And not just to Rome. The stately dome became the symbol of power and glory afterward and has remained so ever since, in both secular and religious settings, with periodic changes and improvements. From the Romans, the dome passed to the Byzantines, and they in turn transmitted it on to Western Christendom and to such secular settings as the United States Capitol. The Byzantine dome, along with Persian domes, also influenced Islamic architecture. It all goes back to Nero.
His most masterful use of concrete is found in a small and sophisticated room. Today it lies buried under one of Rome’s hills, but originally it stood out in the open on the hillside, a monument to architectural achievement. The concrete room was octagonal in shape and had a domed ceiling with a “bull’s-eye” opening for light. Along with the suite of rooms around it, it represents an architectural revolution. It was the jewel in the crown of Nero’s new construction program after the Great Fire; a series of measures that widened streets, outlawed party walls, and monitored the water level in aqueducts, among other things.
First, Nero cleared out 250 acres of prime real estate in the center of Rome for a new palace. It was called the Golden House (Domus Aurea), but it was actually a complex of structures. Working with the best architects and engineers, Nero created something that was elegant, opulent, radical, and greatly influential. On a more mundane level, the concrete vaults that he favored were more fireproof than timber roofs.
The Golden House climbed the hills overlooking the valley where the Colosseum (built later) now stands. The key features were an artificial lake in the valley, a huge vestibule on the hill to the west of the Colosseum high enough to hold a 120-foot-high bronze statue of Nero, a splendid fountain house on the hill to the southeast, and a palace and probably also more public baths on the hill to the northeast. The palace offered innovative architecture decorated with sophisticated wall paintings and mosaics. It was as impressive as any stage set, with views of valley and hills. The domed, octagonal room stood here.
When he built the Golden House, Nero proclaimed that now at last he could live like a human being. He surely planned to share that new lifestyle with the inhabitants of the city, inviting them from time to time to events on the lake or to stroll in the park. Tacitus said, perhaps in reference to the palace, that Nero treated the whole city as if it were his house.
DEATH
Fantasy and decadence marked Nero’s last years. Although many considered him a disgrace, Rome’s wounded honor did not bring down Nero. Only when he made people fear for their property and their lives did they take action. Nero’s building projects, lavish games, and generous gifts to the people and the soldiers were expensive, as were the costs of rebuilding after the Great Fire, and the wars in Armenia, Britain, and Judea. In response, Nero inflated the currency. The silver content in Roman coins decreased by about 10 percent, but it was not enough. Someone had to pay. Although the common people of Rome largely adored Nero even after the Great Fire, his trip to Achaea for a year and a half, much of the time devoted to an artistic tour, was an act of bravura and incompetence, especially with discontent brewing among influential elites. Meanwhile, the emperor made time to do something to disgust his opponents. Still mourning Poppaea, he found a young male freedman who resembled her. He made the young man dress like her. Then he had him castrated and, finally, during his tour of Greece, Nero married him. Earlier, as part of a festival in Rome, Nero had married another freedman. In modern terms, Nero was primarily heterosexual, and all the while he remained married to his third wife. One or both of his marriages to young men was probably a parody, yet they shocked the public nevertheless.
In his last years, Nero turned down a proposal to have Rome build a temple to his divinity because it was not merely bad form but bad luck to worship the emperor as a god while he was still alive. He was happy, however, to change the name of the month April to Neroneus, and he planned on renaming Rome as Neropolis, Nero City in Greek, which was a triple insult to Roman traditionalists. Neropolis took the city named for Romulus, the legendary figure who Romans believed to have founded their city in 753 BC, and replaced it with something foreign, arrogant, and revolutionary.
By now, Nero, the not-quite-god, had deteriorated physically. He had a thick neck, protruding belly, and thin legs, whose bad effects were accentuated by his average height. No more was Nero the young prince.
