August 15, 2023 • 46 mins
A Kingdom isn't cool. A Dyansty is cool. Or so said Roman Emperor Vespasian's Justin Timberlake look-alike friend over drinks at the club. And so that's what Vespasian built: a dynasty. In this episode, Ben and Pat talk about a man who saved the Roman Empire, built the Roman Coliseum and so much more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Rome is burning. The fledgling Empire, once
forged in iron and ruled with a steady hand, has
been weakened by the tyrannical rains of cruel, sadistic, and
self obsessed dictators. The days of Augustus are gone. His successors,
(00:23):
infamous men like Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero have driven the
empire according to their own personal whims. Caligula made his
horse a senator, Nero fiddled while the city burned around him. Now,
in the wake of their ruin, an age of even
more carnage appears as civil war threatens to tear the
Empire apart. It's up to one man, a man nobody expected,
(00:48):
to rise up and take power and save the Roman
Empire from ultimate destruction. My name is Ben Thompson, and
I'm here, of course, with my co host Pat. Good morning.
How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I'm doing okay? How are you? Ben?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Are you doing okay? Right? Yeah, I'm doing good. I
just got back from my cruise. Weirdly. We started in
Venice and we went down the Adriatic and we went
to a lot of places that were part of the
Venetian Republic, the most serene Republic of Venice, and I
didn't know much about it, and there was a lot
of really interesting stuff. So I think in a future
episode I want to get into talking a little bit
(01:28):
about Venice because I think that that's a really cool
time period and a really cool area and everything was
just beautiful and amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, I'd love digging into Venice more on a future episode.
That'd be great.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I mean the thing that jumped out to me
the most was there was some general. It was a
naval commander. He might have been a doge. He didn't
go into battle unless he was wearing red and had
his cat with him.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Well, obviously, obviously that's how you win battle stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, you gotta wear red into battle and bring your
lucky house cat with you. Maybe we'll have to talk
about that guy at some.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Point, totally, totally and his cat.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yes, I don't know if bat did I miss anything
exciting While I was gone. I tried to not read
the news, as I usually tried to not read the news.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
You know, that's actually probably very very good for your
mental health. So I do occasionally read the news, and
there was something that jumped out to me because it
reminded me of another badass that we've talked about. You
remember Hercules, Oh yeah, yeah, and you remember how when
he was a baby m hm.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh he strangled the serpents. Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Now, I thought that this was just a thing of myth,
but it turns out, according to this news report from
a village in Turkey, there was a two year old
girl who was playing in her family's garden and a snake.
Now it's a twenty inch snake, so okay, that wouldn't
daunt Hercules. This is a two year old girl who,
as far as I know, does not have any divine ancestry.
(02:51):
But you know, the neighbors heard her screaming and they
run in and they rushed her to the hospital for
snake bite injuries. But it was too for the snake
because apparently she had bitten the snake. She grabbed the
snake and bit it and managed to kill it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That's fantastic. Twenty eight snake is like no small, Like
I think that's my son is almost too, and he's
like a pretty high percentile for his height. I mean,
twenty inch is almost two feet right, Like, that's the serious.
That's a serious snake. And I don't really trust my
son to like be coordinated enough to get on and
off the couch without falling down. So being able to
(03:32):
bite a snake to death is pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Maybe that inspired the Hercules myth. Anyway, so that's what's
been happening in the world.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
That's how that's how this sort of thing gets started, right,
you know, like a two year old bites a twenty
inch snake to death, and then that story gets told
down through the ages, and then two thousand years later
we're talking about how she you know, it was a
fourteen foot long anaconda and she ripped its throat out
with her teeth.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yep, yep, an anaconda sent by the goddess Hera in
retribution for things that the kid didn't even do.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah. No's she's the goddess of vengeance in this town.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
So yeah, snakes, watch out, watch out for toddlers.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah awesome. Well, sounds like I missed a few interesting things.
But one other thing that came up with with my
cruise was, you know, a lot of these places along
the Adriatic. We started in Italy and we went down Croatia, Montenegro,
Greece and then back through Sicily a lot of old
Roman ruins. Of course, like you know, a lot of
some of that stuff was in various stages of being
(04:34):
well preserved, but there was a lot of really cool
Roman old Roman amphitheaters and temples and buildings, and you know,
an old wall here that dates back to the Empire.
And that got me thinking and it kind of led
into why we picked the character we did for this
episode today. So I would to say, like I have
this huge back catalog of Badass of the Week stuff.
(04:55):
I've been doing this for almost twenty years now, people
know more or less where I stand on various things
if they're familiar at all with the website. So Pat,
I kind of wanted to get into the stuff that
you were into. And when we started doing the show,
one of the first questions I asked you was who's
your favorite Roman emperor? Because you are trained in specialized
(05:16):
in Roman history, so you have to have a favorite emperor.
It was curious to know who it was, and your
answer was very surprising to me. So I think that
today we should talk about it further.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Vespasian and he's maybe not the most famous people think
of Augustus as the first real emperor, or Colligula or
Nero as the notorious ones.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That's what I was going to say, right, Yeah, they like, oh,
the best ones Augustus, and then you know me, like
I like to gravitate towards the crazy ones, like oh,
let's talk about Caracalla or one of these one of
these nut bar guys you dressed up like Hercules who
thought he was Hercules and when fighting in the gladiators
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So you can go that route with emperors who are
I guess one's favorite or badass because they just take
whatever impulses and desires and I don't know, ambitions or
just whatever idiosyncratic agenda they've got going on in their
(06:20):
heads and they just pursue that. And then there's the
other kind of badass, which is a lot more practical, like, Okay,
we've got a job to do, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I like this, right, because this kind of fits our
differing takes on history as well. Right, Because on my website,
I've written about Augustus, Tiberius and Julia Agripina, who was
Nero's mom and Khalila's sister. So I've written about the
crazy ones. I've never written about vest Beaesian. I knew
of him, but I didn't know too much about him
until we started kind of digging into the research on
(06:55):
this episode. So I'm excited to hear what you got
to say about him.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
And now for a word from oursponsor, I.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Guess we should just get into it.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, So this is Vespasian, and he kind of had
a reputation for being very practical and down to earth
and not showy and flashy. One of the things that
makes him badass is that he's he's coming in it's
almost by contrast with many of these previous emperors. And
it's not just that he's contrasting with Nero or Caligula
(07:29):
or even Tiberius in his own way, but also that
the Roman Empire itself is in a state of crisis.
We're talking about the year sixty eight and sixty nine.
It's known as the year of four Emperors because everything
is just falling apart. It's in crisis. So what makes
Vespasian so badass? Rome had been under the Julia Claudian
(07:51):
dynasty for several decades and with Nero, the last of
the Julia Claudians, when he died, we're looking at a
so war, we're looking at chaos because we've had several
emperors and you've had a sort of clear line of succession,
you know, whoever the current emperor is formally adopts one
(08:14):
of his relatives, whether by blood or by marriage, to
be his official son, making him the heir to the empire.
Nero hasn't done that. So when Nero's dead, what's happening?
People are so used to thinking in terms of emperors
by now instead of the republic that had happened over
a century ago, that you have various people trying to
(08:35):
claim the throne. The year sixty eight sixty nine is
known as the year of four Emperors because in this
year you actually have to mark the emperor's the official
emperor's reign, not just by the month of their reign,
but even in some cases the day of the month
that they started or ended their reign, because things were
just there's a lot of turnover in that job. So
(08:57):
whatever you may think about the fact of having an
emperor officially known as the principit because the official term
was prinkepts first among equals. You know, whatever you may
think about that as a system of government from the
point of view of many of the Romans of many
different classes. Even if it wasn't perfect, there was a
sort of stability. And we've had about a century of
(09:20):
not having civil war.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Right, so, I mean the last civil war that they've
had was was Augustus fighting against Brutus and then Julius
Caesar times Augustus taking over. This is about one hundred
years ago. It's about as far away as World War
Two is for us today. So that's a good way
to think of it. It was like, you know, pre
World War two, like, okay, I mean, we had we
(09:42):
had a republic back then, but very few people alive
today remember it. Very few people alive today remember the
civil war, but we've all been hearing stories about it,
like you and me have been hearing the stories about
World War Two. I'd really rather not go through that again.
It sounded pretty horrible, And so you have this kind
of time period where we all kind of remember this,
(10:03):
but it's far enough away that, like, we don't really
want to go back to it. People who are alive
have only ever known emperors and don't really want to
change the system of government. But let's look at kind
of the stage here. Let's look at the world that
Vespiasian is walking into. The previous emperors are kind of
a mixed bag, right. Augustus is pretty generally considered to
be okay, He's probably the best one, he's the most
(10:26):
famous one. He had his flaws, but for the most part,
he built the Roman Empire into what it would become
in the future. He was succeeded by his children, who are,
like I said, hit or miss Tiberius had his crazy
sex palace on Capri, murdered a bunch of his own successors,
then abandoned government to a guy that was executed for
almost overthrowing him. And you have Caligula, of course, who
(10:48):
was also a sex fiend. He appointed his horse consul
once he declared warm Poseidon and had a bunch of
catapults shoot the ocean and then collect seashells as tribute.
