Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Roman traditionalists viewed it all with bitter contempt. The dominant faction had turned the state into a junket. Their purpose was simply to retain power, amass wealth, and pursue pleasure. Rome’s pretensions to govern and civilize the world were made a mockery. But the regime might well have survived had it not threatened the property of the ruling class and the integrity of the empire. The crux of the problem was finance. The expenditures on luxury and largesse were vast. When, in AD 66, the Armenian client-king Tiridates made a state visit to Rome, for example, the expenses amounted to 200,000 denarii per day. Continual prodigious expense at the centre of the empire was met by rising exploitation in the provinces. The dangers inherent in this policy had been demonstrated often enough: the army was fully extended guarding the frontiers, and the reserves did not exist to suppress internal revolts without compromising border security. Super-exploitation – the flaying of sheep – risked revolts that might overwhelm the army: this, the lesson of the Teutoburg Forest, was as valid in AD 66 as in AD 9.

  Already there had been a major revolt in Britain in AD 60 or 61. It was provoked by heavy-handed land seizures and debt-collection. Specifically, Nero’s agents moved in to take over the territory of the Iceni when the client-king Prasutagus died. Their purpose was probably to add former royal land to the imperial estate, and to impose Roman taxation on everyone else. At the same time, multimillionaire creditors, like the leading minister Seneca, were calling in overdue debts, now grossly inflated by the crippling interest rates that prevailed in the Roman world, a form of legalized swindling with which the hapless British notables were probably unfamiliar until they received demand for repayment. The peasantry was oppressed by taxes, labour services, and, around the new Roman colonia at Colchester, the confiscation of their farms. When Boudica, the widowed queen of the Iceni, raised the banner of revolt, tens of thousands joined her. The rebel army defeated a legion and destroyed three towns before its annihiliation in battle by the Roman governor. Events might easily have turned out differently: the Romans had been heavily outnumbered in the final battle; had they been commanded by another Varus, the Roman occupation of Britain might have ended as abruptly as that of Germany.

  No general lessons were drawn from the Boudican Revolt, however. Nor from a humiliating defeat suffered by the Roman army in AD 62 during its long-running war with Parthia over the status of Armenia (AD 53–63). It should have been clear that tax-rates were being ratcheted up to dangerous levels, and that the army was overextended. Taxation was almost certainly the issue which, in spring AD 66, ignited the greatest anti-imperialist revolt of the century. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman governor Gessius Florus had demanded 100,000 denarii from the treasures of the Temple in Jerusalem ‘for Caesar’s needs’. He may, under pressure from above, have been attempting to make good a shortfall in revenue due to an incipient tax strike. Anticipating resistance, he sent in the troops. Clashes with groups of demonstrators ended in massacre and provoked full-scale urban insurrection. Overwhelmed, the governor and his troops abandoned the city. When Cestius Gallus, Governor of Syria, tried to smash his way back with an army of 30,000 men in the autumn, he was defeated with heavy loss at the battle of Beth-Horon north-west of the capital and sent into headlong retreat. That winter, the revolt spread across Palestine, and tens of thousands were organized into revolutionary militias to resist the Roman army in the spring.

  It took the Romans three years to recapture Jerusalem, and three more to suppress continuing residual resistance. The siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 turned into an apocalyptic confrontation between the haves and have-nots of the Roman Empire. The city was defended for almost five months by some 25,000 militiamen, mainly recruited from peasant villages and inspired by a millenarian message of imminent freedom from corrupt rulers, tax-collectors and landlords. They eventually succumbed to the overwhelming power of 60,000 professional soldiers, and were consumed by fire, sword, famine, pestilence and the cross. Handfuls escaped across the desert to continue the fight from remote fortresses, but these too, one by one, were suppressed – until, by AD 73, only Masada remained. Here, when the Romans broke in, they were confronted by an eerie silence, for the defenders, knowing their walls breached, had committed suicide in preference to defeat and slavery, and now lay dead, 960 of them, in rows, the men, women and children of each family side-by-side.