By the end of his reign, Nero lost the support of the Roman establishment. One province, Judea, was in revolt. Other provinces were angry at having to pay for Nero’s expenditures. His generals no longer trusted an emperor who rewarded success with execution. When generals fear, soldiers march. In spring 68 bad news came from the west: a rebellion of Gallic peoples led by a Gallic noble who served Rome as governor of Gallia Lugdunensis (central and western France). Although loyal troops from Germany put down the revolt, news of additional trouble soon followed. The governor of Hispania Tarraconensis (roughly, Mediterranean Spain) was acclaimed as emperor by his troops. He cautiously left the matter up to the Senate to decide. He was Servius Sulpicius Galba, a wealthy and eminent Roman noble. Galba had the connections, the reputation, and the troops for a serious rebellion. Among other things, he had been one of Livia’s court favorites in earlier years.
Nero seems to have retreated into fantasy at the end. He talked about winning back Gaul by going there and singing to the troops. Then he spoke of moving to Alexandria and becoming a professional singer. On June 8 the Senate declared him a public enemy. The Praetorian Guard deserted him.
Nero fled Rome. The next day, June 9, abandoned by all but his most dogged loyalists, Nero committed suicide just outside the city. As he prepared to take his life, the man who had once supervised the rebuilding of Rome ordered around a few companions to prepare a funeral pyre and dig a hole in the ground to bury his ashes. He is supposed to have said at the end, “What an artist perishes in me!” If he did actually utter these words, they might not mean what they seem. The Latin word for artist can also mean “artisan.” Perhaps what Nero really meant was not that he was still a great artist but, rather, that the once-great artist was now reduced to giving directions to menials.
If so, he needn’t have worried, as his ashes were removed by his faithful nurse and taken to a more dignified location—although not to the one an emperor would have wished. Nero was the first and only member of the imperial family to be denied burial in the mausoleum of Augustus. His cremated remains were placed instead in a tomb in the crypt of his birth father’s family on the Pincian Hill outside the city walls. Nero came into office to applause and left unwelcome in his dynasty’s tomb.
Meanwhile, Galba heard that Nero was dead and that both the Senate and the Praetorians had declared him emperor. He now marched on Rome. He would reign for seven months.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CAESAR
Nero did quite respectably at some of the aspects of his job. He won the support of the common people. He was a great builder. He was a superb impresario. He presided over a cultural renaissance. He loved Greece and won the support of the Greek East. It should also be remembered that for about the first five years of his reign, he had the support of the Senate as well.
Where did Nero fail? By appointing an incompetent governor, he caused a major revolt in Judea. By confiscating property, he stirred up revolt in the Western provinces. By persecuting and executing elite enemies, and by embarrassing himself in the eyes of the elite through his personal behavior, he stirred up conspiracy and revolt.
Nero was the most cultivated and cruelest emperor Rome had seen, and one of the last members of the old Roman nobility to serve as emperor. After Nero, and with the exception of Galba’s brief reign, it would be nearly two hundred years before another member of the Roman nobility served as emperor.
Nero’s predecessors, aristocrats all, were more martial and sometimes madder, but none was more magnificent. None would match his exhibitionism.
Nero’s suicide threatened the future of Roman monarchy. Augustus had saved Ro
me by subjecting it to the rule of one man. Every emperor since had either been Augustus’s biological descendant, his grandnephew, or his adopted son. Augustus staked his rule on his family. The principate would stand or fall on family values, and Augustus was confident that it would stand. He was too optimistic.
Unlike Nero, Galba was not descended from Augustus, but no male descendants of the empire’s founder were left. Knowing that he had no direct heirs and frightened by potential rivals, Nero had killed them all.
None of the members of Augustus’s family matched his success. Tiberius lacked not just charisma but charm and the common touch. Germanicus, his nephew and heir, had all those, but he lacked Tiberius’s common sense, and he died before he could rule. The three members of Germanicus’s family who followed Tiberius on the throne were unprepared. Caligula, Claudius, and Nero lacked significant administrative experience before ruling nor had any of them commanded an army. The pressures of dynastic life turned them into megalomaniacs, spendthrifts, and killers of the Roman nobility who hastened the decline of the Senate.
