Arch of Dolabellae Et Silani (Arch of Dolabella and Silanus)

On the Caelian Hill, at the top of the ancient street known as the Clivus Scauri, stands one of Rome’s least visited and most layered monuments. The Arch of Dolabella and Silanus is a single-bay travertine arch, modest in scale — four metres wide, just over six and a half metres high — and undecorated except for two plain cornices and an inscription on its eastern attic face. That inscription, CIL VI 1384, records that the consuls Publius Cornelius Dolabella and Gaius Iunius Silanus built it by senatorial decree in A.D. 10. Built, however, most probably means rebuilt: the arch almost certainly replaced a gate that had stood on this spot since the fourth century B.C., and the new travertine structure was raised on Republican foundations.

The Servian Wall, Rome’s Republican-era circuit of defensive fortifications, enclosed the city with a series of gates keyed to the roads leading in and out. On the Caelian Hill, the relevant gate was the Porta Caelimontana, through which the Via Caelimontana entered the city and continued downhill as the Clivus Scauri. By the Augustan period the wall had long since lost its military function — Rome had expanded far beyond it — but the gates retained their topographical and ceremonial significance. The archaeologist Antonio Maria Colini, whose 1944 study of the Caelian remains the foundational work on the hill’s archaeology, observed that blocks of Grotta Oscura tufa, the volcanic stone characteristic of the Servian Wall, were embedded in the northern pier of the arch. Colini’s conclusion that in A.D. 10 Dolabella and Silanus replaced the Porta Caelimontana with a new travertine structure on the same alignment, is now widely accepted.

The arch thus belongs to a broader pattern of Augustan-era investment in Rome’s Republican infrastructure. A parallel monument, the Arcus Lentuli et Crispini, was built in A.D. 2 with an almost identical inscription and formula, and scholars including Filippo Coarelli have suggested that the two arches were part of a coordinated programme of renovating the Servian Gates along the stretch from the Tiber to the Caelian. Whether this reflects genuine civic concern for Rome’s ancient fabric, or a more deliberate effort by Augustus to associate his reign with the city’s Republican past, is a question the evidence does not settle.

The arch’s subsequent history adds further complexity. Under Nero, it was incorporated into the infrastructure of the Aqua Claudia, the aqueduct that supplied the imperial palace on the Palatine. The massive arcades of Nero’s branch line still march up the Caelian today, and the Arch of Dolabella and Silanus — originally a gate, then a consular monument — became part of Rome’s hydraulic network, its function transformed entirely. The structure visible today carries this layered history in its fabric: Republican tufa in the piers, Augustan travertine in the arch, and the ghost of Neronian water engineering above.

It stands now on a quiet residential street, unpublicised and largely unvisited, which is part of what makes it worth seeking out. Few monuments in Rome compress so much history into so small a space.

FURTHER READING

1. Colini, Antonio Maria, and Pontificia accademia romana di archeologia. Storia e topografia del Celio nell’antichità, con rilievi, piante e ricostruzioni, di Italo Gismondi. Tip. poliglotta vaticana, 1944.
2. Richardson, Lawrence. A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome. JHU Press, 1992.
3.  COARELLI, FILIPPO, et al. “CAELIAN.” Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide, 1st ed., University of California Press, 2014, pp. 213–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt5vk043.12. Accessed 17 July 2026.