The Twelve Caesars (45 page)

In truth, when it came, it was (or should have been) Vespasian’s victory. Vespasian, we know, was the commander of 50,000 troops in Judaea, he the military mastermind,
experienced, accomplished. But Vespasian had embarked on a bigger
campaign. With his father poised to become Rome’s new ruler, a promotion Tacitus claims as
Titus’ in inspiration,
⁸
Titus was left to finish the job of conquest, annexing for himself spoils and renown. In August 69, Mucianus set off for Rome at the head of pro-Flavian troops. He had
thrown in his lot with Vespasian, erstwhile jealousy forgotten, the hard knot of his resentment softened, as we have seen, by Titus’ charm and the younger man’s good looks. His purpose
was the overthrow of Vitellius. At the same time, Vespasian and Titus journeyed to Alexandria. If necessary, Vespasian meant to seize control of Egypt’s grain shipments, his means of starving
Vitellian Italy into submission.
⁹
Titus continued on to Palestine. There, aided at Vespasian’s direction by the Jewish former procurator of Judaea, Tiberius Julius Alexander, a man of proven
military ability, he embarked on the siege of the fortified city of Jerusalem.

It was 10 August 70 when a Roman soldier hurled the flaming torch which destroyed the Temple and facilitated the theft of its treasures. According to Jewish historian Josephus, Titus’
apologist, that over-zealous soldier acted in direct contravention of his master’s wishes.
¹⁰
The later classical account of Sulpicius Severus, perhaps inspired by passages of Tacitus’
Histories
which have since been lost, argues the flip side of the coin.
¹¹
If the truth is unreclaimable, the sources appear to voice no regret on Titus’ part – unless the origin of
that single stab of conscience, which Suetonius records on his deathbed, was his sanction of the defilement of the Holy of Holies and, later the same day, sacrifices to Roman standards made in the
temple precincts, a double heresy of blood and flame. The evidence of the Arch of Titus, albeit a commission instigated by Domitian after Titus’ death, is discouraging. In 70, the temple
burned. Its precincts glistened with the blood of the faithful. The Table of the Shewbread and all its golden furniture, dragged into the
daylight, were dispatched to Rome.
Jerusalem, besieged through a long period of attrition, struggled no more. Its defences had been breached for the last time and the temple would never be rebuilt.

In October and November, at Caesarea Maritima and Berytus respectively, Titus celebrated the birthdays of his brother and his father. On both occasions, Josephus unflinchingly records, the
celebrations included the slaughter of several thousand Jewish prisoners, ‘who perished in combats with wild beasts or in fighting each another or by being burnt alive’.
¹²
To modern ears,
these sound unedifying spectacles: Roman opinion baulked only at the modesty of the death toll. Impresario-like, in ashes and gore Titus shared his glory with Vespasian and Domitian. It was Flavian
égoïsme à trois
, a pact sealed in the public suffering of the vanquished – oblations made to the family’s household gods writ large. Vespasian surely approved
the policy. Josephus notwithstanding, the manner of Titus’ birthday tributes suggests a singular lack of remorse. It is what we should expect from a conquering hero.

The following year Titus shared with Vespasian the grandest triumph in Rome’s history. Tableaux charting four years of conflict wound their way through the capital, followed by Simon ben
Giora, architect of the revolt, dragged by a halter, humbled and scourged.
¹³
For all its vaunting symbolism, this vainglorious street parade was insufficient to settle the Judaean account (closure
would only be achieved once another kinsman, Flavius Silva, stormed Masada in 73, forcing the mass suicide of the last rebel group). Foremost for Titus among the campaign’s loose ends in 71
was the Jewish queen who had sided with Rome against her co-religionists. Her name was Berenice.

A statue in Athens describes Julia Berenice as a ‘great’ queen.
¹⁴
Surviving sources make it clear that her name was coupled with many less
flattering adjectives besides. She was rich, foreign, Jewish, powerful, libidinous... and female – impossible not to fall victim to the long arm of Augustan propaganda. Berenice became
Titus’ Cleopatra. In his treatment of his Eastern queen, the second of the Flavians would prove himself a greater and a lesser man than Mark Antony. As with his winning demeanour as
princeps
, and like his earlier jettisoning of Marcia Furnilla, the instinct for political survival sidelined more complex truths; Titus escaped with his life and Rome’s throne. Or
perhaps Suetonius was mistaken and, when the time came, renunciation was easy, appetites slaked, all passion spent.

A great-granddaughter of Herod the Great, Berenice had been married three times when, in 66, the high-handedness and brutality of procurator Gessus Florius provoked the First Jewish Revolt in
Judaea and a large-scale Roman military presence under Vespasian’s command. Her spouses included a connection of Titus’ associate Tiberius Julius Alexander, chosen on account of his
wealth, and her uncle, another Herod, whom Claudius had created king of Chalcis; but the longest relationship in her life was with her brother, Agrippa II, one of several client kings educated at
the imperial court in Rome. According to Josephus, whose enmity towards Berenice still taints her posterity, her final marriage – to King Polemo of Cilicia (a match she both made and unmade
herself) – arose from her desire to curtail rumours of an incestuous relationship between the royal siblings. If this were the case, Josephus made sure that Berenice failed. The
‘inappropriate sexual desire’ he cited as her grounds for divorcing Polemo, who had converted to Judaism at her request, was for Agrippa. It was not, of course, the whole story. The
sources omit mention of the first meeting
of Titus and Berenice, which probably took place in Ptolemais or, with greater ceremony, at Agrippa’s splendid palace at his
administrative capital of Caesarea Philippi:
¹⁵
all agree on its long-term success. The relationship of the Roman quaestorian legionary legate and the Jewish princess branded by history a siren would
survive for more than a decade, despite lengthy separations and at least one preliminary breaking-off. Thanks to a rich literary tradition – inspired by a single line in Suetonius’
account – it has endured two millennia.

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.