The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Like his wife and his daughter, Vespasian’s forceful, socially aspirant mother did not live to witness the triumph of his seventh decade. Perhaps he would not have wished it. Suetonius ascribes his upbringing chiefly to his paternal grandmother, Tertulla, whose small estate at Cosa lay in mountainous farming country northeast of Rome. It was Tertulla, not Polla, who remained an object of veneration for Vespasian, hers the house he revisited as emperor over and over again. Its furnishings and condition were preserved as a tribute to her memory – and, surely, the memory of childhood happiness uncoloured by a mother’s harsh taunts. Of the home of his father, Titus Flavius Sabinus, which Suetonius sites in a small village beyond Reate (modern Rieti) called Falacrina, even the precise location has been lost. The region’s fame was confined to its mules.

  Yet neither Vespasia Polla, nor the character of Sabinus’ antecedents, can be erased from the record. Despite the provincial accent to which he clung until his death, Vespasian belonged to a family already on the move – ironically, given his ultimate usurpation of their throne, their progress a Julio-Claudian success story. Three times his maternal grandfather had served as military tribune; his mother’s brother was senator and praetor. Polla was not wrong to cherish hopes of more to come. Hers was the family from which the future emperor took his surname. Her family’s was the trajectory his life would follow, outstripping the small-town distinction of those sepulchral monuments which Suetonius tells us crowded a steep spot on the road from Nursia to Spoletium, itself known as ‘Vespasiae’. For his part, Sabinus was acclaimed for the honesty of his tax-gathering in Asia. Before his death, he had amassed a fortune from banking. That fortune, more than the habit of honesty, would accelerate the social mobility of his sons, the younger Sabinus and Vespasian, sufficient in the short term for the senatorial property qualification and rapacious Roman electioneering. Its recent origins – the memory of leaner times – underpinned Vespasian’s excessive meanness, ridiculed throughout the sources, acknowledged by the emperor without remorse.

  Vespasian’s garb of provincialism, then, was almost certainly considered. Prior to his principate, it served a protective purpose. In the eyes of the Julio-Claudians and their associates, it disqualified Vespasian from any but insignificant office-holding, a curtailment to reasonable ambition – ‘a man... in no wise to be feared because of the obscurity of his family and his name’. It, as much as military prowess, encouraged Nero to appoint Vespasian to the Judaean command in 67. Suetonius relishes the irony. So fateful a miscalculation recalls Galba’s appointment of Vitellius to Lower Germany, that proud fool’s egregious equation of corruption with ineptitude. Later, emblematic, the throne his own, Vespasian’s rustic middlingness seemed to Romans a guarantee of Neronian elitism quashed... perhaps a mark of family piety... of stubbornness... of the arrogance of the successful outsider. Perhaps, more pertinently, it provided a further means of associating Vespasian with Augustus, both ‘new men’ whose conspicuous talents seemed to sidestep the courtier’s fandangles. By the summer of 69, when the legions hailed him as emperor, Vespasian had a lifetime behind him: too late for the leopard to change his spots or, in his case, the fox his fur. More than forty years had passed since, aged sixteen, he put on the toga virilis in 25 or 26, more than thirty years since he was elected to the aedileship on his second attempt and subsequently the praetorship. (The lacklustre attainments of the intervening decade – tribune of the soldiers in Thrace, quaestorship in Crete and Cyrene – were the under-achievements which goaded Vespasia Polla into tartness.) If Vespasian’s career encompassed setbacks, it was also, of course, marked by notable successes, particularly during Claudius’ reign (as emperor, Vespasian would commemorate his early sponsor by building a temple to the Deified Claudius on the Caelian Hill). Experience furnished an accurate assessment of the value in all this of the mellifluousness of his speech – and the limited damage accruing from frankness concerning his family’s obscurity.

