Rome: An Empire's Story (30 page)

This precisely describes its contents in thirty-five succinct chapters, which list in exhausting detail the peoples conquered, the monuments built in the city of Rome, and the gifts given to all and sundry. It also offers a highly tendentious account of his role in the civil wars. The Latin original of the title had more nuance. Augustus is described by the term
divus
—deified— rather than the blunt term for god, his achievements are glossed as those by which he made the entire world subject to the will of the Roman people, and his gifts are explained as the sums he expended on behalf of the state
and of the people. Saviour, conqueror, benefactor, patron, and a Roman who had outdone all his peers and all his predecessors. It is a longer epitaph than the one Sulla chose for himself, but maybe not so different.

Dynasties

Tiberius’ accession in
AD
14—long planned for and formidably resourced— went smoothly. This was the first in a number of crucial stages through which the charisma and standing enjoyed by Augustus personally become institutionalized into the role of emperor. Tiberius ruled until
AD
37, efficient and cautious, but remote and unpopular. Much of the latter part of his reign he spent away from Rome, ruling the city via his praetorian prefect. There were crises but he survived them.
AD
41 showed the dynasty could survive an assassination, that of Tiberius’ successor Caligula. After Caligula’s death the Senate had reportedly discussed a return to Republican government: the debate was still running when the imperial guard installed Claudius on the throne. As far as we know the issue was never seriously raised again. Nero’s suicide in
AD
68 left no obvious heirs, and a short civil war followed. It was the first in a century and it lasted less than two years. Governors in Gaul and Spain had been the first to rebel against Nero, and on his death installed Galba as his successor. But he failed to win over either Rome or the other armies and was murdered on 15 January
AD
69, the year remembered as that of four emperors. Otho was backed by the Praetorian Guard, Vitellius by the German legions, and Vespasian by the armies of the Danube and Syria and the prefect of Egypt. But after victory for Vespasian’s party, the institutions of empire snapped quickly back into place and all seemed to continue much as before. It was as if Senate, equites, people, army, and provinces all felt a need for one man to hold the centre. A bronze tablet records a senatorial decree passed in December
AD
69, and probably formally approved by the assembly shortly thereafter, which grants Vespasian a series of privileges, citing powers and rights granted to Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius as precedents. By the time it was issued Vespasian had no real rivals and the Senate and people no real choice, but it expresses the will of all sides for a restoration of the status quo before the civil war.

The events of
AD
69 show the importance of the person of the emperor as a symbolic centre, as a focus of ritual and cosmological power. For
Vespasian’s candidacy was supported by heaven. Josephus, a rebel Jewish leader in captivity, predicted it; Vespasian waiting at Alexandria performed healing miracles; the goddess Isis supported his cause. Without an emperor the Capitol burned and there were rumours of Druidic curses. The world did seem to be coming apart. German auxiliaries and Gallic rebels dreamt of founding a new empire on the Rhine. The installation of the new Flavian dynasty (Vespasian’s full name was Titus Flavius Vespasianus) immediately restored order to the world.

Descent mattered above all else. The title king continued to be avoided in Rome. But there can have been no doubt from the start that the Roman Empire was now a family affair. Not only did Augustus advertise himself son of the god (of the deified Julius Caesar, that is) but he covered the city in monuments named after family members and their spouses. The porticoes of Livia, Octavia, and Julia, the theatre of Marcellus, the baths of Agrippa joined the Julian and Augustan fora. That monumental idiom was maintained by his successors. Heirs were designated from his family, and the coming of age of his grandchildren was celebrated on the grandest scale. Poets and provincial cities soon got the idea: extravagant honours were paid to one imperial prince after another. The calendar of a military unit stationed on the Persian frontier shows many of these festivals were still being celebrated 200 years later. Consent to the hereditary principle is evident in the support given to otherwise very lacklustre emperors. Claudius, when raised to the throne by the Praetorians, had only his name and ancestry to recommend him. Many refused to believe Nero dead, and there were at least three pretenders claiming to be him. When Vespasian won the support of the eastern and Danubian armies for his bid for the throne it is very clear that one major recommendation was that he had two adult sons, Titus and Domitian, as potential successors. Despite the lack of any family connection, Vespasian’s formal imperial name was Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus. And in an innovation the title Caesar was employed to designate Domitian as his heir.

Imperial women had their part to play too in the presentation of a dynasty. The wives of emperors were public figures, appearing in ceremonial, honoured by the Senate, people, and army, and often given religious roles.
³
Augustus married his daughter to a series of potential heirs. Empresses were also the mothers of potential future emperors. Before her fall from grace, images of Claudius’ beautiful young wife Messalina, carrying the child Britannicus, advertised the posterity of the dynasty. Caligula’s sisters feature on his coinage and in portrait sculpture, associated with cardinal virtues.
⁴
Agrippina the Younger was celebrated as Mother of the Camps. Livia was given honours by the Senate, before and after her death. Imperial women might be given extravagant funerals and consecrated after their deaths as
divae
, the female counterparts of the deified emperors. Provincial cities often had priestesses of the living empress.

