Titus Caesar Vespasianus ruled Rome for just two years from 79-81 CE after the death of his father Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian Dynasty. His younger brother and successor, Domitian, implied that Titus was just a historical footnote and that he was his father’s true successor. But Titus’s reign was eventful and his achievements considerable. He destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem ending the Roman-Jewish War, served as praetorian prefect and enforcer for his father, and inaugurated the Colosseum.
Titus also died with his reputation intact, with the generally critical imperial biographer Suetonius calling him “the delight and darling of the human race.”
Young Titus
Despite establishing Rome’s second imperial dynasty, the Flavians had relatively humble origins. An equestrian family from the Sabine region of Italy, they were able to rise in power and position due to the number of aristocratic families killed during the civil wars of the 1st century BCE and the prosecution of threats by the Julio-Claudians through treason trials in the 1st century CE. Vespasian, Titus’s father, and his brother Titus Flavius Sabinus were the first Flavians to reach senatorial rank.
But Vespasian did well for himself under the Julio-Claudian emperors Gaius, Claudius, and Nero. He began the cursus honorum, the standard succession of public offices, under Gaius, and was made consul in 51 CE under Claudius, under whom he also joined the invasion of Britain. He was also favored under Nero, being invited to accompany the emperor on his tour of Greece. However, he briefly fell out of favor after falling asleep during one of Nero’s musical performances.
Titus was born in Rome on December 30, 39 CE, the eldest of Vespasian’s three children. Titus’s sister Domitilla was born in 45 CE, and his brother Domitian in 51 CE. According to the Roman imperial biographer Suetonius, while Vespasian had a humble upbringing, his father’s favor at court meant that Titus was raised alongside Britannicus, the son of the emperor Claudius. This gave Titus a classical education. He was said to be an accomplished orator and poet in both Latin and Greek.
According to Suetonius, Titus was dining with Britannicus when the young prince drank the poison that Nero used to kill him. He also records that one of Claudius’s freedmen, Narcissus, called in a physiognomist to examine Britannicus’s features and prophesy his future. He was told that Britannicus would never succeed his father, whereas Titus, who was present, would achieve that distinction. Titus is also said to have posthumously awarded Britannicus honors such as statues in the palace when he came to power.
After his education, Titus followed the standard career for an aspiring Roman politician and general. He served as a military tribune in Germania between 57-59 CE and went to Britannia the following year. He would have been involved in the clean-up after the bloody revolt of Boudicca.
In 63 CE, Titus returned to Rome to focus on his political career. This included making advantageous marriages. First, he married Arrecina Tertulla, the daughter of a former praetorian prefect, Marcus Arrecinus Clemens. They had a daughter, Julia Flavia, who would survive into adulthood. Her mother would pass away after only a few years of marriage. Titus then married Marcia Furnilla, a member of a prestigious family, but her family was later tainted by association with the Pisonian Conspiracy against Nero in 65 CE. To avoid losing Nero’s favor, Titus divorced her. He does not seem to have had time to marry again before the Flavians rose to power.
Titus in the East
In 66 CE, the province of Judea revolted against Roman rule. The Judean client King Agrippa II, and his sister Berenice, fled the capital of Jerusalem for Galilee and called on the Romans for help. Initially, a nearby Syrian legion was sent in under the general Cestius Gallus. They suffered a humiliating defeat with 6,000 Roman troops slaughtered and their legionary standard seized. Nero decided to send a much bigger force.
Vespasian was probably chosen to lead this military effort because he had proven himself in Britannia, but also because of his humble origins. Surely, he did not have the aristocratic connections or support to use the military force under his command to try and seize power for himself?
Nevertheless, nepotism was alive and well in the Roman world. When Vespasian headed for Judea in late 66 or early 67 CE, he appointed his inexperienced son Titus, who was in his mid-20s, as one of his legionary commanders. While Vespasian went straight to Judea with the Vth and XIIth legions, Titus was sent via Alexandria, in Egypt, to collect the Xth legion and local allies.
