The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  In Rome itself, the senate dragged its heels. Not until 22 December did it officially grant Vespasian full imperial honours and privileges, including the award of imperium. Suetonius neglects even to mention the senate’s role, an instance of rubber-stamping, the prize of empire no longer in its gift. The tenth Caesar remained absent from Rome, although the city – numb after too many interludes of butchery – was now his, administered in his name by a former provincial governor, Mucianus, and his eighteen-year-old younger son Domitian. A stranger to self-delusion, the new emperor estimated senatorial blandishments at their true worth. Setting the tone for his ten-year premiership, he resisted dissimulation. He dated his accession not by any decree or award of the senate’s, nor by his own arrival on the Capitol, but by those first Eastern acclamations made by men familiar with his deeds (although not privy to any full disclosure of his motives). In the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria, eulogized in the fourth century by Ammianus Marcellinus as ‘splendid to a point that words would only diminish its beauty’,13 Vespasian had consulted the auspices for guidance at the most critical moment of his life. His focus was not the temple’s beauty. The memory of loyal shouts ringing in his ears, he made sacrifices again and again. Blood, smoke and charred offerings – burnt flesh, singed skin – tincted air dense as incense, and Vespasian experienced a vision: he saw the figure of his freedman Basilides, arms outstretched, offering him garlands, sacred branches and loaves, though Basilides was far away and physically infirm. Like every incursion of the supernatural into Vespasian’s historical record, it was a sign, of course. Next dispatches brought news of Vitellius’ death.

  How had it come about, this revolution for which there were no constitutional precedents, this ‘happy’ ending which Dio estimated at a cost of 50,000 deaths? Certainly not in any way that is likely to be revealed to us completely. Victors have a habit of kicking over the traces, chucking out the account books and starting afresh. So it was with the Flavians. One explanation lies in that hotchpotch of signs and signifiers listed by Suetonius, tokens of the good fortune attendant on Vespasian (as well as of Vitellius’ certain demise). This constituted Vespasian’s own explanation, as early coin issues celebrating the emperor’s fortune attest. An affectation of easygoing modesty notwithstanding, Rome’s tenth princeps was nothing if not thorough. He made public the substance of his dreams and portents and, in the everyday currency of Rome’s taverns and marketplaces, reiterated their message of divine intervention. In addition, Suetonius (like Tacitus) highlights the role of legions clamorous in support of the new man from Judaea, a soldiery trigger-happy in the knowledge that, a century after Actium, the choice of emperor lay within its own grasp. Both suggestions leave gaps and raise questions. Persuasive as it must have been to Roman minds that Nero had dreamed he was commanded to take from its shrine the sacred chariot of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and deliver it to Vespasian’s house, the visions of a doomed man, reported in the time of his disgrace and preserved in the written accounts of his successors, do not invite blind trust. As it survives in The Twelve Caesars, the Flavian settlement takes little account of Vespasian himself. Prior to his accession, he is a magnet for presentiments, a cardboard cutout of the physical attributes of Roman manhood: a portrait of unassumingness distinct from the common run only in his martial arts. We glimpse his strengths and weaknesses through a prism of impending glory.

  How different he appears from his partner in crime, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, and his sons Titus and Domitian. His sons will succeed him as emperors – Titus like him a model of the ‘good’ ruler, Domitian a study in all that is most disgraceful, victim of the ancients’ weakness for vigorous contrast. For the moment, both younger men display flashes of selfishness and self-importance at odds with our portrait of their father. Their loyalty is a fragile, shifting thing, in thrall to their own desires and devices. Neither shares Vespasian’s military genius, although Titus has gained experience of warfare in Britain and Germany and Judaean victory is imminent. At this stage, their undisciplined appetites embrace wide-ranging depravity – the chronicler’s taste for tittle-tattle perhaps. In power, Vespasian’s outlook will reveal itself as explicitly dynastic. His hopes then centre on his sons, acclaimed like the heirs of Augustus as principes iuventutis, ‘Princes of Youth’ – Flavian self-regard a feature of both his own and Titus’ principates: in Vespasian’s reign, senatorial offices, imperial titles and numismatic acclamations are all enlisted in the service of the family trio. In the struggle for power, the contributions of Titus and Domitian counted less than the efforts of Mucianus, Tiberius Julius Alexander (the same Jewish equestrian prefect of Egypt who later served alongside Titus in Judaea), and the unlooked-for support of an opportunistic Pannonian legionary commander of questionable renown, Marcus Antonius Primus.

