The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Jews attributed Titus’ untimely demise to a mosquito. Burrowing its way into the emperor’s head, it grew to the size of a pigeon and tormented him with seven years of unbearable headaches which eventually overcame him.32 Those of longer memory, mindful of the Julio-Claudian record, blamed his brother and successor Domitian, whom Suetonius accuses of ceaseless plotting. The historian does not stoop to evidence. Plutarch’s explanation is more likely to have found favour with Titus, uniting as it does father and son. He records the diagnosis of Titus’ attendants: that it was the excessive coldness of the waters at Aquae Cutiliae, so harmful to Vespasian, which also dispatched his elder son. Certainly Titus’ death in the Sabine country of his ancestors, as last vestiges of summer gave way to autumn, occurred in the same house, perhaps even the same room, in which Vespasian had died. Certain, too, that it was Domitian who benefited.

  Titus met death protesting. He was unready, unwilling, unable to muster that flippancy which had served his father to the end. A single, unspecified fault, we know, robbed his final hours of equanimity. If his thoughts turned to Berenice, he concealed them from the ears of history. Ditto his only child Julia, celebrated on the coinage of his all-too-short reign. He referred neither to Domitian, his heir, nor to his failure to provide Rome with an alternative princeps, a serious fault in the eyes of history given what lay ahead. It was a modest, unpretentious end, in a simple rural homestead in the hilly vastnesses outside Rome, almost, we might assume, a piece of propagandist Flavian stage-management, reiterating the dumb show of family humility – this unpatrician, unhistrionic dynasty. In its very simplicity lies its pathos, grounds for an approach to martyrdom: the loving public servant cut off in his prime. Death came as a surprise, giving the lie to the old enemies’ tradition of seven years of headaches.

  Perhaps, too, it was an ungenerous passing for an emperor who had promised that no petitioner should leave his company bereft of hope. For Titus – former waywardness stifled by imperial laurels – uniquely among the first twelve Caesars had repented of a day on which he failed to confer a single favour. Unlike that of Otho, his death was no more honourable than his short reign.

  DOMITIAN

  (AD 51–96)

  ‘But the third’?

  Domitian: Ancient bronze Roman coin Domitian © Paul Picone

  Unlike Vespasian and Titus, Domitian mishandled posterity. This ‘object of terror and hatred to all’ – Juvenal’s ‘bald-headed Nero’1 – shared with Nero Rome’s ultimate posthumous ignominy: damnatio memoriae, the erasure of his memory. (Only underground was his name left intact, borne by the water and sewerage pipes laid during his reign, a legacy without dignity or distinction.) But despite the broken statues, the inscriptions smashed, scratched or recarved, the last Flavian was neither eradicated nor forgotten. He had built on too grand a scale. His costly, city-wide programme of construction and restoration encompassed the sacred and the profane: at least ten temples, an artificial lake for recreating naval battles, a new palace close to the Circus Maximus, a stadium whose outline survives in the Piazza Navona. Both his physical bequest to Rome and those scars he inflicted on members of the senatorial class, Rome’s writers of history, ran too deep: incontinent enmity prevented the latter from consigning him to obscurity. Thanks to their animosity (which was at no point senate-wide), hostile sources occlude any balanced reading of Domitian’s life. Beneath the cant an imprint of his actions survives like pentimenti in a painting, his designs half-lost beneath a later gloss. For this emperor who famously legislated against the planting of vines in order to increase the Empire’s grain yield, the slate is not clean.

  ‘More like Nero or Caligula or Tiberius than his father or brother... he provoked such universal detestation that he effaced the remembrance of his father’s and his brother’s merits,’ sneered the resolutely inimical Eutropius.2 An overstatement undoubtedly, but the Domitian of the sources, blackened by the personal and political allegiances of early chroniclers, is a man of aphotic reputation, menacing and murky. Alone he sits in palace rooms, lost in silence, catching flies and stabbing them with a keenly sharpened stylus; alone he walks in out-of-the-way places, doing nothing, seeing no one; alone he consumes immoderate lunches which make his belly heave and restrict him to a single apple at the evening banquet; alone, we assume, he broods and he plots and he plans. He likes no one, bar a clutch of unnamed women; he craves flattery but abhors the flatterer, averse to sycophancy and plain speaking alike. In the interests of the story it has to be. Given the ancients’ love of pungent contrast, the shimmering goodness of the deified Titus presupposes the opposite in his successor. Willingly, it appears, Domitian embraced the expectations of the dark side.

