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Nothing had impelled the Gauls to believe that the end of our Empire was at hand so much as the burning of the Capitol [in Rome]. ‘Once upon a time,’ it was said, ‘the city was captured by Gauls, but Jupiter’s seat remained intact and so Roman power endured. Now, with this fatal fire, a sign has been given of heaven’s anger: possession of all human affairs, it portends, will pass to peoples beyond the Alps.’ Such were the prophecies of the Druids, with their empty superstition.
Tacitus, Histories 4.54, on AD 69–70
Nero’s death in June 68 marked the end of the Julio-Claudians but it was not a prelude to the end of the world. Instead it led to a year of four consecutive emperors, civil wars between opposing units of the Roman army and the eventual triumph of Vespasian, a military man of modest Italian origins whose father had once made capital by moneylending among the Swiss. The result was a new start, based on old supports and strategies. A new dynasty was established, the Flavian family who produced three emperors and lasted for twenty-seven years. It had to negotiate the dangers which previous emperors had shown to be endemic: the need for military prowess, the temptation for the ruler to be dissolute, the need to keep the Praetorian guards sweet, the need to keep army commanders outside Italy sweet too, the importance of conciliating their source, the Senate, and the need to humour and sustain the very varied population of Rome. There was also the cardinal problem of the succession: why should a First Citizen’s son succeed him?
Once again, tendentious publicity abounded during the four emperors’ reigns, infecting historians who wrote under the victor. Freedom and luxury, those relative benchmarks, were prominent in the spin. The first emperor, Galba, was an elderly aristocrat, sagging and unmilitary to the disgust of the guards, and ugly to the disgust of the plebs. Senators saw more in him (he had no children), especially as he was the opposite of prodigal Nero. He was, however, denounced for being mean: he forced jurors in Rome to work over the cold New Year because (it was said) he would not pay for any more of them. The Praetorian guards replaced him with Otho, who had once been an ominously close friend of Nero: he was even said to have shown Nero how to have sweet ointments rubbed into the soles of his feet. Nero had then taken away Otho’s gorgeous wife, Poppaea, and sent him off to govern western Spain. When in power, Otho imitated his persecutor and continued to spend heavilyon finishing Nero’s Golden House. He did not survive the third contender, Vitellius, a man with serious army backing. His enemies mobilized the spectre of luxury yet again. Vitellius was said to have paid for a gigantic cooking-pan, cast in a special furnace, which he called the ‘Shield of Minerva’, like the one on the Acropolis of classical Athens. Dinners for him were said to ruin whole towns in Italy. ‘Luxury’ helped the winner, the Emperor Vespasian, who emphasized his own simple lifestyle as a contrast.
The flexible theme of freedom was much in evidence too. The great Russian historian, M. I. Rostovtzeff, even saw the year 68/9 as ‘the protest of the provincial armies and the people of the Empire in general against the degenerate military tyranny of the successors of Augustus’.1 It certainly began in the West as a protest, but the protest was against Nero’s particular extravagance and looting. Not all the armies or provincials responded; they lacked political leaders and there was no attempt at a new political system. What people wanted was the existing system brought back under moral restraint and a restored respect for law.
The theme of ‘liberty’ was voiced by army-commanders and was visible on all four emperors’ coins. However, it never meant democracy or even the freedoms of the long-dead Republic. When Nero died, people in Rome wore the ‘cap of liberty’, as if freed from slavery. Greeks had hailed him as ‘Zeus of Freedom’ for freeing their province, but Roman coins now proclaimed ‘Jupiter Liberator’ for freeing them of their tyrant. Old Galba then proclaimed ‘liberty’, as did his Gallic backer Vindex, but they simply meant freedom from Nero. Galba and Verginius, another important commander, each implied that it would be for the Roman Senate and people to exercise freedom, in this case the freedom to choose the next ‘First Citizen’. Vitellius proclaimed freedom, but only freedom from the Nero-like habits of Otho. Vespasian then proclaimed ‘freedom’ from Vitellius. It had to be ‘asserted’ or ‘vindicated’, he stated, as if the Roman people had been ‘slaves’ to the wrong master.2
The personal choice of an heir and successor was not freedom at all, but Galba and Vespasian both did it. The Praetorian guards chose Otho and nobody at Rome could stop them, either. Among these rivalries, surely the ‘people of the Empire in general’ had a chance to be free? Conspicuously, none took it, until the drama was nearly over and then only in a corner of north-west Europe. In early summer 69 there was a real call here to freedom from Rome and the formation of an ‘Empire of the Gauls’. This campaign was led in the north-east of Gaul and among neighbouring German peoples by the well-born Civilis, a man of Germanic origin, who cut a fine figure with his one eye (like a new Hannibal, he said) and a long beard which he dyed red. Civilis was not a noble savage, but a cunning leader who knew Roman ways and tactics from his own experience of them. Others helped him, including a local prophetess, Veleda, who apparently had links with the banned lore of the Druids and prophesied success for the revolt.
