SPQR

by Mary Beard

  Hand in hand with the expansion of the imperial palace went an expansion of the imperial administration at the central hub of the empire. Little is known in any detail about how the first Augustus’ staff was organised, but it was probably an expanded version of the household of any leading senator of the previous century: large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves, acting in every capacity from cleaners to secretaries, with family and friends as advisors, confidants and sounding boards. That is certainly the impression given by the occupants of a large communal tomb (a so-called columbarium, or ‘dovecote’), discovered in 1726 on the Appian Way. This originally contained the ashes of more than a thousand of the slaves and ex-slaves of Livia, with small plaques recording their names and jobs. Those that survive give a snapshot of her staff: they included five doctors and a medical supervisor, two midwives (presumably for the rest of the household), a painter, seven seamstresses (or menders), a bedroom attendant (capsarius, possibly the ancient equivalent of ‘handbag carrier’), a caterer and a eunuch (function unspecified). This looks like the slave staff that any aristocratic lady might have had, but on a vastly expanded scale. Where they all lived is something of a mystery. They can hardly have fitted into the imperial couple’s Palatine houses and presumably must have been lodged elsewhere.

  By the time of Claudius, thirty years later, there was an administrative organisation attached to the emperor on a completely different scale and level of complexity. A series of departments or bureaux had been established to deal with different aspects of administration: separate offices for Latin correspondence and Greek correspondence, another to handle petitions to the emperor, another accounts, another to prepare and organise the legal cases judged by the emperor. They were largely staffed by slaves, many hundreds of them, and headed by divisional managers, who were at first usually ex-slaves – reliable administrators, whose loyalty to the emperor could more or less be guaranteed. But when the immense power that these men wielded became something of a cause célèbre with the traditional elite, members of the equestrian class replaced them as managers. The senators never enjoyed being upstaged by a powerful servile underclass prancing around (as they would have seen it) above their station.

  This looks very much like a modern civil service, but in one important sense it was not. There is no sign of the clearly defined hierarchies below the divisional managers or of the grading of posts, the qualifications and examinations that we now associate with the modern Western or ancient Chinese idea of the civil service. So far as we can tell, it was still based on the structure of the old-fashioned slave household, such as Cicero’s, even if vastly magnified. But it also points to another aspect of the emperor’s job that often gets forgotten among all the tales of luxury and excess: the paperwork.

  Most Roman rulers spent longer at their desks than at the dinner table. They were expected to work at the job, to be seen to exercise practical power, to respond to petitions, to adjudicate disputes throughout the empire and to give verdicts in tricky legal cases, right down to those that from the outside (though not to the parties involved, no doubt) appear relatively trivial. On one occasion, so a long inscription explains, the first Augustus was asked to pass judgement on a brawl in Cnidos, where the famous Aphrodite came from, on the southwestern coast of modern Turkey. It was a nasty local fight that had ended with one thug being killed by a falling chamber pot accidentally dropped by a slave from the upper window of the house that the ‘victim’ was attacking. Who was guilty, Augustus had to decide, the assailant or the pot dropper or his owner?

  It was the support of the emperor’s increasingly large staff that made it possible to deal with many cases like this, with the sacks of letters arriving in the palace post room and the streams of envoys that turned up, all expecting an imperial answer or audience. In that sense, it was rather like a modern civil service: for it must often have been a team of slaves and ex-slaves who read the documents, advised the emperor on the appropriate course of action and no doubt drafted many of the decisions and replies. Realistically, a good proportion of the letters ‘from the emperor’ received by local communities in the provinces and proudly put on display inscribed in permanent form in marble or bronze can hardly have been more than nodded through by him and stamped with his seal. But maybe that did not matter much to the recipients.

  The majority of those who lived in the provinces, or even in Italy, had only the vaguest idea, if any, of what the imperial palace was like or how the emperor’s administration operated. Only a tiny number would ever have seen the living emperor. They would, however, have seen his image over and over again, on the coins in their purses and in his portraits that continued to flood the Roman world. The atmosphere was not so different from that of a modern dictatorship, with the ruler’s face peering out from every shopfront, street corner and government department. It even occasionally was converted into edible form, stamped into the biscuits distributed at religious sacrifices, as a few of the surviving biscuit moulds make clear. In fact, the second-century CE scholar, teacher and courtier Marcus Cornelius Fronto, in a letter to his grandest pupil, Marcus Aurelius, treated the spread of imperial images as a source of pride, even if he was sniffy about the artistic talents on display in the spontaneous initiatives of the ordinary people. ‘In all the banks, shops, bars, gables, colonnades, windows everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘portraits of you are on public display, even if they are badly painted and modelled and carved in crude, almost worthless style.’

