Although Vespasian allowed himself time off for a daily drive and siesta (which he took in the company of a mistress), he worked extremely hard. Before dawn, he read whatever letters had come in. While dressing and putting on his shoes, he admitted his friends and conversed with them. During the rest of the day he devoted a lot of time to his duties as judge. On his deathbed he tried to struggle to his feet, remarking that ‘An emperor ought to die standing.’ The man who occupied the imperial throne must always be at his duties, and this involved a remarkably time-consuming level of personal accessibility. At his favoured residence in the Gardens of Sallust, security precautions around his person were greatly relaxed. All this was part of his constant desire to stress his own comparatively humble origins. They are reflected clearly too in a variety of portrait-busts, created by sculptors of great ability and sympathetic insight.

Despite his own incessant labours, Vespasian had to have a helper; and while Mucianus was at first an important adviser, the emperor relied more and more on his elder son Titus. Moreover, it was clearly understood that Titus, his praetorian prefect and colleague in the censorship, would eventually take his place on the throne; for from the very outset Vespasian openly announced (following his less successful predecessor Vitellius) his intention of creating a new Flavian dynasty, and this was explicitly stated on the coinage. However, conservatives still objected strongly to this undisguised assumption that the Principate could be handed down by hereditary transmission, like a personal estate – especially in a family lacking the prestige of the Julio-Claudian house. In consequence, Vespasian incurred a good deal of hostility.

His critics included moralists – describing themselves as Cynic philosophers – who adopted an anarchic, anti-establishment position. But various less philosophical groups of senators, too, were adamant in their objections to Vespasian’s dynastic plans. Prominent among them was Helvidius Priscus, an adherent of Stoicism who had married into a family of constitutional objectors, being the son-in-law of Nero’s victim Thrasea. Priscus had insulted Vitellius in public, and had been a friend of Vespasian; but he had changed into such an abrasive critic that the emperor felt obliged to banish him and then in 75 to order his execution, though allegedly with regret. Far more dangerous, however, was the intelligence, received four years later, that two senior senators who formed part of the central imperial establishment, Eprius Marcellus (an intimate counsellor of Vespasian) and Caecina Alienus (who had deserted to Vespasian from Vitellius), were conspiring against his life. By the initiative of Titus, neither survived.

Not long afterwards, Vespasian fell ill of a fever, withdrew to his summer retreat at the spa of Aquae Cutiliae near his birthplace, and died on 24 June 79. Suetonius describes him as a strong, square-bodied man with a curious strained expression on his face. He enjoyed excellent health, which he preserved by fasting one day a month. To his friends, his scurrilous sense of humour proved rather wearing. Much of it centred on the somewhat sordid ways in which he raised money for the state. For example Titus, we are told, complained of the tax which his father had imposed on the contents of the city urinals. In response, Vespasian handed him a coin which had been part of the first day’s proceeds: ‘Does it smell bad?’ he asked; and when Titus had to admit that it did not his father went on: ‘Yet it comes from urine.’ He also made a final joke on his deathbed: ‘Oh dear! I think I am turning into a god!’ (‘Vae, puto deus fio’).

Taken from: ‘The Roman Emperors – A Biographical Guide To The Rulers Of Imperial Rome 31BC – AD476’; Michael Grant; Phoenix, 1997 (First Published 1985)

If you’re looking for more on Vespasian his entry in Michael Grant’s ‘The Twelve Caesars’ would be another good point to check out; or you could just go straight on to the Suetonius.