Caesar's and Pompey's Rome: ideological and propagandistic town planning choices

This paper aims to re-assess the remarkable impact that Pompey’s and Caesar’s monumental interventions had on the topography of the city of Rome. Following a short introduction on the fundamental importance of considering architecture as one of the expressions of political propaganda even in the Republican period, the paper will analyse the ideological and propagandistic implications of Pompey’s and Caesar’s monumental interventions in relation to the locational choices and to their topographical relations in the overall context of Rome’s town-planning. The conclusions will highlight how Pompey’s interventions show not only a reference to the Hellenistic monarchies, but also to the oldest Roman traditions and to his political plans for Rome; they will also underline how strongly the rise of enmity between the two men, and especially Caesar’s propagandistic response to the ‘Pompeian’ faction after the civil war can be traced in the sequence of locational choices for the buildings.