Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  It also made him dangerous and unpredictable; especially after the scare of Saturninus’s coup. Informers were encouraged. Philosophers and astrologers were banned from Rome. Various politicians, generals and intellectuals were charged with treason and executed. Then, as so often, the terror began to devour its own children. Some close to the emperor came under suspicion and were cut down – two Praetorian Guard commanders, a top imperial freedman, and the emperor’s own cousin, husband to his niece, who was charged with atheism. The terror was soon out of control. It began to consume the dominant court faction. A plot formed at the highest level in AD 96. It included senators, army officers, members of the imperial household staff, and the empress herself. The assassination was messy. One of the imperial staff, a man called Stephanus, who was facing a charge of embezzlement, offered to kill the emperor. He was admitted to Domitian’s bedroom on the pretext that he had uncovered a plot and possessed a list of names. He promptly stabbed the emperor in the groin as he was reading the document, but, having failed to kill him outright, was then grappled. Domitian might yet have survived, but others of the imperial household joined the fray, a junior officer, a freedman, the head-chamberlain, and one of the emperor’s personal gladiators. Overpowered and stabbed seven times, Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors, finally succumbed. An aged and colourless senator, Cocceius Nerva, figurehead leader of the plot, was hailed emperor on the same day.

  After a period of civil war, the Flavian emperors had at first pursued an essentially moderate policy at home and on the frontiers, one designed to restore the empire’s equilibrium. The governing class, after a preliminary purge, was left unmolested. The talented were promoted and the ranks of the elite broadened. The Romanization of the provinces was pushed forwards. The mob was succoured and entertained. The soldiers were regularly paid and kept busy. There was peace, prosperity for some, security for the propertied. The mass social base of the imperial system was restored. Also, with mutineers and rebels rooted out, the army was returned to discipline. The frontiers were carefully guarded, and, where necessary, strengthened by limited campaigns to punish a hostile tribe or improve a badly placed line. But problems remained. Partly they were those of a ramshackle political structure in which successive dictators were raised up who lacked legitimacy. Domitian was such a man. ‘Contrary to his natural inclinations,’ explained Suetonius, ‘shortage of funds made him predatory and fear made him cruel.’(12) Domitian’s attempts to buy popularity with the soldiers and the mob drained his treasury of funds. The opposition he faced within the governing class made him stuff his court with favourites and impose a reign of terror on the city. These were the politics of a weak dictator; and the tensions they generated within the Roman imperial elite could be resolved only by Stephanus’s dagger. But underlying these parochial concerns – beyond the goldfish bowl of court and Senate – were tensions of far greater moment; tensions that could not be so easily resolved; tensions that would ultimately bring the empire down. These arose from a slowly shifting balance of forces between the rulers of the empire on one side, and the empire’s enemies, both within and beyond the frontiers, on the other.

  Decebalus had revealed again the limits of imperial power. A ‘rogue state’ had challenged the masters of the world and survived. The prestige of the empire had been dented. Was the empire strong enough to batter the Dacians into submission? Did the Pax Romana still hold?

  A brief golden age: Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, AD 98–161

  After the crisis of AD 66–70, it had been hoped that the Flavian victory might herald another century of peace and security like that after Actium. Rebels, mutineers and civil-war factions had been crushed, and, during the 70s AD, with order and discipline restored under strong rulers, the army pushed forwards again on the frontiers – in Britain, in Germany, in the East. Then things seemed to unravel in the mid-80s. The Dacians had invaded Roman territory and defeated Roman armies. Domitian had punished them, but left them unbroken, a great kingdom just over the Danube, a skulking menace in the vastness of the Carpathians. Instead of settling with Decebalus, he had been provoked by plotters into turning on his own people, and blood had flowed among the rulers of Rome in the 90s. From great victories to punitive raids and civil strife: the later years of Flavian rule seemed to follow a depressing, downward trajectory. Was Roman power waning?

