The vestals, the priestesses who served Vesta, made up the most exclusive and most revered of Rome’s religious orders. There were just six members of this, Rome’s only all-female order. Priestesses joined the order between the age of eight and ten; Roman females were launched into adult life early, being legally eligible to become engaged at the age of twelve and to marry at thirteen. Most entrants would stay in the order all their lives. Down through the centuries, a number of vestals would be executed for breaking their vow of chastity—traditionally, buried alive. Many emperors overlooked the affairs of vestals, although within two decades, the emperor Domitian would crack down on unchaste members of the order. A small number of vestals left the order after many years’ service, with some marrying, although that was traditionally considered unlucky for all involved.
It brought a Roman family great honor for a daughter to be chosen as a vestal. She was expected to observe chastity and lead a very regimented life, dressed in white headdresses and white robes. She lived in the expansive House of the Vestals on the Forum, beside the Temple of Vesta, although if she fell ill, she was expected to immediately move to the house of a relative until she recovered, so that she did not infect fellow vestals. The vestals’ official carriage, a two-wheeled, enclosed carpentum , was the only vehicle, apart from builders’ carts, permitted to traverse the streets of Rome in daylight. Preceded by a lictor, the carriage of the vestals had total right-of-way.
It was a capital crime should anyone harm a vestal, and the best seats were reserved for vestals in all theaters and amphitheaters; their front-row white marble seats can still be seen at the Colosseum to this day. On their rare public appearances, the women were heavily veiled. There was a legend that should a condemned Roman citizen see a vestal when on his way to his execution, he must be set free at once. The vestals were also entrusted with the safekeeping of important documents. Julius Caesar was one of numerous leading Romans who left his will with the vestals. Some of the vestals’ most important duties occurred in June, leading up to and during the Vestalia, the Festival of Vesta. Critically, too, it was the responsibility of the vestals to ensure that the Eternal Flame was never extinguished. While the flame burned, it was believed, Rome would prosper. Should a vestal allow the flame to go out, she could be executed.
Now, in the predawn darkness, with the emperor watching and attendants holding torches high, the six women conducted the secret renewal ceremony, paying homage to Vesta and beseeching her blessing for the year ahead. Led by the chief vestal, the older priestesses guided their newest and youngest colleague. Just eighteen months before this, the vestal Laelia had died. She had been replaced by the prepubescent Cornelia, a member of the Cossi family. This child novice would rise to become chief vestal, only to be buried alive during the reign of Domitian for being unchaste, one of four vestals executed by Domitian. Now, the novice Cornelia, the elderly Domitia, the beautiful Rubria, and the three other vestals conducted the ceremonial that went back hundreds of years, under the watchful, and some say lecherous, eye of Nero—according to historian Suetonius, Nero once raped the vestal Rubria.1
With the ceremony completed and with Vesta’s fire burning brightly in the center of the goddess’s temple, Nero departed for his other early-morning duties before returning to his Palatium. March was a busy month on Rome’s official calendar. As the name of the month reflects, it was devoted to Mars. And it was indeed a martial month, with various religious activities culminating late in March in the blessing of the implements of war—weapons, standards, and even military trumpets—prior to the year’s military campaigning season. In Roman provinces bordering foreign states, the legions would similarly be preparing for campaigning. In western Britain, the legions would soon be countering the raids of the fierce Silure tribe. On the Rhine, there would be punitive Roman raids east against German tribes. In Syria, Corbulo would be consolidating his successes against the Parthians.
And as the legions went forth in spring, so Rome’s latest crop of provincial officials would leave the capital to take up their appointments for the coming year. The proconsuls, the provincial governors appointed by the Senate, would set off for their one-year tenures, taking along gaggles of staff. Each governor was accompanied by a quaestor, the most junior of Rome’s magistrates. Chosen by the emperor and rubber-stamped by a vote of the Senate, the quaestor was his governor’s chief financial officer and was responsible for military recruiting in his province. A quaestor, on his return to Rome, could automatically take a seat in the Senate.