  Suetonius underplays Mucianus’ role. He is unable to reconcile his own theory of omens and portents with Mucianus’ untenable claim that it was he who single-handedly made Vespasian emperor. The Neronian ex-consul and lordly governor of Syria, who in his youth had run through a fortune in pursuit of high placement, and afterwards, for unspecified reasons, earned the disapproval of Claudius, emerges more forcefully from Tacitus’ Histories. There he is a study in contradictions, as much a vehicle for rhetorical dexterity on the writer’s part as a credible biographical portrait: evil and good, arrogant and courteous, vigorous and self-indulgent, a construct of pithy polarities. He is a raffish, boldly disreputable figure, whose dissipated prodigality and opulent hauteur – the dark side of Julio-Claudian grandeur – will jar in the new reign of moderation. Catamites follow him in flotilla. But his private life does not besmirch his position. He appears the very model of a Roman major general. Eminent in his magnificence, his wealth and that personal greatness which generated the prestige Romans celebrated as dignitas, he possessed the added gift of conferring the best possible gloss on his own words and deeds. He is, it seems, a would-be emperor. Princely, he lacks humility and the attributes of a subject. Prior to the intervention of Titus, whose charm and good looks effect a rapprochement between the neighbouring governors, he regards Vespasian with jealous contempt, even hostility, unwilling to acknowledge parity either of office or of person. That haughtiness is the prerogative of high birth and never wholly gives way to amity. In time, Mucianus would fail to treat the emperor Vespasian with the deference due to his elevation. He may not have had the stomach or the humility for such an inversion of the natural order. Enough that, conscious of his childlessness and age, and wooed by Titus, he forswears personal hopes of the purple.

  Writer and historian, Mucianus compiled a natural history of the East. It was remembered by Pliny the Elder as rich in reports of miraculous happenings, Roman belief in natural phenomena one connection between these two men of widely differing backgrounds and outlook. Literary endeavours aside, his contribution to Vespasian’s cause was the three Roman legions stationed in Syria. But he was not the Flavian’s Svengali, save in the luridness of his sexual proclivities, nor was he Vespasian’s Maecenas. The one-time governors’ association was pragmatic, a considered and tactical decision on both their parts. (If Tacitus can be trusted, Mucianus’ habitual priority was neither equity nor truth but the depth of a man’s purse, and he may simply have relished the prospect of influencing Rome’s next emperor to his own benefit.) Whatever his motives, the Syrian legions doubled the number of troops at Vespasian’s disposal.

  Those same troops had acclaimed Vespasian as imperator by the middle of July 69. Vitellius had been emperor of Rome for three months. At the beginning of July, as we have seen, similar acclamations had already been made in Egypt and in Vespasian’s own province of Judaea. At a council of war, Mucianus chose for himself the role of Rome’s conqueror, setting out on the long march westwards at the head of his sixth legion and 13,000 veterans.14 Vespasian journeyed to Egypt. In Alexandria, where his arrival inspired the Nile to overflow, and Pelusium, a border fortress on the easternmost banks of the Nile, he intended to restrict
the supply of grain to Italy, as a means if necessary of starving Vitellius’ Rome into surrender. It was a plan of which his brother Sabinus, reappointed to the office of city prefect by Otho, was already apprised, the brothers complicit despite the potentially contentious nature of Sabinus’ recent ‘assistance’ in the matter of Vespasian’s finances. As it happened, the plan would not be necessary.

  We do not know whether sight of that portent recorded by Suetonius before the battle of Bedriacum was reported to the hapless Otho. Two eagles fought in full view of the assembled troops. One defeated, a third approached from the East – ‘direction of the rising sun’... of Egypt, Syria and Judaea – and drove away the victor. There were pressing, more concrete reasons for Otho’s suicide. But soldiers present that day were impressed by the evident symbolism of this airy puppetry.