  The emperor’s face was ubiquitous, but it could be represented very differently. Only those with their eyes half shut could have failed to spot a dramatic change near the beginning of the second century CE in how the ruler looked. With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.

  This change cannot have been merely a whim of fashion or, as one ancient writer predictably speculated, a device for Hadrian to cover his spots. But the reason for it remains puzzling. Was it an attempt to emulate the Greek philosophers of the past? Hadrian was a well-known admirer of Greek culture, as was the philosophical Marcus Aurelius. So was it part of an attempt to intellectualise Roman imperial power, to re-present it in Greek terms? Or did it point in the opposite direction, harking back to the tough military heroes of earliest Rome, even before the era of Scipio Barbatus in the early third century BCE, when to sport a beard seems already to have been something remarkable in a Roman? It is impossible to know, and no ancient writing that survives ever explains the new beards. But, at the very least, they hint that within the palace someone was thinking hard about the imperial image, right down to the facial hair, and, for whatever reason, was prepared to make a break from tradition.

  73. The head of Hadrian in gilded bronze, with his characteristic facial hair. It was once on loyal display in a town in North Italy (Velleia, near modern Parma).

  Important, and visible, as some of these developments were, the basic structures of imperial power, as the first Augustus had formulated them, remained in place throughout the rule of these fourteen emperors, no matter who was on the throne: Tiberius near the beginning of the first century CE would not have found it difficult to slip into the imperial shoes of Commodus near the end of the second. They all continued to blazon the title ‘Augustus’, amid a string of other often very similar names. It has always taken a sharp eye to distinguish Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus from the man who was emperor after him, Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius, the pair better known as Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. To their face they were all called Caesar. ‘Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you’, as gladiators occasionally shouted to the emperor bef
ore fights, would have been a form of address appropriate to each and every one of them.

  They all continued to follow the Augustan precedent in building their way into power, in flaunting their generosity to the people and in displaying their military prowess – or they were much criticised if they did not. Vespasian’s most famous construction, the amphitheatre inaugurated under his son Titus in 80 CE, cleverly combined all three aims. Eventually known as the Colosseum, from a colossal statue of Nero that stood close by and lasted long after Nero’s end, this was simultaneously a massive building project (it took almost ten years to finish, using 100,000 cubic metres of stone), a commemoration of his victory over Jewish rebels (the booty from the war paid for it) and a conspicuous act of generosity to the Roman people (the most famous popular entertainment venue ever). It was also a criticism of his predecessor, pointedly built on the site that had once belonged to Nero’s private park.

  But the fourteen emperors were also heirs to the problems and tensions that Augustus bequeathed. For the ‘Augustan template’, though enduringly solid in some respects, was in others a precarious balancing act. It had left some issues perilously unresolved. In particular, Augustus had never solved the problem of succession to imperial power. He had left the role of the senate and the relationship between the emperor and the rest of the elite highly contested. And, more generally, awkward questions remained about how the power of the ruler of the Roman world was to be defined and represented. How, for example, did the parade of civilitas or the idea that he was simply the ‘first among equals’ (‘primus inter pares’, in the Latin slogan) fit with vast imperial honours and the emperor’s nearly divine status? Exactly how close to a god was the Roman ruler?

  All emperors and their advisors had to grapple with these dilemmas, which lie just below the surface of many of the lurid anecdotes. Several of the stories of the poisoning of imperial heirs, for example, point to the uncertainty of the rights of succession. The bantering insults of Gaius to his long-suffering consuls reflect the edgy relationship between senate and ruler. So it is to these defining conflicts of imperial power that we now turn: the succession, the senate and the status of the emperor, divine or not. They are as important to our understanding of how Roman imperial politics worked as the mammoth building schemes, military campaigns and generous benefactions; far more important than all the curious stories about crime, conspiracy or horses as consuls.

  Succession

  The murder of Gaius was a particularly bloody case of regime change, but the transmission of imperial power in Rome was often murderous. Despite the impressive survival rate of the emperors (fourteen rulers in almost 200 years is one testament to stability), the moment of succession was fraught with violence and surrounded by allegations of treachery. Vespasian in 79 CE was the only emperor in the first two dynasties to die without any rumours of foul play surfacing. Gaius, Nero and Domitian met obviously violent ends. There were rumours of murder surrounding the deaths of all the others. The names, dates and details change, but the story remains the same. Some said that Livia poisoned Augustus to ease Tiberius on to the throne; Tiberius was widely believed to have been poisoned or smothered to make way for Gaius; Agrippina is supposed to have dispatched her husband Claudius with some poisoned mushrooms in her successful bid to make her son Nero emperor; and some said that Domitian had a hand in the early death of Titus – contrary to a hopeful story in the Talmud which claims that after Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, a gnat flew into his nostril and gradually ate away his brain.

