Roman historians branded the Julio-Claudian successors of Augustus—Tiberius (A.D. 14–37), Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54) and Nero (54–68)—as a hypocrite, a madman, a fool, and a knave. The hypocrite spent millions rehabilitating Asia Minor after an earthquake, the madman provided Ostia with a splendid aqueduct, the fool built for the same city a great artificial harbor, the knave rebuilt Rome—after burning it down first, his enemies said—with a new and intelligent city plan. But it would be easy to interpret the Julio-Claudian age as one of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste: there were many who fiddled before Rome ever burned. Thus both Tiberius and Caligula built on the Palatine grandiose palaces, and Nero’s Golden House, as we shall see, outdid them all. Tiberius’ monstrous barracks at the city wall for the praetorian guard introduces a sinister note. Claudius’ Altar of Piety, modelled on Augustus’ Altar of Peace, shows how derivative official art can be. Out of the complexity of this half-century, as archaeology reveals it to us, I have chosen four examples, one from each reign: a stately pleasure-dome of Tiberius by the sea at Sperlonga; a pair of extraordinary houseboats, probably Caligula’s, from the Lake of Nemi; the curious subterranean basilica at the Porta Maggiore in Rome, which flourished briefly and mysteriously in the reign of Claudius; and Nero’s fabulous Golden House.

In August, 1957, road improvements near Sperlonga, on the coast, about sixty-six miles southeast of Rome, offered G. Iacopi of the Terme Museum the opportunity for partially restoring, and closely examining, the ruins of a well-known villa there, commonly called the Villa of Tiberius. Making soundings near the villa in a wide, lofty cave fronting on the beach (Fig. 7.1), partly filled with sea-water, Iacopi discovered that the natural cave had been made over into a nymphaeum or vivarium, a round artificial fish-pool, with a large pedestal for statuary in the middle, and artificial grottoes opening behind (Fig. 7.2). In the pool and the grottoes, buried under masses of fallen rock, Iacopi and his assistants found an enormous quantity—at last accounts over 5500 fragments—of statuary. The fallen rock gave a clue for dating at least one phase of the cave’s existence, and a possible confirmation of the popular name for the adjoining villa. For the historian Tacitus mentions that in A.D. 26, Tiberius, dining in a natural cave at his villa at Spelunca, was saved from being crushed under falling rock by the heroism of his prefect of the praetorian guard, Sejanus, who protected him with his own body. This is very likely the actual cave which Iacopi explored, though his discoveries suggest that there were additions after Tiberius’ time.

The exploration was carried on under difficulties of several kinds. The Italian budget for archaeology is notoriously inadequate; the cave was subject to flooding from springs, and lashing by winter storms; and it contained a dangerous quantity of ammunition and explosives stored there in World War II. The first difficulty was temporarily overcome by the generosity of the engineer in charge of the road-building nearby; the second by installing three pumps and building a dike; the third by keeping an ordnance expert constantly on duty.

When the finds from the cave were first reported in the press, great excitement was caused by the announcement—premature, as it turned out—that among the fragments of sculpture were some resembling the Laocoön group. The original Laocoön group had been described by Pliny the Elder as carved out of a single block, probably with the sculptors’ names on the base, whereas the famous Vatican Laocoön is not monolithic and is unsigned. Among the Sperlonga finds, on the other hand, were fragments of a Greek inscription giving the names of the three Rhodian sculptors mentioned by Pliny (but not in the precise form transcribed by him: in the Sperlonga inscriptions, their fathers’ names are recorded, in Pliny not), plus some colossal pieces (the central figure would have been nineteen feet eight inches tall) including parts of two snake-like monsters, presumably the serpents sent by Athena to punish Laocoön and his sons for resisting the proposal to drag the Wooden Horse within the walls of Troy. This great group, much larger, earlier (according to Iacopi, on the somewhat doubtful evidence of the letter-styles of the Greek inscription, which he would date in the second or first century B.C.) than the Vatican version, and different in conception, fits the pedestal in the middle of the circular pool.

