But much more important to us today are two building, two buildings. The first, a bath. And the second, a forum that are examples of the devotion that Trajan had to public architecture during his reign. And I show you a view here. In fact, a plan of the so-called Baths of Trajan in Rome that were dedicated in AD 109, as you can see from the monument list. We know the architect in this particular case, it is Apollodorus of Damascus. And his name says a lot about him. Apollodorus from, from Damascus, modern Syria. So it's very interesting. We have an emperor from Spain and an architect from Syria, who work together. This is a sign that things are beginning to change in the Roman empire as the Romans, as Trajan extends those borders even further. It brings in an even more multifaceted, multifaceted civilizations around the world and talent begins to pour into Rome from all of those places. Appolodorus of Damascus, as we'll see today was an extraordinary architect, right up there with Severus and Celer and with Rabirius, in fact, one could argue even the equal of Rabirius. And what's particularly interesting is that, that Apollodorus of Damascus, like Severus and Celer before him, appears to have been, above all, a great engineer. He actually accompanied Trajan on Trajan's military campaigns, and served as Trajan's military architect. So his first commissions were building bridges. I'm going to show you reference to one today. Building bridges or building forts and camps on Trajan's military campaigns, and then using that expertise, ingratiating himself with the emperor who sees that he is enormously talented, because Trajan was on the, Trajan participated in these campaigns himself. Seeing how talented he was and then putting him in charge of his building projects in Rome, which is really quite interesting. And so, these projects are not only aesthetically pleasing and fascinating, but also show extraordinary engineering skill on the part of the major designer, namely Apollodorus of Damascus. Now these Baths of Trajan are very interesting in all kinds of ways. You can already see by looking at the plan, their location. They are located on the Esquiline Hill and part of the Oppian Hill, which I don't think I've mentioned before. O-p-p-i-a-n, the smaller Oppian Hill. And the Baths of Titus that, well, let me, let me remind you first that the the Domus Aurea of Nero was built in part on the Esquiline Hill. And you'll recall the so called Esquiline Wing, which is the one wing of Nero's Domus Aurea that is still preserved underground. You'll recall that after Nero's damnatio memoriae and the coming to power of the Flavian Dynasty, that Vespasian and Titus and even Domitian, built their, razed to the ground Nero's buildings, Vespasian did that, and then he and Titus and Domitian built new buildings on top of those and chose to make those buildings the kind of public buildings that the citizenry as a whole would enjoy, from the Colosseum and ampitheater to the Baths of Titus. And you see again the Baths of Titus here, located right again on top of this area that originally belonged to Nero's Domus Aurea. Trajan follows suit. He not only is interested in public architecture, like Vespasian and Titus before him, but he follows their lead in building these buildings on top of earlier structures now destroyed of Nero, so it's again the same message giving back to the people the land that Nero had taken illegally from Rome during his reign. The Baths of Trajan are based in large part on the plan of the Baths of Titus. With some editions, but you can see the extraordinary difference in scale. The Baths of Titus were not small and yet the Baths of Trajan are at least three, if not four or more, times the size of the Baths of Titus. So this tells us something again about the grandiosity of the vision. Of Trajan, about the the funds that he had at his disposal. And he got those funds, in large part, because of all these military victories, in which he took all kinds of spoils and booty, which he used to fund his building campaigns in Rome. And it also tells us something about his ambitions. Now, I don't want you to get the impression that we never had big buildings before. You can think back way to the beginning of the semester, when we talked about Julius Caesar and his architecture and his bragging that he had built a, or, one of the authors of that period tells us that Julius Caesar had built a temple to Mars, the biggest in the world. So in its own day, it was supposedly the biggest in the world. But we're getting even more ambitious vis-a-vis scale, and I think perhaps again I'm psychoanalyzing Trajan too much, but I think the fact that this is a man who had the ambitions that he did, to extend the Empire to its furthest reaches, seems to go, seems to be in keeping with the kind of man who would want to make the buildings in Rome, that he built, a kind of microcosm of that hugely expanded empire. With regard to the plan of the baths, you will see that it follows the so-called Imperial Bath type that was initiated by the Baths of Titus, at least with regard to baths that are still preserved. I mentioned to you, when we talked about the Baths of Titus, there may have been an earlier Bath of Nero. That actually followed this same imperial bath form. We're not absolutely sure about its plan. That is, the Neronian baths existed, but we're not absolutely sure about their plan. But if we look back at the baths of Titus, you'll remember that what made them distinctive and what made them differ from the earlier Stabian baths or forum baths at Pompeii was the way in which they placed the bathing block in the center, rather than to the side. That they arranged the main rooms, the, the, the tepidarium, the frigadarium, and the caldaria in this case in axial relationship to one another, and then all the other rooms of the bath were displayed around those in a symmetrical way. So axiality and symmetry reigned supreme. And then otherwise, we saw here the rest of the precinct with an elaborate entrance way over here. We see roughly the same in the Baths of