Berenice and Titus probably met in the year 67, when he and Vespasian were gathering their forces. Agrippa and three other client kings in the region supplied troops to help the Romans. Berenice’s beauty and charm won Titus’s heart, while her wealth, deployed strategically, won Vespasian’s gratitude. She was approximately eleven years older than Titus, but the age difference did not deter him. Indeed, although she was around thirty-nine when they met, she was, says Tacitus, in the prime of her beauty, and she made the twenty-eight-year-old Titus burn with youthful desire.
EGYPT
By early 69, it became clear that Judea wasn’t the only place that Vespasian and his talented son could rule: Rome itself beckoned. So Agrippa and Berenice threw their support behind Vespasian’s bid for the throne, as did Berenice’s former brother-in-law, Tiberius Alexander. On July 1, 69, he had the legions of Egypt swear an oath of loyalty to Vespasian.
It was the first open sign of rebellion against Vitellius, but it was also a revolution in a system. The son of a tax collector from the Sabine hills was hailed as the ruler of the world; the successor of Augustus was proclaimed in the city of Antony and Cleopatra; the shouts of the soldiers in their red woolen cloaks in Alexandria replaced the orderly deliberation of the senators in their purple-bordered togas in Rome. A few days later, the legions of Judea and Syria followed their brothers in Egypt. It took another five months until December for the Senate to recognize Vespasian, and sticklers were annoyed in later years when he marked July 1 as the anniversary of his reign.
Having claimed the empire, Vespasian now had to take it from Vitellius. Vespasian said he hoped to win without bloodshed, by pressuring Rome through shutting off the Egyptian grain supply. But he sent an army to Italy. Yet, despite his military skill, Vespasian did not join it; he stayed in Egypt instead. Meanwhile, he gave Titus the job of finishing the war against the rebels in Judea.
Egypt was strategically important, and it was safely removed from the struggle in Italy. In Egypt Vespasian bided his time and demonstrated a hitherto unknown royal touch. In Alexandria, while seated on his tribunal, he supposedly healed two members of the common people—one blind and one lame—a sign of his new divine gift. Along with omens and portents from Italy, Greece, and Judea, it was great propaganda.
The decision to remain in Egypt was also vintage Vespasian. For all his veneer of unrefined simplicity, he was a master manipulator. He was, one imagines, one of those leaders who likes to be underestimated, as he knew that it made him more dangerous. In fact, he was as strategic as Ulysses, the wily hero of Homer’s Odyssey.
On his path up, Vespasian was second to none when it came to flattering the boss. And for all his air of being an accidental man, he burned with ambition. He might not have planned all his life to be emperor, but when the opportunity arose, he was ready to seize it. Like Augustus, Vespasian had a talent for getting others to work for him. Caenis, Mucianus, Sabinus, Tiberius Alexander, Julius Agrippa, Berenice—they were all part of a pattern. Nor did Titus break the mold. It might seem as if Vespasian sought the throne merely as a career booster for his son, but it was Vespasian who became emperor. Titus worked for him.
ANTONIUS PRIMUS, CRIMINAL AND CONQUEROR
While he stayed in Egypt, Vespasian sent Mucianus westward with the Syrian legions. They had a mighty force to hurl against Vitellius and his troops, but Mucianus didn’t launch the blow. Marcus Antonius Primus beat him to it.
A man of about fifty, Primus came from the city of Tolosa (modern Toulouse) in Gaul. He rose in Roman politics, but in the year 61 he was convicted of forging a will and expelled from the Senate. Then, in 68, he was rewarded for his support of Galba with reinstatement as a senator and command of a legion in Pannonia. Bold and decisive, in 69 the convicted criminal switched to Vespasian. Tacitus describes Primus memorably: “He was brave in battle, ready of speech, dexterous in bringing odium upon other men, powerful amidst civil strife and rebellion, rapacious, prodigal, the worst of citizens in peace, but in war, no contemptible ally.”
