Rome

by Woolf, Greg

  The gradual social and economic transformations of the first three centuries AD were not confined within the political limits of the empire. The political economy of the empire may be thought of as a vast redistributive system that drew resources from all over the interior and spent them at the frontiers, mostly as army pay. The court was the other main recipient and this too was increasingly located at the edge rather than the geographical centre of the empire. Perhaps no provincial societies were transformed as utterly as those on the frontiers. The effects can be traced in the spread of new cults, of epigraphy and technology, and in the apparent prosperity of areas that had once been marginal. Nor were these effects confined to Roman subjects. The eastern frontier bisected a chain of caravan cities with ancient shared traditions of language, cult, and commerce. Greek, Aramaic, and its sister languages were spoken in a great arch that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. By the late third century there were populations of Jews, Christians, and Manichaeans on both sides of the Romano-Persian frontier.

  Rome’s northern frontier had bisected other peoples with shared prehistoric cultures. The existence of a frontier zone promoted connections. Population densities were low in this region, relative to the Mediterranean world, and there were no cities beyond the Roman provinces. But the agricultural potential was high. Commerce, including slaving, crossed the frontier, and there is archaeological evidence for Roman manufactures in a broad band 50–100 kilometres (around 30–60 miles) wide stretching back from the frontier.20 There were technology transfers too. The political units and ethnic groups of this zone seem to have been quite unstable. Roman writers sometimes blamed this on differences of temperament and characterized barbarism as a deficiency in the stability of settled, urban societies. Perhaps the larger hegemonies were intrinsically temporary. Yet these populations were not nomadic, and it is possible their political fragmentation was actively managed by Rome, which (like China) gave subsidies to their friends, took hostages, sheltered exiled princes, and generally tried to extend their control well beyond the limit of the provinces. Periodic raids and expeditions by both sides were simply one part of a complex relationship. From early in the first century AD there is also evidence for the recruitment of ‘barbarians’ to serve in the Roman army, and some rose to high ranks. Romans often found themselves facing enemy armies commanded by former Roman soldiers, like Arminius who had led the massacre of Varus’ legions in AD 9, in fact, and many spoke Latin. By the second century, many societies bordering the Roman frontier were locked into a series of interdependent relationships with Roman power. Certainly the leaders of the groups we hear of in the third century, such as the Alamanni on the upper Rhine, and the Goths on the lower Danube, knew the Roman Empire well.21

  That world began to change in the late second century AD for reasons that are fiercely disputed. One school of thought sees the transformation of barbarian societies as the main cause of the collapse of the frontiers. The long relationship with Rome created better organized and equipped enemies who knew very well the riches the empire had to offer. Eventually Rome lost the arms race and the frontiers folded. Others see the change originating in Rome’s increasing military commitment on the eastern front. As troops were withdrawn from the west to serve first against Persia, and then in successive civil wars, the delicate balance on the western frontiers collapsed: Alamanni, Franks, and others walked into provinces that were effectively undefended. Yet others see the origin of the crisis in obscure movements on the distant Steppe, where truly nomadic peoples, especially those that Romans later came to know as the Huns, pressed hard on the settled barbarians of temperate Europe pushing some populations, like the Goths, south and west onto the Roman frontiers. Large population movements certainly occurred within Europe in some periods, and had intruded into Mediterranean world on several occasions, including the Gallic sacks of Rome and Delphi in the fourth and third centuries BC and the Cimbric wars and the Helvetian migration at the end of the Republic. Various combinations of all these factors might, naturally, be imagined. The problem is simply that we know very little of movements so far beyond the Roman frontier.

