The Frontiers — Domitian: Lord and God

First Domitian does something Galba never wanted to do. He raises the soldiers’ pay by a third: each soldier gets three more gold coins a year. Dio counts differently: each of the three installments rises from three hundred to four hundred sesterces. It comes out the same — by a third. Galba said you don’t buy soldiers. Domitian pays. The army will love him. The treasury will not.

Rome gets peace — and a show. Decebalus’s envoy receives a diadem from the emperor, as if Domitian were appointing kings for the Dacians. Envoys and a letter from the king travel to the capital. Rumor has it that the emperor forged it. At the celebrations spoils are paraded, but Dio writes that these are furnishings from the palace storerooms, because the war yielded no spoils. Remember the black banquet? It is among these “triumphs” that Dio describes it. Now you know whose funeral was being observed there.

The matter of the revolt remains. The governor who started it, Lucius Antonius, is dead. His conqueror, Lucius Maximus, finds the rebel’s papers in his chests. And burns them all. Dio writes that he cannot praise him enough: Maximus risked his own head so that no one could blackmail others with those letters. Remember Otho, who burned letters on his last night? The same gesture, twenty years later.

Domitian looks for the guilty anyway. Suetonius writes that after this civil war he became even crueler. He forbids two legions to share one camp, and any camp treasury to hold more than a thousand sesterces per soldier. He concluded that it was the savings of two legions from a shared winter camp that had given the rebel money.

And Britain? There the general Gnaeus Julius Agricola advanced with his legions farther north than any Roman before him. We know so much about him because Tacitus married his daughter and wrote a biography of his father-in-law. Tacitus puts into the mouth of the British chieftain Calgacus a speech before the battle. He composed it himself, but Europe still quotes one sentence of it today.

Domitian receives the news of victory with a smile on his face and unease in his heart. Tacitus writes that he feared most that the name of a private man would rise above the name of the emperor. He gives Agricola the triumphal ornaments and recalls him. The general returns to Rome by night, as ordered. In the palace the emperor greets him with a brief kiss — and not a word. Agricola vanishes into the crowd of courtiers.

Since the revolt at Mogontiacum, Domitian sees conspiracy everywhere.