The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  A plan that he should abdicate, the first in our story, came to nothing. It was spearheaded by Sabinus and promised the emperor 100 million sesterces and a country estate in return for a peaceful handover of power. It failed, in Tacitus’ account, thanks to a spectacular coup de théâtre inadvertently engineered by none other than Vitellius himself. On 18 December, surrounded by his family, his household and his soldiers and himself dressed in mourning, Vitellius appeared in the Forum. He explained the course he had decided upon,

  saying that he withdrew for the sake of peace and his country; he asked the people simply to remember him and to have pity on his brother, his wife, and his innocent young children. As he spoke, he held out his young son in his arms, commending him now to one or another, again to the whole assembly; finally, when tears choked his voice, taking his dagger from his side he offered it to the consul who stood beside him, as if surrendering his power of life and death over the citizens.16

  Neither consul nor citizens would accept his symbolic surrender. When Vitellius moved away to return the insignia of office to the Temple of Concord, his path was blocked. Only the road to the palace remained open. In a state of bewilderment, Vitellius returned to his gilded cage. It was the opposite of what he had intended. Once, in a province of the north, soldiers had made him emperor. Now they forced him to keep faith with that pact.

  With Vitellian forces defeated everywhere bar Rome, it represented a moment of crisis. Sabinus pressed the emperor to honour their agreement. But Vitellius was powerless. Action belonged to the soldiers and they seized the initiative in startling fashion, besieging the Capitoline Hill where Sabinus had taken refuge and burning to the ground the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Sabinus himself was taken prisoner and killed; Vespasian’s younger son Domitian escaped. Reprisals were swift once Primus’ men reached Rome. Vitellius fled the palace in a litter carried by kitchen slaves, his destination a house belonging to his wife on the Aventine. Too late he changed his mind. He returned to the palace, which everyone else had now deserted. The price of vacillation was his life.

  Through the corridors of the empty palace limped this bulky man with the crushed upper leg, his chariot-racing injury and the first wound dealt him by the principate. As in the case of Gaius before him, in whose company he had sustained that injury, the ancient biographer’s image of the emperor of Rome haunting the corridors of his own palace in search of peace and succour is a disturbing one. It will end badly for Vitellius, we know.

  He has chosen to put on a ragged and filthy tunic by way of disguise. Concealed around his waist is a belt filled with gold pieces. Now he hides in the only place he can find safe enough to conceal him till darkness falls. The room is small and foul-smelling: here palace guard dogs take their rest. Vitellius lies down with them, barricading the door against intruders with a couch and a mattress. His thoughts are not of sleep but of his escape under cover of night to Tarracina, where his brother has promised him safety. It is not to be. When, inevitably, he is discovered by enemy soldiers who have stormed the palace, the foul-smelling tunic is gashed with blood. For the dogs have bitten him, those denizens of his own house. He attempts to dissemble, pretending that he is not Vitellius, not the emperor. The soldiers are not deceived. They tie a noose around his neck and bind his hands behind his back. Like a dog they lead him away from the palace and through the streets of Rome towards the Staircase of Wailing, where he is tortured and beheaded. ‘And yet I was your emperor,’ he offers, the same claim which minutes earlier he had denied. In truth, Vitellius was and was not emperor of Rome, a stopgap figurehead briefly exalted by conflict, afterwards consumed by the dogs of war.

  VESPASIAN

  (AD 9–79)

  ‘The fox changes his fur, but not his nature’

  Vespasian: Titus Sabinus Vespasianus, Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library

  It began in the cauldron of civil war and ended in the cold douches of a provincial watering hole. In between, the reign of Vespasian of the Flavii, Suetonius’ ‘unexpected’ emperor, eschewed both fire and ice. Level-headed and continent, disinclined to rashness, alert to cheats and jocular in the face of his own well-publicized miserliness, this tenth Caesar – acclaimed only on the cusp of his sixtieth birthday – restrained extravagance and licentiousness where he found it. He did so without personal compromise. These details alone, assuming that they are true, distinguish him from his immoderate predecessors and account for his success where Galba, Otho and Vitellius had spectacularly failed.

