Free The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City by Stephen Dando-Collins

early-morning duties before returning to his Palatium. March was a busy month on Rome’s official calendar. As the name of the month reflects, it was devoted to Mars. And it was indeed a martial month, with various religious activities culminating late in March in the blessing of the implements of war—weapons, standards, and even military trumpets—prior to the year’s military campaigning season. In Roman provinces bordering foreign states, the legions would similarly be preparing for campaigning. In western Britain, the legions would soon be countering the raids of the fierce Silure tribe. On the Rhine, there would be punitive Roman raids east against German tribes. In Syria, Corbulo would be consolidating his successes against the Parthians.
     
    And as the legions went forth in spring, so Rome’s latest crop of provincial officials would leave the capital to take up their appointments for the coming year. The proconsuls, the provincial governors appointed by the Senate, would set off for their one-year tenures, taking along gaggles of staff. Each governor was accompanied by a quaestor, the most junior of Rome’s magistrates. Chosen by the emperor and rubber-stamped by a vote of the Senate, the quaestor was his governor’s chief financial officer and was responsible for military recruiting in his province. A quaestor, on his return to Rome, could automatically take a seat in the Senate.
     
    One such quaestor preparing to depart Rome this spring of AD 64 was Gnaeus Julius Agricola. In his twenties and a provincial (being a native of Massilia), Agricola had married Domitia Decidiana, a member of a leading Roman family. The couple had a sickly young son, and Julia was pregnant with their second child, but Agricola would have to leave mother and child in Rome while he served his year on the staff of Salvius Titianus, new proconsul of Asia. Agricola’s chief would be taking his wife and elder children with him to Asia, as was the practice and the privilege of a provincial governor, but a humble quaestor had no such right. Still, Agricola and his wife “lived in rare accord, maintained by mutual affection and unselfishness,” and both would bear the separation of the next year with good grace. 2
     
    As an officer cadet, Agricola had served on the staff of the governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, during Boudicca’s revolt and had lived through the bloody do-or-die AD 60 battle in which 10,000 Roman troops headed by the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix Legion had overcome 230,000 rampaging rebel Britons. The battle that destroyed Boudicca had made that legion the most feared unit in the Roman world. It would be some years before Agricola made his name, but when he did, it would be as a general, and back in Britain.
     
    In a lottery-style process, candidates for provincial appointments put their names in an urn. Agricola’s was one of a certain number drawn out to match the number of vacancies. Another draw was made to match names with vacant posts. This was how Agricola won his Asian appointment. Over the next year, he discovered that his proconsul Titianus was “an abject slave to greed.” The proconsul’s self-serving policy, to Agricola’s mind, was one of “You wink at my offenses, and I’ll wink at yours.” 3 While Agricola was serving in Asia, his son would die, but during the same period, his wife Domitia would give birth to a healthy daughter. That daughter would one day marry the historian Tacitus.
     
    As men such as Agricola and his superior Titianus were preparing that spring to leave Rome no later than July for appointments abroad, as the law required, others were returning after completing their yearly appointments. One such returnee to Rome that spring of AD 64 was Titus Flavius Vespasianus, better known to us as Vespasian, the future emperor. Fifty-four-year-old Vespasian, who had made a name for himself as commander of the 2nd Augusta Legion during the AD 43 invasion of Britain, returned to the