One day in February, AD 67, a middle-aged Roman general was receiving his regular morning back and neck massage in the bathhouse of a rented seaside villa. His name was Titus Flavius Vespasianus. For convenience’s sake, modern historians would shorten his name to Vespasian. This particular morning, Vespasian lay on a massage bench in an out-of-the-way town on an island in the Aegean Sea.27
As friends and members of his staff listened with worried frowns, Vespasian’s secretary read him a short letter from the emperor Nero, summoning him to an urgent meeting at the Greek city of Corinth, where the emperor had based himself for the past few months. Should Vespasian go to Nero? Vespasian knew that his colleague, the renowned general Domitius Corbulo, brother-in-law of the late emperor Gaius also known as Caligula, had similarly received a summons from Nero recently. And as Vespasian knew, that summons had led to Corbulo’s death.
When Corbulo stepped ashore from a fast warship at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth, he’d been met by senior freedmen on Nero’s staff, who had given him a blunt option—take his own life or face execution as a traitor. His daughter Domitia’s husband, Lucius Annius Vinicianus, had just committed suicide at Rome on the emperor’s orders, after being discovered plotting against Nero.
Although no evidence linked Corbulo with his son-in-law’s treasonous plot, Nero considered him guilty by association. The emperor had long harbored fears about the loyalty of his best general. Eight years earlier, when Centurion Arrius Varus, now chief centurion of the 3rd Gallica Legion, had carried messages to Rome from Corbulo while leading a vexillation of 3rd Gallica cohorts campaigning in Armenia with the general, Centurion Varus had whispered in Nero’s ear that Corbulo privately spoke in unflattering terms about his emperor. Nero had promoted Varus and filed his information away in the back of his mind. Now, the paranoia engendered in Nero by a plot against his life the previous year, led by a senator named Piso, caused him to eliminate all potential threats, even though his late chief secretary, Seneca, had once warned him that a man can never eliminate his successor—because there will always be one.
If Corbulo had insisted on his innocence and subsequently been condemned and executed, his estate would have been forfeited to the emperor, leaving his wife and family destitute. If he took his own life, his estate and his family would be preserved. So, Corbulo drew his sword, and crying “Axios!”—which meant “I am worthy (of such a noble death)!”—he literally fell on his sword, dramatically taking his own life.28
Did Nero also suspect Vespasian of complicity in this plot? Vespasian was on good terms with Corbulo’s well-connected family, as he would demonstrate by marrying his son Domitian to Corbulo’s youngest daughter Domitia Longina in AD 70. Thoughtfully now, and wearing his habitual dour expression, Vespasian sat up, put on his shoes, then came to his feet and dressed himself without the help of servants, as was his habit. He was of moderate height, solidly built, with a paunch and the hint of a double chin. Round-faced, he was balding, with his remaining hair silvering. Born near Reate in Latium, central western Italy, in AD 9 (the same year as the massacre of Varus’s legions in Germany), he was the son of a tax collector and banker, and grandson of a centurion in the senatorial forces of Roman general Pompey the Great that had been defeated by the rebel senator Julius Caesar. “They were admittedly an obscure family,” says Vespasian’s Roman biographer, Suetonius, “none of whose members had enjoyed high office.”29
Vespasian’s elder brother Flavius Sabinus had been the first member of the Flavian family to enter the Senate. Sabinus had gone on to command a legion in the reign of Claudius, after which Nero had appointed him to the powerful post of city prefect at Rome, making him the capital’s combined police and fire chief. Sabinus still held that very post at this moment. Surely Sabinus would have alerted his brother if he’d heard anything that suggested Vespasian was likely to share Corbulo’s fate? Vespasian and Sabinus were close. When proconsul of the province of Africa three years back, Vespasian had fallen into debt, and Sabinus had bailed him out, taking mortgages on Vespasian’s properties.