Primus almost singlehandedly talked the Danubian legions into supporting Vespasian. They marched boldly into Italy, where they seized the key city of Aquileia and then crushed Vitellius’s legions in a battle outside Cremona. Afterward, they sacked Cremona itself: a four-day rampage of Roman soldiers killing Roman civilians that came as a shock and a disgrace to the empire.
Meanwhile in Rome, Sabinus negotiated an agreement for Vitellius to abdicate. Peace was at hand, but some of Vitellius’s troops refused. They forced Sabinus and his son and grandsons to seek refuge on the Capitoline Hill, high above the Roman Forum. Vespasian’s younger son, Domitian, was with them. Vitellius’s forces took the hill. Sabinus’s family, including Domitian, escaped, but Sabinus was captured. After dragging him to Vitellius, the soldiers brutally murdered him. During the course of the fighting, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter the Best and the Greatest burned down. It was an ill omen, because the temple was the religious center of the Roman state and because Jupiter was closely associated with the emperor.
The very next day, December 20, Primus and his legions entered Rome. After heavy fighting, they took the city. Vitellius was dragged through the streets, tortured, and killed.
VESPASIAN IN ROME
Domitian took the title of Caesar and moved into the palace, but real control in Rome belonged to Primus. Then Mucianus entered the city and took charge. He didn’t dare attack the popular Primus directly, but Mucianus was nothing if not devious. He removed the two legions closest to Primus and his allies, convinced Primus to take a governorship in Hispania, and wrote to Vespasian to turn him against Primus. In due course, Primus retired to his hometown of Tolosa.
It took nearly a year, until October 70, for Vespasian to reach Rome. Until then, Mucianus ran the government, behaving “more like the emperor’s colleague than his agent,” says Tacitus. He continued to receive recognition and office—triumphal honors for his role in the civil war and two consulships (in 70 and 72)—but power passed into Vespasian’s hands. The Senate granted Vespasian the same high offices and the same title as his predecessors: Imperator Caesar Augustus. Their decision sealed what the brief reigns of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius suggested but never got the chance to prove: that the imperial office was highly transferable. The ever-practical Romans solved the problem of legitimacy neatly by simply giving the imperial title to the strongest man, regardless of a blood or adoptive connection to the founder of the empire.
Meanwhile, they granted the appellation of Caesar to Titus and Domitian. For the first time, Caesar was used to designate an heir. As for Mucianus, he fades from the historical record. It seems that he retired from public life because he had time to publish his letters, speeches, and memoirs of his years in the East. He died around the year 75.
For eighteen months, from the death of Nero to the victory of Vespasian, the Roman world endured a period of uncertainty, battle, sacks, devastation, and revolt. It was a heavy price to pay, but much less than Rome suffered in fifteen years of war and revolution during Augustus’s rise to power. If Vespasian could restore peace, then one might even say that, flaws and all, the system worked.
Compared with the rulers of other empires, most Roman emperors enjoyed only short tenures in office. Although that led to instability, it also let talent from outside the ruling family reach the throne. In order to succeed, a new emperor had to satisfy several key constituencies.
Vespasian wanted to consolidate power and pass it on to his sons, to reestablish the army and the Treasury after years of luxury and war, and to enjoy life with the woman he loved. First, though, he had to sell himself to the Senate and the people of Rome.
It wouldn’t be by his looks. By now, Vespasian was balding and given to gout. His face showed determination that could also be taken as a strained expression, as if, as one wit put it, he suffered from constipation.
Nor would Vespasian sell himself by his eloquence. He was no Cicero, although he did have a wicked sense of humo
r and the timing of a stand-up comic. When, for example, an ex-consul, Lucius Mestrius Florus, corrected his pronunciation of plostra to plaustra, Vespasian greeted Florus the next day as “Flaurus.” In Greek, phlauros means “vile”—a pun that would not be lost on Florus, who was friends with Plutarch, the eminent Greek writer.
Nor would Vespasian succeed by divine right. In the provinces, from Iberia to Armenia, he assiduously promoted the worship of himself as a god, but in Rome and Italy, he was just a man. So he was limited in his ability in the capital to use religion as a feature to make his rule attractive.
