The Romans also came under attack from the Macedonian Greeks to the east. Just over a century previously, the Macedonian leader, Alexander the Great, had conquered Anatolia, Egypt, and Persia, reaching as far as the banks of the Indus. This large, short-lived empire fell apart on his death, eventually fracturing into more than half a dozen separate states. Even so, the Macedonians remained a formidable fighting force.
Fortunately, the Romans were led by Publius Scipio, the only military strategist of the age who could match Hannibal’s genius. Scipio led an invasion of North Africa, which struck at the heart of Carthage, and in 202 BC defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zuma. Carthage sued for peace, and henceforth the victorious Roman general became known as Scipio Africanus, on account of his North African great victory, which had saved the empire and led to him becoming a consul.
During the Punic Wars, Roman power began expanding through Spain, North Africa, southern France, and perhaps most importantly of all, into Greece. At this point, Greece remained arguably a superior civilisation to the Romans, both culturally and possibly even militarily. The secret of Alexander the Great’s unprecedented military success had been the Greek phalanx. Basically, this consisted of an impenetrable advancing line of soldiers with interlocked shields bearing short swords. Behind them was a similar line of soldiers with longer spears, which protruded beyond the shields of the front line. Supported by wedge-formations of cavalry, this proved an irresistible force.
Then in 197 BC, the invading Roman army came into conflict with the defending Greek army at the Battle of Cynocephalae. The Macedonian Greek forces outnumbered the Romans, but were hampered by swirling mists and the vulnerable flanks of their phalanxes.The Macedonian phalanx proved no match for the more manoeuvrable Roman legions, which were supported by cavalry, including twenty war elephants. (The Romans had learned from the Carthaginians: elephants were unstoppable, and terrified even the strongest infantry formations.)
From this point on, the Roman legions would prove all but invincible, until they reached the extremities of Gaul (France); the harrying Germanic tribes of the Rhine who disappeared into their forests and avoided fixed battles; and the Piets of northern Britannia, where according to legend the famous Ninth Legion (of 5,000 men) marched north into the mists of Caledonia, never to return, with no trace of them being discovered to this day.
The history of Ancient Rome is usually divided into three distinct eras. As we have seen, the initial Kingdom gave way to the Republic in 476 BC. It was during the four and a half centuries of the Republic that Rome expanded into an Empire. Increasingly, the republican tenor of Rome would come under threat during these years. This is best illustrated by the social situation in Rome itself. Initially, the ruling patrician families and the plebeian commoners appear to have lived in relative harmony.
This was largely due to a system of patronage, known as clientia, by which upper class ‘patrons’ looked after their lower class ‘clientele’. Such patronage might typically include employment, protection, sponsorship for office and so forth – with reciprocal support for patrons. The latter indicates an important mutual aspect of this arrangement. Patrons could employ crowds of supporters, vociferously calling for political office for their paymaster. The more clientele a patron had, the more prestige he could command.
As the empire expanded, more slaves were despatched to Rome, and this arrangement of patronage came under stress. Plebeians who had been employed in menial tasks found themselves surplus to requirements. Landowners took on slaves to do their agricultural work, and important citizens even took on educated slaves as scribes. In a parallel development, the governors of provinces of the new empire became increasingly wealthy. Egypt and the Carthaginian hinterlands of Africa Vetus (Old Africa) provided increasingly large and lucrative shipments of grain.9
Most significant of all was the growing power that began accruing to the successful commanders, who began expanding the empire, as well as dealing with such troubles and revolts as arose within it. Amongst the legions, an aspect of clientia continued to flourish. To avoid conflict of interest, foreign legionaires were invariably posted far from their homeland. (The Ninth Legion, which disappeared in Caledonia, consisted of Spanish soldiers.) Consequently, legionaires felt increasingly bound to their commander, their loyalty invested in the man who led them and rewarded them with booty, rather than the rulers in distant Rome. The commander of a legion (legatus) held his post for up to four years, often passing on to a provincial governorship, where he could amass a substantial fortune. Charismatic commanders increasingly came to regard their troops as their own men. One such was Julius Caesar, whose life aptly parallels the last days of the Republic.
