I

The phrase lautusque couples an extraordinary public event of Titus’ reign, the grand opening of the Colosseum (amphitheatri perfecto opere), with a personal daily routine such as taking a bath. This combination has seemed problematic to many scholars. Already J. Lipsius, at the end of the sixteenth century, wondered whether lautusque makes any sense at all and proposed the emendation lautibusque, from an unattested fourth-declension noun lautus, meaning ‘baths’.Footnote ¹ Three centuries later, this idea was espoused by E. Klebs, who defended the reading lautus, interpreting it as the genitive singular of this unattested noun, governed by opere.Footnote ² Either way, the translation would be: ‘after the completion of the amphitheatre and of a bathing facility’. J. Arntzen, in the eighteenth century, emended lautusque into ludisque: ‘after the completion of the amphitheatre and the performance of the inaugural games’.Footnote ³ In his 1971 monograph on Victor, C.E.V. Nixon quotes this sentence with a question mark after lautusque, indicating his inability to interpret it.Footnote ⁴ According to P. Dufraigne, ‘lautus is difficult to account for’ and Victor may have misunderstood Dio's text, or some unknown source, which mentioned a bathing town as the locality where Titus died (cf. Cass. Dio 66.26.1 μετήλλαξεν ἐν τοῖς ὕδασιν ἐν οἷς καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ; Suet. Vesp. 24.2 Aquae Cutiliae).Footnote ⁵ H.W. Bird evades the issue with a rather unliteral translation: ‘when work on the amphitheatre had been completed in a splendid manner’.Footnote ⁶ The most recent commentators wonder whether there is a lacuna before lautusque.Footnote ⁷

The solutions proposed by these scholars seem unconvincing not only because they are highly speculative but especially because they focus on the content, rather than the form, of the transmitted text. The meaning of the passage is clear: Titus was poisoned after taking a bath (lautus ueneno interiit),Footnote ⁸ at a time when the Flavian amphitheatre had already been dedicated. Although this version is unique to Victor, each of the elements that compose it is confirmed by other ancient sources. The chronological reference to the completion of the amphitheatre is correct, since the Colosseum was officially opened in 80 c.e., one year before Titus’ death.Footnote ⁹ The sequence bath > meal > death is confirmed by a contemporary medical treatise (although in connection with a disease, not with poisoning).Footnote ¹⁰ The detail that Titus died from poisoning is indeed dubious, since according to most sources he died of a disease; but it is attested by one other source (although this source does not mention the bath).Footnote ¹¹ Whether or not the sequence bath > poisoning is historically true,Footnote ¹² there is no reason (I believe) to question that this is what Victor wrote and meant. Quintilian complains that the ancient Romans drank heavily while at the baths (1.6.44), a fact confirmed by Mart. 12.70.6–8. Furthermore, it was normal practice for both commoners and emperors to have a meal right after returning from the baths.Footnote ¹³ Thus, an emperor's eating or drinking session while or immediately after bathing may have been (and may have seemed to Victor) an ideal occasion to try and poison him. This is confirmed by Herodian and the author of the so-called Epitome de Caesaribus. Both narrate a plot to kill Commodus carried out by administering poison to him as soon as he came back from a bath, when it was easiest to catch him off guard (Hdn. 1.17.8 ἐλθόντι δὲ αὐτῷ ἀπὸ τοῦ λουτροῦ ἐμβαλοῦσα ἔς τε κύλικα τὸ φάρμακον οἴνῳ τε κεράσασα εὐώδει δίδωσι πιεῖν; Epit. de Caes. 17.5 egresso e balneo ueneni poculum obtulit). The same strategy was used by the Lombard queen Rosamund, who killed her second husband, the usurper Helmichis, by handing him a poisoned cup as he was coming out of a bath (Paul the Deacon, Hist. Lang. 2.29 egredienti ei de lauacro ueneni poculum … propinauit).

The problem with lautusque is merely formal: why should Victor connect the ablative absolute perfecto opere to the participle lautus through a conjunction (-que)? True, Victor makes frequent recourse to a type of uariatio that combines, through the conjunction ‘and’, elements belonging to two distinct grammatical classes, as in the following cases: 3.17 militares plebisque animos; 4.5 genus mulierum atque seruile; 8.2 Moesiae Pannonicique exercitus; 11.4 inchoata per patrem uel fratris studio; 40.11 huic quinquennii imperium, Constantio annuum fuit; 40.28 ex auro aut argenteae [statuae]; 41.4 supplicium patibulorum et cruribus suffringendis. In all these cases, however, the two elements are analogues: two complementary categories such as soldiers and civilians, two categories of supposedly inferior human beings such as women and slaves, two provinces, etc. At 10.5, on the contrary, the elements connected through -que refer to two quite incomparable facts: the inauguration of the Colosseum happens once in a lifetime at best, whereas surely Titus bathed before dinner on a regular basis. Moreover, lautus must refer to a bath that Titus took on the same day as his death, while the celebrations for the Colosseum were complete by the end of July 80 at the latest, more than a year before Titus died in September 81.Footnote ¹⁴

