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Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
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Among Vespasian’s first visitors now that he was back at the capital was one of his good friends, if one of his more eccentric friends, the forty-one-year-old Gaius Plinius, Pliny the Elder as we know him, uncle of Pliny the Younger, Martial’s later patron. There had been a time when the elder Pliny was a devoted lawyer in Rome’s courts, but by AD 64, he rarely left his house at the capital, where he studied and wrote relentlessly. A workaholic who slept little and wrote day and night, Pliny dreaded time-wasting. He was the noted author of many books, which ranged from his first literary work (a military handbook on throwing the javelin while mounted) to biographies, a textbook on oratory, and his thirty-seven-volume
Natural History
, which many considered his masterwork. His
German Wars
, a twenty-volume history of all Rome’s wars with the tribes of Germany, would later be used as a reference by Tacitus for his greatest contribution to the written history of Rome, the
Annals
.
Natural History
, which many considered his masterwork. His
German Wars
, a twenty-volume history of all Rome’s wars with the tribes of Germany, would later be used as a reference by Tacitus for his greatest contribution to the written history of Rome, the
Annals
.
When he was in his late teens, Pliny was a “thin stripe” tribune, or officer cadet, serving in the Roman army on the Rhine. It was there that he befriended Vespasian, who was then the legate, or commander, of the 2nd Augusta Legion when it was still stationed at Argentoratum, modern Strasbourg, prior to participating in the invasion of Britain. A few years later, Pliny served as a prefect of auxiliary infantry and then commanded an auxiliary cavalry wing, also on the Rhine.
Now, when Pliny the scholar went visiting at Rome, he was carried from his house on the Esquiline Hill in a sedan chair, with a freedman secretary walking beside him taking notes in shorthand on wax tablets as his master dictated. At this time, Pliny was working on the eight-volume
Problems in Grammar
. Pliny’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, who would himself become a noted writer, later commented that during this period in Nero’s reign, “when the slavery of the times made it dangerous to write anything at all independent or inspired,” his uncle deliberately chose to avoid political subjects and put his energies into this work on grammar, which could offend no one, least of all the emperor.
5
There was another reason that the elder Pliny was carried in a sedan chair. He was a stout man and suffered from a constitutional weakness of the throat, which was often inflamed, and as a consequence, he breathed with a pronounced wheeze. This meant that walking any distance was not an option.
Problems in Grammar
. Pliny’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, who would himself become a noted writer, later commented that during this period in Nero’s reign, “when the slavery of the times made it dangerous to write anything at all independent or inspired,” his uncle deliberately chose to avoid political subjects and put his energies into this work on grammar, which could offend no one, least of all the emperor.
5
There was another reason that the elder Pliny was carried in a sedan chair. He was a stout man and suffered from a constitutional weakness of the throat, which was often inflamed, and as a consequence, he breathed with a pronounced wheeze. This meant that walking any distance was not an option.
Yet Pliny would not acknowledge a physical infirmity or use it as an excuse to be carried. To him, every moment that could be used for work should be used for work. “I remember how he scolded
me
for walking,” Pliny the Younger related. “According to him, I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought that any time was wasted which was not devoted to work.”
6
And so it was that the elder Pliny was carried along the dark city streets before dawn to see his friend Vespasian, preceded by a servant or a client bearing a flaming torch, at every step composing his grammatical thoughts.
me
for walking,” Pliny the Younger related. “According to him, I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought that any time was wasted which was not devoted to work.”
6
And so it was that the elder Pliny was carried along the dark city streets before dawn to see his friend Vespasian, preceded by a servant or a client bearing a flaming torch, at every step composing his grammatical thoughts.
Vespasian, meanwhile, now that he was back at Rome, appeared to rest on his laurels as a successful general and winner of the decorations of a Triumph. But, all the while, he was hoping for another lucrative appointment from Nero so that he could further improve his financial fortunes. To win another imperial post, Vespasian was prepared to join Nero’s entourage when he traveled. The man under the emperor’s nose was more likely to win the emperor’s favor than another who failed to make the effort to flatter his lord and master. In short, Vespasian had no scruples about sycophancy if that fanned the flickering flame of prosperity.
