The Twelve Caesars (50 page)

We have learned to treat with caution these charges of ‘secret’ poisoning. In the sources, there is always a shadow across the face of the sun. It is doubtful
whether the people suspected the source of their entertainments; uncertain, too, when Domitian first looked to senatorial appropriations to fund his bounty.

He restored Rome’s libraries destroyed by fire in 80, commissioning from the scribes at Alexandria replacements for burned books. Earnestly, with every appearance of
conscientiousness and scruple, he applied himself to the
princeps
’ judicial functions, targeting deceit and corruption where he found it. He took measures against Rome’s
underground satirists and parodists. He was vigilant in gathering taxes, notably the
fiscus Judaicus
payable by Jews, immensely valuable as a source of revenue; and conservative in his
religious policy, demanding stringent punishments for Vestal Virgins who broke their vows. Dio notwithstanding, his later qualities of cruelty and avarice are not to the fore. He went so far as to
overrule wills in the emperor’s favour in instances where the inheritance rightly belonged to a child of the testator, and cancelled debt proceedings of long duration. So extreme was
Domitian’s youthful aversion to bloodshed in 69 that we read of him contemplating outlawing bulls’ sacrifice. Blood and thunder were not uppermost in his thoughts in 81. Instead, he
offered to Rome and her people a roundelay of civic-mindedness unglimpsed since Augustus. Suetonius enumerates his benefactions unhurriedly: we know already that it is too good to last.

If only the senate could have met him halfway. Suspecting his motives, senators reportedly belittled the achievements of his military sorties. Is this revisionism on the part of the ancient
authors? Perhaps. Perhaps those nearest to him, known to Domitian and he to them since 69, greeted his reign with an accurate assessment of his true nature.

He campaigned in the first place on the German frontier, focus of military attention throughout the Flavian period. Undoubtedly he was overhasty in claiming victory. There are grounds for our
sympathy. By 83 Domitian had waited so long.
Vespasian had routinely denied him opportunities to prove himself militarily; as a result he lacked the prestige not only of his
immediate predecessors but of his own best generals. His first campaign, probably begun the year after his accession, was against the Chatti north of the upper Rhine. Poets of the regime including
Martial celebrated a ‘triumph’ which cut little ice in Rome: improved frontier defences, improved lines of communication for Roman troops, improved efficiency. The Chatti themselves,
however, warlike and truculent, were not comprehensively defeated. Dio described Domitian as returning to Rome ‘without so much as having seen hostilities anywhere’.

He would reiterate that taunt two years later, when Decebalus of the Dacians, an accomplished militarist, led his soldiers from their homeland – modern-day Romania – across the
Danube to invade Moesia. In the aftermath of the death of the governor of Moesia, Oppius Sabinus, Domitian hastened eastwards in company with Sabinus’ successor, Cornelius Fuscus. Even at
this juncture, with Roman hegemony seriously at risk, Dio asserts that Domitian failed to take an active role:

Early Roman victories under Fuscus created an artificial buoyancy. In a speedy reversal of fortune, Fuscus was killed along with most of a regiment. In Rome, Domitian took time
to regroup. His successful counter-attack occurred in 89, after
which Dacia became a client kingdom under Decebalus. It was not an outcome to win plaudits in
Rome.
¹⁵

The
princeps
prepared to parley with Decebalus in 89 was older, graver and more circumspect. For the year had begun with the most serious threat to date of
Domitian’s reign.

Suetonius offers neither explanations nor context. He is content to record the name of the malefactor, Lucius Antonius Saturninus, and the conspiracy’s locale: Upper Germany.
Suetonius’ interest, characteristically, is in the mystical aspect of the crisis – a magnificent eagle which enfolded in its wings a statue of the emperor in Rome, accompanying the
action with exultant shrieks. This grandiose and unambiguous spectacle was vouchsafed to Domitian on the same day rebellion was roundly quashed by the governor of Lower Germany, Lappius Maximus
Norbanus. Borrowing a leaf from Suetonian portent, the weather too lent assistance. German tribesmen enlisted in his cause by Saturninus were prevented from intervening by the sudden and untimely
thawing of the Rhine, which left them stranded on the wrong side of the river. South of the Alps, Domitian continued full tilt towards rebel headquarters, determined to exact ferocious retribution.
He had developed a novel form of torture, which combined Roman fire with the victim’s genitalia.

For Domitian, victory was not as sweet as it might have been. In Rome the Arval Brethren, that priestly college reputedly formed by Romulus, gave thanks for a happy
outcome. None can have overlooked the sacrifices the unsuspecting brotherhood had previously offered: ‘that the conspiracy of evil-doers may be detected.’
¹⁸

Something in the atmosphere had changed. In Suetonius’ account, it is Saturninus’ revolt that unleashes the full force of Domitian’s cruelty, characterized henceforth as
‘savage’, ‘excessive’, ‘cunning’ and ‘sudden’. An emperor who mistrusted the senate had placed his confidence in the army. Parts of that army had
failed him. It was a recipe for isolation. Domitian’s response was an increase in that tendency to keep his own counsel which had marked his reign from the outset. And so he took a further
step away from the senate, compounding his sins in their eyes. He pursued policies which bore his own stamp, among them an escalation in that witch-hunt-style moral prurience at odds with the easy
loucheness of Rome’s upper classes. His spotlight returned to the Temple of Vesta, where age-old standards of chasteness had deteriorated and errant Vestals had already been executed earlier
in the reign. In 91 his focus was the principal Vestal herself, Cornelia. On this occasion, Domitian stood on precedent. He insisted that Cornelia receive the punishment reserved for her
transgression since time immemorial. She was buried alive. Her lovers, with the exception of the Praetorian Valerius Licinianus, were beaten to death with rods.
¹⁹
Faithful to the spirit of Republican
piety, Domitian’s martinet stance spoke as much of his own compromised authority as of that religious conservatism which Romans once held dear. It was a chilling, distasteful incident from
which none emerged unscathed.