Nero’s body was in the grave, but his soul went marching on down the centuries of imperial Rome. Augustus earlier tamed the old warrior republic and rededicated it to the twin propositions of empire and peace. Yet he left unanswered the question of what to do with Rome’s restless conquering spirit. Nero offered an answer: he would rededicate it to pleasure. But he was too impractical and too imperious to see the limits of his power or to bother about the matter of who would pay the price. Nor did he reckon with the continuing appeal of honor in the Roman heart. The elite really weren’t willing to tolerate a charioteer, actor, and arsonist as their ruler, especially not when he’d also murdered his mother and his wife.
Few of Nero’s successors proved willing to try the patience of their contemporaries as Nero had, and if they did, the attempt proved quickly fatal. Yet when it came to elevating the importance of entertainment, there was a little Nero in every one of Rome’s future emperors.
Rome faced an urgent problem: Could the empire continue without the House of Caesar? Rome without Caesar—after a century of peace since the Battle of Actium, the city shuddered at the thought.
Vespasian on a silver denarius.
4
VESPASIAN
THE COMMONER
The year 67 found the Roman army in a hard fight to retake the rebel province of Judea. Leading the legions was one of the empire’s most experienced generals, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, one of the conquerors of Britain. Vespasian, as we know him today, was every inch a soldier, riding on horseback among the cavalry in the army’s marching column, mixing with the men, and paying attention to their safety and well-being while driving them forward. When one of the defenders on a city wall in Galilee hit Vespasian in the sole of his foot with an arrow, the legions shuddered. But it was just a flesh wound, and the fifty-seven-year-old general got up to show the men that he was fine, which spurred them to fight harder. He was slow, steady, and unflappable. He was, says one writer, the equal of the great generals of old in everything but his greed. And, as we will see, that criticism might just have been an aristocrat’s sneer.
In November 67 Vespasian was under assault inside the walls of Gamla, a fortified rebel town on a precipitous ridge above the Sea of Galilee. The Romans had broken into Gamla only to run afoul of tottering houses and treacherous terrain. As the general in command, Vespasian fought in the thick of things. Ordering his men to link shields in a protective formation, he and they withdrew calmly and did not turn their backs until they were safely outside the walls. He then went on to regroup and, on a later day, conquer the town. This was the hardy warrior to whom Nero entrusted his army.
Vespasian was ready to begin the siege of Jerusalem in summer 68 when word came of Nero’s death. He broke off operations until instructions came from the new government. But before the Roman war machine started up again, the world turned upside down several times, and when it stopped, Vespasian stood on top.
Nero was forced into suicide by a defiant Senate and an increasingly mutinous military. All agreed on the need for change, but when it came to the new emperor—or to deciding whether there should even be an emperor—the only consensus was that the sword would have the final say.
After a century, the Augustan peace was over. The new reality was war, and it raged from Gaul and Germany to Judea and Italy itself. It was an era of pitched battle, sacks, sieges, and street fighting. Two of the empire’s most revered shrines, the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem and, in Rome, the pagan Temple of Capitoline Jupiter the Best and the Greatest, were reduced to ruins. As if to put an exclamation mark on the age, not long after peace was restored, Italy suffered the most dramatic natural disaster in its history.
The year 69 was the Year of Four Emperors. After Nero’s suicide on June 9, 68, four men in turn seized the throne. Three of them came and went quickly: Galba (December 24, 68, to January 15, 69), Otho (January 15 to April 16, 69), and Aulus Vitellius (April 16 to December 22, 69). Only the fourth, Vespasian, made his claim stick. He founded a new dynasty.
