House of Augustus

The great Roman emperor Augustus, grandnephew of Julius Caesar, was frightened of thunder and fond of virgins, but his most publicized characteristic was opposition to ostentation. He lived, according to the historian Suetonius, in a modest house on Rome's Palatine Hill. But his successor, Tiberius, crowned the hill with an elaborate palace, and when the Roman Empire fell, barbarian kings. Popes and nobles made their homes on the Palatine.

Under their masses of masonry the modest home of the great Augustus was buried and forgotten.

Only a few dim clues remain to suggest where the great emperor lived. But early this year Professor Gianfilippo Carettoni, a government archaeologist, started searching for Augustus' house on the Palatine. Diggers soon uncovered the tops of hefty brick foundation piers mingled with older stone walls outlining two rooms.

A fragment of painted plaster gave Professor Carettoni reason to hope that something interesting might be inside the rooms; with infinite patience he removed the earth and rubble from three sides.

As his workers dug deeper, they began the first thorough housecleaning that the rooms had had in nearly 20 centuries. Bucket after bucket of earth was lifted out of the first room, and Carettoni spotted faint patterns on the inner plaster walls--well-preserved frescoes of the long-gone Augustan period.

After the rooms were cleared and the plaster carefully cleaned, the ancient frescoes stood out almost as fresh as when they were first painted. In one room the walls are painted to represent yellow columns linked with festoons of green pine branches sacred to the goddess Cybele, whose temple stood near by.

In the second room the decorations are more elaborate. One wall is painted in the vivid colors of a stage, with tall, narrow side doors standing ajar, and leering comic masks peeking through small windows. Large central openings show gardenlike vistas. On top of the stage are small, blue glass vessels. Perspective and brushwork are so skilled that the scene has startling depth.

After the reign of Augustus (27 B.C. to A.D. 14), brick pillars were built on the mosaic floors to support a building on a higher level. Earth packed between the brickwork and the walls saved the decorations. But before the walls disappeared, an irreverent person named Quintus, perhaps a bricklayer, scratched his name on the dead emperor's frescoes.

"Though the frescoes are exceptional for their color and preservation," says Professor Carettoni, "they are most important for their location. Everything found so far indicates that this was the house of Augustus."

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