Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire Read online

  ANCIENT ROME

  THE RISE AND FALL

  OF AN EMPIRE

  Simon Baker

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  First published in 2006

  This edition published in 2007 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

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  Copyright © Simon Baker 2006

  Foreword by Mary Beard © Woodlands Books Ltd 2006

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  Commissioning editor: Martin Redfern

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  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Mary Beard

  Map

  Seven Hills of Rome

  I REVOLUTION

  II CAESAR

  Augustus

  III NERO

  IV REBELLION

  Hadrian

  V CONSTANTINE

  VI FALL

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  For my mother, Patsy

  Your task, Roman, and do not forget it, will be to govern the peoples of the world in your empire. These will be your arts – and to impose a settled pattern upon peace, to pardon the defeated and war down the proud.

  Vergil, Aeneid

  So power and greed ran riot, contaminated and pillaged everything, and held nothing sacred or worthy of respect until [the Romans] plunged themselves to their own destruction.

  Sallust, War with Jugurtha

  FOREWORD

  Rome was a city founded on murder. In 753 BC the twin brothers Romulus and Remus – at the head of a small band of exiles and malcontents – dug the defences of the tiny village that was to become the capital of an empire that stretched from Scotland to the Sahara and beyond. But excitement soon turned to tragedy. The brothers quarrelled, and Romulus killed his twin.

  More problems were soon to follow. Romulus had only a handful of supporters. So where were the citizens for the new city to be found? The answer was: from all-comers. Romulus declared his city an ‘asylum’, and welcomed any exiles, refugees, runaway slaves and criminals who chose to take up residence. Rome was a city populated entirely by, in the ancient sense of the term (which is not so very far from our own), asylum-seekers.

  That took care of the men. But where were the women to be found to make the wives and mothers in his new state? Here Romulus resorted to mean trickery. He invited some of the neighbouring peoples to a religious festival and, when he gave the signal, had his lads run off with the young female guests. This so-called ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ has appealed to writers and artists ever since as a story of violence, lust and hard-headed political expediency.

  We have no idea how much of this lurid tale is actually true. The precise date of 753 is the result of an elaborate and frankly unreliable calculation more than five hundred years later by Roman scholars, who were as interested as their modern equivalents in working out when exactly Rome began; but it does fit roughly with evidence that has been recovered by archaeologists for the earliest phases of the city. Romulus himself was no more or less an historical person than King Arthur of Britain.

  But, accurate or not, this is how the Romans for the rest of their history, over more than a millennium, told the story of Rome’s origins. They saw in the story many of the questions that were to dominate their political life ever after, and for that matter still dominate ours. These are the exciting themes that underlie this book. How should a state be governed? Can violence ever be justified in politics? Who has a right to citizenship and to benefit from its privileges?

  When Romans reflected on the civil wars that sometimes scarred their political life, they looked back to the quarrel of Romulus and Remus and saw their city as destined from the very beginning to suffer the nastiest kind of internecine strife. The death of Romulus also provided them with food for thought. They could not agree whether he had in the end been taken up to heaven by the grateful gods, or hacked to death by angry citizens. This was a story debated with even greater intensity after the murder of Julius Caesar (see Chapter II) in 44 BC – hacked to death by his enemies in the name of liberty for becoming an autocrat, yet made into a god by his supporters and honoured with his own temple in the heart of the city.

  This book concentrates on six pivotal moments in the history of Rome, from the second century BC to the fifth century AD – a time of dramatic, sometimes revolutionary, change. During this period, Rome came to be the dominating power around the Mediterranean and much further afield (traces of the presence of Roman traders have been found as far east as India). It turned from a more or less democratic republic into an autocratic empire. And – most dramatic of all perhaps – Rome was finally transformed from a pagan to a Christian city. Formally baptized only on his deathbed in 337, Constantine (see Chapter V) was the first Roman emperor publicly to sponsor Christianity. Indeed, he was the original founder of several of the churches and cathedrals that define the sacred landscape of Rome even today, including the first St Peter’s.

  Each of the pivotal moments touches on big questions of political change and conflict. The story of Tiberius Gracchus (see Chapter I), for example, and his controversial attempts to redistribute land to landless peasants, raises issues of the gap between rich and poor and who should benefit from the profits of a wealthy state. The story of Nero (see Chapter III) explores the consequences of autocracy gone mad. But these particular moments have been chosen for another reason too. For they offer us a vivid glimpse of some of the key personalities in Roman history. They let us get close to individual characters, their human motives, their political dilemmas, and their attempts to change the world in which they live
d.

