Domitian - a Biography

Martial:

Epigram 4.1

O auspicious birth-day of Caesar, more sacred than that on which the conscious Ida witnessed the birth of Diotaean Jupiter, come, I pray, and prolong your duration beyond the age of Pylian Nestor, and shine ever with your present aspect or with increased brilliancy. Let Caesar, decked with abundance of gold, sacrifice to Minerva on the Alban mount, and let many an oak-garland pass through his imperial hands. Let him welcome the approaching secular games with magnificent sacrifices, and celebrate the solemnities due to Romulean Tarentus. We ask indeed great things, O ye gods, but such as are due to earth; since for so great a god as Caesar what prayers can be extravagant?

Epigram 9.6

To you, chaste prince, mighty conqueror of the Rhine, and father of the world, cities present their thanks: they will henceforth have population; it is now no longer a crime to bring infants into the world. The boy is no longer mutilated by the art of the greedy dealer, to mourn the loss of his manly rights; nor does the wretched mother give to her prostituted child the price paid by a contemptuous pander. That modesty, which, before your reign, did not prevail even on the marriage conch, begins, by your influence, to be felt even in the haunts of licentiousness.

Epigram 9.8

As if it were but a trifling crime for our sex to bargain away our male children to public lust, the very cradle had become the prey of the pander, so that the child, snatched from its mother s bosom, seemed to demand, by its wailing, the disgraceful pay. Infants born but yesterday suffered scandalous outrage. The father of Italy, who but recently brought help to tender adolescence, to prevent savage lust from condemning it to a manhood of sterility, could not endure such horrors. Before this, Caesar, you were loved by boys, and youths, and old men; now infants also love you.

Timeline:

51 CE  Domitian born

66 CE Vespasian and Titus quell revolt in Judaea

68 CE Nero takes his own life

69 CE Year of the Four Emperors - Domitian placed under house arrest by Vitellius

69 CE December - Vespasian  becomes emperor

70 CE Domitian marries Domitia

79 CE Vespasian dies. Titus becomes emperor.

81 CE Domitian becomes emperor

83 CE Campaign against the Chatti

88 CE Campaign against the Dacians

89 CE Saturninus Revolt

89-93 CE Multiple senators executed

96 CE Domitian assassinated

Transcript:

OK, we have got a discussion about a Roman emperor today, they are always fun, and for this one we have an excellent choice of guest, if I do say so myself. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Hello, yes, my name is LJ Trafford and I write books about ancient Rome. Somebody should really stop me. I started off writing historical fiction, so I wrote a full book series on the year of the four emperors, so I wrote close to 400,000 words on just one 18-month period, and then I more recently moved into writing non-fiction, so I wrote a book called How to Survive in Ancient Rome, which was set in the year 95 AD. I looked at all different topics, I think I did about 13 different topics, kind of religion and entertainment and food and clothes, and pretty much a little bit of everything. And then I also wrote a book called Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome, which does what it says on the cover. Ancient Rome's Worst Emperors was another one of my ones, and most recently I've written Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, so I've moved away from the Romans briefly, but I'm back on them again and with the current book I'm writing about women in Ancient Rome, so I've come back to the fold after a brief break. You can't stay away from Rome too long. I just can't stay away.

And for listeners, all of the links to all of LJ's publications will be in the episode description, and they are fantastic. You need to grab yourself a copy. So we are going to talk about Domitian. Exciting character. Born in 51 AD, became emperor when he was about 30. But I want to start with Domitian's childhood. So he was born during the Julio-Claudian dynasty, wasn't he? And therefore he wasn't raised with the assumption that he was going to be an emperor. So what's a childhood like for someone who's almost accidentally going to become emperor later?

Well, he's a member of the Rome's elite class. His father, Vespasian, is a senator, which means that he's wealthy because he did like a million Cisterces to qualify for the Senate. So he's from a well-off background, and he's said he would be probably educated at home by slaves. We know that Domitian liked poetry and literature, so he was quite well-educated. And then when he would hit his late teens, he'd be expected to do some military service under his belt in the provinces. And then men of the elite, they start their official public careers at about age 30, and they work up a series of positions that lead all the way to consul. So that's what his father had done, and that's what his older brother Titus had done, and that's what he would be expecting to do as well from his childhood. But of course something gets in the way in that his father becomes emperor before he gets a chance to start on that kind of public career.

You've mentioned that his father became emperor and that he had an older brother. Was he similar to them? Was he a person that got on well with his family?

Well, Titus is 11 years older than Domitian, which I think is worth pointing out. And they have quite different childhoods, because when Titus is growing up, Vespasian's very much in favor in court under Claudius. He's very much in favor. Titus is actually educated alongside Claudius' son Britannicus, so he's very much favored. And he's said to have been lying next to Britannicus when Nero poises Britannicus at dinner one night, so he was very close to the action. But by time Domitian is born, Vespasian's kind of fallen out of favor, because he's fallen foul of Agrippina the Younger, who's Nero's mother. And suddenly he's not getting the jobs anymore. He's not getting the positions. So you turn to the line that kind of Domitian's childhood was, he grew up in poverty. It's kind of relative poverty because the line is, he was so poor he didn't even have silver plates. So it's not really poor, is it now, silver plates now. And they live in a house very attractively named Pomegranate Street, which I think is lovely. So yeah, so Domitian doesn't have the same kind of educated at court childhood that Titus has. So there's a difference there. And of course, when Vespasian becomes emperor, or Titus has already done his military service abroad, he's starting out on the public ladder of career. So he's got a background in kind of administration and running the empire. And Domitian is a teenager. So there's kind of a big difference there between their life experiences and how they enter into the role of when their father becomes emperor.

So we've got that age gap there. What were Vespasian and Titus doing in their military service? Is this when Domitian was a child?

Yes. You have to wonder how much Domitian saw of his kind of father and brother, because his brothers are out seeing his military career in the provinces when Domitian's growing up. And then his father, when he gets back in favour after Agrippina the Younger dies, he's then off to his pre-consul of Africa. So he goes off to Africa and he's with Nero. He goes on Nero's tour of Greece in 65. And allegedly gets kicked off for falling asleep during one of Nero's poetry recitals, which is, I don't know, it's a bit of propaganda to show that he wasn't down with Nero and his poetry. It's quite possibly true. I can't imagine that Nero's a great poet. And then he goes to Judea with Titus and they're involved in the Jewish war that's going on over there. There's been an uprising in Judea, so they're both responsible for quelling that. So they're both in the East, and Domitian's left in Rome. And we don't know quite where he was living and who he was living with. Possibly with his uncle, who's a city prefect in the kind of late 60s. So he's possibly staying with him, possibly not. He had a sister, but his sister seems to have died before 60, and also his mother's died as well. So he's kind of on his own a bit while his brother and father are off doing Roman manly things. So it's kind of a suggestion that he maybe had a bit of a lonely childhood. He's said to have very much liked his own company, which is very un-Roman, because Romans do everything in public. So he liked to take walks by himself, which seems terribly transgressive, having a nice pleasant walk by yourself with nobody else there.

So there's the age gap. He doesn't spend a lot of time with his family because they're all fighting people abroad. Is that because Titus is the heir and Domitian is the spare, or is that just because of the age gap and the fact that his father has this huge political career?

I think it's because of the age gap. Domitian's doing everything at the right age. He's just about ready to go to military service when this whole year the four emperors of Malachi kicks off and disrupts everything. So when Vespasian is emperor, Domitian gets roles in the administration. They kind of act as if he's a bit of the spare, but he has like six consulships, which is only one less than Titus. So he's given plenty to do when Vespasian is emperor. He's not kind of hidden away. What recommends Vespasian is emperor at the end of the year with the four emperors is the fact he's got two adult sons. And that's stability for Rome because you've had the situation with Nero not having an heir, and it's all kicked off and it's been a bloody civil war. But Vespasian can say, I've got two sons to take over if something happens to me. That's really what sells him as well. And he picks that up in the coinage. You will see coinage of Domitian and Titus together, looking at each other face to face like they're about to headbutt each other, one of them. But they're on horseback and they're styled sons of Augustus. So they're both bigged up. But because of the age gap, Domitian is one consulship behind Titus. He has to, when they're out on triumph, he has to be on the horse at the back. It's a status thing. But he's not forgotten. He's not kind of shoved in a cupboard as a spare. He's given plenty to do. You can see that he just tried really hard as well to give up to the kind of family name in a kind of quite touching way. It's just, I guess, difficult being a decade behind trying to catch up. Yeah. He's desperate to go on military campaign. He begs his father to let him go, to go fight Gauls, go fight some Gauls. He begs to go sort out stuff in Parthia. He gets turned down each time, which you could say that they're snubbing him. He's too important. He's a prince. He could inherit. They don't want him to get killed in battle. But he's desperate to prove himself, I think, because he knows that he hasn't got this experience that Titus hasn't. It's just an age thing. Titus has got the experience that Domitian hasn't. He's got to learn. He does learn. He's trained up for the role.

