“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

Your may be confused by my title of this blog post, let me explain. Its a quote from a character in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, that I got to know lately. This week we started learning about the play, starting out with the characters. We learned about the characters before reading the play, so everything could make more sense. Each table group had a character from the play to research on, and mine ended up with Octavian/ Augustus Caesar. My group was Maggie, Daniel, Raina, Owen and me. Then, once we researched Octavian and got to know him, it made it easier to complete our task, which was to create a cut out body of our character that describes him. The twist was we weren’t allowed to just write facts about him, we had to make symbols of his story.

We first made a pages doc with info about him, in order to get to know who we had to do this project on.

Then I drew a sketch of what we were planning on creating, which helped us stay organized. We ended up not adding some of symbols, and edited some of them.

 

Next we traced Daniel, which failed because… long story. Anyways, we ended up tracing Owen and that worked out. We then did small details on the body shape and cut it out.  We each took a few symbols to draw, and drew them. We decided to draw mostly everything on white paper, and cut it out, so it could stand out more. Next time I would spend less time making the body and symbols perfect, so we could have time to make more symbols.

 

We chose the colour blue because it represents peace (which he created for 200+ years in Rome) and loyalty (which describes him because he was loyal and dedicated to Rome). His pose was inspired by a famous sculpture of him, expressing power.

 

On his head, we decided to make his face a peace sign because his brain motivated him to create peace, not war or disaster. The golden crown represents how he was the first emperor of Rome. Now for his heart, with the info we had, it showed he really cared about Rome. Therefore, that’s where his heart was, so thats why we put a map of Rome in it to show his love of Rome and its people.

 

On his spine, we placed a timeline representing his story. We chose to place it there because the spine is so important, and his story is so important. It starts with his birth and ends with his death. On his stomach we added bread and fish, which is what he ate daily. Our group found it cool how August is named after him because its something so common in our language. We had extra space, so we added it because we found it so interesting.

His arms have his Temple of Augustus because he built it. You build with your arms. And yes I know he didn’t build it, buts it’s his temple so we’re saying he did. We also have a sword on his left arm (our right) because he fought Cleopatra and Mark Antony and won.

 

Now his legs. Your legs hold you up, and make it possible to stand tall. They’re your foundation, just like his power. He wouldn’t be able to do what’s he did, without power, and a strong sense of self. The names are a part of his foundation because he was a Caesar, giving him power. And the other leg has a drawing of him using his power.

Finally, his feet. He traveled across ocean, across deserts to achieve his goals of peace. So we felt it important to incorporate his travels on his body.

Overall, we used our time pretty wisely, besides the last ten minutes of placing everything on the body. This was a cool little project, that taught me and my group a lot. It was also cool to hear the reasons behind the other group’s symbols.