The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  The most striking account of the Dacian Wars is not a written record but a visual one – Trajan’s Column, a 30-metre (100-ft) high marble pillar erected in AD 113. The location of the column, as visitors to Rome can see, is the forum of Trajan, east of the Roman Forum (near the Quirinal Hill), which took shape, with great speed, in the years after the Dacian war. In its entirety it stands as a powerful symbolic expression of Trajan’s values. The forum’s design, by the Greek engineer and architect Apollodorus of Damascus, now consists of five main elements: the column celebrating the Dacian wars, two libraries (one Greek, the other Latin), the massive Basilica Ulpia and the Temple of the Divine Trajan, probably a later addition – it is not situated at the centre of the forum but behind the Basilica Ulpia. As a group, these diverse structures serve to emphasize the military virtues of Trajan, and his belief in Greco-Roman culture as the pinnacle of civilization. With its spiral relief carvings telling the story of the Dacian Wars, the column offers the most detailed surviving picture of the Roman army on campaign, and of the central role played by the emperor. Trajan is shown no fewer than 59 times, engaged in various activities: offering sacrifices, returning in triumph to Rome, addressing his army, rallying the troops in battle and rewarding them for their victories. Another notable feature of the column is the picture it paints of the Roman army as a civilizing force – building bridges, cities and forts during its pacification of Dacia. After Trajan’s death in AD 117, the senate voted to have his ashes interred in an urn in the column’s pedestal.

  Even as the Dacian Wars were ending, the king of Arabia died and Trajan decided that it was time to absorb this longstanding Roman client state directly into the empire. Trajan’s annexation of Arabia (roughly the area of modern Jordan) as a province in AD 106 completed a process begun by his father Marcus Ulpius Traianus, who had incorporated many of Rome’s client states around Syria into the provincial structure of the empire under Vespasian. A century of contact with Roman administration in these regions had stimulated growing urbanization, which in turn made them more viable areas where direct Roman rule could be applied.

  If Trajan’s Dacian Wars were motivated by a concern to preserve the security of the empire, it is hard to interpret his massive invasion of the Parthian empire in AD 113 as anything other than military adventurism. Following a plan of campaign likely inherited from the last days of Julius Caesar’s reign, Trajan set out from Armenia and headed south into Mesopotamia (Iraq), capturing the western Parthian capital of Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad) in AD 115. This was a major triumph, but it was to be short-lived. To the rear of Trajan’s invasion force, the Jewish population of Cyrenaica (the North African coast west of Egypt), Egypt, Palestine and other border regions suddenly rose up against their Roman overlords, apparently inspired by messianic visions of the world’s end. In Mesopotamia itself, the eruption of fierce insurgencies a year after the Jewish revolt convinced Trajan that the best he could hope for was to install puppet governments in former satellite kingdoms of the Parthian empire, so that any regime filling the power vacuum in Ctesiphon after Roman withdrawal would be too weak to pose a threat to Rome. He then began a fighting retreat, crushing rebel forces wherever he encountered them, and sending large detachments west to smash the Jewish revolts, a task they carried out with extreme brutality.

  A legitimate successor?

  As Trajan returned to the west in AD 117 he suddenly fell ill on the southern coast of Turkey and died on 9 August. Hadrian (AD 76–138), then governor of Syria, succeeded to the throne. While he was the only possible heir from within the imperial household, it appears that Trajan may have toyed with the idea of appointing someone else as his successor. Significantly, perhaps, Hadrian may only have been adopted as Trajan’s son – thus putting his claim beyond all dispute – as Trajan lay dying. Or possibly not; there were whispers that Pompeia Plotina had slipped a servant into Trajan’s deathbed to impersonate the emperor and planned to make the announcement after the real Trajan had passed away without naming a successor. The rumour reflects serious tensions that were on the verge of erupting between senior generals and the royal household. Within months, even before Hadrian returned to Rome, four of Trajan’s leading generals who were suspected of conspiring against Hadrian had been executed.