No, Vespasian would sell himself as Augustus had done, by pageantry and building, all the while crafting an image and rebranding Rome in his family’s name. Like Augustus, he denied the reality of civil war, presenting himself and his family as conquerors of foreign enemies of the Roman people. And he did it with a flair for communication that matched Rome’s best.
Vespasian didn’t abandon Nero’s policy of spectacle and pageantry. Instead, he doubled down on it, but with one big difference. Vespasian behaved with dignity and simplicity, and he treated the Senate with relative respect. The emperor did not play the lyre or race chariots in public, nor did he leave himself open to charges of arson or matricide. Vespasian was more dignified than Nero, but he offered no better solution to the crisis of the Roman soul than his predecessor did.
Yet Vespasian did offer one major innovation. The great commoner brought a new class to power: a group of wealthy and ambitious men like himself who came from Italy or the provinces. He greatly expanded the imperial elite, with consequences for many years to come.
THE SELLING OF THE EMPEROR
In spring 70 Titus besieged Jerusalem. The Jews had an inspiring and effective leader in Simon Bar Giora. A former partisan who built an army, he promised freedom for the slaves and a reckoning for the rich. He issued coins with the messianic legend REDEMPTION OF ZION.
Yet in spite of fierce resistance, Jerusalem fell to Titus in late summer 70. Bar Giora and a small group of followers tried to escape through underground tunnels, but even with the help of stonecutters, they failed. In the end, Bar Giora emerged where the Temple of Jerusalem had stood. A leading Roman officer took his surrender. Bar Giora was wearing a white tunic and the purple cloak of a king—or the Messiah.
Only the fortress of Masada—steep, arid, and remote—remained in the hands of the rebels, to fall finally in 73 or 74 after a massive Roman siege. As Vespasian’s coins depicted, Judea was defeated. The coins show Judea as a mourning woman seated beneath a palm tree, with a bearded man standing nearby, hands tied behind his back. In Rome, the new emperor had the doors of the Temple of Janus closed to signify peace, as Augustus did after Actium and Nero after the settlement with Parthia over Armenia.
In June 71, after Titus’s return to Rome, he and Vespasian celebrated a joint triumph over conquered Judea. Like earlier rulers, they knew how to put on a show: a splendid sight attracting a standing-room-only crowd. Father and son dressed in the tradition of conquering generals, wearing reddish-purple togas and bay-leaf-wreath crowns.
Vespasian began the day by greeting his soldiers and demonstrating his ability to work a crowd. To quote Josephus:
Now a tribunal had been erected before the Portico of Octavia, and ivory chairs had been set upon it, when Titus and Vespasian came and sat down upon them. Whereupon the soldiery made an acclamation of joy to them immediately, and all gave them attestations of their valor; while they were themselves without their arms, and only in their silken garments, and crowned with laurel: then Vespasian accepted these shouts of theirs; but while they were still disposed to go on in such acclamations, he gave them a signal of silence. And when everybody entirely held their peace, he stood up, and covering the greatest part of his head with his cloak, he put up the accustomed solemn prayers; the like prayers did Titus put up also; after which prayers Vespasian made a short speech to all the people, and then sent away the soldiers to a breakfast prepared for them by the emperors.
The victory parade included floats illustrating the cities conquered along with, wherever possible, the actual enemy leaders who had commanded them. Soldiers and senators, sacrificial animals, and hundreds of tall, healthy prisoners all marched in the procession. The prize captives were Simon Bar Giora and another key leader of the revolt, and they were whipped along the way. Among the spoils displayed were a table and menorah from the temple, both made of gold. Vespasian and Titus rode in chariots—the emperor first—with Domitian on a splendid horse. After Bar Giora was executed (the other leader suffered life imprisonment), there were sacrifices on the Capitoline Hill and then banquets all over the city.
Vespasian made it his first order of business to restore the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, which had been destroyed in the fighting of December 69. He wanted to show that he had the gods on his side. So when it came time to lay the foundation stone of the new temple, he was the first to help clear the debris. The emperor carried out a load of soil from the site on his head.
