10. Death, however, intervened; which was a far greater loss to the world than to Titus himself. At the close of the Games he wept publicly; and then set off for Sabine territory in a gloomy mood because a victim had escaped when he was about to sacrifice it, and because thunder had sounded from a clear sky. He collapsed with fever at the first posting station, and on his way home in a litter, is said to have drawn back the curtains, gazed up at the sky, and complained bitterly that life was being undeservedly taken from him—since only a single sin lay on his conscience. It was difficult to guess what he meant; and though this enigmatic remark has been taken as referring to incest with Domitian’s wife, Domitia, she herself solemnly denied the allegation. Had the charge been true she would surely never have made any such denial but boasted of it—as she did of all her other misdeeds?108
11. Titus died at the age of forty-two, in the same country house where Vespasian had also died. It was 1 September, 81 A.D., and he had reigned two years, two months, and twenty days. When the news spread, the common people went into mourning as though they had suffered a personal loss. Senators hurried to the House without waiting for an official summons, and before the doors had been opened, and at once began speaking of him with greater thankfulness and praise than they had ever used while he was among them. Their official eulogies were couched in the same vein.
XII
DOMITIAN
On 24 October, 51 A.D., a month before Vespasian, as Consul-elect, was due to take office, his son Domitian was born in Pomegranate Street, which formed part of the sixth district of Rome. Later, he converted his birthplace into the Temple of the Flavians. Most people agree that Domitian spent a poverty-stricken and rather degraded youth: without even any silver on the family table. At all events, it is an established fact that Claudius Pollio, an ex-praetor, and the target of Nero’s satire The One-eyed Man, used to show his guests a letter in Domitian’s handwriting, which he happened to have kept, offering him an assignation. It is also often insisted that Domitian was enjoyed by his eventual successor, the Emperor Nerva.
During Vespasian’s war against Vitellius, Domitian with his uncle Sabinus and some members of the Court, fled to the Capitol; but when the Vitellians set the temple on fire,109 Domitian concealed himself all night in the caretaker’s quarters and, at daybreak, disguised as a devotee of Isis, took refuge among the priests of that rather questionable order. Presently he managed to escape with a friend across the Tiber, where the mother of one of his fellow-students hid him so cleverly that she outwitted the agents who tracked him to her house and searched it from cellar to attic. Emerging after Vitellius’s death, Domitian was hailed as ‘Caesar’ and accepted an appointment as City praetor with consular powers—but in name only, because he left all judicial decisions to a junior colleague. However, the lawlessness with which he exploited his position as the Emperor’s son clearly showed what might be expected of him later. I shall not discuss this subject in any detail; suffice it to say that Domitian had affairs with several married women, and finally persuaded Domitia Longina to divorce her husband Aelius Lamia for his sake; and that once, when he had distributed more than twenty appointments at home and abroad in the course of a single day, Vespasian murmured: ‘I wonder he did not name my successor while he was about it!’
2. To acquire a military reputation that would compare favourably with his brother Titus’s, Domitian planned a quite unnecessary expedition into Gaul and Germany from which, by luck, his father’s friends managed to dissuade him. He earned a reprimand for this and was made to feel a little more conscious of his youth and unimportance by being put under Vespasian’s tutelage. Whenever Vespasian and Titus now appeared seated in their curule chairs, he had to be content with following behind in a litter; and, while taking part in their Judaean triumph, rode on a white horse, the conventional mount for young princes on such occasions. Of the six consulships enjoyed by Domitian before becoming Emperor, only one was not an honorary appointment, and that came his way because Titus had resigned in his favour.
Domitian pretended to be extremely modest, and though he displayed a sudden devotion to poetry, which he would read aloud in public, his enthusiasm was matched by a later neglect of the art. It is to his credit, however, that he did everything possible to get sent against the Alanians when a request for auxiliary troops, commanded by one of Vespasian’s sons, arrived from Vologaesus, king of the Parthians. And he subsequently tried by bribes and promises to coax similar requests from other Oriental kings.
