Brian W. Jones
The Emperor Domitian
London: Routledge, 1992. ISBN 9780415061823

It is difficult to think of a Roman emperor so hated by those who wrote, and whose works have survived, as Domitian. Others had their critics—Tiberius, Caligula, Nero—but these usually wrote long after the event, and had no personal grudge. The nastiest attacks that survive on Domitian are by those who knew him. This may count against him. Or it may not. Pay attention, and you’ll see that those insisting he was a monster were the usual enemies of competent rule—senators, obscenely rich Stoics, and status-obsessed freeloaders— Suetonius called him “a man of blood.” Tacitus, writing under the grateful patronage of Domitian’s murderers, said as little as possible and made sure the tone was damning when he did. Pliny, whose talents were limited to flattery and sycophancy, went into raptures over Domitian’s pliable replacement.

Brian W. Jones’s The Emperor Domitian is an attempt to clear away the senatorial bile and judge the man on his actions rather than his enemies’ opinion. What emerges is not a tyrant, but an unsentimental ruler: efficient and ruthless, and clever, and on the whole humane—though a ruler too who didn’t care what the senators thought of him.

Born on 24 October 51 AD, Domitian was the younger son of Vespasian, the soldier-emperor, who came to power during the chaos of 69. His older brother Titus, beloved for reasons more sentimental than rational, died young in 81, leaving Domitian the purple. The Senate had no say in the succession. The army accepted him. The equestrian class, rising in influence, had no objections. He ruled until his assassination on 18 September 96—death by just the sort of conspiracy he’d spent a decade and a half anticipating: a freedman steward stabbed him in his palace, aided by members of the court. Nerva, an aged senator of at best limited charisma, was hastily installed by the plotters. He was then succeeded by a prize war-monger, whom the Senate loved, and whose military adventures put a drag on his own successor’s reign.

But back to Domitian. The Senate, grateful he was out of the way, obliged by declaring his memory damned and chiselled his name from the monuments. You can see an example of this in the British Museum.

Was he a monster? Well, his reign was marked by careful administration and a desire for order. He was not loved, but he was effective. He insisted on discipline among the military. He oversaw detailed audits of provincial governors. He demanded transparency in accounts. He hated waste. He hated corruption.

One of the strongest arguments for Domitian’s competence lies in his handling of the coinage. Roman monetary policy before and after him was often a shambles. He restored the purity of gold and silver coinage and brought discipline to the imperial mints. The inscriptions on his coinage were deliberate and bureaucratically precise, projecting an image of calm authority. A temporary devaluation in AD 85 was corrected with speed and efficiency. By the standards of Roman monetary policy, his reign was almost boring—which is to say, remarkably competent.

Then there are his legal reforms. Unlike the Stoics, he had no use for moral posturing.  His interest in law was not theoretical but practical—he wanted it to work. He tried to enforce consistency in the courts. He reformed inheritance law, giving more weight to the rights of women and children in inheritance law. He made a law to ban the castration of slaves, and insisted on strict enforcement. He applied harsh penalties to extortion by provincial governors. These were not the reforms of a soft-hearted liberal. They were those of a man who believed in system and hierarchy—but also in fairness, applied from the top down.

He also avoided unnecessary wars. Where action was needed—against the Chatti in Germany, or the Dacians under Decebalus—he responded with limited, tactical force. Otherwise, he fortified rather than expanded. He withdrew where costs exceeded benefits. His campaigns in Britain continued the work of his father and brother but stopped short of fantasy conquests. The fortress at Inchtuthil was built, then abandoned. The message: Rome would go only so far as it must. There would be no imperial overstretch on his watch.

He was, in short, the kind of emperor who had much to offer his lesser subject, but nothing to offer the senators. Instead, he irritated them by expecting them to behave.

Not surprisingly, the senatorial aristocracy, long used to treating the empire as a family estate, hated him. Domitian was not one of them. He lacked ancient lineage. He expected deference. Worse, he insisted that his authority mattered more than theirs. That he asked to be called dominus et deus—lord and god—was probably a joke. He did have a sense of humour. Even Suetonius allowed that. “How I wish,” the imperial biographer quotes him, “that I were as fine looking as Maecius thinks he is.” (Suetonius, Domitian 20)

Another of his probable jokes was the “black banquet,” described in glorious detail by Dio Cassius:

He prepared a room that was pitch black on every side, ceiling, walls and floor, and had made ready bare couches of the same colour resting on the uncovered floor; then he invited in his guests alone at night without their attendants. And first he set beside each of them a slab shaped like a gravestone, bearing the guest’s name and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet. After this all the things that are commonly offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits were likewise set before the guests, all of them black and in dishes of a similar colour. Consequently, every single one of the guests feared and trembled and was kept in constant expectation of having his throat cut the next moment, the more so as on the part of everybody but Domitian there was dead silence, as if they were already in the realms of the dead, and the emperor himself conversed only upon topics relating to death and slaughter. Finally he dismissed them…. And scarcely had each guest reached his home and was beginning to get his breath again…. when one person brought in the slab, which was of silver, and then others in turn brought in various articles, including the dishes that had been set before them at the dinner… last of all came that particular boy who had been each guest’s familiar spirit, now washed and adorned. Thus, after having passed the entire night in terror, they received the gifts. (Dio Cassius, Epitome, Book 67.9.1–6)

This was not cruelty for its own sake. It was a calculated message to a class that had long confused inherited privilege with entitlement to rule. The senatorial aristocracy, after all, was not a collection of statesmen and thinkers but a cartel of self-regarding parasites. They had done nothing to earn their position except be born into it. They functioned as a vast vacuum cleaner, extracting wealth from the empire’s desperately poor majority and squandering it on dinners and the ever-lengthening genealogies carved into their tombs.

Domitian, whose family had risen from humble origins, saw through the vanity of this caste. He demanded loyalty and competence. Many of the men he executed or exiled plainly considered him their inferior in status, and themselves his replacements. Accusations that they had plotted against him were less paranoia than probability. As Domitian himself observed with weary bitterness, “No one believes a ruler when he says there is a conspiracy against him – not, that is, until it succeeds and he is dead.” (Suetonius, 21)

What the senatorial sources record as tyranny was often nothing more than the assertion of imperial authority over a hostile elite. If they feared him, it was because he had given them reason to. He knew what they were, and he kept them in check—not from sadism, but from statecraft.

Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius did everything in their power to bury Domitian beneath slander. Brian Jones doesn’t try to paint him as a saint. What he does, and does well, is show that the traditional narrative cannot stand. The facts of his reign contradict the image. He was feared—but with reason. He was cruel—mostly to the powerful. He was paranoid—because plots were real.

We might see in him a model for modern Caesarism—government not by the wise, but by the competent; not by those who seek favour, but by those who impose order. Domitian was a good ruler. After the present madness has run its course, Britain could do worse than a Domitian of its own.

Further Reading:

• Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves. Revised ed. Penguin Classics, 2007.
• Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 67. Available in the Loeb Classical Library.
• Tacitus, Agricola and Histories. Various editions.
• Brian W. Jones, The Emperor Domitian. London: Routledge, 1992.

NB – All images used are either mine or from Wikipedia