There was never any question that Domitian would succeed his brother.
Vespasian was in this for the long haul.
He created a dynasty and expected both of his sons, first Titus,
his older son and then his younger son, Domitian to succeed him.
So Domitian's eventual rise to power was never in question.
And yet Domitian was jealous of his brother, who
was very popular in Rome, as I've already mentioned, and
who had this great military victory on
which the Flavians based their claim to rule.
And Domitian was, was very jealous of his brother.
He felt out of the loop.
And so, when he succeeded Titus quicker than he
thought, because Titus died way before his time, in
his 30s, as you know, when Domitian succeeded Titus,
he came to power as a very embittered man.
And he never got over that bitterness.
And in fact, what we see Domitian doing is really reverting to the
megalomaniacal way of thinking of people like
Caligula and Nero. Exercising his imperial prerogatives to
the fullest and in fact, even insisting that he be
that he be addressed as “lord and god,” dominus et deus,
which I put on your monument list for you. Dominus et deus, that’s lord and god.
And he not surprisingly, given his bent, he, not surprisingly, moved
away from the public architecture that Vespatian and Titus had favored.
For Vespatian, of course, buildings like the Colosseum.
For Titus, the Baths of Titus.
The public architecture that had been favored by
his father and his brother, he moved back
to being interested in building palatial
architecture, essentially to his own glory.
And we're going to see that the
major monument that he commissioned was the imperial
palace on the Palatine Hill that had been began by Ca, by Tiberius and Caligula.
He completed that palace in the nineties AD.
Before we get to that, which will be our
main focus, today I would like, because it's extensive and
there's a lot to see.
I would like to say a, a few words
about another commission of Domitian, because he wasn't without
the desire to at least build some public buildings,
and I'd like to begin with one of those here.
This is a model of the so-called Stadium of Domitian.
A stadium, or race course that was used that was put up during
Domitian's reign.
We date it usually to the latter part of his reign,
92 to 96 AD, and you see that model again here.
And you can tell a lot about this building from both the scanty remains
but also from other, other evidence that allows us to be able to
reconstruct it relatively accurately. You see it here, these stadia
were hairpin in shape, as you can see, a straight end on one side, a curved end on
the other, a long, elongated, a kind of elongated
oval with one straight side as you can see.
It was put up in very similar fashion to theaters and to amphitheaters in that they
built a concrete hill, and lined that concrete hill with stone seats.
And then buttressed it with a wall, as you can
see here that was decorated just like the Theater of Marcellus
or like the Colosseum, with, in this case two tiers of
arches, two, two sets of arcades with columns in between them.
Those columns again having no structural purpose
whatsoever, just used as decoration for the monument.
And then the exits and entrances again
done very similarly to amphitheater or theater architecture
as we've discussed it thus far.
So the main difference is, it's not quite as tall as amphitheaters, for
example, or theaters, and just two tiers of columns, as you can see here.
And the main diff, the main difference in plan is that it's
a hairpin shape again with one straight side and one curved side.
