The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  The army

  The central institution supported by the tax system (it required somewhere between half and three-quarters of all tax revenue) was the Roman army. Augustus had transformed the army from a force primarily based in Italy, whence had come most of the soldiers in the Republic and to which most aspired to return upon discharge, into a frontier force whose members were increasingly recruited from the provinces.

  At the time of Augustus’ death, the Roman military consisted of four types of soldier, whose professional status was marked by differences in legal status, equipment, training and salary. At the top were members of the new imperial guard, known as the Praetorian Guard, stationed only in Italy during Augustus’ lifetime; Sejanus would later gather them into a single camp in Rome. They served sixteen years, were the best-paid, and were armed like regular legionaries but with extra training in urban warfare (they would be called upon to suppress riots in the city). Legionaries were next, serving for twenty years; they were supposedly all Roman citizens upon enlistment (in fact, citizenship was often conferred upon enlistment). Fighting as heavily armed infantrymen, their primary tactical purpose was to lure the main battle line of the enemy into hand-to-hand combat and destroy them. Auxiliaries came next, usually wearing less substantial armour than did legionaries; they would only receive citizenship if they gained an honorary discharge after twenty-five years’ service. They were drawn from the various provinces and client kingdoms, and organized into cavalry ‘wings’ for horsemen, or cohorts with notional strengths of either 500 or 1000 men, usually all of infantry, though there were some special units that combined horse and foot. Finally there were sailors, who were essentially members of the auxilia who served at sea.

  In AD 14, as a result of the decision not to replace the legions lost with Varus, there were twenty-five legions, each with a theoretical strength of 5,600 men, giving a total of 140,000 legionaries; the recently constituted praetorian guard numbered 10,000 men, and it is probable that there were around 170,000 soldiers serving with the auxilia. Assuming that there were roughly 20,000 men serving with the main battle fleets, which would henceforth be based at Ravenna and Misenum, the total military establishment of the Augustan age amounted to around 340,000. In the reign of Marcus Aurelius the number of legions had expanded to thirty, or roughly 168,000 legionaries and about 200,000 auxiliaries with, again, about 30,000 men serving in the guard and the fleets. The military establishment under Marcus, in terms of the empire’s total population (which had increased by about 50 per cent in these years), was therefore smaller than it had been under Augustus, though it likely consumed about as much of the budget, since pay and benefits had been increased in the interim.

  When not in the field, and for much of the period after Augustus, most of the army spent little time on campaign; soldiers could be found oppressing civilians or working on the empire’s infrastructure. In their dealings with civilians, the army’s record was often appalling. One Jewish text states that if a woman was kidnapped by soldiers one could assume she had been raped, not a fate that could be assumed if she had fallen in with brigands; elsewhere we find soldiers demanding bribes, kidnapping local worthies who they thought could pay a ransom, or compelling people to cart things around – the Biblical expression ‘to go the second mile’ derives from a Roman soldier’s right to compel a civilian to carry kit for him.

  When not making life hard for civilians, soldiers were typically employed in major public works projects such as the great transportation system that drew the empire together through new roads and bridges – still the marvel of Europe more than a thousand years after the Roman empire in the west came to an end, in the fifth century AD – or in elaborate training exercises. These often involved intricate drill, which created a strong esprit amongst serving soldiers, who were proud of what they were able to accomplish when they had officers who were committed to keeping them in top form (devotion to hard physical labour was by no means a universal attribute of Roman officers).

  The problem with these exercises, though, was that they were often irrelevant to the specific areas where the soldiers were stationed, and based on increasingly archaic tactical doctrines. This much becomes clear when we look at two short books of the period that treat military matters, written by a historian and philosopher of Greek descent called Arrian of Nicomedia (c. AD 92–175). Arrian not only had a practical knowledge of contemporary warfare – as governor of the Roman province of Cappadocia from AD 130 to 138, he commanded an army that repelled an invasion by the Alan tribes from the steppes of central Asia – he was also a scholar of ancient history. In particular, he admired Alexander the Great, and his account of the campaigns of the Macedonian king remains the foundation for modern study of that era. Yet therein lay the problem; for all his undoubted accomplishments on the battlefield, when formulating tactics Arrian recommends infantry formations that are adaptations of the fourth-century BC phalanx used by his military hero. In writing on cavalry tactics, he is marginally more up to date, but even then he commends innovations borrowed from the Gallic and Spanish tribes of the first century BC.