When Vespasian had arrived in Greece in the emperor’s vast entourage the previous October, he’d been high in Nero’s favor. Nero had come to Greece intending to stay a year and compete in all four classical Greek games, including the Olympic Games, changing the dates of several of the competitions (which were normally staged two years apart) so that he could do all four in twelve months. Nero considered himself an expert driver of racing chariots and an accomplished actor, singer, and lyre player. The Roman elite secretly ridiculed him when he competed in public competitions, and the much later myth that Nero fiddled while Rome burned in the AD 64 Great Fire of Rome grew from this criticism. He had in fact been competing in a singing contest on the west coast of Italy when that fire broke out, and had hurried back to Rome to supervise firefighting efforts.
Nero, who became emperor at the age of sixteen, had progressively seen the deaths of the three figures who’d restrained him from indulging his passions for racing and the stage. First, he’d had his manipulative mother, Agrippina the Younger, murdered in AD 59. In AD 62, Burrus, his prefect of the Praetorian Guard, had died from throat cancer. Burrus’s colleague Seneca, who had served as Nero’s tutor and then chief secretary, had retired following Burrus’s death, but in AD 65 he’d been implicated in the Piso Plot, as a result of which the emperor had forced Seneca and numerous others to commit suicide.
The removal of this trio had left Nero free to play, and, says Cassius Dio, he came to Greece intent on being crowned “Victor of the Grand Tour,” the title bestowed on the winners of consecutive Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean Games, much as the winners of consecutive US, Wimbledon, French, and Australian tennis championships today are said to win the Grand Slam.30
Just the same, Nero was not as blind to his public image as his uncle Caligula, who had also endeavored to be a chariot racing and theatrical star, in the process alienating his senior military officers. Caligula’s bookish successor, the emperor Claudius, had seen the need to impress his legions with martial success and had gone forward with the invasion of Britain that Caligula had previously toyed with. As it happened, Vespasian and his brother Sabinus had commanded two of the four legions that undertook that AD 43 British invasion. In emulation of Claudius’s military success, following his Grand Tour of AD 66–67, Nero intended to launch not one but two conquering military campaigns to give him a macho reputation as a soldier.
According to Roman writers Tacitus and Cassius Dio, one of Nero’s campaigns was to be a push to the Caspian Gates, also known as the Wall of Alexander and traditionally said to be iron gates built by Alexander the Great to keep out barbarian tribes from the Russian Steppes. Several locations have been suggested for these otherwise unidentified gates, including a pass between Russia and Georgia on the Caspian Sea, and south of the Caspian, not far from Armenia.
Like his mentally unstable uncle Caligula, Nero was clearly intending to emulate Alexander the Great—Caligula had worn Alexander’s armor, retrieved from his mausoleum in Alexandria. For his Caspian Gates mission, Nero created a new military unit, grandiosely calling it the Phalanx of Alexander the Great. With a minimum height of six feet, its exclusively Italian recruits were armed as Greek hoplites, with twelve-foot-long spears. This five-thousand-member “phalanx” raised in Italy in the second half of AD 66, was the first military unit composed of Roman citizens, apart from the Praetorian Guard, recruited in Italy south of the Po River in the imperial period since the reign of the emperor Augustus. Within two years it would be renamed the 1st Italica Legion (1st Italian Legion), and be equipped in the traditional legion fashion.31
In preparation for the Caspian Gates operation, an existing legion, the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix, had been transferred from Britain to Carnuntum on the Danube in AD 66. The Phalanx of Alexander the Great was due to join it in the spring of AD 67 for a summer campaign. With Corbulo’s reputation as a crack general and his experience in Armenia, close to the Caspian, it would have been logical to have expected him to be put in command of the Caspian Gates operation, and he probably went to Greece hoping this appointment was the reason for the emperor’s summons.
Nero’s second military campaign was to be the previously mentioned push south from Egypt into Ethiopia. Vespasian was a leading contender for command of this operation. His military credentials were strong. After he’d served as a military tribune in Thrace in the early AD 30s, in AD 41, through the influence of Narcissus, the emperor Claudius’s secretary of correspondence, Vespasian was appointed a legate and given command of the 2nd Augusta Legion on the Rhine, which he’d subsequently led in the AD 43 invasion of Britain.
