey, the exterior walls of the temple-shaped tomb of a local patron named Opramoas from Rhodiapolis were covered in thousands of engraved words. Together these formed a publicly displayed archive in stone of nearly three decades’ worth of documents concerning the benefactor. They included letters about Opramoas written by the emperor himself, reports of the honors conferred upon the deceased by his hometown and other nearby cities, and the lengthy reports of the benefactions he made to them, including his substantial investments in architectural reconstruction in the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster.

4. 4. Finally, fast forward three and a half or four centuries, to the late fifth/early sixth century. In a still-glittering late antique metropolis in Asia Minor, local inhabitants came to know their governor, a certain Palmatus, the imperial official responsible for their province, through the presence of his imposing full-length portrait in official garb standing on a tall base in the square before the city theater. Below the governor’s marble feet, in easy reach of the eyes of bystanders, those who could read (and those who were read to) saw him hailed as renewer and founder of the city and benefactor of the whole province in gratitude for which the statue towering above them was set up.

These cases are varied in geography, language, and format. They originate at points that span some 500 years of Roman rule in the Mediterranean. They range from the hand of the emperor to testimony of the provincial elite. Our investigation, however, begins with what they have in common. All grew out of and in turn further fed into a powerful economy of honor in which both new architectural projects and restored and rebuilt civic structures played crucial roles. All were texts and also monuments – in other words, texts that existed in public space, carved and displayed for all, literate and illiterate, to see. They each testify to the material and political heft carried by claims of architectural building and rebuilding in Roman cities and how deeply embedded both could be in shaping individual and collective standing in the present and legacy in the future.

Augustus, His Res Gestae, and Restoration as Imperial Virtue

The expectation that rebuilding was a virtuous undertaking had long-standing currency in both the Republican world of the Romans and in the Hellenistic Greek east.Footnote ¹⁶ However, a major turning point can be found in the reign of Augustus and is exemplified by the first of our vignettes. That sketch describes a summary account of the 75-year-old Augustus’ deeds that, according to Cassius Dio and Suetonius, was read out in the Roman Senate after the emperor’s death in 14 CE and was then, on the deceased’s instructions, inscribed on bronze tablets set up before his huge mausoleum in the Campus Martius in Rome (Fig. I.7, no. 1).Footnote ¹⁷ These original bronze inscriptions from the capital do not survive, but copies of the full text of the emperor’s roster of achievements made their way elsewhere in the empire, the most complete of which, carved into the marble of the exterior walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus in Ankara (ancient Ancyra; Fig. 1.1), like another from Apollonia (modern Uluborlu, Turkey) also in the province of Galatia, also included a version of the text rendered into Greek, the language used by the local population.Footnote ¹⁸

Figure 1.1 Temple of Rome and Augustus, Ankara

(Photo: courtesy Jona Lendering, Livius.org)

We know the text as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (abbreviated RG in what follows), or in English, “The Accomplishments of the Deified Augustus” (emphasis added), but the fuller version of the text’s opening heading, as preserved in oversized letters on the surviving inscribed copies, distinguished between and stressed both the emperor’s accomplishments and his financial investments on behalf of the Roman people: “A copy of the achievements of the divine Augustus, by which he subjected the whole world to the rule of the Roman people, and of the expenses (inpensarum), which he made for the state and people of Rome.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Greek version is even more direct, tellingly omitting the nod toward world domination and describing the contents simply as an account of the “deeds and gifts of the god Augustus” (πράξεις τε καὶ δωρεαὶ Σεβαστοῦ θεοῦ).Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, in both Latin and Greek versions, the “expenses” or “gifts” portion of the text that follows is extensive. It comprises a series of paragraphs given over to the enumeration of donations of money handed out to Roman citizens and soldiers (RG 15–18), architectural benefactions (RG 19–21), games sponsored (RG 22–23), and donations to provincial temples (RG 24).

Within the report of Augustus’ benefactions, considerable attention is devoted to architectural works. We should not pass over this observation too quickly since, though not entirely unprecedented, in accounts of one’s own achievements, it was both remarkable in its time for its lengthy emphasis on architecture and proved to be profoundly influential to later generations.Footnote ²¹ As Jaś Elsner has underscored,

Importantly, it was not only new construction that Augustus stressed. Particularly surprising, and central to our discussion here, is the extremely prominent role that architectural restoration, specifically, played within the Res Gestae. Sandwiched between paragraphs 19 and 21, which are dominated by verbs of construction (feci, “I built/made,” and consacravi, “I consecrated”), paragraph 20 emphasizes architectural process and temporality with verbs that describe restoration, completion, and improvement: refeci (“I remade”), perfeci (“I finished,” implying a project begun by another), and munivi (here best understood as “repaired” or “paved,” referring to Augustus’ improvement of the Via Flaminia).Footnote ²³

At the same time, the verbs themselves can be misleading, and there is more rebuilding here than first meets the eye. Consider Chapter 19, the first of the architecture chapters and the one in which, as mentioned, Augustus enumerates a series of structures that he built on public land:

Despite the emperor’s choice of the verb feci (“I built,” rendered with ἐπόησα in the Greek text), scholars have long noted that many of the structures listed in this section were actually rebuilding projects. Most significant in this respect are the temples that Augustus includes here. Indeed, as Pierre Gros pointed out over forty years ago, the temples listed in RG 19 were among Rome’s most venerable cult buildings: the small temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitoline was the famous depository of the spolia opima, arms taken directly from an enemy commander after his death at the hand of a Roman commander, beginning with Romulus’ victory over King Acron of Caenina; the temple of Magna Mater on the Palatine was built as the home of the Phrygian mother-goddess Cybele after her “arrival” in Rome at the prompting of the Sibylline Books at the end of the Second Punic War in the late third century BCE; the Temple of Quirinus was remembered by Livy as having been first built in the fourth century BCE after a victory over the Samnites; and so on.Footnote ²⁵

