Vespasian

• 1. Introduction

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  Vespasian was born on the 17th of November, 9 AD, in a village called Falacrinae, northeast of Rome, to a moneylender and debt collector. His family had no political pedigree worth mentioning. His mother's family had inched a little higher, with her father reaching the rank of prefect of the camp and her brother becoming a Senator, but that was the ceiling. Nobody in this household looked destined for the purple. Vespasian himself, by his own mother's admission, needed taunting to pursue public office at all.

  Yet on the 23rd of June, 79 AD, this same man died as Roman emperor, after a decade of rule that ended the bloodiest chapter the empire had seen in a generation. He had founded a dynasty, built the Colosseum, restored Roman finances, and suppressed a Jewish revolt that had humiliated his predecessors. Along the way he was declared a pharaoh in Egypt, performed healing miracles in public, and coined a phrase about money and urine that people still repeat today.

  How does a man from equestrian stock, a man once pelted with turnips and mocked as a muleteer, end up as Rome's stabilizing force after a year in which four men claimed the throne in succession? The answers lie in a life of surprising reversals, strategic friendships, and an almost theatrical patience.

• 2. Undistinguished Beginnings

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  Vespasian's grandfather, Titus Flavius Petro, was the first in the family to distinguish himself, fighting at the Battle of Pharsalus for Pompey in 48 BC before settling into work as a debt collector. Petro's son, also named Titus Flavius Sabinus, became a customs official in the province of Asia and later a small-scale moneylender among the Helvetii. He gained a reputation as scrupulous and honest, which counted for something, but he still married upward to secure any social footing at all.

  Vespasian was educated not in Rome but in the countryside, at Cosa, near what is today Ansedonia, Italy, under the guidance of his paternal grandmother. The attachment stayed with him throughout his life. Even after he became emperor, he returned often to the places of his childhood and left his grandmother's former villa exactly as it had been.

  His older brother, Titus Flavius Sabinus, had entered public life first and pursued the formal path of offices known as the cursus honorum, taking an important military command on the Danube. Vespasian appeared the less promising of the two, and it was reportedly his mother's taunting that finally drove him to follow his brother's example. That reluctant start shaped the man who would later survive conspiracies, civil wars, and the collapse of three emperors before him.

• 3. A Career Built on Mud and Mules

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  When Vespasian returned to Rome around 30 AD after military service in Thracia, he was assigned to the vigintivirate, the minor magistracies, most probably to one of the posts responsible for keeping the streets clean. He performed so poorly that Emperor Caligula reportedly stuffed handfuls of muck down his toga in rebuke. This was the beginning of Vespasian's public career.

  He failed on his first attempt to gain an aedileship, succeeded on his second in 38, and achieved a praetorship in either 39 or 40, reaching it at the youngest permitted age of thirty during a period of political upheaval in how elections were organized. What helped him, historians suggest, was his long-standing relationship with Antonia Caenis, a freed-woman who served as confidential secretary to Antonia Minor, the Emperor's grandmother, and moved in the circle of courtiers and servants around the imperial household.

  His consulship came in 51, after his military successes in Britain, but he then retired from public life after making an enemy of Agrippina, Claudius's wife and the most powerful figure in that reign. He was sent as governor to Africa Province in 63, where ancient sources disagree sharply about his record: Tacitus called his rule infamous and odious, while Suetonius said he was upright and honourable. On at least one occasion, Suetonius records, he was pelted with turnips.

  In North Africa, most governors treated the post as an opportunity to extort money to recoup the cost of their prior campaigns. Corruption was so standard it was nearly expected. Vespasian instead made friends, which left him financially stretched. He was forced to mortgage his estates to his brother and turned to the mule trade to survive, earning the nickname mulio, meaning muleteer. He returned from Africa to tour Greece in Nero's retinue, then fell from imperial favor after paying insufficient attention during one of the Emperor's lyre recitals. Some sources say he simply fell asleep. For a time, he was politically invisible.

