Rome: An Empire's Story (2 page)

3.
A bust of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, Roman copy after a Greek original, from the Villa of the Papyri, Ercolano (ancient Herculaneum), Campania Region, Italy

4.
The monument at Delphi that commemorated Aemilius Paullus’ victory at Pydna

5.
The sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican

6.
A slave collar (original in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano in Rome)

7.
Mithridates VI Eupator King of Pontus portrayed as Hercules

8.
Bronze statuette of Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, 2nd half of 2nd century
AD

9.
Bust of Sulla in the Munich Glyptothek

10.
Bust of Julius Caesar

11.
The theatre of Pompey

12.
One of the fresco wall paintings in the
cubiculum
(bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale

13.
The Empress Messalina and her son Britannicus,
AD
45, Roman sculpture, marble, Louvre

14.
The Roman ceremony of the Adventus depicted on a coin

15.
The tax law of Ephesus (now in Ephesus Museum)

16.
A detail of Trajan’s Column showing triumph of the emperor after the first campaign against the Dacians

17.
Hadrian’s Wall

18.
The Stabian Baths at Pompeii

19.
Porphyry statue of the Four Tetrarchs at the Basilica di San Marco, St Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy

20.
An image from the late antique
Notitia Dignitatum

21.
The basilica, formerly Emperor Constantine’s throne room, now a Protestant church, Trier

22.
The head of a gigantic statue of Emperor Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Capitoline Museum, Rome

23.
A mosaic portraying the Emperor Justinian from San Vitale, Ravenna

24.
The amphitheatre at Arles

List of Maps

1.
The peoples of Italy around 300
BC

2.
The Mediterranean and its continental hinterlands, showing major mountain ranges and rivers

3.
The Republican empire around 100
BC

4.
The Roman empire at its greatest extent in the second century
AD

5.
The third-century crisis

6.
The empire in the year 500
AD

7.
Justinian’s reconquest (
AD
565)

Notes on Further Reading

The Roman Empire has been the object of serious research for around a century and a half and imperialism has never been off the agenda. It would be impossible to provide a complete guide to the scholarship on which this book is based, and I have not tried to do so. Each chapter is followed, however, by a few suggestions for further reading. I have recommended only work available in English and have tried to pick the most exciting and most recent works, since new research continues at an astonishing pace. I have also added a few notes to each chapter, some identifying the source of particular quotations or key passages of ancient writers, some acknowledging the source of particular ideas or acknowledging books or articles that were especially helpful when I was writing the chapter. Here too I have concentrated on the most recent work, but I have included a few really crucial items written in other languages. After all, the study of antiquity is an international venture, and the Roman Empire is bigger than any of us.

The bibliography at the end of the volume gathers together all works cited, but cannot claim to be a comprehensive guide to the subject. Fortunately in the twenty-first century we benefit from a number of very recent and authoritative reference works on all aspects of Roman history. The best one-volume reference work to all aspects of antiquity is the
Oxford Classical Dictionary
(4th edn. 2011). The revised
Cambridge Ancient History
devotes seven volumes to Rome (1989–2005). The first volume of the
New Cambridge Mediaeval History
(2005) is also relevant to the end of this story, as is the
Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire
(2008), the
Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
(2007), and the first volume of the
Cambridge History of World Slavery
(2011). Harvard’s
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World
(1999) combines thematic essays with a dictionary. The best multi-volume dictionary is Brill’s
New Pauly
(2007). All these works are available on-line, as well as in hard copy. The
Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
(2000) is the best guide to the topography of antiquity.

KEY DATES IN CHAPTER I

I
THE WHOLE STORY

Traditions about what happened before the foundation of the City, or while it was being founded, are more suited for poetic fictions than for the trustworthy records of history.

(Livy,
From the Foundation of the City
Preface)

The story of Rome is long one. This chapter tells it all—at breakneck speed—hitting just the high spots of the millennium-and-a-half-year story of rise and fall. It is intended as a motorway route planner for the book, or a set of satellite images, snapped at long intervals, provided for orientation. If you already know the pattern of the Roman past, feel free to skip ahead. If not, enjoy the ride!

The Kings and the Free Republic

The Romans of the historical period believed that their city had been founded by Romulus at a date that corresponds to our 753
BC
. Romulus was the first of seven kings. The earlier kings were honoured as founding fathers, the later ones reviled as tyrants. Eventually the last of the kings, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out of Rome and a Republic was founded. The
conventional date for this was 509
BC
. After Aeneas and Romulus, this was something like the third foundation of Rome. Its hero was a Brutus. When Julius Caesar made himself dictator for life nearly 500 years later, it was on the base of statues of this first Brutus that graffiti were scrawled, calling on his distant descendant to take up arms and slay the tyrant.

