Money Doesn’t Stink — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink
The Rome the emperor finds in the autumn of AD 70 looks like a place after a war, because it is a place after a war. The Capitol is ashes, the streets are full of ruins from fires, and the treasury holds nothing. Right at the start of his reign Vespasian says how much is needed to get the state back on its feet: forty billion sesterces. So say the manuscripts of Suetonius. As early as the 16th century scholars proposed correcting this to four billion. Even that is a fairy-tale sum.
Suetonius, who likes Vespasian, writes honestly: the only thing one can justly reproach him with is love of money. The emperor restores the taxes abolished by Galba, invents new ones, and doubles the tribute of some provinces. He buys up goods to resell them at a profit. He sells offices to candidates and acquittals to defendants, guilty and innocent alike. It was even said that he promoted the greediest officials on purpose, so they could line their pockets, and then condemned them and took everything. Rome called them the emperor’s sponges: he soaked the dry ones and squeezed the wet.
An old herdsman whom the emperor made pay for his freedom shouted in his face: “The fox changes his coat, but not his nature.” Yet the money went to good causes. The emperor pays teachers of rhetoric a regular salary, a hundred thousand sesterces a year, the first in Rome to do so. To impoverished former consuls he gives five hundred thousand a year. To an engineer who devised a cheap way to haul heavy columns onto the Capitol he pays a generous reward, but does not use the machine. “Let me feed my poor people,” he says. Porters have to eat too.
The most famous tax concerned public latrines. The urine was collected by fullers for cleaning cloth. From then on, as is usually assumed, they paid the emperor for it. Titus is indignant. His father holds a coin from the first payment under his nose and asks whether it stinks. “No,” the son answers. “And yet it comes from urine.” When a city votes him a costly statue, the emperor holds out an open palm: the pedestal is already here, give me the money.
Work on rebuilding the Capitol began before the emperor returned. On June 21, AD 70, under a cloudless sky, the praetor Helvidius Priscus, the same man who had stood up to Vitellius a year earlier, purifies the site with a sacrifice, and magistrates, priests, senators and the crowd haul a great foundation stone on ropes. Tacitus still had time to describe it, tenderly: gold and silver were scattered on the foundations. When Vespasian arrives, he is the first to carry out a basket of rubble on his head. Senators must follow him, and the people after them. He has the three thousand bronze tablets that burned with the temple restored: decrees of the Senate and treaties from centuries past.
On the restored buildings he has the names of the original builders inscribed, not his own. Whoever does not rebuild his ruin loses the plot to anyone who wishes to build on it. He also begins to raise a great amphitheater in the very heart of the city. That was reportedly once the plan of Augustus. The next episode will tell on whose ground it rose and how it was opened.
He spends little time in the palace and much in the Gardens of Sallust. The palace doors stand open all day, without guards. He receives friends even before dawn, still lying in bed.
Beside the emperor lives a woman he may not marry. Caenis, freedwoman and secretary of Antonia, Claudius’s mother. She was his mistress before he married. After his wife’s death he went back to her, and as emperor he treated her almost like a lawful wife. The law forbade senators to marry freedwomen. The emperor did not marry her either.
Dio admires her memory and tells a story that no one else recorded. Antonia once dictated to her a secret letter to Tiberius about Sejanus. You know how that letter ended for Sejanus. Then she ordered everything erased. Caenis is said to have answered: “In vain, my lady. Everything you dictate to me I carry in my head, and it cannot be wiped out from there.” As the emperor’s companion she traded in offices, priesthoods and even his decisions. People suspected that Vespasian gladly allowed it, since the money ended up in one purse. She died a few years before him.
The emperor laughs at himself and lets others laugh at him. When he suspects that his driver stopped to shoe the mules only so that some petitioner could run up to the imperial carriage, he asks how much he was paid for it and demands a share. Dio relates that Phoebus, the freedman of Nero who had once told him to go to hell, came to apologize. Vespasian did nothing to him. He answered with the same words. To the philosopher Demetrius, who insults him despite being in exile, he has this message passed on: “You do everything to make me kill you, but I do not kill a barking dog.”
Only one flaw spoils this portrait. Helvidius Priscus, the same man who consecrated the foundations of the Capitol, calls the emperor by his name like a private citizen and does not mention him in any edict. Vespasian exiles him, then has him killed. Suetonius assures us that he at once sent men to call off the killers, and would have saved him had it not been for a false report that it was already too late.
The emperor is sixty-nine and has one last joke in reserve.