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Maximilian, later to be Emperor of Mexico, when he visited Pompeii in 1851, found it terrible, its rooms like painted corpses. Since then, modern archaeological methods (scientific, not miraculous) have brought the corpses to life. What archaeology has presented to us here, as at its best it always does, is not things but people, at work and play, in house and workshop, worshiping and blaspheming, and after their fashion patronizing the arts. So vividly does archaeology reveal them that we are moved to say with Francis Bacon, “These are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, by a computation backwards from ourselves.”
As the rain of ashes was covering Pompeii, and the river of lava engulfing Herculaneum, life in Rome, that Eternal City, went on. It was the age of the Flavians. Vespasian, the bourgeois founder of the dynasty, died just a month before Pompeii was buried. He and his sons, the good Titus and the wicked Domitian, enriched Rome with splendid art and architecture.
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Flavian Rome
Two fora, an amphitheater, an arch, a sculptured relief, a palace, a stadium: these may stand as typical of archaeology’s contributions to our knowledge of the Flavian age. As in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the buildings and the sculpture epitomize the atmosphere of the time, the last three decades of the first century A.D. After the excesses of Nero and the bloodbath of A.D. 69—a year of civil war which saw three Emperors in succession, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, raised to the purple and then murdered—the Roman people wanted “normalcy.” Under Vespasian and Titus they got it; under Domitian the pendulum swung again—and so did the headsman’s ax.
Flavian architecture and art sum up, too, the personalities of the Emperors. The bluff, no-nonsense Vespasian, the Emperor of reconstruction, symbolized, in his majestic Forum of Peace, what one of his staff called the “immense majesty” of the peace he had brought to a war-torn world, and Vespasian gave credit, in the frieze of the Forum Transitorium, to the artisan class which was his ardent supporter. Again, true to his bourgeois origins, he built for the people, over the pool of Nero’s Golden House, the great amphitheater which posterity was to call the Coliseum. Titus summed up the great moment of his short life when he immortalized his capture of Jerusalem on his arch at the top of the old Forum. Domitian, would-be triumphator, would-be rival of his great predecessors, exalted, in the reliefs recently found under the Cancelleria palace in Rome, the military prowess of the dynasty which in his view culminated in himself. He took over Vespasian’s Forum Transitorium, to thrust himself into a class with Augustus and his own father; reared on the Palatine a palace to outdo the Golden House; and, with philhellenism genuine or affected, built in the Campus Martius a stadium for footraces in the Greek fashion.
Fig. 9.1 Rome, Forum of Peace, Colini and Gatti reconstruction from Forma Urbis. (G. Lugli, Roma antica, Pl. 6)
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