Though Augustus writes in the RG that he “built” them, it is inconceivable that Romans would have been duped into thinking that he had originated these revered, centuries-old structures that were so central to the religious life and cultural identity of their community. Yet to simply dismiss these claims as “inaccuracies” or “lies” would surely miss the point. They were part of a larger calibrated rhetorical strategy. As one scholar has written, “The Res Gestae presents a masterclass in the deployment of economy with the truth.”Footnote ²⁶ Augustus had latitude to label and “package” the structures as “built” rather than “rebuilt” despite, or even because, he and his audience would not have understood the verbs “fecit” or “refecit” in our modern, overly literal sense.Footnote ²⁷ Rather, the terms were malleable, with semantic leeway that could encompass a range of building activities. The selection of verb was nevertheless useful, I suggest, in shifting temporal emphasis in order to wrap architectural innovation in a mantle of tradition or to reorient reworked structures by casting a light of newness upon them. Subsequent chapters of this book consider several of the material, epigraphic, and spatial mechanisms by which structures were “reactivated” or “recharged” through rebuilding. Here I want to focus not so much on individual buildings as on the dynamics of praise and honor associated with architectural reconstruction writ large.

Beyond verb selection, we find the emphasis on rebuilding signaled by sheer numbers of projects included in the Res Gestae. Particularly noteworthy, as indicated in the vignette above, is the emperor’s boast of having rebuilt a remarkable eighty-two temples in a single year, that of his sixth consulship, which was in 28 BCE (RG 20.4). Even if we take this to mean projects begun and not necessarily brought to conclusion during that year, this is a truly striking claim in terms of both its absolute and relative scale.Footnote ²⁸ It is even more powerful embedded as and where it was within the text that highlights a number of high-profile, explicitly named projects. Here, in heralding more than six dozen unnamed yet quantified temples, Augustus trumpets not just the rebuilding of particular marquee buildings but positions the act of rebuilding as a praiseworthy virtue in its own right.Footnote ²⁹

Turning to Augustus’ legacy, Elsner is right, in the passage I quoted above, to emphasize the knock-on effects of the prominence of architectural patronage in Augustus’ autobiography for later imperial figures. But we can press the point further since it is true not only for architectural patronage in general, but also specifically for rebuilding. For example, Ovid’s reference to Livia’s restoration of the Temple of Bona Dea on the Aventine in his Fasti characterizes the work as an intentional imitation of her husband (Fast. 5.157). Indeed, after Augustus, architectural restoration became a key measure by which emperors were praised (or criticized). Statius, for example, vaunts Domitian’s construction of a new road, the Via Domitiana, in light of his major architectural restoration and revision projects in the city, the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Temple of Peace (Silv. 4.3.16–17).Footnote ³⁰ The renewal and longevity of the emperor’s building projects contribute directly to the poem’s concluding, panegyrical wish for the emperor’s own “eternal youth:” “As long as the Trojan fire burns and the Tarpeian father thunders in his reborn palace (aula renata), until, while you still rule the earth, this road [the Via Domitiana] outlives the aged Appian Way.”Footnote ³¹

Cassius Dio likewise points to architectural rebuilding in his commending of Trajan. In the section of his history praising the emperor’s character, we hear echoes of Augustus in the descriptions of Trajan’s generous financial spending on reconstruction and of his modesty in describing his own input:

Augustus’ reign also appears to have opened a new chapter of large-scale disaster relief. C. P. Jones points out that, while there are instances of Hellenistic kings funding major post-earthquake reconstruction, Republican generals do not seem to have engaged in funding such relief, which appears rather to begin in the Roman world with Augustus.Footnote ³³ For example, Augustus was remembered for his post-disaster aid to provincial cities in the so-called Appendix to the Res Gestae, the third-person summary that supplemented Augustus’ first-person account of his accomplishments on the walls of the Ankaran temple, likewise in both Latin and Greek.Footnote ³⁴ Later historians also credited the emperor’s magnanimity in rebuilding communities that had been devastated by natural disasters. Cassius Dio, for example, reports that Augustus gave funds to the people of Paphos after an earthquake and permitted them to rename the city Augusta.Footnote ³⁵ The sixth-century Agathias relates a detailed account of the aftermath of an earthquake in Tralles when, in response to the appeal of a local farmer, a certain Chaeremon, the emperor generously sent a delegation, who “diligently supervised the rebuilding of the city, spending huge sum of money on the project and giving the city the form which it has preserved to the present day.”Footnote ³⁶ The base of a statue of the farmer inscribed with the account was, according to the historian, still legible in his time.Footnote ³⁷

As with English expressions used in modern political discourse, in the Roman world, the semantic range of “renovation” (renovatio), “restoration” (restitutio), and related terms such as restorator and conservator, allowed the concept to be applied widely and at variable scale, from individual buildings and named provinces to global concepts (e.g., restorer of the Republic, restorer of peace, restorer of the world: restorator rei publicae, restorator pacis, restorator orbis).Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, in terms of imperial image-shaping, architectural restoration had the potential to carry extra currency in allowing patrons concrete expression of more abstract, retrospective ideologies of cultural, political, and moral restoration. We can observe this perhaps most directly from the fact that many of those rulers who trumpeted restoration as a broad value of their reign – for example, through the medium of minted currency – also devoted significant attention to real architectural restoration work (and the heralding of it).Footnote ³⁹

