Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The Empire of the Gauls was, however, a fortress of sand. When Classicus and Tutor attempted to win over the rest of Gaul at a great congress of the tribes at Rheims, they failed; the rebel empire remained confined to the Rhineland. Too many top-ranking Gauls had become stakeholders in the imperial system; or they feared the mutinous soldiery and Germanic tribesmen who formed Civilis’s army; or, quite simply, they expected Vespasian to win. The rebel confederation itself began to break up. A rag-bag alliance of notables, mutineers and tribesmen, of Romans, Gauls and Germans, it was never politically coherent and only briefly militarily effective. At the mere approach of loyalist legions under the Flavian general Quintus Petilius Cerealis in the summer of AD 70, the rebel legionaries deserted back to the Roman side. The Gauls under Classicus and Tutor were then defeated in battle outside Trier. Shortly afterwards the Germans under Civilis were also defeated near Vetera. Finally, far to the north, in the marshes of the Rhine and Meuse estuaries, the Batavians, the last of the rebels to hold out, were crushed in their turn. By this time also, Jerusalem had fallen to the army of Titus, Vespasian’s elder son, who had assumed command in Palestine after his father’s elevation; the Jewish resistance was down to a handful of remote desert fortresses. Broadly, by the beginning of AD 71, the empire was again at peace. But Flavian victory had been hard-fought, and there was no guarantee the peace would hold. Moreover, even if the worst of the crisis was over, there were immediate problems with an estranged governing class, a disloyal army, unsettled frontiers, and an empty treasury. In the longer term, two years of civil war, army mutinies and popular revolt had taught sharp lessons: the empire of the Julio-Claudians had been overexploited and overextended; a new, more cautious, more measured policy was essential. The mission of the new Flavian dynasty – if it was to survive – was to restore equilibrium to a system out of kilter.

  AD 71, however, was a year for celebration. There had been victory over Vitellians, Jewish rebels and the Gallic Empire; and, as in 30 BC, with a real yearning for peace and order, there was the basis for an alliance between the new dynasty – that of an upstart military dictator, after all – and Rome’s traditional elite. Triumphs were held for the capture of Jerusalem and the subjugation of the Batavians. The doors of the Temple of Janus were closed to symbolize the coming of peace. Major construction projects were launched – to rebuild the Capitolium, to inaugurate a new Temple of Peace, to sweep away Nero’s palace, and to provide Rome with a great stone amphitheatre. The Colosseum was rich in symbolism. It was built on the site of Nero’s ornamental lake: what had once been a monument to a tyrant’s luxuria was now a place of free public entertainment. The construction work meant contracts for Rome’s businessmen and workshops, while heavy labour was provided by slaves, many no doubt from Palestine and the Rhineland: the subjugated ‘other’ put to work in the service of the conquerors. The shows put on when the amphitheatre was complete – the first in AD 81 – were spectacles of power and empire: gladiator-slaves were decked out in the manner of Rome’s historic enemies.

  The new regime was popular at home. Though he developed a reputation for meanness – as expenditure was cut back to restore government finances – Vespasian himself was straight-dealing, unpretentious and tolerant of opposition (‘I don’t kill dogs for barking’). Few, anyway, were given cause to oppose. The old nobility had been reduced to a rump; the great majority of senators now were aristocrats-of-office raised up by the Caesars. The ideological republicans had shrunk into a small sect. The more thoughtful among the aristocracy sought refuge in philosophy. But the various brands on offer amounted to little more than a retreat from attempts to change the world into obsessive individualism. The Cynics denounced all government as corrupt and urged withdrawal from public life. The Stoics maintained that forms of government were dictated by divine reason, and favoured public service and political conformity. The Epicureans considered the pursuit of pleasure to be the greatest good. Though admired by some (the ‘stiff upper lip’ taught in British public schools probably owes something to the Stoics), these philosophies were essentially vacuous. They offered a choice of lifestyles, not an analysis of the world; they coated powerlessness in a patina of virtue. Vespasian could safely let the dogs bark. Treason trials were few in his ten-year reign. The regime’s real anxiety was not the loyalty of aristocratic salons, but that of the military headquarters and army barracks.