Dio preserves an anecdote intended to illustrate Domitian’s mirthless viciousness. He ordered that a room in the palace
be decorated entirely in black, every surface
and every object pitchy and lustreless, and filled the room with leading knights and senators. To each he gave a small stone slab shaped like a gravestone and engraved with his name, a tomb lantern
and a naked attendant similarly painted black. A succession of dishes of black food was served as Domitian discoursed on appropriately tenebrous subjects, all connected with death. Then he
dispatched the shaken senators for home. When, shortly afterwards, imperial messengers retraced their steps, each man expected the order of execution. In fact they received gifts: the
‘gravestones’, tomb lanterns and costly vessels from that Stygian banquet – plus a charming naked boy apiece, clean now and comely.
²⁰

Humiliation of the senate was a high-risk strategy. In Domitian’s case, it was one aspect of an unwavering determination to rule with minimal senatorial interference: by humiliating the
senate’s members, the emperor asserted the discrepancy in their relative positions. For a decade he pursued this policy without accident. It could not continue indefinitely.

Three years after his accession, Domitian had issued coins bearing an image of Jupiter. The king of the gods, who was also the god of thunder, appeared armed with a spear and a
thunderbolt. Within a year, Jupiter had yielded up his thunderbolt to a depiction of Domitian himself.
²¹
It marked the beginning of a process of iconographic synthesis. For the final decade of
Domitian’s reign, coins awarded the thunderbolt to Domitian alone. No longer illustrated, Jupiter was present only associatively. The import was clear.

It was a gesture not of vanity but of political intent. ‘Be assured that nothing is more pleasing than beauty, but nothing
shorter lived,’ Domitian had written
in a trichological treatise,
On the Care of the Hair
. Much of his own hair had since fallen out. Bald but retaining vestiges of former good looks, the emperor made an accurate estimation of
the value of appearances. Undeniably his numismatic godliness was intended as a potent visual statement (proof, too, of latent megalomania). It was an expression of a need to be obeyed and a
determination to dominate the apparatus of government. In 82, he had embarked on the first of seven consecutive consulships; he would hold the office again in 90, 92 and 95, bringing his total
number of terms of office, including those under Vespasian, to an unprecedented seventeen.
²²
In 85, like Vespasian before him, he also exercised the power of the censorship. Afterwards he declared
himself censor for life. Vespasian had exploited the office to reconstitute the senate in the Flavian image; Domitian likewise, by advancing members of the equestrian class, altered its
composition. Heedless of any need for conciliation, Domitian also demanded the senate’s concurrence with his wishes without stooping to persuasiveness or blandishments. It was an accurate
statement of the light in which he regarded it. In addition, in his role as censor, this dour, unsmiling twelfth Caesar embraced that policy of moral vigilance which overlooked his own
nostalgie
de la boue
and, in its pinched officiousness, further alienated an upper class irked by his high-handedness and contemptuous of his meagre qualifications for rule. Like his grandiose building
plans for Rome, it was a token Augustanism. He also revived Augustus’ Julian law against adultery.

Domitian, we can assume, understood the grounds of the senate’s contempt. He did not of course sanction it. Rather, by creating an imperial persona which blurred distinctions between the
mortal and the immortal, he sought to pull the rug from under senators’ feet. According to Republican practice,
Domitian was unsuited to high office and its related
grants of power on account of family background (a deified father and brother notwithstanding) and his limited acquaintance with the magistracies of the
cursus honorum.
The Domitian who
appeared on his coins as an associate of Jupiter and who, the following year, probably in 86, evolved the style of address
dominus et deus
(‘master and god’), clearly did not
hold sway in Rome as a result of tribunician power and
maius imperium
awarded by the senate. Nor did his eminence derive from the authority and prestige previously associated with the
consulship (although, as we have seen, he took steps to monopolize any benefits the consulship continued to bestow). Instead, his power devolved from a higher authority. Unquantifiable, it was also
inarguable. This vaunting trump card scarcely represented emollience towards Roman patricians. Given the recrudescence of Republicanism within the senate during Domitian’s reign, it was
perhaps the only alternative to reprising Augustus’ affection of an age-old ladder of magistracies, the
princeps
first among equals (even if Flavian status would have permitted this).
Domitian possessed neither the adeptness nor the inclination for that deceit. Instead, he shirked half-measures. Like overtly autocratic emperors before him, he confined much effective political
debate to his
consilium
of friends, freedmen and hand-picked advisers, the role of the senate the equivalent of rubber-stamping. He also ordained that any statues made of him should be of
gold or silver (and ordered the death of a woman whose ‘crime’ was to have undressed in front of his statue). In doing so, he claimed his place in a dangerous continuum which included
Cleopatra and Gaius. Neither had benefited in the long term from their golden images and senatorial hostility. Nor, as we know, would Domitian.