Tombs constructed in late Republican Rome include the remarkable sepulcher of the baker Eurysaces and his wife, built between 50 and 20 BCE in the shape of an enormous baker's oven.

From about 30 BCE, Roman cement walls were usually faced with baked bricks (opus testaceum).

The victory of Augustus has inaugurated an attempt to turn Rome from a city of brick into one of marble.

Augustus, electing to follow the Hellenistic and classical models of Greece, employs concrete only in concealed parts of buildings.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), Marcus Agrippa had built and dedicated the original Pantheon during his third consulship (27 BCE).

Located in the Campus Martius, at the time of its construction, the area of the Pantheon is on the outskirts of Rome, and the area has a rural appearance.

Under the Roman Republic, the Campus Martius had served as a gathering place for elections and the army.

However, under Augustus and the new Principate both institutions are deemed to be unnecessary within the city.

The construction of the Pantheon is part of a program of construction undertaken by Augustus and his supporters.

They build more than twenty structures on the Campus Martius, including the Baths of Agrippa and the Saepta Julia.

It had long been thought that the current building was built by Agrippa, with later alterations undertaken, and this was in part because of the inscription on the front of the temple.

The inscription across the front of the Pantheon says, M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT, meaning "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, having been consul three times, built it."

However, archaeological excavations have shown that all but the facade of the Pantheon of Agrippa had been completely destroyed, along with other buildings, in a huge fire in CE 80.

Beginning around 20, a technique of imitating an articulated marble-encrusted wall in painted stucco, the so-called third style, returns to the two-dimensional wall surface.

The vertical division continues in the form of large panels, but the architectural elements of the second style become a delicate surface decoration, and the views beyond the wall disappear.

Marcus Verrius Flaccus compiles the first recognizable general dictionary by about 20 (no copy survives, but part of Sextus Pompeius's Festus's late-second-century CE abridgment of his De verborum significatu—”On the Meaning of Words”—is extant and quotes extensively from the earlier work).