• 4. War in Judaea

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  In 66 AD, Vespasian was appointed to suppress a Jewish revolt in Judea that had already killed the previous governor and routed Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria. He arrived commanding two legions, with eight cavalry squadrons and ten auxiliary cohorts. His elder son, Titus, came separately from Alexandria with another legion.

  Among those captured during the campaign was Flavius Josephus, a Jewish resistance leader taken at the Siege of Yodfat. Josephus would go on to write his people's history in Greek, and under Vespasian's patronage he remembered his captor as a fair and humane official. Josephus also recorded an episode after the Roman Legio X Fretensis and Vespasian destroyed Jericho on the 21st of June, 68: Vespasian took a group of Jews who could not swim, possibly Essenes from Qumran, and had them fettered and thrown from boats into the Dead Sea to test the sea's legendary buoyancy. They bobbed to the surface.

  At the war's conclusion, Josephus cited a prophecy from sacred scripture that a man from the Jewish nation would become ruler of the habitable earth around the time Jerusalem and the Second Temple fell. Josephus interpreted this as applying to Vespasian. Tacitus agreed the prophecy pointed to Vespasian and Titus, though he noted the common people had applied it to themselves and refused to believe otherwise even when disaster came. The story of a commander destined by prophecy to rule the world proved useful in the years immediately ahead, when Vespasian needed exactly that kind of legitimacy.

• 5. The Year of Four Emperors

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  Nero died by suicide in June 68, and Rome descended into civil war. Galba was murdered by supporters of Otho, who was then defeated by Vitellius. Otho's supporters, looking for a new candidate, turned to Vespasian. According to Suetonius, a prophecy widely circulating in the Eastern provinces held that from Judaea would come the future rulers of the world. Vespasian had already been told by Josephus that he was the man of destiny; now omens and oracles multiplied around him.

  He and Titus resolved to challenge for the Principate as early as February 69, but made no move for months. Throughout the early part of the year, Vespasian met repeatedly with eastern generals. Gaius Licinius Mucianus, governor of Syria and commander of three legions, became a key ally. In May 69, Mucianus formally urged Vespasian to challenge Vitellius. The legions at Alexandria, acting under instructions from the prefect Tiberius Alexander, swore loyalty to Vespasian on the 1st of July. Vespasian's Judaean legions followed on the 3rd of July, and Mucianus's Syrian legions on the 15th of July.

  Vespasian himself went to Egypt and took control of Rome's grain supply. His general Marcus Antonius Primus led the Flavian forces into Italy from the northeast, defeated Vitellius's army at Bedriacum, sacked Cremona, and advanced on Rome. In the resulting confusion, the Capitol was burned and both Vitellius and Vespasian's own brother Sabinus were killed. From Alexandria, Vespasian immediately sent urgently needed grain to Rome and issued an edict promising to reverse Nero's laws, especially those on treason charges. On the 21st of December, 69, the Senate formally declared him emperor through the passage of the Lex de imperio Vespasiani.

  While in Egypt, Vespasian visited the Temple of Serapis and reportedly experienced a vision. He performed healing miracles. He was hailed as pharaoh and proclaimed son of the creator-deity Amun, in the tradition of the ancient pharaohs, and an incarnation of Serapis in the manner of the Ptolemies. He was the first emperor since Augustus to appear in Egypt.

• 6. Governing a Wounded Empire

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  The empire Vespasian inherited was financially damaged and politically fractured. While he was still in Egypt in early 70, his son Titus suppressed the Jewish revolt with the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish Temple. According to Eusebius, Vespasian then ordered all descendants of the royal line of David to be hunted down, likely to extinguish potential Messianic rival claimants. The Jewish temple at Leontopolis was sacked in 73.

  In January 70, an uprising in Gaul and Germany, known as the second Batavian Rebellion, was led by Gaius Julius Civilis and Julius Sabinus, the latter claiming descent from Julius Caesar and declaring himself Emperor of Gaul. The rebellion absorbed two Roman legions before Vespasian's son-in-law, Quintus Petillius Cerialis, crushed it by the end of 70.

