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. He questioned prisoners himself, face to face, holding their chains in his hand. Dio adds that he feared them even in shackles.
He used to say that the lot of emperors is wretched: when they uncover a plot, no one believes them until they are killed.
Those who joked too loudly paid for it. Aelius Lamia, Domitia’s first husband, dies for old jokes. When someone praised his voice after he lost his wife, he replied that he was “practicing abstinence.” The emperor’s cousin Flavius Sabinus — namesake of the uncle who died at the Capitol — dies because on election day the herald by mistake proclaimed him not consul but emperor-elect. For praising the old opposition figures, Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio are killed, and philosophers are banished from Rome and Italy.
Tacitus remembers this time as his shame. He was a senator and sat in the Curia with the others when in AD 93 the younger Helvidius, son of that opposition figure, was tried. In the biography of his father-in-law he writes: “Our own hands dragged Helvidius to prison.” In August AD 93 Agricola dies. A rumor goes around that he was poisoned. Tacitus honestly notes that he would not dare to assert anything. The emperor, whom Agricola had named in his will as co-heir, was reportedly pleased — as if it were a tribute.
Domitian also takes on morals. He has the chief Vestal, Cornelia — probably the same one who was chosen under Nero — condemned under the old, cruel custom for Vestals. He collects the tax on Jews without mercy, including from those who lived as Jews without admitting it publicly. Suetonius remembers how as a young boy he watched the examination of a ninety-year-old man in a crowded hall. In AD 95 the emperor has Epaphroditus, Nero’s freedman, executed. The charge? That he once helped his master die. Domitian wants his own servants to know: a patron must not be killed, even for a good reason.
He strikes closest in AD 95. Flavius Clemens is the emperor’s cousin and currently consul. Suetonius calls him a man of “contemptible inertia.” Yet Domitian had designated his two small sons as successors and given them new names: Vespasian and Domitian. Suddenly, on a trivial suspicion, almost at the end of his consulship, Clemens is executed. Suetonius writes that with this very act the emperor most hastened his own downfall.
Clemens’s wife, Flavia Domitilla, is also a relative of the emperor. Dio writes that both were accused of “atheism” — a charge for which many were condemned “who had drifted into Jewish customs.” Clemens was executed, Domitilla exiled to Pandateria. It is the same island to which Augustus banished his daughter Julia, and Tiberius — Agrippina the Elder.
Domitilla’s steward, the freedman Stephanus, is accused of embezzlement. He has only a few days.