So Nero is assassinated, and then we have the Year of the Four Emperors, which we have an episode on with Nathaniel Katz. So listeners, if you haven't listened to that one, go and catch up. Year of the Four Emperors and, spoiler alert, who is the winner of that Year of the Four Emperors?

Yes, we've sort of given it away already, haven't we? Yeah. It's Vespasian. Vespasian is the winner of the Year of the Four Emperors. But I think what's interesting about it, because Vespasian is in the East, as we said, in Judea with Titus. Domitian is in Rome, and it's in the summer around 69 that they find out in Rome that Vespasian's declared himself emperor. And you have to ask the question, did Domitian know he was going to do this? There's a good possibility.  Communication takes time in the ancient world. So for example, Titus was coming over to Rome to greet Emperor Galba, got as far, I think it was Turkey, and found out that Galba's been assassinated, and Otho is now emperor, and heads straight back to the East. So, lots of things happen simultaneously. It's not a kind of linear thing. So communication takes time. So it's quite possible that he did not know that his father was going to declare himself emperor. And then he's suddenly in the middle of this, and he's the face of the Flavian dynasty because he's in Rome. He's only 18, 19 years old. As we say, he's got no military experience, no public speaking experience, and he's thrust into this world, this very dangerous world. And his uncle is killed in front of him, and he has to flee for his life from the burning temple of Jupiter. And   , it's pretty bloody, he's kept under house arrest by Vitellius, and it's pretty bloody scary for a teenager, I think. I think that possibly influences a lot of what happens to Domitian, and Domitian's personality is what happens to him in 69. The forefront of the Flavian dynasty and being under house arrest and having to escape and seeing all these senators and people swap sides. I think that lingers, because the year of the four emperors, everybody's... you're sucking up to one emperor, and then suddenly you've got another one, so you've got to do a quick turn and go, oh no, no, no, you're the best guy to be emperor. And he sees this firsthand, and I think that probably does reflect in how he later acts as emperor.

So you mentioned it. I can't let this go. He sees his uncle murdered in front of him. What happens there?

There's a siege. They're on the Capitol Hill, and they're holding out the Capitol Hill, Vespasian's brother, and Domitian is there as well, and they're hiding out, and they get attacked by the Vitellians who come up the Capitol Hill, and Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian's brother, is captured, and he's taken away. He's possibly not killed in front of Domitian, but he's certainly taken away in chains, along with everybody else, and he's executed in front of the palace. Vitellius actually doesn't want it to happen, but Vitellius has completely lost control of the troops right now, and he doesn't want to kill Vespasian's brother because that's his bargaining chip. They've offered Vitellius a chance to abdicate, and he's accepted it, and then it all kicks off, and that's out the window, but once he kills Vespasian's brother, there's going to be no mercy for Vitellius. So Flavius Sabinus is killed in front of the palace, and Domitian's hiding in a temple disguised as a temple attendant, and he manages to escape, and then when eventually Vespasian's forces arrive and overthrow Vitellius, he comes out of hiding. He's hiding in the house of a friend, and he's then taken to the palace as the Flavian dynasty. So that's quite terrifying because they're searching the city for the Vitellian troops, and he's hiding out. Again, he's only 19. This is going to be bloody terrifying, and he's probably heard what's happened to his uncle. His uncle's been killed, his father and his brother are out east, and it's all kicked off around him, and people are after him, and as we say, if he didn't know his father was going to do this, it's a hell of a situation to be dropped into.

Yeah, can you imagine? Do you think, just speculating wildly here, because why not, do you think if he had known that his father was going to declare himself emperor, that Domitian might have removed himself from Rome, or at least would have shown more preparation than we see him making?

They quite possibly would have got him out of Rome quite possibly, so he didn't end up under house arrest, I guess, if he'd have more foreplanning, so he was ready to step in when everything's safe, because he's put in real peril, he's in real danger. So quite possibly that Vespasian's associates in Rome would have got him out before the announcement, quite possibly. I mean, he would go along with it, I think, because you do,  in Roman society, you do what your father says, don't you? He's your head of the father, so he probably would have gone around, but yeah, if he'd had more notice, I suspect they would have got him out and somewhere safe to then appear when everything had calmed down and all was calm in the city, but yeah, no, he's thrown right into it, so it does make you suspect that he didn't know and that this news came as a shock, because yeah, they don't get him out of the city, he's there, and he's under house arrest, and  he's in real danger.

Sounds pretty chaotic, sounds unplanned on Vespasian's part, everything seems to be moving more quickly than they can plan for.

Yes, yeah, well, that's the year of when it was all around, it's all one thing after another, it all kicks off, like,  the kind of Vespasians force it invades Rome, it's not actually under Vespasian's command, it's just somebody who's decided, I'm siding with Vespasian, I'm going to go invade Rome, and he does it without Vespasian's permission or say so, or knowledge, and he just goes for it, so again,   communication, people just making decisions on the spot without referring back to upper command and just going for it, so, it's all bloody chaos.

So Domitian's gone from a kind of lonely adolescence where he didn't even have silver plates, he's gone from being under house arrest hiding in a temple, to in a snap of fingers, all of a sudden, he is the son of the emperor of Rome, that's a huge leap to make, right, so how do we see him handling that, how does his life change in that moment?

Well, he takes full advantage of it according to Tacitus, and kind of sets himself up in his father's village just outside Rome with a load of naked women, because he's suddenly very attractive because he's the son of an emperor, so women are presumably throwing themselves at him, but, for all Tacitus, kind of saying that he's surrounded by naked women and giving into temptation, the speeches and the stuff that's going on in the Senate that he mentions,   Domitian is there in some not very interesting kind of parliamentary style business, and he makes a speech that Tacitus can't find anything to really criticize about, so it must have been quite a good speech because Tacitus hates everybody and especially hates Domitian and if he could find anything to slag him off, he would, but he has to kind of say, yeah, it was okay, but we didn't know what he was like then, and he looked like he was blushing, but we now know that he wasn't blushing, he's not as innocent as he appears. Yes, he makes a reasonable speech and he's there doing stuff, but yeah, I can imagine you would take advantage, wouldn't you? You're the son of an emperor and women are throwing themselves at you when you're 19, you're like, yeah, you would take advantage of it!

Whilst Vespasian and then later his brother, Tacitus, are emperor, what is Domitian doing? Is he living a life of leisure because he doesn't have to do anything, or is he trying to carve out his own path?

He's part of the administration, he's been trained up, he's the son of Augustus, Vespasian posing as Augustus, and he,  like we say, he's consul six times, he has various public positions, he's working, the joke is he's a bit too generous, he gives out like 20 positions in one morning, and Vespasian jokes, I'm surprised he didn't appoint my successor as well, so, he's actively working and doing stuff, and you can see that he's trying so hard to live up to the family name and do everything right, and he hasn't quite got enough experience yet, like I say, he begs to be allowed to go on military campaign, but they won't let him. So he spends like 12 years under Vespasian, and Titus being trained up, basically, to be emperor. So he's got,  he's the first emperor since Tiberius that's actually got a decent background in public administration,  because Claudius becomes emperor because they found him behind a curtain, and he was there, and  Caligula becomes emperor at 25 with no military experience or no public office at all, and Nero, he's like 15 or something, he's only 15, 17, when he becomes emperor. So Domitian and Titus, well, are the first two to become emperor. We've got a decent training in what it means to be an emperor.

Which is interesting, isn't it? Because everyone thinks Julius Claudius the emperor is, and here you've got people who weren't necessarily born to be emperors, but they've definitely received training. That's telling, right?

That's telling, yeah. Vespasian prepares them well. I mean, they're set up to succeed, like say, what recommends Vespasian is that he has two adults to succeed him, and he makes sure they're trained up in what they need to know. And I think that shows,  when you see Domitian's emperor, he's very good at the admin side of it. He's very good at it. He's very good at the details, and that's because he's been trained up to do it. He knows how to do it. He's not coming in blank like Caligula and just trying to muddle his way through. He knows how the system works, and he uses it. Right.

So Vespasian dies, Titus becomes emperor because he's the older brother. How long is Titus emperor for?

I don't think it's even three years. I think it's two years something. It's not very long. He dies very unexpectedly, and he's about 40, 45 or something like that, and he dies of a fever officially. It's very unexpected because they expected him to reign for like 10 years, 20 years like his father, and, yeah, nobody saw it coming.

Does he not have a family of his own successes that he's been training up?

