Vandalism and Resistance in Republican Rome
penelope j. e. davies
University of Texas at Austin
I
n 122 BCE, Roman officials erected seating in the
Forum to accommodate paying spectators at the upcom-
ing gladiatorial games (Figure 1).1 One of the people’s
tribunes, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, then ordered the seats
removed so that the poor, too, could watch the show. To quote
Plutarch, a Greek biographer of the imperial period:
Since no one paid any attention to his command, he waited till
the night before the spectacle, and then, taking all the work-
men whom he had under his orders in public contracts, he
pulled down the seats, and when day came he had the place all
clear for the people. For this proceeding the populace thought
him a man, but his colleagues were annoyed and thought him
reckless and violent.2
This is one of a set of episodes recounted by ancient authors
involving late Republican acts of violence against built struc-
tures, temporary and permanent (Figure 2). These acts have
been discussed, along with other forms of violence (such as
rioting and bodily assault), by modern political historians such
as Wilfried Nippel and Andrew Lintott, but they have never,
to my knowledge, been addressed in histories of Roman archi-
tecture.3 In assessing the destruction of buildings during the
Kosovo conflict of 1998–99, architectural historian Andrew
Herscher suggests a reason for this: although violence has
entered artistic and architectural discourse as a resource for
cultural production, especially in the early twentieth-century
avant-garde,
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78, no. 1 (March 2019),
6–24, ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2019 by the Society
of Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress
.edu/journals/reprints-permissions, or via email: jpermissions@ucpress.edu.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2019.78.1.6.
6
destruction usually displaces architecture from the architec-
tural discourse, if not the domain of “culture” more generally,
and positions it in the domain of “violence,” and so, in typical
formulations, in radically different disciplinary sites and episte-
mological frameworks. The underlying assumption, character-
istic in humanist discourse, is that “culture” and “violence”
stand in unmediated opposition to one another.4
Violence, Herscher contends, seems fairly apparent: when
rational, it is already interpreted; when irrational, its interpreta-
tion often relies on contextualization. Architecture, by contrast,
attracts critical interpretation—that is, until its destruction. At
that point, its context examined, it becomes “a mere surface
expression of supposedly ‘deeper’ social, political, or economic
conditions”—the realm of violence scholars. Focus passes to
agents or catalysts, while the buildings themselves receive only
passing mention.5
In this article, I aim to characterize late Republican acts of
violence against architecture as something more than vandal-
ism. Viewed in their historical and political contexts, these acts
express broad discontent with the status quo (as Lintott argues
regarding violence more generally), and in this they are clearly
ideologically driven. The choice of targets suggests as much,
too. But more important, perhaps, is that when these violent
acts are set against the background of architectural sponsor-
ship patterns, it becomes clear that they were part of a calcu-
lated strategy to challenge those in political authority. They
were a form of cultural production, or antiproduction: in their
own right, they constituted part of an architectural discourse,
a counterlanguage, that, through architecture’s destruction,
defied and circumvented the language of power established
by the dominant class. In other words, where the dominant
built, the dominated destroyed. This language, in turn, takes
its place in a long tradition encompassing (inter alia) the
French Revolution and Britain’s late nineteenth- and early
Figure 1 Forum Romanum (Roman Forum), with the Curia (Senate House) on the right, current state (author’s photo).

Figure 2 Map of Rome, ca. 44 BCE, showing

demolished structures and (in gray) vandalized
structures: 1, Saepta Iulia (voting enclosure); 2,
Temple D, Area Sacra di Largo Argentina (Temple
of the Nymphs); 3, Temple of Concordia; 4, Basilica
Porcia; 5, Curia (Senate House); 6, Forum seating
area; 7, Regia; 8, precinct of Vesta; 9, Temple of
Castor; 10, Temples of Fortuna and Mater Matuta
at S. Omobono; 11, house of Cicero; 12, Sanctuary
of Magna Mater; 13, theater on the Palatine
(created by Penelope Davies and Onur Öztürk).

VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 7

Figure 3 Temple of Castor in the Forum Romanum (Roman Forum), current state (author’s photo).
twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement, as well as the
Kosovo conflict and the events of 9/11; it also reverberates
through current efforts to confront vandalism, which inform
city planning.6 My claim is predicated on the extraordinary
power of public architecture, for which there is probably little
need to build a case. But it is still worth noting that in ancient
Rome public architecture developed as a means, if not the
means, of communicating elite ideology long before the writ-
ten word.7 Here, I hope to amplify a nonelite voice; where
other scholars have assessed nonelites as agents of nonelite
works, I propose the possibility of discerning agency on be-
half of, and sometimes by, nonelites in the realm of state
architecture.8
Acts of Vandalism in the Late Republic
Some years after the Forum seating incident, other acts of
vandalism occurred. In 100, so the mid-first-century Roman
historian Sallust relates, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus served,
like Gracchus, as the people’s tribune—an office set up in
the fifth century to protect the people from abuse by elected
officials (known as magistrates). Saturninus championed a bill
proposing that the state buy and store grain and sell it to
the public below market price. When it came to a vote in the
8 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
Forum, the city quaestor (supervisor of the treasury), Quintus
Servilius Caepio, balked. Saturninus responded by smashing
the pontes—the “bridges” onto which voters climbed to cast
their ballots—and scattering the ballot boxes.9 Later that
year, when Saturninus hoped to install his ally Gaius Servilius
Glaucia as consul, his agents clubbed to death one of the
other candidates. Gaius Marius, then consul, locked Saturni-
nus, Glaucia, and their supporters in the Senate House, sup-
posedly for their own protection. Furious crowds ripped roof
tiles off the building and hurled them down below, effectively
stoning Saturninus and Glaucia and other officials to death.10
Further episodes occurred in the mid-first century and
clustered around the person of Publius Clodius, a young
man of patrician descent who was tribune in 58.11 First, as
a populist protest, Clodius commandeered the Temple of
Castor in the Forum as a rallying point for his gangs of
supporters and as a place to store weapons (Figure 3). His
supporters trampled down the building’s doors and pur-
portedly, at one point, ripped up its steps.12 On a separate
occasion, at the trial of Publius Vatinius, Clodius and his
followers incited crowds to drive the presiding praetor
(a magistrate tasked, inter alia, with overseeing courts,
usually in the Forum) from the tribunal, scatter his benches,
overturn the ballot boxes, and impose general chaos on the

Figure 5 Area Sacra di Largo Argentina, Rome, ca. 100 BCE, showing (from right) Temples A (Iuturna), B (Fortuna Huiusce Diei), C (Feronia?), and D
(Nymphs) (hypothetical reconstruction by John Burge).
court’s physical apparatus.13 Next, having convinced the
Senate to legalize Cicero’s voluntary exile on the grounds
that, as consul in 63, he had falsified the Senate’s wishes
by executing the Catilinarian conspirators without trial,
Clodius confiscated the orator’s Palatine residence and
arranged for its sale at auction.14 Clodius took possession of
the house, which rioters had pillaged on Cicero’s departure,
and began to demolish and burn it and distribute its appur-
tenances as plunder. He then invited his brother-in-law,
Quintus Pinarius Natta, the most junior pontiff, to authorize
a shrine to Libertas (Liberty) on the site, and he expropriated
an adjacent portico that Quintus Lutatius Catulus had
erected around 101 to house spoils of war. When Gnaeus
Pompeius (Pompey), one of the most influential men in
Figure 4 Temple D, Area Sacra di Largo Argentina
(Temple of the Nymphs), Rome, current state
(author’s photo).
Rome, agitated for Cicero’s recall, Clodius staged an assassi-
nation attempt against him. Pompey barricaded himself
inside his house for the rest of the year, with Clodius’s
gangs lurking ominously outside and Clodius threatening
to deal with Pompey’s house as he had Cicero’s.15
Two years later, in 56, Clodius was aedile (a magistrate
in charge of city maintenance, as well as the games and the
corn supply). Insinuating that Pompey, now in charge of
the grain supply, was slashing the dole list, one of Clodius’s
henchmen, Sextus Cloelius, incited a food riot, and Clo-
dius’s supporters set fire to the Temple of the Nymphs in
the southern Campus Martius (probably Temple D in
Largo Argentina) (Figures 4 and 5).16 Finally, in January of
52, as Clodius and his entourage were returning to Rome
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 9
from Aricia along the Via Appia, they encountered Clodius’s
rival Titus Annius Milo and his men. A fight broke out, and
Clodius was murdered. The city erupted into turmoil. Over-
night, crowds gathered in the house where his body lay, and
just before dawn they moved it, naked, to the speakers’ plat-
form in the Forum, where tribunes proclaimed lamentations
over it. The result was explosive. In the words of historian
Cassius Dio (155–235 CE):
The populace, as a result of what it both saw and heard, was
deeply stirred and no longer showed any regard for things sa-
cred or profane, but overthrew all the customs of burial and
burned down nearly the whole city. They took up the body of
Clodius and carried it into the senate-house, laid it out prop-
erly, and then, after heaping up a pyre out of the benches,
burned both the corpse and the building.17
Consumed in the flames with them, so Asconius (a first-century
CE historian) recounts, was the adjacent Basilica Porcia. The
crowd also launched attacks on the houses of Marcus Aemilius
Lepidus, who was interrex (a short-term authority in the absence
of elected consuls) and Milo.18
Defining the Aggression against Architecture
To convey ideological motivation for aggression against
painted or sculpted images (e.g., during religious conflicts in
Byzantium and the Protestant Reformation), scholars use the
term iconoclasm.19 Aggression against architecture, however,
usually falls under the rubric of destruction—a term that implies
completeness—or vandalism.20 The latter term, often used to
characterize the sorts of events recounted above and evoking
the Germanic tribe(s) that sacked Rome in 455 CE, was coined
in 1773 by the French revolutionary Joseph Lakanal to deni-
grate both the act and its agents, associating them with barba-
rism. With similar objectives, Abbé Henri Grègoire was the
first to use the term in print some twenty years later.21 In the
eyes of these men, to be a vandal was to destroy French patri-
mony and was therefore against the aims of the new state.
