His first acts. Titus.
One of the first acts of the new emperor was to purify the Senate, reduced to two hundred members, soon followed by the restoration of the finances. He rebuilt the capitol, erected the temple of Peace, the new forum, the baths of Titus, and the Coliseum. He extended a generous patronage to letters, and under his reign Quintilian, the great rhetorician, and Pliny, the naturalist, flourished. It was in the ninth year of his reign that an eruption of Vesuvius occurred, when Herculaneum and Pompeii were destroyed, to witness which Pliny lost his life. Vespasian had associated with himself his son Titus in the government, and died, after a reign of ten years, exhausted by the cares of empire; and Titus quietly succeeded him, but reigned only for two years and a quarter, and was succeeded by his brother, Domitian, a man of some ability, but cruel, like Nero. He was ten years younger than Titus, and was thirty years of age when proclaimed emperor by the prætorians, and accepted by the Senate, A.D. 81. At first he was a reformer, but soon was stained by the most odious vices. He continued the vast architectural works of his father and brother, and patronized learning.
Domitian. Conquest of Britain.
It was during the reign of Domitian that Britain was finally conquered by Agricola, who was recalled by the jealousy of the emperor, after a series of successes which gave him immortality. The reduction of this island did not seriously commence until the reign of Claudius. By Nero, Suetonius Paulinus was sent to Britain, and under him Agricola took his first lessons of soldiership. Under Vespasian he commanded the twentieth legion in Britain, and was the twelfth Roman general sent to the island. On his return to Rome he was made consul, and Britain was assigned to him as his province, where he remained seven years, until he had extended his conquests to the Grampian Hills. He taught the Britons the arts and luxuries of civilized life, to settle in towns, and to [pg 597] build houses and temples. Among the foes he encountered, the most celebrated was Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, on the eastern coast, who led the incredible number of two hundred and forty thousand against the Roman legions, but was defeated, with the loss of eighty thousand,—some atonement for the seventy thousand Romans, and their allies, who had been slain at Londinium, when Suetonius Paulinus commanded.
Persecution of Christians.
The year of Agricola's recall, A.D. 84, forms the epoch of the undisguised tyranny which Domitian subsequently exercised. The reign of informers and proscriptions recommenced, and many illustrious men were executed for insufficient reasons. The Christians were persecuted, and the philosophers were banished, and yet he received the most fulsome flattery from the poet Martial. The tyrant lived in seclusion, in his Alban villa, and was finally assassinated, after a reign of fifteen years, A.D. 96.
Nerva.
On his death a new era of prosperity and glory was inaugurated, by the election of Nerva, and for five successive reigns the Roman world was governed with virtue and ability. It is the golden era of Roman history, praised by Gibbon and admired by all historians, during which the eyes of contemporaries saw nothing but to panegyrize.
Death of Nerva.
Marcus Cocceius Nerva was the great-grandson of a minister of Octavius, and was born in Umbria. He was consul with Vespasian, A.D. 71, and with Domitian, in A.D. 90, and was far advanced in life when chosen by the Senate. The public events of his short but beneficent reign are unimportant. He relieved poverty, diminished the expenses of the State, and set, in his own life, an example of republican simplicity. But he did not reign long enough to have his character tested. He died in sixteen months after his elevation to the purple. His chief work was to create a title for his successor, for he assumed the right of adoption, and made choice of Trajan, without [pg 598] regard to his own kin, then at the head of the armies of Germany.