During this period Narcissus had even arranged for Vespasian’s son Titus to be schooled alongside the imperial children at the Palatium, the emperor’s palace on the Palatine Hill at Rome. Titus had become the best friend of Claudius’s son Britannicus; he’d even been right beside Britannicus the night the prince was poisoned at dinner in a plot by Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger. That assassination had made Nero heir to Claudius’s throne.
In the invasion of Britain, Vespasian had commanded his legion with distinction, fighting thirty battles in today’s southern England and capturing twenty British towns and the Isle of Wight as he pushed all the way to Cornwall. He and his brother Sabinus had both been awarded Triumphal Decorations by Nero for the British campaign, the highest military award a Roman general other than a member of the royal family could then attain.
After a consulship in AD 51, Vespasian had lost his influential friend Narcissus in AD 54 when Agrippina engineered the correspondence secretary’s death. Without friends in high places, and careful not to antagonize Agrippina, Vespasian had thereafter kept a low profile while she still lived. Once before, he’d incurred the wrath of the imperial family, and he had no intention of repeating his mistake. That had been during the earlier reign of Caligula, when serving as Aedile of the Alleys, a city official responsible for keeping Rome’s alleys clean, which Vespasian failed to do. After being humiliated by the emperor for his failure, he had worked hard to regain Caligula’s favor, and as a novice senator in January of AD 40 had made a sycophantic speech in the Senate in support of the wayward young emperor, going on to boast that Caligula had invited him to dinner at the imperial palace prior to setting out on an AD 39–40 tour of Gaul.
During Caligula’s reign, too, Vespasian had cultivated the friendship of Praetorian Prefect Clemens, later marrying his boy Titus to Clemens’s daughter, Arrecina Turtulla. Vespasian only made a career comeback once Agrippina was dead and Burrus and Seneca were out of power with appointment as governor of the province of Africa in AD 63, a post that covered today’s Tunisia and Algeria. He’d been in Nero’s favor ever since and, as a feted general and one of a handful of ex consuls in the emperor’s Greek touring party, was justified in anticipating appointment to command Nero’s planned invasion of Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian operation was due to be launched in the fall of AD 67. This timing was to allow the march south along the Nile to take place after the crushing heat of summer. That same heat had defeated previous attempts to conquer the region that went all the way back to the sixth century BC and Cambyses II, son and successor of the creator of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great. It was also designed to permit Nero to base himself in Alexandria to “oversee” the operation once he had completed his Greek Grand Tour.
Although not yet explicitly offered to him by Nero, Vespasian seems to have prepared for the Ethiopian command, for he brought along on the tour a personal party that included his eldest son, Titus, and a number of clients who might take up posts in his command team. It seems likely that the three legions earmarked for the invasion of Ethiopia were intended to remain there as the Roman garrison of the conquered territory, with the operation’s commander serving as governor of the new province of Ethiopia, as had been the case with the invasion of Britain.
But several months into the Greek tour, Vespasian had blotted his copybook with the emperor and been banished from his presence. Vespasian was an earthy man. He ate and dressed conservatively and was not a fan of the theater. All the members of the emperor’s touring party were expected to attend when Nero gave speeches and appeared at the hippodrome or in the theater, and in October–November Vespasian had sat on the terraces at Olympia with the others of the imperial entourage along with excited, starstruck locals when the emperor predictably won the Olympic Games chariot race and the Games’ contests for singing, tragic acting, and heralding.
He’d been present, too, when Nero had given a speech on November 29 at Corinth, a Roman military colony since the days of Julius Caesar, and declared that he wished to reward all Greece for its goodwill and piety toward him by liberating the Greek provinces from the obligation of paying taxes to Rome in the future. Overnight, a not insignificant portion of the Roman treasury’s income was eliminated by Nero’s desire to please the Greek populace with this blanket tax immunity. The Greeks adored him for it, with their cities sending him pledges of undying loyalty and calling him Zeus the liberator.
