Vedius Pollio - Legacy

Legacy

Vedius's treatment of his slaves and Augustus's conduct towards him became popular subjects for anecdotes in antiquity. During or shortly after Augustus's reign, Ovid praised his demolition of Vedius's house as a grand statement against immoral luxury made even at the emperor's own cost. Scott notes that in replacing the house with a public monument Augustus merely "carried out the terms of the will", and argues that any suggestion he wished to censure Vedius's memory may have been mere "gossip".

Also in the 1st century AD, Vedius's story was used by the philosopher Seneca the Younger and the encyclopedist Pliny the Elder. In two ethical treatises, Seneca used Vedius's treatment of the cup-bearer and Augustus's response to illustrate the extremes to which anger could lead and the need for clemency. Pliny the Elder mentioned Vedius's lampreys in his Natural History while treating varieties of fish, noting the man's friendship with Augustus while ignoring the story of the latter's clemency. Pliny was no admirer of Augustus and his handling of the story has been seen as "a gratuitous jibe" at the emperor. In a highly rhetorical passage, the Christian writer Tertullian stated that after executing slaves, Vedius had his lampreys "cooked straight away, so that in their entrails he himself might have a taste of his slaves' bodies too".

In several works, Adam Smith cited Augustus's intervention to save the cup-bearer in support of an argument that the condition of slaves was better under a monarchy than a democracy. He embellished the story by claiming that Augustus manumitted all of Vedius's slaves, a statement not based on any ancient source, in one 1763 lecture even estimating the value of the property their master thus lost.