Domitian was born in Rome on 24 October 51 CE, in a house on Pomegranate Street on the Quirinal Hill. His father was Vespasian, a successful general who would become emperor in the civil wars of 69 CE, and his mother was Domitilla, daughter of a treasury clerk. The family was respectable rather than glittering, and Domitian grew up while his father was away on campaign, first in North Africa and then in Judaea, the province where Rome was fighting the Jewish revolt. His mother died while he was young, leaving him in a household dominated by the memory and achievements of his older brother Titus, the brilliant son marked out as Vespasian's heir. Domitian received the education expected of a young senator's son, reading Greek and Latin literature, practising rhetoric and writing poetry. Yet he was also drawn to solitude and archery, two habits that would remain with him long after he wore the purple.

His first taste of imperial danger came in 69 CE, the Year of the Four Emperors, when Rome tore itself apart in civil war. While Vespasian's armies marched on Italy, Domitian sheltered with his uncle Sabinus in the Capitol, the citadel of Rome. Supporters of the emperor Vitellius stormed the hill and set fire to the temple of Jupiter. Domitian escaped through the flames disguised as a priest of Isis, the Egyptian goddess whose mystery cult was spreading through Rome, crossed the Tiber alone with a shrine guardian and hid in the home of a schoolfriend's mother until Vespasian's victory was secure. He emerged to be hailed as Caesar, the title given to an imperial son, and was appointed city praetor with consular rank. The honour gave him dignity but little real power. His father watched him carefully, reportedly laughing at his eagerness to hand out offices and remarking that it was a wonder Domitian did not appoint a successor too.

During Vespasian's reign, Domitian was kept away from the centre of command. He received priesthoods and consulships, but no independent army and no share in the imperial authority enjoyed by Titus. He married Domitia Longina, the daughter of Corbulo, a celebrated general forced to suicide by the emperor Nero, and arranged for her to divorce her first husband so the match could be made. It was a politically useful marriage, but the ancient stories made it as stormy as the palace itself. When Vespasian died in 79 CE, Titus became emperor and Domitian remained the second son, honoured in public and suspected in private. When Titus fell gravely ill in 81 CE, Domitian moved quickly to the Praetorian Guard, the emperor's imperial bodyguard, and was hailed emperor before his brother's death had become public. From that moment, the younger son who had waited for thirty years became master of the Roman world.

The new emperor governed with restless energy. He raised the silver content of the denarius, Rome's principal silver coin, soon after his accession, restored confidence in the currency, and later left the treasury with a surplus despite enormous spending. He increased the annual pay of a soldier from nine to twelve gold pieces, strengthened the Rhine and Danube frontiers, reorganised provinces, appointed financial investigators and punished corrupt officials. He restored roads in Italy and the provinces, improved harbour works and took a close personal interest in law cases. In the early years he could appear measured and generous. He pardoned some debtors, refused dubious inheritances and punished informers who made false accusations for profit. Behind this diligence, however, lay an autocrat's instinct: Domitian did not want to guide the Senate. He wanted the machinery of empire to answer to him.

Rome itself became the great statement of his rule. After a devastating fire in 80 CE had burned the Capitoline temple and much of the Campus Martius, Rome's public field of temples and exercise grounds, Domitian rebuilt on a scale that transformed the city. He restored the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, built a temple to the divine Flavian family, completed a forum later dedicated under Nerva, raised a stadium where the Piazza Navona now lies, built an Odeum for music and erected a vast palace complex on the Palatine Hill. Its courts, basilicas, gardens and banquet halls covered the south-eastern crown of the hill so completely that later emperors simply moved in. He gave the people gifts, public dinners and lavish games. Charioteers raced for new Golden and Purple teams, gladiators fought by torchlight, female combatants entered the arena, poets competed in Greek and Latin, and naked footraces were held in his stadium. Every spectacle proclaimed that Rome was still the centre of the world and Domitian its master.

His religion was public, traditional and deeply tied to his own image. He favoured Minerva, goddess of wisdom and defensive war, and celebrated her festival each year at his villa on the Alban Mount. He founded the Capitoline Games in honour of Jupiter in 86 CE, bringing athletes, horsemen, musicians and orators from across the empire to compete before him. He wore the Greek half-boots and purple cloak of a divine judge, crowned with gold and seated like a god among the contestants. In 85 CE he made himself censor for life, the first Roman to hold the ancient moral office without term or colleague. Through it he could supervise senators, remove the unworthy and present himself as the guardian of public virtue. He expelled a senator for dancing, punished adultery, restricted inheritance for women he judged immoral and ordered the ancient burial alive of Cornelia, a chief Vestal found guilty of breaking her vow of chastity. To Domitian, morality was not private. It was a law inscribed on the state itself.