  Recalling its disloyalty under the Julio-Claudians, the Praetorian Guard was reduced in numbers and placed under the command of Vespasian’s son Titus, who thus became in effect the Flavian chief-of-police. It was Titus, too, in his role as censor for that year, who carried out a purge of the Senate in AD 73–74, reducing its numbers overall, while promoting party loyalists, among them many generals. The new intake included numerous Italians and provincials. A typical member of the Flavian aristocracy was Gnaeus Julius Agricola. He was born in the Roman colony of Forum Julii in southern Gaul in AD 40, and was educated at the local Greek city of Massilia (Marseille). The Julius in his name implies an ancestor enfranchised by Julius Caesar and probable Gaulish descent. Both his grandfathers had been equestrians in the imperial service, and his father had been made a senator. Agricola himself ascended what had, by his time, become a conventional career ladder for sons of senators. He first served a military apprenticeship in Britain as a legionary tribune, participating in the suppression of the Boudican Revolt in AD 60/61. He was then successively quaestor in Asia in AD 64, tribune of the plebs in Rome in AD 66, and praetor, again in Rome, in AD 68. This qualified him for a senior army command, and Vespasian appointed him legate of the Twentieth Legion in Britain in AD 70–73/74. This was followed by a senior civil post, that of Governor of Aquitania in Gaul, where he served from AD 74 to 77. Experienced, reliable and, above all, loyal to the regime, he now reached the summit of a senatorial career, holding a consulship in Rome in AD 77 or 78. His proconsular status then qualified him for the most senior and highly coveted posts of all. Among the choicest plums at the time were the governorships of Britain and Syria, since both conferred command of three or four legions, a strong possibility of military action, and thus a chance of military glory. Agricola served a double term as Governor of Britain (AD 78–84), where he directed some of the most aggressive and successful military campaigns of the Flavian era.

  We owe our knowledge of Agricola’s career to the remarkable survival of a short account of his life written by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus. The Agricola throws much light on the inner workings of the Flavian empire. As well as promoting a ‘career open to talent’ within the existing imperial hierarchy – somewhat in contrast to the factionalism prevalent under the Julio-Claudians – the Flavian emperors promoted loyalty and stability in the provinces through a deliberate policy of Romanization designed to raise up native elites. ‘Certain domains,’ Tacitus tells us, ‘were presented to King Togidubnus, who maintained his unswerving loyalty right down to our own times – an example of the long-established Roman custom of employing even kings to make others slaves.’(7) An inscription found in Chichester in 1723 refers to this king. It tells us that a temple had been erected in honour of Neptune and Minerva, and for the well-being of the ‘divine house’ (the imperial family), under ‘the authority of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, great king of Britain’.(8) The king’s Roman-style name reveals that he received his citizenship under Claudius, but Tacitus implies that he ruled well into the Flavian period. The temple dedication referred to on the inscription makes clear his commitment to Romanization. Like pro-western ‘modernizers’ in today’s Third World, Togidubnus rejected native culture in favour of an imported Romanitas associated with prosperity, civilization and power. The archaeology of the three towns within what may have been Togidubnus’s kingdom – Chichester, Silchester and Winchester – has revealed early examples of classical town-planning and monumental architecture. At Fishbourne, moreover, a mile or so from Chichester, is the probable site of the king’s palace. At first, in the 60s AD, a
substantial masonry villa was constructed, including a bath-house and an enclosed courtyard, the so-called ‘proto-palace’. Then, some time between AD 75 and 80, construction began of a new house on a vast scale, creating something without parallel anywhere west of Italy. Approached through parkland, a cavernous entrance-hall gave access across a formal courtyard garden to a grand audience chamber on the far side. Elsewhere in the four ranges of rooms around the courtyard were the private apartments of the king and his family, suites for relatives, guests and royal servants, and, of course, a bath-house. The whole complex was decorated with marble, mosaic and fresco. Classical sculpture, bronze pitchers, imported tableware and elegantly crafted dining couches no doubt completed the Mediterranean ambience. Covered colonnades, neat box-hedges and stone-lined drains did the same for the garden.

