Parrying Nero, we know, was a central tenet of Flavian policy. Not for Vespasian and his sons Otho’s celebration of a lost friend nor the grandeur of Julio-Claudian descent with its weighty baggage of attitudes and assumptions. Not for them an arrogant kingship revelling in personal distinction nor, at Vespasian’s death, a court culture of extravagance, sadism and murderous family mistrust. They had experienced this at first hand and witnessed too the turmoil of its collapse. Theirs was a new way. Vespasian’s was an earthy, amiable, spade-calling-spade, farting-and-belching, barrack-room Italianness. Unlike Nero, he had not succumbed to cultural effeteness and pursued a vision of Greece, any more than he had emptied Rome’s coffers chasing pleasure, sung for his subjects or paraded his contempt for Roman sensibilities by dressing as a bride and offering both arse and troth to a former slave. Nothing in Vespasian’s policy-making or public behaviour had suggested a craving for golden statues. He laughed to scorn attempts to relate him to Rome’s pantheon and cheerfully broadcast the inferiority of his connections. Admitted, the Flavians accepted autocracy. Willingly and without complaint, they accepted those generous provisions of the lex de imperio Vespasiani by which the Republic died another death. But they insisted on a gulf of clear blue water – flexible and delineated to serve their own purposes – between themselves and their predecessors, theirs a duty-focused, merit-based principate with no stake in the divinity of Augustus or his haughty progeny. New emperors flaunted new clothes. As an alternative approach to absolutism and a means of bringing stability and a semblance of unity in the wake of civil war, it spoke of Vespasian’s shrewdness.
Titus was shrewd too. He perpetuated the same illusion. As with his portraiture, so apparently with his policy: a careful assimilation of father and son, toeing the line, a sense of continuity and dynastic coherence, the Flavian way; only in Titus’ case, marked not by Vespasian’s piss-taxing parsimony but by an oft-repeated show of largesse – generosity and forebearance the autocrat’s prerogatives. To his enemies he described his pre-eminence as destiny’s gift, his throne neither an accident of birth nor, crucially, a prize within other men’s grasp. Happy with his lot – and which emperor, bar the protesting Tiberius of the early years, was ever not? – he repaid destiny by offering mainland Italians a father’s love. He understood the power of a speaking gesture, as generous with words as with deeds, in the historical record as accomplished a public-relations supremo as Augustus. Puppet-master of this Titus who emerges from darkness into light, Suetonius offers us implicitly the possibility that his beneficence, concealed till his accession, was mummery: pragmatism, nothing less. It was certainly unexpected by those who anticipated a return to the bad old days of Agrippina’s brat – rightly so, given Titus’ track record?
Titus Flavius Vespasianus had enjoyed a childhood of sunshine and shadows. He was born at the midpoint in Gaius’ short principate, AD 39. The place was a tenement building – its name suggests seven storeys – probably on the Quirinal,3 that hill once associated with the ancient Sabines, in Titus’ youth remote from Rome’s aristocratic epicentre of the Palatine. There his mother Domitilla laboured in a cramped, dark room to give him life. Later, in accordance with Flavian posturing about humble birth, the room became a tourist attraction, lowly linen sanitized by a history of good behaviour. At the time, family circumstances were straitened. Elections to the aedileship and the praetorship had drained Vespasian’s purse. There was no one at hand to provide a bailout. In marrying a kinswoman of uncertain status, Titus’ father had even forsaken the safety net of a dowry.