His wars carried the same message. In Britain, his general Agricola, the father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, drove Roman arms into Caledonia, the far north of Britain, and defeated the northern tribes at Mons Graupius. Domitian recalled him before the conquest could be completed and celebrated only minor honours for the campaign. On the Rhine he campaigned against the Chatti and returned to Rome with the title Germanicus, a triumph his senatorial enemies later mocked as a parade without conquest. The hardest struggle came on the Danube, where Decebalus, king of the Dacians across the Danube in the region of modern Romania and one of Rome's most capable barbarian opponents, defeated and killed the governor Oppius Sabinus. Domitian sent his Praetorian prefect Cornelius Fuscus against him, but Fuscus too was killed. A later Roman force won a victory at Tapae, yet the Dacian king remained unconquered. Domitian bought peace with money, craftsmen and the crowning of a Dacian envoy, then displayed the settlement as a triumph in Rome. His soldiers received gifts and honours; the Senate saw the truth more clearly.

In 89 CE the governor of Upper Germany, Antonius Saturninus, rose in revolt at Mainz. Domitian hurried north as his loyal general Lappius Maximus crushed the rebellion, but the victory loosened something darker in the emperor. Informers multiplied, treason trials filled the courts and senators learned to fear a flattering word as much as an open insult. Domitian executed or exiled former consuls, philosophers and members of his own family. He banished teachers of philosophy from Rome, punished Arulenus Rusticus, a senator and philosopher, for praising earlier opponents of tyranny, and struck at the younger Helvidius Priscus for a stage piece that seemed to mock the imperial marriage. A famous story told of a dinner where leading senators were seated in a pitch-black room beside gravestones bearing their names, served black food by boys painted black and kept silent while Domitian spoke only of death. At dawn the guests discovered that the gravestones and dishes were gifts of silver. The joke was costly: every man at the table had spent the night believing his throat would be cut.

The palace became a court of mirrors and suspicion. Domitian lined his walking galleries with polished moonstone so that no one could approach from behind unseen. He kept prisoners in chains even while questioning them alone. He executed Epaphroditus, the freedman who had helped Nero die, as a warning to his own servants that no master should ever be struck. When his cousin Flavius Clemens was executed on a trivial charge, the emperor's wife Domitia was said to have feared she would be next. Taxes grew harsher, the Jewish tax was collected with intrusive zeal, and property could be seized on the word of an informer. Yet the empire did not collapse beneath this terror. The roads remained repaired, the frontiers held, the grain arrived, the army stayed loyal and the people cheered at the games.

On the day before his death, Domitian was haunted by omens. He dreamed that Minerva had laid down her weapons and could no longer protect him. An astrologer who predicted that he would be torn apart by dogs was executed, only for a storm to scatter his pyre and allow the prophecy to come true. Domitian asked the hour and was told the dangerous fifth had passed, although his freedmen were lying. Believing himself safe, he went to his bedroom to meet Stephanus, a steward accused of embezzlement who had hidden a dagger beneath woollen bandages around his arm. The chamberlain Parthenius had already removed the blade from the sword kept under the emperor's pillow. As Domitian read the paper Stephanus handed him, the steward stabbed him in the groin. The emperor grappled with him, clawed at his face and called for the hidden blade, but only the hilt remained. Clodianus, Maximus, Satur and an imperial gladiator rushed in, and seven more wounds finished the work.

Domitian died on 18 September 96 CE, aged forty-four, after fifteen years on the throne. His body was carried out on a cheap bier by the poor gravediggers of Rome and cremated by his old nurse Phyllis, who secretly carried his ashes to the temple of the Flavian family. The Senate ordered his statues smashed and his name erased from stone. Soldiers in the capital wanted to call him divine and demanded the death of his killers. Domitia survived him, as did the vast palace, the stadium, the temples, the restored currency and the frontier works. His successor Nerva, an elderly senator with a mild manner and no army of his own, began the chain of rulers later celebrated as the Five Good Emperors. Domitian's damnation helped make their moderation shine all the brighter.

The ruins tell two stories at once. In senatorial memory he was a suspicious, arrogant tyrant who fed on fear and disguised despotism as morality. In stone, coin and administration he was the ruler who rebuilt Rome, strengthened the currency, secured the frontiers, rewarded the army and governed the empire with an efficiency many of his praised successors inherited. His portraits were hacked from their pedestals or recut into the face of Nerva, but the shape of his palace remained on the Palatine and the curve of his stadium still defines a Roman square. Domitian was hated too well and understood too late. The man whom the Senate tried to erase left his fingerprints across every part of the world Rome ruled.