Rome: An Empire's Story (3 page)

Romans of the later periods imagined that at its height the Republic was a harmonious system in which the ambitions of the mighty were guided by the wisdom of the Senate, with the support of a deferential people. The ruin of the Republic was attributed (in different ways) to the luxury and arrogance brought by empire. For the early imperial historian Velleius Paterculus

The first Scipio paved the way for Roman domination, the second opened the door to luxury.
¹

Others historians chose other watersheds, but the pattern of virtuous rise followed by vicious fall was a commonplace. The truth is more complex. Social conflicts of one sort or another occurred throughout Roman history. But the urban violence and civil wars that began at the end of the second century
BC
were on a new scale. The last century of the free Republic was at once the period of greatest territorial expansion, the period in which Roman literary and intellectual culture achieved its classic form, and also 100 years of bloody civil war. Conflicts between Romans and their Italian allies became conflated with social struggles between the poor (or those who claimed to represent them) and the rest of the wealthy. Traditional rivalries between aristocrats were supercharged by the proceeds of imperialism. Politicians recruited first mobs, and then armies to fight their corners.

A destructive feedback loop was created between competition at home and aggressive warfare abroad. Generals thought in the short term, with an eye always on opportunities when they returned. They took spectacular risks, attacked Rome’s neighbours without the permission of Senate or people, handed over conquered territories to be exploited by their political allies, and gave little thought to the long-term security of Rome. Foreign allies of dubious loyalty were allowed to build huge power bases on the frontiers. Romans were loathed in the provinces. The low point came when Mithridates, the King of Pontus, a former Roman ally whose power had been built up by Rome and whose increasingly aggressive actions had been ignored by a Senate preoccupied with Italian affairs, invaded Roman-controlled western Asia Minor. At Mithridates’ command 10,000 Italians were slaughtered in the Greek cities of the province. Rome briefly lost control of all territories east of the Adriatic. This was just another opportunity for Roman generals. Sulla was first given the army, and then deprived of it, but he refused to step down and instead marched his soldiers on Rome. The forum ran with blood, and he got his way, and after organizing Rome as he saw fit marched east, where he sacked Athens, before returning to fight his way back into Rome. Declaring himself dictator he then ‘proscribed’ a list of political enemies. Anyone whose name was on the list could be killed without punishment, and their property was forfeit. Sulla was a model for all those generals who came after, including his lieutenant Pompey, his enemy Caesar, and those who came after Caesar including the future Emperor Augustus. All of these acquired great armies for foreign wars, and ultimately used them to campaign against each other in the provinces, while spending money in Rome on political faction and grand monuments. Conflict came to a stop at the battle of Actium in 31
BC
, with the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra by Caesar’s heir Octavian, later rebranded as Augustus in a conscious attempt to make civil war (and with it aristocratic liberty and the power of the people) history.

The Early Empire

The long reign of the first emperor, Augustus—he died in
AD
14—is the fulcrum of Roman history. Before him there was the Republic: after him only emperors. The 300 years that followed are known as the early empire or (after Augustus’ other title of First Citizen,
princeps
) the Principate.

Much of Augustus’ way of running Rome was really a continuation of the main themes of Republican history, and this was exactly the way he wanted it to be seen. Once his own position in Rome was secure, and the civil war armies had been largely demobilized, he engaged on campaigns of conquest and civic building on scales that surpassed the achievements of Pompey and Caesar. At his accession, Rome dominated the Mediterranean through a network of provinces and alliances. But civil war and aristocratic rivalry had started many wars beyond the region that remained unresolved. Augustus extended Roman direct rule across half of Europe to the rivers Rhine and Danube, fixed a boundary, and made peace with the Persian Empire. On Julius Caesar’s death many building projects had been begun but not yet finished. Augustus completed these and added new ones of his own, turning the Field of Mars into a sort of monumental theme park, and appropriating the Palatine Hill for a complex of imperial residences and temples, the origin of our term Palace.

