073 - The Only Man Who Improved

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 73, The Only Man Who Improved. At the beginning of his histories, Tacitus claims that the year 69 AD was very nearly the last of Rome's existence. While this can be easily set aside as dramatic exaggeration, there is no doubt that the last 18 months had taken their toll on the empire. Commerce had been lost, property had been destroyed, and the rule of law had been thrown out the window. It would take more than a year of civil war to destroy the empire, but if things had gone on like they had been going since the suicide of Nero, the Romans very well could have been facing the end of their civilization. Luckily for the Romans, by the time the Senate recognized Vespasian as emperor in the last days of December 69 AD, the civil wars had already swept up all the legions from Spain to Syria and deposited them in Italy to fight it out. Anyone who was in a position to make a bid for the throne had already tried, so there was no one left to perpetuate the cycle of ascension and deposition once Vespasian's forces had overthrown Vitellius. So things did not go on as they had, and Roman civilization survived, battered but far from beaten.

An important thing to take away from this reality is to understand that there was nothing special or divine or cosmic about Vespasian's rise. Unlike Marius or Sulla or Julius Caesar or Augustus, he did not really possess the phenomenal charisma or military brilliance that had allowed those men to outshine their rivals and remake their own world. He simply got into an exhausting tug-of-war later than the others had, and was thus able to outlast the last of them. This is not to say that he wasn't charismatic or intelligent, just that his fortuitous placement in the East at the beginning of the year had as much to do with his success as his own personality. But though he rode a wave of circumstance to power, essentially being in the right place at the right time, Rome's luck would mirror that of their new ruler. Vespasian turned out to be a pretty good emperor. In fact, his unremarkable biography up to that point prompted Tacitus to report that Vespasian was the only emperor in history to improve himself upon taking office.

The first few weeks of his reign, however, did nothing to presage the moderate administration that he would be remembered for. Antonius' army had taken Rome by force, and unchecked by any higher power, the troops continued to run amuck in the streets. The praetorian guard and the urban cohorts, who usually took the lead in maintaining law and order, were all either captured out on the frontiers or dead in the field. So there was no one to stand up to Antonius' army, as they treated Rome as if it was a captured enemy city. On top of everything, career criminals and citizens with old scores to settle masqueraded as Flavian soldiers and joined in the anarchic pillaging. Tacitus exaggerates when he says that 50,000 people were killed in those first bloody weeks, but there is no denying that the death toll would have been high.

Things began to settle down when Musianus arrived in the first week of January 70 AD. Antonius had been acting this whole time on his own initiative, and though the Flavian high command had been smart enough to get out of the way of the man who was winning the war for them, that did not mean that Antonius represented Vespasian in any official or political sense. Musianus, however, carried with him the seal of the new emperor, and was fully empowered to act in Vespasian's name. When he arrived with his armies, it was as if Vespasian himself had arrived, and Musianus had both the ability and the ego to act the part.

The first thing that needed to happen, obviously, was to get all the troops out of Rome. The city had been occupied for months by squatting legionaries, and the resulting chaos, death, and property damage had to be dealt with. Antonius' legions were either ordered back from whence they came, or, in a few cases, reassigned to the Rhine to help bolster the now weakened garrison there. With order restored, Musianus set about consolidating Vespasian's political position, or, I suppose I should really say, Musianus set about consolidating Musianus' political position, and then he took care of Vespasian's business. It rewarded Antonius' service by offering him Galba's old proconsular position in Spain, quickly removing one of the two key rivals for power he needed to neutralize before he felt secure in his position.

The other key rival was 18-year-old Domitian, the youngest son of Vespasian, who had spent the year of the four emperors in Rome. Immediately following Vitellius' death, Flavian supporters had brought the boy out of hiding, declared him Caesar, and paraded him around as their natural leader. When Musianus arrived in the city, though, he placed a mission under his personal protection and promised to keep the boy safe until his father arrived to collect him. In other words, don't anybody get confused, I'm in charge here, not the boy. Then he set to work, settling Vespasian's scores.

In all of this, the new emperor was blessed by remaining physically absent from the city. He could thus plausibly disavow, first the carnage wrought by Antonius' army, and then the purge overseen by Musianus. It had taken a lot of blood to put Vespasian on the throne, but none of it actually wound up on his hands. When he finally arrived in Rome in mid to late 70, he was greeted warmly by a population who praised him for all that was good, while refusing to blame him for all that was bad. All in all, a nice place to be.