  The executions shocked the political establishment, but effectively drove home the message that the new emperor would not tolerate dissent in any shape or form. A man of powerful intellect, Hadrian viewed officials as lackeys rather than colleagues and dealt firmly with anything he perceived as insubordination. The palace staff received warning of his imperious attitude when he fired two senior officials, a praetorian prefect and the biographer Suetonius (c. AD 69–c. 130), then his chief secretary for correspondence in Latin, for excessive familiarity with his wife Vibia Sabina. Since these dismissals occurred in AD 122, while Hadrian was in Britain, it may be that he suspected his wife of trying to assume a similar role to that played by Plotina in Trajan’s court. Sabina herself was publicly embarrassed by this event, when Hadrian declared that he would have divorced her if he had had the freedom permitted to private individuals. Similarly, when a poet recited some lines suggesting that he was thankful that he wasn’t following the emperor on what he portrayed as lice-ridden journeys around the empire, Hadrian responded with a poem of his own lambasting the poet as a lazy wastrel.

  Another sign of Hadrian’s impatience with the political establishment was his desire to be absent from Rome as much as possible; more than half of his reign was spent outside Italy. Even when he was in Italy, he preferred to stay not in the capital but in the massive villa that he built for himself at Tivoli. His overt intellectualism and dislike of senatorial life are somewhat reminiscent of Tiberius, a parallel reinforced by his intense interest in astrology. Like Tiberius, he was also concerned to consolidate and develop the empire’s existing holdings rather than wage new wars of conquest.

  The great wall that Hadrian ordered built across northern Britain from AD 122 onwards was as much a sign to his own people that the province’s borders were set, as it was to the Caledonian tribes north of the wall (the Picts and Scots) that he had no interest in forcibly bringing them under the aegis of Roman rule. The wall itself is one of the most dramatic surviving monuments of Roman rule, extending 73 miles (117 kilometres) from Wallsend on Britain’s east coast to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. Many sections of it are still standing, and it is likely Hadrian himself surveyed the line of the wall during his visit to northern Britain as construction was being planned.

  For a distance of 42 miles (67 kilometres), the eastern end of the wall was built in stone, ten feet thick and about thirteen and a half feet high; the western portion was made of turf, roughly nineteen and a half feet wide at the base and ten and a half feet high. Small castles were set in the wall at each Roman mile (hence their name, ‘milecastles’), while watchtowers were erected every third of a mile. Three legions were involved in the construction of the wall, and the design of each milecastle varies according to which legion built it. Nineteen feet to the north of the wall was a forward defensive ditch, the vallum; in most places, this measured ten feet deep by twenty-six and a half feet wide. A further series of 12 full-sized forts – the number was later increased to 17 – was built south of the wall, as was a second, slightly less extensive, vallum. The total garrison of the wall and its supporting forts typically comprised some 9,000 men.

  Other similar walls, made of wood and turf rather than stone, were also constructed along the frontiers of Rome’s German provinces, and it was during Hadrian’s reign that the familiar image of the empire as a fortress was first promulgated, protecting civilization from the barbarian hordes beyond its frontiers and symbolizing Hadrian’s determination to set limits to Rome’s age of expansion.

  Judea erupts once more

  During his extensive travels in the provinces, Hadrian became involved in the most intense personal relationship of his mature years, with a youth from Bithynia named Antinou
s. Historical sources do not say precisely when Hadrian met his young paramour, but he is estimated to have been around 13 or 14 years of age at their first encounter. In AD 130 the relationship came to a sudden and tragic end when Antinous drowned in the Nile. In his grief, Hadrian spared nothing in commemorating his beloved, including renaming the town closest to the place where he had died Antinopolis, and granting several cities permission to offer divine honours to his lover.

  It is testament to Hadrian’s firm grip on the empire that his authority was not impaired by what would have seemed a major domestic scandal in the case of a ruler who commanded less respect. His subjects’ forbearance was doubtless also mingled with self-interest; Hadrian’s willingness to promote outsiders to the imperial ruling class began to change the senate from a predominantly Italian and western body into one that more closely reflected the population of the empire as a whole. This was perhaps Hadrian’s single greatest contribution to the continued success of the empire.

