Galba, on hearing news of his elevation in Rome, recovered his nerve, emerged from the interior of his province, and set off for the capital. But he was destined for an unstable and short-lived reign. His supporters were an uneasy alliance of Praetorian Guardsmen, old-school senators, and career politicians from Spanish postings. The alliance was held together by the promise of immediate reward. But what was on offer to the officers of the Rhine, Danube and eastern legions? In fact, they were doubly disadvantaged under Galba: excluded from access to court patronage, their resentment and disloyalty could be anticipated, so that even posts they already held were under threat. First the Governor of Lower Germany was superseded, then the Governor of Upper Germany. Each of these men had commanded 20,000 legionaries, and in January AD 69, at the instigation of their senior officers, these soldiers refused to renew their allegiance to Galba and hailed Aulus Vitellius emperor in his place.
News of this revolt brought the tensions within Galba’s government to a head. The new emperor’s policy had been a disastrous mixture of sanctimony and corruption. The Praetorian Guard had been angered by Galba’s refusal to pay their promised bribe. The officers from Spain were alienated by his nomination of another blue-bloodied senator like himself as prospective successor. So Marcus Salvius Otho, Governor of Hispania Lusitania, one of Galba’s leading lieutenants and effective head of the ‘Spanish’ faction, went to the Praetorian barracks and offered to pay the soldiers. The guardsmen proclaimed Otho emperor and denounced his rival as an enemy. Galba, a bald and arthritic old man, was hunted down and lynched in the Forum. This resolution of the immediate crisis in Rome still, however, left two emperors in play within the empire, each representing a powerful bloc of politicians and officers, one rooted in Rome, Italy and Spain, the other in the Rhineland; and with each faction heavily armed, only war could decide which of them would prevail.
Otho, in control of Rome and given legitimacy by senatorial support, attracted the formal allegiance of most provincial governors and the practical assistance of the Danubian legions. His position – like that of Pompey in 49 BC – appeared, on the face of things, the stronger. But the Vitellians – like Caesar’s Gallic War legions at the Rubicon – represented a coherent bloc of concentrated military power. Though Vitellius himself was grossly fat and debauched, he was merely a mask for the career ambitions of the Rhineland officers, skilled commanders of an experienced and loyal army. When the rival armies clashed near Cremona in northern Italy, legion against legion in a day-long battle amid the vineyards, the Othonians were defeated. Their 37-year-old leader, his fastidiously hair-plucked body crowned by a toupee to hide his baldness, committed suicide and so brought to an end his 95-day reign as Roman emperor. As the victorious army headed for the capital, the empire accepted the judgement of war, the Senate and most provincial governors switching allegiance for the third time in a year to acclaim Vitellius the new ruler.
The Vitellian revolution was in an important sense different from its immediate predecessors. The secret of empire, as Tacitus explained, was out: emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome. The secret had been concealed behind a façade of Republican rectitude: Augustus had claimed to have ‘restored the Republic’, and his successors had maintained this fiction. The image had dissolved momentarily in AD 41, but even then military intervention had amounted to a brief, near-bloodless coup carried out by a few thousand guardsmen in Rome. Only now, in AD 69, was the full reality of the military dictatorship revealed. Vitellius was the ‘Rhineland’ emperor, a creature of the generals stationed there, a ruler brought to Rome by 40,000 frontier legionaries. His was the regime of a narrow faction, and, as with Galba and Otho, a purge was needed to consolidate its power, though this time, after civil war, a bloodier one. For the ‘Germans’ – despite their victory over Otho’s alliance of ‘Spaniards’ and ‘Danubians’ – might yet be challenged in their turn. They knew that one other player remained in the game: Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the top Roman general in the East.
Vespasian cannot have considered himself in contention at the beginning of the crisis. He owed his current eminence – he was commander of the 40,000-strong army fighting the Jewish rebels in Palestine – to relative obscurity. Born into a small-town family of Italian landowners, army officers and businessmen, his grandfather had been a commoner, his father an equestrian, and Vespasian himself was a first-generation senator. The Flavian family was, in fact, a good example of the class of ‘new men’ from the Italian municipal aristocracy who had flourished under the new Augustan order. Such men tended to be more loyal agents of the Caesars than nobles from ancient families: they depended more heavily on the good favour of their patrons, and their ambition, in the nature of things, could hardly extend to the purple throne itself. By flattering tyrants and their flunkies, Vespasian had ascended the administrative hierarchy, survived the purges, and finally been promoted to the most senior of military commands – partly because he was not considered a political threat. Now, by one of history’s ironies, he stood poised on the brink of supreme power.
