The Palatine Hill

Banqueting hall of the gods . . .

It is from the Palatine that the English word ‘palace’ is derived, as the site provides what is perhaps the single most splendid example of Classical Western aristocratic life. The marvelous complex inaugurated on the hill for Domitian in 92 A.D. remained the official Roman residence of the emperor into late antiquity. Yet a building is not a palace only because rulers reside in it, but moreover because of its location and resulting symbolism. Shrouded in myth, legend and intrigue, the Palatine may take its name from the crude idol of Pallas-Athena with which Aeneas fled the flames of Troy. Virgil wrote of this legendary ancestor of Romulus and Remus humbly entertained on the hill by the shepherd Evander, and lodged in a hut with swallows under the eaves. Interestingly enough, potsherds found in 1959 near the foot of the Palatine have in fact pushed the date of earliest Rome back into the 1200s B.C. – a date which would seem to fit the myth of the arrival here of Trojan War refugees.

Sixteen miles to the southeast – in a grouping of extinct volcanoes known as the Alban hills – archaeological finds beneath a thick bed of lava have been connected with the fabled city of Alba Longa, traditionally founded in the mists of prehistory by the son of Aeneas, then ruled by a legendary dynasty of kings from his lineage. Since Renaissance stone-robbing of later architectural accretions on the Palatine has facilitated the modern discovery of the post holes of a village of huts in the bedrock dating to the 800s B.C., it is fascinating to speculate whether one of these ‘Aeneid’ kings moved his capital (and his pottery) to a humble village on the hill after a volcanic eruption devastated Alba Longa. For the traditional date of Rome’s founding is 753 B.C., expressly on the site of a pre-existing settlement. And it was in this period that the Latin histories describe the institution of the ‘Time of the Kings,’ from the first of whom – Romulus – the city takes its name.

Though it is still heavily debated whether or not these kings were colonial autocrats left over from an Etruscan move to drive the Greeks from southern Italy, whatever the case may be, something critical did happen in the area in the 700s B.C. For it was then that an architectural and technological revolution took place – a drive to civilize in which the marshland that would become the Roman Forum was drained. After Romulus founded the city, six additional ‘kings’ would rule Rome until the last, Tarquin the proud, was overthrown. On that day, in 509 B.C., the Roman Republic was founded.

All tradition and legend aside, Rome at its beginnings was just another village among many in the Latial region. The settlement at Alba Longa continued on after its founding, and was even destroyed by the Romans in 650 B.C. Whether it was originally the metropolis and Rome the colony – as the Latin histories say – or the other way around, archaeology reveals a surprisingly uniform culture in the zone before this so-called ‘Time of the Kings.’ And though Rome’s relative primitivism in the face of the rich, sophisticated and energetic civilization of the Etruscans makes its colonization by this mysterious people in the 700s B.C. believable given the critical momentum it then achieved, the village that became Rome already possessed a promising location – a sense of ‘Place’ which we can still feel. Set at a crossroads, with a ford provided by a sandbank in the middle of the Tiber, it not only had water, but protection for flocks and herds provided by the Palatine.

Although the hill’s earliest levels are largely unexcavated, all of its archaeological finds suggest an increasingly dense occupation up until the 30’s B.C., when Octavian took up residence in a well-to-do neighborhood adjacent the temple of Victory. Fresh from his defeat of Sextus Pompey during the civil war into which Caesar’s murder had plunged the Republican political scene, the choice was not only shrewd but propitious, for this nephew of the great Julius was to become the founder of a new Rome and its first emperor, Augustus. And it was in just this area where tradition had it that Romulus and Remus were reared by the shepherd Faustulus and his wife – after being washed ashore on the river bank, and then suckled by a she-wolf in a cave at the foot of the Palatine.

