SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  5. A glimpse into the world of Rome in the fourth century BCE – and a rare example of high quality artistic production at that period. These are the handles of the ‘Ficoroni Cista’, an elaborate bronze casket, so-called after its eighteenth-century collector. The inscription on the object records that it was made at Rome by Novios Plautios, and was given to her daughter by a woman called Dindia Macolnia.

  6. This painting from an early third-century tomb at Rome offers a contemporary glimpse of the Samnite Wars. Fighting on the lowest register includes a figure (on the right) with a large plumed helmet. Above the apparent scenes of ‘surrender’ outside the battlement have sometimes been differently interpreted. Is perhaps the toga-clad ‘Fabius’ on the right giving some kind of military decoration to a Roman – not a Samnite – soldier on the left?

  7. Scenes of fighting from the François Tomb at Vulci (mid fourth century BCE) hint at an Etruscan view of some of the characters in Roman history. Written labels identify the figure on the far left as ‘Macstrna’ or Mastarna who was, according to the emperor Claudius identical with Servius Tullius. On the far right ‘Aule Vipenas’ or Aulus Vivenna (perhaps a lost Roman king) dispatches an enemy.

  8. Remnants of the First Punic War raised from the bottom of the sea off Sicily: here one of the rams of the warships. Several of these have writing stamped into the bronze. On the Roman rams we can read traces of officialdom: ‘Lucius Quinctius the son of Gaius, the quaestor, approved this ram.’ On the one surviving inscribed Carthaginian ram, we read: ‘We pray to Baal that this ram will go into this enemy ship and make a big hole.’ It is a clear contrast in national ‘style’.

  9. The most famous modern reconstruction of the Roman triumphal procession is by Andrea Mantegna, whose series of ‘The Triumphs of Caesar’ was painted for the Gonzaga family of Mantua in the late fifteenth century. This panel shows Caesar on his Renaissance-style triumphal chariot. Behind him stands the slave whose job was to whisper in the triumphant general’s ear to remind him that he was, despite the glory, just a man.

  10. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, the pair and rival of the more famous Column of Trajan, still stands almost forty metres high in central Rome. Spiralling all around it are scenes from the emperor’s wars on the Danube that went on for most of his reign (161–180 CE). On the lowest level the bearded emperor is shown sacrificing. On the third level (above) a battle is waged around a German hut.

  11. The emperor Caracalla’s family. This painted wooden panel shows his father the emperor Septimius Severus with his mother Julia Domna behind. In front on the right is the young Caracalla; on the left the face of his brother, the murdered Geta, has been rubbed out.

  12. A characteristic image of Livia, the wife of the first Augustus, sculpted in shiny – and expensive – black basalt from Egypt. Her hairstyle, with a roll of hair at the front and a bun at the back, was highly traditional, signalling old-fashioned Roman virtues.

  13. One vivid trace of the luxury of the imperial court are the remains of the pleasure barges that the emperor Gaius had constructed on Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, between 37 and 41 CE. Though they were heavily damaged in World War II, some of the extravagant fitments and interior decoration still survive – like this bronze head of the snake-haired Medusa, which fitted over the end of one the wooden beams.

  14. One image of Roman dining. This painting from Pompeii captures the hierarchies of a Roman party (note the small figure of a slave at the bottom left removing the guest’s shoe) and the fantasies of excess (on the right another guest is already being sick). Although this particular occasion appears to be an all-male gathering, that was not the Roman norm.

  15. The Bar of the Seven Sages at Ostia. Here the great thinker ‘Solon … of Athens’ (his name is written in Greek on either side of him) watches the scene from his lavatory, while his advice on defecation appears above: ‘To shit well (ut bene cacaret) Solon stroked his belly’.

  16. A Roman slave collar. The tag offers a reward if the slave should have escaped: ‘I have run away, catch me. Take me back to my master Zoninus and you will get a reward.’ It is possible that some of these collars were intended for animal rather than human property. But the fact that we cannot now be certain of the difference between them tells its own story.

  17. A gold bracelet found near Pompeii, inscribed ‘Dominus suae ancillae’ – ‘From the master to his slave girl’. It may be a touching token of the man’s affection and a hint at intimacy between the two. What the slave girl’s attitude was to the present (and to the giver) we can only guess.

  18. Three scenes from life in a laundry at Pompeii. At the top, workers are treading the cloth. In the centre, one man is brushing a piece of cloth, another carries a frame with an owl on top (a mascot of the laundry trade), while in the corner a customer waits with her maid. At the bottom, a woman on the left is collecting some article of clothing, and other garments hang on a line overhead.

  19. A seal stone in carnelian commemorating the victory at Actium in 31 BCE. It shows Octavian in the guise of the god Neptune, carrying a trident and mounting a sea-chariot. The name of the engraver, or the owner, Popil(ius) Alb(anus) is written in Greek letters across the top.

  20. The ‘Great Cameo of France’ dates to the reign of Tiberius and represents the imperial world order. Augustus, now a god, is reclining in heaven. In the middle register, Tiberius sits on the throne, flanked by his mother Livia. At the bottom, the conquered barbarians are in their place. It has been in France since the thirteenth century (hence the name), and was then misidentified as a biblical scene of Joseph at the Court of the Egyptian Pharaoh.

