HISTORY OF ROME-THE IMPERIAL PEACE

CHAPTER I

IV.

TITUS

Vespasian dead Titus succeeded as a matter of course; on the 24th June 79 he became princeps, and that same day received the titles of Pontifex Maximus and Pater Patriae. He had one child, Julia, a girl of about thirteen, but no son; his brother Domitian was bound to be his heir, and Titus protested he should be his partner and his successor. But he did nothing to confirm his protestations: Domitian remained as before Princeps Juventutis; he held a consulship in 80 with his brother but he received no share of proconsular imperium and no grant of tribunician power.

There was a lack of sympathy between Titus and his assertive and ambitious brother and nothing could heal it. It was plain that he distrusted him; Domitian retorted by complaining that Titus had tampered with Vespasian's will and by assiduously undermining him.

Men had dreaded Titus' accession, remembering his ruthlessness, his extravagance, and his affair with Berenice, but he completely falsified their expectations. There were no executions, no trials for maiestas; on the contrary informers were publicly scourged and then sold into slavery or banished to those islands to which they had often sent victims. Court life remained on the same modest level as in his father's day. Berenice, who apparently returned to Rome, he again dismissed. In the enthusiastic accounts which have come down he stands out as the ideal princeps, solicitous for the welfare of all and loved by his people. Under forty when he succeeded, handsome, brilliant and gracious, the stormer of Jerusalem, the favourite of the soldiers, fluent both in Greek and in Latin, equally adept in the arts of peace and war, all that he did only increased his popularity and esteem; when he died after a little over two years' rule he had become (in Suetonius' phrase) "amor ac deliciae generis humani".

The little we know of his laws and actions reveals a paternal and equitable spirit. He put a stop to two evil practices; the first was one by which informers who had failed to net their victim on a charge under one law tried under another, the second was one by which they tried to invalidate a dead man's testamentary dispositions by challenging his right to free status. The first Titus prohibited altogether, the second he forbade after a term of years had passed; this term was fixed by Nerva and by Marcus Aurelius later at five years.

He showed a like kindly spirit in meeting two disasters which befell Italy. The first was a fire at Rome, which destroyed, among other buildings, the Porticus Octaviae with its libraries, the Iseum, and the recently restored temple of Capitoline Juppiter and so made a large rebuilding programme necessary. The second was the famous eruption of Vesuvius on August 24 A.D. 79, which overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here he showed, as Suetonius records, not only the anxious care of a princeps but the love of a father. He had senators appointed by lot to act as curatores for the ruined district, and assigned the property of those who died intestate to the relief of distress. It was in this eruption that a friend of Titus lost his life, the elder Pliny: he went impelled by scientific curiosity about the phenomena of the eruption, he stayed to rescue panic-stricken fugitives.

'THE DARLING OF MANKIND' 

The games that Titus gave at the opening of the Colosseum were lavish and splendid, lasting a hundred days; his benefactions were frequent and liberal. Tradition remembered with praise a remark of his at the close of a day when he could not remember any benefit conferred—'Friends, I have lost a day!' Some ancient critics and most modern have seized upon this characteristic and drawn from it the generalizations that, had he lived longer, he might have been a second Nero, and that his liberality drained the Treasury. Both seem ill-founded: by his dismissal of Berenice and the frugality of his private life he showed he could control himself, and the evidence for wastefulness is not strong. True, by one edict he confirmed all beneficia granted by his predecessors to corporations or individuals; but it may be remarked that any beneficia that had passed the critical scrutiny of Vespasian must have been well-deserved, and that all succeeding emperors followed Titus' equitable practice. The fact too that he reclaimed some of the subsiciva suggests that he had all his father's financial shrewdness, and had no intention of wasting public money.

Loved though he was, he had to face the danger of conspiracies. Yet we hear that he forgave all plotters, even promoted some. It was partly a wise clemency, partly fatalistic composure. Himself a soldier, knowing his family had come to power by the strangest of destinies, he felt—like the Illyrian soldier-emperors of two centuries later—that 'empire was a gift of Fate!' But against his own brother this could not avail him, though he remonstrated with him with tears. Whether Domitian assisted him out of life, as various traditions assert, cannot be told, but he certainly did not lack the will to do so. Titus was attacked by a fever and died in his father's country-house at Reate on September 13, 81. His death was greeted by a spontaneous outburst of mourning and affection, such as were manifested for few rulers, and his deification naturally followed. One discordant note alone sounds through the chorus of praise and that was from the Jews, who, hating the destroyer of their Temple, ascribed to him an agonizing end; to the rest of the world he was Divus Titus, undeniably to be reckoned among the good rulers that Rome had enjoyed.

V.

DOMITIAN: THE COURT AND THE ARISTOCRACY