That guy was murdered his own bodyguards and replaced by Claudius,
who was pretty much dominated by Agrippina. Claudius is there's
been a little bit of revision, like looking back at
(11:10):
him and making him a little bit maybe taking a
different take on him, But for the most part, people
have considered Claudius to be kind.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Of weak, weak, but not one of the bad.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Not evil, right, not like outwardly or openly evil. Then
he's followed by Nero, who was kind of a narcissistic
tyrant who burned a big part of the city to
the ground, possibly on purpose, because he wanted to build
a big golden house for himself. There. He used to
drunkenly run around pretending he was Hercules and was such
a nightmare that the Senate declared him an enemy of
(11:42):
his own empire and ordered him to kill himself. And
it's just excess wealth, debauchery. Nobody knows what the hell
is going on. Everybody's just extravagant, having big parties, getting drunk,
being crazy. And then when that line ends, it's what
happens in you know, Succession is a big problem for
empires and kingdoms throughout all of history. Who's going to
(12:02):
take over? Well, it's the guy with the biggest army.
So like, let's all just kill each other and the
last man standing can be emperor. So, like you said,
sixty nine is the year four emperors, and Vespasian is
the fourth.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And I feel comfortable calling Claudius a good emperor because
the senate considered him a good emperor. So the Roman senate,
if you're an emperor, after you died, the senate could
declare you a god. And you know, Augustus was declared
the divine Augustus. Claudius actually was declared the divine Claudius.
So that's why I put him in the good bucket.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah. I like Claudius. He was just kind of like
an older guy. And like the Creetorian guard came in.
They're like the worst bodyguards in the history of any
kingdom ever. The Praetorian guards come in, they kill Caligula.
Because Coligilias is a threat to himself and everyone around him,
they come in, they murder him. Claudius. The story is
Claudius was hiding behind a curtain or something and they
found him and they're like, hey, you're the emperor now
because you're like next of kin, and Claudius was like okay,
(12:59):
and he didn't set the empire on fire.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He didn't set the empire on fire.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Nero is complicated and even though actually Agrippina, his mom,
tried to have positive influences on him, like he had
a tutor. He had this guy Buris who was sort
of like a handler that their influence could only go
so far, and yeah, Nero Nero became problematic. So anyway,
so now we zoom in on Vespasian. So he's the
(13:29):
guy who spoiler alert, comes out on top after the
year four Emperors. But how does he get there and
why is it unusual for him to be this guy?
So let's think about Rome. Rome is a very status
conscious place. The class you belong to, the family background
you come from, matters a great deal. When I say
(13:51):
Rome often I mean Rome the city as opposed to
the Roman Empire, which encompasses the whole Mediterranean, basically just
fanning out from the Mediterranean, You've got this huge territory
controlled by Rome, ranging from Turkey or what they called
Asia Minor in the east, over to Spain and France
in the west, you know what we call Germany up
(14:14):
to the north, and then the whole northern part of Africa,
including Egypt. And I want us to have that image,
like this whole map of the Mediterranean in our minds
as we go into this, because I'm going to be
talking about Rome the city, but also there are things
happening all around the Empire that are going to converge
on Rome the city. There was a prejudice against people
(14:34):
who weren't actually from Rome the city, and this could
even mean the rest of the Italian peninsula. And in
addition to class in general, if you're in government, if
you're in politics, there is a very particular prejudice against
people who are from non senatorial families because senatorial status
(14:54):
was kind of it was actually hereditary. So if your
dad or your grandfather was a senator and you were
a guy, you could become a senator. And there were
ways of becoming senators that were not hereditary, but they
were you know, you had to work at it, and
the people who were from established senatorial families kind of
looked down on the newcomers. So anyway, all of those
(15:16):
things that I've just told you, coming from outside the city,
from parts of Italy that are not Rome, coming from
a non senatorial family, and Vespasian our guy, not only
was his family non senatorial, but his father was engaged
in money lending and historians call him a muleteer, so
he may have been in the trade of trading mules
(15:40):
or driving mules or some sort of some sort of
not very glamorous profession, some sort of not very glamorous trade.
So here's this guy Vespasian now on his mother's side.
On his mother's side, he actually can trace a little
bit of senatorial ancestry, but the class doesn't come through
your mother.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah. So, like you said, Roman's belief that if you
weren't from Rome, you weren't really a Roman, you were
just an Italian, which is you know, if you look
on the map of where Vespagian comes from, it's not
that far away from Rome. You kind of would think, oh,
it's the same, but for them it's not the same. Right. So, yeah,
he's born Titus Flavius Vespasianus. I don't know if I'm
saying that, right, Pat, You're gonna have to correct me.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, I mean he would he would probably have said
it Titus Flowus Wespasianus. But you can just calm Titus
Flavius with Spasianis. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
He was just a He was a big bald military guy.
He was from an equestrian cast. Like you said, his
dad was probably a tax collector or a muletier, which
I love as a name for a person who drives mules.
He was a Questrian cast which is kind of like
the warrior class. It's not the senator, it's not the
not the aristocrats, and just like kind of a country guy.
He had an accent. At this time, everybody was trying
(16:47):
to mimic the emperors, right, because the emperors create culture
in Rome, and all of these emperors Nero and Caligula
and Tiberius, they had these big parties and everything was
flashy and gaudy, and this guy was just kind of
like down to earth, is from a farm or whatever. He's,
you know, a military guy, very simple, very This is
how it is, is how it's going to be. Like
Clint Eastwood walking up to the capitol in the Hunger Games,
(17:07):
is how I'm envisioning this guy.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah. So yeah, So we've got this guy who's an outsider,
very down to earth, and he makes his career in
the military. And in the year sixty six, Nero is
still emperor. You've got the whole rest of the empire
to pay attention to, and some parts of the emperor
are easier to keep under control than others. And over
(17:30):
in the east there's this region called Judea, and from
Nero's point of view. From the Romans point of view,
it's a pesky place, and there's actually a prophecy floating
around supposedly that someone coming from Judea will rule things,
will rule the world. Okay, fine, okay, prophecies. They never
(17:51):
mean what you think they mean, but you still feel
like you have to pay attention to them. That also,
from the Romans very pragmatic point of view, you need
someone to keep an eye on things in Judea, and
it's it's annoying. Nero wants someone in charge in Juday
whom he can rely on to keep things under control.
From the rum point of view, but also someone who's
(18:14):
not too prominent, because if someone is in charge of legions,
or if someone's in charge of a province somewhere and
they're maybe a little two famous, a little too flashy,
a little too prominent, Nero might see them as potential competition.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, and Vespatian was the perfect guy for this, Yeah,
because when you look at where he'd been before this, right,
so he was like this country guy, good upbringing, and
up until this point in sixty six, he had been
a career military guy. He served in Thrace, he served
in Egypt. He commanded the second Legion during the invasion
of Britannia. He was like the commander of the legion
(18:50):
when they fought through. They fought along the Thames and
then southwest into Cornwall in Somerset. He'd been wounded in
battle a couple times. He took an arrow to he
was shield and a rock to his knee, but he
was like a war hero in Britannia. He became a
consul in fifty one, but pissed off our friend Agrippina,
(19:11):
got scared of her and quit because he didn't want
to face retribution. And so for the last few years
they positioned him out in North Africa, kind of the
middle of nowhere, for if you were like a Roman
and you were worried about somebody trying to seize power
in Rome. He was a governor in North Africa, where
he had made a name for himself as kind of
a up to People in North Africa liked because he
(19:32):
was surprisingly not super super corrupt like every other Roman
governor of North Africa had been up until that point.
But he's the perfect guy to send him to Judea,
because even if this guy has some military victories, They're
in a very distant part of the empire. And this
guy is never going to become emperor, right.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
No, of course not. Who would ever think that. So Vespasian,
you know, he's out there, he's out there in Judea
putting down the revolt. And meanwhile back in Rome Nero dies.
This guy Galba, who is the head of some regions
out in Spain, is proclaimed emperor by the Senate. Galba
(20:12):
is within a few months overthrown by this guy Autho. Okay,
I'm going to number these guys. So it's the year
of four emperors. Galba's the first of the four emperors,
Autho's the second, Vitellius is the third, and the Spasian's
the fourth. And I'm just saying that because it took
me a while to be able to tell them apart
or keep them straight. So Galba, the first guy, he
(20:34):
came across as not like Nero, and that's why people
thought he might be an okay, emperor, the guy he
was replaced by, Autho, the guy who overthrew him, actually
was kind of Neuronian, and Autho tried to present himself
as being like Nero in an attempt to appeal to
the people who missed Nero, because not everyone hated Nero,
some people loved him. As it is with politics as
(20:56):
it is, as it is, so Autho tries to present
himself as being more like Nero. And while Atho is
emperor and alive, another guy, Vitelius, this is guy number three,
is also claiming the throne. And there were these legions
stationed out by the Rhine River, you know, modern day Germany,
(21:19):
and they were the ones who actually started a claiming
Atho as emperor. And then Vitelius defeats Atho, Autho commits suicide. Vitelias,
guy number three, becomes the emperor. He's proclaimed by the Senate.