Both Trajan and Hadrian, for instance, two of the great builder and rebuilder emperors, issued coins that highlighted their spearheading of overarching programs of “restoration.” Tied to his roadworks and alimentary programs, Trajan famously issued a series of coins that featured a personified “Italia restituta.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Hadrian expanded this notion geographically and conceptually while simultaneously converting the action of restoration from a quality of the object (as with Trajan’s “Italy restored”) to a personal epithet.Footnote ⁴¹ In numerous coin issues, Hadrian himself appeared as “Restorer” of particular provinces (e.g., restitutor Italiae; restitutor Achaiae; restitutor Africae) (Fig. 1.2), and of the empire as a whole (restitutor orbis terrarum).Footnote ⁴² In the case of at least one example from this series, the “restorer” title was applied quite literally: Hadrian had devoted considerable attention to rebuilding the city walls, markets, and tetrapyla of Nicomedia (Izmit, Turkey) after a devastating earthquake and then subsequently appeared as “restitutor Nicomediae” on a sestertius issue, which was all the more attention-grabbing since it appears that it was one of only two in this series that featured a named city rather than a larger region or province.Footnote ⁴³

Figure 1.2 Aureus of Hadrian, gold, 130–38 CE, with reverse showing Hadrian raising up a kneeling personification of Achaea (legend: RESTITVTORI ACHAIAE) (RIC II.3, 1565)

(Source: American Numismatic Society, inv. 1944.100.45557; image in the public domain)

Figure 1.2Long description

The obverse side has a right-facing portrait head of bearded Hadrian with curly hair and a ring of clear, inscribed text to its left and right. It reads, Hadrianus Aug Cos III PP. The reverse side of coin shows Hadrian standing on the right, turned to the left, extending his right arm towards a kneeling Acheaea, with her right knee on the ground, and right arm outstretched to meet Hadrian's. A vase with a miniature palm is on the ground between them.

Hadrian’s geographic and semantic expansion of the emperor-as-restorer trope on the official imagery of Roman coins has been credited with the popularity of the type in subsequent centuries, including by some emperors who claimed the abstract virtue of restoration in the absence of an extensive architectural program, as well as by those who bolstered such ideological claims with material construction and rebuilding programs.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the turn of the second to third century, for example, Septimius Severus also claimed the title restitutor urbis on some coins, a move that’s been associated both with the re-establishment of peace after the civil war that ended in 197 and with building projects he undertook in the capital as part of an effort to stress the stability of his new dynasty.Footnote ⁴⁵

A hundred years later, in the first decade of the fourth century, the usurping princeps Maxentius (supported by his father, the recently retired tetrarch Maximian) deployed a similar strategy in taking up the mantle of “preservers” (conservatores) of Rome in a series of issues.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 307, coins minted in Ticinum (Pavia), Aquileia, and Rome bore the legend “preservers of their city” (conserv[atores] urb[is] suae) surrounding an image of Roma within a temple with reverse portrait of either of the Augusti, Maximian or Maxentius, or sometimes of the Caesar, Constantine (Fig. 1.3).Footnote ⁴⁷ As tensions between the rulers mounted in the following years, Maxentius appropriated the legend for himself and was acclaimed as sole “preserver of his city” in a series of coins issued from all three mints until his defeat by Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312.Footnote ⁴⁸ These featured the same legend around an image of a temple with a seated statue of Roma within.Footnote ⁴⁹

Figure 1.3 Nummus of Maxentius, bronze, 307 CE; legend on reverse: CONSERVATORES VRB SVAE (RIC VI (Ticinum) 86)

(Source: American Numismatic Society, inv. 1984.146.1805; image in the public domain)

Figure 1.3Long description

The obverse side has a right-facing portrait head of stubble-bearded and short-haired Maxentius wearing a laurel wreath. A ring of inscribed text encircles his head. It reads, Imp C Maximinianus P F Aug. The reverse side shows an engraving of a temple with 6 columns across its façade and a statue at its center erected on a tall base. The right hand of the statue holds a sphere and the left, a scepter.

The coins’ message of the usurper’s preservation of the city of Rome was potently materialized when, after a fire of ca. 307, Maxentius rebuilt the massive temple that Hadrian had, over 175 years earlier, built to Roma along with Venus on the Velia, towering over the east end of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum (Fig. 1.4).Footnote ⁵⁰ After Maxentius’ defeat, his former-ally-turned-rival Constantine issued a nearly identical coin but conspicuously swapped out the word “conservator” for “liberator.”Footnote ⁵¹ Constantine’s “liberator of his city” coins nevertheless clearly retained the image of the temple from Maxentius’ issues, and this, along with the huge “real world” Temple of Venus and Roma that had been recently, magnificently restored, added a new link in the chain of appropriations and adaptations that carried forward the ideal of conservation associated with architectural rebuilding.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 1.4 Temple of Venus and Roma, Rome

(photo: daryl_mitchell, 2014, Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 1.4Long description

The top of the platform is comprised mostly of a large grassy area, bordered left and right by the standing fragments of pillars. At the center of the platform are the brick remains of a building. Tall portions of the rear wall with a large, well-preserved apse at its center are also in view. The left wall is preserved to approximately half its height. The locations of the 6 columns of the building's facade are indicated by chunks of marble. Pedestrians move on the street road in the foreground. In the background to the left, a part of the marble Arch of Titus is visible, and to the right, a modern street, the Via dei Fori Imperiali.

