Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith, and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode X, X V. a pleasant surprise from the Emperor Titus.

When we last left Titus, he had made the Roman Empire proud by bringing the city of Jerusalem

to its knees.

He now returns to Rome where his father

Vespasian has been proclaimed the new emperor. All Titus has to do now is

patiently wait his turn. He is Rianna Evans.

Titus is our second Flavian emperor succeeding his father in 79 CE.

But there was a story that his reign had been foretold by somebody who studied the appearance of people, a

physiognomist who had looked at him and Britannicus the son of Claudius, of course at the time Britannicus might be the one thought to

succeed to being emperor but he said that in fact Britannicus would not succeed

but unexpectedly surprisingly Titus, Titus would.

Now at this point in the 50s see, nobody would have thought that the Flavians were going to come to power.

So this is very prescient if true, although possibly the kind of thing that people said in retrospect.

Once they knew that the Flavians were going to be a long-lived dynasty.

And once you're the emperor, it's rather handy to have a

prophecy in your back pocket to say look this has always been felt told hasn't it?

Yes and it does underline again something of a problem for the Flavians which they seem to have

managed to spectacularly overcome, which is that they had no birth connections to anybody who had

been Prenkes or emperor before.

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