by Woolf, Greg
Politicians of all sides rallied to Rome’s cause. Marius, no longer as popular as when he had routed the Cimbri and Teutones, fought alongside his rival Sulla. There were two frantic years of fighting, between 90 and 89, with a couple more years of mopping-up actions. Rome won the battles, but conceded all that had been demanded. By 87 most Italians were Roman citizens. The reasons were straightforward. Rome had been fighting wars she had not chosen for nearly two decades, she had only just escaped a repeat of the Gallic sack, and the domestic political system was imploding. Survival without the Italians was unthinkable. And just to encourage them to do the right thing, yet another threat emerged.
War in Italy offered Mithridates of Pontus an unmissable opportunity. His armies annexed the neighbouring kingdoms of Bithynia and Cappadocia in 89 BC. The deposed kings bribed the Roman ambassador Manius Aquillius to compel Mithridates to restore them. But when Aquillius ordered Bithynia to invade Pontus in punishment, Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia, executed Aquillius by pouring molten gold down his throat to punish him for his greed, and instructed the Greek cities to demonstrate their loyalty by killing all their Roman residents. Estimates of the Roman and Italian dead range between 80,000 and 150,000. The Pontic armies swept across the Aegean to Athens; there the anti-Roman faction welcomed them with open arms. Victory was short-lived. Sulla marched east to sack Athens. The peace he made with Mithridates was not a permanent solution, but enough to allow him to return to Rome determined to purge the city of popularis politics, and of its main exponents. At home and abroad politics had entered a new, and bloodier, phase.
Further Reading
Robert Morstein-Marx’s From Hegemony to Empire (Berkeley, 1995) expertly tracks the evolution of Roman rule in the east between the fall of Carthage and the supremacy of Pompey. The opening chapters of the first volume of Stephen Mitchell’s Anatolia (Oxford, 1993) set this story in a rich geographic frame. Rome’s equally tentative search for stable limits of power in the western Mediterranean is the subject of Stephen Dyson’s The Creation of the Roman Frontier (Princeton, 1985); one of the many strengths of this work is the inspiration it draws from comparative studies. The implications of seeing the Mediterranean as a region in which continents meet, rather than a world enclosed in itself, are discussed in several contributions to William Harris’s Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005).
The best single account of the collapse of the Republican system is the title essay in Peter Brunt’s The Fall of the Roman Republic (Oxford, 1988). Mary Beard and Michael Crawford’s Rome in the Late Republic (London, 1999) is full of ideas. Anyone seeking a detailed account of the period is referred to volume ix of the Cambridge Ancient History, edited by Andrew Lintott, John Crook, and Elizabeth Rawson (Cambridge, 1994). Howard Scullard’s brilliant textbook From the Gracchi to Nero, 5th edn. (London, 1982) is still difficult to beat. Modern understandings of what the populares thought they were doing, at home and in the provinces, have been revolutionized by the publication of a marvellous edition of their epigraphic laws, in Michael Crawford’s Roman Statutes (London, 1996). Andrew Lintott’s Judicial Reform and Land Reform in the Roman Republic (Cambridge, 1992) contributes to the same debate. Important essays on the role of the people in this period are now helpfully gathered in the first volume of Fergus Millar’s collected papers, Rome, the Greek East and the World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
VIII
AT HEAVEN’S COMMAND?
The most important respect in which Roman civil society surpasses that of other states seems to me to be how it treats the gods. I think too that the very thing that among other people is viewed unfavourably is, among the Romans, a source of cohesion: I mean their respect of the gods. For it is developed to such an extraordinary extent among them—both in their private affairs and in the common business of the community—that nothing is treated as more important than this. This fact seems astonishing to many people.
(Polybius, Histories 6.56.6–8)
A Moral Empire
We are, in many ways, still Greeks when we contemplate the rise of Rome. It is not just that we rely heavily on Greek narrative accounts; nor even that we share with our Greek witnesses—Polybius and Diodorus, Dionysius and Plutarch among many others—a sense of ourselves as outsiders looking in on Rome. Even more fundamentally, the way we try to understand how societies work remains firmly based in a tradition of political science that can be traced directly back to classical Greece. When Polybius asked why it was Rome that had conquered the Mediterranean, he found his answer in a unique balance of political and military institutions—a perfect blend of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements—along with the attitudes and habits they inculcated. Religious awe was just one component; he followed the passage quoted above with a good functionalist explanation of its role in stabilizing the social hierarchy. He looked, in other words, for Rome’s comparative advantage over its competitors. Another Greek, Aelius Aristides, in a speech of praise addressed to Rome nearly three centuries later, compared Roman success in government to the failure of earlier empires. One key variable he identified was inclusiveness; that Romans were unusually willing to incorporate those they had subjected into the citizen body.1 Whether or not we agree with these particular arguments, the analytical procedure is familiar.
Romans did not think like this, or not until the Greeks taught them to do so. Even after Rome had grown its own philosophers, they did not supply the most influential explanations of Roman success and failure. To access those we have to investigate the interlinked worlds of moral discourse and religious practice. For from the very earliest records we can access, Roman texts and monuments alike proclaim that Rome had grown great through the virtue of her men, and the favour of her gods.
