Rome
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PLATE 7 ♦ Strategic mobility was the key to victory over lightly equipped, fast-moving guerrillas like the Numidians. Roman general Gaius Marius abandoned carts and made his soldiers carry their equipment on their backs: part of the growing professionalisation of the army under the Late Republic.
Source: DK Images/Karl Shone
PLATE 8 ♦ Coin of the Social War rebels. The revolt of Rome’s Italian subjects meant a revolt by half her army that could have brought the empire down. The rebels were defeated – but were granted Roman citizenship.
Source: The Trustees of the British Museum
PLATE 9 ♦ Pompey the Great. The Late Republic was dominated by a succession of great warlords whose power eclipsed that of their senatorial colleagues and presaged that of the emperors.
Source: Alamy Images/Visual Arts Library (London)
PLATE 10 ♦ Luxuria (the extravagant and conspicuous consumption of wealth) became more socially acceptable among the elite under the Late Republic.
Source: David Bellingham
PLATE 11 ♦ The Roman Forum. Late Republicam warlords invested much of their plunder in monumentalising the city – building a downtown symbolic of slaughter and slavery.
Source: Punchstock/Brand X
PLATE 12 ♦ Cicero. Though a ‘new man’, he became the leading representative of senatorial reaction in the middle of the 1st century BC, attempting to build a conservative bloc against the popular forces behind politicians like Caesar, Antony and Octavian.
Source: Corbis/Sandro Vannini
PLATE 13 ♦ Julius Caesar, the greatest politician and general of the Late Republic, and the man who finally destroyed the power of the senatorial aristocracy and inaugurated the regime of the ‘new men’.
Source: akg-images Ltd
PLATE 14 ♦ The siege of Alesia, 52 BC, was an apocalyptic climax to Caesar’s eight-year conquest of Gaul. The war made Caesar the most powerful player in Roman politics – at a cost of a million dead and a million enslaved.
Source: akg-images Ltd/Peter Connolly
PLATE 15 ♦ Octavian-Augustus. A murderous civil-war faction leader is transformed into a heroic monarch in all but name by the spin doctors, in-house poets and court artists of the new Augustan regime.
Source: Corbis/Roger Wood
PLATE 16 ♦ Augustus’s image-makers portrayed him both as a paternalistic ‘father of his country’ (wearing a toga) and as a statesman-like commander-in-chief who guaranteed national security and internal order (wearing a cuirass).
Source: akg-images Ltd/Nimatallah
PLATE 17 ♦ The Res Gestae – Augustus’s political testimony – was inscribed in stone and placed on public view at various places across the empire. Today he would tour the TV studios.
Source: DK Images/Mike Dunning
PLATE 18 ♦ The Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) in Rome is rich in political symbolism. Augustus, Rome’s new military dictator, claimed to have ‘restored the Republic’. Here, then, to make the point, are Rome’s senatorial aristocracy.
Source: Ancient Art & Architecture/C M Dixon
PLATE 19 ♦ The Ara Pacis again, but now we see the imperial family, women and children included – the new power of the dynasty and apparently a complement to the old authority of the Senate.
Source: Ancient Art & Architecture/C M Dixon
PLATE 20 ♦ Behind a mask of constitutional rectitude was the fist of military power. The Praetorian Guard was stationed in Rome, and, as events in AD 41 proved, it, and not the Senate, was the final arbiter of power.
Source: DK Images/De Agostini Editore Picture Library
PLATE 21 ♦ The enemy within. Onto the floor of this room fell the debris – benches, tables, writing implements – of the first-floor scriptorium where the Dead Sea Scrolls were inscribed: a call to revolutionary holy war against the Roman Empire.
Source: author’s collection
PLATE 22 ♦ A Roman base in the Judean Desert outside the Jewish fortress of Masada, where the last of the revolutionaries of AD 66–73 defied the might of Rome. Classical civilisation was sometimes bitterly contested by its victims.
Source: author’s collection
PLATE 23 ♦ Nero the lyre-player had laid out a pleasure park here, but the ‘blood and iron’ Flavian dynasty preferred an amphitheatre for the games. The Colosseum is Rome’s Auschwitz: built for the mass murder of slaves as a form of public entertainment.
Source: DK Images/Mike Dunning
PLATE 24 ♦ Hadrian’s Wall. For more than half a millennium, Rome had expanded. But the wilderness was unconquerable, and by the early 2nd century AD the frontiers had become permanent.
Source: Alamy Images/Robert Estall Photo Agency
PLATE 25 ♦ Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens. Built by Hadrian, the temple symbolises the emperor’s policy of constructing a commonwealth of the civilised behind the frontier walls he was also raising.
Source: Alamy Images/Steve Allen Travel Photography
PLATE 26 ♦ The ride turns. The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome has the form of a traditional victory monument – but this had been a war to eject Germanic invaders after the frontier defences on the upper Danube had collapsed.
Source: Corbis/Araldo de Luca
PLATE 27 ♦ A return to normality? On the Arch of Septimus Severus at Leptis Magna in Libya, the new emperor, victor in civil war, appears with his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, in a conventional scene. In fact, the developing ‘military monarchy’ represented a radical break with the past.
Source: Marcus Prinis & Jona Lendering
PLATE 28 ♦ A victory monument with a difference. The Sassanid emperor (mounted) receives the submission of the captive Roman emperor Valerian (kneeling) on a rock carving at Naqsh-i-Rustarn. Defeats were many in the mid-3rd century AD.
Source: Alamy Images/Robert Harding
PLATE 29 ♦ The end of the pax Romana. Portchester Castle, a Roman fort on the ‘Saxon Shore’ – one of many new frontier defences built by the embattled empire of the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.
Source: author’s collection
PLATE 30 ♦ Roman towns were also walled by the Late Empire – even as urban life within declined – turning them into the strong points of a developing system of defence-in-depth.
Source: author’s collection
PLATE 31 ♦ A bureaucratic empire. The Notitia Dignitatum of c. AD too, with its titles, lists and badges of office, bears testimony to a bloated centralised state expanding at the expense of civil society.
Source: TopFoto
PLATE 32 ♦ Theodosius the Great, the last emperor of a united empire, whose political authoritarianism and Christian militancy was not enough to reconstruct a viable polity.
Source: akg-images Ltd/Pirozzi