Titus and Berenice: The Elegiac Aura of an Historical Affair

INTRODUCTION

Plagued by stories about his private debauchery and heavy handedness as praetorian prefect, Titus, the son of Vespasian, was, as Suetonius (Tit. 7.1) reports, feared as another Nero.¹ As a result, his ascent to the throne was supposedly met with hostility (Cass. Dio 65.12.1, Suet. Tit. 6.2, Vesp. 25.1), while his relationship with the Jewish queen Berenice came under severe scrutiny—as it had also while Vespasian was alive. Such was Titus’s alleged infatuation with this Hellenistic queen,² who had caused scandal in her native Judaea, that he allegedly considered marrying her, especially since after 75 they had openly cohabited at Rome (Tac. Hist. 2.2.1).³ Their relationship apparently shocked the Roman public and invited comparisons with the disastrous passion of Marcus Antonius for Cleopatra VII, the Hellenistic Egyptian queen whom Antonius had preferred over Octavia, Augustus’s sister (Plut. Ant. 53.1–54.6, 57.2–3). This was also the queen who had, in the not-so-distant past, threatened to overturn Rome’s Mediterranean hegemony.⁴ Furthermore, Cleopatra’s oriental charm, which had ensnared Antonius, conflicted with the ancestral values that the legendary Aeneas had, according to the poet Vergil (Aen. 4.68), upheld by abandoning infelix Dido (“unhappy Dido”), thereby enabling him to establish a new fatherland under divine guidance.⁵ Presumably aware of the Roman dislike for Cleopatra and her most recent incarnation, Titus dismissed Berenice⁶ and then went on to rule as the “amor ac deliciae generis humani” (“the love and delight of the human race,” Suet. Tit. 1.1).

Titus’s separation from Berenice and his change of character have been systematically presented by scholars as the result of anti-Flavian campaigns waged by some senators, possibly including either Licinius Mucianus or Helvidius Priscus. John Crook (1951.162–64) argues that Titus was embroiled in a struggle with Mucianus and his supporters, most notably A. Alienus Caecina and T. Clodius Eprius Marcellus, and that his relationship with an eastern queen provided them with a ready means to stigmatize him. Perry Rogers (1980.86–87, 92) slightly subverts this argument by adding that, although Mucianus’s death, possibly in 74,⁷ gave Titus confidence, Caecina’s subsequent murder and Marcellus’s forced suicide were serious mistakes that caused an unpopular reaction and could only be redeemed by Berenice’s dismissal (but cf. Vasta 2007a.7). Recently, the criticism levelled at Titus and his queen by the influential philosopher Helvidius Priscus⁸ and his circle, led by his father-in-law Thrasea Paetus, has been cast as the real reason for the affair’s termination.⁹ However, a closer look at the literary evidence suggests that Titus had hitherto been very sober in decisions relating to his personal life. As will be argued, he never truly intended to marry Berenice and thus displease the Roman populace. Whether the affair had simply run its course or whether Titus shrewdly maintained it for as long as Berenice’s financial aid and eastern contacts were politically necessary, her dismissal gave pro-Flavian writers an opportunity to celebrate it, in retrospect, as an indication of Titus’s imperial suitability—all the more so given that Titus’s excellence needed to be juxtaposed with the self-serving character of his successor, his brother Domitian, posthumously cast as a “rhetorical” tyrant in accordance with a long-standing tradition in Greek and Roman rhetoric of presenting tyrants as the enemies of freedom and the law.¹⁰

Roman historiography relied on quite rigorous paradigms when advocating the patterns of behaviour deemed socially commendable and worthy of emulation.¹¹ The example set by Augustus, who had styled himself as the restorer of traditional Roman values, had acquired particular relevance following the allegedly orientalizing regimes of Gaius and Nero— both of whom were perceived to have added an eastern character to their reigns through their notorious addictions to luxury and tyrannical displays of power—all of which the Romans typically associated with oppressive eastern despots.¹² By rejecting Berenice, Titus...