  Two of Rome’s greatest emperors, ruling in succession, Trajan (AD 98– 117) and Hadrian (AD 117–138), offered radically different solutions to the crisis of empire in the early 2nd century. The contrast reveals the uncertainty of an imperial ruling class past its peak: the uncertainty that occurs when unexpected weakness is exposed and the attempt to continue in the old way falters. The history, traditions and values of Old Rome denied this possibility: was it not the divinely ordained destiny of the race of Romulus to rule the world, ‘to command the nations, to impose peace, to spare the submissive, to crush the proud’? Yet a different image of the future had intruded, one in which shadowy forms of barbarian hordes and insurgent masses appeared in the frame. Perhaps the priority was to stiffen the empire’s defences, and to foster the loyalty, unity and commitment of those standing behind them; to draw a line across the world, ‘separating Romans and barbarians’, them and us, rallying all the human and material forces of the empire in the cause of civilization. To continue to conquer in the old way, or to build a new commonwealth of peoples: this was the choice represented, respectively, by Trajan and Hadrian.

  Trajan’s immediate predecessor, the emperor Nerva (AD 96–98), had been an old man of little account. Representing no one in particular, he had had no particular mission to perform. He had been an historical dud, a convenient fill-in while the Roman governing elite recovered its nerve and found a way forwards. Once they had, Nerva obligingly died. By then, his regime was tottering, propped up at the last minute by one of the few wise decisions he made: naming Marcus Ulpius Traianus his successor. Trajan was a true soldier-emperor. An experienced and successful career officer, he was, at the time of his accession, serving as Governor of Upper Germany, making him one of Rome’s top generals and a man rooted in one of its three major army-groups. Though of Romano-Spanish origin, his family was already established in the Senate, so, if he was a soldiers’ candidate, he was equally acceptable to the politicians. Having named this popular successor, Nerva could be left to die peacefully, which he did just a month or two later. Trajan, still in Germany, was immediately hailed emperor without opposition.

  Like Tiberius or Vespasian – but unlike Caligula or Domitian – Trajan did not have to prove his fitness to rule, and happily dispensed with the flummery of power that lesser men found necessary. His court was simple, the etiquette minimal, his person approachable, straight-talking, on the level. In this respect he was a Roman of the old school. So, too, in other, more important respects: for Trajan was, above all, a general and a conqueror.

  Strangely – for he is one of Rome’s greatest emperors – our written sources for his reign are poor. Our principal source for his two great campaigns of conquest in Dacia is his own victory monument – Trajan’s Column, which still stands in the centre of Rome, its outer surface adorned with a spiralling ribbon of carved stone, just under a metre wide, some 200 m in length, depicting more than 2,500 separate figures engaged in the successive stages of war. It is, of course, a tainted source. It depicts only Dacians dead and dying, never Romans, and we can guess that much else about the imagery is selective. Yet, close reading of the ribbon, of one image following another – supplemented by fragments of evidence from elsewhere – allows a tentative reconstruction of events in Dacia in AD 101–102 and 105–106.

  A force of perhaps 100,000 men was involved. Their supply was a logistical challenge of the highest order. The key was to use the Danube to ship grain from the Black Sea, but the rapids at the Iron Gates were an insuperable barrier to up-river navigation until Trajan’s engineers cut a canal to bypass the worst, and restored a towpath that was pa
rt-carved into the cliff-face and part-projecting on a cantilevered timber frame. Then troops, transports and equipment were concentrated, new store-bases, forts and signal-stations constructed. Finally, the army crossed on pontoon bridges, the legionaries wearing new reinforced helmets and arm-guards, amply supplied with high-tech artillery, and supported by numerous auxiliaries, including archers, slingers and armoured cavalry.

  But Decebalus was a cunning old fighter. He withdrew deep into his mountains, burning the ground behind him, until he reached Tapae, where, posting his warriors on the slopes above the pass, soon turned into slides of mud by torrential rain, he held shut the gates of Dacia. The following year, Trajan attacked again, this time in two columns, one to hold the enemy at Tapae, the other to force a way through by a second route, outflanking the main Dacian defence. The Column shows the native hill-forts on the approach reduced one by one – testimony to the fort-busting power of Roman siege-assaults – as the protective shell around Decebalus’s capital at Sarmizegethusa was cracked open. Then, at the eleventh hour, Decebalus sued for peace. He saved his kingdom from annexation, but it was reduced to client status, and he was compelled to demolish his remaining hill-forts and accept a Roman garrison at his capital. Presumably the Dacian resistance had been strong enough to prevent outright victory, the capital perhaps just beyond Trajan’s grasp at the end of a second summer.

