The Early Roman Empire and the Principate: Vespasian
Also, how liberal arts majors ran the world
It’s been a very busy week at my school with homecoming festivities, so this week’s post is a lightly revised narrative on the emperor Vespasian, along with some added thoughts on the nature of the humanities and classical education. We pick up the story shortly after Nero’s suicide.
- After Nero
Back in Rome, the Senate was not mourning the death of one of the great artists of all time. Instead, the Senate was re-learning the unhappy lesson that power in Rome was still based ultimately on the army. If any aristocrats harbored nostalgic visions of restoring the old Republic, they were quickly disabused. The next year, 69 AD, became known as the Year of the Four Emperors, as no less than four different generals or officials claimed the throne. When the dust finally settled a very different man was standing atop the pile. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was a respected veteran general, and at the outbreak of rebellion most of the Eastern legions had come out in support of him. Vespasian (69-79) and his sons Titus (79-81) and Domitian (81-96) would establish the fairly successful yet short-lived Flavian Dynasty.
Vespasian always proves to be a surprisingly popular emperor among students. From a modest farming background in rural Italy (emperors originating from outside Rome will become an ever more important trend going forward), Vespasian was a career soldier, and with a soldier’s sense of humor. Where Nero was a narcissistic wastrel and aesthete, Vespasian was down-to-earth and practical; a no-nonsense sort of fellow who disliked philosophers and poets, but who was also very intelligent, and relatively good-humored. He was one of the funniest of the Roman Emperors, and though he understood the value of prestige and fancy titles, Vespasian didn’t personally stand on ceremony. Once, when some dutiful scholars came to him to describe how they had traced his lineage and “discovered” he was descended from a companion of Hercules, Vespasian laughed them out of the room. He once forgave a group of conspirators who had plotted to kill him, saying that they were fools for not realizing how many burdens a ruler had to bear. Surviving statues of Vespasian are probably true to his actual personality and features; rather than the idealized portrayal of the Julio-Claudians rulers as Greek demi-gods, Vespasian’s busts show a return to traditional earthy Roman realism. We picture him looking over the absolute wreck of things left by Nero, making a wry joke or two about it (in the way of soldiers everywhere), and then getting down to business.
Realizing that the state needed a lot of attention, Vespasian sat down to repair the massive hole in the Imperial budget. Vespasian became famous for penny-pinching and raising money by any means possible. He reimposed many taxes that Nero had exempted on favored groups, he cracked down on corruption and peculation, downsized the imperial household (he lived rather plainly), and looked for any new taxes or fees that he could impose, no matter how small. Famously, he even imposed a small tax on urine collection (which was left out on doorstops for collection by the tanning industry). When his son Titus protested at the baseness of the tax, his father produced a gold coin and said, “doesn’t it smell fresh? And yet it comes from urine.” Paid urinals in Italy and France are still called Vespasiani (vespasienne in France) today.
An empire of liberal arts majors -
Despite his care for saving money, and the fact that he disliked philosophers in general (he had a few exiled in his time), Vespasian did believe that education was an important social good, and he instituted the practice of helping provide state-paid tutors and school teachers in big cities, which helped broaden the number of educated individuals in the empire. This may also have had the clever effect of making sure that most of the “intelligentsia” who might normally go around criticizing the government, were now on the state’s payroll, tying their interests to those of the emperor. In any case, this helped expand the already entrenched Hellenization amongst Rome’s populace. For a long time, any Roman noble with an ounce of self-importance would have been sure to hire Greek tutors for their children. Now, the habits and manners of an upper class educated in Greek philosophy and literature, would continue to spread through the Roman world. Power in Rome may have ultimately rested on the army, but for several hundred years the men who wielded that power were frequently steeped in the greatest philosophical and artistic tradition of the ancient world.