At Vespasian’s death Domitian toyed for awhile with the idea of offering his troops twice as large a bounty as Titus had given them; and stated bluntly that his father’s will must have been tampered with, since it originally assigned him a half-share in the Empire. He never once stopped plotting, secretly or openly, against his brother. When Titus fell suddenly and dangerously ill, Domitian told the attendants to presume his death by leaving the sick-bed before he had actually breathed his last; and afterwards granted him no recognition at all, beyond approving his deification. In fact, he often slighted Titus’s memory by the use of ambiguous terms in speeches and edicts.
3. At the beginning of his reign Domitian would spend hours alone every day catching flies—believe it or not!—and stabbing them with a needle-sharp pen. Once, on being asked whether anyone was closeted with the Emperor, Vivius Crispus answered wittily: ‘No, not even a fly.’ Domitia presented Domitian with a daughter during his second consulship and, in the following year, with a son, and was therefore awarded the title of ‘Augusta’; but he then divorced her because she had fallen in love with Paris, the actor. This separation, however, proved to be more than Domitian could bear; and he very soon took her back, claiming that such was the people’s wish. For a while he governed in an uneven fashion: that is to say, his vices were at first balanced by his virtues. Later, he transformed his virtues into vices too—for I am inclined to believe that he was not evil-minded to begin with: it was lack of funds that made him greedy, and fear of assassination that made him cruel.
4. Domitian presented many extravagant entertainments in the Colosseum and the Circus. Besides the usual two-horse chariot races he staged a couple of battles, one for infantry, the other for cavalry; a sea-fight in the Colosseum; wild-beast hunts; gladiatorial shows by torchlight in which women as well as men took part. Nor did he ever forget the Quaestorian Games which he had revived; and allowed the people to demand a combat between two pairs of gladiators from his own troop, whom he would bring on last in their gorgeous Court livery. Throughout every gladiatorial show Domitian would chat, sometimes in very serious tones, with a little boy who had a grotesquely small head and always stood at his knee dressed in red. Once he was heard to ask the child: ‘Can you guess why I have just appointed Mettius Rufus Prefect of Egypt?’ A lake was dug at his orders close to the Tiber, surrounded with seats, and used for almost full-scale naval battles, which he watched even in heavy rain.
He also held Saecular Games, fixing their date by Augustus’s old reckoning, and ignoring Claudius’s more recent celebration of them; and for the Circus racing, which formed part of the festivities, reduced the number of laps from seven to five, so that 100 races a day could be run off. In honour of Capitoline Juppiter he founded a festival of music, horsemanship, and gymnastics, to be held every five years, and awarded far more prizes than is customary nowadays. The festival included Latin and Greek public-speaking contests, competitions for choral singing to the lyre and for lyre-playing alone, besides the usual solo singing to lyre accompaniment; he even instituted foot races for girls in the Stadium. When presiding at these functions he wore buskins, a purple Greek robe, and a gold crown engraved with the images of Juppiter, Juno, and Minerva; and at his side sat the Priest of Capitoline Juppiter and the Priest of the Deified Flavians, wearing the same costume as he did, except for crowns decorated with his image. Domitian also celebrated the annual five-day festival of Minerva at his Alban villa, and founded in her honour a college of priests, whos
e task it was to supply officers, chosen by lot, for producing lavish wild-beast hunts and stage plays, and sponsoring competitions in rhetoric and poetry.
On three occasions Domitian distributed a popular bounty of three gold pieces a head; and once, to celebrate the Feast of the Seven Hills, gave a splendid banquet, picnic fashion, with large hampers of food for senators and knights, and smaller ones for the commons; taking the inaugural bite himself. The day after, he scattered all kinds of gifts to be scrambled for, but since most of these fell in the seats occupied by the commons, had 500 tokens thrown into those reserved for senators, and another 500 into those reserved for knights.
