Emperor Domitian - Rome's Tragic Tyrant Documentary [55:45]

Transcript

The man known to history as Emperor Domitian of Rome was born on Pomegranate Street in the sixth district of the city of Rome as Titus Flavius Domitianus on the 24th of October in the year 51 AD. His father was Titus Flavius Vespasianus, a member of the gens Flavia, a Roman equestrian family. The Flavians had mixed fortunes during the chaotic decades of civil war which characterized the end of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. Under the early empire, Vespasian’s father had been a provincial tax collector, hardly a prestigious position, yet one which allowed for Vespasian to carve out a career as a middling politician and then use this to rise to relatively senior military offices in the Roman legions of the 30s AD.

In the mid-40s AD, he was one of the most senior military commanders involved in the initial Roman conquest of southern Britain and served there down to the early 50s AD. Right around the time Domitian was born, Vespasian retired and played no major part in public life for over a decade thereafter. Domitian’s mother was Domitilla, the daughter of a quaestor, a minor Roman official involved in financial administration. She had married Vespasian in the late 30s AD. Their first child arrived soon after, a boy named Titus, while Domitian also had a sister named Domitilla after her mother, born about five or six years before Domitian. Hence, he was the youngest of the three siblings and there were twelve years separating him and Titus.

For an individual who would later become the most powerful man of his time, we know almost nothing about Domitian’s early life. Our most detailed source is a single passage written by Suetonius, a contemporary of his who wrote biographies of the first twelve Roman emperors. This simply states that Domitian grew up in “great poverty and infamy,” a fairly non-descript statement and one which was also untrue. While the Flavians were not a major Roman aristocratic family, Vespasian and his family, including Domitian, would still have lived in comfort. Indeed, in 63 AD, after over a decade in partial retirement, Domitian’s father was granted the governorship of the province of Africa corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.

This would have meant that for the vast majority of the time between when he was 11 or 12 years of age in 63 AD down to the early 70s AD, Domitian barely saw his father, nor his older brother for the most part, as Titus was already emerging as a successful commander in the Roman military. Back in Rome, we can assume that Domitian received an education typical of the son of a middling Roman politician, one which was focused on subjects such as rhetoric, the law, and literature.

Domitian’s younger years were spent living through a period of Roman history in which the concept of imperial rule was solidifying. The Roman Republic came to an end in 27 BC after decades of civil wars between figures like Julius Caesar and his great rival, Pompeius Magnus or Pompey the Great. After Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, his great-nephew Octavian became his political heir and after defeating Mark Anthony in another civil war established a political settlement in 27 BC through which he changed his name to Caesar Augustus and adopted the title of ‘imperator’, meaning ‘commander’ or ‘conqueror’. We derive the term emperor from this.

Yet what Augustus attempted to do was to make himself the first citizen of Rome, with a large number of magisterial offices. What this meant was that he was a powerful ruler, but he continued to govern in association with the powerful Roman Senate comprised of the state’s wealthiest and most esteemed political figures. As we will see, this had significance for how Domitian’s reign would play out. After Augustus’ death in 14 AD, his position as ‘imperator’ was inherited by various members of his dynasty, the Julio-Claudians. The Emperor Claudius was ruling at the time of Domitian’s birth, but he was succeeded in 54 AD by the Emperor Nero. Despite his later reputation, Nero was a popular ruler at first and through much of Domitian’s childhood years there would have been no indication that civil war lay on the horizon.

One of the things which contributed to the outbreak of civil war when it came was a major disturbance in the east of the empire. In 66 AD, the Jewish people in the province of Judaea launched a major revolt against Roman rule after decades of heavy-handed behavior by the Roman authorities towards their religion and denigration of the sacred temple of Jerusalem by successive Roman governors of the province. This exploded into insurrection in 66 AD. The First Jewish Revolt would last for well over half a decade. When it initially broke out, the Roman commanders in the eastern provinces around Syria and the Levant proved incapable of suppressing it and so Nero soon appointed Domitian’s father Vespasian to oversee the military campaign. Vespasian left along with Domitian’s older brother, Titus, to wage war in Judaea. Domitian was left behind in Rome as he was still reasonably young, though a young adult in Roman terms by then.

His whereabouts and activities during this period around 67 and 68 AD are frustratingly unclear. Vespasian’s first wife, Domitian’s mother, died around this time and it is probable that Domitian was living in the household of his uncle, Vespasian’s brother, Titus Flavius Sabinus, in Italy while Vespasian and Titus were engaged against the First Jewish Revolt in the east. Although nearly all of the correspondence which the Romans engaged in with each other, the millions and millions of letters which passed over and back across the Mediterranean world over a period of centuries, have nearly all been lost, we can speculate that Domitian might have written to his father in Judaea in the early summer of 68 AD to alert him to momentous political events in Rome.

