The Aventine Temple and Imperial Favour

Domitian's devotion to Minerva produced his last major building project, a temple to the goddess set within a new forum built to connect the older Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Peace, a narrow, elongated space later called the Forum Transitorium because it mainly served as a passage between them. Domitian did not live to see it finished; he was assassinated in 96 CE, and it was his successor Nerva, whose own reign was brief and troubled, who completed and dedicated the temple, giving the forum his own name even though its design and purpose belonged to the emperor he replaced.

The temple itself was demolished centuries later, its columns and marble stripped for other buildings, and only one fragment of its colonnade, a section of wall still known as the Colonnacce, survives above ground in modern Rome, decorated with relief carvings that include scenes of Minerva presiding over women's household crafts such as spinning and weaving. That the most visible physical trace of Domitian's personal devotion to the goddess is now a single ruined wall says something about how thoroughly later Roman opinion, hostile to Domitian's memory, allowed his building projects to decay once his dynasty had fallen.