THE FIRE OF 80 CUT RIGHT ACROSS THE CITY'S MONUMENTAL CENTER FROM the Palatine Hill westward to the heart of the Campus Martius. The omission of secondary neighborhoods from admittedly sketchy surviving accounts may be merely prejudicial, but we can at least allow that Nero's residential building regulations did some good. Still, the list of high-value architectural casualties is long (Fig. 55). Titus had barely begun repairs before his death in September 81. The city's refashioning would belong to Domitian.

Domitian set about not just repairing or replacing, but augmenting. His architect, Rabirius, devised an entirely new scheme for the residential core of the palace on the southern and eastern Palatine, though we have no evidence that the fire touched this area. In its baroque intricacy and fecundity of volumetric ideas, with its banquet halls, baths, sunken gardens, and elaborate engagement with the Circus Maximus below, the palace became the new beacon of the Roman architectural revolution, outshining the fast-disappearing Domus Aurea (Fig. 56). Obsessively and redundantly, Domitian built monuments to his family: the temple of Vespasian and Titus and the Arch of Titus on the Forum; the Temple of the Flavian Family at his own birthplace on the Quirinal; and the Porticus Divorum, a large enclosure in the Campus Martius on the traditional site where the census was taken and soldiers were conscribed, again honoring his deified father and brother. Following long-standing custom, he was fond of anchoring memorials to events in the urban landscape.

If these dynastic monuments convey insecurity and megalomania in equal measure, Domitian can at least be excused for scrupulously appeasing the gods whose temples had been ravaged in Rome during his lifetime. In the city he dedicated another series of fixtures anchored in the landscape: “altars of the Fire of Nero,” which had been vowed after 64 but never built. The inscription of one altar obliquely chastises Nero's negligence, implying that the fires of 69 and 80 resulted from his impiety. The emperor lavished special attention on Jupiter, whose temple – the Capitolium – had suffered from both calamities.