Now, I just said that there was nothing really remarkable about Vespasian, and that he certainly wasn't on the level of Julius Caesar or Augustus in terms of overall ability. But if there was one realm that he did excel at, it was propaganda, and the management of public perception. In this, he was every bit as savvy as the greatest of his predecessors. He was acutely aware of the need to legitimize his reign, and restore public respect for imperial authority, which was practically non-existent now after the musical chairs of the previous year. He encouraged the spread of Eastern prophecies that had supposedly foretold his rise to power, and did nothing to dispel rumors that he had miraculously returned sight to a blind man and restored the withered legs of a cripple. Vespasian knew that he was just a man, but it was important for the people to believe that he was perhaps something a bit more.

Beyond this subtle mysticism, the iconography of the coins minted during his reign, one of the key vehicles for massaging reality in ancient Rome, harped relentlessly on two themes, peace and victory. Vespasian is the one who brings you peace. Vespasian is the one who will defeat the enemies of peace. These powerfully simple ideas formed the bedrock of the new Flavian administration, and helped put the dark days of civil war in the rearview mirror.

But Vespasian added one further wrinkle to his propaganda campaign, and it was this final wrinkle that really endeared him to the people. Though he encouraged the belief that he could heal the sick or was an irresistible force destined to rule the empire, when he actually talked to the man, he was refreshingly self-deprecating. He knew he was not descended from some ancient line of nobility, he knew that he was an unrefined rustic, and he knew that he was too old to pretend to be otherwise. When some of his supporters presented him with a family tree that traced his ancestors back to one of the comrades of Hercules, Vespasian simply burst out laughing and sent them on their way. He liked to tell off-color jokes, eat simple foods, and even caused a minor scandal when it got out that he took his own boots off in the evening. Needless to say, after the sometimes waning, but usually waxing megalomania of the Julio-Claudians, Vespasian's down-home charm was a welcome change of pace.

Of course, we know all of this, because as part of his propaganda campaign, Vespasian also made sure to patronize the heck out of the arts and letters. He put teachers on the public payroll for the first time, and commissioned histories to be written to ensure that the Flavian version of history would become the only version taught. So who knows where fact and fiction diverge, but we do know that Vespasian was the first emperor since Augustus to die of natural causes, so it is not unreasonable to think that he was well-regarded in his own time. Ironically, though, as much as he sponsored scholars to write glowing histories of his rise to power and what he did when he got there, precious little has actually survived about Vespasian's time as emperor. He was in office from December 69 AD until his death in June of 79, and all we have to draw on to describe that decade are scattered anecdotes.

What we do know is that his reign seems to have been focused on physically rebuilding the empire and setting the government back on firm financial footing. To take the latter point first, Vespasian inherited an empty treasury and a shattered tax code and aimed to do something about it. Rome had been grappling with the hangover from Nero's excesses when it had gone and tacked on a year's worth of civil war to the tab. Upon taking office, Vespasian estimated that he would need, quote, 40,000 million sesterces to get the empire back on its feet. Because it is nearly impossible to accurately convert ancient denominations to modern equivalents, we're just going to have to leave that as Vespasian was about to go hunting for an astronomical sum of money.

He doubled the tax burden in the provinces, which, yeah, I think everyone saw that coming, but he also engaged in some pretty unseemly business practices that stood as the only real blemish on his record. For example, the emperor didn't think twice about accepting bribes to decide court cases this way or that, and he openly encouraged office seekers to deposit into the imperial treasury an amount that they felt quantified their desire for a given post. Vespasian was also fond of using his agents to corner the market on various scarce goods and then jacking up the price once a monopoly had been achieved. And in perhaps his most diabolical scheme, the emperor would let loose corrupt tax collectors and look the other way as they extorted the population to their own financial advantage. Then, when the collector had gotten rich enough, Vespasian would suddenly discover their fraud and swoop in to punish the criminal and seize the ill-gotten assets. The pattern repeated itself enough that the people began to refer to these men as Vespasian sponges who would soak up all the gold before being wrung out by the emperor.

He also dreamed up new taxes that hit the usually exempt citizens of Italy. Perhaps the most famous of these was his so-called toilet tax. In ancient Rome, urine was deposited in huge cesspools and then resold by the collectors for a variety of industrial applications. Vespasian imposed a tax on the purchase of said urine, which ignited an outcry that eventually wound its way back to Vespasian by way of his son Titus. Arguing to his father that there was something a bit off about using sewer money, Vespasian smelled the coins Titus had brought along and famously declared that money does not stink, which more or less summed up Vespasian's whole attitude towards revenue generation.

But though no one liked how he got the money, Vespasian's reputation did not suffer too much as he always plowed the profits right back into the empire. Though his infrastructure projects could be seen as an extension of his public relations campaign, there is no denying that both within Rome and out in the provinces, good work was being done to improve the material lives of the citizens. Between the neglect of Nero and the civil wars that followed his death, the Eternal City itself was beginning to look like a crumbling shadow of its former self. Vespasian encouraged the rebuilding of damaged buildings, allowed new owners to take control of forgotten vacant lots, while he himself took the lead in repairing the burned-out Capitoline Hill and finishing construction on the abandoned Temple of Claudius.