Yielding to destructive ignorance, so-called vandals were said
not to be revolutionaries; conversely, truly “revolutionary”
destruction could not be called vandalism. Thus conceived,
the term vandalism—implying barbarism, blindness, igno-
rance, baseness, lack of taste—allowed revolutionaries to exert
legitimate forms of violence against suspect or “enemy” archi-
tecture and artworks while branding unauthorized forms of
violence as vandalism and excluding the perpetrators from civ-
ilized society.22
This pejorative charge persists into the present. Social sci-
entist Alison Ravetz concluded in 1983 that for many people
the term vandalism implies perpetrators who are little more
than thugs.23 While Cicero and his peers would probably
have been satisfied with this characterization of Clodius and
10 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
his ilk (and, such is the influence of Cicero’s voice, many still
are), Dario Gamboni, historian of the French Revolution, in-
sists that the word’s connotations make it inappropriate for
use in more objectively aimed interpretive contexts.24 At the
very least, we should qualify the term. Sociologist Stanley
Cohen does this when he distinguishes “conventional vandal-
ism” (its motives being “unavowed”—e.g., greed, envy, intol-
erance, stupidity, and the “bestial instinct of destruction”)
from “ideological vandalism” (which is driven by motives that
are “avowable,” such as religion, prudishness, sentiment or
aesthetics, and politics).25 How destruction is characterized
is, thus, a matter of perception. As art historian Martin
Warnke cautions, iconoclasm, broadly conceived, is “a privi-
lege for the victors, and a sacrilege for the vanquished.”26
The challenge, then, is to determine motives while also reck-
oning with outcomes.
Late Republican Violence: The Political Context
That the late Republican episodes noted above should be
identified as ideological vandalism seems evident from their
political context.27 These episodes fall into two phases, corre-
sponding with peaks in activism on the part of the tribunes
and the plebs as cooperation and collaboration broke down
and new strategies for political engagement emerged. The
first phase, during the last quarter of the second century, was
the culmination of a development that began at midcentury,
when tribunes willfully defied the conservative majority in
the Senate. Thus, when Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a consul
(one of the two principal magistrates in charge of the city and
the armies) of 151, proposed a levy to address growing resis-
tance to military service during the war in Spain, tribunes cast
him into prison. A similar event occurred in 138.28 Whatever
their personal goals, the tribunes did achieve some successes
for the plebs through these tactics (improved army condi-
tions, a permanent extortion court beginning in 149, the se-
cret ballot in 139–137); official efforts to rein them in bear
witness to their growing autonomy.29 Tribunician activism
reached its crescendo in 133 and 123–122 with Tiberius and
Gaius Gracchus, whose agitation for popular causes (agrarian
reform for the first, a grain dole for the second) and unortho-
dox tactics (taking bills to the people’s assembly rather than
the Senate) exposed the enormous power of the office. The
result was their deaths—Tiberius lynched by members of the
Senate, Gaius by his own hand in the midst of an uprising—
along with the execution of thousands of partisans. Their ac-
tions also led to an abiding tension between those members
of the governing elite who pursued their agendas through
traditional senatorial means (the optimates) and those, like the
Gracchi, who took their agendas to the assembly (the popu-
lares). Gaius Gracchus’s dismantling of Forum seating in
122 and Saturninus’s demolition of the voting galleries in
100 fit this pattern of tribunician defiance through innovative
strategies. The people’s abuse of the Curia in the same year
followed their cues.
To contain the tribunes, Publius Cornelius Sulla, during
his dictatorship of 82–81, drastically curtailed their powers.
The second phase of destructions followed the restoration of
those powers in the 70s.30 In the next decade, tribunes, now
the principal agents of political change, learned to exploit the
weight of the neighborhoods (vici), where old discontents—
underemployment, poor housing, debt—had been exacer-
bated by an influx of new citizens after the Social War of
91–88.31 In 67, one tribune, Gaius Manilius, scheduled an
election concerning the assignment of freedmen into voting
tribes late on the day of the new-year neighborhood enter-
tainments (ludi Compitalicii, or Compitalia), when those who
were assembled for the games could be mobilized to vote en
masse. The bill passed, fighting ensued, and the law was over-
turned. But the incident fired the political consciousness of
the plebs, and by 64 the Senate saw the neighborhoods as so
volatile and so ripe for subversive activity that it dissolved all
local clubs and guilds (collegia) that it judged contrary to the
state’s well-being and banned those that remained from cele-
brating the Compitalia.32
Against this backdrop, Clodius came of political age. By 59,
he had sufficiently championed popular issues to cultivate a
following among the lowest social ranks in the vici. Appar-
ently, he saw this as his path to a political career. Ineligible for
the people’s tribuneship on account of his patrician birth, he
made the extraordinary move of changing his status to plebe-
ian. Winning the office in 58, he used it, whatever his personal
goals, to reward the people for their support (providing,
among other things, a free monthly corn dole at crippling ex-
pense to the state) and to challenge leading senators through
alarmingly aggressive tactics.33 His incitement of acts of vio-
lence against architecture was one such tactic. Again, the peo-
ple followed.
As Lintott puts it, by the late Republic, most Romans
would not have regarded political violence as primitive barba-
rism. They would have recognized it as a political weapon.34
Similarly, I suggest, they would have seen violence against
buildings as something more than simple vandalism. They
would have understood it to be ideological.
Choice of Target
Target selection drove this point home, making the acts easily
decipherable to an urban population already keenly attuned
to architectural messages. When sponsoring buildings, mag-
istrates made calculated choices regarding building types, de-
ities to be honored (for temples), designs, and locations. Over
the Republic’s duration, a finely tuned language of competi-
tive construction developed, with incontrovertible signs of
architectural intertextuality—where new buildings referred
to and gained meaning from preexisting ones. The juxtaposi-
tion of temples sometimes signaled family connections, alli-
ances, or rivalries. In other cases, divinities were rehonored
to emphasize lineage or to display bitter ironies. Aqueducts
vied in munificence. Even a road like the Via Appia of 312
could be a site of competitive topographical expropriation
through successive repavings.35
All the targets for aggression were located in or on the
fringes of Rome’s principal political centers, the Forum and
the Campus Martius. Some constituted evident markers of
wealth and/or social inequity. In the courts (such as the Basil-
ica Porcia, built in 184 by Marcus Porcius Cato), which were
disrupted by Clodius and burned in 52, the rich had a history
of looking after their own. In election venues, too, the votes
of the wealthy carried greater weight than those of the
poor.36 Forum seating further represented wealth inequality
and the clear articulation of Rome’s profoundly hierarchical
social order. In 191, at the inauguration of plays in honor of
Magna Mater and at the Roman Games, the censors (magis-
trates in charge of assigning public contracts) instructed the
aediles to segregate senators from the rest of the audience,
a practice that was maintained thereafter.37 The Temple of
the Nymphs, selected as the venue for a riot that resulted in
arson, was where censors probably stored census lists and the
state sorted citizens into rank by wealth.38 T. P. Wiseman
notes that Clodius’s partisans may have been targeting Pom-
pey’s new grain dole lists when they attacked the building,
these lists having been intended as a corrective to Clodius’s
controversial grain policy.39
Other targets were senatorial icons. By Clodius’s time, the
Temple of Castor, commissioned in about 496 and one of the
oldest of the Republic, had long been the seat of the consuls
and a bastion of the Senate. Successive restorations had ren-
dered its cella gradually less accessible, with a conversion
from tetrastyle to hexastyle façade around 130, and finally
to octastyle along with the removal of its axial staircase in
about 117 (Figures 6, 7, and 8).40 This building’s frontal tri-
bunal and lateral staircases, added in ca. 130, may also have
accommodated elections, allowing citizens to ascend to the
voting gallery on one side, cast their votes on the tribunal,
and return to ground level on the other. In this case the tem-
ple may have been designed to maintain elite control over the
ballot even once it was secret.41 Storming the temple and
tearing down its doors in a popular revolt, Clodius’s support-
ers exerted their right to enter, and with the destruction of
the steps, they defended their new headquarters while visibly
denying entrance, symbolically reversing traditional hierar-
chies of access to political authority and the gods (as Cicero
recognized in an appeal to the Senate).42
Cicero’s house, in turn, was the dwelling of one of the
most vocal of the senatorial majority, for whom it served as
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 11
Figure 6 Temple of Castor, Rome, ca. 496 BCE
(hypothetical reconstruction by John Burge).

Figure 7 Temple of Castor, Rome, as restored in

the second half of the second century BCE
(hypothetical reconstruction by John Burge).

Figure 8 Temple of Castor, Rome, as restored ca.

117 BCE, showing lateral and frontal steps
targeted for vandalism (hypothetical reconstruction
by John Burge).
a headquarters.43 With that building’s destruction, Clodius
exulted in Cicero’s exile, and with the expropriation of the
portico of Lutatius Catulus the elder, he rejoiced in the death,
in 61, of Quintus Lutatius Catulus the younger, chief repre-
sentative of the Sullan old guard and princeps senatus (head of
the Senate). The long history of this much-contested site
added to the impact of Clodius’s act: at the time of construc-
tion, Lutatius Catulus’s portico had replaced the house of
Gaius Gracchus’s cohort Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, which was
demolished after his assassination.44 Clodius could claim that
the shrine to Liberty and the portico reappropriated the
property in the name of the people’s freedom from tyranny.
The house of Aemilius Lepidus was similarly charged, while
that of Milo, like its owner, stood in for his patron, Pompey.
Most iconic of all was the Curia Hostilia, constructed in ar-
chaic times, purportedly by King Tullus Hostilius, as a meet-
ing place for his council.45 It later served as the headquarters
of the Republican Senate. When Sulla doubled the size of this
body from three hundred to six hundred, reinvigorating it and
returning it to authority in all public spheres, he rebuilt the
structure, enlarging it and renaming it the Curia Cornelia.
