TEMPLE OF APOLLO
There is much conflict over the exact position of the buildings on the Palatine that predate Domitian as he almost obliterated the area to make room for his own palace between 81 and 92AD most sources express this difficulty. For the benefit of this web site we have used this model from Claridge .
The dotted line marks out the path our characters take.
To read the comments Platner and Ashby make on the conflicts click here.
Two other major sources Zanker and Favro appear to contradict themselves over the actual layout on the Palatine in the Augustan period. Thus highlighting further the difficulties identifying the exact positions of the buildings.
The description of the Temple used in the story is largely based on the following elegy:
“His new temple he has opened is stunning: that brilliant golden pavilion he promised Apollo is built on the Palatine hill with a grand promenade with a row of columns of yellowish marble between which the statues of Danus’ fifty daughters. And then at the end, there’s Phoebus, resplendent----- his lyre is mute and his parted lips produce no music, but the god himself cannot be more impressive or handsome. Milling around his alter are cattle the sculptor Myron carved, you’d swear that they might at any moment chew the cud or moo, they seem so lifelike. The shrine at the centre is marble of purest white from Carrara, and Pheobus cannot prefer his Ortygian home to what Caesar has given him here in Rome. On the pediment in rich detail is the sun’s chariot, blazing. On the doors of African ivory one of the carvings depicts the Gauls defeat at Parnassus. The other portrays Niobe’s death and her children’s. And between his mother and sister, the Pythian god himself strums as he sings.” Propertius II. 31