THIS BOOK EXAMINES THE Templum Pacis, the first monument built ex novo by Vespasian, and its propagandistic role in the foundation of the Flavian dynasty. After its completion in AD 75, Pliny the Elder considered the Templum Pacis to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, along with the Basilica Paulli (Aemilia) and the Forum of Augustus. It housed the spoils from the Great Temple of Jerusalem (including the menorah), Greek statues from Nero's Domus Aurea, and, very likely, a predecessor of the Severan Forma Urbis, a huge marble plan of Rome that survives in thousands of fragments. In a sequence of investigations based on material, visual, and literary evidence, I examine the impact of the Templum Pacis in late first century AD art, architecture, politics, and religion. Unlike the nearby imperial forum of Augustus, Vespasian's monument was not a forum linked to its founder, and it was not used for business or the administration of justice; it was a templum and, as Galen tells us (De libris propriis, 2: Kühn 19.21–22), by the middle of the second century AD, it became “the general meeting-place for all those engaged in learned pursuits.” Examining the Templum Pacis in dialogue with the Forum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis in the Campus Martius, I highlight the persistence of a series of late Republican and Augustan motifs in the Flavian monument and investigate what this may reveal about tradition and innovation in Roman architecture. The second aim is to assess what the Templum Pacis and its collections of statues, paintings, and books, along with the Jerusalem spoils and the marble plan, meant for the citizens of Rome and its empire, and how they reacted when all of this was destroyed by the fire of AD 192. The title of Volume 1 – “Art and Culture in Imperial Rome” – refers to the population of statues and the meetings of doctors, philosophers, and grammarians in the square, along the porticoes, and in the halls of the Templum Pacis.

The structure of the book follows this order of inquiry. In the first chapter, I set Vespasian's project in its historical, religious, and urban context.