The Writing on the Wall: The Intersection of Flavian Literary and Material Culture

The transmission of Tacitus’ text has deprived us of his narrative of Domitian’s principate, which the historian would have handled in the later books of the Histories. Tacitus had first-hand experience of Domitian’s principate, during which his political career excelled: he was both a praetor and quindecimvir sacris faciundis.

In the late 15^th century CE, a gilded bronze statue of Hercules was discovered on the site of the Forum Boarium in Rome, during demolition work under Pope Sixtus IV (1471-81). This statue displays many of the key features associated with the god: the knotted club in his right hand and apples from the garden of the Hesperides in his left. Yet there is another feature that has also attracted attention: the statue’s apparent resemblance to the emperor Domitian.

Construction on Domitian’s Forum Transitorium began at the same time as the emperor, in his capacity as censor, revived Augustus’ Julian laws. Along the entablature of Le Colonnacce (the only two surviving columns projecting from the walls of the Forum), a frieze depicts Minerva and the myth of Arachne, flanked by images of spinning and weaving women: a visual program expressing not just an ideology of reform indebted to and evolving from the ‘moral topography’ of the Augustan principate, but also a powerful warning of the consequences of disobeying authority.

In the years following Nero’s death, authors and leaders alike were intent on advancing a set of images and narratives designed to further tarnish Nero’s memory, even as they laid claim to the purported ideals of Augustus, his dynasty’s founder. Evidence from multiple forms of representation suggests the totalizing and intermedial nature of this project.