Vespasian

Titus Flavius Vespasianus was born on 17 November in the year 9 CE at Falacrine, a small village in the Sabine hills northeast of Rome ^[1]. His family belonged to the equestrian order, respectable but far from noble. His grandfather had served as a centurion or, by some accounts, worked as a debt collector, and his father Flavius Sabinus made a living as a tax farmer in the province of Asia and later as a moneylender among the Helvetii ^[2]. Nothing in this background suggested a future emperor.

His mother, Vespasia Polla, came from a slightly grander family and pushed her sons toward public careers. Vespasian was raised partly by his paternal grandmother Tertulla on her estate at Cosa, and he kept a lifelong attachment to the place, returning there even as emperor and drinking from a small silver cup that had belonged to her ^[2]. His elder brother, Flavius Sabinus, entered senatorial life first, and Suetonius records that Vespasian hesitated to follow until his mother mocked him into it ^[2].

The Sabine origins mattered throughout his life. Romans associated the region with old-fashioned thrift and plain living, and Vespasian cultivated exactly that reputation. Where earlier emperors traced descent from gods and republican heroes, he made no such claims and openly joked about attempts to invent a distinguished pedigree for him ^[1].

Vespasian's early career followed the standard senatorial ladder, though without much polish. He served as a military tribune in Thrace, held a quaestorship in Crete and Cyrene, and scraped into the aedileship on a second attempt, reportedly finishing last among the successful candidates ^[2]. He reached the praetorship under Caligula, where he survived by conspicuous flattery of an unpredictable emperor.

Real distinction came with soldiering. In 43 CE Vespasian commanded the Second Legion Augusta during the Roman invasion of Britain under the emperor Claudius. According to Suetonius he fought thirty battles, subdued two powerful tribes, captured more than twenty hill forts, and took the Isle of Wight ^[2]. Archaeological work at sites such as Maiden Castle in Dorset has long been discussed in connection with this campaign ^[3]. The British operations earned him triumphal ornaments and, in 51 CE, a consulship.

His fortunes then wavered. He held the proconsulship of Africa around 63 CE, governing so honestly, ancient writers claimed, that he left office poorer than he entered it and had to mortgage property to his brother, briefly trading in mules to stay solvent ^[2]. Worse, he fell asleep during one of Nero's singing performances while touring Greece with the imperial court, a lapse that pushed him out of favor ^[1]. Retirement might have followed, but in 66 CE a major revolt broke out in Judaea, and Nero needed an experienced general who was too obscure to be a political threat. Vespasian fit both requirements. Given three legions, he methodically reduced Galilee in 67 CE, capturing the rebel commander Josephus, who later wrote the fullest surviving account of the war ^[4].

Nero's suicide in June 68 CE broke the Julio-Claudian line and exposed what the historian Tacitus called the secret of empire: that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome ^[5]. Galba, Otho, and Vitellius seized power in rapid succession during 68 and 69, each destroyed within months. Vespasian, still commanding in Judaea, watched and calculated.

On 1 July 69 CE the legions in Egypt, prompted by their prefect Tiberius Julius Alexander, proclaimed Vespasian emperor, and the armies of Judaea and Syria quickly followed ^[5]. The governor of Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, became his indispensable ally, marching an army toward Italy while Vespasian secured Egypt and its grain supply, a stranglehold on Rome's food. Meanwhile the Danube legions declared for him and, under the aggressive commander Antonius Primus, invaded Italy ahead of schedule, crushing the Vitellian forces at the second battle of Bedriacum near Cremona in October 69 ^[5].

The final weeks were ugly. In Rome, Vespasian's brother Sabinus was besieged on the Capitoline hill and killed, and the ancient temple of Jupiter burned during the fighting ^[5]. On 20 December 69 the Flavian army took the city and Vitellius was dragged through the streets and murdered. The Senate voted Vespasian the imperial powers the next day, later recording them in a surviving bronze inscription, the lex de imperio Vespasiani, a key document for how imperial authority was legally framed ^[1]. Vespasian himself reached Rome only in the autumn of 70 CE, leaving his elder son Titus to finish the Jewish War with the siege and destruction of Jerusalem that same year ^[4].