  Romanization started at the top, but it trickled downwards, seeping through long-established networks of patronage to create a substantial pro-Roman bloc of privileged, powerful people in each locality. ‘Agricola,’ explained Tacitus, ‘had to deal with men who, because they lived in the country and were culturally backward, were inveterate warmongers. He wanted to accustom them to peace and leisure by providing delightful distractions … He gave personal encouragement and public assistance to the building of temples, piazzas and town-houses … he gave the sons of the aristocracy a liberal education … they became eager to speak Latin effectively … and the toga was everywhere to be seen … And so they were gradually led into the demoralising vices of porticoes, baths and grand dinner parties. The naive Britons described these things as “civilisation”, when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement.’(9) As it happens, part of a dedicatory inscription from one of those piazzas, found during excavations at Roman Verulamium (St Albans) in 1955, bears the name of the great governor. Only five small fragments were recovered, so the reconstruction is uncertain, but it probably records the opening of the new stone-built civic centre, comprising a grand assembly-room and council offices on one side, three ranges of private offices and shops on the others, and a central open courtyard fringed by covered, colonnaded walkways. Such buildings – along with others of the standard Roman urban package: temples, bath-houses, theatres, amphitheatres, official motels – symbolize the Romanization of local elites below the level of kings.

  Tacitus’s real interest in the Agricola, however, was his father-in-law’s military achievements; it was these that he and his audience considered the proper measure of greatness. Each year of his governorship, we learn, Agricola pushed forward the conquest of Britain: in AD 78 the conquest of Wales was completed with the defeat of the principal northern tribe and the occupation of Anglesey; in AD 79 Brigantia (northern England) was overrun; in AD 80 the Roman army advanced across Scotland beyond the Central Lowlands as far as the River Tay; in AD 81 a series of forts was built along the Forth-Clyde line; in AD 82 south-west Scotland was conquered; and in AD 83–84 an advance up the east coast brought the Roman army to the Moray Firth and a great set-piece battle against the Caledonian tribes at Mons Graupius. The tribes were routed and left a third of their 30,000 men on the hillside where they had made their stand. It seemed to Tacitus that ‘Britain had been completely conquered’.

  But it had not. No Caledonian delegation arrived to offer submission. The beaten warriors skulked in their Highland glens, but they did not submit. Agricola was forced to fall back on winter bases further south, the war unfinished. The following year he was replaced by a new governor with orders to remain on the defensive. A few years later the Romans withdrew from the far north. The unfinished earth-and-timber legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the Tay, lynchpin of the defences on the southeastern fringe of the Highlands, was dismantled and abandoned in the late 80s AD. Soon, all forts north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus had been evacuated, and the Romans held a new line across the Southern Uplands, anchored on Newstead, where excavation has shown an early Flavian fort overlain by a late Flavian one. Finally, even the Newstead line was given up, and the Romans fell back in c. AD 105 to a position along the ‘Stanegate’ on the Tyne-Solway line between modern Newcastle and Carlisle. Tacitus, knowing of the retreat when he came to write his father-in-law’s biography, was outraged: Britain may have been completely conquered, but it was then, he lamented, ‘immediately lost again’. What had gone wrong?

  The historian’s explanation is wholly unconvincing: it was, he claimed, down to the jealousy of the new Flavian emperor Domitian, younger son of Vespasian. ‘He knew that there was nothing so dangerous for him as to have the name of a subject exalted above that of the emperor.’(10) This is nonsense. Agricola was an arch-loyalist. Imperial generals won victories on behalf of the emperor they served. Defeats and retreats were damaging to prestige. Tacitus’s account, anyway, is vitiated by transparent special pleading: when the emperor is reported heaping public praise on the returning general, we are informed, without a shred of supporting evidence, that he merely ‘pretended to be pleased when in fact he was deeply disturbed’.(11) In truth, the historical and archaeological evidence for Flavian frontier policy elsewhere shows that events in Britain conformed to a pattern.

