Today's lecture is entitled "The Prince and the Palace:

Human Made Divine on the Palatine Hill."

And I want to begin essentially where we left off,

and that is with the emperor Vespasian,

the founder of the Flavian dynasty,

and the political shrewdness that Vespasian demonstrated,

when he made the decisions that he did --

when he made the decision especially to use architecture

to further his political agenda.

And you'll recall that the way in which he did that was that

he-- and I'm going to show you the

site plan once again on the Esquiline and Palatine Hills;

the site plan that shows us how he did this.

How he did this was he recognized that he didn't want

to associate himself with Nero, but it was to his advantage to

associate himself instead with the emperor Claudius.

And he did that by finishing the platform,

and indeed the temple itself that we looked at last time,

and that is the Temple of the Divine Claudius,

the Claudianum, that had been begun by

Agrippina the Younger.

He completed that as a nod to Claudius;

and again, a very smart political move on his part.

He also, as you'll recall, razed the Domus Aurea of Nero

to the ground, covered up what was left of it

otherwise, and then he filled in the

artificial lake, and he used the property that

the artificial lake was on, to build the Colosseum,

which itself was a shrewd gift to the Roman people,

to gain their favor, and he did succeed in that

regard.

Equally important, perhaps even more important,

is the decision that Vespasian made in the year 79 A.D.,

and that decision--and we see a portrait once again of

Vespasian, on the right-hand side of the

screen, now in Copenhagen--the decision

he made in 79 was to appoint his elder son,

Titus, as co-regent.

And we see a portrait of Titus on the left-hand side of the

screen, in military costume.

It's a portrait that was found in Herculaneum,

so that we know it needs to date prior to 79:

so very likely sometime in the seventies,

that particular statue was put up.

Now the reason it was smart politically to appoint Titus as

his co-regent was that Titus was extremely capable.

He was also extremely popular in Rome, with the people,

with the Senate, and what it did was to ensure

the succession: to ensure the succession.

And so when Vespasian died of natural causes in 79 A.D.,

Titus was prepared to take over, and indeed he did,

and he took over without any contest whatsoever,

which was a great accomplishment.

Titus, however--oh, and Titus, by the way,

was young when he became emperor;

he was in his early thirties, about thirty-two,

full of energy, and he needed it for what lay

ahead, because he was unlucky.

And his reign was affected by three major events,

the first of which you know intimately already,

and that is the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Titus' reign was 79 to 81.

So in 79 A.D., Vesuvius erupts and Titus has

to deal with the consequences of that, covered over,

as you well know, almost all of Campania.

In the year 80 he suffered, or Rome suffered,

a very serious plague, which Titus also had to deal

with.

He had to marshal all of his energy and all his ingenuity to

deal with a very serious plague in Rome,

and that plague was followed by a fire,

also an exceedingly serious fire.

So Titus had his hands full, and perhaps it's not

surprising, given all the stress of those

years that he too died of natural causes in 81,

at a very young age.

But despite what he went through during 79 to 81,

Titus' claim to fame was something that happened much

earlier, and I've mentioned it before,

and that is something that happened already in the year

A.D.

70.

And it was in the year A.D.

70 that Vespasian sent his elder son to Jerusalem,

to Judea, to get involved in a major military war.

And it was Titus, as you'll recall,

who was victorious in the Jewish Wars, and that took place

in 70 A.D.

And it was extremely important, not only in itself,

from Rome's standpoint, but also because it provided

legitimacy to the Flavian dynasty.

I mentioned that when a Roman dynasty came to power in a civil

war-- which was the case,

both for Augustus, after the civil war that Rome

was plunged into after Caesar's death,

and was the case again for Vespasian after the chaos of the

year 68/69-- they needed a foreign victory

to gain legitimacy.

So for the Flavian dynasty, the war over Jerusalem gave

them that legitimacy, and was therefore extremely

important in terms of the art and ideology of the Flavian

dynasty.

I want to turn to an arch that was put up in honor of that very

victory over Jerusalem, sometime after A.D.

81.

It was the so-called Arch of Titus,

one of the most famous Roman monuments of all,

and it was put up, although it bears Titus' name,

it was put up not by him, but by his brother Domitian,

his younger brother Domitian, who succeeded him after Titus'

death, which is why we date it to

sometime after A.D.

81.

I want to show you first its location, because that itself is

significant.

We are looking at the Google Earth view of the Roman Forum.

You see the Roman Forum here.

You see the Colosseum up at the top center.

