by David Potter
Vitellius reached the capital at the start of June and began the process of establishing his own regime in the face of serious opposition. In particular, Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus; AD 9–79), a first-generation senator, he had displayed considerable ability as a soldier during Claudius’ invasion of Britain and had been appointed commander of the force sent to pacify Judea during the Great Jewish Revolt, disputed Vitellius’ appointment. He rapidly garnered support among the eastern garrisons. On 1 July, AD 69, Vespasian was proclaimed emperor by the Roman army occupying Egypt, and the armies in Judea and Syria swiftly followed suit. This was a powerful military coalition, and Vespasian’s campaign soon gained momentum among other units closer to Rome. The Balkan legions in the provinces of Pannonia, Illyricum and Moesia, fearing retribution for their support of Otho, soon declared for Vespasian (moreover, in some cases, they were commanded by men with strong links to the eastern commanders, having served under Corbulo).
Faced with this growing rebellion, Vitellius tried to hedge his bets. He dispatched his main force to northern Italy to confront Vespasian, but at the same time kept potential sources of mediation in play by not arresting either Vespasian’s brother Sabinus or his younger son, the future emperor Domitian. Even so, his position became increasingly untenable. Vespasian’s army crushed his legions on almost exactly the same spot where Vitellius had earlier defeated the forces of Otho and then marched on Rome. During the fierce battle for the city, Domitian and Sabinus took refuge in the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, Rome’s most sacred monument. Domitian managed to escape, but Sabinus was captured by Vitellius’ troops and killed despite Vitellius’ efforts to save his life. When Vespasian’s men finally secured control of Rome, they were no more merciful, stabbing Vitellius to death and hurling his body into the Tiber. Vespasian was proclaimed emperor while he was still at Caesarea in Judea. It is a mark of how heavily Roman emperors had come to rely on the army as a power broker that Vespasian dated his rule not from when the Roman people voted to confirm his installation but from 1 July, AD 69, when his troops acclaimed him.
The Flavian dynasty
On the face of it, the start of Vespasian’s reign was highly inauspicious. He lacked a noble lineage; neither his former wife, the daughter of an obscure Roman equestrian, nor the freedwoman lover who replaced her were well connected. This freedwoman, Caenis, was the same person who in AD 31 had warned Tiberius of Sejanus’ plot and who, according to rumour, had also shielded Vespasian from Nero’s wrath on several occasions (for instance, when he dared to doze off during one of Nero’s recitals). Yet Roman high society still looked down on her as a former slave. Compounding Vespasian’s problems, the destruction of the temple of Jupiter during the assault on Rome portended the ruination of the city in the eyes of its superstitious inhabitants.
Away from Rome, things also augured badly for Vespasian. Judea was still in flames, and a massive rebellion had broken out on the Rhine, as the Germanic auxiliaries turned on the legions that Vitellius had left behind. At the same time, the first of three fraudsters who tried to capitalize on whisperings that Nero was still alive appeared in the Aegean region, playing a lyre and claiming to be the emperor. Yet Vespasian was made of sterner stuff than Galba. Leaving his son Titus to deal with the revolt in Judea, he travelled from Judea to Rome to put things in order. Titus moved on Jerusalem in the summer of AD 70, subjecting the city to a close blockade – during which many of its inhabitants starved to death – before launching the final assaults that progressively occupied the city from July to September. Most of Jerusalem was ransacked and burned, including, most devastatingly for the Jewish people, the Second Temple. The day on which this desecration took place, August 29 – known as Tisha B’Av in the Jewish calendar – is often referred to as the ‘saddest day in Jewish history’. The fall of Jerusalem marked the official end of the war, which was celebrated with a massive triumph at Rome in AD 71, even though fighting continued until the then governor, Flavius Silva, laid siege to Masada in AD 73–74, building an enormous rampart with Jewish slave labour that enabled the attackers to position a siege tower against the walls. When the defensive walls were breached, the defenders of Masada committed mass suicide rather than fall into Roman hands.
