Talk:Palatine House

The account by Suetonius

If needed, I included below the specific passage where C. Suetonius Tranquillus explains the birthplace of Augustus, extracted from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, published in the Loeb Classical Library, 1913 (the text of which is in the public domain). --Pichote 23:08, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

(5) Augustus was born just before sunrise on the ninth day before the Kalends of Octobera in the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius, at the Ox-Heads in the Palatine quarter, where he now has a shrine, built shortly after his death. For it is recorded in the proceedings of the senate, that when Gaius Laetorius, a young man of patrician family, was pleading for a milder punishment for adultery because of his youth and position, he further urged upon the senators that he was the possessor and as it were the warden of the spot which the deified Augustus first touched at his birth, begged that he be pardoned for the sake of what might be called his own special god. Whereupon it was decreed that that part of his house should be consecrated.

(6) A small room like a pantry is shown to this day as the emperor's nursery in his grandfather's country-house near Velitrae, and the opinion prevails in the neighbourhood that he was actually born there. No one ventures to enter this room except of necessity and after purification, since there is a conviction of long-standing that those who approach it without ceremony are seized with shuddering and terror; and what is more, this has recently been shown to be true. For when a new owner, either by chance or to test the matter, went to bed in that room, it came to pass that, after a very few hours of the night, he was thrown out by a sudden mysterious force, and was found bedclothes and all half-dead before the door.

Devil's Advocate

On the other hand, how many hundreds of old townhouses might there be on the Palatine? I'm thinking it would be tough to conclude that this particular one was Augustus's birthplace. It would be like some archaeologists in 3006 digging through Park Avenue trying to find where Teddy Roosevelt was born. -- Cranston Lamont 21:15, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

It sounds like a flimsy attempt to get into the headlines to me. Chicheley 01:14, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Maybe if you were only digging in that area and had no other historical resources to point you in the right direction, then it might be impossible. However, in neither this case nor your example would that be true. — BRIAN0918 • 2006-07-22 06:27

Some further details (from the release?) are posted at PhDiva: Dorothy King's archaeology blog. I was unable to open the link at The Ministero di Beni Culturali. --Wetman 06:21, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Merge

There was no discussion where it should be, so whoever's monitoring this: I agree, there is not much on the "House" but a repetition of Palatine Hill#Excavations and some assumptions. Plus, the discussion on the palace would be lost in such a remote article. Panella's remark is rather unnecessary, the Italian link I am indifferent about, leaving five lines addition to the main article on the excavations on Palatine Hill --Flammingo^Parliament 14:48, 15 November 2006 (UTC)