Rome
Page 25
More than any of these groups, however – more than senators, equestrians, civil servants, decurions, veterans, farmers, the mob – the regime depended on its soldiers. The army was trimmed down to a permanent force of 28 (later 25) legions, each around 5,000 men, formed of long-service professionals, all of them Roman citizens. Each legion was divided into ten cohorts, and each cohort into six centuries, such that the basic tactical sub-unit was a century of 80 heavy infantry commanded by a centurion. Each legion also had a small cavalry unit for reconnaissance and communications, and strong field artillery, perhaps 60 light arrow-shooters, and 10 heavier stone-throwers. As well as approximately 125,000 legionaries, there were roughly equal numbers of auxiliaries, non-citizen troops of the kind traditionally raised from Rome’s allies as cavalry, light infantry, and other specialists, but now organized as regulars and integrated into the standing army. Legionaries served for 20 years and enjoyed good pay and conditions of service; upon retirement they received grants of land or money generous enough to set them up as substantial members of the communities where they settled. Auxiliary service also offered good pay and conditions, plus, on completion of 25 years’ service, the grant of Roman citizenship, a highly coveted privilege.
Half or more of the state’s tax revenue was expended on the army. Much of the private wealth of the emperor – the profits of civil war now organized as a vast imperial estate – went to supplement this. The soldiers regarded the emperor as their commander-in-chief, swore allegiance to him, and remained deeply loyal as long as he remained an effective patron, a provider of pay, perks and pensions. At the core of the empire, then, was a state-army nexus of power. This was fuelled by a ‘tax-pay cycle’, in which the decurions of a thousand towns collected the local taxes across the empire, the state redistributed the revenues as payments to the army, and the soldiers spent their wages and thus pumped money back into the civil economy. The state-army nexus and the tax-pay cycle were essential characteristics of the Roman state between the 1st and 5th centuries AD.
Augustus stationed almost the whole of his army in the frontier provinces. For much of his reign the soldiers were engaged in the greatest campaigns of conquest in Roman history. In terms of territory won, Augustus was Rome’s foremost empire-builder. The turmoil of the Late Republic had brought the expansionist dynamic that powered Roman society to a peak as successive warlords competed to accumulate plundered wealth through military victory. Augustus, in this respect, stood in the line of Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. The cost of populism had, in this time, become heavily inflated. In chapters 15–17 of the Res Gestae Augustus listed some of the staggering sums paid out in his reign: 280 million denarii in gratuities to citizens and soldiers; 215 million denarii in compensation to landowners for veteran settlements; 80 million denarii in subventions from the emperor’s private resources to state coffers. These sums alone are equivalent to the wealth of 2,300 senators. Many other expenditures are listed in the Res Gestae, such as the 15 major construction projects recorded in chapter 19, and the 82 temples repaired in chapter 20. This unprecedented largesse could be paid for only by permanent war. Imperial expansion was, in any case, central to the regime’s ideology. Its supporters had heady expectations of further glory and conquest. As Virgil explained, Rome’s mission was to rule the world. The Augustan regime – a regime that trumpeted commitment to peace – was underwritten by sustained imperial violence.