He doesn't have a son. He has a daughter called Julia, but he has no son, so there isn't an heir. The only heir there is is Domitian. And Titus has some wonderfully enigmatic final words, which are,  he says, he only had one regret in life, which is quite possibly not finishing that sentence because we don't know what that one regret was in life. People have speculated that his one regret was that he left Domitian to become emperor, but it could be anything. Drunk too much of that party, made a fool of myself like 20 years ago or something like that. If Titus is only in his 40s, I'm guessing everyone was assuming that he would start having sons, even if it meant swapping to a more fertile wife perhaps.

Yeah. So was Domitian ever thinking, I'm going to be emperor one day, or was he thinking, I'm going to be an emperor's uncle one day?

We don't know. I mean, Suetonius says that he was forever plotting both openly and secretly against his brother, which you think would be the point at which you get a whole list of the plots he was involved in. But that's all Suetonius says about it. There's no details of any plot that he was ever involved in against his brother or his father, so I don't think he was involved in anything at all, but it's difficult to say whether he thinks he's going to be emperor. I mean, he has been, like we say, he's been training in administration to whether he would have some role in Titus's child's rule or whatever. Yeah, it's difficult to know. We don't know whether he expected to be emperor, but I mean, people die in ancient Rome all the time. It's a dangerous place to live. There's no modern medicine. People die in battle. People die of fevers like Titus did, so the unexpected does happen. I mean, Augustus lost, I don't know how many, how many heirs to the throne,  there's nobody left but Tiberius by the end. So, well, because this is like, everyone else is dead, it's you. So it's feasible, that it's absolutely feasible given how many heirs Augustus gets through. Vespasian, you must be thinking similar, I'll get two sons. It doubles the chances they both have kids and we're kind of secure.

So with Titus's death, fever, were there any rumours at the time that Domitian might have poisoned him or something like that?

Well, this, yeah, this gets more, this gets more extreme. When you read it in Suetonius, it doesn't say he does anything. It says he left him for dead before he breathed his final breath, which could just mean he just left him in bed. But we're turning to Cassius Dio, it gets ridiculous in that apparently Domitian gave Titus a box of snow, saying it was a cure for his chill, but he secretly knew that it would kill Titus, which... that's a ludicrous murder plot anyway. It clearly wasn't enough to build a kind of sensible 'oh, he was poisoned a la Julio Claudian's Livia' or whatever. So, yeah, there's kind of rumours that he was involved in it, but nobody can think of a really convincing story, even after like a hundred years later, Cassius Dio can't think of a more convincing story than he gave him a box of snow. That's on Titus really, if that happened, because, Titus is an idiot, and if he thinks the snow is going to cure him.

Like a Roman Cluedo board, one of the murder weapons, a box of snow!

A box of snow. I mean, he didn't even poison the snow. He couldn't at least poison it. He just gave snow to make him worse.

Just going to make him slightly chilly.

Yeah, just even a bit cold. Yeah, a bit of worse chill. But yeah, so, yeah, I don't think it's convincing.

It doesn't sound convincing at all. Domitian, he's now around 30, right? And he finds himself becoming the emperor. What happens next? What's his first thing that he does?

Well, the first thing he does, he kind of hides in the Praetorian camp for a bit. And I think this is because he wasn't expecting to take over, right? When Titus took over from Vespasian, the role of emperor is a bit more solid by this point, but it's still a bit nebulous because the whole thing set up by Augustus is not actually a position. There's no kind of title of emperor. It's a series of powers that get handed over to you that allow you to act like emperor, like the Tribune power and kind of imperium. So with Vespasian, he'd slowly handed over these powers to Titus because Vespasian was getting on a bit and he knew he hadn't got long. So Titus was in full power, had these powers when he became emperor. And they didn't expect Titus to die, so Domitian hasn't had these powers passed on to him. So there's a kind of bit, you feel that he's a bit worried about that until he's ratified by the Senate, then he's a bit nervous, which we would explain that. Fraud, intense persuasiveness, he rules quite well. He's a very good details guy, is Domitian, and he does a whole series of really quite good things. And you can kind of see this if you look at Suetonius because there's 10 chapters of good Domitian and I think about 13 of bad Domitian. When you look at Caligula, you've got 8 chapters of good Caligula and 38 chapters of bad Caligula.

So when Domitian becomes emperor and he's hiding in the Praetorian camp, is this because Titus has unexpectedly died? Is he expecting a rival to try and nudge him out?

I think he's just worried. I think having lived through 69, I guess you could be worried that maybe somebody else, someone in the Senate could say, oh actually, or somebody of an army, certainly one of the provincial governors could say, 'oh, I'll be emperor' because they've seen that happen. They've seen that happen before in the year 69. So it's possibly that, but it just feels like a little bit of insecurity, just wanting everything to be official and sorted. And Domitian throughout his reign uses a lot of titles, which again you feel is about insecurity and just protecting himself. I am this massively long title, I've got all these honors and yeah, I kind of feel it's just a little bit of insecurity based on what he kind of witnessed in kind of 68, 69.

So in the first years of his reign, is he using the training that his father and his brother have given him? Is it situation normal, everything's continuing, or is he doing things differently from his father and his brother?

He's continuing the playbook of being emperor, which Vespasian's done.  He throws magnificent games, he brings back the secular games, which are held every hundred years and he brings it back in the proper year they're meant to be held and he sets up various other kind of games. So he does a whole pleasing to people thing. He's a great builder, he builds loads of stuff in Rome. So much so that some wag put a bit of graffiti in one of his building projects and just said, this is enough because they were just fed up with so, so much building. So he rebuilds a lot of what you see on the Palatine Hills today, it's Domitian's Palace. You can see the floor on that. Built his favorite house, which was his father's in the Alban Hills, which is now a papal property, I think it's Castel de Gandolfi, which is just outside Rome. Yeah, he does that up tremendously. He rebuilds the Temple of Jupiter, which is burnt down again because that keeps happening. He builds a temple to his own family, to honor them. He's the one who puts up Titus's Arch, which is just outside the Forum. And he builds roads, a road down to Naples for easier transport. Yeah, he builds a hell of a lot of stuff. And he does things like he stamps out corruption. It's very big on corruption. So he brings on laws against that. And he goes on a kind of moral crusade, a la Augustus, and sort out some kind of morality legislation. So yeah, there's a law where you had to, if your wife was found guilty of adultery, you had to divorce her. But they were finding that people were then remarrying afterwards. So he stamped that one out and said, no, you can't remarry. So that avenue was closed. He bans the castration of children.

Oh, wow.

And then puts a limit on the price of eunuchs so the slave traders can't cash in on eunuchs they've already got. So he does a whole series of things. He does a lot of stuff, does Domitian. When you go down, there's a lot of stuff he does and Suetonius and others spend quite a long time listing it. So yeah, he follows the whole playbook of - keep the people happy. And he gets to pay rise to the army, which goes down very well with them. So keep the army happy, keep the people happy. Doesn't really keep the Senate happy, to be honest. But two out of three ain't bad. Two out of three ain't bad.

So we've talked about Domitian building in Rome and I'm guessing abroad. We've talked about him being really good with admin. We've also talked about in his youth, he was blocked from the military side of things. And I want to talk about that because his father and his brother, military heroes, they go on campaign, they bring back loads of wealth. You've got the Colosseum that was built from the loot that they brought back from Judea. That's a really visible thing. Rome being a military society, Domitian has lived through the year of the Four Emperors, so he knows how important an army is. When he becomes emperor, do we see him desperately attempting to catch up on the military side of things?

There are a number of wars under Domitian against the Dacians, for example, and the Chattai, are two that come up. But what's going to be amusing about it is when the historians are describing this, they describe them as unnecessary wars. They rage without provocation. You're thinking, isn't all Rome's wars unnecessary? If you go through the early Republic, when I was a student, undergrad, I was trying to work out why they were going to war with this country, this Italian town. And then you reach a conclusion because that's what Romans do. They do war. They have a campaigning season that starts in March and ends in December, and they do war in that period. And that's what they do. There is no cause. So the fact that he's accused of fighting unprovocated, unnecessary wars by Romans is quite shocking, I think.

Yeah. He's acting in a Roman manner. How dare he?

He's acting in a Roman manner, but yeah. They downplay them and say, I mean, there was no new territory gained. And allegedly, they couldn't find decent enough captured soldiers to parade in triumph, so they dressed up some slaves as Chattai warriors, allegedly, in order for him to have a parade. So he's treated as if it's a sham. It's a sham military victory. It's not a proper military victory. And it was against people that fought unnecessarily and nothing was gained, and there weren't real prisoners in the triumph. So yeah, his kind of military successes are very much played down by the sources, discredited, and he's given no credit for them whatsoever.

Is he a military dud though, or is he doing things like strengthening borders? Because that's an important job that doesn't necessarily move the border, but it sure seems like an important thing to do.

