Titus
Titus’s death was not violent or theatrical or mysterious, it was simply sad. This was an emperor, we are told, who oozed potential but never got the chance to fully fulfill it. His death, on September 13 81 AD at the age of 41, was, in the words of Suetonius, “more humanity’s loss than his own”. There’s really little to say about Titus’s death from the Roman accounts. Returning from the games to his Sabine estate, a sudden fever forced him to stop off at Rieti. Inauspiciously, it was at the same villa his father, Vespasian, had passed away in just two years before.
The only intriguing question concerns his final words. While being carried in a litter to his family villa in Rieti, he apparently drew back the curtains and lamented about his life being cruelly taken from him when he didn’t deserve to lose it—okay, so maybe it was quite theatrical. He then uttered that he had just one regret in life. However, presumably to the annoyance of those around him, he refused to disclose what this was, though some speculated a secret affair with his brother’s wife, Domitia.
An altogether different version appears in the Babylonian Talmud. According to this Jewish text, the cause of Titus’s death was an insect that flew up his nose and picked away at his brain for seven years. That the Jewish author should have suggested this is hardly surprising: no love was lost between Titus and the Jews, given that the emperor had captured Jerusalem and sacked their Temple in 70 AD, killing as many as one million people. What’s surprising is that this legend was lazily copied from another regarding the biblical King Nimrod.
We’re told that the Roman public mourned as if they had lost a member of their own family, clearly an exaggeration. Moreover, Suetonius tells us that upon hearing about his death the senators flocked to the senate house, opened its doors, and took it in turns to heap praises on the deceased emperor, speaking more highly of him than they ever had when he was alive. We should be careful in seeing any of this as genuine; it more probably reflected their attempt to ingratiate themselves with his brother, and successor, Domitian.