  Suetonius once planned more than twelve lives, to bring his account up to date. Like Claudius meditating a written history of the civil war during Augustus’ lifetime, the imperial secretary was dissuaded from so hazardous an undertaking. Whatever the author’s first intentions, Domitian makes a fitting finale to this rakes’ progress. Underlying his downfall are tendencies which dogged the early principate. Absolutism, philhellenism and flirtation with divinity disturbed, and in some cases destroyed, the reigns of several of his predecessors: Domitian was nothing daunted. In themselves these troublesome aspirations evidenced unresolved tensions in this new chapter in the life of Rome. Each shaped and challenged evolving ideas of Romanness and inspired an ongoing reassessment of the significance and implications of the fall of the Republic (and in particular the curtailment of senatorial influence). Each constituted a powerful affront to the Republican mindset. In the case of Gaius, a toxic combination of all three – which that unsystematic, unhinged twenty-something did nothing to conceal – culminated in personal tragedy and the system’s discredit. In Suetonius’ hands, faced by the admonishments of history, Domitian is implacable. Indeed, ‘he never took any pains to become acquainted with history’. In the holder of an office which throughout our story remains deeply contentious, such a stance – derived from resistance? incuriosity? arrogance? – is both baffling and culpable. For Rome, as Augustus and Vespasian had understood, was a city in thrall to visions of its past. In time, unable to reconcile past and present, Domitian shared Gaius’ fate. Disillusioned Praetorians again shaped the conspiracy.

  Where bad government is the taunt, there must be sexual transgression. For good measure, greed too: a panoply of unconstrained appetites. We have seen the pattern before, with Tiberius, Gaius and Nero. Domitian is no exception. Suetonius condemns him as rapacious in the extreme and ‘excessively lustful’, revelling in fornication – or ‘bed wrestling’, as the emperor himself described it; in a distant echo of Tiberius, he also enjoyed swimming with prostitutes. Compared with the affronts of his libidinous predecessors, Domitian’s mostly loveless carnality appears moderate; like the milk-and-water sex lives of the older Augustus and Vespasian, it did not distract him from the business of state. For much of his life he was good-looking, too: tall, large-eyed, unassuming in his expression, quick to blush. The path of a handsome man close to the centre of power will always be strewn with temptation: his preference was for other men’s wives. Previously, probably in the meagre years flanking Vespasian’s departure for Africa, Domitian had offered himself to a senator called Claudius Pollio and allowed himself to be debauched by the future emperor Nerva, more than twenty years his senior.12 As an adult his homosexuality seems to have confined itself to a taste for eunuchs – Dio names one Earinus – evidently a Flavian predilection: Titus enjoyed a similar frisson. More startling – and in its particularity perhaps closer to the truth – is the assertion that Domitian depilated his mistresses by hand.

  He also kept faith with that persistent accusation levelled against ‘bad’ emperors, namely incest. The Flavii, as we have seen, enjoyed a strong family focus and corporate egotism. In the interests of genetic exclusivity and dynastic vigour, Titus urged Domitian to marry his daughter Julia. Although Domitian demurred, some time after his marriage to Domitia Longina in
71, he took Julia, then aged no more than six, into his house to live with them.

  The relationship of uncle and niece altered in the aftermath of the former’s divorce in 83. Perhaps initially Julia did no more than act as hostess and chatelaine for her wifeless uncle, constrained, as her portrait corpus would suggest, by that towering erection of unnaturally crisp curls whose improbable arrangement surely consumed much of her day. Soon, Dio records, gossip described them living ‘as husband and wife, making little effort at concealment’.3 They were not married, however, and never would be. Instead, prompted either by widespread popular feeling in Domitia’s favour or because, as Suetonius offers, he was unable to bear their separation, a grim-faced Domitian reconciled himself to the reckless ex-wife who had cuckolded him with a well-known pantomime actor called Paris. (Fearsome in his anger and black-and-white in his outlook, Domitian had killed Paris in the street, so he may have felt that the problem had been adequately dealt with. Afterwards, for good measure, he also killed an adolescent pupil of the actor, who resembled him in appearance and ability. His intention had been to kill Domitia herself. Later, Domitia’s first husband, Aelius Lamia, would also die, killed for a joke at the emperor’s expense. The final death in this knockabout black comedy was that of Helvidius Priscus the Younger who, quite understandably, felt moved to satirize Domitian’s divorce as popular entertainment, a farce of ‘Paris’ and ‘Oenone’.) If he expected continence from Domitia, Domitian had no intention of practising the same himself and continued his relationship with Julia. When Julia fell pregnant, Domitian insisted that she abort the baby. She too duly died. As with her father and grandfather, Domitian decided on deification: coins celebrated her ascent to heaven riding on a peacock.413