The tragic and dramatic events of these years have left powerful reminders to this day. At Rome itself, in AD 80, the emperor Domitian commemorated his deceased elder brother’s sack of Jerusalem by erecting the Arch of Titus (the model for all subsequent such edifices, such as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris), which still stands on the Via Sacra south of the Forum in Rome. In Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall on the Temple Mount is all that survives of the Temple destroyed during the Roman assault, while at Masada the siege rampart can still be seen along with the outlines of Roman camps in the valley. Since the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the defence of Masada has become a powerful symbol of national identity and absolute determination to resist invasion. Troops of the country’s armed forces attend swearing-in ceremonies on the plateau, during which they take the vow that ‘Masada Shall Never Fall Again’.
Much less memorable today, though more serious at the time, was the revolt along the Rhine. The situation became ever more threatening in the first half of AD 70 when the rebels compelled the surrender of two Roman legions, and a wave of religious fanaticism, ably exploited by leaders of the revolt, encouraged people to think that the empire’s days were numbered. Vespasian, however, proved equal to the task, sending his nephew to suppress the revolt on the Rhine, which he accomplished successfully before the end of the year. Vespasian could then concentrate on forging a genuinely warm relationship with the people of the capital.
A safe pair of hands
Vespasian had an unusual profile for a Roman emperor: he had two grown sons, worked hard at the job, and lived in a stable relationship with a woman he clearly loved. A first-rate soldier, his reputation for virtus had been earned on the battlefield as a legionary commander in Claudius’ invasion of Britain in AD 43, and was confirmed by his sure handling of the hitherto chaotic Roman response to the Jewish revolt. The new emperor’s domestic lifestyle was austere by the standards of the Julio-Claudians after Augustus. Perhaps the most obvious sign of Vespasian’s new approach was his decision to tear down the Golden House of Nero and build a vast amphitheatre in place of an artificial lake that Nero had constructed within his palace. Although the official name of this new building was the Flavian Amphitheatre, it would become known to later generations as the Colosseum. This massive structure, which takes its modern name from the colossal statue of the Sun God that once stood next to it, was conceived as a monument commemorating the suppression of the Jewish revolt, which had finally came to an end after Flavius Silva captured Masada in AD 74.
Vespasian consciously strove to present himself as a ruler in the tradition of Augustus. In particular, he eschewed government through a coterie of favourites among the palace staff, the style of rule that was favoured by his immediate predecessors in the post. Rather, in the manner of Augustus, his closest advisers were drawn from the senatorial and equestrian orders, and he was not afraid to promote people of genuine ability irrespective of their background. A good example of his egalitarian attitude was the promotion of Ulpius Traianus (c. AD 30–100), a Spaniard of Roman descent who had commanded a legion during the Jewish revolt, to supreme commander of the eastern provinces.
In AD 79, after ten years of energetic and generally successful rule, Vespasian died, just before completion of the Colosseum. It was Titus (AD 39–81), his eldest son and successor, who inaugurated the new amphitheatre in AD 80 with one hundred days of spectacular games. This is one of the defining moments of Titus’ brief reign. The other took place barely two months after his accession, when Mount Vesuvius, which dominates the Bay of Naples, erupted. The disaster was monumental. By the first century AD, the fertility of the surrounding region had attracted many people to settle and farm there, and major towns like Pompeii (population c. 15,000) and He
rculaneum (c. 5,000) had grown up around the mountain’s lower slopes. On the afternoon of 24 August, AD 79, after four days of minor foreshocks, the volcano exploded. For 19 hours, Vesuvius rained lava, rubble and volcanic ash over the surrounding region, completely burying Pompeii and Herculaneum, the one in volcanic ash, the other in a fiery mudslide, while killing an unknown number of their inhabitants.