  Among them was the Danubian legionary commander and determined rabble-rouser Marcus Antonius Primus. A convicted forger disgraced in the reign of Nero, at fifty Antonius was the sort of restless thrill-seeker who finds his métier in the theatre of war. He declared his support for Vespasian in a spectacular gesture which nullified Mucianus’ proposed march on the capital and Vespasian’s war of attrition. Unsanctioned by authority, in October Antonius engaged Vitellian troops at the battle of Cremona in north-central Italy. He inflicted an overwhelming defeat. So ferocious and unforgiving was the encounter at Cremona that, in Tacitus’ account, it represents the very end of that city, 286 years after its foundation. Afterwards, puffed with victory but clearly not sated, Antonius led his men south towards Rome. There, entering the city via a quiet district of the northeast, they again routed Vitellian forces. It was the feast of the Saturnalia and easy in the free-for-all holiday atmosphere to initiate what quickly developed into full-scale rioting in surrounding streets – a bloody spectacle, according to Tacitus, watched by cheering, jeering Romans as if the Empire’s future governance were just another gladiatorial combat. Legionary banners acclaimed Vespasian. It was victory for the cause after a fashion. On this occasion neither Vespasian nor Suetonius had recourse to portents to establish blamelessness.

  Surely Vespasian entertained the highest hopes on his arrival in Rome more than a year later. The oracle of the god of Carmel, whom he had consulted in Judaea, had promised that whatever he planned or wished, however great, would come to pass. It was an unequivocal response – possibly, dangerously, carte blanche. As throughout his public life, Vespasian interpreted the green light responsibly. He assumed the consulship – shared with Titus, a suffect appointment granted to Mucianus – and addressed himself clear-sightedly to the task in hand as he saw it.

  It was as if, from the outset, he had dedicated himself to winning that good opinion with which posterity continues to furnish him. ‘He considered nothing more essential than first to strengthen the state, which was tottering and almost overthrown,’ Suetonius tells us, ‘and then to embellish it as well.’ Did he hope to vindicate his legitimacy through a surfeit of civic-mindedness? Was good behaviour the surest means of self-preservation, new building on Rome’s streets as much a metaphor for order restored as that review of membership of the senate he pursued following his revival of the censorship in 73? The ancient author, habitually impartial, comes close to panegyric. In truth, the new man at the top was prepared to undertake almost any measure to shore up his position, understandably reluctant to replicate the swift downward spirals of Galba, Otho or Vitellius, and to stabilize the ‘tottering’ state.

  The regime needed adherents. Veteran of that pelting in Hadrumetum, Vespasian understood with no prompting from Juvenal that the commons of Rome would cheer anyone who fed and entertained them, too poor for the luxury of political discernment. Roman senators were lured less readily. They could as easily cherish the memory of the affable, well-born Vitellius, like Vespasian popular with his troops and distinguished by a reputation for integrity during his provincial governorship in Africa. On the streets of Rome, Vespasian cultivated a jocular buffoonery. He was quick to jest, apparently without self-importance, his humour unrarefied, blokeish and winning, laughter at his own expense. Behind palace doors, he entertained a continuous stream of senate members and himself accepted invitations to dinner. He transferred his principal residence from the Palatine – superior eyrie of the Julio-Claudians – to the Gardens of Sallust, a bequest to Tiberius from Sallustius Crispus in AD 20. There his doors stood open to all callers. It was an arrangement reminiscent of senatorial practice under the Republic. In the Flavian charm offensive, accessibility and openness were to be the keynotes. At the same time, in an irreconcilable (and unpublicized) impulse, he controlled the principal appointments of state with a tight grasp, avoiding those distinguished by family history – an untenable policy on his part – in favour of men who had demonstrated loyalty and friendship to him personally. In 71, for example, he may have appointed Tiberius Julius Alexander to share prefectship of the Praetorian Guard with Titus.15 He himself shared the consulship with Titus seven times – in 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 and 79 – exploiting the office for personal and dynastic gain. Family monopoly was deliberate and more than simply a security measure. His revival of the censorship in 73 enabled him to re-examine the make-up of the senate and fill vacancies with his own nominees – some sixty-nine senators, including Romans, Italians and provincials.16 Suetonius casts what may as easily have been self-serving as a moral crusade, Vespasian’s criteria for senatorial rank merit, worthiness and respectability. As under the Republic, so under the first Flavian: the great magistracies of state were the means of conferring that personal prestige or auctoritas which, municipal bourgeois that he was, Vespasian could not take for granted.