  Modern professional historians tend to stress how little we know about the Roman world. True, we are almost completely in the dark about what life was like for the slum dwellers of the city (though we can make a fair guess!) or for peasants struggling to find a livelihood in the countryside. And we are not much better off when it comes to understanding the feelings of women or slaves, or how the Roman empire’s balance of payments actually worked, or – for that matter – what Romans wore under their togas or how they disposed of their sewage (the miracles of Roman drainage have, I am afraid, been grossly exaggerated). But on a wide range of other aspects we are probably better informed about Rome than about any other society before the fifteenth century. We have direct access to the writings, the thoughts and feelings of Roman politicians, poets, philosophers, critics and commentators.

  Take Julius Caesar, for example, and his decision to march on Rome – a decision that launched the civil war that effectively ended democracy and ushered in the one-man rule of the emperors (see Chapter II). We still have his own autobiographical account of these events, published in his multivolume memoirs, On the Civil War. In some ways it makes strange reading; for example, he refers to himself throughout in the third person: ‘Caesar decided. . .’, not ‘I decided’. In other ways it is a stirring story, and a clever justification of his actions.

  But not only that. From the run-up to the outbreak of war and through the conflict itself we can still read a series of private letters written by – and sometimes to – one of Rome’s most weighty statesmen (or so he would have liked to think). This was Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was also a notable philosopher and orator, as well as a supporter of Pompey, Caesar’s rival. It is still something of a mystery how these letters were preserved and published. But they certainly give us an extraordinary insider’s view of a man wrestling with his doubts and indecisions about whom to support and how to make the best of it when he found himself on the losing side – all interspersed with the day-to-day problems of disloyal slaves, divorce, the death of a daughter, and shady property deals.

  As it turned out, Caesar was characteristically generous to Cicero; whatever his political ruthlessness, ‘clemency’ was one of his slogans. But after Caesar’s assassination, his apparatchik Mark Antony (of ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen. . .’ fame) had him summarily ‘removed’. The story was that after Cicero’s death, his hands and tongue (his most powerful political weapons in writing and speaking) were pinned up on display in the Roman Forum, and that Antony’s wife took particular pleasure in piercing them with her hairpins. It’s a story that speaks as much about Roman views of women as about the hatred of Antony and his wife for Cicero.

  Of course, none of these accounts is as simple as it seems. Neither Caesar’s own memoirs, nor Cicero’s published correspondence, are any more reliable than the equivalents penned by a modern politician. We cannot take them straightforwardly on trust. But they do bring us directly to the heart of Roman history and politics. And they are not alone. We get our most detailed and vivid information about the unsuccessful Jewish Revolt against the Romans (see Chapter IV), which ended with the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70, from the history written by one of the participants – Josephus – a Jewish rebel and then notorious turncoat, who ended up living comfortably in Rome under the patronage of the emperor Vespasian. Most stories of unsuccessful rebellions are told by the winners. There is, in fact, no other such detailed account by a rebel against an imperial power from any empire before the modern period.

  And even if nothing significant survives from the mouth or pen of the emperor Nero himself, there are still extraordinary pieces of writing by members of his court circle and by key players in the politics of that notorious reign. We have, for example, a philosophical treatise addressed to Nero by his tutor Seneca, giving some clear and level-headed advice on how to be an emperor. Clemency usually works better than cruelty was the general message – following the example of Julius Caesar. As we shall see, Seneca did not in the end win clemency from his old pupil; in fact, he was to die a slow and agonizing death at Nero’s behest.

  Some people think that a hilarious skit on Nero’s predecessor, the emperor Claudius, becoming a god was also written by Seneca while he still enjoyed Nero’s favour. Claudius was apparently an unpromising candidate for immortality by Roman standards (he limped, stuttered and was believed to be a fool). And the satire – which now goes under the English title The Pumpkinification of Claudius (a pun on ‘deification’) – pokes cruel but hilarious fun at him in particular and, more generally, at the whole Roman institution of making ‘good’ emperors (and some not so ‘good’ ones) into gods. One of the characters in the skit is the first emperor Augustus, the gold standard against whom all future emperors were measured. He was made a god on his death in AD 14, but decades later, Seneca jokes, he still hasn’t nerved himself to make his maiden speech in the heavenly senate, so in awe is he of all the ‘proper’ deities. It is one of the very few pieces of ancient comedy that can still make you laugh out loud. Humour doesn’t usually travel well across cultures, but The Pumpkinification works for me at least.

