March
07
/ 2015
It turns out Caesar Augustus was an undeserving braggart. He claimed, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” But new research by a university professor has found that only a small minority of the city of Rome’s buildings in Augustus’ time were marble. “Many scholars have looked at Augustus’s claim from a political standpoint, as a metaphor for him transforming a republic into an empire. I wanted to see if Rome literally transformed under his rule,” said Diane Favro of the University of California-Los Angeles’ Department of Architecture and Urban design. Favro used a mapping website called ArcGIS and a highly advanced form of a technique called procedural modeling to recreate a detailed
