Nerva rolls back Domitianic repression

Nerva knew his power lay in paper. He had no army, only the Senate and a city exhausted by trials that turned friends into informers. So within weeks of September 96, he ended prosecutions for maiestas—the capacious crime of treason that had made accusation a weapon—and ordered confiscated properties returned. In Rome, clerks on the Palatine unsealed bundles of records, their wax a dull gray, and began writing reversals that would ripple out to the Forum and the provinces [18].

These acts had a specific audience. On the Capitoline Hill, senators who had watched colleagues fall under Domitian read the new edicts with something like relief. In the basilicas along the Forum Romanum, advocates greeted clients no longer hounded by scarlet-sealed subpoenas. In Ostia, merchants who had seen estates seized under political pretexts waited for notices that might restore their credit [18][12].

The policy gamble was straightforward: reduce enemies by removing causes for bitterness. Every estate restored meant one fewer grievance in Rome and in provincial towns from Tarraco to Antioch. Every dismissed informer signaled that the rules had changed. Nerva’s moves aligned with the tone Cassius Dio sketches at the end of one reign and the beginning of the next: a clearing of the docket before Trajan’s campaigns fill the stage [1].

But mercy alone does not move legions. From Mogontiacum on the Rhine to Vindobona on the Danube, commanders watched for signs that the new regime understood the army’s weight. The sound in those forts was not applause but the steady cadence of drill. Policy in Rome had bought time; it had not bought loyalty.

Nerva’s reforms, then, functioned as stabilization, not strategy. He turned down the temperature in the courts and restored a measure of equity. In the city’s marble heart, that sounded like a thousand reeds scraping papyrus, a bureaucratic symphony designed to make Rome’s pulse regular again [18].