The Palace of the Emperor Titus was completed in 81 AD by the architect Rabirius.[footnoteRef:2] Located on the greater part of Esquiline Hill, the Baths of Titus (named the Palace of Titus by Pliny) extended from the “based of the Esquiline Hill near the Coliseum to one of its summits at the Church of SS. Martino e Silvestro, and to another at S. Pietro in Vincoli.”[footnoteRef:3] It is believed that the Palace was built rather quickly by converting an existing structure into the Baths.[footnoteRef:4] The Palace used the house of Mecenas and the Golden House of Nero which had come across from Palatine Hill as part of the construction that existed to make the Palace. There were “nine long corridors, converging together like the radii of the segment of a circle, divided from each other by dead walls, covered at the top and closed at the end” according to one 19th century visitor of the Palace’s ruins.[footnoteRef:5] The Palace was used a baths house but its ornate style and size prompted Pliny to call it a Palace. Suetonius mentions that the Palace was quickly built to coincide with the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre.[footnoteRef:6] The Palace also housed murals by Fabulus. [2: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Caesarum Tit.6.1.3; Spivey, Nigel, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude. Berkely, Univeristy of California Press, 2001, 26; Darwall-Smith, Robin Haydon. Emperors and Architecture: A Study of Flavian Rome. Brussels: Latomus Revue D'Etudes Latines, 1996; The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. XI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.] [3: Parker, John William, “Some Account of the City of Rome, Part VII,”...

73; Pliny, The Natural History, John Bostock, ed., chapter 4.4.] [4: Sear, Frank, Roman Architecture, Cornell University Press, 1983, 145.] [5: Parker, 74.] [6: Suetonius, Divus Titus, Alexander Thomson, ed., Tit. 7.]
The Palace was destroyed in the 16th century long after being restored by Hadrian in 238 AD. The marble materials and other building parts were reused by architects of the Renaissance for building Christian churches. The Church of Gesu and the fountain of the Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican, for example, each ended up with the some of the ancient materials used to construct the Palace.[footnoteRef:7] [7: Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, Little Brown & Company, 1854, 323.]

Titus used myth and symbolism to control his subjects by communicating stories that had moral elements that his subjects could apply to their own lives. For example, the Palace of Titus housed the Laocoon statue which depicts the story of Laocoon, a priest from Troy, who was killed along with his sons when they tried to show that the Greeks’ Trojan Horse was a trick by piercing the horse with a spear. They were attacked by snakes, and that is what is depicted in the statue. Throughout history, snakes have represented evil (such as in the Book of Genesis, in which Satan takes the form of a snake to seduce Eve). Here, the snakes represent the evil intent of the Trojan priest in his effort to thwart the will of the Gods. For that, snakes punish the priest by attacking him. The moral of this story is that punishment for offending the gods and goddesses would be delivered to any who dared to challenge them, as…