Yeah. I mean, he's all very, he's in with the army. He gets why the army is important. And like I say, he increases the pay of the army, so he's very popular with the army. Martial does a load of poems praising his German battles and that. So yeah, he bigs himself up as the kind of great military leader, but they're not great military victories. There's nothing, it's not like, like you say with Judea, there's suddenly monies coming in through the door. But yeah, there's nothing outstanding that he does militarily, but he holds it together. There's nothing, nothing falls apart,  and  after 69, anything can happen with the army. So the fact that nothing kind of falls apart is probably to his credit.

Yeah, it's an achievement in itself, right?

There's not endless wars with the German tribes. It doesn't need to be because everything's quite stable. So maybe that says something in itself. It's stable. It's not falling apart yet.

Okay. What about his private life? Is he a womanizer? Is he a drunkard? Is he a monk hiding in his room all day reading poetry? What's he doing in his spare time?

He gets married. He marries Domitia, who's a daughter of a very famous general, Corbulo.

And she, they're related distantly back to Augustus more than many Julias of the Julian-Claudian dynasty. So she's got quite a good lineage. So it's quite a good match. It's suspected that he marries her before Vespasian gets to Rome in 70/71. So he marries probably without his father's consent. So Vespasian gets to Rome from the east and discovers that Domitian's got married, which is not how it's done. Yeah, there's kind of suspicion there because they wanted, they wanted him to marry his niece, which isn't incest because Claudius did a law to make it not incest... They wanted him to marry Titus's daughter, Julia, and that cements the Flavian dynasty. But he goes off and marries somebody else and they stay married. They have quite a tumultuous relationship. At one point, he has her exiled and she's accused of having an affair with an actor named Paris. Domitian is accused of killing a slave because he looked a bit like Paris and he couldn't take it. So she disappears for a bit and she disappears off the coinage. But then she comes back again. He brings her back again because he can't live without her as he puts it. So she comes back again. So he stays married and there's clearly it's an up and down relationship with him and his wife. Suetonius says that he was excessively fond of what he called bed wrestling, euphemism. There's not, I mean, the Domitian chapter in Suetonius, after you've read Vitellius and Caligula, it's really disappointing because he's meant to be a bad emperor. You're expecting all this terrific scandal in it. And it's really quite disappointing because the worst things that Suetonius cannot would be is that he used to pluck the hairs of his favourite mistress's legs, which is a service really. It's not a dubious pastime. It's quite helpful to depilate their legs. He's accused of having an affair with, again he's accused of having an affair with his niece, Julia. She dies quite young and it is said that she died of an abortion because she was pregnant with her uncle's child. But yeah, again, that's just a rumour. That's about as bad as it gets. There's not endless stories of incest. There's not stories of running off with senators' wives. There's not all that orgy or setting up a brothel in the palace, all the kind of standard things that some emperors do, he doesn't do. Yeah, he's quite light on scandal in that sense. Because he's a big moral campaigner.

That's one of his features of his reign is he brings in all these laws to make Rome more moral. Maybe a lot of the digs of him about Julia, and certainly bringing his wife back because he makes it a law that you have to divorce an adulterous woman. Well, he takes his wife back and by his own law, he shouldn't do that. So it's used to show his hypocrisy rather than anything dubious about his private life. It shows his hypocrisy. He's got these moral laws that he's inflicting on everybody else, but he's not keeping to them.

Which sounds very Augustan, right? Tumultuous family life whilst saying everyone's got to play happy families. So this marriage, is it a love match then? Because, I mean, does he marry her to avoid incest or is he marrying her because he just sees her across the room and thinks, I have to have her?

She's already married when he meets her. And he's like, this is when he's in Rome in 69 in the old villa surrounded by naked ladies. He meets her around that time and she's married to somebody else, but, son of emperor. So that's no bar. I mean, like we say, she's well connected. So she's a good match for this new dynasty in that she's got blood to Augustus and her father was a war hero. So she's a good match. But, yeah, possibly it's a love match. We don't know. But, I mean, she does. I mean, after he dies, she keeps calling herself the widow of Domitian. At a time when it's not political good sense to do that, because it's under Trajan, she continues to call herself the widow of Domitian. So I think that probably says something in there. There's a loyalty there, whatever their relationship was like. And,  at the end, it gets quite dark in Domitian's life. There's an affection there. There's definitely an affection there.

Because whenever we talk about emperors and their partners, we talk about a love match and what we really mean is the emperor loved her. It doesn't even necessarily mean that they treated them well. So we do see some evidence then that she was genuinely fond of him!?

Yeah, because I don't think she would call herself Domitian's widow if she hadn't been, because it's not

in her best interests under Trajan to publicise that's her background. I was married to Domitian, Domitian's been assassinated, and she's putting his name down and saying, 'I'm his widow.' Yeah, it's on sort of lead piping or something in some business she owned that it says, Domitia, widow of Domitian. So yeah, there's some affection and the fact that he brings her back from exile, forgives her kind of alleged adultery, again, there's an affection there.

And it sounds like he's not also got lovers.

You never hear about them, but there was a whole wing of presumably sex slaves in the palace because they pop up every now and then.  Certainly in Dio you get lots of mentions of this, but yeah, there's a wing somewhere with women that he can have sex with, which would be slaves, basically. So, but I mean, that's kind of standard for a Roman emperor, but he only marries once. He stays married to Domitia, which is very unusual for a Roman emperor. Generally they get through several wives.

You mentioned that she was married. What happens to the first husband?

Well, the first husband, nothing happens to him until 15 years later. He gets executed for making a joke. And it's a joke that he's made, I think, 15 years earlier that Domitian hears about and suddenly takes offense with. This is when Domitian starts to get paranoid towards the end of his reign. I can't remember what the joke is. It's something along, it makes a gag about how Domitian went off with his wife. And it's really innocuous gag. And it was told 15 years ago to Titus, but suddenly Domitian decides that that's a crime and has him executed for a joke that he made 15 years ago. And at the same time he has Otoo. Otho was briefly emperor in 69. His nephew is suddenly executed for the crime of, if you like, just celebrating his uncle's birthday. But Otho was emperor 20 years before, for a few months. It's not really any threat to Domitian. So you start to get these sort of very paranoid executions that start to happen later during his reign.

So let's talk about his popularity because he's known, isn't he, colloquially? He's known as one of the Bad emperors. Who likes him? Who hates him? Can we work out why?

The military love him because he gives him a pay rise. The people are generally, I'd say they're kind of indifferent. They like him well enough, but after he's dead... After Nero dies, you get a whole series of false Neros, fake Neros, people popping up claiming to be Nero, because people want to believe he's alive. And the people are very upset when Nero dies and they put like little effigies down on him outside the palace and stuff like that. There's a real mourrning. When Domitian dies, you don't get that from the people. I think they liked him well enough. He's not got the character, he's not got the charisma to make people love him, I think, as emperor. He likes to be on his own. He likes solitude. He maybe hasn't got the charisma necessary to make the public love him. So they're kind of a bit different to him.

And who hates him is the Senate. The Senate hates him and obviously they write all the histories, which affects how we view Domitian. But yeah, he falls out of the Senate in numerous ways. One of which is that he appoints people he thinks will be good to roles. So he points a lot of equestrians and he points a lot of freedmen, because they're actually good at the roles he's going to give them. Just because you're a Senator and daddy's got a lot of money doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be any good in the finance department. So he looks for talent where he finds it, which is, again, a good administrator. But yeah, it puts the Senate back up. And because he spends a lot of time in the Alban Villa, which is his favorite villa, and the Senate have to go to him. And that breaks that bond that pretends that Augustus sets up that he's just ruling through the Senate and the Senate is in real power. No, the Senate have to go to Domitian.  Domitian's out of Rome. So it breaks that tightrope walk, the illusion, the Senate are in power. And as we say, Domitian, he likes to be called master. And he gives himself loads of titles. And there's that gap between him and the Senators.

So when we talk about bad emperors, are we talking about bad emperors to the average Joe on the streets of Rome? Is that always the case when we talk bad emperors? Because it certainly doesn't sound like that's the case here.

No, he's a bad emperor to the Senate, to people who are Senators. And let's talk of  the 'Reign of Terror'... And people have looked at this and they've worked out that he has executed 13 Senators, which,  is a lot. But when you look at Claudius, Claudius kills 35 Senators and 300 equestrians. Every single emperor will be executing Senators because that's what Emperors do, because plots are formed and they have to stamp down on it and that is kind of standard. But then it's all very well to say it's not a Reign of Terror because it's only 13. It's all very well for us to say this 2000 years later. But if you're one of those Senators, you're Tacitus or Pliny, he's bloody terrifying and they are terrified of him. It's an interesting one, I think, Domitian. I think,   , I know we're going to go and talk about sources, but we've got a wealth of people who were contemporary with Domitian who write. They may be writing under Trajan, so they're writing under the next regime, which maybe affects what they say, but they knew him. They worked for him. And then we have people like Martial and Statius, the poets who were producing stuff who were contemporary Domitian. They're producing poetry during to mission's reign. And then we've got Cassius Dius a hundred years later, so let's just chuck him out. But, Suetonius was alive during to mission's reign. He was in Rome. He can make reference to a couple of things he witnessed as a young man in Rome. So this is quite unusual in Rome history, because usually they're all writing a hundred years later, so you can just count them. We've got people who are contemporary to Domitian. We've got people who knew him writing about him. And I think that makes it really interesting and quite controversial who you believe. And can we discredit eyewitnesses? Yeah.