Illyricum had been conquered in 35–34 BC, securing Italy’s northeast frontier, and providing a firm launch-pad for subsequent Roman advances across the Balkans and towards the Danube. Egypt was annexed in 30 BC. The royal treasures were carted off immediately to pay Octavian’s war-debts, and grain and tax began to flow from the land of the pharaohs to the Rome of the emperors. Thrace and Moesia (modern Bulgaria) were overrun in 29–28 BC, bringing the Roman frontier to the lower Danube. Augustus undertook a grand tour of Gaul and Spain in 27–26 BC, and a renewal of Caesar’s stalled attack on Britain was openly canvassed. Instead, however, the focus shifted to Spain, where between 26 and 19 BC the conquest of the peninsula was completed, with the north finally subjugated and a new legionary base established at Leon, bringing to an end 200 years of Roman military operations against the Celtiberian tribes. Meantime, in 25 BC, the Salassi were crushed on Italy’s north-western border, and Roman communications across the Alps to Gaul made safe. Armed diplomacy in the East secured peace with Parthia in 20 BC, symbolized by the much-acclaimed return of standards captured at Carrhae 30 years before. The northern frontier was extended to the upper Danube to create the provinces of Noricum and Raetia in 17–15 BC. The strategic offensive then reached its peak in the years 13 to 7 BC, with simultaneous invasions of Pannonia, to complete the subjugation of the Balkans, of Germany, conquered as far east as the Elbe, and of Moesia and Thrace, where a major rebellion had broken out. Facing massive armies commanded by the greatest soldiers of the age – Augustus’s two stepsons, Tiberius in Pannonia, Drusus in Germany – the resistance of Rome’s barbarian enemies wilted under the onslaught. Such huge territories were overrun in this final push that by 7 BC Augustus had doubled the size of the empire. Five hundred years of Roman imperialism had been brought to an extraordinary climax. The heady claims of Augustan propaganda seemed fully vindicated, both at home and abroad.
The culture of the Augustan Age has been admired for centuries. The Forum of Augustus, the Ara Pacis sculptures, and the poetry of Horace, Ovid and Virgil represent pinnacles of achievement. But richness of form cannot compensate for poverty of content. Augustan art served dictatorship and empire. Its themes are the vacuous propaganda messages of power. A cult of personality was constructed around the ruler, portrayed sometimes as a reincarnation of Aeneas or Romulus, legendary founders of nation and city, sometimes as Pater Patriae, the benevolent ‘Father of His Country’, sometimes as imperator, army commander and world conqueror. ‘I received the title of Augustus by decree of the Senate,’ the dictator proclaims, ‘and the doorposts of my house were publicly decked with laurels, the civic crown was fixed over my doorway, and a golden shield was set up in the Julian Senate House, which, as the inscription on this shield testifies, the Roman Senate and People gave me in recognition of my valour, clemency, justice and devotion.’(3) National rebirth was a recurring motif – a new beginning after decades of discord and civil war. Traditional cults and values were revamped – the regime represented a return to the past, to the good old days of a Republic based on courage, duty and piety. The message was that the revolution was over: nobility could breathe easy, secure again in its privileges; the Augustan aristocracy of ‘new men’ now enthusiastically embraced the ancient aristocracy of blood; all could unite to advance the cause of Roman civilization against northern barbarians and oriental despots. On the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) sculptures, the imperial family and friends appear on the south frieze, the magistrates, senators and priests of Rome on the north, new regime and old nobility thus symbolically joined. Aeneas and Romulus, mythic and metaphoric forebears of Augustus, are depicted on the west panel, female personifications of Rome and Italy amid images of abundance on the east. In the niches of the colonnades in the Forum of Augustus were statues of Roman heroes, great figures from Republican history down one side, the ancestors of the Caesars down the other. Towering over them on the far side of the piazza was the Temple of Mars the Avenger, erected to celebrate the defeat of Caesar’s assassins, men who are thus, by the victors’ disingenuous implication, portrayed as wickedly bent on destroying the harmony of the state. If form alone is the criterion, much Augustan art is stunning. If content be the measure, it is a gallery of empty-headed propaganda.
But as Augustus approached his final decline, Nemesis struck. In AD 6 the Pannonians, crushed by the might of Tiberius’s army in 12–9 BC, then crippled by military requisitions, rose in revolt. The Illyrians, conquered in 35–34 BC, immediately joined them. The occupation forces were wiped out, and Italy was threatened with invasion. Troops had to be re
deployed from Germany, and only when Roman strength reached perhaps 100,000 men was it possible for the empire to go on to the offensive. Though the revolt in the Balkans had been defeated by AD 9, the weakening of the garrison in Germany necessary to achieve this proved fatal. To replace Tiberius and Drusus in Germany during the Balkan war, Augustus had appointed Publius Quintilius Varus, a man without experience of the country, who attempted to consolidate imperial control by imposing taxation and Roman jurisdiction on the recently conquered inhabitants. A young chieftain of the Cherusci tribe called Arminius, who had served as an auxiliary in the Roman army and been granted citizenship and equestrian status, was elected to lead a revolt. Varus and his three legions were lured into the Teutoburg Forest, where they were ambushed and destroyed by an army of German tribesmen. Some 25,000 soldiers perished with their commander, 10 per cent of the Roman imperial army, leaving a gaping hole in the empire’s frontier defences. It was Rome’s worst defeat since Carrhae in 53 BC, and the worst at the hands of northern barbarians since Arausio in 105 BC.
