The Twelve Caesars (39 page)

Like his wife and his daughter, Vespasian’s forceful, socially aspirant mother did not live to witness the triumph of his seventh decade. Perhaps he would not have wished it. Suetonius
ascribes his upbringing chiefly to his paternal grandmother, Tertulla, whose small estate at Cosa lay in mountainous farming country northeast of Rome. It was Tertulla, not Polla, who remained an
object of veneration for Vespasian, hers the house he revisited as emperor over and over again. Its furnishings and condition were preserved as a tribute to her memory – and, surely, the
memory of childhood happiness uncoloured by a mother’s harsh taunts. Of the home of his father, Titus Flavius Sabinus, which Suetonius sites in a small village beyond Reate (modern Rieti)
called Falacrina, even the precise location has been lost. The region’s fame was confined to its mules.

Yet neither Vespasia Polla, nor the character of Sabinus’ antecedents, can be erased from the record. Despite the provincial accent to which he
clung until his death, Vespasian belonged to a family already on the move – ironically, given his ultimate usurpation of their throne, their progress a Julio-Claudian success story. Three
times his maternal grandfather had served as military tribune; his mother’s brother was senator and praetor. Polla was not wrong to cherish hopes of more to come. Hers was the family from
which the future emperor took his surname. Her family’s was the trajectory his life would follow, outstripping the small-town distinction of those sepulchral monuments which Suetonius tells
us crowded a steep spot on the road from Nursia to Spoletium, itself known as ‘Vespasiae’. For his part, Sabinus was acclaimed for the honesty of his tax-gathering in Asia. Before his
death, he had amassed a fortune from banking. That fortune, more than the habit of honesty, would accelerate the social mobility of his sons, the younger Sabinus and Vespasian, sufficient in the
short term for the senatorial property qualification and rapacious Roman electioneering. Its recent origins – the memory of leaner times – underpinned Vespasian’s excessive
meanness, ridiculed throughout the sources, acknowledged by the emperor without remorse.

Vespasian’s garb of provincialism, then, was almost certainly considered. Prior to his principate, it served a protective purpose. In the eyes of the Julio-Claudians and their associates,
it disqualified Vespasian from any but insignificant office-holding, a curtailment to reasonable ambition – ‘a man... in no wise to be feared because of the obscurity of his family and
his name’.
It, as much as military prowess, encouraged Nero to appoint Vespasian to the Judaean command in 67. Suetonius relishes the irony. So fateful a miscalculation
recalls Galba’s appointment of Vitellius to Lower Germany, that proud fool’s egregious equation of corruption with ineptitude. Later, emblematic, the throne his own, Vespasian’s
rustic middlingness seemed to Romans a guarantee of Neronian elitism quashed... perhaps a mark of family piety... of stubbornness... of the arrogance of the successful outsider. Perhaps, more
pertinently, it provided a further means of associating Vespasian with Augustus, both ‘new men’ whose conspicuous talents seemed to sidestep the courtier’s fandangles. By the
summer of 69, when the legions hailed him as emperor, Vespasian had a lifetime behind him: too late for the leopard to change his spots or, in his case, the fox his fur. More than forty years had
passed since, aged sixteen, he put on the
toga virilis
in 25 or 26, more than thirty years since he was elected to the aedileship on his second attempt and subsequently the praetorship. (The
lacklustre attainments of the intervening decade – tribune of the soldiers in Thrace, quaestorship in Crete and Cyrene – were the under-achievements which goaded Vespasia Polla into
tartness.) If Vespasian’s career encompassed setbacks, it was also, of course, marked by notable successes, particularly during Claudius’ reign (as emperor, Vespasian would commemorate
his early sponsor by building a temple to the Deified Claudius on the Caelian Hill). Experience furnished an accurate assessment of the value in all this of the mellifluousness of his speech
– and the limited damage accruing from frankness concerning his family’s obscurity.

As in the Republic, so too under the principate. Vote-winning was a costly business only loosely caught up with popular favour. Where family history failed to supply the
novus homo
with a
ready-made political profile, the void could be filled by
patrons and prominent protectors – best of all, by friends in high places: courtiers, freedmen, even the
emperor’s smile. For all his country boy’s vowels and his determination as
princeps
to distance himself from the court politics of past regimes, Vespasian did not lack worldly
wisdom. Gaius had heaped mud upon the hapless aedile of 38: as praetor, his erstwhile victim importuned the senate for special games to celebrate the emperor’s victory in Germany. In the same
space, he thanked the emperor for honouring him with an invitation to dinner. Following Gaius’ death, Claudius’ freedman Narcissus was among those who championed Vespasian’s
cause.

Such nuggets of sycophancy and self-serving trouble us. Indicative of a degree of hard-headedness, they fly in the face of that Flavian propaganda which insists on a no-nonsense nature impatient
of machinations, disdaining the place-seeker’s insincerity. They refute that denial of ambition Suetonius invokes portents to express. And they suggest, too, the extent to which, equestrian
rank and mangled diphthongs notwithstanding, Vespasian the Sabine newcomer operated from within the system, the insider’s outsider. A mother’s ambition... a father’s new-made
fortune... personal opportunism: Vespasian’s advance through the magistracies of the
cursus honorum
was anything but revolutionary.

