by Ken Parejko
We learned this all second-handed, from couriers from the capitol, of how in Gaul the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, an adept administrator named Julius Vindex, had had enough. He had not come over to the Roman side to see true authority made a mockery of by a petulant emperor-become-actor. In the name of reason and liberty he wrote open letters to provincial governors to rise up against Nero. A copy of the letters ended up in Nero’s hands. Vindex’ strongest supporter in rebellion was the governor of Hispania Tarraconenesis, Servius Sulpicius Galba, a heavy-set bald man with blue eyes and a sensual passion for strong, mature men. Vindex declared his support for Galba as emperor, and in so doing dragged Galba into the fray. Galba’s position was perilous; he had only one legion against all of Nero’s. Nero ordered his legions to move against the conspirators. They quickly destroyed Galba’s army. Vindex killed himself. Galba retired to his provincial mansion, waiting the messengers from Rome demanding he kill himself or be killed.
In his letters to his brother Sabinus interpreted for us events inside Nero’s court. It had been the murder of his own mother, almost a decade before, by which Nero had signed his own death-warrant. Demon they saw her as, the people of Rome could not forgive matricide. Perhaps more importantly, try as he might he could not forgive himself. She came to him more and more often now. Sometimes in the loneliness of his insanity she came as a protectress to touch and caress his burning spirit in ways no one else could. But more often she came to him as a Fury, to remind him of his misdeeds, to harry his spirit, and to fan the flames of agony which devoured it. It was this terrible conflict by which Nero could no longer be sure of anything, even the love of his mother, which pushed him to a place of mind and spirit from which he could not return. In the ineluctable logic of Fate her murder ultimately led to his own end.
The forced suicide of Corbulo played into the hands of the anti-Neronians. Meanwhile the unrest we were in the middle of in Judea raised worries about the supply of African and Egyptian grain, and that brought on rampant inflation in the price of bread. His closest advisers convinced Nero that his position teetered on the brink of destruction. He took refuge in his poetry and art; but the refuge of a dream cannot save us from reality.
The end came surprisingly quickly. The Senate declared Galba emperor. Nero’s most trusted generals turned against him. The final blow was the decision by the prefect of the Praetorian guard that Nero’s cause was lost, and the mutiny of the Praetorians in favor of Galba. Even Nero in his madness could not ignore the absence of his personal guards. Exposed as he now was to the disdain and anger of the people, unable to go out for fear of assassination, he became a prisoner in his huge and lavish Golden House. The gigantic gold-gilt rooms, decorated with all the wealth the empire could bring him, echoed with his madness. He wandered the lonely halls, demanding that expensive banquets be prepared and set for guests who did not come, and staged plays and music recitals at which he was the only player and the audience consisted of his few remaining servants.
Reality took some time to seep into the Golden House, but in time it did and wrapped even this, the last descendent of the Julio-Claudians, in its cold embrace. Any day the Praetorians might show up at his door, demanding his suicide. He could stand it no longer. Grabbing up his most precious treasures, he fled for the countryside. Once there, he believed, he could find someone to put him up, if not out of loyalty then at least in exchange for a golden cup or pearl necklace.
But the emperor of Rome does not move unnoticed. As he cut through the alleyways he had become so familiar with on his night-time carouses, he was shadowed by the Praetorians. He slipped out of the city into the suburbs, where he found an empty hovel to rest and hide in. He’d barely lain down when the Praetorians barged through the door. The scene that followed was eerily reminiscent of the last act of his mother’s life.
“We have you,” the captain of the guard said. “You will not leave alive.”
Nero cowered on the floor, reached a golden goblet set with gigantic pearls toward the man, who kicked it against the wall.
“We'll leave and give you ten minutes,” the man said. “If you haven't killed yourself by then, we will do it for you.”