The Emperor Nero had become increasingly unpopular in previous years as a result of the Great Fire of Rome which destroyed much of the city in 64 AD and a number of other developments, not least the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt in the east. Early in 68 AD, the governors of provinces in Gaul and Hispania had rebelled against the emperor and the crisis soon spread to Rome itself where Nero lost all support, fled the capital, and took his own life. He was succeeded by Galba, the governor of the Spanish province who had been a major contributor to the war and who now seized power, bringing the Julio-Claudian dynasty to an end. Yet this was just the beginning of a sustained period of civil war. Galba was in turn murdered in January 69 AD by Otho, who in turn only ruled for 13 weeks before Aulus Vitellius, the commander of the Roman legions on the Rhine frontier in Germania, came south towards Italy and seized power as Emperor Vitellius in April 69 AD.

Speculating on the extent to which Domitian was keeping his father abreast of affairs in Rome is important because this information would have dictated much of Vespasian’s response to these events. Vespasian’s response in the east would come to dictate the course of the rest of Domitian’s life. In Judaea, his father was in charge of several legions of troops, each consisting of nearly 5,000 soldiers. He had been provided with an unusually large military force in order to crush the Jewish Revolt. What this meant was that as events unfolded to the west in Rome and Western Europe, Vespasian had the military resources necessary to potentially claim the imperial title himself. He duly did so. After the governors of several provinces in the east indicated they would support him, Vespasian was proclaimed as emperor and commenced a civil war with Vitellius.

In Rome, Domitian was immediately placed under house arrest when news of his father’s treachery reached Vitellius’s government. He was still detained in this way when legions loyal to Vespasian arrived at Italy from the borders along the River Danube and began clashing with Vitellius’ forces in the late autumn and early winter of 69 AD. Vitellius’ forces were defeated in northern Italy, but the final stages of the civil war saw violent clashes in and around the city of Rome itself on the 19th and 20th of December, during which Domitian’s uncle Sabinus was killed. Domitian, by all accounts, nearly lost his life as well, escaping a mob of Vitellius’ supporters by apparently disguising himself as a priest of the Egyptian deity Isis. Thereafter, Vespasian’s forces entered Rome and murdered Vitellius. Domitian’s father was accepted as the new emperor by the Senate shortly thereafter. The civil war was over.

When the supporters of Vespasian emerged victorious in Rome in late December 69 AD, Domitian’s father was still far away in the east. The military campaign into Italy had actually been overseen by his close ally, Licinius Mucianus. As the son of the new emperor, Domitian was quickly proclaimed as Caesar, an honorary title meaning something equivalent in more modern terms to Prince. This honor aside, it was Mucianus who ran affairs in Rome until such time as Vespasian arrived after a considerable delay. In 71 AD, Domitian took part in the military triumph which was held in Rome in honor of Vespasian’s victory in the civil war and Titus’ capture of the city of Jerusalem from the Jewish rebels in 70 AD. These military triumphs were a common feature of Roman life well into the Republican period, and consisted of a major parade and festival organized in the city to honor the conquering generals.

Even at this early date, Domitian was clearly being placed in the line of succession to potentially succeed as emperor one day if Titus predeceased their father or died himself without an heir. Hostile accounts of Domitian written by Roman historians imply that Vespasian had detected some sort of character defects in his younger son and was attempting to exclude him from the succession. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this was the case.

Domitian’s career during the decade that his father was emperor actually points towards Vespasian favouring his younger son, as well as his brother Titus. Domitian, for instance, was appointed by his father as one of the consuls of Rome, the most important political office in the state beyond that of emperor, on no less than six occasions, as well as being the senior consul in 73 AD. One Roman historian suggests that Domitian petitioned to be given the command of a Roman army if one were sent east to aid the King of the Parthian Empire, Vologases I, when he requested the help of Rome against the invasion of Parthia by a nomad confederacy of the Alans, a people who dominated the Pontic-Caspian Steppe at that time. This was during a rare period of amicable relations between Rome and Parthia, who were normally mortal enemies in the ancient Middle East. The Alans would later come to haunt the Romans, migrating west in the fourth century and invading Germania and Gaul. Domitian’s desire to have been appointed to the command had it materialised may have reflected his hopes of achieving some military renown in emulation of his older brother Titus, who had been so instrumental in the suppression of the Jewish Revolt.

Beyond this, the 70s AD were also significant in Domitian’s life for his marriage to Domitia Longina in 71 AD, the daughter of a renowned Roman general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who had been forced to end his own life by Nero in 67 AD after the emperor became fearful of his popularity amongst the Roman people. Domitian and Domitia’s marriage was largely childless. At least one child was born to them but died in infancy, leading to the adoption of other children, a not uncommon occurrence in Roman society where adoption was extremely common amongst the upper classes.