More than any building, this spacious hall, dominating the
people’s assembly place on the northwest edge of the Forum
(the Comitium), communicated Sulla’s vision of the Senate’s
place in government and vis-à-vis the people and their trib-
unes.46 For Cicero, the building was metonymic with the
dictator and his reforms.47 So its destruction in 52 was no ac-
cident. As Cassius Dio wrote, “They did not do this under the
stress of such an impulse as often takes sudden hold of crowds,
but with such deliberate purpose that at the ninth hour they
held the funeral feast in the Forum itself, with the senate-
house still smoldering.”48 Making it Clodius’s pyre, the people
gave their martyred hero his own version of the extraordinary
state cremation with which the Senate honored Sulla more
than twenty-five years earlier, substituting paraphernalia of
state—senators’ benches—for aromatic flowers and incense.49
Violence against Architecture as an Act
against the State
In a study of Roman arson, Steven Johnstone argues that the
ideological force of arson derived from the identification of
the state with its architecture. If public architecture repre-
sented the state, then acts of violence against architecture were
the acts of outsiders.50 I would extend this to other forms of
architectural destruction as well. Indeed, the equivalence be-
tween the state and its architecture was exceptionally close in
Republican Rome because of unusually restrictive patterns of
architectural patronage. From the early Republic, the govern-
ing elite recognized that architecture bestowed authority on its
sponsors and perpetuated that authority. These were the ends
to which kings had used architecture, and the ends to which
those in power continued to use it throughout the Mediterra-
nean for many centuries to follow.
To contain architecture’s exploitation within an elective
system, the elite established that public buildings could be
commissioned only by elected officials, and specific ones at
that: aediles for entertainment venues, infrastructure mainte-
nance (such as street surfacing and minor restorations), and
occasionally temples; dictators or consuls, in their capacity as
generals, for most temples; and censors for major civic initia-
tives (such as aqueducts and basilicas). These officials, who did
not include the tribunes of the people, acted on the state’s
behalf. Even given their authority, they labored under con-
straints that informed their building projects: most were in of-
fice for only a year’s term (about eighteen months for censors),
and their use of state resources was subject to senatorial super-
vision. A single structure was usually buildable in a short time
and with a limited budget, but the sorts of massive projects car-
ried out by Hellenistic kings and later emperors were not. The
resultant architecture was more than a representation of the
state; the cityscape, composed of a multiplicity of independent
buildings sponsored by a multiplicity of talented individuals,
mirrored the state’s leadership structure and ideals.51
Yet even if Rome’s architecture did not represent a mon-
archy’s power, it did exert that of an oligarchy—the Senate.
And just as the sponsorship system helped the political elite
to self-regulate and kept wealthy private individuals from
buying visibility through building, so it barred everyone out-
side the senatorial class—the great majority, even many of the
rich, and the tribunes, men of wealth and political ambition
who represented the plebeians and who saw building as a
means to power—from harnessing a potent language of au-
thority to challenge a system heavily biased against them.
Late Republican episodes of ideological vandalism posed a
direct challenge to this system. They served as a response to
the dominant language of authority expressed and perpetuated
through construction. Denied access to that language by the
constraints of state sponsorship, the tribunes and the people
defied it and devised an architecturally based counterlanguage
of their own, which replaced construction with alteration and
destruction. Where those in authority built, they, lacking au-
thority, demolished. They recognized, as Gamboni puts it,
that the very images (or buildings) that were used to express,
impose, and legitimate power could be misused to challenge,
reject, and delegitimate that power.52 Their destructions, then,
should be seen as a means of communication in their own
right, even if the materials they used were already the vehicles
of other people’s expression and communication.53
Earlier Acts of Ideological Destruction in Rome
Although these late Republican destructive acts are the first
recorded instances of ideological vandalism in Rome, they
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 13
were not the first politically motivated architectural demoli-
tions. Signs of deliberate destruction are apparent at the
beginning of the Republic in two places: the Area Sacra di Sant’
Omobono in the Forum Boarium (the commercial district by
the Tiber), and just beyond the east end of the Forum. At the
end of the sixth century, buildings at these sites seem to have
been willfully leveled before they were reconstructed in
slightly modified forms. The structures (a temple probably
dedicated to Fortuna in ca. 580–570, rebuilt and enlarged in
ca. 540–520; the Regia, in a fourth phase of construction dat-
ing to ca. 530; the precinct of Vesta, in a second phase of con-
struction ca. 575; and an adjacent structure identified with the
Domus Publica) were probably all closely associated with re-
gal patronage. Their treatment may have been conceived as
an erasure of monarchy, expressing the notion of a res publica
defined by the absence of a king.54
Much later, the censors of 154, Gaius Cassius Longinus
and Marcus Valerius Messalla, commissioned Rome’s first
stone theater on the southwest slope of the Palatine.55 Accord-
ing to the Periochae, this building was close to completion
when “on motion of Cornelius Nasica it was torn down by
order of the Senate, on the ground that it was inexpedient and
would be injurious to the public character; and for some time
thereafter the people stood to see theatrical performances.”56
Unlike Greeks, who took seats for their assemblies at the
bouleuterion (council house) and during entertainments, and
whose meetings fostered discussion, Romans remained stand-
ing during comitial meetings, and their contiones (political as-
semblies), always convoked and supervised by a magistrate,
were organized to constrain audience participation. Only des-
ignated speakers presented their views, and no debate was
tolerated. As tensions rose in Rome, Cornelius Scipio Nasica,
a high-ranking senator, may have persuaded the Senate that a
permanent theater would encourage political gatherings in the
Greek style, allowing Romans to assemble without a magis-
trate’s oversight, engage in populist debate, and challenge the
social hierarchies that earlier forms of audience segregation ar-
ticulated.57 More than that, it was in the theater that Greek
monarchs and strategoi conflated drama and reality to frame
and perform their leadership before their seated subjects;
so the theater might prove the perfect Roman venue for
social subversion and crowd control by populist agitators
and transgressive generals such as Cassius Longinus.58 In
the construction of a stone theater, the Senate may have
feared a threat of power from below (the populus) and from
above (an autocracy)—a threat to its own place in the run-
ning of the state.
Other documented destructions targeted private residen-
ces. By Cicero’s time, tradition told of the Senate ordering
the demolition of the houses of those condemned of, and
executed for, aspiring to kingship. According to one tradition,
one of the first consuls, Publius Valerius Poplicola, started
14 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
building a stately house on the Velia, a ridge beyond the
eastern edge of the Forum where the kings Ancus Marcius,
Tullus Hostilius, and Tarquinius Priscus had purportedly
lived, before tearing it down to quell suspicions of regal
aspirations.59 Spurius Cassius’s house was purportedly de-
molished on his death in 485, as were Spurius Maelius’s
house on the Capitoline after 439 and Marcus Manlius
Capitolinus’s after his execution in ca. 384.60 Scholars have
cast doubt on all these instances, judging it unlikely that
the Senate would have destroyed the inherited property of
Roman families and suggesting that tales of destruction
evolved by analogy with a Greek practice and as etymolog-
ical elaborations of traditional place-names.61 Used as
exempla, these stories were rhetorically embellished dur-
ing and after the Gracchan upheavals. More credence
might be given to the demolitions of the Palatine residen-
ces of Gaius Gracchus’s cohort Fulvius Flaccus and Marcus
Vitruvius Vaccus, a citizen of Fundi whose house was de-
stroyed after his execution in 329 for leading the Fundani
and Privernates in revolt against Rome.62
The common denominator in all these instances, his-
torical or not (with the exception of Valerius Poplicola’s
case), is that the agent was the Senate, which was acting
against a perceived threat to the Republic (that is, the ac-
tion was state sanctioned). Architectural destruction was
therefore commonly conceived as ideological. Gracchus
was the pioneer of deploying this strategy without the
state’s sanction and against senatorial conservatives as a
means of circumventing his lack of a building mandate.
Clodius was its master, a demolition man who played to
the populace while maneuvering to diminish his eminent
rivals. As for the people, when they attacked the Senate
House, they harnessed architecture’s symbolism to express
rage at their lot and at urban lawlessness in the only way
open to them, pressing blame on the Senate with a destruc-
tive force learned from their tribunes. If public buildings
represented the state, destruction signified that the perpe-
trators were not of the state.63 Perhaps the claim is better
turned on its head: if the sponsorship process meant that
public buildings represented the state, destruction signi-
fied that the state was not of the perpetrators.
Alternative Forms of Protest
Demolition and destruction were not the only means of using
architecture as a vehicle for protest. Plutarch claimed that the
people called on Tiberius Gracchus to recover public land for
the poor “through writings upon porticoes, walls, and monu-
ments.”64 When Lucius Opimius sponsored his Temple of
Concordia after Gaius Gracchus’s suicide and the murder of
his partisans, someone etched onto it, “A work of mad discord
produces a temple of Concord.”65 Graffiti, like arson, offered
relative anonymity. Inscriptions on statues made them speak,
so the writers could stay silent. Anthropologist James Scott
describes graffiti as a “hidden transcript,” a “discourse that
takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by power
holders.”66 Graffiti was ubiquitous in Rome during this
period, and Roman attitudes toward it differed from modern-
day attitudes. The act of defacement was not judged a crime,
so it was not considered vandalism. Resistance resided not in
the act but in the message inscribed.
More overt and institutionalized, ritual protests (a term
coined by anthropologist Setha Low to describe fiestas, pa-
rades, and carnivals) might invert hegemonic meanings of
public space much as they did social structures, although
only temporarily.67 During parades for the cult of Magna
Mater, imported from the east and a nonelite favorite, for-
eign priests (Galli) in bright, luxurious robes brandished
knives to symbolize their self-castrated state, begging for
alms in Magna Mater’s name and playing loud music to an
unfamiliar Phrygian meter. The cult’s Phrygian adherents,
the Corybants, resplendent in crested helmets, leapt about,
shaking their heads and clashing armor, while fervent
crowds showered their path with money and roses.68 Every
April, these raucous processions transformed the hallowed
Palatine into the people’s realm. Other rituals could alter
space more permanently, as they did in the early days of
tribunician activism. Standing on the Rostra to champion
a bill for elective priesthoods in lieu of co-optation in
145, Gaius Licinius Crassus turned his back on the Comi-
tium to address the crowd in the Forum; or, in an alterna-
tive version of the event, he led the crowd out of the
Comitium to vote in the piazza.69 Either way, history was
made and the Comitium, dominated by the Senate House,
began to recede as a political space in favor of the larger pi-
azza. Conservative authority was diminished.
