The City of Rome; Its Vicissitudes and Monuments from Its Foundation to the End of the Middle Ages. with Remarks on the Recent Excavations (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PKEFATORY TOPOGRAPHICAL REMARKS. XXXI Emperor are representatives of foreign cities come to beg the remission of their debts. The scene at the tribunal relates to home affairs, and the female personifies Roma, to whom some favour is granted. In the other relief the Emperor himself is seen setting fire to an enormous pile of bonds, and that they are foreign bonds may be-inferred from the circumstance that they are borne into the Forum through the Vicus Tuscus, thus showing that they have been brought to Kome by the Tiber. The Emperor has been variously called Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, who are all known to have done an act of this kind.1 But he cannot possibly have been one of the three emperors last named, for the eastern relief shows the temples of Concord and Saturn on the Clivus, and between them an arch of the Tabularium. Now this interval was filled up before the time of Trajan by Domitian's temple of Vespasian, which would have hidden the Tabularium. Palpable evidence like this in marble is worth more than all inferences from texts, however ingenious they may be. We know from Suetonius2 that Augustus burnt the tablets concerning old debts to the Treasury. We also learn from the following chapter of the same author that he was accustomed to administer justice at the tribunal, as he is seen to be doing in the western relief. It is, perhaps, not improbable that these slabs formed a frieze at the sides of the arch erected on the Forum in honour of Augustus. The fact of the reliefs with the sacrificial annuals being in so much better preservation than those on the other sides, shows that they were inside some arched, or covered building. And it may be added that the sculpture is quite worthy of the Augustan age. Some important objects have been disco...