Domitian’s father died in the summer of 79 AD just short of his seventieth year. Titus succeeded him as a new hereditary dynasty, the Flavians, was firmly established. He was an enormously popular ruler by all accounts owing to his military prowess in his earlier years and well-liked policies which he pursued during his brief time in power, notably a series of lavish festivities held in Rome to celebrate the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre which Vespasian had begun the construction of years earlier and which is better known today as the Colosseum. No sooner had these games been held than Titus promptly died just two years into his reign at 41 years of age in September 81 AD. The symptoms of his death involved a fever of some sort but it is unclear what actually killed him. It was all suspicious enough that biographers of Domitian after his own time suggested that he plotted to kill his brother, with one stating that when Titus became ill, Domitian, quote, “ordered that he be left for dead.” There is no evidence to prove this, but it did benefit him all the same. Titus had no children and so Domitian became Emperor of Rome at 29 years of age. His first order was to deify his brother, a common practice which stated that a Roman emperor had become a god in death.

At the outset of considering Domitian’s reign, it is worth examining how political power was shared in the Roman Empire, as well as the main sources which we have available for Domitian’s life and how those sources were biased by rivalry between the emperor and his staff and the Senate in the first century AD. While Caesar Augustus had claimed immense power back in 27 BC, he didn’t become an absolute ruler in the sense of a modern dictator or an early modern absolutist monarch. Instead, he took the powers which several magistrates such as the Roman tribunes had held during the Republican period into his hands. This gave him huge authority, but there were still some limitations on the emperor’s behaviour. Furthermore, the management of the Roman provinces was divided up, with roughly half of the empire’s provinces being managed by the emperor and the imperial staff, known as the Familia Caesaris or ‘family of Caesar’, and the other half managed by the Senate. What this indicates is that while the Roman emperors were enormously powerful, they were still expected to respect the Senate and the leading aristocratic families who provided the several hundred senators.

Domitian, it seems clear from the available evidence, clashed with the Senate as his reign went on. This is highly significant in terms of how his time as emperor has been interpreted, as two of the three major sources for his reign were written by senators and the third was also sympathetic to the Senate. These are the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, who was not a senator but generally presented a less than flattering picture of any emperor who was known to have clashed with the Senate, the writings of Tacitus, a senator and major political figure himself during Domitian’s reign, and Cassius Dio, a Greco-Roman senator who was writing at a lengthy remove from events in the early third century and who echoed the criticisms of Suetonius and Tacitus. All three presented a negative picture of Domitian and this has coloured views of the emperor down to the present day. However, it doesn’t mean their view of him was wholly correct. Ancient Greek and Roman historians often did not try to write in an objective, neutral fashion, but instead sought to convince their readers of a particular political viewpoint, sometimes even presenting fabricated details if they suited their arguments. Hence, any appraisal of Domitian’s reign should take into account this immense bias which is inherent in the main sources for his life and reign.

On occasion, the hostility towards him was somewhat inexplicable. Another writer, Pliny the Younger, also critiqued Domitian after he was dead, despite the fact that Domitian had facilitated Pliny’s progression through the cursus honorum, the ‘succession of offices’ which any aspiring political figure expected to ascend through in order to become governor of a province and senior member of the Senate.

We have a clear example of how this tension between the emperor and the Senate and the traditional Roman aristocracy played out in one instance that also relates to a major aspect of foreign policy during Domitian’s reign. This comes from Britain. The Romans had been in contact with Britain since Julius Caesar’s time, though it was not until the reign of Emperor Claudius in the 40s AD that the first conquest of the island was undertaken, with much of what is now southern England being brought under Roman rule during the reigns of Claudius and Nero. Domitian’s father and brother had continued the policy of expansion there and in the 70s AD Roman legions campaigned north into northern England and westwards into Wales. In 77 AD, Vespasian entrusted this work into the hands of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a member of an esteemed Roman senatorial family and an experienced military commander. He was made proconsul or governor of Britain by Domitian’s father. Agricola was immediately successful, conquering the Ordovice tribe of Celts in Wales and on the island of Anglesey in his first years in command in Britain.

Domitian left Agricola in charge in Britain upon his accession. The governor continued to do good work from a Roman perspective. In 83 and 84 AD he campaigned as far north as any Roman army ever did, progressing through the Scottish lowlands and then heading further north into the highlands, clashing with the Celtic Caledonians there and possibly even sailing by and landing on the Orkney Islands in 84 AD. This was as close as the Romans would ever come to subjugating the Caledonians, a people who would prove particularly resistant to Roman rule, requiring the Emperor Hadrian to build his famous wall across northern England a half a century later to keep them out of the Roman province. Given his successes, it is peculiar then that Agricola was recalled from Britain by Domitian in 85 AD. In addition, he was not given a major military command thereafter and the suspicion has lingered that Domitian was jealous of Agricola’s military successes and ended his career as a result. At the same time, it is hard to be sure. Our major source for these events is a biographical history of Agricola’s life and career which was written by Tacitus, who also happened to be Agricola’s son-in-law. On the one hand, Tacitus presented Domitian’s treatment of his father-in-law as a clear example of the emperor’s disrespectful attitude towards the traditional Roman aristocracy, yet on the other hand, Agricola had served nearly eight years as governor of Britain when he was recalled in 85 AD, an unusually long period to serve as governor of a province.