There were also moments when tribunes, lacking a
building mandate, contrived populist adjustments or con-
tributions to the urban landscape through their bills. It was
probably by virtue of his position on the agrarian commis-
sion that Tiberius Gracchus brought bills for road and gra-
nary construction.70 In 119, Marius championed a bill to
narrow the voting bridges to reduce abuse and interference
by patrons during elections.71 To build his shrine to Lib-
erty, Clodius probably claimed the authority of the exile
law.72 His creativity was on fullest display, however, when
he was aedile, a post many Romans exploited furiously for
visibility through construction. Although Vettius Cyrus,
Cicero’s architect, cleared his books of commitments in an-
ticipation of Clodius’s contracts, Clodius apparently built
nothing at all.73 By not complying with the expectations of
his mandate, he defied established order.
Still, arson and other forms of destruction remained the
most aggressive and public strategies. For the perpetrators,
there was much to recommend such actions, as criminologists
Robin Griffiths and J. M. Shapland suggest:
Vandalism is one of the safest and most anonymous of offences.
Rarely is there a personal complainant (since public property is
such a ready target) and the offender does not have to carry
away or dispose of property. Nor does he have to carry an in-
strument of destruction with him—simply hands or feet, or the
use of an object lying ready to hand at the scene will often suf-
fice. . . . Unless the vandal is caught at the time, the chances of
escaping detection altogether are extremely good.74
Such acts were also loud and far-reaching. Experienced first-
hand, destruction—sometimes carefully staged—is a specta-
cle: blinding clouds of commotion, the swinging of axes,
abandon in the release of anger.75 Fire brings primal fear and
fascination; it dashes or wanders with changes of the wind.
Unbidden and unseen, the noise of fire travels and beckons.
Smoke and flakes of ash, dancing lazily through the air, creep
silently into taverns and bedrooms, reaching for the unin-
volved, the uninformed, angering some, drafting others to
join this “mythic present” of revolutionary consciousness, to
savor, momentarily, the self-realization of this collective act.
For participants in a destructive act, community is born
around a sacred new consensus; in the foundational moment,
history is made—the past defined as an ancien régime—and
progress is performed.76 As the building crumbles, its past
significance is constructed, intensified, in a way that justifies
and necessitates its destruction.77 And after the moment:
odors linger, of charred wood and acrid stucco; ash settles, a
dissident’s unmelting snow. The city bears its scars: hacked
timbers and smashed stones, piles left uncleared, burned-out
shells of former glory, torched with blackened edges. Here
the abstract becomes real, while the real becomes a revolu-
tionary legend.78
Immediate Outcomes
Did the acts of destruction in Rome achieve anything? Per-
haps not, for if they had, history would cast them as modern-
ization or progress rather than vandalism.79 Violence against
buildings failed, in fact, to create a viable consensus (just as it
did two millennia later, when the costs of suffragettes’ de-
structions helped to alienate the perpetrators from a wary
public).80 Indeed, it is Gamboni’s view that vandalism tends
to entrench rather than challenge the balance of power to
which it reacts, precisely because the agents can be cast as en-
emies of culture and society—so much so that charges of tar-
geting visual culture can become a propaganda weapon. In
Rome, charges of arson, which reverberated loudly in a city
dependent on wood construction, were leveled against inter-
nal opponents thought to be vying for control of the state.81
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 15
Figure 9 Sanctuary of Magna Mater, Rome, ca. 100 BCE. The procession probably moved along the Clivus Victoriae (path shown on the left) through a
covered road under the forecourt to join the Scalae Caci (Steps of Cacus) on the right; from there it ascended to the Temples of Victoria (right) and Magna
Mater (left) (hypothetical reconstruction by John Burge).
“The illegality,” Gamboni writes, “but even more the illegiti-
macy of ‘vandalism’ . . . make it a dominated reply that rein-
forces domination.”82
The various strategies for resistance did provoke reac-
tions, however. In the short term, the clearest indications of
success followed graffiti. Plutarch believed that “most of all,
the energy and ambition of Tiberius Gracchus were fired by
the people’s graffiti,” but the graffiti urged action on the part
of a single dissident, not consensus among the many or con-
cessions from those in power.83 Most reactions were negative.
In spaces that had been transformed through use, temporarily
or permanently, the Senate reasserted hegemonic power.84
By the end of the second century, a redesigned Sanctuary of
Magna Mater, credited to a member of the Caecilius Metellus
family, figureheads among senatorial conservatives, con-
tained and controlled processions (Figure 9); access to the
temple could even be shut off.85
As for destructions, Plutarch cites a (disputed) claim that
the Forum seating demolition cost Gracchus a third tribune-
ship.86 In other cases, the boot of oppression stamped firmly
down. Thus, after Cicero’s return from exile in 57 and his
lengthy appeal, the Senate restored his house to him; the site,
16 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
however, remained contested, with another phase of violence
by Clodius’s followers.87 The Temple of the Nymphs, mean-
while, was magnificently restored from the ground up (see
Figure 5). Its huge new podium (23.5 by 37 meters) extended
back beyond adjacent temples—all the more remarkable
given that podia were rarely destroyed by fire and the stan-
dard practice was reuse—and its unusually large cella occu-
pied almost two-thirds of the podium’s length and its entire
width.88 The restoration was grand enough to be seen as a
pointed rebuttal to Clodius’s vandalism and sufficiently spa-
cious to house a new census archive. As for the Curia, sym-
bolism was answered with even more deafening symbolism:
as violence raged after Clodius’s death and cremation inside
the building’s walls, and the Senate charged Pompey with
levying troops, one of the Senate’s first orders of business was
to assign the Curia’s rebuilding to Faustus Cornelius Sulla, a
conservative and son of the dictator. For Cassius Dio, the rea-
son was evident: “It was the Curia Hostilia, which had been
remodeled by Sulla; hence they came to this decision about it
and ordered that when restored it should receive again the
name of the same man.”89 The Senate restored order after
Sulla’s model, through its own visible reempowerment.
Long-Term Outcomes
In the longer term, it is tempting to suppose that the cost and
danger of destructive acts—discontent with the state made
manifest—helped to lead Gaius Julius Caesar (who had crossed
the Rubicon in the name of the tribunes’ freedom) to urban
policy that, like his calendrical and legislative reforms, improved
the lot of the city populace.90 Caesar strove to increase home-
ownership, compiled regulations for municipal administration,
prescribed street maintenance and limitations on traffic, and
aspired to enhance the city’s overall grandeur.91 Still today,
homeownership, regular building services (cleaning, mainte-
nance, and so on) and general visual appeal are all deemed crucial
to the prevention of vandalism.92 For debt relief, Caesar remit-
ted low-end rents for 46, and he revised the census list vicus by
vicus to manage the grain dole more efficiently.93
Whatever his motives, Caesar, too, used the language of
architecture to empower the people in the sometime spaces
of their protest. His initiative to monumentalize the wooden
voting enclosure on the Campus Martius (previously known
as the ovile and henceforth as the Saepta Iulia) and his magnif-
icent new Forum Iulium (built for legal business), both begun
in 54 and clad in Carrara marble, exalted the people’s sover-
eignty and the very institutions—elections and the law—that
might promote their cause.94 Caesar visibly marginalized
their constant target, the Senate, most obviously in 44 when
he moved the Rostra from the northwest corner of the
Forum, adjoined to the Comitium and overshadowed by the
Curia, to the west end of the Forum (Figure 10).95 There,
picked out in vivid colored marble—slabs of pink portasanta
from Chios and decorative pilasters of black Lucullan stone,
one of the earliest uses of colored stone in permanent public
architecture in Rome—against the pale travertine pavement
and surrounding buildings, and separated from the Curia, the
structure was literally and symbolically released from senato-
rial will and supervision.96 A new east–west axis governed the
Forum, framed by lateral basilicas (the Basilica Sempronia,
now named Iulia for Caesar); the Rostra and the people’s as-
sembly place dominated. Off axis entirely, the Senate House,
still under construction, was sidelined. In fact, when the Sen-
ate gave Caesar the charge to assume construction of the new
Senate House in 45–44, he indulged in a second design phase
in his Forum, extending it to the east so the buildings would
be integrated.97 The Curia, now an appendage to the Forum
Iulium, hung between the city’s growing powers: the Forum
Romanum, where the people were sovereign, and Caesar’s
Forum, drenched in his presence.
If under Caesar the voice of the people drew strength,
the rise of the young Gaius Julius Caesar—Augustus—
brought suppression, achieved again through architecture.
Like Caesar, Augustus modified the Forum, only now to
shut it down. At the site’s southeast corner, his triple-bayed
Parthian Arch, vowed around 19 and probably completed by
6, controlled and restricted access from the lower Via Sacra;
by the late first century, a pendant arch probably spanned the
Figure 10 Plan of the Forum Romanum (Roman
Forum) and environs, ca. 44 BCE, highlighting
buildings erected or restored by Julius Caesar: 1,
Capitoline substructure (“Tabularium”); 2,
Southwest Building; 3, Basilica Opimia; 4, Temple
of Concordia; 5, Carcer (prison); 6, Basilica Porcia;
7, Comitium area; 8, Curia Iulia (Senate House); 9,
Forum Iulium (Forum of Caesar); 10, Macellum
(market); 11, Basilica Aemilia; 12, Regia; 13,
Domus Publica; 14, precinct of Vesta; 15, Temple
of Castor; 16, Basilica Iulia; 17, Temple of Saturn;
18, Rostra Caesaris (Rostra of Caesar) (created by
Penelope Davies and Onur Öztürk).
