Gaius Octavius was the first Roman emperor to rule after the republic. The Senate conferred upon him the name Augustus, a title that is meant to convey Octavius’s superiority among men. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Actium left Octavian the master of the Roman world. This supremacy, successfully maintained until his death more than 40 years later, made him the first of the Roman emperors. Suicide removed Antony and Cleopatra and their potential menace in 30 BC, and the annexation of Egypt with its Ptolemaic treasure brought financial independence. With these reassurances Octavian could begin the task of reconstruction.
Law and order had vanished from the Roman state when its ruling aristocrats refused to curb their individual ambitions, and the most corrupt and violent people could gain protection for their crimes by promising their support to those ambitious. Furthermore, the ambitious and the violent together could thus transform a republic based on disciplined liberty into a turbulent cockpit of murderous rivalries.
Good government depended on limits being set to unrestrained aspirations, and Octavian was in a position to impose them. But his military might, although sufficiently strong in 31 BC to guarantee orderly political processes, was itself incompatible with them; nor did he relish the role of military despot. The fate of Julius Caesar, an eagerness to acquire political respectability, and his own esteem for ancestral custom combined to dissuade Octavian from it. He wished to be, in his own words, “the author of the best civilian government possible.” His problem was to regularize his own position so as to make it generally acceptable, without simultaneously reopening the door to violent lawlessness. His pragmatic responses not only ensured stability and continuity but also respected republican forms and traditions so far as possible.
Large-scale demobilization allayed people’s fears; regular consular elections raised their hopes. In 29–28 BC Octavian carried out, with Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, his powerful deputy, the first census of the Roman people since 70; and this involved drawing up an electoral roll for the Centuriate Assembly. Elections followed, and Octavian was inevitably chosen consul. Then, on Jan. 13, 27 BC, he offered to lay down his powers. The Roman Senate rejected this proposal, charging him instead to administer (besides Egypt) Spain, Gaul, and Syria for the next 10 years, while the Senate was to supervise the rest of the empire. Three days later, among other honours, it bestowed upon him the name by which he has ever since been known, Augustus.
As most of the troops still under arms were in the regions entrusted to Augustus’s charge, the arrangements of 27 BC hardly affected his military strength. Moreover, so long as he was consul (he was reelected every year until 23 BC), he was civilian head of government as well. In other words, he was still preeminent and all-powerful, even if he had, in his own words, placed the res publica at the disposal of the Senate and the Roman people. Augustus particularly wished to conciliate the senatorial class, without whose cooperation civilian government was impossible. But his monopolization of the consulship offended the Senate, making a different arrangement clearly necessary. Accordingly, in 23 Augustus made a change; he vacated the consulship and never held it again (except momentarily in 5 BC and again in 2 BC, for a limited, specific purpose).
Gaius Octavius was the first Roman emperor to rule after the republic. The Senate conferred upon him the name Augustus, a title that is meant to convey Octavius’s superiority among men. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In its place he received the tribunician power (tribunicia potestas). He could not become an actual plebeian tribune, because Julius Caesar’s action of making him a patrician had disqualified him for the office. But he could acquire the rights and privileges pertaining to the office; and they were conferred upon him, apparently by the Senate, whose action was then ratified by the popular assembly. He had already been enjoying some of a tribune’s privileges since 36; but he now acquired them all and even some additional ones, such as the right to convene the Senate whenever he chose and to enjoy priority in bringing business before it. Through his tribunician power he could also summon the popular assembly and participate fully in its proceedings. Clearly, although no longer consul, he still retained the legal right to authority in civilian affairs.
The arrangement of 23 entailed an additional advantage. The power of the plebeian tribune was traditionally associated with the protection of citizens, and Augustus’s acquisition of it was therefore unlikely to rouse resentment. Indeed, Augustus thenceforth shrewdly propagated the notion that if his position in the state was exceptional (which it clearly was), it was precisely because of his tribunician power. Although he held it for only one year at a time, it was indefinitely renewable and was pronounced his for life. Thus, it was both annual and perpetual and was a suitable vehicle for numbering the years of his supremacy. His era (and this is true also of later emperors) was counted officially from the year when he acquired the tribunician power.