But Vitellius doesn't have all that much support aside from
those particular legions in the Rhine, the area of the
Rhine River, you know, saying like oh yeah, you and
(21:42):
what army well in this time and place. That's kind
of how things work. All of these various claimants to
the throne need the backing of the army. You don't
just show up. You have to build credibility, you have
to build a support base, you have to build you know,
oomph and defend yourself from other people who have legions
supporting them.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Right, and so, like, I mean, if you look at
these four emperors, right, Galba the first one, he shows
up in Rome in sixty nine for the first time,
and he's like, hey, I'm here, I'm going to be
the emperor now. And then Autho's army shows up to
kill him. They cut Galba's head off and chop the
rest of his body apart. They put his head on
a pike and parade it around town. Petelius shows up
(22:22):
a few months later and does something pretty similar to Author,
or at least threatens to. Author kills himself before they
decapitate him, but they do definitely like display his body
publicly as another false emperor. So so, yeah, you and
what army is important because anybody can be declared emperor,
but you need some friends or you're going to be
in big trouble. That imperial robe isn't going to do
(22:43):
much to protect you from a broadsword.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, So the question of who's supporting you and how
big a stick do they have, and how many other
sticks do they have? Any friends with sticks do they have,
and do they trust the friends or the friends just
sort of opportunistic mercenaries, you know. Meanwhile, this is going
on in Rome. You know, Galba's head is getting paraded
around like a cake pop or something, and oh.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
No for you.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Meanwhile, out in the region of the Danube River, there
were these legions who had supported Autho guy number two.
And okay, so remember Vitellius is the emperor, but of
course the empire's a big place and can't be equally
in charge at all places at all times. So, uh,
these Athonian troops they heard these reports that author was dead,
and they these guys they'd been doing what armies sometimes do,
(23:39):
and you know, raping and pillaging and just kind of
behaving wantonly, and they were worried that if they made
it back to Rome they would face punishment for just
pillaging and just behaving badly. So you're thinking to themselves,
what do we do?
Speaker 1 (23:55):
What do we do?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
What do we do? We should find some other guy,
like if all who really is dead, we should find
some guy to look after us. So you know, hey,
the Spanish legions had found a guy to proclaim emperor.
The Victorian guard had found a guy to proclaim emperor. Hey,
let's jump on the proclaiming a guy emperor bandwagon. So
the legions they kind of put their heads together and
(24:17):
they think, okay, who do we know? Who do we know?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Now?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Some of these soldiers had been serving in Syria before
being transferred to the Danube, and they said, hey, wait
a minute, that guy, our old boss, Vespasian, we liked him.
So the other soldiers supposedly unanimously voted to acclaim Vespasian
as their guy.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
And this is awesome, right, So they're just like, we
need a dude, like you said, and they recruit Vespasian
without him being there, and then I guess he gets
the word. That's like, hey, like half the army thinks
that you're the emperor now while he's off in Judea
like trying to put down a revolt. But it's because
he was cool. It was the same thing as why
they liked him in North Africa, because he didn't He
wasn't corrupt and just taking advantage of everybody. He wasn't
(25:01):
one of these legionary commanders who was using his soldiers
as a stepping stone to his political career, or was
like beating them up, or was cruel with them or
any of that stuff. They all liked him and they
said you should be the leader because you're the best option.
But now he's got to like question his loyalty to
the emperor.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So this seems like a good place to take a
break and we'll pick it up again on the flip side.
So what does he do? Yeah, so he's not actually there.
These legions that had just acclaimed him. They have to
just kind of keep on legioning around the Danube and
Pannonia and Vespasian he had been in Judea. He was
(25:44):
also heading towards Egypt because Egypt had become the bread
basket of Rome. The grain that was produced in Egypt
was just so important for supplying tables in Rome and
in fact all of Italy. So if you want to
know why Vespasian was in Egypt, he was keeping an
(26:04):
eye on the grain supply, making sure that Romans could
get their bread, but also put him in a position
to choke the grain supply if he decided to do that.
So there are shenanigans in Rome. Remember that Vitellius is
there in Rome. His supporters are there in Rome and
also elsewhere in Italy. And two of Vespasian's supporters, Mucianus
and Primus are there.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And of those two supporters, Marcus Antonius Primus was actually
the man who overthrew Vitellius, a guy number three, but
he's a badass. We'll talk about another day.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Okay. So obviously the troops and Pannonia support him, but
do the gods support Vespasian? And this is a very
Roman way of doing things. I mean, the Romans aren't
the only culture that do this, but you have to
imagine Vespasian. He's in Egypt. They have different gods in Egypt.
Now that doesn't phaze Romans because Romans are very good
at just sort of assuming that all the gods are
kind of either connected or actually kind of the same
(26:55):
or whatever, you know. And so he proceeds to the
temple of Serapis, and he is doing this alone. He
goes up the stairs, he enters the temple, everything is silent,
He approaches the statue of the god and then something
(27:16):
makes him turn around. Oh hey, bacilities, my faithful servant,
what are you doing here? And Vespasian was surprised that
he could see facilities, because not only was facilities mobility impaired,
and it would have been very, very surprising, it would
(27:38):
have been very hard for him to walk up those
stairs on his own. He if this is facilities. There
was no one helping him, and he didn't have any
mobility aids with him, but also carrying the offerings that
you're supposed to carry to the temple facilities. I thought,
I didn't think you were in town. What are you
(27:58):
doing here? Well, maybe it was facilities, maybe it was
a vision from the gods. And at that moment a
messenger arrives. There's news from Cremona in Italy. Vitellius's troops
have been defeated the current to one of the sources,
the messenger also said that Vitellius himself had been killed.
Is a coincidence? Is it a sign from the gods?
(28:20):
So Vespasian, who has been acclaimed by his troops in Egypt,
so they decided that they were going to acclaim him too.
In addition to those guys in Pannonium, He's actually being
acclaimed by an army, by legions that are actually in
the same place that he is in. He's sitting there,
he's acting the part of emperor. He's sitting in a tribunal.
(28:41):
You know, he's holding audience petitioners are coming to make requests.
Two guys show up. One of them is blind, can't see,
there's some he's got some disease in his eyes. And
the other one his difficulty walking. You know, he does
not have full use of his legs. And they ask Vespasian.
They beseech vespage heal us oh Vespasian, and Vespatian says,
(29:07):
I'm an emperor gym, not a medical doctor. And the
guy who's lame, the guy who can't walk, says, Emperor,
touch my knee with your heel. And the guy who
can't see, the blind guy says, anoint my eye with
your saliva. So he does. He lifts up the hem
(29:30):
of his toga and touches the knee of the one
guy with his own heel, and he spits in the
eye of the guy who can't see, and behold, they
are cured. And so you've got this, You've got this miracle,
and you've got the miracle of facilities appearing in the temple.
And then also apparently, apparently reports have it that far away,
(29:53):
in the region of Arcadia in Greece, some soothsayers tell
people to dig in a particular place, and they dig
up some clay items. They might be pottery with paintings
on them that look a lot like Emperor Vespasian. His
coming was foretold in vase paintings, so clearly clearly the
God's favorite Vespasian. Okay, now I'm going to give you
(30:15):
some calendar dates. Okay, this is actually relevant to how
bad ass Vespasian is. So Vespasian is acclaimed as emperor
in Egypt in July of the year sixty nine, and
since he has control over the grain supply, he could
actually bottlenecket. He could hold up the grain supply if
he ever needs to use that as leverage to get
his own way. On December twentieth of the year sixty nine,
(30:39):
Vittelius is killed for real, and the Senate instantly acknowledges
Vespasian as emperor. And here's the thing. It's been six
months since the legions in Egypt have acclaimed Vespasian, and
Vespasian actually gets the Senate to do something. This is unusual,
this is unprecedented. He gets the Senate to issue a
(30:59):
decree to a law basically back dating his emperorship to
July of that year. So all of the actions that
Vespasian had done for the last six months even before
the Senate officially proclaimed his emperor get like retroactively ratified.
So he's proclaimed emperor by the Senate even though he
(31:22):
wasn't there and he was in Alexandria. And what does
he do as emperor. He puts down rebellions. He expands
the boundaries of the empire, which is kind of a
big deal because if you expand the boundaries of the empire,
you actually get to move the city walls of Rome.
You get to make that a little bigger. He works
out his relationship with the Senate. And some emperors had good,
(31:42):
good or good ish relationships with the Senate. Some of
them had a very hostile relationship. Some senators just loathed
some of the emperors, for example.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Nero, Right, and yeah, you've seen some really combative interactions
between emperors and senators before. And going back to what
you were saying before, or the thing that separates Vespaesian
as emperor, and like, you know, the narrative of I
wasn't even there and I didn't even know, I wouldn't
even want to be emperor, but you guys made me.
You know that that could be a little bit of
propaganda on his part. He could just be kind of clever.
(32:14):
But the deal with Vespasian is that once he takes over,
he's not killing and plundering and mutilating and destroying all
his political enemies and using the treasury to buy himself
a huge palace. He kind of keeps his old way
of doing things, not really big like pomp and circumstance.
Compared to some of these other guys, Rome was on
the brink of collapsing into different kingdoms. Every legion was
(32:36):
going to proclaim its own emperor and then you were
just going to have different countries eventually. Right, And because
he's able to work with the Senate and also with
the military because they respect him, he is this stabilizing force,
right And one thing we're mentioning with vest Beajian is
that this is happening in sixty nine seventy AD. You know,
you always talk packs Romana, a thousand years of peace,
(32:58):
all that stuff. This was an empire for like, you know,
sixty seventy years. At this point, there is no Pax
Romana without Vespasian kind of arriving at this very very
critical moment in Roman history and saving it from fracturing apart.
