Domitian

• 1. Introduction

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  Domitian was assassinated on the 18th of September 96, stabbed seven times in a carefully staged attack by members of his own household. His chamberlain had recruited a steward named Stephanus, who spent several days feigning an arm injury so that he could carry a concealed dagger beneath his bandage. The sword Domitian kept hidden under his pillow as a last resort had been removed beforehand. Even the servants who might have intervened found the doors to their quarters locked.

  Within hours the Senate convened, celebrated, and passed a formal condemnation wiping Domitian's name from public records. His statues were melted, his arches torn down, and his face was literally chiseled off existing monuments and recut to resemble his successor. The army, by contrast, was furious. Soldiers called for his deification and rioted in the provinces.

  This split verdict is the heart of the Domitian problem. A man despised by the writers who recorded history and beloved by the soldiers who served under him. A ruler condemned as a tyrant by senators and praised by historians a century later as the architect of Rome's peaceful second century. What kind of emperor was he? What did he actually do? And why does it matter who tells the story?

• 2. A Family from Obscurity

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  Titus Flavius Petro, Domitian's great-grandfather, fled the battlefield at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC. That single act of cowardice left a stain on the family name, but it did not stop their rise. Petro married a woman named Tertulla, whose considerable wealth set the Flavian family on an upward trajectory that would eventually place them on the throne of Rome.

  Domitian's grandfather Sabinus rebuilt the family's fortunes still further, working as a tax collector in Asia and a banker in Helvetia. His marriage into the more prestigious Vespasia family secured senatorial rank for his sons. One of those sons, Vespasian, would hold the offices of quaestor, aedile, and praetor before reaching the consulship in 51, the same year Domitian was born.

  Domitian came into the world on the 24th of October 51 in Rome, the youngest child of Vespasian and Flavia Domitilla Major. By the time he was 16, his mother and sister were both dead, while his father and elder brother Titus were away commanding armies in Germania and Judaea. The boy who would one day claim the title of Dominus et Deus spent a significant portion of his adolescence alone, under the care of relatives or family friends. One of those figures may have been Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a loyal Flavian ally who would one day be proclaimed emperor on the very afternoon of Domitian's murder.

  Suetonius describes a young man of genuine intellectual promise. He could quote Homer and Virgil fluently, wrote poetry and works on law, and displayed what observers called elegant conversation. He also showed skill with a bow. But unlike his brother Titus, who was educated at court alongside the emperor's own son Britannicus, Domitian received no formal military training and no real responsibilities.

• 3. The Year of Four Emperors

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  On the 9th of June 68, Nero committed suicide, and the dynasty that had ruled Rome for a century collapsed with him. What followed was a year of brutal civil war. Four generals, each commanding armies in different corners of the empire, rose and fell in rapid succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian.

  Vespasian was commanding the siege of Jerusalem when news of Nero's death reached him. He had four legions and nearly 80,000 soldiers, and his brother Titus Flavius Sabinus II held the position of city prefect of Rome, commanding the entire capital's garrison. When Otho fell at the First Battle of Bedriacum, the armies in Judaea and Egypt declared Vespasian emperor on the 1st of July 69.

  Back in Rome, 17-year-old Domitian was placed under house arrest by Vitellius. On the night of the 18th of December, with Flavian legions closing in, his uncle Sabinus and a group of supporters seized the Capitoline Hill. Domitian was among them. By the following morning, Vitellian forces had stormed the hill, captured and executed Sabinus. Domitian escaped by disguising himself as a worshipper of the goddess Isis and spent that night hidden with one of his father's supporters, a man named Cornelius Primus.

  By the afternoon of the 20th of December, Vitellius was dead. Domitian emerged from hiding to be greeted by the invading Flavian forces and saluted with the title of Caesar. The following day the Senate proclaimed Vespasian emperor. Domitian had survived the most dangerous period in his life, but the episode had given him no real power. That would be withheld for another decade.

• 4. The Long Wait

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  Vespasian did not return to Rome until September 70, leaving a power vacuum in the capital that was filled not by Domitian but by Gaius Licinius Mucianus, the governor of Syria. Mucianus was careful. He promoted away the generals closest to Domitian, replaced them with more reliable men, and curtailed the young Caesar's political role at every turn.