At Gaius’ command, as we have seen, Vespasian the aedile had been pelted with mud, an irksome punishment for his failure to keep clean the streets of Rome. At no point can Titus have been encouraged to regret this mud-slinger’s gruesome demise occurring in his third year, nor to regard the family that spawned him with anything but circumspection. Childish prejudice notwithstanding, Vespasian’s first-born shared his own fast-rising fortunes under Gaius’ successor Claudius. Indeed, promoted beyond his father’s rank, the Quirinal behind him, Titus was brought up as a child courtier. He became the devoted companion of Claudius’ son Britannicus, whose lessons and tutors he shared. This detail, which Titus would later emphasize, exploiting his association with a ‘good’ Julio-Claudian as evidence of imperial legitimacy, lends his early years (of which little is known otherwise) a fable-like quality. In Flavian propaganda, he is the supporting actor of pantomime and fairytale, the prince’s friend familiar with palace ways: one foot in the door, associated but not implicated, sufficiently obscure to survive skullduggery and evil plots... the lamb who escapes sacrifice. As indeed proved to be the case. If that good nature which afterwards characterized his reputation as emperor was indeed an affectation, assumed in the interests of popularity and security, Titus learned the value of dissimulation young, at Britannicus’ side. He was next to Britannicus when the latter drank the fatal draught prepared for him by his wicked stepbrother Nero. Foremost among Titus’ childhood ailments in Suetonius’ account was the lingering illness he sustained after draining dregs of poison from his friend’s cup.4 In 55, only sixteen years old, Titus was forced to acknowledge that the good need not end happily, nor the bad unhappily. It was a recipe for cynicism which, with hindsight, offers grounds for exoneration.
For Suetonius, Titus’ willingness to share his friend’s misfortune is a symbolic act, a show of sympathy, and surely intended by an earnest young man as a demonstration of loyalty. Perhaps it is more, too – the baton of kingship assumed by the low-born friend of whom a physiognomist summoned by Narcissus had claimed that he and not Britannicus would inherit his father’s greatness. If so, that act of usurpation was unconscious on Titus’ part. A quarter of a century later, he commissioned a golden statue of Britannicus for his palace; he appeared behind an ivory statue of Britannicus at the opening of the Colosseum. By then a lifetime had passed since the two men – both now sons of emperors, one laurel-wreathed, the other invested with garlands by tragedy – had shared the anointing of that same poisoned chalice. Suetonius does not invite us to query the depth of Titus’ friendship for the dead boy or his motives in perpetuating before Roman crowds that distant amity.
When Titus was twelve, his mother gave birth to a brother, Domitian, and his father attained the consulship, a neat example of Roman gender roles satisfactorily fulfilled. Domitian’s birth cannot have impacted greatly on Titus’ life, Vespasian’s ascent more so. Yet this token of worldly success – the highest appointment of the cursus honorum, the result, as we have seen, of military service and high standing at the Claudian court – proved illusory. Lacking office in the wake of the consulship, Vespasian withdrew from public life for a dozen years. His return to prominence as proconsul of Africa led to renewed imperial contact, this time with Nero. His father’s fluctuating career caused Titus greater concern than the squalls of an infant brother: Vespasian was pelted with vegetables in the marketplace in Hadrumetum and afterwards, when best behaviour was the order of the day, yawned his way through an imperial song recital. In the intervening wilderness years, of which little is known, Domitilla died and the family fortunes suffered an abrupt decline. His mother’s death scarred Domitian more than Titus, the loss of family prestige ditto. Not for Domitian a childhood at court, sharing Rome’s best teachers, an education in imperial politics and the nuances of the colour purple; nor that sense of entitlement characteristic of Titus’ behaviour prior to his accession, acquired perhaps from proximity to Britannicus and Vespasian’s good odour. If Domitian chafed at blessings withheld, Titus learned the whimsicality of fate, its perils and setbacks. In time those different responses became factors which shaped the brothers’ divergent interpretations of ultimate power.
There were lessons to be learned at the court of the emperor Nero. As under Gaius, life was cheap, favour capricious. Unwittingly, Vespasian had demonstrated indifference to his master’s performance skills – under the circumstances Titus could not depend on this leas
t predictable princeps, nor would Vespasian have encouraged such reliance. Instead, former benefits under Claudius offered Titus the wherewithal for a career of his own outside palace confines. That education which he had shared with Britannicus had created a young man of gifts, sophisticated, even a belle-lettrist in his parts, the author of Latin poetry as well as tragedies and poems in Greek – like Julius Caesar, Tiberius and Claudius, one capable of containing the world in words and thus, surely one day, of shaping the written record. For good measure Suetonius throws into the mix good looks, horsemanship, musicality and – all-important – a talent for arms, though this can scarcely have been visible in the beginning. Roman electioneering, of course, begged more than ability. Like his father, Titus had not been Agrippina’s man, nor was he now an acolyte of Nero’s. The former Flavian patrons Narcissus and Lucius Vitellius were no longer on hand to expedite his progress. He embarked on political life unspectacularly, offices of the vigintivirate and military service abroad followed by a period practising law in Rome – the latter perhaps no more than a divertissement, channelling his facility with words; in time he attained the quaestorship.5 It was the beginning of a textbook senatorial career. It was also nothing special.