Any list of Vespasian achievements begins with money. Civil war and Nero's extravagance had emptied the treasury, and the new emperor announced that the state needed an enormous sum to stand upright again ^[2]. He raised old taxes, invented new ones, revoked exemptions granted to Greek cities, and reclaimed public land. When his son Titus objected to a levy on urine collected from public latrines for use by fullers, Vespasian held a coin from the first payment under his nose and asked whether it smelled. The exchange gave later European languages their word for public urinals, vespasiennes in French ^[2].

The recovered revenue went into visible works. In 70 CE he began rebuilding the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, carrying away the first basket of rubble on his own shoulders ^[2]. He built the Temple of Peace to house treasures from Jerusalem, and around 72 CE he started his most famous project, the Flavian Amphitheatre, known since the Middle Ages as the Colosseum, financed in part from the spoils of the Jewish War and erected on ground Nero had taken for the lake of his private Golden House ^[3]. Returning that land to public use was a deliberate political statement.

Administration received the same steady attention. Vespasian extended Latin rights to communities across Spain, enrolled new senators from the Italian towns and the provinces, and restored discipline in armies that had spent a year fighting one another ^[1]. He also endowed the first publicly salaried chairs of rhetoric at Rome, with the teacher Quintilian among the beneficiaries ^[6]. The frontier work was quieter but lasting: legions were repositioned, client kingdoms in the east were annexed, and the revolt of Julius Civilis on the Rhine was suppressed in 70 CE ^[1].

Vespasian married Flavia Domitilla before his rise to power, and the couple had three children: Titus, Domitian, and a daughter, also named Domitilla. Both his wife and daughter died before he became emperor ^[2]. He never remarried. Instead he resumed a relationship with Caenis, a freedwoman who had once been secretary to Antonia, the mother of the emperor Claudius. Caenis lived with him as a wife in all but law until her death around 74 CE, an arrangement Roman convention permitted a widower of his rank ^[1].

His habits were famously plain. He rose before dawn, read his correspondence, received friends while dressing, and kept a working routine that ancient writers contrasted with the theatrical excess of Nero or the gluttony of Vitellius ^[2]. He spent summers at Aquae Cutiliae, a spa near his Sabine birthplace, and made a point of returning to the modest family villa at Falacrine, which he refused to enlarge ^[2].

The humor stayed with him to the end. Suetonius preserves a string of his jokes, many aimed at himself, including his response to an omen-monger and his tolerance of lampoons that would have cost a man his life under other emperors ^[2]. He was not soft, though. The Stoic senator Helvidius Priscus, who persistently defied him, was eventually exiled and executed, and the philosopher-agitators of the capital were expelled from Rome around 71 CE ^[1]. Vespasian preferred clemency and mostly practiced it, but he did not confuse it with weakness.

Vespasian never disguised his intention to found a dynasty, declaring to the Senate that either his sons would succeed him or no one would ^[7]. Titus shared consulships, censorial powers, and command of the praetorian guard, an unprecedented concentration of trust in an heir. The plan worked: the succession of 79 CE was the first peaceful transfer of imperial power from father to son in Roman history.

In the spring of 79 he fell ill with fever, probably after bathing in cold water at Aquae Cutiliae, the Sabine spa where he had gone to recover ^[2]. He kept working from his bed, receiving embassies and joking that an emperor ought to die on his feet, which by report he tried to do, dying in the arms of attendants in June 79 CE at the age of sixty-nine ^[2]. His most quoted remark came near the end: aware that dead emperors were routinely deified, he said he could feel himself becoming a god ^[2]. The Senate duly consecrated him after death.

His reputation has aged remarkably well. Tacitus, no friend of emperors, allowed that Vespasian was the only ruler who changed for the better after taking power ^[5]. The dynasty he founded lasted through Titus and Domitian until 96 CE, and the amphitheatre he began still dominates the center of Rome, arguably the most recognizable Roman building in the world ^[3]. Modern biographers such as Barbara Levick treat his decade as the hinge on which the empire recovered from its first great succession crisis, a working demonstration that Roman government could survive the extinction of its founding family ^[1]. For readers of any Vespasian biography, the essential Vespasian facts are simple ones: he inherited a bankrupt, war-torn state and left a solvent, stable one, without terror and without pretense.