The year 23 likewise clarified the legal basis for Augustus’s control of his provincia (the region under his jurisdiction) and its armed forces. The Senate invested him with an imperium proconsulare (governorship and high command), and, while this had a time limit, it was automatically renewed whenever it lapsed (usually every 10 years). This proconsular imperium, furthermore, was pronounced valid inside Italy, even inside Rome and the pomerium (the boundary within which only Roman gods could be worshiped and civil magistrates rule), and it was superior (majus) to the imperium of any other proconsul. Thus, Augustus could intervene legally in any province, even in one entrusted to someone else.
The network of favours owed him that Augustus had cultivated within the state, among people of the greatest authority over their own networks, made his position virtually unassailable, but he avoided provoking this high class of his supporters, senatorial and equestrian, by not drawing attention to the most novel and autocratic of the many grants of power he had received, the imperium proconsulare majus. Instead, he paraded the tribunician power as the expression of his supreme position in the state.
After 23 no fundamental change in Augustus’s position occurred. He felt no need to hold offices that in republican times would have conferred exceptional power (e.g., dictatorship, lifetime censorship, or regular consulship), even though these were offered him. Honours, of course, came his way. In 19 BC he received some consular rights and prerogatives, presumably to ensure that his imperium was in no particular inferior to a consul’s. In 12, when Lepidus died, he became pontifex maximus (he had long since been elected into all of the priestly colleges). In 8 BC, the eighth month of the year was named after him, and in 2 BC, he was designated pater patriae (“father of his country”), a distinction that he particularly esteemed because it suggested that he was to all Romans what a paterfamilias was to his own household. He also accepted special commissions from time to time—e.g., the supervision of the supply of grain and water, the maintenance of public buildings (including temples), the regulation of the Tiber, the superintendence of the police and firefighting services, and the upkeep of Italy’s roads. Such behaviour advertised his will and capacity to improve the lives of people dependent on him. Of that capacity, manifest on a grand scale, his tribunician power and proconsular imperium were only the formal expression. He was a charismatic leader of unrivaled prestige (auctoritas), whose merest suggestions were binding.
Like an ordinary Roman, he contented himself with three names. His, however, Imperator Caesar Augustus, were absolutely unique, with a magic all their own that caused all later emperors to appropriate them, at first selectively but after AD 69 in their entirety. Thereby they became titles, reserved for the emperor (or, in the case of the name Caesar, for his heir apparent); from them derive the titles emperor, kaiser, and tsar. Yet, as used by Augustus and his first four successors, the words Imperator Caesar Augustus were names, not titles—that is, respectively, praenomen, nomen (in effect), and cognomen. One title that Augustus did have was princeps (prince). This, however, was unofficial—a mere popular label, meaning Rome’s first citizen—and government documents such as inscriptions or coins do not apply it to Augustus. But because of it the system of government he devised is called the principate.
Augustus regarded the Senate, whose leading member (princeps senatus) he had become in 28, as a body with important functions. It heard fewer overseas embassies than formerly, but otherwise its dignity and authority seemed unimpaired. Its members filled the highest offices, and its decrees, although not formally called laws, were just as binding. The Senate soon became a high court whose verdicts were unappealable. It supervised the older provinces and, nominally, the state finances as well and, in effect, elected the urban magistrates. Formally, even the emperor’s powers derived from the Senate.
Nevertheless, it lacked real power. Its provinces contained few troops (and by AD 40 it had ceased to control even these few). Hence, it could hardly dispute Augustus’s wishes. In fact, real power rested with Augustus, who superintended state finances and above all controlled membership in the Senate; every senator’s career depended on his goodwill. But he valued the Senate as the repository of the true Roman spirit and traditions and as the body representing public opinion. He was considerate toward it, shrewdly anticipated its reactions, and generally avoided contention with it. He regularly kept it informed about his activities; and an imperial council (Consilium Principis), which he consulted on matters of policy, in the manner of a republican magistrate seeking the opinion of his advisory committee, consisted of the consuls, certain other magistrates, and 15 senators—not handpicked by him but chosen by lot every six months.
To rid the Senate of unworthy members, he reduced its numbers by successive reviews to about 600 (from the triumviral 1,000 or more). Sons of senators and men of good repute and substance who had served in the army and the vigintiviri (“board of twenty,” minor magistracy) could become members by being elected, at age 25 or over, to the quaestorship. Their subsequent rank in the Senate depended on what other magistracies they managed to win. These were, in ascending order, the aedileship (or plebeian tribunate), the praetorship, and the consulship. No one disliked by Augustus could expect to reach any of them, while anyone whom he nominated or endorsed was sure of election. Despite the emperor’s control, there were usually enough candidates for keen contests.
