Recent excavation has added little to earlier knowledge of this Forum, but it is of absorbing interest for what it adds to our portrait of the Flavians. Domitian takes over his father’s plan, and pushingly insinuates himself, as it were, between his father and the Empire’s founder, both of whom he envied and tried to emulate. But it was beyond even his effrontery to associate himself with the Minerva who was patroness of artisans; nothing could be more incongruous than his connecting his elegant dilettantism with the homely arts of the household. The frieze is probably a part of Vespasian’s plan: its theme suits his plain personality, and the references to handicrafts suit its location on a street leading to a worker’s quarter. The support of the workers (and of their wives, whose influence was all the more important to win because it was indirect) was worth having, and meanwhile Minerva’s connection with the Muses (the creative arts and literature) could be turned by Domitian to his purpose: he desired to be known as a patron of the arts. * * * * * The showiest surviving result of Domitian’s patronage of the art of architecture is his palace on the Palatine, planned by the famous Rabirius, and finished perhaps in A.D. 92. Here is a return, after the comparative austerity of his father’s and brother’s reigns, to the baroque extravagance of Nero. Since no final publication of this important complex has ever appeared, the best archaeology can do is to comment on the palace as reflecting Domitian’s personality, as indebted to earlier, and seminal of later Roman architecture. Its throne room (21B on the plan, Fig. 9.12), with its colossal niches for statues, was built for an Emperor with delusions of divinity. The dining room (H) had a dais to elevate the god-Emperor above his guests, but the peristyle (D), originally faced with marbles polished like mirrors (to reflect possible assassins), was planned by a terrified mortal who feared stabs in the back. (Blocks from the peristyle cornice show, as in the _Forum Transitorium_, Rabirius’ “spectacles-signature.”) The restless inward and outward curves of the rooms at 21E in the west block (the public part) of the palace, and at 23C and D in the eastern private quarters, were made possible by the flexibility of poured concrete, which, as we saw in Chapter V, makes it possible to enclose space in any shape (see reconstruction, Fig. 9.13). This fluidity appealed to Hadrian, the most gifted amateur architect among the Emperors, and he imitated it, as we shall see, in his Villa near Tivoli. [Illustration: FIG. 9.12 Rome, Palatine, Palace of Domitian, plan. (G. Lugli, _Roma antica_, Pl. 8)] [Illustration: FIG. 9.13 Rome, Palatine, Palace of Domitian, reconstruction. (F. Castagnoli, _Roma antica_, Pl. 44.1)]