But Titus was his father’s son. As Nero, touring Greece, sang his way out of a job, Vespasian was moving closer to that position from which, before the decade was out, he would revolutionize Rome’s concept of its leading citizen. The fortunes of father and son were inextricably entwined. In time commentators would attribute to Titus’ support the success of Vespasian’s later years, unique in the history of the principate to date. In the first place – and more often – the advantage worked in the opposite direction, father to son. It was the Roman way and should not concern us unduly, for Romans believed in heredity, the transmission of skills and attributes through successive generations, paternity a blueprint for the future, the mark of the father indelible: a guarantee. ‘Brave noble men father brave noble children,’ the poet Horace had written in Augustus’ reign. ‘In bulls and horses likewise the male’s stamp shows clearly; we never find fear bred from fierceness, eagles hatching doves.’6 In Titus’ case, Vespasian’s were mighty coat-tails, capable of offering both flight and protection. From a distance, there are grounds for believing that the success of Titus’ short rule was attributable to measured continuance of the policies of the previous reign; it could not have continued so indefinitely. The new emperor’s most striking innovation was his affectation of open-handedness where Vespasian had revelled in stinginess. But all that lay in the future. In 67, for father and son, Judaea, not Rome, was the challenge.
Titus’ role was legionary commander. He was twenty-eight years old, a veteran of military postings in Germany and Britain. He was also twice married, both widower and divorcee. He had divorced his second wife, the well-connected Marcia Furnilla, in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy for motives of political expediency, Furnilla’s family having forfeited Nero’s favour. Shortly before, Furnilla gave birth to Titus’ only child. At this stage the sources indicate no particular fondness for the child, a daughter called Julia (after 71, she was brought up not in Titus’ house but in that of her married uncle Domitian). Nor, in the case of either marriage, do they reveal emotional involvement with his spouses, an oversight suggestive of unsusceptibility or, at best, self-containment. In Judaea over the course of the next three years Titus would achieve military glory and an independent profile, emerging from his father’s shadow; he also won the love of an ambitious, attentive mistress eleven years his senior. In his own lifetime he earned plaudits for the former, while the latter, thanks to the mistress in question, gave rise to deep mistrust. History has preferred to reverse that order. The desecration of Judaism’s inner sanctum remains an angry blot. Meanwhile in theatres and opera houses around the world Titus still lays claim to immortality. His heroism, Suetonius insisted, consists of an act of renunciation made unwillingly to a yet more unwilling lover. As Racine has it, ‘Oh Rome!... Wretched me! Must I be emperor and love?’7
In truth, when it came, it was (or should have been) Vespasian’s victory. Vespasian, we know, was the commander of 50,000 troops in Judaea, he the military mastermind, experienced, accomplished. But Vespasian had embarked on a bigger campaign. With his father poised to become Rome’s new ruler, a promotion Tacitus claims as Titus’ in inspiration,8 Titus was left to finish the job of conquest, annexing for himself spoils and renown. In August 69, Mucianus set off for Rome at the head of pro-Flavian troops. He had thrown in his lot with Vespasian, erstwhile jealousy forgotten, the hard knot of his resentment softened, as we have seen, by Titus’ charm and the younger man’s good looks. His purpose was the overthrow of Vitellius. At the same time, Vespasian and Titus journeyed to Alexandria. If necessary, Vespasian meant to seize control of Egypt’s grain shipments, his means of starving Vitellian Italy into submission.9 Titus continued on to Palestine. There, aided at Vespasian’s direction by the Jewish former procurator of Judaea, Tiberius Julius Alexander, a man of proven military ability, he embarked on the siege of the fortified city of Jerusalem.