  The aim was not a return to the expansionism of the Late Republic. The Flavian emperors retrenched and consolidated. Vespasian, like Tiberius, was a veteran general when he came to the throne. Titus, his successor, was the conqueror of the Jews. Neither had anything to prove. Both understood that the empire was overextended, that further conquests could be justified only if they increased frontier security without imposing new demands on the army. Even so, the army was kept busy. Discipline was quickly restored by disbanding four or five disloyal legions and the mutinous Gallic and German auxiliary regiments, replacing them with new formations. The reformed army was kept close to the frontiers in an extended line; instead of large battle groups concentrated for offensive action, there were now numerous local packets deployed for defence. When offensives were launched, they were designed as localized initiatives either to suppress hostile border tribes or to create shorter, straighter, more defensible lines. Vespasian had only one less salutation as imperator than Augustus, but the objectives and scale of warfare were quite different. Roads and forts – the work of the spade – came to predominate over battle. Britain became a major theatre of offensive action only because the Boudican Revolt had effectively halted the Roman advance on an indefensible line: a long diagonal across lowland Britain from Exeter to Lincoln, with actively or potentially hostile hill-tribes to west and north. Vespasian therefore appointed a succession of fighting governors to continue the conquest of the island until the frontier rested on the sea, or at least ran on a short east-west line. On the German frontier, in the upper Rhine and Danube region, where the Flavians inherited a sharp re-entrant projecting into Roman territory, the line was pushed steadily forwards. Domitian initiated the main forward advance by attacking the Chatti on the middle Rhine in AD 83, an offensive designed to force this hostile tribe back from the frontier and establish a new Roman line east of the river. The re-entrant to the south was then gradually bitten off, shortening the Roman line and improving communications between the Rhine and Danube army groups.

  Despite Flavian caution, however, the empire’s defences remained under pressure. A new threat had arisen on the middle Danube: King Decebalus and the Dacians. For a generation, from AD 85 to 106, the Dacians were to be Rome’s principal enemies. Their mountain kingdom – roughly corresponding to modern Rumania – was rich in gold, and the Dacian kings, under threat of Roman expansion in the Balkans, had welded the hill-tribes into a powerful centralized state. Their territory was difficult to penetrate and defended by numerous elaborate hill-forts. Their army was formed of barbarian warriors, fiercely independent, organized in tribal contingents, and wielding the horrendous falx, a two-handed cutting weapon comprising an inward-curving, razor-sharp blade fitted to a long wooden shaft (in later campaigns, Roman soldiers would wear metal arm-guards and helmets reinforced across the top with metal cross-bars
as defence against the downward slicing blows of the falx). In AD 85 Decebalus led his army across the Danube into Moesia, killed the governor, overpowered various Roman garrisons, and plundered the province. Domitian ordered a punitive counter-offensive, but his invasion force was defeated in AD 86. It was two years before the Romans were ready for a more determined effort, but on this occasion they won a great victory at Tapae, a mountain pass deep inside Dacia which led into the heart of Decebalus’s kingdom. Before this victory could be consolidated, however, revolt broke out in the Roman rear and the army had to be recalled.

  The generals’ plot of AD 89 was led by Lucius Antonius Saturninus, Governor of Upper Germany. It was probably a direct response to the regime’s perceived incompetence in the war against Decebalus. If so, the recent victory may have tipped the balance against the plotters, for most of the empire remained loyal, including the Governor of Lower Germany, whose forces had suppressed the revolt even before Domitian himself reached the scene. None the less, it had been the most serious conspiracy of the Flavian period, and Domitian, less secure on the throne than either his father or brother had been, cracked down on potential opponents. Domitian, as the younger son, had never expected to become emperor. He had lived his life in the shadow of his more accomplished father and elder brother. Vespasian had saved an empire. Titus had won a war. Domitian was merely his father’s son. The Flavian dynasty, moreover, was very new, just 12 years old, when the new emperor acceded. Domitian’s war against the Chatti had perhaps been fought – like Claudius’s war against Britain – in part to win the emperor his spurs. He celebrated victory by raising his soldiers’ pay by one third (from 225 to 300 denarii). He donned the dress of a triumphator (the victorious general in a triumph), and adopted the title Germanicus (Conqueror of Germany). He spent heavily throughout his reign on handouts, games and monuments. Yet there was another side to Domitian’s Caesarism: the triumphalism of Claudius was married to the megalomania of Caligula. September and October were renamed Germanicus and Domitianus. Poets called him Dominus et Deus (Master and God). At newly established games in honour of Jupiter, he presided in Greek dress wearing a crown. He constructed a massive imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, and another in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Politically insecure, the emperor strove to elevate himself above the body-politic. Fear turned Domitian into a demi-god.