Julius Caesar was born into the nobility in 102 BC. Romans had long admired Greek learning, and in 75 BC Caesar was on his way to Rhodes to study oratory when he was captured by Aegean pirates. Insulted at the low ransom the pirates required for his freedom, he vowed to them that on his release he would hunt them down and crucify them – which he did. Through connections and ability, he quickly rose to become a political tribune. On a posting to Spain he saw a statue of Alexander the Great, prompting him to realise that at his age, Alexander had ruled the world. This spurred his already overweening ambition.
By 59 BC, he had been elected (by means of bribery) as a consul. Yet during his period of office, he sought to redistribute land amongst the poor. Such was typical of Caesar’s character: both ruthless, yet true to his beliefs. His time as consul was followed by a series of military campaigns in which he proved himself the equal of any commander. His exploits included the first invasion of Britain (55 BC), building a bridge across the Rhine, and an ultimately victorious series of campaigns against the Gauls (58–50 BC). During the course of this bitterly fought campaign, which included the loss and slaughter of a Roman legion, Caesar is said to have despatched as many as 100,000 slaves to Rome, helping to pay off the huge debts he had accumulated in furthering his ambitions.
In 50 BC, Caesar was ordered to disband his army and return to Rome to face charges of exceeding his orders. Had Caesar returned alone, he would have faced criminal prosecution, with his many enemies calling for his death. Instead, he marched his 13th Legion back to Italy. By marching across the Rubicon (a river in north-east Italy), he entered Roman territory bearing arms, an act of treason from which there was no going back. In the ensuing civil war, he chased his rival Pompey to Egypt, where he hunted down and killed his enemy. There then followed his celebrated affair with Cleopatra.
On his return to Rome, he assumed dictatorial powers. He at once began instituting a number of much-needed reforms, including a redistribution of land, pensions for veterans, and in 45 BC the introduction of a new calendar. Known as the Julian calendar, after its originator, this would last for one and a half millennia; we still retain the same names for the months, with July being named after Julius Caesar. Other reforms included a concentration of power, and bestowing upon himself the title ‘dictator in perpetuity’, an honorific he would hold for just one month before he was assassinated in March 44 BC.
The reign of Julius Caesar was a tipping point, signalling the death throes of the Republic. As a man he was a contradiction, emphasising many of the best, and the worst, aspects of Ancient Rome. The most obvious, but often overlooked of his qualities was his sheer intelligence. This was counter-balanced by his vanity, which ran the full gamut of his amour propre – from never forgetting a slight, to his constant worry over his receding hairline. Which brings us to his love life. Despite going through three wives, and juggling mistresses even in the midst of his most pressing campaigns, he is also known to have had a number of serious homosexual affairs, for which he suffered at the hands of the satirists and gossip-mongers in the senate.
Caesar’s most noticeable characteristics were insatiable ambition and increasing megalomania, which were matched by his belief in the simple virtues of early Rome: physical and mental vigour, civic virtue and the like. He believed in reform
s that would return Rome to these early glories, a cause which endeared him to his followers. His reforms endeared him to the plebs and middle classes, as well as a sizeable faction of the patricians. Many, such as the equally charismatic general Pompey, would later turn against him – whilst still retaining their admiration for his many skills. .These included a military acumen on a par with Scipio, as well as highly developed and calculating political expertise.
He was also a fine, if unvarnished writer: his Gallic Wars contain precise (often self-serving) historical descriptions of his campaigns, and remain studied as classical texts to this day. He was also aware of the element of luck. The chances he took were often far more than calculated risks: he dared Fortuna, the goddess of luck. And he would certainly have seconded Napoleon’s remark: ‘I would rather have a lucky general than a good one.’
