The most controversial room of all is the apsidal number 80, decorated with scenes from the Trojan war: Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, Thetis bringing Achilles his shield. Nero was fascinated by the Trojan War: it was an epic of his own composition on the fall of Troy that he recited as Rome was burning. What was in the apse? Equivocal Renaissance reports place the finding of the Vatican Laocoön somewhere in this area, the apse is of a size to fit the statue, and the subject is appropriate to a room full of Trojan motifs. The statue’s baroque quality would have appealed strongly to Nero’s taste. This is the circumstantial evidence for room 80 as the findspot of one of the most notorious statues of antiquity. That this survey of the Julio-Claudian age should approach its end, as it began, with mention of the Laocoön, suggests how conventional was the repertory of Roman taste. [Illustration: FIG. 7.13 Rome, Golden House, reconstruction drawing of whole area. (_Fototeca_)] [Illustration: FIG. 7.14 Rome, the Neronian Sacra Via. (E. B. Van Deman, _Mem. Am. Ac. Rome_, 5 [1925])] But a description of the rooms of the Golden House is not quite the whole story. In 1954 the Dutch archaeologist C. C. Van Essen published the results of careful probing in the whole section of Rome for half a mile around the Coliseum, where he found traces of Nero’s palace in a number of places on the perimeter. For the Golden House was much more than the complex of rooms just described. It was a gigantic system (Fig. 7.13) of parks, with lawns, groves, pastures, a zoo. Over its central pool later rose the great bulk of the Coliseum. Within these grounds, twice the extent of Vatican City, was a great Versailles in the midst of the teeming metropolis. The eighty-odd rooms we have been describing made up but one of several palaces in the grounds. And an American, Miss E. B. Van Deman, working from some very unlikely-looking architectural blocks piled beside the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the old Forum, was able in 1925 to restore on paper (Fig. 7.14) the monumental approach, over 350 feet wide, to the palace grounds from the old Forum and Palatine. It was a mile long, with arcades of luxury shops, and eight rows of pillars. Its plan is concealed today under mounds of dumped earth between the Hall of the Vestals and the Arch of Titus. Beside it rose a colossal statue of Nero, 120 feet tall, now marked by a pattern in the pavement. When Hadrian desired to remove the statue to make room for his Temple of Venus and Rome, it took twenty-four elephants to do the job. But decades before, his predecessors the Flavians had done what they could, with the Baths of Titus and the Flavian Amphitheater (the proper name of the Coliseum) to erase the memory of Nero’s monstrous extravagance, and turn his palace grounds to public use. * * * * *