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

The power of descent should not surprise. Aristocratic families had run Rome since the beginning of the Republic, and the family remained at the centre of the Roman social order. Any other kind of monarchy would have been harder to explain. The Flavian dynasty lasted until
AD
96 when Domitian was assassinated. Again the imperial order snapped back into place, without even a civil war this time, and Nerva became emperor. He was not a very successful one, but his adoption of the dynamic general Trajan avoided a less smooth transition. None of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, or Antoninus Pius had sons, and a virtue was made of the necessity of selecting successors from more distant relatives and connections. Yet nomination was always accompanied by adoption, and if one reads the official names and titles of the emperors, these awkward transitions are obscured. So Trajan ruled as Imperator Caesar Nerva Traianus Augustus, Hadrian as Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, and so on. Adoption was in any case a very traditional means by which aristocratic families renewed themselves. Polybius’ friend Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, who sacked Carthage in 146 and was the victor of Numantia in 133
BC
, was in fact the natural son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the victor of Pydna, but had been adopted in childhood by Scipio Cornelius Africanus to ensure he had an heir. And testamentary adoption was the means by which Octavian (born Gaius Octavius) had become the son of Julius Caesar, in fact his uncle. Augustus had formally adopted his stepson Tiberius, and Tiberius adopted his nephew Germanicus. Imperial portraiture was fairly standardized and shows a concern to make Julio-Claudian princes show an exaggerated family resemblance.
⁵
Adoption expressed continued belief in the importance of families and dynastic succession. So it was no surprise that given Marcus Aurelius did have a son, Commodus, he duly succeeded. His assassination in
AD
192 did not result in an orderly replacement. After a couple of false starts, another brief civil war followed between the generals of the major armies. The war was almost a replay of the events of
AD
69, with different armies backing their own candidates after the failure of the Senate of Rome and the Praetorians to create a local successor. The victor was Septimius Severus, who founded a dynasty that remained in power until
AD
235. Severus’ son now known by his nickname Caracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus but eventually ruled as Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Pius Augustus. These extravagant displays of continuity not only masked breaks between dynasties, but also asserted the stability of the order despite the frequency of assassinations. Caracalla himself was killed in 217, six years
after he had murdered his co-emperor and brother Geta with his own hands. In fact, assassinations only rarely caused civil wars, and these were typically short affairs. From the point of view of provincial populations the replacement of emperors, whether by adoption or murder, probably mattered very little. However precarious the position of emperor might seem, the institution was very stable, and stabilized the empire as a whole.

That stability came to an end in the early years of the third century. The story of how first of all renewed wars on the northern frontier, and then the rise of an aggressive new dynasty in Persia, created a military crisis that nearly destroyed the empire will be told in
Chapter 13
. The restored empire that re-emerged in the 280s had new military, fiscal, and administrative institutions, a new coinage, and soon a new public religion. But it still had emperors. More than twenty emperors ruled—or tried to do so—between
AD
235 and 284: to aristocratic historians some of them seemed almost as brutal and uncouth as the barbarians they spent most of their time fighting. But the emperors of the fourth century busily set about founding their dynasties just as the Severi had done, with fictive adoptions, the use of ancient dynastic names and titles. The dynastic principle actually grew stronger in the centuries that followed. When Theodosius I died in
AD
395 his 11-year-old son Honorius, who had already been formally co-emperor for two years, took over the western Roman Empire. Rome had never had a child emperor before. The eastern empire was ruled by his elder brother Arcadius who was still in his teens. Both emperors struggled to assert themselves against their chief ministers and female relatives. This situation would have been unthinkable in the early empire, but is in fact an indication of how deeply entrenched the hereditary principle had become at Rome.

Emperors and Empires

Over the millennium and a half between Augustus’ victory and the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 almost every Roman institution disappeared or was utterly transformed. Popular assemblies petered out during the early first century
AD
. Elections were moved into the Senate by Tiberius, and although we hear of occasional formal acclamations by the people, their political role was over. When the masses gathered to cheer or jeer at emperors it was in the circus, the theatre, or the amphitheatre.
⁶
The Senate survived much longer, but it progressively lost its functions: embassies were
rarely received in the Senate after the first century
AD
, and during the second century laws began to take their authority from decisions of the emperor not from senatorial decrees.
⁷
During the third century senators lost many of their roles in government. Most of this was accidental rather than planned, consequences of the diminishing time emperors spent in the city of Rome. The restored empire of the fourth century had a separate imperial bureaucracy and multiple imperial courts, one for each member of a college of emperors. Senates existed in Rome and Constantinople, but they had little role in government. The equestrian order, Rome’s junior aristocracy, enjoyed a period of prominence in the early empire, supplying many military commanders, financial officials, and even governors: it was the basis of new military and civil administrations in the late empire. But by the end of the fourth century it no longer existed as a separate entity.
⁸
The public priesthoods were swept away by Christianity in the early fifth century. Roman citizenship was extended to provincial aristocrats, to former soldiers, to ex-slaves, and eventually to almost everyone in the early third century. As a result its value and significance declined. The city of Rome itself became marginalized as the emperors spent less time there. Constantine’s new capital on the Bosporus became a rival and then replaced Rome completely when Italy was divided up among barbarian kingdoms.