In the final months of 51, he reached the consulship. It was a reward for military achievements. In Germany, thanks to Narcissus’ influence, he had commanded a legion stationed near
modern-day Strasbourg;
⁹
in Britain, a focus of Claudius’ own imperial ambitions, the tally of his successes included more than twenty towns reduced to subjection and the Isle of Wight peaceful
under Roman rule. That last ‘victory’ – clearly over-egged in Rome, where neither the island’s tiny size nor its nugatory strategic importance can have been accurately
understood – earned Vespasian triumphal regalia in 47. He had fought more than thirty battles. Impressive in his tirelessness, with a head for tactics, strategies and
the organized disposal of troops, as well as a hands-on approach, rapport with his men and crowd-pleasing carelessness in the matter of his own comforts, the Vespasian of the sources is a natural
soldier, the equal (bar his money-grubbing) of the generals of antiquity, according to Tacitus.
¹⁰
A brace of priesthoods followed the awards of 47, then finally the consulship. Vespasian was
forty-two.

In ascending the highest rung of the ladder, he had equalled the record of his maternal uncle and satisfied the yearnings of a mother who may or may not have survived to bear witness. His own
feelings are unknown. Briefly eminent, he would discover that, in the short term, there was no more to come, a surprise to those readers who extrapolate from Suetonius a narrative of inevitability.
In 51 his wife Domitilla gave birth to a second son, Domitian, a brother for Titus, born in 39, and the couple’s daughter, the younger Domitilla. Claudius divorced Messalina. On the Palatine
a new wind was blowing. The emperor, as we have seen, took as his fourth wife his niece Agrippina the Younger. A tang of fear coloured the air. There were accusations, recriminations, careers
abruptly shattered; Claudius’ grip on government was loosening. In palace precincts, hunger for power replaced lust as the prevailing appetite. As a dynamic, it was simultaneously more
determined and deadlier. In Rome at large, imperial politics toppled to the politics of the imperial family, a high-risk confrontationalism in which there could be only one winner – as
Agrippina herself would learn to her cost. Claudius’ bride Agrippina had ambitions. Agrippina had a venomous capacity for hatred. Agrippina had a son and, from the outset, a court party of
her own. Vespasian was not among its number, with
the result that he held no court appointment during Claudius’ final years or the beginning of Nero’s principate.
Other losers in the fallout included Narcissus. Once Agrippina’s enemy, Claudius’ puffed-up freedman could not escape her loathing. We can assume that the same brush tarred Vespasian.
In his case the empress’s enmity was not personal or he could scarcely have escaped with his life. Sabinus continued as city prefect; Titus – for a spell fortune’s favourite
– continued to take his lessons alongside Britannicus, Claudius’ son by Messalina. For Vespasian, a hiatus had been reached – appropriately a caesura. Father of three, soldier,
senator and priest, he found himself for the moment less well placed than either his brother or his elder son, estranged from the machinery of power.

Beginning in 63, two appointments recalled Vespasian to life. The first was a proconsulship of limited lustre. Far from enriching Vespasian, short-term overlordship in the Roman
province of Africa – today a slice of North Africa centred on Tunisia – brought him to the brink of financial collapse and earned him, while it lasted, a degree of personal
unpopularity, the source of which is unclear, buoyantly expressed in a pelting with vegetables in the port of Hadrumetum. The second was a command which, we have seen, he won precisely on account
of his indifferent social status. First in Africa, afterwards in Judaea, Vespasian embarked on the journey which led him out of the shadows towards the purple.

His route was necessarily unorthodox. He had no right to the throne, no grounds for covetousness or hope, no reason to contemplate his own preferment: like Otho, in principle barred by caste
from imperial aspirations, but unlike Otho, able to
reflect on the unhappy history of the latter’s fleeting prominence. Vespasian’s position echoed that of
Verginius Rufus, the knight chosen as emperor by German legions following Nero’s suicide. Rufus, who would be offered the throne on two occasions, declined on grounds of birth. Eventually, as
we have seen, after a significant, voluble interval of silence, he pledged his support for the unimpeachably aristocratic Galba, that veteran of the empress Livia’s court. On his tombstone he
ordered the inscription, ‘Here lies Rufus, who, after defeating Vindex, did not take power but gave it to the fatherland.’

Until Vitellius’ victory over Otho, a Flavian principate was not even a probability. Haemorrhaging money in Rome’s best interests under a cruel African sun in 63, Vespasian can have
had no inkling of his final destination. He may have resented that roll of fortune’s dice which had allotted him an obscure appointment offering such threadbare recompense. Indeed, for
Vespasian there were
no
pecuniary rewards in Africa. His duties cost him dear. The proconsulship over, he was forced to mortgage his estates to his brother, poor again in Rome’s name
as he had been in the aftermath of the aedileship and quaestorship, reduced then to living in a tenement building in an unfashionable district. On this occasion, to support his family and maintain
repayments, he set himself up as a dealer in mules. As an indignity, it pinpoints the precariousness of his position as
novus homo
and Neronian outsider. Evidently he was unable to take for
granted either the emperor’s lucrative favour or the comfortable safety net of unearned family sesterces, his father’s fortune dissipated in the service of two sons’ senatorial
ambitions. Suetonius’ use of language in describing Vespasian’s latest calling affirms the exigency of his position. Does the author imply dishonesty, the second-hand car
salesman’s trick of talking up the second rate, in Vespasian’s
equine dealings? Certainly he presents the enterprise without indulgence. Vespasian’s chosen
entrepreneurship returned him to the land of his forefathers and the jobbing status of the non-aristocrat. Even in one who would afterwards rule with honour, it constituted anything but grounds for
praise.