A Podcast about Rome. Episode 14. Paranoia and Porphyry: Domitian and the Domus Flavia on the Palatine Hill

When visiting the ruins of the imperial palaces on the bucolic and ever-glorious Palatine Hill—possibly my favourite place in the world—today much of what we see is the complex as it was rebuilt by Domitian. He was terrified of being murdered by a conspiracy, and that was exactly what happened, amid the halls and fountain courtyards once gleaming with materials quarried and mined across the Empire.

In this episode I quote both Suetonius and Statius. The translations I’ve used are respectively Rolfe, Loeb, 1914, and Slater, Clarendon Press, 1908.

Column of Aswan pink granite. Once floated down the Nile past crocodiles, now languishing in the dust.

Perhaps the dining hall described by Statius. The undulating floor sits atop a hypocaust system for heating in winter

Numidian yellow marble from modern-day Tunisia: echoes of the triumph over Hannibal

Looking across the Palatine Hill towards the Alban Hills

A geological map of Empire in the lovely Palatine Museum