Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  All of this cost. So, too, did a generous programme of largesse and public works. Six bounties paid to the mob and the soldiers are estimated to have totalled some 220 million denarii. There were lavish games in Rome. The fiscus funded the imperial post – an empire-wide system of roads, state motels and changing stations. It also paid out to revive the old alimenta system, whereby loans of capital were made to support Italian farmers, and the interest on these provided a primitive form of social security for the support of poor citizen families. Not least, Severus mounted a huge building programme, both in Rome and in favoured cities of the empire. North Africa especially benefited – above all, Leptis Magna, the emperor’s home town.

  Severus has been acclaimed as ‘the black emperor’. The fact that Severus was African has been cited as evidence that Rome was colour-blind, free of racism, a genuinely multicultural commonwealth. Septimius Severus was no more ‘black’ than Julius Caesar. Politically, culturally and racially, he was part of the broad Mediterranean elite that ruled the Roman Empire. Just as the blood of Etruscans and Samnites flowed in the veins of Italian nobles (like Augustus or Vespasian), and that of Celts and Iberians in those of Spanish ones (like Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus), so did the blood of Berbers and Carthaginians flow in the veins of an African noble like Severus. Yet, no less than any of his predecessors, Severus was classically educated, thoroughly Romanized, and, one has to assume, every bit as contemptuous of barbarians, peasants and slaves as other members of his class. We are told that ‘he retained a trace of an African accent into old age’.(4) No doubt: he probably knew Libyan, Punic and Greek as well as Latin, and it would have been most surprising if the Latin of Leptis Magna had sounded like that of Rome; an ‘African accent’, in other words, was a Roman provincial accent, not a foreign one.

  Leptis was one of the three great cities that formed Tripolitania (today the north-west coastal region of Libya). Like nearby Oea and Sabratha, it was a great entrepôt, receiving grain and olive oil from the rich estates along the coast, and, from trans-Saharan desert caravans, salt, gold, semi-precious stones, ivory, slaves, wild animals for the arena, and natron for use in embalming and glassmaking. Already fabulously rich, Leptis scaled new heights of grandeur when its most illustrious son became emperor. A great marble-faced complex – forum, basilica, colonnaded street, four-way arch – was constructed by the Wadi Lebda which led down to the harbour. The harbour itself was lined with new warehouses and provided with a new lighthouse at its entrance. A circus for chariot racing was built beside the amphitheatre on the edge of town.

  Despite the lavish spending, the regime remained solvent; indeed, Severus’s successor inherited a bulging fiscus. The Severan military monarchy had achieved a spectacular resolution of the financial crisis that had almost crippled imperial defence under Marcus Aurelius. Like the great civil wars of the Late Republic, those of AD 193–197 had effected a massive transfer of wealth from the defeated to the victors. The wreckage of army-camps and sacked cities had yielded rich booty. The estates of the dead and the fled had been annexed to the imperial estate. The post-war police terror had produced further crops from the condemned and expropriated. Severus had emerged from his wars against Niger and Albinus richer than all his predecessors, and a special treasury, the res privata principis, was established to handle the new acquisitions. His regime had triumphed by plundering the estates and cities of the empire – by waging war not only on civil war factions, but on civil society itself. Added to this were new hauls from foreign war. With his domestic enemies dead, the governing class cowed, the army thoroughly reformed, and revenues pouring into the treasury, Severus had been able to take the offensive in the East, where the Parthians, seeking to benefit from the Roman civil war in the West, had launched an attempt to recover lost territory. In the late summer of AD 197, Severus had marched his Danubian veterans and three new legions raised in his Balkan power-base to confront the traditional enemy. As so often when faced by all-out effort, the Parthians melted away before the Roman advance, and Mesopotamia was overrun. Now, as before at Antioch, Byzantium and Lyons, the streets of Ctesiphon succumbed to an orgy of massacre, destruction and looting by Severan soldiery. The war then followed a familiar pattern: the opening blitzkrieg was followed by a tedious war of sieges, while Roman strength was sapped by disease and long supply-lines. Even so, Parthian power was crumbling – it was destined to succumb to the Sassanians, a new breed of invading warlords from Iran, within a generation – and Severus held on to far more of Mesopotamia than any of his predecessors. It was easily enough of a victory to merit a grand tour of the eastern provinces – Syria, Palestine and Egypt (AD 199–202) – before returning in triumph to Rome, where the booty of the war was consumed in handouts, games and monuments.