  Bum-boy, fornicator, eunuch-fancier and niece-lover: Domitian’s ‘sins’ scarcely distinguished him from many of his contemporaries. That he attained the principate, however, exposed these foibles in a larger arena. Like Augustus before him, Domitian spearheaded a programme of moral legislation aimed at curbing the worst laxities of Roman sexual mores: also like Augustus, he made no efforts to toe the line himself. In Dio’s account, adultery and hypocrisy combine. Among the socially prominent women who fell victim to the emperor’s evangelism were those whose favours he had not scrupled to enjoy himself, while, with wonderful irony, he struck off a knight from the list of jurors ‘because he had taken back his wife after divorcing her and charging her with adultery’. Legislation and a taste for senatorial wives were both factors which shaped Domitian’s relationship with the ruling class: at his own instigation his private life became a matter of politics which could not be discounted. Not if we are to believe the sources, in which the most pedestrian concupiscence is exploited to Domitian’s detriment. In truth, the only consistent presence in the palace bedroom was a statue of the goddess Minerva, traditionally understood as ever virgin. The emperor’s devotion to this Greek-inspired goddess of poetry, wisdom and magic, ‘whom he worshipped with superstitious veneration’, exceeded any discernible fondness on his part for ordinary mortals, male, female, castrated, depilated, family member or otherwise; exceeded too, Dio tells us, his reverence for any other god (including, presumably, the cults of his father and his brother).

  What then of sibling rivalry? Invested with ‘execrable’ pride by Eutropius, Domitian chafed against his bronze-medal placement in the Flavian pecking order. Briefly in 69 and early 70, following Vitellius’ death and awaiting the arrival of Vespasian and Titus in Rome, he played the Caesar’s part. He did so with enthusiasm. ‘In a single day he assigned more than twenty positions in the city and the provinces,’ Suetonius relates, ‘which led Vespasian to say more than once that he was surprised that he did not appoint the emperor’s successor with the rest.’ It may be true. First Mucianus, then Vespasian, took it upon themselves to curb the bumptious eighteen-year-old’s swagger. The poet Martial asserts that their efforts were unnecessary: ‘Although alone he already held the reins of Julian power, he gave them up and in a world that had been his own remained but the third – after both Vespasian and Titus.’5 Other sources paint a different picture in which the success of the older men’s restraining orders was qualified. Tacitus has Domitian secretly petitioning his kinsman Quintus Petilius Cerialis for control of the latter’s troops in Lower Germany, his plan to wage war against Vespasian or exceed Titus’ record.6 The claim is certainly an exaggeration. What did emerge from the early days of Vespasian’s takeover was a forcible reminder of Domitian’s youth and inexperience. It was a defeat the second son accepted without grace, forced to live in his father’s house, Vespasian’s purpose either to assert Domitian’s place in the dynastic scheme or to curb his instincts through watchfulness. For the next decade, quickened by his fleeting taste of power, resentment lent a tang to Domitian’s impatience.

  The roots of the problem lay in a childhood of suburban scrimping. Add to the deficit emotional deprivation: the undated death of Vespasian’s wife and Domitian’s mother, Flavia Domitilla, its import impossible to quantify. Also a sense of precariousness connected to Vespasian’s fall from favour after Claudius’ marriage to Agrippina. Titus’ birthplace we know hardly constituted a silver spoon. By the time of Domitian’s birth twelve years later, despite his father’s successful ascent of the cursus honorum, the Flavian advance had yet to reap noticeable material dividends. Still on the Quirinal, in a house on unfashionable Pomegranate Street, the family vaults remained empty of silver. Suetonius denies the existence of a single piece of plate. In The Twelve Caesars, the dominant characteristic of Domitian’s boyhood and early youth is poverty. By senatorial standards this was probably true. The historian is not belittling Vespasian, one of his chronicle’s heroes. Instead, he is preparing his readers for later revelations concerning Domitian’s ungovernable covetousness and his preposterously inflated self-importance.

