← Back to the map Surviving courtyards and walls of the Domus Augustana on the Palatine

Ruins of the Domus Augustana, Palatine Hill · Wikimedia Commons

Domus Augustana (Imperial Palace, private wing)

Domus Augustana

PalaceItalia · Rome, Italy, Palatine HillBuilt 92 CE

About

Private residential wing of Domitian's vast Flavian imperial palace on the Palatine, completed in 92 CE by his architect Rabirius; from this point it served as the main imperial residence of Rome through the 2nd century. Rabirius also laid out the palace's sunken garden on its eastern side, an elongated space with a curved southern end, sunk ten meters below the surrounding terraces and long mistaken by early explorers for a private racetrack, still known today as the Stadium. Napoleon III bought the site as the Farnese Gardens in the 1860s and sponsored the first systematic excavations here. In use as the emperor's palace in 117 CE, with Trajan having died in Cilicia that August, Rome's imperial household still resided here.

What happened here

The public rooms are enormous and the private ones are not. A visitor is walked through an audience hall built to make him feel small, waits with everyone else, and is admitted in order of usefulness. Behind that front, the household runs on hundreds of slaves and freedmen with narrow specialities — one for the lamps, one for the silver, one who remembers names. The kitchens are far from the dining rooms, so food arrives warm at best. Business never stops: petitions from provincial towns, judicial appeals, dispatches read aloud while the emperor is being shaved. Gardens and fountains take up as much ground as the buildings, because being able to waste that much space in a crowded city is the point.

In ancient writing

Statius, Silvae 4.2
A guest's account of dining in Domitian's new palace: a hall so high the eye tires before it reaches the ceiling, and columns that could hold up the sky.