.jpg?width=800)
Domus Aurea (Nero's Golden House)
About
NOT extant as a functioning palace in 117 CE - kept on the map for context because it directly underlies two extant POIs. Nero's sprawling post-fire palace complex (64 CE) was disowned by the Flavians: its lake was drained for the Colosseum, and its Esquiline wing was deliberately buried under earthen fill to serve as the foundation for the Baths of Titus (80 CE) and then the much larger Baths of Trajan (104-109 CE). By 117 CE the site was entirely subsumed beneath Trajan's bathing complex; the buried frescoed halls survived underground and were not rediscovered until the Renaissance.
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
- Suetonius, Divus Nero 31.2
Suetonius reports Nero's only comment on dedicating his finished palace: that he could at last begin to live like a human being.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →