Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (16 page)

From his vantage point in a faraway fortress on the Danube, Hadrian was able to see that opinion in Rome was much too sanguine. Domitian had been well liked by the rank and file, and most legionaries and probably many centurions were furious about his removal. Some units of the Danubian army, perhaps in Lower Moesia, were mutinous. But without support from the general staff, without a commander to lead them, there was little they, or the Praetorian Guard in Rome, could do. For the moment the skies were calm, but a storm threatened.

The affable and cultivated Nerva got off to a surprisingly good start, working in partnership with the Senate and promoting reconciliation. He moved fast and with sure judgment.

The first step was to sweep away the evidence of his predecessor’s reign. The Senate withheld the compliment of deification, which they had conferred on his father and brother, and endorsed a condemnation of his memory—
damnatio memoriae
. Now that the tyrant was dead, this was the worst punishment they could inflict. His body was disposed of with the minimum of ceremony, buried by his nurse in the temple of the Flavian clan. Innumerable statues and arches, symbols of Domitian’s personality cult, were removed. To refill a depleted treasury, imperial possessions, from estates to clothes, were sold off.

Rome did not possess the bureaucracy to establish a police state, but Domitian had gone as far in that direction as possible through the use of denunciation and what were in effect show trials, with death or banishment the almost invariable outcomes. Now all those facing trial for treason, or
maiestas
, were immediately released, and all the exiles recalled. For the future,
maiestas
charges were outlawed, as was the accusation of “adopting the Jewish mode of life”: in other words, Flavius Clemens was rehabilitated. The emperor swore never himself to put a senator to death.

These negative, if necessary, measures underpinned a positive vision that carried signs of forethought. Nerva used the coinage as a universal means of conveying his message. An aureus, a gold coin worth one hundred sesterces, showed the head of the new emperor on one side and on the other the personification of Liberty holding a
pileus
and a ruler’s
scepter:
a pileus
was a felt cap shaped like half an egg that was given to a slave on his enfranchisement. A legend read “Public Liberty.”

Other coins marked achievements, either real or wished for, that indicated fault lines about which the regime was worried. One of them celebrated the provision of grain for the capital city, underlining Nerva’s anxiety to keep the plebs on his side. They had welcomed Domitian’s departure but needed practical reassurance that the new emperor could feed them. Another numismatic image reflected hope rather than experience—beneath a pair of clasped hands a slogan read “Harmony of the armies.” It was still unclear whether or not the military
would
accept Domitian’s demise.

This in no way signified a return to the old days of the Republic. Even the most idealistic “noble Roman” could see that a rowdy six-hundred-strong committee, the Senate, was a defective mechanism of government. Nerva’s clever trick was to transform the Flavian despotism into something approaching a constitutional monarchy. The emperor kept his all-trumping
imperium
, but framed it within the rule of law and institutional convention. The days of the
dominus et deus
were over and the old term devised by Augustus—
princeps
or leading citizen, first among equals—regained its common use. Tacitus, ferocious critic of imperial misrule, offered words of warm praise:

In the opening weeks of the new reign, vengeful prosecutions had been brought against run-of-the-mill
delatores
. One of the consuls remarked that it was a bad thing to have an emperor under whom no one was allowed to do anything, but worse to have one under whom
anyone
was allowed to do anything. Nerva agreed, and ordered that cases of this kind should cease.

Despite the embargo, Pliny the Younger found it unjust that no senator had yet been charged. “Once Domitian was dead,” he confessed, “I decided on reflection that this was a truly splendid opportunity for attacking the guilty, avenging the injured, and making oneself known.”

His colleagues in the Senate did not agree. “Let us survivors stay alive,” one of them said. Too many of their number had compromised themselves under Domitian, and they were determined that bygones should be bygones.

Nerva appointed many onetime supporters of the Flavian dynasty to high office, and had no intention whatsoever to revisit the “bloodstained servility” of the recent past. A discreet forgetfulness veiled it from view. An exchange at a small dinner party summed up the situation well. Nerva was lying next to one of Domitian’s closest supporters, a noted
delator
. The conversation turned to another even more celebrated
delator
, the blind Lucius Valerius Catullus Messalinus, a man “whose loss of sight increased his cruel disposition.” An
amicus
, he was a member of Domitian’s
consilium
.

“I wonder what would have happened to him if he were alive today,” Nerva remarked.

“He would be dining with us,” said another guest drily, a member of the Stoic opposition who had recently returned from exile.

Nerva was able to bring together sworn enemies not only in a dining room, but also into a harmonious administration. His policy of reconciliation was generally popular. The emperor remarked with satisfaction: “I have done nothing that would prevent my laying down the imperial office and returning to private life in safety.”

The elite may have been content, but the Praetorian Guard had sharp memories. They had been reluctantly persuaded to accept the change of regime, but Domitian’s removal still rankled. In the autumn of 97 their simmering anger brimmed over.

Nerva ill-advisedly, as it turned out, appointed a new prefect of the guard, a certain Casperius Aelianus, who had held the same post late in the previous reign, to serve alongside the compliant Petronius Secundus, who had calmed the Praetorian Guard in the immediate aftermath of the
assassination. Casperius sided with his soldiers and gave them the leadership they had lacked twelve months before. The Guard took over the palace, arresting the emperor and keeping him in custody. They demanded that Nerva hand over his predecessor’s murderers, especially Petronius and the freedman Parthenius, who was still in the imperial employ.

