The Twelve Caesars (42 page)

For the better part of a year Mucianus oversaw the business of government, preparing for Vespasian’s autumn arrival and the less explosive, more challenging task of restoration. In
Dio’s account, it is Mucianus who embarked on the programme of tax increases which, in time, overcame Rome’s staggering post-Nero, post-civil war deficit, estimated by Vespasian in
Suetonius’ account at 40,000 million sesterces at a time when the annual tax revenue was only 800 million sesterces.
¹⁷
He ‘gather[ed] countless sums into the public treasury with the
greatest eagerness from every possible quarter, thereby relieving Vespasian of the censure which such a proceeding entailed’;
¹⁸
as the year drew to its close, he encouraged Vespasian to pursue
a similar policy. Briefly, the self-proclaimed king-maker enjoyed absolute power. He was authorized, he claimed, by a ring bearing the imprint of the imperial seal, given to him by Vespasian. Only
Domitian, appointed urban praetor with consular powers, shared Mucianus’ temporary majesty. In the fortunes of this loose-living libertine with a talent for intrigue but neither the ambition
nor the courage to aim for ultimate honours, it represented a high-water mark. In the years that followed, despite a position of esteem and influence at Vespasian’s court, he would never
again wield such unqualified power.

Vespasian banished the astrologers from Rome. No need for them and their ilk now: the portents’ work was done. Did he set up in that house at the
Gardens of Sallust those antique vases whose iconography proclaimed his supremacy? We will probably never know. In place of soldiers’ boots and breastplates, the streets of Rome rang with the
sound of the emperor’s task of rebuilding. A year later, the route of Vespasian and Titus’ triumph of Jerusalem bore witness to the speedy eradication of civil-war scars. In the
interval, Vespasian had addressed himself to the backlog of legal cases unheard in eighteen months of fighting and confusion; declared an amnesty for Neronian informers; examined the composition of
various legions in order to diffuse lingering Vitellian loyalty; and evolved a model of working alongside the senate in which, while every courtesy was observed, an emperor of non-senatorial
background maintained full decision-making powers over that body which had procrastinated for half a year before investing him with
imperium.
His focus, like that of every new-made
princeps
before him, was the maintenance of his own position. Although Vespasian’s power had been formalized in December 69 in the so-called
lex de imperio Vespasiani
, which
conferred on the new emperor either by law or by decree of the senate all of those powers enjoyed formally and informally by his Julio-Claudian predecessors, as well as the authority to do
‘whatsoever he may deem to serve the interests of the State and the dignity of all things divine and human, public and private’,
¹⁹
for fullest success this ubiquitous remit demanded both
popular and senatorial consensus. Vespasian broadcast the policies he intended to adopt to that end numismatically. The legends of his coinage lulled Romans with sound-bites: ROMA RESURGENS,
LIBERTAS RESTITUTA. As it happened, in both short and long terms his gifts to Rome were peace and solvency. He enshrined the first in that glittering temple acclaimed by
Pliny; the latter survives in a wealth of anecdotes which animate the sources.

The Alexandrians called Vespasian ‘Cybiosactes’. It was the surname of an Alexandrian king of notorious penny-pinching and scarcely a compliment since the attributes of kingship,
particularly in the East, embraced munificence. In Suetonius’
Life
, Vespasian’s reputation for covetousness pre-dates his principate. Perhaps it accounts for his turnip-pelting
in Hadrumetum – a boisterous response to a problem with the city’s food supply brought about by the proconsul’s meanness. The same shortcoming may also have contributed to
Vespasian’s poor election performances at the outset of his career (he achieved the aedileship only on his second attempt, in sixth place by a whisker). If so, Rome’s new emperor would
feign no false remorse. Parsimony quickly became a watchword of his policy-making, celebrated by Vespasian as a Flavian virtue. It was the right approach at the right time, sole means of reversing
the depredations of civil war and generations of Julio-Claudian folly. Like Mucianus, Vespasian amassed revenues with lip-smacking delight. The process even inspired in this down-to-earth
burgomaster uncharacteristically creative thinking. He placed a tax on the use of public urinals. The initiative offended Titus, whose concept of imperial dignity had been shaped by his childhood
at Claudius’ court. Beneath Titus’ wrinkled nose, Vespasian held out coins gathered in the first levy. Tersely the son agreed with the father’s assessment that the money did not
smell. And yet, Vespasian smiled, it came from piss.

But parsimony, the emperor knew, must be balanced: that was the lesson to be learned from Galba’s mistakes. There must
be largesse, a talent for the sweeping
gesture. Vespasian’s purse targeted the arts. A restorer of statues, a tragedian called Apelles or Apellaris, lyre-players Terpnus and Diodorus, and a successful but impecunious poet called
Saleius Bassus – all received payments from Vespasian of up to half a million sesterces.
²⁰
At the same time the emperor endowed chairs of rhetoric in Rome and Athens, each with a salary of
100,000 sesterces. Perhaps the policy was Titus’ in inspiration. Educated to the highest level, Titus wrote poetry in Latin and Greek and even turned his hand to Greek tragedy.
Vespasian’s own accomplishments can hardly have soared so high. His understanding was born of insight, not letters. He recognized the role of spectacle, visual propaganda like his coin
slogans writ large or that token hefting of temple debris from the Capitoline. Although building work remained unfinished at the time of his death, the Flavian amphitheatre, known since the Middle
Ages as the Colosseum, was Vespasian’s gift to the Roman people. On the site of the pool at the centre of Nero’s Golden House complex, it was funded with Jewish spoils and first
planned, Vespasian claimed, by Augustus. As Titus would demonstrate, it allowed tens of thousands of spectators at a single sitting to witness visual extravaganzas of eye-watering excess. From its
steeply tiered seats, the Roman mob absorbed the thrilling narcotic of mass bloodshed.