By AD 5 destinatio seems to have been the practice—that is, a special panel of senators and equites selected the praetors and consuls, and the comitia centuriata automatically ratified their choice. In about AD 5, likewise, the consulship was shortened to six months. This not only gratified senators and increased the number of high-ranking qualified officials but also showed that the consuls’ duties were becoming largely ceremonial. This was also true, but to a far lesser degree, of the other unpaid magistrates. A senator really made his mark in between his magistracies, when he served in important salaried posts, military or civilian or both, sometimes far from Rome.
One of the great institutions of the Roman Empire developed because senators were either too proud or too few to fill all the posts open throughout the empire. Some posts were considered menial and went to the emperor’s freedmen or slaves. Others were entrusted to equites, and thus it was that the equestrian order developed.
Augustus decided that membership in the order should be open to Roman citizens of means and reputation but not necessarily of good birth. Ultimately, there were thousands of equites throughout the empire. Although this was a lower aristocracy, a good career was available to them. After tours of duty as an army officer (the so-called militiae equestres), an aspiring eques might serve as the emperor’s agent (procurator) in various capacities and eventually become one of the powerful prefects (of the fleet, of the vigiles, or fire brigade, of the grain supply, of Egypt, or of the Praetorian Guard). This kind of an equestrian career became standardized only under Claudius I, but Augustus began the system and, by his use of equites in responsible posts, founded the imperial civil service, which later was headed chiefly by them.
The equites also performed another function. The senatorial order had difficulty in maintaining its numbers from its own ranks and depended on recruitment from below, which meant from the equestrian order. Because this order was not confined to Rome or even to Italy, the Senate gradually acquired a non-Italian element. The western provinces were already supplying senators under Augustus.
Members of the equestrian order, called eques, were the Roman equivalent of an English knight. Most were originally part of the military cavalry, later becoming members of a political and administrative class. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Ordinary Roman citizens who were neither senators nor equites were of lesser consequence. Although still used, the old formula senatus populusque Romanus (“the Senate and the Roman people”) had changed its meaning; in effect, its populusque Romanus portion now meant “the emperor.” The “Roman people” had become the “Italian people,” and it was embodied in the person of Augustus, himself the native of an Italian town.
To reduce the risk of popular demonstrations in Rome, the emperor provided grain doles, occasional donatives, and various entertainments; but he allowed the populace no real power. After AD 5 the Roman people’s participation in public life consisted in the formality of holding occasional assemblies to ratify decisions made elsewhere. Ultimately, this caused the distinction between the Roman citizens of Italy and the provincial inhabitants of the overseas empire to disappear; under Augustus, however, the primacy of Italy was insistently emphasized.
Indeed, Italy and justice for its inhabitants were Augustus’s first cares. Arbitrary triumviral legislation was pronounced invalid after 29 BC, and ordinary Roman citizens everywhere had access to Augustus’s own court of appeal (his appellate jurisdiction dated from 30 BC and in effect replaced the republican appeal to the people). His praetorian and urban cohorts provided physical security; his officials assured grain supplies; and he himself, with help from such aides as Agrippa, monumentalized Italian towns. The numerous Augustan structures in Italy and Rome (as he boasted, a city of brick before his time and of marble afterward) have mostly perished, but impressive ruins survive (e.g., aqueduct, forum, and mausoleum in Rome; bridge at Narni; arch at Fano; gate at Perugia). Doubtless their construction alleviated unemployment, especially among the proletariat at Rome.
But economic considerations did not influence Augustus’s policies much (customs tariffs, for instance, were for fiscal, not protective, purposes), nor did he build harbour works at Ostia, Rome’s port. Italian commerce and industry—notably fine pottery, the so-called terra sigillata, and wine—nevertheless flourished in the conditions he created. Public finances, mints, and coinage issues, chaotic before him, were placed on a sound basis, partly by the introduction of a sales tax and of a new levy (inheritance taxes) on Roman citizens—who hitherto had been subject only to harbour dues and manumission charges—and partly by means of repeated subventions to the public treasury (aerarium Saturni) from Augustus’s own enormous private resources (patrimonium Caesaris). To keep the citizen body pure, he made manumission of slaves difficult, and from those irregularly manumitted he withheld the citizenship. His many highways also contributed to Italy’s economic betterment.
