Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  Although Vespasian cultivated a lowbrow image, he was the first emperor to establish chairs in Latin and Greek rhetoric. He knew a prestige move when he saw one, and he understood the value of an educated ruling class. The first holder of the Latin chair was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus—Quintilian—the Roman world’s most important student of rhetoric. Among his many sayings are “No man can be an orator unless he is a good man,” and “It is feeling and force of imagination that make us eloquent.” He advised aspiring orators to study history for facts and precedents but not for a model of how to persuade judge and jury, since the purpose of history is to tell a good story and not to prove a case. Since Quintilian later influenced such figures as the early Christian thinker Saint Augustine, the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, and also possibly the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach and the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, the world owes much to Vespasian’s patronage.

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  From the first, Vespasian made it clear that his sons, especially his older son, Titus, would be his partners in rule. Like Domitian, Titus took the title of Caesar, but that was just the beginning. Among his many other honors and offices, he shared seven of the eight consulships while Vespasian was emperor. Vespasian also appointed Titus Praetorian prefect, which made him something like the director of the FBI but with a lot more leeway. Titus prided himself on being an expert forger; an odd but no doubt useful skill for the chief of security. Titus was all but co-emperor, and, in particular, he served as his father’s enforcer.

  Titus took charge of putting down alleged conspirators. When two prominent senators, formerly supporters of Vespasian, were suspected of plotting a coup, Titus had one of them tried and convicted in the Senate, after which the condemned man slit his own throat with a razor. Titus ordered the other conspirator murdered in the palace—after the man got up from dinner with Vespasian.

  Then there was the problem of Helvidius Priscus. A staunch defender of the Senate, Helvidius apparently took issue with Titus’s role as Vespasian’s intended heir. According to one account, Helvidius reduced Vespasian to tears at a senate meeting, with Vespasian saying as he left, “Either my son will succeed me or no one at all will.” Helvidius was dangerous because he belonged to the circle of high-minded Stoic philosophers who stood up to what they saw as imperial tyranny. Nero had already exiled him and forced his father-in-law to slit his wrists. Helvidius’s wife, Fannia, supported her husband and followed him into a second exile imposed by Vespasian. Eventually Vespasian had Helvidius executed. Fannia lived on and neither forgave nor forgot. Years later, she sponsored a biography of Helvidius that criticized Vespasian. As a result, its author, a senator, was executed, and Fannia was exiled.

  Tabloid-type headlines stand out, but by and large, Vespasian and Titus enjoyed good relations with the Senate. The emperor showed respect by attending Senate meetings in person or, when his health prevented that, by sending one of his sons. More important, Vespasian elevated to the Senate his legionary commanders and other important supporters in the East. That made the body more favorably disposed to him, and it added a new source of talent to the Roman aristocracy that had been depleted by luxury and oppression. Its most wide-ranging result, though, was to create a new Roman elite; one with staying power. Roman citizens from Spain and southern Gaul now became senators, consuls, provincial governors, priests, and patricians; their sons and grandsons would rise even higher.

  Consider one of Vespasian’s lieutenants in the East. Marcus Ulpius Traianus came from Hispania, where his ancestors had migrated from Italy centuries earlier. An ambitious man, Traianus entered the Senate under Claudius and then served as one of Vespasian’s legionary commanders in Judea. After becoming emperor, Vespasian kept on promoting Traianus, giving him, among other things, a consulship, important provincial governorships, and the so-called triumphal ornaments—the highest military honor now available outside the imperial family. Fast forward thirty years after Vespasian became emperor, and Traianus’s son ascended to the throne himself. He was the emperor Trajan. Two of his successors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, also came from families promoted by Vespasian. The emperor did nothing less than open the Roman ruling class to the leaders of the provinces.

