The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  The flexible theme of freedom was much in evidence too. The great Russian historian, M. I. Rostovtzeff, even saw the year 68/9 as 'the protest of the provincial armies and the people of the Empire in general against the degenerate military tyranny of the successors of Augustus'.1 It certainly began in the West as a protest, but the protest was against Nero's particular extravagance and looting. Not all the armies or provincials responded; they lacked political leaders and there was no attempt at a new political system. What people wanted was the existing system brought back under moral restraint and a restored respect for law.

  The theme of 'liberty' was voiced by army-commanders and was visible on all four emperors' coins. However, it never meant democ­racy or even the freedoms of the long-dead Republic. When Nero died, people in Rome wore the 'cap of liberty', as if freed from slavery. Greeks had hailed him as 'Zeus of Freedom' for freeing their province, but Roman coins now proclaimed 'Jupiter Liberator' for freeing them of their tyrant. Old Galba then proclaimed 'liberty', as did his Gallic backer Vindex, but they simply meant freedom from Nero. Galba and Verginius, another important commander, each implied that it would be for the Roman Senate and people to exercise freedom, in this case the freedom to choose the next 'First Citizen'. Vitellius proclaimed freedom, but only freedom from the Nero-like habits of Otho. Vespasian then proclaimed 'freedom' from Vitellius. It had to be 'asserted' or 'vindicated', he stated, as if the Roman people had been 'slaves' to the wrong master.2

  The personal choice of an heir and successor was not freedom at all, but Galba and Vespasian both did it. The Praetorian guards chose Otho and nobody at Rome could stop them, either. Among these rivalries, surely the 'people of the Empire in general' had a chance to be free? Conspicuously, none took it, until the drama was nearly over and then only in a corner of north-west Europe. In early summer 69 there was a real call here to freedom from Rome and the formation of an 'Empire of the Gauls'. This campaign was led in the north-east of Gaul and among neighbouring German peoples by the well-born Civilis, a man of Germanic origin, who cut a fine figure with his one eye (like a new Hannibal, he said) and a long beard which he dyed red. Civilis was not a noble savage, but a cunning leader who knew Roman ways and tactics from his own experience of them. Others helped him, including a local prophetess, Veleda, who apparently had links with the banned lore of the Druids and prophesied success for the revolt.

  The most prominent champions of it, the Batavians, had suffered particularly from Roman conscription; its officers had forced thou­sands of them, including young boys, into auxiliary army units which were then transferred very far from home. Civilis was to be adopted in later times by the Dutch (who presented themselves as kin of the Batavians) and became the Dutch national hero: Rembrandt even painted him for the town hall of Amsterdam.' But this subsequent 'nationalist' role was not true to the Civilis of history. National con­sciousness was indeed behind the Batavian-Gallic uprising, but it was not inflamed into nationalism as it had been among the Jews, and it was even less unified than the Jewish revolt. More of the participants in the revolt were Germans than were Gauls and their various tribes mistrusted or hated each other already. Six Roman legions were sent to put the danger down, but even without them the revolt would have collapsed quite soon. An 'Empire of the Gauls' would have been economically isolated from Roman Britain and from Roman terri­tories around it. People also realized that Roman power had been containing old rivalries among them and by keeping the peace it was the lesser of two evils.

  The Empire's darkest year was in fact proof of its stability. The eventual winner, Vespasian, emerged from Syria and Judaea where he and Titus, one of his sons, had been leading the legions with distinction against the Jews. His formal proclamation as emperor began in Alex­andria on i July 69, but plans had already been laid in advance. His rise was said to be backed by omens and prophecies from the gods: Vespasian consulted oracles and in Alexandria he was coaxed into a wondrous 'healing' of a blind man and a cripple who approached him on the advice of the healing god Serapis. Sceptical at first, Vespasian and his supporters capitalized on his success, a real 'royal touch'.4 It was almost unique in the history of Roman emperors (but not of medieval kings).