Just him not being crazy or him just being uniting
(33:21):
was badass by itself.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, he had exactly. He had many previous emperors to
kind of look to as models, and he mostly looked
at Augustus, who was generally regarded as good. After the
Civil War, Augustus tried to have like sort of amnesty,
like not be overly harsh and vindictive to people who
had fought against him. Vespasian does that, you know. One
(33:46):
particularly notable gesture is that Vespasian gave a generous dowry
to the daughter of Vitelius, guy number three, who was
Vespasian's most bitter rival at the very end. And was
this general Was it reconciliation? Yes, also maybe a little
bit strategic, right, because you want to keep your friends
(34:07):
close and your enemies closer. He's there are anecdotes about
him being sort of like a crotchety, down to earth
country guy. You know, Ben, you mentioned that he had
an accent, and there's a story that someone tried to
correct his accent, his country accent. Vespasian just makes fun
of him for it, and you know it's like, yeah, no,
I'm owning the way I talk. I think it's really
(34:28):
indicative of him that, well, he taxes the public bathrooms,
and why would you do that? Well, it's tax revenue, right,
You need money to run an empire, especially if you're
patching up an empire that's just been through a year
of four emperors. And his son Titus. Remember this as Titus,
who had been his lieutenant in Judea and who was Vespasian,
(34:49):
was making sure he's getting super educated. Vespasian was preparing
him to be his successor. Anyway, Titus and Vespasian are
talking and Titus says, come on, Dad, taxing urine. Doesn't
that smell?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Ugh?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
And like what an inelegant thing to do. Come on, Dad,
you can be better than that. And Vespasian takes a
coin and holds it under Titus's nose and says, okay, son,
does this smell? And Titus says, well no, and Vespasian says,
and yet this coin came from p Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Interestingly, he also began construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, which
is a structure we know as better today as the
Roman Colosseum, which I think is really interesting because you
always picture Nero and Augustus being in the Colisseum, but
they weren't because Vespasian built it.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, and they actually built the Colosseum on land that
used to belong to Nero's Golden House.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Oh, so the section that because there was there was
some speculation that, like the section of Rome that got
burnt down, was burned down on purpose because Nero wanted
to have a big plot of land to make his
golden palace. But instead it became the Colosseum. I guess.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Another example is this guy Medius pump Usianus. What Medius
Pompousianus did was request an astrologer to make a horoscope
for the emperor for Vespasian. If you're not actually the
emperor and you want an astrologer to predict the horoscope
to figure out the horoscope of the emperor, that's pretty
(36:18):
sus because why would you want a horoscope of the emperor.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
It's worth mentioning that this isn't like a newspaper horoscope.
This is like your star chart that basically predicts the
course of your life, including theoretically the date of your death.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, and if you got one of those in your possession,
you know the emperor is going to want to know
why and Vespasian's friends tell him about it. They think,
watch out for this guy. Mettius Pompousianus and an earlier emperor,
Tiberius actually was very harsh on people who cast horoscopes.
For that reason, Tiberius was kind of paranoid. Vespasian not
(36:54):
only brushes off the fact that Medias Pompousianus had drawn
up a horoscope for him, but he even makes me
es pompousianis console.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, it might as well, right, Like you said, keep
your friends close and your enemies closer. Yeah, at least
as a console he could keep an eye on him.
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
He emulated Augustus in other ways. Augustus liked to promote
this image of peace. Vespasian put up this temple to peace.
You could deify abstract concepts.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
In Rome.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
There were a lot of writers and intellectuals flourishing under Vespasian.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, he funded a bunch of writers. It is Suetonius,
Pliny the Elder, Josephus. They all met him at various
times and got funding from him. Flavius Josephus wrote The
Jewish War about Vespasian and then later his son Titus's
battles in Judea putting down the revolt there, and most
(37:45):
of what we know about it is is from this
text that was funded by by Vespasian, which is kind
of interesting because he's the enemy to Josepha's at the beginning.
The revolt begins in sixty six with Harad Agrippa is
the Roman governor of Judea. None of the people that
live there like him. He's kind of a tyrant and
they have a revolt against him. Obviously, Rome can't stand
(38:09):
for that, so they send the army, and Vespasian, like
we talked about, was the guy that was sent. We
didn't get too much into the war in Judea, but
it was very, very bloody and brutal, and many people
died on both sides, and Vespasian had to be pretty
harsh to put down the revolt. But Josephus was one
of the leaders of the revolting army. There were a
(38:32):
couple different guys that were leading Jewish forces against the Romans,
but Josephus was one of them, and he was defeated
and he was imprisoned, but then Vespasian employed him as
a translator and then later made him a Roman citizen
brought him back to Rome, Josephus wrote the story of
the war, and kind of interesting considering that they were
(38:53):
opposing generals at some point that vespasian Wood would fund
in enemy soldier and enemy general to write the history
of the war that the two of them had together.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, interesting move, interesting move, bold move, power move.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
I mean he probably got like editorial rights on the
final draft, I'd imagine.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, well, never know for sure, but yeah, you have
to you do have to read these sources with a critical.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Eye, even if it was very extreme editorial control over
the final text of Josephus's book. The book doesn't make
the Romans look great. It's not talking about how awesome
Miss Pasion is. It's talking about how he's killing prisoners
sometimes and sometimes very brutally, like repressing a revolt and
destroying the Temple of Jerusalem. Like he doesn't have positive
(39:48):
words for the Roman army when he's talking about that.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
So, yeah, sometimes he can do things that are I
think remarkably smart, gracious, useful, high minded. Sometimes he can
do total dick moves too. There was a dick move
regarding the Marine fire Brigade. Now, when I say marine
fire brigade, that sounds pretty important and useful, right, you know,
it sounds like a public safety thing. Anyway, the Marine
(40:12):
Fire Brigade, the members of the Marine Fire Brigade had
to be constantly on the move between various places. You know,
they were always on their feet, and they applied for
extra money for shoes because they had to be walking
around all the time because it was part of their job.
And they this Spasian turned down their request for extra money.
(40:35):
And not only did he turn down their request for
extra money for shoes, but he actually forbade them from
wearing shoes and told them that they would have to
do their job barefoot.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Why did you give a reason.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
For I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Like back in my day, we didn't have any shoes
when we were in the war.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Personally, I don't get it. I think it's probably some
OSHA violation. But the Marine Fire Brigade, I end took
it the direction that you were saying, and they continued
to not wear shoes and turned it into a point
of pride for them.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Oh. He also he also tore down the Second Jewish Temple.
That's kind of a dick move. Also, he didn't see
that you can't win them all, you know, Oh.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
No, no, you totally can't win them all. He's my
favorite emperor. But you have to understand this is in
the category of Roman emperors, except.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Right, you're gonna be real hard pressed to find one
who didn't like flaughter for people though.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Okay, yeah, but by the standards of Roman emperors, he
was one of the good ones, and the Senate, the
Senate thought so. And you know, I Vespasian is looking
back over his life, over his career. He wanted he
wanted to die standing up as it were, you know,
he wanted to He just want to go. He wanted
to be active up until the very end. And he well, okay,
(41:48):
he was at He was really really really near the end.
And I can't say he was on his deathbed because
he wouldn't allow that. He insisted on standing up, even
though he had diarrhea. He had someone help him stand up, okay,
and he you know, he thought back over his career.
He thought back over the emperors who had preceded them.
You know, some of them were totally reviled by the Senate,
(42:14):
reviled by posterity. Some of them were awarded divine status
and according to the biographer Suetonius well biographer. According to
the historian Suetonius, his dying words were, or what it's
worth the Latin is why puto deus fio? Or oh, dear,
I think I'm becoming a god?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
As a soldier, he wants to die on his feet, right,
he doesn't want to die in his deathbed. He stands up, Oh,
I think I'm becoming a god.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
And one of the benefits of having Vespasian as emperor
is that he had an automatic, unambiguous plan of succession
in place. So his older son Titus, whom he had
been you know, taking with him as a lieutenant to Judea,
who he had actually had educated at the imperial court.
When Nero is emperor, you know, so Titus really got
to know the ins and outs of all of this.
(43:01):
So Titus took over as emperor. History remembers Vespasian as
one of the good emperors. His ability to hold the
empire together allowed successive emperors, including the Antonine emperors Trajan Hadrian,
Antonised Pious, Marcus Aurelius, you know, who are remembered as
good emperors, permitted an era of stability, prosperity, and the
(43:28):
historian Tacitus, who he's notorious for being able to throw
shade at emperors he does not like. He says about
Vespasian that he was the first person to improve after
becoming emperor.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Going back to the beginning, what I was saying was
the ones I like to talk about and the ones
I remember are Caligula and Nero and that kind of thing.
But Vespasian takes basically he bridges its Nero. Then it's
all out civil war, and that it's Pax Romana because
of Vespasian and his steadying hand. He was a career soldier.
(44:02):
He could definitely kick ass. He did it in Egypt
and Judea and North Africa and all across Britannica. But
at the end, it was his level headedness and coolness
and ability to exert his authority over what was becoming
an increasingly chaotic empire that really made the Roman Empire
(44:24):
into what we think of when we think of it today.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah, I didn't know very much about him. I knew
the name, and I knew a little bit about him,
but I was kind of surprised when you said that
he was your favorite badass emperor and having gone through
it together, like I can see why.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Well, thank you for asking. It was so much fun,
so much fun talking with you about Vestasian.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, and you know, we've got a lot of other cool,
cool characters are going to be talking about on the
show in the future. And you know, we mentioned Agrippino,
we mentioned the Venetians. We've got a bunch of other
cool stuff planned and lined up. We're really excited to
get back on here and talk about it again in
the future. So thanks to everybody for listening, and I
guess we'll see how the next one.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs,
and Allie Lamer. Mixing and music and sound design is
(45:30):
by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to
Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based
on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where you
can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If
you want to reach out with questions ideas, you can
email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com. If
(45:54):
you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your
friends and your enemies if you want as We'll be
back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Rome is burning. The fledgling Empire, once
forged in iron and ruled with a steady hand, has
been weakened by the tyrannical rains of cruel, sadistic, and
self obsessed dictators. The days of Augustus are gone. His successors,
(00:23):
infamous men like Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero have driven the
empire according to their own personal whims. Caligula made his
horse a senator, Nero fiddled while the city burned around him. Now,
in the wake of their ruin, an age of even
more carnage appears as civil war threatens to tear the
Empire apart. It's up to one man, a man nobody expected,
(00:48):
to rise up and take power and save the Roman
Empire from ultimate destruction. My name is Ben Thompson, and
I'm here, of course, with my co host Pat. Good morning.