“No, don’t go,” Nero begged, “I could not bear to die alone.” So they stayed and watched him pull a knife from his clothes, slash his wrists, and lay back to die. He glanced around, at the dirt floor only too willing to receive his precious blood, at the jumble of golden cups and plates, jewelry and silverware he’d brought with him, useless as straw. The guards stood mercilessly above him, cold guardians of his last moments. Slowly his blood slipped out of his body, leaving him weak and dizzy. The Praetorians faded in and out of focus. A mangy dog appeared in the doorway, attracted by the smell of blood. When a guard kicked at it to chase it away, the cur growled and slinked off to a safer distance, where it lay in the dust and watched, with calculating eyes, the dissolution of the emperor. “Please,” Nero begged the guards, “don’t let him have me. Bury me, or burn me, but don’t let him have me.”
The guards stood unresponding.
His breath became shallow, intermittent, his eyelids slipped half-shut. His final words were barely audible.
“Qualis artifex pereo,” he said. “What an artist perishes with me.”
His eyes, still half open, glazed over. Now he saw what the guards could not: his mother, Agrippina, come to take him into her arms. They saw his mouth shape itself into the death-grin as he felt himself taken up in her embrace. They were together now in their own reality. Unimpeded by the close confines of the physical world there was from now til eternity no limit to the anguish they could wreck on one another.
Chapter 13
Judea and Alexandria
69 C.E.
You Romans make someone responsible
for harbors, streets, buildings, walls.
But as for your children and
women, you have no thought for them.
Apollonius of Tyana, Letters
Sabinus told us about all this, in his letters, over the coming weeks.
At its center the government seemed to be falling apart. Even before he'd arrived from Spain the Senate declared Galba emperor. He entered a city on the edge of chaos. Surely, they tried to convince themselves, the devil we have is better than the one we had.
Galba drove Nero’s cronies from the palace and the government. He replaced Sabinus with a hand-picked praefectus urbi. Some saw this as a warning to Vespasian who, after all, was in command of the greatest army in the empire. Sabinus wrote that there were rumors, unsubstantiated but worthy of notice, that Galba had dispatched an assassin to Judea. Trust no one, Sabinus warned.
Hereditary claim to the throne ended when the last drop of Nero’s blood drained onto the squalid floor of his death. The rules had changed. With enough support anyone could declare themselves emperor. By being the first to openly declare Nero mad Galba had set himself on the road to power, and declared himself emperor. But when he began putting one after another of Rome’s most prominent men under the blade it became clear that Galba’s brutality was no better than Nero’s. By tradition on the first of January the legions swore an oath of loyalty to the emperor. But the legions from Germany refused allegiance to Galba, in favor of the governor of Lower Germany, Aulus Vitellius. Galba's friend Salvisu Otho, upset that Galba had named someone else as successor, declared against Galba. The Praetorians lent their support to Otho.
Now the Furies unleashed chaos onto the city. Mobs supporting both candidates took to the streets. Somehow, perhaps it was only wishful thinking, Galba convinced himself that Otho’s followers had given up. He left the security of the palace and ventured to the Forum to accept their surrender. Along the way equites supporting Otho recognized him. No one came to his aid. Galba was killed near the Lacus Curtius. A passing soldier decapitated the dead emperor and presented his head to Otho, who had it impaled and paraded around the city.
Two candidates remained: Vitellius, with the support of the
German armies, and Otho. Neither had hereditary right to the throne. Titus saw a door opening into a future only a month before he could hardly have imagined.
We began to feel as though there was more in the wind than just putting down the Jews. In private Titus outlined his thoughts to me. We commanded the largest, best equipped and disciplined of the empire’s armies. We already controlled most of Judea, all of Syria, Egypt, and north Africa, which put Rome’s supply of grain into our hands. Otho, one of Nero’s favorites in debauchery, dragged around with him the stench of Nero’s reign, and other than among the Praetorians had few followers. Vespasian on the other hand was well-known and his common sense, down-to-earth ways much respected. A victory in Judea would bring his name and the Flavian name to the fore. Our troops, aware of the pivotal role they played in the future of the empire, could be counted on to fight as never before.
It all made sense to me, but other than taking Jerusalem as quickly as possible, I offered little advice.
