Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  It was during the last years of the reign of Tiberius. As a man on the make in imperial Rome, Vespasian didn’t hesitate to do what he had to do to get ahead. He sucked up to the tyrannical Caligula and took his side against the Senate. Nor did he complain when Caligula ordered his soldiers to cover Vespasian’s toga with mud (possibly a euphemism for something worse) for having failed to keep the alleys clean even though it was Vespasian’s job as a public official.

  In the year 39 Vespasian convinced the Senate to deny burial to a man convicted of conspiracy against Caligula. This won Vespasian a dinner invitation from the emperor but at a price: Vespasian also earned the undying hatred of Agrippina. In spite of being Caligula’s sister, she was a coconspirator and possibly the convicted man’s lover.

  THE SLAVE WHO LOVED ME

  Vespasian married an undistinguished woman, perhaps when he was still thinking of a career in finance, since senators usually married up. His wife, Flavia Domitilla, had been abandoned at birth and then taken in and raised as a slave before her birth father successfully sued on her behalf to establish her freedom. She and Vespasian had two sons, Titus (born in 39) and Domitian (born in 51), and a daughter, also named Flavia Domitilla (born around 45).

  Meanwhile, Vespasian made a shrewd career move by taking up with one of the more powerful women in the imperial court, Antonia Caenis. The affair began probably in the mid-thirties, when he was in his late twenties; Caenis was at least two years older than him. She was hardly a kinswoman of the emperor—in fact, she started life as a slave. Her name suggests a Greek origin; perhaps from the city of Histria on the western coast of the Euxine Sea (today’s Black Sea), which she is known to have visited. No description of her looks survives, but her brains and ambition shine through. She was highly talented: bright and bold, with a photographic memory. Perhaps there is something of her in the so-called Seated Agrippina statue in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. The head, evidently from the Flavian period, to judge by its hair, shows a dignified, serious, and strong-looking woman.

  She came to the attention of one of the most powerful women in Rome: Antonia the Younger, daughter of Octavia and Mark Antony, wife of Emperor Tiberius’s brother, mother of the great Germanicus and the emperor Claudius, and grandmother of the emperor Caligula. Antonia was honored late in life with the title of Augusta. Caenis served as her personal secretary. If later tradition is accurate, Antonia relied on Caenis in the very risky business of revealing to Emperor Tiberius the conspiracy against him by Sejanus. Antonia and Caenis succeeded and Tiberius put down the plot. Caenis was rewarded: by the time of Antonia’s death on May 1, 37, if not earlier, she freed Caenis, which made Caenis what the Romans called a liberta, or freedwoman.

  Although Vespasian eventually suspended the affair with Caenis, she probably continued to help his career with friends in high places, almost all of them connected to Antonia and Claudius. One such friend was Lucius Vitellius the Elder, father of the later emperor. A very successful diplomat and general, Vitellius was the consummate survivor. He managed to be a power broker under three emperors, to die of natural causes, and to earn a state funeral. A footnote to Vitellius’s career: he removed the hugely unpopular governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate—the same Pilate who had condemned Jesus. As for Vespasian, Vitellius helped him become consul in the year 51.

  More doors opened to Vespasian at court when Antonia’s son Claudius became emperor in the year 41, and his secretary, a freedman, became one of the most influential men in the empire. The freedman favored Vespasian, and we have to wonder if Caenis introduced them. At any rate, he got Vespasian command of a legion, which was perfect timing for an ambitious young man, what with Claudius about to embark on an expedition to conquer Britain. In the end, the conquest took decades and saw many setbacks, but Claudius achieved some real success. So did Vespasian, distinguishing himself as one of four legionary commanders in the campaign of 43.

  Vespasian immersed himself in the world of the legions. From the praetorium (the general’s headquarters) to the battlefield, and from the enemy’s walls to his ruined cities, that world was hierarchical, rigorous, unforgiving, and loud. It was a sphere of trumpets and shouts; of the thud of pickaxes and shovels digging trenches; of horses’ hoofbeats and the rhythmic, pounding feet of men marching, shoulder to shoulder, six abreast; of the rap of spear against shield, the clang of swords, and the hissing of arrows; of the rush of catapult stones and the shrieks and groans when they found their targets; of howls and applause, eloquence and pleas; the buzzing of flies and the rasp of vultures around corpses after a battle.