It was an important gesture of Roman renewal, but Judea, not Jupiter, burned most brightly in the Flavians’ minds. They commemorated their victory in not one but two triumphal arches, the carved reliefs of one of which, the Arch of Titus, are still visible today. A prominent part of the sculptural program was the menorah or seven-branched candelabra from the temple. On the Arch of Titus the menorah now looks colorless. But recent scientific study shows that it was originally painted a rich yellow, representing the gold of the actual menorah. The other arch was destroyed in the Middle Ages, but the inscription, which was recorded, praised Titus for the feat of conquering the Jewish people and destroying Jerusalem, both at his father’s orders. Archaeologists recently discovered parts of this second arch in Rome at the edge of the Circus Maximus.
But that was just the beginning of the Flavians’ plan to stamp their victory over the Jews on Rome’s urban space. Another prominent feature was the Temple of Peace. Vespasian did not choose the name lightly. Like Augustus, who built an Altar of Peace, Vespasian knew from personal experience that only by the grace of the gods had Rome achieved a hard-won peace. Like the forums of Caesar and Augustus, Vespasian’s construction was a centrally located public square, with colonnades all around and a temple on one side. It was magnificently decorated with a combination of new construction as well as building parts and art works from Nero’s Golden House. It also housed the golden vessels from the Temple, which were probably looted by Alaric, King of the Visigoths, when he sacked Rome in 410. Although recent excavations have brought much of the complex to light, it is hard to appreciate its grandeur today because a large part now lies under the massive road that Fascist premier Benito Mussolini drove through the heart of ancient Rome, the Street of the Imperial Forums, in the 1930s.
But the most visible part of Vespasian’s program is also the most famous building in Rome: the Colosseum. The workforce probably included both skilled and unskilled laborers, both free and slave, with captives from the Jewish War likely among them. An inscription says that the building was financed by “the general’s share of the booty,” probably a reference to the Jewish War. Like Augustus, Vespasian seems to have financed a major building project in Rome with the spoils of war, which boosted his public standing.
Nowadays we think of the Colosseum as typically Roman, but at the time, it was an innovation. Although many Italian cities boasted stone amphitheaters, Rome had preferred to put up temporary wooden stands for gladiatorial games—a holdover from the republican-era fear of crowds. There was once a small, partially stone amphitheater in Rome, but it burned down in the Great Fire of 64. Vespasian ordered a breathtaking replacement that would seat about fifty thousand spectators, making it one of the largest amphitheaters ever built. Construction began during his reign, but it was not completed and opened until a year after his death.
In antiquity, the Colosseum was known as the Flavian Amphitheater. The Colosseum received its current name in the Middle Ages fr
om a colossal bronze statue of Nero, rising an estimated 115 feet that stood beside it. The name first appears in a saying of the seven hundreds: “While the Colosseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, the world shall fall.”
Colosseum or Flavian Amphitheater—what’s in a name? In this case, plenty, because “Flavian Amphitheater” made the building as iconic and as personal as the city of Alexandria (named for Alexander the Great), the Forum of Julius Caesar, the mausoleum of Augustus, and, in modern times, Victoria Falls, the Eiffel Tower, and Hoover Dam. And the building leapt into the heart of Roman consciousness because the new amphitheater was an arena not just for sports but also for politics. As a means of communication, it was as revolutionary as Facebook or Twitter. From its dedication in 80 on, everyone with power attended the games there, to see and be seen. People sat in order of rank, with emperor, senators, and Roman knights at the front and ordinary people at the back. The crowd alternately cheered the emperor or cried and shouted for their favorite causes. In its own way, the Flavian Amphitheater rivaled the Forum or the Senate House—and it was branded with the name of the new first family in town.
Ironically, Vespasian did not like gladiatorial shows, perhaps because he had seen enough of war. But he knew that the Roman people loved their games. Vespasian sited his amphitheater on land seized by Nero after the Great Fire for his lavish Golden House. The new emperor had most of the Golden House torn down. The Colosseum rose on the site of the Golden House’s artificial lake.
Ten Caesars Page 14