Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Antoninus Pius (AD 138–161) was mercifully free of ambition, whether of Trajanic or Hadrianic type. The spirit of the age was mediocrity, and Antoninus was a fitting figurehead. Neither great generals, nor revolutionary leaders, nor reforming ministers were needed; merely an administrator who would do nothing to upset the geopolitical equilibrium. Expansion had ended, but retreat had not yet begun. This was the essence of Gibbon’s golden age: ‘In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners, had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines.’(16) Peace, order, wealth, civilization: the 2nd century empire certainly offered these. But all the while the mole of history was at work. Several phases passed in quick succession: the exhaustion of expansion under Trajan; the consolidation of frontiers under Hadrian; an equilibrium of forces under Antoninus; and then, under Marcus, a collapse along the upper Danube and a great flood of German tribesmen into northern Italy.

  On the surface, all seemed calm. Almost everywhere there was peace. The only major campaign of Antoninus’s reign was in northern Britain, a push forwards to take in the Southern Uplands and form a new line between the Forth and the Clyde. The reasons are obscure, but they were surely to do with improving frontier security; not that it worked, whatever the plan may have been, for the Romans were back on Hadrian’s Wall a generation later. Elsewhere, it was a matter of small local campaigns and police operations – the straightening out of a stretch of frontier in Germany, a war against mountain ‘brigands’ in Mauretania, a tax revolt in Egypt: routine stuff. Meantime, across the empire, materialized in the archaeology of ten thousand Roman sites, the imperial economy was booming. Basilicas, temples, bath-houses, theatres, amphitheatres and shopping malls went up in town centres. Grand town-houses filled the suburbs, while villas were built on nearby country estates. Local aristocrats thus equipped themselves to shuttle comfortably between the amenities, social round and public duties of the town, and the relative tranquillity of their rural seats. A Mediterranean ambience was universal. A single Graeco-Roman cultural koine defined the elites of the empire. Everywhere it was colonnaded courtyards, frescoed and mosaic-floored living rooms, gardens filled with classical statuary, box-hedges and marble fountains. People drank wine, conversed in Greek or Latin, made offerings to Jupiter, and read – or claimed to read – the classics. Trade and the crafts flourished, and so did the larger farms with a surplus to sell and good roads or waterways to take it to market: for the empire and its civilization, the soldiers and the elite, the forts and the towns, all needed an unceasing supply of grain, meat, salt, cloth, leather, timber, stone, pottery, ironwork, bronze, silver, gold, and much else.

  Yet the true stakeholders were a minority. The majority were slaves, serfs, poor peasants, or at best middling peasants with enough for themselves and their families but little to spare. These were perhaps three-quarters or more of the empire’s people. They were the producers from whom surplus was creamed in tax, rent, interest and forced labour – the surplus that was invested in forts, towns and villas, the surplus that made empire and civilization possible. As things stood, though the empire brought no benefit, though it offered only a life of toil and trouble to the mass of rural people, nonetheless it generally left them enough to carry on, enough for some sort of life. But the balance was a fine one. The margin of safety for millions – the margin between how much went in tax and what was needed to feed a family and stock a farm – was perilously narrow. Tip the balance just a little, and millions might plunge to ruin.

  For the state, too, the balance was fine, the margin of safety narrow: it currently took just enough in tax to support the minimum of soldiers needed to man the empire’s defences. But the line – thousands of miles of stone, earth, iron and flesh – was stretched thin. Dangerously thin, as the skies darkened in the far north.

  Chapter 5

  The decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire

  The military monarchy: Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, AD 161–211

  Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–180) was a child of the Pax Romana. Like Trajan and Hadrian, he was Romano-Spanish, his elevation a further testament to the ‘provincialization’ of the imperial elite. Brought up and educated in the circle around Hadrian, he studied under top philosophers, became a convinced Stoic, and produced his own tract, Meditations, which has survived. Then he spent 23 years serving Antoninus Pius, 15 of them as a close advisor. He embraced the Hadrianic vision of the empire as a commonwealth of peoples, and, under Antoninus, tried to live up to the Stoic ideal of public service and noblesse oblige. True to the spirit of the age, his succession was seamless. Made Antoninus’s adoptive son, married to his daughter, advanced through a series of top political posts, he already enjoyed full imperial power at the time of his patron’s death. The accession was therefore automatic and uncontested. Though ostensibly sharing power with Lucius Verus – also Antoninus’s adoptive son and nominated successor – the latter was a weak and dissolute young man, and it was always Marcus Aurelius who truly ruled. Yet Marcus stands as a figure of Tolstoyian tragedy, for his probity and good intentions were of no account in a reign dominated by storm and strife. Overextended, no longer subsidized by war and plunder, sinking slowly in the global geopolitical balance, the empire was invaded and devastated on a scale not seen since the time of Hannibal.