  Vespasian and Mucianus renewed old taxes, instituted new ones, and increased provincial tribute. Among the taxes revived was one on the collection of urine, originally introduced by Nero as the vectigal urinae, which Vespasian reimposed around 70 AD. When Titus criticized him for taxing urine, Vespasian held a coin from the first instalment under his son's nose and asked whether it smelled. When Titus said no, Vespasian replied that it came from urine. That exchange, recorded by both Dio Cassius and Suetonius, gave rise to the Latin proverb Pecunia non olet, meaning money does not stink.

  Almost a third of all coins minted in Rome under Vespasian celebrated military victory or peace. Construction projects carried inscriptions praising him and condemning previous emperors. A temple of peace was built in the forum. He also began construction of the Colosseum, using funds from the spoils of the Jewish Temple. In 75 he erected a colossal statue of Apollo, originally begun under Nero, and dedicated a stage of the theatre of Marcellus. Agricola, appointed to command the Legio XX Valeria Victrix in Britain, helped reimpose discipline and expand Roman control northward into campaigns against the Brigantes in 71.

• 7. History as a Weapon

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  Suetonius observed that Vespasian, as an unexpected and still quite new emperor, lacked auctoritas and maiestas, the backing and majesty that older dynasties carried by default. He solved this partly through propaganda: the theology of victory tied his right to rule to his conquest of Judaea. But he also worked directly on the historical record.

  Vespasian approved histories written during his reign, with biases against him removed. He offered financial rewards to writers who served his interests. The ancient historians who lived through the period, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus, speak notably well of Vespasian while condemning those who preceded him. Tacitus admitted his own status had been elevated by Vespasian. Josephus called him patron and saviour. Pliny the Elder dedicated his Natural History to Vespasian's son Titus during this same reign.

  Those who spoke against Vespasian were treated differently. A number of Stoic philosophers were expelled from Rome for allegedly corrupting students. Helvidius Priscus, a philosopher with republican sympathies, was executed for his teachings. Others had their works seized, destroyed, and denounced, some of them posthumously. Suetonius, however, offers a counter-reading: he claims Vespasian bore criticism from friends, lawyers, and philosophers with great patience, and that only Helvidius Priscus was put to death, and only after repeatedly insulting the Emperor with studied provocations Vespasian had initially tried to ignore. The philosopher Demetrius was merely banished to an island, and when word reached Vespasian that Demetrius continued criticizing him from exile, he sent the philosopher the message: "You are doing everything to force me to kill you, but I do not slay a barking dog." The truth of the reign likely sits somewhere between the official histories that praised him and the works that were destroyed.

• 8. Death and Afterlife

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  In his ninth consulship, Vespasian fell ill in Campania with what began as a slight illness. He returned to Rome and then traveled to Aquae Cutiliae in the country near Reate, where he spent every summer. His illness worsened into severe diarrhea. According to Suetonius, as he felt death approaching, he joked: "Vae, puto deus fio," meaning dear me, I think I am becoming a god.

  He died on the 23rd of June, 79 AD, aged sixty-nine years, seven months, and seven days, in the arms of those trying to help him stand. His last recorded words were: "An emperor ought to die standing." He was succeeded by his eldest son Titus, making Vespasian the first Roman emperor to be succeeded by his natural son. Domitian, his second son, followed Titus.

  The Flavian dynasty he founded ruled the empire for twenty-seven years. He slightly debased the denarius during his reign, reducing the silver purity from 93.5 to 90 percent and dropping the silver weight from 2.97 grams to 2.87 grams. He was generous to impoverished senators and equestrians, to towns struck by natural disaster, and especially to men of letters and orators, several of whom he pensioned with salaries of as much as a thousand gold pieces a year. Quintilian is said to have been the first public teacher to receive this imperial favor. In modern Romance languages, urinals carry his name: vespasiano in Italian, vespasienne in French. The man who began his career cleaning streets, and failed at that, ended up lending his name to public sanitation across Europe.