  Vespasian conquered much of southwestern Britain during four years of operations across the thick vegetation and deep mud of rolling hills and mist-filled valleys. He fought thirty battles, some of them combined land-sea campaigns, took twenty hilltop forts, and subdued two tribes. “It was the beginning of his coming good fortune,” wrote the historian Tacitus, adding, “fate came to know Vespasian.”

  Rome came to know him too. Only members of the emperor’s family were allowed to celebrate a triumph, but Vespasian won the next best thing: “triumphal honors”—that is, the right to wear triumphal dress in public, and have a bronze statue erected in the Forum of Augustus and another in his own home. He won two priesthoods as well and, as mentioned, a consulship in the year 51.

  Meanwhile, Vespasian’s brother, Sabinus, was even more successful. After serving, too, as a commander in Britain, he landed a provincial governorship in the Balkans and then was appointed prefect of the city of Rome, a post he held for eleven years, making him the pride of the family. Vespasian had to wait until 63 for a provincial governorship, in North Africa, and afterward he came home honest but broke. Rumor said that he went into the transport business, which involved the mules for which his hometown of Reate was famous—a profitable activity but one below a senator’s dignity.

  Perhaps Vespasian suffered for having backed the wrong man in high places. During Claudius’s reign, Vespasian was influential enough to have his son Titus raised in the palace with Britannicus, the son of Claudius, where they were taught the same subjects by the same masters. But Claudius took Agrippina as his second wife, and her enmity toward Vespasian made Titus’s position dangerous. Titus was reclining on a dining couch at Britannicus’s side at what turned out to be Britannicus’s last meal: he died shortly afterwards. Rumor said it was poison and also that Titus took some of the poison too and got sick, but the rumor is unverifiable. It’s clear that Titus survived. Meanwhile, Vespasian was too good a politician to be kept out of power for long.

  THE REVOLT OF JUDEA

  The last years of Nero’s reign proved bloody for the Roman nobility. The discovery of conspiracies led to executions and enforced suicides of famous politicians, generals, and intellectuals. But Vespasian and his family prospered. Agrippina was gone, murdered at Nero’s behest, so she no longer stood in Vespasian’s way. In later years, he claimed to have opposed Nero’s tyranny. He let it be known, for instance, that the emperor refused to admit him to his company after Vespasian had fallen asleep at one of Nero’s performances. But Vespasian was too ambitious for real opposition. Instead, he broke ties with senators opposed to Nero. Meanwhile, Titus divorced his wife, niece of an elderly senator who was accused of treason against Nero and forced to commit suicide.

  Nero rewarded such loyalty. When the province of Judea revolted in the year 66, Nero appointed Vespasian commander of three legions to put down the revolt. He also allowed him to appoint the twenty-six-year-old Titus to command of one of the legions, despite Titus’s low rank and the rarity of such father-son combinations. An ambitious and successful general might march on Rome, something to worry about, but Nero considered Vespasian safe because the Sabine muleteer lacked the right pedigree to be emperor.

  Judea had simmered for decades under oppressive Roman rule, with its high taxes and customs duties, an army garrisoned in Jerusalem, and favoritism toward the non-Jewish communities in the land. Vari
ous Roman insults to the Temple in Jerusalem created the impression of Rome as a “kingdom of arrogance.” Poor Jews resented the pro-Roman Jewish upper classes, and they had more than one Robin Hood waiting for his moment.

  It came when the Roman governor took a large sum of silver from the temple, probably to cover taxes owed. Insurgents now rose up. They stopped offering sacrifices for the welfare of the Roman people and the emperor, crushed the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, defeated a relief army under the governor of Syria, and declared independence. The country was ablaze with clashes between Jews and non-Jews. That is when Nero sent in Vespasian.

  Building on his experience in Britain, the commander methodically captured the fortified cities of Galilee’s hill country in 67 and the next year began the drive for Jerusalem by taking the surrounding strongholds one by one. And so he began the tough military campaign with which this chapter began; the road that led to Jerusalem until Nero’s suicide brought Rome’s drive to a standstill.

