Caesar was a greater man than Pompey. His spoils of victory, after eight years in Gaul, were richer, and so was his building program. The most impressive surviving evidence of it is the ground plan of his basilica, the Basilica Julia in the Republican Forum, and, north of the old Forum, which Rome and his own grandeur had outgrown, a grandiose new one, the prototype of an Imperial series. The Basilica Julia was planned and executed at Caesar’s direction between 54 and 46 B.C., to balance the second-century Basilica Aemilia opposite. All that remains is pavement and piers, but the size of the piers is enough to show that the building had two stories, presumably with a balcony to afford a view of spectacles in the open space of the Forum below. Time and man have dealt harshly with the basilica. When it was excavated, in the 1840’s, a medieval limekiln was found on the pavement. This, plus the knowledge that its stone was sold by the oxcart load in the Middle Ages for the benefit of a hospital which rose on the site, explains what happened to the superstructure. Scratched on the pavement are rough sketches, done by ancient idlers, of statues which once adorned the building or the Forum adjacent, and over eighty “gaming-boards,” scratched circles divided into six segments on which dice were thrown and counters moved. Lawyers’ speeches apparently did not always hold the full attention of the Forum hangers-on. [Illustration: FIG. 5.12 Rome, Via dell’ Impero, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini, 1932. (University of Wisconsin Classics Dept. photo)] [Illustration: FIG. 5.13 Rome, Imperial Fora, plan, showing actual and hypothetical coincidence of axes. (P. von Blanckenhagen, _Journ. Soc. Arch. Hist._, 13.4 [Dec., 1954], Fig. 2)]