Vespasian did not approve of this imperial generosity. His own checkered record with personal finances had seen him become extremely careful with money. As his financial fortunes were restored he’d invested in mule farms, which held contracts to supply the Roman army and were a license to mint money. As governor of Africa he’d resisted the temptation to make money via corruption, a temptation to which many in his position yielded. He returned to Rome from Africa no richer than when he left, according to Suetonius, who knew Vespasian from a distance as a child and later had access to the imperial archives, which included Vespasian’s later lost memoirs, Commentaries of Vespasian. Vespasian had become such a miser when it came to the public purse in Africa that he’d been pelted with turnips in one African city after imposing a new local tax.
Vespasian may have winced on hearing the announcement of Nero’s tax relief for the Greeks, but he said nothing. He knew better. But then, in December, while in the audience for one of Nero’s musical performances, the bored Vespasian had fallen asleep. His son Titus had probably nudged him awake, with both men sighing with relief when the emperor seemed not to have noticed.
Alas, early the next morning, when Vespasian went to pay his respects to Nero, as he and the other members of the imperial party did every day, he was barred from entering the audience chamber by Phoebus, the imperial freedman who served as doorkeeper to the emperor. Phoebus told Vespasian to go away, as the emperor did not wish to see his face. Clearly, someone on Nero’s staff had seen Vespasian nod off.
“But, what shall I do?” Vespasian asked. “Where on earth shall I go?”
“Oh, go to Morbia!” responded Phoebus with a shrug. There was no such place as Morbia. This was Phoebus’s sarcastic little joke. Morbius was the Latin word for distress and illness. It was a joke that would rebound on Phoebus three years after this, as will later be related.32
Hoping to be recalled by Nero, and leaving his son Titus with the imperial retinue to continue to pay daily obeisance to the emperor, Vespasian had gone to the villa at the out-of-the-way town and waited for weeks. Now, the call had come. But was it a call to service, or a call to his death? With his son Titus a veritable hostage at court, Vespasian had no choice but to take a ship back to Achaea to answer the emperor’s call.
As Vespasian would later tell Josephus the historian, Nero received him graciously, as if there had never been a falling out between them. For the emperor was at last aware of the disastrous fate of Cestius Gallus’s punitive Judean operation. The information had come to him via the agency of King Herod Agrippa II. Two leading Jewish priests, the brothers Saul and Costobarus, had slipped out of Jerusalem in the wake of Gallus’s retreat and gone to the king at Beirut. The king had recently welcomed his cavalry commander Philip bar Jacimus back into his fold after retrieving him from Gamala, where he’d been hiding under the noses of the rebels since his escape in disguise from Jerusalem. So, Agrippa had sent Philip, Saul, and Costobarus to Cestius Gallus at Antioch, where they offered to go to Nero in Achaea and tell him that the revolt in Judea was all Procurator Florus’s fault.33
Grabbing this opportunity to absolve himself of blame for the Judean calamity, Gallus had sent the king’s delegation to the emperor along with a member of his own staff who carried his report of the operation, a report which stressed the deficiencies of Florus and the insane courage of the rebellious Jews who had dealt the Roman army such a bloody defeat. Nero had not been fooled. Or at least his chief advisers had not been fooled. By the time that Vespasian came to this meeting, the emperor was fully aware of the cause of the predicament that now prevailed in Judea.
“What has happened was rather due to the negligence of the commander than to the valor of the enemy!” twenty-nine-year-old Nero angrily declared as he paced back and forth in front of Vespasian. “Well, I, who bear the burden of the Empire, despise such misfortunes,” he added, trying to appear nonchalant about the affair.34
Vespasian would tell Josephus that he could see beyond the pompous facade of the tall, thin, young Caesar that day. He could see that, while he wanted to appear the big man and stand above such petty annoyances, Nero had been shaken by the news from Judea. Gallus’s inglorious and costly Judean retreat had exceeded Paetus’s disastrous Armenian expedition in its ineptitude. It rivaled Varus’s defeat at the hands of the Germans in AD 9 in terms of the loss in Roman military numbers and prestige. Beneath the emperor’s puffed-up exterior, says Josephus, Vespasian saw consternation and fear.
