ABSTRACT
One of the Emperor Augustus’ proud boasts, according to the biographer Suetonius, was that he had found Rome a city built of mud-brick and left it a city of marble.1 As with all such tags, the truth is much more complex, and less impressive.2 Indeed, Augustus used marble from the quarries at Carrara in northern Italy, opened comparatively recently, to build temples, and in his epitaph, which he wrote himself, he states that under his administration eighty-two existing temples were rebuilt.3 In general, however, marble, which was expensive to transport from a distance, was not used even in other public buildings, let alone private ones, and it is quite untrue to say that before Augustus rebuilt them all the temples, to say nothing of the other buildings, were constructed of mud-brick. True, mudbrick must have been used in the earliest buildings, put up in the ‘Italian manner’, which means, for temples, like those of the Etruscan cities, and doubtless some of these still survived. Stone had long since replaced mudbrick for these and other important buildings, as and when their primitive predecessors fell down or required reconstruction, even though the building stone available close to Rome, with the exception of travertine, is not of particularly good quality. No doubt many private houses, at least the poorer ones, though not those of the wealthy aristocracy of the late republic, were flimsily built, with mud-brick playing its part. Even the high-rise tenements which housed a city whose population had increased out of all recognition since Rome had become a world power, were becoming more sturdily built, though the majority were doubtless still timber-framed, perhaps with wattle or similar infilling, and prone to catch fire. Only a few years before Octavian Augustus gained sole control of the Roman world, Crassus, a rival of his adopted father Julius Caesar, had made his fortune by owning a private fire brigade, and buying up burning property at distinctly advantageous prices from the distraught owners before putting the fire out. Such houses continued to exist under Augustus, who tried to control the risk of fire not only by instituting a public fire brigade, but also by enacting legislation to limit the height of such tenements to 70 ft (Roman), a figure later reduced by Trajan to 60.4 Even so, it was not until the great fire in the reign of Nero that most of these primitive forms of construction were swept away.