  While generally humanist in his outlook and fair in his dealings with his subjects, Hadrian had a serious blind spot for the sensibilities of one particular group: the Jews. With no regard for their traditions, he may seriously have expected them to rejoice at the ‘honour’ he bestowed on Judea when he refounded Jerusalem as the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. The outcome was quite the opposite. Inspired by the Rabbi Achiva, and led by Simeon ben Kosiba (who assumed the name Bar Kochba, or ‘Son of the Star’, in response to a prophecy by Achiva), the countryside of Judea took up arms against the Romans. Hatred of the Roman occupation was compounded when Hadrian toured his eastern provinces in AD 129–30 and proscribed the practice of circumcision. The Bar Kochba revolt lasted for three and a half years, from AD 132 to 135, and was quelled only by massive and merciless military intervention.

  By the early AD 130s it was clear that Hadrian was not going to have a son. The obvious successor would have been Pedanius Fuscus, the son of Hadrian’s uncle, the venerable Julius Severianus, but Hadrian, who appears to have had a very difficult relationship with Severianus, would have none of it. In AD 136 he ordered them both to commit suicide and adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, whose name was changed to Lucius Aelius Verus. Aelius was the stepson of one of the men whom Hadrian had executed after Trajan’s death, and his sudden adoption may have been out of remorse for this earlier injustice. It also had the advantage of ensuring that the throne would fall to a mature man with children of his own; Aelius had a young son, and one of his daughters was betrothed to a youth, Marcus Annius Verus, whom Hadrian also favoured. Then disaster struck – Aelius died on 1 January, AD 138, within months of his adoption, and Hadrian cast about for an heir whom he could trust to look after the interests of Aelius’ children. In February, AD 138, he adopted Aurelius Antoninus, the elderly uncle of Annius Verus, on condition that he would in turn adopt Verus and the son of Aelius. On 10 July of that year Hadrian died peacefully in a villa in the resort town of Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

  Enter the Antonines

  Aurelius Antoninus, who would become known to history as the emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 86–161), could not have been more different from his predecessor. He earned the name ‘Pius’ through his strict adherence to the wishes of Hadrian; indeed, his filial piety towards his adoptive father even extended to coercing an unwilling senate to proclaim Hadrian a god. However, in marked contrast to the muchtravelled Hadrian, for the entire 23 years of his reign, Pius never left Italy. Instead, he remained in Rome and – as might have been expected of a man who had enjoyed an extremely successful senatorial career – was content to entrust the day-to-day business of government to experienced administrators. He also placed full confidence in provincial governors to suppress outbreaks of unrest during his reign, in Judea, Mauretania (North Africa) and Britain. Marcus Aurelius, as Marcus Annius Verus became known after his adoption, would later refer to Antoninus Pius as the model emperor: kind, diligent, polite to subordinates, unwilling to decide in haste and always putting the good of the community before anything else. Aside from Marcus Aurelius’ personal recollections, little else is known of the man who ruled Rome at the height of its prosperity. During his reign – the longest since that of Augustus – there were no major wars, no scandals and no executions of prominent men, save one who had openly and unsuccessfully tried to incite a rebellion in Spain.

  Long before Pius died, Marcus Aurelius had been marked out as the heir apparent, while the emperor permitted Lucius Aelius Verus’ son Lucius to live in the palace only ‘as a private citizen’. However, it had been Hadrian’s express wish that Lucius and Marcus should eventually rule jointly, and, despite feeling no great affection for Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius felt honour-bound to obey his wishes. And so, when the senate met to vote him the few powers of an emperor that he did not already have, he refused to accept them unless the senate voted the same powers to Lucius. So began the joint reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180) and Lucius Verus (AD 130–169), an event unparalleled in Roman history.

