Roman architecture has inspired generations of architects, and of its types, temples have been particularly influential. The same was also true in antiquity, and, for that reason, temples, according to John Stamper, tell us a great deal about the religious, political, and social history of the Roman world. But while the Romans built temples throughout the Mediterranean, Stamper focuses only on those of central Rome: their religious, social, and historical backgrounds and their architectural history and relationships.

He begins with the sixth-century BC Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. From the beginning of the Republic through the late-fourth-century AD, it was Rome’s most prestigious shrine. After a summary of the monument’s history, its rediscovery, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century reconstructions (chapter 1), Stamper presents his own new reconstruction (chapter 2), one considerably smaller than those of previous scholars. The footprint of Stamper’s temple (about 115 Roman feet) equals those of earlier reconstructions, but Stamper’s building replaces their massive podiums with a terrace divided into three levels.

Although dedicated by one of the first pair of consuls, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was a regal project. Aristocrats sponsored the early Republican temples in the Forum (chapter 3). Successful nobles led armies, and their spoils or the income from their agricultural estates paid for the new buildings. The earliest temples in the Forum (Saturn, 498 BC; Castor and Pollux, 484 BC) were Etruscan in plan with three cellae. Later shrines had single cellae with columns in antis.

Leading to elegant, innovative ceremonies (like the triumphal processions of the conquerors), and introducing novel architectural ideas, the conquest of the Greek East brought new wealth into Rome (chapter 4). Temples now regularly had single cellae with Ionic porches (like the pseudoperipteral Temple of Portumnus, god of harbor and sea farers, near the Tiber). By the early first-century BC, Hellenistic styles from the East introduced the Corinthian order into Rome (chapter 5), and when Sulla rebuilt the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus after a fire in 83 BC, he used Corinthian capitals (or perhaps whole columns) from the unfinished Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens.

In the late Republic (chapter 6), Pompey and Caesar celebrated their vast military and political powers with grandiose sacred buildings where images of the conquerors accompanied those of the gods. Pompey used his Temple of Venus Victrix as a pretext for the construction of Rome’s first permanent theater in the Campus Martius (55 BC). Representing Pompey as all-powerful, the ceremonies and presentations in the temple and the theater reminded audiences of his extraordinary achievements, and the theater’s popularity assured long-term maintenance of both theater and temple. Caesar also displayed himself in an entirely new and sumptuous setting, his Forum Iulium with his own grandiose Temple to Venus Genetrix (Venus the Progenitor).

The architectural projects of Augustus completely outclassed those of his predecessors (chapter 7). In Rome that meant a whole series of exciting new buildings. Their form partially resulted from ready access to new materials: the white marbles of Carrara and Greece, the colored ones from North Africa, Asia Minor, and Greece; and initial experimentation matured into a “fully orthodox Corinthian style” with “dynamic tensions between formal variety and unified conceptualization” (105). Earlier temples, like those of the Divus Iulius (29 BC) in the Roman Forum and Apollo Sosianus next to the Theater of Marcellus (20 BC), introduced new design elements (the rectangular modillions of the Temple of the Divus Julius, the florid Corinthian detailing of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, the unusual plan of Agrippa’s Pantheon [25 BC]). In almost all these buildings, Augustus’ architects combined Hellenistic innovations with typically Roman plans: high, frontally oriented podiums, deep front porches, and closed rear façades. But the shrine that best expressed all the religious, social, and artistic achievements of Augustus’ reign was his impressive Temple dedicated to Mars Ultor, “Mars the Avenger,” in its own new forum (chapter 8). Its design embodied earlier architectural features—axiality and symmetry, a high podium, the Corinthian Order, but regularized and summarized—transformed into a richly authoritative new classical style that symbolized the power, wealth, and success of the Augustan regime’s tightly controlled order.

The most important temple built by Augustus’ Julio-Claudian successors was the shrine to the Divine Claudius on the Caelian Hill; but the Flavian emperors, Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian, undertook major new projects (chapter 9): the Temple of Jupiter (twice rebuilt after fires) and two new fora, each with its own temple: the Temple of Peace (AD 75) and the Forum Transitorium with the Temple of Minerva (dedicated by Nerva in AD 98). The former celebrated the conclusion of the war and revolution that had ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and it displayed booty from Judaea and fine Hellenistic statuary in elegant gardens. The latter housed Domitian’s divine “progenitor” in an appropriate new home and provided a spacious vestibule, boulevard-like in plan, for those entering the Forum from the Subura district.