Public Acclamation for Non-Imperial Rebuilders

Rebuilding and restoration also came to be integrated into the honorific discourse for individuals outside of the emperor and his family.Footnote ⁵³ Vignettes 2–4 sketched on p. 50, selected to illustrate the breadth and diversity of the trend, are but three examples from many across the empire. The first of these, a surviving statue base of 138–40 CE, tells of the otherwise unknown, wealthy woman named Agusia Priscilla from Gabii who combined architectural benefaction with the sponsoring of spectacular games in her community (Fig. 1.5).Footnote ⁵⁴ Though we don’t know precisely where Agusia’s portrait statue originally stood in Gabii (the base, sans statue, was discovered at the end of the eighteenth century and later moved to Rome, where it still resides), we can be quite confident that it was in a prominent public place such as the forum, where it likely shared company with those of other civic benefactors, as was common in cities throughout the empire by this time.Footnote ⁵⁵

Figure 1.5 Agusia Priscilla base, from Gabii, 138–40 CE (CIL 14.2804)

(Photo: M. G. Schmidt 2000; CIL-Archive, inv. n. PH0003013)

The text informs readers that Agusia Priscilla was a priestess of Spes and Salus Augusta and that the architectural benefaction she promised to fund was the restoration of the porticus of Spes that had been “damaged by old age.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Agusia’s benefactions reflected her devotion toward the imperial cult and the well-being of the imperial family: The cult of Salus Augusta can be seen as part of what has been called a broader “salutary ideology,” and Agusia Priscilla’s inscription explicitly praises her fulfillment of religious obligation (“religioni satis facerit”).Footnote ⁵⁷ Not only was the porticus whose repair she pledged dedicated to Spes (Hope), but the games she funded were also, the inscription tells readers, offered “for the health (salus) of the emperor Antoninus Pius, father of the fatherland, and his children.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Civic priesthoods offered women like Agusia important avenues of public visibility and influence, advantages that she, like so many wealthy women of the imperial world, amplified through civic benefaction, including architectural restoration that garnered monumental expressions of thanks.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the roughly contemporary case that forms the subject of our third vignette (p. 50), investment in architectural restoration was embedded within an even lengthier and more diversified set of civic benefactions, and the honors repaid to the patron took an even more dramatic and publicly arresting form. Early in the reign of Antoninus Pius, probably in 141 or 142 CE, an earthquake ravaged many cities and towns in the ancient province of Lycia, in the southwest of modern Turkey.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the wake of the disaster, Opramoas of Rhodiapolis, a particularly prominent and wealthy dignitary, undertook much rebuilding work in his hometown and in surrounding cities.Footnote ⁶¹ His 8 × 7 m mausoleum took the form of a small temple and occupied a privileged position in the center of Rhodiapolis (near modern Kumluca, Turkey) before the theater (Figs. 1.6 and 1.7, no. 10).Footnote ⁶² Sarah Cormack also rightly underscores the structure’s spatial relationship to the theater and a stoa with niches to the west of Opramoas’ mausoleum structure and another portico to the south near which inscriptions to Opramoas’ father and mother were found (Fig. 1.7, nos, 9, 11, and 13).Footnote ⁶³ The exterior surfaces of the mausoleum’s entrance facade (on the south) and side walls were carved with some seventy distinct texts originally penned between 123 and 152 CE: records of honors he received from the Lycian federation and copies of letters concerning those decrees from various officials, including twelve from the Emperor Antoninus Pius himself. The inscriptions, arranged in 20 columns of about 100 lines each, form an unparalleled archive, painstakingly analyzed by Christina Kokkinia, of one provincial donor’s extensive benefactions (Fig. 1.8).Footnote ⁶⁴ To this can be added numerous inscriptions recovered from other cities that received his investments.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 1.6 Opramoas mausoleum, partially reconstructed, with theater behind, Rhodiapolis (Turkey)

(Photo: courtesy Dick Osseman, 2016)

Figure 1.7 Plan of Rhodiapolis (Turkey)

(source: Çevik, Book of Lycia, 442, courtesy Nevzat Çevik)

Figure 1.7Long description

At the upper portion of the plan near the center, and just east of the area labeled, the Byzantine kastron, is hashtag 9, the Roman theater. Directly below this is hashtag 10, the Mausoleum of Opramoas, which is surrounded, in clockwise order from right, by hashtag 12, Bouleuterion, hashtag 13, two-storey stoa, and hashtag 11, Stoa of Opramoas.

From this dossier, it is clear that Opramoas had long been a civic benefactor and that after the earthquake he dedicated large sums of money to architectural reconstruction of civic buildings in numerous cities in southern Lycia.Footnote ⁶⁶ The names of at least thirty communities are attested among the cities receiving his benefaction, and several specific structures are also listed in the records carved on Opramoas’ monument in Rhodiapolis or other inscriptions, including the theater and a bath at Tlos, the sanctuary of Apollo at Patara, and the impressive theater at Myra.Footnote ⁶⁷ Opramoas’ text-encrusted tomb situated at the cultural and political heart of his hometown turned his benefaction itself into a public monument.Footnote ⁶⁸ Within that larger program of multidirectional civic benefaction, it is noteworthy that his post-earthquake repairs loomed large: Reference to the earthquake appeared no fewer than thirteen times on the monument, including in texts prominently situated on either side of the structure’s entrance on the south facade (Fig. 1.8).Footnote ⁶⁹

Figure 1.8 Diagram of organization of inscriptions on the mausoleum of Opramoas, with approximate locations of references to earthquakes in yellow

(Source: after Kokkinia, Opramoas-Inschrift, Beilage 1, courtesy Christina Kokkinia)

