The Twelve Caesars (47 page)

As with his ‘donation’ of Pompeian revenues, it was generosity of a qualified variety: it demanded little of Titus beyond inspiration and virtually nothing of
the imperial treasury. As a public-relations exercise, it earned the emperor hefty dividends. Among them is Suetonius’ celebration of his ‘surpassing’ father’s love for his
people. With hindsight, we see that the benefits Titus garnered from his response to the natural disasters of his principate serve to underline the ambiguity of another Suetonian assessment: that
it was art and good fortune as much as his nature which enabled him to win universal love and become ‘the delight and darling of the human race’.

After tragedy, a party. Vespasian’s laggardly deification was probably formalized early in 80. At the same time, the four-storey amphitheatre of marble and limestone,
subsequently known as the Colosseum, which Vespasian had begun as a riposte to the grandeur of Nero’s palace-building, was hastily completed. Close by, also on the site of Nero’s Golden
House, new baths were constructed with equal speed. In the baths, Titus demonstrated condescension by mingling freely with Rome’s commons. In the Colosseum, he paraded his much-vaunted
generosity in an opening ceremony which lasted a hundred days. He himself appeared in procession behind an equestrian statue of Britannicus. It was the final symbolic gesture in the Flavian
rebuttal of Nero, linking Titus and Vespasian to Claudius and denying Rome’s intervening misfortunes by elision: Nero’s hated Golden House supplied location and building materials. On
this occasion there was no jibbing at undue moderation as there had been at the birthday celebrations offered to Vespasian and Domitian in the aftermath of victory over the Jews: 5,000 wild
beasts were slaughtered in a single day. Succeeding weeks saw contests between elephants and even cranes and the dispatch of a further 4,000 animals, some of them tame,
killed by men and women alike. Carpaphorus the hunter slew twenty bulls, a bear and a lion. Their blood mingled with that of gladiators and prisoners – including one Laureolus, who was
crucified, then exposed to an enraged Caledonian bear – in a baptism of astonishing brutality.
³⁰
Remarkable even to contemporaries as a set piece of Roman crowd-pleasing, it inspired
Martial’s first book of poems,
On Spectacles
, and the poet’s assertion that all the wonders of the ancient world would pale before Caesar’s amphitheatre. At Titus’
request, the Colosseum was flooded and a sea battle re-enacted between Corcyreans and Corinthians. The floodwaters washed away the offal and ordure of earlier carnage.

For Titus, it was a last hurrah. The conclusion of this extravagant butchery was a bungled sacrifice on a day that combined sunshine and thunder. We are reminded in the first instance of Gaius
and that bloody flamingo. Both factors inspired unhappy presentiments in the emperor’s breast. He left the Colosseum in a state of deep depression after breaking down in view of the crowds,
‘performed no further deed of importance’, according to Cassius Dio,
³¹
and within months, aged forty-one, was dead.

Jews attributed Titus’ untimely demise to a mosquito. Burrowing its way into the emperor’s head, it grew to the size of a pigeon and tormented him with seven years of unbearable
headaches which eventually overcame him.
³²
Those of longer memory, mindful of the Julio-Claudian record, blamed his brother and successor Domitian, whom Suetonius accuses of ceaseless plotting. The
historian does not stoop to evidence. Plutarch’s explanation is more likely to have found favour with
Titus, uniting as it does father and son. He records the diagnosis
of Titus’ attendants: that it was the excessive coldness of the waters at Aquae Cutiliae, so harmful to Vespasian, which also dispatched his elder son. Certainly Titus’ death in the
Sabine country of his ancestors, as last vestiges of summer gave way to autumn, occurred in the same house, perhaps even the same room, in which Vespasian had died. Certain, too, that it was
Domitian who benefited.

Titus met death protesting. He was unready, unwilling, unable to muster that flippancy which had served his father to the end. A single, unspecified fault, we know, robbed his final hours of
equanimity. If his thoughts turned to Berenice, he concealed them from the ears of history. Ditto his only child Julia, celebrated on the coinage of his all-too-short reign. He referred neither to
Domitian, his heir, nor to his failure to provide Rome with an alternative
princeps
, a serious fault in the eyes of history given what lay ahead. It was a modest, unpretentious end, in a
simple rural homestead in the hilly vastnesses outside Rome, almost, we might assume, a piece of propagandist Flavian stage-management, reiterating the dumb show of family humility – this
unpatrician, unhistrionic dynasty. In its very simplicity lies its pathos, grounds for an approach to martyrdom: the loving public servant cut off in his prime. Death came as a surprise, giving the
lie to the old enemies’ tradition of seven years of headaches.

