The Twelve Caesars (43 page)

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
: 19th century engraving of the Roman Emperor Titus, iStockphoto

H
ardly 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 and 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.

Parrying Nero, we know, was a central tenet of Flavian policy. Not for Vespasian and his sons Otho’s celebration of a lost friend nor the grandeur of Julio-Claudian
descent with its weighty baggage of attitudes and assumptions. Not for them an arrogant kingship revelling in personal distinction nor, at Vespasian’s
death, a court
culture of extravagance, sadism and murderous family mistrust. They had experienced this at first hand and witnessed too the turmoil of its collapse. Theirs was a new way. Vespasian’s was an
earthy, amiable, spade-calling-spade, farting-and-belching, barrack-room Italianness. Unlike Nero, he had not succumbed to cultural effeteness and pursued a vision of Greece, any more than he had
emptied Rome’s coffers chasing pleasure, sung for his subjects or paraded his contempt for Roman sensibilities by dressing as a bride and offering both arse and troth to a former slave.
Nothing in Vespasian’s policy-making or public behaviour had suggested a craving for golden statues. He laughed to scorn attempts to relate him to Rome’s pantheon and cheerfully
broadcast the inferiority of his connections. Admitted, the Flavians accepted autocracy. Willingly and without complaint, they accepted those generous provisions of the
lex de imperio
Vespasiani
by which the Republic died another death. But they insisted on a gulf of clear blue water – flexible and delineated to serve their own purposes – between themselves and
their predecessors, theirs a duty-focused, merit-based principate with no stake in the divinity of Augustus or his haughty progeny. New emperors flaunted new clothes. As an alternative approach to
absolutism and a means of bringing stability and a semblance of unity in the wake of civil war, it spoke of Vespasian’s shrewdness.