The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  The ultimate costs and consequences of the invasion were not in view when Claudius hurried north to share in the glory of his forces as they completed their victory, and even gave his son the honorific ‘Britannicus’ (offered to Claudius himself by the senate, but refused) in commemoration of the triumph. Meanwhile, at Rome, the highly competent freedmen he appointed as secretaries of state also ensured that the administration of Rome and her empire ran smoothly. One of his most impressive public works projects was the construction of the vital new commercial port of Portus north of Ostia at the mouth of the River Tiber (another project initially conceived by Julius Caesar). Linked by canal to the Tiber, Portus could handle year-round shipments of the grain needed to make bread, the staple of the Roman diet.

  It was only in the later 40s that Claudius’ turbulent private life began seriously to compromise the achievements of his administration. Claudius gradually became estranged from Messalina, his third wife, who was much younger than him. He took slave mistresses, and she in turn took lovers of her own. Messalina’s licentious conduct began to scandalize Rome; there were rumours that she spent an evening in a brothel seeing if she could make love to more men than an experienced prostitute. In AD 48, while Claudius was out of town, she even went through a mock wedding ceremony with one of her partners, Gaius Silius. It is possible that the pair were plotting to usurp the emperor’s power, or that they were simply set on defying the conventions of popular morality. In any event, the incident galvanized Claudius into drastic action, and Messalina was summarily executed along with several of her lovers.

  Heeding the advice of his freedmen, Claudius took a new bride straight away, and his choice fell on his niece Agrippina. The relationship was plainly incestuous, but Claudius had the law changed to accommodate his wishes. Agrippina moved into the palace with her son Nero (AD 37–68), who was three years older than Britannicus. A highly ambitious woman from impeccable stock (her grandfather by adoption was Augustus and her father Germanicus), Agrippina made sure that Nero was introduced to public life, and soon amassed enormous power for herself within Claudius’ domus. She realized that Britannicus could not legally succeed Claudius until he had reached manhood at the age of 14 in February, AD 55. In late AD 54 she arranged for Claudius to be fed poisonous mushrooms at a banquet. Nero was proclaimed emperor at the tender age of 16, and Britannicus was poisoned a few months later. The people and especially the senate, many of whose members had been unable to penetrate the charmed circle of freedmen who enjoyed Claudius’ confidence, greeted the news of Nero’s accession with delight.

  The last of the Julio-Claudians

  It took some time for it to emerge that Nero’s appointment as emperor was a disaster. Initially, he had little interest in governing and left effective control of the state in the hands of competent people handpicked for the task by his mother. This enabled him to devote himself to the pursuits he favoured – he fancied himself a poet and actor. The reins of power were held at this time by the famous Spanish-Roman philosopher and man of letters Seneca the Younger (4 BC–AD 65) who was Nero’s former tutor, and the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus (d. AD 62). A clear measure of their practical competence was their appointment of a seasoned and gifted soldier, Domitius Corbulo (AD 7–67), to take charge of a new conflict that had arisen with the Parthians over control of Armenia. Corbulo acquitted himself well in this role.

  Nero fiercely resisted any attempts by others to regulate his private life. As part of his mother’s succession project, he had been persuaded to marry Claudius’ daughter Octavia, whom he found deeply uncongenial. As emperor he began to take concubines and play the field of senatorial women. Agrippina, who was well aware that such conduct had precipitated her brother Caligula’s fall from grace with the Roman people, signalled her disapproval. Nero soon tired of his mother’s interference, and communication between them broke down almost totally. It was at this point that Nero first met Poppaea Sabina, the granddaughter of one of Tiberius’ generals, and a woman of powerful personality.

  He planned to divorce Octavia and make Poppaea his wife. Agrippina and the senior advisers counselled against this; Octavia was a valuable symbol of stability and continuity. Nero’s response was to seek other counsel and hatch a plot to kill his mother.

