Domitian
TITUS FLAVIUS AU- GUSTUS (dō-mish'yan), the last of the "Twelve Casars," and youngest son of the Emperor Vespasian; born in 51 A. D.
He early displayed the licentiousness and cruelty of his disposition, and was keptboth by his father and by his brother, the noble Titus, who succeeded Vespasian -entirely apart from public life. When proclaimed emperor, on the death of Titus, which he is suspected of having accelerated, if not procured, he proved the wisdom of the restraint which had been put upon him by the ferocity of his conduct. Aspiring to military fame he was unsuccessful in his undertakings, and after his defeat by the Dacians, who compelled him to make a humiliating peace, his natural disposition, suspicious, savage, gloomy and morose, manifested itself in all its naked deformity. To be honorable and virtuous was to be a mark for destruction, the mere suspicion of patriotism a warrant for death. His bloody reign furnishes some of the most thrilling pages of Tacitus; and points with its keenest shafts the withering irony of the satirist Juvenal. After escaping from many conspiracies, the monster fell, on Sept. 18, 96, the victim of a plot in which his wife, Domicia, bore a prominent part.
His DON (ancient, Tanaïs), a river of Russia, which issues from Lake Ivan- Ozero, in the government of Tula; and flows S. E. through governments Riazan, Tambov, Voronej, and Don Cossacks, to within 37 miles of the Volga, where it turns abruptly S. W. for 236 miles, and falls into the Sea of Azof; whole course nearly 900 miles. The chief tributaries are: Right bank, the Donetz and Voronej; left, the Khoper and Manitsch. Although not admitting vessels of much draught, the Don carries a large traffic especially during the spring floods, and a canal connects it with the Volga system of navigation. It has also very extensive and productive fisheries.
DON