  Many of these stories must be fiction. It takes a lot to believe that the elderly Livia would have painstakingly smeared poison on figs still growing on a tree, then tricked her husband into eating them. But true or not, together they underline the uncertainty and danger in the transmission of power. The message was that succession almost never happened without a struggle or a victim. This was a pattern projected back to the myths of the early kings too: they enjoyed long reigns, but only two of the seven died natural deaths. Why was it so difficult? And what solutions did the Romans find?

  The first Augustus intended to make one-man rule permanent and to keep it in the family. But the series of deaths among those marked out as his heirs and the lack of any surviving sons from his marriage to Livia dogged his plans. Succession throughout the first dynasty continued to be fraught, as different claims from different sides of the Julio-Claudian family tree clashed. But the problems were bigger than that, and they would not have disappeared even if the imperial couple had produced half a dozen healthy boys.

  Augustus was trying to invent from scratch a system of dynastic succession, against the background of a fluid set of Roman rules about the inheritance of status and property. Crucially there was no presumption in Roman law that the firstborn son would be the sole or principal heir. The standard modern system of primogeniture is a fail-safe mechanism for removing any doubt about who should succeed, although – by making the order of birth the only criterion – it risks some decidedly unsuitable incumbents on the throne. In Rome, the eldest male child of the emperor would have had a certain advantage in trying to follow his father, but no more than that. A successful claim to power also rested on behind-the-scenes manoeuvres, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part and on the careful manipulation of opinion. It also depended on being in the right place at the right time. The only reliable way to guarantee a peaceful transition was to have the new emperor on the spot to take over the old Augustus’ signet ring as he breathed his last, with no awkward gap. That is what the rumour-mongers realised: most of the allegations of poisoning under the Julio-Claudians present the murder not as part of a plot to spring some new candidate into power but as an attempt to get the timing right and to ensure a seamless takeover for the man already marked out as the likely successor.

  These uncertainties about how to establish a legitimate claim to rule also help to explain the peculiarly murderous image of the Roman imperial court, where danger seems to have lurked on every fig and such an atmosphere of suspicion prevailed that Domitian is said to have had the palace walls lined with reflecting stone so that he could see who was coming up behind. Without any agreed system for the transmission of power, every relative counted as a potential rival of the emperor or of his likely heir – and it followed that those in the penumbra of the imperial family found themselves in a very perilous position indeed. Many of the stories may well be more fantasy than fact; the Roman elite was not by nature particularly cruel and ruthless, even if that is the image they have in film and fiction. What was ruthless was the fundamental logic of imperial succession. Tacitus captures that, with characteristic cynicism, in describing the events of the beginning of Nero’s reign in 54 CE. ‘The first death under the new emperor,’ he starts, implying that there were many more to follow, was that of Marcus Junius Silanus Torquatus, the governor of Asia. He was a man of no ambition whatsoever, so shamelessly apathetic, Tacitus explains, that Gaius had aptly nicknamed him the Golden Sheep. But his death was inevitable, and the reason obvious: ‘He was a great-grandson of Augustus.’

  There were alternative routes to power. One was exactly what the first Augustus had tried to preclude: elevation by the army. In 41 CE the Praetorian Guard in Rome had played the leading part in putting Claudius on the throne. In 68 CE, to quote Tacitus again, ‘the secret of imperial rule was revealed, that an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome’. ‘Somewhere other than Rome’ is a euphemism for ‘by the legions in the provinces’, as each of the four rival claimants to replace Nero was backed by army units from different provinces. Within eighteen months, Vespasian was raised to power in the East, with no connection by birth to the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It is clear, however, that he and his supporters felt that military force alone was not enough to secure his position. Despite the down-to-earth image he later projected, at the beginning of his rule widespread reports of the miracles he had worked underpinned his claims to the throne. In Egypt, jus
t before his proclamation as emperor, he is supposed to have restored sight to a blind man by spitting on his eyes and to have cured another man’s withered hand by standing on it. Whatever carefully manipulated display lay behind these reports (and whatever the uncanny similarity with a far better known miracle worker of the first century CE), eyewitnesses are said to have vouched for the miraculous cures years later, long after Vespasian’s death.

  The praetorians continued to influence imperial succession; certainly, no one would have been able to hold on to the throne if the troops in the city actively opposed him. But in the period up to 192 CE they never again engineered quite such an open coup as they had in 41 CE, nor in that period did the legions in the provinces ever again create an emperor. That is partly because from the end of the first century CE – after a brief interlude of relatively unproblematic succession in which Vespasian had been followed by his two natural sons – an alternative route to the throne was devised, which appeared to get round some of the earlier difficulties: adoption.