Looking back in history to the pre-Roman era, we can see that Caesar echoed many of the characteristics of those early rulers of empires, especially Alexander. Looking forward we can see uncanny echoes of his life and development in the many who would seek to emulate him – both seriously (Napoleon) and laughably (Mussolini).
A period of instability swept the Roman Empire, before Augustus took power in 27 BC as the first self-declared Emperor. This marks the beginning of the third period of Ancient Rome: the Empire, which would go through several transformations before its fall in AD 476. Ironically, the solid foundations of the Roman Empire were established well before the ‘Empire’ period, which mainly takes its name from the fact that it was ruled by an Emperor.
The first emperor Augustus was an adopted son of Julius Caesar, and would in time become known as Augustus Caesar. A precedent had been set: from now on the emperor would adopt his successor and bestow on him the name ‘Caesar’. The original meaning of this name is obscure and disputed, but it may well refer to Julius Caesar’s birth by Caesarean section, from the Latin word caedere ‘to cut’ (supine: caesum). Following on from the Roman emperors, the name would evolve into the Russian ‘Czar’, and the German ‘Kaiser’. Resemblances to the earlier Babylonian Belshazzar and the Akkadian-Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar fall into the ‘at best circumstantial and at worst non-existent’ class of history. But as we have seen, such ‘theories’ will always flourish – with items like the Chinese discovery of Australia, and Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods,10 making regular appearances.
More interestingly, many fundamental cultural theories held to be self-evidently true for centuries have also been relegated to this ‘non-existent’ class. Flat earthers and alchemists may have fallen foul of scientific investigation, but more plausibly supported theories remain vulnerable to newly discovered facts, or even simply a transformation of cultural outlook. In 1969, the British art historian Kenneth Clark delivered what was deemed at the time to be a definitive TV series named Civilisation. Almost half a century later, a series of programmes with similar grandiose ambitions, delivered by Mary Beard, Simon Schama and David Olugosa, would be named Civilisations, in the plural. This trio – an entertainingly erudite classicist, a British art historian of Jewish descent, and a British-Nigerian popular academic – extended their scope far beyond the Western tradition central to the patrician Clark’s vision.
Their fresh world-view included examples across the ages from every inhabited continent. Here too was a transformation that quite matched the end of the flat earth era. The solid, self-evident, two-dimensional plane of a single progressive Western civilisation had been transformed into a three-dimensional globe of multi-cultural traditions. History will always remain fluid, open to fresh interpretation – spurred by the discovery of new facts, the evolution of new modes of thought.
In the Empire period, the population of the city of Rome is thought to have been somewhere between 320,000 and a million, while the empire it ruled over covered the equivalent area (though not the exact territory) of modern Europe, containing a population of between 50-90 million. The range and inexactitude of these figures is indicative: indeed, the word ‘census’ is derived from the Latin word censere (to estimate). Roman citizens, and those foreigners lucky enough to attain Roman citizenship, were granted a number of privileges – such as the right to vote, immunity from certain taxes, the right to defend themselves at a fully legal trial, and the right to live in Rome. Women and slaves were not counted as citizens, although their number may have blurred the census estimates. Women of child-bearing age were almost permanently pregnant, with unwanted babies left out on street corners.
Not for nothing was it said that ‘all roads lead to Rome’. The characteristically straight Roman roads fanned out overland to the most distant parts of the empire. But they also attracted many to journey to the greatest city the world had yet seen. Curiously, this powerful urban centre did not actually produce anything. All goods, from grain to wine, nails to cloth, had to be imported – largely through the port of Ostia, some twenty miles south-west at the mouth of the Tiber. Here cargo arrived from all over the Mediterranean and beyond (grain from North Africa, tin from Cornwall, silk from China via the Levant); it was then transported up the Tiber on barges.
