The Twelve Caesars
Page 26
Vespasian banished the astrologers from Rome. No need for them and their ilk now: the portents’ work was done. Did he set up in that house at the Gardens of Sallust those antique vases whose iconography proclaimed his supremacy? We will probably never know. In place of soldiers’ boots and breastplates, the streets of Rome rang with the sound of the emperor’s task of rebuilding. A year later, the route of Vespasian and Titus’ triumph of Jerusalem bore witness to the speedy eradication of civil-war scars. In the interval, Vespasian had addressed himself to the backlog of legal cases unheard in eighteen months of fighting and confusion; declared an amnesty for Neronian informers; examined the composition of various legions in order to diffuse lingering Vitellian loyalty; and evolved a model of working alongside the senate in which, while every courtesy was observed, an emperor of non-senatorial background maintained full decision-making powers over that body which had procrastinated for half a year before investing him with imperium. His focus, like that of every new-made princeps before him, was the maintenance of his own position. Although Vespasian’s power had been formalized in December 69 in the so-called lex de imperio Vespasiani, which conferred on the new emperor either by law or by decree of the senate all of those powers enjoyed formally and informally by his Julio-Claudian predecessors, as well as the authority to do ‘whatsoever he may deem to serve the interests of the State and the dignity of all things divine and human, public and private’,19 for fullest success this ubiquitous remit demanded both popular and senatorial consensus. Vespasian broadcast the policies he intended to adopt to that end numismatically. The legends of his coinage lulled Romans with sound-bites: ROMA RESURGENS, LIBERTAS RESTITUTA. As it happened, in both short and long terms his gifts to Rome were peace and solvency. He enshrined the first in that glittering temple acclaimed by Pliny; the latter survives in a wealth of anecdotes which animate the sources.
The Alexandrians called Vespasian ‘Cybiosactes’. It was the surname of an Alexandrian king of notorious penny-pinching and scarcely a compliment since the attributes of kingship, particularly in the East, embraced munificence. In Suetonius’ Life, Vespasian’s reputation for covetousness pre-dates his principate. Perhaps it accounts for his turnip-pelting in Hadrumetum – a boisterous response to a problem with the city’s food supply brought about by the proconsul’s meanness. The same shortcoming may also have contributed to Vespasian’s poor election performances at the outset of his career (he achieved the aedileship only on his second attempt, in sixth place by a whisker). If so, Rome’s new emperor would feign no false remorse. Parsimony quickly became a watchword of his policy-making, celebrated by Vespasian as a Flavian virtue. It was the right approach at the right time, sole means of reversing the depredations of civil war and generations of Julio-Claudian folly. Like Mucianus, Vespasian amassed revenues with lip-smacking delight. The process even inspired in this down-to-earth burgomaster uncharacteristically creative thinking. He placed a tax on the use of public urinals. The initiative offended Titus, whose concept of imperial dignity had been shaped by his childhood at Claudius’ court. Beneath Titus’ wrinkled nose, Vespasian held out coins gathered in the first levy. Tersely the son agreed with the father’s assessment that the money did not smell. And yet, Vespasian smiled, it came from piss.
But parsimony, the emperor knew, must be balanced: that was the lesson to be learned from Galba’s mistakes. There must be largesse, a talent for the sweeping gesture. Vespasian’s purse targeted the arts. A restorer of statues, a tragedian called Apelles or Apellaris, lyre-players Terpnus and Diodorus, and a successful but impecunious poet called Saleius Bassus – all received payments from Vespasian of up to half a million sesterces.20 At the same time the emperor endowed chairs of rhetoric in Rome and Athens, each with a salary of 100,000 sesterces. Perhaps the policy was Titus’ in inspiration. Educated to the highest level, Titus wrote poetry in Latin and Greek and even turned his hand to Greek tragedy. Vespasian’s own accomplishments can hardly have soared so high. His understanding was born of insight, not letters. He recognized the role of spectacle, visual propaganda like his coin slogans writ large or that token hefting of temple debris from the Capitoline. Although building work remained unfinished at the time of his death, the Flavian amphitheatre, known since the Middle Ages as the Colosseum, was Vespasian’s gift to the Roman people. On the site of the pool at the centre of Nero’s Golden House complex, it was funded with Jewish spoils and first planned, Vespasian claimed, by Augustus. As Titus would demonstrate, it allowed tens of thousands of spectators at a single sitting to witness visual extravaganzas of eye-watering excess. From its steeply tiered seats, the Roman mob absorbed the thrilling narcotic of mass bloodshed.
