Titus’ own feelings, however, are frequently unclear, attested only in Tacitean insinuation.16 His sexual tastes, like those of many of his contemporaries, ranged widely. He had a weakness for dancing boys and male prostitutes and shared his contemporaries’ bath-house fascination with eunuchs. These were the associates – source of his reputation for lewdness – whom he forswore on his accession to the purple. As love objects go, Berenice was more highly charged than any shimmying catamite and shared their fate, discarded in order to silence those who quibbled and carped. For she, Cleopatra in miniature, more than any teenage cock-tease inspired fear and loathing in Roman minds, damned in equal measure by her religion and her sexual independence. Loving Berenice would become for Titus a matter of high politics. When crunch-time came, he preferred duty... or the dictates of romanitas... or fidelity to Vespasian’s model of an imperial court free from petticoats government... or perhaps simply self-interest.
The triumph of Jerusalem, celebrated within days of Titus’ arrival in Rome in 71, served useful purposes for Titus and Vespasian. It quashed reports of a rift between father and son. It invested the fledgling regime with military élan and, in doing so, something of that prestige which the equestrian Flavii lacked. It underlined the imperial nature of Flavian rule, since under the Julio-Claudians triumphs had become the exclusive prerogative of the imperial family. It exploited visual symbolism to assert from the outset Vespasian’s dynastic intent and his choice of Titus as successor.17
Vespasian and Titus wore identical clothes, each dressed as the god Jupiter; they offered identical prayers and sacrifices. Quadriga-drawn, they appeared before the people of Rome as princeps and helpmeet.18 Thereafter, Suetonius claims, Titus abandoned any personal agenda, partner in government to his sexagenarian father. As we have seen, the two men shared the consulship in 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 and 79. In tandem with Vespasian, Titus exercised tribunician power and that of the censorship; father and son shared priesthoods. Coins minted in 71 acclaimed Titus as DESIGNATUS IMPERATOR, princeps-elect.19 It did not amount to becoming Vespasian’s equal, but it laid down a strategy for the future. In Josephus’ account, Romans flocked to support the self-aggrandizing aspirations of this family of equestrian provincials who had succeeded where Galba, Otho and Vitellius had failed: they prayed ‘that Vespasian, his sons and all their posterity might continue in the Roman government for a very long time’. Vespasian’s dream was of a stable and secure Rome. But it was not compounded of altruism alone. It was also a vision of enduring power for his own line. The family from nowhere had taken a one-way ticket and Titus was his father’s nominated heir. Business-like, Suetonius tells us, Titus took upon himself ‘the discharge of almost all duties’: he ‘personally dictated letters and wrote edicts in his father’s name, and even read his speeches in the senate in lieu of a quaestor’,20 experience which doubtless contributed to his ability as emperor to compete with his secretaries in the matter of shorthand dictation.
More surprising is that the beneficiary of Vespasian’s dynastic imperative took no steps himself to assure through remarriage the succession which, throughout his decade-long principate, was among his father’s principal concerns.
Instead, Titus led what on the surface appears a double life: by day a diligent bureaucrat vigilant in the maintenance of Vespasian’s security and wellbeing, after nightfall a hardened carouser, lover of a foreign queen, anathema to Rome. Since neither drunkenness nor wantonness impacted on his conduct of public duties, the distinction is misleading – unless we agree that a faculty for compartmentalization is a signifier of emotional detachment, perhaps an approach to cruelty. Titus’ prominence under Vespasian, nurtured by the latter in coin inscriptions and the language of Roman pageantry, inspired, we are told, overwhelmingly negative responses among his contemporaries. Only an apparent change of character, coinciding with his father’s death, finally brought about recognition of his fulfilment of his official role. Vespasian had sought to banish the spectre of the Julio-Claudians, in particular that aspect of their insistence on the principate as a family affair which had resulted under Augustus’ heirs in the politicization of imperial private life. Time would prove that the inheritance was unshirkable. Can it be construed as a challenge to the rowdy, roistering Titus of the seventies? Emperor-in-waiting, he scarcely seems to have cared.
