by David Potter
THE EMPERORS OF ROME
THE STORY OF IMPERIAL ROME FROM JULIUS CAESAR TO THE LAST EMPEROR
DAVID POTTER
First published as an illustrated edition in Great Britain in 2007 by Quercus
This updated ebook edition published in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
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Seventh Floor, South Block
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Copyright © 2007, 2013 David Potter
The moral right of David Potter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 78087 336 7
Print ISBN 978 1 78087 750 1
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin, in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Victor’s Crown, also published by Quercus.
Contents
Prologue
Being Caesar
ONE
Great Caesar’s Ghost
A Succession of Strong Men
Rome from Gaius Marius to Caesar 107–44 BC
A Time of Turmoil
Octavian and Antony 44–30 BC
Foundations of the Empire
The House of Augustus 29 BC–AD
Eccentric Stability
Emperors from Tiberius to Nero AD 14–68
TWO
Caesars and Their Subjects
New Dynasties
From the Flavians to the Antonines AD 68–180
Running the Empire
Emperors and Administrators AD 68–180
Civic Pride
Caesars and Their Cities AD 68–180
The Imperial Melting Pot
Roman Culture AD 68–180
THREE
Reinventing Caesar
The Slippery Slope
The Beginnings of Rome’s Decline AD 180–211
Inadequates and Misfits
Emperors of the Early Third Century AD 211–238
Anarchy and Disorder
The Crisis of the Third Century AD 239–270
Steadying the Ship of State
Restoration of the Imperial Office AD 270–305
Beginnings of the Christian Empire
The Reign of Constantine AD 305–337
FOUR
Losing Caesar
Carving up the Empire
From Constantine’s Sons to Valens AD 337–375
Enemies at the Gate
The Barbarian Invasions AD 376–411
Final Decline and Fall
The Collapse of the Western Empire AD 411–476
Epilogue
Dido’s Revenge
Glossary
Prologue
Being Caesar
One murdered his mother. Another fought as a gladiator. Two were philosophers, while yet another is revered as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. What all these diverse personalities had in common was that they were emperors of Rome. Given the extreme behaviour exhibited by many of the holders of this office, it is little wonder that much of the political comment that has come down to us from Ancient Rome focuses on individual personalities. In polemical tones all too familiar to modern ears, Romans lambasted their leaders as lunatics, murderers or imbeciles or lionized them as heroes or geniuses.
Roman political discourse also resembled that of the present day in judging leaders and their achievements by an ideal standard. In the light of this, it is worth considering for a moment what a job description for a prospective emperor might look like. Following the approved practice of human resources managers, in drafting this description we need to consult the best available literature, and keep in mind both the experience of previous holders and the needs of the organization. Aided by ancient works of political theory on kingship, and taking the average age of the incumbents as our yardstick of the level of experience required, we might well arrive at the following profile:
Wanted: Well-educated man in his late thirties
Key responsibilities: Ruling the known world; commanding the world’s most powerful army; preserving civilization as we know it
Applicants should possess:
A keen legal mind
Good interpersonal skills, especially in dealing with foreign peoples
An ability to handle an enormous volume of communication and make clear policy decisions
A proven ability in a senior military capacity, while not essential for the role, would be a distinct advantage
Diverting though this exercise is, two basic problems bedevil any attempt to quantify the role of Roman emperor. First, the job as outlined above is fundamentally impossible, and second the material that we used to construct our job description is misleading. In writing about the ‘perfect’ emperor, the topic ancient commentators were actually addressing was the purpose of government. Emperors were representatives of the government as a whole, and the individual job description for each one might vary enormously from our norm. Even the notion of an ideal age for a new emperor is specious – in practice they fell into roughly three age brackets: one starting at around the age of 60, one around 40, and one in the early teens. These were largely conditioned by the needs of the age. There were periods when Romans did not need their emperor to do very much at all, and yet other times when his services were in great demand.
Communal power
It was quite remarkable that Romans should opt to be governed by emperors at all. Their state had done very well without a sole ruler and they were generally hostile to anything that smacked of kingship, for historical reasons that will presently become apparent. Moreover, temperamentally they were inclined to individualism, a trait which, when it has manifested itself in other societies, has sat uneasily with autocracy. Yet after hundreds of years of democracy, Romans found that their government could no longer keep pace with the speed of change and the special demands that came with being a superpower. Foremost among these demands was that government should remain responsive to the needs of the majority of the people and not be hijacked by special-interest groups. The government of the Roman Republic failed to do this, and fell victim to men who took advantage of its weaknesses to further their own ambitions. That said, the men who usurped power in this way still found it impossible to do away entirely with the traditions of collective government that had existed for centuries under the Republic. The result was that Roman emperors always remained part of a governing group. What is even more extraordinary, however, and distinguishes the Roman empire from many more modern such polities, was that the post of emperor was not reserved for people of Roman ancestry. Over time, it was filled by men from many different parts of the empire. Some only spoke Latin as a second language, while one was even the son of a freed slave.