“I’ve been deliberating as to whom I should commit the care of the East,” the emperor went on, “and who might punish the Jews for their rebellion, and might prevent the same sickness from also seizing upon the neighboring nations.” Now, Nero must have broached a smile. “I have found no one but you, Vespasianus, equal to the task, and able to undergo the burden of so mighty a war.”35
And so the general was able to inwardly sigh with relief and listen in respectful silence as Nero rattled off Vespasian’s military record, as if he knew it by heart, and lavished him with “great praises and flattering compliments,” according to Josephus. The same source tells us the emperor did remark that, although the fifty-seven-year-old Vespasian was now “growing to be an old man in the [military] camp,” his life ever since his youth had been filled with military success, right up to the British campaign, via which Vespasian had allowed the emperor Claudius, Nero’s late uncle and adoptive father whom Nero despised, “to have a Triumph bestowed on him without any sweat or labor of his own,” in Nero’s words.
Nero spoke as if he felt the need to talk Vespasian into accepting the appointment, as if the incident with Phoebus might incline Vespasian to turn down the proffered post of Roman commander in chief in the East. But Vespasian knew the Judean opportunity could remake his reputation and his fortunes. More importantly, Vespasian was to tell Josephus, he knew that Nero “had his sons as hostages for his faithfulness”—apart from Titus, who was here in Achaea with him, his youngest son, the fifteen-year-old Domitian, was being schooled back at Rome, in the care of Vespasian’s brother Sabinus but within easy reach of Nero’s chief freedman, Helius, who had been left in charge at Rome with all the emperor’s powers over life and death.
There was also the matter of Vespasian’s mistress, Antonia Caenis. She had been the young freedwoman secretary of Antonia the Younger, daughter of Mark Antony and mother of Claudius and his famous soldier brother Germanicus. In AD 31, when Vespasian was twenty-one, Caenis had carried a secret message from Antonia at Rome to the emperor Tiberius on the Isle of Capri, a message that revealed Tiberius’s Praetorian Prefect Sejanus was plotting against him. That warning had resulted in Sejanus’s execution. Vespasian had commenced his affair with Caenis when a young man but had ended it when he married Flavia Domitilla the Elder around AD 36. After the death of Domitilla sometime in AD 50s, Vespasian had resumed the relationship with Caenis, and he now kept her in her own villa on the Via Nomentana in the northeastern outskirts of Rome. Vespasian never married Caenis, but he dearly loved her, as all Rome knew. She would remain his devoted mistress until the day she died. Vespasian would have appreciated that, like his sons, Caenis, far away in Rome, was also a hostage to Nero.
So it was that, for a variety of reasons, Vespasian accepted the job of putting down the Jewish Revolt in Judea. Nero had no interest in military affairs. Considering himself an athlete and an aesthete, following his meeting with Vespasian he would have gone off to drive a chariot, to rehearse a song with his homosexual lover, Sporus, or to have a theatrical costume fitting with his wardrobe mistress, Calvia Crispinilla.
To discuss the military details of his mission, Vespasian would have had a detailed briefing meeting with one of Nero’s two Praetorian prefects, Gaius Ofinius Tigellinus. In effect the emperor’s defense secretary, Tigellinus was heading up the military branch of the Palatium staff traveling with the emperor. Tigellinus, who was roughly the same age as Vespasian, had succeeded Burrus as prefect of the Praetorian Guard in AD 62 after serving as prefect of the Cohortes Vigilus, Rome’s seven-cohort Night Watch, whose former slaves stood duty through the night hours as both a nocturnal police force and fire brigade. Tigellinus gained his first important post through the influence of Agrippina the Younger. His freedwoman mother had served in the house of Antonia the Younger, where Antonia’s granddaughters, Agrippina and her sisters, the daughters of Germanicus, had grown up. Tigellinus had even been sent into exile for a time after being accused of sexual relations with Agrippina. Despite a far from glorious military track record, Tigellinus nonetheless had a reasonable grasp of strategy.
