In accordance with the fashion which Caligula and Nero had set, Domitian’s earliest manners were those of an urbane and gentle prince.  Later, when he made it his turn to rule, informers begged their bread in exile.  Where they are not punished, he announced, they are encouraged.  The sacrifices were so distressing to him that he forbade the immolation of oxen.  He was disinterested, too, refusing legacies when the testator left nearer heirs, and therewith royally generous, covering his suite with presents, and declaring that to him avarice of all vices was the lowest and most vile.  In short, you would have said another adolescent Nero come to Rome; there was the same silken sweetness of demeanor, the same ready blush, in addition to a zeal for justice and equity which other young emperors had been too thoughtless to show.

His boyhood, too, had not been above reproach.  The same things were whispered about him that had been shouted at Augustus.  Manifestly he lacked not one of the qualities which go to the making of a model prince.  Vespasian alone had his doubts.

“Mushrooms won’t hurt you,” he cried one day, as Domitian started at the sight of a ragout a la Sardanapale, which he fancied, possibly, was a la Locuste, “It is steel you should fear.”

At that time, with a father for emperor and a brother who was sacking Jerusalem, Domitian had but one cause for anxiety, to wit —­that the empire might escape him.  It was then he began his meditations over holocausts of flies.  For hours he secluded himself, occupied solely with their slaughter.  He treated them precisely as Titus treated the Jews, enjoying the quiver of their legs, the little agonies of their silent death.

Tiberius had been in love with solitude, but never as he.  Night after night he wandered on the terraces of the palace, watching the red moon wane white, companioned only by his dreams, those waking dreams that poets and madmen share, that Pallas had him in her charge, that Psyche was amorous of his eyes.

Meanwhile he was a nobody, a young gentleman merely, who might have moved in the best society, and who preferred the worst—­his own.  The sudden elevation of Vespasian preoccupied him, and while he knew that in the natural course of events his father would move to Olympus, yet there was his brother Titus, on whose broad shoulders the mantle of purple would fall.  If the seditious Jews only knew their business!  But no.  Forty years before a white apparition on the way to Golgotha had cried to a handful of women, “The days are coming in which they shall say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; to the hills, ‘Cover us.’” And the days had come.  A million of them had been butchered.  From the country they had fled to the city; from Acra they had climbed to Zion.  When the city burst into flames their blood put it out.  Decidedly they did not know their business.  Titus, instead of being stabbed before Jerusalem’s walls, was marching in triumph to Rome.