  Among the tens of thousands of prisoners taken by Vespasian in Galilee was the rebel-appointed Jewish governor of the province, Joseph ben Matthias. He was destined to be brought to Rome and executed, but he found a way out. He prophesied to Vespasian that he would be emperor. When in turn the legions indeed proclaimed Vespasian emperor, Joseph was freed from his chains. Although some Romans considered Joseph a Jewish spy, Vespasian and Titus found him useful. After the war, he ended up in Rome living in the palace under their protection, became a Roman citizen named Flavius Josephus, and wrote a detailed history of the revolt that survives today.

  THE MAKING OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR, 69

  Nero committed suicide in June, and Galba, the new emperor, reached Rome in October 68. Galba went on to disappoint nearly everyone. About seventy years old, he was an aging aristocrat whose political skills were as low grade as his lineage was exalted. He offended the Senate, proved stingy with the soldiers and the people, and chose the wrong friends and enemies. “By common consent, he would have been a capable ruler—if he had never ruled,” was the historian Tacitus’s acid verdict.

  On January 2, 69, the legions of the Lower Rhine (southern Netherlands and Germany’s northern Rhineland) rebelled and named as emperor their commander, Vitellius, son of the Roman powerbroker we met earlier. He’d been appointed by Galba. Then came January 15, 69, a busy day in Rome. The Praetorian Guard named Otho emperor, Galba was murdered in the Forum, and the Senate confirmed Otho’s new title, all in one day. Three months later, on April 14, troops led by Vitellius’s allies defeated Otho’s army in northern Italy. Otho committed suicide, and Vitellius entered Rome in mid-July. Meanwhile, Vespasian prepared to move.

  Although he had taken the oath to Galba, Vespasian did not trust him after Galba fired Vespasian’s brother Sabinus as prefect of Rome. In December 68 Vespasian rushed Titus off to the capital to work things out, even though it meant a dangerous winter sailing. Then, just weeks later, while in Corinth, on his way to Rome, Titus got the news of Galba’s death. He called together his friends for a meeting, and they decided to return to Judea. Titus reached Vespasian in February. It was then that Vespasian decided to go for the throne.

  In Roman eyes, he lacked authority, reputation, grandeur. He wasn’t even the most distinguished member of his family—that honor went to his brother. But Vespasian must have believed in himself. Perhaps he took to heart various omens and dreams or the prophecies by Josephus and others that he was destined to rule. Nor was Vespasian unduly sentimental about past ties. He rejected Vitellius as emperor, thus turning on the son of his former patron. But Vitellius, unlike Vespasian, did not have three hardened legions racking up victories in Judea. Vespasian might not have been the noblest man in the empire, but his army could make him the First Man in Rome.

  Flavian propaganda said that Vespasian’s soldiers came up with the idea of naming him emperor and forced him into it. But the truth was the other way around: Vespasian and a few powerful allies, including his legionary commanders, set the agenda, and the troops followed. A military man, Vespasian never forgot the support of the army, and he repaid it generously, but he also watched for news from Rome. Sabinus, reinstated as prefect by Otho and still in that position under Vitellius, represented a vital source. Caenis surely continued to have her ears to the ground in Rome and no doubt fed information to Vespasian as well. Besides them and Titus, Vespasian’s most important supporters in were a gay man, a white-collar criminal, and a family of Romanized Jews. They included the most glamorous and powerful Eastern queen since Cleopatra.

  MUCIANUS

  The gay man was Gaius Licinius Mucianus, governor of Syria. Like Vespasian, Mucianus had a distinguished public career. Tacitus says that Vespasian was a born soldier but greedy, while Mucianus was generous, a superb orator, and a cunning politician, but “his private life had a bad reputation.” That is probably a polite way of saying that Mucianus was not only homosexual, something Romans tolerated, but a passive partner, something they did not. Speaking privately to a friend, Vespasian once dismissed Mucianus with a cutting remark about his “notorious unchastity,” grumbling, “I at least am a man.”