Vespasian began his new appointment by making his son Titus his deputy for the Judean operation. Titus, the same age as the emperor but possessing the military skills and experience that Nero lacked after serving as an active and efficient tribune and prefect with legions and auxiliary units on the Rhine and in Britain, looked much like his father—round-faced, muscular, with a tendency to paunchiness. But he was also handsome—some say even cherubic—could sing well, and could play the harp. Titus was a fine horseman and skilled with sword and javelin. He was deadly accurate with a bow, an unusual skill for a Roman gentleman. And, says Suetonius, Titus had a phenomenal memory. He had mastered Roman shorthand and claimed he could imitate any handwriting, joking that, if all else failed, he could become the most celebrated forger in existence. After his military service, Titus had worked as a lawyer at Rome and had just served an annual term as a quaestor, a junior Roman magistrate, when his father included him in his party for the Greek tour.36
With Titus at his side, Vespasian ironed out the military details of the Judean mission with Tigellinus. To allow Vespasian to be commander in chief in the East, Nero invested him with imperium, equaling the emperor’s powers. This gave him authority over all other Roman generals and governors and gave him the right to march Roman troops over provincial borders, which no general or governor was ordinarily permitted to do under pain of being declared an enemy of the state by the Senate, as Julius Caesar had been in 49 BC.
Vespasian’s plan was to begin by quashing all opposition in Galilee and Samaria, isolating Jerusalem, before setting out to conquer the city. Tigellinus told Vespasian that he could use the legions already stationed in Syria as he saw fit, but after their thrashing under Gallus, Vespasian demanded fresh blood. The two legions and supporting auxiliary units that had been assigned to Egypt for Nero’s Ethiopian operation were ideal. Clearly, Nero must be informed that that Ethiopian operation had to be suspended, at the very least until Judea was firmly back in Roman hands.
The 15th Apollinaris Legion was already in Alexandria for the Ethiopian expedition, and as Vespasian and Tigellinus were speaking, the 5th Macedonica Legion was en route there. Vespasian wanted both these legions, which had relatively fresh enlistments, were up to strength, and possessed strong reputations. Josephus referred to the 5th Macedonica as one of Rome’s most esteemed legions. Its fame went back to its defeat of the war elephants of Julius Caesar’s senatorial opponents at the 47 BC Battle of Thapsus in North Africa. Ever since, the legion had carried the elephant emblem on its shields. The 5th Macedonica had earned its title from a victory won while serving in Macedonia between 30 BC and AD 6. More recently, in the early AD 60s, the legion had undergone its twenty-year discharge and enlistment of new recruits at its then station in Moesia on the Danube. All its new recruits had been from Moesia, and as a result its men were frequently referred to by their legionary colleagues as the Moesians, and the unit itself as the Moesian Legion.
Vespasian was told he could have both these legions, but in exchange the Palatium wanted the six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica Legion currently garrisoning Caesarea for service on the Danube. Ever since the 5th Macedonica had been transferred from Moesia to Pontus, the Germanic and Sarmatian tribes beyond the Danube, which formed the province’s northern border, had been restive. The Syrians of the 3rd Gallica, stung by their losses to the Jews, would be given the opportunity to show their mettle in Moesia as they filled a gap in Rome’s defenses there.37
This transfer of the 3rd Gallica to Moesia would be facilitated by a piece of logistical coincidence. Everything points to Rome’s new Pontic Fleet, formed in AD 64, conveying the 5th Macedonica by sea from its base at Trapezus on the Black Sea to Alexandria at the very moment Vespasian, at Corinth, was discussing troop dispositions for his Judean campaign. On its return to the Black Sea, the forty-ship fleet would be calling at Caesarea. There, it could collect the three thousand men of the six 3rd Gallica cohorts and transport them to the western side of the Black Sea, from where they could march to their new base on the Danube. And this appears to have been what took place. Meanwhile, Centurion Antonius’s seventh cohort of the 3rd Gallica, which was currently cut off at Ascalon, was left where it was for now, holding that city, and would not be involved in the transfer to Moesia.