After the death of Augustus, the hill became the express property of the Roman emperors. His successor Tiberius built the first palace on the northwestern spur during the adolescence of Christ. Fifty years later, Nero – the last of the Julio-Claudian line – raised a new one on the southeastern spur. With its vaulted corridors penetrated by small, centrally lit domed chambers, this so-called ‘Domus Transitoria’ offered a titillating foretaste of the new ‘Imperial’ style.

After the great fire of 64 – during which Nero supposedly fiddled while the city burned – the young dilettante set about building a new and more ambitious residence which extended down the Palatine and outward into a kind of sprawling urban villa the construction of which would have more to do than any another of his eccentricities in getting himself deposed. Yet, despite all the perversity of its conception, the result was a remarkable and highly individual complex of buildings and parkland which can fairly claim to have been a turning-point not only in the history of Roman architecture, but in that of the world.

Nero’s architect Severus, and his engineer Celer, were well-equipped to provide such wonders as an artificial lake, a revolving banqueting hall representing the motions of the stars, coffered ivory ceilings which scattered flowers and scent upon the guests beneath, and baths supplied with sea-water and water from the sulfur springs near Tivoli. Men of vision, within a few short years, Severus and Celer were able to plan and carry into effect the vast program of landscaping and construction that lay behind the creation of this so-called ‘House of Gold,’ seeing and exploiting all of the aesthetic possibilities of the new concrete medium. Perhaps regrettably to architectural specialists, the Flavian dynasty who succeeded Nero decided to pull down and build over much of their work. The Colosseum was constructed over part of its grounds by Vespasian and his son Titus, whose younger brother Domitian built the new palace on the Palatine.

Known officially as the ‘Domus Augustana,’ and colloquially as the ‘Palatium,’ the complex was designed by the ingenious architect Rabirius, who most probably cut his teeth working under Severus and Celer on the notorious House of Gold. But the lessons there learned served him well, for Rabirius turned almost half of the land mass of the Palatine into a multi-leveled symphony of water and colored marbles replete with a basilica, a throne room, a colossal dining room, five fountain courts and a stadium. The plan was a flamboyant and successful answer to the problem of combining the conflicting requirements of a palace and a private residence on a site of some complexity.

The state rooms were sited where they could be readily accessible from the Clivus Palatinus, the road which ran up the valley between the two spurs of the hill, and the only direct means of access from the center of the city. Alongside and tucked away behind two colonnaded courts lay the emperor’s private apartments where, in the web-like suite of rooms, there was no evident visual conclusion to the continuum of spaces. To the south and east and created by cutting back the slope of the hill and building up its opposite three sides to utilize what would otherwise be lost to its fall-off, lay both a fountain court and a garden in the shape of a circus racetrack, both surrounded by two-storied porticos – arcaded on their ground floors, columnar on their upper levels – which allowed visitors a sheltered participation with nature.

Axial sequences of light and shade, long known in Roman architecture, were given new expression through the vaulted volumes Rabirius designed. The motion and the sound of water playing against colorful mosaics, the light upon a myriad of fountains and pools, proliferated on every side. And it should not be forgotten that the glories of Greco-Roman sculpture – with the cold-marble curve of a hamstring, the delicate vein of a bicep, or the vacuumed sweep of a torso – broke the geometric conception of wall, floor and ceiling with the more organic one of mankind.

In the Middle Ages the marble statues were broken up, carted off and burned for lime, and the bronzes melted down likewise. The mosaics have fallen, the stucco work crumbled away, and the few surviving paintings have been torn from their contexts and placed in museums. Still, echoes of the Palatine’s glory remain. Relics of the outlandish marble wall veneer from both Nero’s and Domitian’s palaces can be seen in its small museum. And, though largely unpublished and only recently and incompletely excavated, the spatial complexity of the ruins still evokes the mysterious and unseen inner core of the monarchy – a monarchical system which ever revered its history, maintaining an almost-superstitious respect for it unfortunately unobserved by today’s western leaders. For the ‘House of Romulus’ – a humble reed hut which the priests carefully preserved through the centuries – was reportedly still in existence on the Palatine in the late 400s A.D.

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