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The holes which are now so conspicuous in the travertine blocks of the exterior wall of the Coliseum were probably made in the middle ages to extract the iron clamps by which the stones were fastened together. Some antiquarians have however held that they are the holes in which the beams of the buildings which clustered round the Coliseum in mediæval times were fixed. At the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the travertine blocks of the amphitheatre were used as a quarry from which to build palaces, and it is said that the Palazzo di Venezia, the Palazzo Farnese, and the Palazzo della Cancelleria were constructed of the stone robbed from hence. During part of the eleventh and twelfth centuries a castle of the powerful family of the Frangipani, which afterwards belonged to the Annibaldi stood in the walls of the Coliseum. Later generations of nobles and popes since the beginning of the nineteenth century have propped the building by buttresses of brickwork, and have endeavoured to postpone the date foretold by two Anglo-Saxon pilgrims as that of the fall of Rome. “When the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall.”[73]

Aurea Domus of Nero.
Baths of Titus.

The Coliseum was built by Vespasian in a depression between the Cælian and Esquiline Hills, which had been occupied by a large lake of ornamental water, called the Stagnum Neronis, used by Nero for aquarian entertainments and exhibitions. The vast palace known as the Domus Aurea Neronis extended along the side of the Esquiline on the north of the Coliseum. The Flavian emperors destroyed this palace, and Titus built a new group of courts and chambers over the ruins. The relics of these buildings of Titus are now remaining mingled with the substructures and lower parts of the Domus Aurea which they superseded. They are entered by a gateway on the road leading from the Coliseum to S. Pietro in Vincoli.

So far as we can draw any conclusion from the fragmentary and confused piles of ruins now left, and from the plan which Palladio sketched at a time when the remains of the palace had not so completely disappeared, it seems that this part of Nero’s palace consisted of a long straight façade of buildings extending along the slope of the Esquiline from east to west in the direction marked on the plan (A-B). In front of this there seems to have been a projecting court surrounded by small chambers (C-D). A few of these still remain at the western end, and are used as a dwelling-house for the custode. Behind the above-mentioned façade were numerous rooms of various kinds, and courts surrounded with colonnades. One of these courts with its adjacent corridors and apartments is now partly accessible (E, F), but the greater part were filled in with rubbish when the baths of Titus were built over them, and have never been entirely cleared. In the centre of this court the remains of a fountain-basin and a pedestal may be seen. The area is now traversed by parallel walls built by Titus to serve as substructions to his Thermæ. These are indicated on the plan by the dotted lines in black.

All the rooms in this part which are now accessible have arched roofs, and are covered with decorative paintings. Fortunately a great number of these have been preserved to us by artists who copied them before they were destroyed by damp and the soot of the cicerone’s torch. At the present time scarcely enough remains to show the beauty and delicacy of the designs. The best preserved paintings are in the long north corridor, where is also an inscription illustrating Persius, Sat. i. 113:

“Pinge duos angues: pueri, sacer est locus, extra
Mejite.”

The two snakes were symbolic of the Lares Compitales, and are common at Pompeii. Raphael adopted the same style of ornamentation as that preserved here in the Loggie of the Vatican. The rooms now shown, which contain a bath and other household apparatus, apparently belonged to a private house, and may either have formed a part of the Aurea Domus, or of some house built on its site at the time immediately following Nero’s death. The eleven rooms (F) which occupied the north side of the court (E) contain traces of wooden staircases leading to an upper story. The decorations and fittings of these appear to have been so inferior to those of the other rooms, that we must suppose them to have been occupied by the imperial slaves, or by the household troops. At the northern end of this row of chambers is a room with mosaic pavement at a considerably lower level than those surrounding it, and which must therefore have belonged to some building earlier in date than the Domus Aurea. It is sometimes called a part of the House of Mæcenas, but there is no authority for this, and it is more probable that the House of Mæcenas stood nearer to the Agger of Servius.

Sette Sale.