At the root of these apparent idiosyncrasies of Rome’s imperial system lie certain ingrained Roman attitudes. Notable among these was the great emphasis that Romans placed on an individual’s relations with the community at large, plus their tendency to gauge personal happiness in terms of how other members of society saw them. These factors had a crucial bearing on Romans’ perception of what it meant to be emperor.
The Roman fix
ation on communal participation is even enshrined in the official designation of the state – the res publica populi Romani, or ‘public possession of the Roman people’. To be one of the people – a citizen – was therefore to be co-owner of an extraordinary entity. That said, not all the state’s joint owners were created equal; every person’s standing was reflected in the level of service that they devoted to the state. Being a wealthy Roman entailed taking an active role in government, holding public office and serving in positions of command in the army alongside one’s peers. Middle-class Romans also undertook military service, while their appointed political role was to sanction the position of their social betters by voting them into office and affirming the proposals they put forward to the state’s legislative bodies. The concept of serving the state even extended to the poor, who were expected to raise children and affirm the status quo by participating in the rituals of the state. To the Roman mind, there was nothing more abhorrent than the man who tried to shirk the duties that attended his station in life.
Virtus and domus
An essential quality required by a Roman citizen was that of virtus. Its English derivative ‘virtue’, defined as ‘the quality or practice of moral excellence or righteousness’, does not successfully convey the meaning of the Latin concept. To the Romans, the word virtus, which was cognate with the Latin term for man (vir), denoted specifically male qualities of service to the state. So prevalent was the notion that virtus was essential to the community as a whole that women were also expected to demonstrate their own particular form of virtus by playing a supporting role to their menfolk. This role required them to maintain a stable environment within the man’s home, or domus. The domus housed the family, who lived under the control and protection of a paterfamilias. His role was to represent the group in public and make sure that its members comported themselves in a fitting manner. To this end the paterfamilias was granted patria potestas – the power of life and death over every member of his family. Being invested with this draconian power meant that the Roman male was not truly a private person even within the bosom of his family. Rather, he was a representative of the community, supervising the actions of women, children and slaves to ensure that their behaviour conformed to the norms of Roman society. The fact that the domus was filled with sundry individuals who were subordinate to, and excluded from, the male world of public life meant that it was also a potential threat to the order of society. In Roman thought the back rooms of the domus were places where un-Roman activities could occur. The antithesis of open public life was conspiracy, and conspiracies tended to be hatched by slaves and women in places that were out of sight of the community. It was within the domus that a man might give vent to unacceptable passions, where he might be dominated by women or slaves, indulge excessively in sex with his subordinates, eat to excess, or waste the resources that should be at the disposal of the state in times of need.
To the poor Roman who could not afford a domus, living in one room with a spouse and children in a rickety tenement, or in a hut in the country, the real test of the worth of a prominent citizen was how he behaved within his domestic setting. Did he live up to his public image or disgrace himself when he thought no one was looking? Be nice to your slaves if you are thinking of running for office, one politician advised another – they’re the ones the people who hang around the forum will be talking to. It was in reaction to crimes committed within the domus that the Romans believed their res publica was shaped.
From monarchy to republic
By the time the Romans started writing their own history in the third century BC, it was generally believed that kings had ruled them between the foundation of the city and the end of the sixth century. According to legend, in 509 BC the son of an odious king by the name of Tarquin the Proud (Tarquinius Superbus, reigned 535–510 BC) raped a woman called Lucretia. Lucretia revealed the crime to her brother Brutus before committing suicide. This outrage sparked a popular uprising; Brutus summoned the Roman people to the forum and called on them to depose the royal family, declaring the king and all members of his domus outlaws. In their place, he instituted a government based on annually elected colleges of magistrates. The working principle of this system was the devolution of imperium, the power to rule that the people had once conferred upon the king. The new government, where imperium was not only shared but also subject to checks and balances through legislation passed by the people, was seen as the polar opposite of one-man rule and autocracy, which came to be known simply as regnum, or ‘royal power’.