The six 3rd Gallica cohorts transferred to Moesia would very quickly make a reputation for themselves there. Shortly after arriving at their new station they would be called out in wintry weather after ten thousand fierce mounted warriors of the Roxolani tribe crossed the Danube and began raiding Roman territory in Moesia. The Roxolani were expert horsemen who sheathed their immense broadswords down their backs, drawing them two-handed over their shoulders. One icily cold day, the 3rd Gallica men would catch the Roxolani in an encampment protected by nothing more than an encirclement of wagons. The three thousand Syrian legionaries would slaughter all ten thousand Roxolani in one bloody surprise attack. Theirs was a victory that would resonate around the Roman world at a time when Romans had been rocked by the news of the losses in Judea, and would give the 3rd Gallica men a fearsome reputation among fellow legionaries and civilians alike.
With these legion transfers agreed, Vespasian dispatched his son Titus to take a Liburnian, the fast frigate of the Roman navy with a narrow profile and a single bank of oars, from Achaea across the Mediterranean to Alexandria to fetch the two selected legions there up to Judea, braving the rough seas of the late winter that still kept the shipping lanes closed to wind-powered cargo ships. As a member of the Equestrian Order, Titus could legally enter Egypt without specific permission from the emperor, and in Egypt the 5th and 15th were currently both commanded by tribunes, meaning they would take Titus’s orders without demur. Titus would then march the two legions, plus a number of auxiliary units also being withdrawn from Egypt, and up the Mediterranean coast to meet his father in Ptolemais, which would once again serve as the Roman army’s staging point.
There was one small irritation, which Vespasian would have to live with. As expected, both Cestius Gallus and Procurator Florus were now summarily removed from their posts by Nero. As the new proconsul of Syria, Nero appointed Gaius Licinius Mucianus. Like Vespasian, Mucianus was a former consul and a member of Nero’s touring party in Greece. Roman biographer Suetonius claimed that Mucianus had long shown jealous hostility toward Vespasian, which he made no effort to hide. Meanwhile, Vespasian considered the unmarried Mucianus “a notoriously immoral fellow” who “treated him disrespectfully.” Mucianus liked pretty boys and was known to don a dress on occasion, interests he shared with the emperor, which endeared him to Nero. Vespasian never publicly said an unkind word about Mucianus other than on one occasion when an acquaintance mentioned his sexual predilections. “Personally,” Vespasian responded, “I’m content to be a male.”38
Despite their mutual dislike, the two men knew they had to not only work together but travel overland together to reach Syria with their retinues. Mucianus, once based in Antioch, would take orders from Vespasian even after the general moved on to Judea. So, to get the job done, they buried the hatchet. As the pair set off from Greece, the Palatium sent out letters to the same three kings who had provided allied forces to Gallus’s army, commanding them to send troops to reinforce Vespasian in Judea in preparation for a new campaign against the Jews in the late spring. A new ally was also approached for reinforcements for this campaign, King Malchus of Arabia, who would send six thousand Arab archers to join Vespasian’s gathering army at Ptolemais.
As the Roman war machine slowly but methodically creaked into motion, official word reached Cestius Gallus at Antioch that he’d been dismissed. All Gallus’s clients also lost their jobs and dejectedly went home to Rome, among them Tribune Neapolitanus and Legate Gallus of the disgraced 12th Fulminata Legion. Governor Gallus himself died in Antioch before he could return home, probably as a result of a heart attack, although the historian Tacitus suggested he died of shame.39