How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I'm doing okay? How are you? Ben?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Are you doing okay? Right? Yeah, I'm doing good. I
just got back from my cruise. Weirdly. We started in
Venice and we went down the Adriatic and we went
to a lot of places that were part of the
Venetian Republic, the most serene Republic of Venice, and I
didn't know much about it, and there was a lot
of really interesting stuff. So I think in a future
episode I want to get into talking a little bit
(01:28):
about Venice because I think that that's a really cool
time period and a really cool area and everything was
just beautiful and amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, I'd love digging into Venice more on a future episode.
That'd be great.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah. I mean the thing that jumped out to me
the most was there was some general. It was a
naval commander. He might have been a doge. He didn't
go into battle unless he was wearing red and had
his cat with him.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Well, obviously, obviously that's how you win battle stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, you gotta wear red into battle and bring your
lucky house cat with you. Maybe we'll have to talk
about that guy at some.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Point, totally, totally and his cat.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yes, I don't know if bat did I miss anything
exciting While I was gone. I tried to not read
the news, as I usually tried to not read the news.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
You know, that's actually probably very very good for your
mental health. So I do occasionally read the news, and
there was something that jumped out to me because it
reminded me of another badass that we've talked about. You
remember Hercules, Oh yeah, yeah, and you remember how when
he was a baby m hm.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh he strangled the serpents. Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Now, I thought that this was just a thing of myth,
but it turns out, according to this news report from
a village in Turkey, there was a two year old
girl who was playing in her family's garden and a snake.
Now it's a twenty inch snake, so okay, that wouldn't
daunt Hercules. This is a two year old girl who,
as far as I know, does not have any divine ancestry.
(02:51):
But you know, the neighbors heard her screaming and they
run in and they rushed her to the hospital for
snake bite injuries. But it was too for the snake
because apparently she had bitten the snake. She grabbed the
snake and bit it and managed to kill it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That's fantastic. Twenty eight snake is like no small, Like
I think that's my son is almost too, and he's
like a pretty high percentile for his height. I mean,
twenty inch is almost two feet right, Like, that's the serious.
That's a serious snake. And I don't really trust my
son to like be coordinated enough to get on and
off the couch without falling down. So being able to
(03:32):
bite a snake to death is pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Maybe that inspired the Hercules myth. Anyway, so that's what's
been happening in the world.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
That's how that's how this sort of thing gets started, right,
you know, like a two year old bites a twenty
inch snake to death, and then that story gets told
down through the ages, and then two thousand years later
we're talking about how she you know, it was a
fourteen foot long anaconda and she ripped its throat out
with her teeth.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yep, yep, an anaconda sent by the goddess Hera in
retribution for things that the kid didn't even do.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah. No's she's the goddess of vengeance in this town.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
So yeah, snakes, watch out, watch out for toddlers.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah awesome. Well, sounds like I missed a few interesting things.
But one other thing that came up with with my
cruise was, you know, a lot of these places along
the Adriatic. We started in Italy and we went down Croatia, Montenegro,
Greece and then back through Sicily a lot of old
Roman ruins. Of course, like you know, a lot of
some of that stuff was in various stages of being
(04:34):
well preserved, but there was a lot of really cool
Roman old Roman amphitheaters and temples and buildings, and you know,
an old wall here that dates back to the Empire.
And that got me thinking and it kind of led
into why we picked the character we did for this
episode today. So I would to say, like I have
this huge back catalog of Badass of the Week stuff.
(04:55):
I've been doing this for almost twenty years now, people
know more or less where I stand on various things
if they're familiar at all with the website. So Pat,
I kind of wanted to get into the stuff that
you were into. And when we started doing the show,
one of the first questions I asked you was who's
your favorite Roman emperor? Because you are trained in specialized
(05:16):
in Roman history, so you have to have a favorite emperor.
It was curious to know who it was, and your
answer was very surprising to me. So I think that
today we should talk about it further.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Vespasian and he's maybe not the most famous people think
of Augustus as the first real emperor, or Colligula or
Nero as the notorious ones.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That's what I was going to say, right, Yeah, they like, oh,
the best ones Augustus, and then you know me, like
I like to gravitate towards the crazy ones, like oh,
let's talk about Caracalla or one of these one of
these nut bar guys you dressed up like Hercules who
thought he was Hercules and when fighting in the gladiators
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So you can go that route with emperors who are
I guess one's favorite or badass because they just take
whatever impulses and desires and I don't know, ambitions or
just whatever idiosyncratic agenda they've got going on in their
(06:20):
heads and they just pursue that. And then there's the
other kind of badass, which is a lot more practical, like, Okay,
we've got a job to do, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I like this, right, because this kind of fits our
differing takes on history as well. Right, Because on my website,
I've written about Augustus, Tiberius and Julia Agripina, who was
Nero's mom and Khalila's sister. So I've written about the
crazy ones. I've never written about vest Beaesian. I knew
of him, but I didn't know too much about him
until we started kind of digging into the research on
(06:55):
this episode. So I'm excited to hear what you got
to say about him.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
And now for a word from oursponsor, I.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Guess we should just get into it.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, So this is Vespasian, and he kind of had
a reputation for being very practical and down to earth
and not showy and flashy. One of the things that
makes him badass is that he's he's coming in it's
almost by contrast with many of these previous emperors. And
it's not just that he's contrasting with Nero or Caligula
(07:29):
or even Tiberius in his own way, but also that
the Roman Empire itself is in a state of crisis.
We're talking about the year sixty eight and sixty nine.
It's known as the year of four Emperors because everything
is just falling apart. It's in crisis. So what makes
Vespasian so badass? Rome had been under the Julia Claudian
(07:51):
dynasty for several decades and with Nero, the last of
the Julia Claudians, when he died, we're looking at a
so war, we're looking at chaos because we've had several
emperors and you've had a sort of clear line of succession,
you know, whoever the current emperor is formally adopts one
(08:14):
of his relatives, whether by blood or by marriage, to
be his official son, making him the heir to the empire.
Nero hasn't done that. So when Nero's dead, what's happening?
People are so used to thinking in terms of emperors
by now instead of the republic that had happened over
a century ago, that you have various people trying to
(08:35):
claim the throne. The year sixty eight sixty nine is
known as the year of four Emperors because in this
year you actually have to mark the emperor's the official
emperor's reign, not just by the month of their reign,
but even in some cases the day of the month
that they started or ended their reign, because things were
just there's a lot of turnover in that job. So
(08:57):
whatever you may think about the fact of having an
emperor officially known as the principit because the official term
was prinkepts first among equals. You know, whatever you may
think about that as a system of government from the
point of view of many of the Romans of many
different classes. Even if it wasn't perfect, there was a
sort of stability. And we've had about a century of
(09:20):
not having civil war.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Right, so, I mean the last civil war that they've
had was was Augustus fighting against Brutus and then Julius
Caesar times Augustus taking over. This is about one hundred
years ago. It's about as far away as World War
Two is for us today. So that's a good way
to think of it. It was like, you know, pre
World War two, like, okay, I mean, we had we
(09:42):
had a republic back then, but very few people alive
today remember it. Very few people alive today remember the
civil war, but we've all been hearing stories about it,
like you and me have been hearing the stories about
World War Two. I'd really rather not go through that again.
It sounded pretty horrible, And so you have this kind
of time period where we all kind of remember this,
(10:03):
but it's far enough away that, like, we don't really
want to go back to it. People who are alive
have only ever known emperors and don't really want to
change the system of government. But let's look at kind
of the stage here. Let's look at the world that
Vespiasian is walking into. The previous emperors are kind of
a mixed bag, right. Augustus is pretty generally considered to
be okay, He's probably the best one, he's the most
(10:26):
famous one. He had his flaws, but for the most part,
he built the Roman Empire into what it would become
in the future. He was succeeded by his children, who are,
like I said, hit or miss Tiberius had his crazy
sex palace on Capri, murdered a bunch of his own successors,
then abandoned government to a guy that was executed for
almost overthrowing him. And you have Caligula, of course, who
(10:48):
was also a sex fiend. He appointed his horse consul
once he declared warm Poseidon and had a bunch of
catapults shoot the ocean and then collect seashells as tribute.