  As in the Republic, so too under the principate. Vote-winning was a costly business only loosely caught up with popular favour. Where family history failed to supply the novus homo with a ready-made political profile, the void could be filled by patrons and prominent protectors – best of all, by friends in high places: courtiers, freedmen, even the emperor’s smile. For all his country boy’s vowels and his determination as princeps to distance himself from the court politics of past regimes, Vespasian did not lack worldly wisdom. Gaius had heaped mud upon the hapless aedile of 38: as praetor, his erstwhile victim importuned the senate for special games to celebrate the emperor’s victory in Germany. In the same space, he thanked the emperor for honouring him with an invitation to dinner. Following Gaius’ death, Claudius’ freedman Narcissus was among those who championed Vespasian’s cause.

  Such nuggets of sycophancy and self-serving trouble us. Indicative of a degree of hard-headedness, they fly in the face of that Flavian propaganda which insists on a no-nonsense nature impatient of machinations, disdaining the place-seeker’s insincerity. They refute that denial of ambition Suetonius invokes portents to express. And they suggest, too, the extent to which, equestrian rank and mangled diphthongs notwithstanding, Vespasian the Sabine newcomer operated from within the system, the insider’s outsider. A mother’s ambition... a father’s new-made fortune... personal opportunism: Vespasian’s advance through the magistracies of the cursus honorum was anything but revolutionary.

  In the final months of 51, he reached the consulship. It was a reward for military achievements. In Germany, thanks to Narcissus’ influence, he had commanded a legion stationed near modern-day Strasbourg;9 in Britain, a focus of Claudius’ own imperial ambitions, the tally of his successes included more than twenty towns reduced to subjection and the Isle of Wight peaceful under Roman rule. That last ‘victory’ – clearly over-egged in Rome, where neither the island’s tiny size nor its nugatory strategic importance can have been accurately understood – earned Vespasian triumphal regalia in 47. He had fought more than thirty battles. Impressive in his tirelessness, with a head for tactics, strategies and the organized disposal of troops, as well as a hands-on approach, rapport with his men and crowd-pleasing carelessness in the matter of his own comforts, the Vespasian of the sources is a natural soldier, the equal (bar his money-grubbing) of the generals of antiquity, according to Tacitus.10 A brace of priesthoods followed the awards of 47, then finally the consulship. Vespasian was forty-two.

  In ascending the highest rung of the ladder, he had equalled the record of his maternal uncle and satisfied the yearnings of a mother who may or may not have survived to bear witness. His own feelings are unknown. Briefly eminent, he would discover that, in the short term, there was no more to come, a surprise to those readers who extrapolate from Suetonius a narrative of inevitability. In 51 his wife Domitilla gave birth to a second son, Domitian, a brother for Titus, born in 39, and the couple’s daughter, the younger Domitilla. Claudius divorced Messalina. On the Palatine a new wind was blowing. The emperor, as we have seen, took as his fourth wife his niece Agrippina the Younger. A tang of fear coloured the air. There were accusations, recriminations, careers abruptly shattered; Claudius’ grip on government was loosening. In palace precincts, hunger for power replaced lust as the prevailing appetite. As a dynamic, it was simultaneously more determined and deadlier. In Rome at large, imperial politics toppled to the politics of the imperial family, a high-risk confrontationalism in which there could be only one winner – as Agrippina herself would learn to her cost. Claudius’ bride Agrippina had ambitions. Agrippina had a venomous capacity for hatred. Agrippina had a son and, from the outset, a court party of her own. Vespasian was not among its number, with the result that he held no court appointment during Claudius’ final years or the beginning of Nero’s principate. Other losers in the fallout included Narcissus. Once Agrippina’s enemy, Claudius’ puffed-up freedman could not escape her loathing. We can assume that the same brush tarred Vespasian. In his case the empress’s enmity was not perso
nal or he could scarcely have escaped with his life. Sabinus continued as city prefect; Titus – for a spell fortune’s favourite – continued to take his lessons alongside Britannicus, Claudius’ son by Messalina. For Vespasian, a hiatus had been reached – appropriately a caesura. Father of three, soldier, senator and priest, he found himself for the moment less well placed than either his brother or his elder son, estranged from the machinery of power.

