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

  Predictably enough, the answers proposed for these particular historical and literary conundrums were especially loaded around the period of the French Revolution. Voltaire, for example, presented a dramatic version of the events, which clearly had one eye on the execution of the French royal family when it unequivocally backed the assassins’ deeds as honourable. But twentieth-century politics also found good food for thought in the dilemmas raised by the events of the Ides of March, 44 BC. Orson Welles’s debut production at the famous Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937 was a staging of Julius Caesar, which (in a then daring experiment with modern dress) had the cast of Caesar’s supporters kitted out as Mussolini’s fascist thugs.

  Not all the characters discussed in this book have had quite such an enduring shelf life. Tiberius Gracchus, for example, is not exactly a modern household name. In fact, outside academic ancient history, posterity has served his mother Cornelia rather better than it has served him. A model of devoted (and ambitious) parenthood, she is supposed to have turned her nose up at the rich jewels being shown off by a friend – pointing to her sons instead as her ‘treasures’. In her doting maternal role she starred in a whole series of eighteenth-century paintings, usually depicted with a pair of (to us) rather priggish boys at her side, and looking decidedly sniffy at the strings of pearls and suchlike being trailed in front of her. And, again in her parental role, she makes a striking appearance alongside other Western heroes, from the Greek tragedian Sophocles to the emperor Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus, in the famous nineteenth-century memorial stained glass at Harvard University. But even Tiberius has recently enjoyed a certain celebrity, being used as a pointed comparison for the occasional modern politician (such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) known as a radical or revolutionary reformer.

  The emperor Nero, however, has had almost as busy an afterlife in Western culture as Caesar. One of the greatest and earliest Italian operas, Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppaea (1642), explores the intense relationship between the emperor and his mistress Poppaea. A case study in devious manipulation, as well as in the power of passionate love, she is depicted cynically disposing of all the obstacles in her path towards marriage with the emperor – including the opposition of the moralizing but virtuous Seneca. The opera ends with Poppaea being gloriously crowned as empress of Rome. But a well-informed audience will already know that this victory will be short-lived, as Poppaea is destined soon to die after a vicious blow from Nero himself (a scene powerfully dramatized in the BBC series). It is a chilling and timeless exploration of passion, ruthlessness and immorality.

  More often, though, Nero has found a decidedly lurid role in modern popular culture, especially in film. The classic image of a luxury-loving and decadent emperor, he has been portrayed countless times consuming unlikely foods (dormice and pretty little songbirds, as the usual cliché of Roman dietary habits would have it) amid grape-strewn orgies, cackling over his megalomaniac schemes to rebuild Rome after the great fire of AD 64 and ‘fiddling while Rome burned’.

  Much of this is the product of modern elaboration and the projection of all our stereotypes of Roman luxury on to the convenient figure of Nero. But the theme of ‘fiddling’ (that is, ‘playing the violin’ – not, as it is often now taken to be, ‘footling aimlessly’) goes back to an ancient story that, while Rome was in flames, the emperor climbed up a tower to get a good view of the blaze and sang a song on the destruction of the legendary city of Troy. True or not, this was no doubt meant to portray the emperor as a self-obsessed artist, utterly out of touch with practical realities. In fact, as recounted in Chapter III, whatever his artistic ambitions, Nero seems to have taken eminently sensible steps to cope with the immediate aftermath of the fire.

  There was also a story that he looked for scapegoats to blame for starting the fire, and picked on the early Christian community in the city – whose view that the end of the world was nigh may well have made the accusation more plausible. To make an example of the Christians, according to Tacitus, he crucified them or burnt them alive (using them, it is said, as lamps to brighten the night). It was the first Christian ‘persecution’, and St Peter may have been one of the victims.

  This has given another distinctive theme to modern portrayals of Nero. Film and fiction have indulged in touching but entirely implausible fantasies of Christian heroism in the face of Neronian tyranny – often enlivening the picture with the subplot of a pretty young Christian girl converting her young pagan boyfriend, and taking him with her to a noble but gory death (usually involving lions). Many of these stories are versions of a best-selling novel, Quo Vadis, by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, which was published in the nineteenth century and quickly translated into almost every European language (the title, meaning ‘Where are you going?’, is taken from words addressed by Peter to Jesus).

  The most famous film version of this book was made in 1951, starring Peter Ustinov as a villainous Nero with an upper-class English accent (the goodies were American). But, as always, even if villainous, Nero did retain an aura of glamour too. In fact, the film’s makers, MGM, promoted it with a series of ‘tie-in’ products. These included some gaudy boxer shorts and pyjamas, advertised under the slogan ‘Make like Nero!’ Persecutor of the Christians he may have been, but – or so the implied message was – it was still fun to feel like ruler of the world by sporting Nero’s brand of underwear.

  As we look back, some of the ways that past generations (even relatively recent ones) have re-created the Romans and Roman history can seem strange, unappealing or downright laughable. We can hardly see how Shakespeare’s actors strutting the stage in their own Elizabethan costume could ever have done plausible duty as Romans – though we are, I suspect, more sympathetic (inconsistent as it may be) to Orson Welles’s fascist thugs. It is almost equally hard to take seriously those wooden paragons of virtue in so many Hollywood movies, dressed up in white sheets, and orating in a pretentious fashion – as if they had jumped straight out of the nineteenth-century House of Commons or a schoolboy’s Latin textbook.

