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          The Augustan building projects in the northern Campus Martius took place against a complex background of architectural, political, and social developments in this area of Rome (Castagnoli ; Gros ; Coarelli , ; Harris ; La Rocca a; Wiseman ; Palmer ; L. Richardson ; Patterson , –). From earliest times, it was associated with the military and electoral activities of the Roman people. The two functions had to be conducted outside the pomerium, and they often intertwined. Here troops trained for war, and successful generals exhibited their spoils before beginning their triumphal procession through the city. After their triumphs, they dedicated temples and public buildings to impress the populace and curry its favor in elections. Here too the citizens voted and elected the most important magistrates of the state, the consuls and censors. Aristocratic families competed with one another in this arena of architectural display, and here a few exceptional individuals were granted burial at state expense (funus publicum). It is difficult today to get a sense of what this area looked like in antiquity. Since the early Middle Ages, when the city contracted to the abitato (the inhabited area between the Vatican and the Capitoline Hill), the Campus Martius has been one of the most heavily urbanized sectors of Rome. In this area, most of the remains of the imperial city still lie buried beneath palazzi and narrow streets; few structures have been excavated entirely, and we are often completely dependent on the evidence provided by ancient literary sources. The fragments of the Marble Plan of the city, of Severan date,          Field of Dreams The Campus Martius The rest of the city is only an appendage. —Strabo .. provide important clues (Castagnoli –; Rodriguez-Almeida –), but we must use our imagination to recapture a sense of what the area looked like during the Augustan period. Originally, the area of the Campus Martius resembled a large, flat triangle, each side approximately  kilometers long (figs. –). Its eastern edge is bounded, from north to south, by the ridges of the Pincian, Quirinal, and Capitoline hills, which extend like long fingers into the plain, while a sharply angled curve of the Tiber defines its northern , western, and southern sides. Relatively low-lying, and thus repeatedly subject to flooding, this plain lay outside the city boundary until after the Augustan age, and only in the time of Claudius, Vespasian, and Hadrian were its northern limits incorporated (Boatwright ). Thus, unlike the traditional seven hills of Rome, separated by narrow , congested valleys, the Campus (as it was often called) offered unencumbered spaces for activity of all kinds. Over a period of several centuries, the vast open area of the Campus gradually began to fill with buildings, starting in the south and gradually spreading north as Rome expanded. Even in antiquity, the actual limits of the Campus Martius were considered somewhat amorphous, a situation that has caused much debate among modern topographers . For our purposes, the Campus includes the area bordered on the east by the present-day boulevard, the Corso, on the west by the curve of the Tiber, on the north by the Piazza del Popolo, and on the south by the Capitoline Hill and Forum Boarium. In antiquity a sizable stream, the Amnis Petronia, flowed south and west from the Quirinal somewhat through the center of the Campus to empty into the Tiber, helping to separate off a southern area, the Flaminian Fields (prata Flaminia), which extended for approximately  meters along the river. Eventually, the fields were regularized and took on the name of “Circus Flaminius,” though the “circus” was essentially an open rectangle increasingly defined by buildings along its edges, and not an arena for horse racing in the traditional sense. North of the Amnis Petronia was the Campus Martius proper, with a marshy area or pond near its center, the Palus Caprae (Goat’s Marsh), roughly the site now occupied by Hadrian’s Pantheon (Briquel ; Coarelli b). The construction of the Via Flaminia in , running north and west along the line of the modern Corso from the foot of the Capitoline Hill, served to bisect the Campus (Ashby and Fell ), and by the reign of Tiberius, and possibly earlier, the area to the east of the Flaminia had become known as the Campus Agrippae after Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s friend and colleague and one of the great builders of the early imperial city. At the western tip of the Campus Martius, tradition told of a natural feature, a volcanic fissure, supposed to be one of the entrances to the...

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