80 MICHAEL DEWAR
seen from ground level. Misjudgements do occur, of course. One
might hypothesize a disagreement between Domitian and the sculptor
or sculptors not unlike the one between Hadrian and Apollodorus of
Damascus over the Temple of Venus and Rome: Apollodorus, we are
told, wanted a tall podium for the temple, to give it proper dignity and
to let it dominate the Via Sacra,^21 but Hadrian opted for a lower po-
dium, which resulted in a squatter appearance generally held to be less
appealing. More germane to our concerns here, however, was Apollo-
dorus’ complaint that the statues of the seated goddesses Venus and
Roma were too big for the cella. “For now,” he said rather cattily, “if
the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.”
(Dio Cassius 69.4.3–5) But there is another consideration to take into
account. The statue would not be seen only from ground level. A view
from the upper galleries of the Julian and Aemilian basilicas is a dif-
ferent matter, and here we may recall how the friezes on the column
of Trajan were surely designed in part to be viewed from the upper
floors of surrounding buildings.
As for the Sol-Colossus of Nero, as Geyssen (1996, 25–6) ac-
knowledges, it is effectively “written into” the poem when Statius
later alludes to the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes (lumina con-
tempto mallet Rhodos aspera Phoebo, Silv. 1.1.104). In any case, it is
not clear that anyone standing by the equestrian statue at ground level
could really have seen anything of the Sol-Colossus: it would surely
have been largely obscured from view by the sizeable facade of the
Temple of the Deified Julius. All this, however, is almost beside the
point. We are not on the Velia, and we are not by the site of the
Domus Aurea. The predecessor with whom Statius presents Domitian
as competing in the Forum Romanum is not Nero, but Julius. The
statue confronts Julius’ temple, and symbolically challenges Julius’
divine status; and moreover, according to Statius, the role of the Julian
basilica, the largest Julio-Claudian building in the Forum, is more or
less merely to guard Domitian’s statue:
at laterum passus hinc Iulia tecta tuentur
(Si lv. 1.1.28)
But your spreading flanks are guarded, on one side by the Julian build-
ing21 “and he was surely right” is the comment of Ward-Perkins 1981, 123.