  But we do still retain a soft spot for the marvellous images of Roman debauchery and cruelty set in luxurious baths, at dinner parties or the amphitheatre. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, for example, staged some really compelling scenes of butchery and mass crowd dynamics in the Colosseum; though, interestingly, these were largely based not on the ruins themselves, but on nineteenth-century paintings (which Scott found more convincing and impressive than the real thing). We can enjoy too those fictional re-creations of Roman life ‘below stairs’, such as the classic musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which first appeared on Broadway in 1962, was made into a film in 1966, and was revived at the National Theatre in London in 2004). This drew on the traditions of ancient Roman comedy itself, but owed much of its appeal to the glimpse it offered of what might have happened beneath the glittering marble veneer of the city.

  Part of the reason that some of these older visions of Rome now seem to us so unconvincing is that our understanding of Roman history and culture has changed in the interim. New information continues to be discovered. For example, our picture of life on a Roman army base has been enriched in the last few years by private letters and other documents (including the famous invitation to a birthday party from one officer’s wife to another) unearthed at the fort of Vindolanda in northern England. In Italy one of the most impressive discoveries of the twentieth century was the excavation of a large villa at Oplontis, near Pompeii, which seems to have belonged to the family of Nero’s wife, Poppaea, and allows us to reconstruct her background with much greater confidence. And it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that we obtained a full, reliable text of the autobiography of the emperor Augustus, which had been discovered inscribed on the wall of a Roman temple (dedicated to Augustus as a god) in Ankara.

  No less significant are the changing interpretations of old evidence. One particular debate, which is acutely relevant to our account of Tiberius Gracc
hus and Julius Caesar, concerns the underlying motivations of Roman politicians, especially in the hundred years or so before Julius Caesar’s rise to power. One view, prevalent for much of the last century, is that there was very little ideological difference between the opposing political leaders. What was at stake was no more and no less than naked, personal power. If some (such as Gracchus or Caesar) chose to rely on the support of the people rather than the aristocratic Senate, that was simply because it offered the most direct route to the power they yearned for. Increasingly, this has come to seem to a new generation (as, in fact, it had already seemed to our predecessors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) an inadequate way of seeing the debates and political struggles of the period. It is hard to make sense of the violent clashes around Tiberius Gracchus without imagining that a meaningful conflict about the distribution of wealth in the state was at stake. And it is this view that the television series and this book have followed.

  In many ways, though, changing images of Rome are a consequence of each generation looking for something different in Roman history. True, some things remain fairly constant. It seems very unlikely, for example, that we shall ever shake off our notion of Rome as a culture that is somehow larger than life, for good or ill. The sheer extent of its empire and the size of its monuments, such as the Colosseum, will probably ensure that. But recent historians have tended to shine their spotlight on aspects of Rome that their predecessors left barely illuminated.

  They have, for example, chosen to look beyond the monumental centre of the city. Certainly, from the period of Augustus onwards, the heart of Rome was packed with temples, theatres and public buildings of all sorts, constructed not just from white marble, but also from precious multicoloured marble embossed with gold and occasionally encrusted with jewels. It must have been a staggering sight to any visitor from more ‘barbarian’ provinces, such as Britain or Germany. But there was always a seedier side. This was not only the poor back-street world that A Funny Thing. . . tried to capture. But also, before the age of Augustus (who boasted that he had transformed Rome from a place of brick to one of marble), the whole city was much less glittering and grand, certainly not full of the planned urban spaces, promenades and porticoes of popular perception. Frankly, with the exception of just one or two neighbourhoods, it probably looked more like Kabul than New York. And it was about as violent.

  Part and parcel of these changes of vision is a growing tendency to question the image of ancient Romans as somehow very like us (or perhaps more like our imperialist Victorian ancestors) – different only in the sense that they wore togas and, picturesquely but no doubt uncomfortably, ate their dinners lying down. Historians now tend to find their fascination with the Romans lies as much in their foreignness as in their comfortable familiarity. Their norms of sexual behaviour, of gender difference, of ethnicity were quite different from ours. They lived in a world (as one historian recently put it) ‘full of gods’, and the élite were served by battalions of slaves, a whole subordinate population of humans who lived outside the rights and privileges of humanity. The account given in this book, and in the television reconstruction, tries to incorporate some sense of that difference between them and us.

  Of course, all reconstructions are inevitably provisional. And the implication of these changing attitudes to Roman culture (and they are bound to go on changing) is that our own modern version of Rome, however historically grounded it is, is likely to appear in a hundred years’ time as quaintly old-fashioned as nineteenth-century reconstructions now look to us.

