On hearing this, Josephus expressed a desire for a private interview with him. Vespasian having ordered all to withdraw except his son Titus and two of his friends, the prisoner thus addressed him: “You imagine, Vespasian, that in the person of Josephus you have taken a mere captive; but I come to you as a messenger of greater destinies. Had I not been sent on this errand by God, I knew the law of the Jews and how it becomes a general to die. To Nero do you send me? Why then? Think you that [Nero and] those who before your accession succeed him will continue? You will be Caesar, Vespasian, you will be emperor, you and your son here. Bind me then yet more securely in chains and keep me for yourself; for you, Caesar, are master not of me only, but of land and sea and the whole human race.”

As Josephus predicted, Vespasian become emperor, ruling from AD 69 to 79, and was succeeded by his son Titus, who was succeeded in turn by his brother Domitian. Freed by Vespasian, Josephus became a Roman citizen and lived out the rest of his life in Rome, where he wrote The Jewish War and other works of Jewish history.

THE COLOSSAL TURBOT

Satires, IV

Juvenal

Translated by William Gifford, 1817; revised by John Warrington, 1954

Juvenal was one of the great satirists of ancient Rome. He flourished in the troubled times of Emperor Domitian (ruled AD 81–96), the ‘last Flavian’ and ‘bald-pate Nero’, who exiled him to the Egyptian desert after he made a particularly mocking reference. The AD 80s and 90s were fraught with anxieties. Political informers flourished until Domitian was assassinated in AD 96. Juvenal jests about Domitian’s hair loss in this satire about a very expensive fish. The shady but wealthy Crispinus, a member of Domitian’s staff, crops up in several of Juvenal’s satires.

When the last Flavian, drunk with fury, tore

The prostrate world, which bled at every pore,

And Rome beheld, in body as in mind,

A bald-pate Nero rise, to curse mankind,

It chanced that where the fane of Venus stands,

Reared on Ancona’s coast by Grecian hands,

A turbot in the Adriatic main

Filled the wide bosom of the bursting seine.

Monsters so bulky from its frozen stream

Maeotis renders to the solar beam,

And pours them, fat with a whole winter’s ease,

Through the bleak Euxine into warmer seas.

The mighty draught the astonished boatman eyes,

And to the Pontiff’s table dooms his prize.

For who would dare to sell it, who to buy,

When the coast swarmed with many a practised spy—

Beachcombers, prompt to swear the fish had fled

From Caesar’s ponds wherein it erstwhile fed;

And, thus recaptured, claimed to be restored

To the dominion of its ancient lord?

Nay, if Palfurius may our credit gain,

Whatever rare or precious swims the main

Is forfeit to the Crown. Our boatman chose