Equestrian Statue of Domitian

Domitian fought the Chatti, a Germanic people living east of the middle Rhine, in 83, took the title Germanicus, and claimed further successes along the Rhine and Danube in the years that followed. In 91 a colossal bronze equestrian statue of him went up at the center of the Roman Forum, on the open square beside the Lacus Curtius, turned toward the Temple of Divus Julius at the eastern end.

Almost everything known about its appearance comes from a poem. Statius devoted the opening piece of his Silvae to it, and the poem seems to have been written for the dedication. He describes a monument large enough to dominate the buildings around it, with the horse’s raised hoof set over a head representing the conquered Rhine, and the emperor holding a figure of Minerva. A coin of 95 or 96 shows a horse and rider matching the description closely enough to confirm the poem was working from the object. Statius closes by promising the statue will last as long as the earth, the sky, and the light of Rome.

It lasted five years. Domitian was assassinated in September 96, the Senate voted his memory condemned, and his images across the empire were pulled down, melted, or recut. The Forum statue was destroyed and its foundation buried beneath the pavement. Trajan later put up a building over part of the site.

One equestrian Domitian does survive. In 1968 excavators at Misenum, the naval base on the Bay of Naples, found a bronze statue of the emperor in military dress on a charging horse, set up in the shrine of the priests of the imperial cult. After 96 the face was cut away along its contour and replaced with a portrait of Nerva, leaving everything from the ears backward as Domitian’s own. It is the only surviving bronze imperial portrait known to have been altered because of a condemnation. It has been suggested that the Augustales of Misenum chose the equestrian type because news of the Forum monument had reached them.

In 1903 excavation in the middle of the square uncovered a large concrete mass cutting into the main cuniculus and one of its cross-passages, part of a network of corridors beneath the Forum floor, which places the concrete in the Flavian period. Three travertine blocks were set into its top, each pierced by a socket sized to anchor a support. Sealed inside the eastern end were clay jars holding sand, stone, pitch, and tortoise shell, one with a chip of gold-bearing quartz. The pottery matched the early burial ground near the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and the finds were read as a prehistoric grave struck during construction and reburied rather than disturbed.

Whether that mass carried Domitian’s horse is disputed. Later excavation argued the associated pavement level points to a date between Caesar and Augustus, and a rectangle of blocks beside it has been proposed instead, on the grounds that it leaves the passages below intact.

FURTHER READING

1. Newlands, Carole E. Statius’ Silvae and the poetics of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
2. Varner, Eric. Mutilation and Transformation. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 01 Jun. 2004. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047404705 Web.
3. Flower, Harriet I. The art of forgetting: Disgrace and oblivion in Roman political culture. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2011.
4. Thomas, Michael L. “(Re)Locating Domitian’s Horse of Glory: The ‘Equus Domitiani’ and Flavian Urban Design.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 49, 2004, pp. 21–46. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4238816. Accessed 1 Aug. 2026.