  The latter was surely an offshoot of status anxieties and accounts for Domitian’s high-handedness towards his father’s freedwoman mistress Caenis, whom he refused permission to kiss him. It may also have enhanced the attractions of his errant wife, Domitia Longina. Notwithstanding her marriage to the senator Aelius Lamia, Domitian pursued Domitia with ardour and determination. As in the case of Augustus and Livia, Domitia’s family distinction far outstripped that of her second husband. She was a great-great-great-granddaughter of Augustus via Julia the Younger; her father’s half-sister was the empress Caesonia, ill-fated fourth wife of Gaius. Her father himself was that warrior-like general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, whom Nero compelled to suicide, fearful of the extent of his military eminence and the potential threat it posed.14 By the end of 81, like Livia before her, Domitia found herself invested with the title ‘Augusta’. She was the first imperial wife so nominated since Poppaea.

  Titus, of course, began life with no more than his younger brother, but found himself, thanks to Narcissus’ partisanship towards Vespasian, at the epicentre of the Roman world. Unlike that of Domitian, his childhood playground was the Palatine, his education a courtly affair enjoyed in company with Claudius’ son Britannicus. Afterwards he shared in Vespasian’s return to prominence in Judaea. By contrast Domitian remained at home, motherless, fatherless, brotherless. We ought not to be surprised at his divergent concept of family unity, nor his preference for time spent in very different company at his villa in the Alban Hills, a day’s journey southeast of Rome. Too often he had been excluded from Flavian inclusiveness. If accounts indicate a loner’s instinct on the part of the adult Domitian, their focus may be no more than those strategies he had developed over time to endure isolation.

  In the sources Domitian’s jockeying for position with Titus is a feature of Vespasian’s principate from the outset. It begins in the crazy days immediately following the Flavian settlement and Titus’ successes in Judaea, when Domitian planned an expedition to Gaul and Germany with the sole intent, Suetonius writes, ‘that he might make himself equal to his brother in power and rank’. A decade later, worn out with waiting,
he abandoned the ailing Titus to die without regret. Suetonius’ version suggests that the younger brother countermanded the necessary medical assistance. Cassius Dio goes a step further, relating the rumour that, in the spirit of his previous plots against Titus (unspecified), Domitian assisted the older man’s death. While chances of recovery still remained, he placed his brother in a chest. He surrounded him with snow, ‘pretending that the disease required, perhaps, that a chill be administered’, but knowing better, of course.7 With his brother on ice, certain now to expire, Domitian hastened to Rome, where he received titles, power and authority in the Praetorians’ camp, as well as the first of twenty-two acclamations of ‘imperator’. As with the demise of each previous princeps, the sources decry the possibility of a natural death. Given Domitian’s future behaviour, it is important that his accession bear the stamp of illegality from the start.

  Self-seeking and savvy, Rome’s latest emperor expedited his brother’s deification and quickly commenced work on the Arch of Titus. As with Augustus’ celebration of the anniversary of Actium, Domitian meant to make capital out of the Flavians’ greatest military victory. Ditto the deification of his father and brother. Once he had written a poem celebrating Titus’ victory in Judaea; now he built temples to the Divine Vespasian and the Flavian family, with their own cult attendants, the Flaviales. What he never intended was to rule in Titus’ shadow. No memorial games commemorated Titus’ birthday during the fifteen years of Domitian’s principate. Perhaps it really was the case that he considered that Titus, at his own reckoning an accomplished forger, had altered Vespasian’s will and denied him joint inheritance in 79. (If so, he misread Vespasian’s clear signs throughout his reign that the order of succession favoured Titus in the first instance. Certainly the brothers shared the title of princeps iuventutis; equally certain that it was Titus who, on six occasions to Domitian’s one, shared the consulship with their father.) Dio accepts no excuses. ‘This same emperor,’ he declaims, ‘paid no heed to the praises which men bestowed upon Titus.’8 On the contrary, for Domitian family feeling was a question of expediency uncoloured by liking. He struggled to regard Vespasian’s and Titus’ legacies with equanimity and ‘quite outdid himself in visiting disgrace and ruin upon the friends of his father and of his brother’;9 he also killed those remaining Flavian males who might have succeeded him: Titus Flavius Sabinus, Flavius Clemens (whose sons were named as Domitian’s heirs) and Arrecinus Clemens. Eventually Domitian would pay a heavy price for this contrariness – one, like much in Suetonius’ account, presaged by portents. Disgraced and childless, he brought about the end of the dynasty within the timespan foretold in that dream of a balance once granted to Vespasian.