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. They have ladders brought and, before their eyes, his shields and portraits torn from the walls and smashed on the ground. Finally they decree that his name is to be chiseled from inscriptions everywhere and the memory of him erased. The people receive the news with indifference. The soldiers despair. They want to declare him a god at once and are ready to avenge him. They lack only leaders.

The body is carried out on a common bier by the bearers of the poor. Phyllis, his nurse, cremates it at her estate on the Via Latina. She secretly takes the ashes to the temple of the Flavian family — the one that was once the house on Pomegranate Street — and mixes them with the ashes of Julia, Titus’s daughter, whom she also raised. Julia died young; hostile sources blame Domitian.

A few months before the assassination a crow perched on the Capitol and cawed what seemed to be “it will be well.” Someone added a little verse: the crow could not say “all is well,” only “it will be.” And the soothsayer from Germania, condemned on the morning of September 18? The execution was postponed so that he would die once the emperor had survived a dangerous day. The soothsayer survived. The new emperor gave him four hundred thousand sesterces.

The new emperor was ready before the first blow fell. Dio writes that the conspirators did not strike until they had settled who would take power. They asked many. Each refused, thinking it a provocation. Marcus Cocceius Nerva agreed: of the noblest family, mild, and already once endangered, because astrologers had foretold him power. Domitian spared his life only because another astrologer assured him that Nerva would die in a few days anyway. Nerva is sixty-five, with no children and no legions. The Senate proclaims him emperor. For the first time this season it is the Senate, not the army, that makes the emperor — though the men from the palace chose him.

So who was Domitian? The monster from the pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, or an efficient ruler described by his enemies? Let us lay two portraits side by side.

The verdict, plainly: an efficient ruler and a cruel man whose portrait was painted by those who feared him. He died because he feared everyone. And that is why those closest to him had to strike first. Suetonius puts it in one sentence: poverty made him greedy, and fear made him cruel.

So ends the season that began with Tacitus’s remark: an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome. For a year, soldiers handed out the throne. Then an old muleteer built something more lasting, and his younger son squandered it through fear. The Capitol burned, rose, burned again and rose again — with one name on the inscription. Now that name is being chiseled out across the empire.

Preview. The Guard has not yet been handed the killers of its emperor. It waits. When two new consuls took office in AD 91, Dio writes, both saw the same signs. For one, Glabrio, they foretold ruin — Domitian killed him. For the other they foretold power. The other is named Trajan. A year after the assassination the commander of the Guard will incite the soldiers against Nerva and demand the surrender of Domitian’s killers. The old man will bare his neck to them — and achieve nothing. Then he will write a letter to the governor of Germania. And on the Danube King Decebalus counts the Roman money every year and waits to see who comes for the reckoning.