SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  The one big exception to this picture is found in Cicero’s relationship with his slave secretary Tiro, the man who in the medieval imagination was credited with the invention of a well-known form of shorthand. Tiro’s origins are entirely unknown, unless the far-fetched Roman gossip was right to suspect that Cicero was so fond of him, he could only have been Cicero’s natural son. He was freed with much celebration in 54 or 53 BCE, to become a Roman citizen under the name of Marcus Tullius Tiro. The relationship of Tiro with the whole Cicero family has often been seen as the ‘acceptable face’ of Roman slavery.

  Many of the family’s letters to him (no replies survive) brim with affection, chat and often concern about his health. ‘Your health makes us terribly worried,’ Quintus Cicero wrote, typically, in 49 BCE, ‘… and it’s an enormous worry that you are going to be away from us for so long … but really don’t commit yourself to a long journey unless you are good and strong’. And the occasion of Tiro’s grant of freedom was marked by joyous congratulation, and self-congratulation. Quintus again, writing to his brother from Gaul, where he was serving with Julius Caesar, captures something of the significance of the change of status: ‘I am really pleased with what you have done about Tiro and that you decided that his status was below what he deserved and that you would rather have him as a friend than a slave. I jumped for joy when I read your letter. Thank you.’ Tiro appears almost to play the role of a surrogate son around whom the sometimes dysfunctional family could happily unite. But even so, there is a lingering ambivalence, and Tiro’s servitude was never wholly forgotten. Years after his grant of freedom, Quintus wrote to Tiro to complain that, once again, no letter had arrived from him. ‘I’ve given you a good thrashing, or at least a silent ticking off in my head’, as Quintus puts it. A harmless bit of banter? A bad joke? Or a clear hint that in Quintus’ imagination Tiro would always remain someone you could think of thrashing?

  Towards a new history – of emperors

  Tiro long outlived his master. Cicero, as we shall see, came to a gory end in December 43 BCE, as did his brother, Quintus. Tiro lived on, so it was said, until 4 BCE, when he died at the age of ninety-nine. He had spent the intervening years fostering and controlling Cicero’s memory, helping to edit the correspondence and speeches and writing his biography, which – although it has not survived – became a standard source of information for later Roman historians. He even issued a large collection of his jokes. One of Cicero’s later admirers suggested that his reputation for wit might have been better had Tiro only been a little more selective.

  Tiro also lived to see a new permanent regime of one-man rule, emperors firmly installed on the throne of Rome and the old Republic an increasingly distant memory. This new regime is the theme of the last four chapters of SPQR, which explore the period of just over 250 years from the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE to the early third century CE – more specifically, to the particular turning point in 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. It is a very different story from that of the first 700 or so years we have explored so far.

  Roman history in this later period is in some ways much more familiar than anything earlier. It was during these centuries that most of those famous ancient landmarks still standing in the city of Rome were constructed: from the Colosseum, erected as a place of popular entertainment in the 70s CE, to the Pantheon (‘Temple of All Gods’), built fifty years later, under the emperor Hadrian, and the only ancient temple that we can still walk into in more or less its original state – it was saved by its conversion into a Christian church without wholesale rebuilding. Even in the Roman Forum, the centre of the old city, where the big political battles of the Roman Republic took place, most of what we now see above ground was built under the emperors, not in the age of the Gracchi, or Sulla, or Cicero.

  Overall there is much more evidence for the world of the first two centuries CE, even if no other individual ever stands out in quite such vivid detail as Cicero. That is not to do with the survival of vast new quantities of literature, poetry or history, though there are certainly volumes of that, and of increasingly varied types. We still have gossipy biographies of individual emperors; cynical satires, from the pens of Juvenal and others, pouring scorn on Roman prejudices; and extravagantly inventive novels, including the notorious Satyricon, written by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a one-time friend and later victim of the emperor Nero and filmed 2,000 years later by Federico Fellini. This is a bawdy story of a group of rogues travelling round southern Italy, featuring orgies, cheap lodging houses with beds crawling with bugs, and a memorable portrait – and parody – of a rich and vulgar ex-slave, Trimalchio, who almost gave his name to a much later classic novel; the working title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio at West Egg.

  The dramatic change is rather in documents inscribed on stone. We have already analysed a few of these from centuries earlier, whether the tombstone of Scipio Barbatus or the semi-comprehensible inscription mentioning the ‘king’ (rex) dug up in the Forum. But in those early periods they were relatively few in number. From the first century CE, for reasons that no one has ever really fathomed, there was an explosion of writing on stone and bronze. In particular, thousands and thousands of epitaphs survive from right across the empire, commemorating relatively ordinary people or at least those with enough spare cash to commission some permanent memorial for themselves, however humble. They sometimes refer to little more than the occupation of the dead (‘pearl seller’, ‘fishmonger’, ‘midwife’ or ‘baker’), sometimes to a whole life story. One peculiarly loquacious stone commemorates a woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the centre of a ménage à trois that split up after her death. There are also thousands of short biographies of leading citizens carved into the plinths of their statues all over the Roman world, and letters from emperors or decrees of the senate proudly displayed in far-flung communities of the empire. If the job of the historian of early Rome is to squeeze every single piece of surviving evidence for all it can tell us, by the first century CE the question is how to select the pieces of evidence that tell us the most.

