Why Nero’s Lavish Golden House Was So Controversial

When a devastating fire tore through Rome in A.D. July 64, it destroyed more than two-thirds of the city, including substantial portions of Nero’s palace complex, the Domus Transitoria. But amid the ruins, Nero, perhaps the most infamous Roman emperor, saw an opportunity.

He exploited the newly cleared landscape to build the most ambitious palace complex Rome had ever seen: the Domus Aurea, or Golden House. It would become known as one of antiquity’s most notorious monuments to imperial excess.

Modern estimates suggest Nero’s sprawling new estate spanned 100 to 400 acres—up to nearly four times the size of Vatican City. According to historian Suetonius, the complex had buildings that resembled cities, alongside tracts of fields, vineyards and woods surrounding a pond “like a sea.” A triple colonnade stretched for a mile and an enormous vestibule housed a 120-foot-tall statue of the emperor.

Interiors glittered with gold, precious stones and mother-of-pearl, while dining room ceilings showered guests with flowers and perfume. Most spectacular of all, Suetonius claimed the palace’s circular main banquet hall revolved continuously, “like the heavens.”

About a decade after Nero’s death, the Roman poet Martial recalled the Golden House in scathing terms. “Hatefully gleamed the palace of a savage king,” he wrote, “and but a single house now stood in all the City.”

It’s clear ancient writers condemned the palace, but was the Golden House really as widely hated as the surviving accounts suggest?

Fueling hostility toward the Golden House was the suspicion that Nero had engineered the Great Fire to clear the way for his new estate. Tacitus, a historian writing several decades later, even recorded a rumor that as flames engulfed the city, Nero took to his private stage and sang about the destruction of Troy—an account that would eventually evolve into the famous legend that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Suetonius went further, claiming that several former consuls, among Rome’s highest-ranking senators, found Nero’s servants on their estates carrying kindling and torches.

But Anthony Barrett, author of Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty, argues that the emperor was unlikely to have started the fire. He was some 35 miles away at Antium when the fire began, while Suetonius’ torchbearers, Barrett suggests, might simply have been burning buildings to create firebreaks that could slow the flames.

The footprint of the Golden House actually began well before the fire and even Nero’s reign. “Over roughly three generations, the imperial house had expanded from a fairly small sector on the south side of the Palatine Hill [a prestigious residential district favored by Rome’s elite] to encompass the entire hill and its slopes,” says Rabun Taylor, a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process.

Much of that earlier expansion had occurred legally, sometimes through political favors or gifts. However, Taylor says, “Nero took things to an entirely different and dangerous level.” After several years of relatively stable rule, he grew increasingly grandiose and erratic, targeting wealthy landowners with treason charges. “Naturally, this resulted in confiscation of their properties,” Taylor explains.

By around A.D. 60, Nero had amassed extensive holdings across the city and started to build his first palace, the Domus Transitoria, which stretched from the Palatine toward the Caelian, Oppian and Esquiline hills. The project generated enormous resentment, Taylor says, though it seems to have been largely confined to the aristocracy.

The Great Fire, however, radically transformed Nero’s ambitions. While Suetonius described the Golden House as a “restoration” (restitutam) of the Domus Transitoria, Barrett argues that in reality it “represented a radically new project,” whose extraordinary scope was only made possible by the fire.

In its aftermath, Nero bought properties formerly occupied by members of Rome’s elite and absorbed them into his enormous new estate. Archaeological excavations in areas incorporated into the Golden House have uncovered luxurious homes damaged by the fire, then demolished and leveled for Neronian construction. 

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in the fire’s aftermath Nero suffered what Barrett calls an “irreparable breach” with Rome’s powerful elite.

“Nero’s fiercest enemies were the senatorial elite, and that bias is reflected in the historical literature of the time, which was written by and for elites,” Taylor says. Yet their hostility was not shared by the broader population. “By and large, Nero was genuinely popular among ordinary Romans,” Taylor adds.

There were reasons for Nero’s popular appeal. He funded major building projects, reduced some taxes and made a cash distribution of 400 sesterces to each member of the Roman populace—equivalent to roughly five months’ pay for an ordinary legionary. After the Great Fire, he also opened his gardens to the homeless, erected temporary shelters, brought in emergency food supplies and lowered the price of grain.

The Golden House, itself, might also have contributed to Nero’s popular appeal. Although “we don’t have perfect confirmation,” Taylor says there is little doubt that Nero opened parts of the estate to the public. He points to its enormous vestibule and colossal statue, which were likely intended to be seen by the public. “Probably some of his huge hoards of artworks, many looted from Greece, were in publicly accessible galleries, too,” he says.

Yet what might have made the Golden House popular with ordinary Romans likely made it especially galling to the elite. Nathan Elkins, deputy director of the American Numismatic Society and author of A Monument to Dynasty and Death: The Story of Rome’s Colosseum and the Emperors Who Built It, explains that wealthy Romans traditionally provided lavish gardens for public enjoyment on the city’s outskirts.

The Golden House brought that tradition “into the heart of the city,” Elkins says. “The senatorial class enjoyed special access to the emperor, and this populist move by Nero inverted the social order.”

The Flavian emperors who succeeded Nero resolved this tension by repurposing large sections of the estate for public use while, as Elkins puts it, “reasserting the traditional Roman social order.” Most famously, they built the Colosseum over Nero’s artificial lake. Its entertainments “could be enjoyed by all Romans,” but its seating remained “rigidly hierarchical,” with privileged places for senators over plebeians, he explains.

“The Flavian emperors dismantled Nero’s palace complex to erode Nero’s mark on the city and to make it their own,” Elkins says. “The message was one of legitimacy, as the new dynasty sought to associate themselves with earlier ‘good’ emperors such as Augustus and Claudius.”

“The less developed parts of the Golden House that could be returned to former owners probably were returned, while other parts were overbuilt with prominent public buildings,” Taylor adds. That process continued under Trajan, who built his enormous baths complex over the surviving rooms on the Oppian Hill, using the palace’s walls and vaults as foundations, effectively burying them.

“These were moral statements in their own right,” Taylor says, that showed Nero’s successors were turning his private property “back over to the public and making that property useful in a very tangible way.”

Ironically, burying part of the Golden House helped preserve some of its spectacular artwork. In the late 15th century, explorers discovered its long-buried rooms, their ceilings still covered in ancient frescoes.

Artists including Raphael and Giovanni da Udine ventured underground to study the fantastical combinations of foliage, animals and mythological figures. The style became known as grotesque decoration—a name derived from the grotte, or “grottoes,” that the buried rooms resembled. Raphael famously adapted the style for the Vatican’s great Loggia and its 13 vaulted bays.