Trajan, in that again, the bathing block is located right at the center of the structure and the main rooms are aligned with one, one another axially. If you look up to the, where it says Baths of Trajan, that at the northern end is the entrance into the baths. You enter from there into N which is an natatio or swimming pool, a piscina. And you can see that is surrounded by columns. On axis with the swimming pool, is the frigidarium at F and you can see just like that on the Baths of Titus, it is a groin vaulted room. A triple groin vaulted room as you can see by the three x's over the rectangular area. It has a kind of an, an, an apse or exedra at the uppermost part through which one comes from the natatio into the frigidarium, and you can see that is screened by columns. Then from there, into the fairly simple rectangularly shaped tepidarium, that serves more as a kind of passageway from the frigidarium into C, which of course, is the caldarium, or the warmest room, the sauna of the baths, that also has a rectangular shape but with these radiating alcoves, radiating alcoves that we're going to see are screened by columns. And they are of course facing the southern end where the sun is and that would of course help to heat the caldarium, as well. And then what we see, what we see though with regard to the Baths of Trajan, that make them differ from the Baths of Titus and a part of this evolution of imperial bath architecture in Rome is the fact that the bathing block is placed in this very large rectangular precinct and this large rectangular precinct has a series of rooms around it, as you can see. Real rooms, and rooms that take all kinds of shapes, many of them are, these, a, hemicycle-type shapes, screened, by col-, from, with columns from the larger, en-, central space, but some of them also look like the tabernae that we've become used to in plan. We see all of those there, and these were used as far as we can determine, as meeting halls, lecture halls, Greek and Latin libraries. So this is, this extension of the bath from being just a place where you went to get to you know, for wellness, essentially. To to bathe and to relax and to have social interaction with your friends. They are adding an intellectual element to the bath building so that you can also go there if you want to read. If you want to to go to the library, read Greek books, read Latin books, go to lectures, go to seminars, have conversations, intellectual conversations. Are also beginning to happen here. So the bath becomes even more of a mecca for people who are interested in intellectual life as well as bathing and social life, which is a very important development culturally for the, the Romans. Note here also this great hemicycle down here, which is part of the bath building. A hemicycle that had seats on it. Which probably served for performances of whatever kind, that would have taken place here. So that's another interesting addition to the bathing scene and should remind you of the kind of hemicycles that we saw for example in the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palastrina or the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli where, where they also had those performance areas. So bringing in some of those elements from sanctuary design into bath design in the Baths of Trajan in Rome. The Baths of Trajan some parts of them still exist, but scattered. And in fact, they are located now in a kind of, of pleasant garden area. As you can see here. This is a Google Earth view that shows you their proximity to the Colosseum. We see the edge of the Colosseum over here. So the Esquiline Hill in large part. And you can just barely make out here, if you look, you see this curved wall down here. That curved wall is in fact that hemi cycle with the, where the theatrical performances that I showed you just before and that is actually the entrance for anyone going to Rome over break, that's actually the entrance to the Domus Aurea if it's opened. It periodically closes sometimes if things are falling down, but if it's open that's how one gets there. And over here you can actually see this is the, I may have shown this to you before, but this is actually the oculus of the oc, octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea. You can see it if you wander through this park, you can see it from above with a grate on top of it as well as down below if you visit the palace itself. And then up here, you can see another just right up above my finger, you can see another curved wall and there's another one somewhere down here, that are part of those those, those curved rooms. Those hemicylce shaped rooms [LAUGH] that are, that are these lecture halls and meeting halls and so on. So and actually that one, the one that's up here. Actually has niches in the wall with shelves which indicates to us that that was used as one of the libraries. The scrolls would have been placed on those shelves and then have cupboards in front of them. So one can see remains, it's made out of concrete faced with brick. One can see remains on the top of that hill. But a model over here gives you a better sense of what it looked like in antiquity we're again looking at that large hemicycle that served with it's seats, served four performances here, we're looking at the outer precinct wall, we can see this semi domes of some of the hemicycle's here. And we can also see the bathing block at the uppermost part, the entranceway. The courtyard surrounded by columns, which is where the pool, or natatio, was located. The covered area here was the frigidarium. Then the tepidarium. The caldarium is here. And here you can see those radiating alcoves. With columns that open them up for vistas and the like, as well as to the warmth of the sun. So, an incredible bathing establishment, and one that has taken us a step further in the evolution of imperial bath architecture in Rome. And will serve as the major model for the two most famous and much better preserved baths in Rome. And that is the Baths of Caracalla, and Baths of Diocletian, which we'll look at later in the semester.