5. He restored a good many gutted ruins, including the Capitol, which had burned down again in the year 80 A.D. but allowed no names to be inscribed on them, except his own—not even the original builder’s. He also raised a temple to Juppiter the Guardian on the Capitoline Hill, the Forum of Nerva (as it is now called), the Flavian Temple, a stadium, a concert hall, and the artificial lake for sea battles—its stones later served to rebuild the two sides of the Great Circus which had been damaged by fire.
6. Some of Domitian’s campaigns, the Chattian one, for instance, were quite unjustified by military necessity; but not so that against the Sarmatians, who had massacred a legion and killed its commander.110 And when the Dacians defeated first the ex-Consul Oppius Sabinus, and then his successor, a former Commander of the Guards named Cornelius Fuscus,111 Domitian led two punitive expeditions in person. After several indecisive engagements he celebrated a double triumph over the Chattians and Dacians; but did not insist on recognition for his Sarmatian campaign, contenting himself with the offer of a laurel crown to Capitoline Juppiter.
Only an amazing stroke of luck checked the rebellion which Lucius Antonius raised during Domitian’s absence from Rome; the Rhine thawed in the nick of time, preventing the German barbarians in Antonius’s pay from crossing the ice to join him, and the troops who remained loyal were able to disarm the rebels. Even before news of this success arrived, Domitian had wind of it from portents: on the critical day, a huge eagle embraced his statue at Rome with its wings, screeching triumphantly; and a little later, rumours of Antonius’s death came so thick and fast that a number of people claimed to have seen his head being carried into Rome.
7. Domitian made a number of social innovations: cancelled the corn issue, restored the custom of holding formal dinners, added two new teams of chariot drivers, the Golds and the Purples, to the existing four in the Circus—namely, Blues, Whites, Leek-greens, and Reds; and forbade actors to appear on the public stage, though still allowing them to perform in private. Castration was now strictly prohibited, and the price of eunuchs remaining in slave-dealers’ hands officially controlled. One year, when a bumper vintage followed a poor grain harvest, Domitian concluded that the cornlands were being neglected in favour of the vineyards. He therefore issued an edict that forbade the further planting of vines in Italy, and ordered the acreage in the provinces to be reduced by at least half, if it could not be got rid of altogether; yet took no steps to implement this edict. He reserved half of the more important Court appointments, hitherto held by freedmen, for knights. Another of his edicts forbade any two legions to share a camp, or any individual soldier to deposit at headquarters a sum in excess of ten gold pieces; because the large amount of soldiers’ savings laid up in the joint winter headquarters of the two legions on the Rhine had provided Lucius Antonius with the necessary funds for launching his rebellion. Domitian also raised the legionaries’ pay from nine to twelve gold pieces a year.
8. He was most conscientious in dispensing justice, and convened many extraordinary legal sessions in the Forum; annulling every decision of the Centumviral Court which seemed to him unduly influenced, and continually warning the Board of Arbitration not to grant any fraudulent claims for freedom. It was his ruling that if a juryman were proved to have taken bribes, all his colleagues must be penalized as well as himself. He personally urged the tribunes of the people to charge a corrupt aedile with extortion, and to petition the Senate for a special jury in the case; and kept such a tight hold on his city magistrates and provincial governors that the general standard of justice rose to an unprecedented high level—you need only observe how many such personages have been charged with every kind of corruption since his time!
As part of his campaign for improving public manners, Domitian made sure that the theatre officials no longer condoned the appropriation by the commons of seats reserved for knights; and came down heavily on authors who lampooned distinguished men and women. He expelled one ex-quaestor from the Senate for being over-fond of acting and dancing; forbade women of notoriously bad character the right to use litters or to benefit from inheritances and legacies; struck a knight from the jury-roll because he had divorced his wife on a charge of adultery and then taken her back again; and sentenced many members of both Orders under the Scantinian Law, which was directed against unnatural practices. Taking a far more serious view than his father and brother had done of unchastity among the Vestals, he began by sentencing offenders to execution, and afterwards resorted to the traditional form of punishment. Thus, though he allowed the Oculata sisters, and Varronilla, to choose how they should die, and sent their lovers into exile, he later ordered Cornelia, a Chief-Vestal—acquitted at her first trial, but re-arrested some years later and convicted—to be buried alive, and had her lovers clubbed to death in the Comitium. The only exception he made was in the case of an ex-praetor, who had the death sentence commuted to banishment, for confessing his guilt after the interrogation of witnesses under torture had failed to establish the truth of the crime with which he was charged. As a lesson that the sanctity of the gods must be protected against thoughtless abuse, Domitian made his soldiers tear down a tomb built for the son of one of his own freedmen from stones intended for the Temple of Capitoline Juppiter, and fling the contents into the sea.
