Domitianic Rupture: Domitian's Actions Against Texts and Intellectuals (81–96 CE)

This preprint defends a constrained historical hinge used in the Five Streams reconstruction by narrowing the question to a mechanism-level problem: what late-first-century event-complex is actually attested to (i) remove elite household personnel by execution/exile/confiscation, (ii) reach the infrastructure of elite textual labor (authors, copyists, patronage, and books as objects), and (iii) do so through administrative categories rather than theological recognition. On primary-source grounds, the essay argues that Domitianic enforcement (81–96 CE) plausibly satisfies these constraints in the surviving record, including transmission-chain liability (Suetonius), suppression aimed at texts as objects (Tacitus), survival by dispersal through private custody and exile (Pliny), and charge language that profiles prosecutable practices (Cassius Dio). The paper develops a mechanism model for household-archive collapse under enforcement pressure and offers constrained expectations for how fragments survive, scatter, and mutate in clandestine custody. The specific identification of a “Christian” workshop is hypothetical; the historical claim defended here is the demonstrated vulnerability of elite textual labor under Domitianic administrative enforcement. A supplementary appendix is included as a separate file in this record.