Flavia Domitilla was a Roman noblewoman of the 1st century AD. She was a granddaughter of Emperor Vespasian and a niece of Emperors Titus and Domitian. She married her second cousin, the consul Titus Flavius Clemens, a grand-nephew of Vespasian through his father Titus Flavius Sabinus.
There is disagreement about whether the Flavia Domitilla mentioned in certain fourth-century and later Christian writings is the same person or another.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Flavia Domitilla was the daughter of Domitilla the Younger by an unknown father, perhaps Quintus Petillius Cerialis, with whom her mother had two sons.
Marriage and children
A contemporary inscription indicates that Flavia Domitilla and her husband Titus Flavius Clemens had seven children, who were thus grandnephews and grandnieces of Domitian. Suetonius, who was born in 69 and thus a contemporary, states that Domitian designated as the emperor's successors two very young sons of Flavius Clemens, and changed their names to Domitian and Vespasian. Quintilian (c. 35 – c. 100) mentions that Domitian had entrusted to him the tutelage of two grandsons of Domitian's sister, presumably the two boys designated by the emperor as his successors.
Mommsen also claimed that she had a daughter also named Flavia Domitilla who married Titus Flavius Onesimus but later retracted this theory.
Banishment
Suetonius writes: "Finally he put to death his own cousin Flavius Clemens, suddenly and on a very slight suspicion, almost before the end of his consulship; and yet Flavius was a man of most contemptible laziness and Domitian had besides openly named his sons, who were then very young, as his successors, changing their former names and calling the one Vespasian and the other Domitian. And it was by this deed in particular that he hastened his own destruction." Cassius Dio (c. 155–235) reports in his Roman History: "Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and married to Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. The charge brought against them both was that of sacrilege or godlessness (Ancient Greek ἀθεότης), a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of these were put to death, and the rest were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria."
Suetonius says that one of those involved in the assassination of Domitian on 18 September 96 was Domitilla's steward Stephanus.
Religious traditions
Jewish
Some scholars connect Domitilla with a character in Jewish tradition, a Roman matron in the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 10b) and Deuteronomy Rabbah 2.25. When the emperor had decreed that in 30 days the Senate would confirm an edict to kill all Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire, the Roman matron convinced her husband to stand up for the Jews. In that tradition, Flavius Clemens converted to Judaism after having contact with the great sage Rabbi Akiva.
Christian
Both the Greek Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church celebrate a Flavia Domitilla as a saint.
The Greek Orthodox Church celebrates Saint Flavia Domitilla on 12 May and a publication of the Apostolic Service of the Church of Greece states that she lived in Rome in the first century, that she was the wife of the Roman official Titus Flavius Clemens and a daughter of Emperor Domitian's sister, and that she died a martyr for refusing to sacrifice to idols. This description identifies her with the Flavia Domitilla described above.
The identity of the saint honoured in the Catholic Church, whose feast is now on 7 May, is less clear.
In his Church History, written at the end of 323 or 324, Eusebius, speaking of "writers who were far from our religion", says that "they recorded that in the fifteenth year of Domitian Flavia Domitilla, daughter of a sister of Flavius Clement, who at that time was one of the consuls of Rome, was exiled with many others to the island of Pontia in consequence of testimony borne to Christ."
In his Chronicon, which survives in a translation by Jerome (c. 340–420), Eusebius quotes an earlier writer who gives similar information. Under Year 16 of Domitian in the 218th Olympiad (96 AD, the year of Domitian's assassination), he states: "Brutius writes that there were very many Christian martyrs under Domitian, among whom were Flavia Domitilla, niece (on his sister's side) of Flavius Clemens the consul; she was exiled to the island of Pontia, because she bore witness that she was a Christian."
The identity and religion of this Brutius or Bruttius are uncertain.
George Syncellus, who died after 810, repeats the statement by Eusebius in his Chronicon and adds that Flavius Clemens died for Christ. He is the first to speak of this first-century Roman consul as a Christian. In quoting Eusebius, Syncellus describes Domitilla as Clement's ἐξαδελφή (exadelphe), a term that can mean "cousin" and not only, as Jerome understood it, "niece".
Writing of the death in 404 of Saint Paula, Jerome says that on her way to the Holy Land, "the vessel touched at the island of Pontia ennobled long since as the place of exile of the illustrious lady Flavia Domitilla who under the Emperor Domitian was banished because she confessed herself a Christian; and Paula, when she saw the cells in which this lady passed the period of her long martyrdom, taking to herself the wings of faith, more than ever desired to see Jerusalem and the holy places".