  Beginning in 63, two appointments recalled Vespasian to life. The first was a proconsulship of limited lustre. Far from enriching Vespasian, short-term overlordship in the Roman province of Africa – today a slice of North Africa centred on Tunisia – brought him to the brink of financial collapse and earned him, while it lasted, a degree of personal unpopularity, the source of which is unclear, buoyantly expressed in a pelting with vegetables in the port of Hadrumetum. The second was a command which, we have seen, he won precisely on account of his indifferent social status. First in Africa, afterwards in Judaea, Vespasian embarked on the journey which led him out of the shadows towards the purple.

  His route was necessarily unorthodox. He had no right to the throne, no grounds for covetousness or hope, no reason to contemplate his own preferment: like Otho, in principle barred by caste from imperial aspirations, but unlike Otho, able to reflect on the unhappy history of the latter’s fleeting prominence. Vespasian’s position echoed that of Verginius Rufus, the knight chosen as emperor by German legions following Nero’s suicide. Rufus, who would be offered the throne on two occasions, declined on grounds of birth. Eventually, as we have seen, after a significant, voluble interval of silence, he pledged his support for the unimpeachably aristocratic Galba, that veteran of the empress Livia’s court. On his tombstone he ordered the inscription, ‘Here lies Rufus, who, after defeating Vindex, did not take power but gave it to the fatherland.’

  Until Vitellius’ victory over Otho, a Flavian principate was not even a probability. Haemorrhaging money in Rome’s best interests under a cruel African sun in 63, Vespasian can have had no inkling of his final destination. He may have resented that roll of fortune’s dice which had allotted him an obscure appointment offering such threadbare recompense. Indeed, for Vespasian there were no pecuniary rewards in Africa. His duties cost him dear. The proconsulship over, he was forced to mortgage his estates to his brother, poor again in Rome’s name as he had been in the aftermath of the aedileship and quaestorship, reduced then to living in a tenement building in an unfashionable district. On this occasion, to support his family and maintain repayments, he set himself up as a dealer in mules. As an indignity, it pinpoints the precariousness of his position as novus homo and Neronian outsider. Evidently he was unable to take for granted either the emperor’s lucrative favour or the comfortable safety net of unearned family sesterces, his father’s fortune dissipated in the service of two sons’ senatorial ambitions. Suetonius’ use of language in describing Vespasian’s latest calling affirms the exigency of his position. Does the author imply dishonesty, the second-hand car salesman’s trick of talking up the second rate, in Vespasian’s equine dealings? Certainly he presents the enterprise without indulgence. Vespasian’s chosen entrepreneurship returned him to the land of his forefathers and the jobbing status of the non-aristocrat. Even in one who would afterwards rule with honour, it constituted anything but grounds for praise.

  The proconsulship had been awarded by lot, no particular gift from Nero. But Nero it was who, all unwitting, came to Vespasian’s rescue in the donkey-dealing doldrums of the mid-sixties. The emperor placed Vespasian at the head of three legions in rebellious Judaea. In time, Nero was among those whose downfall would prove as essential to Vespasian’s ascent as the support of the legions with which he endowed him. The appointment, which suited Nero, was not intended as a compliment to its recipient. Less than a year before his departure for the East, Vespasian had played Russian roulette with lèse-majesté. Travelling through Greece in the emperor’s suite, the tradesman ex-consul disgraced himself at an imperial song recital. Exact circumstances are unclear. Did Vespasian, as the sources indicate, really fall asleep, or was he simply unwise enough to leave early? It hardly matters. Enough to note Suetonius’ assertion that Draconian strictures sought to prevent the disturbance of Nero’s performances. Women gave birth on the spot, uncomfortable and unassisted in the theatre, rather than court displeasure by departing, while those goaded beyond endurance feigned death as the only fail-safe grounds for certain removal. Vespasian’s transgression cut short his Hellenic holiday and sent him scuttling out of reach of imperial ire. Happily, within the space of half a year, Nero’s mood had changed. Proven military prowess and a lack of aristocratic distinction emphasized by his current indebtedness outweighed Vespasian’s faulty etiquette and his flawed connoisseurship.