Another inscription goes some way to explain both the quantity and the arrangement of the sculpture in the grotto. In ten lines of Latin verse it describes how a certain Faustinus adorned the cave with sculpture for the pleasure of his Imperial masters, choosing subjects which, Vergil himself would admit, outdid his own poetry. One of the subjects mentioned is Scylla, the fabulous cave-dwelling sea-monster, with a girdle of dogs’ heads about her loins, who guarded the straits of Messina. Now in the cave, carved in the living rock, at the right of the entrance, is the prow of a ship, set with blue, green, yellow, and red mosaic, and presenting some evidence of having once had a marble superstructure. To this ship Iacopi would assign some of his key figures: a bearded Ulysses in a seaman’s cap, his face expressing horror; a lovely archaic statuette of Athena (Fig. 7.3), grasped by a huge hand (Athena might be the figurehead); Scylla’s gigantic hand seizing a seaman by the hair, and a terrified mariner who has taken refuge from Scylla at the ship’s prow. A niche carved in the rock above the ship would be an appropriate vantage-point for Scylla herself; in one fragment one of her dog’s heads has bitten deep into a sailor’s shoulder. It is true that the mosaic names the ship Argo, but Iacopi explains this as a generic name for a ship, not necessarily referring to the one that bore the Argonauts.

If Iacopi is right about this group, it was a baroque or even rococo effect that Faustinus arranged for his Imperial masters. But the Laocoön and Scylla groups by no means exhausted his fancy or his pocketbook: there was Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, Ganymede borne to heaven by an eagle (carved so as to be seen to best effect from below, and therefore possibly belonging to a pedimental treatment of the cave façade). There are heads of gods and heroes, satyrs and fauns, a charming Cupid trying on a satyr’s mask, a delightful head of a baby with ringlets over the ears—all in the fanciful, complex, sometimes tortured baroque style of Hellenistic Pergamum and Rhodes. These are all of fine crystalline Greek island marble, so that they may be Greek originals. The soapy native Carrara stone is normally used in Roman copies—and in too much modern American church sculpture.

At the present writing the Sperlonga cave cannot be said to have yielded up all its secrets. It is not even certain that the equipping of Tiberius’ outdoor dining-room as a lavish baroque museum took place in Tiberius’ lifetime, for the donor, Faustinus, may be the rich villa-owner of that name who was a friend of the poet Martial, and therefore of Domitianic date. The residents of Sperlonga want the sculpture kept where it was found, to entice tourists; the archaeologists want to take it to Rome for analysis and reconstruction. Meanwhile, definitive conclusions are impossible. But one thing is certain: the bizarre taste of the place, whether Tiberius’ or Domitian’s, is characteristic of the first century of the Empire, and reflects the gap between the ostentatious rich and the church-mouse poor which was one day to contribute to the Empire’s fall.

The same fantastic extravagance marks our next finds. Seventeen miles southeast of Rome, cupped in green volcanic hills, lies the beautiful deep blue Lake of Nemi, the mirror of Diana. Here divers, as long ago as 1446, reported, lying on the bottom in from sixteen to sixty-nine feet of water, two ships, presumably ancient Roman. A descent was made in a diving bell in 1535. Another attempt in 1827 used a large raft with hoists and grappling irons, and an art dealer tried again in 1895, but all three efforts were chiefly successful in damaging the hulls, tearing away great chunks without being able to raise the Ships to the surface. The 1895 attempt did, however, produce a mass of tantalizing fragments (Fig. 7.4): beams; lead water-pipe; ball-bearings; a number of objects in bronze, including animal heads holding rings in their teeth, a Medusa, and a large flat hand; terracotta revetment plaques, a quantity of rails and spikes, and a large piece of decking in mosaic. This treasure-trove, displayed in the Terme Museum, naturally whetted appetites, not least Mussolini’s. He determined to get at the ships by lowering the level of the lake, a colossal task undertaken eagerly by civil and naval engineers enthusiastic about classical civilization. The job was made easier, but no less expensive, because there existed an ancient artificial outlet, a tunnel a mile long, dating from the reign of Claudius, which could be used to carry off the overflow. The pumps were started on October 20, 1928, in the presence of the Duce. After various vicissitudes over a space of four years, the lake level was lowered seventy-two feet, and by November, 1932, the first ship was installed in a hangar on the shore, and the second (Fig. 7.5) lay exposed in the mud.

