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Vespasian

Latin nameVespasian

Commoner-born emperor who ended the civil war and began the Colosseum

Born to the Purple · Kings & Emperors
The Flavian dynastyThe ColosseumYear of the Four Emperors

Who they are

After Nero’s death four generals proclaimed themselves emperor in turn within a single year (the Year of the Four Emperors). The one who won out, Vespasian, came of the Italian middle class with no distinguished blood, and rose by his war record and his practicality, founding the Flavian dynasty. He set the treasury, drained by civil war, in order with shrewd finance — even taxing the urine of public latrines (collected for use in the fulling trade), leaving the line "money has no smell." On the private lake of Nero’s Golden House he began building the Flavian Amphitheatre — the later Colosseum — giving the garden a tyrant had monopolized back to the citizens as public entertainment, at once an engineering feat and a political statement. On his deathbed he joked at his own expense: "Dear me, I think I am becoming a god." (Roman emperors were customarily deified after death) — practical enough to make a joke even of his own deification.

Key stories

Money has no smell

Vespasian taxed the urine collected from public latrines (urine is rich in ammonia, an industrial raw material of the day for fulling wool and tanning leather). When his son Titus found the tax distasteful, Vespasian took a coin of the revenue, held it to his son’s nose, and asked, "Does it smell?" Titus said no. "Yet it comes from urine." — "Pecunia non olet," money has no smell, became a Western proverb from then on. French to this day calls a public urinal a "vespasienne" (after Vespasian), a little joke of history.

Turning a lake into an amphitheatre

Nero’s "Golden House" covered a vast area, at whose center was an artificial lake — a private garden an emperor had dug for himself in the heart of the city, the most vivid symbol of tyranny. Vespasian ordered the lake drained and on the site built the Flavian Amphitheatre, holding fifty thousand. The choice of site was itself a statement: land a despot had taken for his own, given back to the Roman people as a place of public entertainment. He had died by the time the Colosseum was completed, and his son Titus opened it with a hundred days of games — a building that for two thousand years has been the very totem of the word "Rome."

Appears in

The Principate & the Roman PeaceVespasian & the Colosseum
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