  The Rome in which Vespasian found himself – received rapturously in the months following the Flavian sack of Jerusalem – was a city partly purged. The murderous hell of Antonius’ conquest had passed. Vitellius’ ugly death, an unedifying example of mass viciousness and the fickleness of mob rule, had inspired rabid atrocities on the part of Flavian troops and even civilians: looting, slaughter and rampaging bloodlust like that of foxes released into a chicken coop. Prior to Antonius’ arrival in Rome, Vespasian’s mortgage-broking brother Sabinus had perished in the torching of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus as order buckled before misrule. More fortunate than his uncle, Domitian – left behind for the duration of the Judaean campaign – managed to escape from the same hiding-place. It was an event on which Domitian would later pleasurably dwell, as if, like Vespasian’s nimbus of portents, escape invested him with quasi-divinity. In years to come, he built a temple on the spot of his delivery. In it he placed a statue of himself borne aloft by Jupiter Custos (‘Jupiter the Guardian’). Portraiture is never neutral in imperial Rome: that Domitian should present himself in such a light, cradled by a god, is a vainglorious gesture at odds with Flavian understatement, not to mention Vespasian’s ability to laugh at himself. In the short term, while terror gripped the streets, Domitian the survivor, saved by the intervention of Jupiter Custos or otherwise, had savoured his freedom in an orgy of partying. Immature, headstrong, dizzy with the splendid destiny suddenly revealed to him and insensitive to niceties in the relief of remaining alive, he had accepted as his father’s representative the soldier’s acclamation of ‘Caesar’. But he was not Caesar. ‘There was no emperor and there were no laws,’ Tacitus records. The integration into the Flavian narrative of Domitian’s miraculous escape from fire and perfervid Vitellians would remain temporarily unresolved. Later it formed a cornerstone of that unhappy emperor’s personal mythology.

  Arriving in early 70, it was Mucianus who in fact played the Caesar’s part, the language of command instinctively within his lexicon. He expelled Antonius’ lawless troops from the city and sidelined their light-fingered commander, who was even then rewarding himself with plunder from the imperial household. (His history of pliant loyalties offered limited grounds for trust.) Antonius left Rome first to plead his cause before Vespasian in Alexandria, afterwards – Vespasian h
aving smoothed his ruffled feathers with admirable diplomacy – for retirement in his native Tolosa (modern Toulouse). Mucianus’ thoughts turned then to Domitian. Amiably or otherwise, he set about curbing the young man’s pretensions and herding him back within the fold. Together he and Domitian began that reconstituting of the Roman machinery which Vespasian would continue, appointing governors and prefects. Mucianus executed Vitellius’ son. It was a necessary precaution perhaps, but one Vespasian himself could not have taken without forfeiting the garb of good-naturedness he had chosen as an alternative to lofty birth or that ‘great renown’ with which Suetonius endows him at this point.

  For the better part of a year Mucianus oversaw the business of government, preparing for Vespasian’s autumn arrival and the less explosive, more challenging task of restoration. In Dio’s account, it is Mucianus who embarked on the programme of tax increases which, in time, overcame Rome’s staggering post-Nero, post-civil war deficit, estimated by Vespasian in Suetonius’ account at 40,000 million sesterces at a time when the annual tax revenue was only 800 million sesterces.17 He ‘gather[ed] countless sums into the public treasury with the greatest eagerness from every possible quarter, thereby relieving Vespasian of the censure which such a proceeding entailed’;18 as the year drew to its close, he encouraged Vespasian to pursue a similar policy. Briefly, the self-proclaimed king-maker enjoyed absolute power. He was authorized, he claimed, by a ring bearing the imprint of the imperial seal, given to him by Vespasian. Only Domitian, appointed urban praetor with consular powers, shared Mucianus’ temporary majesty. In the fortunes of this loose-living libertine with a talent for intrigue but neither the ambition nor the courage to aim for ultimate honours, it represented a high-water mark. In the years that followed, despite a position of esteem and influence at Vespasian’s court, he would never again wield such unqualified power.