The ships proved to be enormous by ancient standards, of very shallow draft, very broad in the beam (one was sixty-six feet wide, the other seventy-eight) and respectively 234 and 239 feet long (Fig. 7.6). They were larger than some of the early Atlantic liners. Their 1100 tons burden gave them ten times the tonnage of Columbus’ largest ship.

The task of freeing the ships of mud and debris, recording the finds level by level, reinforcing the hulls with iron, shoring them up, raising and transporting them to the special museum built for them on the lake shore proved in its way to be as great a challenge to Italian patience and ingenuity as the job of excavating the slabs and fragments of the Altar of Peace from under the Palazzo Fiano. There was always the danger of the ships’ settling in the mud in a convex curve, springing the beams. The excavating tools used were made entirely of wood; iron would have damaged the ancient timbers. As each section of the hull emerged from the water that had covered it for so many centuries, it was covered with wet canvas to keep it from deteriorating.

The hulls proved to be full of flat tiles set in mortar. These overlaid the oak decking, and over these again was a pavement in polychrome marble and mosaic. Fluted marble columns were found in the second ship, suggesting a rich and heavy superstructure (Fig. 7.7). A round pine timber from the first ship, thirty-seven feet long and sixteen inches in diameter, with a bronze cap ornamented with a lion holding a ring in its teeth, proved to be a sweep rudder, one of a pair. It showed that these enormously heavy vessels (the decking material alone must have weighed 600 or 700 metric tons) were actually intended to be practicable, and to move about in the waters of the lake.

Clay tubes, flanged like sewer-pipe to fit into each other, were arranged in pairs to make an air-space between one level of deck and another. This suggests radiant or hypocaust heating, as in a Roman bath: these floating palaces, or temples, or whatever they were—perhaps both—had bathing facilities. Wooden shutters warrant the inference that the ships were provided with private cabins. A length of lead water-pipe stamped with the name of Caligula has been used to date the ships to that reign (and indeed in some ways they accord well with Caligula’s reputation for madness), but of course there is nothing to prevent lead pipe of Caligula’s short reign (A.D. 37–41) from being used in Claudius’, and many scholars, on the evidence of the art objects found, would date the ships in the latter reign.

Boards in the bottom of the hold were removable to facilitate cleaning out the bilge. This was done with an endless belt of buckets, some of which were found, and are on display, restored, in the museum. Over the ribs of the hull was pine planking, then a thin coating of plaster, then a layer of wool treated with tar or pitch, finally lead sheathing clinched with large-headed copper nails.

The second ship had outriggers supporting a platform for the oarsmen, and a bronze taffrail decorated with herms—miniature busts tapering into square shafts. A number of mechanical devices of great technical interest was found: pump-pistons; pulleys; wooden platforms (use unknown), one mounted on ball-bearings, another on roller-bearings; a double-action bronze stem-valve (perhaps for use in pumping out the bilge), which had been welded at a high temperature (1800° Fahrenheit); anchors, one with the knot tied by a Roman sailor still intact, another with a moveable stock, anticipating by over 1800 years a similar model patented by the British Admiralty in 1851. Its use is to cant the anchor, giving it a better bite in the mud.

In 1944 the retreating Germans wantonly burned the ships in their museum. Their gear, stored in a safe place, survived. From careful drawings made at the time the ships were raised, models were made to one-fifth scale. They are now on display in the restored museum.