That guy was murdered his own bodyguards and replaced by Claudius,
who was pretty much dominated by Agrippina. Claudius is there's
been a little bit of revision, like looking back at
(11:10):
him and making him a little bit maybe taking a
different take on him, But for the most part, people
have considered Claudius to be kind.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Of weak, weak, but not one of the bad.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Not evil, right, not like outwardly or openly evil. Then
he's followed by Nero, who was kind of a narcissistic
tyrant who burned a big part of the city to
the ground, possibly on purpose, because he wanted to build
a big golden house for himself. There. He used to
drunkenly run around pretending he was Hercules and was such
a nightmare that the Senate declared him an enemy of
(11:42):
his own empire and ordered him to kill himself. And
it's just excess wealth, debauchery. Nobody knows what the hell
is going on. Everybody's just extravagant, having big parties, getting drunk,
being crazy. And then when that line ends, it's what
happens in you know, Succession is a big problem for
empires and kingdoms throughout all of history. Who's going to
(12:02):
take over? Well, it's the guy with the biggest army.
So like, let's all just kill each other and the
last man standing can be emperor. So, like you said,
sixty nine is the year four emperors, and Vespasian is
the fourth.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And I feel comfortable calling Claudius a good emperor because
the senate considered him a good emperor. So the Roman senate,
if you're an emperor, after you died, the senate could
declare you a god. And you know, Augustus was declared
the divine Augustus. Claudius actually was declared the divine Claudius.
So that's why I put him in the good bucket.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah. I like Claudius. He was just kind of like
an older guy. And like the Creetorian guard came in.
They're like the worst bodyguards in the history of any
kingdom ever. The Praetorian guards come in, they kill Caligula.
Because Coligilias is a threat to himself and everyone around him,
they come in, they murder him. Claudius. The story is
Claudius was hiding behind a curtain or something and they
found him and they're like, hey, you're the emperor now
because you're like next of kin, and Claudius was like okay,
(12:59):
and he didn't set the empire on fire.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He didn't set the empire on fire.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Nero is complicated and even though actually Agrippina, his mom,
tried to have positive influences on him, like he had
a tutor. He had this guy Buris who was sort
of like a handler that their influence could only go
so far, and yeah, Nero Nero became problematic. So anyway,
so now we zoom in on Vespasian. So he's the
(13:29):
guy who spoiler alert, comes out on top after the
year four Emperors. But how does he get there and
why is it unusual for him to be this guy?
So let's think about Rome. Rome is a very status
conscious place. The class you belong to, the family background
you come from, matters a great deal. When I say
(13:51):
Rome often I mean Rome the city as opposed to
the Roman Empire, which encompasses the whole Mediterranean, basically just
fanning out from the Mediterranean, You've got this huge territory
controlled by Rome, ranging from Turkey or what they called
Asia Minor in the east, over to Spain and France
in the west, you know what we call Germany up
(14:14):
to the north, and then the whole northern part of Africa,
including Egypt. And I want us to have that image,
like this whole map of the Mediterranean in our minds
as we go into this, because I'm going to be
talking about Rome the city, but also there are things
happening all around the Empire that are going to converge
on Rome the city. There was a prejudice against people
(14:34):
who weren't actually from Rome the city, and this could
even mean the rest of the Italian peninsula. And in
addition to class in general, if you're in government, if
you're in politics, there is a very particular prejudice against
people who are from non senatorial families because senatorial status
(14:54):
was kind of it was actually hereditary. So if your
dad or your grandfather was a senator and you were
a guy, you could become a senator. And there were
ways of becoming senators that were not hereditary, but they
were you know, you had to work at it, and
the people who were from established senatorial families kind of
looked down on the newcomers. So anyway, all of those
(15:16):
things that I've just told you, coming from outside the city,
from parts of Italy that are not Rome, coming from
a non senatorial family, and Vespasian our guy, not only
was his family non senatorial, but his father was engaged
in money lending and historians call him a muleteer, so
he may have been in the trade of trading mules
(15:40):
or driving mules or some sort of some sort of
not very glamorous profession, some sort of not very glamorous trade.
So here's this guy Vespasian now on his mother's side.
On his mother's side, he actually can trace a little
bit of senatorial ancestry, but the class doesn't come through
your mother.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah. So, like you said, Roman's belief that if you
weren't from Rome, you weren't really a Roman, you were
just an Italian, which is you know, if you look
on the map of where Vespagian comes from, it's not
that far away from Rome. You kind of would think, oh,
it's the same, but for them it's not the same. Right. So, yeah,
he's born Titus Flavius Vespasianus. I don't know if I'm
saying that, right, Pat, You're gonna have to correct me.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, I mean he would he would probably have said
it Titus Flowus Wespasianus. But you can just calm Titus
Flavius with Spasianis. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
He was just a He was a big bald military guy.
He was from an equestrian cast. Like you said, his
dad was probably a tax collector or a muletier, which
I love as a name for a person who drives mules.
He was a Questrian cast which is kind of like
the warrior class. It's not the senator, it's not the
not the aristocrats, and just like kind of a country guy.
He had an accent. At this time, everybody was trying
(16:47):
to mimic the emperors, right, because the emperors create culture
in Rome, and all of these emperors Nero and Caligula
and Tiberius, they had these big parties and everything was
flashy and gaudy, and this guy was just kind of
like down to earth, is from a farm or whatever. He's,
you know, a military guy, very simple, very This is
how it is, is how it's going to be. Like
Clint Eastwood walking up to the capitol in the Hunger Games,
(17:07):
is how I'm envisioning this guy.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah. So yeah, So we've got this guy who's an outsider,
very down to earth, and he makes his career in
the military. And in the year sixty six, Nero is
still emperor. You've got the whole rest of the empire
to pay attention to, and some parts of the emperor
are easier to keep under control than others. And over
(17:30):
in the east there's this region called Judea, and from
Nero's point of view. From the Romans point of view,
it's a pesky place, and there's actually a prophecy floating
around supposedly that someone coming from Judea will rule things,
will rule the world. Okay, fine, okay, prophecies. They never
(17:51):
mean what you think they mean, but you still feel
like you have to pay attention to them. That also,
from the Romans very pragmatic point of view, you need
someone to keep an eye on things in Judea, and
it's it's annoying. Nero wants someone in charge in Juday
whom he can rely on to keep things under control.
From the rum point of view, but also someone who's
(18:14):
not too prominent, because if someone is in charge of legions,
or if someone's in charge of a province somewhere and
they're maybe a little two famous, a little too flashy,
a little too prominent, Nero might see them as potential competition.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, and Vespatian was the perfect guy for this, Yeah,
because when you look at where he'd been before this, right,
so he was like this country guy, good upbringing, and
up until this point in sixty six, he had been
a career military guy. He served in Thrace, he served
in Egypt. He commanded the second Legion during the invasion
of Britannia. He was like the commander of the legion
(18:50):
when they fought through. They fought along the Thames and
then southwest into Cornwall in Somerset. He'd been wounded in
battle a couple times. He took an arrow to he
was shield and a rock to his knee, but he
was like a war hero in Britannia. He became a
consul in fifty one, but pissed off our friend Agrippina,
(19:11):
got scared of her and quit because he didn't want
to face retribution. And so for the last few years
they positioned him out in North Africa, kind of the
middle of nowhere, for if you were like a Roman
and you were worried about somebody trying to seize power
in Rome. He was a governor in North Africa, where
he had made a name for himself as kind of
a up to People in North Africa liked because he
(19:32):
was surprisingly not super super corrupt like every other Roman
governor of North Africa had been up until that point.
But he's the perfect guy to send him to Judea,
because even if this guy has some military victories, They're
in a very distant part of the empire. And this
guy is never going to become emperor, right.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
No, of course not. Who would ever think that. So Vespasian,
you know, he's out there, he's out there in Judea
putting down the revolt. And meanwhile back in Rome Nero dies.
This guy Galba, who is the head of some regions
out in Spain, is proclaimed emperor by the Senate. Galba
(20:12):
is within a few months overthrown by this guy Autho. Okay,
I'm going to number these guys. So it's the year
of four emperors. Galba's the first of the four emperors,
Autho's the second, Vitellius is the third, and the Spasian's
the fourth. And I'm just saying that because it took
me a while to be able to tell them apart
or keep them straight. So Galba, the first guy, he
(20:34):
came across as not like Nero, and that's why people
thought he might be an okay, emperor, the guy he
was replaced by, Autho, the guy who overthrew him, actually
was kind of Neuronian, and Autho tried to present himself
as being like Nero in an attempt to appeal to
the people who missed Nero, because not everyone hated Nero,
some people loved him. As it is with politics as
(20:56):
it is, as it is, so Autho tries to present
himself as being more like Nero. And while Atho is
emperor and alive, another guy, Vitelius, this is guy number three,
is also claiming the throne. And there were these legions
stationed out by the Rhine River, you know, modern day Germany,
(21:19):
and they were the ones who actually started a claiming
Atho as emperor. And then Vitelius defeats Atho, Autho commits suicide. Vitelias,
guy number three, becomes the emperor. He's proclaimed by the Senate.
But Vitellius doesn't have all that much support aside from
those particular legions in the Rhine, the area of the
Rhine River, you know, saying like oh yeah, you and
(21:42):
what army well in this time and place. That's kind
of how things work. All of these various claimants to
the throne need the backing of the army. You don't
just show up. You have to build credibility, you have
to build a support base, you have to build you know,
oomph and defend yourself from other people who have legions
supporting them.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Right, and so, like, I mean, if you look at
these four emperors, right, Galba the first one, he shows
up in Rome in sixty nine for the first time,
and he's like, hey, I'm here, I'm going to be
the emperor now. And then Autho's army shows up to
kill him. They cut Galba's head off and chop the
rest of his body apart. They put his head on
a pike and parade it around town. Petelius shows up
(22:22):
a few months later and does something pretty similar to Author,
or at least threatens to. Author kills himself before they
decapitate him, but they do definitely like display his body
publicly as another false emperor. So so, yeah, you and
what army is important because anybody can be declared emperor,
but you need some friends or you're going to be
in big trouble. That imperial robe isn't going to do
(22:43):
much to protect you from a broadsword.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, So the question of who's supporting you and how
big a stick do they have, and how many other
sticks do they have? Any friends with sticks do they have,
and do they trust the friends or the friends just
sort of opportunistic mercenaries, you know. Meanwhile, this is going
on in Rome. You know, Galba's head is getting paraded
around like a cake pop or something, and oh.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
No for you.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Meanwhile, out in the region of the Danube River, there
were these legions who had supported Autho guy number two.
