In no other matter did he act more wastefully than in building a house that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill, which he originally named ‘Transitoria’ [House of Passages], but when soon afterwards it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt he called it ‘Aurea’ [Golden House]. It was a house whose size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate: its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the emperor himself stood there; it was so spacious that it had a mile-long triple portico; also there was a pool of water like a sea, that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance of cities; and besides that, various rural tracts of land with vineyards, cornfields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every kind of animal both wild and domesticated. In other parts of the house, everything was covered in gold and adorned with jewels and mother-of-pearl; dining rooms with fretted ceilings whose ivory panels could be turned so that flowers or perfumes from pipes were sprinkled down from above; the main hall of the dining rooms was round, and it would turn constantly day and night like the Heavens; there were baths, flowing with seawater and with the sulphur springs of the Albula; when he dedicated this house, that had been completed in this manner,
Suetonius,
he approved of it only so much as to say that he could finally begin to live like a human being.
The Lives of the Caesars: Nero 31
Visitors to Rome taking selfies next to the Colosseum are often unaware they are standing where once there was a large man-made lake and a marvellous garden, overlooked by a magnificent pillared pavilion, whose gilded decoration shone in the sunlight. This was the sumptuous private retreat of Emperor Nero (r. AD 54-68): the fabled Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House’, sprawling over the Oppian Hill.
A huge bronze statue of the emperor towered over the site: the very name of the Colosseum derives from this amazing landmark. The statue later disappeared, but the palace did not. It was, however, forgotten: regarded by Nero’s successors as a symbol of the emperor’s decadence, it was intentionally buried under a huge mound of earth. Within a decade of Nero’s death, in AD 68, it had been stripped of its luxurious marble furnishings and of all of its moveable treasures. The 1st century AD structures were then filled with layers of soil and levelled to serve as the substructure for the grand baths of Emperor Titus (r. AD 79-81) and those of Emperor Trajan (r. AD 98-117) in a deliberate attempt to obliterate not only the former emperor’s memory, but also all traces of the Domus Aurea, and to return to public use land that Nero had claimed as his own.