One of the most prominent victims of the disaster was the author and naval commander Pliny the Elder, who was then in command of the Roman fleet at nearby Misenum and who went to investigate the eruption at close hand. He was killed by what vulcanologists now call ‘pyroclastic flow’, a cloud of superheated, choking gas. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, provided a detailed account of his death:
My uncle perished in a catastrophe which destroyed the loveliest regions of the earth, a fate shared by whole cities and their people. On 24 August, my mother drew his attention to a cloud of unusual size and appearance … He changed his plan and what he had begun in a spirit of enquiry he completed as a hero … the dense fumes choked his breathing by blocking his windpipe … When daylight returned on the 26th, his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.
Many of the citizens of the towns destroyed by the eruption – which were abandoned and never rebuilt – were found in the same state as Pliny the Elder when the settlements were rediscovered in the 1740s. The ash-fall deposits that covered Pompeii preserved the people, houses and artifacts in remarkable condition. The site has yielded a wealth of information to archaeologists and historians on how the Romans of the first century AD lived. Titus himself responded as a good ruler should, visiting the scene of the disaster twice, and reportedly spent large amounts of his personal wealth on relief for the victims. This and his similar efforts following a major fire in Rome the next year helped endear him to his subjects, who mourned his loss when he succumbed to a fever on 13 September, AD 81.
Domitian (AD 51–96), the younger brother of Titus, was a very different sort of person from his father and brother. Although he retained many of Vespasian’s advisers, his relationship with the court and the senate was strained by his overweening sense of imperial grandeur mixed with an unappetizing tendency to prurient self-righteousness. The former trait was manifest in his insistence on being addressed as ‘master and god’, an extreme variation of the polite Roman form of address dominus (‘master’, or simply ‘sir’). The latter came to the fore when he assumed the title of censor for life in AD 84 and used this position to conduct several high-profile investigations into sex scandals. One of his witch-hunts resulted in two Vestal Virgins being buried alive when it was found that they had not lived up to their vows of purity. Yet, like many self-appointed guardians of public morality, Domitian’s own conduct was far from beyond reproach.
Despite his personal shortcomings, Domitian retained the loyalty of the military, both in Rome and the provinces, while his dependence upon men who had risen to prominence under Vespasian protected entrenched interests. The army soon found itself busy along the northern borders of the empire, as Domitian annexed fresh territory north of the Rhine and embarked on a series of wars against the powerful Dacian kingdom (occupying roughly the area of modern Romania) that dragged on for almost 20 years. By the end of the AD 80s, however, discontent with his reign was beginning to translate into practical action, including an unsuccessful assassination attempt and a major revolt by the governor of Lower Germany. The revolt was rapidly and brutally put down, but Domitian now grew ever more suspicious of people outside his immediate circle. These problems were compounded in AD 92 when two legions were routed by the Dacians, a crushing defeat that left the Danubian provinces open to invasion until a new expeditionary force restored order.
During this crisis, Domitian ordered the execution of several critics of his regime, both real and perceived. His high-handed actions outraged many in the senate who, along with palace functionaries, plotted his removal. On 18 September, AD 96, the chief of the palace domestic staff stabbed the emperor to death.
A sense of relief
The death of Domitian was greeted with unbridled joy by the senate, which immediately expunged his name from all the public monuments he had built. The praetorian guard was less than ecstatic, however, and it was only the intervention of its commanders and the senate’s promise of a generous ‘gift’, or donativum, that ensured the troops’ support for the accession of the next emperor, Marcus Cocceius Nerva (AD 30–98). An elderly and well-respected senator, Nerva was the senate’s candidate for the position and seems, like Galba before him, to have mainly owed his elevation to emperor to his age and childless state. Yet unlike Galba, he was alive to the necessity of maintaining the goodwill of the military, and promptly acceded to the praetorians’ demands when they took to the streets, calling for the execution of Domitian’s murderers.