Although Victor's style may be awkward at times, not all oddities found in the manuscripts have to be accepted without questioning. The only two existing manuscripts are heavily corrupted, recent (fifteenth century) and closely related to each other. Therefore, the probability of common mistakes is high. The particle -que may be the result of a banal dittography, one likely to occur when texts written in scriptio continua are copied. I would suggest: amphitheatri perfecto opere, lautus[que] ueneno interiit. Confusions of que/ue, in both directions, are common in the transmission of any Latin text.Footnote ¹⁵

II

The reading satis is obviously corrupted. The original reading must have been an adjective in the ablative, parallel to pilleatis. Several conjectures have been put forward: Sacisque by the early editors, Iazygisque by Schott, aliisque by Mommsen, capillatisque or Sarmatisque by Pichlmayr, hirsutisque or bracatisque by Dufraigne, Scythisque by Festy, Scythicisque by Colombo. None has imposed itself.Footnote ¹⁶

The adjective juxtaposed with pilleatis may well be expected to designate another piece of clothing. The Dacians would be mentioned through reference to specific garments in the same way in which the Romans styled themselves as the gens togata (for example Aen. 1.282)Footnote ¹⁷ and associated foreign peoples with certain clothes or clothing habits through adjectival epithets such as ‘pallium-wearing’ (Plaut. Curc. 288 Graeci palliati), ‘pilleus-wearing’ (Mart. 10.72.5 Parthos pilleatos), ‘trousered’ (Pers. 3.53 bracatis Medis; and cf. the phrase Gallia bracata, designating Gallia Narbonensis as attested, for example, by Plin. HN 3.31), ‘dressed in garments of Canusian wool’ (Mart. 9.22.9 Canusinatus Syrus), ‘ungirt’ (Aen. 8.724 discintos Afros; Sil. Pun. 2.56 discinctos Libyas).

On the Arch of Constantine, Trajan's Column and other ancient artefacts, the Dacians are identified by their typical outfit, which consisted predominantly of pillei, bracae and saga.Footnote ¹⁸ Victor was surely familiar with the Dacian dress, both from observation of these and similar monuments and through direct contact with real-life Dacians. Indigenous Dacian communities survived the Roman conquest and were integrated into the new province created by Trajan;Footnote ¹⁹ one of the few things we know for sure about Victor is that, while writing the De Caesaribus, he was serving in the imperial bureaucracy at Sirmium, on the border between Pannonia and the former province of Dacia Apulensis (Amm. Marc. 21.10.6). The text written by Victor may have been: domitis in prouinciam Dacorum pilleatis sagatisque nationibus. A haplographic dropping of the syllable ga after sa is palaeographically probable and could have been facilitated by the semantic autonomy of the remaining letters (satis).

Support for this proposal comes from an analysis of Victor's references to clothing throughout his work. His De Caesaribus compresses 400 years of Roman history into only about fifty-five Teubner pages. Given this extreme condensation of material, it may seem surprising that Victor mentions an ethnographic detail such as the typical attire of a foreign people. In fact, the remark about the Dacians’ pillei is the only ethnographic reference to clothing in the entire work, a circumstance that (however one emends the text) invites closer inspection. Excluding Caes. 13.3, there are 15 mentions of clothes, or lack thereof, in Victor. Of these, 2 are found in metaphorical or quasi-metaphorical phrases; the remaining 13 references (86 per cent) involve an employment of clothes that is forbidden, inappropriate or unusual.Footnote ²⁰ Victor's fixation with the misuse of clothes is remarkable. It can be explained by various circumstances. In general, the ancient Romans were intensely preoccupied with the social implications of clothing.Footnote ²¹ Imperial historians were often interested in the emperors’ sartorial preferences as an indicator of their personality and character.Footnote ²² Most importantly for the purposes of this paper, fourth-century bureaucratic officials such as Victor were obsessed with dress code and clothing etiquette; this reflected the internal conflict within the late antique Roman elite between the civilian togate administrators and the increasingly powerful ‘barbarian’ upstarts from the military, whom the former criticized owing to their failure to conform to the Roman clothing traditions.Footnote ²³ Victor's focus on the misuse of clothes by Romans and his lack of curiosity about the costumes of foreign peoples together suggest that he may have meant his reference to the Dacian pillei at Caes. 13.3 not as a purely descriptive ethnographic detail but rather as a remark on a wardrobe choice that, to his eyes, seemed unorthodox.

How do these considerations relate to the conjecture that I have proposed above? The Dacians’ combination of pillei and saga must have shocked ancient Romans. These two garments belonged to the category of clothes that Roman citizens wore only on special occasions, which required them to put aside the traditional toga. But pillei and saga were associated, in Roman culture until the fourth century, with inherently opposite situations and feelings: the pilleus was worn during the merriment of the Saturnalia (with the concomitant adoption of a synthesis replacing the toga) and other festive celebrations; the sagum was worn (instead of the toga) during periods of mourning or national crisis.Footnote ²⁴ That the pilleus and the sagum were perceived by ancient Romans as antithetical and, practically, as a contrasting pair is shown by Sen. Ep. 18. During the Saturnalia, Seneca urges Lucilius to do the opposite of the ‘pilleus-wearing’ crowd (18.3 pilleatae turbae) at least for a few days; this involves sleeping on a crude pallet, eating grimy bread and wearing a sagum (18.7).

In line with his preoccupation with anomalous clothing, Victor may have singled out pillei and saga at 13.3 precisely because the Dacians wore them simultaneously whereas for a Roman—and especially for a fourth-century bureaucrat—they were incompatible.