The Emperor from Egypt — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink
In two years Vespasian takes the whole plain and all the cities of Judaea except Jerusalem. In that time Nero dies in Italy, and after him Galba, Otho and Vitellius fight over the throne. You know from earlier episodes how it looked from Rome’s side. In the East, people are watching one man.
In the summer of AD 69, as Tacitus writes, a few soldiers greet him in front of his quarters simply as emperor, and the rest take up the cry. Josephus, who was in the camp at the time as a prisoner, tells another story: the general refused for a long time, until the soldiers surrounded him with drawn swords and threatened to kill him if he would not agree to rule. Such a version looks good in a book written for a new dynasty: a throne that was not wanted.
A few weeks later, at Berytus, the emperor remembers the prisoner. He summons his commanders and says it is a disgrace to keep in chains a man who foretold him power. Titus adds some advice: they should not unlock the chain but cut it. That is how in Rome people treated those who had been chained unjustly: as if they had never been bound. Someone comes in and cuts the chain. From then on the prisoner is the emperor’s man. In autumn the emperor must decide what next. He holds something worth more than legions.
Toward the end of the year news reaches him in Alexandria that his legions have crushed Vitellius’s army at Cremona and that Vitellius himself is dead. The emperor stays where he is and waits for the summer winds. In these months things happen that the Romans took for miracles. To the emperor sitting on his tribunal comes a blind man, and with him a man with a withered hand. Both claim that the god Serapis told them to ask for help: the emperor is to moisten the blind man’s eyes with spittle and touch the sick man’s hand with his foot. Vespasian first laughs and refuses. Then he asks the doctors whether such ailments can be cured at all. He hears that perhaps they can, and if not, only the petitioners will make fools of themselves. He does what they ask, in front of a crowd of people. Both leave healed.
Three authors tell this. Tacitus adds a sentence worth remembering: eyewitnesses repeat the story even now, when lying brings no reward. Suetonius says outright what these miracles gave him. The new emperor, with no lineage and no ancestors, lacked authority and, so to speak, divinity. Now he received it.
The Alexandrians cared more about money. They counted on a reward for being the first to recognize the emperor, and got new taxes instead. They sang mocking songs about “six obols more” and nicknamed him after one of their own kings, a famous miser.
Meanwhile, two men hold power in Rome. Licinius Mucianus, governor of Syria, claims he is the one who gave Vespasian the throne. He wears a ring with the imperial seal and signs orders in the emperor’s name. Beside him the eighteen-year-old Domitian, the younger son, hands out posts. In one day he fills more than twenty offices. His father writes him a letter.
Suetonius knows a second version of the same barb: the father was supposedly astonished that his son, appointing so many people at once, had not named a successor to the emperor too. Tacitus records what was said about his parting from Titus. Before the elder son sailed off to Jerusalem, he long begged his father not to listen to accusations against his brother. Legions and fleets, he said, are not as sure a prop of power as a large family. The father was moved. He was not reconciled with Domitian.
In the summer of AD 70 Vespasian boards a merchant ship. He sails to Lycia, then to Brundisium, where Mucianus and the senators are waiting. He meets his younger son only at Beneventum, and coolly. He enters Rome in the autumn. His elder son stays in Judaea. And a city with three walls.