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 17
Figure 11 Plan of the Forum Romanum (Roman
Forum) and environs, ca. 14 CE, highlighting
buildings erected or restored by Augustus: 1,
Capitoline substructure ("Tabularium"); 2,
Southwest Building; 3, Basilica Opimia; 4, Temple
of Concordia; 5, Carcer (prison); 6, Comitium area;
7, Curia Iulia (Senate House); 8, Forum Iulium
(Forum of Caesar); 9, Forum Augustum (Forum of
Augustus); 10, Macellum (market); 11, Basilica
Aemilia; 12, pendant arch; 13, Temple of Divus
Iulius (Temple of Deified Caesar) with Rostra; 14,
Regia; 15, Domus Publica; 16, precinct of Vesta;
17, Parthian Arch; 18, Temple of Castor; 19,
Basilica Iulia; 20, Temple of Saturn; 21, Rostra
Caesaris (Rostra of Caesar) (created by Penelope
Davies and Onur Öztürk).

Via Sacra’s northern branch, connecting the Basilica Aemilia
and the Temple of Divus Iulius (Figure 11).98 As for the Fo-
rum buildings, the Temple of Castor, site of popular protest,
was neutralized in the 30s, when the Temple of Divus Iulius
was sited so as to jut into the assembly space out in front of
the Temple of Castor.99
Other buildings would be adapted to refer to Augustus’s
victory over Marcus Antonius at Actium in 31, a mark of his
autocracy: a new East Rostra, with ships’ prows from Actium,
mirrored the West Rostra, with prows from the Battle of
Antium in 338; the Curia Iulia, completed by Augustus, fea-
tured Victory atop an orb at the peak of the pediment, draped
figures holding naval implements as corner acroteria, and an-
other statue of Victory inside; and acroteria in the form of tri-
tons blowing conches adorned a restoration of the Temple of
Saturn, begun by L. Munatius Plancus in 42 but apparently
completed in the early 20s (Figure 12).100 The emperor’s
family was featured heavily: magnificent reconstructions of
the Temples of Castor and Concordia Augusta were under-
taken by Tiberius, Augustus’s adoptive son and eventual heir,
and rededicated in his name along with that of his deceased
brother, Drusus (in 6 and 7 CE, respectively). Augustus also
built a portico in honor of his grandsons Gaius and Lucius
Caesar in front of the Basilica Aemilia.101 In short, if Caesar
turned the Forum into the people’s voting space in lieu of the
Comitium, Augustus circumscribed and controlled that
space. Indeed, by historian Nicholas Purcell’s estimation, by
the time of Augustus’s death in 14 CE, the Forum had be-
come a symbol of imperial power, a place of display. For the
Augustan geographer Strabo, it was “reduced to being a
venerable and grand forecourt to the new heart of the city,”
meriting only passing mention as an appendix to a description
of Rome.102
Use of public space was controlled to a similar end. Accel-
erating a process begun by Caesar in an apparent attempt
to expand the Forum, Augustus ensured that functions once
accommodated there were transferred to, or duplicated in,
other venues, such as the Forum Augustum (after 2) and his
own Palatine residence.103 Still a site for gladiatorial games in
the early Augustan era, the Forum seems to have been stripped
of these, too, after its repaving in the last decade BCE. Writing
in the early second century CE, the imperial biographer Sue-
tonius claimed that, on seeing a crowd of men in dark cloaks
(pullati) at a public meeting, Augustus cited a line of Virgil
(“Behold them Romans, lords of the world, the nation clad
in the toga”) and instructed the aediles to ensure that nobody
appeared in the Forum or its vicinity unless clad in a toga and
uncloaked.104 Long a marker of citizen status, the toga was

18 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019

Figure 12 Denarius, 29–27 BCE, with reverse image showing the façade of the Curia Iulia (Senate House), Rome, as completed by Augustus
(Numismatik Lanz, Munich, Auction 154, lot 287).
encoded, through variations in ornamentation, to communi-
cate rank within the citizenry.105 Consisting of an ample swath
of white wool, a toga was beyond the financial reach of many
of the less affluent, and most Romans who could afford a toga
rarely wore one, except on ceremonial occasions. The likely
effect of the dictate, then, was to “cleanse” the Forum of many
from the working classes, whose remonstrations rang the
loudest. As for Caesar’s glorious reconception of the voting
enclosure on the Campus Martius, completed under the first
emperor, the most noteworthy events there in Augustus’s time,
according to Cassius Dio and Suetonius, were gladiatorial
games held in 7, a mock sea battle, and the public display of
a rhinoceros.106 Topographical context helped convert mean-
ing: if once the Saepta stood adjacent to the Villa Publica,
headquarters of the censors, it found new Augustan neighbors
in structures designated for leisure—Agrippa’s magnificent
lake, gardens, and heated baths.
In the end, the people’s newfound ability to articulate con-
cerns through their own architectural language—destruction—
was ruthlessly quelled. When arsonists targeted the Forum
in 7, “the blame for the fire was laid upon the debtor class,
suspected of having contrived it on purpose in order that they
might have some of their debts remitted when they appeared
to have lost heavily.”107 Augustus reorganized the city’s ad-
ministration, encircling the four regions attributed to Servius
Tullius with an additional ten. Within those fourteen regions,
he established extensive bureaucracies at the vicus level. In-
spired, perhaps, by Caesar’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood
census, Augustus designed these new agencies ostensibly to
administer food and water distribution and to address the
threat of fire, but their reach stretched further.108 Managed
separately to preclude the unification of the vici against the
center, they were manned by a network of magistri vici (neigh-
borhood officials) who reported to the aediles, tribunes, and
praetors. This scheme may have stemmed vandalism by involv-
ing residents in the maintenance of their neighborhoods.109
The officials who ran it, however, drawn from the lowest ranks
of society, wore their status as a source of pride; they paraded
it through the streets of their vici on designated days, each es-
corted by a pair of lictors and wearing the toga praetexta (with
a purple border stripe, the privilege of magistrates and priests).
Some even erected marble altars at street corners (such as the
monument from the Vicus Aesculeti now in the collection of
the Centrale Montemartini); carved with their names and with
symbols associated with the new regime (laurels, oak wreaths,
and shields of virtue), these altars functioned as silent re-
minders of their watchfulness (Figure 13).110 This elevation in
rank, unattainable by other means, assured the officials’ loyalty
to the emperor. Acting as his eyes and ears in the vici, they
allowed him to know Rome—and thus to control it.111
The following year, Cassius Dio wrote that when “the
masses, distressed by the famine and the tax and the losses
sustained in the fire, were ill at ease, and they not only openly
discussed numerous plans for a revolution, but also posted at
night even more numerous bulletins,” their pleas fell on deaf
ears.112 Again Augustus refused debt relief and instead insti-
tuted the vigiles, a corps whose duties included firefighting. In
this, he improved the material welfare of the urban plebs, but
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 19
Figure 13 Altar from the Vicus Aesculeti, 2 CE
(Centrale Montemartini, Rome, inv. 855;
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut).
the vigiles were, first and foremost, a military force, indistinct
from any other. Their role was not simply to control arson
but also, through a crackdown on places and means of sedi-
tion, to suppress its larger context: political and social tur-
moil.113 Faced with the people’s resistance, Augustus
entrenched and proclaimed the mobilization of force in the
city as solely the state’s right.114 Whatever chance the people
once had for collective political action was over; whatever
voice they had found was silenced.
The history of Roman state architecture is usually written as
the history of the powerful, and for good reason: the voices of
the dominant resonate loudest in our sources, while the voices
of the dominated rarely rise to audibility. In this article I have
described the mechanisms that made popular protest through
architecture so difficult, but I have also considered the means by
which tribunes and the people they represented, far from
20 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
accepting domination, used acts of purposeful vandalism—
their language of defiance—to defy it publicly. These acts have
a rightful place in Roman architectural history. Although re-
pressed in their immediate aftermath, protests through archi-
tecture’s destruction may have gained some ground for the
urban plebs under Caesar. Setting a different course, Augustus
silenced them, leaving Cicero’s voice to echo through the ages
with a charge of mindless vandalism.
Penelope J. E. Davies is author of Death and the Emperor (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000) and Architecture and Politics in Repub-
lican Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as numerous
articles and essays in scholarly publications. Her research focuses on
Roman state architecture and its ideological purposes, investigating
the interdependence of building and diverse political systems.
pjedavies@austin.utexas.edu
Notes
1. I am grateful to Onur Öztürk for assistance with maps, and to Keith Egge-
ner and an anonymous reviewer for JSAH for their insightful comments on
the text.
All ancient dates in this article are BCE unless otherwise indicated.
2. Plutarch, C. Gracchus 12.3–4, trans. Bernadotte Perrin.
3. Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); Andrew Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
4. Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Con-
flict (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 4. See also Robert
Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, 2nd ed. (London: Re-
aktion Books, 2016).
5. Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 4–6. See also Keith Bresnahan, “On ‘Rev-
olutionary Vandalism,’ ” Architectural Theory Review 19 (2014), 280.
6. For instance, in the 1970s a British group of local authorities, the Consor-
tium for Method Building, cautioned that the siting of school buildings and
their relationship to play areas and circulation spaces can influence the likeli-
hood of vandalism. See David White, “Vandalism in Housing Estates: Where
It Occurs and How It Can Be Prevented,” in Designing against Vandalism, ed.
Jane Sykes (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979), 43–53; see also
other essays in the same volume.
7. See Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman
Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
51–62; Penelope J. E. Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
8. See, for instance, Diana E. E. Kleiner, Roman Group Portraiture: The Funer-
ary Reliefs of the Late Republic and Early Empire (New York: Garland, 1977);
Natalie Kampen, Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin:
Gebr. Mann Studio-Reihe, 1981); Lauren Hackworth Petersen, The Freed-
man in Roman Art and Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006). Others have explored iconographic representations of the nonelite in
elite art, and the nonelite presence in elite spaces; see John R. Clarke, Art in
the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-elite Viewers in Italy,
100 B.C.–A.D. 315 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sandra R.
Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, The Material Life of Roman Slaves
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
9. Auctor ad Herennium 1.21; Sallust, Historiae 1.62; Lintott, Violence in Repub-
lican Rome, 68.
