After Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Rabbis tell us, a small insect flew up his nose and lodged in his brain. It ate at him for the rest of his life. The only thing that quieted the gnawing, he discovered, was the sound of a blacksmith's hammer. So he ordered smiths to hammer before him all day long. To a Gentile blacksmith he paid four zuzim a day. To a Jewish smith he paid nothing, saying with a smile, "It is payment enough that you see your enemy suffering."
For thirty days the hammering brought relief. Then it stopped working. Nothing could muffle the insect anymore.
As for what happened after his death, the Talmud (Gittin 56b) preserves the testimony of Rabbi Phineas ben Aruba: "I was among the Roman magnates when the inquest was held on his body. When they opened his skull they found a gnat the size of a swallow, weighing two selas." Others said it was as big as a year-old pigeon and weighed two litras. Abaye added that its mouth was copper and its claws iron.
Titus knew the God of Israel had not finished with him. Before he died, he gave orders that his body be burned and the ashes scattered over the seven seas, so that the God of the Jews might never find him to bring him to judgment. The Rabbis tell this story, preserved again in the 1901 Hebraic Literature anthology, not as history but as a moral verdict: the man who ground the Temple to dust was ground down, in turn, by something too small to see.
No grave deep enough, no ocean wide enough, to hide from what you have done.