His crowning achievement, though, was his plan for the remains of Nero's golden palace. The sprawling complex that had eaten away the heart of the city was dismantled and in its place Vespasian ordered the construction of a massive amphitheater. Rising from the drained bed of Nero's old private lake, what became known as simply the Colosseum, took shape over the next decade, and though he would not live to see the completion of what the Romans called the Flavian Amphitheater, when the stadium was dedicated by his son Titus in 80 AD, it quickly became one of the most famous architectural achievements in history.

But he did not simply focus on Rome itself. Vespasian was quick to send money and resources whenever some region or another was hit with a natural disaster, so that rather than being left to fend for themselves, the victims of floods, fires, and earthquakes found a friend in the emperor. After years of enduring a reclusive and disinterested Tiberius, a megalomaniacal Caligula, and admittedly decent Claudius, but then a cruelly self-absorbed Nero, Vespasian's actions were nothing short of a political and fiscal revolution. For Vespasian it was an easy call, using the imperial treasury for the material benefit of the empire conformed with his compassionate nature, but it also conformed with his pragmatic nature, because usually a small investment was all that was required to keep the people happy and paying their taxes.

Vespasian's pragmatic compassion extended up and down the social classes and earned him praise from commoner and noble alike. After the chaotic splintering of the upper classes during the civil wars, the ranks of the senatorial and equestrian orders was a confused mess. So Vespasian reorganized the ranks to reflect a post-year of the four emperors' reality, but rather than solidifying his rule by executing his enemies and packing the senate with corrupt supporters, he seems to have followed a program of leaving virtuous men in place and removing the worst of the worst, whoever they had supported during the wars. He even took it a step further by extending financial aid to otherwise worthy senators who had fallen beneath the asset requirements for office. Having stabilized the upper classes, he then took a hands-off approach to their debates and encouraged men to say their piece honestly without fear of imperial reprisal. Vespasian never introduced anything resembling the treason trial so loved by the hypersensitive Julio Claudians, commenting once about a particularly vocal Helvidius Priscus that he would not kill a dog simply for barking. Of course, the irrepressible Priscus had to keep pushing to see just how far he could go, and in 75 Vespasian was forced to banish him from Rome. Eventually the dissident Stoic would be executed by Titus, but he was a particularly troubling pain in the rear end, and definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Vespasian's decade in office is usually understood to have been one of peace at home and abroad. Certainly the Cointee minted drove home the idea that all was well and the empire was at peace. But in reality, in the beginning anyway, Vespasian could not escape the entropy that always pulls at the edges of empire. In Judea, the revolt Vespasian had been assigned to put down did not stop simply because he had turned his attention westward. In fact, with the Roman world in crisis, Jewish leaders redoubled their efforts, believing that now was the perfect time to drive off the distracted legions. But unfortunately for the Jews, Rome was more than able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Vespasian assigned his more than capable son Titus to take over operations in Judea, and in 70 AD, just months after his father became emperor, Titus began the final siege of Jerusalem. Surrounding the city with his four legions, Titus cut off supplies going into the city and then opened negotiations for a peaceful surrender. But the scene inside of Jerusalem was ugly. The Jewish leadership was fractured, and infighting between the moderate and extreme elements led to a toxic atmosphere of mutual assassination and terrorist attacks. At one point, the food stores were torched by hardline anti-Romans who believed the loss of their security blanket would force the moderates to fight to the death. By May, Titus was done talking and crashed through one of the outer walls. Intense street fighting followed, with the Jews left alive falling behind the secondary walls near the Temple Mountain. But the Romans finally overcame these last offenders, and by September, the entire city was in their hands.

History records that at this point, the Roman soldiers, enraged at the ordeal the Jews had just put them through, plundered the city mercilessly and set fire to the rest, including, against Titus' explicit orders, the Great Temple itself. Josephus, who was present with Titus at the time, reports that over the course of the siege over a million people died, and another 100,000 were taken prisoner. The Great Jewish Revolt was broken. However, a few pockets of resistance still existed, and after Titus was recalled to Rome to serve as his father's colleague, a deputy was put in charge of mop-up duties.

The most famous of these pockets was of course the fortress at Masada, garrisoned by 960 Sicarii fighters. The fortress, situated atop a high mesa, was nearly impregnable, and it took a full year's worth of rampart building for the Romans to even reach the walls. On April 16, 73 AD, though, the Romans finally broke down the gate with a battering ram and, to their surprise, found the entire population of Masada dead from an apparent mass murder-suicide pact to avoid capture and slavery. The siege of Masada quickly entered into the Jewish collective consciousness and has held a prominent place there ever since. Today, beyond its popularity as a tourist destination, the Israeli Defense Force holds its basic training graduation at the ruins of the fortress, where their newly inducted soldiers swear to never allow Masada to fall again.