Augustus’s great achievement in Italy, however, was to restore morale and unify the country. The violence and self-aggrandizement of the first century BC had bred apathy and corruption. To reawaken a sense of responsibility, especially in official and administrative circles, Augustus reaffirmed traditional Italian virtues (by laws aimed against adultery, by strengthening family ties, and by stimulating the birth rate) and revived ancestral religion (by repairing temples, building new shrines, and reactivating moribund cults and rituals). To infuse fresh blood and energy into disillusioned Roman society, he promoted the assimilation of Italy: the elite of its municipal towns entered the Roman Senate, and Italy became firmly one with Rome.
Sharply distinguished from Italy were the provinces of the empire. From 27 BC on they were of two types. The Senate supervised the long-established ones, the so-called public provinces. Their governors were chosen by lot, usually served for a year, commanded no troops, and were called proconsuls (although only those superintending Asia and Africa were in fact former consuls, the others being former praetors). The emperor supervised all other provinces, and collectively they made up his provincia. He appointed their governors, and these served at his pleasure, none with the title of proconsul because in his own provincia proconsular imperium was wielded by him alone. These imperial provinces might be “unarmed,” but many of them were garrisoned, some quite heavily. Those containing more than one legion were entrusted to former consuls and those with a legion or less to former praetors; in both cases their governors were called legati Augusti pro praetore (“legates of Augustus with authority of a praetor”). There were also some imperial provinces governed not by senators but by equites (usually styled procurators but sometimes prefects); Judaea at the time of Christ’s crucifixion was such an equestrian province, Pontius Pilate being its governor. An entirely exceptional imperial province was Egypt, so jealously guarded that no senator could visit it without express permission; its prefect was unique in being an equestrian in command of legions.
The provinces paid tribute, which helped to pay for the armed services, various benefactions to supporters, a growing palace staff, and the public-works programs. Periodical censuses, carefully listing provincial resources, provided the basis for the two direct taxes: tributum soli, exacted from occupiers of provincial soil, and tributum capitis, paid on other forms of property (it was not a poll tax, except in Egypt and in certain backward areas). In addition, the provinces paid indirect taxes, such as harbour dues. In imperial provinces the direct taxes (tributa) were paid to the emperor’s procurator, an equestrian official largely independent of the governor. In senatorial provinces, quaestors supervised the finances; but, increasingly, imperial procurators also appeared. The indirect taxes (vectigalia) were still collected by publicani, who were now much more rigorously controlled and gradually replaced by imperial civil servants.
To reward his troops after faithful service, Caesar had settled them on lands mostly in the provinces, in veteran towns; and Augustus, for the same reason and to reduce the dangerous military presence in the state generally, resorted to the same procedure on a vast scale. Thus, in the space of a single generation, more than 120 new centres were organized across the empire in an explosion of urbanizing energy never equaled or even approached in later times. In the settlements called coloniae all residents were to be Roman citizens, and the form of government and many other aspects of life specified in their charters bore a thoroughly Roman character. Some coloniae, in further approximation to Italian models, enjoyed exemption from tribute. In the municipia, only those elected as magistrates were awarded Roman citizenship (after Hadrian, in Africa, admission was sometimes extended to the whole of the local senate); but the whole of the local aristocracy in the course of time would be in this way gradually incorporated fully into the state. In municipia, too, charters specified Roman forms of government. Urban centres that were wholly noncitizen, called civitates, enjoyed autonomy in their own affairs, under the governor’s eye. They paid taxes and administered the rural territory around them. In the west, many of them were eventually granted the status of municipia, and they adopted the originally Italian magistracies (duoviri and aediles, collectively quattuorviri) and senate (curia or ordo), normally numbering 100 members. The entire West rapidly came under the administration of urban centres of these three forms, without which the central government could never have done its job. Moreover, these centres radiated economic and cultural influence around them and so had an immense effect, particularly on the way of life of the more backward areas. In the east, however, urban centres, though equally important for government purposes, had already been in existence and long settled into their own culture and their own forms of government.
The provinces were generally better off under the empire. Appointment over them as governor was now and henceforth generally granted with the emperor’s approval. Because he thought of himself as in some ways the patron and defender of the provincial population, lax or extortionate officials could expect some loss of imperial favour, an end to their careers, or an even more severe punishment.
