Lord and God — Domitian: Lord and God
The first months of his reign. Every day the emperor shuts himself away alone for several hours. He catches flies and stabs them with a sharp stylus. Someone outside the door asks whether anyone is with Caesar. The senator Vibius Crispus answers: “Not even a fly.”
Domitia becomes Augusta. They have a son, but the boy dies in the second year of his father’s reign. Domitian declares him a god. Then comes a scandal: the empress falls in love with the actor Paris. Suetonius writes that the emperor divorced her, could not bear the separation and soon took her back, claiming the people demanded it. Dio tells it more harshly: Domitian wanted to have her executed; a certain Ursus talked him out of it. Paris was killed in the middle of the street, and people who laid flowers there were ordered put to death. The emperor himself says he called his wife back “to his divine bed.”
And here begins the trouble for anyone who simply wants to hate him. The same Suetonius admits that Domitian judged conscientiously and kept officials on a short leash. Never were magistrates in Rome and governors of provinces so honest and just — he writes — and after him we saw many accused of everything. An emperor who does not punish informers breeds them himself: that, too, is his view.
He builds like mad. The Capitol stands again — for the second time within about a dozen years — except that on the rebuilt temples he has only his own name carved, without the names of the earlier builders. He puts up a stadium, whose outline Piazza Navona follows today, an odeon for musicians and a temple of the Flavian family. On the Palatine a new palace rises. On one of the arches someone writes in Greek: “Enough.”
And then come the titles. Suetonius writes that the emperor had a circular letter sent out in the name of his procurators, which began with the words: “Our lord and our god commands that this be done.” From then on that is how he was addressed in writing and in speech. Dio confirms: Domitian wanted to pass for a god and was proud when people said “lord” and “god” to him.
This court is best captured by satire. Juvenal, a poet who wrote after the emperor’s death, tells how a fisherman brings a gigantic turbot to Domitian’s villa by the Alban Mount. There is no platter big enough, so the emperor calls a council of the most important men of the state. They rush in, panic-stricken, as if summoned over news of the Germans. After long deliberation they decide: leave the fish whole, make a special platter, and from now on potters are to accompany the emperor’s camp. Among the advisers is old Crispus, the one with the flies. He lived to eighty because he never said what he thought. Juvenal calls the emperor “the bald Nero.” The emperor, adds Suetonius, was very sensitive about his bald head, though he himself wrote a book on the care of the hair.
On the frontiers men die, and in Rome the emperor counts his honors.