For the ‘Easterners’, the news from Rome was gloomy: the victory of Vitellius meant direct Rhineland control over imperial patronage and a corresponding slump in the fortunes of men stationed in the East. Worse, it was rumoured that Vitellius would switch the western and eastern legions, forcing the latter to exchange the comfort and ease of city billets for wooden forts in a cold and wet German forest. But if the officers on the Rhine could create their own emperor, why not those in the East? The ancient sources aver that Vespasian was reluctant to accept a nomination, but this may have been a traditional deceit. Whatever, once widely canvassed as a candidate for the throne, no man could safely draw back: he was henceforward and forever tainted as politically suspect. The momentum towards an eastern military coup quickly became unstoppable, and Vespasian was propelled willy-nilly into a new civil war.
Perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps through hurried last-minute negotiation, the Prefect of Egypt declared for Vespasian on 1 July AD 69, calling upon the soldiers and citizens of Alexandria assembled before him to swear allegiance. With Egypt secure, giving him two legions and the Nile grain-stores, Vespasian ten days later accepted the acclamation of his own army in Palestine. Shortly afterwards came further declarations in his favour, two of them, Syria and the Danube, representing decisive shifts in the balance of power. This support – the whole of the East and the Balkans, and two of the three main army groups in the empire – gave Vespasian a potentially winning hand, especially as the Flavian revolt seems to have taken the Vitellians by surprise, the discipline of the Rhineland legions having broken down after their arrival in Rome.
But Vespasian dithered. Before bringing on a decisive clash, he aimed to cut off Rome’s grain-supply from Egypt, and to gather more support by sending an advance expedition through Asia Minor. His partisans, however, showed greater initiative. Antonius Primus, leader of the pro-Flavian revolt on the Danube, ignoring any orders he may have received from the East, crossed the Alps to invade Italy and fall upon the Vitellians while they were still in disarray. In the late autumn, the Rhineland and Danubian legions clashed again on the battlefield of Cremona, and this time the Danubians triumphed. As the Vitellians broke and ran, the Flavians massacred the fugitives and then looted Cremona. A second Vitellian force arriving from Gaul was beaten soon after, and a final attempt to block the snow-bound passes over the Apennines disintegrated as the Vitellian rank-and-file deserted. The 56-year-old emperor – whose ‘ruling vices were gluttony and cruelty’ according to Suetonius – made a final bid to save himself by cutting a deal with Vespasian’s brother, who was acting as the family’s representative in Rome. The deal collapsed when the Vitellian soldiery mutinied, stormed the Capitoline Hill, and lynched the Flavian leader. Antonius Primus’s Danubians then pressed on to Rome, where they destroyed the remaining Vitellians in fierce street-fighting. Vitellius himself was dragged into the streets half-dressed and bloated with food and drink (Suetonius again), and there pelted with dung and filth, tortured by little sword cuts, and finally murdered on the banks of the Tiber. Afterwards, while their senior officers set up a provisional government headed by Vespasian’s younger son Domitian, the Danubian soldiers celebrated by looting Rome. It was December. The empire now had its fourth emperor in a year – and Rome and the Italian towns had been twice plundered by the army that was supposed to defend them. Even now, though, the crisis was not over.
