The showiest surviving result of Domitian’s patronage of the art of architecture is his palace on the Palatine, planned by the famous Rabirius, and finished perhaps in A.D. 92. Here is a return, after the comparative austerity of his father’s and brother’s reigns, to the baroque extravagance of Nero. Since no final publication of this important complex has ever appeared, the best archaeology can do is to comment on the palace as reflecting Domitian’s personality, as indebted to earlier, and seminal of later Roman architecture. Its throne room (21B on the plan, [Fig. 9.12]), with its colossal niches for statues, was built for an Emperor with delusions of divinity. The dining room (H) had a dais to elevate the god-Emperor above his guests, but the peristyle (D), originally faced with marbles polished like mirrors (to reflect possible assassins), was planned by a terrified mortal who feared stabs in the back. (Blocks from the peristyle cornice show, as in the Forum Transitorium, Rabirius’ “spectacles-signature.”) The restless inward and outward curves of the rooms at 21E in the west block (the public part) of the palace, and at 23C and D in the eastern private quarters, were made possible by the flexibility of poured concrete, which, as we saw in Chapter V, makes it possible to enclose space in any shape (see reconstruction, [Fig. 9.13]). This fluidity appealed to Hadrian, the most gifted amateur architect among the Emperors, and he imitated it, as we shall see, in his Villa near Tivoli.
Fig. 9.12 Rome, Palatine, Palace of Domitian, plan. (G. Lugli, Roma antica, Pl. 8)
Fig. 9.13 Rome, Palatine, Palace of Domitian, reconstruction. (F. Castagnoli, Roma antica, Pl. 44.1)
The impluvium (pool for rain-water) in the peristyle (23B) of the private quarters contained a fountain, and is curiously treated with cut-out segments of circles, with cuttings in its top face for setting statues. This combination of plays of water and works of art is in the taste of the Sperlonga villa of Tiberius: ancient sources find a parallel between that monarch’s suspicious, tyrannical nature and Domitian’s. The small temple in the upper peristyle (24E), connected with the “mainland” by a curious seven-arched bridge, was built, to judge by its materials and technique, two centuries later than Domitian. But his is the “stadium” (26). Its portico makes it unlikely that it was ever a track for running races in the Greek style; he was to build such a stadium full-scale in the Campus Martius in A.D. 93. The Palatine stadium, in spite of its apsidal Imperial spectator’s box (the model for Bramante’s Vatican Belvedere), was probably a garden for shady strolling. Perhaps Hadrian had this plan in mind when he built the so-called “Painted Porch” or “Poecile” of his villa, to which we shall return. It is hard to realize that all this splendor lies only 100 yards from the site of “Romulus’” straw hut. The difference measures the distance Roman culture had travelled in 800 years.
Nowadays, one can sit under the umbrella pines of a summer evening and hear symphony concerts played in Domitian’s stadium-garden. On such occasions it may seem less of a pity that the Palatine is incompletely excavated. Here, on this hill of dreams, as Miss Scherer calls it, one can imagine Domitian’s palace rich with many-colored marbles, bright with paintings and gold. One can wander in the dappled light among oleander and orange-trees, golden broom and scarlet poppies, and admire how the mellow brick glows rose-colored in the afternoon sunlight. One can appreciate the mood of the Romantics for whom, a century and a half ago, all Rome had this dream-like quality. One can argue that their attitude may not have been scientific, but it produced the classical revival in architecture. Here is the old dilemma, but its horns are properly labelled not art and science, but sentiment and intelligence. If we want truly to understand ancient Rome, the choice is clear. Sentiment is not a Roman quality; intelligence is. The atmosphere of Domitian’s reign was not dream but nightmare. The natural beauty of the Palatine is attractive but adventitious; the essence of the place is of another kind, starker, grander, more disciplined, than a nineteenth-century water color, and behind it looms always the shadow of violence.
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Not violence but intelligence, and the affectation of Hellenism, lies behind Domitian’s stadium (for Greek games) and odeum, or music hall (for literary and musical competitions) in the Campus Martius. The shape of the stadium has been preserved almost intact in the loveliest of Rome’s squares, the Piazza Navona ([Fig. 9.14]). In 1936 the driving of a great new street, the Corso del Rinascimento, north and south through the Campus Martius, as a part of Mussolini’s ambitious new city plan, gave an opportunity for definitive examination of the stadium’s remains, preserved in the cellars of shops and the crypts of churches. This Colini undertook, and emerged from his mole-like labors with a plan ([Fig. 9.15]) and a model ([Fig. 9.16]) of the stadium, a prime example of what archaeology can do with bits and pieces. Nowadays remains of the hemicycle are visible under an insurance building outside the north end of the piazza, and one travertine pier is to be seen under the arcade of the Corsia Agonale, in the middle of the stadium’s east side. Beneath this area are traces of the footings, of cement poured in caissons, thicker and stronger the farther east they go, to support the increasing weight of the rising tiers of seats above. Brick stamps found here date the building to A.D. 93 or a little after, with evidence of major repairs under Hadrian—another Greek lover—and Caracalla—another violent despot.