It was 10 August 70 when a Roman soldier hurled the flaming torch which destroyed the Temple and facilitated the theft of its treasures. According to Jewish historian Josephus, Titus’ apologist, that over-zealous soldier acted in direct contravention of his master’s wishes.10 The later classical account of Sulpicius Severus, perhaps inspired by passages of Tacitus’ Histories which have since been lost, argues the flip side of the coin.11 If the truth is unreclaimable, the sources appear to voice no regret on Titus’ part – unless the origin of that single stab of conscience, which Suetonius records on his deathbed, was his sanction of the defilement of the Holy of Holies and, later the same day, sacrifices to Roman standards made in the temple precincts, a double heresy of blood and flame. The evidence of the Arch of Titus, albeit a commission instigated by Domitian after Titus’ death, is discouraging. In 70, the temple burned. Its precincts glistened with the blood of the faithful. The Table of the Shewbread and all its golden furniture, dragged into the daylight, were dispatched to Rome. Jerusalem, besieged through a long period of attrition, struggled no more. Its defences had been breached for the last time and the temple would never be rebuilt.
In October and November, at Caesarea Maritima and Berytus respectively, Titus celebrated the birthdays of his brother and his father. On both occasions, Josephus unflinchingly records, the celebrations included the slaughter of several thousand Jewish prisoners, ‘who perished in combats with wild beasts or in fighting each another or by being burnt alive’.12 To modern ears, these sound unedifying spectacles: Roman opinion baulked only at the modesty of the death toll. Impresario-like, in ashes and gore Titus shared his glory with Vespasian and Domitian. It was Flavian égoïsme à trois, a pact sealed in the public suffering of the vanquished – oblations made to the family’s household gods writ large. Vespasian surely approved the policy. Josephus notwithstanding, the manner of Titus’ birthday tributes suggests a singular lack of remorse. It is what we should expect from a conquering hero.
The following year Titus shared with Vespasian the grandest triumph in Rome’s history. Tableaux charting four years of conflict wound their way through the capital, followed by Simon ben Giora, architect of the revolt, dragged by a halter, humbled and scourged.13 For all its vaunting symbolism, this vainglorious street parade was insufficient to settle the Judaean account (closure would only be achieved once another kinsman, Flavius Silva, stormed Masada in 73, forcing the mass suicide of the last rebel group). Foremost for Titus among the campaign’s loose ends in 71 was the Jewish queen who had sided with Rome against her co-religionists. Her name was Berenice.
A statue in Athens describes Julia Berenice as a ‘great’ queen.14 Surviving sources make it clear that her name was coupled with many less flattering adjectives besides. She was rich, foreign, Jewish, powerful, libidinous... and female – impossible not to fall victim to the long arm of Augustan propaganda. Bere
nice became Titus’ Cleopatra. In his treatment of his Eastern queen, the second of the Flavians would prove himself a greater and a lesser man than Mark Antony. As with his winning demeanour as princeps, and like his earlier jettisoning of Marcia Furnilla, the instinct for political survival sidelined more complex truths; Titus escaped with his life and Rome’s throne. Or perhaps Suetonius was mistaken and, when the time came, renunciation was easy, appetites slaked, all passion spent.
A great-granddaughter of Herod the Great, Berenice had been married three times when, in 66, the high-handedness and brutality of procurator Gessus Florius provoked the First Jewish Revolt in Judaea and a large-scale Roman military presence under Vespasian’s command. Her spouses included a connection of Titus’ associate Tiberius Julius Alexander, chosen on account of his wealth, and her uncle, another Herod, whom Claudius had created king of Chalcis; but the longest relationship in her life was with her brother, Agrippa II, one of several client kings educated at the imperial court in Rome. According to Josephus, whose enmity towards Berenice still taints her posterity, her final marriage – to King Polemo of Cilicia (a match she both made and unmade herself) – arose from her desire to curtail rumours of an incestuous relationship between the royal siblings. If this were the case, Josephus made sure that Berenice failed. The ‘inappropriate sexual desire’ he cited as her grounds for divorcing Polemo, who had converted to Judaism at her request, was for Agrippa. It was not, of course, the whole story. The sources omit mention of the first meeting of Titus and Berenice, which probably took place in Ptolemais or, with greater ceremony, at Agrippa’s splendid palace at his administrative capital of Caesarea Philippi:15 all agree on its long-term success. The relationship of the Roman quaestorian legionary legate and the Jewish princess branded by history a siren would survive for more than a decade, despite lengthy separations and at least one preliminary breaking-off. Thanks to a rich literary tradition – inspired by a single line in Suetonius’ account – it has endured two millennia.
The Twelve Caesars Page 27