  ‘The fox changes his fur, but not his nature,’ an irate yokel taunted him. And so, to Vespasian’s credit, it proved to be. Under the Julio-Claudian heirs of Augustus and those would-be emperors of 69, that tag applied to the principate itself, emperor succeeding emperor, a shift in iconography, overweening fallibility consistently a hallmark. The decade of Vespasian’s rule marks a watershed. Rome changed: luxury was checked, aristocratic grandeur replaced by circumspection and, on the Palatine, a culture more prosaic. This affable, strong-limbed soldier, piously devoted to the memory of his grandmother, observed a monthly fast day and, with equal assiduousness, the state of Rome’s coffers, and remained for the most part apparently impervious to the corruptions of office. The nameless concubines with whom at intervals he shared his bed were rewarded with bulging purses of sesterces – payments the emperor could well afford – but denied the influence of former imperial women. (Save in the matter of Vespasian’s mistress Caenis selling offices and imperial decisions, a rumour recorded by Cassius Dio,1 who added that Vespasian himself happily profited from such a trade, the majesty of Flavian women was circumscribed. Confined to hairdressing, it survives in the ziggurat arrangements of stiff, liquorice-allsorts curls which decorate the sculpted busts of first-century princesses.) The army’s emperor – like Galba, Otho and Vitellius before him, as Suetonius takes care to point out – Vespasian reconstituted the senate and wooed its members with courtesy, on the surface punctilious and attentive, but never lost sight of first loyalties. Effectively omnipotent, this provincial-knight-made-good massacred Latin vowels but spared the majority of Romans. Such mildness is remarkable in our chronicle. Equally remarkable in Suetonius’ reckoning, it emerged from a house of no distinction – without the loftiness of that patrician sense of entitlement which, in Augustus’ successors, had valued at naught suffering, iniquity or even workaday diligence; different even from the families of Otho and Vitellius. Fine words have been expended in Vespasian’s name. Not least, that in ending civil war, he cleansed the entire world of its madness. Like all victories – and few can have inspired such a paean – it came with a price tag: according to Cassius Dio, some 50,000 casualties.

  Marked covetousness notwithstanding, history – including Suetonius’ Life – celebrates the deified Vespasian as a ‘good’ emperor. So too did the majority of his contemporaries. He restored Rome to order and sought to make good the inviolability of the princeps’ place, prizing regard over ostentation; like Augustus, he cultivated a semblance of concern for Republican sensibilities, and paraded his respect for Rome’s ancient ceremonies in a widespread programme of temple restoration. He lost no chance of celebrating that peace of which he himself claimed authorship. Between the Basilica Aemilia and the Argiletum, on the site of a former meat market,2 he built a Temple of Peace eulogized by Pliny the Elder as one of the wonders of the world. A veritable open-air museum, it displayed for Roman edification golden vessels from the Temple of Jerusalem, alongside ancient masterpieces of painting and sculpture.3 In a city battered by civil war, he raised taxes, including the fiscus Judaicus paid by Jews, to fund an immediate Rome-wide rebuilding initiative: among its objects was restoration of the Claudian aqueduct and a reliable water-supply, and a network of roads and bridges including the Appian and Flaminian Ways. At an age when many Roman magistrates confined themselves to carping and overeating, he appeared at the restoration of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline ready to remove debris in a basket carried on his head. Into
that basket he piled broken remnants of the most important temple in the Roman world, the same building which, months earlier, as fear and misery gripped the city, had given fleeting refuge to his son Domitian and, once before, sheltered Brutus and the tyrannicides in the aftermath of Caesar’s murder. The figure of the toiling Vespasian, vigorous if bulky, symbolized a city on the brink of rebirth. It is not an image we can apply to Nero, whose building of the Golden House took account only of private pleasures and threatened to force ordinary Romans beyond the city boundaries; to Galba, patrician and geriatric; to Vitellius, fat and fuddled with good living. Happy to hoist hods, Vespasian embraced a kingship grounded in service; he avoided the tyrannical, sadistic, insane and megalomaniac tendencies of recent incumbents. Little surprise, then, that popular feeling, as Dio claims, was strong in his favour, swayed by his prudence and good nature.4 As rationales go, posthumous acclaim for this ‘good’ Caesar seems starkly black and white.