Less ostentatiously, Augustus succeeded in making the Roman state civil war proof. The rather shambolic mess of governmental and fiscal expedients imposed by one conquering general after another were drawn into a more regular system of provincial government. Rome now had a dedicated military treasury with which to pay a new standing army. The Roman and Italian aristocracies were given roles in the new order as governors, and as military commanders. But the money, and the loyalty of the soldiers, was kept firmly in Augustus’ hands. Augustus, not the people and certainly not the Senate, now decided which aristocrats would occupy which magistracies and which priesthoods. Indeed all important decisions were now made in the imperial court. The Senate and people of Rome were given greater honours as they lost power. But busts and statues of Augustus were visible everywhere, portraying him as a general, as a priest, and as a god. He and his successors were worshipped in every city and province alongside the ancestral and domestic gods, and by the soldiers in the camps as well.

The real mark of Augustus’ success was that he was able to pass on most of his powers to a series of successors. Rome avoided civil war for a hundred years after Actium. Augustus’ immediate successors were not all talented: one (Caligula) was assassinated, and another (Nero) committed suicide because he thought he had lost control of the empire. But the system survived, with few modifications. When conflict between generals did break out, after the disaster of Nero’s reign, it was only because none of Augustus’ family survived to provide a new emperor. The war lasted less than two years (
AD
69–70) and the victor, Vespasian, engineered a very Augustan
restoration. The empire shuddered but was left undamaged. Without any formal establishment of a new constitution or title, the Roman emperor had become effectively the chief office of the Roman state. Weak and incompetent individuals could not now discredit the system, and there is no sign that anyone wished to do without the emperors. When Caligula was killed in
AD
41 the Senate did briefly discuss a return to the Republic, but spent more time thinking about a possible successor. While they debated, the Praetorian Guard found Caligula’s uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the palace and made him emperor. From this point on the question was always simply Who should be emperor?

And emperor followed emperor. The Flavian dynasty ruled for most of the late first century
AD
. Wars of conquest added Britain and parts of southwest Germany to the empire, client kingdoms were swallowed up, frontiers fortified. A series of imperial forums extended out from the old Republican Capitol to the valley of the Colosseum. The city gradually acquired the trappings of an imperial capital. The assassination in
AD
96 of the last Flavian, Domitian, shook the system much less than the death of Nero had. During the second century a series of long-reigning emperors presided over a relatively stable empire. Trajan (98–117) led wars of conquest north of the Danube and into what is now Iraq. His successor Hadrian (117–38) travelled widely around the empire. The emperors became more overtly monarchical and dynastic, especially outside Rome where they did not need to worry about senatorial sensibilities. An itinerant court emerged, one in which favourites and concubines competed for influence, scholars and poets were entertained, and the prefects of the Praetorian Guard acted as grand viziers. Provincial communities sent streams of ambassadors to track down the emperor wherever he might be. They might have found Hadrian on the banks of the Nile, or supervising the construction of the great wall that crossed northern Britain, helping plan his great new temple of Venus opposite the Colosseum, making a speech to soldiers on parade in Africa, or at ease in his vast palace at Tivoli or in his beloved Athens. The empire was ruled from wherever the emperor happened to be.

