Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel
be purged as by fire, and the purging came with the accession of Domitian.
The inner secret of that sombre reign will probably remain for ever a mystery. There is the same question about Domitian as there is about Tiberius. Was he bad from the beginning, or was he gradually corrupted by the consciousness of immense power,308 and the fear of the great order who might challenge it? Our authorities do not furnish a satisfying answer. We know Domitian only from the narrative of men steeped in senatorial traditions and prejudices,309 and, some of them, intoxicated by the vision of a reconciliation of the principate with the republican ideals. The dream was a noble one, and it was about to be partially realised [pg 53]for three generations, under a succession of good emperors. But the men inspired with such an ideal were not likely to be impartial judges of an emperor like Domitian. And even from their narrative of his reign, we can see that he was not, at least in the early years of his reign,310 the utter monster he has been painted. Even severe judges in modern days admit that he was an able and strenuous man, with a clear, cold, cynical intellect,311 which recognised some of the great problems of the time, and strove to solve them. He was indefatigable in judicial work.312 In spite of the sneers at his mock triumphs,313 his military and provincial administration was probably guided by a sound conception of the resources and the dangers of the Empire. His recall of Agricola, after a seven years’ command in Britain, was attributed to jealousy and fear.314 It is more probable that it was dictated by a wish to stop a campaign which was diverting large sums to the conquest of barren mountains. Domitian was an orator and verse writer of some merit, and he gave his patronage, although not in a very liberal way, to men like Quintilian, Statius, and Martial.315 Like Nero, he felt the force of the new Hellenist movement, and, under forms sanctioned by Roman antiquarians, he established a quinquennial festival in which literary genius was pompously rewarded.316 He had the public libraries, which had been devastated by fires in the previous reigns, liberally restocked with fresh stores of MSS. from Alexandria.317 He gave close attention, whatever we may think of his science, to the economic problems of the Empire. And his discouragement of the vine, in favour of a greater acreage of corn, would find sympathy in our own time, as it was applauded by Apollonius of Tyana.318 The man who decimated the Roman aristocracy towards the end of his reign, advanced to high positions some of those who were destined to be his bitterest defamers. Pliny and Tacitus and Trajan’s father rose to high office in the [pg 54]earlier part of Domitian’s reign.319 He designated to the consulship such men as Nerva, Trajan, Verginius Rufus, Agricola, and the grandfather of Antoninus Pius.320 This strange character was also a moral reformer of the antiquarian type. He punished erring Vestals, more majorum. He revived the Scantinian law against those enormities of the East, of which Statius shows that the emperor was not guiltless himself.321 Yet a voluptuary, with a calm outlook on his time, may have a wish to restrain vices with which he is himself tainted. A statesman may be a puritan reformer, both in religion and morals, without being personally severe and devout. Domitian may have had a genuine, if a pedantic, desire to restore the old Roman tone in morals and religion. He was, after all, sprung from a sober Sabine stock,322 although he may have sadly degenerated from it in his own conduct. And his attempt to reform Roman society may perhaps have been as sincere as that of Augustus.