One such quaestor preparing to depart Rome this spring of AD 64 was Gnaeus Julius Agricola. In his twenties and a provincial (being a native of Massilia), Agricola had married Domitia Decidiana, a member of a leading Roman family. The couple had a sickly young son, and Julia was pregnant with their second child, but Agricola would have to leave mother and child in Rome while he served his year on the staff of Salvius Titianus, new proconsul of Asia. Agricola’s chief would be taking his wife and elder children with him to Asia, as was the practice and the privilege of a provincial governor, but a humble quaestor had no such right. Still, Agricola and his wife “lived in rare accord, maintained by mutual affection and unselfishness,” and both would bear the separation of the next year with good grace.2
As an officer cadet, Agricola had served on the staff of the governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, during Boudicca’s revolt and had lived through the bloody do-or-die AD 60 battle in which 10,000 Roman troops headed by the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix Legion had overcome 230,000 rampaging rebel Britons. The battle that destroyed Boudicca had made that legion the most feared unit in the Roman world. It would be some years before Agricola made his name, but when he did, it would be as a general, and back in Britain.
In a lottery-style process, candidates for provincial appointments put their names in an urn. Agricola’s was one of a certain number drawn out to match the number of vacancies. Another draw was made to match names with vacant posts. This was how Agricola won his Asian appointment. Over the next year, he discovered that his proconsul Titianus was “an abject slave to greed.” The proconsul’s self-serving policy, to Agricola’s mind, was one of “You wink at my offenses, and I’ll wink at yours.”3 While Agricola was serving in Asia, his son would die, but during the same period, his wife Domitia would give birth to a healthy daughter. That daughter would one day marry the historian Tacitus.
As men such as Agricola and his superior Titianus were preparing that spring to leave Rome no later than July for appointments abroad, as the law required, others were returning after completing their yearly appointments. One such returnee to Rome that spring of AD 64 was Titus Flavius Vespasianus, better known to us as Vespasian, the future emperor. Fifty-four-year-old Vespasian, who had made a name for himself as commander of the 2nd Augusta Legion during the AD 43 invasion of Britain, returned to the capital after a torrid year-long posting as proconsul of the province of Africa, in North Africa. Vespasian was a no-nonsense soldier at heart, gruff, with no airs or graces. His soldierly style of government had been so unpopular in Africa that on one occasion, the locals had pelted him with turnips.
Along with Asia, Africa was the most sought-after of all the proconsular appointments, being the best paid, as it earned the appointee 400,000 sesterces for his year of service. A legionary in the ranks of Rome’s legions, meanwhile, earned 900 sesterces a year. As it happened, Vespasian had great need of those 400,000 sesterces. He had invested in mule farms. A mule farm with a contract to supply the military was a license to mint gold, but somehow, the farm managers had got it wrong. The farms had gone broke, and so had Vespasian. To escape his financial bind, Vespasian had been forced to sell his valuables and to mortgage his family home at Rome to his elder brother Flavius Sabinus, who was in his second term as Rome’s city prefect, a combined city manager and chief of police. Vespasian’s household silver had been among the first assets to go. His sons would remember the embarrassment of growing up without silver on the table and
eating from wooden plates just like slaves.
Now Vespasian was back in that family home, which was on Pomegranate Street on the Quirinal Hill, in Rome’s Regio VI, or Sixth Precinct. His brother Sabinus also had a house on the Quirinal. This was not one of Rome’s best addresses. The private mansions clinging to the lower slopes of the Palatine and Capitoline hills claimed that distinction. The Aventine Hill, too, had become fashionable with Rome’s elite in recent years after long being considered an ordinary address. But while the Quirinal was not fashionable, neither was it a dowdy address. It sat above the city, away from the industrial districts. One of the city’s larger water reservoirs, the Fundanus Basin, called a lake by many Romans, sat at the foot of the Quirinal. The basin acted as a barrier between the Quirinal and the less salubrious valley suburbs such as the Subura, where Julius Caesar had a home before he came to power and which had a name for crime and unsavory characters.