The early Roman Empire was a world at peace. Warfare was minor in scale, and emperors rarely had difficulty in restricting it to the frontiers. The economy and population grew. The number of Romans increased as provincial aristocrats, former soldiers, and freed slaves were granted citizenship: by an edict of the early third-century Emperor Caracalla (198–217), almost everyone in the empire was enfranchised. Roman law suddenly embraced everyone. The lawyer Ulpian, writing in the aftermath of this
most spectacular of imperial benefactions, insisted wills would be valid in any language, Celtic or Syriac as well as Greek and Latin. Roman ways of life were widely adopted, new technologies of architecture and manufacturing spread in the provinces. The rich in particular decorated their spectacular mansions with imported marbles and donated grand buildings to their native cities. Shared cultures of bathing, of education, of eating emerged in the cities of the empire. Even the poorest spectated at gladiatorial combats, beast hunts, athletic festivals, and other ceremonies, often focused on the imperial house. The early third century
AD
marked the apogee of ancient urbanism. To be sure there were parts of the empire where nine out of ten people still lived in the countryside. But in central Italy and western Anatolia, in North Africa, and Syria and Egypt, maybe thirty per cent of the population lived in cities or large villages. Most of the monuments of the Roman Empire that impress us so much today when we travel around its former provinces were built in this period. Trajan’s conquest of Dacia was the last permanent expansion to the empire. Wars continued to be fought through the second century, but generally on the emperors’ terms. Emperors and local elites alike seem to have been relatively prosperous, although it is unclear how far this rested on genuine growth and how far on the gathering of property into a smaller and smaller number of hands.

Conditions changed around the turn of the second and third centuries
AD
. Urban building declined from before 200 in the west and before 250 elsewhere. No new theatres or amphitheatres were built after this point, the number of inscriptions plummets, and temple dedications seem fewer. At least some cities began to shrink in size, again especially in the west. Meanwhile the wars on the northern frontier seem to have taken more of the emperors’ time and resources. Perhaps this began as early as the reign of Marcus Aurelius, when wars against the Marcomanni of the middle Danube raged almost continuously between 166 and 180. Another round of civil war followed the murder in 192 of Marcus’ son Commodus. The struggle between provincial generals was a close rerun of what had followed Nero’s suicide, and the Severan dynasty that emerged ruled Rome 193–235 in a fairly traditional manner. But the revival of the Persian Empire under the Sassanian dynasty in the early third century put the army (and the treasury) under new pressure. For the next half-century, the empire was subjected to increased war on the Danube and the Rhine, suffered raids deep into the empire that resulted in the sack of cities like Athens and Tarragona which had hardly seen a soldier in 300 years, fought off major Persian offensives, and had to deal with secessions that for a while split the empire into three separate territories.
Most emperors lasted only a few years, some only a few months, and few died in their beds. Increasingly they were drawn from military backgrounds, and their links with Rome and the Senate became even more attenuated. Military recovery began in the 260s but the empire was not a unified whole until the end of the century. The long reign of Diocletian, declared emperor in 284 and abdicating in 305, marked the empire’s survival.

The Later Roman Empire

By the early fourth century, the Roman world was a very different place. Cities had in some regions shrunk back to tiny walled circuits built hurriedly out of dismantled monuments. Some of the most recently conquered territories had been abandoned. There was still a Senate in Rome, but its members no longer had much role in government or military command. The empire had a new religion, Christianity, and a new capital at Constantinople with its own Senate, its own Seven Hills, and its own imperial palace. The empire had a new currency too, with which to pay much higher taxes than ever before, needed to pay bigger armies and a growing bureaucracy. There was now a college of up to four emperors at any one time, the senior ones titled Augusti, the junior ones Caesars. Each had his own court and each was to concentrate on a different region of the empire, but especially on the northern and eastern frontiers. From now on the emperors had to keep a constant watch on the barbarians, and had to manage a difficult relationship with the rival empire of Persia.

The history of Persia in this period parallels that of Rome in many respects. Shapur II, Persian king of kings (309–79), created a highly centralized empire in which a bureaucracy replaced the quasi-feudal baronies that had often barely acknowledged the authority of the Parthian kings. The Persian Empire too had a state religion, Zoroastrianism. Throughout late antiquity the frontier hardly shifted. Both empires had to deal with religious minorities and powerful priests. Wars were frequent and some cities regularly changed hands within a great border zone that stretched from Armenia in the north through Syria to the Arab world. But there were also periods of relative calm, and traders, missionaries, spies, and envoys moved back and forward between the two brother empires. That situation lasted until the seventh century when the Arab conquests destroyed the Sassanian Empire and very nearly the Roman one too.