But there can be little doubt that Domitian, although he was astute and able, was also a bad man, with the peculiar traits which always make a man unpopular. He was disloyal as a son and as a brother. He was morose, and he cultivated a suspicious solitude,323 around which evil rumour is sure to gather. The rumour in his case may have been well-founded, although we are not bound to believe all the tales of prurient gossip which Suetonius has handed down. It is the penalty of high place that peccadilloes are magnified into sins, and sins are multiplied and exaggerated. It was a recognised and effective mode of flattering a new emperor to blacken the character of his predecessors; Domitian himself allowed his court poets to vilify Caligula and Nero.324 And Pliny in his fulsome adulation of Trajan, finds his most effective resource in a perpetual contrast with Domitian. Tacitus could never forgive the recall and humiliation of his father-in-law. The Senate as a whole bore an implacable hatred to the man who carried to its furthest point the assertion of imperial prerogative.325 [pg 55]Still the authorities are so unanimous that we are bound to believe that Domitian, with some strength and ability, had many execrable qualities. He shows the contradictions of a nature in which the force of a sturdy rural ancestry has not been altogether sapped by the temptations of luxury and power. He had a passionate desire to rival the military glory of his father and brother, yet he was too cautious and self-indulgent to attain it. He had some taste for literature, but he kept literature in leading-strings, and put one man to death for his delight in certain speeches in Livy, and another for a too warm eulogy of Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus.326 He threw his whole strength into a moral and religious reaction, while he was the bitterest enemy of the republican pretensions and dreams of the Senate. Great historical critics have called him a hypocrite.327 It may be doubted whether any single phrase or formula could express the truth about such a twisted and perverse character. Probably his dominant passion was vanity and love of grandiose display. He assumed the consulship seventeen times, a number quite unexampled.328 His pompous triumphs for unreal victories were a subject of common jest. He filled the Capitol with images of himself, and a colossal statue towered for a time over the temple roofs.329 The son and brother of emperors, already exalted to divine honours, he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming divinity for himself, and he allowed his ministers and court poets to address him as “our Lord God.”330 His lavish splendour in architecture was to some extent justified by the ravages of fire in previous reigns. But the £2,400,000 expended on the gilding of a temple on the Capitol,331 was only one item in an extravagance which drained the treasury. Its radiance, which dazzled the eyes of Rutilius in the reign of Honorius,332 was paid for in blood and tears. The emperor, who was the ruthless enemy of the nobles, like all his kind, was profusely indulgent to the army and the mob. The legions had their pay increased by a fourth. The populace of Rome were pampered [pg 56]with costly and vulgar spectacles,333 as they were to the end of the Western Empire. Domitian’s indulgence of that fierce and obscene proletariat was only a little more criminal than that of other emperors, because it ended in a bankruptcy which was followed by robbery and massacre. While the rich and noble were assailed on any trivial accusation, in order to fill an empty treasury, the beasts of Numidia were tearing their victims, gladiators were prostituting a noble courage in dealing inglorious wounds in the arena, and fleets of armed galleys charged and crashed in mimic, yet often deadly, battle in the flooded Flavian amphitheatre.334
To repair this waste the only resource was plunder. But Domitian was a pettifogger as well as a plunderer; he would fleece or assassinate his victims under forms of law. The law of majesty, and the many laws for restoring old Roman morality, needed only a little ingenuity and effrontery to furnish lucrative grounds for impeachment.335 The tribe of delators were ready to his hand. He had punished them for serving Nero; they were now to reap a richer harvest under Domitian. Every fortune which rose above mediocrity, every villa with rich pastures and woodlands in the Apennines, or on the northern lakes, was marked for plunder.336 Domitian was the first and only emperor who assumed the censorship for life.337 The office made him absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his nobles. A casual word, a thoughtless gesture, might be construed into an act of treason; and the slave households furnished an army of spies. Nay, even kindred and near friends were drawn into this vast conspiracy against domestic peace and security. It may be admitted that Domitian had to face a real peril. The rebellion of Antonius Saturninus was an attempt which no prince could treat lightly, and the destruction of the correspondence in which so many men of rank were involved, may well have heightened Domitian’s alarm.338 He struck out blindly and savagely. He compelled the Senate to bear a part in the massacre, and Tacitus has confessed, with pathetic humiliation, his silent share in the murder of the upright and innocent.339 Yet the imperial [pg 57]inquisitor was himself racked with terror in his last hours. He walked in a corridor where the walls were lined with mirrors,340 so that no unseen hand might strike him from behind. On his last morning he started in terror from his bed and called for the diviner whom he had summoned from Germany.341 But, amid all his terror, Domitian had a deep natural love of cruelty. He was never more dangerous than when he chose to be agreeable;342 he loved to play with his victims. What a grim delight in exquisite torture, what a cynical contempt for the Roman nobles, are revealed in the tale of his funereal banquet!343 The select company were ushered into a chamber draped from floor to ceiling in