Two _fora_, an amphitheater, an arch, a sculptured relief, a palace, a stadium: these may stand as typical of archaeology’s contributions to our knowledge of the Flavian age. As in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the buildings and the sculpture epitomize the atmosphere of the time, the last three decades of the first century A.D. After the excesses of Nero and the bloodbath of A.D. 69--a year of civil war which saw three Emperors in succession, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, raised to the purple and then murdered--the Roman people wanted “normalcy.” Under Vespasian and Titus they got it; under Domitian the pendulum swung again--and so did the headsman’s ax. Flavian architecture and art sum up, too, the personalities of the Emperors. The bluff, no-nonsense Vespasian, the Emperor of reconstruction, symbolized, in his majestic Forum of Peace, what one of his staff called the “immense majesty” of the peace he had brought to a war-torn world, and Vespasian gave credit, in the frieze of the _Forum Transitorium_, to the artisan class which was his ardent supporter. Again, true to his _bourgeois_ origins, he built for the people, over the pool of Nero’s Golden House, the great amphitheater which posterity was to call the Coliseum. Titus summed up the great moment of his short life when he immortalized his capture of Jerusalem on his arch at the top of the old Forum. Domitian, would-be _triumphator_, would-be rival of his great predecessors, exalted, in the reliefs recently found under the Cancelleria palace in Rome, the military prowess of the dynasty which in his view culminated in himself. He took over Vespasian’s _Forum Transitorium_, to thrust himself into a class with Augustus and his own father; reared on the Palatine a palace to outdo the Golden House; and, with philhellenism genuine or affected, built in the Campus Martius a stadium for footraces in the Greek fashion. [Illustration: FIG. 9.1 Rome, Forum of Peace, Colini and Gatti reconstruction from _Forma Urbis_. (G. Lugli, _Roma antica_, Pl. 6)] * * * * * Since very little of Vespasian’s Forum of Peace remains above ground, recourse for information about it must be had in the first instance to literature. Pliny the Elder, who was on Vespasian’s staff, described it as one of the most beautiful squares in the world, embellished as it was with trophies of war, including the famous seven-branched gold candlestick from the temple in Jerusalem, carved in relief on the Arch of Titus. A fragment of the previously-mentioned Marble Plan of Rome, the _Forma Urbis_, inscribed with the letters CIS (Fig. 9.1), is easily restored to something like [Forum Pa] CIS, Forum of Peace. It shows a portico, on one side walled, on the other colonnaded, the colonnade approached by steps. An open space is incised with a series of three long indented strips, apparently representing formal garden-plots. The fragment also shows one right angle of a structure which should be an altar.