When visiting the ruins of the imperial palaces on the bucolic and ever-glorious Palatine Hill—possibly my favourite place in the world—today much of what we see is the complex as it was rebuilt by Domitian. He was terrified of being murdered by a conspiracy, and that was exactly what happened, amid the halls and fountain courtyards once gleaming with materials quarried and mined across the Empire.

In this episode I quote both Suetonius and Statius. The translations I’ve used are respectively Rolfe, Loeb, 1914, and Slater, Clarendon Press, 1908.

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