78 MICHAEL DEWAR
But your spreading flanks are guarded, on one side by the Julian build-
ing and on the other by the palace of warlike Paullus. The back your fa-
ther beholds, and Concord with her tranquil face.That is, the Temples of Concordia and Vespasian are behind it, to the
west. It follows of course that the statue faced east, beyond the Roman
Forum towards the Upper Via Sacra and to the very spaces that the
Flavians had left their mark upon so firmly. But above all, to turn to
the third point, that of size, the statue was, Statius assures us, abso-
lutely vast:
quae superimposito moles geminata colosso
stat Latium complexa forum?
(Silv. 1.1.1–2)
What is this mass that stands there, redoubled by the colossal figure
placed upon it, and embraces the Latian Forum?Geyssen doubts this. He suggests hyperbole has gone further here
even than elsewhere in Statius’ work, and that the statue was in prac-
tice rather more modest in size. He pays particular attention to the
absence of any explicit reference by way of comparison to the other
colossal statue in the general area, namely the colossus of Nero, its
head replaced by one of Sol, which stood over on the Velia, close to
the former vestibule of the Domus Aurea. Indeed:
while a colossal equestrian statue might have presented an imposing
figure of the emperor, its effect would have been diminished as the
horse would have overpowered its surroundings and obscured its rider
except from a distance.
(Geyssen 1996, 24)These arguments are not wholly convincing. In the absence of both
remains of the actual statue and knowledge of its exact site, it is pre-
cisely Statius’ claim and its plausibility that remain our surest guide.
Here the most striking consideration is the fact that Statius goes out of
his way to highlight the question of the statue’s size. Whether the
poem’s transmitted titulus (Ecus Maximus Domitiani Imperatoris) is
Statius’ own name for it remains moot,^19 but in any case the phrase
merely repeats his own characterization of the statue from the preface
to Book One of the Silvae, where he tells the dedicatee Stella about
19 On the question of the authenticity of the tituli see Coleman 1988, xxviii–xxxii,
and Nauta 2002a, 269–72.