Dio preserves an anecdote intended to illustrate Domitian’s mirthless viciousness. He ordered that a room in the palace be decorated entirely in black, every surface and every object pitchy and lustreless, and filled the room with leading knights and senators. To each he gave a small stone slab shaped like a gravestone and engraved with his name, a tomb lantern and a naked attendant similarly painted black. A succession of dishes of black food was served as Domitian discoursed on appropriately tenebrous subjects, all connected with death. Then he dispatched the shaken senators for home. When, shortly afterwards, imperial messengers retraced their steps, each man expected the order of execution. In fact they received gifts: the ‘gravestones’, tomb lanterns and costly vessels from that Stygian banquet – plus a charming naked boy apiece, clean now and comely.20
Humiliation of the senate was a high-risk strategy. In Domitian’s case, it was one aspect of an unwavering determination to rule with minimal senatorial interference: by humiliating the senate’s members, the emperor asserted the discrepancy in their relative positions. For a decade he pursued this policy without accident. It could not continue indefinitely.
Three years after his accession, Domitian had issued coins bearing an image of Jupiter. The king of the gods, who was also the god of thunder, appeared armed with a spear and a thunderbolt. Within a year, Jupiter had yielded up his thunderbolt to a depiction of Domitian himself.21 It marked the beginning of a process of iconographic synthesis. For the final decade of Domitian’s reign, coins awarded the thunderbolt to Domitian alone. No longer illustrated, Jupiter was present only associatively. The import was clear.
It was a gesture not of vanity but of political intent. ‘Be assured that nothing is more pleasing than beauty, but nothing shorter lived,’ Domitian had written in a trichological treatise, On the Care of the Hair. Much of his own hair had since fallen out. Bald but retaining vestiges of former good looks, the emperor made an accurate estimation of the value of appearances. Undeniably his numismatic godliness was intended as a potent visual statement (proof, too, of latent megalomania). It was an expression of a need to be obeyed and a determination to dominate the apparatus of government. In 82, he had embarked on the first of seven consecutive consulships; he would hold the office again in 90, 92 and 95, bringing his total number of terms of office, including those under Vespasian, to an unprecedented seventeen.22 In 85, like Vespasian before him, he also exercised the power of the censorship. Afterwards he declared himself censor for life. Vespasian had exploited the office to reconstitute the senate in the Flavian image; Domitian likewise, by advancing members of the equestrian class, altered its composition. Heedless of any need for conciliation, Domitian also demanded the senate’s concurrence with his wishes without stooping to persuasiveness or blandishments. It was an accurate statement of the light in which he regarded it. In addition, in his role as censor, this dour, unsmiling twelfth Caesar embraced that policy of moral vigilance which overlooked his own nostalgie de la boue and, in its pinched officiousness, further alienated an upper class irked by his high-handedness and contemptuous of his meagre qualifications for rule. Like his grandiose building plans for Rome, it was a token Augustanism. He also revived Augustus’ Julian law against adultery.
Domitian, we can assume, understood the grounds of the senate’s contempt. He did not of course sanction it. Rather, by creating an imperial persona which blurred distinctions between the mortal and the immortal, he sought to pull the rug from under senators’ feet. According to Republican practice, Domitian was unsuited to high office and its related grants of power on account of family background (a deified father and brother notwithstanding) and his limited acquaintance with the magistracies of the cursus honorum. The Domitian who appeared on his coins as an associate of Jupiter and who, the following year, probably in 86, evolved the style of address dominus et deus (‘master and god’), clearly did not hold sway in Rome as a result of tribunician power and maius imperium awarded by the senate. Nor did his eminence derive from the authority and prestige previously associated with the consulship (although, as we have seen, he took steps to monopolize any benefits the consulship continued to bestow). Instead, his power devolved from a higher authority. Unquantifiable, it was also inarguable. This vaunting trump card scarcely represented emollience towards Roman patricians. Given the recrudescence of Republicanism within the senate during Domitian’s reign, it was perhaps the only alternative to reprising Augustus’ affection of an age-old ladder of magistracies, the princeps first among equals (even if Flavian status would have permitted this). Domitian possessed neither the adeptness nor the inclination for that deceit. Instead, he shirked half-measures. Like overtly autocratic emperors before him, he confined much effective political debate to his consilium of friends, freedmen and hand-picked advisers, the role of the senate the equivalent of rubber-stamping. He also ordained that any statues made of him should be of gold or silver (and ordered the death of a woman whose ‘crime’ was to have undressed in front of his statue). In doing so, he claimed his place in a dangerous continuum which included Cleopatra and Gaius. Neither had benefited in the long term from their golden images and senatorial hostility. Nor, as we know, would Domitian.
As in his father’s reign, senatorial opposition to Domitian arose on philosophical grounds. It was both abstract – a theoretical objection to the principate’s vesting of far-reaching formal powers in the hands of an individual – and concrete, focusing on Domitian himself and the nature of his government. Domitian, however, was not Vespasian. Chaffed by Demetrius, harried by Helvidius Priscus, Vespasian had shown equanimity in the face of his friends’ candour and patience with philosophers whose behaviour Suetonius characterizes as impudent. The response of Vespasian’s son was less indulgent, as we should expect. Where Vespasian’s claim to power was flawed, Domitian’s was non-existent. He had not, like his father, brought to a close a period of unbridled political and civil unrest in the life of Rome; nor, thanks to the efforts of Vespasian and Titus, was the condition of the Empire such that it demanded radical approaches (a puritanical young man of gentle countenance, patchy experience and stubborn self-importance). Despite Domitian’s best efforts, the deification of his predecessors did not, like the effulgence of Augustus’ glory, bathe him in inviolability. Even the unique award to Domitia of the title ‘Mother of the Divine Caesar’, following the death of the couple’s only child, a boy who was subsequently deified, fell short of the grandeur of Rome’s previous dynasty.