It's a good question. So to the average Joe then, it sounds like his reign was pretty positive. There's no major wars. There's no rebellions from neighbours. Is he doing things like taxing them in huge amounts?

It's a good reign if you're not a philosopher and you're not Jewish. Right. Because he kicks all the philosophers out of Rome with them asking questions presumably. And he puts a tax on the Jews in Rome, which is an account Suetonius brings up. He can remember an elderly Jewish man being stripped so they could see whether he'd been circumcised to see whether he was due to paying the tax, which is a horrible situation. So yeah, so he does do things which do affect the general public, things like that.

Do we know why he was so cruel to the Jews in particular?

I think Roman emperors tend to pick on bits of the populace. You get, all manner of people get kicked out of Rome en masse at various times. You get magicians get kicked out of Rome en masse at one point. Fans of actors cayse a riot, because people are too obsessed by their favourite actor. And so everybody, all the actors get kicked out of Rome and all the writers get kicked out of Rome. They get kicked out of Rome. Yeah. So you get, they were central to some kind of Bacchanalia. People who were celebrating the Bacchanalia cult, they all got kicked out of Rome or executed. So they tend to pick on pockets of people at one time or another to kind of scapegoat for something. And I mean, maybe it's because of the wars that his brother and father fought in Judea. Maybe that gives him the idea to tax the Jews. But yeah, the Jewish population gets kicked out of Rome numerous times as well. And again, it's just kind of picking on people. They're not as tolerant as people like to pretend, I think the Romans. They can be quite intolerant. And yeah, whole populations get kicked out for stuff. Yeah. All the philosophers get kicked out. Another source we have is Epictetes, a philosopher who's under Domitian. He gets expelled from Rome for being a philosopher.

He's okay-ish for the general population as long as you're not in one of these minority groups. Military like him. The Senate don't like him.

The senators are, I'm guessing, the ones that are usually starting off rebellions and assassination plots?

There is a revolt by the, I think it's the German governor, Saturnius, that I think really messes with Domitian's mind because this is, it's after that that he starts to get increasingly paranoid and he tries to, he tries to start up a revolt and it doesn't succeed. It's caught really quickly. But there's something about that that starts to affect his paranoia. I mean, he said himself that nobody believes in conspiracy theories until,   , nobody believes you're going to be assassinated until a plot is successful. He starts to see plots where there aren't plots and this is where we get people executed for jokes told 15 years before and it messes with him. But I mean, it's not the Senate who assassinate him. The people who assassinate him are his own staff within the palace.

Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny will talk about what happened to senators but there must have been something very dark happening up at the palace and for what happened and it, because it's a high up, the ones who plot it are his chamberlain, Parthenius, and Entilus who's in the treasury, I believe, and Sagaris, who's another chamberlain. They are very high up in the freedman hierarchy. They're right at the top. They're so at the top. They're so at the top of their game that Parthenius is allowed to wear a sword in the palace. He's got numerous honours and Martial writes a series of poems to Parthenius,  begging him to put his poetry in front of Domitian and act as a patron to him. They plot his assassination and they don't actually do it. They get somebody else to do it for them which is a guy called Stephanus and he very cleverly wears like a sling across his arm for several days and then one day he hides a knife in it, and that's how Domitian gets assassinated. But for them to plot against him, his most favoured freedman, there had to be something very dark going on there.

And the reasons given is that Domitian, he has killed a guy called Epaphroditus who was one of the freedman who was with Nero when he died because Nero fled Rome and he took Sporus and Epaphroditus and Phaon. So the only people with him at the end were like three of his freedman and Epaphroditus helped Nero commit suicide. And this is like 25 years previously and suddenly Domitian decides that he helped, he killed an emperor. He helped an emperor kill himself. That's dangerous. And he has him executed and whether that set off alarm bells for the freedman in the palace, they're thinking if he can go, we can all go. We're all in danger. I suspect that there was a lot of dark things going on in the palace but we don't hear about what happens to freedman. We don't hear about what's happening to the slaves in the palace. We hear what's happening to senators, they're being executed. And we hear from Tacitus and Pliny about how frightening it is to be in a room with Domitian. They're terrified of him. Pliny says the worst thing was to feel his eyes on you. And Tacitus has a line that those of us who survive are no longer once what we were. So they really frightened of him.

I think the way he dies, that he's assassinated by his own staff kind of backs that up. I mean, we can say they're not objective. We can say, or they're writing in Trajan's Reign, they're slagging off the previous emperor. But just the brutality of Domitian's murder suggests there was a lot of darkness going on and that his paranoia was really, really, really frightening.

So it's a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy then. He's so terrified of assassins...

Yeah. He walks into it. I mean, he just seems like there's a famous black banquet invites some senators around for dinner. And they come and they discover that all the slaves are dressed in black. All the food is black. There's kind of tombstones, there's decoration. And they're all terrified. They're absolutely terrified. And they get home. And then there's a messenger sent to the houses and they're thinking, oh, this is it. He's going to kill us. And no, it's just there to say, oh, thanks for coming to my dinner party. He's gone out of his way to intimidate them, to frighten them, to make them think they're going to get killed. And you kind of think, what games is he playing up in the palace with the slaves and their freedmen?

Psychological manipulation, right?

Yeah. He's trying to terrify them into not killing him, but it does the opposite. It forces them into killing him. So he's a victim of his own personality, is Domitian. That's the kind of tragedy of it. Because he's had that really traumatic experience when he was still in his late teens. He's clearly survived at least one plot.

I mean, we've used the word self-fulfilling prophecy. Do you think there was any chance that he was ever going to die in bed?

No, I don't think so. I think something had happened up at the palace. Something was going on. This assassination plot is well thought out. Like, Stephanus is wearing the sling for days beforehand. They've plotted it all out. And they don't, apart from that, don't get caught for quite some time because nobody knows they're behind it. They do it so skillfully. And it's not until Nerva' reign that somebody blabs, obviously, but they got away with it because nobody knew who was involved. And somebody blabs, and they're horribly executed because the army insists upon it because they liked Domitian. They want vengeance. Yeah, I mean, it was a clever plot. Well thought out. They hadn't got their hands dirty. It was all settled. And then somebody dobs them in.

So he was assassinated in private then at the palace where they had complete privacy. Yeah, he was assassinated in his bedroom. And we know all the details of it because there was a small boy who was looking after the household gods. He was just sorting out the altar when Stephanus comes in and stabs Domitian. And he fights back. He holds onto the knife so he's got bloody hands and tries to gouge out Stephanus' eyes. And it's a really heated battle. And further people have to come in and then help kill Domitian because I guess the slaves are then in a position that if we save him, are we for the chop? Or do we get help helping kill him? And it's all confusion. But yeah, he fought for his life. He really fought and he wasn't easily killed. It was a horrible, horrible bloody death.

So what happens with the corpse? Because as we know, you and I, Romans don't always treat corpses particularly well. What happens to Domitian's body?

It doesn't go down through the Gemonian steps and get given a good kicking unlike many people. I think it does get buried somewhere because there's no mention of it.  They don't drag him around the streets and everybody spits at him or kick him or anything like that. There's a feeling that they need to get stuff sorted very quickly. So there is a new emperor in place suspiciously quickly. By the end of the day... Domitian is assassinated at one point of the day. By the end of the day, we have Nerva as emperor. So again, is this pre-planning by Parthenius and the others? They've pre-planned. They've got their guy who's going to take over because they,   because everybody would fear another 69. Nero died about an heir. Domitian hasn't got an heir. The same thing could kick off again, but they planned it so that there's somebody ready to take over in the place. As we say, the guys who assassinate Domitian, Parthenius and that, they do get horribly executed.

I mean, it sounds like a horrible way to go.

Yeah. It's a horrible, bloody, bloody death, yeah. But it also sounds kind of inevitable. They don't tell us what's happening at the palace, but if it was dark enough for the likes of Pliny and Tacitus were experienced, it was pretty dark. It must've been even worse in the palace for the slaves. There must've been a lot of stuff going on. He's paranoid about everything. Yeah. They would fear their lives and this is the only way they can see out of it. These very wealthy men who Martial writes poems about their lovely gardens and their snow-white toga that Parthenius gave them as a gift... these educated, intelligent, rich men who've got everything they need and they've been given it by this emperor, but they can see no other way out apart from having bloodily murdered. They've prospered under Domitian. They owe everything to Domitian, but it's got to such a point he has to be killed and that there has to have been something awful going on up there for that to even happen.

