State of the Empire Address: Rome’s delusional, destructive, insecure heir
I am unapologetically anti-Trump, anti-bigotry, anti-sexism, and anti-foul behaviour and foul attitudes from both elected officials and citizenry, and do not have respect for the choice of supporting this person’s points of view. If this stance concerns you, enough to keep you away from reading the comic: I’m not going to be indulging in much discussion of this on this site beyond this post, and would prefer that people not do so in the comments, either. (Policy subject to change at a future date.) I would, though, be open to discussion of ancient Rome and its survival, around the time of this story, of an assortment of vile rulers and frankly crazy-pants behaviour.
Domitian was always going to be portrayed as…Domitian. If you see any parallels, just know that his character–delusional, narcissistic, selfish, massively insecure, and destructive–and his story arcs within Felix’s own story were already planned out.
I think the obvious difference is that I think Domitian’s “delusional” nature was, oddly, sincere; he (or, at least, the “he” that his Senatorial rivals have left us an image of…) was a profoundly self-absorbed man – indeed, his literary portrayal suggests a borderline sociopath – who genuinely believed his own hype. I don’t think he was pretending to be “devout”. I think he genuinely WAS…in his own way. But I think he was the sort of person who said or did something and, because he said or did it, knew it to be good and right.
(By way of comparison I think a certain modern self-absorbed would-be autocrat is fundamentally a con man. Occasionally he con’s himself, too, but in his case the delusions aren’t actual delusions; they’re just patter to cover shiking the rubes…)
And, particularly in a pre-industrial society, it probably wasn’t that difficult to survive a vicious or delusional or otherwise-dangerous ruler. If you were physically removed from his presence the likelihood that he’d even notice you, much less destroy you in a fit of rage, was pretty small…
The senatorial class, as well as the functionaries of the imperial bureaucracy, OTOH, were right up against it. Which kind of explains why most of the reigns that were arbitrarily shortened by violence were terminated as Domitian’s was, by internal coups rather than, as in the Yer of Four Emperors, by an external coup…
I would agree. Good assessment.
If Domitian tells the populace Minerva is on his side, it would be because he believed it. He too had a thirst for revenge and inflicting pain and ruin; but on the other hand, I don’t recall that he ever tried to drum up and set loose a violent mob of plebeians.
Another stark personality difference is his apparent lifelong devotion to his wife, even with its dramatic ups and downs, from teenage years to the very end (whatever her role in that ending was). Like his father and brother I surmise he appreciated a smart, capable partner. The “affairs” he had were within societal norms, not acts of aggression or “cheating.” Within societal norms of the time–different standard for a woman. He also just doesn’t appear to have been stupid, and he had some creative leanings.
Yegads, Domitian is starting to sound good in comparison. I think you’re right that he wouldn’t have seemed so bad from far away, though terrifying if you were within striking distance. I have to remember that he also killed people to prove a minor point; that he had a cruel streak wider than the Tiber; and that he sank into an abyss of paranoia with bloody results all around.
He was a bloody-minded SOB – he hunted down and killed Domitia Longina’s ex at one point. And he a brutal man in a brutal society; for all that we like Felix and Mus and Iusta I think we moderns would have been pretty appalled at the level of casual brutality in imperial Rome. Slavery, alone, made for some pretty ugly things…
(speaking of “different standards for a woman” I read somewhere that one of the basic differences between our time and the Romans was the availability of female slaves to citizen men; basically, many if not most Roman men were introduced to sex that was fundamentally a form of rape. Hopefully the relationship between household slaves and their masters wasn’t completely anonymous, and hopefully the boys learned more than they started with…but I suspect that a lot of Roman husbands came to their wedding nights with the basic concept of lovemaking as “find somewhere to stick it and stick it”. Yike!)
And much as I enjoy the Emperor Palpatine Domitian in SPQR-B I’m not sure that I’d be all THAT hard on the IRL Domitian. Brian Jones, in his 1992 work on Domitian, notes that while Domitian has a rep for bloodyhandedness he’s known to have executed about 20-odd senators. Dear old “I, Claudius”, on the other hand, had 35 senators and something like 300 equestrians shortened by a head but was still deified by the Senate after his death.
I think a big part of our view of Domitian comes from Suetonius, who never found a salacious or shocking tale he didn’t like.
The fun part of historical fiction, though, is the fiction, so I’m enjoying your version as much as anything. Thanks for the fine work..!
I do have to say, I don’t aim to write an exaggerated version of historical people–it’s not my way. There’s of course some fluidity when the historical record is incomplete and biased. But I hope readers don’t feel the story aims to create more of a villain than the scholarly approach would allow, only for the sake of dramatic plot.
I don’t find Domitian apologist biographers fully convincing. He may not have been Rome’s greatest monster by far, but his disordered personality is clear, and even if he’s not relatively as bad, our mostly-fictional heroes would still be relatively dead if either Titus or Domitian cared to make that happen….
