The Colosseum Read Online Free PDF

emperor and prince spent a leisurely time in the rich eastern provinces raising taxes to repair the damage to state finances caused by Nero’s extravagances. They returned to Rome – first Vespasian, then Titus – to celebrate a joint triumph over the Jews in 71.
    This triumphal procession proclaimed the end of civil war, the supreme power of the Roman state and popular hopes for future happiness; or so we are told by a writer who may well have witnessed the ceremony, the historian Josephus, once himself a rebel Jewish commander, now a turncoat favourite at the Roman court. The two generals, dressed in ceremonial purple costume, travelling in a chariot drawn by white horses, made their way through the streets of Rome. In the procession, the conquering soldiers displayed a selection of their prisoners (apparently Titus had specially chosen the handsome ones) and their booty to cheering crowds: a mass of silver, gold, ivory and precious gems. Large wagons, like floats in a modern carnival, were decorated withhuge pictures of the war: a once prosperous countryside devastated, rebels slaughtered, towns destroyed or on fire, prisoners praying for mercy. And from the Temple of Jerusalem itself there came curtains ripped from the sanctuary (and destined to decorate Vespasian’s palace), a scroll containing the Jewish Law, a solid-gold table and the seven-branched candelabra, the Menorah, whose image still clearly stands out on the triumphal arch in honour of Titus at the east end of the Forum (illustration 6). On the ruined Capitoline hill, the procession halted in front of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. Only after Simon son of Gioras, the defeated Jewish general, had been executed did Vespasian and Titus say prayers and sacrifice; the people cheered and feasted at public expense. Rome’s imperial regime was safely restored.
    The new emperor Vespasian’s first task was to reconstruct the ceremonial centre of Rome, to stamp his own identity on the city and to wipe away the memory of Nero. He rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter and constructed a vast new Temple of ‘Peace’, a celebration of Rome’s military success (‘Pacification’ might be a better title) as much as its civilising mission. The obvious problem, however, was what to do with the most notorious of Nero’s building schemes: his vast palace known as the Golden House, whose parkland had taken over a substantial swathe of the city centre, up to 120 hectares (300 acres) in some modern (and probably exaggerated) estimates. The surviving wing of this architectural extravaganza amounts to some 150 rooms preserved in the foundation of the later Baths of Trajan. These were opened again to the public for a few years in the early 2000s, but are now closed once more because of the dangerous condition of the building (in any case, the famous painted decoration is sadly dilapidated and nothing to compare with what Raphael and his friends saw when they rediscovered the site in the sixteenth century). Originally the Golden House’s highlights were said to have included a state-of-the-art dining room with revolving ceiling, a colossal bronze statue, more than likely representing Nero himself, some 30 metres tall, and a private lake – ‘more like a sea than a lake’, according to Nero’s Roman biographer, Suetonius – surrounded by buildings made to represent cities. Much of the ancient report of this palace is overblown. Recent excavation on the site of the lake, for example, has suggested that far from being ‘more like a sea’, with all the images of wild nature that implies, it was a relatively small, rather formal affair. And there is no good reason to suppose, as was alleged soon after, that Nero had himself started the great fire of Rome in 64, simply in order to get his hands on vacant building land (even if he took advantage of the trail of emptiness and devastation the fire had left in bringing his grandiose schemes to fruition). Nonetheless there seems