  That the fighting tactics outlined above were not Arrian’s alone is made plain by another surviving text from the same period that comes from North Africa. It is in the form of an inscription recording a series of speeches that Arrian’s patron Hadrian gave when visiting the area, praising the drills performed by various auxiliary units. Tellingly, one of these formations is precisely the same Spanish cavalry drill described by Arrian. The coincidence of this identical tactic being recommended in two different parts of the Roman world smacks of the dead hand of tradition. The troops that Hadrian was inspecting were the garrison that patrolled the northern boundaries of the Sahara, yet there is nothing in his speech to suggest that he took into account the very special requirements of desert warfare. Certainly, there was no centralized drill manual, and Roman armies had been known since the days of the republic for adopting the fighting and campaigning skills of their adversaries. The problem was that these days lay far in the past, and for a long time no new strategic or tactical thinking had been evolved to cope with changed circumstances.

  Troubling as these aspects of Roman military doctrine might be from a long-term perspective, it was still the case in the first and second centuries that Rome’s enemies had yet to catch up. The Roman army was still beyond question the most effective fighting force in Europe and the Middle East; and when not oppressing civilians, soldiers did have to work hard, and in so doing went some way towards justifying the image of soldiers as representatives of Roman civilization that figures, for instance, on Trajan’s column. The other quality that we find on Trajan’s column is devotion to the emperor: in these years the army was by and large extremely loyal to the imperial system, which is perhaps the single most important aspect of the Roman military in these years.

  One reason why the army may have been so loyal to the imperial regime was that soldiers of the period viewed themselves as a privileged class apart from and above the civilians, whom they saw themselves as ruling – a distinction that, at least symbolically, was enhanced in the early third century by the fact that soldiers were not allowed to contract legal marriages before they left the service. But while they saw themselves as rulers, they also had to be ruled, often by officers whom they did not like very much. Even by the time of Augustus’ death in AD 14, there was considerable hostility between enlisted men and their officers now that the rank of centurion (the commander of a century, usually comprising around 80 men) was becoming the first rung on the ladder for a normal equestrian career, which meant that centurions were usually drawn from the upper classes.

  Because of the social gap between enlisted men and their officers, military administration came to consist of marginally intersecting spheres of interest. The average soldier seems to have viewed himself as a member of an élite group that ruled the area in which he served, while their officers, from the rank of centurion upwards (all of whom were allowed to
marry), saw themselves as members of an imperial élite for whom military service ideally led to a move into the equestrian civil service or to a more significant social position altogether. Given such attitudes, there could be no specific military agenda; officers and men reacted to events in terms of what they understood to be their best interests – and the default setting for those interests was typically loyalty to the emperor. That may be the reason why events such as those of AD 69 were so very rare in the centuries after Actium. Indeed, it was the unwillingness of armies to march on Rome that set the imperial period apart from the era of Sulla and Caesar. The army’s loyalty was thus the central pillar of the pax Romana.

  All roads do not lead to Rome

  Although it was the army that secured the empire, it was still the tax system that provided the basic forum of interaction between government and the governed, so it also helped shape the empire. In economic terms, the empire created a superstructure made up of a number of relatively autonomous zones, each of which centred either on a major city or on a large military garrison. In the west, these zones included the two main areas of military occupation along the Rhine and Danube rivers, each with a garrison of around 80,000 men, and Rome. In the east, the principal zones were the highly urbanized region of western Turkey (Asia Minor), which included Ephesus, Pergamon and Smyrna, as well as a host of smaller places, plus the area around Antioch in Syria. In all cases, the zones’ hinterlands supplied the major cities or garrisons with revenue, goods and services. Rome, for instance, with a population of around one million people, required the excess agricultural resources of North Africa, Spain and Egypt to support its existence.