  But why bother with the Romans at all? Partly because, in Europe at least, they are still with us. Their precious treasures, artworks, bric-a-brac and kitsch fill our museums. The monuments sponsored by several of the key players in this book are still prominent landmarks in Rome: the great arches of Titus and Constantine are the best known of the city; the Colosseum, built with the profits of the Jewish War, is visited by millions of tourists a year; Nero’s extravagant Golden House can still be explored underground. Further afield, the traces of their activity mark the landscape across their empire – in our road networks, our town plans and our place names (it is almost certain that any British town or village whose name ends in ‘-chester’ is sitting directly on top of a Roman camp or castra). And, of course, their surviving literature – from elegant love poetry to thundering epic, from hard-headed history to self-serving memoirs – is as impressive, acute and provocative as any in the world, and it is worth all the attention we can give it.

  The Romans also have a lot to teach us. I do not mean that in terms of direct relevance or comparability. Intriguing comparison though it is, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is much more different from Tiberius Gracchus than he could ever possibly be like him. But we share with the Romans many fundamental political dilemmas, and can usefully watch them wrestling with solutions. They, after all, were among the very first to wonder how to adapt models of citizenship and political rights and responsibilities to vast communities that transcended the boundaries of a small, ‘face-to-face’ town. By the first century BC the population of the city of Rome alone, excluding Italy and the more remote territories of the empire, was in the order of a million.

  One-man rule, in the shape of emperors good or bad, was only one of their solutions – but the best known and to us the least palatable. More crucially, they reformulated the idea of citizenship in the context of the nearest thing to a global state the ancient world ever knew. Unlike the exclusivity of, for example, ancient Athens, which restricted citizenship to Athenians born and bred, Rome came to unite its huge empire through sharing its political rights. Slaves who were freed by their masters, as many were, became citizens with political rights. Citizenship was gradually extended throughout the empire, until in 212 the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free populations within the Roman empire. Rome, in other words, was the first multicultural megastate.

  It was also the inspiration of those men and women who are more directly responsible for shaping the political world in which we live today. The founding fathers of the United States saw a model in the republican politics of Rome before the advent of one-man rule. Hence American ‘senators’ and the ‘Capitol’ (after the Roman Capitoline Hill) as seat of government. In Britain the Labour movement saw resonances of its own conflicts with a land-owning and industrial aristocracy in the struggle of the Roman people against aristocratic conservatism. Hence the left-wing Tribune newspaper (called after the office of tribune held by Tiberius Gracchus and other radical politicians), and the ‘Tribune Group’ of Labour MPs. To understand our world we need to understand how it is rooted in Rome.

  In many ways we are still living with the legacy of Romulus’s murder of Remus.

  MARY BEARD

  June 2006

  Seven Hills of Rome

  In about 350 BC the Romans developed a story about how their ancient city was first founded. It was a story that would seek to trace their ultimate origins back to a remote past beyond even the age of Romulus and Remus. At the time the Romans were a people from a powerful city-state in Italy, but they were also beginning to strut on the international stage of the Mediterranean. There was one civilization in particular with which they came into greater and greater contact – that of the Greeks in the east. This was an enticing, older world, rich in myth, history, sophistication, wealth and influence. It was one the Romans wanted to connect with, to be part of, to measure up to. One of the ways they achieved that was to adopt a foundation story they could share with that more ancient civilization whenever Greeks and Romans met. It was the story of the Trojan Aeneas. Later, at the height of the Roman empire, it would come to be seen by some as the moment when the ancient Greek world began its transformation into the new Roman order.

  Aeneas was a hero of the Trojan War fought against the Greeks. Leaving behind his desolate, burning city of Troy (on the northwest coast of modern Turkey), Aeneas made his escape. But he was not alone. He carried his f
rail father on his back, held his son by the hand and was accompanied by a band of Trojan survivors. One night, after years of travelling the seas of the Mediterranean, Aeneas was woken up with a shock. The god Mercury appeared before him and delivered a stern message from the god Jupiter. Aeneas’s destiny, he said, was to found the city that would become Rome. His old home destroyed, Aeneas was set on a mission to found a new one. It was no less than a heaven-sent task. Continuing their travels, he and his followers eventually reached Italy. Sailing upriver, the greased pine timbers of their ships gliding gently over the water, they laid eyes on the future site of the city. Here they found an idyllic rural land called Latium, its quiet green woods standing in contrast to the bright colours of their boats and the shine of their armour. But in this Eden-like land events quickly spiralled out of control. The Trojan settlers who came in piety and peace quickly turned invaders, began a bloody war and found themselves murdering local countrymen.

  Although the story is a myth anchored in the very ancient past, its theme gets to the heart of early Roman history: conflict and the Italian countryside. It would not be the first and only time that war and the rural ‘quiet land’ of Italy bled into each other. Indeed, in 350 BC, at the time of the myth’s creation, those two spheres of Roman life were fast becoming stitched into a single fabric. Early Roman citizens were both farmers and part-time soldiers. In both war and agriculture Romans humbly and piously called upon the traditional gods to sanction their endeavours and bring success to them and their families. The cycles of the agricultural year and the season of military campaigning were the same too: March (the month of Mars, the god of war) heralded the period of greatest activity. By the time October came around, the tools of the farmer and the weapons of the soldier were put away for the winter.