VI
THE WATER COMMISSIONER
W
ell before the end of March, with the ceremonials devoted to Mars continuing, Nero, impatient to escape the capital and begin his planned performance tour, departed Rome. He did not go alone or unnoticed. Carried in a litter, guarded by heavily accented German bodyguards from the German Cohorts and men from the Praetorian Cohorts, accompanied by a train of litters bearing scores of leading Roman citizens, and followed by carts and wagons laden with baggage and thousands of slaves and freedmen on foot, the massive Neronian cavalcade passed through the Porta Capena and proceeded down the Appian Way to the south.
ell before the end of March, with the ceremonials devoted to Mars continuing, Nero, impatient to escape the capital and begin his planned performance tour, departed Rome. He did not go alone or unnoticed. Carried in a litter, guarded by heavily accented German bodyguards from the German Cohorts and men from the Praetorian Cohorts, accompanied by a train of litters bearing scores of leading Roman citizens, and followed by carts and wagons laden with baggage and thousands of slaves and freedmen on foot, the massive Neronian cavalcade passed through the Porta Capena and proceeded down the Appian Way to the south.
Praetorian prefect Tigellinus remained at the capital. Other serving officials, too, would not be leaving Rome. The two consuls would remain, as would the twenty praetors, who were the senior magistrates of Rome and were required to preside at court hearings on all business days through the year. Various other officials also had a reason, or an excuse, not to accompany the emperor, among them the city prefect, Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus, as well as the grain commissioner, the streets commissioner, and water commissioner Publius Marius, who had just begun his eighteen-month tenure in his new job.
Marius had been a consul two years earlier. As water commissioner, he was charged with keeping Rome’s water supply flowing, and pure. So that he could achieve those goals, the water commissioner had control of two groups of slaves, the water gangs. Like so many Roman institutions and innovations, the state water gang had been established in the reign of Augustus. The other gang, Caesar’s water gang, had been created by Claudius. The former, paid for by the state treasury, numbered some 240 men. The work of this gang was subsidized by water rights fees paid into the treasury by private individuals who piped water under imperial license from the aqueducts along their routes. The cost of maintaining the 460 slaves of Caesar’s water gang was met by the emperor’s private purse.
Between them, the 700 men of the water gangs were supposed to keep Rome’s aqueducts in good repair. Some water gang members worked outside Rome, maintaining the underground and over-ground waterways of the vast and efficient water supply system that ran from the hills to the northeast, east, and southeast of Rome. The remaining water gang slaves worked on the water supply system within the city. The aqueducts were gravity-fed; not a single pump was employed. From many miles away, the aqueducts brought water coursing into Rome for government and private use. On the last stage of the water’s journey, it traveled high in the air over massive arches that elevated the water channels up to 158 feet above the ground.
Once it reached the city, the water was distributed from the aqueducts into reservoirs throughout Rome—247 of them by the end of the first century—and from these in underground lead pipes running throughout the metropolis. Seventy-five of Rome’s public buildings, including public baths and imperial palaces, received running water around the clock. A total of thirty-nine ornamental fountains and a dozen military and paramilitary barracks in the capital were likewise fed with water by the system. Water was also piped to 521 public water basins, from where the servants of apartment dwellers collected it for domestic use. Martial complained about the lack of running water in his tenement building, a shortcoming made all the more galling to him by the sight of an aqueduct close by.
1
1
Private contractors accounted for about a third of Rome’s total water consumption. They resold water to the owners of houses, apartment blocks, and businesses, including the many commercial bathhouses flourishing in the city. Accommodating both men and women, more than one hundred public bathhouses were scattered around Rome in AD 64; the number would increase to a thousand the following century. Every large house in Rome also had its own private bathhouse. To tap into the system, the private contractors were required, by decree of the Senate, to produce a license bearing the imperial seal, the Sardonychis.
The water commissioner was not responsible for the removal of wastewater via Rome’s extensive underground sewer system, which emptied liquid waste into “Father Tiber,” the Tiber River. This came under the control of another official of like rank, the commissioner of the “Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the Sewers of Rome.” The vaulted stone and brick sewers of ancient Rome were so well constructed that some are still in use today. The largest was fifteen feet across; a wagon could be driven through it. Augustus’ right-hand man Marcus Agrippa had taken such an interest in Rome’s water supply and sewers, which he brought under his mantle, that he made an inspection tour through the sewers in a rowboat.
A total of nine aqueducts brought water to Rome in Nero’s day. Under Nero, a single aqueduct, the Claudia, built by Claudius and modified by Nero, served both the Caelian and the Aventine hills. “The result,” wrote Sextus Julius Frontinus, water commissioner under the emperor Nerva thirty years later, “was that whenever any repairs caused interruptions, these densely inhabited hills suffered a drought.”