  The fact that Rome needed food from abroad to survive did not mean that the economic traffic was all in one direction. Continuing consumer demand in Rome directly benefited the regions that supplied it. For example, the infrastructure required to ship North Africa’s agricultural surplus to Rome was directly responsible for regenerating Carthage as a major city. Similarly, in Egypt, the supply chain that led from the fertile Nile valley confirmed the status of Alexandria as a major city; in addition to handling large quantities of home-grown agricultural produce, the city was also a key entrepôt for the lucrative trade in luxury goods – chiefly spices – from Asia. On a smaller scale, the same process generated wealth throughout the empire. The garrisons on the Rhine were supported by the excess production of France, while the army on the Danube stimulated the growth of agriculture throughout the Balkans. In both areas, which had no significant urban settlement prior to the Roman conquest, a number of major cities grew up along or near rivers. In Germany, these cities included Bonn (Bonna), Trier (Augusta Treverorum), Mainz (Moguntiacum) and Cologne (Colonia Agrippina), with significant further development along the Rhône at Lyons (Lugdunum) and in the ancient city of Marseilles (Massilia). Along the Danube, large conurbations arose at Aquincum and Sirmium, as well as Siscia on the major east–west road to the south and Thessalonica. In Britain, London grew into a major trading city, while Córdoba (Corduba) in Spain emerged as the centre of the highly productive Guadalquivir valley.

  By establishing a redistribution network for excess production, and creating a stable market for goods from far and wide, the Roman empire brought a hitherto unknown level of prosperity to the territories under its control. The system also enabled Roman emperors to alleviate periods of hardship in particular areas by diverting surpluses from regions that were thriving.

  The striking feature of the imperial redistribution system is that all roads did not lead to Rome. While massive grain fleets did indeed sail there every year from North Africa and Alexandria, the rest of the trade flowed away from the capital. There were no ancient equivalents of the bullion fleets of early modern Spain sailing into the harbours of Italy, having despoiled the resources of the empire. Most of the tax revenue that was collected, either in agricultural produce (required for the land tax) or hard currency (deriving from the poll tax and various taxes on the transshipment of goods), was used to support the administration in the areas where it was collected, or in the areas serviced by the local redistribution network.

  Fiscal flaws

  The decentralization of the Roman system was its greatest strength, for it meant that if disaster struck in one area, the rest of the empire could remain relatively free of disruption. On the other hand, the fact that most tax revenue supported local needs also meant that emperors were often chronically short of cash. In response, over the course of the first two centuries, the emperors began gradually to reduce the quantity of pure silver in the basic silver coin, the denarius, to roughly 60 per cent, avoiding rampant inflation by tariffing the denarius against the basic gold coin, or aureus, at a rate of 25:1. The result was that inflation in the course of the two centuries after Augustus remained relatively stable, at around 0.25 per cent annually.

  Although the emperors could control inflation by supporting the gold standard, and alleviate shortages by redirecting surpluses, their fiscal condition remained parlous. The tax system, based as it was on the relatively inelastic system of 10- to 14-year censuses, could not be counted on to generate massive new revenues when they were needed. Shortfalls in the budget had to be made up by the emperors who, from the time of Augustus onwards, diverted surpluses from their own income to the state treasury (aerarium). However, the transfer of imperial funds was not always enough. In the crisis of the Danubian Wars, Marcus Aurelius was actually forced to auction off palace furniture to meet his expenses. Nor was it just wartime that depleted the coffers; despite the fact that the empire enjoyed a long period of peace in the reign of Antoninus Pius, he still found it necessary to impose a luxury tax on the upper classes in the form of a 25–33 per cent surcharge on the sale of gladiators. By the time Marcus, in a magnanimous gesture celebrating his military victories, finally repealed the gladiator tax it had yielded between five and seven million denarii a year, the equivalent of about 7.5 per cent of the base cost of the entire Roman army.