  In AD 59 Nero arranged for Agrippina to take a trip across the Bay of Naples on a boat that had been sabotaged so that its stern, where she would be seated, would break off during the voyage and sink. Yet Nero had failed to take into account that his mother was a strong swimmer. Having made it safely back to shore, the empress was an object of pity to the crowd that assembled as she dragged herself on to the beach. Her son showed no mercy. Learning of her escape, he planted a dagger on her freedman and, concocting a story that she had in fact planned to kill him, sent a detachment of guards to detain Agrippina and put her to death.

  The murder of Agrippina changed everything. Seneca’s and Burrus’ influence instantly began to wane, as Nero’s megalomania took a firm hold. Seneca was fired in AD 60, while Burrus died a year later. Octavia was falsely accused of adultery, divorced and executed around the same time that Seneca was dismissed. Poppaea was installed as empress, and a man named Tigellinus (d. AD 69), previously a supplier of chariot horses for the circus, joined Nero’s inner circle. Tigellinus would prove a loyal confederate in encouraging the worst of Nero’s vices, and was rewarded in AD 62 by being made prefect of the praetorian guard.

  Meanwhile, the foundations of the empire began to totter. In AD 60, a violent revolt broke out in Britain, led by Boudicca (d. AD 60/61), the queen of the Iceni tribe. Our chief source for information about Boudicca’s revolt in AD 60–61, Tacitus, exonerates the senatorial governor of Britannia (who also happened to be employing Tacitus’ future father-in-law on his staff at the time), blaming the incident instead on the arrogance and brutality of the province’s equestrian bureaucracy. According to Tacitus, when King Prasutagus of the Iceni in East Anglia, Boudicca’s husband, died, a dispute arose over what portion of his kingdom Rome was entitled to claim, since the king had made his two daughters and the emperor Nero co-beneficiaries of his will. In stepped the imperial procurator Decianus Catus while the governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was away on campaign in Wales, to enforce Rome’s will in a heavy-handed manner. Boudicca was beaten, and her daughters were raped.

  Boudicca’s cruel treatment ignited the powder-keg of British resentment of the occupation. The founding of the settlement at Camulodunum (Colchester) incensed both the Trinovates, in whose territory the colony was forcibly implanted, and the Iceni, their neighbours to the north. Inspired by hatred of all that was Roman, Boudicca’s forces attacked Camulodunum, Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (London). The sheer scale of the destruction at these sites that has been unearthed by archaeologists testifies to the Britons’ desire to expunge the physical creations of Roman rule, and slaughter all those who supported it. Early in the revolt her forces also crushed a Roman force sent from Lincoln to relieve Colchester. She was less fortunate when she met Suetonius Paulinus’ main force somewhere in the Midlands. Her army was destroyed, and Tacitus says that she committed suicide shortly thereafter.

  Four years later disaster struck closer to home, when a fire destroyed most of Rome. The Roman version of disaster planning was sketchy, and relief efforts were not coordinated by Nero, who allegedly reacted very badly to news of the conflagration: it is said that he recited a poem on the fall of Troy even though his ‘press office’ claimed that he was instrumental in fighting the fire. Nero found a convenient scapegoat for the fire in the form of a minor religious sect – the Christians. Followers of this faith were subjected to hideous tortures for their alleged guilt, including being covered in animal skins and having dogs set upon them, crucifixion, and being burned alive.

  Nero’s regime lurched from crisis to crisis. A year after the fire, in a fit of rage, Nero kicked his wife Poppaea Sabina in the stomach while she was pregnant, causing her death. That same year, a con
spiracy was uncovered among members of the senate and the guard to kill the emperor and install a new ruler. A round of executions followed, and Tigellinus and his confederates took advantage of the situation to settle old scores. Seneca was forced to commit suicide, and within the year other enemies were arraigned on trumped-up charges. In this orgy of bloodletting, Nero’s advisers blundered by charging Corbulo, the all-conquering hero of the Parthian War, with treason and executing him. Yet Corbulo had many influential friends and admirers in Rome. In AD 67, when Nero left for Greece to demonstrate his skill as a charioteer in the Olympic Games (which were rescheduled to fit round his visit), a serious conspiracy arose among various generals and governors.