Vespasian’s eldest son, twenty-four-year-old Titus, was currently in Britain, serving as commander of an auxiliary cavalry ala, or wing, attached to his father’s old legion, the 2nd Augusta. Vespasian’s younger son, thirteen-year-old Domitian, was waiting at home for his father. Domitian would soon be studying rhetoric and declamation at a school conducted by one of Rome’s leading teachers. Vespasian, a widower since his wife Flavia Domitilla died when he was in his twenties, would soon pay a visit to his longtime mistress, Caenis. A wealthy woman in her own right and a former slave, Caenis had in her youth been the most trusted servant of Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and mother of the emperor Claudius and his brother Germanicus. It had been Caenis who had carried a note from Antonia to her brother-in-law Tiberius to warn him of Sejanus’ plot to topple him from his throne. When Vespasian became emperor, he would treat Caenis as his “wife in all but name,” despite her lowly freedwoman status.4
Among Vespasian’s first visitors now that he was back at the capital was one of his good friends, if one of his more eccentric friends, the forty-one-year-old Gaius Plinius, Pliny the Elder as we know him, uncle of Pliny the Younger, Martial’s later patron. There had been a time when the elder Pliny was a devoted lawyer in Rome’s courts, but by AD 64, he rarely left his house at the capital, where he studied and wrote relentlessly. A workaholic who slept little and wrote day and night, Pliny dreaded time-wasting. He was the noted author of many books, which ranged from his first literary work (a military handbook on throwing the javelin while mounted) to biographies, a textbook on oratory, and his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, which many considered his masterwork. His German Wars, a twenty-volume history of all Rome’s wars with the tribes of Germany, would later be used as a reference by Tacitus for his greatest contribution to the written history of Rome, the Annals.
When he was in his late teens, Pliny was a “thin stripe” tribune, or officer cadet, serving in the Roman army on the Rhine. It was there that he befriended Vespasian, who was then the legate, or commander, of the 2nd Augusta Legion when it was still stationed at Argentoratum, modern Strasbourg, prior to participating in the invasion of Britain. A few years later, Pliny served as a prefect of auxiliary infantry and then commanded an auxiliary cavalry wing, also on the Rhine.
Now, when Pliny the scholar went visiting at Rome, he was carried from his house on the Esquiline Hill in a sedan chair, with a freedman secretary walking beside him taking notes in shorthand on wax tablets as his master dictated. At this time, Pliny was working on the eight-volume Problems in Grammar. Pliny’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, who would himself become a noted writer, later commented that during this period in Nero’s reign, “when the slavery of the times made it dangerous to write anything at all independent or inspired,” his uncle deliberately chose to avoid political subjects and put his energies into this work on grammar, which could offend no one, least of all the emperor.5 There was another reason that the elder Pliny was carried in a sedan chair. He was a stout man and suffered from a constitutional weakness of the throat, which was often inflamed, and as a consequence, he breathed with a pronounced wheeze. This meant that walking any distance was not an option.
Yet Pliny would not acknowledge a physical infirmity or use it as an excuse to be carried. To him, every moment that could be used for work should be used for work. “I remember how he scolded me for walking,” Pliny the Younger related. “According to him, I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought that any time was wasted which was not devoted to work.”6 And so it was that the elder Pliny was carried along the dark city streets before dawn to see his friend Vespasian, preceded by a servant or a client bearing a flaming torch, at every step composing his grammatical thoughts.
Vespasian, meanwhile, now that he was back at Rome, appeared to rest on his laurels as a successful general and winner of the decorations of a Triumph. But, all the while, he was hoping for another lucrative appointment from Nero so that he could further improve his financial fortunes. To win another imperial post, Vespasian was prepared to join Nero’s entourage when he traveled. The man under the emperor’s nose was more likely to win the emperor’s favor than another who failed to make the effort to flatter his lord and master. In short, Vespasian had no scruples about sycophancy if that fanned the flickering flame of prosperity.
