Saint Flavia Domitilla

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. Flavia Domitilla was the daughter of Domitilla the Younger by an unknown father, perhaps Quintus Petillius Cerialis, with whom her mother had two sons. 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. 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.