Imperium Romani

The Flavian Dynasty: Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian

Emperors & Dynasties · 8 min read

The story of the three Flavian emperors who rebuilt Rome after the chaos of 69 CE — the founder Vespasian, his conquering son Titus, and the tyrant Domitian.

When the last Julio-Claudian emperor died by his own hand in June 68 CE, the Roman world spent the next eighteen months tearing itself apart. Four generals in succession claimed the purple, and the empire was fought over from the Rhine to the Euphrates before a stout, sixty-year-old soldier named Vespasian marched into Alexandria and was proclaimed emperor by his legions. With him began the Flavian dynasty, a new imperial family that ruled Rome for twenty-seven years, from 69 to 96 CE, and gave the Roman Empire some of its most iconic monuments. For a broader survey of all the emperors, see Roman Emperors.

The Flavians were not aristocrats. Vespasian came from an equestrian family of Sabine origin, and his family name — Flavius — had been a common Italian name without particular distinction. The dynasty’s claim to legitimacy rested on the army and on a single devastating event: the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, an event commemorated on the Arch of Titus that still stands at the edge of the Roman Forum.

Vespasian: The Founder (69 – 79 CE)

Vespasian (born Titus Flavius Vespasianus, 9 – 79 CE) was sixty years old when he became emperor. He had been a successful general under Claudius and Nero, had crushed the revolt in Roman Britain in 60 CE, and had spent two years in the east preparing to besiege Jerusalem when the war of succession broke out. His troops in Egypt and Judaea declared for him in July 69 CE, and within six months his general Antonius Primus had won the decisive Second Battle of Bedriacum in northern Italy, securing the throne.

Vespasian’s reign was a study in fiscal prudence. He found the empire bankrupt after the extravagance of Nero and the costs of the civil war, and he set about raising money with a thoroughness that shocked the senatorial class. He taxed everything in sight — including, according to Suetonius, the public urinals, whose contents were sold to fullers for cleaning wool. The joke that the emperor smelled of money stuck with him for centuries.

But the money was put to good use. Vespasian rebuilt the Capitoline Temple in Rome, which had been destroyed in the civil war, and began the construction of the great amphitheater that would later bear his family name. He reformed the army, expanding the legionary establishment and creating new legions such as II Adiutrix, II Augusta, and IV Flavia. He sent his son Titus to finish the war in Judaea and awarded him a joint consulship and a shared tribunican power as a sign that he was the designated heir.

The most ambitious project of Vespasian’s reign was the Colosseum. He began it in 70 or 72 CE on the site of the drained lake of Nero’s Golden House, and he is said to have financed it with the spoils of the Jerusalem temple itself. By the time of his death the foundations and the first stories of the giant amphitheater were up, and the work was completed under his son. Vespasian was also the emperor who first appointed a curator of the water supply, recognizing that Rome’s aqueducts needed an official of high rank to maintain them. He died in June 79 CE, of a fever contracted during a trip to Campania. According to Suetonius, his last words were a joke: “Alas, I think I am becoming a god.”

Titus: The Conqueror (79 – 81 CE)

Titus (Titus Flavius Vespasianus, 39 – 81 CE) was thirty-nine when he became emperor and had been his father’s unofficial second in command for years. He was a more complex figure than his father, having spent his young adulthood as a playboy in the court of Nero. He was popular with the Roman people, however, and his short reign was marked by a series of disasters that he handled with remarkable calm.

In August 79 CE, only months after he became emperor, the volcano Vesuvius erupted in a series of catastrophic explosions. The towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis were buried under meters of ash and pumice, and an estimated two thousand inhabitants perished. Titus appointed two former consuls to coordinate the relief effort, spent the imperial treasury on the victims, and even sold his own household furniture to raise more money. Pliny the Younger, whose uncle Pliny the Elder died attempting to rescue friends by ship from the eruption, left us a vivid eyewitness account.