  The Imperial Melting Pot:

  Roman Culture

  (AD 68–180)

  The Roman empire embraced many different cultures, yet still managed to instil in the peoples under its protection a sense of being Roman. Not that this task was at all straightforward: ultimately, the authority of the Roman state depended upon the willing acquiescence of its subjects. If the terrible tale of the Jewish revolts of the first and second centuries reveal nothing else about Roman administration, it was that popular insurrection in just a small province had the capacity to stretch the resources of the empire to their limit. What, then, were the methods by which hearts and minds were won?

  Rome’s key policy of sharing power with local élites meant that it could not simply prescribe what it meant to be Roman and expect people to follow unquestioningly. Broadly speaking, the empire was divided between the Greek-speaking east and the Latin-speaking west, but this crude distinction conceals radical differences in the way that Latin or Greek culture was assimilated by the vast mass of people for whom neither language was indigenous. In Britain, Germany and Gaul, Latin was often a second language to either local Celtic or Germanic dialects.

  E Pluribus Unum

  Roman Africa – the province centred on Carthage – was a particularly interesting case. Though a Roman province since the end of the Third Punic War (146 BC), it retained a distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The first language of an African aristocrat might well be Punic (the dialect of ancient Carthage, which developed from the language of the Phoenician traders who founded the city) or some other local tongue. Even North Africans who attained high office in Roman service maintained a strong connection to their roots. For example, Lusius Quietus, one of the four leading generals executed by Hadrian at the start of his reign, was the son of a North African tribal chieftain, and probably spoke a Berber dialect. Likewise, the Historia Augusta (a late-Roman collection of biographies of emperors from AD 117 to 284) recounts that Septimius Severus (AD 146–211), the future emperor
who entered the senate under Marcus, spoke Latin with such a heavy Punic accent that he pronounced his own name ‘Sheptimiush Shervush’.

  In Egypt, many local officials had a very poor command of Greek – we know of one village administrator there, Petaus the son of Petaus, who could barely spell his own name in Greek – because their first language was a form of Egyptian known as Demotic. In Syria, the dominant language was Aramaic, while in Asia Minor a hodgepodge of ancient languages continued to be spoken in preference to Greek; the Acts of the Apostles relate that when Paul of Tarsus performed a miracle in the city of Lystra in Asia Minor on his first missionary journey in AD 47, those who witnessed it cried out in Lycaonian. As late as the third century AD, the Roman jurist Ulpian (d. 223) noted that a governor had to be able to accommodate people speaking Phoenician and Aramaic, as well as Latin and Greek, in his court. Ulpian himself came from Tyre, a Roman colonia in the eastern Mediterranean that was an enclave of Latin culture in a district where otherwise Phoenician and Aramaic were far more common than Greek or Latin. One suspects that if Ulpian had been from Gaul, he would have included Celtic; it is certainly clear from the comments of two Christian commentators of the second century that the original languages of that region continued to be spoken, if not written, long after the start of the Roman occupation. Conversely, a Gaul named Favorinus (c. AD 80–150, whose other claim to fame was an undescended testicle) mastered the Greek language so perfectly that he became one of the foremost Greek orators in Rome during the reign of Hadrian.

  A world of entertainment

  Roman emperors promoted various practices that were designed to inculcate the values of Roman culture into the peoples of the wider empire. The incentive was that favours would be granted by Rome to those willing to assimilate. These initiatives included encouraging people to learn Greek and Latin well enough to be able to participate in government, to construct cities on a Greek or Latin model and to adopt Greek or Roman dress. Roman values were transmitted not only through the periodic appearances of senior magistrates, but also through various forms of public announcements – missives from the emperor were always read out in a public ceremony and then posted in a public place – or public spectacles.