  At the beginning of the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire looked stronger than ever. The civil wars were over. The Parthians had been crushed. Northern Mesopotamia had been annexed. The army had been enlarged and professionalized. The treasury was full. There was a construction boom in the imperial cities. Streams of merchant ships crisscrossed the Mediterranean. Farms were peaceful and prosperous.

  And yet so little was truly secure. The military monarchy had imposed heavy burdens on the people of the empire. Discontent festered in remote villages. The pressure valves of constitutional opposition had been shut down – the rotting heads and mangled corpses of the dictator’s enemies discouraged criticism. The ruler, the court, the upper echelons of the state machine, the army high command, these commanding heights of power were no longer rooted in the institutions of civil society. Little vestige of accountability remained. The state had been elevated above society – dominating, exploiting, siphoning resources. It had become an end in itself, a self-perpetuating mechanism of power. The empire had thus acquired a distorted form, its parts unbalanced and out of kilter, the head swelling as the limbs shrivelled.

  Even before the old dictator died, in the bogs and glens of the British North the imperial leviathan, lashing out into the mist and drizzle, was reduced to despair by bands of blue-painted skirmishers. Slowly dying, gout-ridden, carried about on a litter, Septimius Severus remained to the end a man of blood and iron. ‘Let no one escape utter destruction at our hands,’ was the chilling injunction to his men; ‘let not the infant still carried in its mother’s womb, if it be male, escape from its fate.’(5) But they did escape, and it was Severus who was taken by fate, early in AD 211, at the city of York, shortly before the new campaigning season opened. Maybe, after all, blood and iron would not suffice to save the Empire.

  The Anarchy: from Caracalla to Diocletian, AD 211–284

  For the conqueror of Mesopotamia, the British war of AD 208–211 was a dismal business. The empire’s north-west frontier had been troubled since the 180s AD. Mutiny and civil war had so weakened the army there that Roman commanders had been reduced to bribing barbarian chieftains to keep the peace. Severus would have none of it, and saw as well a chance to get his sons, Caracalla and Geta, away from Rome and toughen them up with some soldiering. His preparations were thorough. Tens of thousands of men were massed on Hadrian’s Wall. South Shields was remodelled to hold a three-month grain supply. A fleet was assembled to transport men and stores up the east coast of Scotland. As the army marched, new roads were cut through forests, causeways laid across marshes, bridges thrown over rivers. Perhaps it was just too thorough, for the tribesmen avoided pitched battle and waged guerrilla war. The struggle was already in its third year when Severus died, and the chances of decisive victory seemed remote. The Romans had failed in these northern wastes before, retreating under Domitian in the 80s AD, and again under Marcus in the 160s AD. Elsewhere, too, campaigning outside the limits of plough-cultivation, in the mountains, forests and deserts beyond the frontiers, they had often found themselves in a military morass. We do not know what advice the two young emperors were given by the generals after Severus’s death, but some surely doubted the wisdom of the war. It probably looked unwinnable. The
Highlands were hard to control. The tribes were desperately poor. There was little booty. Meantime, the army, its prestige compromised by failure, was thousands of miles from Rome, the Balkans and the eastern frontier. That was dangerous. Whatever was said, Caracalla and Geta would have needed little encouragement to pack for home. They made peace with the Caledonian tribes, dispersed the field army, and returned forthwith to Rome.