  MONEY HAS NO SMELL

  Nero drained the Treasury, and civil war took whatever was left while sowing destruction and ruin. Rebuilding Rome’s finances was Vespasian’s most urgent job besides founding a dynasty. He needed to raise taxes and cut spending, and he did both well. Financial management came naturally to him, given his father’s career in tax collecting and money lending—a striking contrast with Vespasian’s aristocratic predecessors. The result was that he gained a reputation for greed. Jokes of the day made him into something of an ancient Jack Benny, that mid-twentieth-century miser of the American airwaves. But the truth is that Vespasian was just a wise manager of the national Treasury. He displayed “prudence rather than avarice,” to quote one ancient judgment.

  We can only piece together the shape of Vespasian’s various financial policies. Some of the details that we know are that he renewed harbor taxes, the 5 percent tax on the value of freed slaves, the 1 percent tax on auction sales, the 5 percent inheritance tax on bequests to other than close relatives, the 4 percent tax on slave sales to finance the night watchmen of Rome, and customs duties between Gaul and Iberia. He converted the annual tax that Jews used to send to the Temple in Jerusalem into a fund for rebuilding and maintaining Rome’s Temple of Capitoline Jupiter (and ultimately for other purposes), and he extended it from males only to women, children, and slaves. It was a humiliating poll tax on Jews that would last for centuries. Vespasian cracked down on squatters on public land and made them pay for it or see it sold. He increased taxes throughout the provinces and sold imperial property in Alexandria and Asia Minor and taxed the owners. New censuses in Italy and the provinces made the tax collectors’ job easier. Meanwhile, Vespasian was frugal with government resources; for example, he reduced the size of diplomatic missions.

  None of this made him popular, but, as usual, Vespasian tried to share the bad press. Mucianus, for instance, did yeoman’s service of confiscation and taxation, thereby relieving the emperor of some of the blame. Mucianus was known for calling money “the sinews of sovereignty.”

  A delightful story survives about Vespasian’s fiscal policy. When Titus blamed him for the indignity of levying a tax on the use of public latrines, Vespasian replied that money has no smell.

  “THE GOOD FORTUNE AND GOOD DISCIPLINE OF EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS”

  In 68 and 69, Roman legions and their commanders in Gaul, Germany, Judea, Syria, Egypt, the Balkans, and Italy had violated their oaths by turning on the emperor Nero and his three successors, creating four new emperors in turn. They fought major battles in Gaul, Germany, and Italy, sacked Cremona, and subjected the city of Rome to a reign of terror. On the Lower Rhine, the tribes were in active revolt against Roman rule after Vespasian became emperor and they had allies in Gaul. In earlier times, the Roman army built the empire using “the good fortune and good discipline of eight hundred years,” as one general put it when facing down the rebels. In two years, the army had almost destroyed everything, and then Vespasian put the empire back together.

  The new emperor’s actions consisted of repression, reform, reorganization, and restraint. Vespasian sent a massive army under Petialis Cerealis, his former son-in-law (the widower of Vespasian’s late daughter, Domitilla) that put down the revolt on the Rhine in the year 70. In Germany, which had seen heavy fighting, some legions were disbanded and new ones formed—with men and commanders trusted by Vespasian, and new traditions established with loyalty to him and his family in mind. Elsewhere, replacement soldiers were added as needed, and loyal veterans were discharged and settled on land. Likewise, various auxiliary corps were dissolved and replaced.

  But the bigger story is what Vespasian didn’t do. He didn’t expand the size of the ar
my. Its strength remained, as under Nero, around three hundred thousand men. Nor did Vespasian give the army a regular political role, although the army had made him emperor. He returned the legions to their camps and left political power in the hands of civilians in Rome: his friends, his family, and the Senate. In short, Vespasian kept Augustus’s political system intact.

  It is indicative of Vespasian’s emphasis on military discipline that he reduced the donative (the regular gift to the soldiers) to 25 denarii per head. An anecdote is indicative. When the soldiers of the fleet, based in Italy, demanded that the emperor pay for the shoes for their courier duty between the Bay of Naples and Rome, Vespasian replied that, in the future, they should go barefoot. He made it clear that he, and not the soldiers, was in charge.

  Vespasian moved some military units from the interior to the borders. Knowing the prestige accorded to extending the empire, he ordered his generals to conquer a bit more territory in Britain and along the Rhine. But a man whose theme was consolidation wouldn’t be expected to make major changes in the size of the empire, and Vespasian didn’t.