Trajan’s great project in Rome was his famous Forum (chapter 10, fig. 132). Strongly reminiscent of the Forum of Augustus, the complex concluded to the north of the still-standing Column of Trajan with a colossal temple (AD 128), slightly larger than the Temple of Mars Ultor and the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. In reconstructing the Pantheon, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, created one of Roman architecture’s greatest masterpieces (chapter 11). With its earlier connection to Augustus and Agrippa, its site closely linked Hadrian and his regime with that of the empire’s founder. A porch with eight columns and a pediment (of approximately the same width as those of the temple of Mars Ultor and Capitoline Jupiter) leads to a circular interior that substitutes a concrete, coffered dome for the conical, timber-truss roofs of its predecessors. Under the dome, the circular shrine housed the gods of the Roman pantheon and represented the universe. It also symbolized the empire, “an equal fraternity of provinces and nations harmoniously linked by tradition and administration around the person of the emperor” (203). Hadrian’s second great shrine in Rome (chapter 12) was the Temple of Venus and Rome (completed in AD 140–45). Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, completed two additional temples, one on the Campus Martius to Hadrian as divus (AD 145) and, in the Roman Forum, the Temple to his deified wife Faustina (AD 141–61), later also dedicated to Antoninus after his death and elevation to divus.

Constructed from the spoils of conquest, Roman temples exhibited the high status of their patrons and provided increasingly magnificent stages on which emperors, aristocrats, and commoners both celebrated the divine support for Rome’s past and (hopefully) assured its sponsorship of her future ambitions. Stamper’s book introduces these important monuments in a clear, transparent style that leads the reader along easily. For each temple, historical, religious, and social introductions allow even the non-specialist to comprehend design, purpose, and use; and the accompanying photographs, plans, sections, and elevations (most of them new) present simplified versions of the architectural details in readily comprehensible fashion. Stamper is not the first to point out that Roman architecture advanced by study, adaptation, and variation of precedents, and his account of the evolution of Roman temples from Etrusco-Italic styles through Hellenistic influences and loans (like the Ionic and Corinthian orders) to a thoroughly original Roman synthesis is not new. Particularly valuable, however, is his identification of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter as the great model for the religious architecture of Republican and early imperial Rome—a suggestion that provides Roman religious architecture with a readily comprehensible unity of style and purpose. The details of his reconstruction of that shrine may be questioned, but the reappearance of similar dimensions in later Roman temples suggests that his thesis about its size is very probably correct.

There are only a few minor points to criticize. Late Republican and early imperial temples were visually striking, and the larger part of Stamper’s elevations and sections do not so indicate. Most are by Stamper and his students (xiv), and while some are very good (the cover illustration, figs. 72, 106, 126), others are less successful (figs. 79, 94, 156). All, however, are simplified line drawings that give little idea of the richly ornamented designs that made temples such attractive models for later architects. When comparing Stamper’s drawings and those of most of his students with those of Andrea Palladio (figs. 47, 53, 99, 110, 143), of other Italian illustrators (figs. 1, 159), and of American (fig. 70), German (figs. 82, 87), and French architects (figs. 34, 56, 147, 154), this problem is particularly noticeable. And finally, Stamper’s drawings of the Vespasianic and Domitianic versions of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter (figs. 116, 117) incorrectly give the pediments Etruscan cornices that extend far beyond the upper cornices of the architraves. Surely, as shown by Giuseppe Gatteschi in Restavri di Roma imperiale (Rome: Comitato di Azione Patriottica, 1924; fig. 3), and Italo Gismondi (fig. 113, the model of ancient Rome in Rome’s Museo della Civiltà Romana), the forms of these features must have followed the fashions of contemporary temples, not the outmoded styles of the Etruscans.

Nonetheless, despite these minor problems, as the first study of its kind, Stamper’s account of ancient Rome’s temples is an important and highly original chapter in the history of Roman architecture. All those interested in the field owe him a considerable vote of thanks.