  One traditional narrative of the crisis begins in the late second century AD with Marcus Aurelius’ wars against the Marcomanni and Sarmatians, wars that kept him occupied for years on the northern frontier. The new provinces he allegedly contemplated creating would have been to the west of the three Dacian provinces founded by Trajan earlier in the century. But unlike Trajan’s wars, these did not result from an imperial initiative. The Marcomannic Wars began with a German invasion of Italy in 166 and continued, with only short periods of remission, until 175. A new war drew Marcus back in 177 and he was still campaigning on his death in 180. Commodus abandoned the war rather than finishing it. The frontier evidently held, even while Roman armies were distracted by civil wars in the 190s. Renewed activity on the northern frontier began on the Danube in the 230s with raids on Black Sea vassals of Rome and then on the Roman province of Moesia. Gothic warbands raided Dacia and the Danube provinces in the 240s. Decius, who ruled between 249 and 252, briefly repelled them, but was killed in a counterattack. Goths continued to raid through the 250s. Who were these groups, not yet united into a single force or nation? One possibility is that the Goths originated among populations who had lived on the borders of Trajan’s new Dacian provinces, peoples who had recently undergone processes of social transformation of the kind experienced by other German-speaking groups on the Rhine much earlier.22 Whether wars on the lower Danube led to Roman neglect of points further west, or whether now-invisible pressures moved east to west over the century, the security crisis spread. On the middle Danube, the Sarmatians raided Noricum, Rhaetia, and Pannonia in the later 250s. At the same time there were raids by the Alamanni across the Rhine into Gaul and down into Spain. During the 260s Tarraco was sacked by the Franks, Athens by the Heruli, and Ephesus by the Goths. The Roman recovery began finally in 268 when Claudius II defeated the Goths at Naissos: thereafter it was surprisingly fast. Aurelian expelled the Iuthungi from Italy in the early 270s and Probus repelled the last major invasion of Gaul across the Rhine in 276.

  War on Two Fronts

  The task of restoring normal relations with the northern peoples was conducted in deadly counterpart with a deterioration of relations on the eastern front. It is common to blame this on the appearance of a new Persian dynasty, the Sassanians, in 226 AD and the aggression of the Emperor Shapur (241–72), who fought several wars against Rome, defeated the Emperor Philip in 240, seized the city of Antioch in 256, and captured and executed the Emperor Valerian in 260. But the Romans bore some responsibility for all this. Again the story can be traced back to the 160s. After Trajan’s conquest and Hadrian’s withdrawal from his new province of Mesopotamia there had been peace with the Parthians until the joint reign of Marcus and Lucius, when Roman armies once again invaded Persia, without much provocation.23 Severus did the same a couple of decades later. Roman aggression did a good deal to destabilize the Parthian dynasty, creating an opportunity for the Sassanian takeover. It is difficult to tell now whether Persia exploited Rome’s difficulties in the north or vice versa or whether the security system of the early Roman Empire was simply incapable of dealing with threats on so many fronts.

  What is clear is that the inability of the emperors to defend the great cities and unarmed provinces of the interior of the empire led to a crisis in their legitimacy. One index of failure was that in the period 235–84 more than twenty emperors reigned. The exact number depends on how many rebels are considered as short-lived rulers. A second index of failure was geographical fragmentation. Local rulers, client kings, and army commanders took over responsibility for protecting their immediate localities. When Aurelian came to power in 270, most of Gaul, Spain, and Germany had been ruled from the Rhineland for over a decade, and the monarchs of the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria controlled much of the Near East, even including Alexandria. Usurpations had been attempted in Africa
, on the Danube, in Egypt, and in Asia Minor. Successful and unsuccessful usurpers alike were drawn from the military classes, their links to their armies personal and contingent on their continued success. Civil war and failure at the frontiers fed off each other. Only military success could restore legitimacy and reverse the fragmentation of authority. Valerian’s son Gallienus (253–68) achieved some external successes. Aurelian (270–5), who had expelled the Iuthungi from Italy, went on regain control of Egypt (272), to suppress the secessions led by Palmyra (273) and the emperors of Trier (274). His successors inflicted more defeats on the Germans. Carus finally carried the Persian war into Mesopotamia and captured the Persian capital Ctesiphon. He died on campaign in 283 and his successor Numerian withdrew, but within a year he had been replaced by Diocletian, who ruled until his abdication in 305. During his long reign he too fought on the Danube and against Persia, and had to assert his power in Egypt and against rebels in the west. He left behind a completely reorganized Roman Empire. The period from the end of the Severan dynasty in 235 to the accession of Diocletian in 284 is sometimes known as the Anarchy. Any ‘crisis’ that lasts for half a century would inflict a huge cost on institutions. Diocletian’s empire did indeed need a new coinage, a new taxation system, and a new administration as well as a new military system. Under Constantine it acquired a new capital and a new religion too. But the late Roman Empire was not created in a revolution. Well before Diocletian’s reign a new ideal of the emperor had emerged, crowding out the productions of senatorial historians and Greek panegyrists. This emperor was a soldier rather than a fellow citizen, and he was surrounded by spectacular ceremonial and ferocious justice.