  THE EMPEROR’S CONCUBINE

  After his wife Flavia Domitilla’s death at some point before Vespasian was named emperor in the year 69—we don’t know just when she died—he renewed his affair with Caenis. She was at least sixty-two by the time he became emperor, so Caenis was no trophy wife. Presumably Vespasian chose her because he loved her. He now took her as his concubine—that is to say, his de facto or common-law wife because, as a member of the senatorial order, Vespasian could not marry a freedwoman like Caenis. Roman society was used to de facto marriage as a way of coping with various legal prohibitions and restrictions. But let us not underestimate how astonishing it was that the Roman emperor should live openly with a freedwoman—and a Greek—as if she were his wife.

  In any case, Vespasian cherished Caenis and treated her as all but an empress. Ironically, the ex-slave whose bed he shared and who had served Antonia the Augusta (daughter of Mark Antony and mother of the emperor Claudius) was the closest he came to the glamor of the House of Caesar. Caenis felt so secure as a member of the family that once, when returning to Rome from a visit abroad, she offered her cheek to Vespasian’s son Domitian to kiss. But, snob that he was, Domitian rebuffed her and gave his hand instead.

  With Caenis’s intelligence and knowledge of how Rome worked, it would be no surprise if she had advised Vespasian on his rise to imperial power. Once he became emperor, Caenis is said to have sold access and offices, including governorships, generalships, and priesthoods as well as pardons. She was, in short, a fixer. These stories can’t be verified, but they have the ring of truth—as does the charge that some of the money she earned made its way to Vespasian. In any case, Caenis became a very wealthy woman.

  The former slave herself owned slaves and eventually freed some of them, who then took her name. She had a villa and extensive grounds in the suburbs of Rome, with running water piped in—a rare luxury—and opulent baths. After her death, the estate passed to the emperor, and the Baths of Caenis were eventually opened to the public and maintained by one of the emperor’s freedmen.

  Caenis died around the year 75, at perhaps age sixty-eight. No one ever replaced her in Vespasian’s affection. Instead, he occupied himself with a series of mistresses. Caenis’s funerary monument, found near her villa, survives to this day. It’s not unusual to come across the tombstone of a former Roman slave; in fact, freedmen put up most of the surviving funerary monuments of imperial Rome. Gravestones were status symbols, and who had a greater need than ex-slaves to proclaim, carved in stone, that they had made it? Caenis’s monument did the job nicely.

  It was an impressive altar-shaped tombstone; a common type of upscale grave monument, always featuring an inscription on the front and sometimes boasting decorations on the sides and back. Caenis’s altar was heavy, massive, elaborate, and luxurious: a large piece carved of a single block of Cararra marble, the same material that would be used for Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon and, during the Renaissance, for Michelangelo’s David. The altar stands about four feet high, with a base a little over two feet by about three feet.

  The epitaph, on the front, states that one Aglaus, probably the overseer of Caenis’s estate, put up the monument in his name and that of his three children. He dedicated it to the memory of “Antonia Caenis, Freedwoman of the Augusta, the best of patrons.” Although the epitaph associates Caenis with one of Rome’s most powerful women, it discreetly says nothing of her role as Vespasian’s concubine. But carved reliefs on three sides of the altar contain reminders that an emperor loved her. They include cupids and swans—the bird that pulled Venus’s chariot—as well as laurels, a symbol of the emperors. Swan was cygnus in Latin and kuknos in Greek, so there may also be a pun on the name of Caenis (Kainis in Greek).

  Around the time of Caenis’s death, Queen Berenice came to Rome, accompanied by her brother, Julius Agrippa. He was appointed to a praetorship, while she moved into the palace with Titus. Whether Caenis had opposed the presence of Titus’s mistress, we have no idea. Yet it is remarkable that the two men who ruled Rome, father and son, each lived in succession in Rome with a common-law wife from the East. Each man took a walk on the wild side, but the rough-hewn Vespasian slummed it while the genteel Titus preferred the comfort of a royal bed. Together they were a world apart from Augustus and Livia.