The splintering of the imperial elite and the distraction of the army in civil war had created openings for revolt from below. The discontent bubbling away under the oppressive Neronian regime now boiled over. The Jewish Revolution, a great rising of the rural poor, was entering its fifth year, and its greatest battle, the defence of Jerusalem, was yet to come. On the other side of the empire, in the Rhineland, there was mutiny in the regiments of Gaulish and German auxiliaries serving in the Roman army. The revolt was led by Julius Civilis, a Romanized Gaulish chieftain, and it tapped deep pools of bitterness in the frontier districts. Raising an army of mutineers and German tribesmen, and facing legionaries disoriented and demoralized by civil war, Civilis quickly established military dominance on the Lower Rhine, and soon had the major Roman base at Vetera under siege. His example, coupled with news from Rome – notably that the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter had been burnt down – inspired a wider revolt of Gaulish tribes led by other Romanized chieftains, namely Julius Classicus and Julius Tutor, supported by militant members of the druidic priesthood, who were predicting the conquest of Rome by the peoples of the North. The rebels now organized themselves into a proto-state – an ‘Empire of the Gauls’ – and such was the momentum of revolt in the frontier districts that many legionaries were won over (a high proportion of whom were no doubt of Gallic or German origin). If Rhineland soldiers could march on Rome and install an emperor, they could equally well stay at home and set up a rival empire there. Another secret was out: if emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome, so too could empires.
The Empire of the Gauls was, however, a fortress of sand. When Classicus and Tutor attempted to win over the rest of Gaul at a great congress of the tribes at Rheims, they failed; the rebel empire remained confined to the Rhineland. Too many top-ranking Gauls had become stakeholders in the imperial system; or they feared the mutinous soldiery and Germanic tribesmen who formed Civilis’s army; or, quite simply, they expected Vespasian to win. The rebel confederation itself began to break up. A rag-bag alliance of notables, mutineers and tribesmen, of Romans, Gauls and Germans, it was never politically coherent and only briefly militarily effective. At the mere approach of loyalist legions under the Flavian general Quintus Petilius Cerealis in the summer of AD 70, the rebel legionaries deserted back to the Roman side. The Gauls under Classicus and Tutor were then defeated in battle outside Trier. Shortly afterwards the Germans under Civilis were also defeated near Vetera. Finally, far to the north, in the marshes of the Rhine and Meuse estuaries, the Batavians, the last of the rebels to hold out, were crushed in their turn. By this time also, Jerusalem had fallen to the army of Titus, Vespasian’s elder son, who had assumed command in Palestine after his father’s elevation; the Jewish resistance was down to a handful of remote desert fortresses. Broadly, by the beginning of AD 71, the empire was again at peace. But Flavian victory had been hard-fought, and there was no guarantee the peace would hold. Moreover, even if the worst of the crisis was over, there were immediate problems with an estranged governing class, a disloyal army, unsettled frontiers, and an empty treasury. In the longer term, two years of civil war, army mutinies and popular revolt had taught sharp lessons: the empire of the Julio-Claudians had been overexploited and overextended; a new, more cautious, more measured policy was essential. The mission of the new Flavian dynasty – if it was to survive – was to restore equilibrium to a system out of kilter.
AD 71, however, was a year for celebration. There had been victory over Vitellians, Jewish rebels and the Gallic Empire; and, as in 30 BC, with a real yearning for peace and order, there was the basis for an alliance between the new dynasty – that of an upstart military dictator, after all – and Rome’s traditional elite. Triumphs were held for the capture of Jerusalem and the subjugation of the Batavians. The doors of the Temple of Janus were closed to symbolize the coming of peace. Major construction projects were launched – to rebuild the Capitolium, to inaugurate a new Temple of Peace, to sweep away Nero’s palace, and to provide Rome with a great stone amphitheatre. The Colosseum was rich in symbolism. It was built on the site of Nero’s ornamental lake: what had once been a monument to a tyrant’s luxuria was now a place of free public entertainment. The construction work meant contracts for Rome’s businessmen and workshops, while heavy labour was provided by slaves, many no doubt from Palestine and the Rhineland: the subjugated ‘other’ put to work in the service of the conquerors. The shows put on when the amphitheatre was complete – the first in AD 81 – were spectacles of power and empire: gladiator-slaves were decked out in the manner of Rome’s historic enemies.