And it was something new indeed in Roman eyes. All the previous emperors had been named in Rome, three of those four were chosen in the provinces: Galba in Hispania, Vitellius in Germania, and Vespasian in Egypt. They were also the first emperors to be chosen by their legions. When the Spanish legions decided on Galba, wrote the historian Tacitus, “the secret of empire was now divulged, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome.”
Romans expected their rulers to have the prestige that came with noble birth. They all did, in one way or another, until Vespasian. He was Rome’s first nonnoble ruler. The first commoner on the Palatine Hill. The first plebeian emperor. The sources are full of stories about how earthy and practical he was. According to one anecdote, when the commander of a cavalry unit came to see him drenched with perfume, Vespasian said that he would rather that the officer smelled of garlic; in other words, he preferred his officers manly and uncouth to soft and cultured.
Vespasian had no direct ancestors in the Senate. He was what the Romans called a “new man” (novus homo). To the Romans, unlike us, “new and improved” was an oxymoron; they preferred “old and time tested.” The road to the palace would be hard for a new man, yet Vespasian decided to take it.
UP FROM SABINE COUNTRY
The rivers of the Sabine country northeast of Rome flow through lush green fields and woods. They empty into the Tiber and add to the surge downstream that, in spring and fall, often used to flood the low-lying areas of the city before the modern embankments were built. You never knew what the river might bring to Rome from the Sabine highlands, and on November 17, 9, it brought a baby who would grow up to be emperor.
He was born Titus Flavius Vespasianus in a hamlet near the Sabine city of Reate (modern Rieti). Vespasian was rooted in the soil and common sense of rural Italy. The Sabine country was a land of ox plows and mule carts, of the tinkling of goat bells and the chirping of cicadas, of hot summer afternoons and icy cold spring water. It seemed so quintessentially Italian that Lake Cutiliae, not far from Reate, was called “the navel of Italy.”
According to tradition, the Sabines were early rivals of Rome who quickly became allies. Legend speaks of the “rape”—that is, abduction—of the Sabine women by the early Romans, a largely male group in need of wives. When the Sabine men went to war, the women supposedly made peace between their fathers and brothers and their new husbands. Vespasian, too, would be a peacemaker, though of a different sort.
Vespasian’s family, known as the Flavians, consisted of upwardly mobile Italians. They first made a breakthrough to big money during the civil wars of the late republic. His father was a tax collector in Asia Minor and a moneylender in Gaul. Vespasian inherited his father’s interest in finance, and it would prove handy to him as emperor. But it was the women of the family who seem to have inspired big ambitions in Vespasian and his older brother, Flavius Sabinus (literally, “the Sabine”)
.
Knowing that Romans set great store by their mothers, perhaps Vespasian played up this angle in public. For example, as emperor, he made a point of visiting his grandparents’ estate. The story went that his grandmother had raised young Vespasian there while his father was in Asia Minor.
Vespasian’s mother, Vespasia, was, they said, a key figure of his adolescence. She was the daughter of a military officer and Roman knight. More important, her brother was a Roman senator, and she wanted her two sons to follow suit. Her older son, Flavius Sabinus, eagerly became quaestor and thus automatically a senator, but his brother, Vespasian, held back. At first, he wanted to go into finance like his father, but eventually he changed his mind. The story goes that Vespasia drove him to it by insulting him rather than asking him; she called Vespasian his brother’s anteambulo: the slave that walked before his master to clear the way.
Whether maternal abuse really changed his mind or not, Vespasian decided to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Around the year 35, when he was about twenty-five, Vespasian, too, was elected quaestor, and so began his career as a Roman senator. Having chosen his course, he drove forward with the single-mindedness of a Sabine muleteer whipping his animal up a narrow mountain path. He was a strong and healthy young man, well built and vigorous but not handsome. Blunt, earthy, and plebeian, he had the face of a bulldog and the bearing of a soldier.
Ten Caesars Page 12