Titus founded no religion, taught no doctrine, and is the object of no cult: and so, although his actions bear directly on sacred history, this atlas records him as a historical figure rather than as a sacred character of any tradition. Where a caliph or a monk belongs inside the tradition he served, Titus stands outside the traditions his acts touched. His weight here is entirely that of an agent of history: the man who destroyed the Second Temple and carried off its menorah.
That role gave him a durable place in Jewish memory, and not a kind one. Rabbinic tradition calls him Titus ha-Rasha, "Titus the Wicked," and tells lurid legends of his sacrilege in the sanctuary and of the divine punishment, a gnat that tormented his brain, that killed him. The Roman record is very different: Suetonius and the senatorial tradition remember a handsome, capable, popular prince, "the darling of the human race," who completed the Colosseum, relieved the disaster of Vesuvius in 79, and reigned briefly and well before dying of a fever in 81, aged only forty-one. The two memories never meet, and the atlas keeps both: the same man is a benefactor in Rome and a destroyer in Jerusalem.