  Severus had named his sons joint heirs, and on his deathbed had enjoined them not to quarrel. But deep hatred divided them. They travelled separately on the journey home, kept separate courts within the palace, and even discussed splitting the empire in two. The matter was resolved when Caracalla had his brother murdered – stabbed to death by army officers, it is said, having fled through the palace into his mother’s arms. Caracalla went immediately to the Praetorian Barracks to secure the allegiance of the Guard. ‘With you I pray to live or, if need be, die,’ announced the emperor, though he wisely added, ‘Yours are all the treasures of the state’(6) – specifically, higher pay and better rations. Then he went to the Albanum Barracks, where the legion his father had stationed near Rome was based. At first the gates were closed against him, but, again, an offer of higher pay promptly secured the soldiers’ allegiance. Soon, around the empire, frontier legionaries were being assembled on their parade-grounds to be told of the army pay-rise, to damn the traitor Geta, and to swear devotion to Caracalla. Many stone-cut records of these events, so-called ‘loyalty inscriptions’, have been found at army bases. Meantime, Geta’s friends and allies were destroyed in a savage purge (one source inflates the total slain to 20,000).

  Insecurity and inflated spending were hallmarks of Caracalla’s reign. The power of the internal security apparatus – essentially an empire-wide network of military police and paid informers – was increased. The army pay-rises were underwritten by hefty tax increases. The inheritance and manumission taxes paid by Roman citizens were increased from 5 to 10 per cent, and Caracalla’s famous citizenship edict of AD 212, by which all free persons in the empire became citizens, was intended to increase the numbers obliged to pay. Aurum coronarium – the ‘coronation gold’ traditionally paid only on the emperor’s accession and often in practice remitted – became a recurring extraordinary levy. The coinage was debased: a new double-denarius was issued at a lower weight (and therefore silver content) than the two denarii it supposedly represented. All these schemes transferred surplus from civil society to the state and its army. By these means the cost was met of the military-bureaucratic complex over which Caracalla presided: not only army pay-rises and rewards to favourites, courtiers and loyalist officers; also the ‘bread and circuses’ and monumental building that appeased and awed the mob; and the bribes and subsidies to border chieftains that were a growing feature of imperial defence.

  Once things were settled in Rome, Caracalla spent his time with the army, fighting first in Germany (AD 213), then in the East (AD 215–217). His methods were a mix of vanity, intrigue and brute force. Modelling himself on Alexander, he adopted Macedonian dress, created a 16,000-strong phalanx, and tried to fix up a marriage alliance with an eastern princess. He employed secret diplomacy to buy off potential enemies and isolate the more intractable. His armies were then free to crush, successively, German tribesmen, Egyptian tax-rebels and Parthian garrisons. Even so, the emperor did not inspire confidence, and his position was gravely weakened in the winter of AD 216–217 when he ordered a retreat in the face of an impending Parthian counter-offensive. Caracalla was assassinated by a common soldier in April AD 217.

  For a moment the grip of the Severan dynasty was broken. The eastern army hailed one of its own generals emperor. But Macrinus ruled for only a year. He succumbed in June AD 218 to a military revolt orchestrated by the leading women of the ousted House of Severus. Though Septimius’s widow, Julia Domna, was dead, her sister, Julia Maesa, was very much alive, and her two daughters, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mammaea, each had a son – and therefore a ‘legitimate’ Severan heir. Determined to maintain the pre-eminence of the family, Julia Maesa roused her Syrian supporters to revolt (she was from the eastern city of Emesa), bribed the soldiers to overturn Macrinus, and placed one of Septimius Severus’s two great-nephews on the throne.

  The ‘Syrian’ faction were unfortunate in their chosen instrument. Elagabalus, who had taken the name of the eastern sun-god of which he was chief priest, was a religious fanatic. Established in Rome from early AD 219, he continued to don the fantastic garb of an eastern priest, filled the court with a retinue of religious charlatans and cranks, and ordered the Senate to elevate the cult of the Unconquered Sun into the principal state religion. In the bizarre theocratic dictatorship of Elagabalus, devotion was the principal qualification for high office, and an actor became Praetorian Prefect, a charioteer headed the Night-watch, and a hairdresser supervised the corn-supply. Accounts of the fertility ‘rites’ enacted at court lost nothing in the retelling in Rome’s salons and bars. By the summer of AD 221, Julia Maesa was manoeuvring to destroy her grandson and replace him with his less colourful cousin. The blow fell in March AD 222. The Praetorians were bribed, Elagabalus and his mother murdered, and the rest of the court hunted down and killed. The theocratic dictatorship collapsed in a day, and Severus Alexander was hailed emperor.

