There were three Flavian emperors, Vespasian (69-79) and his sons Titus (79-81) and Domitian (81-96). They personified a new phase in the development of the empire, one when the emperor could come from outside the traditional noble families of Rome and make his way to power through sheer merit. Vespasian was not to disappoint. He was the first emperor since Augustus to maintain good relationships with those varied constituencies, the senate, the army, and the people of Rome. Although severe in tone and cautious with his spending, he also had a sound awareness of what the empire needed—the definition of boundaries, stable provincial government, and a widening of citizenship so that its subjects could be progressively drawn into loyalty.
Nero’s reign and the disruption of the year 69 had left the empire unsettled. In Judaea Vespasian’s son, Titus, brought the revolt to a bloody end with the capture of Jerusalem in 70. The harrowing account by the Jewish historian Josephus of the slaughter within the city (in his The Jewish War) sits uneasily with accounts of Titus as a kindly man, even though there is some evidence that his troops went further in their retaliation than he had intended. Elsewhere the most restless provinces were in the north-west, in Britain and along the Rhine, where the shattering of Vitellius’ legions had left the Roman presence weaker and encouraged revolt. On the Rhine border the auxiliary troops, raised from local peoples, defected en masse and rallied to one Julius Civilis, a native of Germany. Julius incited local nobles to proclaim a local ‘Gallic’ empire. It is unclear what his motives were. In the event the empire proved to be a fantasy and soon collapsed. Nevertheless it took eight legions to restore order. These legions were then transferred to Britain, where they moved to the north, to subdue the powerful tribe of the Brigantes, and westwards into the Welsh mountains. In the early 70s the modern cities of York, Chester, and Carlisle were founded.
It was in the reigns of Vespasian and Domitian that the German borders were defined by permanent barriers. (The provinces of Upper and Lower Germany were formally constituted in the 80s.) Archaeologists have been able to plot the stages by which Roman control was pushed northwards and eastwards from the Rhine so as to forge better communications in the difficult territory between the Rhine and the Danube. A limes, a road, was cut through the forest with observation towers every 500 or 600 metres and small forts between them. By the 90s, if not earlier, it was complete. It was manned by auxiliary forces who had been reconstituted under Roman officers after the revolts of the early 70s.
As the borders were stabilized there was a gradual shift of troops from Britain and the Rhine frontier towards the Danube. There was a threat here from the Dacians. The Dacians were well established as agriculturalists in the plain of Transylvania, north of the Danube, and also exploited the iron, gold, and silver of the Carpathian mountains north of the plain. A self-confident chieftain, Decabalus, had united the local tribes under his control and shown that he had no fear of
Roman power. The threat he offered meant that attempts by the governor of Britain, Agricola, to conquer Scotland had to be curtailed. A temporary fortress built in wood on the banks of the river Tay at Inchtuthil was abandoned (and, archaeological evidence suggests, dismantled about 88) and one of the four legions in Britain was transferred to the Danube some time between 85 and 92. Tacitus’ biography of Agricola portrays the retreat as a betrayal typical of Domitian’s high-handedness, but the conquest of the Scottish Highlands was hardly feasible at a time of danger elsewhere and Domitian’s decision seems wise. Domitian was able to conduct a war against Decabalus in 88 and reduce him to the status of client king.
Vespasian was known for his distaste of extravagance but his political instincts told him when it was justified. It was during his reign that one of the great surviving monuments of ancient Rome, the Colosseum, was begun. Amphitheatres were the largest constructions undertaken by the Romans. Most were built to house 15,00020,000 spectators though some, such as the well-preserved examples at Thysdrus (modern El Djem) in Africa and Verona, could take 30,000. The Colosseum with a capacity of 50,000 dwarfed them all. Its building was remarkable in many ways. It was built over the site of an artificial lake constructed by Nero for his Golden House, yet the foundations were laid so successfully that there is still, 2,000 years later, no trace of settlement. (By restoring land taken by Nero from the city of Rome Vespasian was in effect returning to the people what they considered theirs, and when he created a temple to Peace to commemorate his victories in Judaea, he transferred works of art from the Golden House to it.) The building could take in and disperse its thousands of spectators efficiently while also containing the victims, both animal and human, of the slaughter they had come to see. The construction work was so effectively organized that the Colosseum was ready for service just ten years after its inception. The emperor Titus was able to throw a hundred days of inaugural games, one of which involved the sacrifice of 5,000 animals. (It was a display of munificence that proved typical of Titus’ short reign. Faced with a disastrous fire in Rome, the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius, and plague in Italy, he proved particularly generous in his relief of suffering.) (See Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins, The Colosseum, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2005.)