For the majority in Rome, gladiatorial combat was as close as they would come to bloodshed during Vespasian’s reign. So too, for the most part, it proved for the emperor himself. The man who rose early and devoted his day to work, pausing from the business of empire only to drive through the rebuilt city, take a siesta or indulge in perfunctory sex with the succession of unnamed concubines who consoled him after Caenis’ death, did not scruple to conceal in the interests of security his whereabouts or timetable. He ended Claudius’ habit of searching his guests – ended too that culture of fear and uncertainty in which opposition, not daring to speak out, corkscrewed underground into labyrinthine conspiracy. In Suetonius’ account, ‘He bore the frank language of his friends, the quips of pleaders and the impudence of the philosophers with the greatest patience.’ That last group continued its opposition to the principate and the nature of imperial power within it, consistent in its carping and criticism. Vespasian responded with understatement. He dismissed a banished Cynic called Demetrius as no more than a cur: ‘Though you do your best to persuade me to kill you, I don’t kill dogs for barking.’ To a former friend, Helvidius Priscus, praetor in 70, he showed less leniency. In this instance, the sources attribute blame to Helvidius himself, over-zealous in his impertinence, determined to give offence, in Dio’s account the linch-pin of a large-scale revolutionary plot. Vespasian ordered his exile and execution in 75. His hasty countermanding of that decision came too late: Helvidius, whom Dio’s Vespasian had grown to hate, died too soon for imperial clemency. In the last year of his reign, two further former friends were detected in a conspiracy to kill Vespasian: at Titus’ instigation, Titus Clodius Eprius Marcellus and Aulus Caecina Alienus were dealt with in summary fashion. The former preferred to cut his throat with a razor than face the senate’s sentence, the latter met death in a palace corridor. He was probably taken unawares. Neither could have known that for Vespasian too the sands of time were running out.
In the end there could be no resisting death. Like so much in Vespasian’s life, it was foretold in portents. ‘The Heavens themselves blaze[d] forth the death of princes,’ as Calpurnia tells Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on the brink of tragedy.21 A comet appeared in the heavens and the doors of the Mausoleum of Augustus opened of their own volition. A joker still, Vespasian interpreted the former as boding ill to the king of Parthia, long-haired as any shooting star; the latter to Junia Calvina, a great-great-granddaughter of Augustus through Julia the Younger as well as Vitellius’ sister-in-law. Suetonius records the affable emperor’s humorous impulse. Apparently dispassionate, his version of events does not lack pathos. Approaching his seventieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of his accession, Vespasian may simply have clung to life, drawing death’s teeth through jests. Perhaps he was afraid. All was in vain. After a lifetime’s exploitation of the numinous – and scant attention to the state of his health bar occasional massaging at the baths complex – it was impossible to repudiate the supernatural now.
Fever had struck during a tour of Campania. Doubly afflicted, the gouty emperor cut short his peregrinations, returned to Rome and promptly departed for Aquae Cutiliae. This bathing resort noted for its natural springs, where Vespasian had continued to spend his summers, lay in the Flavian homeland near Reate. There, uncharacteristically overindulge
nt, the emperor drank excessive quantities of cold spring-water. As his fever intensified, that guiltless bibulousness further irritated his intestines.
