Arch of Nero

The Arcus Neronis, erected on the Capitoline Hill sometime between 58 and 62 AD, has left no physical trace. The arch is known from two brief notices in Tacitus and from a series of bronze sestertii struck in Rome and at the Lugdunum mint in the mid-60s AD — coins whose reverses preserve, in miniature, the only image we have of a monument that once stood at the symbolic center of Roman power. It is a striking situation: one of the most prominent honorary arches of the Julio-Claudian period exists today exclusively as numismatic evidence.

The arch commemorated Roman victories in Armenia, where Rome and Parthia had been contesting influence for decades. The general responsible for those victories was Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo — he rebuilt a demoralized Syrian army, campaigned deep into Armenian territory, and sacked the ancient capital Artaxata. It was Corbulo who eventually brought the Parthian prince Tiridates to the negotiating table, a process that ended in 66 AD with Tiridates traveling to Rome to receive his crown from Nero’s hands in person. The emperor had not left Italy. Tacitus records in Book XIII that the Senate responded to the Armenian victories by voting Nero statues, successive consulships, public thanksgivings, and an arch. Under the system established by Augustus, military glory belonged institutionally to the emperor: a general could be rewarded with the decorations of a triumph, but the monuments that followed accrued to the emperor in whose name the war was fought. The arch was Nero’s because the victory was legally his. The same chapters give Corbulo some of the most admiring prose in the Annals: a general who drilled his men through bitter Armenian winters, led from the front, and imposed discipline on an army that had grown soft in peacetime garrisons.

Its location on the Capitoline was not incidental. The hill was the symbolic apex of Roman civic and religious life, home to the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the endpoint of triumphal processions. The specific site — described in ancient sources as inter duos lucos, between two sacred groves — was the hollow between the hill’s two summits, where Romulus was said to have established an asylum to attract settlers to the newly founded city. To put an honorary arch here was to insert a claim into the oldest and most charged landscape in Rome.

The coins are what make the arch recoverable at all. The Harvard Art Museums’ specimen shows the reverse in fine detail: a single-bayed arch surmounted by a quadriga at the center, Nero standing in the chariot and escorted by Victory on one side and Pax on the other, two soldiers below, and a figure of Mars in a niche on the arch’s flank.

After Nero’s death in 68 AD the arch vanishes from the record entirely. No later writer mentions it; no medieval traveler reported remains. The most plausible explanation is deliberate destruction. Nero died having been declared an enemy of the state by the Senate, and the erasure of his monuments — portraits smashed, names struck from inscriptions — was swift and thorough. An arch in his honor on the Capitoline Hill would have been an early and obvious target.

FURTHER READING

1. Kleiner, Fred S. The Arch of Nero in Rome: A Study of the Roman Honorary Arch before and under Nero. G. Bretschneider, 1985.
2. Richardson, L., Jr. A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. [Source: Johns Hopkins University Press]
3. HILL, PHILIP V. “Buildings and Monuments of Rome As Coin Types, AD 14-69.” The Numismatic Chronicle (1966-), vol. 143, 1983, pp. 81–94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42665169. Accessed 18 July 2026.
4. Vervaet, Frederik Juliaan. “DOMITIUS CORBULO AND THE SENATORIAL OPPOSITION TO THE REIGN OF NERO.” Ancient Society, vol. 32, 2002, pp. 135–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44034959. Accessed 18 July 2026.