The Twelve Caesars (40 page)

The proconsulship had been awarded by lot, no particular gift from Nero. But Nero it was who, all unwitting, came to Vespasian’s rescue in the donkey-dealing doldrums of the mid-sixties.
The emperor placed Vespasian at the head of three legions in rebellious Judaea. In time, Nero was among those whose downfall would prove as essential to Vespasian’s ascent as the support of
the legions with which he endowed him. The appointment, which suited Nero, was not intended as a compliment to its recipient. Less than a year before his departure for the East, Vespasian had
played Russian roulette with
lèse-majesté.
Travelling through Greece in the emperor’s suite, the tradesman ex-consul disgraced himself at an imperial song recital. Exact
circumstances are unclear. Did Vespasian, as the sources indicate, really fall asleep, or was he simply unwise enough to leave early? It hardly matters. Enough to note Suetonius’ assertion
that Draconian strictures sought to prevent the disturbance of Nero’s performances. Women gave birth on the spot, uncomfortable and unassisted in the theatre, rather than court displeasure by
departing, while those goaded beyond endurance feigned death as the only fail-safe grounds for certain removal. Vespasian’s transgression cut short his Hellenic holiday and sent him scuttling
out of reach of imperial ire. Happily, within the space of half a year, Nero’s mood had changed. Proven military prowess and a lack of aristocratic distinction emphasized by his current
indebtedness outweighed Vespasian’s faulty etiquette and his flawed connoisseurship.

In February 67, Jewish rebellion in Judaea gave Vespasian a purpose. It also endowed him with position – a return to public service – and in
the long term, unconsidered by Nero, the foundations of a power base. Without the First Jewish Revolt (prosaically described by the Jewish historian Josephus as an upheaval of the greatest
magnitude),
¹¹
the support of the governor of neighbouring Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, and renewed military command, Titus Flavius Vespasianus would not have become Rome’s tenth Caesar and
progenitor of the Empire’s second dynasty. That fabled destiny, like the Flavian advance from Reate to the senate house, was a Julio-Claudian bequest.

In Vespasian’s historiography, the Judaean command proved a gift to Suetonius, too. ‘There had spread over all the Orient’, we read, ‘an old and established belief that
it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world.’ Suetonius’ relief is almost palpable. Here, at the moment when a man since deified stands on the brink of
treason, poised to seize the Empire for himself, the
numina
again come to the historian’s rescue. Vespasian’s path is foretold, preordained, his promotion the spoils of fortune:
gift-wrapped in omens, there can be no question of personal ambition or cupidity. An emperor-made-god finds exoneration in portents. Suetonius, of course, adopted his own interpretation of that
‘old and established belief’ in Judaean-sent world-rulers. He awarded the honours to Vespasian and Titus, their acquaintance with the region prior to 67 less than a stamp in a passport
– the elder born in a farmhouse fifty miles from Rome, the younger the creature of a dismal city tenement block. Yet at one level both were indeed
‘born’ in
Judaea, Roman mettle proven in the crucible of war. Modern readers will furnish their own interpretations.

But that is to jump ahead. Nero for one had not troubled himself with Eastern prophecies. He did not baulk at the supplementary legions placed at Vespasian’s disposal, the cavalry and
auxiliaries, a mighty force extending to some 50,000 fighting men, sufficient surely for the task of revolution.
¹²
Nero’s concept of the East championed Greece alone; his conquests were won
with lyres. He left Judaea to the Sabine rough diamond who, lacking musicality, had once won victories for Claudius and since governed Africa with honesty but no gain.

Unlike Vespasian’s principate, Roman victory in Judaea was certain, even once events in Rome had forced Vespasian to entrust command to his elder son Titus, who was
twenty-eight at the time, with little of his father’s experience. Supreme in numbers, training and technology, the Romans overpowered the insurgents. They advanced roughshod over Jewish
fighters and Jewish sensibilities: consistently they offered every possible affront to the insurrectionists. In the face of siege tactics and bandit warfare, Vespasian’s approach was dogged
and methodical. Energetic, tough, occasionally inspired and able to conjure reserves of courage like rabbits from a trickster’s hat, he plotted a course from town to town as his opponents
sought to establish their stronghold first in one location, then the next. Mackerel on a fisherman’s line, he seized each rebel encampment in turn, beginning in Galilee, Jerusalem his goal.
Even the fitful nature of his campaign did not seriously endanger its outcome. He paused in his offensive following Nero’s suicide in 68; in 69, fighting was temporarily suspended
when Vespasian left Judaea for Egypt and a bigger battle, in which more than a province was at stake.

