Domitian

Titus Flavius Domitianus, known as Domitian, was born in Rome on 24 October 51 CE, the younger son of Titus Flavius Vespasianus (the future emperor Vespasian) and Flavia Domitilla. The Flavians belonged to the Italian municipal aristocracy rather than the old senatorial nobility: Domitian’s grandfather had been a tax collector, and his father rose through equestrian and then senatorial ranks under the Julio-Claudians. His childhood and youth fell in the later years of Claudius and the reign of Nero. Ancient biographers, above all Suetonius, report that the household knew periods of reduced means before Vespasian’s later success, and that Domitian received the rhetorical and literary education customary for a young Roman of senatorial rank. During the Jewish War of the late 60s, Vespasian and Domitian’s elder brother Titus were in the East; Domitian remained in Rome.

The civil wars of 69 CE, the Year of the Four Emperors, transformed the family’s position. After the eastern armies proclaimed Vespasian emperor, Domitian was in the capital when the Vitellian regime collapsed. He took refuge on the Capitol with his uncle Flavius Sabinus, escaped when the Capitoline temple was burned, and after the Flavian victory was saluted as Caesar. Under Vespasian (69–79) and Titus (79–81) he held several consulships, including an ordinary consulship, and various priesthoods, but contemporary and later writers agree that he was kept away from independent military command and from the inner direction of government. Around 70 he married Domitia Longina, daughter of the general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who had been forced to suicide under Nero. The marriage allied the new dynasty with a respected name. The couple had at least one son, who died in childhood and was later deified, and possibly a daughter. Hostile sources claim Domitian lived a dissipated private life in these years; modern historians treat such claims with caution because they come from a tradition shaped after his condemnation of memory.

When Titus died on 13 September 81, Domitian succeeded as emperor without open challenge. His fifteen-year reign was the longest since Tiberius and was more openly autocratic than that of his father or brother. He held the ordinary consulship repeatedly, assumed perpetual censorship, and concentrated jurisdiction, finance, and military appointment in the imperial household and among equestrian officials. After the fire of 80 he undertook a large building program in Rome, including the Palatine palace complex, the Stadium of Domitian in the Campus Martius, the Forum Transitorium, restoration of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and further work associated with the Flavian amphitheatre. On the frontiers he campaigned in person against the Chatti in Germany in the early 80s, awarded himself a triumph, and took the cognomen Germanicus. In Britain the governorship of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, known from Tacitus, fell in this period. On the Danube he faced serious wars against the Dacians under Decebalus and against Suebic and Sarmatian peoples, with mixed results and heavy cost. He raised legionary pay, a lasting fiscal decision, and paid close attention to provincial administration and to the grain and building supply of the capital.

Relations with the senatorial order worsened over time. Domitian’s use of maiestas (treason) trials, his promotion of equestrians, and court ceremonial that—at least according to later writers—encouraged the address dominus et deus alienated many aristocrats. The revolt of Lucius Antonius Saturninus on the Rhine in 89 was suppressed; thereafter executions and confiscations increased, especially in the years 93–96, a period senatorial historians described in terms of terror. Philosophers and astrologers were expelled from Italy on more than one occasion. Later Christian authors, including Eusebius, associated Domitian with persecution of Christians, sometimes linking him to the exile of Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla and to traditions surrounding the Book of Revelation. The scale and even the existence of a general persecution remain disputed among modern historians, who note that contemporary evidence is thin and that Flavius Clemens was charged in pagan sources with atheism or Jewish manners. Domitian also enforced older Roman moral and religious legislation, including severe punishment of unchaste Vestal Virgins.

On 18 September 96 Domitian was assassinated in the palace by a group of court officials. Ancient accounts name the steward Parthenius and others, and they implicate, with varying confidence, the empress Domitia Longina and the praetorian prefects. The Senate immediately chose Marcus Cocceius Nerva as emperor and voted Domitian damnatio memoriae: his name was erased from inscriptions and his statues were destroyed. His body received no official honor. Suetonius records that his nurse Phyllis had him cremated on her estate on the Via Latina and then placed the ashes in the Temple of the Flavian family on the Quirinal, mingling them with those of Julia, daughter of Titus. The senatorial literary tradition of Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio fixed a portrait of cruelty, hypocrisy, and megalomania that dominated until the twentieth century. More recent scholarship, while not denying the executions of the 90s, has emphasized Domitian’s administrative competence, fiscal and military policies, and the bias of sources written under the adoptive emperors who had every reason to blacken the last Flavian.