The Prisoner from Jotapata — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink
The prisoner says “Caesar” to a man who has not a drop of the Caesars’ blood in his veins. Vespasian is fifty-seven, bald, with the look of a man who is always wrestling with something. He has no ancestors in wax masks. What he has is a family that has been counting money for three generations.
His grandfather, Titus Flavius Petro, fled the battlefield at Pharsalus when Pompey was losing and went home to collect debts. His father held the contract for collecting customs duties in Asia. Cities put up statues to him inscribed: “To the honest tax collector.” For a tax collector, a rare compliment. The son will remember that there is no shame in collecting money.
He was born on November 17, AD 9, in the village of Falacrina near Reate, in the land of the Sabines. His grandmother raised him. As emperor he drank on holidays from her little silver cup, and he had her house left exactly as it was. He had no great wish to enter the Senate. His mother, Vespasia Polla, pushed him into it, and not by asking but by mocking: she called him his older brother’s footman.
His career is an uphill climb. He wins the office of aedile only on the second try, and in sixth place. The aedile looks after the streets of Rome, and the emperor is Caligula.
Under Claudius he finally gets to fight. As commander of a legion he sails to Britain, which you remember from the episode on Claudius: thirty battles, two mighty tribes, more than twenty towns and the Isle of Wight. He receives triumphal ornaments and a consulship. Then he vanishes from view, because he fears Agrippina, who hates every friend of Narcissus.
As governor of Africa he rules honestly. During riots at Hadrumetum the crowd pelts him with turnips. He returns to Rome so poor that he mortgages his estate to his brother and starts trading mules. Rome gives him a nickname: the Muleteer.
Remember the game about Nero’s concert from season one? Vespasian chose none of those answers. He fell asleep.
Here the sources diverge. Tacitus repeats the story that it happened in Rome, in AD 65, at Nero’s games: the freedman Phoebus scolded the old soldier for closing his eyes, and only the intercession of kindly people saved him. Suetonius moves the scene to Greece, to the emperor’s tour in AD 67: Vespasian either walked out when Nero sang or dozed off if he stayed. As punishment he was thrown out of the court. When he asked where he was supposed to go now, he heard: “Go to hell.” In Suetonius it is a doorkeeper who says it, in Dio Phoebus himself. Vespasian hid in a small town and feared for his life.
And yet it is he who gets the army. A revolt has broken out in Judaea: the Jews killed the Roman procurator, defeated the governor of Syria and captured a legion’s eagle. Nero needs a general who knows how to win but whom there is no need to fear. Vespasian is ideal: capable and harmless at the same time, with a modest family and an unknown name. In early AD 67 the old soldier travels east. He takes his elder son, Titus, as one of his commanders.
Still in Greece he has a dream. Good fortune will come to him and his family when Nero’s tooth is pulled. The next day a doctor walks into the hall and shows him the tooth he has just pulled from the emperor. Suetonius and Dio tell this in all seriousness. You don’t have to.
Back to July AD 67 and the camp at Jotapata. How do we know what the prisoner said in private? From him. Josephus, son of Matthias, a priest from Jerusalem, will years later write “The Jewish War,” in Rome, under the patronage of the Flavians. You already know him: it is from his “Antiquities of the Jews” that the episode on Caligula took its fullest account of the assassination.
Josephus adds a detail meant to make him credible. One of the general’s friends asked mockingly why the prophet had not foretold the fall of his own city. Josephus replied that he had: he had told the defenders that Jotapata would fall on the forty-seventh day and that he himself would fall alive into the Romans’ hands. Vespasian quietly questioned the prisoners. It checked out.
Others tell the scene differently. In Dio, Josephus laughs: “You may imprison me now, but in a year, when you are emperor, you will free me.” In Suetonius a noble captive merely assures him that the same man will soon free him, by then as emperor.
For now Vespasian has a bigger worry than prophecies: a war to be won. The prisoner from Jotapata stays at his side in chains. For now.