  Three years later, Decebalus felt strong enough to break free. He first took the commander of the Roman garrison at Sarmizegethusa hostage. But the general, an old friend of Trajan, killed himself to leave the emperor free to act. Again, two columns invaded, moving fast, reducing hill-forts in rapid succession, fighting with greater brutality than ever against men now deemed rebels. This time the Dacian capital was besieged and captured, though the king fled into the mountains, hotly pursued by Roman cavalry. The images on the Column are graphic: we see the king on the ground, isolated, surrounded, knife poised to take his own life, as so many of his followers had already done; meantime, towns and villages are torched, fugitives cut down, captives rounded up and dragged into slavery; and then an image of the dead king’s head, held aloft before Trajan’s assembled army.

  In 1965, in a field in northern Greece, the tombstone of a Roman soldier was found: it was that of the man who had captured Decebalus and carried his severed head to Trajan. It read: ‘He was made a duplicarius [junior NCO] by the divine Trajan in the Second Pannonian Cavalry, and then an explorator [scout]. He was decorated twice in Trajan’s Dacian and Parthian wars. He was promoted to decurio [senior NCO] in the same cavalry regiment because he captured Decebalus and brought his head to Trajan at Rannistorum. He was honourably discharged by Terentius Scaurianus.’(13) This, of course, was the ultimate victory: the enemy dispersed; his capital taken; his leader slain; his territory plundered, laid waste, stripped of men. Dacia was ethnically cleansed, its people enslaved, at least 50,000 of them, though possibly, if there is no error in transmission of the written source, as many as 500,000; others, no doubt, were driven into the wilderness, where they perished. New settlers were introduced, and a new Roman province built, with roads, towns, pastures, salt-works and gold-mines.

  The conquest of Dacia was celebrated in the old-fashioned way. A corrupted written source records the haul as 2.25 million kg of gold, 4.5 million kg of silver, and 500,000 slaves. Assume a simple transmission error and we might reduce these astronomical figures to a tenth of the size; even then, they represent, at the equivalent of around 675 million denarii, more than the whole sum of disbursements recorded by Augustus in the Res Gestae. We see something of this booty still preserved in surviving monuments of stone. A new commercial harbour, nearly one kilometre across, with berthing for 100 ships, ringed by great warehouses, was built at Portus near the Tiber mouth: a guarantee of the city’s grain-supply. A massive public bath-house was erected, no doubt with deliberate symbolic intent, on the ruins of Nero’s Golden House on the Esquiline Hill. Ancient slums were cleared in the zone immediately north of the Forum, and a great chunk of the Quirinal Hill, to a maximum depth of 38 m, was cut away, creating a wide open space, 200 m by 120 m, for the greatest of Trajan’s buildings. The space was filled by a new imperial forum and basilica, the latter 80 m long by 25 m wide and lavishly decorated with imported marble columns. Beyond the basilica, on the western side of the complex, was a pair of libraries, and these framed the famous Column, allowing visitors to the library a close view of the sculpted scenes of the emperor’s Dacian wars. Behind the imperial forum, resting against the cut-away hill to the north, a multi-storey complex of vaulted passageways, arcaded shops and luxury flats was built. Trajan’s Markets still survive as the best place in the modern city to get a sense of what it was like to walk the streets of ancient Rome. There was a message in all of this. Trajan’s answer to the crisis of empire was the familiar one: war is glorious, and it is conquest that yields security and riches. The empire was not weakening: Rome was still an earth-shaking colossus striding the globe.