There are some unsavoury aspects of Roman life I’ve been hesitant to show. I’ve pushed some aspects back to “so subtle no one could know it’s there but me.” If Felix acted like your average man of his era, it might be hard, I worry, for some readers to respect and connect with him. As for brutal, well, Felix did pitch someone off a roof and try to kill another person by smashing the man’s face into a table; he grew tired of being Titus’s hit man, but not because of moral qualms. But I can build in life circumstances to make him kinder than normal with female slaves and someone who sees even slave children as needing to be protected. Not fully enlightened, but a little aware. Weirdo.
It’s complicated. I have a point, but I’m tired and in low spirits.
Seriously, though: Felix will kill you then go have a sausage snack and some wine and a nice nap. But only if, you know, you need killing. Not because he felt slighted, paranoid, or bored.
I’m glad you have softened the hard edges of Roman life, not so much because I want it to have been that way but because I think that stories need to be about people, thoughts, and acts, and it would be difficult for us to look past the jarring anachronisms of Roman society that would have been part and parcel of “normal” life in the time.
For us the idea of Felix and Iusta enjoying a day at the Games, discussing favorite gladiators and death-fights would be horrifying…whereas to them it would have been no different from a modern Felix and Iusta going to a football game and arguing over their favorite players. “Autre pays, autre mors”…but it would be nearly impossible for us to see past the brutality and see them, not as brutal themselves but in context of their society.
As far as his lethality goes, well, Felix was a professional soldier is a deadly efficient army that fought and killed with hand tools. I would be shocked if he WASN’T a stone killer when he needed to be; he’d not have survived the Jewish War (since I assume that’s where he fought) if he wasn’t.
No, for me what makes him a decent man is not that he knows how to kill, but that he knows when NOT to.
I have such a deep, deep disgust of, for example, bear baiting, that I had to make it clear on Sweetums’ first appearance that it was a “dancing animals” show, not an animal fight. But I didn’t want to wash the whole reality away, so Mus (I think it’s him–have to check!) makes a comment that implies he doesn’t actually find bear fights wrong.
Felix mayhap isn’t an anomaly in his feelings about that type of brutal “reality show,” but at the time would have had his fill of non-useful brutality for a little while.
Of course, the Coliseum will be opening soon.
Oh, and speaking of Domitian and the plebians…one of the things that Suetonius says about him is that he treated the senators and his own family with as “little respect” as he did everyday citizens. And, of course, they hated the hell out of that and liked him less, not more, for his egalitarian ways…
But does he posit that Domitian considered the common citizens his equal? Or everyone as equally beneath him?
It sounds like it was more a case of his suspicion and distrust both of the senatorial classes and his own family. Supposedly he was a distant man and not close to/well-liked by his own gens, which I understand was a real oddity in nepotistic Roman society.
He seems to have liked working with “self-made” people from the equestrian order, who he would elevate into positions he tossed relatives and senatorial-class officeholders out of.
So not so much either truly “egalitarian” or contemptuous of everyone else but an unsentimental sort of man who viewed people as either useful or in the way and preferred the former…
That would support his depiction in SPQR Blues as regards his use of Felix. And abrupt discarding of Felix.
The suspicious side seems to have consistently gotten the better of him in terms of wanting to get people permanently out of the way.
Ah, but this all happened long ago, on a peninsula far, far, away. Right?
My history is shaky, I know. But I often wonder if there was a day when it hit the more astute citizens of Rome, say sometime in the fourth century, that the future was all downhill. And how they felt about it.
I believe we find graffiti of the time, in Greek and Latin, saying, “Gone To Canada.”
Maybe there were doomsdayers who saw it and enjoyed it all.
In all seriousness, I would think, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, people kept muddling along thinking the situation (chaos, plague, villains) could be managed, while opportunists jockeyed for power and took whatever they could gain, until the walls caught fire.
Here’s Juvenal in about 100CE, talking about #NotMYRome:
“What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie; if a book is bad, I cannot praise it, and beg for a copy; I am ignorant of the movements of the stars; I cannot, and will not, promise to a man his father’s death; I have never examined the entrails of a frog; I must leave it to others to carry to a bride the presents and messages of a paramour. No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff: I am treated as a maimed and useless trunk that has lost the power of its hands. What man wins favour nowadays unless he be an accomplice—-one whose soul seethes and burns with secrets that must never be disclosed? No one who has imparted to you an innocent secret thinks he owes you anything, or will ever bestow on you a favour; the man whom Verres loves is the man who can impeach Verres at any moment that he chooses.”
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_03.htm
no arguments here.
Thanks.
By the way, what was going to be a quick “thanks” turned into a longer screed, so I separate it out here:
I know that a line of five decent, hard-working emperors are coming eventually to Rome, but it’s hard right now to tell the story of what leads beforehand to the triumph of the wicked and sadistic.
The comment thread up top notwithstanding, my stance is, don’t become convinced that Domitian wasn’t so bad or that it doesn’t matter as much because his most direct wrath, revenge urges, and sadism (mental as well as physical) fell on the people in closest contact with him, not the whole population. (Except when he was expelling certain segments of the population and yeah other emperors did similar.) His own family saw he was unfit. Being benevolent to some, having select courtier friends, doesn’t erase being devastation to others because of his own behaviour and eventual psychological struggles.