VI
THE WATER COMMISSIONER
Well before the end of March, with the ceremonials devoted to Mars continuing, Nero, impatient to escape the capital and begin his planned performance tour, departed Rome. He did not go alone or unnoticed. Carried in a litter, guarded by heavily accented German bodyguards from the German Cohorts and men from the Praetorian Cohorts, accompanied by a train of litters bearing scores of leading Roman citizens, and followed by carts and wagons laden with baggage and thousands of slaves and freedmen on foot, the massive Neronian cavalcade passed through the Porta Capena and proceeded down the Appian Way to the south.
Praetorian prefect Tigellinus remained at the capital. Other serving officials, too, would not be leaving Rome. The two consuls would remain, as would the twenty praetors, who were the senior magistrates of Rome and were required to preside at court hearings on all business days through the year. Various other officials also had a reason, or an excuse, not to accompany the emperor, among them the city prefect, Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus, as well as the grain commissioner, the streets commissioner, and water commissioner Publius Marius, who had just begun his eighteen-month tenure in his new job.
Marius had been a consul two years earlier. As water commissioner, he was charged with keeping Rome’s water supply flowing, and pure. So that he could achieve those goals, the water commissioner had control of two groups of slaves, the water gangs. Like so many Roman institutions and innovations, the state water gang had been established in the reign of Augustus. The other gang, Caesar’s water gang, had been created by Claudius. The former, paid for by the state treasury, numbered some 240 men. The work of this gang was subsidized by water rights fees paid into the treasury by private individuals who piped water under imperial license from the aqueducts along their routes. The cost of maintaining the 460 slaves of Caesar’s water gang was met by the emperor’s private purse.
Between them, the 700 men of the water gangs were supposed to keep Rome’s aqueducts in good repair. Some water gang members worked outside Rome, maintaining the underground and over-ground waterways of the vast and efficient water supply system that ran from the hills to the northeast, east, and southeast of Rome. The remaining water gang slaves worked on the water supply system within the city. The aqueducts were gravity-fed; not a single pump was employed. From many miles away, the aqueducts brought water coursing into Rome for government and private use. On the last stage of the water’s journey, it traveled high in the air over massive arches that elevated the water channels up to 158 feet above the ground.
Once it reached the city, the water was distributed from the aqueducts into reservoirs throughout Rome—247 of them by the end of the first century—and from these in underground lead pipes running
throughout the metropolis. Seventy-five of Rome’s public buildings, including public baths and imperial palaces, received running water around the clock. A total of thirty-nine ornamental fountains and a dozen military and paramilitary barracks in the capital were likewise fed with water by the system. Water was also piped to 521 public water basins, from where the servants of apartment dwellers collected it for domestic use. Martial complained about the lack of running water in his tenement building, a shortcoming made all the more galling to him by the sight of an aqueduct close by.1
Private contractors accounted for about a third of Rome’s total water consumption. They resold water to the owners of houses, apartment blocks, and businesses, including the many commercial bathhouses flourishing in the city. Accommodating both men and women, more than one hundred public bathhouses were scattered around Rome in AD 64; the number would increase to a thousand the following century. Every large house in Rome also had its own private bathhouse. To tap into the system, the private contractors were required, by decree of the Senate, to produce a license bearing the imperial seal, the Sardonychis.
The water commissioner was not responsible for the removal of wastewater via Rome’s extensive underground sewer system, which emptied liquid waste into “Father Tiber,” the Tiber River. This came under the control of another official of like rank, the commissioner of the “Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the Sewers of Rome.” The vaulted stone and brick sewers of ancient Rome were so well constructed that some are still in use today. The largest was fifteen feet across; a wagon could be driven through it. Augustus’ right-hand man Marcus Agrippa had taken such an interest in Rome’s water supply and sewers, which he brought under his mantle, that he made an inspection tour through the sewers in a rowboat.
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Page 6