  Nero’s Greek trip was a great success, and he was crowned victor in all the events he entered. However, he was immediately summoned back to Rome by a letter from his freedmen warning him of the conspiracy. Nero arrived too late to change the course of events. In March, AD 68, the governor of one of the Gallic provinces proclaimed his loyalty to the Roman government rather than to Nero; the governor of Judea, who commanded a powerful army assembled to suppress the revolt that had broken out there in AD 66, suddenly suspended military operations, and Galba, the governor of a Spanish province, had himself proclaimed emperor. The commander of the major army in Germany switched sides to support Galba. Within Rome itself a fifth column was at work, which enjoyed the support of the praetorian guard. Its commanders may have grown weary of Nero and taken the pragmatic view that their troops were no match for a seasoned provincial army. On 9 June, AD 68, the guard declared for Galba and the senate deposed Nero, declaring him an enemy of the state. Nero fled the palace, making for the house of a freedman named Phaon, not knowing that Phaon had already betrayed him. As he heard his captors approach, Nero stabbed himself to death. Vain and deluded to the last, the emperor’s reported last words were ‘How great an artist dies with me!’

  TWO

  Caesars and Their Subjects

  New Dynasties:

  From the Flavians to the Antonines

  (AD 68–180)

  Between the deaths of Nero (AD 68) and Marcus Aurelius (AD 180), the century or so of stability that the Roman empire brought to regions under its control remains an astonishing achievement. While peace and prosperity were by no means universal, most crises were, by the standards of earlier and later eras, relatively short. One major exception to the general pax Romana was the province of Judea, covering the territory of the modern state of Israel, plus parts of Jordan and Syria. There, two major revolts, in AD 66–73 and AD 132–135, caused terrible destruction and loss of life.

  Sixteen centuries later, at the start of his magisterial six-volume work Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), the English historian Edward Gibbon famously summarized this era in the following terms:

  If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.

  Context is everything. First, Gibbon was writing at a time when the burgeoning British empire was facing insurrection in its American colonies; the didactic thrust of his work was that governance must always proceed from civic virtue – a lesson that later rulers of the Roman empire forgot at their peril as, by implication, would the ministers of his own time. Second, the Enlightenment, with its stress on reason and order, which informed Gibbon’s approach to his subject, followed on the heels of more than two centuries of turmoil in Europe marked by a succession of wars of religion and dynastic succession. Gibbon’s glowing appraisal of this period of Roman history was tempered by his awareness that even the best of empires emerge from conflict and secure happiness for the many at the cost of the few. It is against this background that the accomplishment of the second century AD needs to be set.

  Three brief reigns

  It is unlikely that anyone in Rome in AD 68–69 would have predicted a century of stability. After Nero’s suicide, a vacuum had opened up at the heart of the empire. It was filled by civil war – the first Rome had seen since the bloody struggle between Octavian and Mark Antony in 32–30 BC – and a succession of military pretenders, each of whose reigns lasted months rather than years. So ephemeral was their hold on power that AD 69 is remembered as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’. Servius Sulpicius Galba (3 BC–AD 69), a former general and consul, was governor of the province of Hispania Tarraconensis in AD 68. His rise to power was not the result of a determined campaign, or indeed decisive action of any kind on his part. On the contrary, he vacillated when Julius Vindex, leader of the first major revolt against Nero in AD 68, announced that Galba was his chosen candidate to succeed Nero. It was only when he was certain that the praetorian prefect had declared in his favour that he marched to Rome. Galba had no outstanding leadership qualities or populist flair, and in his brief reign earned a reputation for being callous, mean and snobbish. One likely explanation for his succession was that ambitious men in the army and senate backed his appointment as a stop-gap measure, calculating that, aged 71 and with no children, he would be sure to die before long and leave the field open for more dynamic personalities. As it turned out, his demise actually came far sooner than anyone expected.

