The Triumph — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink

After the capture of Jerusalem the soldiers hail Titus as imperator and do not want to let him leave the province. They plead and even threaten: let him stay, or take them all with him. In Rome whispers begin that the son wants to become king of the East. When Titus puts on a diadem at the festival of the Apis bull in Memphis, in Egypt, as the old custom of that ceremony required, the rumor grows.

Titus does not wait for it to grow further. He boards a transport ship, lands at Rhegium, then at Puteoli, and races to Rome. He greets his father with words meant to cut off all the whispers: “I am here, Father. I am here.”

The procession ends at the Capitol. There, by old custom, they waited for word that the enemy leader was dead. That leader was Simon bar Giora, the leader of Jerusalem’s defenders. He had walked in the procession among the captives, and he alone was put to death on the day of the triumph. Father and son received the titles of imperator, but neither took the surname “Judaicus,” though victors often bore such names, like Germanicus or Britannicus from season one.

The spoils did not go to the treasury. Vespasian builds the Temple of Peace beside the Forum to house them. He finishes it astonishingly fast. Inside he gathers works of art that people used to travel all over the world to see, and next to them the golden vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem. The emperor has the Book of the Law and the purple curtains of the Holy of Holies kept with him, in the palace. He dedicates the new temple in AD 75.

Jews everywhere they lived had for years paid two drachmas a year for their Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple is gone. The tax remains.

Titus stays in Rome as his father’s right hand. He writes letters for him, reads his speeches in the Senate and takes command of the Praetorian Guard. He is the first praetorian prefect who is not an equestrian but the emperor’s son. The Guard, which in AD 69 made and unmade emperors, now has the heir to the throne above it. You will see how he commanded it in the next episode.

The war looks finished. But one fortress by the Dead Sea has still not surrendered.