And okay, so remember Vitellius is the emperor, but of
course the empire's a big place and can't be equally
in charge at all places at all times. So, uh,
these Athonian troops they heard these reports that author was dead,
and they these guys they'd been doing what armies sometimes do,
(23:39):
and you know, raping and pillaging and just kind of
behaving wantonly, and they were worried that if they made
it back to Rome they would face punishment for just
pillaging and just behaving badly. So you're thinking to themselves,
what do we do?
Speaker 1 (23:55):
What do we do?
Speaker 2 (23:56):
What do we do? We should find some other guy,
like if all who really is dead, we should find
some guy to look after us. So you know, hey,
the Spanish legions had found a guy to proclaim emperor.
The Victorian guard had found a guy to proclaim emperor. Hey,
let's jump on the proclaiming a guy emperor bandwagon. So
the legions they kind of put their heads together and
(24:17):
they think, okay, who do we know? Who do we know?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Now?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Some of these soldiers had been serving in Syria before
being transferred to the Danube, and they said, hey, wait
a minute, that guy, our old boss, Vespasian, we liked him.
So the other soldiers supposedly unanimously voted to acclaim Vespasian
as their guy.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
And this is awesome, right, So they're just like, we
need a dude, like you said, and they recruit Vespasian
without him being there, and then I guess he gets
the word. That's like, hey, like half the army thinks
that you're the emperor now while he's off in Judea
like trying to put down a revolt. But it's because
he was cool. It was the same thing as why
they liked him in North Africa, because he didn't He
wasn't corrupt and just taking advantage of everybody. He wasn't
(25:01):
one of these legionary commanders who was using his soldiers
as a stepping stone to his political career, or was
like beating them up, or was cruel with them or
any of that stuff. They all liked him and they
said you should be the leader because you're the best option.
But now he's got to like question his loyalty to
the emperor.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So this seems like a good place to take a
break and we'll pick it up again on the flip side.
So what does he do? Yeah, so he's not actually there.
These legions that had just acclaimed him. They have to
just kind of keep on legioning around the Danube and
Pannonia and Vespasian he had been in Judea. He was
(25:44):
also heading towards Egypt because Egypt had become the bread
basket of Rome. The grain that was produced in Egypt
was just so important for supplying tables in Rome and
in fact all of Italy. So if you want to
know why Vespasian was in Egypt, he was keeping an
(26:04):
eye on the grain supply, making sure that Romans could
get their bread, but also put him in a position
to choke the grain supply if he decided to do that.
So there are shenanigans in Rome. Remember that Vitellius is
there in Rome. His supporters are there in Rome and
also elsewhere in Italy. And two of Vespasian's supporters, Mucianus
and Primus are there.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And of those two supporters, Marcus Antonius Primus was actually
the man who overthrew Vitellius, a guy number three, but
he's a badass. We'll talk about another day.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Okay. So obviously the troops and Pannonia support him, but
do the gods support Vespasian? And this is a very
Roman way of doing things. I mean, the Romans aren't
the only culture that do this, but you have to
imagine Vespasian. He's in Egypt. They have different gods in Egypt.
Now that doesn't phaze Romans because Romans are very good
at just sort of assuming that all the gods are
kind of either connected or actually kind of the same
(26:55):
or whatever, you know. And so he proceeds to the
temple of Serapis, and he is doing this alone. He
goes up the stairs, he enters the temple, everything is silent,
He approaches the statue of the god and then something
(27:16):
makes him turn around. Oh hey, bacilities, my faithful servant,
what are you doing here? And Vespasian was surprised that
he could see facilities, because not only was facilities mobility impaired,
and it would have been very, very surprising, it would
(27:38):
have been very hard for him to walk up those
stairs on his own. He if this is facilities. There
was no one helping him, and he didn't have any
mobility aids with him, but also carrying the offerings that
you're supposed to carry to the temple facilities. I thought,
I didn't think you were in town. What are you
(27:58):
doing here? Well, maybe it was facilities, maybe it was
a vision from the gods. And at that moment a
messenger arrives. There's news from Cremona in Italy. Vitellius's troops
have been defeated the current to one of the sources,
the messenger also said that Vitellius himself had been killed.
Is a coincidence? Is it a sign from the gods?
(28:20):
So Vespasian, who has been acclaimed by his troops in Egypt,
so they decided that they were going to acclaim him too.
In addition to those guys in Pannonium, He's actually being
acclaimed by an army, by legions that are actually in
the same place that he is in. He's sitting there,
he's acting the part of emperor. He's sitting in a tribunal.
(28:41):
You know, he's holding audience petitioners are coming to make requests.
Two guys show up. One of them is blind, can't see,
there's some he's got some disease in his eyes. And
the other one his difficulty walking. You know, he does
not have full use of his legs. And they ask Vespasian.
They beseech vespage heal us oh Vespasian, and Vespatian says,
(29:07):
I'm an emperor gym, not a medical doctor. And the
guy who's lame, the guy who can't walk, says, Emperor,
touch my knee with your heel. And the guy who
can't see, the blind guy says, anoint my eye with
your saliva. So he does. He lifts up the hem
(29:30):
of his toga and touches the knee of the one
guy with his own heel, and he spits in the
eye of the guy who can't see, and behold, they
are cured. And so you've got this, You've got this miracle,
and you've got the miracle of facilities appearing in the temple.
And then also apparently, apparently reports have it that far away,
(29:53):
in the region of Arcadia in Greece, some soothsayers tell
people to dig in a particular place, and they dig
up some clay items. They might be pottery with paintings
on them that look a lot like Emperor Vespasian. His
coming was foretold in vase paintings, so clearly clearly the
God's favorite Vespasian. Okay, now I'm going to give you
(30:15):
some calendar dates. Okay, this is actually relevant to how
bad ass Vespasian is. So Vespasian is acclaimed as emperor
in Egypt in July of the year sixty nine, and
since he has control over the grain supply, he could
actually bottlenecket. He could hold up the grain supply if
he ever needs to use that as leverage to get
his own way. On December twentieth of the year sixty nine,
(30:39):
Vittelius is killed for real, and the Senate instantly acknowledges
Vespasian as emperor. And here's the thing. It's been six
months since the legions in Egypt have acclaimed Vespasian, and
Vespasian actually gets the Senate to do something. This is unusual,
this is unprecedented. He gets the Senate to issue a
(30:59):
decree to a law basically back dating his emperorship to
July of that year. So all of the actions that
Vespasian had done for the last six months even before
the Senate officially proclaimed his emperor get like retroactively ratified.
So he's proclaimed emperor by the Senate even though he
(31:22):
wasn't there and he was in Alexandria. And what does
he do as emperor. He puts down rebellions. He expands
the boundaries of the empire, which is kind of a
big deal because if you expand the boundaries of the empire,
you actually get to move the city walls of Rome.
You get to make that a little bigger. He works
out his relationship with the Senate. And some emperors had good,
(31:42):
good or good ish relationships with the Senate. Some of
them had a very hostile relationship. Some senators just loathed
some of the emperors, for example.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Nero, Right, and yeah, you've seen some really combative interactions
between emperors and senators before. And going back to what
you were saying before, or the thing that separates Vespaesian
as emperor, and like, you know, the narrative of I
wasn't even there and I didn't even know, I wouldn't
even want to be emperor, but you guys made me.
You know that that could be a little bit of
propaganda on his part. He could just be kind of clever.
(32:14):
But the deal with Vespasian is that once he takes over,
he's not killing and plundering and mutilating and destroying all
his political enemies and using the treasury to buy himself
a huge palace. He kind of keeps his old way
of doing things, not really big like pomp and circumstance.
Compared to some of these other guys, Rome was on
the brink of collapsing into different kingdoms. Every legion was
(32:36):
going to proclaim its own emperor and then you were
just going to have different countries eventually. Right, And because
he's able to work with the Senate and also with
the military because they respect him, he is this stabilizing force,
right And one thing we're mentioning with vest Beajian is
that this is happening in sixty nine seventy AD. You know,
you always talk packs Romana, a thousand years of peace,
(32:58):
all that stuff. This was an empire for like, you know,
sixty seventy years. At this point, there is no Pax
Romana without Vespasian kind of arriving at this very very
critical moment in Roman history and saving it from fracturing apart.