Suddenly the regime looked terribly fragile. When the news reached Rome, the Praetorian Guard was ordered on to the streets as precaution against any attempted coup. Provincial governors were retained in their posts so that the empire remained in the hands of proven loyalists. Special games were celebrated in honour of Jupiter to assuage divine anger and divert the mob. ‘Indeed,’ relates Suetonius in his biography of Augustus, ‘it is said that he took the disaster so deeply to heart that he left his hair and beard untrimmed for months, and would often beat his head on a door, shouting, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”; and he always kept the anniversary as a day of deep mourning.’(4)
Augustus’ reaction, if accurately reported, reflected the gravity of the defeat. The army had been pared down to the barest minimum needed to guard the thousands of miles of the empire’s frontiers, and yet its strategy had remained relentlessly offensive, with tens of thousands of men engaged year-on-year in new wars of conquest. Demilitarization had been essential, both to reassure the ruling class that stability and normal government had been restored, and to cut costs and release funds for regime-building largesse. The consequent army reductions had left the empire without a strategic reserve, while the ideology of the regime and the expectations of its supporters – not least the all-important professional officer class – had propelled it into an unbroken succession of military adventures. The result was that the empire was militarily overextended, such that, because it lacked reserves, one major tactical defeat risked strategic disaster. It was fortunate, indeed, that Arminius’s German host broke up after victory. The Germans were content to have destroyed their enemies, freed themselves of tax-collectors, and returned home rich in plunder. But Rome could not risk another Teutoburg Forest. Augustus halted offensive operations on all fronts. His successor – ironically the great soldier Tiberius – would maintain this policy. Not before AD 43 would the empire again mount a major military offensive. Even then, the invasion of Britain was an exceptional event, not the start of a new trend. In AD 9 the great epoch of Roman imperial expansion came to an end. The Empire, a product of 500 years of conquest, its size doubled in the 50 years of history dominated by Octavian-Augustus, would thereafter hardly grow at all. Here was a transformation of the greatest historical significance: AD 9 was nothing less than the central pivot on which the whole history of Rome turned. The empire had risen to its highest point. From this moment on, its historical trajectory flattened out. It ceased to expand. It had reached its limits. And in the course of time it would be revealed that the glory days were over for good, and that Rome was heading towards decline, fragmentation, and the eventual collapse of the Western Empire.
The limits of power: the Julio-Claudian emperors, AD 14–68
Power is never absolute. The Roman emperors were among the most powerful rulers in history, yet the survival of their regimes depended upon successful management of a complex of contradictory pressures. Often their position at the summit of the political order was precarious. Occasionally they were toppled. And the last of the Julio-Claudians so mismanaged the politics of empire that the dynasty was destroyed in civil war.
Not least among the problems was the succession. The army was the basis of power and could, if it chose, intervene to decide who should wield it; without a clear succession, therefore, the danger was that a dispute between rival candidates might lead to civil war. There was, of course, no constitutional precedent for succession to the Principate. Rome under the emperors was not an hereditary monarchy. The forms of power were still those of the Republic: ostensibly the ‘leading man’ received his authority from the Senate, and in theory any man could succeed him (or, indeed, none at all). In practice, however, the hereditary principle was strongly developed at the outset. It was helped by the common Roman belief that personal qualities could be inherited, such that ancestry and family were considered strong arguments for preferment. Of perhaps greater value was inheritance of the emperor’s personal fortune and estate, making the prospective successor the richest man in the empire. If no natural son was available, the heir, in established Roman tradition, might be adopted, as Octavian had been by Julius Caesar. Either way, he would be advanced rapidly through a series of senior posts to gain appropriate experience and public recognition.
