Octavian’s building activity, both before and after he took the title Augustus, was prodigious. In his autobiography he boasts of restoring no less than eighty-two temples. He built many new ones besides, and embellished Rome, and his own glory, with his new Forum, a portico, his arch, his grandiose mausoleum, an Altar of Peace, and, in addition, arks and gardens, baths, theaters, a great library, markets, granaries, docks, and warehouses. Meanwhile he himself lived in ostentatious simplicity in a modest house on the Palatine, and encouraged the cult of antique austerity by restoring the hut of Romulus. At his death Rome was at last an Imperial metropolis: the city of brick had become a city of marble. Rome had gained grandeur and lost freedom in the process. Toward the assessment of the gains and losses, the excavators’ discoveries in Augustus’ Forum, at his arch, in his mausoleum, and particularly in the difficult and ingenious recovery and reconstruction of his Altar of Peace have made the most important contributions. * * * * * Ever since 1911, Corrado Ricci had dreamed of excavating the site of Augustus’ Forum (see Fig. 5.13), known to lie to the northeast of and at right angles to Caesar’s, overlaid by modern construction. In 1924 Mussolini gave him his chance, and by 1932, when the Via dell’ Impero was opened with Fascist pomp (see Fig. 5.12), the Fora of Caesar, Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan had all yielded up secrets to the archaeologist’s spade. Of Augustus’ Forum, when Ricci began to dig, the most conspicuous part was the firewall at the back, separating it from the fire-trap slums of the Subura, ancient Rome’s redlight district. The firewall is over 100 feet high, the exposed parts in travertine, the rest in _peperino_ and _sperone_, the traditional Italic building stones, of the period. This use of local materials, combined, as Ricci was to discover, with marble, is the symbol of the compromise, the amalgam of Italic and Greek materials, methods, and forms, which is the hallmark of the Augustan Age. [Illustration: FIG. 6.1 Rome, Forum of Augustus, model by I. Gismondi. (Mostra Augustea della Romanità, _Catalogo_, Pl. 35)]