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18.2 Leptis Magna in the Age of Augustus
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Roman Architecture
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Hometown Boy: Honoring an Emperor's Roots in Roman North Africa
Timgad, Trajan’s colony for Roman army veterans, was designed as a castrum; Leptis Magna, with Carthaginian roots, was developed first under Augustus. Leptis-born Septimius Severus renovated his hometown featuring a forum, basilica, and arch. Entrepreneurs, providing animals to Rome's amphitheaters, commissioned Hunting Baths with intimate vaulted spaces revealed on the outside and silhouetted against the sea, suggesting that they knew how to innovate and enjoy life.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I talked about the sand and there's a lot of sand in this part of the world.
This is essentially a desert.
And we see it especially around the city of Leptis Magna.
Leptis Magna, If Timgad is in modern Algeria, Leptis Magna is in modern
Libya, Colonel Gaddafi country. And it is an amazing site.
A few words about the history of Leptis Magna prior to
the birth of Septimius Severus.
It too, well, it was, as I mentioned, a port city.
It was a Phoenician port, actually initially.
Then it came under the sway of Carthage, of the Carthaginians.
It had some interactions with Greece, but again just as this area as a
whole, and this part of the part of Africa that we that Leptis Magna
is located in is, was known as Tripolitania, Tripolitania.
And so we, we see the Carthaginians holding sway.
We see some interactions with Greece but again, but
again it doesn't take as significant a foothold here
as it did in other parts of the Roman
world and then Rome Rome takes over Leptis Magna.
Makes it, makes it a colony, makes the area
a colony Tripolitania as a colony.
And it begins to be built up, as I mentioned to
you before, already in the late republic and into the Augustan period.
We'll see that there was significant
Augustan architecture there that still survives.
It was then that architecture was added to by Hadrian during the period
of Hadrian, during the time, during the reign of Hadrian when there was continued
interest in Leptis Magna.
And then it was built up and renovated significantly under
Septimius Severus, so in the early third century A.D. It
continued to thrive throughout the third century into the fourth
century A.D. but in the fifth century A.D., it was attacked.
Significant attack by the Vandal tribes it was, it was devastated actually
during that period.
But it had a, a brief renaissance under the
Byzantines a Byzantine wall was added to the city.
As well as a church during that period.
In Medieval and modern times though it was
essentially abandoned and it became a place where treasure
hunters did not, did not hesitate to go and
take stone and works of sculpture away with them.
But fortunately because of these sands, because these sands shifted over time with
the winds, with the sirocco and so on they eventually did their job by covering over
a good part of the city, which was actually fortunate, because it meant that
everything that hadn't already been looted by
those treasure hunters was at that point preserved.
It stayed covered for the most part until around World War Two.
At that time
in the 20th century trip, Tripolitania was essentially a protectorate of Italy.
And in right at, at the time of World War Two and
right after World War Two Italian
archaeologists went in and excavated the site.
And revealed it in the way that we can experience it.
If we visit Leptis Magna today. And if we visit Leptis Magna today
we're going to see sights like this.
What I'm showing you is a view from the air of the forum that was put up in the
time of Septimius Severus, the so-called Severan Forum of Leptis Magna.
And you can see that this is another one of these bigger is better buildings.
It's extraordinarily large and you can see that it has
a, a, that it is not in the best of conditions,
and much of it has fallen down.
We see extensive fragments of columns and And in
tablatures and arcades and so on and so forth, strewn around the structure today,
but there's enough there that we can get a quite good sense
as we shall see of what these buildings looked like in antiquity.
If one goes to the sculpture depot on
the site, one can also see a host of sculpture, despite the, the looting.
One can also see a host of sculpture that still survives.
In fact, it's interesting.
Right in the center here, we see a portrait of, Joe, who is it?
[LAUGH]
Sorry to put you on the spot, but having taken Roman art.
It's Augustus, good.
Excellent, it's the emperor Augustus right there
in the center, which proves, or which tends to make it likely to to support the
point that this was an area that was
built up under Augustus and decorated with Augustine sculpture.
We see a host of statues, man, women fragments of body parts, including
hands, and arms as you can see over here at the depot and This again gives
us some general sense of how heavily decorated the, this town was
in its heyday with sculpture of the imperial family, surely.
And and mm, local magistrates, as well as gods and goddesses.
This is a plan of Leptis Magna as it would have looked in the ancient period.
We are, if we look at it here, we will see number
one that it is, you can tell very well from this,
that it was a port city and that a port was built.
You're seeing of the the Mediterranean, then you're seeing
a tributary of that river and you can see right
below that river you can see a sort of
roughly circular area that was the port of Leptis Magna.
Not so different from the port of Claudius, for example, at Portus.
And then you see
the rest of the city as it was laid out from
the first century B.C. until, or through, the time of Septimius Severus.
And if you look very carefully, you will see a host of buildings.
The one that's right in the uppermost part
there closest to the harbor is the Old Forum.
It's not on your monument list, but I'm going to show it to you briefly.
If you, if you go down from that to the left, you will see the theater,
that's easy to pick out.
The theater that was put up during the reign of Augustus.
And to the right of the theater, you see two circles there?
That is the marketplace that was also put up during the age of Augustus.
Down here you see a very large bath in the
imperial bath type that was built during the reign of Hadrian.
