The Twelve Caesars (41 page)

Suetonius underplays Mucianus’ role. He is unable to reconcile his own theory of omens and portents with Mucianus’ untenable claim that it was he who single-handedly made Vespasian
emperor. The Neronian ex-consul and lordly governor of Syria, who in his youth had run through a fortune in pursuit of high placement, and afterwards, for unspecified reasons, earned the
disapproval of Claudius, emerges more forcefully from Tacitus’
Histories.
There he is a study in contradictions, as much a vehicle for rhetorical dexterity on the writer’s part
as a credible biographical portrait: evil and good, arrogant and courteous, vigorous and self-indulgent, a construct of pithy polarities. He is a raffish, boldly disreputable figure, whose
dissipated prodigality and opulent hauteur – the dark side of Julio-Claudian grandeur – will jar in the new reign of moderation. Catamites follow him in flotilla. But his private life
does not besmirch his position. He appears the very model of a Roman major general. Eminent in his magnificence, his wealth
and that personal greatness which generated the
prestige Romans celebrated as
dignitas
, he possessed the added gift of conferring the best possible gloss on his own words and deeds. He is, it seems, a would-be emperor. Princely, he lacks
humility and the attributes of a subject. Prior to the intervention of Titus, whose charm and good looks effect a rapprochement between the neighbouring governors, he regards Vespasian with jealous
contempt, even hostility, unwilling to acknowledge parity either of office or of person. That haughtiness is the prerogative of high birth and never wholly gives way to amity. In time, Mucianus
would fail to treat the emperor Vespasian with the deference due to his elevation. He may not have had the stomach or the humility for such an inversion of the natural order. Enough that, conscious
of his childlessness and age, and wooed by Titus, he forswears personal hopes of the purple.

Writer and historian, Mucianus compiled a natural history of the East. It was remembered by Pliny the Elder as rich in reports of miraculous happenings, Roman belief in natural phenomena one
connection between these two men of widely differing backgrounds and outlook. Literary endeavours aside, his contribution to Vespasian’s cause was the three Roman legions stationed in Syria.
But he was not the Flavian’s Svengali, save in the luridness of his sexual proclivities, nor was he Vespasian’s Maecenas. The one-time governors’ association was pragmatic, a
considered and tactical decision on both their parts. (If Tacitus can be trusted, Mucianus’ habitual priority was neither equity nor truth but the depth of a man’s purse, and he may
simply have relished the prospect of influencing Rome’s next emperor to his own benefit.) Whatever his motives, the Syrian legions doubled the number of troops at Vespasian’s
disposal.

Those same troops had acclaimed Vespasian as
imperator
by the middle of July 69. Vitellius had been emperor of Rome for
three months. At the beginning of July, as
we have seen, similar acclamations had already been made in Egypt and in Vespasian’s own province of Judaea. At a council of war, Mucianus chose for himself the role of Rome’s
conqueror, setting out on the long march westwards at the head of his sixth legion and 13,000 veterans.
¹⁴
Vespasian journeyed to Egypt. In Alexandria, where his arrival inspired the Nile to overflow,
and Pelusium, a border fortress on the easternmost banks of the Nile, he intended to restrict the supply of grain to Italy, as a means if necessary of starving Vitellius’ Rome into surrender.
It was a plan of which his brother Sabinus, reappointed to the office of city prefect by Otho, was already apprised, the brothers complicit despite the potentially contentious nature of
Sabinus’ recent ‘assistance’ in the matter of Vespasian’s finances. As it happened, the plan would not be necessary.

We do not know whether sight of that portent recorded by Suetonius before the battle of Bedriacum was reported to the hapless Otho. Two eagles fought in full view of the assembled troops. One
defeated, a third approached from the East – ‘direction of the rising sun’... of Egypt, Syria and Judaea – and drove away the victor. There were pressing, more concrete
reasons for Otho’s suicide. But soldiers present that day were impressed by the evident symbolism of this airy puppetry.

Among them was the Danubian legionary commander and determined rabble-rouser Marcus Antonius Primus. A convicted forger disgraced in the reign of Nero, at fifty Antonius was the sort of restless
thrill-seeker who finds his métier in the theatre of war. He declared his support for Vespasian in a spectacular gesture which nullified Mucianus’ proposed march on the capital and
Vespasian’s war of attrition. Unsanctioned by authority, in October Antonius engaged Vitellian troops at the battle of Cremona in north-central Italy. He inflicted an overwhelming
defeat. So ferocious and unforgiving was the encounter at Cremona that, in Tacitus’ account, it represents the very end of that city, 286 years after its foundation. Afterwards,
puffed with victory but clearly not sated, Antonius led his men south towards Rome. There, entering the city via a quiet district of the northeast, they again routed Vitellian forces. It was the
feast of the Saturnalia and easy in the free-for-all holiday atmosphere to initiate what quickly developed into full-scale rioting in surrounding streets – a bloody spectacle, according to
Tacitus, watched by cheering, jeering Romans as if the Empire’s future governance were just another gladiatorial combat. Legionary banners acclaimed Vespasian. It was victory for the cause
after a fashion. On this occasion neither Vespasian nor Suetonius had recourse to portents to establish blamelessness.

Surely Vespasian entertained the highest hopes on his arrival in Rome more than a year later. The oracle of the god of Carmel, whom he had consulted in Judaea, had promised that
whatever he planned or wished, however great, would come to pass. It was an unequivocal response – possibly, dangerously,
carte blanche
. As throughout his public life, Vespasian
interpreted the green light responsibly. He assumed the consulship – shared with Titus, a suffect appointment granted to Mucianus – and addressed himself clear-sightedly to the task in
hand as he saw it.