Perhaps, too, it was an ungenerous passing for an emperor who had promised that no petitioner should leave his company bereft of hope. For Titus – former waywardness stifled by imperial
laurels – uniquely among the first twelve Caesars had repented of a day on which he failed to confer a single favour. Unlike that of Otho, his death was no more honourable than his short
reign.

Domitian
: Ancient bronze Roman coin Domitian © Paul Picone

U
nlike Vespasian and Titus, Domitian mishandled posterity. This ‘object of terror and hatred to all’ –
Juvenal’s ‘bald-headed Nero’
¹
– shared with Nero Rome’s ultimate posthumous ignominy:
damnatio memoriae
, the erasure of his memory. (Only underground was his
name left intact, borne by the water and sewerage pipes laid during his reign, a legacy without dignity or distinction.) But despite the broken statues, the inscriptions smashed, scratched or
recarved, the last Flavian was neither eradicated nor forgotten. He had built on too grand a scale. His costly, city-wide programme of construction and restoration encompassed the sacred and the
profane: at least ten temples, an artificial lake for recreating naval battles, a new palace close to the Circus Maximus, a stadium whose outline survives in the Piazza Navona. Both his physical
bequest to Rome and those scars he inflicted on members of the senatorial class, Rome’s writers of history, ran too deep: incontinent enmity prevented the latter from consigning him to
obscurity. Thanks to their animosity (which was at no point senate-wide), hostile sources occlude any balanced reading of Domitian’s life. Beneath the cant an imprint of his actions survives
like
pentimenti
in a painting, his designs half-lost beneath a later gloss. For this emperor who famously legislated against the planting of vines in order to
increase
the Empire’s grain yield, the slate is not clean.

‘More like Nero or Caligula or Tiberius than his father or brother... he provoked such universal detestation that he effaced the remembrance of his father’s and his brother’s
merits,’ sneered the resolutely inimical Eutropius.
²
An overstatement undoubtedly, but the Domitian of the sources, blackened by the personal and political allegiances of early chroniclers, is
a man of aphotic reputation, menacing and murky. Alone he sits in palace rooms, lost in silence, catching flies and stabbing them with a keenly sharpened stylus; alone he walks in out-of-the-way
places, doing nothing, seeing no one; alone he consumes immoderate lunches which make his belly heave and restrict him to a single apple at the evening banquet; alone, we assume, he broods and he
plots and he plans. He likes no one, bar a clutch of unnamed women; he craves flattery but abhors the flatterer, averse to sycophancy and plain speaking alike. In the interests of the story it has
to be. Given the ancients’ love of pungent contrast, the shimmering goodness of the deified Titus presupposes the opposite in his successor. Willingly, it appears, Domitian embraced the
expectations of the dark side.

Suetonius once planned more than twelve lives, to bring his account up to date. Like Claudius meditating a written history of the civil war during Augustus’ lifetime, the imperial
secretary was dissuaded from so hazardous an undertaking. Whatever the author’s first intentions, Domitian makes a fitting finale to this rakes’ progress. Underlying his downfall are
tendencies which dogged the early principate. Absolutism, philhellenism and flirtation with divinity disturbed, and in some cases destroyed, the reigns of several of his predecessors: Domitian was
nothing daunted. In themselves these troublesome aspirations evidenced unresolved tensions in this new chapter in the life of Rome. Each shaped and challenged evolving ideas of Romanness and
inspired
an ongoing reassessment of the significance and implications of the fall of the Republic (and in particular the curtailment of senatorial influence). Each
constituted a powerful affront to the Republican mindset. In the case of Gaius, a toxic combination of all three – which that unsystematic, unhinged twenty-something did nothing to conceal
– culminated in personal tragedy and the system’s discredit. In Suetonius’ hands, faced by the admonishments of history, Domitian is implacable. Indeed, ‘he never took any
pains to become acquainted with history’. In the holder of an office which throughout our story remains deeply contentious, such a stance – derived from resistance? incuriosity?
arrogance? – is both baffling and culpable. For Rome, as Augustus and Vespasian had understood, was a city in thrall to visions of its past. In time, unable to reconcile past and present,
Domitian shared Gaius’ fate. Disillusioned Praetorians again shaped the conspiracy.