  In spite of such obloquy, Mucianus might have pushed his own candidacy for emperor. He was governor of Syria, after all, and controlled four legions, while Vespasian only had three. But he supported Vespasian, the most experienced general in the Roman army, with triumphal honors to his name for his success in Britain, and a reputation for vigilance, thrift, and good sense. Mucianus himself made these points in a speech that Tacitus attributes to him. Vespasian currently commanded an army that was actively fighting and winning in Judea, a campaign in which he added to his reputation for manliness, as the Romans saw it. More important, his men loved him for winning and for paying them well and promoting them rapidly. Mucianus could content himself with exercising enormous power behind the scenes. Or perhaps he never really wanted the burdens and dangers of office. Tacitus thought that Mucianus “was a man who would find it easier to transfer the imperial power to another than to hold it for himself.”

  And then there was Titus, who played key roles both with the public and with Mucianus. Like Vespasian, Titus was a good commander who earned the love of his troops, but he had a touch of class that his father lacked because the boy had grown up in the imperial court. Although he was short and paunchy, he was handsome, strong, intelligent, a gifted linguist, and even a decent poet and singer. Titus also had a rare ability to earn practically everyone’s affection. Although passionate about women, he kept a troupe of pretty boys and eunuchs around him, at least at one point in Rome, which raised eyebrows. Never mind, he was, said the biographer Suetonius, “the darling and delight of the human race.” He was, in short, a golden boy.

  By putting Titus front and center, with his younger son, Domitian, waiting in the wings, Vespasian played to his strengths and minimized a weakness: his age, sixty-one. That might have worried an empire grown weary of brief reigns. Vespasian proposed a package deal, as if to say to Rome: “Accept me as emperor, and you will get the stability of a dynasty.” Not a single previous Roman emperor had succeeded in leaving the throne to his birth son.

  Titus served as the broker between Vespasian and Mucianus. “By his character and manner of living, Titus was qualified for attracting even a man of Mucianus’s habits,” writes Tacitus. No need to bother becoming emperor, said Mucianus, when an Emperor Mucianus would only adopt Titus as his successor—and Titus would follow Vespasian soon enough.

  A FAMILY OF ROMANIZED JEWS

  As for the family of Romanized Jews, it may seem surprising that Vespasian and Titus, of all people, should have had prominent Jewish supporters. After all, between them, they conquered rebellious Judea, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and enslaved, deported, and killed massive numbers of Jews. Rabbinic sources remember Titus as “an evil man, son of an evil man.” Yet many Jews had opposed the rebellion. They hated Rome but considered the rebellion doomed and didn’t want any part of it. Other Jews, e
specially among the upper classes, feared their own poor fellow Jews more than they feared the legions, and so were pro-Roman. Titus inherited Jewish friends, some of whom knew Vespasian back in the days of Claudius and Antonia.

  One of them was Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Roman citizen and member of a prominent Jewish family of Alexandria. His distinguished military and political careers included a stint as governor of Judea. As governor of Egypt since the year 66, he controlled Rome’s wealthiest province and its breadbasket. Annual grain shipments from the fertile Nile Valley fed Rome. Tiberius Alexander had two legions at his disposal. Like Mucianus, he had the potential to be a kingmaker; perhaps even more so because of his influential former sister-in-law, Julia Berenice, and her brother, Marcus Julius Agrippa, like him, prominent Jews and Roman citizens.

  The two were descended from the infamous King Herod, their great-grandfather. He had ruled Judea, but then the Romans annexed Judea and made it a Roman province. Julius Agrippa had to settle for a smaller kingdom located in today’s northern Israel and Lebanon, along with jurisdiction over the Temple in Jerusalem. He became a friend of Titus and was with him on the mission to Galba in 68 and 69. But his sister proved even more important.

  Berenice was briefly married to Tiberius Alexander’s brother, but the bridegroom died soon after the wedding. Although she moved on—she married two Eastern kings, both of who died—the two families remained connected. Eventually Berenice served as the partner in rule of her bachelor brother, King Julius Agrippa. He gave her a magnificent diamond, which spurred attention—and fed malicious rumors of incest.

  Berenice was ambitious and politically savvy. She was also patriotic but pragmatic. In the year 66 she witnessed Roman atrocities in Jerusalem firsthand and tried to stop them at great personal risk. But she and Julius Agrippa were dead set against revolt from invincible Rome. They tried to talk the Jewish public out of it—Julius Agrippa with a speech; both of them with tears—but in vain. The mob burned their palaces and helped themselves to a (small) part of their treasure. Agrippa and Berenice hewed to Rome and, in particular, to the commander of its legions in Judea and his son.