The Arch of Titus: Last surviving evidence of an ancient religious mystery

In AD 81, after the death of Emperor Titus, his younger brother Domitian ordered a triumphal arch be built in his honour, and he placed it on an important site along the Via Sacra near the Roman Forum.

Domitian ordered its construction in AD 81, and the Arch of Titus was likely finished within the next few years, possibly by AD 85, based on analysis of style and comparisons with other Flavian-era monuments.

The arch remembered Titus’s key military achievement, the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple during the First Jewish–Roman War, which had ended in AD 70.

By placing his family’s claim to approval from the gods into Rome’s public architecture a decade after the campaign, Domitian supported the authority of the Flavian dynasty at a time when imperial succession had recently caused civil conflict. 

At that moment, the Flavians had only just brought order to the empire following the Year of the Four Emperors.

As such, the arch responded to that need and presented the dynasty’s success as linked to the gods.

Sculptors carved scenes of Titus’s victory parade, during which Roman legions displayed the goods taken from the Jerusalem Temple.

These images created a lasting record of an event that had already stopped being part of public ceremonies, ensuring that the Temple’s destruction and the removal of its sacred objects would remain visible for generations.

Josephus was a first-hand witness and a former Jewish general who had joined the Romans, and he described in The Jewish War how temple treasures, including a golden table and sacred texts, were reported to have been paraded through the streets during Titus’s triumph.

Josephus did not name the menorah directly, but the Arch of Titus relief gives visual proof that the menorah was among the items taken.

One of the arch’s most famous reliefs is the panel that shows Roman soldiers who carried sacred treasures looted from the Jerusalem Temple.

The golden menorah is shown standing at the centre of the scene. Sculptors carved it with a curved central stem and six branching arms, each of which ended in a lamp.

Its raised position and careful detail show that the artists tried to make it both impressive and easy to recognise. 

Roman artists placed the menorah beside other Temple objects, including trumpets and the Table of the Showbread, but gave the menorah visual focus.

The raised platform on which soldiers carried it implied a official public display, and the movement of figures and spectators gave the scene a celebratory tone.

Roman citizens would likely have met this image as a triumphant celebration of the emperor’s piety and power because for them the capture of the menorah was used as visible proof that Rome’s gods had overcome the deity of Jerusalem.

On the opposite panel, Titus rides a quadriga accompanied by figures of Victory and Virtus.

This image eventually became the main source for later images of the menorah, since no physical trace of the original object had survived and later Jewish art, synagogue mosaics, and even modern state symbols drew on the version carved on the arch.

In 1949, the modern State of Israel adopted a national emblem showing a stylised menorah inspired by the Arch of Titus and it turned a symbol of ancient defeat into one of national rebirth.

The modern version added paired lions and olive branches that were not on the original.

Questions remain about whether the image on the arch is fully accurate, but it is the only known representation had been made before the menorah’s disappearance, and, as a result, the Arch of Titus effectively kept the last confirmed image of an object that once stood at the centre of Jewish worship..

Above the central passageway, on the underside of the arch’s vault, a sculpted panel shows the deceased emperor Titus rising into the heavens.

Carried by an eagle and shown in mid-air with his arms outstretched, he appears as a divine figure in Roman religious practice.

The eagle as a symbol made this more than decoration. It declared that the emperor had received divine approval and that his soul had passed into the realm of the gods.

The Latin inscription atop the arch reads: “Senatus Populusque Romanus divo Tito divi Vespasiani filio Vespasiano Augusto,” which declared that the Senate and the Roman People honoured the divine Titus, son of the divine Vespasian. 

Soon after Titus’s death, the Roman Senate had officially declared him divine, granting him status among the divi, or divine emperors, which mean that Domitian, eager to boost his own right to rule, had reason to include this image in the arch.

It made his brother’s conquest of Jerusalem more than a civic honour and presented it as a deed that earned divine reward.

The link between military success and official deification was central to Roman imperial belief.

By showing Titus as having become divine, the arch proposed that the destruction of the Temple had served the empire and had fulfilled divine will. 

At the same time, this scene echoed earlier Roman ways of honouring leaders, since Roman coins and funeral art had long used the eagle as a sign of divine ascent.

After the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, Jewish religious life underwent a lasting change.

With the priesthood disbanded and sacrifices stopped, Jewish communities could no longer practise worship as they had for centuries.

Over time, new forms of religious expression developed, which included rabbinic study and synagogue worship together with the legal scholarship that later came to define post-Temple Judaism.

The loss of the Temple forced a change of focus, and that change showed itself in the images on the Arch of Titus. 

Elsewhere, the image of the looting of holy objects served as a constant reminder of what had been lost.

For centuries, Jewish tradition discouraged walking under the arch, and that custom continued until the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948.

The menorah's disappearance is unexplained. Some later reports claimed it had travelled to Carthage with the Vandals or was taken during the sack of Rome in AD 455.

The historian Procopius later claimed that the menorah had gone to Carthage and then to Constantinople after Belisarius conquered North Africa in AD 534.

Some medieval sources reported further sightings, but none were confirmed, and no clear record exists after Late Antiquity.

For that reason, the Arch of Titus acts not only as a Roman monument but also as the last witness to the fate of one of the most sacred artefacts in Jewish history.

Today, the arch remains the only place where the original Temple menorah can be seen, where it appears as a captured relic rather than a sacred object.

Ultimately, its images did not explain the fate of the menorah, as they only showed what Rome wanted the world to believe.