The Twelve Caesars (38 page)

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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 his 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,
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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.
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