As it happened, Titus’ assessment of the leeway available to him was correct. History showed that revolution in Rome was a rarefied business, confined to the city’s political classes: his behaviour was his own affair so long as it failed to incite conspiracies. His accession to the throne in June 79 passed unopposed. Little matter that his cruelty, catamites and, it was rumoured, corruption in accepting bribes for court sentences – all, as we have seen, standard behaviour under the principate – poisoned his reputation. Tiberius was proof that ill repute alone did not topple thrones, while even the ‘good’ Vespasian had taken a cut of the fees extorted by his mistress Caenis for expediting imperial decision-making. The support of the Praetorian Guards, known to be crucial, had been guaranteed since 71 when Titus was appointed Praetorian prefect. This was the first time this important post had been filled by so close a relative of the emperor’s: in addition to giving Titus responsibility for his father’s security, it also placed him at the head of the largest military force in Italy.21 Titus’ assiduity in exploiting his position to eliminate dissent, though flattering to the Guard itself and within the letter (if not the spirit) of the Guard’s purpose, offended strict legalities and suggested a nature inclined to tyranny. Winning hearts and minds does not appear to have recommended itself as an aim. Mucianus had reduced the numbers of Guards from Vitellius’ swollen tally. Into Rome’s public gathering places, so the story goes, Titus sent the remnants of this virtual private police force. At his instruction, they denounced suspected conspirators. Those who were named as often died. In Suetonius’ reckoning, it was a provision for Titus’ own future safety; in the short term, it added further dark coruscations to his notoriety. His murder of the ex-consul Aulus Caecina Alienus, a noted opportunist whose turncoat support had nevertheless contributed to Vespasian’s successful bid for power in 69, shocked even unsentimental Romans: Caecina was stabbed as he left Titus’ dinner-party on the eve of delivering a harangue to the troops. That would-be conspiracy, in the dog days of Vespasian’s reign, was probably genuine. Caecina’s track record of oscillating loyalties offers limited scope for exculpation. As a response to a perceived threat, Titus’ behaviour was ruthless and ruthlessly successful. Caecina’s revolt died with him.
Revolution when it came was not the work of disaffected senators but of Titus himself. It did not emerge, like Jerusalem’s surrender, in conflagration. There was no conspiracy, no exchange of contumely in the senate house, no convulsions in Rome’s smooth running. Rather, with the power and the glory his, the emperor Titus, Rome’s eleventh princeps and the first non-Julio-Claudian to succeed through the hereditary principle,22 embraced benignity. In the ancient sources it appears a change quite as significant as any plotted by Caecina or his ilk; it may just as easily have been a case of smoke and mirrors, another instance of pragmatism. As one of the shortest reigning of the twelve Caesars, his principate beset by unprecedented natural disasters, Titus had few opportunities to review or discard his father’s interpretation of imperial government: his task was repeatedly immediate, its concerns those which in succeeding millennia would be associated with the concept of ‘welfare monarchy’. Embracing paternalism, he maintained Vespasian’s golden mean. His reaction to large-scale setbacks was effective, considered, balanced: legacy perhaps of that early exposure to fate’s unpredictability which had robbed him, for example, of Britannicus’ friendship. If vigorous appetites had enlivened his youth, duty would characterize his reign, an unremarkable day-by-day diligence which he was nevertheless at pains to make public. Tacitus responds with understatement: Titus ‘practised more self-restraint in his own than in his father’s reign’.23 That sel
f-restraint exchanged love of pleasure for a ‘father’-like love for each and every one of Rome’s children. So startling a metamorphosis glossed autocracy with benignity.
There were inevitably exceptions to his kindliness. Among them were informers, whom Titus renounced as a group, subjecting them to public punishment before selling them as slaves; and Berenice.