  21. The ‘Peutinger Table’ (so called after one of its early owners) is a version of a map of the Roman empire made in the thirteenth century, but very likely based ultimately on the map displayed in first-century BCE Rome by Augustus and Agrippa. In our terms, it is more a route diagram than a map, almost seven metres long, showing the roads, rivers and towns of the empire. This section shows the Nile delta, with part of Crete to the left, and Asia Minor above.

  EPILOGUE

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  THE FIRST ROMAN MILLENNIUM

  IN 212 CE the emperor Caracalla decreed that all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, wherever they lived, from Scotland to Syria, were Roman citizens. It was a revolutionary decision, which removed at a stroke the legal difference between the rulers and the ruled, and the culmination of a process that had been going on for almost a millennium. More than 30 million provincials became legally Roman overnight. This was one of the biggest single grants of citizenship – if not the biggest – in the history of the world.

  For centuries, defeated enemies had become Romans. Slaves had been granted Roman citizenship at the same time as their freedom. And, as time went on, provincials in vast numbers, both soldiers and civilians, were made citizens as a reward for loyalty, service and collaboration. This was not entirely without controversy or conflict. Not all of those who were given citizenship wanted it. Some Romans did not conceal their suspicion of outsiders, citizens or not (‘I can’t bear a city full of Greeks’, as the satirist Juvenal voices the complaint). And the desire of some of Rome’s Italian allies to gain the citizenship from which they felt excluded partly drove one of the bloodiest wars in Roman history, the so-called Social War in the early first century BCE. But the underlying pattern is clear. Caracalla in 212 CE completed a process that in Roman myth Romulus had started a thousand years earlier – that is, according to the conventional date, in 753 BCE. Rome’s founding father had been able to establish his new city only by offering citizenship to all comers, by turning foreigners into Romans.

  Why Caracalla chose to take this step, at precisely this moment, has puzzled historians ever since. He was the second ruler in a new dynasty that came to power after the assassination of Commodus on 31 December 192 CE. In the first civil war at Rome since the brief conflict after the death of Nero in 68 CE, different units of the army, including the Praetorian Guard and legions in
the provinces, attempted to install their own candidate on the throne. One of these was Lucius Septimius Severus, originally from Leptis Magna in North Africa, who marched into Italy backed by the army he had been commanding on the river Danube. His first years as emperor, until 197 CE, were spent eliminating the opposition. Caracalla was his son and heir, who ruled from 211 CE – and was officially known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. For, in a ludicrous twist on the use of adoption in imperial succession and in a desperate gambit for legitimacy, Septimius Severus arranged for himself and his family to be retrospectively adopted by the long-dead emperor Marcus Aurelius. ‘Caracalla’ was a nickname taken from the particular style of military cloak (caracallus) that he often wore.

  Caracalla is not remembered as a far-sighted, radical reformer. He is best known as the sponsor of the largest set of public baths then built in Rome, whose towering brick walls still provide the impressive backdrop for a summer, open-air opera season. But that hardly hints at the bloodier aspects of his reign. This started in 211 CE with the murder of his younger brother and rival, Geta. In a tawdry replay of the fratricide that marked the origin of the city of Rome, Caracalla apparently engaged a posse of soldiers to finish the young man off as he cowered in his mother’s arms. It ended when Caracalla was just twenty-nine years old, in 217 CE, with assassination by one of his bodyguard, who took advantage of a private moment when the emperor was relieving himself by the roadside to plunge the knife in. The commander of the Praetorian Guard at the time, Marcus Opellius Macrinus, followed him briefly on to the throne. Probably implicated in the assassination, Macrinus was the first Roman emperor who was not by birth a senator.

  This inglorious career of Caracalla has often suggested that there must have been sinister, or at least self-interested, motives behind the citizenship decree. Many historians, including Lucius Cassius Dio and Edward Gibbon, have suspected that it was prompted by a need to raise money, for these new citizens would automatically have become liable for Roman inheritance tax. If so, this was an extremely cumbersome way of going about it. There was no need to give citizenship to more than 30 million people if all you wanted to do was increase tax revenue.

  Whatever lay behind it, this decree changed the Roman world forever, and that is why my story of Rome closes here, at the end of the first Roman millennium. The big question that had guided politics and debate for centuries, about the boundary between the Romans and those they ruled, had been answered. After a thousand years, Rome’s ‘citizenship project’ had been completed and a new era had begun. It was not an era of peaceful, multicultural equality, though. For no sooner had one barrier of privilege been removed than another was put up in its place, on very different terms. Citizenship, once granted to all, became irrelevant. Over the third century CE, it was the distinction between the honestiores (literally ‘the more honourable’, the rich elite, including veteran soldiers) and the humiliores (literally ‘the lower sort’) that came to matter and to divide Romans again into two groups, with unequal rights formally written into Roman law. It was, for example, only honestiores who were exempted, as all citizens once had been, from particularly cruel or degrading punishments, such as crucifixion or flogging. The ‘lower sort’ of citizens found themselves liable to the kind of penalties that had previously been reserved for slaves and non-citizens. The new boundary between insiders and outsiders followed the line of wealth, class and status.