Flavius Palmatus’ case (vignette no. 4, p. 50) from the late fifth or early sixth century, illustrates the degree of abstraction that the language of honor evoking rebuilding could take, especially by the late antique period (Fig. 1.9).Footnote ⁷⁰ It also directly and indirectly highlights significant differences with earlier conventions. After a peak of architectural construction across the empire in the second to early third century CE, monumental building slowed in absolute terms, though of course impressive individual projects continued to be constructed across the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁷¹ The decline in building (and rebuilding) activity after the second-/early third-century height can be traced through a variety of sources (such as epigraphic testimony of building activity, architectural remains, and statues set up in honor of benefactors), and the slowing pace can be attributed to a range of influences. The epigraphic record of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries continues to preserve the memory of wealthy individuals who channeled private funds toward architectural projects, but there are distinct changes. For one, construction financing for public buildings, not only in the capital of Rome and later Constantinople but also in provincial cities, came to be increasingly centralized, concentrated in the hands of the imperial government (undertaken either directly by the emperor or by his representatives, the provincial governors).Footnote ⁷² In addition, commemorative practices evolved. Both monumental writing (the so-called epigraphic habit) and the practice of erecting statues (the so-called statue habit) decreased markedly after the middle of the third century.Footnote ⁷³ Finally, religious and other cultural changes altered priorities and models of elite investment and status construction and meant that much of the architectural patronage that did continue shifted away not only from temples but also from other types of public buildings toward churches and monasteries.Footnote ⁷⁴

(a)

(b)

(Photo: Alamy; drawing: K. Görkay, courtesy NYU-Aphrodisias Excavations)

Figure 1.9 Statue of Flavius Palmatus from Aphrodisias, Turkey; (left) present state (Aphrodisias Museum exc. inv. 72-49); (right) restored elevation of statue on its base

Illustrative of a certain degree of cultural continuity, as well as change, Palmatus’ monument takes up thoroughly traditional forms, though with a contemporary twist. Palmatus was the provincial governor of Caria, and his full-length statue from Aphrodisias sports the distinctive toga style of the day, now worn short to reveal the governor’s fully conventional senatorial boots, and he holds contemporary status symbols: a mappa (the handkerchief often associated with presiding over circus games) and consular scepter.Footnote ⁷⁵ His “mop” hairstyle is au courant and carved with the deeply drilled locks reflecting contemporary sculptural style as well.Footnote ⁷⁶ As I have just discussed, however, by the time it was erected, newly carved monuments to benefactors were something of a rarity. Even in the well-off city of Aphrodisias, where Palmatus’ portrait was set up, corners were cut.Footnote ⁷⁷ Palmatus’ tall base and its plinth were fashioned out of two recycled blocks of marble.Footnote ⁷⁸ It has also been suggested that his portrait head, which was carved separately for insertion into the monolithic body, appears rather too small, which likely indicates that the body was reused from another statue.Footnote ⁷⁹

The text of Palmatus’ monument similarly exhibits both traditional and of-the-moment elements. Like earlier benefactors’ statue bases, the language of Palmatus’ inscription outlines his offices, praises him for his qualities, and overtly defines the statue as an object of social exchange – a monument both of and set up for Palmatus in thanks for his civic support, if not in this case explicit architectural patronage:

In hailing the governor as a “renewer and founder of the metropolis” (ἀνανεωτής καὶ κτίστης τῆς μητροπό[λεως]), the inscription taps into tropes of honorific language with particularly deep roots.Footnote ⁸¹ At the same time, superlatives abound on Palmatus’ base, which is a prominent feature of late antique rhetoric of praise and one that would have lent it a distinctively contemporary feel.

Even the display context of Palmatus’ statue, which was set up in a highly visible public space in the company of other honorific statues, participated in and revised centuries-old spatial conventions. Unlike so many ancient sculptures and inscriptions, in the case of Palmatus’ monument both base and statue were discovered in situ where they had toppled. This allows us to reconstruct the statue’s setting and observe that Palmatus’ image would have looked down upon visitors as they wandered through Aphrodisias’ tetrastoon in front of the theater in the monumental heart of the city (Figs. 1.10 and 1.11, no. 62).Footnote ⁸² Excavations have retrieved other statue bases set up before other columns of the same (west) colonnade. For example, two inscribed bases, also apparently set up before columns of the tetrastoon’s west colonnade (nos. 20 and 21 on Fig. 1.11), supported imperial statues while simultaneously honoring the sculptures’ donor, the mid fourth-century provincial governor, Antonius Tatianus – one of these explicitly praises him as well for his construction of the tetrastoon and its decoration.Footnote ⁸³ The unusual survival history of these honorific monuments from Aphrodisias reminds us that donors’ images regularly formed part of larger galleries that spanned generations, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts in shaping the empire’s urban spaces into diachronic environments for advertising and affirming local elite ideals, which frequently, as here, included the prominent showcasing of both new construction and architectural restoration.Footnote ⁸⁴

Figure 1.10 West colonnade of tetrastoon, before the theater of Aphrodisias, with base of Palmatus statue (center; no. 62 on Fig. 1.11) and column of anonymous governor (right; no. 64 on Fig. 1.11) in situ

(Photo: Mossman Roueché, 1976, courtesy Charlotte Roueché)

Figure 1.11 Plan of theater and tetrastoon of Aphrodisias with indication of the original positions of late antique inscriptions, including statue monument of Fl. Palmatus (no. 62), columnar statue base of another (anonymous) governor (no. 64), and statues of Emperors Julian, later revised to Theodosius (no. 20), and Valens (no. 21), set up by Antonius Tatianus, builder of the tetrastoon (numbers correspond to inscriptions in ala2004 database)