  An even bigger difference, however, in reconstructing this part of the story of Rome is that we must now largely do without the luxury, or constraint, of chronology. That is partly because of the geographical spread of the Roman world. There is no single narrative that links, in any useful or revealing way, the story of Roman Britain with the story of Roman Africa. There are numerous microstories and different histories of different regions which do not necessarily fit together and which, retold one by one, would make a decidedly unilluminating book. But it is also because, after the establishment of one-man rule at the end of the first century BCE, for more than two hundred years there is no significant history of change at Rome. Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history. Of course there were all kind of events, battles, assassinations, political stand-offs, new initiatives and inventions; and the participants would have had all kinds of exciting stories to tell and disputes to argue. But unlike the story of the development of the Republic and the growth of imperial power, which revolutionised almost every aspect of the world of Rome, there was no fundamental change in the structure of Roman politics, empire or society between the end of the first century BCE and the end of the second century CE.

  So we shall start by looking in the next chapter at how, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the emperor Augustus managed to establish one-man rule as a permanent fixture – perhaps the most important revolution in the story of Rome – and then explore the structures, problems and tensions that both underpinned and undermined that system for the next two centuries. The varied cast of characters will include dissident senators, the drunken clients of Roman bars and persecuted (and, for the Romans, troublesome) Christians. The big question is: how can we best understand the world of the Roman Empire under an emperor?

  CHAPTER NINE

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  THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF AUGUSTUS

  Caesar’s heir

  CICERO MAY WELL have been sitting in the senate on the Ides of March 44 BCE when Caesar was assassinated, an eyewitness to a messy and almost bungled murder. A gang of twenty or so senators crowded round Caesar on the pretext of handing him a petition. One backbencher gave the cue for the attack by kneeling at the dictator’s feet and pulling on his toga. The assassins were not very accurate in their aim, or perhaps they were terrified into clumsiness. One of the first strikes with the dagger missed entirely and gave Caesar the chance to fight back with the only weapon he had to hand – his sharp pen. According to the earliest account to survive, by Nicolaus of Damascus, a Greek historian from Syria writing fifty years later but likely drawing on eyewitness descriptions, several assassins were caught in ‘friendly fire’: Gaius Cassius Longinus lunged at Caesar but ended up gashing Brutus; another blow missed its target and landed in a comrade’s thigh.

  As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide. The famous Latin phrase ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (‘You too, Brutus?’) is an invention of Shakespeare’s.

  The watching senators took to their heels; if Cicero was there, he was presumably no braver than the rest. But any quick escape was blocked by a crowd of thousands who were at that moment pouring out of the Theatre of Pompey next door, after a gladiatorial show. When these people got wind of what had happened, they too wanted to make for the safety of home as quickly as they could, despite Brutus’ trying to assure them that there was no need to worry and that it was good news, not bad. The confusion only got worse when Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, one of Caesar’s close colleagues, left the Forum to muster some soldiers stationed just outside the city, almost bumping into a group of assassins coming from the other direction to announce their victorious deed, closely followed in turn by three slaves carrying Caesar’s body on a litter back to his house. It was an awkward job with only three of them, and reports were that the dictator’s wounded arms dangled gruesomely over the sides.

  That evening Cicero met Brutus and some of his fellow ‘Liberators’ on the Capitoline Hill, where they had installed themselves. He had not been part of the plot, but some said that Brutus had called out Cicero’s name as he plunged his knife into Caesar – and in any case, as an elder statesman, he was likely to be a useful figurehead to have on board in the aftermath. Cicero’s advice was clear: they should summon the senate to meet on the Capitoline straight away. But they dithered and left the initiative to Caesar’s followers, who soon exploited the popular mood, which was certainly not behind the killers, despite Cicero’s later fantasies that most ordinary Romans in the end believed that the tyrant had to go. The majority still preferred the reforms of Caesar – the support for the poor, the overseas settlements and the occasional cash handouts – to fine-sounding ideas of liberty, which might amount to not much more than an alibi for elite self-interest and the continued exploitation of the underclass, as those at the sharp end of Brutus’ exactions in Cyprus could well have observed.

  A few days later, Antony staged a startling funeral for Caesar, including a wax model suspended above the corpse, intended to make it easier for the audience to see all the wounds he had received, and where. A riot broke out, ending with the body being given an impromptu cremation in the Forum, the fuel partly provided by wooden benches from the nearby law courts, partly by the clothes that the musicians tore off themselves and threw into the flames, and partly by the jewels and their children’s junior togas that women heaped on top.

