EQUUS DOMITIANI
a bronze equestrian statue of Domitian erected in the
forum in 91 A.D. in honour of his campaign in Germany. Statius
devotes one poem (Silv. i. I) to a description and celebration of this
statue. It stood on the concrete base discovered in 1903 near the
centre of the forum (
CR 1904, 139, 328-329;
BC 1904, 75-82, 174-178;
Mitt. 1905, 71-72; Atti 574-577; HC 141-144; DR 479-482). This
base is 11.80 metres long and 5.90 wide, and its top is 1.50 metres below
the level of the latest pavement. The mass cuts into the main cuniculus
and one of the cross-passages, and dates from the Flavian period. In the
top of the base are set three square blocks of travertine, in which are
holes about 0.44 metre square and 0.15 deep, which seem well adapted
to hold supports of some kind. In the east end of the base was a hollow
block of travertine (over which was placed another block as a lid), containing clay jars, in which were sand, stone, pitch, and fragments of
tortoise shell, and in one of them a small piece of quartz with a bit of
gold attached, but nothing suggestive of funeral gifts. There seems to
be little doubt that, as Hulsen thinks, the workmen who sunk the
foundations for the statue came on a prehistoric tomb (for the pottery is
identical with that of the necropolis near the temple of Antoninus and
Faustina) and that, inasmuch as its true nature was unknown, the pottery
was regarded as highly venerable and enclosed in the base of the statue.
So also Von Duhn, Italische
Graberkunde i. 417; and cf.
BUSTA
GALLICA, DOLIOLA.
The statue itself was undoubtedly destroyed in consequence of
the damnatio decreed by the senate after the death of Domitian, and its
base concealed under the pavement of the forum. Over part of it
Trajan afterwards erected a building (not the imperial tribunal) (
BPW
1906, 221 ;
CR 1906, 132, where Boni's misinterpretation of Plin. Panegyr.
36 is discussed). It has been thought that the so-called Trajanic reliefs
(generally, and rightly, attributed to the Rostra) are really Flavian,
and once decorated the enclosure wall round this statue (SScR 142).