It's quite an interesting picture, isn't it? Because I would perhaps be expecting you to tell us that he was insanely cruel to everyone across the board, but it sounds like the people on the streets were fairly neutral because they weren't seeing any of this happening. Can you give us more anecdotes that illustrate his personality and the way that he was cruel to the people with a closer proximity to him like senators?

One who gets executed is his own cousin when he's sharing the consulship with him, Flavius Clemens. Somebody else gets done because when he was announced for an election they accidentally gave him the wrong title and then Domitian thought he was too big for his boots. Otho's nephew goes for celebrating his uncle's birthday. The slave that looks a bit like Paris who had an affair with his wife, he's killed because he looks a bit like Paris. Petty little things that people are getting pulled up for a joke made 15 years earlier. There's just a general air of menace that you get when you read Pliny and Tacitus and when they talk about Domitian having rages and his face going red and him shouting and they're terrified of him. He's a terrifying figure and I think that's what comes out of it really.

So he dies when he's 44, 45. He's been emperor for 15 years. Has this been an antagonist or an antagonistic relationship where he's been psychologically torturing senators for 15 years or is it a gradual ramp up to full-on sadism?

It's difficult to tell because the main account, the finished account is by Suetonius and he doesn't do things chronologically. So he just starts off with the good things and then the bad things. It does seem to go downhill after the Saturninus revolt. That's when things start to snowball and get a bit more paranoid. But yeah, I mean he does lots of good acts. Again, it's difficult to know the beginning or the end of his reign because we don't have the chronology. So in our heads we think, oh, he started off well and then he deteriorated. But not necessarily the case, he could still be bringing good laws as he deteriorates. But we get the execution of a Vestal Virgin in 91, which is a horrific thing. They're entombed alive. Pliny witnessed this and he doesn't think she's guilty. He thought she showed all signs of modesty, but she's led down, paraded through the streets, led down, then entombed alive to die. So that's quite late on his reign, which leaves, again, the menace to it. But from Domitian's point of view, he's adhering to religion. If he believes Rome's fate is in danger because a Vestal Virgin has been unchaste and he has to do the right thing to save the city. So from his point of view, he probably thinks he's doing the right thing.

So from Domitian's point of view, then, we can see a lot of the things that he does as justifiable, particularly when we see what he had to live through and personally experience when he was still so young. What is it exactly about the senators that he hates so much? Is it literally just because they have a modicum of power, they're close, and he assumes that they all want his job? Or can we see them doing things that he will not like?

I think the Senate will always be up themselves, aren't they? They have this lineage. We are the Roman Senate. We are the Roman Senators. We are important people. Our ancestors go back this far to the Republic. We are important people. We must be treated importantly. And they expect a certain amount of dignity and respect. And the clever emperor walks that tight rope of giving them the dignity and respect they want without giving them real power and ensuring that they vote whatever way the emperor wants to vote. But I don't think Domitian isn't having any of it. As we say, he appointed equestrians, adds freedman to jobs he thought they would be good at. They're snubbing them. So there's a snub element of them not getting the jobs they think they should get. And yeah, I think his experience in 69 has seen them change sides. And I don't think he wants to play the game. He doesn't want to play the Augustus game, pretending they have the Roman state. They are the Roman state as far as they're concerned. They're not. It's all a game, but the dignity and the veritas and all that kind of stuff that they have about their position. I think his odds with Domitian, who is a real details man and a real administration, just wants to get the job done. And he's going to choose people he thinks are good at it, not based on who their father are and what their position is. So I think that's probably at the heart of it.

And, I mean, there are plots, because there are always plots against emperors. Even good emperors have endless plots against them. And most of them do come from the Senate. It's quite rare that the Senate actually assassinated emperors, and he just seemed oblivious to what was happening in his own house. Yeah, he certainly doesn't see it coming from his style.

He's taken completely unawares. Is there a level of naivety there, or is it arrogance?

I think it's probably arrogance. I think he thinks he's winning this. I've got them all under control. I'm in charge. I've shown them what will happen to them if they step out of line because of what happened to Paris. I've shown the Senate what will happen to them if they step out of line because I've executed my own cousin. I think he thought he'd got control of it. I think that probably made him feel more secure, but he doesn't – yeah, he's oblivious to the fact that he's set up his own assassination. Set something in place. It's not going to go away. There's no going back from it, I think, once they – and they must have planned it for months. They had to find a success. They had to find someone to step in the nerve. They must have gone to numerous people saying, do you want to fancy being emperor if you assassinate him?

It wasn't something that they cooked up in five minutes.

No. No. This took planning. This took a lot of planning. He can't take it anymore. This was planned. This was meticulously planned.

So, million-dollar question. He dies a horrible, horrible death. I think we can all agree on that, whether we like the guy or not. Do you think he deserved it?

I think it was kind of inevitable. Whether he deserved it or not, he was undone by his own demons. He was undone by his own personality. I don't think anybody deserves such a horrible death. As we say, Rome is secure. Rome is stable. Rome is still wealthy. There's not any big troubles or disasters during current emissions rain. Everything's running well. If you took him role as just emperor, he's doing a good job. He isn't undone by his own personality. I think it was inevitable rather than deserved. I think that's the sad thing about Domitian. He's undone by his own demons. He walks into it himself. He's gone to a dark place. I don't think anyone could have brought him out of it. I think he's in that paranoia and nothing anybody could have said would have gone in which is rather sad, I think.

Yeah, he had no self-awareness to be able to reverse the train once it had started going.

Once it had started going, once he was on that route.

So he's replaced by Nerva. Who is Nerva?

Nerva, yeah, good question. Nerva's the hinge, I'd say. He's the hinge between Domitian and Trajan. Whenever you get a kind of assassination and an end of dynasty type thing, you tend to get like a safe pair of hands steps in. So after Nero dies, you get Galba, who's like in his 70s and has held numerous positions and is quite well respected and he steps in as caretaker emperor. It doesn't last very long. After Commodus dies, you get Pertinax again. He's an old pair of hands in his 60s. He didn't last very long either. After Domitian's assassination, you get Nerva, who's in his 70s. He's actually had no military experience, but he's held various positions. He's been consul under Domitian and things like that. And he's put up as the kind of safe option. Possibly because he's so uncontroversial and unexpected that he hasn't got factions around him, boosting him up. So maybe they're hoping that he can keep everything calm. He's not one of the provincial governors with an army who might do something. He's in Rome. So he's maybe seen as a safe pair of hands, just to keep things calm, so there's no kickoff a la 69 and everything going to pot again. So yeah, so he takes over and he dies naturally, well timed, but naturally. And then Trajan takes over. And  there's all kinds of conspiracies about whether Trajan was opportuning for this emperor role way beforehand. And with Nerva is just a patsy in the middle.

So his wife is still happy to publicly say I'm his widow. But what are Nerva and Trajan saying about Domitian in those first years after Domitian's assassination?

Pliny writes kind of panegyric of Trajan, which says that they smashed all these statues. He says, what delight we took in smashing those faces down with our axes and our chisels... which you can't really imagine Pliny doing because he's a bit of a man of letters.

I can't imagine Pliny with a sledgehammer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He took his slaves down. They had a hammer each and he went do that. But  this is when he's praising Trajan, so obviously he's going to slag off the guy before. So yes, Domitian's statues get pulled down, they get smashed up. He gets Damnatio Memoriae, which is, his name is erased from history, but it's not really erased from history because you wouldn't know his name has been erased from history unless you talked about it being erased from history. So it's that weird thing where 'we'll forget about him, we'll talk about him so we know that we've forgotten him.' Because they're all talking about Domitian, Tacitus and Pliny and Juvenal, whoever, they write lots about Domitian. So to Damnatio Memoriae certainly does not mean never mentioning them again. Any new dynasty, you have to slag off the one before, don't you, to justify your position. For the Flavians, Vitellius gets a very bad press because otherwise Vespasian is a guy who murdered the previous emperor to become emperor. So Vitellius has to be really awful and deserve his fate for Vespasian to look like the good guy. So Nerva and Trajan have got to look like the good guy. So they'll maybe ham up how bad Domitian was.

Yeah, they're incentivised to do so, right?

They're incentivised to do so, yeah.

The people seem neutral. We've mentioned that the military love him. How do they respond to the death?

They want the killers of Domitian punished. And they do find out that it's Parfenius and it's they are horribly executed. And Nerva has lost all credibility after that point, really. So it's just as whether he dies conveniently and then comes Trajan. So the rumour is that Trajan had set up that. Because Nerva, after that, Nerva is forced to nominate Trajan as his heir, adopt him as his heir, or allegedly forced.