Nerva was also aware that he had to choose a successor who would be acceptable to the army, and so named as his heir the commander of the legions in Upper Germany, the son of Vespasian’s old marshal, Ulpius Traianus. His adoption of the younger Traianus – or Trajan as he is commonly known in English – brought a measure of stability to the political scene for the remaining year of Nerva’s life. In addition to making an intelligent choice of successor, he endeared himself to the upper classes by discouraging prosecutions for treason, which had become something of a political game under Domitian, and granted amnesties to opponents of his predecessor who had been exiled. He died of a fever on 27 January, AD 98; his restrained use of power retrospectively earned him the accolade of being regarded as the first of the ‘Five Good Emperors’ who ruled Rome from AD 96 to 180.
Trajan proved a spectacularly good choice. Like Vespasian, he had worked his way up through the ranks, beginning with the minor official tasks that senators were given at the start of their careers and then holding subordinate commands in the legions before taking up more senior posts in Rome, where he was appointed consul in AD 91. Trajan’s well-earned and growing reputation for efficiency constantly recommended him for higher office. Finally he commanded legions and governed provinces. By the time he became emperor, the 44-year-old Trajan knew the business of government inside out.
At the time of Nerva’s death, Trajan was in Lower Germany. News of his succession was brought to him by the future emperor Hadrian, then assigned to the army in Germany, but, ever the professional soldier, Trajan was in no hurry to return to Rome. In fact, he only arrived in the capital in AD 100, where he immediately set to work altering the cityscape. On land next to the Roman forum, a new forum began to take shape that would ultimately house a vast library and the ancient equivalent of a shopping mall. At the same time, Trajan also began an extensive reconstruction of the Circus Maximus, the great arena for chariot racing. Augustus had installed marble seating on the lower courses, and Trajan now extended this over the entire structure. In conjunction with the earlier Colosseum, these two new major public-works projects now effectively surrounded the traditional heart of Rome with buildings put up solely for the benefit of the Roman people – a physical sign of continuity with Vespasian’s regime and of the emperor’s devotion to the welfare of his subjects.
Within the domus, Trajan’s conduct seems largely to have coincided with the civic virtue that marked his public persona. Although the third-century historian Dio Cassius reports that he was given to excessive drinking and enjoyed the sexual company of boys, he was hard-working and imbued his staff with a sense that the ‘spirit of his age’ – a phrase that appears several times in the letters he exchanged with a governor in northwestern Turkey – required his officials to exercise wise government. These officials were charged with ensuring that rivalries between local politicians did not get out of hand, that town councils did not waste money on useless projects and that the administration of justice was honest. One of his appointments was that of the eminent senator and historian Tacitus to govern Asia in AD 112–13. Trajan also seems to have allo
wed those he trusted most a great deal of latitude, recalling Vespasian’s treatment of his own father, and Augustus’ management of the empire as a collective enterprise.
Within the palace, Trajan balanced the interests of senior officers with those of his family, which were dictated by Pompeia Plotina, the most powerful empress since Livia. Plotina was the power behind the throne, cleverly forging close relationships with senior functionaries while maintaining the trust of her spouse. Like many other Roman imperial matriarchs before her, her principal aim was to secure dynastic preferment for a close relative. She ensured that Hadrian, Trajan’s nephew and the husband of her niece, Sabina, gained enough experience in government that he would be fit to succeed as emperor if she failed to bear Trajan a son (which, given that she was already in her 40s when Trajan came to power, did indeed turn out to be the case).
Trajan’s Dacian campaign
Trajan did not have an expansionist agenda at the outset, but found himself obliged to counter an immediate threat to the empire from north of the Danube. After Decebalus, king of the Dacians (reigned AD 87–106), attacked Roman territory in AD 101, he instantly found himself the target of a Roman punitive expedition. By the beginning of AD 103, his armies were so badly beaten that he reluctantly accepted peace terms making him a subject of Rome. But in AD 105 he broke the treaty, with devastating results both for himself and for his people. Within two years Dacia, essentially modern Romania, was made a province, and Decebalus committed suicide to avoid capture by a detachment of Roman cavalry. His severed head was later displayed in Rome on the steps leading up to the Capitol.