Suetonius wrote The Twelve Caesars, a set of short lives of the men who ruled Rome from Julius Caesar through Domitian. This is the last of those twelve, the life of Domitian, last of the Flavian family on the throne. The scene is Rome itself, not a distant province.

In the hostile story Suetonius tells, Domitian wants to be called lord and god. The charge of maiestas — insulting the emperor’s majesty — comes back, and senators die. On the Danube he fights the Dacians, a people in what is now Romania, in wars that will not stay won. The portrait is of a second Nero for the elite: cruelty, suspicion, a palace that turns on its own. Courtiers and officers, including intimates who cannot sleep, kill him because they fear him more than an empty throne. After the knives, Nerva’s time calls itself a recovery. The twelve lives end where they had to: a conspiracy indoors, a dynasty that could not outlast its own fear.