  The first year of the new reign was a disaster. The Tiber burst its banks and flood-damage was widespread. Famine gripped parts of Italy. Border wars erupted in Britain and Upper Germany. Worst of all, King Vologases III overran Armenia, installed a Parthian puppet, defeated the Governor of Cappadocia, and then swept on down into Roman Syria, scattering the legions before him. It took time to organize a Roman counter-attack – not least because Lucius Verus was put in nominal command – but when it came, a steady succession of victories pushed the Parthians back, out of Armenia in AD 163, out of northern Mesopotamia in AD 164, and finally out of southern Mesopotamia also in AD 165; the Romans even penetrated into Media in the Zagros Mountains in AD 166.

  Parthia was a declining power. Its occasional acts of aggression were the spasms of a weak, and weakening, political order. Momentary successes were due to surprise, and once Rome’s legions were marshalled, the Parthian forces were invariably unable to meet them in pitched battle. But, just as Trajan had been in AD 115, Lucius Verus was overextended with his army on the Gulf. Of this, the young emperor was oblivious: he toured the Greek cities of the East calling himself Armeniacus, Hercules Pacifer, Parthicus Maximus, Medicus (Conqueror of Armenia, Hercules the Peacemaker, Great Conqueror of Parthia, Conqueror of Media). Marcus also celebrated, holding a triumph in Rome, taking the title pater patriae (father of his country), and giving his two sons the title Caesar. But Marcus, if not his co-emperor, understood the limits of power, and the eastern settlement he imposed reflected this: Armenia was restored as a Roman buffer state, but there was no repeat of Trajan’s mistake in trying to hold Mesopotamia; the Romans pulled back to a safer line that could be held in strength. Even so, fate charged a terrible price for the Parthian War.

  In AD 165, in the sweltering heat of the Mesopotamian summer, a deadly contagion was imported into the camps of the Roman army. It may have started at Seleucia, a city sacked by the Roman army in violation of an agreement. The story went around that a soldier had broken open a casket in the Temple of Apollo and unwittingly released ‘a pestilentia
l vapour’. The contagion kept its grip through the winter, and then flared up again the following summer. The Roman army retreated in a chaos of physical and moral collapse. The survivors reaching Syria brought the plague with them, and during AD 167 it swept across the Roman world. We do not know what it was. The Greek doctor Galen records fever, pustules, skin rash, and the spitting of blood. Perhaps it was smallpox. What is clear is that it was both virulent and persistent, a spectre of death haunting the army barracks and urban backstreets through all the long years of Marcus’s reign and into the next. ‘From the frontiers of the Persians to the Rhine and Gaul,’ reported the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘the foul touch of the plague polluted everything with contagion and death.’(1) ‘Such great pestilence devastated all Italy,’ explained Orosius, ‘that everywhere estates, fields and towns were left deserted, without cultivators or inhabitants, and relapsed into ruins and woodland.’(2) An outbreak in AD 189 – perhaps of the same contagion – killed 2,000 people a day in Rome. Some communities may have lost 25 per cent or more of their population. The plague emptied the tribute-bearing farms and frontier-holding forts of the Roman Empire with a power Vologases could never have imagined.

  The same year the plague reached Italy – already weakened by bad harvests and famine several years running – a huge force of Germans crossed the Danube, defeated a Roman army of 20,000, passed over the Julian Alps, and descended into northern Italy. Led by Ballomar, King of the Marcomanni, they were a great tribal confederation that included Marcomanni, Quadi, Vandals and Lombards. Nothing like it had been seen since Marius had defeated the Cimbri and Teutones 250 years before. Roman countermeasures were desperate. Slaves, gladiators and brigands were enrolled in the army. Germanic barbarians were recruited. Reinforcements were rushed in from the East. The palace treasures were sold off at auction to raise funds. Marcus Aurelius took the field in person (as, again, did Lucius Verus, though he died soon after, in AD 169). For several years fighting raged across the empire’s Danubian provinces, and then, in AD 172–175, the emperor carried the war forwards into Germany. His aim was perhaps to destroy German military power so completely that no further invasion of imperial territory would be possible; perhaps also to create a buffer zone north of the Danube that would protect Roman territory. But forward aggression brought new enemies into the fray – notably the Sarmatians – and the war dragged on. A pause in AD 175–177 was followed by renewed fighting against Marcomanni, Quadi and Sarmatians in the final years of Marcus’s reign.

  The world was changing fast. The barbarian peoples of the North had evolved from loose tribal associations into proto-states ruled by kings. Contact with Rome had been a decisive influence. The emperors offered a model of autocratic power to tribal leaders. Subsidies and diplomatic missions enhanced the power of Roman clients. A steady flow of luxury goods, whether traded or given in gift-exchange, increased the patronage of those who controlled them. Above all, the threat posed by the Roman imperial army encouraged confederation, a forging of larger polities, obedience to kings who, by commanding thousands instead of hundreds, could offer both protection and plunder. In the past, great German leaders like Arminius, the victor over Varus at the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, had been the elected commanders of temporary alliances; now, increasingly, they were reigning monarchs whose power lasted as long as they could keep their thrones. The Germans had become more redoubtable foes. Ten years fighting in the forests and mountains of the North had taught hard lessons. Rome, too, had to change. After the stopgap measures of AD 167, longer lasting reforms were set in train. It was in Marcus Aurelius’s German wars that what has been called ‘the military monarchy’ first took shape.