(Source: ala2004, plan 6; courtesy Charlotte Roueché)

Reorienting Past and Future: Piety, Rebuilding Names, and Legacies of Obligation

A central reason, I suggest, that rebuilding came to be so tightly embedded within the euergetistic system of the Roman empire was the opportunity it offered to affect perception of the present vis-à-vis the past and the future. In other words, temporally speaking, we see claims of restoration doing two things: They fashion the recent past as a period to be leapfrogged over and broken with while they simultaneously align present actions with venerable origins and values. Looking forward, restoration projects activate renewed attention on the present via a pre-existing architectural structure. They create the perception of a return and renewal of commitment to tradition, but hidden within, of course, are contemporary realities, priorities, and expectations. Rebuilding brings with it unique opportunities for reframing and revising the history of places and legacies of past patrons, which is also a way of saying that it presents civic benefactors with a means to advance their own agenda in light of the past while setting up models for and expectations of posterity. What interests me here is how the rhetorical gestures toward tradition were materialized and manipulated through investments in old architecture and the ways in which these rebuilding projects were described or “packaged” for contemporary audiences.

One of the clearest manifestations of the challenges that architectural rebuilding posed to the negotiation of past, present, and future legacies in the Roman world can be found in the tension surrounding the names found on public buildings. How Roman benefactors navigated and advertised their patronage of previous patrons’ work was clearly loaded. Once again, Augustus’ Res Gestae is a locus classicus for the issue.

At two places in the text of this retrospective account of his life’s achievements, Augustus overtly draws attention to the naming practices he applied to his architectural rebuilding projects. In RG 19.1, after indicating his construction (feci) of a sequence of major structures on public land in the heart of the Roman Forum and on the Palatine Hill (namely the Curia, the Chalcidicum, the Palatine Temple of Apollo with its porticoes, the Temple of Deified Caesar, and the Lupercal), Augustus points to the portico near the Flaminian Circus, which, he writes, “I allowed to be called Octavian after the name (ex nomine) of the man who had built an earlier one on the same foundation.”Footnote ⁸⁵ By the same token, in the next paragraph, he writes of rebuilding the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and the Theater of Pompey without adding a monumental inscription that credited his interventions. Alison Cooley has observed that the word order of Augustus’ Latin in this instance would also have added extra amplification. Instead of the usual construction in which the main verb would be expected to come at the end, in RG 20.1 he placed the phrase about naming in what we might call the “power position” after the sentence’s verb: “I restored the Capitoline Temple and the Theater of Pompey, incurring great expense for both buildings, without any inscription of my name” (Capitolium et Pompeium theatrum utrumque opus impensa grandi refeci sine ulla inscriptione nominis mei).Footnote ⁸⁶ Others have noted that in the case of the Porticus Octavia he likely didn’t stand to lose much credit given the similarity of the name of the original builder, Gnaeus/Cnaeus (in Latin, abbreviated “Cn.”) Octavius (who constructed it after his victory in the Battle of Pydna, which ended the Third Macedonian War in 168 BCE), to his own (i.e., Augustus’ birth name, Gaius [abbreviated “C.”] Octavius, from his natural father, Gaius Octavius).Footnote ⁸⁷ As Dan-el Padilla Peralta writes, “[t]he boast is cheeky if not brazen in its disingenuousness, since the renovator’s original nomen gentilicium was the same as that of the first dedicator; surely the princeps realized (hoped?) that it would not be difficult for a passer-by to read C OCTAVIUS instead of CN OCTAVIUS.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Augustus’ Res Gestae, set up at his tomb and copied at other sites in the provinces, presents a fascinating and influential case of this sort of “displaced” discussion of building names, for here we see attention directed to the contentious issue of the preservation or addition of patrons’ names in building inscriptions spelled out in an inscription that was not itself a building inscription (i.e., the type inscribed upon the completion of a building’s construction, usually prominently positioned in large letters over the main entranceway). At the sites of any of the surviving RG copies, whether in the Campus Martius in Rome or one of the Galatian contexts, those reading Augustus' claims about not adding his name to restored buildings would not have been able to see the dedication inscriptions of those structures.Footnote ⁸⁹ I do not mean to suggest that Augustus would have claimed not to have added his name to one of his restoration projects if it was patently untrue. Yet, it is significant that, in the RG, Augustus’ record of buildings that he revised was displaced from the buildings themselves and recontextualized within a text that both emphasized his architectural patronage of new and revised projects and set them within the larger record of his deeds and benefactions. In Chapter 4 we will dig deeper into the material and textual effects of diachronic histories of benefactors’ names on the surfaces of individual structures, but here it is worthwhile to consider how the claims of adding one’s name to a restoration project – or not to have – were ideologically loaded in and of themselves, not – or not only – at the physical sites of the buildings. On the RG inscriptions, evocations of restoration projects were embedded within larger descriptions of imperial actions and character at a remove from the actual buildings in question.Footnote ⁹⁰

