The city of Rome is a tapestry of memory, a landscape lush with buildings and monuments that bear witness to attempts over the centuries to remember as well as forget. This is a crucial point to grasp when trying to appreciate the degree to which the Republic lingered in the Roman imagination. On a purely practical level it was impossible in the period under discussion to avoid reminders of pre-imperial Rome. It is a mark of the Roman veneration for the past and for tradition that old buildings and monuments were seldom deliberately destroyed to make way for the new. Rather, new buildings were squeezed in to sit cheek by jowl with their precursors, old ones regularly rebuilt or refurbished. Thus while it is true that beginning with Julius Caesar and, most dramatically, Augustus, the topography of Rome was transformed in some significant ways, in certain respects the city itself would have looked the same in ad 50 as it did in 50 bc. This was in part the point of the Augustan building program: while some new structures were built (RG 19), the name of the game was restoration (cf. the refeci of RG 20).

Armed with even a rudimentary knowledge of Rome's past, therefore, a person strolling through the city in the early imperial period encountered at every turn buildings and monuments associated with the men whose memory the exempla tradition perpetuated as well as with the political traditions of the Roman Republic.