And then right above, to right of the bath
you see the forum as it was laid out.
The forum, the basilica, and the temple as they
were laid out during the reign of Septimius Severus.
And then down here to the left of the Hadrianic baths,
there was an arch put up on one of the streets.
An arch put up also to Septimius Severus, which we will look at together today.
I want to begin with the Augustan remains.
I'm going to show you two Augustan buildings from Leptis Magna.
The first is the markets.
And the second will be the theater.
And they're very interesting in all kinds of ways.
You see a restored view of what the
market would have looked like in the Augustan period.
This is a restored view that comes from your textbook, from the Ward-Perkins.
We know that the uh,building dated
precisely to 8 B.C. That is in the reign of Agustus.
8 B.C. How do we know that?
Because there's an inscription on the building
that interestingly enough, is written in both Latin
and then has a Neo-Punic translation, so this is a nod still in the Augustan age.
To the Carthaginian segment of the population who still
continued to live there even with the Roman advent.
So 8 B.C. and as we look at this we know in
fact what was built in 8 B.C. was only part of this.
It was the two pavilions, the two market pavilions that you see in the center here.
This scheme of having a, a, a round, or roundish structure.
Either one or two pavilions in the center of
an open courtyard is actually not special to Leptis Magna.
We know this type in
Italy, there are examples still preserved, for example, in Campania.
I showed you one although we didn't discuss it
in the plan of the forum of Pompeii for example.
But so this is not, this is an idea that probably made it's way from,
may have made it's way from Italy to Leptus Magna in the age of Augustus.
We see it here these two pavilions.
But if we look at these
pavilions carefully we see some interesting features.
We see that the central element is indeed circular.
There's a circular wall here that has in it arcuated
windows and doorways that pierce it and open it up.
Then around it though interestingly enough, we see that the staircase the, the
way in which the columns are arranged and the roof are, make up an octagon.
Make up an octagon in the case
of both of these pavilions.
Now, that is very, very interesting when we talk about.
What happens first and where, in Rome
itself, Campania, central Italy, or in the provinces.
Because in this particular instance, we are seeing an octagon extremely early.
The is 8, 8 B.C., the age of Augustus.
We don't see the octagon used in Rome until the age of Nero.
Until the
Domus Transitoria, sort of, and then fully blown in
the Domus Aurea, the octagonal room of the Domus Aurea.
So, is this a formulation that begins first in the provinces
and ends up in Rome, or are, again, there some missing links?
Were there octagons earlier in Rome that have no longer survived?
It's an interesting and almost certainly unanswerable question
unless something new is excavated that changes the picture.
So for now, it looks
as if we see an octagon earlier in the provinces than we see it in Rome.
The the, the, while the pavilions, and the pavilions were indeed these market
pavilions, and by the way I should mention that there we no permanent markets here.
There were temporary stalls that would have been set up
daily between the columns around the pavilions and the columns
in the portico. The open portico was not done in 8 B.C.,
was not done in the age of Augustus, but was added under Tiberius, Augustus's
successor between 31 and 37 A.D., as is indicated on your monument list.
And there is a difference in the materials that were used here.
And the materials, interestingly enough, and this is
very important for our understanding of the evolution
of architecture and Leptis Magna. During this period, the age of Augustus,
local stone was used entirely. They used a local sandstone and limestone.
I'll show it to you in a moment.
For these pavilions, and then when Tiberius
added, or when the, when the outer area,
the portico was added, in the age of Tiberius the columns were made out of a
gray stone, but a gray stone that was also local.
So, only local stone used here, no concrete used in this building.
This is an entirely stone building put up in the Augustan period in Leptis Magna.
One of the pavilions, very well preserved as you can see here.
And you can see that we are dealing,
again, with a very attractive local sandstone or
limestone that is used for the instruction,
for the structure for the central pavilions entirely.
And then you can see the contrast between the coloration of that and
the gray columns also local stone that are used for the surrounding portico.
If we look at this, if we look at this pavilion we can see both
the central, the central round element that I've
already described with it's arcuated windows and doorways
on a tall base.
We can also see the columns that surround it and
you can tell very well that these are Ionic columns.
Some of them are columns, some of them are in a sense piers.
They're wider and those wider ones are at
the corners and it's interesting to see how
the architects have gotten around the fact that
they have to turn the corners in this octagon.
By making these wider and making them splay out on
either side. You can also see some stone benches in
between some but not all of the columns here.
[COUGH] And when I did let me let me go back for a second just to.
Show you also that the that while the columns of
the of the pavilions, or the macella, by the way, that's the
word in Latin.
Macella, or macellum, macellum in the singular.
The columns, the capitals of the surrounding portico were Corinthian.
As opposed to the Ionic ones that are used for the earlier market pavilions.
Here's another detail.
This is the one that's on your monument list.
And although it's in black and white, doesn't
give you a sense of the coloration of
this stone, it's useful because you can see one
of these piers that turns a corner better here.
And you can also see that there are striations that make up the flutes
of the pilasters that are located in
between these arcuated openings on the central element.
This is another view that shows you the less, the less preserved second pavilion.
You can see here again the color of the stone.
You can see the way in which the peers turn
the corner here and get a sense of the remains.
A further sense of the remains of the Augustan market place from this view.
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