THE EQUINE CUCKOO 71
That is, the god’s four faces more or less looked out on four Fora, the
Roman Forum, those of Augustus and Caesar, and the Forum Transi-
torum itself, and in gratitude for his splendid new home he is asked to
keep his gates permanently closed, thereby guaranteeing (what else?)
eternal peace under the rule of the Flavians. The theme of peace again
emerges strongly in the description of the sedes of the new shrine
which we find in the poetry of Martial’s contemporary Statius:^8
Ianus ... quem tu uicina Pace ligatum
omnia iussisti componere bella nouique
in leges iurare fori.
(Silv. 4.1.13–5)
Janus ... whom, with his neighbour Peace to bind him, you have bidden
to lay all wars to rest and swear to obey the laws of the new Forum.The two Flavian buildings in the Forum Romanum itself, however,
belong to opposite ends of Domitian’s reign, the temple to the begin-
ning, the new Curia to A.D. 94. This activity may be interpreted as a
kind of attempt to claim for the dynasty as much as possible of the
north and west sides of the Forum, just as the Julio-Claudians had
essentially claimed as their territory pretty much the whole of the
south and much of the east sides.
Even so, there was a space that had not yet been built over, namely
the open space itself, what we might call the Forum Square. And there
was something that came between the building of the temple of
Vespasian and the reconstruction of the Senate House, something that,
as a consequence of the damnatio memoriae to which Domitian was
subjected after his assassination, has left very little trace in the ar-
chaeological record. We know about it partly from its image on a coin
that can be dated to about A.D. 95,^9 but by far our main source for
information about it is the poem that Statius wrote to celebrate its
dedication, a poem that takes first place in his published collection of
occasional poetry, the Silvae. That something is, of course, the Ecus
Maximus Domitiani Imperatoris.
8 For a full discussion see Coleman 1988, 69–71.
9 The coin in question, a sestertius (BMC 476+), is usually dated to A.D. 95/96. It
depicts a cloaked man on a horse, with his right hand lifted up and the horse's hoof
resting on a head. “It is even possible to glimpse the statuette of Minerva under mag-
nification. Therefore this must be the Equus Domitiani.” (Darwall-Smith 1996, 228–
29, with fig. 29). For further discussion see Geyssen 1996, 23–4 and Thomas 2004,
28, n. 34.