  Domitian was desperate for military glory. When the Batavian revolt broke out in Gaul under Gaius Julius Civilis, he joined the officer corps intending to command a legion. Mucianus refused to assign him one, keeping Domitian nearby rather than leaving him unsupervised. When Domitian wrote personally to the victorious general Quintus Petillius Cerialis suggesting he hand over command of his army, he was refused again.

  The pattern persisted throughout the reigns of both Vespasian and his brother Titus. While Titus accumulated seven consulships, censorship, tribunician power, and command of the Praetorian Guard, Domitian held honorary priesthoods and a series of suffect consulships. Six consulships during Vespasian's reign, but only one, in 73, was an ordinary consulship. The other five were suffect appointments, usually replacing his father or brother mid-year in January.

  Two disasters struck in rapid succession near the end of this period. In late 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under metres of ash and lava. The following year a fire burned through Rome for three days, destroying important public buildings. Titus spent his short reign managing relief efforts. On the 13th of September 81, after barely two years in office, he died unexpectedly of fever during a trip to the Sabine territories. Domitian was at his brother's side, but ancient sources allege that rather than mourn, he headed immediately to the Praetorian camp to be proclaimed emperor. The Senate confirmed his powers the following day.

• 5. Building an Empire

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  Domitian's building program was, by any measure, one of the most ambitious in Roman history. Around fifty structures were erected, restored, or completed during his reign, a record surpassed only by Augustus. At the center of this program was the Flavian Palace on the Palatine Hill, designed by his master architect Rabirius, a building so opulent that one contemporary writer marveled that even a single colonnade of the palace surpassed the costliness of the entire Capitol.

  The Stadium of Domitian, whose footprint is preserved today under the Piazza Navona in Rome, served as a permanent venue for Greek-style athletics. Beside it stood the Odeon of Domitian, a venue for artistic competitions. Both were inaugurated in connection with the Capitoline Games, which Domitian founded in 86 as a quadrennial contest featuring athletic displays, chariot racing, and competitions for oratory, music, and acting.

  The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill, the most sacred structure in the Roman religious world, was restored with a gilded roof that an ancient source claimed cost more than 12,000 talents, a sum beyond the reach of any private citizen. He also completed the Arch of Titus, the Temple of Vespasian and Titus, and added a fourth level to the Colosseum, finishing its interior seating area.

  His reach extended far beyond Italy. In Egypt, Domitian appears alongside Trajan in offering scenes on the propylon of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. His cartouche also appears in the column shafts of the Temple of Khnum at Esna. Seven villa-palaces across the Italian peninsula are linked to Domitian at sites including Tusculum, Antium, and Baiae, though only two, at Sabaudia and Vicarello, have been positively identified.

• 6. Wars on Every Frontier

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  Domitian understood, even if his critics did not, that the Roman Empire in the 80s faced genuine military threats on multiple fronts simultaneously. His strategic doctrine was explicitly defensive. He rejected expansionist warfare and invested instead in the Limes Germanicus, a vast network of roads, forts, and watchtowers along the Rhine designed to protect the empire's northern edge.

  In Britain, his general Gnaeus Julius Agricola arrived around 77 as governor and pushed the Roman frontier as far as Caledonia. At the Battle of Mons Graupius in the summer of 84, Agricola faced the Caledonian armies under their leader Calgacus and inflicted heavy losses. But two-thirds of the Caledonian force escaped into the Scottish Highlands, and the island was never fully subdued. Agricola was recalled to Rome in 85, having served more than six years as governor, longer than normal for his rank. Tacitus, whose biography of Agricola is the main source for these events and who was Agricola's son-in-law, claimed Domitian recalled him out of jealousy. Several modern historians argue the opposite: that Agricola was in fact a close friend of Domitian and that Tacitus was rewriting history after the dynasty had fallen.

  The more serious war was against Dacia, the kingdom in what is now Romania. Around 84 or 85, King Decebalus crossed the Danube into Moesia and killed the provincial governor Oppius Sabinus. Domitian's praetorian prefect Cornelius Fuscus drove the Dacians back in 85, but the following year Fuscus led an ill-fated expedition into Dacia and was killed, losing the battle standard of the Praetorian Guard. Domitian returned, reorganized his forces, and by late 88 his general Tettius Julianus had defeated Decebalus at the very site where Fuscus had died.