There is an enduring stereotype about classical education and the humanities being “impractical,” or only useful as “book smarts." This stereotype is even sometimes fostered and encouraged by scholars and enthusiasts in the humanities, on the notion that this sort of learning is somehow more “pure” and unsullied; the contemplative pursuit of wisdom free from the grubby concerns of the “real” world. I recall my high school chemistry teacher, who did have a business background, playfully mocking our Latin and Rhetoric teacher for the uselessness of studying verb endings and Cicero. Our Rhetoric teacher took it all in good-natured stride, knowing his worth, but from other humanities enthusiasts one sometimes detects a whiff of bookish self-defensiveness about avoiding the concerns of the “real world.”
Aristotle claimed that the contemplative life is ultimately higher and more noble than the active one; and as a teacher I think we should want our students to pursue wisdom and the Higher Things in life. But to teach and study the classical humanities as only contemplative interests for the private cultivation of the soul and mind is to simply miss an entire half of their role and purpose during their most important formative periods (Greco-Roman antiquity, and the Renaissance, respectively). All the way back to the time of the classical Greek polis, a primary purpose of education was to produce good citizens who could deliberate, fight, and lead. Rhetoric started out in the law courts as an essential skill of any citizen who needed to defend themselves in court, and in time became the highest discipline of a liberal (as in, free, possessing self-mastery) individual. Medieval scholastic education dropped much of this political role (for understandable reasons amongst monks attempting to die to the world), but the Renaissance’s studia humanitatis recovered a sense of the public good with a vengeance.
In the 20th century, the rise of technical and scientific education displaced the humanities, as poetry seemed to have little to do with spreadsheets or computing. And generally speaking, the sort of person most interested in preserving the classical humanities in such an environment would be one chiefly interested in their intrinsic (contemplative) value - the scholars who preserve ancient books out of love and devotion are not often interested in entrepreneurship, or the sort of innovation that blends and combines new ideas. So an enduring dichotomy between pure-minded “education for its own sake” vs practical “streets smarts” and technical education has grown up.
There has always been, and should be, a place for contemplative education that pursues knowledge and wisdom for its own sake (sometimes that may be the only way to save one’s soul). But ancient education and philosophy also envisioned that citizens use their gifts and talents for public service; Polybius thought that it was almost impossible to write good history without prior military and political service, and Aristotle’s magnanimous man, and Cicero’s helmsman of the state have distinctly public lives.
This tradition of education wasn’t simply open to public life; it was manifestly successful at it. It’s very hard to imagine that Rome’s lasting stability and relatively good governance couldn’t have been tied to the educational tradition that supported it, and this trend continued with the very long-lasting success of the Byzantine empire as well, with clear periods of decline when the education of rulers suffered, such with the Barracks emperors of Rome’s Third Century Crisis, or the Byzantine Empire during the Iconoclasm controversy. The degradation of the humanities as generally “impractical” is a recent development.
- An Emperor becomes a God
Education wasn't the only thing changing under Vespasian. His rise to power, backed by the muscle of the legions and control of the Eastern provinces, did much to expose the noble lie that everyone in Rome had been telling themselves for almost a century. The fiction of princeps and senate ruling together was still there, but an honest judge of the situation would have to admit that power in Rome, though perhaps wielded by men tutored in philosophy and the arts, still rested on the army (as it had since the days of Marius and Sulla). The army had put Vespasian on the throne, and new emperors would continue to ensure that their first order of business was to pay the donative bonuses to their troops, before they even went to formally meet with the Senate. Vespasian seemed to acknowledge this reality, as he often preferred to be called imperator rather than princeps (though perhaps that also speaks of his comfort with his military background). The process accelerated under his sons.
Vespasian finally died an old man, in 79 AD. His last act, as he was about to expire, was to insist on being helped to stand, because, he said, “an emperor should die on his feet.” More famously, he is remembered for having quipped on his deathbed, “ah, I think I’m becoming a god,” in mockery of the growing practice of deifying Roman emperors. We see again the trend of Roman Emperors having utterly memorable last words that perfectly sum up their reigns. Vespasian had that rare ability to be an utterly serious person, and yet not take himself too seriously.
There is more to be said about Vespasian’s reign, including the Jewish revolt and building of the Coliseum, but that’s for a future post. Next week, we’ll return to the question of general laws in history.