ABSTRACT
By the mid-to-late first century AD, however, it is clear that abundant wealth was indeed an essential part of the dominant culture, and an even more essential force in visual display, as evidenced by the biographers of the Julio-Claudians. The specific kinds of material objects described in the Silvae are ones that appear in Domitian’s Palatine palace and, significantly, in the villas of private citizens whose backgrounds range from patrician to servile. In many cases Domitian’s endorsement of certain objects endows them with cultural value, sanctions them as symbols of taste and fashion, and thereby legitimizes them. The author divided the types of material wealth into three major categories, consisting of Residential, Personal, and Funerary; he have further subdivided these categories to express the range and variety of material goods represented in the poems with the hope of making this categorization as all-inclusive as possible.
