Titus

Titus was born in Rome on December 30 of 39 CE according to Suetonius, though some later sources place the birth in 41 CE. His father was Vespasian, then a rising officer from the Sabine town of Reate, and his mother was Domitilla the Elder ^[1]. The family belonged to the equestrian order rather than the old senatorial aristocracy, and Suetonius records that Titus spent part of his boyhood in a cramped house near the Septizonium, a modest start for a future emperor ^[1].

His education, by contrast, was anything but modest. Titus was raised at the imperial court alongside Britannicus, the son of the emperor Claudius, and the two boys shared tutors and meals. Ancient tradition holds that Titus was dining beside Britannicus in 55 CE when the young prince drank the poison arranged by Nero's circle, and that Titus tasted the same cup and fell seriously ill ^[2]. Whatever the truth of that story, the connection to Claudius's household gave the Flavian family visibility it would not otherwise have enjoyed.

Contemporaries described the young Titus as gifted to an unusual degree. He composed poetry in Greek and Latin, sang, played the lyre, and could reportedly take shorthand fast enough to compete with professional scribes ^[1]. He was also strong, trained in arms, and comfortable on horseback, a combination that suited him for the military track his father had followed.

Who was Titus before the purple? First, a soldier. He served as a military tribune in Germany and Britain around 61 CE, then returned to Rome to practice law, marry, and hold the quaestorship ^[3]. His first wife, Arrecina Tertulla, died young; his second, Marcia Furnilla, came from a family entangled in opposition to Nero, and Titus divorced her after the failed Pisonian conspiracy of 65 CE, a prudent separation in dangerous times ^[3].

The decisive turn came in 66 CE, when Nero sent Vespasian to crush the great Jewish revolt in Judaea. Titus went with him in command of the Fifteenth Legion Apollinaris and proved himself at the sieges of Japha, Tarichaea, and Gamala ^[4]. The historian Josephus, who fought against the Romans before surrendering and joining their side, portrays Titus as personally brave to the point of recklessness, riding into skirmishes ahead of his bodyguard ^[4].

Nero's suicide in 68 CE threw the empire into the chaos remembered as the Year of the Four Emperors. Vespasian's bid for the throne in 69 CE depended on negotiation as much as force, and Titus acted as his father's diplomat, shuttling between the legions of Judaea and the governor of Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, to cement the alliance that carried Vespasian to power ^[3]. When Vespasian left the East to claim Rome, he handed his son the war in Judaea and, with it, the chance to finish the conquest in his own name.

In the spring of 70 CE Titus marched on Jerusalem with four legions and encircled a city swollen with refugees and divided among rival rebel factions. The siege lasted roughly five months and grew steadily more brutal: Roman earthworks, famine inside the walls, and mass crucifixions of those caught trying to escape ^[4]. Josephus, present in the Roman camp, left the fullest surviving account, though his numbers and his efforts to shield Titus from blame are treated with caution by modern historians ^[4].

In August of 70 CE the Romans stormed the Temple Mount and the Second Temple burned. Josephus claimed Titus tried to save the sanctuary and that soldiers fired it against orders; other ancient sources, and many modern scholars, suspect the destruction was deliberate policy ^[5]. Either way, the loss of the Temple reshaped Judaism permanently, ending the sacrificial cult and beginning the rabbinic tradition that grew in its place.

Titus returned to Rome in 71 CE to celebrate a joint triumph with his father. The procession displayed treasures from the Temple, including the golden menorah, a scene later carved on the Arch of Titus that still spans the Via Sacra in Rome ^[5]. From that year he served openly as Vespasian's partner in power, holding seven consulships, sharing the tribunician power, and running the praetorian guard, where his willingness to eliminate suspected conspirators earned him a reputation for ruthlessness that alarmed the Senate ^[1].

Vespasian died in June 79 CE and Titus succeeded him without opposition, the first Roman emperor to follow his biological father on the throne ^[3]. Those who expected a second Nero were surprised. Among the most cited Titus facts is his transformation in office: he ended treason trials, punished informers with public flogging and exile, and swore that he would rather die than put a senator to death, a promise the sources say he kept ^[1].