Augustus’ inclusion of the descriptions of building work in the RG amplified his ability to boast about two virtues at the same time: enhancing the city fabric of Rome through architectural patronage and respecting the memorials of previous benefactors. In the sections on architectural work in the RG, Augustus blatantly points to filial piety in both retrospective and prospective directions. On the one hand, he directly invokes Caesar’s buildings that he, Augustus, had finished, drawing attention to that legacy fulfilled: “I completed (perfeci) the Julian forum and the basilica which was between the Temple of Castor and the Temple of Saturn [i.e., the Basilica Iulia], building projects which had been started and almost finished by my father ….”Footnote ⁹¹ Then, Augustus immediately turns to the notion of future ancestry and legacy by invoking a building inscription he undertook in his sons’ names and by tying in expectations for his descendants: “… and I started work on the same basilica under an inscription in the name of my sons, after it had been destroyed by fire, expanded its site, and if I do not complete it in my lifetime, I have ordered it to be completed by my heirs.”Footnote ⁹² This knitting together of retrospective and prospective piety builds on an ongoing theme in the RG. For example, earlier, in a section that trumpets Rome’s population growth (and hence prosperity), Augustus celebrated his revival of threatened tradition and overtly identified himself as a model to be emulated: “I revived many exemplary ancestral practices which were by then dying out in our generation, and I myself handed down to later generations exemplary practices for them to imitate.”Footnote ⁹³

To contemporary audiences and later generations of both rulers and non-imperial elite, Augustus indeed proved to be a role model both for his patronage of architecture as a whole and for his strategies of packaging rebuilding projects in ways that sought to balance piety and traditional values with contemporary political and cultural agendas. For example, for audiences of the copy of the Res Gestae in Ankara (Fig. 1.1), the stress on building was emphasized through additional mechanisms, both textual and visual. First, the text of the inscription pushed to the foreground the emperor’s giving, above and beyond other portions of the Res Gestae as a whole, through a summary text added at the end. This so-called Appendix appeared in both Latin and Greek inscribed after the main text in their respective portions of the monument in Ankyra (Fig. 1.12 at the end of “B” [Latin] and “C” [Greek]).Footnote ⁹⁴ Written in the third person, it seems to have been added specifically for the provincial audiences of the emperor’s document, and significantly, this appended summary paragraph reviews and enumerates only the benefactions portion of the RG’s content, not the emperor’s other achievements and honors.Footnote ⁹⁵

Figure 1.12 Plan of Temple of Rome and Augustus, Ankara, with locations of inscriptions indicated: A and B – Latin text of the Res Gestae; C – Greek text of the Res Gestae; D and E – Galatian priest lists

(after Perrot, Guillaume, and Delbet, Exploration archéologique, 1872, v. 2, pl. 19; courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

Moreover, the layout of the Res Gestae inscription also drew special attention to the building – and rebuilding – program described within the text. At the Ankyran temple, the Latin text was engraved upon the inner walls of the pronaos, on the inner faces of the two anta (“wing walls”) flanking the entrance to the temple (“A” and “B” on Fig. 1.12).Footnote ⁹⁶ Chapter 19 of the RG, the portion that opens the discussion of Augustus’ architectural projects, heads up the second half of the text, appearing at the top of the right-hand entrance wall (i.e., the inner face of southeast anta) (Fig. 1.13, located at “B” on Fig. 1.12).Footnote ⁹⁷ In addition to its prominent placement, the spacing and organization of the words directed additional emphasis to the building projects. We see that the entire first column of the text to the right of the entranceway comprises Augustus’ benefactions, beginning with chapter 19’s buildings (which starts with “curiam et” at the upper left of Fig. 1.13) and ending with chapter 24 on the restoration of ornaments to temples (the paragraph of which is marked by the “exdented” opening words “in templis omnium” at the lower left of Fig. 1.13), grouping them visually into a vertical unit.Footnote ⁹⁸ In addition, graphic punctuation features, including a large space and shallow diagonal slash, placed visual emphasis on many of the buildings included in Augustus’ list of projects.Footnote ⁹⁹ We can observe too the ways in which the organization of the text on the wall calls attention to specific words, patterns, and repetitions. In chapter 19, for example, pictured at the top left of Fig. 1.13, we see the stacking of “aedes/m” (“temple”) at the beginning of each of the last four lines of the paragraph.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Figure 1.13 Watercolor of second half of Latin Res Gestae (starting with chapter 19 of the text) inscribed to right of temple entrance (on inner face of southeast anta wall) of the Temple of Rome and Augustus, Ankara, as reproduced in Perrot, Guillaume, and Delbet, Exploration archéologique, 1872

(v. 2, pl. 26; courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

Finally, the “success” of the princeps’ benefactions as role model for other, even non-imperial, patrons is evident from the larger corpus of inscriptions upon the very same walls of the Ankyran temple. Over time, this larger collection’s subsequent history further amplified the original text’s focus on benefaction as well as the public commemoration of named benefactors as part of the “return” for their gifts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Immediately juxtaposed to the Latin text of Augustus’ Res Gestae on the narrow front edge of the northwest/left anta of the Ankara temple was a list of local, Galatian priests of “the god Augustus and the goddess Roma” (“D” on Figs. 1.12 and 1.14).Footnote ¹⁰² The list, over ninety-five lines long (and punctuated by the officeholders of the Roman provincial governorship), proceeds in chronological order, naming the annual priests, some of whom were sons of Galatian chieftains. Mitchell and French’s recent re-examination of the physical evidence conducted for the new edition of the inscription concludes that the list began with the priestly officeholder of 5/4 BCE and included the annual priests through the year 16/17 CE but was not added each year. Rather, it appears that the first eighty lines of the text, up to the priesthood in the year of Augustus’ death (14 CE), were carved in a single campaign, along with the RG itself, and then the subsequent entries were added in the Tiberian period, probably in 17 CE or shortly thereafter.Footnote ¹⁰³ Moreover, this priest list is no mere enumeration of names. Rather, like local mini versions of the emperor’s text, the annual priestly officeholders are commemorated on the temple walls for their euergetistic expenditures on behalf of the community.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The entry from 2/1 BCE, for example, indicates that that year’s priestly officeholder bequeathed both celebrations and spectacles as well as land for public buildings: “[Pylaemenes] twice gave a public feast, twice gave shows, gave an athletic competition with chariot races and horse races, and likewise a bull-fight and a hunt, provided oil for the city, made available the places where the Sebasteion is and the festival gathering and the horse races take place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The entry for the following year includes the donation of two public feasts and statues of Augustus and Livia.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Galatian priest list juxtaposed to the Res Gestae on the exterior surfaces of the Ankaran temple is, in other words, an ordered roster of local religious leaders publicly commemorated for their euergetistic benefactions, both material and ephemeral, to the community.