Although sick with fear, the emperor strongly resisted, baring his throat and challenging his captors to kill him. As the men were found and led out to execution, Nerva vomited and suffered an attack of diarrhea, but he went on protesting. It would be better for him to die, he said, than to befoul his
imperium
by colluding in the deaths of those who had given it to him. He was ignored. Petronius was dispatched with a merciful single blow, but Parthenius had his genitals torn off and stuffed into his mouth before being strangled.

Nerva was then forced to address an assembly of the people and offer public thanks to the Praetorian Guard “since they had killed the basest and most wicked of all human beings.” Casperius was paid off, but the damage had been done. The emperor’s humiliation was complete and his authority fatally undermined.

Nerva’s position was untenable, but what was to be done? Things would only be made worse if he were to abdicate or be deposed. No successor had been named and the outcome would very probably be civil strife. Yet again everyone’s mind went fearfully back to the catastrophe of 69. The solution was, in fact, obvious. The emperor had to find an acceptable heir. Bearing in mind his age and state of health, and the fact that he now moved with commendable speed and decisiveness, we can assume that Nerva had already been laying his plans.

As soon as the emperor was ready he staged a compelling piece of political theater. A laureled dispatch arrived in Rome from Pannonia, announcing a victory—presumably by Trajan over Germanic tribes. The emperor walked up the winding path from the Forum to the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol and laid the laurels on the altar. When he came out of the temple he announced in a loud voice: “May good fortune attend the Senate and People of Rome and myself. I hereby adopt Marcus Ulpius Traianus.”

In theory, adoption was a private matter that brought no necessary
political consequence. But the signal was clear, and a complaisant Senate awarded Trajan the
cognomen
of Caesar. He was also hailed as Germanicus, for his recent victory over the Suebi. In addition, the emperor endowed him with the two key mechanisms of imperial power: the first was the
proconsulare imperium maius
, which allowed him to give instructions to proconsuls, or provincial governors, and the second was the
tribunicia potestas
, the authority of a tribune of the people to propose laws, convene the Senate, and veto its decisions.

Nerva sent his adopted son, now styled Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus Caesar, a diamond ring with a message in which he quoted a line from Homer’s
Iliad
. “May the Danaans by your arrows requite my tears.” So prayed the soothsayer Calchas, when he called on the archer god Apollo to avenge his humiliations at the hands of the Greek army outside Troy. The emperor was hinting that he expected his adopted son to take measures against his Praetorian tormentors.

In the meantime, he moved Trajan from his posting in Pannonia to Germany, where he assumed overall command of the two provinces: it is not altogether clear why, but an unrecorded emergency had supervened. It may have been some unfinished business of Domitian—perhaps a recrudescence of trouble among the Germanic tribes on the far side of the Rhine, or some challenge to the new
limes
, the chain of forts that demarcated the limit of empire.

There was general surprise at the adoption, and general approval. Pliny noted: “All disturbances died at once.” Although the promotion appeared to come out of the blue, Trajan was a rational choice. The son of a distinguished father, he was a second-generation patrician. He had made a name for himself as an able soldier, popular with both the men and their commanders.

According to Pliny, Trajan was reluctant to accept his appointment as Nerva’s colleague in empire. “You had to be pressed. Even then you could only be persuaded because you saw your country in peril [from the Praetorian Guard] and the whole state tottering to a fall.”

There is evidence that Trajan had been informally discussed as
capax imperii
, worthy of rule, for some time. Tacitus states that his father-in-law,
Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a general who was responsible for much of the conquest of Britannia, “foretold” the principate of Trajan “in our hearing both as something to be prayed for and something that would happen.” The point here is that Agricola had died as long ago as 93, at the height of Domitian’s terror. Gossip of this kind was dangerous then not only to the speaker but to the person he was speaking about. Trajan was lucky that it did not reach the emperor’s ears.

A remark by Pliny, that not to have adopted Trajan would have indicated the “wanton tyranny of power,” suggests that Nerva’s hands were tied in advance. And a late source claims that the dexterous and unscrupulous Licinius Sura had engineered a coup d’état: in other words, the adoption had been a seizure, not a gift. So perhaps Trajan was not as retiring as he seemed.

It is impossible to be sure exactly what happened, but here is a plausible scenario that takes account of what we are told and of the changeless imperatives of political action. During the last terrifying years of the previous reign Trajan’s name began to be whispered in opposition circles as a potential
princeps
. As a distinguished soldier he could be counted on to adopt a more aggressive military posture than Domitian, which would please the general staff. Domestically, he held moderate views and would be likely to cooperate with rather than browbeat the Senate. If he showed no uncomely enthusiasm for the throne, that was a reassuring bonus.

The conspirators nominated Nerva to the purple rather than Trajan because the latter was physically too distant from the center of events, and the imperial system could not tolerate a vacuum, even for a few days, without risking civil war. The Praetorian Guard needed to be confronted with an immediate fait accompli if they were to tolerate Domitian’s violent removal from the stage. Trajan, marooned in his province, on security grounds surely could not have been informed of the plot to kill Domitian. He would have to wait until the next time for a chance of winning the purple. And to make sure that the next time actually arrived, Licinius Sura was on hand as his confidential “agent” in Rome (in fact, it is not known where he was at this period, but if he was looking after Trajan’s interests, as suggested, he could hardly have done so effectively unless he was in the capital).