Flavians

Even when the Julio-Claudian dynasty fell, the imperial configuration remained: soldiers created emperors, emperors retained the republic. As Nero tottered, the provincial legions and the praetorian guard at Rome proclaimed successive emperors, beginning with the governor of Gaul, lulius Vindex. Four of them made it to Rome to be recognized by the republic: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian. Yet even soldiers recognized that the imperial state would include the republic. When the Spanish legions acclaimed Galba in early April 68 ce, he ‘‘mounted a tribunal, on the front of which he had set up all the images he could find of those condemned and executed by Nero... and was declared imperator and legatus of the Senate and Roman People’’ (Suet. Gal. 10.1). Eight months later, on January 1, 69 ce, the Upper German legions revoked their oath to Galba and demanded a replacement, ‘‘allowing the power of choosing him to the Senate and Roman People’’ (Tac. Hist. 1.12). When the praetorians and the legions acclaimed Otho and Vitellius, the new emperors too received titles, powers, and priesthoods from the Roman people, a process we can follow in the Acts of the Arval Brothers for 69 ce (Scheid 1998: no. 40). On January 26, 69 ce, the Arvals sacrificed to celebrate Otho’s election (comitia) to the consulship; on February 28, the tribunician power; on March 3, lesser priesthoods; on March 9, the pontificate. Then on March 14, the Arvals ‘‘pronounced vows for the health and return of Vitellius’’; on April 30, they sacrificed to celebrate Vitellius’ election to the tribunician power. Finally, on July 1, 69 ce, the eastern legions proclaimed Vespasian imperator, and Vespasian took the date as the start of his reign, although six more months would pass before he formally received power to make treaties, summon the Senate, and extend Rome’s sacred boundary (pomerium) by popular statute (ILS 244). By the terms of the statute, Vespasian explicitly received the same powers as the ‘‘good’’ Julio-Claudians Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius. Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian each adopted the Julio-Claudian names Imperator, Caesar, Augustus. By the imperial right to ownerless property, each assumed the Julio-Claudian wealth. Each new emperor took his place in a developed monarchical system.

During the reigns of Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian the Roman Empire continued to grow. Vespasian and Titus had emerged from the suppression of the Jewish revolt against taxation and misrule (Goodman 1987). But the Roman Empire was not only a matter of military conquest and direct rule. As Polybius had recognized in the second century bce, Roman power extended wherever ‘‘all had to harken to the Romans and obey their orders’’ (Polyb. 3.4.3) - to both tributary provinces and non-tributary ‘‘friendly kingdoms’’ (Millar 1996). Between the two the distinction was often fluid. Judea, for example, had gone from kingdom to province to kingdom to province. So did Commagene, on the upper Euphrates. Yet all the while Commagene preserved its ruling house, as an inscription cataloguing seven generations of the dynasty from 69 bce to 72 ce now shows (Schmitz, Sahin, and Wagner 1988); the grandson of the last Commagenian king would become consul under Trajan.

As under the republic, the growth of the empire was projected onto the city of Rome. With spoils from the Jewish war, a fresh reading of the entrance inscriptions to the Colosseum reveals, Vespasian and Titus ordered the construction of their ‘‘New Amphitheater’’ (CIL 62, 8, 2, 40454a) (Figure 4.3). The tradition of returning generals using victory spoils to finance public monuments in Rome went back far into the republic. Pompey and Caesar raised the scale when they used spoils from the East and Gaul respectively to build the Theater of Pompey and the Forum lulium with the Temple of Venus Genetrix. The tradition continued when Augustus used spoils from Egypt to build the Forum of Augustus with the Temple of Mars Ultor; the conquest of Britain allowed Claudius to extend the pomerium; and Domitian used spoils from Dacia to begin his forum, which Trajan completed in his own name (LTUR s. v. Forum Traiani). With this tradition must be contrasted the imperial innovation of the republic’s erecting monuments for the emperor, his family, and his followers.

Domitian campaigned in person on the Rhine and Danube and raised legionary pay to 300 denarii a year in 84 ce - out of which a soldier at Carlisle took a 100-denarius advance already on November 7, 83 ce (Tomlin 1992). Domitian attended the Senate in triumphal dress instead of civilian toga, went everywhere surrounded by a dictatorial 24 lictors, and was eventually murdered in court intrigue. For all his overt militarism, Domitian’s reign brought a new advance of republican government, as exemplified by the municipal code that ambassadors from Irni, in southern Spain, inscribed after meeting with Domitian in 91 ce (Gonzalez 1986). Local ‘‘magistrates,’’ the code provides, ‘‘should have in public the album of the person who holds the province and administer justice according to it’’ (sec. 85), the governor’s album being based on the praetor’s edict from Rome. ‘‘On whatever matter there is no explicit provision,’’ the code continues, ‘‘the municipal citizens are to deal with each other in all these matters under the civil law under which Roman citizens deal or will deal with each other’’ (sec. 93). Domitian earned a posthumous reputation as a tyrant, though a re-reading of the inscribed career of one of that reputation’s principal authors shows that the historian Tacitus had served in Domitian’s republic as quaestor of Augustus, the emperor’s spokesman in the Senate (AE 1995 no. 92). The Roman emperor ruled through republican forms.

Figure 6.2a and b The propaganda of the Galban revolution stressed continuity with the republican past. In this case, Galba’s mint masters (6.2a) evidently reproduced the reverse of Brutus’ celebration of the murder of Caesar (6.2b), while plainly observing the principle that the reverse legend continues the message of the obverse with Libertas on the obverse and P(opuli) R(omani) Restituta on the reverse. Figure 6.2a RIG 1 p. 205 n. 24 BMC 7 (photo courtesy of the British Museum). Figure 6.2b ANS 1944.100.4554

Figure 6.3a-c The Flavians: (a) Vespasian (RIC 50); (b) Titus (RIC Titus 94 ANS 1944.100.41797) (photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society); (c) Domitian (author’s collection)