74 MICHAEL DEWAR
long warfare quell ... the wickedness of civil strife”). Indeed, had
Domitian been in Julius’ shoes, there would have been no civil war: te
signa ferente / et minor in leges gener et Cato Caesaris irent (Silv.
1.1.27–8: “ If only it had been you bore the standard, his son-in-law,
less Great than once he was, and Cato would have submitted to the
lawful rule of Caesar”)—thus implying that the emperor who infa-
mously demanded that he be addressed as dominus et deus is in fact
enough of a republican at heart to satisfy not just Caesar’s rival for
dominatio, Pompey, but even the arch tyrant-hater Cato himself.
If the equestrian statue of Domitian represents a continuation of the
dominant Flavian ideology of peace and civil harmony—of, at one
and the same time, victory in Germany and the maintenance of peace
in Rome herself—then it can also be interpreted as an attempt to make
that ideological claim more emphatically and with more panache than
had been hitherto attempted. It did so by virtue of its locale, its size,
and its direction. More than that, it expressed a will to dominate and to
appropriate. Not everyone would agree. Consider this quotation from
John W. Geyssen’s stimulating and sensitive study of the poem, the
most comprehensive to date:
The Statue was part of a triad of Flavian monuments, completed under
Domitian, in the area of the Forum. At the northwest end of the Forum
and partially hidden by the Temple of Saturn stood the temple to Divus
Vespasianus ... At the opposite end, at Summa Sacra Via, Domitian had
erected the Arch of Titus, dedicated to Divus Titus. Although it is with-
out the statuary that originally crowned it, its restored height of fifty-
one feet [c. 17 metres] suggests that it would have been highly visible
from the Forum, competing with the Colossus of Nero, which stood
nearby. Given the monuments dedicated to his father and brother with
which Domitian framed the Forum, the statue, presented by the Senate
and people, was a modest tribute to himself.
(Geyssen 1996, 27)“Domitian” and “modest” are not words you normally see or hear in
the same sentence, not, at any rate, unless there is a negative hovering
around to do the necessary qualifying. And it is in this one matter
Geyssen’s consistently perceptive analysis needs some modification.
Everything that Statius’ poem tells us about the statue of Domitian on
his horse implies that it was intended to dominate its setting: locale,
direction, and size all argue for this.
Consider first the question of locale. As we have seen, although the
sides of the Forum Square left little room for the Flavians to build,