  Despite suffering from gout, Vespasian had promise. He was about to be sixty years old and was the first emperor since the elderly Tiberius who was a proven soldier with experience of the provinces. He had led troops very ably in the invasion of Britain in 43 where he had conquered the south-west and had taken the Isle of Wight. He was a plain blunt man who had kept a local Italian accent and he had none of Tiberius' touchiness or aristocratic pride: even his portrait-busts chose a plain 'Italian' style of realism, not the classicizing ideal look of Augustus or Nero. Unlike the other Julio-Claudians, he brought no strong-willed wife with him: he had married a humbly born Italian, Domitilla, but she was now dead. As a widower, he was living with a freedwoman, Caenis, as his 'concubine' or partner. It was amazing, but not too worrying, that way back, this same lady had been an ex-slave in the household of the great Antonia, Mark Antony's daugh­ter. Caenis was now old and hardly likely to encourage the Mark Antony style. But she could tell old Vespasian some excellent bits of gossip in bed.

  What Vespasian lacked was any other connection with his Julio-Claudian predecessors. While his supporters took Rome for him, he remained usefully out of the way. There was severe fighting in the eternal city; the very Capitol was burned and hundreds of bronze inscriptions were destroyed in an epigraphic meltdown which Vespasian then tried to repair by ordering new copies of the texts. Vespasian did not reach the city of Rome until autumn 70 and in the intervening months questions were raised about his likely manner of rule. Who would advise him? What titles would he take and would he consult the Senate or simply present them with his decisions? The upper classes wanted an emperor who would behave modestly and morally and who would not defy the law. The opponents of Nero's tyranny were not all dead and their favour for moral principles was still supported by a degree of contact with Stoic, philosophic views.

  Lawyers, as usual, were more flexible than philosophers. It was arguably in early 70 that an important law was passed in Vespasian's favour which set out his powers and cited precedents (when available) from the reigns of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians (except the mad Caligula). It is not convincing to see this law as just one more example of an older practice which had already been enacted for previous emperors since ad 14.j Vespasian lacked his predecessors' dynastic authority. As a 'clean break' his rule needed to be spelt out and referred to the Julio-Claudian past. The philosophic minority was still pressing for a well-regulated ruler, but some of the lawyers came up with a crushing answer. The law specified anything from Vespasian's power to make treaties 'with whomsoever he wishes' to his greater role in elections: special consideration was guaranteed for 'his' candi­dates. No precedent (significantly) could be cited here, but hencefor­ward, senators who wanted to be elected would be well advised to keep in with the emperor. Above all, a clause permitted Vespasian to do whatever he thought fit in the public interest 'just as was the case' (no legal right could be cited here) 'for Augustus and the others'. The face of autocracy was thus recognized by law. The legal details continued in two more clauses, one of which specified what 'Caesar Vespasian' was not bound by (citing legal precedents), another of which ratified the decisions which he had already had to take during the year 69.

  This law was a very neat piece of small print. For more than a hundred years Roman lawyers would discuss it in connection with the powers of the emperor (as they still do): he was not a king, like Ptolemy and Alexander, and, lo and behold, this text did indeed relate his autocracy to law and the needs of 'the Republic'. There was something specific here for legal minds to cite and chew over. For Vespasian, the immediate advantage was that the brute facts of life had been ratified and agreed up front. The old aristocratic families, where a few able voices might have challenged him, were almost all extinct. Surviving senators included rather too
many who had thrown restraint to the winds under Nero and were morally compromised by their supporting roles in his shows and orgies. The gaps in their ranks were now to be filled by lesser, newer arrivals, whose expectations of their new status would be satisfied if its role was set out and regulated. Lawyers had now defined it and the small print seemed to say that the rules were part of a tradition which went back long before these newer men arrived. Protesting philosophers were a tiresome and impractical minority. The real questions for the men in the Senate's new intake concerned who would be first to receive higher office or even the honour of a priesthood. After 71 the word 'freedom' never appeared again on Vespasian's coins.

  50

  The New Dynasty

  This statue fears no rainy winters nor the triple fire of Jupiter's lightning . . . it will stand while earth and sky endure, while there is still a Roman daylight. Here, in the silent night, when earthly affairs concern the gods on high, your kin will leave the heavens and glide down and mingle their kisses with you. Son and brother, father and sister will come down to your embrace: your neck alone will make space for all the stars . . .