In contrast to Agricola, Domitian’s own military exploits in the early years of his reign were relatively modest. He was primarily focused on campaigning against the Chatti, a tribe which controlled a large extent of territory beyond the Roman frontier in what is now the Lower Saxony region of Germany. Germanic tribes like the Chatti were a constant source of agitation for the Romans as they perennially tried to make raids over the Roman borders to strike at rich settlements inside the empire. Often such attacks were undertaken at times of perceived weakness within the empire. In this particular instance, Domitian seems to have instigated the campaign rather than it being a response to any hostility by the Chatti. His motive in doing so was probably a desire to establish his credentials as an emperor who could conduct military campaigns. There is more than a hint of some insecurity here on Domitian’s part about the fact that his father and brother had both been esteemed generals before they ever became emperor, whereas Domitian had no credentials in this regard. If the campaign against the Chatti was designed to establish a military reputation, it clearly didn’t work. Contemporaries derided the brief war against the tribe as unnecessary. It largely consisted of a simple raid into Chatti territory and the construction of a Roman road, with Domitian then declaring victory and ordering a triumph to be held in his honour at Rome. He also took the celebratory title of Germanicus, a common title adopted by members of the imperial family who had campaigned in Germania.

While his campaign against the Chatti was something of a stunt, Domitian was responsible for strengthening the northern borders in the course of his reign in other ways. Seven decades before Domitian ever became emperor, the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, as he neared the end of his life, had laid out advice for his successors. A key recommendation had been that the empire should not be expanded any further and that the borders should be consolidated. This advice had been followed fairly closely, particularly so in Germania and further east into Central Europe and the Balkans, where the River Rhine and the River Danube were fixed as natural defensive points on the northern frontier. Over the decades, a series of fortifications and extensive border defences were erected along this vast border. Known as the Limes Germanicus, limes meaning frontier, Domitian added to these defences, ordering the erection of a large fort at Saalburg on the main ridge of Mount Taunus as an advance frontier defence some 25 kilometres north-east of the River Rhine and near modern-day Frankfurt. He also oversaw the erection of new fortifications along the Rhaetian Limes. This was the weakest point of the entire northern frontier, a 550-kilometre long section of the border running between the River Rhine and the River Danube in southern Germany which did not have the advantage of a natural river border.

These building works were not confined to military fortifications along the long northern frontier. Like every emperor since Caesar Augustus, a ruler who famously remarked that he found Rome a city of brick and made it one of marble, Domitian oversaw a major building programme in the Eternal City. Some of this focused on the amphitheatres and racing tracks there. While the construction and initial completion of the Colosseum, known in ancient times as the Flavian Amphitheatre, was undertaken by Vespasian and Titus, Domitian did add to the work of his father and brother. A gallery was built on the top tier of the stadium to increase its capacity to a maximum of about 80,000 people, meaning that at the height of Domitian’s reign approximately one in every 12 or 13 denizens of the city of Rome could attend the events here. Domitian also was responsible for the construction of the hypogeum, a system of subterranean tunnels and rooms in which gladiators prepared for the fights above and wild animals were kept. Hinged platforms allowed for animals and gladiators to be lifted directly up from the hypogeum to the main amphitheatre much like an ancient elevator.

In 86 AD, Domitian also presided over the opening of the Stadium of Domitian, a venue for athletic contests which was constructed primarily during his reign, though Titus had commissioned it in 80 AD as part of the reconstruction of the Field of Mars region of the city after a major fire levelled many buildings there the previous year. The Stadium was infamous in medieval times as the site where St. Agnes, one of the earliest Christian saints, was allegedly martyred during Domitian’s reign. Like much of the history of the early Christian martyrs, the basis for this is generally based on questionable evidence written by Christian hagiographers centuries later.

Domitian’s building work extended beyond stadiums and centres for the holding of games and gladiatorial contests. Much of it was concerned with religion. Domitian’s religious policy was very traditional, and he honoured the old Roman gods through an extensive temple-building programme. The central pillar of this was the rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus on the Capitoline Hill in central Rome. This was one of the most important temples in the entire Roman world. Unfortunately, it was destroyed twice in quick succession during the rule of the Flavians, once in December 69 AD during the battle for control of Rome at the very end of the civil war which brought Vespasian to power and again a decade later in a fire in the city after Vespasian had rebuilt it just a few years earlier. Hence, Domitian’s orders to rebuild it constituted the second time that the temple was reconstructed in less than a decade. Domitian’s version of the temple was apparently the most lavish yet built, with a thin layer of gold across the entire rooftop, something which must have been quite a spectacle in ancient Rome on a sunny day and was also doubtlessly a magnet for thieves.

