Flavian Palace

Underfoot, the ground is uneven. Old brick shows through the grass in low, broken lines, like the outline of a floor plan drawn in clay. Pine trees cast long shadows across the top of the Palatine Hill. Somewhere below, traffic hums around the Circus Maximus. Up here, though, it is quieter. Swallows cut across the open sky, and the air smells of dry earth and warm stone. You are standing inside the rooms where Roman emperors once received the world.

This is the Flavian Palace, often called by its Latin name, the Domus Flavia. It was the public, ceremonial half of a vast imperial residence. The emperor Domitian built it in the late first century, near the end of the Flavian dynasty. That family also gave Rome the Colosseum. Domitian wanted something grander than anything before him. Here, on the hill where legend says Romulus founded the city, he built it.

Here is a fact many visitors miss. The English word palace comes from this hill. Palatium was the Latin name for the Palatine. Because emperors lived here for centuries, the name of the hill became the word for any royal home. Every palace in Europe, from Versailles to Buckingham, carries the name of the ground you are standing on. When you say the word, you are pointing back to this hilltop.

The Roman poet Martial names the architect as Rabirius. Little else is known about him. His work, however, shows a bold mind. The Palatine originally had two separate summits with a dip between them. Rabirius and his builders filled that dip and levelled the ground. They buried older houses beneath new foundations, including parts of earlier imperial buildings. In some areas, archaeologists have reached those lower layers, so the hill holds several palaces stacked one on another.

The Domus Flavia was designed for display. Visitors entered a sequence of enormous halls. The largest was the Aula Regia, the throne room. Here, Domitian sat in state, receiving senators, ambassadors and petitioners. The walls rose very high, faced with coloured marble from across the empire. Niches held statues carved from dark stone. Today you see only the lower walls and the outline of the floor. Try to picture the roof far above you, and a crowd waiting in silence.

Beside the throne room stood smaller spaces with their own roles. One is usually identified as a basilica, where the emperor may have heard legal cases. Another small room is often called the lararium, a shrine for household gods. Scholars still debate the exact purpose of some of these rooms. That uncertainty is honest. The ruins give us shapes and walls, but they do not always tell us what happened inside them.

At the centre of the palace lay a wide courtyard, a peristyle, ringed by columns. In its middle you can still see the base of a large octagonal fountain. Its low walls form a pattern that looks almost like a maze. Water once filled the channels and reflected the sky. Imagine the sound of it running, cool against the heat of a Roman summer, while courtiers walked slowly under the shade of the colonnade.

Now comes one of the strangest stories from this place. The historian Suetonius wrote that Domitian grew afraid of assassination. He had the walls of his walkways lined with a polished, translucent stone called phengite. The surface worked like a mirror. As he walked, he could watch for anyone moving behind him. His fear was not wrong. In the year 96, Domitian was killed in a palace plot. With his death, the Flavian dynasty came to an end.

Beyond the courtyard was the great dining hall, often called the Cenatio Iovis, the dining room of Jupiter. The name suggests how Domitian saw himself. Here he hosted banquets for important guests. Look for the remains of raised floors supported on small brick pillars. This was a hypocaust, a Roman heating system. Hot air flowed under the floor and warmed the room in winter. Fragments of the original patterned marble floor survive here too.

On either side of the dining hall were ornamental fountains, called nymphaea. Guests reclining at dinner could look out at falling water through tall openings. The court poet Statius wrote admiring verses about Domitian's dining hall. He compared the feast to dining among the gods. Poets flattered emperors, of course. Still, the scale of these foundations suggests the praise was not entirely invented.

The Domus Flavia was only one part of the whole. Next to it, and lower down, lies the Domus Augustana, the emperor's private residence. Further along is a long sunken garden shaped like a racetrack, known as the Stadium of Domitian. Together these buildings covered much of the hill. Later emperors added to them and repaired them. For centuries, the complex remained the centre of imperial power.

After Rome's power faded, the palace slowly fell into ruin. Its marble was stripped and reused, and its columns were carried away. Earth and plants covered the rooms. Much later, wealthy Roman families built gardens on the hill, and serious excavation followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What you see today is the result of that long process of loss and recovery. The bare brick you see was once hidden behind marble.

Take a moment before you leave. Stand near the edge of the courtyard and look at the brick. Notice how thin and regular the bricks are, and the lines of mortar between them. Listen to the wind in the pines and the distant voices from the Forum below. Emperors once walked these same paths, watching their own reflections for danger. Today, the hill belongs to the swallows and to you. As you walk on, look down. The floor plan of an empire is still under your feet.