  For us, looking back with hindsight, the most amazing aspect of this story is not that the crisis occurred, but that the empire survived it at all. The energy of the soldier emperors was clearly one factor, but there were other sources of strength not appreciated at the time. Consider, for example, the commitment of the empire’s elite to its continued existence. The ‘Gallic emperors’ who controlled Gaul, and at times the Spanish and British provinces, between 260 and 274 are a case in point. The main figures, Postumus, Victorinus, and Tetricus I, were all soldiers and all apparently descended from rich local families. Their support was drawn from both local nobles and the army of the Rhine. Their ‘empire’ originated in a revolt against Gallienus, but its main efforts were directed at survival and the preservation of vested interests. Following the successes of first Claudius II and then Aurelian, provinces, cities, and then even the last of the emperors rejoined the central empire. Throughout the secession the political propaganda, known mainly through coinages, was utterly Roman. At the other end of the empire the fierce resistance put up by Greek cities drew on even older allegiances. Publius Herennius Dexippus, a historian who organized resistance at Athens, presented his efforts as just the latest episode in a long history of Athenian resistance to the barbarian. The survival of these allegiances is impressive testimony to the durability of the identities created in the early empire. The empire survived because, when it seemed about to come apart, the ruling classes and many of its subjects chose to participate in its rescue.

  Further Reading

  The evolution of the Roman military machine is surveyed in a number of essays in the second volume of the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (Cambridge, 2007) edited by Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby. Adrian Goldsworthy’s Roman Army at War (Oxford, 1996) is a lively account of how it worked in practice. The evolution of a stable frontier, and its social and economic consequences, is the subject of C. R. Whittaker’s Frontiers of the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 1994). Debate still largely responds to Edward Luttwak’s controversial but stimulating Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 1976). A good selection of these responses is included in John Rich and Graham Shipley’s collection War and Society in the Roman World (London, 1993). Benjamin Isaac’s Limits of Empire (Oxford, 1990) discusses the role of Roman armies in controlling the provincial populations they claimed to protect.

  The complex history of the third-century crisis is covered in the usual reference works, but there is a particular good account in David Potter’s The Roman Empire at Bay (London, 2004). A good sense of what historians are arguing about at the moment is given by the collection Crises and the Roman Empire (Leiden, 2007) edited by Olivier Hekster, Gerda de Kleijn, and Danielle Slootjes.

  XIV

  IMPERIAL IDENTITIES

  Once upon a time Kings ruled this City, but they were not fated to have home-grown successors. Outsiders took over their rule, foreigners in fact, for when Numa succeeded Romulus he came from the Sabine lands—not far away to be sure, but it made him a foreigner in those days. When Tarquin the Elder succeeded Ancus Marcius, well he was of mixed race, for his father was Demaratus the Corinthian, while his mother was born in Etruscan Tarquinii. She was not a wealthy women, as you might imagine given she had agreed to such an inferior marriage, and for that reason he was unable to hold office at home. But he migrated to Rome, and here was made king.

  (From a speech of Claudius inscribed on bronze, ILS 212)

  Desperately Seeking the Romans

  The Emperor Claudius’ speech to the Senate in AD 48 proposed opening up membership of the Senate to the wealthiest and most noble citizens of the provinces of Gaul. Part of his words are preserved on a bronze tablet at Lyon, and Tacitus records the resentment the proposal aroused among senators.1 Fear that admitting new blood might dilute national identity is all too familiar today. Claudius’ appeal to an ancient tradition of inclusiveness maybe did not convince, but then he was an emperor and did not need to. But he was correct that Roman identity was in flux right from the very beginning.

