The Twelve Caesars (46 page)

As it happened, Titus’ assessment of the leeway available to him was correct. History showed that revolution in Rome was a rarefied business,
confined to the city’s political classes: his behaviour was his own affair so long as it failed to incite conspiracies. His accession to the throne in June 79 passed unopposed. Little matter
that his cruelty, catamites and, it was rumoured, corruption in accepting bribes for court sentences – all, as we have seen, standard behaviour under the principate – poisoned his
reputation. Tiberius was proof that ill repute alone did not topple thrones, while even the ‘good’ Vespasian had taken a cut of the fees extorted by his mistress Caenis for expediting
imperial decision-making. The support of the Praetorian Guards, known to be crucial, had been guaranteed since 71 when Titus was appointed Praetorian prefect. This was the first time this important
post had been filled by so close a relative of the emperor’s: in addition to giving Titus responsibility for his father’s security, it also placed him at the head of the largest
military force in Italy.
²¹
Titus’ assiduity in exploiting his position to eliminate dissent, though flattering to the Guard itself and within the letter (if not the spirit) of the Guard’s
purpose, offended strict legalities and suggested a nature inclined to tyranny. Winning hearts and minds does not appear to have recommended itself as an aim. Mucianus had reduced the numbers of
Guards from Vitellius’ swollen tally. Into Rome’s public gathering places, so the story goes, Titus sent the remnants of this virtual private police force. At his instruction, they
denounced suspected conspirators. Those who were named as often died. In Suetonius’ reckoning, it was a provision for Titus’ own future safety; in the short term, it added further dark
coruscations to his notoriety. His murder of the ex-consul Aulus Caecina Alienus, a noted opportunist whose turncoat support had nevertheless contributed to Vespasian’s
successful bid for power in 69, shocked even unsentimental Romans: Caecina was stabbed as he left Titus’ dinner-party on the eve of delivering a harangue to the troops. That
would-be conspiracy, in the dog days of Vespasian’s reign, was probably genuine. Caecina’s track record of oscillating loyalties offers limited scope for exculpation. As a response to a
perceived threat, Titus’ behaviour was ruthless and ruthlessly successful. Caecina’s revolt died with him.

Revolution when it came was not the work of disaffected senators but of Titus himself. It did not emerge, like Jerusalem’s surrender, in conflagration. There was no
conspiracy, no exchange of contumely in the senate house, no convulsions in Rome’s smooth running. Rather, with the power and the glory his, the emperor Titus, Rome’s eleventh
princeps
and the first non-Julio-Claudian to succeed through the hereditary principle,
²²
embraced benignity. In the ancient sources it appears a change quite as significant as any plotted by
Caecina or his ilk; it may just as easily have been a case of smoke and mirrors, another instance of pragmatism. As one of the shortest reigning of the twelve Caesars, his principate beset by
unprecedented natural disasters, Titus had few opportunities to review or discard his father’s interpretation of imperial government: his task was repeatedly immediate, its concerns those
which in succeeding millennia would be associated with the concept of ‘welfare monarchy’. Embracing paternalism, he maintained Vespasian’s golden mean. His reaction to large-scale
setbacks was effective, considered, balanced: legacy perhaps of that early exposure to fate’s unpredictability which had robbed him, for example, of Britannicus’ friendship. If vigorous
appetites had enlivened his
youth, duty would characterize his reign, an unremarkable day-by-day diligence which he was nevertheless at pains to make public. Tacitus responds
with understatement: Titus ‘practised more self-restraint in his own than in his father’s reign’.
²³
That self-restraint exchanged love of pleasure for a ‘father’-like
love for each and every one of Rome’s children. So startling a metamorphosis glossed autocracy with benignity.

There were inevitably exceptions to his kindliness. Among them were informers, whom Titus renounced as a group, subjecting them to public punishment before selling them as slaves; and
Berenice.

Berenice had not remained in Agrippa’s palace at Caesarea Philippi. In 75 she is recorded as resident in Rome, her brother with her, the forty-seven-year-old matron married to Titus in all
but name. Such, at any rate, was evidently Berenice’s own interpretation. It was an arrangement strikingly suggestive of that earlier Tiber-side residency of Cleopatra in her role as
Caesar’s mistress and co-parent. In time, unlike Cleopatra, Berenice would be rewarded with neither golden statues in the temple nor the forced sacrifice of her life and her kingdom.
Presumably on account of her age, she does not appear to have borne Titus any children to inspire Roman apprehension: her very presence in Rome was enough. In Cassius Dio’s account,
philosophers spoke out publicly against the couple;
²⁴
at least one paid for his protest with his life. But one Cynic silenced was not enough to win for Berenice a ring and a crown. She, too, paid the
price of their denunciation, banished by her lover. Like Caesar’s Egyptian queen, in loving Rome she surrendered happiness and pride.