Apparently Titus was successful in convincing his father that the time had come for decisive action. Vespasian called his legions together and told them the future of the empire lay in their hands. With the loud blast of bugles, thumping of drums and much ceremony the army left Caesarea. Lucius and I rode just behind Vespasian and Titus straight towards the holy city. Cerealis was sent ahead to cut Jerusalem off from the north. When we arrived the city was already surrounded. Vespasian's legions settled in for a siege, and while we waited Vespasian, Titus and I traveled north to Mount Carmel to confer with Mucianus, who’d brought his troops and, just as important, the latest news from Rome.
Mucianus said Vitellius’ forces had defeated Otho’s army at Bedriacum, and Otho committed suicide. But Vitellius’ path to the throne was not straightforward. Sensing a weakness in the imperialist leadership the Batavian Julius Civilis led a revolt on the Rhine against Roman forces. Vitellius, on his way to Rome from Germany, was forced to leave troops behind to quell the revolt. In the big reception hall of the governor’s palace in Ara Agrippinensis, the very building I’d seen being built some twenty years before at the new colonial capitol’s dedication ceremonies, he declared himself emperor.
At Carmel we held long talks with Mucianus, far into the night and beginning again at morning’s first light. We all knew we were present at history in the making. Vitellius was not a popular man, respected neither as a general nor as a politician. The public made fun of his obesity. Mucianus said Vitellius had once ordered a meal composed of dishes from every part of the empire, which he consumed rapaciously, as though consuming the world itself -- a true raptor orbis.
Mucianus told us, too, the interesting news that thousands of Otho’s troops had refused to declare for Vitellius, instead declaring support for Vespasian, and furthermore that Vologaesus, King of the Parthians, had sent him a note promising forty thousand archers in Vespasian’s cause. Urged on now by Titus and Mucianus – and I didn’t dissent -- Vespasian reluctantly agreed to announce to his troops the next morning that he was declaring himself emperor. It was a momentous moment in our lives and the empire’s history. We were all tired of self-involved leaders of dubious sanity, tired too of civil war. I knew Vitellius personally from earlier days. There was no doubt Rome would be better-served by Vespasian.
As the sun cleared the horizon behind us, promising to deliver another hot summer day, we stood together just outside the walls of the Castrum Samaritanus on Mount Carmel’s flanks. Vespasian’s hundred or so men as well as the troops Mucianus had brought down from Antioch were arrayed in front of us, full of hopeful rumors. When Titus announced that his father, standing beside him, would be Rome’s next emperor a cheer went up that echoed for miles, a cheer which in the coming weeks would carry to the very walls of the capitol. Titus reminded the men of the important role they played in bringing this about, and the rewards that could follow.
It was on the first of July that Mucianus publicly declared his support and his troops took the oath of loyalty to Vespasian, as did Julius Tiberius Alexander’s troops in Alexandria. In the coming years Vespasian would consider that day the first day of his reign.
Mucianus meanwhile hurried back to Antioch where he started a rumor among the troops left behind that Vitellius planned to ship them to Germany, a much less pleasant posting. His troops shifted their loyalty to Vespasian and within a few days all Syria followed.
I returned with Vespasian to his headquarters in Caesarea, where he convened a meeting of the governors of the eastern provinces. Herod’s palace was once again the epicenter of political activity for all the east, in fact now for all the empire. The governors backed him to a man. Vespasian's attention turned to mustering political support, and he handed conduct of the Jewish war over to Titus. Couriers were arriving every day with the latest news from Rome, where Vitellius' support continued to dwindle. Vespasian took his destiny in his hands and sent Mucianus and his Syrian legions to Italy to put down Vitellius’ forces.
To strengthen ties to Egypt, Rome's breadbasket, Vespasian decided on a quick trip to Alexandria, through whose port nearly half of our annual grain supply was shipped. In Rome the civil war had brought about a bread crisis. Prices soared. Controlling the grain shipments was a potent weapon ready at hand. Vespasian ordered a complete shut-down to the shipping of grain from Alexandria. As the price of bread in the capitol skyrocketed popular support for Vitellius plummeted.