Vespasian’s campaign was extremely successful and within a few months, he had taken most of Galilee. Titus was the most junior of his three military commanders and had relatively simple tasks. Furthermore, the one military exercise Titus was given full command of was an embarrassment.
According to Josephus, Vespasian sent Titus with a thousand horsemen to take Gischala, the last city in Galilee not to be conquered. This was considered an easy task as the city had no choice but to surrender. When Titus arrived, the city’s leader, John of Gischala, agreed to surrender but asked Titus to wait until the next day because it was the Sabbath. Titus agreed, and that night, John escaped unnoticed to Jerusalem with many of his followers.
When the city opened its gates to Titus the next day, he was angered to have been tricked and sent some of his men after John. While they did not capture the leader, they reportedly killed 6,000 women and children who had followed him. Josephus says that Titus was mortified.
Titus’s real skill seems to have been as a diplomat, and Vespasian used him for that purpose. He spent large parts of his father’s campaign as his representative to the governor of Syria, Gaius Lucius Mucianus, whose sphere of influence overlapped with Vespasian’s. Titus also spent time with the Judean client King Agrippa II and his sister Berenice. It was probably at this time that Titus started his love affair with the Eastern queen, who was ten years his senior.
Imperial Ambitions
Nero died in disgrace in June 68 CE and the Roman Senate recognized Galba as the new princeps, with the support of the Praetorian Guard. When news of this reached Vespasian, he seemed to accept the change in leadership but considered it prudent to ingratiate himself with the new emperor. He sent his diplomatic son Titus to Rome to pay his respects to Galba and confirm his orders.
But when Titus reached Corinth in Greece, he received the news that Galba had been killed by Otho, who had assumed power, and that the legions in Germania were supporting their general Vitellius as an alternative emperor. The sources suggest that Titus worried about being taken hostage, so he returned to the East.
But it seems that Titus may already have been considering a Flavian bid for power. The sources suggest that Vespasian trusted in omens and prophecies, something Titus would have known. On his return journey, Titus stopped at the Temple of Paphian Venus in Cyprus. He received favorable oracles there that he shared with his father. It was then Titus’s friend Mucianus who finally convinced Vespasian to make a bid for power in June of 69 CE. By the end of the year, Vespasian was the new emperor of the Roman Empire, and Titus was his presumed successor.
Siege of Jerusalem
When Vespasian went off to pursue his imperial ambitions, he did not forget his obligation to finish putting down the Judean revolt. Most of the province had been retaken and it only remained to take Jerusalem itself. The Jews were doing much of the work for the Romans as infighting was tearing the city apart. Vespasian left Titus in charge of finishing the Judean mission, but sent the governor of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander, to support the inexperienced general.
According to Josephus, who was a Jewish general who had defected to the Romans and was with Titus when he laid siege to Jerusalem in 70 CE, he himself tried to negotiate with the city to surrender. But in the end, the Romans had to besiege and storm the city.
The final conflict was bloody. When the Romans breached the outer walls, they crucified any Jewish deserters to intimidate the people who remained inside. When they breached the third wall, the Romans focused their attack on the Antonia Fortress, built by Herod the Great to protect the Second Temple of Jerusalem. They used the fort to launch their attack on the holy structure.
Titus apparently ordered the whole city destroyed so that no one living would remember the name Jerusalem. While there were certainly survivors, the temple was looted and destroyed. According to the Babylonian Talmud, Titus was having sex with a prostitute on the Torah scrolls while the temple was burning. While this is probably not true, it shows that Titus was considered to have completely disrespected the Jews when dealing the final blow.
Returning to Rome
With the destruction of Jerusalem, Titus was free to join his father in Rome. He had to delay in the East for a while because the siege ended in winter, and it was not good sailing weather. He traveled around the region celebrating his victory in Judea and his father’s victory in Rome. He held games at Caesarea Maritima and Berytus, and was presented with a victory crown by Vologases I of Parthia.