The new regime was popular at home. Though he developed a reputation for meanness – as expenditure was cut back to restore government finances – Vespasian himself was straight-dealing, unpretentious and tolerant of opposition (‘I don’t kill dogs for barking’). Few, anyway, were given cause to oppose. The old nobility had been reduced to a rump; the great majority of senators now were aristocrats-of-office raised up by the Caesars. The ideological republicans had shrunk into a small sect. The more thoughtful among the aristocracy sought refuge in philosophy. But the various brands on offer amounted to little more than a retreat from attempts to change the world into obsessive individualism. The Cynics denounced all government as corrupt and urged withdrawal from public life. The Stoics maintained that forms of government were dictated by divine reason, and favoured public service and political conformity. The Epicureans considered the pursuit of pleasure to be the greatest good. Though admired by some (the ‘stiff upper lip’ taught in British public schools probably owes something to the Stoics), these philosophies were essentially vacuous. They offered a choice of lifestyles, not an analysis of the world; they coated powerlessness in a patina of virtue. Vespasian could safely let the dogs bark. Treason trials were few in his ten-year reign. The regime’s real anxiety was not the loyalty of aristocratic salons, but that of the military headquarters and army barracks.
Recalling its disloyalty under the Julio-Claudians, the Praetorian Guard was reduced in numbers and placed under the command of Vespasian’s son Titus, who thus became in effect the Flavian chief-of-police. It was Titus, too, in his role as censor for that year, who carried out a purge of the Senate in AD 73–74, reducing its numbers overall, while promoting party loyalists, among them many generals. The new intake included numerous Italians and provincials. A typical member of the Flavian aristocracy was Gnaeus Julius Agricola. He was born in the Roman colony of Forum Julii in southern Gaul in AD 40, and was educated at the local Greek city of Massilia (Marseille). The Julius in his name implies an ancestor enfranchised by Julius Caesar and probable Gaulish descent. Both his grandfathers had been equestrians in the imperial service, and his father had been made a senator. Agricola himself ascended what had, by his time, become a conventional career ladder for sons of senators. He first served a military apprenticeship in Britain as a legionary tribune, participating in the suppression of the Boudican Revolt in AD 60/61. He was then successively quaestor in Asia in AD 64, tribune of the plebs in Rome in AD 66, and praetor, again in Rome, in AD 68. This qualified him for a senior army command, and Vespasian appointed him legate of the Twentieth Legion in Britain in AD 70–73/74. This was followed by a senior civil post, that of Governor of Aquitania in Gaul, where he served from AD 74 to 77. Experienced, reliable and, above all, loyal to the regime, he now reached the summit of a senatorial career, holding a consulship in Rome in AD 77 or 78. His proconsular status then qualified him for the most senior and highly coveted posts of all. Among the choicest plums at the time were the governorships of Britain and Syria, since both conferred command of three or four legions, a strong possibility of military action, and thus a chance of military glory. Agricola served a double term as Governor of Britain (AD 78–84), where he directed some of the most aggressive and successful military campaigns of the Flavian era.
We owe our knowledge of Agricola’s career to the remarkable survival of a short account of his life written by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus. The Agricola throws much light on the inner workings of the Flavian empire. As well as promoting a ‘career open to talent’ within the existing imperial hierarchy – somewhat in contrast to the factionalism prevalent under the Julio-Claudians – the Flavian emperors promoted loyalty and stability in the provinces through a deliberate policy of Romanization designed to raise up native elites. ‘Certain domains,’ Tacitus tells us, ‘were presented to King Togidubnus, who maintained his unswerving loyalty right down to our own times – an example of the long-established Roman custom of employing even kings to make others slaves.’(7) An inscription found in Chichester in 1723 refers to this king. It tells us that a temple had been erected in honour of Neptune and Minerva, and for the well-being of the ‘divine house’ (the imperial family), under ‘the authority of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, great king of Britain’.(8) The king’s Roman-style name reveals that he received his citizenship under Claudius, but Tacitus implies that he ruled well into the Flavian period. The temple dedication referred to on the inscription makes clear his commitment to Romanization. Like pro-western ‘modernizers’ in today’s Third World, Togidubnus rejected native culture in favour of an imported Romanitas associated with prosperity, civilization and power. The archaeology of the three towns within what may have been Togidubnus’s kingdom – Chichester, Silchester and Winchester – has revealed early examples of classical town-planning and monumental architecture. At Fishbourne, moreover, a mile or so from Chichester, is the probable site of the king’s palace. At first, in the 60s AD, a substantial masonry villa was constructed, including a bath-house and an enclosed courtyard, the so-called ‘proto-palace’. Then, some time between AD 75 and 80, construction began of a new house on a vast scale, creating something without parallel anywhere west of Italy. Approached through parkland, a cavernous entrance-hall gave access across a formal courtyard garden to a grand audience chamber on the far side. Elsewhere in the four ranges of rooms around the courtyard were the private apartments of the king and his family, suites for relatives, guests and royal servants, and, of course, a bath-house. The whole complex was decorated with marble, mosaic and fresco. Classical sculpture, bronze pitchers, imported tableware and elegantly crafted dining couches no doubt completed the Mediterranean ambience. Covered colonnades, neat box-hedges and stone-lined drains did the same for the garden.