9. While still young, Domitian hated the idea of bloodshed; and once, in his father’s absence, remembered Virgil’s line:
Before an impious people took to eating slaughtered beeves…
and drafted an edict forbidding the sacrifice of oxen. No one thought of him as in the least greedy or mean either before, or for some years after, his accession—in fact, he gave frequent signs of self-restraint and even of generosity, treating his friends with great consideration and always insisting that, above all, they should do nothing mean, refused to accept bequests from married men with children, and cancelled a clause in Rustus Caepio’s will which required the heir to find an annual sum of money for distribution among newly-appointed senators.
Moreover, if suits against debtors to the Public Treasury had been pending for more than five years, he quashed them and permitted a renewal of proceedings only within the same twelvemonth, and ruled that if the prosecutor should then lose his case, he must go into exile. Although the Clodian Law restricted the private business activities of quaestors’ scribes, Domitian now pardoned such of them as had broken it; and generously allowed former owners of commandeered land to farm whatever plots survived the assignments of smallholdings to veterans. He severely dealt with informers who had increased the public revenue by bringing false charges against property owners and getting their estates confiscated. A saying attributed to him runs: ‘An Emperor who does not punish informers encourages them.’
10. His good-will and self-restraint were not, however, destined to continue long, and the cruel streak in him soon appeared. He executed one sickly boy merely because he happened to be a pupil of the actor Paris, and closely resembled him in looks and mannerisms. Then Hermogenes of Tarsus died because of some incautious allusions that he had introduced into a historical work; and the slaves who acted as his copyists were crucified. Domitian was always down on the Thracians and a chance remark by one citizen, to the effect that a Thracian gladiator might be ‘a match for his Gallic opponent, but not for the patron of the Games’, was enough to have him dragged fro
m his seat and—with a placard tied around his neck reading: ‘A Thracian supporter who spoke evil of his Emperor’—torn to pieces by dogs in the arena.
Domitian put many senators to death on the most trivial charges: among them a group of ex-Consuls, three of whom, Civica Cerealis, Acilius Glabrio, and Salvidienus Arfitus, he accused of conspiracy; Cerealis was executed while governing Asia; Glabrio while in exile on another charge. Aelius Lamia lost his life as a result of some harmless witticisms at Domitian’s expense, made several years previously; he had been robbed of his wife by Domitian, and when someone later praised his voice remarked drily: ‘I have given up sex and gone into training!’; and then, encouraged by Titus to marry again, asked: ‘What? You are not wanting a wife, too, are you?’ Salvius Cocceianus died because he continued to celebrate the birthday of the Emperor Otho, his paternal uncle; and Mettius Pompusianus, because his birth was said to have been attended by Imperial portents, and because he always carried with him a collection of speeches by kings and generals extracted from Livy and a parchment map of the world—and because he had named two of his slaves ‘Mago’ and ‘Hannibal’! Sallustius Lucullus, Governor-general of Britain, had equally offended Domitian by allowing a new type of lance to be called ‘the Lucullan’; so had Junius Rusticus, by his eulogies of Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus112—an incident which led Domitian to banish all philosophers from Italy; and Helvidius the Younger by his farce about Paris and Oenone, which seemed a reflection on Domitian’s divorce; and Domitian’s own cousin, Flavius Sabinus, by being mistakenly announced by the Election Day herald as Emperor-elect, instead of Consul-elect.