The ships did not contain within themselves clear evidence about what they were used for. Whether they had some religious purpose in connection with the nearby Temple of Diana, or were used as pleasure-craft, or both, they reflect, like the cave at Sperlonga, the mad extravagance which increasingly characterized the Roman Empire on its road to absolutism.

In 1917, on Rome’s birthday, April 21, a landslip beside the Rome-Naples railway line outside the Porta Maggiore revealed, forty-two feet beneath the tracks, a hitherto unsuspected and most remarkable underground, vaulted, stucco-ornamented room, the so-called “basilica,” which will serve as a third example of archaeology’s contribution to our knowledge of the Julio-Claudian age. To protect the basilica against damage from seepage and vibration from trains—240 a day pass directly above it—it was enclosed in 1951–52, at a cost of over $500,000, in a great box of waterproof reinforced concrete with footings anchored nearly twenty-four feet beneath the level of the basilica pavement.

One entered the chamber in antiquity—it was always underground—down a long vaulted ramp which made a right-angle turn and emerged in a little square vestibule, whose skylight provided the basilica’s only natural light. Beyond the vestibule was a vaulted nave (Fig. 7.8) ending in an apse, and two side aisles. The profiles of the piers upholding the vaults, and of the arches connecting the nave with the side aisles, are irregular; and the piers are set at eccentric angles (Fig. 7.9): this suggests a curious method of construction. A trench must have been dug through the surface tufa corresponding to the desired perimeter of the building. Then six square pits were dug, one for each pier, and the outline of the arches and doorways formed in the virgin soil. Then mortar was poured in. When it had set, the entrance corridor was dug and the interior of the basilica emptied of earth through the skylight in the vestibule. Then vault, piers, and walls were stuccoed. In the late Republic and after, Roman artisans showed great skill in ornamental stucco-work, a far cry from the wattle-and-daub, in the primitive huts, which is the remote ancestor of the refined work in the basilica, and a symbol of how far on the road to sophistication Rome had traveled from her humble beginnings.

In the basilica the stucco-work is divided by moldings into squares, rectangles, and lozenges, filled with figures in low relief of great delicacy and elegance. Some are simple scenes of daily life, and many others are part of the standard repertory of Roman art, but the key motifs will bear, as we shall see, a single, serious interpretation. The apse, the focal point of the whole structure, was reserved for a special scene of central importance.

The central panel of the central vault shows a naked human figure, a pitcher in his hand, carried off by a winged creature. (The interior of the figure is eaten out; this is due not to vandalism but to the depredations of a parasitic insect related to the termite.) In the four surrounding panels are four other motifs. A hero wearing a lion’s skin shoots with a bow a monster guarding a maiden chained to a rock. A beautiful, seated, half-naked woman cradles a statuette in her left arm; a bearded middle-aged man stands before her. A young man in a short tunic, carrying a leafy branch or a shepherd’s crook, leads off a woman by the hand. A veiled female figure takes from a tree guarded by a serpent a fleecy object to give to a man kneeling on a table nearby. How are these scenes to be interpreted? Do they share a common motif? According to the French Professor Jérome Carcopino, they do.

The central subject is Ganymede borne heavenward to be Jupiter’s cup bearer. The hero with the lion’s skin is Hercules rescuing Hesione. The woman with the statuette is Helen with the Palladium, the ancient image on which Troy’s safety depended; the wise Ulysses stands before her. Or it might be Iphigenia, in faraway Tauris, about to bear past the Thracian King Thoas the statuette of Artemis which will release her brother Orestes from torment by the Furies. In the next panel, if the young man is carrying a branch, he is Orpheus bringing Eurydice back from Hades; if he is carrying a shepherd’s crook, he is Paris kidnaping Helen. The veiled female is of course Medea getting the Golden Fleece for Jason. The common theme is deliverance. Ganymede, liberated from earthly ties, is borne on wings to the bliss of Heaven. Hercules can free Hesione because, according to some versions of the myth, he has been initiated into the mysteries. The statue, whether of Athena or of Artemis, guarantees the safety of the city or person who possesses it. Helen, in some accounts, can read the future and assuage men’s pain; or, if the theme is Orpheus and Eurydice we may recall that in an early version of the myth the ending was happy. Jason and Medea are freed from fear of the dragon through rites of magic initiation.