  But the richest rewards, as always, glittered beyond the haze of the eastern deserts. Here, the Flavian policy of border annexations had brought the legions up to the Parthian frontier. Then Trajan had ordered the annexation of Nabataean Arabia (centred on the great caravan city of Petra) in AD 105–108. Soon a new road was being built, linking Syria with Petra, Aqaba and the Red Sea. Tension mounted. In AD 110, Osroes succeeded to the throne of Parthia, a king committed to aggressive defence. The pro-Roman puppet ruler of Armenia was ejected and replaced by a kinsman of the Parthian king. Trajan, no less aggressive than Osroes, champion of traditional imperialism, victor over Decebalus, set himself the ultimate challenge: a great war of conquest in the East to eliminate the Parthian threat forever. Concentrating massive force – eight legions plus supporting auxiliaries (80,000 men) – he unleashed a military blitzkrieg in AD 114, overrunning Armenia, descending into northern Mesopotamia, sweeping up hasty declarations of allegiance from the Parthian client-kings in his path. The following year, his army raised to 13 legions (130,000 men), he pushed on south, down the lower Tigris and Euphrates, finally to reach the Gulf, the whole of Mesopotamia under his control. It was a dizzying achievement. The Land of Two Rivers was among the oldest, richest and most heavily populated centres of civilization in the world. It had been the supply-base of numerous great empires over millennia of time, but no Roman – not Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Antony or Octavian-Augustus – had ever come nearly so far. That winter of AD 115/116, Trajan appeared greater than them all: a new Alexander.

  But Alexander had fought two great battles of annihilation against the armies of the Persian Empire before he marched on Babylon. His enemies’ military power had been broken before he took their capital cities. Trajan’s achievement was puny by comparison. He had not yet faced the Parthian army at all – that enemy was still very much at large. His communications stretched back over hundreds of miles of river, desert and mountain. Vast populations were held in thrall by relative handfuls of soldiers. The Roman defence-line was wafer-thin. In the vast expanses of the East, the social and military weight of eastern humanity threatened to swamp the scattered pockets of Roman officials and soldiers among them. And so it came to pass. In AD 116, the Parthian Empire struck back. The main royal army, mustered on the Iranian plateau, swept down the passes of the Zagros Mountains, assailed the Roman supply-line, and crushed the battle groups sent against them. The ancient cities of Mesopotamia exploded into revolt: Roman garrisons were massacred, and Trajan was soon embroiled in a war of sieges to hold and retake key strategic centres. Meantime, deep in the Roman rear, a revolt among the Jews of Cyrene quickly spread to Jewish communities in Egypt, Cyprus and eventually Palestine itself. Finally, gut-wrenching news filtered through to the embattled army commanders in Mesopotamia that there was trouble in Britain and on the Danube: frontiers stripped of men for Trajan’s eastern war were now exposed to attack as enemies learned that the army was bogged down. Trajan headed for home, leaving Hadrian, his pr
incipal lieutenant, in charge in the East. But on the way, in August AD 117, he fell ill and died. And, with the whole East in flames, his attempt to resolve the crisis of imperial overstretch by a return to untrammelled expansionism had died with him. Roman imperialism had lurched forwards, kangarooed and crashed.

  The roots of Trajan’s failure were deep. Ancient military imperialism was dynamically expansionist because it paid for itself and yielded a profit: it generated in plunder and tribute more than it cost. If this had not been so, it would have ruined the states that engaged in aggressive war, and impoverished their ruling classes – in which case there would have been neither the incentive nor capacity to wage it. Quite simply, war and empire were profitable. But only up to a point.

  Everything depended on whether the land fought over could yield a return. Empire and civilization were based, broadly, on plough agriculture. Regions of intensive cultivation, supporting large populations and numerous settlements, produced surpluses that could be expropriated as booty, taxes, rents, tithes, interest and labour services. But the lower the level of agricultural development, the more marginal the potential gains. Beyond the plough-lands, in the marshes, forests, mountains and deserts of true barbaricum, regions populated sparsely by nomads, pastoralists and scattered crofters, there was little portable wealth. Here, moreover, armies could be swallowed up in great tracts of uncharted wilderness, starving at the end of long, fragile supply-lines, harassed by elusive guerrilla bands, bogged down in unwinnable and pointless wars. Heavy investment in men and hardware might count for little in such environments, even be liabilities. War and empire in the wilderness were not profitable, for there was little profit to be had; they were merely a drain on the plough-lands of the hinterland required to support the effort of conquest. Everywhere, the Roman Empire reached its natural limits where the ploughed met the unploughed, ancient agriculture bordered primitive wasteland, civilization confronted barbarism – in the mountain ranges of north-west Africa, at the desert fringes of Libya, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, along the Danube and in the Rhineland of continental Europe, and in the hill-country of northern Britain.