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

capital after a torrid year-long posting as proconsul of the province of Africa, in North Africa. Vespasian was a no-nonsense soldier at heart, gruff, with no airs or graces. His soldierly style of government had been so unpopular in Africa that on one occasion, the locals had pelted him with turnips.
     
    Along with Asia, Africa was the most sought-after of all the proconsular appointments, being the best paid, as it earned the appointee 400,000 sesterces for his year of service. A legionary in the ranks of Rome’s legions, meanwhile, earned 900 sesterces a year. As it happened, Vespasian had great need of those 400,000 sesterces. He had invested in mule farms. A mule farm with a contract to supply the military was a license to mint gold, but somehow, the farm managers had got it wrong. The farms had gone broke, and so had Vespasian. To escape his financial bind, Vespasian had been forced to sell his valuables and to mortgage his family home at Rome to his elder brother Flavius Sabinus, who was in his second term as Rome’s city prefect, a combined city manager and chief of police. Vespasian’s household silver had been among the first assets to go. His sons would remember the embarrassment of growing up without silver on the table and eating from wooden plates just like slaves.
     
    Now Vespasian was back in that family home, which was on Pomegranate Street on the Quirinal Hill, in Rome’s Regio VI, or Sixth Precinct. His brother Sabinus also had a house on the Quirinal. This was not one of Rome’s best addresses. The private mansions clinging to the lower slopes of the Palatine and Capitoline hills claimed that distinction. The Aventine Hill, too, had become fashionable with Rome’s elite in recent years after long being considered an ordinary address. But while the Quirinal was not fashionable, neither was it a dowdy address. It sat above the city, away from the industrial districts. One of the city’s larger water reservoirs, the Fundanus Basin, called a lake by many Romans, sat at the foot of the Quirinal. The basin acted as a barrier between the Quirinal and the less salubrious valley suburbs such as the Subura, where Julius Caesar had a home before he came to power and which had a name for crime and unsavory characters.
     
    Vespasian’s eldest son, twenty-four-year-old Titus, was currently in Britain, serving as commander of an auxiliary cavalry ala , or wing, attached to his father’s old legion, the 2nd Augusta. Vespasian’s younger son, thirteen-year-old Domitian, was waiting at home for his father. Domitian would soon be studying rhetoric and declamation at a school conducted by one of Rome’s leading teachers. Vespasian, a widower since his wife Flavia Domitilla died when he was in his twenties, would soon pay a visit to his longtime mistress, Caenis. A wealthy woman in her own right and a former slave, Caenis had in her youth been the most trusted servant of Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and mother of the emperor Claudius and his brother Germanicus. It had been Caenis who had carried a note from Antonia to her brother-in-law Tiberius to warn him of Sejanus’ plot to topple him from his throne. When Vespasian became emperor, he would treat Caenis as his “wife in all but name,” despite her lowly freedwoman status. 4
     
    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