2
Storms, wear and tear, and shoddy workmanship made repairs to the water supply system by the two water gangs an ongoing task. Repairs were also necessary in country areas through which the system’s subterranean tunnels passed, with damage caused by tree roots, illegal buildings, and even tombs built over the tunnels. Damage also occurred when greedy landowners bored into the tunnels to steal water. Because water consumption was at its height in summer, all but emergency repairs to aqueducts were carried out during the spring and autumn months, when disruption to the supply might not prove such an inconvenience to consumers.
2
Storms, wear and tear, and shoddy workmanship made repairs to the water supply system by the two water gangs an ongoing task. Repairs were also necessary in country areas through which the system’s subterranean tunnels passed, with damage caused by tree roots, illegal buildings, and even tombs built over the tunnels. Damage also occurred when greedy landowners bored into the tunnels to steal water. Because water consumption was at its height in summer, all but emergency repairs to aqueducts were carried out during the spring and autumn months, when disruption to the supply might not prove such an inconvenience to consumers.
The water commissioner of Rome was a very senior position; Frontinus had been a consul and governor of Britain prior to his appointment. Like the grain commissioner and streets commissioner, the water commissioner was paid to apply at least three months of his time every year to his official duties. But through laziness or graft, many water commissioners neglected the administration of the water gangs and failed to police the supply regulations. The business of stealing water was a profitable one for some. After Frontinus became water commissioner, he conducted a detailed survey of the water supply system one July: “There are extensive areas in various places where secret pipes run under the pavements all over the city. I discovered that these pipes were furnishing water by special branches to all those engaged in business in those localities, through which the pipes ran, being bored for that purpose here and there by the so-called ‘puncturers.’”
3
3
These puncturers were water contractors and corrupt water gang overseers who piped away large volumes of water without paying the state a license fee, selling it at great profit. Frontinus also discovered another cagey practice. Each new water licensee was entitled to insert a single outlet into the distribution pipe that passed his property. In the case of an existing license that had been surrendered because of the death or changed circumstances of the licensee, the outlet created by the previous licensee was supposed to be sealed. But this frequently did not happen, so that the new licensee retained the old outlet and created a new one as his license permitted, and took twice as much water as he was entitled to.
By prosecuting water thieves and plugging illegal pipes, Frontinus would stamp out the practice of puncturing. He would be so successful in restoring the overall volume of water reaching the legitimate outlets in Rome that he would divert one of the sources, at today’s Frascati in the Roman Hills, to local consumption, while still delivering more water to the capital than before. Unfortunately for Rome, the water-theft industry flourished under the noses of water commissioners previous to Frontinus, including Publius Marius. Frontinus did not accuse his predecessors of being in the pay of the puncturers. But it was not impossible that some were corrupt. Frontinus did accuse his predecessors of laziness and indolence and for neglecting their duties while taking their salaries and using their state-assigned lictors, clerks, and other assistants for personal tasks.
The Senate produced page after page of regulations for water distribution, even specifying the size of nozzle by which water could be extracted from a pipe. But not a single bylaw was written to regulate the use of water to fight the fires that frequently broke out in the city. House fires were common, which is not surprising, considering that cooking and heating in Rome required the use of an open flame. But major blazes that ravaged significant buildings or entire regions of the city had occurred in almost every decade of the first century to date.
Fire had caused extensive damage at Rome in AD 6. An AD 12 fire had severely damaged the Basilica Julia on the Forum Romanum; the basilica was home to Rome’s law courts. Two years later, the Basilica Aemilia, just across the Forum, also sustained serious fire damage. In AD 22, on the Campus Martius, the massive Theater of Pompey, site of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, had been totally gutted by fire. Tiberius, who paid for the theater’s restoration, had commended his Praetorian prefect Sejanus for prompt action, which had confined the fire to the theater, and the Senate had subsequently installed a statue of Sejanus in the restored building. This was before Sejanus’ spectacular fall from grace.
In AD 26, on the Caelian Hill, which had once been renowned for abundant oak trees but was subsequently covered with buildings, a massive fire destroyed every single closely packed structure. Sponsored by a donation of 100 million sesterces from the emperor Tiberius, new buildings were quickly erected to replace the old on the Caelian Hill that year. They were erected on top of the blackened rubble littering the hill, so that it was said the Caelian actually increased in height as a result of the fire.
BOOK: The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City
7.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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