10. Appian, Bella civilia 1.32.
11. The patricians were a group of aristocratic families who controlled Rome in
the early Republic. Nonpatricians were known as plebeians. See T. J. Cornell,
The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars
(c. 1000–264 BC) (London: Routledge, 1995), 242–58.
12. Cicero, In Pisonem 23; Cicero, De domo sua 54.
13. Cicero, Oratio in P. Vatinio 33–34; Cicero, Pro Sestio 135; Scholia Bobiensia
140, 150; Michael C. Alexander, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 B.C. to
50 B.C. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990), trial no. 255, 125–26;
Jeffrey W. Tatum, The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 140–41.
14. On the exile law, see Cicero, Post reditum in senatu 33; Cicero, De domo sua
21, 96; Cicero, Pro Sestio 42; Velleius Paterculus 2.45.1; Plutarch, Cicero 30;
Cassius Dio 38.14.4; Appian, Bella civilia 2.15; Livy, Periochae 103; Philippe
Moreau, “La lex Clodia sur le banissement de Cicéron,” Athenaeum 65
(1987), 465–92; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 111–13, 136, 156–58; Luca Fezzi,
“La legislazione tribunizia di Publio Clodio Pulcro (58 A.C.) e la ricerca del
consenso a Roma,” Studi Classici e Orientali 47 (2001), 245–340; Robin Seager,
Pompey the Great: A Political Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 101–2.
15. Cicero, De domo sua 67, 110, 129; Cicero, Pro Sestio 69, 84; Cicero, De ha-
ruspicum responso 49, 58; Cicero, In Pisonem 16, 28–29; Cicero, Pro Milone
18ff., 37, 73; Cicero, Post reditum in senatu 4, 14, 29; Cicero, Epistulae ad
Atticum 2.12.2; Plutarch, Pompeius 48.4–49; Christian Meier, Caesar: A Bio-
graphy (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 227, 233–34; E. Frézouls, “La construc-
tion du theatrum lapideum et son contexte politique,” in Théâtre et spectacles
dans l’antiquité (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983), 98–99; Tatum, Patrician Tribune,
174, 181.
16. Cicero, Pro Caelio 79; Cicero, Pro Milone 73; Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum
fratrem 11.3.2; Cassius Dio 39.24.1–2; Claude Nicolet, “Le temple des Nym-
phes et les distributions frumentaires à Rome,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’A-
cadémie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 120–21 (1976), 29–51; Nippel, Public Order
in Ancient Rome, 76–77; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 211; Andrew Wallace-
Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 292. On Pompey and the grain supply, see Meier, Caesar, 266–67;
Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 172–74, 180–81, 184–87, 196; Seager, Pompey the
Great, 106–15, with ancient sources.
17. Cassius Dio 40.49.2–3, trans. Ernest Cary. See also Asconius, Pro Milone
32C; Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1998), 182.
18. Asconius, Pro Milone 2.34; Cicero, Pro Milone 13, 64; Meier, Caesar, 298;
Millar, Crowd in Rome, 182.
19. Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since
the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 31–32; Bresnahan,
“On ‘Revolutionary Vandalism,’ ” 280. On iconoclasm, see, for instance, Alain
Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane
Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Bruno Latour and
Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and
Art, trans. Charlotte Bigg et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Leslie
Brubaker, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
20. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 19.
21. Henri Grégoire, Mémoires, ed. H. Carnot (Paris, 1837), 1:345; Gamboni,
Destruction of Art, 18–19; Keith Bresnahan, “Remaking the Bastille. Architec-
tural Destruction and Revolutionary Consciousness in France, 1789–94,” in
Architecture and Armed Conflict: The Politics of Destruction, ed. J. M. Mancini
and Keith Bresnahan (London: Routledge, 2015), 58–71, 282.
22. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 13; Bresnahan, “On ‘Revolutionary Vandal-
ism,’ ” 282, 286.
23. Alison Ravetz, “Deviance and Disciplines: A Review of Recent Works on
Vandalism,” Town Planning Review 54, no. 2 (1983), 223–29.
24. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 19.
25. Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1959), 1:16–25; Stanley Cohen, ed., Images of Deviance
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Colin Ward, ed., Vandalism (New York:
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973); Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 22.
26. Martin Warnke, Bildersturm: Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks (Frankfurt:
Fischer Wissenschaft, 1977), 11, Gamboni’s translation.
27. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, 67.
28. Cicero, De legibus 3.20; Livy, Periochae 55; Lily Ross Taylor, “Forerunners
of the Gracchi,” Journal of Roman Studies 52 (1962), 19–27, esp. 26.
29. On the secret ballot, see Cicero, De legibus 3.15–16/34–35; Lily Ross
Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1966), 34; Millar, Crowd in Rome, 25–27; Alexander Yakobson, “Popular
Power in the Roman Republic,” in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed.
Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
389–90.
30. On the curtailment of the tribunes’ rights, see Asconius 78; Appian, Bella
civilia 1.100. On the restoration of those rights, see Sallust, Historiae 3.48.8,
10; Plutarch, Pompeius 21.4–5, 22.3. See also Erich S. Gruen, The Last Gener-
ation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 7,
23–26, 28–35; Theodora Hantos, Res publica constituta: Die Verfassung des Dic-
tators Sulla (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1988), 73, 79–89; Millar, Crowd in Rome,
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 21
70; Arthur Keaveney, Sulla: The Last Republican (London: Routledge, 2005),
140–44, 171–72.
31. Millar notes that only one of the laws passed in these years was clearly
passed by a consul, and none by praetors; tribunes passed approximately fif-
teen laws during this period. Millar, Crowd in Rome, 92–93. See also Lintott,
Violence in Republican Rome, 78–83.
32. Cicero, In Pisonem 8; Asconius, In Pisonem 6–7; Frézouls, “Construction
du theatrum lapideum”; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 117; J. Bert Lott, The Neigh-
borhoods of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
36, 47–60; Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 264–69.
33. On Clodius’s change of status, see Cicero, Pro Sestio 15; Cicero, De harus-
picum responso 45; Cicero, De provinciis consularibus 42; Cicero, Epistulae ad
Atticum 8.3.3; Plutarch, Cato Minor 33; Cassius Dio 38.12.2. On the corn dole,
see Cassius Dio 38.13. See also Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 104, 108–13, 120–24;
Seager, Pompey the Great, 91–92, 101.
34. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, 175.
35. Examples of temples whose juxtaposition was significant include Lutatius
Catulus’s Temple of Fortuna Huiusce Diei of ca. 101, built adjacent to what
was probably his ancestor Gaius Lutatius Catulus’s Temple of Iuturna of ca.
241, and the side-by-side temples to Hercules Musarum and Juno Regina on
the Circus Flaminius, dedicated by rival censors Marcus Fulvius Nobilior and
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in 179. An example of rehonoring for irony is
Lucius Opimius’s temple for Concordia, built to celebrate the suppression of
the “populist” Gracchi in 121. Concordia had previously been the subject of a
shrine built by Gnaeus Flavius in 304 to celebrate plebeian gains against pat-
ricians. Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome.
36. On the function of the Basilica Porcia, see Jean-Michel David, “Le tri-
bunal dans la basilique: Évolution fonctionelle et symbolique de la Répub-
lique à l’empire,” Architecture et société: De l’archaïsme grec à la fin de la
Républic romaine—Actes du colloque international organisé par le Centre na-
tional de la recherche scientifique et l’École française de Rome (Rome 2–4 décembre
1980) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1983), 219–45, esp. 223 and
227; Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 133. For a contrary argu-
ment, see Katherine E. Welch, “A New View of the Origins of the Basilica:
The Atrium Regium, Graecostasis, and Roman Diplomacy,” Journal of
Roman Archaeology 16 (2003), 5–34.
37. Livy 34.44.4; Valerius Maximus 2.4.3. On theaters and social order, see
Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 166–69. Patrizio Pensabene and
Alessandro D’Alessio argue that the huge podium and staircase of the Temple
of Magna Mater on the southwest corner of the Palatine were designed to ac-
commodate audiences for plays staged on the platform in front. Patrizio Pen-
sabene and Alessandro D’Alessio, “L’immaginario urbano: Spazio sacro sul
Palatino tardo-repubblicano,” in Imaging Ancient Rome: Documentation, Visual-
ization, Imagination, ed. Lothar Haselberger and John Humphrey (Ports-
mouth, R.I.: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2006), 30–50.
38. On the temple’s identification, see Fausto Zevi, “Minucia frumentaria,
crypta Balbi, circus Flaminius: Note in margine,” in Res bene gestae: Ricerche di
storia urbana su Roma antica in onore di Eva Margareta Steinby, ed. Anna Leone,
Domenico Palombi, and Susan Walker (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2004). For
contrasting views, see F. Coarelli, Il Campo Marzio: Dalle origini alla fine della
Repubblica (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1997), 258–68; F. Coarelli, “Lares Per-
marini, aedes,” in Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 6 vols., ed. Eva Margar-
eta Steinby (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1999–2001), 3:174–75. On the census
lists, see D. Van Berchem, Les distributions de blé et d’argent à la plèbe romaine
sous l’empire (Geneva: Georg & Cie, 1939); Nicolet, “Temple des Nymphes”;
Catherine Virlouvet, “La topographie des distributions frumentaires avant
la création de la Porticus Minucia Frumentaria,” in L’urbs: Espace urbain et
histoire—Ier siècle av. J.C.–IIIe siècle ap. J.C. Actes du colloque international, Rome,
8–12 mai 1985 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1987), 175–89; Coarelli,
22 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
Campo Marzio, 303–8. On the destruction of archives in Kosovo, see
Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 11–12.
39. T. P. Wiseman, “The Census in the First Century B.C.,” Journal of Roman
Studies 59 (1969), 64n48.