  Look again and the truth is more complex, multi-tissued as an onion. It must include that Flavian revisionism which insisted that Vespasian’s seizing the throne arose not from personal avidity but from civic-mindedness at a moment when breakdown of order threatened and the rule of law and of the senate appeared perilously challenged. What are we to think? Incurably superstitious, Suetonius fudges the issue with portents. Presumably, as Tacitus suggests, he took his cue from Flavian spin.5 Suetonius’ Vespasian is a man in thrall to the numinous, beset by omens and supernatural signs of coming greatness. With circumspection – perhaps a suggestion of a raised eyebrow – Cassius Dio accepted a similar explanation.6 We have learned to be wary of those who feign innocence or reluctance in the face of glittering prizes. It was a convention, a necessary apologia for having succeeded where others had so recently failed. Suetonius’ compendium of portents – from an ox prostrate in obeisance before Vespasian to a remarkable, stormproof cypress tree, a revolving statue of Julius Caesar and the spectre of a rheumatic freedman restored to mobility and able to walk through temple walls – served the purpose of whitewash: propaganda, no more or less. It was a denial of the bloody hell of Vitellius’ downfall and of the gruesome and unconstitutional inauguration of a reforming dynasty born out of lawlessness and hatred in the year of Suetonius’ own birth. It was the best possible gloss on a moment when only deeds counted, when the last mechanisms of Republican routes to power were seen to bow to the harsher truths of military might; when tradition – inadequate before the menace of anarchy – fell trampled under the feet of too many ruleless soldiers bent on slaughter. It invested Vespasian’s victory with the vindication of inevitability, where there could be no inevitability: accidents, opportunism and a carrying wind played as great a role in the Flavian settlement as any messianic predeterminism on Vespasian’s part. Like Julian descent from the goddess Venus Genetrix, and Numerius Atticus’ lucrative vision of Augustus’ ascent to heaven, it was the stuff of myth and legend, impossible to verify or gainsay. All-important, it exempted Vespasian from blame: he was not responsible for what had happened to him. It was an alternative, highly convenient rhetoric of ambition. For good measure, as we have seen, Suetonius employed similar portents to imbue Vitellius’ downfall with the same irresistibility.

  Ancient sources invoke every nebulous presentiment to underscore the legitimacy of Vespasian’s rule. Archaeology and soothsaying combined in the find of ancient vases reportedly unearthed in a consecrated spot at Tegea in Greek Arcadia: the vases featured images that bore a striking resemblance to Vespasian. Suetonius and Dio go a step further, with recourse to Christ-like powers. They portray the new-made emperor curing blindness and a withered hand with spit and a healing kick. It is not a cynical account (we read, for example, that the Alexandrians witnessed these feats unimpressed and heartily detested Vespasian the cure-all). But in ancient Rome, those who lacked prestige benefited from intimations of divinity. Vespasian himself, consistently unassuming, dreams in Greece of good fortune for himself and his family – imaginings we are right to trust whether or not we guess at the extent of that good fortune. Even if we suspect hyperbole, his record as it survives solidly reiterates his fitness for power. The portents, we assume, backed the right man. The chronicle is one of plain dealing and plain speaking; in Suetonius’ words, of an empire ‘unsettled and, as it were, drifting... at last taken in hand and given stability’; bankruptcy to the tune of 40,000 million sesterces righted; a sensible head on strong shoulders, after eighteen months in which no fewer than four emperors had met grizzly and untimely deaths. Respected by the legions, exercising tight control over the Praetorian Guard and rationalizing membership of the senate, Vespasian bore the imprint of the survivor. Buffeted by civil war, the Empire needed an emperor, restoration of the Republic the dream of a fond minority. A vacancy existed. Scattered legions chose Vespasian to fill it. The seasoned soldier with a characteristic facial grimace described as that of one straining to defecate did not demur. All that was wanting were the will to grandeur – at best an ambiguous attribute – and something of that dignitas which the Romans held dear.