It sounds like the army and his wife are mourning him. It's not a universal 'ding-dong Domitian's dead.'

No, apart from all the statue smashing that Pliny's slaves. His little word slaves. So yeah, it's not a universal mourning. Some people are mourning him, but it's not a full funeral. Nero, everybody's really upset, everybody liked him kind of thing. So I just think Domitian didn't have the winning personality, the kind of charisma to build loyalty and kind of affection with people. They liked him well enough but not that well enough to be really upset at his demise.

Would the average working class Roman know of Domitian's reputation?

It's a difficult question, isn't it? Because the average working class person in Rome doesn't leave anything behind to tell us what they think. You get occasional things like they'll sing ditties against various emperors in the kind of Colosseum and that. So   they express their opinion that way, but quite possibly not. They would hear about senators being executed.   They had the town criers and that who deliver the news. So they would hear the news as such as   such, who's been executed and who's been offed. So they presumably would hear about it. They wouldn't know what was going on at the palace unless it had gossip or whatever. Again, nobody records what happens at the palace or the slaves. There's no slave records of anything. So it's quite possible they didn't know the ins and outs of what was going on. All they saw was these great shows that he kept putting on for them and maybe that was enough for them. It doesn't affect them directly.

I think that's really important for us to remember, isn't it, that whenever we hear stories of Roman emperors, the sources are coming from a very narrow band of Roman society. So who are the main people whose works survive who mention Domitian?

Tastus is around. Tacitus is a senator under Domitian and prospers, as does Pliny the Younger, they're both senators and they have really good careers under Domitian and they're not in the slightest bit grateful for it. So they do very well under Domitian. So they knew him. They worked for him. They met him. They were terrified of him. But they're writing under Trajan, so they're free to say what they thought about in them. We also have Juvenal who's writing again slightly later, but he was alive during the reign of Domitian's reign. There's some great poetry praising rebuilding the palace. It's marvelous. A statue of him on horseback is marvelous. And then they have to write poems about the anti-castration laws. It's quite hard to write a poem about anti-castration laws. But he does it, which I admire him. Statius has a poem about the road that Domitian did a measure where he increased the size of the pavements in Rome. And Martial writes a poem about that.

Does that survive?

Yeah.

Does the anti-castration poem survive?

Oh, yeah.

How have I not read this? Wow.

There was a great one by Statius. He has dinner with him. He's invited up to the Palatine. He's practically combusting with excitement and saying like, this is the first day of my life. My life before this moment was barren, but now I'm looking at you and I feel like a meeting amongst Jove, amongst the stars and all this kind of stuff. I love court poetry because it's so brilliant. Everybody loves you. Why wouldn't you want that? These court poets, are they changing their tune once it's traded in charge or do they drop off the face of the planet? There's some more poetry by Martial, but it's contentious whether he did actually write it. It's probably not worth mentioning, but they're writing very much under Domitian's reign. It tells you something about Domitian. He likes this kind of stuff. He likes people telling him he's wonderful. He likes people telling him mundane things like increasing the size of the pavement. It's important to him that they celebrate this. Again, details man, administration. They praise him to the hilt. That's contemporary. That's writing during Domitian's reign. The stuff we have that's written during Domitian's reign is very sucky up. That's just haphazardly that's what survived. The people in Domitian's reign who were writing after Domitian's reign, under Trajan or whatever, are a lot harsher on him and not sucky up at all. As you say, it's that interesting question with Tacitu and Pliny that they are eye witnesses. They do know him. Although we can say, oh, it's in their best interest to slag him off because they're under Trajan... We can say they're not objective, but they've got lived experience as they say. They've got lived experience. They knew him. Can we discount their eye witness account of how terrifying he is? All the things they wrote... All these letters, it's like off hand comments. Oh, have you ever seen Regulus look so frightened since Domitian died? It's off hand comment. It's about somebody being frightened. That peppers his letters before he really slags Domitian off. I don't think they are exaggerating.

We hear the whole thing about Richard III, how it was all like propaganda, Tudor propaganda that he had a hunchback and all that. Then they found his body in that car park and he had Scoliosis. He did have a hunchback. All those historians who said it was all propaganda, it was all lies, turned out to be true. I think sometimes we reject the eyes of people who are actually there because we say they're not subjective enough. They've got an ulterior motive, but still they were there. They do know more than we do because they were there.

I'm presuming that because they were writing for people of their own kind of class and education, that they were writing for people who would be quite easily able to say, 'you're making that up, mate. I was there too. '

Yeah. I think so. The stuff they say, it's not that exaggeration. It's about just being in a room with Domitian, of Domitian shouting and that being frightening. That's not a tall story. You could say way worse, but they don't. It's this kind of throwaway lines about just when he was in a rage, the colour of his face and the fear of his eyes falling on you. It's not exaggerated. It's not sexed up. I think that feels quite credible. I think you must have been terrified. If you're seeing people around you being executed for the most mundane reasons, you're going to think you're next, aren't you? That's a really edgy atmosphere. 12 senators is not a lot. It is if you're a senator. It's a lot. It's like a sizable chunk of the 600.

Yeah. As a frame of reference, it could quite easily be you and you don't know when and you won't know why.

You won't know why. It could be something really stupid like somebody announced your election result and giving you the wrong title. That's not your fault, but that could come back to haunt you.

I think that living in terror, that edginess, I think is for most people, at least the ones writing, their lives were made better when Domitian was murdered.

Yeah. It appears so. They don't say anything too nasty about treason, obviously. I think it's like a new golden age that things are better now. As he said, those of us who survived, he survived something and everything's going to be better now and everything's brighter. Pliny seems to feel the same. Everything's brighter, everything's better. Pliny is now talking about how you can go on and prosecute guilty people now. A weight has been lifted off them. You can tell something's been lifted off them. They feel happier and more comfortable and less on edge. From what they say, it just feels like they're in a golden age or much better age anyway than they were. Domitian's death has benefited them. It's lifted a horrible pressure off them and a horrible situation. Things aren't so bad now. We've got Pliny's correspondence with Trajan. He's quite friendly. Trajan doesn't seem terribly frightening. He's answering all Pliny's minor questions about this, that, and the other in quite a pleasant way. He's having a better relationship with this emperor than he did the last one.

What about everyone else? Is there anyone whose life, apart from his actual assassins obviously, was there anyone whose life was made worse by his execution?

Made worse? Probably not. Probably. That's a sad thing, isn't it? Maybe some of the slaves who were closest to me in a favourite eunuch, Aranias. I don't know what happened to Aranias. After Domitian died, nobody does. I don't think necessarily anybody's life, well apart from asssassins and that, after they got handed over to the guard. Probably not.

That's quite damning, isn't it, for his career, that no one, apart from the people that killed him, particularly, nobody was that fussed. Trajan was also quite kind to the military, right? So it's not even as if the military could turn around and say, we hate Trajan because he sucks.

Yeah. That's why Trajan's the genius choice to take over from Nerva because he fulfils that military role that they want. Nerva's in his seventies, he's not got military experience. They've got no respect for him. They respect Trajan. Yeah, so he's the perfect person to fill Domitian's shoes in that way because he's got that military presence that the army respect and they change their allegiance to Trajan fairly easily because he's a strong man. Even the military who love Domitian quickly change their allegiance.

Well, I don't think anyone wants to think that after they've gone, no one will mourn them. What about his impact on Rome? Were the buildings still standing that he'd created? Can we see any positive impact on Rome itself?

Well, there's a forum, what's called the Forum of Nerva was actually Domitian's forum. So, that's his forum. So, he got lasting legacy there. I say if you go to Palatine Hill a lot, what you see the palace is up there. A large bit that is stuff that Domitian built. You can still see the marble floor from his palace there. The Alban Palace is still standing in hands of the Pope. That has a lot of ruins and the grounds of it. Yeah, just numerous fixed aqueducts and stuff like that and roads and yeah, maybe the road. Maybe that road was the lasting legacy, the road that went down to Naples. His lasting legacy increased trade or maybe it was making the pavements wider. The smallest thing. Maybe that made such a big difference to everybody's life. It would get around a lot quicker.

Yeah, I'm always a big fan of going to Piazza Navona.

Oh yes, that was his stadium.

The first permanent stadium in Rome, by the way. Everyone loves Piazza Navona. It's the ultimate Roman place for gelato and wandering around people spotting... Everything ticked over for 15 years [during his reign]. Should we give him some credit for that?