40. On the temple’s use, see Cicero, In Verrem 2.1.129; Taylor, Roman Voting
Assemblies, 28. On its design changes, see Inge Nielsen and Birte Poulsen, eds.,
The Temple of Castor and Pollux 1: The Pre-Augustan Temple Phases with Related
Decorative Elements (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1992); Gilbert J. Gorski
and James E. Packer, The Roman Forum: A Reconstruction and Architectural
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 291–93; Davies,
Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome, 19–24, 102–4, 160–61, and passim.
41. Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies, 34n2; C. Nicolet, The World of the Citizen
in Republican Rome, trans. P. S. Falla (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980), 267–77; Roger B. Ulrich, The Roman Orator and the Sacred Stage: The
Roman “Templum Rostratum” (Brussels: Latomus, 1994), 91–92; Nathan
Elkins, Monuments in Miniature: Architecture on Roman Coinage (New York:
American Numismatic Society, 2015), 24.
42. Cicero, De domo sua 54.
43. Cicero, 53–55, 100; Matthew B. Roller, “Demolished Houses, Monu-
mentality, and Memory in Roman Culture,” Classical Antiquity 29 (2010),
117–80, esp. 134; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 188.
44. Cicero, De domo sua 102, 38; Valerius Maximus 6.3.1; E. Papi, “Domus:
M. Fulvius Flaccus,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 2:105. On
the location, see Birgitta Tamm, Auditorium and Palatium: A Study on Assem-
bly-Rooms in Roman Palaces during the 1st Century B.C. and the 1st Century A.
D. (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1963), 32–36; Andrea Carandini,
Schiavi in Italia (Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1988), 359–87; E. Papi, “Por-
ticus (monumentum) Catuli,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae,
4:119; Steven M. Cerutti, “The Location of the Houses of Cicero and Clo-
dius and the Porticus Catuli on the Palatine Hill in Rome,” American Journal
of Philology 118 (1997), 417–26, esp. 422; Daniela Bruno, “Regione X. Pala-
tium,” in Atlante di Roma, ed. Andrea Carandini and Paolo Carafa (Milan:
Electa, 2013), 230–31.
45. C. M. Amici, “Evoluzione architettonica del comizio a Roma,” Rendiconti
della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 77 (2004–5), 351–79, esp.
352–54; Varro, De lingua Latina 5.155; Cicero, De republica 2.17.31; Livy
1.30; Horace, Carmina 4.7.15; De viris illustribus 4.3; Varro in Aulus Gellius
14.7.7; F. Coarelli, “Curia Hostilia,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis
Romae, 1:331–32; Alessandro Delfino, “Il foro di Cesare nella fase Cesariana
e augustea,” in Giulio Cesare: L’uomo, le imprese, il mito, ed. Giovanni Gentili
(Milan: Silvana, 2008), 52–54.
46. Appian, Bella civilia 1.59; Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 37.6; Keaveney, Sulla,
145–48; G. L. Grassigli, “La curia nei progetti urbanistici di Silla, Pompeo
e Cesare: Architettura e lotta politica a Roma nel I secolo A.C.,” Palladio 8
(1991), 39–50.
47. Cicero, De finibus 5.2; Cicero, Pro Scauro 46; Catharine Edwards, Writing
Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 17; Flower, Art of Forgetting, 96.
48. Cassius Dio 40.49.2–3, trans. Cary.
49. Appian, Bella civilia 1.105–6; Plutarch, Pompeius 15.3; Plutarch, Sulla 38.1;
Granius Licinianus 36.25–26; Cicero, De legibus 2.57; Pliny, Naturalis historia
7.187; Keaveney, Sulla, 174–75.
50. Steven Johnstone, “On the Uses of Arson in Classical Rome,” Studies in
Latin Literature and Roman History 6 (1992), 42, 48–49.
51. Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome. For the argument that
magistrates merely fulfilled a senatorial program, see Eva Margareta Steinby,
Edilizia pubblica e potere politico nella Roma repubblicana (Rome: Jaca Book,
2012); and for a contrasting view, see Seth Bernard, “Politics and Public Con-
struction in Republican Rome: Review of E. M. Steinby, Edilizia pubblica e
potere publico nella Roma repubblicana,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 26 (2013),
513–19.
52. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 27, 35. See also Erika Naginski, “The Object
of Contempt,” Yale French Studies 101 (2001), 44; Bresnahan, “Remaking the
Bastille,” 62.
53. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 27. Sheena Wilson, notes that (twentieth-
century) vandalism is generally committed by those who are deprived of
control over their own lives. Sheena Wilson, “Observations on the Nature of
Vandalism,” in Sykes, Designing against Vandalism.
54. G. Pisani Sartorio, “Fortuna et Mater Matuta, aedes,” in Steinby, Lexicon
topographicum Urbis Romae, 2:281–85; N. Terrenato, P. Brocato, G. Caruso,
A. M. Ramieri, H. W. Becker, I. Cangemi, G. Mantiloni, and C. Regoli, “The
S. Omobono Sanctuary in Rome: Assessing Eighty Years of Fieldwork and
Exploring Perspectives for the Future,” Internet Archaeology 31 (2012),
https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.31.1 (accessed 4 Oct. 2018); Jason M. Urbanus,
“A Brief Glimpse into Early Rome,” Archaeology, May/June 2014, http://
www.archaeology.org/issues/132-1405/trenches/1982-reexcavation-rome-
earliest-temple (accessed 4 Oct. 2018); John N. Hopkins, The Genesis of
Roman Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016),
66–84, 146–52; Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome, 9–12.
A deposit of the temple’s terracottas at Sant’Omobono may represent ritual-
ized catharsis.
55. Frank B. Sear, Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
56. Livy, Periochae 48, trans. Alfred Cary Schlesinger. See also Appian,
Bella civilia 1.28.12; Valerius Maximus 2.4.2; Augustine, De civitate Dei
1.32; Orosius 4.21.4; Velleius Paterculus 1.15.2; M. Sordi, “La decadenza
della Repubblica e il teatro del 154 A.C.,” Invigilata lucernis 10 (1988),
327–41; Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 205–22.
57. A. Rumpf, “Die Entstehung des römischen Theaters,” Mitteilungen des
Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 3 (1950), 40–50; Frézouls, “Construction
du theatrum lapideum,” 195–97; Gary Forsythe, “Review of Erich S. Gruen,
Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992),” Bryn Mawr Classical
Review 94.02.11 (1994); Molly Dauster, “Roman Sumptuary Legislation,
182–102,” in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History, vol. 11, ed. Carl
Deroux (Brussels: Latomus, 2003), 65–93, esp. 70; Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s
Cultural Revolution, 160–69; Amy Russell, The Politics of Public Space in Repub-
lican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 170–71; Davies,
Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome, 141–43.
58. For instance, Plutarch, Demetrius 34.3; also Plutarch, Aratus 23.1–4;
Plutarch, Sulla 11. See also Henner von Hesberg, “The King on Stage,” in
The Art of Ancient Spectacle, ed. Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 65–75; Ufuk Soyoz,
“Drama on the Urban Stage: Architecture, Spectacles and Power in Hellenis-
tic Pergamon” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2010).
59. Cicero, De republica 2.53; Plutarch, Poplicola 10.3ff., 6; Livy 2.7.6ff.; Valer-
ius Maximus 4.1.1; Dionysius Halicarnassensis 5.19.1f.; De viris illustribus
15.2f.; Servius, Aeneid 4.410. See also F. Coarelli, Il Foro Romano: Periodo ar-
caico (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1983), 79–83.
60. On Spurius Cassius, see Cicero, De republica 2.60; Cicero, De domo sua 101;
Livy 2.41. Valerius Maximus (5.8.2, 6.3.2, 16) records a discredited account
implicating his father in the destruction. On Spurius Maelius, see Cicero, De
domo sua 101; Cicero, De divinatione 2.17.39; Varro, De lingua Latina 5.157;
Livy 4.13–16; Dionysius Halicarnassensis 12.2–4; Diodorus Siculus 12.37.1;
Valerius Maximus 6.3.1C; Quintilian 3.7.20; De viris illustribus 17; Flower, Art
of Forgetting, 48. On Manlius Capitolinus, see Livy 6.20.13; Cicero, De domo
sua 101; Ovid, Fasti 6.183–5; G. Giannelli, “Il tempio di Giunone Moneta e la
casa di Marco Manlio Capitolino,” Bullettino della Commissione archeologica
Communale di Roma (1980–81), 7–36; A. Ziolkowski, The Temples of Mid-
Republican Rome and Their Historical and Topographical Context (Rome: L’Erma
di Bretschneider, 1992), 71–73; S. P. Oakley, A Commentary on Livy, Books
VI–X (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 566–67; Andrew Meadows and
Jonathan Williams, “Moneta and the Monuments,” Journal of Roman Stud-
ies 91 (2001), 27–49.
61. Gary Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005), 259–62; Flower, Art of Forgetting, 46–49; Roller,
“Demolished Houses.”
62. On Fulvius Flaccus, see Cicero, De domo sua 114. On Vitruvius Vaccus, see
Cicero, De domo sua 101; Livy 8.19–21; Katariina Mustakallio, Death and Dis-
grace: Capital Penalties with Post Mortem Sanctions in Early Roman Historiogra-
phy (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1994), 59–64; John Bodel,
“Monumental Villas and Villa Monuments,” Journal of Roman Archaeology
10 (1997), 1–35; Flower, Art of Forgetting, 50; Roller, “Demolished Houses.”
63. Johnstone, “On the Uses of Arson,” 48–49; Bresnahan, “On ‘Revolution-
ary Vandalism,’ ” 286.
64. Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8.7.
65. Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 17.6, trans. Bernadotte Perrin.
66. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 4. See also Robert Mor-
stein-Marx, “Political Graffiti in the Late Roman Republic: Hidden Tran-
scripts and Common Knowledge,” in Politische Kommunikation und öffentliche
Meinung in der antiken Welt, ed. Christina Kuhn (Heidelberg: Franz Steiner,
2012), 191–218; Tom Hillard, “Graffiti’s Engagement: The Political Graffiti
of the Late Roman Republic,” in Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to
AD 300, ed. Gareth Sears, Peter Keegan, and Ray Laurence (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 105–22.
