Caesar’s Forum has left more impressive remains. It cost him a fortune, since his enemies, owners of the expropriated houses, charged him 100,000,000 sesterces, five million uninflated dollars, for the land. Its excavation was begun in 1930, and finished in three years, by Corrado Ricci, as a part of Mussolini’s (Fig. 5.12) grandiose plan for systematizing the center of the city and restoring the ancient dictator’s Forum to set off a modern dictator’s monument, a new street, the Via dell’ Impero, driven through slums and ancient monuments to connect the Coliseum with his headquarters in the Palazzo Venezia. The excavation exposed the southern two-thirds of Caesar’s Forum; the rest lies under the new street. The Forum as revealed by Ricci is another example of axial symmetry (Fig. 5.13), a narrow porticoed rectangle, over twice as long as it was wide, with a temple set in the Italic fashion on a high podium at the back. Working with great patience and delicacy, Ricci set up three of the temple’s fallen columns (Fig. 5.14), with their architrave, frieze, and cornice. Some of the architectural blocks leave between the dentils--a row of projecting tooth-like rectangular members below the cornice--two small distinctive marble disks side by side like a pair of spectacles. This is the “signature” of Domitian’s architect Rabirius, and prove that a restoration of the temple was planned during his reign (A.D. 81–96). There are Cupids in the interior frieze, which prove that the temple was dedicated to Venus, Caesar’s ancestor. To have gods for ancestors lent distinction to a Roman clan, though Caesar knew as well as any skeptic what it really meant. He knew his pedigree back to an ever-so-great grandfather, and God knew who _his_ ancestor was. In the _gens Iulia_ the line was traced back to Iulus the son of Aeneas, who was the son of Anchises and Venus. The portico, like that behind Pompey’s theater, was an art museum. Ancient authors mention a golden statue of Cleopatra (one of the dictator’s few sentimental gestures?), a golden breastplate set with British pearls, and a bronze equestrian statue of Caesar on his famous horse which had human front feet! The ground to the south of the Forum rises over fifty feet to the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. This difference in level was filled with three setback stories of luxury shops in massive rectangular blocks of _peperino_. The Street of the Silversmiths, the _Clivus Argentarius_, ran above and behind the shops at the Forum level. This whole complex survives. [Illustration: FIG. 5.14 Rome, Forum of Caesar. (Fototeca)]