  He was an unlikely dreamer, this down-to-earth soldier-king with a genius for military discipline and a taste for mess-room bawdy. Amused by the huge cock of a giant, he quoted Homer, poetry in the service of puerility. Even in the bedroom, his was a business-like approach. When a woman protested that she was dying with love for him, he promptly fucked her. For her pains he reimbursed her generously and entered in the ledger of his accounts the simple mnemonic: ‘To a passion for Vespasian.’ He revoked an army commission when the new officer arrived to thank him reeking of unguents and pomades. His explanation was curt. ‘I should have preferred you to smell of garlic’ – the scents of the wayside and the kitchen more appealing to this hill-born Sabine than all the perfumes of Arabia. Heedless of advancing age, his days were consumed by industry, beginning, like those of Galba, before daybreak when the sky was still thick with shadows. For here was a man defined by the practical, decisive and quick to action. He understood, too, how to play precept-loving Romans at their own game. He cherished a vision of dynastic immortality, his own reign the prelude to that of his sons, and legitimized this un-Republican aspiration in another dream which again found its way into the written accounts. In the middle of the palace vestibule, the sleeping Vespasian saw a balance. At one end stood Vespasian and his grown-up sons, Titus and Domitian; at the other, Claudius and Nero. To the Roman mind the import was clear: the Flavian trio would reign supreme for the same time-span as the last of the Julio-Claudians, a total of twenty-seven years. And so it came to pass, sanctioned by clairvoyance. (Else Suetonius would hardly have seen fit to mention it.) Vespasian dreamed when it suited him. For the most part he had no need for fantasy, despite the personal astrologer Tacitus places in his retinue.

  Once, Vespasian had been goaded into public office only by the contempt of his ambitious mother, Vespasia Polla. She teased him with the success of his elder brother Sabinus, consul in 47 and later twice created city prefect of Rome. Polla harried Vespasian towards the senate not with the encouragement of affection but with that maternal determination which threads a course through Roman history like marbling in a side of beef – an upstart Livia, Volumnia of the Sabine Hills, Vitellius’ Sextilia all over again. Later, championed by legions, Vespasian displaced Vitellius and hoisted himself to ultimate glory. Then there was no mother’s bittersweet cajoling; instead, the enthusiastic support of army chiefs, fellow provincial governors and client kings – Sohaemus of Sophene, Herod Agrippa II of Peraea, Antiochus of Commagene (wealthy and magnificent) and Vologaesus the Parthian, who contributed 40,000 bowmen to the cause. It was an unlikely, unpredictable journey. Along its course Vespasian narrowly avoided death and skirted bankruptcy. He embraced voluntary banishment (hiding in obscurity from Nero’s displeasure) and weathered ridicule. At Gaius’ command, he had faced humiliation in the streets of Rome, pelted with mud for his failure as aedile to keep the thoroughfares clean. Afterwards, perhaps through h
is own fault, he suffered a similar fate in a marketplace in modern-day Tunisia, mud on this occasion giving way to turnips.

  For many, the most striking aspect of Vespasian’s remarkable ascent, as with Augustus’ hegemony a century earlier, was the insignificance of his origins. His was a family of equestrian rank tarnished by associations of tax-gathering and labour-contracting (the latter denied by Suetonius). Its atrium stood empty of those wax ancestor masks which, on festival days, in aristocratic households mimetically restored to life the great and the good of Roman public service. Among the achievements of this non-patrician emperor was his very insistence on his humble, decidedly unaristocratic background. Behind that smokescreen he might plan and plot unobserved. His aid was not vaunting descent but those omens which the historians insist officially shaped his ends. Omens, yes; divine offshoots in the Flavian family tree, no. Vespasian had no interest in the misguided toadies who struggled to unearth connections between the Flavii and a companion of Jupiter’s son Hercules. In his attempt to reassert the personal authority of the princeps – and to do so with broad support – he was hamstrung rather than uplifted by godly DNA. His Everyman posturing was no deceit. He was a stranger to snobbery and too canny to allow himself to be rebranded in the Julio-Claudian mould. Even in his portraiture he eschewed their model, a bull-necked, bald-headed, warts-and-all imagery of age and its imperfections replacing the classicized perfection of those god-like Augustans: its sober verisimilitude was the nearest Vespasian came to flirting with the Republic. In his public life he required the freedom of ordinariness; in his private life he evidently preferred it. A widower at the time of his accession, he had been married to the daughter of a quaestor’s clerk, Flavius Liberalis. Probably a kinswoman of sorts, her free-born status was nevertheless in doubt – hardly a glittering match. His long-term mistress Caenis was associated with Claudius’ mother Antonia. The queen-mother’s friend, she was also her former slave,7 and as such, despite a love which lasted a lifetime, ineligible to marry Vespasian under that Augustan legislation which criminalized marriage between an equestrian and a freedwoman.8