Absolutely, because emperors, as you go further into Roman history, gets a third century in the average range, like 2, 3 years. Yeah, if you hold on to the post event for years, that's bloody good going. Very good going. He keeps it ticking over. Rome's in a good shape when it's taken over. If you're an administrator, nobody notices you're doing a good job until something goes wrong, and then you get noticed. It's that kind of role, isn't it? He's good at administrating. He's good at keeping things going. He's good at making things happen, and the details of anti-corruption laws and morality laws and all this kind of thing. He's very into that. I think he deserves credit for holding it together, and having the Flavian dynasty lasted 25 years because of him. He just didn't leave an heir.

This assessment, he obviously had some deep issues, but he was a great administrator. Is this what classicists of the last couple of centuries saying, or are they so fixated on the ancient sources written by senators who were terrified of him, that they've previously maybe not given him enough credit?

Probably previously. There's been a lot of revisionist stuff, I think, about Domitian, where people are looking at him and saying, actually, he wasn't a bad emperor, actually. He did do good stuff. He was a good administrator. He did well for 15 years. These are the things he did. Then they go on saying it wasn't such a reign of terror because Claudius killed 35 senators and 300 questions. That does that a bit. Revising it there tell us that he was terrifying. I think we should believe them. We shouldn't be desponding them, but we should also perhaps not go for the solely caricature terrible emperor at everything. Yeah. It's certainly not, as I say, reading Suetonius's Twelve Caesars. Domitian's chapter is really disappointing because there's not enough scandal for my liking. Not nearly enough sexual misdeeds or anything. It's really tame. Yes, I think he was good at this, but never forgetting the but. I think that's really important. The but. But yeah, no, credit where credit is due, 'but.'

What about Domitian in pop culture? Have we seen him in any novels or movies or any of that kind of thing?

I certainly wrote him into a novel. I always see him in my Four Emperors series as a slightly petulant teenager. I think it was a Channel 5 documentary that looked at the opening of the Colosseum. He's portrayed in that as slightly effete, slightly feminine kind of character, which is not what he was at all, which is quite bizarre.

I watched Those About to Die directed by Roland Emmerich. It's on Peacock if anyone wants to watch it. I have watched it so that you don't have to. I can do an episode on it later. I mean, they have him from even before he was emperor as fully insane,  like the Caligula caricature of nuts. One of the ways that that series shows him as a negative portrayal is they choose the lazy thing and make him queer and put him in an abusive relationship with a slave who has no agency in the romance and then he has the slave horribly murdered by having a crocodile bite his head off in the bathroom. Those kind of portrayals in pop culture, can we see a caricature that is perhaps slightly unfair?

I think so because he pops up actually in the Lindsay Davis Falco stories, Domitian is kind of lurking. He does, doesn't he? Yeah, and he's the baddie in that as well. So it's taking again that kind of thing that says that he openly plotted against his brother, of which is no evidence. She takes that as a kind of malevolent force at the palace. It takes it on board that he's an out and out villain in those series of books as well. So yeah, it's always assumed that he's a villain from when he's a child. He's naturally villainous. He's born to villainy. Titus is a good guy. Titus is the hero, the war hero. Domitian is lacking. So they take that maybe that insecurity that we talked about Domitian as a young man and not having the experience his brother has, and then ramp that up into a rivalry that probably wasn't there. They always say Domitian is meant to hate Titus, but he has a really good line about him where he says, we gave him no honours to his brother apart from deification. He made his brother a god. No big deal that bit. What a bastard just made his brother a god. He talked about his brother in ambiguous phrases. I was like, what does that mean ambiguous phrases? That's not slagging him off. It's ambiguous.

I mean, when we do watch these things of pop culture, it does make him seem like he was just through and through malevolent from the get-go, but it sounds like he had a really difficult upbringing, some really traumatic experiences when he was young, where he saw the consequences of assassination plots and rebellions. It sounds like, yes, paranoia, but not entirely misplaced paranoia.

No. I mean, paranoia is good in the because there are plots against you. There are always plots against you if you're an emperor. That's a role. But I think if you're writing fiction, it's almost too good a story to have two brothers, and they're very different, and your instinct is to pit them against each other, because that makes for a great drama, I think, isn't it? It's a kind of contrast between them that is probably behind a lot of his portrayals as well, because it's trying to big up some drama. So if Titus is a soldier, the Domitian is going to be a bit queer, a bit effeminate. Which is exactly what those about to die did. Titus, and when Titus became emperor, he let his eunuchs go. He had like a little band of them. I liked his little crew. And he let them out. Listen to this show, please. I want an revision. Titus let them loose and gave them up when he became emperor. Apparently, Domitian's anti-castration laws was kind of vengeance, because Titus liked eunuchs, but Titus had to be dead for ten years by that point, so it's a piss poor revenge. Even before you factor that in. I mean, Domitian sounds like a fascinating character. Whether or not you think that he was pure evil, or whether or not you think that he was perhaps a victim of his upbringing. I think he's a victim of himself. He's a victim of his own personality, and his own paranoia. I think that makes him really interesting, because it's complex. He's a complex character. He's good at what he does, but he does himself. I should say, we're always told that we shouldn't be trying to diagnose people that have been dead for 2,000 years, but it does sound like a fascinating character study of things that are happening around him. Someone said to me, I was doing a Roman festival thing when I was signing books and talking, someone said to me that they reckoned Domitian was autistic. I thought about this because I have an autistic son. He was very attentive to details. He dictates how many rounds the chariots should do. He works out how many circuits they can do in the time available in the secular games. He's emperor. He's surely got better things to do than work out how many times a chariot should go around. He's really details- orientated. He doesn't like people. He likes solitary walks. Does he like maybe quiet? Maybe it's a bit too much. He's not very charismatic. He's not a people person. I could kind of see. I wouldn't diagnose him. There's nothing that would make me think, oh yeah, he's definitely autistic. I thought, that's interesting. There could be something there about his personality that means he's not quite got what it takes to be emperor. He can do it, but he hasn't got the personality or the ability to deal with people that his father and brother likely had.

People like Augustus had a charm, that ability to talk to anybody. He put a barrier between him and the Senate. He's one above them. Against insecurity, probably for his own safety. I thought it was quite interesting. Interesting one.

So, to wrap up, what do you think is the most interesting thing about Domitian? Something in his career, something in the historiography. What's the most interesting thing about this man?

I find it all interesting! I think it is the year 69. It's that this boy being thrown in the middle of this political situation, he's not prepared for. He's the face of Flavian dynasty. He's in Rome. His brother and his dad are in the east. They're quite safe out there. He's at the forefront of it. We know that was important to him. When he was in Rome, temples and monuments and dedications to his survival and being saved by the gods. I think that's quite interesting. I think all the court poetry is just brilliant. All the poetry, bigging him up for his roads and his dinner parties and his anti- things that he did for I don't know how many kinders were quick dudes and whackers. of destroys himself, but there is good and bad empress. I think of the bad emperors, he's probably the best of the bad emperors, if you put it like that.

Right. Okay. So if we were to say then, top 10 bad emperors, does he make the top 10? What kind of number would you put him at?

I wouldn't say the top 10. I think because when I was writing Ancient Rome's Worst Emperors, there's a load of really ineffectual ones that I included who become emperor. Like at the first sign, something goes wrong, they just completely cave. You get people like Petronius Maximus who plots his way in the fourth century to being an emperor and then the Vandals are on their way and he just completely caves in as a runner and ends up getting killed. Or you get Gordian the first who's kind of forced into being emperor and the first sign of any trouble, he hangs himself. There's a load of ineffectual ones and people who become emperor who just aren't qualified because they become emperor and they're like four years old in the case of Valentin the second and they're just not up to the job. So I wouldn't include him in a top 10 because he does stuff. He does lots of stuff. He does the building. He has war, whether they are provoked towards whatever. He does the war thing. He does the building thing. He does the law thing, bringing good laws. He does the morality thing. He's very big on religion. He's very dedicated to Minerva and Jupiter. He does all the right things on religion and state religion. He gives good shows. I wouldn't say he's in a top 10 worst emperors, even though I did include him in my ancient Rome's worst emperor's book.

But only because I wanted to talk about him because he's complex.

There you go. He's not even cracking in the top 10. Well, I think, wherever he is, if he's listening, I think he'd be quite pleased with that.

It's all just a shame, I would say to him.

It's a shame. It started so well and, Yeah. I mean, it's the perfect example, isn't it, of how history could have been different if they just had therapy?

Yeah, if you just had therapy, yeah. Or someone who dared to just say, yeah, maybe you should turn it down a bit. Just turn it down a bit and start off not happy, yeah.

Calm down.

Calm down. Just calm down a bit.

Chill out a bit.

Yeah. Just chill. Right.

Well, thank you so much because this conversation has been brilliant and I know Domitian is such a knotty character. It's been fantastic to go through all of it and then try and work out the fact from the fiction. So thank you so much.!

Well, thank you for inviting me on. It's been fun. I like talking about Domitian, as you can tell. Any opportunity!