  It is impossible to write an account of the Roman Empire without lapsing into writing about the ‘Romans’, as if it is obvious who should be included in that term. But it is surprisingly difficult to answer the simple question ‘Who were the Romans?’

  Formal answers exist, of course. If we were to apply strict legal criteria we would have to focus on Roman citizens.2 But the nature and composition of that group was repeatedly transformed, as Rome grew from a conventional city-state, with its assemblies, taxation, and armies all based on citizenship, into a Mediterranean power composed of different kinds of imperial subjects. En route we would need to consider the citizens of the middle Republic, concentrated in Rome, but with a penumbra of citizen colonies up and down the peninsula; then Italy after the Social War in which almost all free people were citizens; then the situation in the early empire when citizenship was acquired by various privileged groups, including provincial aristocrats and auxiliary veterans; and finally the Roman world after Caracalla’s Edict by which citizenship was generalized, a world in which most people were citizens and yet the status was strangely still valued.3

  It would also be necessary to factor in peculiarities such as the Roman habit of extending citizenship to many former slaves, and also a range of ‘half citizens’, most of them termed ‘Latins’ of one kind or another. That title was extended from its original sense of citizens of other Latin states, first to members of the Latin colonies, founded by Rome in Italy in the middle Republican period, and filled with a mixture of settlers drawn from Romans and allies; then to citizens of certain provincial communities granted the Latin right in a series of regional grants beginning in Caesar’s day; and also to a different category of freedmen who were not fully citizens and were known as Junian Latins (after the Lex Iunia which created the status). Other Mediterranean citizenships were drawn into the system: within the astonishingly complex society of Roman Egypt, Alexandrine citizens meant not just citizens of the provincial capital but also a status group treated as halfway between other Egyptians and Romans. Multiple citizenships were absolutely normal too, not just in Cicero’s sense that he had two homelands—Arpinum and Rome—but also in the sense that many provincial communities had come to allow dual citizenship, and had also created half-citizenships of
their own, giving resident aliens a range of rights and obligations. Some of these grants were privileges, others devices designed to make sure the ever more mobile propertied classes did not evade local obligations either where they lived or where they were born.4

  Nor were all citizens equal. There were experiments in the Republican period with creating citizens without the vote. The traditional assemblies were in any case organized in complex ways that gave more weight to the votes of those in higher census categories than to others. Freedmen could vote, but in many cities were not allowed to hold office or become members of the most senior councils. Women of all social statuses faced strict limits on how far they could exercise citizen rights. The wives and daughters of Roman citizens could confer citizenship on their male children, but their political participation was effectively zero, very few had financial autonomy or could make independent use of the law, and their roles in ritual—if often prominent—were always subordinated to the authority of male priests. Many of the things that defined the role of citizen in Republican Rome—including voting, fighting, sacrificing, being taxed, taking public contracts, and being counted in the census—never applied to women. The crucial point is that Romans did not use citizenship as a way of creating a hard boundary between themselves and aliens. Instead they used the language of citizenship to express a set of statuses and relationships through which individuals might be involved in the community in different ways, and also to various degrees.

  Other ways existed to mark the boundaries. Romans were often contrasted to barbarians, especially in imperial propaganda. A common coin type of the second century depicted a mounted emperor trampling down a cowering barbarian. More elaborate developments of these motifs appear on monuments such as Trajan’s Column. Roman literature also displays a rich harvest of xenophobic and racist stereotyping, a legacy presumably of traditions of invective that were so central to Roman oratory.5 Then again, scholars writing in Latin since Cicero’s day differentiated between the writings of the Greeks and those of nostri, which literally means ‘our people’. Tacitus does this describing writers who had dealt with Britain before he did, and Pliny the Elder added a list of sources for each book of his Natural History divided into Roman and foreign authorities. The arrangement was replicated in Roman libraries where Greek and Latin books seem, in theory at least, to have been shelved separately. Roman priests also traditionally distinguished a bundle of cults considered of alien origin as needing to be celebrated ‘with Greek rituals’: in fact, the rituals were nothing of the kind, but the idea of a difference evidently mattered.6