Domus: Horti Maecenatis (1)

The residential quarters of the horti of Maecenas, adjacent to the *“Auditorium Maecenatis”, may be identified with the series of rooms discovered under the Cinema Brancaccio on the W side of the *Servian Wall. An Augustan date is suggested by the use of opus reticulatum, and by sculptural finds which included marble column capitals from the Augustan period (Häuber 30 n.61). The (partial) ground-plan is taken from 19th-c. excavation drawings. The S and N parts stood on slightly different axes, but both may be integrated with the orientation of the “Auditorium”. Häuber offers a highly hypothetical interpretation of the domus of Maecenas, based on the coincidence that the Servian Wall was dismantled for a stretch of 150 m SW of the central axis of the “Auditorium”, and that this is exactly half the length of the paupers’ cemetery described by Horace (Sat. 1.8.12): 1000 x 300 Roman feet (300 x 90 m). She then reconstructs a 300 x 90 m rectangular residential area on both sides of the wall with the Auditorium at its center (Häuber 98; Bell, logically, places this rectangular cemetery further E, outside the Servian Wall). Even Häuber tacitly recognizes this rectangle as highly conjectural; it is shown on a small map within the text (Häuber 84 fig. 67) but not on the accompanying large fold-out maps. Of more serious concern is the unstated influence of this theory on Häuber’s dating of the known structures; everything within the rectangle is considered Augustan, everything outside post-Augustan. Some of the structures discovered E of the Servian Wall, which she herself describes as late-antique (Häuber 29 fig. 13, 99), appear on her map 3 as Augustan. The precise dividing line is the rectangle drawn from Horace. These late-antique structures are omitted from our map, as is an apsidal structure and two rectangular structures either within or on axis with the rectangle to the N, near the *“Via Labicana-Praenestina”, for which the original excavation reports give no evidence for an Augustan date (see Häuber 69-70, 78, with map 3). Moreover, the N part of the building under the Cinema Brancaccio is artificially separated from its S part and given a post-Augustan date, again because it does not fit within the rectangle. Yet Gatti has published the original excavation drawings of 1914 which show that both parts of this building include large portions built in opus reticulatum; these remains appear on our map as the core of the domus of Maecenas.