  Although the simultaneous election of two emperors might seem a radical break with the past, it was actually the logical extension of a time-honoured practice stretching back as far as the early years of Augustus’ reign. For nearly 20 years after Actium, Agrippa had been his co-emperor in all but name, while in the last years of Augustus’ life so too had Tiberius. Likewise, Germanicus and Drusus had performed a similar role for Tiberius, and Titus had been virtual co-ruler with Vespasian, as had Trajan in the few months between his adoption by Nerva and the latter’s death. It is also notable that, with the exception of Tiberius, all the emperors who had openly ruled in concert with one or more close confederates in their administration were regarded as very good rulers. Conversely, Domitian had alienated people by insisting on his sole prerogatives, and Hadrian’s tight personal hold on the reins of power did not endear him to his subjects. Thus, while they had at times been forced to suffer the whims of autocratic rulers, Rome’s governing classes far preferred regimes that were essentially collaborative. In any event, the mettle of the system of joint rule would soon be tested to its limits.

  Vologaeses throws down the gauntlet

  Even before Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius came to power, major changes were afoot on the empire’s northern and eastern frontiers. Menacing new tribal groupings began to encroach on the areas adjoining Trajan’s province of Dacia, which occupied an extremely exposed position north of the Danube. Meanwhile in Iraq, a new Parthian regime had come to power in the late AD 140s under King Vologaeses IV (r. AD 147–191), who was determined to reverse the political effects of Trajan’s victories. His timely withdrawal of Roman troops before they became bogged down fighting endless insurgencies had left Rome with considerable influence in the former Parthian client kingdom of Characene in southern Iraq. This region was especially important because it was a vital transshipment point midway along a major trade route to India and east Asia. Goods unloaded at the port of Mesene, near modern Basra, were carried up the River Tigris and across the desert to Syria by a network of traders based at the desert city of Palmyra, which was formally incorporated within the Roman provincial system. In AD 157, Vologaeses seized control of Characene and, even as Pius lay dying, prepared a massive invasion of the eastern Roman provinces. Pius’ decision not to react militarily to the Parthian invasion of Characene was, with hindsight, probably correct; the region was no more amenable to Roman rule than it had been under Trajan, while Vologaeses would ultimately do himself more harm than good by launching an offensive into Roman territory.

  However, at the time Rome’s decision not to nip Vologaeses’ aggression in the bud looked like a monumental error of judgement, as the Parthian king’s forces swept inexorably westward. In AD 161 his armies defeated a badly led provincial garrison in Commagene, north of Syria, and moved into Syria itself. Marcus responded by dispatching a huge army and several highly competent generals to Syria, with Lucius in titular control of the operation. While Lucius remained at Antioch – lacking expe
rience of direct command, his function must largely have been to chair meetings of people who knew what they were doing – the newly arrived forces drove the Parthians back into their own territory.

  In AD 163, under the command of the gifted young general Avidius Cassius (c. AD 130–175), these armies began to retrace the expedition of Trajan, and two years later destroyed the city of Seleucia on the Tigris and sacked the Persian capital at Ctesiphon. Rome’s forces advanced as far as Medea (modern Iran). At this point Vologaeses IV fled, and the Romans proceeded to consolidate their grip on the border regions by installing new, more loyal client rulers there. Stability was thus restored and, following one further Roman campaign in northern Iraq, the armies withdrew to the west in AD 166. Lucius Verus was awarded a triumph, but died of a stroke three years later.

  The Antonine Plague

  The Roman withdrawal took place against the backdrop of a sudden and devastating natural disaster. A pandemic illness took hold in Mesopotamia while the Romans were mopping up there. As they returned to their posts around the empire, the legions brought the disease with them.

  The result was catastrophic, with some 10 per cent of the empire’s population – as many as six or seven million people – falling victim to the illness, which subsequently became known as the Antonine Plague. Ancient medicine had no cure; the famous Greek physician Galen (c. AD 129–199) described its symptoms as diarrhoea, high fever, and the appearance of pustules on the skin after nine days. Galen’s brief account has led later experts to speculate that the disease was most likely smallpox.