Fig. 9.14 Rome, Piazza Navona, air view. (A. M. Colini, Stadium Domitiani, frontispiece)
Fig. 9.15 Rome, Stadium of Domitian. (Colini, op. cit., Suppl. Pl. B)
Fig. 9.16 Rome, Stadium of Domitian, Gismondi model. (Colini, op. cit., Pl. 16)
Colini found that Domitian’s architect, to compensate for providing here only one ambulacrum or vaulted corridor for sauntering, where the Coliseum had two, widened his corridor at regular intervals between the stairs to provide halls where spectators—the stadium had seats for 30,000—might congregate between footraces. The stadium was built in a repeated sequence: stair, entrance, hall, entrance, stair, which gives classical orderliness and efficiency to the plan (perhaps Rabirius’). In the center of the west side was the Imperial box: the crypt of the church of Sant’ Agnese marks its substructure. Here, according to legend, the good saint suffered martyrdom, condemned by the Emperor Diocletian to the brothels that flourished in the stadium arcades. The whole building profited by the experience of the builders of the Coliseum, as they in turn had profited from the experience of the builders of the Theater of Marcellus. Thus its exterior was adorned with engaged columns, Doric on the first level, Corinthian on the second. But the total effect was deliberately different, graceful where the Coliseum was massive, dedicated to Greek footraces instead of Roman blood-sports. The only thing of its kind outside the Greek world, the stadium was a deliberate flouting of Roman tradition. This was in Domitian’s manner. The Roman people rejected it, in theirs. To them, Greek footraces represented foreign degeneracy, nudism, and immorality. No sooner was the tyrant murdered (in a courtier’s plot sparked by his wife) than they went back to their simple pleasures of watching the murder of gladiators and wild beasts. Domitian’s odeum, traces of which were found south of the stadium in 1936–37, did not suffer the same fate, for it could be used for pantomime (see [Fig. 13.1]) and other degraded forms of dramatic art.
Here then, is a part, a small part, of what archaeology can tell us of the prodigious Flavian activity in architecture and in art. It will be noticed that, not for the first or the last time in Roman history, the greatest tyrant is also the greatest builder. (He is also Rome’s last great Emperor who did not come from the provinces.) Absolutism was the price Rome paid for its grandeur. But, in the century after Domitian’s murder, absolutism marked time. Nerva’s successor, the Spaniard Trajan, is the second of the “five good Emperors,” under whom the metropolis and its port prospered, and the provinces lived content.
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Trajan: Port, Forum, Market, Column
Archaeologically speaking, the most important sites in Italy to illustrate Roman events and the Roman way of life in the happy reign (A.D. 98–117) of Trajan—called Optimus Princeps, “best of princes”—are the port of Ostia, which in his time reached its apogee, and his Forum, the last and grandest of the Imperial Fora.