He retreated to a house which may have been that of his grandmother at Cosa, that repository of happy memories which he had never allowed himself to abandon or outgrow. Assiduously – against the advice of his physicians, according to Dio – he continued to play the emperor’s part.22 From his sickbed he struggled to manage as much as possible of the business of government, like Augustus and Claudius at a loss how to beguile these dog days save in the customary public service. Did he really say ‘I think I am becoming a god’? As the shadows closed in, that instinct for the practical did not desert him. It was no more than a recognition that his sons, either from gratitude or, like the Julio-Claudians, making capital from kinship with the heavens, would actively promote his deification. The statement may have been an instruction to Titus, the dying man shrewd enough to see that, though his own reign represented a revolution on the Palatine, Rome had not changed so much that an emperor at the outset of his reign would not benefit from a father who was also a god. Or perhaps it was less considered. Dragged in and out of consciousness by fever, the clarity of his thoughts blurred, Vespasian gave vent to subconscious aspirations he may otherwise have chosen to keep hidden. If instead he meant to joke, it was one last splendid riposte to the grandiose self-delusions of his Augustan predecessors with their twopence-halfpenny approach to pantheism.
Or was Vespasian writing his own epitaph, a summation of his pilgrim’s progress, that long, previously untrodden path from provincial obscurity to the loftiness of the purple on which he had acquitted himself with shrewdness, consistency and honour? Impossible to tell. Those who record the statement – Suetonius and Cassius Dio – do so without levity. By contrast, a recent commentator characterizes it as a hostile sneer on the part of Vespasian’s contemporaries, a deliberate echo of Claudius’ ‘Oh! I think I’ve messed myself’ in Seneca’s satirical Apocolocyntosis.23 If so, Vespasian, not his detractors, has the last laugh. Thanks to Titus, he did indeed become a god.
Before that, the last trump – a vicious attack of diarrhoea which overwhelmed the failing man and thwarted his ambition to die standing. It was an ironic, explosive, unlooked-for end for one whose facial expression had so often been likened to that of a man battling costiveness and who had replaced former imperial cruelty and caprice with a harmless taste for lavatorial humour and coarse ribaldry. That Vespasian’s death provided grounds for the rumour (believed by the future emperor Hadrian) that Titus had poisoned him at a banquet confirms that unexpectedness which is implicit in Alienus’ and Marcellus’ last-minute conspiracy. Gout aside, and despite a life which had encompassed both physical hardships and emotional strain, Vespasian, unlike the majority of his predecessors, was a virtual stranger to bodily frailty.
For almost ten years he had paved the way for his sons’ succession, the right to nominate the eleventh Caesar arguably encompassed by those catch-all provisions of the lex de imperio Vespasiani. ‘My sons shall succeed me or no one shall,’ he had asserted, a red rag to the bullish Helvidius. None doubted the earnestness of his intent. And now he stood on the brink of godhead, gilding at a stroke both Titus and Domitian with the lustre of his own self-proclaimed divinity. His remains were interred in the Mausoleum of Augustus. In death as in life were associated Rome’s two great founders of dynasties destined to deteriorate.
There was a theatrical, occasionally irreverent quality to imperial and aristocratic Roman funerals.24 Paid mourners feigned operatic grief – female professionals who wept, tugged their hair, beat their breasts. Musicians and dancers swelled the processions. Dressed in clothing that indicated the highest attainments of the deceased, an actor impersonated the object of mourning in words and gestures deemed characteristic. In a celebration which embraced every emotion from patriotism to genuine sorrow, no lip-pursing concept of deathbed respect curtailed the actor’s behaviour.25
At Vespasian’s funeral, the emperor’s wax death-mask was worn by a leading mime-player called Favor. Favor assailed the procurators: ‘How much will this funeral cost me?’ The answer – an impressively large sum – provoked a ready reply: ‘Give me a fraction of that and be done with the body: hurl it into the Tiber.’