Elsewhere, in a somewhat peculiar obsession with a faraway province, Domitian expended a large amount of imperial revenue having temples rebuilt or expanded in Egypt, notably the Dendera Temple Complex in southern Egypt where the Temple of Hathor, dedicated to an Egyptian sun deity, was built on Domitian’s orders. Beyond these religious structures, Domitian was also responsible for erecting a number of buildings which catered more towards his and the imperial household’s needs and the legacy of the Flavian Dynasty. For instance, while it bears the name of his brother and was erected in his honour, it was Domitian who had the Arch of Titus built on the Via Sacra in Rome. This was built to commemorate Titus’ role in the suppression of the First Jewish Revolt, as well as their father’s. The Arch of Titus has survived in a remarkable state of preservation and has been the inspiration for a number of triumphal arches built in more modern times, notably the Arc de Triomphe in Paris commissioned in the early nineteenth century by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Arch of Titus was most likely designed by the architect Rabirius, who was also responsible for the design of the Villa of Domitian or Alban Palace, a vast palace laid out for Domitian in the Alban Hills not far from Rome and overlooking the city’s main port of Ostia. After its completion, Domitian spent a growing amount of time here. This may have contributed to the growing divide between him and the Senate. Another of his predecessors, Tiberius, became increasingly unpopular in the second half of his reign after he effectively abandoned Rome to go and live in his palace on the island of Capri, and it appears that the senatorial class were disillusioned by the idea that an emperor would rule in a heavy-handed fashion from a distant palace rather than from within Rome itself where he would consult with the Senate regularly.

Domitian might have spent lavishly on erecting these buildings in Rome, its environs, and in Egypt, yet he was not a spendthrift ruler. He was concerned with managing the public finances in a prudent manner, particularly after a fiscal crisis of sorts in the mid-80s AD. One of the few fields of endeavour which the ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a very sophisticated approach to was economics. There was only limited understanding of how issues like inflation and fiscal crises arose. In response to them, Domitian ordered reform of the Roman coinage. The silver sesterces, the standard form of Roman coin, one which was made of actual solid silver, had been devalued during the crisis period of the late 60s and early 70s AD as the First Jewish Revolt and the civil wars created a need for more and more coins to pay the legions and to offer financial bribes to both soldiers and politicians who agreed to support a contender for the imperial title in return for money. The upshot of this was that silver coins started being produced that had cheap base metals mixed into them to reduce the amount of silver needed to mint them. By the 70s AD, the silver content in some of the coins had fallen to below 90%, and people were becoming aware of this coinage manipulation. Domitian was the first of the Flavians who moved to reverse this, and studies of coins from Domitian’s reign from 85 AD onwards indicate that the silver content returned consistently to over 95% at that time, restoring confidence in the coinage. This was an enlightened approach given that the drastic devaluation of the coinage in the second and third centuries AD caused immense havoc in time to come, contributing in a major way to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

One notable element of Domitian’s fiscal policy was his decision to continue and even expand what was known as the Fiscus Judaicus, ‘the Jewish tax’. This was a tax which had been first imposed by his father Vespasian on the Jews of the province of Judaea essentially as a punishment for having revolted against Roman rule and the cost of suppressing the First Jewish Revolt. It was initially imposed on adult male Jews and those who actively practiced Judaism. Domitian, though, expanded the tax so that it was applied to all Jews, be they men, women, or children of any age, as well as Jews outside of Judaea itself, notably in Egypt where there was a large Jewish community in cities like Alexandria. Even non-practicing Jews seem to have been forced to pay the tax. Domitian’s zeal in imposing the tax may have reflected his own insecurities about not having been involved in suppressing the Jewish Revolt back in the late 60s and early 70s AD along with his father and brother. The degree to which it was imposed may also have reflected official anxieties about the seeming spread of Judaism to new communities in the Eastern Mediterranean.

What the Roman authorities may have actually been noticing in this respect wasn’t the spread of Judaism, but actually the emergence of some of the first communities of Christians in parts of the Levant, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece, a religion which for many decades the Romans perceived as simply being a branch of Judaism. An enormous proportion of all the tax take of the Roman state was spent on the military. In a state which was very light on welfare and government intervention in spheres other than the financing of its war machine, over 50% of the state budget was spent on supporting the legions in the first and second centuries AD. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that for extended periods of time there was little warfare being engaged in. As we have seen, there was a regional conflict in Britain where successive emperors over a period of centuries were trying to extend the border further north, and there were the perennial clashes with tribes like the Chatti near the Rhine River frontier. Beyond these, though, Domitian only engaged in major conflicts in one area during his decade and a half long rule. This was against the Dacian Kingdom, a powerful state ruled by the Dacians, an Asiatic people who had migrated into the Balkans over half a millennium earlier. By Domitian’s time they ruled territory centred on modern-day Romania and extending into parts of Serbia, Bulgaria, and other regions. In 85 AD their king, Duras, ordered his armies to conduct a raid over the border into the Roman province of Moesia. This action led to war between Rome and Dacia which would last down to 88 AD.