  In February 67, Jewish rebellion in Judaea gave Vespasian a purpose. It also endowed him with position – a return to public service – and in the long term, unconsidered by Nero, the foundations of a power base. Without the First Jewish Revolt (prosaically described by the Jewish historian Josephus as an upheaval of the greatest magnitude),11 the support of the governor of neighbouring Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, and renewed military command, Titus Flavius Vespasianus would not have become Rome’s tenth Caesar and progenitor of the Empire’s second dynasty. That fabled destiny, like the Flavian advance from Reate to the senate house, was a Julio-Claudian bequest.

  In Vespasian’s historiography, the Judaean command proved a gift to Suetonius, too. ‘There had spread over all the Orient’, we read, ‘an old and established belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world.’ Suetonius’ relief is almost palpable. Here, at the moment when a man since deified stands on the brink of treason, poised to seize the Empire for himself, the numina again come to the historian’s rescue. Vespasian’s path is foretold, preordained, his promotion the spoils of fortune: gift-wrapped in omens, there can be no question of personal ambition or cupidity. An emperor-made-god finds exoneration in portents. Suetonius, of course, adopted his own interpretation of that ‘old and established belief’ in Judaean-sent world-rulers. He awarded the honours to Vespasian and Titus, their acquaintance with the region prior to 67 less than a stamp in a passport – the elder born in a farmhouse fifty miles from Rome, the younger the creature of a dismal city tenement block. Yet at one level both were indeed ‘born’ in Judaea, Roman mettle proven in the crucible of war. Modern readers will furnish their own interpretations.

  But that is to jump ahead. Nero for one had not troubled himself with Eastern prophecies. He did not baulk at the supplementary legions placed at Vespasian’s disposal, the cavalry and auxiliaries, a mighty force extending to some 50,000 fighting men, sufficient surely for the task of revolution.12 Nero’s concept of the East championed Greece alone; his conquests were won with lyres. He left Judaea to the Sabine rough diamond who, lacking musicality, had once won victories for Claudius and since governed Africa with honesty but no gain.

  Unlike Vespasian’s principate, Roman victory in Judaea was certain, even once events in Rome had forced Vespasian to entrust command to his elder son Titus, who was twenty-eight at the time, with little of his father’s experience. Supreme in numbers, training and technology, the Romans overpowered the insurgents. They advanced roughshod over Jewish fighters and Jewish sensibilities: consistently they offered every possible affront to the insurrectionists. In the face of siege tactics and bandit warfare, Vespasian’s approach was dogged and methodical. Energetic, tough, occasionally inspired and able to conjure reserves of courage like rabbits from a trickster’s hat, he plotted a course from town to town as his opponents sought to establish their stronghold first in one location, then the next. Mackerel on a fisherman’s line, he seized each rebel encampment in turn, beginning in Galilee, Jerusalem his goal. Even the fitful nature of his campaign did not seriously endanger its outcome. He paused in his offensive following Nero’s suicide in 68; in 69, fighting was temporarily suspended w
hen Vespasian left Judaea for Egypt and a bigger battle, in which more than a province was at stake.

  As it happened, it was Titus, not Vespasian, who conquered Jerusalem, in August 70, after a siege of epic proportions lasting 140 days. By then, the older man could afford to share both laurels and limelight, and laughed at his own pretensions in coveting the grandeur of a triumph in Rome as acknowledgement of his generalship. For by 70 the world had turned upside down. There would be no more trading in mules or mortgages between brothers, no hiding in obscurity from a prima-donna sovereign smarting under imaginary sleights. The dynasty of Julius and Augustus, born out of genius, had ended in something resembling the chaos of farce, Augustus’ great-great-grandson virtually alone on the Palatine in lamenting his own inglorious demise. On 1 July in Egypt, and two days later in Judaea, Vespasian was acclaimed as imperator. It was more than Vespasia Polla had conceived, this eleventh-hour equality with Gaius, Claudius and Nero. The men who raised their voices in his cause were, like him, soldiers. It would be naïve to assume surprise on Vespasian’s part. Suetonius admits that his ‘hope of imperial dignity’, kindled by those convenient portents, was then of long duration.