TITUS
(AD 39–81)
‘The delight and darling of the human race’
Titus: 19th century engraving of the Roman Emperor Titus, iStockphoto
Hardly anyone ever came to the throne with so evil a reputation as Titus. Like iron filings to a magnet, accusations adhered to him: he was arrogant, cruel, unchaste, greedy and tyrannical. His passage to the purple in June 79, so doggedly plotted by Vespasian, was ultimately cleared by an explosion of shit – his father’s fatal diarrhoea. His brief reign would be marked by emissions, eruptions and explosions on a mighty scale. That first dark stain – notoriety more fitting the Julio-Claudians than the Flavians – was swiftly erased, history rewritten, misgivings dispelled. He became, in Suetonius’ account, ‘most kindly by nature’, indulgent, the scourge of informers, a patient and forgiving brother. Not for the first time, the historian has his cake and eats it. Perhaps Titus did too. For more than rumour was confounded by the apparent volte-face of Suetonius’ Titus: like Otho first Hyde, then Jekyll, he exploded the ancient biographical convention that character, unsusceptible to circumstance, was fully formed from infancy – the fox who changed his nature with his fur. As Dio has it, ‘Titus after becoming ruler committed no act of murder or of amatory passion, but showed himself upright... and self-controlled.’1
At the outset, unsurprisingly, there was no sign of popular rejoicing – indeed, there was no rejoicing. Vespasian dead was grounds for regret. Far from degenerating, his reign had improved over time, civil strife banished, the treasury replenished, an alternative to the spent dregs of Augustus’ gene pool lordly on the Palatine. Why welcome his demise? During Titus’ principate, the very elements trumpeted disdain and disappointment. Rome burned; plague raged; in the south Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae perished under nineteen hours of volcanic lava – and Titus (of middling height and pot-bellied but laying claim, in retrospect, to exceptional talents) transformed himself from villain to victor, and vanquisher of Roman hearts to boot. All within the space of two years, two months and twenty days.
At his own reckoning, this slum-born emperor was destined to earn his coronet in shadier regions than the Forum. He might, he said, have been a prince among forgers, such was his skill at imitating handwriting. Happily as it turned out, petty crime was not his vocation, nor his only talent.
Posterity mocks the meagreness of Titus’ self-appraisal. He survives today in different garb – a tragic lover, celebrated in seventeenth-century verse by Racine, Corneille and Thomas Otway; and, from ancient times, unlover-like, in the stone erection that bears his name, souvenir of a mighty general. Today the Arch of Titus – elegantly albeit triumphantly bombastic – frames glimpses of another, more famous Flavian monument, the Colosseum (begun by Vespasian, completed by Titus). Do not be distracted. The Arch’s carved panels record the conquest of Jerusalem, the Temple sacked, its treasures stolen, the same episode which afterwards inspired artists from Poussin to David Roberts; a triumph in Rome complete with prisoners and plunder including the seven-branched candelabrum snatched from the Holy of Holies – Rome’s disgrace or one of her finest hours, depending on the point of view. The glory and the spoils of that bloody impiety are claimed for Titus alone. The Arch presents a vision of Titus’ career that is compressed like snapshots in a magic-lantern show into a narrative of highlights, all martial, all victorious, culminating in his deification. It is the story of a life filtered teleologically through the prism of a single incident, debated now and even then. Surviving portraiture is in every way more rounded. Titus’ is a comparatively bland iconography, unromanticized but resisting ghoulishness. Its middle way skirts popular loathing and victorious carnage. Statues a
nd busts of Titus – brow furrowed in imitation of Vespasian – deny the calculation of the small-beer criminal, the dash of the romantic hero, the conqueror’s swagger or even warrior-like prowess: avuncular, heavily jowled and running to fat, mostly benign-seeming. Given this eleventh Caesar’s subsequent election to the gods, anything else would be surprising.
Suetonius cocks a snook at Titus’ image of himself as forger manqué, which may anyway have been a throw-away comment not intended for the ears of history. For Titus’ destiny was to rule: as in Vespasian’s case, oracles and clairvoyants agreed. In the event his reign was short. Its very brevity may account for its success: certainly Cassius Dio and the poet Ausonius thought so.2 Or perhaps, as Suetonius intimates, it was the misprision that he would prove a second Nero, unexpectedly but consistently parried, which provided the happy outcome to this tale of the unexpected.