  Galba was far along the path to self-destruction even before he entered Rome in September AD 68. Despite the fact that his position depended entirely upon military backing, he set about alienating key elements of the army. During Nero’s vain attempt to muster forces to crush the growing rebellion against his rule, he had raised a legion from marines serving in the fleet in the Bay of Naples, promising these irregular troops equal pay to that received by regular legionaries. Galba now refused to honour this pledge and executed those who protested. In his dogged concern to get state finances back on an even keel at all costs, he even countermanded loyalty payments due to the praetorians who had ensured his rise to power. At the same time, he lost the support of the army of southern Germany (Germania Superior) by removing its popular commander, Verginius Rufus (AD 14–97). Verginius had been responsible for putting down Vindex’s revolt against Nero, whereupon the army offered him the throne. He refused and offered his services to Galba. Galba probably owed his life to this decision, but was less than gracious. The soldiery regarded the dismissal of Verginius and his replacement by a nonentity as a calculated insult.

  Trouble on the horizon

  Meanwhile, changes were also afoot in the army stationed in Rome’s other German province (Germania Inferior). Unwisely, in late AD 68, Galba appointed the ambitious Aulus Vitellius (AD 15–69), whose father had been Claudius’ closest associate, to reimpose discipline on this force after their previous commander was murdered. Vitellius immediately began to manoeuvre himself into a position to seize power. Perceiving that Galba was weak, and that the army in Germany had been insufficiently rewarded for its break with Nero, he ingratiated himself with the general staff in Colonia Agrippina (Cologne). Moreover, even before leaving Rome he had taken a sword that had once belonged to Julius Caesar from the temple of the Divine Julius. The fact that he was allowed to remove such a powerful symbolic trophy was a sign that he had lost no time in organizing an efficient fifth column in the capital. On 1 January, AD 69 matters came to a head when the legions at Mainz in Germania Superior refused to swear loyalty to Galba and smashed his statues. The next day the armies of both German provinc
es proclaimed Vitellius their new emperor.

  Typically, Galba’s response was to dither and, equally characteristically, to make an enemy of another erstwhile ally, Marcus Salvius Otho (AD 32–69). This Etruscan nobleman, prominent among the libertines who surrounded Nero, had once been involved in a wife-swapping arrangement with Nero – he had married Poppaea Sabina on the understanding that Nero would sleep with her until he could get rid of Octavia – and allegedly instructed Nero in the art of foot perfuming. Then, it seems, Otho had fallen in love with Poppaea himself, with the result that Nero forced him to divorce her and sent him to govern Lusitania (modern Portugal). Accordingly, he had every reason to support Galba during the revolution, and joined him on his march to Rome. This loyalty, plus an astrological prediction that he would be the next emperor, encouraged him in the belief that Galba would name him his successor. However, his hopes were dashed when Galba adopted the young Lucius Calpurnius Piso (d. AD 69) as his heir on January 10. Galba’s decision was motivated by sheer snobbery; despite Otho’s pedigree, Piso was the scion of an indisputably nobler house, counting Pompey, Crassus and Calpurnia, Julius Caesar’s last wife, amongst his ancestors. The appointment galvanized Otho into high-speed plotting. On 15 January the praetorian guard and other troops stationed in Rome declared Otho emperor. Galba panicked and set off across the Forum to confront the rebels, but was instantly cut down by Otho’s men. The unfortunate Piso was tracked to the temple of Vesta, where he had taken sanctuary, dragged out, and butchered.

  While these dramatic events were unfolding, Vitellius’ legions were on the march from Germany to Rome to install their man as emperor. In the meantime, Otho managed to muster a strong enough force from Nero’s former troops, gladiators and the praetorian guard to mount a credible defence against a force that represented the cream of the Roman army. His wider strategy was to hold Vitellius’ advance units long enough to enable him to call up reinforcements from the province of Illyricum in the Balkans. The holding action failed when Vitellius’ army defeated Otho’s men in a hard-fought engagement at the Battle of Bedriacum outside Cremona. When he learned of the defeat, Otho committed suicide on 16 April to spare Rome further mayhem. His reign had lasted barely three months.