ABSTRACT
Nobody praised Vespasian – unlike Nero, and unlike his ambitious sons, especially the poet Domitian – for being an intellectual, though he was well read, had a good memory, and could make a point if he were teased. Born in ad 9, he had been brought up on Augustan art and literature of the golden age and on the architecture that had gone with it, and he and his sons knew what the re-monumentalized city of Rome – Palatine, Capitol, Quirinal, Fora, Temple of Claudius, Baths of Titus, and the Roman elite that thronged them – demanded. The building that survives most conspicuously, the Flavian Amphitheatre, was perhaps the one that meant most to all three Flavian emperors, beyond even the Temple of Peace. In the amphitheatre, the Princeps was both protagonist and ideal spectator, its arena called by E. Gunderson ‘a social organ of sight’.1