Just him not being crazy or him just being uniting
(33:21):
was badass by itself.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, he had exactly. He had many previous emperors to
kind of look to as models, and he mostly looked
at Augustus, who was generally regarded as good. After the
Civil War, Augustus tried to have like sort of amnesty,
like not be overly harsh and vindictive to people who
had fought against him. Vespasian does that, you know. One
(33:46):
particularly notable gesture is that Vespasian gave a generous dowry
to the daughter of Vitelius, guy number three, who was
Vespasian's most bitter rival at the very end. And was
this general Was it reconciliation? Yes, also maybe a little
bit strategic, right, because you want to keep your friends
(34:07):
close and your enemies closer. He's there are anecdotes about
him being sort of like a crotchety, down to earth
country guy. You know, Ben, you mentioned that he had
an accent, and there's a story that someone tried to
correct his accent, his country accent. Vespasian just makes fun
of him for it, and you know it's like, yeah, no,
I'm owning the way I talk. I think it's really
(34:28):
indicative of him that, well, he taxes the public bathrooms,
and why would you do that? Well, it's tax revenue, right,
You need money to run an empire, especially if you're
patching up an empire that's just been through a year
of four emperors. And his son Titus. Remember this as Titus,
who had been his lieutenant in Judea and who was Vespasian,
(34:49):
was making sure he's getting super educated. Vespasian was preparing
him to be his successor. Anyway, Titus and Vespasian are
talking and Titus says, come on, Dad, taxing urine. Doesn't
that smell?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Ugh?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
And like what an inelegant thing to do. Come on, Dad,
you can be better than that. And Vespasian takes a
coin and holds it under Titus's nose and says, okay, son,
does this smell? And Titus says, well no, and Vespasian says,
and yet this coin came from p Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Interestingly, he also began construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, which
is a structure we know as better today as the
Roman Colosseum, which I think is really interesting because you
always picture Nero and Augustus being in the Colisseum, but
they weren't because Vespasian built it.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, and they actually built the Colosseum on land that
used to belong to Nero's Golden House.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Oh, so the section that because there was there was
some speculation that, like the section of Rome that got
burnt down, was burned down on purpose because Nero wanted
to have a big plot of land to make his
golden palace. But instead it became the Colosseum. I guess.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Another example is this guy Medius pump Usianus. What Medius
Pompousianus did was request an astrologer to make a horoscope
for the emperor for Vespasian. If you're not actually the
emperor and you want an astrologer to predict the horoscope
to figure out the horoscope of the emperor, that's pretty
(36:18):
sus because why would you want a horoscope of the emperor.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
It's worth mentioning that this isn't like a newspaper horoscope.
This is like your star chart that basically predicts the
course of your life, including theoretically the date of your death.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, and if you got one of those in your possession,
you know the emperor is going to want to know
why and Vespasian's friends tell him about it. They think,
watch out for this guy. Mettius Pompousianus and an earlier emperor,
Tiberius actually was very harsh on people who cast horoscopes.
For that reason, Tiberius was kind of paranoid. Vespasian not
(36:54):
only brushes off the fact that Medias Pompousianus had drawn
up a horoscope for him, but he even makes me
es pompousianis console.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, it might as well, right, Like you said, keep
your friends close and your enemies closer. Yeah, at least
as a console he could keep an eye on him.
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
He emulated Augustus in other ways. Augustus liked to promote
this image of peace. Vespasian put up this temple to peace.
You could deify abstract concepts.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
In Rome.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
There were a lot of writers and intellectuals flourishing under Vespasian.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, he funded a bunch of writers. It is Suetonius,
Pliny the Elder, Josephus. They all met him at various
times and got funding from him. Flavius Josephus wrote The
Jewish War about Vespasian and then later his son Titus's
battles in Judea putting down the revolt there, and most
(37:45):
of what we know about it is is from this
text that was funded by by Vespasian, which is kind
of interesting because he's the enemy to Josepha's at the beginning.
The revolt begins in sixty six with Harad Agrippa is
the Roman governor of Judea. None of the people that
live there like him. He's kind of a tyrant and
they have a revolt against him. Obviously, Rome can't stand
(38:09):
for that, so they send the army, and Vespasian, like
we talked about, was the guy that was sent. We
didn't get too much into the war in Judea, but
it was very, very bloody and brutal, and many people
died on both sides, and Vespasian had to be pretty
harsh to put down the revolt. But Josephus was one
of the leaders of the revolting army. There were a
(38:32):
couple different guys that were leading Jewish forces against the Romans,
but Josephus was one of them, and he was defeated
and he was imprisoned, but then Vespasian employed him as
a translator and then later made him a Roman citizen
brought him back to Rome, Josephus wrote the story of
the war, and kind of interesting considering that they were
(38:53):
opposing generals at some point that vespasian Wood would fund
in enemy soldier and enemy general to write the history
of the war that the two of them had together.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, interesting move, interesting move, bold move, power move.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
I mean he probably got like editorial rights on the
final draft, I'd imagine.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, well, never know for sure, but yeah, you have
to you do have to read these sources with a critical.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Eye, even if it was very extreme editorial control over
the final text of Josephus's book. The book doesn't make
the Romans look great. It's not talking about how awesome
Miss Pasion is. It's talking about how he's killing prisoners
sometimes and sometimes very brutally, like repressing a revolt and
destroying the Temple of Jerusalem. Like he doesn't have positive
(39:48):
words for the Roman army when he's talking about that.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
So, yeah, sometimes he can do things that are I
think remarkably smart, gracious, useful, high minded. Sometimes he can
do total dick moves too. There was a dick move
regarding the Marine fire Brigade. Now, when I say marine
fire brigade, that sounds pretty important and useful, right, you know,
it sounds like a public safety thing. Anyway, the Marine
(40:12):
Fire Brigade, the members of the Marine Fire Brigade had
to be constantly on the move between various places. You know,
they were always on their feet, and they applied for
extra money for shoes because they had to be walking
around all the time because it was part of their job.
And they this Spasian turned down their request for extra money.
(40:35):
And not only did he turn down their request for
extra money for shoes, but he actually forbade them from
wearing shoes and told them that they would have to
do their job barefoot.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Why did you give a reason.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
For I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Like back in my day, we didn't have any shoes
when we were in the war.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Personally, I don't get it. I think it's probably some
OSHA violation. But the Marine Fire Brigade, I end took
it the direction that you were saying, and they continued
to not wear shoes and turned it into a point
of pride for them.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Oh. He also he also tore down the Second Jewish Temple.
That's kind of a dick move. Also, he didn't see
that you can't win them all, you know, Oh.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
No, no, you totally can't win them all. He's my
favorite emperor. But you have to understand this is in
the category of Roman emperors, except.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Right, you're gonna be real hard pressed to find one
who didn't like flaughter for people though.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Okay, yeah, but by the standards of Roman emperors, he
was one of the good ones, and the Senate, the
Senate thought so. And you know, I Vespasian is looking
back over his life, over his career. He wanted he
wanted to die standing up as it were, you know,
he wanted to He just want to go. He wanted
to be active up until the very end. And he well, okay,
(41:48):
he was at He was really really really near the end.
And I can't say he was on his deathbed because
he wouldn't allow that. He insisted on standing up, even
though he had diarrhea. He had someone help him stand up, okay,
and he you know, he thought back over his career.
He thought back over the emperors who had preceded them.
You know, some of them were totally reviled by the Senate,
(42:14):
reviled by posterity. Some of them were awarded divine status
and according to the biographer Suetonius well biographer. According to
the historian Suetonius, his dying words were, or what it's
worth the Latin is why puto deus fio? Or oh, dear,
I think I'm becoming a god?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
As a soldier, he wants to die on his feet, right,
he doesn't want to die in his deathbed. He stands up, Oh,
I think I'm becoming a god.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
And one of the benefits of having Vespasian as emperor
is that he had an automatic, unambiguous plan of succession
in place. So his older son Titus, whom he had
been you know, taking with him as a lieutenant to Judea,
who he had actually had educated at the imperial court.
When Nero is emperor, you know, so Titus really got
to know the ins and outs of all of this.
(43:01):
So Titus took over as emperor. History remembers Vespasian as
one of the good emperors. His ability to hold the
empire together allowed successive emperors, including the Antonine emperors Trajan Hadrian,
Antonised Pious, Marcus Aurelius, you know, who are remembered as
good emperors, permitted an era of stability, prosperity, and the
(43:28):
historian Tacitus, who he's notorious for being able to throw
shade at emperors he does not like. He says about
Vespasian that he was the first person to improve after
becoming emperor.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Going back to the beginning, what I was saying was
the ones I like to talk about and the ones
I remember are Caligula and Nero and that kind of thing.
But Vespasian takes basically he bridges its Nero. Then it's
all out civil war, and that it's Pax Romana because
of Vespasian and his steadying hand. He was a career soldier.
(44:02):
He could definitely kick ass. He did it in Egypt
and Judea and North Africa and all across Britannica. But
at the end, it was his level headedness and coolness
and ability to exert his authority over what was becoming
an increasingly chaotic empire that really made the Roman Empire
(44:24):
into what we think of when we think of it today.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah, I didn't know very much about him. I knew
the name, and I knew a little bit about him,
but I was kind of surprised when you said that
he was your favorite badass emperor and having gone through
it together, like I can see why.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Well, thank you for asking. It was so much fun,
so much fun talking with you about Vestasian.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, and you know, we've got a lot of other cool,
cool characters are going to be talking about on the
show in the future. And you know, we mentioned Agrippino,
we mentioned the Venetians. We've got a bunch of other
cool stuff planned and lined up. We're really excited to
get back on here and talk about it again in
the future. So thanks to everybody for listening, and I
guess we'll see how the next one.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs,
and Allie Lamer. Mixing and music and sound design is
(45:30):
by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to
Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based
on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where you
can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If
you want to reach out with questions ideas, you can
email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com. If
(45:54):
you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your
friends and your enemies if you want as We'll be
back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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