Rome: An Empire's Story (32 page)

Much of this evolved over time. There was no moment when the role of emperor was actually designed, indeed it lacked a label for a surprising time. Octavian drew on ideological support and titulature from all possible sources.
Augustus
had a helpfully vague sense of the divine,
tribunicia potestas
evoked a popular mandate,
princeps senatus
(senior member of the Senate) asserted respect for hierarchies of dignity as well as for the Senate’s place in the state, a cluster of priesthoods and other titles alluding to magisterial power and personal heroism completed the package. Most of this was focused on the city of Rome. Out in the provinces he was king in the Greek world, pharaoh in Egypt, and goodness knows what to Gallic and Spanish tribesmen. The army hailed him as
Imperator
, the title awarded to victorious generals: in return he called them ‘Fellow soldiers’.
²³

Court and Empire

Historians of the imperial era complained that under the emperors you never knew for sure what was going on. Tacitus and Dio were senators, and they shared the prejudices of their order, but they were not completely wrong. Empire brought the end of public elections, the end of those meetings of the assembly at which orators competed to persuade the people to war or peace or to accept or reject controversial legislation, the end of
contiones
, those open meetings addressed by magistrates at moments of crisis, the end of political cases in the law courts, and the end of free speech in the Senate. Politics had once taken place largely in the public domain: that space was still there, but it was now for ceremonial. Decision-making took place elsewhere.

Politics had been palatialized. Emperors received information in private and discussed matters of state with their friends and family. Friends might include senators and equestrians. Many emperors had close friendships with individual senators, and many of their relatives were members of one or other of Rome’s aristocratic orders. The equestrian commanders of the Praetorian Guard were often very close to the centre of power. Sejanus and Macro were powerbrokers in the Julio-Claudian period, their second-century successors accompanied the emperor on campaigns, acting as effective viziers, and by the fourth century praetorian prefects were the senior figures in the imperial bureaucracy. But this was not the same as formally consulting the Senate or involving them in decision-making.

Besides, there were more sinister influences than the emperor’s friends and the praetorian prefects. Aristocrats suspected—with good reason—that some emperors paid more attention to their slaves and ex-slaves than they did to senators. Claudius’ attempts to give public honours to imperial freed-men were very unpopular. Later emperors kept their former slaves out of sight, appointing equestrians to be the public head of departments in which we may suspect freedmen still did most of the work. Imperial women were especially mistrusted. Not only were they believed to exert undue influence over the emperor. Their rivalries were said to divide the imperial house, especially when they were fighting over the succession prospects of their sons and husbands. Rumour abounded, along with all sorts of accusations. Even emperors could feel out of the loop. During one crisis the Emperor Claudius appealed to his most trusted freedmen. ‘Am I still emperor?’ It was
a good question: his empress had divorced him and her new lover was planning to adopt their son.

The location of all this activity is a familiar one. It was the imperial court.
²⁴
All monarchies have courts, and they fill vital functions, especially in traditional societies. Courts regulate access to the monarch, ensuring his role as decision-maker is deployed where it matters. Courts offer protection and services to monarchs. Where there are other powerful institutions— whether a senate, a church, or a parliament—courts defend the prerogatives of the monarchy within the state. Courts vary enormously in their nature. Early medieval kings made do with a warrior band, their family, and household servants. Rituals of entertainment and hospitality were elaborated over time and domestic servants, like the chamberlain, came to acquire new roles in government. The most elaborate courts were those of absolutist monarchs: at Versailles and similar palaces, ceremonial acted to integrate the kingdom, employing elaborate etiquette and ritual to create finely nuanced hierarchies of honour.
²⁵

The Roman imperial court was a rather shadowy entity in the first century
AD
. Like the courts of medieval Europe it evolved out of the household, but in this case out of the slave households of Roman aristocrats. Pompey and Caesar had depended on trusted ex-slaves and on their clients and close friends. It is no surprise that the emperors did the same. But to begin with there were no elaborate ceremonials and indeed no real palace to stage them in. The Palatine Hill, between the Roman forum and the circus Maximus, had been an area of aristocratic housing in the late Republic. Cicero, Crassus, and Antony were among those who had mansions there. Augustus acquired one of these houses and gradually extended his control of the hill, joining together houses, temples, and open areas to create what was in effect an imperial compound. More and more buildings were added by his immediate successors. From the Flavian period on a more coordinated complex emerged, with great reception areas and decorations in coloured marble.
²⁶
One probable reason for the initial monumental reticence, in a city now full of spectacular marble temples and places of entertainment, was the lack of a formal description of the position of emperor in the first century. Augustus was a king everywhere but in Rome, and in many parts of the empire he was a god as well. Only in the capital did he have to exercise tact. The palaces of Macedonian kings had been rather grand structures, with great libraries and also hunting enclosures modelled on those of Persian emperors. Augustus did have a library on the Palatine but it was lodged in
the temple of Apollo. The wilder entertainments took place on the Bay of Naples.