In Egypt, on his way to Alexandra, he stopped at Memphis, where he participated in an important ceremony to consecrate the sacred Apis bull. This required Titus to wear a diadem, something that was considered taboo in Rome where kingship was loathed. This led to rumors that Titus intended to rally the troops loyal to him in the East and usurp his own father.
This is probably not the case. Vespasian was not a young man and Titus was his clear heir. Titus had no reason to go against his father. It is more likely that he got carried away with the honors that were offered to him and may have been encouraged by people close to him, such as Princess Berenice. According to Suetonius, even as a young man, he enjoyed a certain level of decadence. Titus quickly realized his mistake and returned to Rome.
When he arrived in Rome in 71 CE, Titus celebrated a joint triumph with his father for the conquest of Judea. If the imagery on the surviving Arch of Titus in Rome is to be believed, Vespasian let Titus take the central role in the triumph. This was no doubt part of Vespasian’s plan to mark Titus as his clear successor. While he might seem like the obvious choice in retrospect, Titus was actually the first biological son to succeed his father as emperor in Roman history.
Other steps were also taken to make it clear that Titus was next in the line of succession. Both Titus and Domitian were given the name Caesar, like the princes of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty before them. In 71 CE Domitian was only 20 years old and had no military experience, so was not a rival to his brother. Titus also shared tribunician power with his father, as Tiberius had with Augustus. Titus shared several consulships with his father, held the censorship jointly with Vespasian in 73 CE, and acted as his father’s secretary, often representing him in the Senate.
Something else that Vespasian did to secure power for himself and his son was to make Titus the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, the only military force allowed in Rome. Many of the Julio-Claudian emperors were brought down by the Praetorians, so he needed someone he could trust as their leader.
Titus made a name for himself while prefect as a ruthless enforcer who would do Vespasian’s “dirty work” for him, leaving the new emperor unsullied. He earned a reputation for executing suspected traitors on the spot without the need for hard evidence. Titus was described as arrogant and tyrannical and as a skilled forger, suggesting that he may have set people up when needed.
In 75 CE, Berenice joined the unmarried Titus in Rome and stayed in the palace with him as a de facto wife. This upset the Romans, who did not trust eastern queens after seeing the influence that Cleopatra exercised over Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Under immense public pressure, Titus sent her away.
Another Nero
When Vespasian died of natural causes in June 79 CE, Titus was immediately named as the new emperor of Rome. Nevertheless, it took Titus six months to have the Senate confirm Vespasian’s deification. This probably reflects a desire to cut back on some of the decadence of the Julio-Claudian Period rather than any disrespect for Vespasian.
Titus did not have a good reputation when he came to power. He was known for his tyrannical stint as a praetorian prefect, was associated with an eastern queen, and had a talent for music and poetry that reminded the people of Nero. Many feared that he would be another problematic princeps. But Titus quickly proved them wrong.
One of his first acts was to call an end to treason trials and to change the law so that men could no longer be tried for treason for simply insulting the emperor or imperial family. This seems like quite a turnaround considering his ruthless behavior under Vespasian. But, according to Cassius Dio, Titus claimed not to be worried about insults for himself because he was above reproach. He also reportedly said that if the dead emperors were truly divine, they could defend themselves. According to Roman historians, no senators were put to death during his reign.
Major Achievements
Only a few months after he came to power, the volcano of Mount Vesuvius erupted and decimated much of the Bay of Naples. Most famously, Pompeii and Herculaneum were covered by volcanic lava and frozen in time. Titus proved himself generous. He sent two ex-consuls to the region to manage the disaster and used imperial funds to help the victims. When the volcano erupted again in early 80 CE, Titus himself traveled to the area.
While Titus was out of the city, a terrible fire that burned for three days and three nights broke out in Rome. Unlike the devastating fire under Nero which destroyed many common homes, it was largely Rome’s great monuments that were destroyed including the Pantheon of Agrippa, the Temple of Jupiter, the Theatre of Pompey, and Saepta Julia. Again, Titus spent generously from imperial coffers to restore the city, and the destruction gave his successor Domitian a chance to rebuild much of Rome.