Berenice, however, returned to Rome. Her reappearance followed close on the heels of Vespasian’s death. Was she propelled across slow expanses of the ancient world by that
image of herself as Titus’ wife? If so, she was to be disappointed. No warm welcome awaited her in Rome’s hills. It is that disappointment, product of a love sufficient to
allow hope to triumph over reason, experience and even certainty, which underscores her tragedy.

As for Titus, the only surviving record of his feelings on Berenice’s final departure in 79 is Suetonius’ assessment of mutual regret. This is the evidence we must balance against an
overhasty assumption that, like his divorce from Marcia Furnilla and his overthrow of those former sex objects, the dancing boys, whose public performances he never again allowed himself to
witness, Titus permitted his feelings to be directed by expediency and opportunism. Suetonius’ Titus is the most sincere of all imperial holders of the office of
pontifex maximus
,
determined that the high-priesthood act as guarantee of his pure intentions. On Vespasian’s death, did the instinct for power overmaster earthier appetites? Or did Titus sacrifice Berenice in
Rome’s favour with a heavy heart? Driven by duty, determination or indifference, in the two years, two months and twenty days that remained to him, Titus kept faith with that apparent spirit
of self-denial which, the tragedians would have us believe, shaped his treatment of his Eastern queen. That he confined lustful impulses thereafter to cuckolding his brother Domitian remains
unsubstantiated rumour and is possibly an instance of confused chronology. Perhaps, as Alma-Tadema’s painting
The Triumph of Titus
(1885) suggests, the period of Titus’
ascendancy in Domitia Longina’s heart was of earlier duration. In Alma-Tadema’s composition, a dewy-eyed Domitia, her fingers lightly touching those of her husband Domitian, gazes
longingly over her shoulder at the covetous, decidedly venal, bearded figure of Titus.

It was late August, early in the afternoon, two months and a day after Titus’ accession, when shadows closed in on the Bay of Naples. A cloud
hovered above the sun-drenched seaside playground. Spreading sideways like spilt molasses, shaped like a pine tree in the eyewitness account of the younger Pliny, and distinctive in the furious
depth of its colouring, it was remarkable for its sheer size: ‘It rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.’
²⁵
It portended not rain but showers of
pumice. So extensive was the fall of volcanic rock that, within less than twenty-four hours, the town of Pompeii lay buried three metres deep.
²⁶
Thousands fled but many remained, sheltering from the
falling rock, awaiting respite. It was not to be. The following day, to the accompaniment of apocalyptic pyrotechnics, a series of hot-ash avalanches completed Pompeii’s internment. Scarlet,
black and molten-gold burned the sky. Fire and cloud hugged the earth. In Cassius Dio’s account, the darkness was akin to an eclipse.
²⁷
Those who had remained died of asphyxiation. The same
fatal cascades, accompanied by surges of hot gas and travelling at irresistible speed, also buried nearby Herculaneum, site of Agrippina the Elder’s house arrest by Sejanus, and Oplontis,
where Nero’s Poppaea had kept a villa.

Quiet since Nero’s reign, Vesuvius had at last erupted in spectacular fashion. Among casualties was Pliny the Elder, whom Titus’ father had been accustomed to summon for advice so
early in the morning that it was not yet light. The death toll surprised even the Romans. Contrary to custom, neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum was ever reoccupied. Ashen, dark and silent, they
subsided into centuries of petty looting. Today Pompeii survives as a tourist destination, titivating backpackers with its insights into the scatological nature of Roman graffiti and the
discomforts of the town’s brothels.

The eruption of Vesuvius provided Titus with the moment when, in words and deeds, he made good that transformation in his character which Suetonius dates
to his accession. His response was swift. After visiting the region, he appointed two ex-consuls to supervise a restoration programme.
²⁸
He allocated to the rescue efforts the estates of those killed
in the disaster who had died without heirs, property which under Roman law accrued to the treasury.
²⁹
Edicts made public his anxieties as well as his efforts.

Although he could not have known it, Titus had created a template for action on which he would soon be called to draw again. It was a matter of months before fire, then plague, devastated Rome.
The fire destroyed buildings across the Campus Martius, flames consuming the temples of Serapis, Isis, Neptune and Jupiter Capitolinus along with the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon and the Portico
of Augustus’ sister Octavia. Unusually, Suetonius resists characterizing this concatenation of catastrophes as portentous. Titus’ own opinion clearly differed. ‘I am
ruined,’ he allegedly claimed, before invoking assistance both human and divine and tasking himself with discovery of the perfect sacrifice to propitiate an angry firmament. He contributed to
the city’s slush fund decorations removed from his own palace – withholding, we must assume, that treasured golden statue of Britannicus which had surely guided him thus far. It was the
latest instance of that trope of the simple-living emperor which Augustus had cultivated so painstakingly and which, more recently, had inspired Galba to ignore the delivery of palace furniture
Nymphidius had dispatched from Rome to Narbo Martius, and Vespasian to spend most of his time in the Gardens of Sallust.