Does the great scene in the apse (Fig. 7.10) harmonize with the interpretation? In it, on the right, a graceful veiled woman, holding the lyre of a poetess, descends a cliff into the sea. She is pushed by a baby winged figure standing behind her. Beneath, waist deep in the water, a figure with a cloak outspread stands ready to receive her and escort her to the opposite shore. There, on another cliff, stands an imposing naked male figure, in his left hand a bow, his right outstretched in blessing. Behind him sits a young man thoughtfully supporting his head on his hand. Below in the sea yet another figure holds an oar and blows a horn in greeting. Any Roman intellectual would recognize the scene: it is Sappho, encouraged by Cupid, received by Tritons, blessed by Apollo, making the lover’s leap to join her beloved Phaon for eternity. This is not suicide, but liberation from earthly love into an eternity of perfect harmony of the senses with the sublime and the supernatural. The scene is consistent with the others, and provides a further clue to the interpretation of the whole, for Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopaedic Natural History, says that the myth of Sappho and Phaon was made much of by a sect called neo-Pythagoreans, inspired by the number-mysticism, and the belief in immortality, of their founder, Pythagoras of Samos, who flourished in the late sixth century B.C. These beliefs were refined in the Hellenistic Age, and taken up by heterodox Roman intellectuals.

This elegant underground chamber, so restrained and literary in décor, so small in size (it measures less than thirty by thirty-six feet) is just the place for a chapel for such an élite and aristocratic sect of ancient freemasons. The hypothesis is borne out by the discovery beneath the floor of the bones of a puppy and a suckling pig, the preferred pièces de résistance for a neo-Pythagorean cult meal, perhaps the meal that inaugurated the chapel.

And still other motifs in the stucco decoration strengthen the hypothesis, by stressing redemption, salvation, initiation: a winged victory; a soul arriving in the Isles of the Blest; a woman with a flower, symbolizing Hope; a scene of Demeter, the earth goddess, and Triptolemus, the hero of agriculture, of whom much was made in the Eleusinian mysteries. Other reliefs show the reverse of the coin: the punishment of the uninitiate. The satyr Marsyas is flayed alive for presuming to challenge Apollo to a competition in music. The Danaids, for the crime of murdering their husbands, perform forever the useless labor of drawing water in perforated jars. There are other sinners: Medea with her slain sons; Pasiphaë, the monstrously adulterous Cretan queen; Phaedra, trying her wiles on her sinless stepson; Hippolytus, over-chaste votary of the maiden-goddess Artemis; King Pentheus murdered, for scoffing at the Dionysiac mysteries; his mother, Agave, carries his severed head aloft in Bacchic frenzy. To these has not been given the true neo-Pythagorean vision of the truth; they are portrayed here to symbolize their doom to a private Hell of their own making.

Two long panels on either side of the spring of the central vault reinforce the general intellectual tone. In one, schoolboys recite their lessons before a seated schoolmaster with a ferule in his hand. In the other, the Muse of Tragedy attends the coming-of-age ceremony of a Roman adolescent. (Some interpret this scene as a marriage; if so, the sect will have allegorized it in some way.) We know that the sect was open to both sexes; reliefs in the wall-panels of the basilica show men and women making offerings.