Berenice had not remained in Agrippa’s palace at Caesarea Philippi. In 75 she is recorded as resident in Rome, her brother with her, the forty-seven-year-old matron married to Titus in all but name. Such, at any rate, was evidently Berenice’s own interpretation. It was an arrangement strikingly suggestive of that earlier Tiber-side residency of Cleopatra in her role as Caesar’s mistress and co-parent. In time, unlike Cleopatra, Berenice would be rewarded with neither golden statues in the temple nor the forced sacrifice of her life and her kingdom. Presumably on account of her age, she does not appear to have borne Titus any children to inspire Roman apprehension: her very presence in Rome was enough. In Cassius Dio’s account, philosophers spoke out publicly against the couple;24 at least one paid for his protest with his life. But one Cynic silenced was not enough to win for Berenice a ring and a crown. She, too, paid the price of their denunciation, banished by her lover. Like Caesar’s Egyptian queen, in loving Rome she surrendered happiness and pride.
Berenice, however, returned to Rome. Her reappearance followed close on the heels of Vespasian’s death. Was she propelled across slow expanses of the ancient world by that image of herself as Titus’ wife? If so, she was to be disappointed. No warm welcome awaited her in Rome’s hills. It is that disappointment, product of a love sufficient to allow hope to triumph over reason, experience and even certainty, which underscores her tragedy.
As for Titus, the only surviving record of his feelings on Berenice’s final departure in 79 is Suetonius’ assessment of mutual regret. This is the evidence we must balance against an overhasty assumption that, like his divorce from Marcia Furnilla and his overthrow of those former sex objects, the dancing boys, whose public performances he never again allowed himself to witness, Titus permitted his feelings to be directed by expediency and opportunism. Suetonius’ Titus is the most sincere of all imperial holders of the office of pontifex maximus, determined that the high-priesthood act as guarantee of his pure intentions. On Vespasian’s death, did the instinct for power overmaster earthier appetites? Or did Titus sacrifice Berenice in Rome’s favour with a heavy heart? Driven by duty, determination or indifference, in the two years, two months and twenty days that remained to him, Titus kept faith with that apparent spirit of self-denial which, the tragedians would have us believe, shaped his treatment of his Eastern queen. That he confined lustful impulses thereafter to cuckolding his brother Domitian remains unsubstantiated rumour and is possibly an instance of confused chronology. Perhaps, as Alma-Tadema’s painting The Triumph of Titus (1885) suggests, the period of Titus’ ascendancy in Domitia Longina’s heart was of earlier duration. In Alma-Tadema’s composition, a dewy-eyed Domitia, her fingers lightly touching those of her husband Domitian, gazes longingly over her shoulder at the covetous, decidedly venal, bearded figure of Titus.
It was late August, early in the afternoon, two months and a day after Titus’ accession, when shadows closed in on the Bay of Naples. A cloud hovered above the sun-drenched seaside playground. Spreading sideways like spilt molasses, shaped like a pine tree in the eyewitness account of the younger Pliny, and distinctive in the furious depth of its colouring, it was remarkable for its sheer size: ‘It rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.’25 It portended not rain but showers of pumice. So extensive was the fall of volcanic rock that, within less than twenty-four hours, the town of Pompeii lay buried three metres deep.26 Thousands fled but many remained, sheltering from the falling rock, awaiting respite. It was not to be. The following day, to the accompaniment of apocalyptic pyrotechnics, a series of hot-ash avalanches completed Pompeii’s internment. Scarlet, black and molten-gold burned the sky. Fire and cloud hugged the earth. In Cassius Dio’s account, the darkness was akin to an eclipse.27 Those who had remained died of asphyxiation. The same fatal cascades, accompanied by surges of hot gas and travelling at irresistible speed, also buried nearby Herculaneum, site of Agrippina the Elder’s house arrest by Sejanus, and Oplontis, where Nero’s Poppaea had kept a villa.
Quiet since Nero’s reign, Vesuvius had at last erupted in spectacular fashion. Among casualties was Pliny the Elder, whom Titus’ father had been accustomed to summon for advice so early in the morning that it was not yet light. The death toll surprised even the Romans. Contrary to custom, neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum was ever reoccupied. Ashen, dark and silent, they subsided into centuries of petty looting. Today Pompeii survives as a tourist destination, titivating backpackers with its insights into the scatological nature of Roman graffiti and the discomforts of the town’s brothels.