Figure 1.14 Temple of Rome and Augustus, Ankara, late nineteenth-century drawing of temple facade, showing remains of priests’ lists on outer faces of anta walls (on left/northwest anta: priests from 5/4 BCE to 16/17 CE; on right/southeast anta: priests beginning in Trajanic period [98–117 CE])

(Source: Perrot, Guillaume, and Delbet, Exploration archéologique, 1872, v. 2, pl. 15; courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

A second, now highly fragmentary, list of priests was added in the Trajanic period to the outer face of the temple’s other anta wall (to the southeast, or the viewers’ right as they faced the entrance, “E” on Figs. 1.12 and 1.14).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This roster appears to have been even more directly inspired by Augustus’ model. Though only the heading and the entry for the first name of this set of priests survives, it reveals that the contents of the Trajanic list explicitly enumerated their architectural benefaction: “The men who promised building works for their additional donations during their high-priesthoods. Marcus Cocceius Seleucus, high priest of the god Augustus, brought(?) … white marble.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus, over time, the growing dossier of texts on the Ankaran temple walls revealed that the princeps’ hopes for his benefactions, which he had described in the Res Gestae as intended as models for his descendants, came to fruition.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

~ ~ ~

Octavian/Augustus was not the first Roman politician to rebuild a public structure. Nor was he the first to advertise his architectural rebuilding projects as part of a concerted strategy of social position-jockeying and self-promotion. He did, however, take the strategy to new levels. Thanks especially to his model, architectural rebuilding came to play a major role in the honorific discourse of the Roman Empire. The discourse was not solely an imperial one, nor was it confined to the capital city of Rome or to the Italian peninsula. The vignettes from the start of this chapter offer a handful of examples among many of a widespread trend. The cases of Augustus’ Res Gestae, Agusia Priscilla’s statue base, Opramoas’ monument in Rhodiapolis, and Palmatus’ portrait in Aphrodisias exemplify the depth and extent to which patronage of architectural reconstruction was woven into the social contract between elites and their communities in the Roman Empire.

The handling of architectural projects in the Res Gestae highlights a particular temporal issue posed by architectural restoration in the Roman world: namely, the relationship between architectural benefaction and communal memory – both retrospective and prospective – of donors, their families, and their civic gifts. Rebuilding could be capitalized on as a strategy for it brought with it something that was much harder to achieve with new construction: the legacy of the site’s pre-existing structures. The overt attention that Augustus drew to architectural naming practices clothed his interventions in the garb of pious respect, which further reinforced building names as a charged medium for demonstrating virtuous behavior. The emphasis placed on preserving earlier patrons’ names and/or adding one’s own also set up architectural work in a forward-facing temporal direction, as an obligation to be carried on by one’s heirs, whether literal descendants or those aiming to position themselves in light of and in line with the patron’s model-worthy legacy (we encountered this phenomenon on the famous inscription that still adorns the Hadrianic rebuild of the Pantheon in the Introduction and will encounter the strategy in non-imperial projects later in the book as well).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Architectural reconstruction was, in other words, capitalized on as an occasion for making claims about virtuous action vis-à-vis predecessors and for throwing a grappling hook into the future by casting the work as to-be-emulated.

The rebuilt buildings themselves manifested this social contract, but so too did the sorts of “off-site” permanent memorials examined in this chapter that were set up in prominent urban spaces on monuments erected by the collective recipients of patrons’ benefaction. Through these, architectural patronage – and rebuilding specifically – became part of the vocabulary of praise and further embedded architectural restoration within the broader honorific discourse of the Roman world. The honorific language directed toward patrons of building and of rebuilding was especially valuable for the opportunities it offered to draw lines across time and space – to gesture toward ancestors (real or imagined) and toward future progeny and legacies, both literal and aspirational. We recall, for example, how the benefactions of generations of priests of the imperial cult at Ankara were added to the very temple walls that broadcast Augustus’ civic patronage, and how Agusia Priscilla, our second-century patroness of the restoration of the portico of Spes in Gabii, was described on her statue base as having followed the “example of illustrious women.” Whether or not this was a veiled reference to Livia, whose own architectural and “restorational” patronage was famous, as some scholars have suggested, the monument cast the local benefactress’s work as one inspired by others and, in turn, it implies that the honoree subsequently joined their ranks as an imitable role model for her piety and investments in the restoration of public architecture.Footnote ¹¹¹

It is crucial to recognize, moreover, that the discourse was not merely a textual one. Both textual content and material form of the monuments linked acts of restoration – and the communal approbation and validation that they engendered – to the social identity of individual patrons (e.g., at the site of their tombs, as for Opramoas, or, in the case of the statue bases, of their likenesses in public spaces of cities around the empire, as for Palmatus’ portrait in Aphrodisias). At the same time, such monuments also reinforced the status of architectural rebuilding as a virtue alongside other forms of civic euergetism, shaping both communal ideals and real civic spaces through their grand, formal, and prominent public messaging.