The stuccoes of the vault were in excellent condition when found. (They have since suffered from dampness, now being corrected by air-conditioning.) Also, they show no traces of addition or repairs, but the wall-panels were desecrated in antiquity by vandals, the consoles for offerings ripped off, the lamps and chapel gear carried away. It looks as though the chapel had had a short life, and the cult a violent end. Will history provide a date? Tacitus mentions in his Annals a rich Roman, Titus Statilius Taurus, known to have owned property near the basilica, who fell foul of Claudius, was accused of practicing magicas superstitiones, and escaped his sentence by committing suicide in A.D. 53. The style of the stuccoes fits this date, the décor of the basilica fits the cult, its state when found fits Tacitus’ story. We may suppose that everything within reach was looted, the chamber filled in, and probably never seen again until the spring day 1864 years later when the landslide by the railway revealed its existence.

In 1907 the German archaeologist F. Weege, following in the footsteps of Renaissance explorers of 1488, made his way through a hole in the wall of the Baths of Trajan, near the Coliseum, to find himself in a labyrinth of underground vaulted corridors and rooms partly filled with rubble, which had once been part of an Imperial palace, the Golden House of Nero. Setting lighted candles at every turning to guide his way back, he explored as many as he could of the eighty-eight rooms of this small part of the palace-complex, sometimes crawling with lighted candle over rubble that filled a room nearly to the vault, while spiders and centipedes, and other nameless creatures scuttled away from him into the darkness.

The rooms had been filled with rubble by Trajan, with a twofold purpose: to make a firm substructure for his baths, and to continue the work of the Flavians in damning the memory of the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste of the hated Nero. Thirteen hundred and eighty-four years later, when the underground rooms were rediscovered, among the visitors was Raphael, who decorated a loggia in the Vatican Palace in the style of the fantastic paintings on Nero’s walls. Since the buried rooms were grottoes, the paintings were “grotesques”—as often, the word has survived, while its history has been forgotten. Other visitors were Caravaggio, Velasquez, Michelangelo, and Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The names of many a famous artist are scrawled right across the face of the ornaments of the vaults. An Italian poem, written not long after the discovery of America, speaks of artists’ underground picnics in the Golden House. The picnickers crawled on their bellies to enjoy their subterranean meal of bread, ham, apples, and wine.

The result of Weege’s more scientific investigation was the working out of a new plan. The western half of the complex (Fig. 7.11) proved to be conventional, with the rooms grouped about a peristyle with garden and fountain. Rooms 37 and 43 have alcoves: it is easy to imagine them as the Imperial bedchambers of Nero and his beautiful red-haired wife Poppaea. In Nero’s bedchamber were hung the 1808 gold crowns he won in athletic competitions in Greece, if competitions they can be called, when all the prizes were awarded to Nero in advance, and armed guards drove off all would-be rivals.

The eastern wing (Fig. 7.12) is more unorthodox in plan, and more interesting. The main approach opened into Room 60, the Hall of the Gilded Vault, so called from the ornate painted stucco ceiling, divided into round and rectangular fields in gilt, green, red and blue, depicting mythological and erotic scenes, very different in tone from the restraint of the subterranean basilica. Hippolytus, off to the hunt, receives a letter containing incestuous proposals from his stepmother Phaedra. Satyrs rape nymphs, Venus languishes in the arms of Mars, Cupid rides in a chariot drawn by panthers. And yet we are told that the painting in this pleasure dome was done by the solemn dean of Roman artists, Fabullus himself, the John Singer Sargent of his day, who always painted in full dress, wearing his toga.

Room 70 is a vaulted corridor 227 feet long, with sixteen windows opening to the north in the impost of the vault, which is painted sky-blue as a trompe d’oeil. Seabeasts, candelabra, and arabesques, sphinxes with shrubs growing out of their backs, griffins, centaurs, acanthus-leaves, Cupids, gorgons’ heads, lions’ heads with rings in their mouths, dolphins holding horns of plenty, winged horses, eagles, tritons, swags of flowers make up the riotous décor. In recesses in the walls landscapes and seascapes, impressionistically painted, attempt the illusion of the out-of-doors. Halfway down the corridor the vault is lowered. Here it supported a ramp which led to the gardens above.

