One building that he was able to complete, or almost complete, was a forum in Rome, the forum Iulium, Iulium. Which is after his family name Iulius. The forum Iulium or as we usually call it, the Forum of Julius Caesar in Rome. Was a building that he was able to begin in the year 52 BC and then it was it was inaugurated in 46 BC, which is a couple of years before his assassination. It wasn't quite finished at the time of its inauguration and it was left to Caesar's follower, Augustus, first emperor of Rome to actually complete some of the details of the forum. But for all intents and purposes it was done by 46. I show you a Google Earth of aerial view of the Roman Forum as you see it here. We've looked at this before. The Roman Forum, the Colosseum just for you to get your bearings. The Circus Maximus, the Palatine hill, the Capital Line hill, the Victor Emmanuel Monument here, Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali here. The so called Imperial fora of which Augusta's forum, which we're also going to talk about today, is a part. The forum of Caesar is very close to the Roman Forum. It's located just to the left here and above the wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel. You see it here and you can barely make out the three columns that are still preserved from the temple that was located inside this forum. So you can see it was adjacent to, and in fact a connected to, the Roman forum that lay over here. So a forum and in that forum a temple. A temple to Venus. Venus Genetrix, genetrix, Venus Genetrix, who was the divine ancestress of the Julian family. The Julian family traced its ancestry back to Venus via Aeneas, through Aeneas. So this was the very special patron goddess of, not only Caesar himself, but of the Julian family. This is a plan of the forum of Julius Caesar, as it would have looked when the building was inaugurated in 46 BC. And I think you can see here that it has two major prototypes that it, models that were being looked back at when this was designed beginning in 52. You can see that it is based heavily on earlier Roman forum, Samnite/Roman Forum design, as we saw in the city of Pompeii. Think of the forum of Pompeii. But it also was based in part on a building that we have not looked at and which no longer survives, but we have information about, and that is that Caesareum of Julius Caesar that he and Cleopatra put up in, in Alexandria. And we know enough about that building to know it to was was an open rectangular space with colonnades around it and a temple as part of it. So, this whole idea of temple in a rectangular complex, we see it in Alexandria, contemporaneously we see it earlier in Pompeii at the forum of Pompeii. So a great open rectangular space, open to the sky with colonnades on either side you can see on this side, there are some additional chambers. And based on what those look like in plan, I am sure you can tell me what they are. Does anyone know? Think back to what we saw in Pompeii, that looked similar to this. What are these here? What? Store, store, storage did you say? Or? Storage not exactly storage. Shops, tabernae, remember the tabernae that we saw fronting the houses in Pompeii? These are a series of shops, or tabernae, opening off the left colonnade of the, of the forum. And then on the, one of the short sides, pushed up against the back wall and in fact, in this case, almost projecting out of the forum to a certain extent., the Temple of Venus Genetrix. We can see a plan and it dominates the space in front of it just as the Capitolium did at Pompeii. We can see the general plan conforms to early Roman temple architecture as we've described it, with its use of the Etruscan plan and the Greek elevation. We can see that there is, it has a, well, I'll show you this in a moment, but take my word, it has a high podium. It has a deep porch, it has free-standing columns in that porch. It has a facade orientation, although one idiosyncrasy of this particular temple is that the staircase is located not just on the front, but on the two sides. But only at the level of the podium, the staircase does not encircle the building as it would've in a Greek temple. But it goes beyond the front to the sides of the podium to allow access to it that way as well. A single entrance, because this is a temple of Venus and not the Capitoline Triad, and then columns, freestanding columns, on either side. and, but a flat back wall, very much in the Etruscan manner. So a temple that is very much in keeping with the other kind of temple architecture that we have seen thus far. What's significant though, again, is that the choice of, the choice of goddess to honor here. The fact that it is Venus Genetrix, a personal goddess, from the point of view of Julius Caesar: someone who was who was associated closely with his family, with the genesis of his family, and not with the Roman State as a whole. And that's a very important distinction, the difference between putting up a temple to the Capitoline Triad, a very state-oriented thing to do, to putting up a temple to your own personal goddess. It signals a certain change vis-a-vis