During the Republic, it was common to attribute Roman successes to the virtue of its leaders, and Roman failures to their vices or occasionally to errors they had made in preparatory rituals. One result was a moralizing rhetoric that coloured all surviving speeches, histories, and biographies and many other kinds of literature.2 Right back in the third century BC, the first of the elogia carved on the sarcophagi from the tomb of the Scipiones shows the close connection made between what we would call private moral qualities and public conduct. A rich tradition of invective preserves many more accusations of vice than memorials of virtue. The political reputation of Caesar was damaged by allegations that he had allowed King Nicomedes of Bithynia to have sex with him. Few of Cicero’s opponents in the trials in which he made his name escaped attacks of this kind. Virtue and vice were also manifested in the public sphere, where Romans performed as speakers and priests and magistrates and generals: so Caesar’s success in conquering Gaul was proof of his own dynamic virtues. The tradition persisted into the imperial period. Sallust, writing in the 40s BC, recalled an ancient habit of taking the examples of virtuous men as models for one’s own conduct.
For I have often heard that Quintus Maximus, Publius Scipio and the most famous citizens of our state were in the habit of saying that their hearts were set ablaze with the ardent desire for virtue when they looked on the images of our ancestors.3
The remark forms part of a justification of history, but he goes on to say how the practice has fallen into decline, and people today only want to outdo their ancestors in wealth rather than virtues. Similar sentiments were expressed by Tacitus; writing nearly two centuries later he made similar comments at the beginning of his account of the exemplary life of Agricola.4 Even the emperors would find themselves under this moral spotlight, as they did in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars or Juvenal’s Satires, although condemnation was generally reserved for those who were safely dead. Roman writers in every age lament the decline of traditional morality, but in fact the moral tradition at Rome was extraordinarily long-lived.5 Arguably the content of Roman virtue hardly changed until Christian bishops redefined it in the fourth century: even then new virtues did not displace old. Procopius’ Secret History offers an unexpurgated accoun
t of the vices of Justinian’s court that would have delighted early imperial readers.
That mode of thought also offered an interpretation of the collective history of the Roman people. Roman prosperity derived from the proper management of relations with Roman gods and from ethical behaviour; periods of crisis might be understood as signs of a breakdown in those relations, and of moral decadence. Rome’s gods had issued no detailed code of personal ethics, but their support might be lost either by neglecting their cult or through acts of impiety: Polybius followed his account of Roman piety with the observation that Romans always abided by their oaths. Equally the gods gave support to the brave and virtuous, concepts the Romans barely distinguished. When disasters struck or when dreadful omens were reported, the Senate might ask a particular college of priests to consult the oracles known as the Sibylline Books, which generally prescribed a major public ritual or the invitation of a new god to Rome. Occasionally more sinister remedies were employed: some disasters might be caused by one of the Vestals breaking her vow of virginity. If she was found guilty she would be buried alive.
No crisis was greater than the civil wars that convulsed the state between the murder of the Gracchi and Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. Naturally these wars came to be explained in terms of collective moral failure, perhaps the effects of the corrupting luxury brought by imperial success. The period saw its fair share of contested omens and struggle for control of religious institutions.6 Trials of Vestals were held not long after the murder of Gaius Gracchus, and one source reports the Romans even resorted to human sacrifice as well. A sequence of public panics—we might almost call them episodes of religious hysteria—also gave rise to some wider feeling that failures in moral conduct were in some sense the root of the troubles of the late Republic. Livy addressed this in the preface to his great history, itself a product of the crisis, but not completed until the reign of Augustus. He begins by sketching out the narrative arc of how Rome grew from small beginnings to the point where it is now overburdened by its greatness, contrasts its pristine virtue to the terrible contemporary circumstances, and asks the reader to reflect on
the way of life and customs, and the sort of men and means by which good order at home and empire abroad was won and extended: then as decline sets in, let him reflect on how standards began to slip little by little, then began to slide faster and faster and eventually collapsed until we reach the situation today, where we can bear neither our vices nor the remedies they call for.7
Livy’s interpretation was not exactly Augustan: the closing phrase is altogether too pessimistic. But the huge investment Augustus put into moral rearmament suggests that ideas of this kind were fairly widespread.8
So too does the way reconciliation took place in the years after the battle of Actium brought the civil wars to an end. In 27 BC, the Senate and people of Rome presented Octavian with a great shield on which were listed Courage, Justice, Mercy, and Piety towards the gods and his country. Courage translates virtus, the origin of our notion of virtue, but meaning something rather different to Romans. Virtus was not a condition but an active force, one connected to manliness, a power that might transform the world. Justice and Mercy were conventional regal qualities. Piety, pietas, was the set of dispositions that held Rome’s hierarchical society together. Pius was the signature virtue of Virgil’s Aeneas, repeatedly displayed towards the gods and his father. Freedmen and clients owed pietas to their former masters and patrons. It includes recognition of duties, as well as respect for persons. Augustus had displayed these qualities, the Shield proclaims: perhaps the senators also hoped he would continue to display them. The battle of Actium was presented as a ‘secular miracle’:9 by winning it Octavian had saved the state. The title ‘Augustus’ was awarded to him around the same time. It was not an office, not did it already have some established meaning, but its connotations were easily understood as religious. Augustus’ virtues had saved the state, and Rome might now return to a Golden Age.10 The original shield, itself made of gold, was hung in the Curia Julia in Rome, where the Senate often met. A copy made in Italian marble, and measuring a metre across, has been found at Arles in southern France, where a colony of veteran soldiers had been recently established. A few years later an issue of denarii, the coin in which soldiers were paid, carried an image of the shield. Other coins bear the image of the civic oak crown, a traditional reward for saving the life of a fellow citizen. That too had been awarded to Augustus. Signs of this kind formed both a rationalization of recent history and a manifesto for the future. Rome, they declared, was back on track.
