Decoding Ancient Structures: Insights into the Roman Empire

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Recommended: Julius Caesar's role in the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire

Throughout the ages, many scholars and future-scholars have offered an explanation for the meaning of structures from the ancient years, either by their placement or construction. None has fascinated or pushed scholars for reasons than structures and art of the ancient Romans, more specifically those constructed in the years of the Pax Romana and Crisis and Decline of the Roman Empire (27 BC to 284 AD).
Although not truly an emperor, Julius Caesar’s reign was the crucial turning point of the evolution from Republic to Empire during his son Gaius Julius Caesar’s, later given the name “Augustus”, rule. During Caesar’s less than pleasing reign to the Romans, he took to renovating the Imperial Fora, also known as the Roman Forum. Forums were …show more content…

Based on his previous works, his approach to the study of the construction of the Forum Iulium is more centered on evidence such as dating of materials used for evidence with documentation serving as support for these findings. In his article he scrutinizes the letter from Cicero to Atticus as well as the theories built from the letter by other scholars. However, that is not to say that he didn’t have interpretations about the Forum Iulium as a whole. Through his analysis of the letter, and the discovery that the Venus Genetrix temple and Curia Julia were not mentioned once in documentation aside from what he describe as Cicero’s lamentation at the loss of the city’s Republican character at the hands of a Greek architect. On this evidence, the placement and construction of the Forum Iulium was a propagandistic statement itself of Julius Caesar, “Rome itself” and “descendant of Venus the goddess.” Ulrich does not make it any clearer than his closing statement of: “The Forum Iulium, however, as a space that challenged the traditional sears of Republican power, reflected the impudence and even recklessness of its

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