  There were, at least to start with, no reprisals. Brutus and Cassius thought it safer to leave the city after the demonstrations at the funeral, but they were not deprived of their political offices (both were praetors). Brutus was even allowed, as praetor, to sponsor a festival in absentia, but the Caesarians quickly replaced the play he had intended to present – on the first Brutus and the expulsion of the Tarquins – by one on a less topical theme from Greek mythology. Following a proposal by Cicero, the senate had earlier agreed that all Caesar’s decisions should be ratified, in return for an amnesty for the assassins. It may well have been a fragile truce, but for the moment further violence had been avoided.

  That changed when Caesar’s appointed heir arrived in Rome, in April 44 BCE, from the other side of the Adriatic, where he had been involved in the preparations for an invasion of Parthia. Whatever the rumours and allegations, and whatever the status of the little boy whom Cleopatra had pointedly named Caesarion, Caesar had recognised no legitimate children. So he had taken the unusual step of adopting his great-nephew in his will, making him his son and the main beneficiary of his fortune. Gaius Octavius was then only eighteen years old and soon started capitalising on the famous name that came with his adoption by calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar – though to his enemies, as to most modern writers wanting to avoid confusion, he was known as Octavianus, or Octavian (that is, the ‘ex-Octavius’). It was not a name he ever used himself. Why Caesar favoured this young man will always be a mystery, but Octavian certainly had an interest in ensuring that the murderers of the man who was now officially his father did not get off scot-free, and that no one among his many possible rivals, principally Mark Antony, should step into the dead dictator’s shoes. Caesar was Octavian’s passport to power, and after a compliant senate formally decided in January 42 BCE that Caesar had become a god, Octavian was soon trumpeting his new title and status: ‘son of a god’. More than a decade of civil war followed.

  Octavian – or Augustus, as he was officially known after 27 BCE (a made-up title meaning something close to ‘Revered One’) – dominated Roman political life for more than fifty years, until his death in 14 CE. Going far beyond the precedents set by Pompey and by Caesar, he was the first Roman emperor to last the course and the longest-serving ruler in the whole of Roman history, outstripping even the mythical Numa and Servius Tullius. As Augustus, he transformed the structures of Roman politics and the army, the government of the empire, the appearance of the city of Rome and the underlying sense of what Roman power, culture and identity were all about.

  In the process of taking and holding power, Augustus also transformed himself, in a staggering shift from brutal warlord and insurgent to responsible elder statesman, signalled by his astute change of name. His early record as Octavian was a mixture of sadism, scandal and illegality. He fought his way into Roman politics in 44 BCE, using a private army and tactics that were not far short of a coup. He went on to be jointly responsible for a ghastly pogrom on the model of Sulla’s proscriptions and, if Roman tradition is to be believed, to have plenty of blood, literally, on his hands. One lurid tale claims that he personally tore out the eyes of a senior official whom he suspected of plotting against him. Only a little less shocking to Roman sensibilities was the story of how he casually impersonated the god Apollo at a lavish banquet and fancy-dress party, held while the rest of the population was close to starving because of the deprivations of civil war. How he left all this behind to become the founding father of a new regime and, in the eyes of many, the model emperor and the benchmark against which his successors were often judged was a question that many observant Romans came to ask. And historians have puzzled and disagreed ever since, both about his radical transformation and about the nature of the regime he established and the basis of his power and authority. How did he do it?

  The face of civil war

  By the end of 43 BCE, in little more than eighteen months after Octavian’s arrival in Italy, the politics of Rome had been turned upside down. Brutus and Cassius had been allocated provinces in the East and left Italy. Octavian and Antony had come to blows in a series of military engagements in northern It
aly and then patched things up again by forming with Lepidus a ‘triumvirate for establishing government’. This was a formal, five-year agreement that gave each of the three men (triumviri) power equal to consuls, their pick of what provinces they wanted and control over elections. Rome was in the control of a junta.

  And Cicero was dead. He had made the mistake of speaking out too powerfully against Antony, and in the new round of mass murder that was the triumvirate’s main achievement, his name featured among those of hundreds of other senators and knights on the dreaded lists. A special hit squad was sent for him in December 43 BCE, and they cut off his head as he was being carried in a litter away from one of his country properties in a hopeless attempt to go to ground (hopeless partly because one of the family’s ex-slaves had leaked his whereabouts). It was another symbolic finale to the Roman Republic, and discussed for centuries afterwards. In fact, Cicero’s last moments were endlessly replayed in Rome’s oratorical training schools, where the question of whether he should have begged Antony for mercy or (even trickier) have offered to destroy all his writing in return for his life was a favourite debating topic on the curriculum. In reality, the sequel was more sordid. His head and right hand were sent to Rome and pinned up on the rostra in the Forum. Antony’s wife Fulvia, who had once been married to Cicero’s other great enemy Clodius, came to view the trophy. The story was that, in her gloating, she took the head down, spat on it and pulled out and pierced the tongue over and over with the pins she had removed from her hair.