  The authority of the state over the bodies and property of its citizens was increased: birth registers were introduced; control over the estates of minors was taken from families and given to civil servants; fathers lost control of the rewards paid to sons on military service. In this and other ways, intermediary institutions – families, guilds, local towns – were displaced as the central state entered into a direct relationship with the civilians on whom it depended for tribute and recruits. Central government interfered increasingly in local affairs: the cost of games and shows was tightly regulated; expenditure on public buildings was reined in; new burdens were imposed on towns and villages, including the provision of food, lodging and transport to the army. Resources were not to be wasted on largesse and grandeur; they were to be husbanded for the war effort. Devastated border areas were repopulated by defeated barbarians, organized in tightly regulated communities under obligation, in return for their land, to perform military service. Other defeated barbarians were enrolled directly into the standing army.

  Much has been written about the ‘barbarization’ of the Roman army. In fact, the army had always recruited barbarians, and if the proportion was now increased, this was a prerequisite of imperial survival. When, as sometimes happened, revolts broke out among barbarian soldiers, these invariably were rooted in specific abuses, not in some general ‘nationalist’ aspiration to bring down the empire. The army was reformed in other ways, too. New regional commands were created, with control over army groups extending across several provinces, and some units were withdrawn from the front-line to form mobile reserves stationed in back-areas. Promotion on merit became more common. The army, always the principal avenue of social advancement, became yet more open to promotion from the ranks, with numerous equestrian officers reaching the highest positions in Marcus’s service. Inherited rank mattered less; the embattled empire put a premium on professionalism.

  Centralized power, cuts in municipal spending, an increase in the burdens imposed on citizens, new barbarian frontier settlements, the reorganization of the army, new military strategies, a career more open to talent: all these are features of the emerging military monarchy. The essence of it was a shift of wealth and power away from citizens, families, towns, even the provinces as a whole – away, that is, from what might be called ‘civil society’ – to the state, the army, the frontiers, and the imperial aristocracy. Here was the first stage in a long process in which the burden of imperial defence – previously subsidized by plunder from wars of conquest – was shifted from expropriated foreign enemies to the civilian population of the empire itself. By one of history’s many ironies, Marcus Aurelius, the would-be philosopher-king, was experienced by most of his subjects as a ruthless warlord.

  In another respect, too, events in Marcus’s reign heralded the epoch of imperial decline. The empire still retained battlefield dominance. It would continue to do so until at least the campaigns of Belisarius in the second quarter of the 6th century AD. The combination in Late Roman and Early Byzantine armies of accumulated military expertise, superb drill and discipline, high-tech armour and weaponry, and first-rate organization, logistics and engineering usually ensured tactical success, even against numerically much superior opponents. The problem was strategic: concentrated force could be applied only in one or two places at any time, leaving the rest of the empire – whose frontier lines were thousands of miles long – relatively exposed. With the empire’s military centre of gravity temporarily in the East during Marcus’s Parthian War, the defences of continental Europe had been weakened, and it was then that the Germans had broken through. Once the weight of the army had been shifted back, not only were the Germans driven out, but the war was successfully carried into their homeland. This see-sawing of military strength would characterize the whole history of the Late Empire; ever shifting from one threatened front to another, the emperor’s mobile army groups would no sooner have plugged one gap than another would gape open elsewhere. This, moreover, was not simply a military problem: the chronic threat of localized frontier collapse that henceforward afflicted the empire imposed a huge strain on its political structure.

  The first responsibility of the state, after all – of any state – was to protect the national territory. A state which could not do this lost legitimacy. From the time of Marcus
onwards, emperors were rarely able to ensure comprehensive, all-round security. The military monarchy was forced to prioritize, concentrating men, military hardware, supplies and financial reserves where they were most needed. This draining of resources to the main battlefronts left officers defending other frontiers dangerously weak. Forts, towns and villas were open to attack. A century of stable frontiers, fixed garrisons and local recruitment, moreover, had forged strong bonds between soldiers and the districts where they served. Many men were defending families, homes and farms nearby. The growing centralism of the Roman state was therefore contradicted by the growing regionalism of its army groups. The military monarchy aimed for a more centripetal empire as the state apparatus at its command was pulled apart by centrifugal forces. The rebel officers of Late Antiquity – like those of AD 69 – may often have been motivated by careerism. Their prospects of advancement dimmed during years passed in garrison forts that were distant from the emperor, the mobile army, and fields of victory. Promotion was faster on active service under the eye of the commander-in-chief. But whatever personal motives drove the successive military revolts of the period, sections of the civil elite often gave strong support: a usurper emperor, one who used local revenues for local protection, often seemed a better prospect than a ‘legitimate’ ruler a thousand miles away.