The eruption of Vesuvius provided Titus with the moment when, in words and deeds, he made good that transformation in his character which Suetonius dates to his accession. His response was swift. After visiting the region, he appointed two ex-consuls to supervise a restoration programme.28 He allocated to the rescue efforts the estates of those killed in the disaster who had died without heirs, property which under Roman law accrued to the treasury.29 Edicts made public his anxieties as well as his efforts.
Although he could not have known it, Titus had created a template for action on which he would soon be called to draw again. It was a matter of months before fire, then plague, devastated Rome. The fire destroyed buildings across the Campus Martius, flames consuming the temples of Serapis, Isis, Neptune and Jupiter Capitolinus along with the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon and the Portico of Augustus’ sister Octavia. Unusually, Suetonius resists characterizing this concatenation of catastrophes as portentous. Titus’ own opinion clearly differed. ‘I am ruined,’ he allegedly claimed, before invoking assistance both human and divine and tasking himself with discovery of the perfect sacrifice to propitiate an angry firmament. He contributed to the city’s slush fund decorations removed from his own palace – withholding, we must assume, that treasured golden statue of Britannicus which had surely guided him thus far. It was the latest instance of that trope of the simple-living emperor which Augustus had cultivated so painstakingly and which, more recently, had inspired Galba to ignore the delivery of palace furniture Nymphidius had dispatched from Rome to Narbo Martius, and Vespasian to spend most of his time in the Gardens of Sallust.
As with his ‘donation’ of Pompeian revenues, it was generosity of a qualified variety: it demanded little of Titus beyond inspiration and virtually nothing of the imperial treasury. As a public-relations exercise, it earned the emperor hefty dividends. Among them is Suetonius’ celebration of his ‘surpassing’ father’s love for his people. With hindsight, we see that the benefits Titus garnered from his response to the natural disasters of his principate serve to underline the ambiguity of another Suetonian assessment: that it was art and good fortune as much as his nature which enabled him to win universal love and become ‘the delight and darling of the human race’.
After tragedy, a party. Vespasian’s laggardly deification was probably formalized early in 80. At the same time, the four-storey amphitheatre of marble and limestone, subsequently known as the Colosseum, which Vespasian had begun as a riposte to the grandeur of Nero’s palace-building, was hastily completed. Close by, also on the site of Nero’s Golden House, new baths were constructed with equal speed. In the baths, Titus demonstrated condescension by mingling freely with Rome’s commons. In the Colosseum, he paraded his much-vaunted generosity in an opening ceremony which lasted a hundred days. He himself appeared in procession behind an equestrian statue of Britannicus. It was the final symbolic gesture in the Flavian rebuttal of Nero, linking Titus and Vespasian to Claudius and denying Rome’s intervening misfortunes by elision: Nero’s hated Golden House supplied location and building materials. On th
is occasion there was no jibbing at undue moderation as there had been at the birthday celebrations offered to Vespasian and Domitian in the aftermath of victory over the Jews: 5,000 wild beasts were slaughtered in a single day. Succeeding weeks saw contests between elephants and even cranes and the dispatch of a further 4,000 animals, some of them tame, killed by men and women alike. Carpaphorus the hunter slew twenty bulls, a bear and a lion. Their blood mingled with that of gladiators and prisoners – including one Laureolus, who was crucified, then exposed to an enraged Caledonian bear – in a baptism of astonishing brutality.30 Remarkable even to contemporaries as a set piece of Roman crowd-pleasing, it inspired Martial’s first book of poems, On Spectacles, and the poet’s assertion that all the wonders of the ancient world would pale before Caesar’s amphitheatre. At Titus’ request, the Colosseum was flooded and a sea battle re-enacted between Corcyreans and Corinthians. The floodwaters washed away the offal and ordure of earlier carnage.
For Titus, it was a last hurrah. The conclusion of this extravagant butchery was a bungled sacrifice on a day that combined sunshine and thunder. We are reminded in the first instance of Gaius and that bloody flamingo. Both factors inspired unhappy presentiments in the emperor’s breast. He left the Colosseum in a state of deep depression after breaking down in view of the crowds, ‘performed no further deed of importance’, according to Cassius Dio,31 and within months, aged forty-one, was dead.
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