  By this time, Nero, and with him the Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty, had perished. The Jewish Revolution, coming so soon after the Boudican Revolt, had alerted the Roman ruling class to the danger represented by the regime. Anxiety was compounded by the growing eccentricity, luxuria and corruption of the court clique. When fire swept through Rome in AD 64, the government diverted suspicion from itself by initiating a ghastly anti-Christian pogrom. Meanwhile, debris was cleared from the gutted districts to lay out a vast new imperial palace and park complex, the grounds two, three, perhaps four times the size of the present Vatican, including a fabulous pavilion that became known as the Domus Aurea (Golden House), complete with revolving dining-room, and a colossal bronze statue of the emperor in the guise of the sun-god Apollo. But a plot to overthrow the megalomaniac dictator in AD 65 was betrayed, and some 30 eminent men – a mixture of career politicians, guards officers, Republican die-hards, intellectuals and literati – were driven to suicide or exile. Thereafter the regime remained suspicious, and the familiar machinery of state terror ground into action, fed by the work of informers, police and torturers. No high-ranking person, no aristocratic estate, was safe. Corbulo, greatest general of the age, victor over the Parthians in Armenia, was forced to commit suicide in the winter of AD 66–67.

  When the emperor and his retinue were away touring Greece in AD 67, a new conspiracy was formed, this time extending outwards from Rome to encompass the governors and generals who commanded the main frontier armies. Upon his return to Italy early in AD 68, Nero was confronted by news that Vindex, Governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, had risen in revolt, supported by the Romano-Gallic leaders of three native tribes. A Romanized Gaul himself, he could not aspire to the imperial purple; instead, undoubtedly by prior arrangement, he called on Servius Sulpicius Galba, a 73-year-old senator from an old Republican family who was currently Governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, to accept the throne. But the revolt faltered. Vindex and his Gallic levies were defeated by loyalist troops from the Rhineland, and Galba, fearing the worst, retreated into the interior of his province. Had Nero and his agents acted quickly and efficiently, they might yet have saved themselves. But that was not their way. The politics of real power, when generals and armies were in play, were beyond them. When the commander of the Roman troops in Africa declared against the regime, Nymphidius Rufus, Tigellinus’s fellow Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, turned traitor and bribed the guardsmen into declaring for Galba. The Senate followed suit. Nero was declared an outlaw, fled the city, and shortly afterwards committed suicide at a nearby villa even as rebel troops arrived to arrest him.

  The Neronian regime had tested imperial power to its limits. These limits were essentially three: major wars of conquest risked overstretching the army and imposing crippling losses; excessive exploitation risked provincial revolt and an unsustainable burden of internal security; and court factionalism and state terror risked civil war by destroying the coherence of the Roman ruling class. Had the Jewish Revolt of AD 66–70 coincided with the Parthian war of AD 53–63, the empire could well have faced military disaster. As it was, the frontiers held, and internal order was restored. But the crisis in relations between court and Senate was not so easily resolved. In fact, the crisis spiralled rapidly out of control. As the Julio-Claudian dynasty plunged into the abyss, it dragged the Roman state with it. For the first time in a century, Italy was to be ravished by Roman armies from distant frontiers, come home to fight a brutal civil war for mastery of the empire.

  The limits of Empire: the year of four emperors and the Flavian dynasty, AD 69–96

  Galba, on hearing news of hi
s elevation in Rome, recovered his nerve, emerged from the interior of his province, and set off for the capital. But he was destined for an unstable and short-lived reign. His supporters were an uneasy alliance of Praetorian Guardsmen, old-school senators, and career politicians from Spanish postings. The alliance was held together by the promise of immediate reward. But what was on offer to the officers of the Rhine, Danube and eastern legions? In fact, they were doubly disadvantaged under Galba: excluded from access to court patronage, their resentment and disloyalty could be anticipated, so that even posts they already held were under threat. First the Governor of Lower Germany was superseded, then the Governor of Upper Germany. Each of these men had commanded 20,000 legionaries, and in January AD 69, at the instigation of their senior officers, these soldiers refused to renew their allegiance to Galba and hailed Aulus Vitellius emperor in his place.

