the triumphant reception of the first Flavian to the explosion of hate which damned the memory, by altering the face, of the last. And these slabs, the expression of a despot’s pride, end leaning against the simple tomb of a lieutenant of Julius Caesar who died fighting, he would have said, to save for his fatherland its free institutions. * * * * * In A.D. 86 Domitian set about continuing the work begun by Vespasian on the narrow Forum between the Forum of Peace and that of Augustus, which we have had occasion to mention earlier. (The final dedication was not to occur until Nerva’s reign.) In effect this Forum was an ingenious device to monumentalize the street which led from the old Republican Forum to the unsavory Subura district and workers’ quarter to the north. Caesar’s Forum was Venus’ precinct; Augustus’ belonged to Mars. A convention had been established, a canonical way of doing things: hence Vespasian dedicated his larger Forum to Peace, the _Forum Transitorium_ to Minerva. Domitian, his devotion to Minerva already established by his having given her prominence on the Cancelleria relief, now remodelled Vespasian’s temple to her, raising it on a high podium. The podium alone remains, with its relieving arch marking where the Cloaca Maxima or great sewer passed below. But the original monumentalizing of the street by Vespasian had involved building a colonnade, of a type common in the frescoes of the Pompeian Third and Fourth Styles. Along its architrave, which was richly decorated on its under side, ran a continuous frieze whose technique resembles that of the Cancelleria relief on a small scale, for the art of the Flavian reigns is recognizably related. The dentils in the cornice show between them the characteristic “spectacles-signature” of the architect Rabirius, who may have worked for Vespasian as well as for Domitian. The surviving section of the frieze portrays Minerva among the nine Muses, and the punishment of Arachne, who for presuming to rival Minerva’s skill at weaving was turned into a spider. The sculptor took the occasion to carve artisans (the figure of a fuller survives) and household scenes, of spinning, weaving, and dyeing, all under Minerva’s special patronage. One sees the wool basket, the upright loom, the scales for weighing the day’s stint, the proud display of a finished roll of cloth. In the attic above the surviving section of the frieze stands the goddess in relief, wearing the characteristic cloak of a Roman general!