Augustus, whose health was poor, was preoccupied by the succession throughout his reign, advancing a series of candidates, all of whom save the last (reluctant) choice predeceased him. The emperor had no son of his own, but for many years personal antipathy prevented him supporting his stepson Tiberius, who, in many respects, was the obvious candidate. On both his father’s and mother’s side Tiberius was a member of the Claudii, an illustrious blue-blooded family that claimed its first consul-ship as early as 495 BC, and had a grand total of 28 consulships in all, plus five dictatorships, seven censorhips, and six triumphs. It was, in short, one of the oldest and most accomplished patrician families in Rome. Moreover, by AD 9, when his position as heir finally became unassailable, Tiberius was the most prominent figure in Roman public life after Augustus. The empire’s greatest soldier, he had spent much of the previous quarter century on campaign, making peace with Parthia, conquering Pannonia, and winning many great victories in Germany. With no other suitable candidates remaining, and with a character and record above reproach, Tiberius was the man finally chosen by the ageing Augustus to succeed him. When the old emperor died, Tiberius had already been promoted to all the offices which in combination made him constitutionally princeps. The succession was therefore seamless.
Born a patrician, highly educated, culturally philhellene, philosophically in sympathy with the Stoics (who advocated willing acceptance of public duties), and ideologically a Roman traditionalist, Tiberius seemed a relic of the Republican Senate, a strange successor to Octavian-Augustus, the faction-leader and upstart dictator. Secure in his aristocratic status and personal accomplishments, Tiberius, with nothing to prove, aimed to rule as his superior intelligence and conservative instincts directed – avoiding military adventures, treating the Senate with respect, defending hierarchy, tradition and order. It proved to be a modus operandi that, however seemingly worthy, the princeps, perched on the pinnacle of power, could not sustain.
The essence of aristocratic politics was competition for high office and the power, wealth and honour which were its rewards. Under the Republic this competition had been mediated by the Senate, and, until the time of Marius at least, rivalry had been contained by the constitution’s strongly collegiate character. The system broke down during the 1st century BC, to be replaced, under triumvirs and emperors, by a form of court government. Autocracy required the appointment of loyalists, so advancement came to depend on association with whichever was the dominant court faction. Since insiders had an interest in monopolizing the privileges of power, outsiders would find their careers stalled. They then had three options: to curry favour and somehow gain entry to the court faction; to restore t
he Republic and a collegiate system for allocating posts; or to overthrow the dominant faction and replace it, including perhaps the emperor himself. Thus, when aristocratic competition for office was displaced from Senate to court, parliamentary manoeuvres gave way to court factionalism. When intrigues developed into plots – real and imagined – the court struck back with purges and executions. The resultant bitterness fostered a new round of plotting.
Intrigue penetrated the court itself, where, as Tiberius visibly aged, three factions manoeuvred to secure the succession. When Tiberius himself – worn out by failure, bored with court politics, fearful of assassination – retired to the island of Capri in AD 26, the faction of Sejanus became dominant. Sejanus, Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, was left in effective control of the empire, trusted by Tiberius because his equestrian status made him dependent on imperial patronage and appeared to impose limits on ambition. His status, however, merely made his dominance more hateful, and as Sejanus manoeuvred to strengthen his position against rival factions, he came under suspicion. He must have feared a future without Tiberius, when, as the former creature of the tyrant, he would have been at the mercy of his enemies. He may have been planning a coup to pre-empt inevitable downfall. We will never know. Tiberius, certainly, was persuaded that Sejanus was plotting, and in October AD 31 orders were dispatched from Capri for the arrest and execution of the traitor. A letter of condemnation was read out in the Senate in the presence of the unsuspecting prefect. The Guard had already been stood down by its newly appointed commander, and the Senate House surrounded by the paramilitary corps of vigiles. Sejanus was dead by nightfall, and Macro the new Praetorian Prefect and effective ruler of the Empire.