As it happened, it was Titus, not Vespasian, who conquered Jerusalem, in August 70, after a siege of epic proportions lasting 140 days. By then, the older man could afford to share both laurels
and limelight, and laughed at his own pretensions in coveting the grandeur of a triumph in Rome as acknowledgement of his generalship. For by 70 the world had turned upside down. There would be no
more trading in mules or mortgages between brothers, no hiding in obscurity from a prima-donna sovereign smarting under imaginary sleights. The dynasty of Julius and Augustus, born out of genius,
had ended in something resembling the chaos of farce, Augustus’ great-great-grandson virtually alone on the Palatine in lamenting his own inglorious demise. On 1 July in Egypt, and two days
later in Judaea, Vespasian was acclaimed as
imperator
. It was more than Vespasia Polla had conceived, this eleventh-hour equality with Gaius, Claudius and Nero. The men who raised their
voices in his cause were, like him, soldiers. It would be naïve to assume surprise on Vespasian’s part. Suetonius admits that his ‘hope of imperial dignity’, kindled by those
convenient portents, was then of long duration.

In Rome itself, the senate dragged its heels. Not until 22 December did it officially grant Vespasian full imperial honours and privileges, including the award of
imperium
. Suetonius
neglects even to mention the senate’s role, an instance of rubber-stamping, the prize of empire no longer in its gift. The tenth Caesar remained absent from Rome, although the city –
numb after too many interludes of butchery – was now his, administered in his name by a former provincial governor, Mucianus, and his eighteen-year-old younger son Domitian. A stranger to
self-delusion, the new emperor estimated senatorial
blandishments at their true worth. Setting the tone for his ten-year premiership, he resisted dissimulation. He dated his
accession not by any decree or award of the senate’s, nor by his own arrival on the Capitol, but by those first Eastern acclamations made by men familiar with his deeds (although not privy to
any full disclosure of his motives). In the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria, eulogized in the fourth century by Ammianus Marcellinus as ‘splendid to a point that words would only diminish its
beauty’,
¹³
Vespasian had consulted the auspices for guidance at the most critical moment of his life. His focus was not the temple’s beauty. The memory of loyal shouts ringing in his
ears, he made sacrifices again and again. Blood, smoke and charred offerings – burnt flesh, singed skin – tincted air dense as incense, and Vespasian experienced a vision: he saw the
figure of his freedman Basilides, arms outstretched, offering him garlands, sacred branches and loaves, though Basilides was far away and physically infirm. Like every incursion of the supernatural
into Vespasian’s historical record, it was a sign, of course. Next dispatches brought news of Vitellius’ death.

How had it come about, this revolution for which there were no constitutional precedents, this ‘happy’ ending which Dio estimated at a cost of 50,000 deaths?
Certainly not in any way that is likely to be revealed to us completely. Victors have a habit of kicking over the traces, chucking out the account books and starting afresh. So it was with the
Flavians. One explanation lies in that hotchpotch of signs and signifiers listed by Suetonius, tokens of the good fortune attendant on Vespasian (as well as of Vitellius’ certain demise).
This constituted Vespasian’s own explanation, as early coin issues celebrating
the emperor’s fortune attest. An affectation of easygoing modesty notwithstanding,
Rome’s tenth
princeps
was nothing if not thorough. He made public the substance of his dreams and portents and, in the everyday currency of Rome’s taverns and marketplaces,
reiterated their message of divine intervention. In addition, Suetonius (like Tacitus) highlights the role of legions clamorous in support of the new man from Judaea, a soldiery trigger-happy in
the knowledge that, a century after Actium, the choice of emperor lay within its own grasp. Both suggestions leave gaps and raise questions. Persuasive as it must have been to Roman minds that Nero
had dreamed he was commanded to take from its shrine the sacred chariot of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and deliver it to Vespasian’s house, the visions of a doomed man, reported in the time of
his disgrace and preserved in the written accounts of his successors, do not invite blind trust. As it survives in
The Twelve Caesars
, the Flavian settlement takes little account of
Vespasian himself. Prior to his accession, he is a magnet for presentiments, a cardboard cutout of the physical attributes of Roman manhood: a portrait of unassumingness distinct from the common
run only in his martial arts. We glimpse his strengths and weaknesses through a prism of impending glory.

How different he appears from his partner in crime, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, and his sons Titus and Domitian. His sons will succeed him as emperors – Titus like him a model of the
‘good’ ruler, Domitian a study in all that is most disgraceful, victim of the ancients’ weakness for vigorous contrast. For the moment, both younger men display flashes of
selfishness and self-importance at odds with our portrait of their father. Their loyalty is a fragile, shifting thing, in thrall to their own desires and devices. Neither shares Vespasian’s
military genius, although Titus has gained experience of warfare in Britain
and Germany and Judaean victory is imminent. At this stage, their undisciplined appetites embrace
wide-ranging depravity – the chronicler’s taste for tittle-tattle perhaps. In power, Vespasian’s outlook will reveal itself as explicitly dynastic. His hopes then centre on his
sons, acclaimed like the heirs of Augustus as
principes iuventutis
, ‘Princes of Youth’ – Flavian self-regard a feature of both his own and Titus’ principates: in
Vespasian’s reign, senatorial offices, imperial titles and numismatic acclamations are all enlisted in the service of the family trio. In the struggle for power, the contributions of Titus
and Domitian counted less than the efforts of Mucianus, Tiberius Julius Alexander (the same Jewish equestrian prefect of Egypt who later served alongside Titus in Judaea), and the unlooked-for
support of an opportunistic Pannonian legionary commander of questionable renown, Marcus Antonius Primus.