The grand apartments have been plunged in darkness since the foundations were laid for Trajan’s Baths. The large remains on the Oppian Hill have by now lost most of their decoration. The unsympathetic may well have reacted as one scholar who wrote, ‘The Fire gave a mortally egocentric autocrat the chance to demand a unique monumental expression of what he considered his worth and position to be”( MacDonald 31). Nero no doubt spoke with enthusiasm of the technical marvels that were in hand. Though never finished, a vast number of buildings were started all around the central lake. ![]() Observers would have gained the impression that a vast complex was in hand, because the work did not proceed area by area. The Golden House was, nonetheless, probably an overambitious project. Thus the Domus Aurea Park need not have prevented movement through the centre of the city, though doubtless the routes were changed.Įven on the Palatine only a cryptoporticus connected the various imperial buildings: there was no need to weld them all into one enclosed complex, and they may have been intended to remain separate. One of the problems for the Pisonian conspirators may have been that after the Fire, with his palace damaged and under reconstruction, Nero was spending his time in imperial properties that were more private, such as the Servilian Gardens. In any case, nothing suggests that Nero meant to shut himself up in the Domus Aurea. Nero may have felt he was opening his house to the citizens, while his critics felt that he was excluding the citizens from their city.Īfter the Fire researchers find him offering public entertainment in his Vatican circus and adjacent gardens, dressed as a charioteer and mixing with the plebs (Champlin 74). Tacitus sneer on this occasion, He “used the whole city as his house” (Tacitus 417), reminds one of the squib Rome will become a house. Shortly before the Fire he held a public banquet in which he extended to the people pleasures normally confined to the few. Nero’s comitas and popularitas must be remembered: he was not a man to deprive his public. Here in his complex of imperial buildings he could hear audiences and do business, while his people would have access to him and to some of the buildings and grounds. As part of his general reconstruction of Rome Nero could have had the idea of embellishing the central area with parks, groves and fountains. Later, Nero’s critics found several features of the place symbolic of his megalomaniacal self-indulgence, including its artificial lake, the 100-foot-tall statue of the emperor, and rooms with revolving mechanisms. Emperor Nero took this opportunity to build a vast, luxurious residence and landscaped parkland called the Domus Aurea, or Golden House. In AD 64 a devastating fire swept through the capital of the Roman Empire, leaving swaths of the city center smoldering and uninhabitable (Gates 362). Art historians are agreed that the only major innovation found in the Domus Aurea, is the use of vault mosaics. ![]() It seems reasonable then to assume that where researchers find evidence of striking artistic innovation in the city of architecture, Nero is to some extent responsible, for the radical improvement of aesthetic quality is considerable.
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