The Dacian War started terribly for Domitian. The initial incursion by the Dacians led to the destruction of a Roman legion under the command of the governor of Moesia, Gaius Oppius Sabinus. The loss of a legion and its standards, the banners which bore the symbols of Rome and the identity of the legion, was considered a serious stain on the honour of the Roman state and when news reached Rome of the incident Domitian decided to campaign in person against the Dacians. Legions were quickly ordered to move from other fronts to the Danube frontier. The emperor was there in the Serbia region for much of 86 AD and divided Moesia into two provinces, Moesia Inferior and Moesia Superior, in order to allow for better administration and more effective dealing with the Dacian threat. After these initial efforts to prepare for the campaign, Domitian, somewhat surprisingly, left Moesia and handed over command of the campaign to Cornelius Fuscus, the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard.

Fuscus won some minor victories initially. Thereafter the new Dacian king, Decebalus, won a major victory over Fuscus, leading to Fuscus’ replacement by Tettius Julianus. Julianus did what Sabinus and Fuscus were unable to do and gained the initiative in the war. By 88 AD he was preparing to strike against the Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa. However, just as this was in preparation, two other tribes, the Marcomanni and the Quaadi, began to threaten the Roman border further to the west around the weak point of the Rhaetian Limes. With this, Domitian agreed to peace with the Dacians so that some of the legions under Julianus’ command could be transferred west to shore up the border area between the Danube and the Rhine rivers. The Dacian War, however, presaged a period of growing conflict between Rome and Dacia and twenty years later the Emperor Trajan would annex Dacia in one of the last major conquests undertaken by the Romans.

Domitian’s reign was a notable one in terms of Roman culture. The last decades of the first century AD witnessed two broad literary trends. The first was the emergence of some of the foremost Roman and Greco-Roman historians whose writings have come down to us, particularly historical biographers. Domitian can hardly be credited with playing a role in this, for two of the main individuals involved, Suetonius and Tacitus, were, as we have seen, hostile towards him, while another, the Greco-Roman historical biographer, Plutarch, lived and worked far from Rome in Greece as a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and did not benefit from the patronage of Domitian, although he had obtained some favour from Vespasian when on a visit to Rome in the 70s AD. Domitian was involved, though, in the other great literary movement of the era. This was a period which saw the genre of satire and satirical poetry reach its peak at Rome, with the satirical writers Juvenal and Martial both producing much of their greatest work during the 80s and 90s AD. The emperor was clearly a patron, especially so of Martial, who recorded being invited to dine with Domitian on one occasion. In return, the poet lauded the emperor, focusing in his second book of Epigrams on Domitian’s military campaign in Germania, stating, “the laurel given for the Chatti is totally yours” in recognition of Domitian’s military victory over that tribe early in his reign.

Juvenal’s relationship with Domitian was more complicated. He obtained imperial patronage early in his career, but his satire became a bit too biting over the years. He is famously associated with the quip that the Roman people were won over by the superficial distractions of ‘bread and circuses’; however, his most penetrating attack on the Roman elite came in his ‘Fourth Satire’ in which he uses the metaphor of a fish to describe the waste and wanton luxury of Roman high society. Juvenal was eventually exiled from Rome, though it is unclear if Domitian was responsible for his expulsion from the city or the Emperor Trajan. Certainly, Juvenal critiqued Domitian directly in some of his work. Nevertheless, his more overt attacks on the emperor were written many, many years after Domitian had died when Juvenal was pandering in the 120s AD to new aristocratic patrons at a time when it had become fashionable to denigrate the deceased emperor. Overall, there is no major evidence to suggest that Domitian was any more inclined to censor writers in Rome than any of his predecessors and the imperial government continued to patronise scholars who were not independently wealthy and who relied on aristocratic patronage for their living.

This favour even extended to the Romano-Jewish scholar Josephus. Josephus was a former Jewish rebel commander who had been involved against Rome at the very start of the First Jewish Revolt. He was captured early on by the Romans and subsequently became a trusted advisor to Titus as he suppressed the rebellion. Later he left for Rome with his patron and there he composed one of the most important works written on Jewish history and Judaism in ancient times under the patronage of Vespasian and Titus. His Jewish War, finished towards the end of Vespasian’s reign, for instance, provides not just a forensic survey of the First Jewish Revolt, but one of the most detailed accounts of any war fought in antiquity. It was formerly believed, in line with the general tendency to view Domitian negatively, that the patronage which Josephus acquired from the imperial family ended with Titus’ death in 81 AD; however, this is an entirely spurious characterisation. Josephus stated in an autobiographical account of his own life that the patronage he received from the emperors remained the same through the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian and several of his more important works, the Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion, were written during Domitian’s reign under imperial patronage and published in 93 and 94 AD.