  The citizenship decree was only one element in a wide series of transformations, disruptions, crises and invasions that changed the Roman world beyond recognition in the third century CE. The second Roman millennium – which did not finally end until Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in the East by the sixth century CE, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE – was grounded on entirely new principles, on a new world order and, for most of the time, on a different religion. The autocratic regime established by the first Augustus had been based in a political language and institutions that went back as far as anyone could trace in the first millennium of Roman history, and what I have called the Augustan template of imperial rule provided a relatively stable political framework for almost two hundred years after Augustus’ death in 14 CE. But if the emperor Tiberius, who succeeded the first Augustus, could have slipped fairly comfortably into the imperial shoes of Commodus at the end of the second century CE, he would not have understood what it was to be an emperor a few decades further on. Rome in its second millennium was effectively a new state masquerading under an old name. Whether this millennium was one long, slow period of decline; a series of patchy cultural and political changes which eventually transformed the ancient world into the medieval; or an extraordinarily dynamic era of art, architecture and cultural reflection depends on your point of view.

  Historians now often talk about ‘the crisis’ of the third century CE. What they mean is the process by which, after the assassination of Commodus in 192 CE, the Augustan template collapsed. The number of emperors is one obvious sign of that. In the nearly 180 years between 14 and 192 CE – apart from the single brief interlude of civil war after the death of Nero, when there were three unsuccessful claimants to the throne – there were just fourteen emperors. In the hundred years between 193 and 293 CE there were more than seventy (the list is elastic depending on how many unmemorable co-emperors, usurpers or ‘pretenders’ you decide to include). But, more to the point, any attempts to keep the legions out of the process of making emperors dramatically failed. Almost all the men who claimed the throne in the middle of the third century CE did so with the backing of one army unit or another. It was more or less continuous civil war. And there were flagrant subversions of traditional claims to power. For Septimius Severus to announce that he and his family had been adopted as heirs by an emperor who had died more than ten years earlier strained even the most flexible Roman standards of adoption.

  At the same time, the city of Rome was eclipsed as the centre of power. Emperors were not often there but hundred of miles away with their armies. They did not have the time, incentive or cash to follow the Augustan model of leaving their mark on the city in brick and marble or of acting as popular benefactors. After the vast baths that Caracalla constructed in the 210s CE, there were hardly any major imperial building projects in the capital for eighty years, until the emperor Diocletian built his even bigger set of public baths in the 290s (large parts of which still stand outside Rome’s main railway station). The absence of emperors from Rome also hastened the decline of the senate. There was no place for civilitas between emperors and senators, for delicate consultation or even for walkouts and stubborn protests by high-minded and unrealistic senators when the man on the throne was not in sight. Emperors increasingly ruled remotely, by decree or by letter, and without reference to the senate. The elevation to the throne of Macrinus, who was not a senator (and more such emperors followed), was another sure indication that the senate could be bypassed.

  What lay behind these changes, and what was cause and what was effect, remains fiercely debated. Invasions by more efficient and often substantially ‘Romanised’ groups of ‘barbarians’ from outside the empire played a part. So too did the effects of the widespread plague in the late second century CE, which even on moderate estimates of its death toll must have seriously undermined Roman manpower. So too did the delicate balance of the Augustan template, with its failure to establish clear rules for succession and its awkward compromises between emperor and senate. Once flouted, it crumbled. But whatever the causes, the new Rome that emerged from ‘the crisis’ of the third century CE was strikingly different from anything that we have been exploring in Rome’s first millennium.

  The city of Rome irrevocably lost its place as the capital of the empire and fell to invaders on three occasions in the fifth century CE, for the first time since its sack by the Gauls 800 years earlier. The Roman world came to be controlled from regional capitals, such as Ravenna and Constantinople, modern Istanbul. The western and eastern parts of the empire were governed
separately. And, after periods of coordinated persecution of the Christians in the later third century CE, the universal empire decided to embrace the universal religion (or vice versa). The emperor Constantine, the founder of the city of Constantinople in the early fourth century CE, was the first Roman emperor to formally convert to Christianity, baptised on his deathbed in 337 CE. Constantine did, in a way, follow the Augustan model of building himself into power, but what he built was churches.

  Not everything changed in this new Rome, and certainly not all at once. The population of the city, Christian or not, were still enjoying spectacles in the Colosseum, probably wild beast hunts rather than gladiators, until well into the fifth century CE, and emperors in Constantinople sponsored popular entertainments on the old model of benefaction, often in the form of chariot racing. But many of the political continuities were superficial or even misunderstood. As a gesture to tradition, Constantinople was given its own senate house, but it was a building for an institution that had become a fossil. When an admittedly rather muddled commentator tried to explain the name of this building in the eighth century CE, he decided that it must have been built by a man called ‘Senatus’.