  Statius, Silvae 1.1.91-8, on Domitian's bronze equestrian statue in Rome, c. ad 91

  It was our delight to dash those proud faces to the ground, to strike them with the sword and savage them with the axe as if blood and agony could follow every blow. Nobody could refrain from joy, late though our rejoicing was, but everyone sought a form of revenge in seeing those statue-bodies torn in pieces, limbs hacked to bits and those dreadful portrait-images cast into the flames and roasted, so that from such terror and threats, they could be transformed for the use and pleasures of mankind. Pliny, Panegyric 52.4-5, on the destruction

  of Domitian's statues in ad 93

  When Vespasian finally reached Rome, nobody could dispute the need for a new style and a new grip on the realities. After Nero and a civil war, the finances were in a dreadful state. The grain-reserves had almost run out; the ranks of senators had been diminished by civil war; rivals had proclaimed 'freedom', but there had been looting by

  the troops, much as during Octavian's own rise to power. The city itself was a sorry sight. The Great Fire of 64 had been followed by yet more burning in the recent conflicts. In the middle of it all, Nero's Golden House was still standing, a gigantic affront.

  Inevitably, taxes had to increase. Italy remained exempt from trib­ute, but existing taxes went up and new ones were soon added: there was even a new tax on the urine from public urinals (which was used for cleaning clothes, as it still was in the First World War). Vespasian, the down-to-earth Italian, had no particular fondness for Greek cul­ture. The turbulent Alexandrians in Egypt found themselves forced to pay the poll tax for the first time and Nero's grant of tax-free 'freedom' to Greece was revoked. It was, then, particularly ingenious of the Arcadian Greeks of Tegea, down in the Peloponnese, to claim that they had uncovered ancient vessels in a sacred place, as predicted by prophets, and that the vessels were found to be carved with a face resembling Vespasian's own. So far from being 'new', they discovered, Vespasian was 'old': it was from Arcadia that the first kings of Rome were supposed to derive. No doubt these Greeks made the most of the discovery. More immediately, Vespasian could profit from the defeated Jews. As they no longer had a Temple to which they would pay regularly, they were obliged to pay a special tax in to Rome's temple of Jupiter instead. Unlike the Temple tax, it was extended to women and children and applied more widely to everyone between the ages of three and sixty. The new revenues here were significant.

  Vespasian himself liked money, but disliked personal extravagance. He was a free gift, therefore, for anecdotes and amusing rumours. At his funeral, it was a neat joke when the mime-actor who was rep­resenting him in the procession (by now, a usual practice) called out to ask how much the funetal was costing. A huge sum was called out in answer, whereupon 'Vespasian' replied that he would rather be given a little bit of it and have his body thrown cheaply into the river Tiber. Exceptions comically upheld the general picture. A woman was said to have had a passion for the old man and begged to go to bed with him (after Caenis' death?). In return, she was said to have received a huge sum, enough to qualify a man as a Roman knight. The joke, surely, was that she was being paid for having ridden the emperor so ably. Vespasian was then said to have told his steward to enter the sum in his account-book, but to put it down as 'To Making Passionate Love to Vespasian'.1 Everything had to be accounted for, including good sex after lunch.

  In the provinces, particular loyalties were wooed with cheap privi­leges and titles (the 'Latin right' was given to Spain): financial rewards were another matter. In Rome, however, an emperor could not be entirely unremunerative. The Praetorian guards had to be rewarded, but this time they were changed, rather than bribed excessively. Those of them who were retired gradually were surely the lucky settlers in a rare phenomenon, the few colonies which Vespasian dared to found in Italy itself. In Rome, too, despite the economic squeeze, the emperor had to spend, because he could not simply hoard coins and starve society of cash in circulation. One outlet for spending was public building. Most of the city's plebs were men of all trades, whatever their particular speciality or social group: they did not depend on public building works for their daily bread, but these works gave them a very helpful extra beside the slave workers who were also engaged on them. In Rome, even during the drive for economy, Vespasian's new buildings were to be far larger than the schemes of Pericles' Athens. The building which we now call the Colosseum was put up on land from Nero's awful Golden House. Four storeys high, it was for the people, not just the emperor, as a real 'people's arena'. The expense, too, was manageable: Jews' assets helped to pay for it, the spoils taken from the victory in Judaea. Jews' assets also helped to pay for a programmatic new temple of Peace whose vast area was ten times bigger than the precinct around Augustus' famous altar to the goddess. The contents of the precinct enhanced the emperor's image.2 The river Nile was carved as a quartz statue with sixteen children. In Egypt, an Egyptian priestess had correctly prophesied a full flood of the Nile, sixteen cubits deep (whence the sixteen children) when Vespasian visited the country at the start of his coup in 69: Vespasian's monument was alluding to his role in bringing the prophecy about. The rest of 'Peace's' decorations were antique sculptures and works of art, some of which had been looted from the Jews, others from the Greek world by Nero. There was a public message here for the people. What Nero had stolen for himself, Vespasian was now 'opening to the public' in a public temple.

