What did Augustus mean by ‘I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble’?

What Suetonius actually wrote

The famous line is not a quotation. Suetonius, writing about a century after Augustus died, reports it in his own words. Rome, he says, was not adorned as the majesty of the empire demanded, and it lay open to floods and fires. Augustus improved it so much that he could justly boast he was leaving in marble the city he had received in brick: marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisset (Augustus 28). He also made it safe for the future, Suetonius adds, as far as human foresight could.

The neat first-person version, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble,” is how later writers in English polished the sentence. The boast is Augustus’s. The wording is ours.

Cassius Dio’s deathbed version

Cassius Dio, a Greek senator writing two centuries after Augustus, puts the line in his mouth on his last day. Augustus told his friends, Dio says, that he had found Rome made of earth and was leaving it to them made of stone. Then Dio explains: he did not mean the look of its buildings, but the strength of the empire (Roman History 56.30). On that reading the boast is about the state he had built out of the wreckage of the civil wars, not about its temples. How he died is a story of its own.

What he built

Suetonius was not exaggerating much. The building program of Augustus and his friends changed the face of the city:

• Temples. In 28 BC alone, Augustus says, he restored eighty-two temples (Res Gestae 20). New ones rose too: Apollo on the Palatine, beside his house; the deified Julius Caesar in the Forum; and Mars the Avenger, dedicated in 2 BC.
• A forum of his own. The Forum of Augustus, built around that temple of Mars, with porticoes lined with statues of Rome’s great men.
• Halls and theaters. A new Senate house, the Curia Julia; the rebuilt Basilica Julia; the Theater of Marcellus, named for his nephew.
• Monuments to the family. His huge round Mausoleum on the Field of Mars and the Altar of Peace, the Ara Pacis, with his family carved in procession.
• Water and safety. His friend Agrippa built aqueducts, baths and the first Pantheon. Augustus divided the city into fourteen regions, set up a fire brigade and cleared the Tiber’s channel against floods (Augustus 30).

He also pressed rich friends to build. Suetonius names several: Statilius Taurus gave Rome an amphitheater, Asinius Pollio a Hall of Liberty, Cornelius Balbus a theater (Augustus 29).

Marble skin, brick bones

Marble had been a rare luxury in Rome. Under Augustus it became the city’s public face: gleaming white stone from the quarries of Luna, today’s Carrara in Tuscany, worked on a grand scale from his time on, and colored marbles shipped in from Greece, Asia Minor and Africa. Often it was a skin, thin slabs and columns over cores of concrete, volcanic tufa or brick.

Augustus himself lived in the old style. Suetonius says that for more than forty years he slept in the same bedroom, in a house on the Palatine that was neither large nor elegant, with short colonnades of plain local stone and rooms without marble or fine floors (Augustus 72). The marble was for the gods and the people. The irony runs further. In the Middle Ages much of Augustus’s marble was carted away or burned for lime, while the brick and concrete of later emperors, Hadrian’s Pantheon among them, still stand.