DOMITIAN (52-96). Titus Flavius Domitianus, the second son of Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Flavia Domitilla, twelfth of the Caesars, and third of the Flavian dynasty, was born at Rome, 24th October 52 a.d. He enjoys an evil prominence as the only tyrant among the succession of good and just princes from Vespasian down to Commodus. According to Suetonius, he was brought up in squalor and ignorance, and led a degraded and miserable youth; but it is hardly credible that so good a prince and so indulgent a father in all his other acts should thus have neglected his son’s education, and the story of his scandalous youth was more probably invented to suit his after life. When Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, Domitian escaped with difficulty from the burning temple of the Capitol, and lay in hiding from the Vitellians till his father’s party proved victorious. After the fall of Vitellius he was saluted as Caesar, or prince imperial, by the troops, obtained the city praetorship, and was intrusted with the administration of Italy till his father’s return from the East. Intoxicated by this sudden rise from obscurity, he grossly abused the power committed to him, and conducted himself more like a Turkish pasha than the son of a sturdy Sabine soldier. Such were the airs of authority he assumed that Vespasian, as the story goes, wrote in irony to thank him for not having dismissed his own father. Certain it is that though in his father’s lifetime he several times filled the office of consul, and after his death was nominally the partner in the empire with his brother, yet he never took any part in public business, but lived in great retirement, devoting himself to a life of pleasure and of literary pursuits till he succeeded to the purple. The death of Titus, if not ...hastened by foul means, was at least eagerly welcomed by his brother. His succession (13th Sept. 81) was unquestioned, and it would seem as if, when his ambition was sated, and before his fears were aroused, he intended, as far as his weak volitions and mean abilities would allow, to govern well. Like Augustus, he attempted a reformation of morals and religion. As chief pontiff he inquired into the character of the vestal virgins, three of whom were found guilty, while in the case of one the awful penalty of a living entombment was revived. He enforced the laws against adultery, mutilation, and the grosser forms of immorality. He forbade the public acting of mimes. He erected many temples and public buildings and restored the temple of the Capitol, on the gilding of which, if Plutarch is to be believed, he expended 12,000 talents, or nearly two and a half millions of our money. He passed many sumptuary laws, one of which is noticeable as showing the increasing dearth of com, which was now grown mainly by the wasteful and inefficient process of slave labour. An edict was issued forbidding the withdrawal of arable land from the plough, and reducing existing vineyards by one half. Finally, he took a personal share in the administration of justice at Rome, and exercised a jealous supervision over the governors of provinces.
Such public virtues counterbalanced in the eyes of the people all his private vices, gross and glaring as they were from the first. Former emperors had been deified after their death, but Domitian was the first to arrogate divine honours in his lifetime, and cause himself in public documents to be styled Our Lord and God. Doubtless in the poets (such as Martial, who calls the emperor’s minion the Ganymede of our second Jove) this deification was nothing but fulsome flattery, but in the case of the provincials it was a sincere tribute to the impersonation of the Roman Empire, as the administrator of good government, and the peacemaker of the world. Even when Rome and Italy felt his heavy hand, and smarted beneath his proscriptions and extortions, the provinces were undisturbed. Though he took the title of imperator more than twenty times, and enjoyed at least one triumph, his achievements as a general were insignificant. His campaign in 83 against the Chatti was “a mere summer promenade ;” in Dacia (87) he received a severe check, and the peace concluded with this nation in 90 was due to the victories of his lieutenant Julianus. Juvenal hints that the flaxen-haired Germans who figured in his triumph were purchased slaves. His jealousy was provoked by the successes of Agri cola in Britain, and the conqueror of Galgacus and the hero of the battle of the Grampians was recalled to Rome (84) in the midst of his conquests, condemned to retirement, and, as Tacitus is inclined to believe, removed by poison.
The revolt of Antonius Saturninus, the commander of the Roman forces in Upper Germany (93), marks the turning point in his reign. By a fortunate rising of the Rhine, which prevented his barbarian allies from coming to his assistance, and by the vigour of Norbanus, it was speedily crushed; but the fears of the emperor once aroused seem never again to have slept. A proscription as bloody as that of Sulla followed, and no man of eminence could feel his life safe. Before this he had sought out victims to gratify his cupidity and replenish his exhausted treasury. Now he struck at all that was conspicuous for talent or virtue, glutted himself with the blood of the Lamiae, and sentenced to death his own cousin and nephew by marriage, Flavius Clemens. A conspiracy among his own freedmen— set on foot, it is said, by his wife, who knew her own life to be threatened—cut short his career of tyranny and bloodshed. He was stabbed in his bedroom by a freedman of Clemens named Stephanus, 18th Sept. 96. Had Domitian died after as short a reign as his brother he might have left behind him as fair a name, and the interesting problem for the historian is to connect the two portions of his reign, and account for the double part he played. Like Hamlet he was born to a position which he felt himself unequal to fill. So long as the popularity which he inherited from his brother lasted, and he felt himself secure on his throne, he carried on the traditions of his father’s government, denounced delators, and administered even justice. After his unsuccessful campaign and the conspiracy of his general, he was seized with the common disease of absolute monarchs, the fear of assassination and distrust of all around him. The last three years of his reign witnessed the awful spectacle of the acts of a madman endowed with unlimited power.
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