the way these individuals thought about themselves, and may, may again have had something to do with the way Caesar was perceived in Rome. And to his eventual demise. In fact, I should also add that Caesar because of his relationship with Cleopatra, ended up putting up a statue of Cleopatra as the Egyptian goddess Isis in this temple as well, standing right next to Venus Genetrix. Which was a pretty arrogant and probably a pretty stupid thing to do in republican Rome where, where where Cleopatra was considered a very interesting public figure, because she did come with them to visit Rome at one point but was also maligned by many among the aristocracy as an enemy of Rome. I'm showing you here a view of the forum of Caesar as it looks today. And you can see the columns on the left hand side from the colonnade. Some of those still stand. You can see the staircase or the foundations of the staircase and the podium, tall podium again, of the Temple of Venus Genetrix. But you can that only a very small number, three in fact, of the columns are preserved so it is in actually quite ruinous state. And what you're looking at here is actually not even, for the most part, the Julian building, because we know that this building was seriously damaged in a fire, later and that it was restored by the emperor Domitian, in the late first century AD., and then by the emperor Trajan, into the early second century AD. And so what stands today is primarily a later structure, but we do believe it was based very closely on the original Julian building and in that regard is a very good reflection of what it would have looked like. This coin over here shows the temple as it was in the time of Julius Caesar. We see the altar in the front. The altar because the sacrifice always takes place in the front of a Roman temple. The temple itself, with it's columns that are parted on this con only to show the state of Venus Genetrix inside. The cult statue. The colonnades on either side. And then if you look closely at the pediment, you can see that there's sculpture in there and we have literary descriptions of what that sculpture depicted. And we know it was a scene of Venus rising from the sea. So Venus Genetrix rising from the sea. The closest thing probably to it is something like, for those of you who know it the, Boticelli's Primavera in Florence is probably the sort of the idea here for emerging from the waters and in, in, in her depiction in this particular pediment above. And we know that there were also scenes of Cupids carrying the arms and armor, probably, of Mars. This is me with a former graduate student of mine pointing out eroded dissertation on the forum of Caesar, which was af-, af-, afterwards published as a book. But he, he's pointing out to me here some of the some of the architectural detail that still survives and one can see when one wanders through that forum today. And you can see the very deep drill work here. Deep drill work that is actually not characteristic of the time of Julius Caesar, but rather of the time of Domitian and Trajan. So probably this decoration belongs to the later of renovation of this particular structure. This gives you perhaps the best idea of what the temple would've looked like in the form. A restored view of the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the forum of Julius Caesar. With it, it's inscription telling us that Caesar dictator of Rome, put it up fake it as you can see here. You can see the tall podium you can see the facade orientation. Although again there was a staircase on the three sides of that podium. You can see the birth of Venus in the pediment above. You can see the columns over here of the side of the colonnade of one, of the left side of the forum, which would have had statues on bases, the shops behind. And most importantly what this restored view shows you is the relationship between the Temple of Venus Genetrix and Caesar's Forum and the Capitolium on the top of the Capitoline Hill. Because when you take away the Victor of monument, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which is there now and which we saw in the earlier image. You can see that the building that was up on top of the hill, at this particular time, was of course, the Capitolium, the Temple of Jupiter OMC. And I mentioned to you, at the time we talked about the temple of Jupiter OMC. Although the Campidoglio as redesigned by Michelangelo, with the senatorial palace in the back which is where the Temple of Jupiter OMC was, faces modern Rome. The ancient temple faced ancient Rome, faced the Roman Forum. And so you see it facing the Roman Forum in this restored view. So I don't think it was coincidental. The Romans were very careful as we've learned about how they sighted their buildings, and they like to make references from one building to another. I don't it is any coincidence that Caesar chose this site for his Temple of Venus so that anyone who gaze at it, would also see, out of the corner of their eye, the Temple of the Capitoline Triad on the Capitoline Hill. And that would only enhance Caesar's stature in the eyes of his contemporaries.