Institutionally too, the Roman court was not like that of the Seleucids, the Antigonids, and the Ptolemies. Roman emperors advertised their
civilitas
—their sense of civic virtue—yet the gap they really had to watch was not between ruler and subject, so much as emperor and aristocrat.
²⁷
The problem was that not much separated the Caesars from other noble families. Macedonian kings had surrounded themselves with companions, young men of noble birth, but their empires contained no real aristocracies apart from the elites of the greater cities. Their courts were places apart. Medieval European kings tried only to marry the daughters of other monarchs, again to separate themselves from their nobility. Yet Roman emperors were members of the Roman nobility, no royal blood ran through their veins, and they were not an anointed lineage. The Senate included their close relatives and—since they never steeled themselves to marry the daughters of Persian emperors—the Senate included their relations by marriage as well. Most emperors had been through a senatorial career of some kind or other, and they knew the prejudices of the senators from inside. Claudius, interestingly, was an exception: perhaps this contributed to his giving freedmen public honours, including the right to wear badges of office associated with Republican magistrates. Clearly there were advantages too in the close relation between emperors and the nobility. Emperors had a wider choice of marriage partners than if they had been restricted to royal princesses. More importantly ancient institutions like patronage, grand dinners (
cenae
) attended by friends of different status, and the notions of formal friendships and enmities could be adapted to new ends. When an emperor publicly renounced his friendship with a senator it was the equivalent of a death sentence. Emperors did well too out of the obligation on Romans to leave legacies to their friends. Yet despite this, Rome constrained the court and limited the freedom of the emperors.

And so they left. There was no single moment at which the emperors abandoned the city. Like other aristocrats they had always maintained residences outside Rome. From the first decades of Augustus’ reign there had been times when their attention was required elsewhere. Tiberius spent the last decade of his reign outside Rome, mostly on Capri, partly on the Bay of Naples. Caligula and Claudius spent long periods in the north-west provinces, Nero spent a year and a half in Greece, and Domitian campaigned in Germany. When emperors left Rome, the court went with them. What this
meant was that they were accompanied by a vast train of guards and slaves, who included personal attendants of every kind and concubines as well as secretaries, and the heads of the palatine offices.
²⁸
Embassies, if they wanted a decision, had to track down the emperor wherever he was. From the second century
AD
there are more and more anecdotes concerning formal receptions on the frontier or in great provincial cities. Hadrian notoriously spent a huge proportion of his reign travelling, to Egypt and Africa, to Britain and the northern provinces, to Athens again and again. Marcus felt compelled to spend much of his reign in the Danube provinces, facing the barbarians.

Itinerant monarchy has often been a solution to the problems of communication in large states and early empires. Medieval kings sometimes moved their hungry retainers to wherever the food was rather than try to get provisions to a single capital. Some Chinese emperors toured shrines in annual cycle. Roman emperors moved to see the world and to get close to the problems that concerned them most at the time. Severus fought campaigns in Persia and Britain even after he was secure on the throne. Since they could govern from anywhere, it mattered little where they were based. True, they could no longer receive foreign visitors in the Senate, or go through the motions of discussing legislation there. But perhaps these were not disadvantages. The city of Rome remained a powerful symbol of empire, even though it played no really essential role in governing the empire.
²⁹
Trajan and Hadrian and Severus and Caracalla all engaged in great building programmes there. Most third- and fourth-century emperors had less time to spare and maybe less money, although that did not prevent them building themselves grand palaces in York and Trier, Sirmium and Split and Constantinople. Most later emperors visited Rome, but it was to look at past glories. Senators worked hard to keep lines of communication open, sent frequent embassies, and even had some of their children enter the imperial bureaucracy. But even as they elaborated the slogan Roma Aeterna, they must have known in their hearts that the centre of the empire was no longer the city, but rather wherever the emperor and his court happened to be.

Further Reading

Perhaps no period of Roman history has been subjected to the same scrutiny as the transition from Republic to Empire. The range of approaches and ideas can be
sampled in three collections of papers,
Caesar Augustus
(Oxford, 1984), edited by Fergus Millar and Erich Segal;
Between Republic and Empire
(Berkeley, 1990), edited by Kurt Raaflaub and Mark Toher, and Karl Galinsky’s
Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus
(Cambridge, 2005). There have been many biographies and assessments of Augustus. The most interesting is his own, the
Res gestae divi Augusti
, which has now been translated and equipped with a marvellous commentary by Alison Cooley (Cambridge, 2009).

Fergus Millar’s
Emperor in the Roman World
(London, 1977) set the emperor at the centre of the empire, not as an animating force but as the point at which all other institutions met. It changed fundamentally how the history of the early empire was written. Brian Campbell’s
Emperor and the Roman
Army (Oxford, 1984) is an essential supplement. How contemporaries understood and described their rulers is the subject of Matthew Roller’s brilliant
Constructing Autocracy
(Princeton, 2001) and also, in a way, of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s subtle
Suetonius
(London, 1983). Studies of the reigns of individual emperors are too numerous to mention: my favourites include Barbara Levick’s
Tiberius the Politician
(London, 1976) and Anthony Birley’s
Hadrian: The Restless Emperor
(London, 1997). Miriam Griffin’s
Nero: The End of a Dynasty
(London, 1996) is at once the history of a key turning point, the portrait of an exceptional reign, and a study of the culture and politics of the court. It is also a great read.

The different circles around the emperor are surveyed in John Crook’s
Consilium principis
(Cambridge, 1955), Paul Weaver’s
Familia Caesaris
(Cambridge, 1972), and most recently in Tony Spawforth’s
The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies
(Cambridge, 2007), which set Roman palace politics alongside those of Egypt, Persia, Macedon, and Han China. Another collection that deals with some of the same issues is David Cannadine and Simon Price’s
Rituals of Royalty
(Cambridge, 1987). Imperial women are not the only subjects of Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson’s two collections entitled
I, Claudia I and II
(Austin, Tex., 1996 and 2000), but they gather together a fascinating collection of art historical, historical, and literary studies.

XII
RESOURCING EMPIRE

There were always kingdoms and wars in Gaul right up until you submitted to our laws. Although we have often suffered at your hands we have, by right of conquest, imposed only this one thing on you, with which we keep the peace. For peace between nations is impossible without soldiers, and there are no soldiers without pay, and no pay unless taxes are paid. Everything else we share with you.