In the doldrum years 69 to 81, Domitian had devoted himself to archery and adulterous sex. His skill at the former was such that, when hunting at his Alban villa, he regularly killed in excess of a hundred wild animals. Sometimes he deliberately shot a beast twice: the two arrows created the appearance of horns. He varied the pace by aiming instead at slaves. A slave stood at a distance and extended his right hand, with the fingers spread. Unerring, Domitian placed his arrows between the slave’s fingers.
As with toxophily, so with philosophy. Like Vespasian, Domitian did not rush his aim. Careful to curry popular favour in a lavish programme of public games, he advanced against the senate gradually. It was not until 93 that he embarked on the sequence of senatorial executions which has since been likened to a reign of terror. That year he targeted a clutch of high-profile senators whose offences included ridicule of the emperor and praise of his enemies. Helvidius Priscus the Younger, son of Vespasian’s old sparring partner, and Arulenus Rusticus were both former consuls; other ‘philosopher’ victims included Herennius Senecio, biographer of the elder Priscus, Junius Rusticus, Priscus’ eulogist, the historian Hermogenes of Tarsus and a bona fide philosopher called Maternus. (The works of Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio were burned in the Forum by triumvirs especially appointed for the task.) Their downfall probably had a symbolic dimension, as Tacitus claimed, indicating Domitian’s intolerance of senatorial independence, which by then was an open secret anyway:23 ‘in that fire they thought to consume the voice of the
Roman people, the freedom of the senate, and the conscious emotions of all mankind.’24 The result fell little short of panic within senatorial ranks. Other victims of Domitian’s zero-tolerance policy included the governor of Britain, Sallustius Lucullus, who had loaned his name to a new design for lances; Salvius Cocceianus for observing the birthday of the emperor Otho, his paternal uncle; Mettius Pompusianus, on the strength of reports that his horoscope marked him out as a future emperor; Acilius Glabrio for impiety and Titus Flavius Clemens, father of Domitian’s heirs Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Titus Flavius Domitianus, probably on a suspicion of conversion to Judaism. So flexible an interpretation of subversion on Domitian’s part was indicative of that escalating fear, loathing and a kind of madness by which he evidently felt impelled to root out each ort and shard of opposition, real or imaginary. Informers did their worst, adding to the frenzied insecurity on the Palatine: Domitian’s victims embraced intimates as well as strangers. ‘What could be more capricious than a tyrant’s ear, when the fate of his so-called friends and advisers hung on his word?’ Juvenal asked with an air of deserved asperity.25 Those whose treasonable actions or words were considered to be of a lower order escaped with confiscation of their estates. For greed alone could rival Domitian’s appetite for cruelty.
While the senate quaked in fear, the emperor was tormented by paranoia. In the magnificent new palace he had built on the Palatine, he lined corridors with polished obsidian and moonstone. The glossy surface of the stone fulfilled a mirrorlike purpose. It revealed to Domitian the approach of all comers. But mirrors reflect phantoms, too, shifting patterns of light and shadow, a tremulous, insubstantial imagery of nothing. It was not granted to Domitian to be all-seeing, and the effort of constant watchfulness proved exhausting. It was inevitable that eventually his vigilance would falter. That weakness proved fatal.
Impossible that the end should come unheralded by portents. In this case dreams. Minerva appeared to Domitian to tell him that she could no longer protect him; she cast aside her weapons, and riding in a chariot drawn by black horses, plunged into an abyss. It was a traumatic revelation on the part of that goddess whom the motherless emperor had chosen as his tutelary deity, amounting almost to a second bereavement. In another vision, Domitian saw a golden hump emerging from his back. We are asked to believe that he interpreted this alarming development as a sign that ‘the condition of the empire would be happier and more prosperous after his time’. This latter, wholly improbable scenario differs from those auguries of impending doom with which we have seen Suetonius endow Domitian’s predecessors. It is a narrative device of the historian’s and clearly self-seeking, a sop to succeeding emperors, an over-neat sycophancy at the expense of Domitian’s final hours. It fails to convince and not simply on account of its unlikelihood, the utter impossibility of the Domitian of the sources arriving at such a conclusion even in extremis. For Domitian’s attacks on the occupants of the senate house imperilled neither the condition of the Empire nor its prosperity, as he surely understood. Those policies he had pursued outside the senate house constituted their own legacy for good, like the new Via Domitiana from Sinuessa to Puteoli, opened the year before Domitian’s death and acclaimed by the poet Statius as the benefaction of a mature and knowledgeable ruler.26 Palatine politics alone weakened Domitian. As the first century drew to its close, Rome’s upper classes remained unprepared for that king-like absolutism which was always Domitian’s aim and which, in successive generations, would stamp the principate. Unable to comprehend the possibility of its own redundancy, the senate exulted in the twelfth Caesar’s downfall. But though they destroyed his statue in the Temple of Jupiter Custos, smashed the votive shields emblazoned with his image which adorned the senate house, and erased his name from the inscriptions attesting to the Sacred Games of 88, they obliterated neither the memory of Domitian nor that impulse to tyranny which they claimed as his principal flaw. In time they would discover that the will to power always increased with eminence, the simplest of the lessons of these twelve Caesars.
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