greatest luminaries of the prevalent philosophy, Albert the
Great and Thomas Aquinas."DOMINIS, Marc Antonio de (1566–1624), celebrated as a theologian and natural philosopher, was born in the island of Arbe, in 1566. He was educated in the order of the Jesuits at their college at Loretto, and afterwards studied at the university of Padua. He was employed for some time by the Jesuits as a teacher of rhetoric and mathematics, but he did not join the order. In 1596 he was appointed to the bishopric of Segni, and in 1602 he was raised to the archbishopric of Spalatro. His endeavours to reform the church soon after made him obnoxious to the papal authorities, and he was compelled to leave his native country. Having become acquainted with Bishop Bedell, whilst the latter was chaplain to Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador from James I. at Venice, he communicated to that prelate his treatise De Republica Ecdesiastica, which was afterwards (1617, 1620) published at London, with Bedell s corrections. The main argument of the work was directed against the superiority of the bishop of Rome to other bishops. He came to England with Bedell, where he was received with great respect, and preached and wrote against the Reman Catholic religion. In 1619 he published at London Father Paul s History of the Council of Trent, with a dedication to King James. He was favourably received by the king, who bestowed on him the deanery of Windsor and other ecclesiastical preferments. But on the promotion of Pope Gregory XIV., who had been his school fellow and old acquaintance, he was deluded by Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, into the hopes of procuring a cardinal s hat, and thus of proving an instrument of great reformation within the church. Accordingly he returned to Rome in 1622, recanted his errors, and was at first well received ; but he afterwards wrote letters to England recanting his recantation, and, these being intercepted, he was imprisoned by Pope Urban VIII., and died in 1624. There were suspicions that be had been poisoned. Being convicted of heresy after his death, his body was exhumed and burned, and the ashes were thrown into ths Tiber. He is believed to have been the first to promulgate a true theory of the rainbow in a tract De radiis visus et lucis in vitris perspectivis et iride (Venice, 1611).
DOMITIAN (52–96). Titus Flavius Domitianus, the second son of Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Flavia Domitilla, twelfth of the Caesars, and third of the Flavian dynasty, was born at Rome, 24th October 52 A.D. He enjoys an evil prominence as the only tyrant among the succession of good and just princes from Vespasian down to Commodus. According to Suetonius, he was brought up in squalor and ignorance, and led a degraded and miserable youth ; but it is hardly credible that so good a prince and so indulgent a father in all his other acts should thus have neglected his son s education, and the story of his scandalous youth was more probably invented to suit his after life. When Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, Domitian escaped with difficulty from the burning temple of the Capitol, and lay in hiding from the Vitellians till his father s party proved victorious. After the fall of Vitellius he was saluted as Ctesar, or prince imperial, by the troops, obtained the city prsetorship, and was intrusted with the administra tion of Italy till his father s return from the East. Intoxicated by this sudden rise from obscurity, he grossly abused the power committed to him, and conducted himself more like a Turkish pasha than the son of a sturdy Sabine soldier. Such were the airs of authority he assumed that Vespasian, as the story goes, wrote in irony to thank him for not having dismissed his own father. Certain it is that though in his father s lifetime he several times filled the office of consul, and after his death was nominally the partner in the empire with his brother, yet he never took any part in public business, but lived in great retirement, devoting himself to a life of pleasure and of literary pursuits till he succeeded to the purple. The death of Titus, if not hastened by foul means, was at least eagerly welcomed by his brother. His succession (13th Sept. 81) was unquestioned, and it would seem as if, when his ambition was sated, and before his fears were aroused, he intended, as far as his weak volitions and mean abilities would allow, to govern well. Like Augustus, he attempted a reforma tion of morals and religion. As chief pontiff he inquired into the character of the vestal virgins, three of whom were found guilty, while in the case of one the awful penalty of a living entombment was revived. He enforced the laws against adultery, mutilation, and the grosser forms of immorality. He forbade the public acting of mimes. He erected many temples and public buildings and restored the temple of the Capitol, on the gilding of which, if Plutarch is to be believed, he expended 12,000 talents, or nearly two and a half millions of our money. He passed many sumptuary laws, one of which is noticeable as showing the increasing dearth of corn, which was now grown mainly by the wasteful and inefficient process of slave labour. An edict was issued forbidding the withdrawal of arable land from the plough, and reducing existing vineyards by one half. Finally, he took a personal share in the administra tion of justice at Rome, and exercised a jealous supervision over the governors of provinces.
Such public virtues counterbalanced in the eyes of the people all his private vices, gross and glaring as they were from the first. Former emperors had been deified after their death, but Domitian was the first to arrogate divine honours in his lifetime, and cause himself in public documents to be styled Our Lord and God. Doubtless in the poets (such as Martial, who calls the emperor s minion the Ganymede of our second Jove) this deification was nothing but fulsome flattery, but in the case of the provincials it was a sincere tribute to the impersonation of the Roman Empire, as the administrator of good government, and the peacemaker of the world. Even when Rome and Italy felt his heavy hand, and smarted beneath his proscriptions and extortions, the provinces were undisturbed. Though he took the title of imperator more than twenty times, and enjoyed at least one triumph, his achievements as a general were insignificant. His campaign in 83 against the Chatti was " a mere summer promenade ; " in Dacia (87) he received a severe check, and the peace concluded with this nation in 90 was due to the victories of his lieutenant Julianus. Juvenal hints that the flaxen-haired Germans who figured in his triumph were purchased slaves. His jealousy was provoked by the successes of Agricola in Britain, and the conqueror of Galgacus and the hero of the battle of the Grampians was recalled to Rome (84) in the midst of his conquests, condemned to retirement, and, as Tacitus is inclined to believe, removed by poison.
the Roman forces in Upper Germany (93), marks the turning point in his reign. By a fortunate rising of the Rhine, which prevented his barbarian allies from coming to his assistance, and by the vigour of Norbanus, it was speedily crushed ; but the fears of the emperor once aroused seem never again to have slept. A proscription as bloody as that of Sulla followed, and no man of eminence could feel his life safe. Before this he had sought out victims to gratify his cupidity and replenish his exhausted treasury. Now he struck at all that was conspicuous for talent or virtue, glutted himself with the blood of the Lamia?, and sentenced to death his own cousin and nephew by marriage, Flavius Clemens. A conspiracy among his own freedmen set on foot, it is said, by his wife, who knew her own life
to be threatened cut short his career of tyranny and