  The principal qualities of the new emperor were that he was a relatively ‘normal’ Roman youth, he was easily controlled by his female minders, and he was not Elagabalus. Even so, the Syrians were discredited and had ground to make up; behind the cardboard ruler they schemed to rebuild their power. The tension that had recently developed between the traditional aristocracy of office represented by the Senate and the military-bureaucratic complex of court and army recruited from the Equestrian Order was eased. Senators were readmitted to the highest councils of the state, and previously reserved equestrian offices – crucially that of Praetorian Prefect – were opened to them. The mob, too, was courted in the usual way, with handouts and public works. Court expenditure, on the other hand, was reined back, and new taxes were levied on the rich. The Syrians were eager to make themselves popular.

  The real danger, however, was not at home but abroad. Decisive shifts in the balance of geopolitical power were taking place in both the East and the North. The military monarchy had effected a significant redistribution of resources from civil society to the state, and an enlarged and reorganized army had enabled it to crush domestic and foreign enemies. But, locked into an eternal military struggle with her neighbours, Rome could only ever gain temporary respite through her victories; indeed, these very victories provided the spur to her enemies to regroup, rearm, and return to fight again. Severus’s conquest of Mesopotamia in AD 197– 199, and Caracalla’s successful defence of it in AD 215–217, had shattered the cohesion of the fast-decaying Parthian Empire. In the 220s AD it had splintered into rebellious provincial fragments. Among the local potentates who then contended for power was one Artaxerxes, Prince of Persepolis, ancient homeland of the Achaemenids, who, 500 years before, had ruled the greatest empire on earth. After smashing the Parthian king in pitched battle in AD 227, Artaxerxes overran Mesopotamia and reached the borders of Syria and Asia Minor in the succeeding three years. As the new ‘Great King’ or ‘King of Kings’, Artaxerxes laid claim to the empire of his ancestors – a domain that had embraced the whole Eastern Mediterranean as far as the Aegean. The wreckage of empire wrought by Severus’s legions a generation before had produced its Nemesis. The spirit of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes walked again: an aggressive, boasting, thrusting imperialism that mirrored that of Rome: the Sassanid Empire.

  Severus Alexander’s attempts to negotiate were ignored, and Roman forces had to be rushed to the East. The campaign was mismanaged and losses were heavy on both sides. Both empires, too, were soon distracted by more pressing problems elsewhere, and the war, which had begun with such grandiose aims in AD 230, had petered out by AD 233. But the relocation of the court to Antioch, and the shift of crack Danubian uni
ts to the East, had gravely weakened the empire’s European defences. German tribes penetrated the frontier screen and plundered territory along the Rhine and Danube. Such news cannot have played well in the ranks of soldiers recently transferred from the Balkans to the East: their families and farms at home had been exposed by their absence fighting a ‘foreign’ war. When court and army relocated again to the North, the centrifugal tensions within the Roman state came to a head. Severus Alexander was eager to cut a deal with the tribes. His mother, Julia Mammaea, wanted to escape the miserable northern forests. The court – or so it seemed to some – was run by women and stuffed with foppish eastern favourites. The ‘Germans’ had had enough of the ‘Syrians’. In March AD 235 the Danubian soldiers acclaimed one of their own emperor: Maximinus Thrax, Maximinus the Thracian, a huge peasant-soldier who had risen from the ranks to top command. The eastern troops panicked and fled. Severus Alexander and his mother were murdered in the base-camp at Mainz.

  Maximinus (AD 235–238) represented the military monarchy in its most extreme form. A farmer’s son from a Balkan village, he was a rough career-soldier who had lived his whole adult life in the army. Immediately threatened by plots, one organized by a group of senatorial officers, another by eastern generals, the opposition was ruthlessly crushed. The candidate of the Rhineland and Danubian legions, he then went onto the offensive in the North, smashing the German tribes in pitched battle. Agents, meantime, were dispatched across the empire to rake in revenue to support the war effort. Within just three years, these policies had provoked a fresh revolt.