While he may have been tolerant of the satirical barbs offered by Martial and Juvenal for the most part and a patron of Josephus, Domitian was decidedly less patient when it came to certain schools of philosophy. In 93 AD he issued a decree which expelled the philosophers from Rome and the entirety of the Italian peninsula. These appear to have been proponents of the Stoic school of philosophy, one of several major schools which include Platonism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism. Prior to this, Domitian had ordered the execution of several prominent Stoics. His expulsion order ensured that one prominent Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, left Rome and set up his own philosophy academy across the Adriatic Sea in north-western Greece at Nicopolis. It used to be considered that Domitian was something of an outlier in deciding on such a course; however, further studies have indicated that several emperors of the first century, including Domitian’s father Vespasian, issued decrees against the Stoics, who appear to have formed some sort of social opposition to rulers who were deemed to be too autocratic in the first century AD. What’s peculiar about this is that the Stoics went from being figures of persecution in the first century to hold power themselves a century later. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled as emperor between 161 and 180 AD, was a noted Stoic philosopher himself.

It is almost impossible to determine what Domitian was like on a personal level. This is because the best account that we have in this respect comes from Suetonius. Suetonius was a most unusual historian, one whose Lives of the Caesars is an immensely valuable source for the history of the early Roman Empire, yet whose tendency towards depicting the emperors almost like pantomime figures when it came to their personalities can make it difficult to separate fact from fiction. In particular, he had a tendency to exaggerate the supposed vices of the emperors. For instance, of Domitian, Suetonius tells us that, quote, “He was excessively lustful. His constant sexual intercourse he called bed-wrestling, as if it were a kind of exercise,” before informing us that Domitian, quote, “swam with common prostitutes.” Elsewhere he tells us that when he first succeeded Titus as emperor, Domitian would spend hours at a time locked away in his rooms idling the time away doing nothing except killing flies while officials and imperial officers waited outside trying to get him to govern the empire.

These passages aside, there is enough information provided by Suetonius to be able to begin to form some kind of accurate picture of who Domitian actually was. He was evidently taller than average, with a tanned complexion and large eyes, though evidently with poor sight. He was an educated ruler, one who was responsible for rebuilding and restocking many of the libraries across Rome which had been destroyed during the great fire which consumed much of the city back in 64 AD during Nero’s reign. This was clearly something of a passion of his and Suetonius tells us that he expended a great amount of imperial finances on rebuilding the libraries as well as trying to reacquire as many works as possible, even dispatching many scribes to the great library at Alexandria in Egypt to produce copies of books there and bring them back to Rome.

Beyond this, his other great interest seems to have been, like many other Romans, the games held in the amphitheatre and the racing tracks of the city, paying for gladiatorial contests and chariot races to be held frequently. He enjoyed gambling on these and on dice, though in other aspects of his life he was moderate in his habits, holding banquets on occasion, though usually retiring early and rarely drinking or eating to excess.

Even emperors can be extremely self-conscious. Domitian, by all accounts, was a relatively handsome man in his younger years, but as he grew older he gained weight and started to go bald. On one occasion he stated of a senior political figure, “How I wish that I were as fine looking as Maecius thinks he is.” His receding hairline troubled him greatly and he took offence whenever he heard of anyone being insulted for their baldness as though it was a slur against his own lack of hair. Such was his obsession with his hairline that he even composed a book on the subject entitled On the Care of the Hair. Incredibly, this appears to have not been a made-up story of Suetonius’, as he even quotes from the text and presumably his readers would have been familiar with the work in question. The book was addressed to a friend of Domitian’s who also suffered from hair loss and who the emperor bemoaned the fate of his hair to in the following words: “Do you not see that I am too tall and comely to look on? And yet the same fate awaits my hair, and I bear with resignation the ageing of my locks in youth. Be assured that nothing is more pleasing than beauty, but nothing shorter-lived.”

Domitian had greater problems than just his hair loss. While the exact reasons for it can be debated, there is no doubt that by the late 80s AD there was growing opposition to his rule from many quarters. The first major sign of this came in 89 AD when Lucius Antonius Saturninus, the governor of the province of Germania Superior, revolted against the emperor. This was a serious matter. The provinces in Germania along the border at the River Rhine were highly militarised and any revolt from this part of the empire always ensured that the leader of any such insurrection there had a large number of troops under his command. In Saturninus’ case, the revolt was quickly suppressed. He had initiated it on the 1st of January in the middle of winter having secured an alliance with the Chatti, the tribe Domitian had waged war on early in his reign; however, their plan to join Saturninus’ legion after he raised the revolt against Domitian was foiled when a sudden bout of warmer weather melted the ice on the River Rhine and prevented the Chatti from joining up with Saturninus’ troops. As a result, in a matter of less than four weeks, Roman legions from the surrounding provinces moved into Germania Superior on Domitian’s orders and crushed the rebellion. Nevertheless, it pointed towards a growing discontent with Domitian’s rule.

