Three men on horseback, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, subdued East and West for Rome, and used part of the profits to change the face of Rome in forty years. They would have said that they did it out of what the Romans called _pietas_, a threefold loyalty to family, state, and gods. Each, to reflect credit on his family which ruled the state, on the gods his ancestors, and on the state his perquisite, erected great public buildings in the city to be his monument. Sulla’s dramatic revamping of the old Forum, Pompey’s theater and portico, and Caesar’s new Forum made of a shabby civic center a metropolis almost worthy to vie with the cities of the Greek East. Almost, but not quite, for the building material was still local stone, stuccoed tufa or the handsome limestone from Tivoli called travertine, which weathers to a fine gold, and has ever since been Rome’s characteristic building material. It was considered worthy in the Renaissance to build the fabric of St. Peter’s. For its next transformation, this time into a city of marble, Rome had to wait for the rise to power of the greatest nabob of them all, Caesar’s adopted son and successor, Octavian-Augustus. 6 Augustus: Buildings as Propaganda In 1922, after the success of the Fascist march on Rome, Benito Mussolini felt acutely the need for an aura of respectability to surround his upstart régime. Another swashbuckling _condottiere_, 1965 years earlier, Caesar’s heir Octavian, had felt the same need. Both resorted to the same method: an ambitious building program, and a vigorous propaganda campaign designed to substitute for dubious antecedents a set of more or less spurious links with the heroes of the glorious past. About Fascist architecture the less said the better; the other point will be the subject of this chapter. In fourteen years (1924–38) Italian archaeologists changed the face of central Rome, and in the process of glorifying _Il Duce_, added more to our knowledge of Augustan Rome than the previous fourteen centuries had provided.