  Titus and Berenice were in love. People said that she expected to marry him—or even that he promised it—and she behaved as if she were his wife. She certainly had influence. On one occasion, Vespasian invited her to sit on the imperial council in a case involving her own interests, with no less than the great Quintilian as her lawyer. Berenice, in short, stood near the summit of power. The Roman people, however, wouldn’t have it. To some, she was another Cleopatra—an Eastern queen who bewitched a Roman man—while to others, she represented the Jewish enemy whose revolt cost Rome so much blood and treasure. Two philosophers denounced Titus and Berenice in the theater. Titus had one flogged and the other beheaded. Yet he still had to send Berenice away. The lovers would not rule Rome.

  “METHINKS I’M BECOMING A GOD”

  Vespasian followed a regular daily regimen in his last years. He awakened before daylight and read correspondence and summaries while still in bed; rose and greeted his friends while dressing and putting on his own shoes, dispensing with the “shoe man,” a slave most emperors used; went riding; came home for a midday rest with one of his several mistresses; and then went for a bath and dinner. The freedmen living in the palace knew that the emperor was in his best mood during this last part of the day, so they waited until then to pounce with their requests.

  In spring 79 Vespasian took ill while traveling south of Rome. He went to his usual summer place on a lake in the Sabine hills north of Rome, near his birthplace, hoping to recover. Its waters were said to have curative powers, but if so, in this case they failed. As the end drew near, Vespasian made two pungent remarks. “Methinks I’m becoming a god,” he said, referring to the deification that a successful emperor could expect in Italy after his death. Then, at the end, stricken with a terrible bout of diarrhea, he struggled to get up, saying, “An emperor should die on his feet.” And die he did, in the arms of those helping him. It was June 24, 79, and Vespasian was sixty-nine years old.

  The funeral was held in Rome. There a leading actor got in one last joke about Vespasian’s cheapness. At the funerals of Roman nobles, it was customary for someone to imitate the deceased, down to copying his gait and gestures, wearing his clothes and putting on a beeswax mask made during the dead person’s lifetime. A star actor whose stage name was Favor performed this service during Vespasian’s funeral. When he asked the officials how much the funeral cost, he pretended that the reply was the astronomical sum of ten million sesterces. So, still imitating Vespasian, he said, “Give me a hundred thousand and throw me into the Tiber!”

  After a delay of six months—we don’t know why�
�the Senate declared Vespasian a god. By the standards of the Romans, he deserved it. Not the most famous of Rome’s emperors, Vespasian is easy to dismiss because of his rough facial features, his coarse sense of humor, and the modern meaning of his name: vespasienne in French and vespasiano in Italian mean “public urinal.” Yet he was one of Rome’s best emperors. Of all the princes before him, Vespasian alone changed for the better after taking office, writes Tacitus. He ascended to power by means of rebellion, violence, and manipulation during Rome’s most terrible year in a century. The legions and not the Senate made him emperor, and they chose him because of his prowess as a general. Yet this man of war brought peace to Rome. Vespasian was that rarest of things: a soldier-statesman.

  Vespasian’s achievement was nothing less than keeping the empire alive. He showed that there would still be Caesars even without the blood of the Caesars (or in the case of Tiberius, of Caesar’s wife) running through their veins. If Vespasian did nothing else, that would have been achievement enough. But he racked up other accomplishments as well: in rebuilding the city, he gave Rome its most iconic monument and changed the culture of politics. He offered stability and sound finance after the go-go years under Nero and the curse of civil war. He created a new ruling class that would govern the empire for the next century. Vespasian opened Rome to new talent, not least in himself, the son of a tax collector from the Sabine country.

  Once again Rome demonstrated the ability to remake itself. In his own modest way, Vespasian put into effect a revolution that emphasized continuity while bringing change as dramatic as the difference between Nero’s Golden House and the Flavian Amphitheater that replaced it; or between the Lady Antonia the Augusta and her former slave, Caenis; or, for that matter, between the blue-blooded Nero and the Sabine muleteer Vespasian.