Fate was granting me my wish to visit Alexandria. With Vespasian, Titus and some twenty aides we embarked on a trireme. We’d barely left Caesarea’s harbor when a liburnian galley was seen coming up fast behind. The galley pulled alongside with stunning news. Though Mucianus and his Syrian troops hadn’t even arrived in Italy, armies loyal to the Flavian cause there had met and defeated Vitellius’ forces at Cremona.
The courier described the battle, which lasted days and had been hard fought with no clear winner. Casualties were high on both sides. Victory could yet bless either side, and to the victor would come the future of the empire.
One of Vespasian’s legions at Cremona was the 3rd Gallic, which had served a while in the east. There they’d come under the influence of the Persian cult of Mithras. In the predawn darkness the 3rd Gallic slipped into their armor and gathered to welcome the sun as it rose. At the first sign of the great golden globe rising above the horizon, signaling to the troops the return of Mithras in his fight of good over evil, the legion let out a loud prolonged shout. Hearing the 3rd Gallic’s shouts Vitellius’ troops assumed the legion was cheering the arrival of Mucianus’ reinforcements from Syria, also to the east. Vitellius’ troops threw their weapons down and ran. In an odd sort of way, Mithras had brought victory to Vespasian’s men.
Events were moving at a dizzying speed. Just months before Vespasian had been a mule-dealer in Reate and persona non gratis in the capitol. On his way to Judea he’d scooped up and brought me along, and I now found myself in a political maelstrom which looked to deposit my old friend smack on the throne. As unlikely as it seemed, it seemed right. Augustus was first to take on the name Imperator, signifying a great general. Today there was no greater general in the empire than Vespasian. Now in my journals alongside observations of local natural history I kept track too of the daily events which made up the grand sweep of human history swirling around me. Even Lucius remarked, more than once, how rapidly Vespasian’s star had risen.
Meanwhile over Egypt another star was rising, the dog-star Sirius, marking midsummer and the beginning of the Nile’s rapid rise. Already the first slow percolation of the river outside its banks, which the Egyptians called the Sweat of Osiris, had begun. Now as Ra’s eye slipped shut over the western seas Sirius rose to the east, and the river’s rise accelerated. For a thousand miles up and down its course the Nile overflowed its banks, forcing people out of their homes and onto higher ground. Villages once connected by roads became islands in the great flood. On-board our ship to Alexandria as I watched Sirius rise from the east a passage from Seneca ca
me to mind. In his Natural Questions Seneca, forced to suicide by Nero’s purge, had written about his estates along the Nile and described the annual flood which inundated them as being as great a marvel of nature as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and terrible storms.
But unlike earthquakes and eruptions the Nile’s flood was predictable. And through these floods the Nile was the fundament of this, the most ancient civilization of all. For after the floods receded the river's great gift to the Egyptian people would be exposed, the thick rich silt on which their culture, and our grain supply, were built.
Our trip to Alexandria went uneventfully, the Child of Isis cutting through the low waves with a steady north wind to our back. Finally we caught sight of Alexandria’s four hundred-foot Pharo, the famous lighthouse we’d read of since children, standing tall above the city’s harbor, called the Harbor of Safe Return. For four centuries under the beacon of that great light an uncountable multitude of ships had plied their way into and out of the port, carrying grain, sesame, safflower and linseed oil, cotton, and the innumerable wares of Egyptian manufacturers. Papyrus, too, pressed from the wild reed growing in swamps along the Nile, made its way from here to all parts of the world. Alexander had the sprawling city built on the shores of Lake Mareotis, which connected by canal to the most westerly branches of the Nile as it spilled into the Middle Sea. The lighthouse, the harbor, and the commerce fed by the city’s strategic position between the sea and the Nile guaranteed its residents’ prosperity. This and Alexander’s own love of the arts and learning also guaranteed the city would prosper as a cultural center. Its temples and buildings were among the finest in the world. The preeminent of these, and the point of my visit, were the city’s renowned Mouseion and Library.