The most prominent champions of it, the Batavians, had suffered particularly from Roman conscription; its officers had forced thousands of them, including young boys, into auxiliary army units which were then transferred very far from home. Civilis was to be adopted in later times by the Dutch (who presented themselves as kin of the Batavians) and became the Dutch national hero: Rembrandt even painted him for the town hall of Amsterdam.3 But this subsequent ‘nationalist’ role was not true to the Civilis of history. National consciousness was indeed behind the Batavian-Gallic uprising, but it was not inflamed into nationalism as it had been among the Jews, and it was even less unified than the Jewish revolt. More of the participants in the revolt were Germans than were Gauls and their various tribes mistrusted or hated each other already. Six Roman legions were sent to put the danger down, but even without them the revolt would have collapsed quite soon. An ‘Empire of the Gauls’ would have been economically isolated from Roman Britain and from Roman territories around it. People also realized that Roman power had been containing old rivalries among them and by keeping the peace it was the lesser of two evils.
The Empire’s darkest year was in fact proof of its stability. The eventual winner, Vespasian, emerged from Syria and Judaea where he and Titus, one of his sons, had been leading the legions with distinction against the Jews. His formal proclamation as emperor began in Alexandria on 1 July 69, but plans had already been laid in advance. His rise was said to be backed by omens and prophecies from the gods: Vespasian consulted oracles and in Alexandria he was coaxed into a wondrous ‘healing’ of a blind man and a cripple who approached him on the advice of the healing god Serapis. Sceptical at first, Vespasian and his supporters capitalized on his success, a real ‘royal touch’.4 It was almost unique in the history of Roman emperors (but not of medieval kings).
Despite suffering from gout, Vespasian had promise. He was about to be sixty years old and was the first emperor since the elderly Tiberius who was a proven soldier with experience of the provinces. He had led troops very ably in the invasion of Britain in 43 where he had conquered the south-west and had taken the Isle of Wight. He was a plain blunt man who had kept a local Italian accent and he had none of Tiberius’ touchiness or aristocratic pride: even his portrait-busts chose a plain ‘Italian’ style of realism, not the classicizing ideal look of Augustus or Nero. Unlike the other Julio-Claudians, he brought no strong-willed wife with him: he had married a humbly born Italian, Domitilla, but she was now dead. As a widower, he was living with a freedwoman, Caenis, as his ‘concubine’ or partner. It was amazing, but not too worrying, that way back, this same lady had been an ex-slave in the household of the great Antonia, Mark Antony’s daughter. Caenis was now old and hardly likely to encourage the Mark Antony style. But she could tell old Vespasian some excellent bits of gossip in bed.
What Vespasian lacked was any other connection with his Julio-Claudian predecessors. While his supporters took Rome for him, he remained usefully out of the way. There was severe fighting in the eternal city; the very Capitol was burned and hundreds of bronze inscriptions were destroyed in an epigraphic meltdown which Vespasian then tried to repair by ordering new copies of the texts. Vespasian did not reach the city of Rome until autumn 70 and in the intervening months questions were raised about his likely manner of rule. Who would advise him? What titles would he take and would he consult the Senate or simply present them with his decisions? The upper classes wanted an emperor who would behave modestly and morally and who would not defy the law. The opponents of Nero’s tyranny were not all dead and their favour for moral principles was still supported by a degree of contact with Stoic, philosophic views.
Lawyers, as usual, were more flexible than philosophers. It was arguably in early 70 that an important law was passed in Vespasian’s favour which set out his powers and cited precedents (when available) from the reigns of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians (except the mad Caligula). It is not convincing to see this law as just one more example of an older practice which had already been enacted for previous emperors since AD 14.5 Vespasian lacked his predecessors’ dynastic authority. As a ‘clean break’ his rule needed to be spelt out and referred to the Julio-Claudian past. The philosophic minority was still pressing for a well-regulated ruler, but some of the lawyers came up with a crushing answer. The law specified anything from Vespasian’s power to make treaties ‘with whomsoever he wishes’ to his greater role in elections: special consideration was guaranteed for ‘his’ candidates. No precedent (significantly) could be cited here, but henceforward, senators who wanted to be elected would be well advised to keep in with the emperor. Above all, a clause permitted Vespasian to do whatever he thought fit in the public interest ‘just as was the case’ (no legal right could be cited here) ‘for Augustus and the others’. The face of autocracy was thus recognized by law. The legal details continued in two more clauses, one of which specified what ‘Caesar Vespasian’ was not bound by (citing legal precedents), another of which ratified the decisions which he had already had to take during the year 69.
This law was a very neat piece of small print. For more than a hundred years Roman lawyers would discuss it in connection with the powers of the emperor (as they still do): he was not a king, like Ptole my and Alexander, and, lo and behold, this text did indeed relate his autocracy to law and the needs of ‘the Republic’. There was something specific here for legal minds to cite and chew over. For Vespasian, the immediate advantage was that the brute facts of life had been ratified and agreed up front. The old aristocratic families, where a few able voices might have challenged him, were almost all extinct. The Senate was made up of lesser, newer arrivals whose self-image would be best satisfied by an apparently regulated order. Lawyers had now defined it and the small print seemed to say that the rules were part of a tradition which went back long before these newer men arrived. Protesting philosophers were a tiresome and impractical minority. The real questions for the men in the Senate’s new intake concerned who would be first to receive higher office or even the honour of a priesthood. After 71 the word ‘freedom’ never appeared again on Vespasian’s coins.