It was as if, from the outset, he had dedicated himself to winning that good opinion with which posterity continues to furnish him. ‘He considered nothing more essential than first to
strengthen the state, which was tottering and almost overthrown,’ Suetonius tells us, ‘and then to embellish it as well.’ Did he hope to vindicate his legitimacy through a surfeit
of civic-mindedness? Was good behaviour the surest means of self-preservation, new building on Rome’s streets as much a metaphor for order restored as that review of
membership of the senate he pursued following his revival of the censorship in 73? The ancient author, habitually impartial, comes close to panegyric. In truth, the new man at the top was prepared
to undertake almost any measure to shore up his position, understandably reluctant to replicate the swift downward spirals of Galba, Otho or Vitellius, and to stabilize the ‘tottering’
state.

The regime needed adherents. Veteran of that pelting in Hadrumetum, Vespasian understood with no prompting from Juvenal that the commons of Rome would cheer anyone who fed and entertained them,
too poor for the luxury of political discernment. Roman senators were lured less readily. They could as easily cherish the memory of the affable, well-born Vitellius, like Vespasian popular with
his troops and distinguished by a reputation for integrity during his provincial governorship in Africa. On the streets of Rome, Vespasian cultivated a jocular buffoonery. He was quick to jest,
apparently without self-importance, his humour unrarefied, blokeish and winning, laughter at his own expense. Behind palace doors, he entertained a continuous stream of senate members and himself
accepted invitations to dinner. He transferred his principal residence from the Palatine – superior eyrie of the Julio-Claudians – to the Gardens of Sallust, a bequest to Tiberius from
Sallustius Crispus in
AD
20. There his doors stood open to all callers. It was an arrangement reminiscent of senatorial practice under the Republic. In the Flavian charm
offensive, accessibility and openness were to be the keynotes. At the same time, in an irreconcilable (and unpublicized) impulse, he controlled the principal appointments of state with a tight
grasp, avoiding
those distinguished by family history – an untenable policy on his part – in favour of men who had demonstrated loyalty and friendship to him
personally. In 71, for example, he may have appointed Tiberius Julius Alexander to share prefectship of the Praetorian Guard with Titus.
¹⁵
He himself shared the consulship with Titus seven times
– in 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 and 79 – exploiting the office for personal and dynastic gain. Family monopoly was deliberate and more than simply a security measure. His revival of the
censorship in 73 enabled him to re-examine the make-up of the senate and fill vacancies with his own nominees – some sixty-nine senators, including Romans, Italians and provincials.
¹⁶
Suetonius
casts what may as easily have been self-serving as a moral crusade, Vespasian’s criteria for senatorial rank merit, worthiness and respectability. As under the Republic, so under the first
Flavian: the great magistracies of state were the means of conferring that personal prestige or
auctoritas
which, municipal bourgeois that he was, Vespasian could not take for granted.

The Rome in which Vespasian found himself – received rapturously in the months following the Flavian sack of Jerusalem – was a city partly purged. The murderous hell
of Antonius’ conquest had passed. Vitellius’ ugly death, an unedifying example of mass viciousness and the fickleness of mob rule, had inspired rabid atrocities on the part of Flavian
troops and even civilians: looting, slaughter and rampaging bloodlust like that of foxes released into a chicken coop. Prior to Antonius’ arrival in Rome, Vespasian’s mortgage-broking
brother Sabinus had perished in the torching of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus as order buckled before misrule. More fortunate than his
uncle, Domitian – left behind
for the duration of the Judaean campaign – managed to escape from the same hiding-place. It was an event on which Domitian would later pleasurably dwell, as if, like Vespasian’s nimbus
of portents, escape invested him with quasi-divinity. In years to come, he built a temple on the spot of his delivery. In it he placed a statue of himself borne aloft by Jupiter Custos
(‘Jupiter the Guardian’). Portraiture is never neutral in imperial Rome: that Domitian should present himself in such a light, cradled by a god, is a vainglorious gesture at odds with
Flavian understatement, not to mention Vespasian’s ability to laugh at himself. In the short term, while terror gripped the streets, Domitian the survivor, saved by the intervention of
Jupiter Custos or otherwise, had savoured his freedom in an orgy of partying. Immature, headstrong, dizzy with the splendid destiny suddenly revealed to him and insensitive to niceties in the
relief of remaining alive, he had accepted as his father’s representative the soldier’s acclamation of ‘Caesar’. But he was not Caesar. ‘There was no emperor and there
were no laws,’ Tacitus records. The integration into the Flavian narrative of Domitian’s miraculous escape from fire and perfervid Vitellians would remain temporarily unresolved. Later
it formed a cornerstone of that unhappy emperor’s personal mythology.

Arriving in early 70, it was Mucianus who in fact played the Caesar’s part, the language of command instinctively within his lexicon. He expelled Antonius’ lawless troops from the
city and sidelined their light-fingered commander, who was even then rewarding himself with plunder from the imperial household. (His history of pliant loyalties offered limited grounds for trust.)
Antonius left Rome first to plead his cause before Vespasian in Alexandria, afterwards – Vespasian having smoothed his ruffled feathers with admirable diplomacy – for retirement in his
native Tolosa (modern Toulouse). Mucianus’ thoughts turned then to Domitian. Amiably or otherwise, he set about curbing the young man’s pretensions and herding
him back within the fold. Together he and Domitian began that reconstituting of the Roman machinery which Vespasian would continue, appointing governors and prefects. Mucianus executed
Vitellius’ son. It was a necessary precaution perhaps, but one Vespasian himself could not have taken without forfeiting the garb of good-naturedness he had chosen as an alternative to lofty
birth or that ‘great renown’ with which Suetonius endows him at this point.