On the other hand, maybe his contrariness and Felix’s contrariness will combine to make them best buddies again.
I think more along the lines of his bloodymindedness will make him dangerous to Felix (and people close to Felix) and Felix will respond with the careful violence that made him a good soldier.
The question at that point is to what degree will Domitian be willing to lose tools he values to get his way/get his revenge versus his practicality in having a whole empire to run and needing those people elsewhere. Fortunately for Felix, Iusta & Co. at this point I think Domitian could still be checked by rationality. But they’d better head for the hustings after that; he had a long memory and his viciousness is supposed to have increased with age…
As a fellow Classicist, I find your portrayal of Domitian far more nuanced than the biographers we have left did, which is of course your intention, since the portrait of Domitian we have isn’t really one of a fully realised human being. That being said, I don’t rightly recall any stories of his popularity post mortem, or imposters, such as when Nero died (my knowledge of the Flavians is shaky, and influenced by Lindsay Davis).
Thank you!
That’s an excellent point–a Nero pretender was popular enough to get pretty far in his efforts, but for Domitian…?
A lot could have contributed to why people would want Nero to come back and save them all, but nonetheless…
Domitian’s secret burial then clandestine re-interment would have set up enough doubt to allow for a pretender, too.
Lindsey Davis is a pretty nice thing to be influenced by! I’m way behind on reading her new series, though.
I suspect that as much as anything the lack of a Domitian-imposter had to do with the popularity of Nerva and Trajan and the circumstances of Nero’s death as anything else.
The end of the Julio-Claudians brought on an interregnum when not only were false Neros popping up but Rome went through four emperors in twelve months or so. Throw in that supposedly Nero’s death was not well reported and his burial was hurried and without the usual ceremony. And that the Flavians were a very different sort than their predecessors (that is, they were censorious towards the sort of freedoms that the plebs had enjoyed under the late Julio-Claudians…) and you have a pretty good soil for those pretenders to sprout from…
Domitian wasn’t particularly popular, especially late in his reign, his successors were, and the Flavii Sabini gens was pretty much wiped out after Domitian…well, there wasn’t much of a reason for anyone to dress up like Domitian and have a go for the curule chair, now, was there..?
I live under a Domitian-like dictatorship. Since I am a small fry nothing happens to me but if I step out of the line, I can expect a visit at midnight from SWAT with an arrest warrant and be fined thousands if not millions of dollars and sentenced to years in prison.
No joke and no hyperbole. It happens.
I have a friend who is publicly critic of the government and is heavily under surveillance.
My Domitian, acts well … like Domitian. He cannot take disagreements. He does not tolerates jokes on his persona. If somebody gives him the finger, he has that person arrested, fined and incarcerated. Unless they crawl on the floor and ask for forgiveness, in which case he regally does so. But the fine must be paid.
Nobody can take photos of him. EVER!! All he does is state secret. Even if it is a stroll in the park. And his praetorians will stop you and force you to give them your phone. They will delete everything in the phone and then return it to you without battery and any memory card it may have.
Again, no hyperbole. It has happened.
The thing is that my Domitian, when he was a privatus, was a failure. He is highly educated but could never get a high paying job. In the end he was just a badly paid nontenured university teacher. His brother had a successful company and helped him make ends meet when his salary was insufficient. His wife had to work as a high-school teacher so their children could get discounts in their tuition.
And he always was in politics. Until the day he was named minister and later some people supported his presidential bid and the rest is history. The moment he was invested his transformation into Domitian began.
Of course he is corrupt and it is a given that he has stolen large parts of, my country’s treasury.
So, in the end. My take is that Domitian suffered the same malady as my Domitian. He was a failure. His family had to help him out but at the same time did not trust him to be able to fend for himself. He was highly educated and truly believed that he knew how things should be done. He could not take criticism very well. And his critics became his enemies. I do remember that Felix’s falling out with Domitian had to do with their disagreement on how to treat slaves. Domitian held grudges and he hates that Felix managed to escape the punishment he had ready for him.
I believe that both Felix and Mus are in great danger. Because for Domitian, Mus is a mean to an end: to make Felix pay for not being dead. Domitian wants to destroy Felix before killing him. It is that part of his personality that earned him his damniato memoriae. Because he was not only content with killing people, other emperors did, but with destroying everything about them.
He was a competent administrator but very likely it was due to having really good subordinates than to his own skills.
He probably ruled for a long time thanks to his paranoia until his paranoia became a reality and he was assassinated.
As for Felix and family, I do believe that the only way that they can escape Domitian’s wrath is only by a certain goddess intervening and telling Domitian to stop. Probably Domitian does remember that Felix claims that Venus had helped him in the past. Of course he prefers to believe that it was Minerva. I think that we can count that he probably will be very wary of harming somebody with such a powerful friend. Specially since he escaped not only his guards, the people sent to detain him but Vesubius itself.
Note: Sorry for any typo in the text.
Thank you for this comment. Don’t worry about any typos; it was all clear.
(I am just starting out my day, but I may have more of a reply later.)