67. Setha M. Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000), 184.
68. Lucretius 2.601–43; Dionysius Halicarnassensis 2.19.2–5; see also
Polybius 21.37.4–6; Ovid, Fasti 4.389–92; Ovid, Amores 3.2.43–57; Susan
G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Phila-
delphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1–22; Lynn E.
Roller, “The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest,” Gender and History 9 (1997),
542–59; Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cyb-
ele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 289; Jacob Abraham
Latham, Performance, Memory and Processions in Ancient Rome: The Pompa
Circensis from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2016).
69. Cicero, Laelius de amicitia 96; Varro, De re rustica 1.2.9; Taylor, Roman
Voting Assemblies, 23–25; Nielsen and Poulsen, Temple of Castor and Pollux 1,
86; Ulrich, Roman Orator, 91.
70. Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 6.3; Festus 370L; G. Bodei Giglioni, Lavori pub-
blici e occupazione nell’antichità classica (Bologna: Patron Editore, 1974), 98–101;
D. Palombi, “Horrea Sempronia,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis
Romae, 3:47.
71. Cicero, De legibus 3.38; Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies, 39.
72. Moreau, “Lex Clodia”; Fezzi, “Legislazione tribunizia.”
73. Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem 2.2.2; Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum
2.3.2; Cicero, Pro Milone, 46; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 198.
74. Robin Griffiths and J. M. Shapland, “The Vandal’s Perspective: Meanings
and Motives,” in Sykes, Designing against Vandalism, 15.
75. On violence staged as spectacle, see Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 22. On
fire, specifically, see Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 82.
76. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 27; Albert Boime, “Perestroika and the
Destabilization of the Soviet Monuments,” ARS: Journal of the Institute of Art
History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences 2–3 (1993), 211–26, esp. 212 and 218;
VANDALISM AND RESISTANCE IN REPUBLICAN ROME 23
Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 71; Bresnahan, “On ‘Revolutionary Vandalism,’ ”
281; Bresnahan, “Remaking the Bastille,” 62.
77. Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 18, 88; Bresnahan, “Remaking the Bas-
tille,” 287–88.
78. Bresnahan, “Remaking the Bastille,” 59.
79. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 214. Baron Haussmann’s destructions,
defended in the name of urban development, earned him the moniker artiste
démolisseur. See also Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 25–26.
80. C. J. Bearman, “An Examination of Suffragette Violence,” English Histor-
ical Review 120 (2005), 365–97. See also Paul Burall, “Introduction,” in Sykes,
Designing against Vandalism, 7.
81. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 188–89; Johnstone, “On the Uses of
Arson,” 41.
82. Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 189. See also Herscher, Violence Taking Place,
51.
83. Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8.7.
84. Low, On the Plaza, 184.
85. Ovid, Fasti 4.348; Valerius Maximus 1.8.11; Julius Obsequens 39;
M. Gywn Morgan, “ ‘Metellus Pontifex’ and Ops Opifera: A Note on Pliny
‘Naturalis Historia’ 11.174,” Phoenix 27 (1973), 238–39; see also F. Coarelli,
Palatium: Il Palatino dalle origini all’impero (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2012),
251–52. On attributions, see Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican
Rome, 154, 161–65. On disruptions in 165, see Terence, Hecyra, prologue;
Gruen, Culture and National Identity, 205–22; Roller, In Search of God, 289.
86. Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 12.4.
87. Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 4.2.5, 4.3.2; Papi, “Porticus (monumentum)
Catuli”; Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 181, 193.
88. Fausto Zevi, “Tempio D nel Largo Argentina: Tempio delle Ninfe in
Campo?,” Archeologia Laziale 12 (1995), 135–43. See also F. Coarelli, “Topogra-
fia e storia,” in L’Area Sacra di Largo Argentina I, ed. I. Kajanto (Rome: Tipog-
rafia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1981), 9–51, esp. 18.
89. Cassius Dio 40.50.2–3, trans. Cary.
90. Caesar, Bellum civile 1.5.5, 1.8.1; Meier, Caesar, 342–46.
91. Tabula Heracleensis. See Allan Chester Johnson, Paul Robinson Coleman-
Norton, and Frank Card Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1961), 93–97; Olivia F. Robinson, Ancient Rome: City Planning
and Administration (London: Routledge, 1992), 17; Michael H. Crawford,
Roman Statutes (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1996), 355–62; Diane
Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 75–76; Davies, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome, chap. 7.
92. Burall, “Introduction,” 7–9; Wilson, “Observations on the Nature of
Vandalism”; Ravetz, “Deviance and Disciplines,” 225. Low notes that when
the city plan of San José, capital of Costa Rica, was being overhauled, the
minister of culture introduced changes to municipal laws to hold landlords
responsible for the maintenance of their buildings and the sidewalks in front
of their properties. Low, On the Plaza, 195.
93. Cassius Dio 42.50; Suetonius, Caesar 38.2; Cicero, De officiis 2.83–84;
Meier, Caesar, 418; Angela Donati, “Cesare e il diritto,” in Gentili, Giulio
Cesare, 38–41, esp. 39.
94. On the Saepta, see G. Gatti, “Saepta Iulia e Porticus Aemilia nella Forma
Severiana,” Bullettino della Commissione archeologica Communale di Roma 62
(1934); G. Gatti, “Saepta Iulia in Campo Marzio,” L’Urbe 2, no. 9 (1937),
8–23; Coarelli, Campo Marzio, 155–64, 580–82; E. Gatti, “Saepta Iulia,” in
Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 4:228–29. On the Forum Iulium,
see Alessandro Delfino, Forum Iulium: L’area del Foro di Cesare alla luce delle
campagne di scavo 2005–2008—Le fasi arcaica, repubblicana e cesariana-augustea
(Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014).
95. Cassius Dio 43.49.
96. Michael H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), 1:473; F. Coarelli, Il Foro Romano: Periodo repubblicano
24 JSAH | 78.1 | MARCH 2019
e augusteo (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1985), 237–57; P. Verduchi, “Rostra
Augusti,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 4:214–17.
97. Cassius Dio 44.4–7. According to a different tradition, the Senate merely
promised to name the Curia after Caesar. Amici, “Evoluzione architettonica”;
C. M. Amici, “Problemi topografici dell’area restrostante la Curia dall’età ar-
caica all’epoca tardo-antica,” in Lo scavo didattico della zona retrostante la Curia
(Foro di Cesare): Campagne di scavo 1961–1970, ed. C. M. Amici et al. (Rome:
Bonsignori, 2007), 161–68; Paolo Liverani, “Cesare urbanista: L’uomo, le
imprese, il mito,” in Gentili, Giulio Cesare, 44–46; E. Tortorici, “Curia Iulia,”
in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 1:332–34. See also Coarelli,
“Curia Hostilia”; Meier, Caesar, 467–68; C. Morselli and E. Tortorici, Curia,
Forum Iulium, Forum Transitorium (Rome: De Luca, 1989), 229–37; Delfino,
“Foro di Cesare,” 53–54.
98. Cassius Dio 54.8.1–3; Eutropius 7.9; Florus 2.34.63; Orosius 6.21; Gorski
and Packer, Roman Forum, 24–27, 301–11. A Fornix Fabianus dating from
soon after 120 BCE spanned the Via Sacra just before it branched: Davies,
Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome, 168. On the basic outcomes of pub-
lic protest, see Low, On the Plaza, 184.
99. Inge Nielsen, “Castor, aedes, templum,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum
Urbis Romae, 1:242–45; Inge Nielsen and Birte Poulsen, eds., The Temple of
Castor and Pollux 3: The Augustan Temple (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider,
2009); Gorski and Packer, Roman Forum, 284–99.
100. On the Curia, see Herodian 5.5.7, 7.11.2; Cassius Dio 51.22; Suetonius,
Augustus 100. On the Temple of Saturn, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.8.4; Pat-
rizio Pensabene, Tempio di Saturno (Rome: De Luca, 1984), 10; Tortorici,
“Curia Iulia”; F. Coarelli, “Saturnus, aedes,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum
Urbis Romae, 4:234–36; Gorski and Packer, Roman Forum, 117–32, 147–54,
159–64, 225–38.
101. Suetonius, Augustus 29.4; Monumentum Ancyranum 20; A. M. Ferroni,
“Concordia, aedes,” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 1:316–20;
Gorski and Packer, Roman Forum, 165–84, 239.
102. Strabo 5.236, trans. Nicholas Purcell. See also Nicholas Purcell, “Forum
Romanum (The Imperial Period),” in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis
Romae, 2:336–42, esp. 339.
103. Purcell, “Forum Romanum.” Within two months of taking office as
pontifex maximus, Augustus had installed a shrine to Vesta in his house on
the Palatine, leaving the old temple and the eternal flame on the edge of
the Forum, but reorienting the cult to the imperial house. Inscriptiones Italiae
13.2: 452.
104. Suetonius, Augustus 40.5.
105. Shelley Stone, “The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume,” in
The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 13–45, esp. 17; Wallace-
Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 42. See also Quintilian 3.137–44.
106. Cassius Dio 55.8.5; Suetonius, Augustus 43.1, 43.3; Gatti, “Saepta Iulia,”
in Steinby, Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae.
107. Cassius Dio 55.8.6–7, adapted from the translation by Cary.
108. Suetonius, Caesar 41; Lott, Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome, 61–65;
Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 269–76.
109. Burall, “Introduction,” 9–10.
110. Lott, Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome, 136–48; Stone, “Toga,” 13.
111. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 276–90.
112. Cassius Dio 55.27, trans. Cary. See also Johnstone, “On the Uses of
Arson,” 58.
113. Cassius Dio 55.8; Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Trea-
son, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1966), 164; Johnstone, “On the Uses of Arson,” 56–58.
114. Ian Harrison, “Catiline, Clodius, and Popular Politics at Rome dur-
ing the 60s and 50s BCE,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 51
(2008), 118.