Though Vespasian had gone, his reign continued.  Not long, it is true, and punctuated by a spectacle of which Caligula, for all his poetry, had not dreamed—­the burial of Pompeii.  But a reign which, while it lasted, was fastidious and refined, and during which, again and again, Titus, who commanded death and whom death obeyed, besought Domitian to be to him a brother.

Domitian had no such intention.  He had a party behind him, one made up of old Neronians, the army of the discontented, who wanted a change, and greatly admired this charming young prince whose hours were passed in killing flies and making love to married women.  The pretorians too had been seduced.  Domitian could make captivating promises when he chose.

As a consequence Titus, like Vespasian, was uneasy, and with cause.  Dion Cassius, or rather that brute Xiphilin, his abbreviator, mentions the fever that overtook him, the same his father had met.  It was mortal, of course, and the purple was Domitian’s.

For a year and a day thereafter you would have thought Titus still at the helm.  There was the same clemency, the same regard for justice, the same refinement and fastidiousness.  The morose young poet had developed into a model monarch.  The old Neronians were perplexed, irritated too; they had expected other things.  Domitian was merely feeling the way; the hand that held the sceptre was not quite sure of its strength, and, tentatively almost, this Prince of Virtue began to scrutinize the morals of Rome.  For the first time he noticed that the cocottes took their airing in litters.  But litters were not for them!  That abuse he put a stop to at once.  A senator manifested an interest in ballet-girls; he was disgraced.  The vestals, to whose indiscretions no one had paid much attention, learned the statutes of an archaic law, and were buried alive.  The early distaste for blood was diminishing.  Domitian had the purple, but it was not bright enough; he wanted it red, and what Domitian wanted he got.  Your god and master orders it, was the formula he began to use when addressing the Senate and People of Rome.

To that the people were indifferent.  The spectacles he gave in the Flavian amphitheatre were too magnificently atrocious not to be a compensation in full for any eccentricity in which he might indulge.  Besides, under Nero, Claud, Caligula, on en avait vu bien d’autres.  And at those spectacles where he presided, crowned with a tiara, on which were the images of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, while grouped about him the college of Flavian flamens wore tiaras that differed therefrom merely in this, that they bore his image too, the people right royally applauded their master and their god.