The south hemicycle and portico, then, ingeniously connected Augustus’ name with a set of nabobs, builders, successful generals, philhellenes, and men remarkable for piety to the gods or popularity with the masses. What of the north hemicycle? Here Ricci discovered the _elogium_ of Rome’s and Augustus’ legendary ancestor, _pius Aeneas_ himself, who also appears on the Altar of Peace; a set of the Kings of Alba Longa; Romulus, also probably on the Altar of Peace; Caesar’s father; Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’ much beloved heir, whose untimely death Vergil movingly mourns in the _Aeneid_, and whose ashes lay in Augustus’ mausoleum; and Nero Claudius Drusus, Augustus’ stepson, who also is figured, like Aeneas and Romulus, on the Altar of Peace. It looks very much as though the Hall of Fame on this side of the portico was intended to connect the legendary Kings of Alba and Home with the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And the climax of it all was yet to come. At the end of the north portico Ricci excavated a square room with a pedestal at the back. On the pedestal he found a cutting for a colossal foot, seven times life size. Forty feet up the back wall were the put-holes for the struts of a huge statue. Whose? The Forum’s temple was dedicated to Mars, but the place for the god is in his temple. The most likely candidate is the _Dux_ himself, Augustus, father of his country, in whom Roman history came, in more senses than one, to a full stop. Medieval limekilns tell, as usual, how the rich marbles which decorated both portico and temple were broken up and melted down into whitewash, but three marble Corinthian columns sixty feet high give some idea of the temple’s grandeur. Its podium, lofty in the Italic fashion, was not solid marble, simply tufa revetted or veneered with thin marble slabs, an economical, and, some might say, dishonest way of making a city of marble of the desired Hellenic appearance. The statue-base at the back of the temple (which was apsidal to match the hemicycles in the porticoes) is too wide for a single figure. The cult statues must have been of Mars and Venus, another delicate reference to the ancestry of Augustus’ adoptive clan. The temple itself was vowed, the literary sources tell us, at the battle of Philippi (42 B.C.) to Mars Ultor, avenger of the murder of Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s sword was piously preserved as a relic in it. The Forum did not neglect the arts. Like Caesar’s, and like Pompey’s portico, it was a museum. It did service also for literature: we are told that lectures were delivered in the hemicycles. Begun in 37 B.C., the Forum took thirty-five years to finish. By 2 B.C. other propaganda devices--especially the arch, the Altar of Peace, Vergil’s epic, Livy’s history, and Horace’s lyric--had, as we shall see, given the desired respectability to Augustus, the Prince of Peace. * * * * *