As the population of Rome began to swell, it became necessary to placate the common people, many of whom lived in crowded tenements and were left unemployed due to slavery. The authorities adopted a policy of panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’).This entailed free food and regular entertainments at the Colosseum, which took ten years to build (AD 70–80), and at its height was said to accommodate over 80,000 spectators. This staged such events as gladiatorial combats, malefactors being attacked and eaten by wild beasts, as well as occasional naumachia (mock naval battles). The latter were particularly popular, and pre-dated the building of the Colosseum.
The first of these was staged in 42 BC by Julius Caesar himself, in a large flooded pit beside the Tiber, estimated to have been some 500 yards long and 300 yards wide. This was a ‘mock’ battle only in the sense that it was staged – and on a huge scale. Several dozen vessels, including triremes (manned by galley slaves hauling three horizontal rows of banked oars), rammed their opponents prior to hand to hand fighting. Caesar’s initial spectacle involved 2,000 ‘soldiers’ and 4,000 ‘galley slaves’. Both ‘soldiers’ and ‘slaves’ consisted of prisoners-of-war and condemned criminals.
Such spectacles not only entertained the masses, allowing them to vent their blood lust, but also cowed them. Life was cheap, and authority was harsh to those who fell foul of it. Compare such entertainments with classical Greek theatre, held in amphitheatres, and attended by the population of a city state. Both forms had a cathartic element, but where one retold the ancient myths of its people (Oedipus and the like), the other was a demonstration of vicious brute force. One embodied art, democracy, and even psychological wisdom; the other indicated an increasingly rigid autocracy.
We may not know the exact populations of Rome and other cities in the empire, but owing to one of the greatest freak occasions in history, we can form a surprisingly precise picture of what life was like in such places. On 23 November AD 79,11 the volcano Vesuvius in southern Italy erupted, covering the nearby town of Pompei in volcanic ash, preserving it largely intact for posterity. Houses, people, streets, wine jars, dogs even – all the bustle and variety of Roman life was immobilised in a long agonising moment. We can see pictures of the richer inhabitants in the precisely preserved frescoes on the walls of their villas; we can hear the gossip and scandal peddled by the common people in the graffiti (‘Restitus was here’, ‘Handle with care’ [beside an outline of a penis], ‘Atimaeus made me pregnant’). There were even cartoons with speech bubbles on the walls of the taverns. We can tell what the inhabitants drank, how the rich banqueted, how citizens relieved themselves in communal rows of open lavatories, the illustrated service charges in the bordellos. All human life is here.
We can deduce from biblical references that things would have been only a little more primitive on the streets of ancient Babylon; likewise, we learn f
rom the fifteenth-century French poet, François Villon, that things were only a little more sophisticated on the streets of medieval Paris. If we judge by mortality rates, the lives of the underprivileged throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region remained much the same until the nineteenth century. During the Babylonian era, life expectancy amongst the common population has been calculated at around twenty-six years, similarly in Roman times it was twenty-five years, and during the medieval era thirty years. Not until nineteenth-century England did this rise to forty years.
Admittedly, all such figures are difficult to gauge, and heavily disputed. Were they skewed by the inclusion of high child mortality rates? Just how much did they apply to the ‘common people’, rather than the population as a whole? Here again, the notion of census would seem to imply a large element of estimation. My point is that despite variations in population, exceptional plagues, wars and so forth, the condition of life for the poor remained for the most part barely above subsistence level throughout these eras.
On the other hand, there is no denying that the Roman Empire marked a great leap forward in human history. Where the Ancient Greeks made a fundamental theoretical contribution, the Roman contribution was largely practical. This is, of course, a huge generalisation. Greek architecture, with its epitome on the Acropolis at Athens, was a wonder to behold. Yet it was the Romans who added the final counter-intuitive practicality in the form of the keystone, which both completed and held together the gravity-defying stones of the arch. This great invention enabled the introduction of longer straight roads, with arched bridges, and finally aqueducts, some more than fifty miles long, often supported by as many as three stacked rows of arches.
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