  Rather than push to total conquest, Domitian negotiated peace. The terms gave Rome passage through Dacian territory but committed Rome to paying Decebalus an annual subsidy of 8 million sesterces. Roman writers condemned the treaty as shameful. Decebalus used the money to fortify his defenses. The wars Trajan later fought, which finally broke Dacia and seized its gold and silver mines in 106, were built directly on the forces and infrastructure Domitian had assembled.

• 7. The Senate's Enemy

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  Domitian made no effort to pretend that the Senate mattered. Where his father and brother had maintained the public fiction of republican government, Domitian moved the center of power openly to his own imperial court, treating senators as administrators rather than partners. He disliked aristocrats and had no fear of showing it.

  The senators despised him in return. Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius all wrote after Domitian was dead, when his memory had been officially condemned to oblivion. Their accounts are the ones that survived, and they were almost uniformly hostile. Tacitus' Histories covering the Flavian period are almost entirely lost; what survives of his views on Domitian comes through brief comments and the sharply negative characterization in Agricola. Pliny's famous Panegyricus Traiani of 100, delivered before Trajan and the Senate, was explicitly structured as a condemnation of Domitian. Juvenal satirized the Domitianic court as corrupt and violent. Only the court poets Martial and Statius, who published during Domitian's own reign, offered praise, and their work was dismissed by later generations as sycophancy.

  The executions were real. At least twenty senatorial opponents were put to death, including Domitia Longina's former husband Lucius Aelius Lamia and three of Domitian's own family members. Among them was Titus Flavius Clemens, a cousin whom Domitian had designated as a successor through Clemens' two young sons, whom he had renamed Vespasian and Domitian. In 85, Domitian nominated himself perpetual censor, the office charged with supervising public morals, and used it to expel senators and judges who he found corrupt or compromised.

  Historian Brian Jones, writing in The Emperor Domitian in 1992, compared the execution count to that of the Emperor Claudius, who killed around 35 senators and 300 equestrians and was still deified by the Senate and remembered as a good emperor. The difference, Jones argues, is who wrote the history.

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Suetonius records that Domitian believed an auspice had told him he would die at midday. On the 18th of September 96 he grew increasingly agitated, repeatedly asking a servant to tell him the hour. The servant, who was one of the plotters, lied. Reassured, Domitian moved to his desk to sign decrees. Stephanus, wearing a bandage he had been feigning for days, entered claiming to have uncovered a conspiracy. As Domitian read the document Stephanus handed him, Stephanus stabbed him in the groin. The struggle went to the floor. Seven additional wounds followed before Domitian died. He was 44 years old.

  His body was carried out on a common bier and cremated by his nurse Phyllis, who later brought his ashes to the Flavian Temple and mingled them with those of his niece Julia. No state funeral was held. The Senate, meeting within hours, passed damnatio memoriae and proclaimed Marcus Cocceius Nerva emperor the same afternoon. On existing portrait reliefs such as the Cancelleria Reliefs, sculptors simply recarved Domitian's features into the likeness of Nerva, enabling rapid production of new imperial imagery from old stone.

  The army's grief was not so easily managed. Soldiers called for Domitian's deification. In October 97, members of the Praetorian Guard, led by a former commander named Casperius Aelianus, laid siege to the Imperial Palace, took Nerva hostage, and forced him to hand over Domitian's assassins. Titus Petronius Secundus and Parthenius were found and killed. Nerva gave a speech thanking the rebellious soldiers and never recovered his authority. He adopted Trajan as his successor shortly afterward.

  In 1894, historian Stephane Gsell published the first major reassessment of Domitian's reign, Essai sur le regne de l'empereur Domitien. Nearly a century passed before the next book-length study appeared: Jones's 1992 The Emperor Domitian, which concluded that Domitian's foreign, economic, and cultural programs provided the structural foundation for the prosperity of the second century. Ronald Syme, writing in 1930, had already called for a reassessment of Domitian's financial record, noting that his coinage standard, even after the devaluation forced by a financial crisis in 85, remained higher than anything Vespasian or Titus had achieved. The silver purity of the denarius, raised on Domitian's accession from 90% to 98%, never reached those heights again after his death. Theodor Mommsen, one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, called the reign somber but intelligent despotism, a phrase that fits more comfortably on an emperor the Senate did not want anyone to remember.