  News of this revolt brought the tensions within Galba’s government to a head. The new emperor’s policy had been a disastrous mixture of sanctimony and corruption. The Praetorian Guard had been angered by Galba’s refusal to pay their promised bribe. The officers from Spain were alienated by his nomination of another blue-bloodied senator like himself as prospective successor. So Marcus Salvius Otho, Governor of Hispania Lusitania, one of Galba’s leading lieutenants and effective head of the ‘Spanish’ faction, went to the Praetorian barracks and offered to pay the soldiers. The guardsmen proclaimed Otho emperor and denounced his rival as an enemy. Galba, a bald and arthritic old man, was hunted down and lynched in the Forum. This resolution of the immediate crisis in Rome still, however, left two emperors in play within the empire, each representing a powerful bloc of politicians and officers, one rooted in Rome, Italy and Spain, the other in the Rhineland; and with each faction heavily armed, only war could decide which of them would prevail.

  Otho, in control of Rome and given legitimacy by senatorial support, attracted the formal allegiance of most provincial governors and the practical assistance of the Danubian legions. His position – like that of Pompey in 49 BC – appeared, on the face of things, the stronger. But the Vitellians – like Caesar’s Gallic War legions at the Rubicon – represented a coherent bloc of concentrated military power. Though Vitellius himself was grossly fat and debauched, he was merely a mask for the career ambitions of the Rhineland officers, skilled commanders of an experienced and loyal army. When the rival armies clashed near Cremona in northern Italy, legion against legion in a day-long battle amid the vineyards, the Othonians were defeated. Their 37-year-old leader, his fastidiously hair-plucked body crowned by a toupee to hide his baldness, committed suicide and so brought to an end his 95-day reign as Roman emperor. As the victorious army headed for the capital, the empire accepted the judgement of war, the Senate and most provincial governors switching allegiance for the third time in a year to acclaim Vitellius the new ruler.

  The Vitellian revolution was in an important sense different from its immediate predecessors. The secret of empire, as Tacitus explained, was out: emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome. The secret had been concealed behind a façade of Republican rectitude: Augustus had claimed to have ‘restored the Republic’, and his successors had maintained this fiction. The image had dissolved momentarily in AD 41, but even then military intervention had amounted to a brief, near-bloodless coup carried out by a few thousand guardsmen in Rome. Only now, in AD 69, was the full reality of the military dictatorship revealed. Vitellius was the ‘Rhineland’ emperor, a creature of the generals stationed there, a ruler brought to Rome by 40,000 frontier legionaries. His was the regime of a narrow faction, and, as with Galba and Otho, a purge was needed to consolidate its power, though this time, after civil war, a bloodier one. For the ‘Germans’ – despite their victory over Otho’s alliance of ‘Spaniards’ and ‘Danubians’ – might yet be challenged in their turn. They knew that one other player remained in the game: Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the top Roman general in the East.

  Vespasian cannot have considered himself in contention at the beginning of the crisis. He owed his current eminence – he was commander of the 40,000-strong army fighting the Jewish rebels in Palestine – to relative obscurity. Born into a small-town family of Italian landowners, army officers and businessmen, his grandfather had been a commoner, his father an equestrian, and Vespasian himself was a first-generation senator. The Flavian family was, in fact, a good example of the class of ‘new men’ from the Italian municipal aristocracy who had flourished under the new Augustan order. Such men tended to be more loyal agents of the Caesars than nobles from ancient families: they depended more heavily on the good favour of their patrons, and their ambition, in the nature of things, could hardly extend to the purple throne itself. By flattering tyrants and their flunkies, Vespasian had ascended the administrative hierarchy, survived the purges, and finally been promoted to the most senior of military commands – partly because he was not considered a political threat. Now, by one of history’s ironies, he stood poised on the brink of supreme power.

  For the ‘Easterners’, the news from Rome was gloomy: the victory of Vitellius meant direct Rhineland control over imperial patronage and a corresponding slump in the fortunes of men stationed in the East. Worse, it was rumoured that Vitellius would switch the western and eastern legions, forcing the latter to exchange the comfort and ease of city billets for wooden forts in a cold and wet German forest. But if the officers on the Rhine could create their own emperor, why not those in the East? The ancient sources aver that Vespasian was reluctant to accept a nomination, but this may have been a traditional deceit. Whatever, once widely canvassed as a candidate for the throne, no man could safely draw back: he was henceforward and forever tainted as politically suspect. The momentum towards an eastern military coup quickly became unstoppable, and Vespasian was propelled willy-nilly into a new civil war.

  Perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps through hurried last-minute negotiation, the Prefect of Egypt declared for Vespasian on 1 July AD 69, calling upon the soldiers and citizens of Alexandria assembled before him to swear allegiance. With Egypt secure, giving him two legions and the Nile grain-stores, Vespasian ten days later accepted the acclamation of his own army in Palestine. Shortly afterwards came further declarations in his favour, two of them, Syria and the Danube, representing decisive shifts in the balance of power. This support – the whole of the East and the Balkans, and two of the three main army groups in the empire – gave Vespasian a potentially winning hand, especially as the Flavian revolt seems to have taken the Vitellians by surprise, the discipline of the Rhineland legions having broken down after their arrival in Rome.

  But Vespasian dithered. Before bringing on a decisive clash, he aimed to cut off Rome’s grain-supply from Egypt, and to gather more support by sending an advance expedition through Asia Minor. His partisans, however, showed greater initiative. Antonius Primus, leader of the pro-Flavian revolt on the Danube, ignoring any orders he may have received from the East, crossed the Alps to invade Italy and fall upon the Vitellians while they were still in disarray. In the late autumn, the Rhineland and Danubian legions clashed again on the battlefield of Cremona, and this time the Danubians triumphed. As the Vitellians broke and ran, the Flavians massacred the fugitives and then looted Cremona. A second Vitellian force arriving from Gaul was beaten soon after, and a final attempt to block the snow-bound passes over the Apennines disintegrated as the Vitellian rank-and-file deserted. The 56-year-old emperor – whose ‘ruling vices were gluttony and cruelty’ according to Suetonius – made a final bid to save himself by cutting a deal with Vespasian’s brother, who was acting as the family’s representative in Rome. The deal collapsed when the Vitellian soldiery mutinied, stormed the Capitoline Hill, and lynched the Flavian leader. Antonius Primus’s Danubians then pressed on to Rome, where they destroyed the remaining Vitellians in fierce street-fighting. Vitellius himself was dragged into the streets half-dressed and bloated with food and drink (Suetonius again), and there pelted with dung and filt
h, tortured by little sword cuts, and finally murdered on the banks of the Tiber. Afterwards, while their senior officers set up a provisional government headed by Vespasian’s younger son Domitian, the Danubian soldiers celebrated by looting Rome. It was December. The empire now had its fourth emperor in a year – and Rome and the Italian towns had been twice plundered by the army that was supposed to defend them. Even now, though, the crisis was not over.

  The splintering of the imperial elite and the distraction of the army in civil war had created openings for revolt from below. The discontent bubbling away under the oppressive Neronian regime now boiled over. The Jewish Revolution, a great rising of the rural poor, was entering its fifth year, and its greatest battle, the defence of Jerusalem, was yet to come. On the other side of the empire, in the Rhineland, there was mutiny in the regiments of Gaulish and German auxiliaries serving in the Roman army. The revolt was led by Julius Civilis, a Romanized Gaulish chieftain, and it tapped deep pools of bitterness in the frontier districts. Raising an army of mutineers and German tribesmen, and facing legionaries disoriented and demoralized by civil war, Civilis quickly established military dominance on the Lower Rhine, and soon had the major Roman base at Vetera under siege. His example, coupled with news from Rome – notably that the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter had been burnt down – inspired a wider revolt of Gaulish tribes led by other Romanized chieftains, namely Julius Classicus and Julius Tutor, supported by militant members of the druidic priesthood, who were predicting the conquest of Rome by the peoples of the North. The rebels now organized themselves into a proto-state – an ‘Empire of the Gauls’ – and such was the momentum of revolt in the frontier districts that many legionaries were won over (a high proportion of whom were no doubt of Gallic or German origin). If Rhineland soldiers could march on Rome and install an emperor, they could equally well stay at home and set up a rival empire there. Another secret was out: if emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome, so too could empires.