Domus Flavia (Imperial Palace, public wing)
About
The public half of the emperor's house on the Palatine, finished in 92 CE, is built to make an audience feel small. Its throne hall is roofed in a single unsupported span nearly thirty metres across and lined with coloured marble columns and niches of statuary. Next door a basilica gives the emperor a courtroom; on the other side a banqueting hall opens through wide windows onto sunken fountain courts, so guests eat looking at moving water. Between them a peristyle garden holds a maze-shaped pool around an island. In 117 CE Trajan's household works here, and after August, Hadrian's.
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
Statius, describing a banquet in Domitian's new palace hall, calls it vast enough to need "as many columns as could shoulder the gods and the sky" rather than the hundred columns of an ordinary great hall.
Sources
Nearby
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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 →