The government of the Roman Republic proved astonishingly successful. During the fourth century BC the Romans conquered almost all of Italy south of the Po river. Rome then humbled Carthage, the North African city-state that had long controlled the sea-lanes of the western Mediterranean. The victory over Carthage and its great general Hannibal, which only came after decades of fierce fighting and terrible defeats, was the defining struggle in Roman history. It transformed Rome from a regional into a Mediterranean power and precipitated the rapid defeat of the Greek kingdoms that had dominated the eastern rim of the Mediterranean since the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. By 146 BC, Rome had become the greatest power in the region’s history. So why, given the signal success of their Republican form of government and their hatred of autocracy, did the Romans even entertain the possibility of imperial rule? This was a question that even the Romans had difficulty answering.
Who was the first Caesar?
The most significant difference between Romans who wrote about the empire and modern authors who make the Caesars their subject matter is that latter-day commentators tend to assert as incontestable fact that the first emperor was Augustus (r. 31 BC–AD 14). Yet the only ancient Roman historian we know of who explicitly dated the start of the imperial system at 31 BC was Cassius Dio (c. AD 155–after 229), who was writing almost 300 years after the event. Among the many precursors and contemporaries who disagreed with Cassius was the biographer Marius Maximus, who was also active in the early third century. Maximus’ book on the ‘next’ 12 Caesars (from Nerva to Elagabalus) implicitly takes its point of departure from the famous Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (c. AD 69–130), which ended with the death of Domitian. Suetonius’ first Caesar was Julius Caesar. In turn, Suetonius’ account of the Caesars also excited opposition from his contemporaries, such as the Greek biographer Plutarch. Plutarch included Julius Caesar in his work on prominent Greeks and Romans who lived before the advent of the empire. Another first-century historian, Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 57–120), chose to begin his account of the development of the imperial system with the death of Augustus.
The lack of unanimity among these historians is mirrored in texts connected with the emperors themselves. A portion of a law conferring supreme power on Vespasian in AD 70 backdated his accession to his rebellion against the reigning emperor in AD 69, and listed only three previous emperors as having had powers comparable to those conferred on him. These were Augustus, Tiberius (AD 14–37) and Claudius, the grand-nephew of Augustus (AD 41–54). The state’s official record thus effectively airbrushed from history five men who had previously occupied the same post as that now held by Vespasian – and had been listed as such by Suetonius – while Julius Caesar wasn’t even deemed part of the group.
A fundamental tension
What, then, became of these five missing leaders? The answer lies in Roman attitudes to power and the appropriate behaviour of an individual. The Roman ruling classes were supposed to set positive examples for their fellow citizens through their exercise of virtus. If they succumbed to the unbridled passions of the domus, they were not fit exemplars for others, and could therefore be struck off the list of ‘approved’ emperors. The emperor did not rule through divine right, but by virtue of a legal process that entitled him to wield power over other members of the governing class. For all his imperial pomp, he still remained a representative of that class – a first among equals, so to speak. This fact i
s echoed in his title of princeps, or ‘leading man’.
Tacitus expressed this point lucidly when comparing the task of the historian in Republican Rome to his role in the imperial age. Whereas historians were formerly required to be well versed in all the diverse aspects of public life, ‘now, with public affairs transformed so that there is no salvation for the state unless one man rules’, their sole subject of study was this sole ruler and his dealings with those around him. This sea-change in the mode of governance came about as a result of the political crises that shook the Roman state to its very core in the century before Augustus. The advent of one-person rule must be seen in the context of a wider process of change affecting the nature of government in the Roman world.
The fundamental tension between the individual ruler and the system that Tacitus identified would remain central to the history of Rome from the first century BC to the point at which the system failed to provide for the needs of society at the end of the fifth century AD. In the light of this, the conventional view of the Caesars as a succession of more or less colourful autocrats needs to be revised. First and foremost, they were representatives of the needs of the Roman people.
ONE
Great Caesar’s Ghost
A Succession of Strong Men: Rome from Gaius Marius to Caesar
(107–44 BC)
Rome’s transition from a republic into an empire took place in the period of social turmoil that followed the infamous assassination of Julius Caesar by his former political confederates. Yet while all ancient historians see Caesar as a pivotal figure in this transformation, they disagree over his precise historical position. While some regard him as the last of the triumvirate of strong men who dominated the political landscape of the Roman Republic in the first half of the first century, others prefer to see him as the progenitor of a dynasty of emperors that endured until AD 68 and included some of the most illustrious and notorious holders of the office.