Rome Read online

  AD 235–84

  ‘The Anarchy’, a prolonged period of military crisis

  AD 284–305

  Reign of Diocletian. Conventional beginning of Later Roman Empire

  AD 306–37

  Reign of Constantine

  AD 313

  Constantine’s Edict of Toleration

  AD 361–3

  Julian fails to restore the worship of the ancestral gods

  AD 378

  Battle of Adrianople. Eastern empire’s army defeated by Goths

  AD 476

  Last western emperor deposed by Ostrogoths

  AD 527–65

  Justinian attempts to reconquer the west

  AD 636

  Arab armies defeat Roman forces at Yarmuk

  AD 711

  Arabs cross the Straits of Gibraltar, invading Visigothic Spain

  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 arm
ies spent longer and longer away from home.

  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, maki
ng 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.