Domitian on Haircare

A man who spent his mornings stabbing flies with a sharpened stylus in the solitude of his imperial chambers. A ruler so paranoid he had the walls of his palace lined with reflective stone so no one could approach him unseen. An emperor who sentenced a Vestal Virgin to be buried alive. And yet, among all the dark chapters of his reign, Emperor Domitian found the time — and, apparently, the emotional urgency — to sit down and write a book about hair care.

Welcome to one of ancient Rome's most unexpectedly human stories.

Domitian was the youngest son of Emperor Vespasian and the brother of Emperor Titus — the two men who conquered Judaea and brought the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem back to Rome in 70 CE. If you've ever walked beneath the Arch of Titus (Roman Forum) and looked up at the carved reliefs showing Roman soldiers carrying the sacred Menorah, you've already met this family's legacy in stone.

But while Vespasian was pragmatic and Titus was beloved, Domitian grew up in their shadow. He was the spare, not the heir. When he finally became emperor in 81 CE, he carried the weight of that resentment into every decision — and every mirror.

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Suetonius, the Roman biographer and senator who gave us some of the juiciest imperial gossip in history, paints a vivid portrait of Domitian's physical appearance. He was tall, well-built, with a modest expression he was apparently quite proud of — he once boasted to the Senate that they had always approved of both his character and his face. He also had hammer toes, a detail Suetonius drops with the kind of casual cruelty that makes you grateful social media didn't exist in the first century.

But the real issue was his hair.

Domitian began losing it relatively young, and the experience tormented him. His baldness became so sensitive a subject that he took any joke about hair loss — directed at anyone, not just himself — as a personal insult. Behind his back, Roman senators whispered his nickname: calvus Nero, the "Bald Nero." It was meant to sting twice — once for the hair, and once for the comparison to Rome's most infamous tyrant.

And yet, in every official portrait, in every bust and coin minted during his fifteen-year reign, Domitian appears with a full, flowing head of hair. The propaganda machine of the Palatine Hill worked overtime: the emperor's image was sculpted with thick curls right up until the day he was murdered.

Here's where the story turns from imperial vanity into something almost endearing. Despite his reputation for cruelty and paranoia, Domitian wrote a book. Not a military treatise, not a political manifesto — a manual on hair care.

The work was called De Cura Capillorum, and he dedicated it to a friend who was presumably dealing with the same affliction. Only two fragments survive, both preserved by Suetonius. And they reveal a side of Domitian that his enemies would have preferred to erase.

In one passage, he writes with a kind of rueful humor, consoling both his friend and himself. He acknowledges his own good looks, then immediately undercuts the boast with resignation — he knows his hair won't last, and he's making peace with aging before his time. It's witty, self-aware, and surprisingly vulnerable for a man who ruled an empire with an iron fist.

The book was apparently well-received. If Rome's libraries had a self-help section — and given the Roman obsession with ars vivendi, the art of living well, they practically did — De Cura Capillorum would have sat comfortably between treatises on rhetoric and guides to the baths.

Of course, Domitian's softer side existed alongside a far darker one. Suetonius tells us that in the early days of his reign, the emperor would lock himself away in his rooms for hours, doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a needle-sharp stylus. When the courtier Vibius Crispus was once asked whether anyone was in there with Caesar, he replied with legendary wit: "Not even a fly."

The Palace of Domitian — the Domus Flavia and Domus Augustana — still dominates the Palatine today. It was a vast complex divided into three wings: one for public ceremonies, one for private life, and a stadium-shaped garden for leisure. The emperor's bedroom was buried deep in the lower quarters, small and windowless, always guarded. Domitian trusted no one, and his paranoia wasn't entirely unfounded — on September 18, 96 CE, a freedman named Stephanus approached him with a bandaged arm concealing a dagger, and stabbed him in the groin. Seven more blows followed.

The Senate celebrated. They decreed a damnatio memoriae — a condemnation of memory. Domitian's name was chiseled off inscriptions across the empire. His statues were torn down or, more practically, recarved into likenesses of his successors: Nerva, Trajan, even Augustus. The man who had carefully curated his image with sculpted curls was, in death, given someone else's face entirely.

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Domitian wasn't alone in his anxiety. Julius Caesar was so self-conscious about his thinning hair that he was reportedly overjoyed when the Senate granted him the right to wear a laurel crown at all times — the leaves conveniently covered his receding hairline. Caligula went further: he made it a capital offense to look down on him from above, because someone might notice his bald spot.

In ancient Rome, a full head of hair signaled youth, virility, and divine favor. Losing it was more than a cosmetic problem — it was a symbolic diminishment. For an emperor whose authority rested partly on visual propaganda, on the image of strength and beauty projected through statues, coins, and public monuments, baldness was a political crisis.

That's what makes De Cura Capillorum so fascinating. It's not just a grooming manual. It's a window into the psychology of power, vanity, and vulnerability at the very top of the Roman world.

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Walk through the Roman Forum and look up at the Arch of Titus — Domitian completed it in honor of his brother. Climb the Palatine Hill and stand among the ruins of his palace, where polished walls once reflected every approaching figure. Visit the Vatican Museums (Vatican Museums), where imperial busts and sculptures tell the story of Roman portraiture and propaganda — including the careful fiction of Domitian's full head of hair.

The Colosseum itself bears his mark — Domitian added the underground network of tunnels and chambers, the hypogeum, that turned the arena into a machine of spectacle. Piazza Navona sits on the footprint of his stadium, the Stadium of Domitian, still traceable in the piazza's elongated oval shape.

His buildings survived. His book didn't — except for those two fragments, honest and unexpectedly human, preserved by a biographer who otherwise had little good to say about him.

Perhaps that's the most Roman thing of all: the stone endures, the words mostly vanish, and what little survives reveals that even the most feared emperor in the room was, in the end, just a man watching his hair fall out and trying to write his way through it.

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