A year later, in 80 CE, a great fire destroyed much of Rome, and the following year, in 81 CE, an outbreak of plague killed thousands. Despite all this, Titus completed his father’s great project, the Colosseum, and inaugurated it in 80 CE with one hundred days of games. The biographer Suetonius, who detested Titus, recorded that he was at heart as cruel as his father was generous, and he may have had his brother Domitian poisoned. The Roman people loved him regardless, and on his death they mourned him with a single phrase: Amor ac deliciae generis humani — “the love and delight of the human race.”

Titus’s other great achievement was the conquest of Judaea. The Jewish revolt had begun in 66 CE and had been ongoing through the civil war of 69 CE. In 70 CE, after a brutal siege, Titus’s legions breached the walls of Jerusalem, looted and destroyed the Temple of Herod, and killed or enslaved the surviving population. The Arch of Titus, still standing at the entrance to the Roman Forum, depicts Roman soldiers carrying the great seven-branched Menorah and other temple treasures in triumph. The menorah has been a Jewish symbol of exile ever since.

Titus died in September 81 CE, probably of fever, after only two years on the throne. He was forty-one.

Domitian: The Tyrant (81 – 96 CE)

Domitian (Titus Flavius Domitianus, 51 – 96 CE) was the second son of Vespasian and the brother of Titus. He had spent the years of his father’s and brother’s reigns in the uneasy position of a designated heir who was not allowed to do anything, and he came to the throne bitter and self-conscious. He was an able administrator and a serious patron of literature and the arts, but he governed as a tyrant and was assassinated in a palace conspiracy in 96 CE.

Domitian’s reign can be divided into two halves. In the first half, until about 93 CE, he was an energetic and successful emperor. He completed the Colosseum and its underground hypogeum, finished the Temple of Vespasian and Titus on the Roman Forum, and built a new stadium on the Campus Martius. He reformed the grain dole, expanded the network of roads across the empire, and campaigned successfully against the Chatti in Germany and the Decebalus in Dacia. He took the title Germanicus and held fifteen imperial salutations.

In the second half, however, his rule degenerated into what the Senate remembered as a reign of terror. He was said to spend hours alone in his study catching flies and stabbing them with a stylus. He demanded to be addressed as dominus et deus, “master and god.” He executed senators on charges of treason in order to seize their property, including his cousin Flavius Clemens and the famous general Agricola, who had conquered much of Scotland. He crushed a serious revolt in Germany in 89 CE led by the governor Antonius Saturninus.

Domitian’s last years were marked by a series of food shortages in Rome, a difficult war on the Danube, and the emperor’s increasing paranoia. By 96 CE there were at least four conspiracies against him, organized by senators and palace officials. On 18 September 96 CE, the chamberlain Stephanus stabbed him in the groin while he was reading a document he had been handed, and the emperor died of his wound after a struggle of several hours. He was forty-four and had ruled for fifteen years, longer than either his father or his brother.

The Senate, which detested Domitian, voted to have his name damnatio memoriae — formally erased from the records — and the soldiers of the Praetorian Guard raised a rag on a lance as the new imperial standard. The Roman Senate, for the first time in nearly a century, would be the body to choose the next emperor. It picked an elderly, childless senator named Nerva, beginning the great adoptive succession of the Five Good Emperors.

The Flavian Legacy

The Flavians ruled for less than three decades, but they left a permanent mark on Rome. The Colosseum has been the symbol of the city for two thousand years. The Arch of Titus is still a focus of Jewish memory. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE was the event that began the long Jewish diaspora. The Flavians were the dynasty that transformed Nero’s extravagant Domus Aurea into public space, building over the artificial lake the world’s largest amphitheater, and they were the dynasty that built the great imperial infrastructure of roads, aqueducts, and frontiers that would outlast them.

The Flavians were also the dynasty that demonstrated, for the first time clearly, that the Roman Empire did not need an emperor of the old aristocratic Julian blood. Vespasian’s family was equestrian and Sabine, and he was chosen by his troops. From his reign onward, any general who controlled enough legions could become emperor. That lesson, as the Crisis of the Third Century would show two centuries later, was as dangerous as it was liberating.