By the first century ad, gladiator fights predominated at the games. These combats had originated in republican times, at funerals. There appears to have been a belief that the souls of the dead needed to be propitiated by human blood. A staged armed contest provided the blood. Gradually the combats became more ostentatious and figured among the public entertainments offered by aspiring politicians. Under Augustus the shows, even those held outside Rome, became associated with the largesse of the emperor and an essential part of his patronage (partly no doubt to prevent ambitious nobles upstaging him). At the dedication of the Colosseum Titus had 3,000 gladiators on hand and Trajan celebrated his victory over the Dacians with 123 days of games with a total of 10,000 men involved. Alongside men came a constant need for animals—tiger, crocodile, giraffe, lynx, rhinoceros—the more exotic the better so that ever more bizarre battles between men and beasts (these animal shows were known as venationes) could be staged.
The world of the gladiator was a strange one. Many gladiators were condemned criminals and their deaths in the arena simply a form of execution, others were prisoners of war or former slaves. They were carefully trained by a lanista, who might be a retired gladiator himself, and in the arena could be presented in various ways. The murmillo was heavily armed with a long shield, visored helmet, and a short sword, the retiarius wore hardly any armour but had a net and trident, while the Thracian had a round shield and a carved scimitar. Successful gladiators would become celebrities and their skills might earn them pardons, even when they had been technically defeated in a battle, so that they went on to have distinguished careers from one games to the next. The courage involved and the aura of physical strength and sexual potency was so powerful that many ordinary Romans were attracted by the profession. Senators and equestrians had to be forbidden by law from debasing themselves in this way. (See E. Kohne and C. Ewigleben, Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, Berkeley and London, 2000 for full details, with illustrations.)
Alongside the southern side of the Palatine Hill where the emperors had their palaces was the Circus Maximus, founded in Rome by the Etruscans as a circuit for chariot racing. It is now a deserted and rather desolate site and it is hard to imagine that in its final form, in about ad 105, it was over 600 metres long and 140 wide with a capacity for 150,000 spectators, three times the number who could fit into the nearby Colosseum. ‘It amazes me, wrote Pliny the Younger, a senator and provincial governor, ‘that thousands and thousands of grown men should be like children, wanting to look at horses running and men standing on chariots again and again, but they did. In a typical day’s racing there would be twenty-four races and, with four horses to a chariot, each race would need forty-eight horses, over 1,150 in total. The demand for horses was so heavy, in fact, that whole herds of wild horses were set aside to help the emperors to meet it. The tight circuit and the use of four horses to a chariot ensured that this was a risky sport but it must have been thrilling to watch. As with most aspects of Roman life the proceedings were highly ritualized, with processions of the gods before the contests began and ceremonies to mark the victories of the drivers who, like successful gladiators, became major celebrities.
The gladiatorial contests and other games were not simply shows for the public’s amusement. They were also political events, ones in which the emperor confronted his people in a way which was no longer possible elsewhere now that the popular assemblies had lost their powers. (There is no record of the concilium plebis meeting after the end of the century.) The emperor was expected to attend (at the Circus Maximus he had a box on the edge of the Palatine Hill), be attentive to the proceedings, and listen to any complaints expressed by the crowd. In his decision as to whether to allow wounded gladiators to live or die he exercised an absolute power. ‘It was, as Keith Hopkins remarks, ‘a dramatic enactment of imperial power repeated several times a day before a mass audience of citizens, conquerors of the world.’
The emperors fulfilled their role with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Augustus was always correct and punctilious in his attendance, aware that Caesar had attracted a bad reputation by conducting his official correspondence while in his box.
He actually enjoyed the games. Tiberius was less enthusiastic and attended only out of duty, while Gaius, typically, lost his temper when he felt the crowd was paying more attention to the gladiators than to himself. Claudius, on the other hand, was so excited about the games that his behaviour was considered to lack the decorum required of an emperor.
Like Claudius before him, Vespasian involved equestrians more fully in the administration of the empire but he appears to have done this without offending the sensitivities of senators. The equestrian class was large and drawn from the same wealthy and educated landowning groups as the senators. It thus represented no threat to the established order. Equestrians were much more socially acceptable as administrators to the provincial notables than freedmen and it made good sense to draw on their skills, a process which was to continue over the next centuries. While Vespasian did this without losing his good relationship with the senate, Domitian, who was altogether less sensitive than his father, flaunted his use of equestrians, even allowing them to sit in judgement over senators. It was only one of many ways in which he earned the hatred of the senators. He was arrogant and autocratic by nature, preferring to be addressed as ‘Lord God’ He took the old republican office of censor, with its right to control the membership of the senate, permanently, and he used it to rid himself of those he disliked or feared. He was particularly suspicious of foreign cults such as Judaism and Christianity but his increasing absolutism also aroused opposition from conventional senators inspired by Stoicism. Such a man was better appreciated by the army, and outside Rome the empire was well administered and maintained. However, the antagonism to Domitian in Rome itself became so acute that a conspiracy to kill him was hatched by disaffected senators, the Praetorian Prefects, and members of his own household. He was stabbed to death within the grand palace he had built for himself on the Palatine Hill in September 96 (for the palace, see further p. 537). In its exultation the senate ordered that every reference to him on public monuments should be erased.
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