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  Becoming Imperial

  Myths of the deep past accumulated over time. Of course they were rewritten as Rome’s empire grew. If we compare stories like these to the foundation myths of other cities in the ancient Mediterranean, it becomes immediately clear that many of Rome’s traditions were not very unusual. A startling number of cities claimed descent from Trojan or Greek refugees.7 This was presumably because Homer’s epics had such great prestige, and because so little else was known about the early first millennium BC. Others claimed to be descended from wandering heroes, Hercules especially, but also Odysseus, Perseus, Antenor, and others. Most Greek colonies claimed divine sanction for their possession of the land, and the dispossession of the previous inhabitants. That sanction might take the form of signs, oracles, or miraculous events. Many paid cult to their founders, as the Romans in fact worshipped Romulus under the name Quirinus. Violent beginnings, battles with indigenous peoples, and marriages between incomers and native women, are also standard elements.8 Even the foundling turned founder has many parallels. Presumably these were the central elements of the first versions of Rome’s tales of origin. Only at a later stage can the prophecies have begun to include world dominion, and the legends started to explore the darker side of Roman nature.

  Unfortunately, we know very little of how Romans thought about themselves before they became an imperial power. The first Latin literature was created at the end of the third century BC.9 By that time Rome was without question the major power in the western Mediterranean basin, and it had for generations dominated the Italian peninsula. The first Roman historians, Fabius Pictor writing in Greek and Cato the Elder in Latin, were already setting out to explain how Rome had overtaken Carthage. Fabius Pictor had taken part in the wars against the Gauls of north Italy in the late third century, and was one of a delegation of senior senators who visited the oracle at Delphi in Greece seeking advice after Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae in 216 BC. Cato (234–149 BC) saw the defeat of Hannibal, and also took part in the first wars against the great kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. His book of Origins was the product of combing Greek scholarship for information about the prehistory of the peoples of Italy. Most of what he gathered must have been foundation legends similar to that of Rome. Earlier Greek historians of the classical period knew a little about Rome; but not much of what they had to say has survived. Rome seems to spring into history fully formed as an imperial power, spectacularly aggressive, with institutions well developed for surviving occasional defeats and converting military victories into lasting political dominion.10

  The Romans of this period already had a sense of their history as a rise to greatness. A contemporary of Cato, Quintus Ennius (239–169 BC), wrote an epic poem that was in effect a history of Rome from the beginning until his own day. It was called the Annales, and was the basis of education in the late Republic in the same way the Aeneid was under the empire. Cicero adored it, but only fragments now survive. All the same we have a good sense of Ennius’ ‘plot’. The first three books told the story of Rome from the fall of Troy through the foundation of the city and the rule of its seven kings until the Republic was created. Then followed twelve books relating Rome’s wars against other Italian communities; against the Macedonian king Pyrrhus; against Carthage, culminating in the conquest of Greek cities in Italy and Sicily; and then the first wars in Spain; and those fought in the Balkans during the early second century BC against the great kingdoms of the east. Ennius then added three more books describing the victories of his patron, the general Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, whom he had accompanied on campaign in the northern Balkans in 189–188 BC. On their return Nobilior built a great temple on the Field of Mars, one dedicated to Hercules and the Muses. A prototype of Augustus’ Fasti was also displayed in it. From the beginning, then, war and poetry went hand in hand. And Roman history was the history of Roman imperialism. Roman power was extended, just war by just war, until the entire sequence came to seem to have been sanctioned by the gods of Rome.11 Their favour could never be taken for granted, but through repeated acts of piety the Roman people retained the divine mandate. Triumph after triumph proclaimed the support of the gods.12 And while these epics and histories (and dramas too, although few have survived) were composed, the city itself became filled with victory temples, many vowed in battle and funded by the spoils donated by individual generals. The same generals decorated their own homes with trophies.

  This then gives us a Roman sense of empire. The rule of one people, the people of the toga, over those whom they had defeated in war; a rule sanctioned by the gods of Rome as a mark of their favour for a people who were uniquely pious. Only in the last century of the Republic did Romans develop means of describing the great political entity they had created.13 Our term ‘empire’ derives from the Latin imperium. Its fundamental meaning was ‘command’, and right up until the end of the Republic, this remained its primary sense. As late as Julius Caesar’s day the word imperator (the origin of our ‘emperor’) simply meant a general, someone invested with command. Soldiers on a battlefield might chant out the title after a battle as a way to honour their commander. Imperium was a temporary power and a personal one, granted him with solemn rituals for the duration of one campaign. Stepping back inside the city, which he had to do if he wanted to celebrate a triumph, meant relinquishing this power. Augustus was the first who never relinquished it. One sense that imperium acquired only very late in the process was the total territory controlled by Rome. Augustus’ account of his own life, inscribed on pillars before his tomb and disseminated as copies throughout the empire, proclaimed world hegemony and made clear that allied states and defeated enemies were all subject to Rome’s command.