Room 84 is octagonal, lighted by a hole in the roof, anticipating, as we shall see, Hadrian’s Pantheon. Perhaps this was the state dining room, described by ancient sources as hung on an axis and revolving like the world. Its ivory ceilings slid back and dropped flowers and perfumes on Nero’s guests.

The most controversial room of all is the apsidal number 80, decorated with scenes from the Trojan war: Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, Thetis bringing Achilles his shield. Nero was fascinated by the Trojan War: it was an epic of his own composition on the fall of Troy that he recited as Rome was burning. What was in the apse? Equivocal Renaissance reports place the finding of the Vatican Laocoön somewhere in this area, the apse is of a size to fit the statue, and the subject is appropriate to a room full of Trojan motifs. The statue’s baroque quality would have appealed strongly to Nero’s taste. This is the circumstantial evidence for room 80 as the findspot of one of the most notorious statues of antiquity. That this survey of the Julio-Claudian age should approach its end, as it began, with mention of the Laocoön, suggests how conventional was the repertory of Roman taste.

But a description of the rooms of the Golden House is not quite the whole story. In 1954 the Dutch archaeologist C. C. Van Essen published the results of careful probing in the whole section of Rome for half a mile around the Coliseum, where he found traces of Nero’s palace in a number of places on the perimeter. For the Golden House was much more than the complex of rooms just described. It was a gigantic system (Fig. 7.13) of parks, with lawns, groves, pastures, a zoo. Over its central pool later rose the great bulk of the Coliseum. Within these grounds, twice the extent of Vatican City, was a great Versailles in the midst of the teeming metropolis. The eighty-odd rooms we have been describing made up but one of several palaces in the grounds. And an American, Miss E. B. Van Deman, working from some very unlikely-looking architectural blocks piled beside the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the old Forum, was able in 1925 to restore on paper (Fig. 7.14) the monumental approach, over 350 feet wide, to the palace grounds from the old Forum and Palatine. It was a mile long, with arcades of luxury shops, and eight rows of pillars. Its plan is concealed today under mounds of dumped earth between the Hall of the Vestals and the Arch of Titus. Beside it rose a colossal statue of Nero, 120 feet tall, now marked by a pattern in the pavement. When Hadrian desired to remove the statue to make room for his Temple of Venus and Rome, it took twenty-four elephants to do the job. But decades before, his predecessors the Flavians had done what they could, with the Baths of Titus and the Flavian Amphitheater (the proper name of the Coliseum) to erase the memory of Nero’s monstrous extravagance, and turn his palace grounds to public use.

The four archaeological examples from the Julio-Claudian age discussed in this chapter were chosen for their intrinsic interest, not to illustrate a thesis. But they do prove a point all the same. Tiberius’ al fresco dining room, with its monstrous and tortured statuary (even though some of it be later in date); Caligula’s houseboats, with their incredibly heavy profusion of work in colored marble, mosaic, and bronze; Nero’s Golden House, with its labyrinth of gaudy and over-decorated rooms of state, all testify to a decadent extravagance beyond Hollywood’s wildest aspirations. By comparison, the cool, quiet taste of the subterranean basilica is an oasis and a relief, but even this is a commentary on Claudius’ intolerance. And it has about it an air of holier-than-thou Brahminism, the furthest possible contrast with the warmth, the close contact with common people, which marked the Christianity that was to be preached in Rome not long after the basilica-sect was outlawed. One cannot but marvel at the staying-power of the organism that could survive this prodigality, this cleavage between class and mass, for over three centuries. But as we focus our attention upon the excesses of court and of metropolis, we ought not to forget that in the municipal towns of Italy and the Empire life went on, more modestly, quietly, and decently. Archaeology gives us precious proof of this in a pair of buried cities of the Flavian Age, Pompeii and Herculaneum.