I Think I’m Becoming a God — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink
In ten years there are many plots against him. Vespasian tells the Senate calmly: either my sons will succeed me, or no one will. Dio places this sentence at a worse moment, when the tribunes arrest Helvidius and the emperor leaves the Curia with tears in his eyes. Suetonius adds a dream: in the middle of the palace stands a pair of scales, with Claudius and Nero on one pan and Vespasian and his sons on the other. The scales balance. The dream came true: both houses ruled for the same number of years.
In AD 79 he falls slightly ill in Campania. He returns to Rome, and then goes, as every summer, to Aquae Cutiliae in the land of the Sabines, not far from where he was born. He drinks the cold water there, and the illness worsens. He receives embassies lying in bed. The doctors scold him for working. He answers that an emperor ought to die standing.
A comet appears in the sky. The Mausoleum of Augustus opens by itself. The emperor jokes: the mausoleum is a matter for Junia Calvina of the house of Augustus, and the comet is an omen for the king of the Parthians. He has long hair, and I am bald.
The final attack comes suddenly. The emperor nearly faints. He tries to stand and dies in the arms of the men who hold him up. It is June 23, AD 79. He is sixty-nine years, seven months and seven days old, and has ruled for ten years less a few days. A fever killed him. Dio dismisses as slander the rumor, repeated even by Emperor Hadrian, that Titus poisoned him.
There is a joke even at his funeral, though not his own. By custom a mime in the dead man’s mask walks behind the bier and imitates him. The mime Favor asks the officials aloud how much the funeral costs. “Ten million sesterces.” “Give me a hundred thousand and throw me into the Tiber if you like.”
What was he like? The least showy and most effective emperor since Augustus. He built order out of money, work and jokes, and also on the ashes of Jerusalem. Tacitus judges him in two sentences. Apart from greed, he was the equal of the generals of old. And alone among the emperors before him he was changed for the better by power. He is also the first emperor to be succeeded by his own son.
In the next episode: Titus takes the throne: conqueror of Jerusalem, commander of the Guard, beloved of a Jewish queen. Rome fears it is getting a second Nero. He has two years and two months ahead of him. And a mountain above the Bay of Naples that no one considers dangerous.