Domitian: Lord and God

Domitian: Lord and God (The younger brother who stood in the shadow all his life. For fifteen years he rules efficiently and ever more alone. He knows the hour he is to die, and waits for it.) — lesson 14 of the course: 7 parts, about 21 min of reading.

Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian and brother of Titus, spends eleven years in the shadow of his family and takes the throne in AD 81. He rules for fifteen years: he rebuilds the Capitol, raises a stadium and a palace on the Palatine, increases the soldiers’ pay by a third and wages wars on the Rhine, in Britain and on the Danube, and then buys peace from Decebalus, king of the Dacians. At court everyone must address him as “lord and god,” and he fears conspiracies more and more. The episode tells of the black banquet, the trials of senators, the executed cousin Flavius Clemens, and September 18, AD 96, when men from his own palace kill him at the hour he had feared since youth. The Senate orders his name chiseled off inscriptions, and in the finale of season two we set two portraits side by side: the one from the writings of Suetonius and Tacitus, and the one scholars draw today.

Films

• The Black Banquet — Night in Domitian’s palace: guests in a black room, slabs bearing their names, an emperor who talks only of death.
• Rhine, Britain, Danube — Domitian’s three fronts: the Chatti across the Rhine, Agricola in Britain, the Dacians on the Danube and the revolt at Mogontiacum. Routes on the maps are approximate.
• The Fifth Hour — Domitian’s last day: a foretold hour, the servants’ lie and a man with a bandaged arm.

Articles

• The Black Banquet — Domitian: Lord and God — A messenger from the emperor opens the door. The guest is certain that this time it is the end.
• The Younger Brother — Domitian: Lord and God — Rome, October 24, AD 51. Vespasian’s second son is born in a house on Pomegranate Street.
• Lord and God — Domitian: Lord and God — The first months of his reign. Every day the emperor shuts himself away alone for several hours.
• The Frontiers — Domitian: Lord and God — First Domitian does something Galba never wanted to do. He raises the soldiers’ pay by a third: each soldier gets three more gold coins a year.
• Gleaming Walls — Domitian: Lord and God — The closer the foretold time, the greater the fear. Suetonius writes that the emperor had the walls of the porticoes where he took his walks lined with phengite — a stone so shiny that he could see in it the reflection of everything happening behind his back.
• The Fifth Hour — Domitian: Lord and God — The palace, AD 96. Domitia has been the emperor’s wife for more than twenty-five years.
• Erased — Domitian: Lord and God — The senators race to be first to take their seats in the Curia. They spare the dead man no abuse.