You see the Capitoline Hill or Campidoglio here;

the Victor Emmanuel Monument here--I've pointed these out

many times before--the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini;

the Imperial Fora to the left; again the Roman Forum here;

and the Palatine Hill, which we're going to be

concentrating on today.

But you'll remember that Nero's hope was to link the Palatine

Hill with the Esquiline Hill, which is right up to the left

of the Colosseum, and to do that via a spur

hill--a spur hill that's located just right here,

a bit above my finger--a spur hill called the Velia,

V-e-l-i-a, that was to link the two.

And you'll remember Nero's plans for his Domus Transitoria,

this palace that was to serve as a point of transit between

those two hills, and you'll recall also the

remains of some of the rooms from the Domus Transitoria.

So this was again land that had been built up by Nero.

So it's not surprising to see the Flavians--

once again Titus following suit, and then his younger

brother Domitian following suit--

to use land that had earlier been used by Nero for new

Flavian monuments, in this case an arch put up to

the victory that Titus celebrated over Jerusalem.

And if you look very carefully, again just a bit,

a few inches above where my finger is,

you will see the Arch of Titus standing on that spur hill,

on the Velia, between the Palatine and the

Esquiline Hills.

The Arch of Titus, again which dates to after A.D.

81, was placed right next to the Sacred Way,

or the Via Sacra.

It doesn't span the street, but it's placed right next to

it, adjacent to it,

and I think you can see that very well in these two views

here, which also show that quite a

bit of ancient road actually survives,

or a piece of ancient road actually survives,

in the Roman Forum.

It's on the slope that you see here, and you can see the way in

which it goes right by the Arch of Titus that you see to its

right.

This is a view up the hill, up the Sacred Way,

toward the Velia, and here down,

from the Arch of Titus, down into the rest of the

Forum.

And again you can see the polygonal masonry of the ancient

road still preserved.

The ancient way, the Via Sacra,

was the road that the triumphant general took when he

returned to Rome, after a great military victory;

so this is exactly the road that Titus himself would've

taken when he came back from Judea and walked in triumph,

or rode in triumph, in his chariot,

along the Sacred Way and up to the Capitoline Hill.

Because the triumphant general, who was garbed with the

attributes of Jupiter, in this procession,

made his way up to the Capitoline Hill,

would get off his chariot up there,

right at the altar, in front of the Temple of

Jupiter OMC, and make a sacrifice to Jupiter.

So you have to imagine Titus doing this;

along with Vespasian, because you'll remember I

mentioned to you that they celebrated a joint triumph,

that Titus was willing to share his triumph with his father

Vespasian.

So they both would've come in, in triumph, into Rome,

after this great victory.

Once again you can see the arch in the view on the right.

Another view of the arch here, which shows it on the Velia;

and here you can get a very good sense of the way in which

that spur hill unites the Palatine and the Esquiline,

as well as the proximity of the Arch of Titus to the Colosseum.

We are seeing that the Flavians are building up a certain area

of Rome, with their monuments, and this is no exception.

The view that we see here, from the Forum,

of one side of the Arch of Titus, shows a modern

inscription, but we'll see that there is an

ancient inscription on the other side.

And we're also going to see that although the arch looks

very well preserved, it was actually quite heavily

restored by an architect by the name of Giuseppe Valadier,

and that happened in the nineteenth century that

Valadier-- V-a-l-a-d-i-e-r;

Giuseppe Valadier--restored the Arch of Titus.

And the part of the arch that is ancient is essentially the

central section, right here--mostly on the other

side actually; on this side just the spandrels

and the inner panels here, and on the other side we'll

see--well I'll show you when we get to the other side.

So this side important to know that the inscription is a modern

one.

Here's the other side of the arch, where you can see again

the central section is ancient, with the spandrels,

these triangular areas here; the columns on this side are

ancient; the keystone is ancient;

the frieze up above the keystone is ancient;

the inscription is ancient on this side.

But all the rest was restored by Valadier, as I said in the

nineteenth century.

And Valadier did something very interesting,

and archaeologically very forward thinking,

in that since the center of the arch was made out of Greek

marble, pentelic marble--p-e-n-t-

e-l-i-c--pentelic marble from Mount Pentelikon in Greece--

which in itself is interesting because we saw that the Flavians

were using imported marbles in their buildings;

I've mentioned that already before.

So we see a continuation of that trend here,

use of pentelic marble for the arch.

But when Valadier did the restorations,

or the reconstruction, he used travertine for the

modern parts of the arch, so that when you--it probably

isn't so evident to you from this view,

but when you stand in front of the arch you can see the

difference in the materials, and he wanted to point out to

the spectator that there was a difference between the ancient

part of the monument and the modern part of the monument,