The Fifth Hour — Domitian: Lord and God
The palace, AD 96. Domitia has been the emperor’s wife for more than twenty-five years. Dio writes that her husband hated her and she feared for her life. Dio introduces what happened next with the words: “I have also heard this version.” The emperor wrote on a two-leaf tablet the names of people he wanted to get rid of all at once, and put it under his pillow. While he was sleeping during the day, one of the boy servants carried the tablet out, not knowing what was on it.
The sky has its say too. For eight months lightning strikes Rome: the Capitol, the temple of the Flavian family, the palace, even the emperor’s bedroom. “Let him strike now whom he will,” Domitian finally cries. He dreams of Minerva, his favorite goddess: she steps out of her shrine and says she can no longer protect him, because Jupiter has disarmed her. The astrologer Ascletarion predicted his death and also predicted his own. The emperor wanted to prove him wrong. It did not work.
On the evening of September 17 someone brings the emperor apples. He orders them put aside for tomorrow and adds: “If I live.” Then he tells his companions that tomorrow the moon will be stained with blood in Aquarius and something will happen that all the world will talk about.
The prophecy of his youth had an hour. He feared the fifth.
Stephanus strikes while the emperor is reading a document. Domitian defends himself: he knocks the attacker down and fights with him for a long time. The conspirators who burst into the bedroom finish it: the officer Clodianus, Maximus, a freedman of Parthenius, Satur, the head of the chamberlains, and a gladiator from the imperial school. The door is shut. The boy who guarded the household gods in the bedroom saw everything. It is from him that we know about the hilt.
Dio tells it a little differently. Parthenius himself had already removed the blade from under the pillow so that the emperor could not defend himself with it. Stephanus died right afterward, killed by men who knew nothing of the plot. According to tradition both prefects of the Guard also knew. Domitian was forty-four and had ruled for fifteen years and five days.
And now the strangest part, and Dio knows of it. At that same moment in Ephesus the sage Apollonius of Tyana reportedly climbs onto a rock, gathers people and cries: “Well done, Stephanus! Bravo, Stephanus! Strike the bloody tyrant!” Dio writes that it really happened, “even if someone doubted it ten thousand times.”
The Senate assembles within a few hours.