  In addition to this rich and varied evidence from some of the leading characters themselves, there are also detailed accounts by later Roman historians of the incidents discussed in this book. In the forefront is the cynical analysis of the early years of the Roman empire, written in his Annals and Histories by Tacitus, himself a Roman senator of the late first century and early second century ad. This account is as much a meditation on corruption and the abuse of power as an historical narrative. It contains, for example, the chilling tale of Nero’s murder of his mother, Agrippina, with which Chapter III opens. After an unsuccessful attempt at doing away with her by sending her out to sea in a collapsible boat, Nero resorts to sending in some armed thugs. As matricide, this was one step worse than the fratricide that marked the very beginning of Rome.

  But Tacitus is only one point of access to the ancient historical tradition. From roughly the same period as Tacitus we have a series of racy ‘Lives of the Emperors’ by Suetonius, who worked for a time in the palace bureaucracy and seems to have had some access to the imperial filing cabinets, or their ancient equivalents. Then there are the moralizing biographies by Plutarch, a Greek inhabitant of the Roman empire, who produced a series of life stories of famous Romans going back to Romulus. Most of these were paired with an appropriate figure from the Greek world. Julius Caesar, for example, pointedly turns up as the biographical twin of Alexander the Great, the most successful conqueror the world had ever known, with a similarly tragic end, and – admittedly unproven – suspicions of assassination.

  All in all, we have a lot for which to thank those medieval monks who painstakingly copied these ancient texts in an unbroken tradition since antiquity, and thus kept them alive to be rediscovered in the Renaissance – later to be interpreted and reinterpreted by us.

  It is these precious survivals from the Roman world itself that have made it possible for the BBC television series to re-create in a compelling and dramatic way some of the key turning points in Rome’s history. Of course, we shall never know exactly what it was like to be there, or be able to reconstruct all the complicated motivations and aspirations of the characters concerned. And we have to recognize that the ancient historians on whom we partly depend were themselves sometimes resorting to imagination and guesswork; after all, how could Tacitus possibly have known what actually happened at the secret murder of Nero’s mother? But we have enough evidence to let us begin to get inside Roman heads, and to see the problems, dilemmas and conflicts from their point of view. We can tell a very good – and historical – story indeed.

  This book complements the television series, as well as being a marvellous read in its own right. Focusing on the same pivotal moments, Simon Baker has put them into a broader context. He has filled out the historical background to each, and exposed some of the intriguing problems of the evidence on which the dramati
c reconstructions are based. Sometimes we are confronted with conflicting versions of the same event. How do we choose between them? Sometimes the evidence simply dries up. Then, like Tacitus and all historians, we are forced to make good guesses and to use our imagination. The result is a history of Rome that combines vivid drama and a gripping story-line with a keen alertness to bigger historical questions, and to the challenges of drawing a clear narrative thread out of the evocative, but complicated and diverse, ancient evidence.

  Ever since ancient times, people in the West have been retelling the history of Rome and re-creating it for their own purposes in fiction, painting and opera, and latterly in film and television. There have always been good and bad versions of this – cheesy clichés as well as powerful and arresting images and narratives. The figure of Julius Caesar has been a particular catalyst of such reconstructions. For centuries he has prompted some of the sharpest analyses of the nature of autocracy and liberty, and raised a question that remains with us even now: can political assassination ever be justified?

  William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, itself loosely based on a translation of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, is only one of many reflections on the rights and wrongs of the case. The audience’s interest is divided between the title role of Caesar, killed less than halfway through the play, and the fate of his assassins, which dominates the second part. Do we feel that we are on Caesar’s side – a legitimate ruler illegally put to death? Or is the killer Brutus our hero for being prepared to murder even a friend in defence of popular liberty? How far do patriotism and political principles demand that we sometimes flout the law and ride roughshod over personal ties of friendship and loyalty?