  The Archetypal Empire

  The modern idea of empire has its own history. Yet Rome has a key place in the history of this idea. The Romans created a set of ideas and symbols that exercised a fascination over many subsequent generations. Other empires had touched the Mediterranean world before Rome, most recently those of the Persians and of Alexander. But their repertoire of ceremonials, titles, and images has had less of an afterlife, in part because Romans refused to acknowledge them as their equals, and invented their own language of world domination, in part because the Latin vocabulary of empire was the one adopted by later powers. The history of the idea of empire in the west is very largely the history of successive imitations of Rome. Each time Rome was copied, directly or indirectly, the idea of empire was modified. Yet Latin titles and imperial eagles lasted well into the twentieth century. ‘Empire’ plunges through European and finally world history, like a snowball rolling downhill.14

  The Roman Empire had many imitators and would-be successors. The rulers of the medieval west lived among the ruins of Roman monuments. Roman coins were still to be found in the fields. Roman walls embraced the tiny towns of Europe, and the best roads remained for centuries those the Romans had built, roads that still crossed rivers on stone bridges that early medieval monarchs could not rival. Latin remained the main language of literature, and classical texts were widely read and treated with exaggerated awe. And knowing Rome was inseparable from knowing about its empire. When Frankish kings began to extend their power over other peoples, Rome was the only possible model. At the end of the twelfth century, the French king was nicknamed Philip Augustus, and his main rivals were the German emperor and the Angevin kings of England, who included lesser kings among their vassals. Emperor meant, for much of the Middle Ages, the supreme secular position of leadership. Ordinary kings ranked below him, popes on a par.

  Besides, there were still live Roman emperors to admire and rival. They ruled in Constantinople on the Bosporus, the city we know as Istanbul and which had been Byzantium before. These emperors justifiably regarded themselves as Romans, the heirs of Justinian and Constantine at least as well as of their pagan predecessors. The language of their empire might now be Greek, and its domains had shrunk to the lands around the Aegean Sea, but the palace, the hippod
rome, and the libraries of Byzantium, as well as the ceremonial and titulature of the court, proclaimed its authentic Roman imperial style. North and west of Byzantium a great penumbra of peoples were drawn into its cultural sphere. Viking adventurers travelled across the European rivers to Novgorod and then on to the city they called Miklagard, the Great City. One of them carved some runes, still visible today, into the balcony of the great imperial church of Haghia Sophia, built by the sixth-century emperor Justinian. Its dome provided the model for Islamic mosques, themselves often built on the site of Roman temples or churches and often employing Roman columns in their construction. After the Fourth Crusade (1202–4) there were Frankish emperors in Byzantium for a while, briefly drawing the western and eastern traditions together. Even when the restored Greek emperors finally lost the city to the Turks in the fifteenth century there was no total rupture. Various princes took the opportunity to declare their own states a ‘Third Rome’: Moscow is the most famous. For a while there had in any case been a sultanate of Rûm ruling former Byzantine possessions in Asia Minor, and the Ottomans staged grand ceremonies in the hippodrome and worshipped in Haghia Sophia, now a mosque, just like their Christian predecessors. Roman political models had been less influential elsewhere in the Islamic world. Other aspects of Roman civilization periodically fascinated. The cities of Byzantine Syria had a brief period of prosperity after the Arab conquest. During the ninth century the Abbasid caliphs employed some of their Christian subjects to trawl Greek literature and translate whatever was valuable. Many medical texts and some works of philosophy have survived only in Arabic translation.15

  Empire had lasting resonance, then, as a set of symbols. From our distant vantage point we can watch the baton being passed down, generation to generation. The predominant dynamic seems to have been competition. Charlemagne employed the language of empire to consolidate Frankish hegemony: he and the papacy also found it a helpful tool in keeping the Byzantine emperor at bay. Four centuries later the author of the Chanson de Roland imagined Charlemagne as a great proto-crusader, who at God’s command would defend Christendom against the paien (the pagan). A few of the medieval German emperors took up this challenge. But mostly they employed the title of emperor to express their sense of being at the pinnacle of a worldly hierarchy, overlords of prince-electors, petty kings, and free cities from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. During the three centuries in which the Hapsburg family provided Holy Roman Emperors, the imperial style was further elaborated in Spain, Austria, and Germany. The enduring power vested in these symbols is demonstrated by the decision of Napoleon to abolish the Holy Roman Empire, and to proclaim the first French empire in 1804. Austria responded by declaring the Austrian Empire the same year. Nineteenth-century France experienced an alternation of republics and empires. The second French Empire perished after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870: the German Empire was born the next year. The British Queen Victoria took the title Empress of India in 1876. The nineteenth century saw brief New World empires established in Brazil, Haiti, and in Mexico. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted until 1918. The Russian tsars lost their empire just a year earlier: their title tsar (derived naturally from Caesar) can be tracked back in Slav languages as far as the rulers of tenth-century Bulgaria, some of Byzantium’s most formidable opponents. British monarchs retained the imperial title until 1948. The latest emperor in this tradition was Bokassa, who ruled the Central African Empire between 1976 and 1979.