Disaster tested him almost immediately. On an autumn day in 79 CE, about two months into the reign, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the surrounding countryside under ash and pyroclastic flows ^[6]. Titus visited the ruined region twice, appointed a board of senior senators to organize relief, and directed that the property of victims who died without heirs be used to help survivors ^[2]. In 80 CE a fire raged through Rome for three days, destroying the rebuilt Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and an epidemic followed. Again the emperor spent freely, reportedly stripping decorations from his own residences to speed the rebuilding ^[2].

The brightest moment of the reign came in 80 CE with the dedication of the Flavian Amphitheatre, the building the world now calls the Colosseum, begun under Vespasian on the drained lake of Nero's Golden House ^[7]. Titus opened it with one hundred days of games: gladiatorial combats, animal hunts involving thousands of beasts, and, according to Cassius Dio, staged naval engagements ^[2]. He paired the amphitheatre with new public baths built nearby, reinforcing the Flavian message that land Nero had seized for private luxury was being returned to the Roman people ^[7]. Taken together, these responses to crisis and this program of public building rank among the clearest Titus achievements, compressed into an astonishingly short span.

Titus married twice and had one acknowledged child, Julia Flavia, his daughter by Arrecina Tertulla or, on some readings of the evidence, by Marcia Furnilla ^[3]. He never remarried after the second divorce, which fed gossip in a court culture that expected dynastic weddings.

The most famous attachment of his life was to Berenice, a Judaean queen of the Herodian dynasty and sister of King Agrippa II. The two met during the Jewish war, and she followed him to Rome around 75 CE, living openly with him in the palace ^[8]. Romans disliked the arrangement intensely; memories of Cleopatra made an eastern queen beside a Roman ruler politically toxic. When Titus became emperor he sent Berenice away, against his own wishes and hers according to Suetonius, a decision the sources treat as proof that he put public opinion above private feeling ^[1].

His habits drew criticism before 79 CE: late banquets, a circle of dancers and eunuchs, and the summary killings he carried out as praetorian prefect. As emperor he shed the entourage, kept the dinners moderate, and cultivated an image of open-handed accessibility. Suetonius preserves the remark that defined him: recalling one evening that he had done no one a favor that day, Titus said, "Friends, I have lost a day" ^[1].

The reign ended almost as soon as it had begun. In September 81 CE, after presiding at games in Rome, Titus set out for the Sabine country of his ancestors and fell ill with fever on the journey. He died on September 13 at Aquae Cutiliae, the same rural estate where Vespasian had died two years earlier, at the age of forty one ^[3]. Suetonius says he was carried in a litter, gazed at the sky, and complained that he did not deserve to die, since only one act of his life required regret; he never said which act, and speculation began at once ^[1].

Rumors inevitably touched his younger brother Domitian, who succeeded him the next day. Cassius Dio records a story that Domitian hastened the death by packing the fevered emperor in snow, though no ancient source proves foul play and modern historians generally accept that Titus died of natural illness ^[2]. Domitian deified his brother, completed the Arch of Titus in his memory, and finished the temple to Vespasian and Titus in the Forum, honors that sat oddly beside the brothers' well attested rivalry in life ^[5].

Roman tradition settled quickly on a verdict. Suetonius opened his life of Titus by calling him the darling and delight of the human race, and later writers ranked the reign among the best Rome ever knew, a judgment helped by its brevity and by the contrast with Domitian's darker fifteen years ^[1]. Modern scholars, led by Brian Jones's full length study, read the record more cautiously, noting that the affable emperor of 79 to 81 CE was the same man who had run Vespasian's security apparatus without mercy ^[3].

In Jewish memory the verdict was the opposite. Rabbinic literature names him "Titus the Wicked" for the destruction of the Temple, and the ninth of Av, the day of mourning for that catastrophe, is still observed each year ^[5]. The menorah carved on the Arch of Titus became so central an image of the loss, and of survival after it, that it served as the model for the emblem of the modern State of Israel ^[5].

The physical legacy is impossible to miss. The Colosseum he inaugurated remains the most visited monument in Italy, and his arch has influenced commemorative architecture from Paris to New York ^[7]. Few rulers compress so much into twenty six months: a contested conquest, three disasters answered with competence, one enormous building, and a reputation for decency that two thousand years of scrutiny has complicated but never quite dislodged.