Romanization started at the top, but it trickled downwards, seeping through long-established networks of patronage to create a substantial pro-Roman bloc of privileged, powerful people in each locality. ‘Agricola,’ explained Tacitus, ‘had to deal with men who, because they lived in the country and were culturally backward, were inveterate warmongers. He wanted to accustom them to peace and leisure by providing delightful distractions … He gave personal encouragement and public assistance to the building of temples, piazzas and town-houses … he gave the sons of the aristocracy a liberal education … they became eager to speak Latin effectively … and the toga was everywhere to be seen … And so they were gradually led into the demoralising vices of porticoes, baths and grand dinner parties. The naive Britons described these things as “civilisation”, when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement.’(9) As it happens, part of a dedicatory inscription from one of those piazzas, found during excavations at Roman Verulamium (St Albans) in 1955, bears the name of the great governor. Only five small fragments were recovered, so the reconstruction is uncertain, but it probably records the opening of the new stone-built civic centre, comprising a grand assembly-room and council offices on one side, three ranges of private offices and shops on the others, and a central open courtyard fringed by covered, colonnaded walkways. Such buildings – along with others of the standard Roman urban package: temples, bath-houses, theatres, amphitheatres, official motels – symbolize the Romanization of local elites below the level of kings.
Tacitus’s real interest in the Agricola, however, was his father-in-law’s military achievements; it was these that he and his audience considered the proper measure of greatness. Each year of his governorship, we learn, Agricola pushed forward the conquest of Britain: in AD 78 the conquest of Wales was completed with the defeat of the principal northern tribe and the occupation of Anglesey; in AD 79 Brigantia (northern England) was overrun; in AD 80 the Roman army advanced across Scotland beyond the Central Lowlands as far as the River Tay; in AD 81 a series of forts was built along the Forth-Clyde line; in AD 82 south-west Scotland was conquered; and in AD 83–84 an advance up the east coast brought the Roman army to the Moray Firth and a great set-piece battle against the Caledonian tribes at Mons Graupius. The tribes were routed and left a third of their 30,000 men on the hillside where they had made their stand. It seemed to Tacitus that ‘Britain had been completely conquered’.
But it had not. No Caledonian delegation arrived to offer submission. The beaten warriors skulked in their Highland glens, but they did not submit. Agricola was forced to fall back on winter bases further south, the war unfinished. The following year he was replaced by a new governor with orders to remain on the defensive. A few years later the Romans withdrew from the far north. The unfinished earth-and-timber legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the Tay, lynchpin of the defences on the southeastern fringe of the Highlands, was dismantled and abandoned in the late 80s AD. Soon, all forts north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus had been evacuated, and the Romans held a new line across the Southern Uplands, anchored on Newstead, where excavation has shown an early Flavian fort overlain by a late Flavian one. Finally, even the Newstead line was given up, and the Romans fell back in c. AD 105 to a position along the ‘Stanegate’ on the Tyne-Solway line between modern Newcastle and Carlisle. Tacitus, knowing of the retreat when he came to write his father-in-law’s biography, was outraged: Britain may have been completely conquered, but it was then, he lamented, ‘immediately lost again’. What had gone wrong?