  Nevertheless, like Augustus, the new dynast did not go unopposed. Artfully, he sent two hated informers of the Neronian age abroad from Rome to take up governorships. However, he was then criticized by the leading philosophic voice in the city, the senator Helvidius. One likely reason for the trouble was the resort to legalized autocracy which was embodied in the new 'law' on the emperor's powers. Another, connected to it, was Vespasian's ambition for his own family. Vespasian had two sons of whom the older, Titus, had led the troops to victory in Judaea. Back in Rome, Titus was even made Prefect of the Praetorian Guard. It was a new post for a member of the imperial house to hold, but an artful one, as it limited the guards' scope for electing an emperor of their own choosing. As the reign developed, Vespasian and his family then occupied the consulship to a degree which not even Augustus had attempted. Speaking against this dyn­asty, the philosophic Helvidius was first exiled, then killed: it was probably in response to him that Vespasian was said to have remarked 'either my sons succeed me, or nobody', apparently on leaving the Senate. Although Vespasian founded distinguished professorships in Rome and Athens and favoured the teaching of oratory, grammar and medicine in major provincial cities, it is conspicuous that any such favour for philosophy was excluded. But versions of Helvidius' brave sayings continued to be circulated by philosophy teachers outside Rome.

  Arguably, Helvidius was proved right. Vespasian's son Titus had charm, a gift for speaking and a mili
tary record, but he antagonized public opinion in the mid-yos by bringing his controversial mistress into Rome. She was a Jewish princess, Berenice, the daughter of Claudius' friend King Agrippa. When she appeared in Rome she was mocked by crowds in the theatre. It was not all a xenophobic protest: Berenice sat among the emperor's advisers, an ill-judged move which half-deserved her reputation as the 'new Cleopatra'.3 She was then judiciously sent abroad, after a supposed conspiracy in which two very senior senators were implicated: Titus, on one view, framed the pair of them in order to get them out of the way before his own accession. He could use the charge of their involvement with Berenice to get her out of Rome too.

  On 24 June 79 Vespasian died, allegedly saying 'Oh dear, I think I am becoming a god', a plain man's comment on his imminent cult. Titus took over and, most remarkably, Hadrian later stated that Titus had actually poisoned Vespasian. On the surface, Titus performed well enough for two years. He had the hated 'informers' paraded in the amphitheatre before exiling them: the next emperors repeated the spectacle. Admittedly, his brother Domitian claimed that Titus had forged his father's will. Titus had remarked that he had the talent to have been a practised forger and he may have deployed it against the two senators, the 'one crime', perhaps, which he used to say that he regretted.4 Perhaps it was fortunate for Titus' reputation that he died so quickly, before the usual honeymoon years were over. It was less fortunate for Rome: his younger brother Domitian took over.

  The change of dynasty had not supplanted the old pattern. Domitian was no better than his weaknesses before becoming emperor. In 69/70 he had been the one family member inside Rome but he had been denied any genuine military distinction. He resented his brother and his father and his nature was anyway suspicious and insecure. Aptly, he was looked back on as the 'bald Nero', not just because he lacked his predecessor's looks and showy hairstyle. In 83 a degree of military success in Germany gave Domitian more confidence, but what emerged was all too familiar. He began by patronizing Greek cultural pursuits and even promoted members of the philo­sophic clique at Rome; one reason why he favoured these things was because his father had disliked both of them. Like Nero, he promoted Greek drama, music and athletics and in 86 gave them their first full festival in the city: he founded a second festival, at his huge country villa, and included them in the programme too. There were still Roman traditionalists who disapproved of Greek athletics and gymnastics because of their links with nudity and 'disgraceful' sex between free men. Domitian's patronage, in the heart of the city, was an important counter-statement in years when the young Hadrian's tastes were forming, the great 'philhellene' of the future. But Domitian was not being idiosyncratic: Greek literature and Greek language were now the normal education, we are told, of young Romans, so much so that many 'young boys speak and learn nothing but Greek for a long while'.' The contrary voices were now a 'moral minority'.