A Second Nero? — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree
AD 55. The palace on the Palatine. Two boys of almost the same age recline at the table for the young. One is Britannicus, son of the late emperor Claudius. The other is Titus, son of a former consul who had commanded a legion in Britain. They are raised together and taught by the same teachers (Suetonius, Titus 2).
Suetonius tells how the freedman Narcissus once brought a physiognomist to court, a man who read the future from faces. He was to assess Britannicus. He declared that Britannicus would never become emperor. And Titus, standing nearby, certainly would.
Remember the dinner from the episode on Nero: Britannicus drinks and collapses. Suetonius adds a detail absent from Tacitus: Titus, it is said, was reclining right beside him, also tasted from that cup, and was ill for a long time afterward (Titus 2). He did not forget. As an adult he will set up a golden statue of his friend in the palace.
Who is this boy? He was born on December 30, AD 39, in a modest house in Rome, in a cramped, dark little room that was still shown to the curious in Suetonius’s day (Titus 1; the year according to Dio 66.18 — Suetonius once gives 41). Handsome, with an extraordinary memory, he writes poems in Latin and Greek. He jokes that he can forge any handwriting and could have been the “prince of forgers” (Titus 3).
Then Judaea, Jerusalem and the return to his father with the cry “I am here, Father!” — you know this from the previous episode. In Rome Titus commands the Praetorian Guard and has a reputation as a harsh, suspicious prefect. He removes suspects without delay (Suetonius, Titus 6).
That is how Caecina meets his end — the same man who betrayed Vitellius in AD 69. In his youth Titus had fought him in mock combat, in full armor, at games for the young (Dio 66.15). In AD 79, with his father still alive, he invites him to dinner. Caecina will not make it out of the dining room. Titus has him killed, because he had obtained a speech to the soldiers written in Caecina’s own hand (Suetonius, Titus 6; Dio 66.16).
Suetonius writes that few came to the throne with such a bad reputation. People spoke of banquets until midnight with the most extravagant friends, and of debauchery. Of bribes taken in cases his father was trying. And of a passion for a queen (Titus 6–7). The Romans said it outright: he will be a second Nero.
The queen is Berenice, whom you know from the previous episode. In AD 75 she comes to Rome with her brother, King Agrippa. She lives in the palace with Titus and behaves as his wife. She is waiting for a wedding (Dio 66.15). Rome grumbles. In a packed theater the philosopher Diogenes reviles the couple in a long speech and is flogged. A second man who tries the same pays with his life. Titus sends Berenice away while his father is still alive.
On June 23, AD 79, his father dies. Titus is emperor. And Berenice returns to Rome (Dio 66.18).
From this moment on, Rome sees a different man. Dio has an explanation: one who rules in another’s name does not care about the good name of power; one who rules alone knows that everything falls on him (66.18).
With a single edict the new emperor confirms all the favors granted by his predecessors, without requiring anyone to ask. He sends no one away without hope: no one should leave an emperor sad. When at dinner he remembers that he has given nothing to anyone all day, he says: “Friends, I have lost a day” (Suetonius, Titus 8).
He has informers flogged in the Forum, led across the arena and sold off or banished to the wildest islands (Titus 8). He takes up the office of pontifex maximus so that, as he says, his hands stay clean. He would rather die himself than destroy others. When two patricians plot to seize the throne, he merely warns them. He invites both to dinner. The next day at the games he seats them beside him and hands them the gladiators’ swords to inspect (Titus 9).
And the second Nero? He really did appear. In Asia a man named Terentius Maximus looks and speaks like Nero. He even sings to the lyre. He gathers followers and goes to the Euphrates, where the Parthian ruler Artabanus receives him and prepares to install him in Rome (Dio 66.19). Rome feared a second Nero on the throne. Instead it got one on the frontier.
Meanwhile in Campania the ground has been trembling for many days. No one minds: it always trembles here (Pliny, Letters 6.20). Some fifteen years ago an earthquake destroyed a large part of Pompeii (Tacitus, Annals 15.22). Repairs are still going on in the town. Above it stands a mountain covered with vineyards. The scholar Strabo once noted that its summit looks burned out (Geography 5.4.8). No one remembers when it last burned.