The city of Rome, whose name is first recorded in the late fourth century on the Ficoroni Cut (in the Villa Giulia), was soon graced with important monuments, such as the Regia, a mid-sixth-century religious building which stood in the Forum, and numerous temples such as those in the Area Sacra beside the Largo Argentina. The basilica gradually developed as a rectangular building with a number of side aisles. The later Republican period saw the erection of the temples in the Forum Holitorium, urban development of the southern areas of the Campus Martius, and the building of the Tabularium on the Capitoline.

The new social classes which emerged during the final prosperous stage of the Republic commissioned sculptors to work on various projects. The most characteristic monument of this new trend, possibly the first public relief sculpture, is the altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, fragments of which are preserved in the Munich and Louvre museums. The reliefs graced the base of a temple to Mars or Neptune in the Circus Flaminius, where the church of San Salvatore in Campo now stands. There were also statues, since lost, of Neptune, Amphitrite, Achilles and Nereids, which, according to Pliny, were made by one Skopas (not to be confused with the renowned sculptor of that name from Paros). Three sides are decorated with a marine procession celebrating the marriage of Neptune and Amphitrite, depicted in a chariot drawn by tritons. The fourth side shows animals being presented, in a scene which is certainly sacrificial in character, and yet contains elements of something quite different. Beside the altar stand the god Mars and the Censor with his assistants. This relief, which also owes something to a military environment, inaugurates a new type of composition centred on the censor. Though they all date from around 110 BC, the reliefs differ in style. The marine procession derives from a Hellenistic and Neo—Attic tradition, and is symbolic rather than realistic in content. The sacrificial scene is considered to be ,the starting point of Roman relief sculpture as we know it.

The use of commemorative reliefs spread rapidly during the first century AD. Examples are the frieze of the Arch of Augustus at Susa (Piedmont) and, in Rome, the base of the altar of the Vicomagistri, erected under Tiberius. Funerary reliefs, of the plebeian or popular kind described earlier, also became very popular in many Italian cities. Some tombs were commissioned by merchants or craftsmen who had grown wealthy, and they tended to embellish their last resting place in monumental fashion. Such tombs are often decorated with scenes from their working life or with funerary banquets.

The culmination of all these developments is to be seen in the frieze depicting preparations for a triumphal procession from the Temple of Apollo Sosianus (Palazzo dei Conservatori). It is based on the triumph celebrated by Sosius in 34 BC, though it was not actually sculpted until twenty or so years later. This relief, like the procession from an altar base which was discovered beneath the Cancelleria building (Vatican Museum), leads on to the mature Roman narrative style which found its fullest official expression on the lateral walls of Augustus’s Ara Pacis.

The attempt to fix a given moment in the life of an individual or group, in functions both public and private, is also evident in Republican portraiture. There is a clean break with the standardized portraits of Etruscan and Italic origin. The supposed portrait of Sulla (Venice) epitomizes the new trend in politically—motivated patrician portraiture, which was to become an essential instrument of propaganda under the new senatorial aristocracy.