Religious Imperialism?
If disasters signalled a breakdown in relations with the gods, it followed that success was a sign of divine favour. The general whose battlefield vow was answered paid his dues by building a temple to the god in question. Each triumph culminated in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline. As with morality and history, this could be imagined on a larger scale. Romans certainly came to believe the gods supported their wider hegemony. Virgil’s Aeneid plots the rise of Rome as the fulfilment of a divine plan, the will of Jupiter. How early did Romans begin to suspect they were especially beloved of heaven? There are a few tantalizing hints that already in the third century BC some Romans had begun to feel that the gods/their gods had some special plan for them, and so that their religious action was not exactly on a par with those of others. In the ruins of the temple of Dionysus on the Greek island of Teos, an inscription was found that records a letter sent by a Roman magistrate in the 190s BC confirming the temple’s privileges. It also asserts that the Roman people were the most religious of men.11
It is possible that when Polybius remarked on the exceptional piety of the Romans he was reflecting the self-image of the Roman elite. Was the exceptional religiosity of the Romans already a theme of the lost history written by the senator Fabius Pictor, a work to which we owe (indirectly) our most detailed accounts of Rome’s earliest major festival the Ludi Romani?12 Pictor had also been part of a delegation sent by the Senate to the oracle of Delphi after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216 BC. Polybius had, naturally, many opportunities for observing the religious life of Rome, and ritual was an important concern for many members of the elite. Many senators held priesthoods, and unlike magistracies these were generally held for life: the most important were regularly signalled in ceremony, and were commemorated long after their death. Caesar, Cicero, and the Younger Pliny all held major priesthoods and their writings show how important this was to them. Priestly colleges co-opted new members on the death of an incumbent: the numbers were tightly restricted, and it was a convention not to co-opt an immediate relative. Support in winning priesthoods established lasting ties of gratitude. The populares briefly introduced elections, but the emperors ended this, making priesthoods another of the gifts they might bestow. Their prestige survived these transformations. Both in ritual performances and in the meetings of the colleges and the Senate itself, senatorial priests devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the precise management of cult and to dealing with prodigies and religious problems, such as how exactly to declare war on a distant enemy or what ceremonies should be used to bring a particular new god into Rome. Religious knowledge at Rome consisted of expertise in ritual, not in theology, and rituals were fundamental to the workings of the state.13 Assemblies, meetings of the Senate, even battles could not begin until the auguries had been taken, that is until the approval of the gods had been established, usually by divining from the flight of birds. Once a general had been given his command, his imperium, he acquired a whole range of temporary ritual duties and prerogatives. Magistrates too performed sacrifices in the course of their civil duties. The Senate was the ultimate mediator between the Romans and their gods. It has even been suggested that the collective authority of the senatorial aristocracy largely derived from its religious functions.14 All ancient communities had priests, but perhaps in Rome the correlation between
political and religious authority was unusually strong.
Yet if we compare the rituals, beliefs, and religious institutions of Rome with those of their neighbours, the Romans seem in many respects very conventional. Most peoples of the ancient world were polytheists: they believed in a plurality of gods, and paid cult to a number of them. A merchant who travelled the Mediterranean around the turn of the millennium would find, in every city he visited, monumental temples, images of the gods, and priests conducting rituals on behalf of the community. The gods were generally treated as powerful social beings—physically close at hand, but of an order of being that transcended the everyday. Rituals were designed to establish their wishes, and to win their support. Winning support almost always involved animal sacrifice. Mostly the animals that were sacrificed were drawn from that small range of domesticates on which all these economies depended. Processions, purifications, hymns, prayers, and music might be added to involve more people. Festivals took place, generally on an annual cycle but also to mark special events, and might involve games or contests of various kinds. Kings and cities were the focus of the grandest cults, but there were also domestic and village cults and even private, personal vows and offerings made to gods. Oracles of various sorts and healing shrines were ubiquitous. All this was true of Greeks and Etruscans, Phoenicians and Samnites, and most of the other peoples of the Mediterranean world.