The Twelve Caesars (44 page)

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 least 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