  It is an obvious point to make, perhaps, but these polities had almost nothing in common. Nor do they correspond very well, in any age, to the list of imperial powers we might draw up on other criteria. The British, by most estimates, ruled an empire (or perhaps two) long before Victoria was persuaded to take the title. Spain was clearly an early modern empire, whether or not the ruling Hapsburg happened to be emperor. On the other hand, these claims cannot be dismissed entirely as megalomaniac fantasies. What we are observing is the enduring power of Roman models of empire to fascinate, especially at moments of intense competition for precedence. When monarchies vied for prestige, they reached for the eagles, the Latin titles, wreaths, and classicizing architecture. Their value was that they were instantly recognizable. Even Bokassa, as he seized power within the Central African Republic, demonstrated how well he had learned the symbolic language of European colonialism.

  The revival of the language of empire in the modern age seems particularly surprising. Rivalry between European monarchies was clearly one factor. Perhaps there were simply not many alternative vocabularies to express the global differentials of power being created. But there were multiple local factors too. Napoleon’s empire was not just about dominion abroad, it was also about the working out of the Republican project within post-Revolutionary France. Victoria’s assumption of the title Empress of India was not just about rivalry with her German son-in-law, Kaiser Wilhelm: it may also have reflected a growing recognition of the national identity of India. The last Mughal (deposed by the British in 1858) had taken the Urdu title Badishah-e-Hind, which is often translated as Emperor of India. The Russian monarchs’ use of the Slavic term czar or tsar also evoked the guardianship of Orthodox Christianity.

  Behind all this we can sense the emergence of a group of nation-states that regarded each other as in a league of their own, as great powers. Today, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, only three members of the G8 and only one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are still monarchies of any kind. But for much of the nineteenth century, all the leading nations had hereditary heads of state. The nineteenth century too was the high watermark of European interest in the classics, and especially in Rome. Perhaps it is not surprising that, by one route or another, so many of these monarchs became emperors, at least for a short while. The language and trappings of empire offered a way to express a sense that they were more than simply kings and queens, and that the nation-states over which they reigned were not ordinary nations.

  Empire did not lose its charm until the middle of the twentieth century. One by one monarchies were abolished, or rendered peripheral. Communist states found Rome a less attractive model than had their predecessors. Fascism was the last major political movement to make use of Roman models. Mussolini’s imitation of Rome was the most explicit: as well as using Roman precedent to make a claim to Mediterranean hegemony, his party was named after the fasces, the bundle of rods surrounding an axe that was the symbol carried before a Roman magistrate. German Fascism too made much use of classical Roman imagery, especially in the architecture of the Third Reich.16 After the Second World War the Japanese emperor was made to renounce his divinity, European empires were dismantled, and imperialism came to acquire a more and more pejorative sense. The British monarchy quietly put away the title after the end of the British Raj. Classical imagery was in any case less and less effective as the new professional and governing classes had less and less knowledge about Rome. ‘Imperialist’ became a term of abuse directed against colonial powers by newly independent peoples, and the label was used as a term of condemnation by all sides in the Cold War. Discussions of whether or not the USA is today an empire are rarely sympathetic towards American foreign policy.

  The multiple afterlives of the Roman Empire are one reason for the enduring importance of Rome. But they can also obscure our vision of Rome itself. It is worthwhile considering some of the less obvious contrasts between Rome and her nineteenth-century imitators. For one thing, the Roman Empire admitted no equals and recognized no predecessor. There was no notion of a community of nations, no elite club of superpowers; the Romans were a single people over and against the rest. Not all of their subjects and neighbours saw things this way. But empire for Rome was novel and unique. Rome was restoring nothing, and the world empire it created seemed, for a while, without precedent.

  Fig 2. A Mercury Dime, depicting the Roman fasces

  Empire as a Category

  The last notion of empire that I want to introduce is one the
Romans would have found hard to credit. This is the idea that empire is a particular kind of political entity, one that has occurred on several occasions and in several locations in world history. This usage makes the term ‘empire’ into a timeless socio-historical category; the very opposite of a phenomenon with its own history.

  We are all familiar, naturally, with the idea that ‘empire’ denotes a particular kind of thing. Alongside the Roman Empire we might want to set the British Empire, the New World empires of the Aztecs and Inkas, the Persians and the Assyrians in antiquity, the Spaniards in the early modern period, and so on. For everyday purposes, we associate empire with the conquest of other peoples or states, with grand capital cities and rich court ceremonial, with rule over a great swathe of territory, and with a leading place in historical narratives. Empires rise and fall, they dominate their neighbours, they gather exotic treasures from the edges of the earth, and claim to be at the centre of it. Empire evokes dreams of universal dominion: a Reich that lasts a thousand years, a flag the sun never sets on, a ruler who is a king of kings.