On the other side of the empire, Vespasian inherited a short-lived, but arguably more serious revolt in Gaul. When Vitellius decided to use the soldiers under his command to invade Italy, he left the Rhine River severely undermanned, and local tribal leaders were not about to miss their opportunity to break away from Roman rule. Specifically, a hereditary prince of the Batavians named Julius Cavillus, who had been made a citizen of Rome previously as a reward for 25 years' service in the Legion, decided that he had had enough of the Romans. The Batavians had long enjoyed exemption from taxation in exchange for providing a disproportionate share of the auxiliary troops stationed along the Rhine, but as Vitellius ascended to the throne, his agents pressed the Batavians to contribute even more troops to help reinforce the Rhine. This was the last straw for the Batavians, who were already ticked off of the empire for a number of other recent slights, and in the guise of helping Vespasian win the throne, Julius Cavillus led his people in revolt. He helped pin down the two legions left on the lower Rhine, and thus did indeed help Vespasian's war effort. But when the Flavians emerged victorious, and Cavillus refused to lift his siege, it became apparent that the Batavians were fighting for themselves alone.

Elsewhere in Gaul, a Belgic leader who claimed to be the great-grandson of Julius Caesar, led his own revolt, and managed to convince the two legions garrisoning the area to come over to his side. With the whole region up in arms, and expecting little relief, the commanders of the two legions besieged by Cavillus surrendered in early 70 AD. But contrary to the promise of safe passage they had received, the two disarmed legions were massacred. Obviously, Rome could not stand for such an atrocity, and the shocked Vespasian, who had already promised the Batavians independence as a reward for their help against Vitellius, ordered a massive army north to crush the rebellion. Cavillus planned to keep fighting, but when word came that Jerusalem had fallen, he knew that the handwriting was on the wall. The Batavian leader had been counting on the continued Roman preoccupation in the east to help him avoid the full brunt of the empire's attention. But now that he knew that he and his countrymen were the only things blipping on Vespasian's radar, it was time to give up. The Batavians surrendered, and agreed to return to the terms of their original treaty, along with a whole host of new restrictions and obligations.

Beyond the unrest of his first years in office, the empire was relatively quiet throughout Vespasian's reign. The only major action thereafter took place in Britain, which we'll cover more extensively next week as it spanned the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. We are blessed to have a full accounting of the campaigns in Britannia, as Cassius married the daughter of the principal Roman commander, Julius Agricola, and chose his father-in-law as the subject of his first major historical work, known as the Agricola.

Vespasian, as I said, was the first emperor in quite some time to die of natural causes, which is a testament to the esteem with which he was held. That is not to say that various attacks weren't made on his life, just that none were able to get close enough to be dangerous. The Praetorians remained loyal, and top commanders refused to get caught up with plots to overthrow a popular ruler. I will mention, though, as an epilogue to the year of the four emperors, that one of the men who did attempt to assassinate Vespasian was none other than Caecina, who was apparently hardwired to betray whatever master he served. Despite earning Vespasian's favor during the war, by 79, Caecina was up to his old tricks again. For unknown reasons, he conspired to kill the emperor, but the plot was discovered, and the habitual turncoat was finally executed by Titus.

Vespasian survived all of this easily, but by June of 79, his health began to slip. At 69 years old, he was not a young man anymore, and knew that his time was at hand. He had brought Titus in to share the burden of empire years before, and was confident he was handing power over to a capable man who could rule for many years, at least long enough for him to sire his own son and keep power away from Vespasian's other son Domitian, a young man of dubious character. On June 23, 79 AD, Vespasian lay on his deathbed, but rather than simply fading away, he demanded that he be helped out of bed, declaring that an emperor should at least die on his feet. According to the legend, his last words, spoken while enduring the painful throes of death, were, Dear me, I must be becoming a god. Vespasian died at the age of 69, after ruling Rome for nine and a half years.

Vespasian's reign is generally seen as a successful one, and I see no reason to contradict the consensus. His naturally mild temperament, pragmatic policies, and skillful use of propaganda allowed normalcy to return to an empire shaken by civil war. In almost every way, he left Rome better than he had found it, and as Tacitus said, he was probably the only man who improved his own character upon taking office. This rustic and obscure general had gone far higher than he had any right to expect, and he had clearly risen to the occasion.

Not only that, but Titus had risen to the occasion along with his father, and despite some initial misgivings about their new emperor, the people of Rome quickly embraced Titus and began to hail the new Flavian dynasty as the answer to all their problems. Unfortunately, Titus would last only a scant two years in office before succumbing to disease, and soon enough, the Romans would be introduced to the dark half of the Flavian coin.