The historian’s explanation is wholly unconvincing: it was, he claimed, down to the jealousy of the new Flavian emperor Domitian, younger son of Vespasian. ‘He knew that there was nothing so dangerous for him as to have the name of a subject exalted above that of the emperor.’(10) This is nonsense. Agricola was an arch-loyalist. Imperial generals won victories on behalf of the emperor they served. Defeats and retreats were damaging to prestige. Tacitus’s account, anyway, is vitiated by transparent special pleading: when the emperor is reported heaping public praise on the returning general, we are informed, without a shred of supporting evidence, that he merely ‘pretended to be pleased when in fact he was deeply disturbed’.(11) In truth, the historical and archaeological evidence for Flavian frontier policy elsewhere shows that events in Britain conformed to a pattern.
The aim was not a return to the expansionism of the Late Republic. The Flavian emperors retrenched and consolidated. Vespasian, like Tiberius, was a veteran general when he came to the throne. Titus, his successor, was the conqueror of the Jews. Neither had anything to prove. Both understood that the empire was overextended, that further conquests could be justified only if they increased frontier security without imposing new demands on the army. Even so, the army was kept busy. Discipline was quickly restored by disbanding four or five disloyal legions and the mutinous Gallic and German auxiliary regiments, replacing them with new formations. The reformed army was kept close to the frontiers in an extended line; instead of large battle groups concentrated for offensive action, there were now numerous local packets deployed for defence. When offensives were launched, they were designed as localized initiatives either to suppress hostile border tribes or to create shorter, straighter, more defensible lines. Vespasian had only one less salutation as imperator than Augustus, but the objectives and scale of warfare were quite different. Roads and forts – the work of the spade – came to predominate over battle. Britain became a major theatre of offensive action only because the Boudican Revolt had effectively halted the Roman advance on an indefensible line: a long diagonal across lowland Britain from Exeter to Lincoln, with actively or potentially hostile hill-tribes to west and north. Vespasian therefore appointed a succession of fighting governors to continue the conquest of the island until the frontier rested on the sea, or at least ran on a short east-west line. On the German frontier, in the upper Rhine and Danube region, where the Flavians inherited a sharp re-entrant projecting into Roman territory, the line was pushed steadily forwards. Domitian initiated the main forward advance by attacking the Chatti on the middle Rhine in AD 83, an offensive designed to force this hostile tribe back from the frontier and establish a new Roman line east of the river. The re-entrant to the south was then gradually bitten off, shortening the Roman line and improving communications between the Rhine and Danube army groups.
Despite Flavian caution, however, the empire’s defences remained under pressure. A new threat had arisen on the middle Danube: King Decebalus and the Dacians. For a generation, from AD 85 to 106, the Dacians were to be Rome’s principal enemies. Their mountain kingdom – roughly corresponding to modern Rumania – was rich in gold, and the Dacian kings, under threat of Roman expansion in the Balkans, had welded the hill-tribes into a powerful centralized state. Their territory was difficult to penetrate and defended by numerous elaborate hill-forts. Their army was formed of barbarian warriors, fiercely independent, organized in tribal contingents, and wielding the horrendous falx, a two-handed cutting weapon comprising an inward-curving, razor-sharp blade fitted to a long wooden shaft (in later campaigns, Roman soldiers would wear metal arm-guards and helmets reinforced across the top with metal cross-bars as defence against the downward slicing blows of the falx). In AD 85 Decebalus led his army across the Danube into Moesia, killed the governor, overpowered various Roman garrisons, and plundered the province. Domitian ordered a punitive counter-offensive, but his invasion force was defeated in AD 86. It was two years before the Romans were ready for a more determined effort, but on this occasion they won a great victory at Tapae, a mountain pass deep inside Dacia which led into the heart of Decebalus’s kingdom. Before this victory could be consolidated, however, revolt broke out in the Roman rear and the army had to be recalled.