All the surviving accounts of the period of the Regal Period have this mythic quality. None was written less than three centuries after the supposed foundation of the Republic. Rome in the late sixth century was well below the radar of the Greeks, who would not begin to write even their own history for another century. Yet it is probable enough that Romans did have a monarchy. Many other Mediterranean cities had monarchs in the archaic age, including many of the cities of Etruria just north of Rome. Many of the later institutions of Rome seem best explained as relics of a monarchical state: there was a sacred house in the forum called the
Regia
, the base of the most senior priest the
pontifex maximus
. The official who conducted elections if there was a gap between magistrates was the
interrex
. But few of the details that have been passed down can be trusted. Individual kings were remembered as founders of specific parts of the Roman state. Romulus created the city, populated it, first by declaring it an asylum for criminals, and then by organizing the mass kidnapping of Sabine women to provide wives for his followers. Numa, the second king, invented Roman religion. Servius Tullius organized the army, the tribes, and the census and so on. Stories about the later rulers mostly recall tales told about tyrants across the ancient Mediterranean: they were arrogant rulers and cruel, sexual predators, and weak sons followed strong fathers. Charges of this kind were common in the aristocratic republics of the archaic Mediterranean and represent the emergence of new ethics of civil conduct. The Romans also remembered their last kings as foreigners, specifically as Etruscans. Stories about the kings added up to an account of what was central and unique to Rome, at least in the minds of those who told and heard them. Our only real control on these myths is archaeological.

The Republican period lasted nearly five centuries, from the early sixth until the final century
BC
. It was later remembered as an age of liberty and piety. Those who enjoyed that liberty were the wealthy, especially the aristocratic families which together monopolized political office and religious leadership. The nostalgia of their heirs colours all our history of that period. A few families—the Cornelii Scipiones above all, then later the Caecilii Metelli—were so successful that they effectively dominated the state, rather
as the Medici dominated Renaissance Florence. But the source of their wealth was very different. Those who led Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean world brought back treasure with which to beautify the city, money with which to buy or occupy land, and slaves with whom to farm it. Rome, like most ancient cities, relied on citizen soldiers. At first most of them were peasants who would join campaigns organized for periods of relative quiet in the agricultural year. Many of them did well out of conquest, and those who lived near enough the city had some influence in the political assemblies that elected Rome’s leaders and made the greatest decisions, such as whether or not to go to war. But Rome never approached the kind of democracy created in classical Athens, where the wealthy were compelled to conceal their riches and to spend part of them on public projects. At Rome power remained in the hands of the few. Magistracies lasted for only a year, but former magistrates sat for life in a council, the Senate, which in effect directed government, legislation, state cult, and foreign policy. How the Republican aristocracy remained so dominant is one of the big questions of Roman history. Was it the institution of patronage that pervaded Roman society? Or the religious authority they acquired from their priestly functions? Other cities faced revolutions when disaffected aristocrats roused up the people against their rivals. Roman nobles were as competitive as any aristocracy, but somehow restrained themselves from infighting until the very end of the Republic. When that restraint collapsed, their world fell apart.

The Republic was also the age in which Rome was transformed from an Italian city-state to the leading power in the ancient Mediterranean world. The kings must have left Rome relatively powerful. The scale of the walls, the probable size of the population, but most of all the early military successes all suggest Rome was already one of the politically powerful cities of central Italy around the year 500
BC
. The history of the first few centuries is hazy, but by the start of the third century
BC
, Rome’s influence extended throughout the Italian peninsula. Colonies dotted strategic points in the Apennines and on the Tyrrhenian Coast, while new roads had opened up communications to the Adriatic. Over the fourth and third centuries Rome fought on all fronts: Gauls to the north, Greeks in the south, a series of Italic peoples in the mountains of the Abruzzi and the arid plains of the Messogiorno. In the 270s they attracted the attention of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who crossed the Adriatic with a large army. Rome was defeated by him in several battles, but survived the war. By the end of the third century,
Romans had won two long wars against Phoenician (Punic) Carthage. The first (264–241
BC
) was largely a naval war in which Rome captured Sicily, and became master of the Greek and Punic cities on the island as well as the indigenous Sicilian peoples of the interior. The second Punic war (218–201) was fought in Spain and Africa as well as in Italy itself. Hannibal crossed the Alps in 217
BC
and the next year inflicted a terrifying defeat on Rome at Cannae. But he did not press home his advantage and lingered in southern Italy until 203 when he had to return to Africa to face Scipio’s army. Hannibal’s defeat at Zama the next year marked the end of Carthaginian power. During the second century
BC
, Roman armies marched even further afield. They took on and defeated the great Macedonian kingdoms of the east, the heirs of Alexander the Great. Carthage and the ancient Greek city of Corinth were both razed to the ground in 146
BC
. Roman armies defeated Gallic tribes north and south of the Alps, waged war on the Spanish Meseta, and resisted German invasions. The city grew and grew in size, was equipped with aqueducts and basilicas and other monuments paid from the spoils of war. The wealthy became even wealthier, citizen armies spent longer and longer away from home.