According to his propaganda, Titus focused on building things for the public, rather than to aggrandize himself and his family as Nero had done. In doing this, he was probably following the example of his father. For example, Titus turned a portion of Nero’s famously decadent golden palace into public baths, known as the Baths of Titus. These opened in 80 CE at the same time as the Colosseum, the grand stadium begun by Vespasian.
While the Colosseum was a gift to the people of Rome, it was also a way to control them. Around 20 years after the reign of Titus, the Roman satirist Juvenal would coin the phrase panem et circenses or “bread and circuses,” suggesting that to control the Roman people you needed to keep them fed and entertained. Titus seemed to understand that, inaugurating the Colosseum with 100 days of extravagant games including gladiatorial combats, exotic imported animals, naval battles that required flooding the Colosseum, and chariot racing. Reportedly, wooden balls with prizes written on them were dropped into the arena. Lucky recipients could exchange the balls for prizes such as gold or slaves.
Titus resumed expansion of the Roman empire, sending Gnaeus Julius Agricola to Britain, where the general started expanding Roman territory north. This campaign is recounted in detail by the contemporary Roman historian and son-in-law of Agricola, Tacitus.
Untimely Demise
While many feared the kind of emperor that Titus would be when he came to power, in the years following his death, he gained a reputation as one of Rome’s best emperors. That is not to say that his position was never challenged. At some point in his reign, Terentius Maximus led a rebellion against Titus, claiming to be Nero. In the years following Nero’s death, he remained popular in the East, and several false Neros emerged to challenge Flavian power. But Titus dealt with them quickly and decisively.
Less decisive were his dealings with his brother Domitian. The Roman historians claim that Domitian also conspired against his brother to take power for himself, but that Titus refused to execute or even exile him. There is little evidence to support this charge, and this conspiracy was probably invented due to Domitian’s later unpopularity. The sources say that Titus took steps to groom Domitian as his successor, as Vespasian had for him.
However, there is also no doubt that Domitian wanted more, especially the opportunity to prove himself in the military, and Titus told him to be patient. Nevertheless, throughout Titus’s reign, Domitian was the presumed heir. Titus even suggested that Domitian marry his daughter Julia to further secure the succession, but the young prince refused because of his desire to marry Domitia Longina.
Titus never remarried or tried for a son. When Berenice returned to Rome at the start of his reign, he sent her away again. Part of the reason Titus did not remarry could have been failing health. Titus knew that he was unwell when he left Rome and headed to his family’s Sabine home following the close of the Colosseum games. He died there on the 13th of September 81 CE.
Suetonius and Cassius Dio say that he died of natural causes, though Philostratus accused Domitian of murdering him. The Jewish tradition suggests that he was slowly tortured and killed by God in revenge for what he did in Jerusalem. While Domitian probably did not kill his brother, he wasted no time presenting himself to the Praetorians and the Senate to be made emperor.
Domitian immediately secured the deification of his brother, and he joined his father among the deified emperors as Divus Titus. While the sources suggest that Domitian had no love for his brother, he did dedicate several temples and monuments to him, ensuring his legacy.
Domitian also ensured Titus’s legacy in another way. Domitian was known for his autocratic rule, which made him unpopular with the Senate. When Domitian was killed by a conspiracy, rather than being deified, he underwent damnatio memoriae, and his name and image were struck from most public buildings. Rome’s historians also took aim at Domitian, accusing him of many personal failings and crimes, just as they had with Nero before him. The last ruler of one dynasty must suffer posthumously to justify the rise of the next dynasty.
In many ways, this did Titus a favor, as authors could compare Domitian unfavorably with his noble brother. We will never know if he deserved to be considered the darling of the Roman people, or if he just died before he could become vilified like Tiberius and Claudius before him.