For the majority in Rome, gladiatorial combat was as close as they would come to bloodshed during Vespasian’s reign. So too, for the most part, it proved for the emperor
himself. The man who rose early and devoted his day to work, pausing from the business of empire only to drive through the rebuilt city, take a siesta or indulge in perfunctory sex with the
succession of unnamed concubines who consoled him after Caenis’ death, did not scruple to conceal in the interests of security his whereabouts or timetable. He ended
Claudius’ habit of searching his guests – ended too that culture of fear and uncertainty in which opposition, not daring to speak out, corkscrewed underground into labyrinthine
conspiracy. In Suetonius’ account, ‘He bore the frank language of his friends, the quips of pleaders and the impudence of the philosophers with the greatest patience.’ That last
group continued its opposition to the principate and the nature of imperial power within it, consistent in its carping and criticism. Vespasian responded with understatement. He dismissed a
banished Cynic called Demetrius as no more than a cur: ‘Though you do your best to persuade me to kill you, I don’t kill dogs for barking.’ To a former friend, Helvidius Priscus,
praetor in 70, he showed less leniency. In this instance, the sources attribute blame to Helvidius himself, over-zealous in his impertinence, determined to give offence, in Dio’s account the
linch-pin of a large-scale revolutionary plot. Vespasian ordered his exile and execution in 75. His hasty countermanding of that decision came too late: Helvidius, whom Dio’s Vespasian had
grown to hate, died too soon for imperial clemency. In the last year of his reign, two further former friends were detected in a conspiracy to kill Vespasian: at Titus’ instigation, Titus
Clodius Eprius Marcellus and Aulus Caecina Alienus were dealt with in summary fashion. The former preferred to cut his throat with a razor than face the senate’s sentence, the latter met
death in a palace corridor. He was probably taken unawares. Neither could have known that for Vespasian too the sands of time were running out.

In the end there could be no resisting death. Like so much in Vespasian’s life, it was foretold in portents. ‘The Heavens themselves blaze[d]
forth the death of princes,’ as Calpurnia tells Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on the brink of tragedy.
²¹
A comet appeared in the heavens and the doors of the Mausoleum of Augustus opened of
their own volition. A joker still, Vespasian interpreted the former as boding ill to the king of Parthia, long-haired as any shooting star; the latter to Junia Calvina, a great-great-granddaughter
of Augustus through Julia the Younger as well as Vitellius’ sister-in-law. Suetonius records the affable emperor’s humorous impulse. Apparently dispassionate, his version of events does
not lack pathos. Approaching his seventieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of his accession, Vespasian may simply have clung to life, drawing death’s teeth through jests. Perhaps he was
afraid. All was in vain. After a lifetime’s exploitation of the numinous – and scant attention to the state of his health bar occasional massaging at the baths complex – it was
impossible to repudiate the supernatural now.

Fever had struck during a tour of Campania. Doubly afflicted, the gouty emperor cut short his peregrinations, returned to Rome and promptly departed for Aquae Cutiliae. This bathing resort noted
for its natural springs, where Vespasian had continued to spend his summers, lay in the Flavian homeland near Reate. There, uncharacteristically overindulgent, the emperor drank excessive
quantities of cold spring-water. As his fever intensified, that guiltless bibulousness further irritated his intestines.

He retreated to a house which may have been that of his grandmother at Cosa, that repository of happy memories which he had never allowed himself to abandon or outgrow. Assiduously –
against the advice of his physicians, according to Dio – he continued to play the emperor’s part.
²²
From his sickbed
he struggled to manage as much as possible of
the business of government, like Augustus and Claudius at a loss how to beguile these dog days save in the customary public service. Did he really say ‘I think I am becoming a god’? As
the shadows closed in, that instinct for the practical did not desert him. It was no more than a recognition that his sons, either from gratitude or, like the Julio-Claudians, making capital from
kinship with the heavens, would actively promote his deification. The statement may have been an instruction to Titus, the dying man shrewd enough to see that, though his own reign represented a
revolution on the Palatine, Rome had not changed so much that an emperor at the outset of his reign would not benefit from a father who was also a god. Or perhaps it was less considered. Dragged in
and out of consciousness by fever, the clarity of his thoughts blurred, Vespasian gave vent to subconscious aspirations he may otherwise have chosen to keep hidden. If instead he meant to joke, it
was one last splendid riposte to the grandiose self-delusions of his Augustan predecessors with their twopence-halfpenny approach to pantheism.