The generals’ plot of AD 89 was led by Lucius Antonius Saturninus, Governor of Upper Germany. It was probably a direct response to the regime’s perceived incompetence in the war against Decebalus. If so, the recent victory may have tipped the balance against the plotters, for most of the empire remained loyal, including the Governor of Lower Germany, whose forces had suppressed the revolt even before Domitian himself reached the scene. None the less, it had been the most serious conspiracy of the Flavian period, and Domitian, less secure on the throne than either his father or brother had been, cracked down on potential opponents. Domitian, as the younger son, had never expected to become emperor. He had lived his life in the shadow of his more accomplished father and elder brother. Vespasian had saved an empire. Titus had won a war. Domitian was merely his father’s son. The Flavian dynasty, moreover, was very new, just 12 years old, when the new emperor acceded. Domitian’s war against the Chatti had perhaps been fought – like Claudius’s war against Britain – in part to win the emperor his spurs. He celebrated victory by raising his soldiers’ pay by one third (from 225 to 300 denarii). He donned the dress of a triumphator (the victorious general in a triumph), and adopted the title Germanicus (Conqueror of Germany). He spent heavily throughout his reign on handouts, games and monuments. Yet there was another side to Domitian’s Caesarism: the triumphalism of Claudius was married to the megalomania of Caligula. September and October were renamed Germanicus and Domitianus. Poets called him Dominus et Deus (Master and God). At newly established games in honour of Jupiter, he presided in Greek dress wearing a crown. He constructed a massive imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, and another in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Politically insecure, the emperor strove to elevate himself above the body-politic. Fear turned Domitian into a demi-god.
It also made him dangerous and unpredictable; especially after the scare of Saturninus’s coup. Informers were encouraged. Philosophers and astrologers were banned from Rome. Various politicians, generals and intellectuals were charged with treason and executed. Then, as so often, the terror began to devour its own children. Some close to the emperor came under suspicion and were cut down – two Praetorian Guard commanders, a top imperial freedman, and the emperor’s own cousin, husband to his niece, who was charged with atheism. The terror was soon out of control. It began to consume the dominant court faction. A plot formed at the highest level in AD 96. It included senators, army officers, members of the imperial household staff, and the empress herself. The assassination was messy. One of the imperial staff, a man called Stephanus, who was facing a charge of embezzlement, offered to kill the emperor. He was admitted to Domitian’s bedroom on the pretext that he had uncovered a plot and possessed a list of names. He promptly stabbed the emperor in the groin as he was reading the document, but, having failed to kill him outright, was then grappled. Domitian might yet have survived, but others of the imperial household joined the fray, a junior officer, a freedman, the head-chamberlain, and one of the emperor’s personal gladiators. Overpowered and stabbed seven times, Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors, finally succumbed. An aged and colourless senator, Cocceius Nerva, figurehead leader of the plot, was hailed emperor on the same day.
After a period of civil war, the Flavian emperors had at first pursued an essentially moderate policy at home and on the frontiers, one designed to restore the empire’s equilibrium. The governing class, after a preliminary purge, was left unmolested. The talented were promoted and the ranks of the elite broadened. The Romanization of the provinces was pushed forwards. The mob was succoured and entertained. The soldiers were regularly paid and kept busy. There was peace, prosperity for some, security for the propertied. The mass social base of the imperial system was restored. Also, with mutineers and rebels rooted out, the army was returned to discipline. The frontiers were carefully guarded, and, where necessary, strengthened by limited campaigns to punish a hostile tribe or improve a badly placed line. But problems remained. Partly they were those of a ramshackle political structure in which successive dictators were raised up who lacked legitimacy. Domitian was such a man. ‘Contrary to his natural inclinations,’ explained Suetonius, ‘shortage of funds made him predatory and fear made him cruel.’(12) Domitian’s attempts to buy popularity with the soldiers and the mob drained his treasury of funds. The opposition he faced within the governing class made him stuff his court with favourites and impose a reign of terror on the city. These were the politics of a weak dictator; and the tensions they generated within the Roman imperial elite could be resolved only by Stephanus’s dagger. But underlying these parochial concerns – beyond the goldfish bowl of court and Senate – were tensions of far greater moment; tensions that could not be so easily resolved; tensions that would ultimately bring the empire down. These arose from a slowly shifting balance of forces between the rulers of the empire on one side, and the empire’s enemies, both within and beyond the frontiers, on the other.
Decebalus had revealed again the limits of imperial power. A ‘rogue state’ had challenged the masters of the world and survived. The prestige of the empire had been dented. Was the empire strong enough to batter the Dacians into submission? Did the Pax Romana still hold?