The ancient port of Rome at Ostia had, in legend, been founded by Ancus Martius, the fourth of Rome’s seven semi-legendary kings. However winds magnified by its position and the exposed nature of the mouth of the river proved particularly treacherous, and in the mid first century Claudius established a new and complementary port at Portus, four kilometres (two and a half miles or so) to the north.

Some six decades after Claudius’ port had been begun, a vast hexagonal basin was created slightly inland. This extension was intended to deal both with increased volume in the traffic of goods, and with the significant deposits from the accumulation of sand and mud from the mouth of the Tiber. Trajan’s harbour at Portus is quite simply one of the most extraordinary engineering feats of the Roman world.

Useful sites of places mentioned:

Portus Project

Museum of the Ships at Fiumicino

Harbours of Claudius and Trajan: opening hours and visiting information

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Last time I spoke of Domitian who came to a Sticky End. After Domitian’s death his successor, Nerva, inaugurated the Forum Transitorium built largely during Domitian’s reign and bearing traces of his fondness for Minerva. More than a “forum” as such, it is a sort of monumentalisation of the Forum end of the Argiletum, a street running between the grubby, noisy alleys of the Subura and the civic heart of the city. Today remnants survive by my petrol pump of choice. All photos taken this week.

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In September this year the structures long referred to as the Domus Tiberiana reopened to the public for the first time since 1970. They once formed a spectacular facade overlooking the Roman Forum, straddling an existing Roman road, and in fact dating not to the reign of Tiberius (as was believed when it was given the name, which stuck) but instead to the reigns of Nero, Domitian, and Hadrian. It’s a fabulously intriguing space, and offers a coherent and exciting connexion between the Palatine Hill and the Forum. It’s also great in my line of work offering another route through the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo; after all rule number one in tour guide school is never retrace your steps.

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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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Last time I spoke of the Flavian Amphitheatre, subsequently and more commonly known as the Colosseum in this free episode. The Flavian Amphitheatre was begun by the Emperor Vespasian and sponsored by the treasures looted during the Sack of Jerusalem by his son Titus. Soon after he oversaw the inauguration of the Amphitheatre as emperor of Rome, Titus died. Eleven years had passed since he had sacked Jerusalem, destroying its Temple, as general. After his death and deification a posthumous triumphal arch was erected in his honour, a monument which still has a profound resonance in Jewish culture.

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The Flavian Amphitheatre is undoubtedly one of the most famous buildings in the world, and an extraordinary manifestation of the control exercised by the Roman Empire over the citizenry. As Juvenal spat with disdain:

“…for the [Roman] People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” (Satires, Satire X)

If grain imported from Egypt and Sicily kept Roman bellies from rumbling, then public entertainments gave Roman souls a state of jingoistic superiority whilst reminding them at every turn of the power of the Empire. The Flavian Amphitheatre, better known as the Colosseum, was a wildly cynical machine for maintaining a docile population through horrific violence. It was also an incredibly efficient structure for getting people in and out quickly and without the brawls that could see revolution lurking at every turn. As a building for managing large numbers of people it worked so well that it remains the prototype of every sports stadium you’ve ever been to.

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This is more an illustrated podcast (or a narrated selection of photographs) because there were just too many good images to choose from.

In his life of Nero Suetonius tells us:

“There was nothing however in which [Nero] was more ruinously prodigal than in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage [Domus Transitoria], but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House [Domus Aurea].”

The vast palace complex of the Domus Aurea was the work, according to Pliny, of the architects Severus and Celer and made use of land cleared by the great fire of 64 CE (the one in which Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned). It occupied all or part of three of the seven hills of Rome.

Trajan subsequently obliterated all memory of Nero, and used the pavilion on the Colle Oppio as ready-made foundations for his new public bath complex.

In the late fifteenth century artists began to explore the “grottoes” below the Baths of Trajan, and emulate the decorations they found. The results can be found all over Italy, but also from Mexico to London and most places in between.

To visit the Domus Aurea one joins an internally organised tour. Presently open Fri-Sun, information and booking here.

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The closest point of the Aurelian Wall to my apartment is also one of my absolute favourite parts. It is the Porta Maggiore, literally “the great gate” which is, in fact a misleading name. In fact the Porta Maggiore predates the walls by over two centuries: it was never intended to be a gate at all. It is instead a triumphal arch of Roman engineering, built to straddle two of the ancient consular roads, the vie Labicana (now Casilina) and Prenestina.

Even after twenty-three years in Rome this remains, to my English eyes, an improbable and grubbily exotic tangle of ancient and modern. Tram-tracks and traffic knot themselves around and through aqueducts, a grand tomb, and ancient fortifications with an inescapable Roman insouciance that I still find so relentlessly appealing.

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The third of Rome’s emperors was Caligula: famously “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Among the many extravagances of his short but indubitably extravagant reign were the floating palaces he had built on Lake Nemi, a crater of the quiescent volcanoes to the south-east of Rome.

A project to raise these ships was first mooted in the fifteenth century, and was finally completed in the twentieth century barely a decade before the ships were destroyed in their museum during the Second World War.

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The Ara Pacis is arguably the finest surviving visual representation of the multiple iconographic motifs employed by Augustus to express his political programme of reconciliation and rebirth after the decades of civil war which had plagued Rome. It is an extraordinary monument, profoundly modern but inextricably rooted in the archaic: an expression in stone of the multi-faceted and wildly sophisticated propagandistic programme which characterises Augustus’ forty year reign, and would echo for centuries after his death.

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