Saturninus might well have revolted in the expectation that if he secured control of several provinces along the northern border, the Senate and its followers in Rome might abandon Domitian in the same way that Nero had lost their support in 68 AD, leading to his fall from power. There certainly appears to have been a growing animosity between the emperor and a faction within the Senate. This was in part responsible for the expulsion of the Stoic philosophers from Rome and Italy in the early 90s AD as Domitian identified them as being associated with his opponents. Several senators were found guilty of crimes over these years and were executed. This is presented as evidence by Tacitus and Suetonius of Domitian’s growing tyranny as his reign progressed. It wasn’t out of the ordinary though. Emperors such as Claudius back in the 40s and early 50s AD had regularly seen the need to execute senators who were perceived as plotting against the regime, and yet they were judged much more favourably by the same historians. Domitian’s condemnation was rooted in a much more broad animosity amongst the senatorial class which was tied into ideas about the traditional honour which should be afforded to the Roman nobility. Given the accounts provided, it also seems reasonable to suggest that Domitian’s behaviour did in fact become more incendiary in the mid-90s AD, while also acknowledging that the extent of this was exaggerated by his critics.

Matters came to a head in 96 AD. In a strange development, given the growing stand-off between the emperor and the Senate, the conspiracy which saw him assassinated emerged from within Domitian’s household staff. The ringleaders were a steward called Stephanus and a chamberlain named Parthenius. On the 18th of September, they organised for the doors of Domitian’s private apartments to be locked and then approached him apparently on official business. Stephanus presented the emperor with a scroll and while Domitian was preparing to read it, he then drew a concealed dagger and stabbed the emperor in the groin. A scuffle followed in which Domitian tried to have an attendant retrieve a nearby dagger for him, but as he did so, other servants rushed forward and stabbed the emperor repeatedly. In a classic example of the flowery stories which Roman historians injected in their work, both Suetonius and Cassius Dio relate that a soothsayer of Germanic origin, Larginus Proclus, had predicted the emperor’s imminent death just days earlier through interpretation of lightning. We are probably on steadier ground in assuming that the conspiracy involved more than those who actually stabbed Domitian to death, as within a very short period of time, Titus Petronius Secundus, one of the commanders of the Praetorian Guard, was securing the imperial precinct and leading senators were being informed of the assassination. Who amongst these might have been involved in the plot remains a mystery.

In the immediate aftermath of Domitian’s assassination, while the former emperor’s blood was still settling, the Senate convened and they elected one of their own, Marcus Coeccius Nerva, as the new emperor. Nerva was a well-respected senator, though an elderly one in his mid-sixties. His selection was a consensus choice with the expectation that his reign would be a short one and a more lasting solution could be found in the interim. And so it proved to be. He died just 16 months later and thereafter Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, who Nerva had appointed as his heir, succeeded him. Trajan’s accession marked a new departure in the Roman Empire, whereby the previous emperor would select a worthy individual who was not necessarily a close blood relative. He would then adopt this heir who would succeed him upon his death. The system proved effective. Trajan was widely considered to have been amongst the greatest of the Roman emperors, with some memorials praising him even above Caesar Augustus. His successors also ruled well and so the period from Domitian’s assassination down to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD encompassing the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, is typically referred to today as the period of the Five Good Emperors, an age which the great Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon deemed to be the era in which life was best for any people in any society in history.

Domitian has traditionally been viewed as one of the more tyrannical of the Roman emperors. This is entirely in keeping with the view of him presented by Suetonius and Tacitus in line with their senatorial bias. However, this interpretation of him needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. While there is no doubt that he clashed with the Senate and this proved to be his undoing, this does not necessarily mean that he was a poor ruler. If anything, it simply points to the power which the Senate held over a century after the creation of the empire. In other respects, his reign was successful. His building programme was considerable and in many ways he ushered in the Pax Romana, ‘the Roman Peace’ which is more usually associated with the Five Good Emperors. Furthermore, in many ways Domitian made strides to combat the issues which would be Rome’s undoing. Beginning in the third century AD, the empire entered a period of crisis based on the overt power of the military which caused civil war after civil war, as well as the invasions of Germanic and Asiatic tribes across the Rhine and Danube into the empire, along with a fiscal crisis caused by the drastic lowering of the silver content in the Roman coinage. A century and a half before this crisis began, Domitian was taking steps to combat two of these three issues by reforming the coinage and increasing the silver content and by establishing extensive fortifications along the northern border. In these respects, whatever the bias of his ancient biographers might have been, Domitian was in many ways a competent ruler.

What do you think of the Emperor Domitian? Did he become a tyrant as his reign went on or was he unfairly maligned by the senatorial class? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.

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