It was Augustus’s soldiers, however, not his worshipers, who made him all-powerful. Their allegiance, like the name Caesar, was inherited from his “father,” the deified Julius. The allegiance was to the emperor personally, through a military oath taken in his name every January 1; and the soldiers owed it after his death to his son or chosen successor. This preference of theirs for legitimacy could not be ignored because they were now a standing army, something that the republic had lacked. Demobilization reduced the 60 legions of Actium to 28, a number hardly sufficient but all that Augustus’s prudence or economy would countenance. These became permanent formations, each with its own number and name; the soldiers serving in them were called legionnaries.
Besides the legionnaries there was a somewhat smaller body of auxiliaries, or supporting troops. The two corps together numbered more than a quarter of a million men. To them must be added the garrison of Italy—the praetorian cohorts, or emperor’s bodyguard, about 10,000 strong—and the marines of the imperial fleet, which had its main headquarters at Misenum and Ravenna in Italy and subsidiary stations and flotillas on seas and rivers elsewhere (the marines, however, were not reckoned good combat forces). All these troops were long-service professionals—the praetorians serving 16 years; legionaries, 20; auxiliaries, 25; and marines, 28—with differing pay scales, the praetorians’ being the highest. In addition to their pay, the men received donatives, shares of booty, and retirement bonuses from a special treasury (aerarium militare) established in AD 6 and maintained out of the sales tax and Roman citizens’ death duties. Under Augustus the praetorians were normally Italians, but many legionaries and virtually all auxiliaries were provincials, mainly from the imperial provinces in the west, the legionaries coming from municipal towns and the auxiliaries from tribal areas. The tendency to use provincials grew, and by the year 100 the Roman imperial army was overwhelmingly non-Italian.
An ivory carving depicting Roman soldiers wearing the legions’ familiar plumed helmets. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Nevertheless, it helped greatly to Romanize the empire. The legionnaries were Roman citizens from the day they enlisted, if not before, and the auxiliaries (after Claudius anyway) from the day they were discharged; and, though serving soldiers could not legally marry, many had mistresses whose children often became Roman citizens. The troops, other than praetorians and marines, passed their years of service in the “armed” imperial provinces—the auxiliaries in forts near the frontier and the legionaries at some distance from it in camps that showed an increasing tendency, especially after AD 69, to become permanent (some of them, indeed, developed into great European cities). There was no central reserve, because, although desirable for emergencies, it might prove dangerous in peacetime.
The officers were naturally Roman citizens. In the legions those of the highest rank (legati and tribuni) were senators or equites; lower officers (centuriones) might enter directly from Italian or provincial municipalities or might rise through the ranks; by the time they retired, if not sooner, many of them were equites. In the auxiliaries the unit commanders (praefecti) were equites, often of provincial birth. On retirement the soldiers frequently settled in the provinces where they had served, made friends, and perhaps acquired families. Imperial policy favoured this practice. Thus the army, which had done much to introduce into the provinces Romans of all ranks, with their own way of life, through veteran settlements of the 40s, 30s, and 20s BC, continued in the same role on a more modest and casual scale throughout the Augustan reign and for two centuries or so afterward.
After Actium and on two other occasions, Augustus solemnly closed the gates of the shrine of Janus (a gesture of peace) to show that Rome had peace as well as a princeps. These well-publicized gestures were purely temporary; the gates were swiftly reopened. His proconsular imperium made Augustus the arbiter of peace and war, and an ostensible search for defensible frontiers made his a very warlike reign. While the republic had left the limits of Roman territorial claims rather vague and indefinite, he planned conquests stretching to the boundaries defined by nature (deserts, rivers, and ocean shores), not always, however, with immediate annexation in mind. When annexation did occur, it was followed by the construction of solidly built military roads, paved with thick stone blocks: these also served the official post system (cursus publicus) and were provided with rest stages and overnight lodges at regular intervals.
Areas where subjugation looked arduous and where Romanization seemed problematic were left to client kings, dependent on the emperor’s support and goodwill and under obligation to render military aid to Rome. Such satellite kingdoms spared Augustus the trouble and expense of maintaining strong defenses everywhere; nevertheless, their ultimate and intended destiny was incorporation as soon as it suited their overlord’s convenience. Usually, territory was gained more easily by creating and subsequently incorporating a client kingdom than by launching an expansionist war.
In the south, Augustus found suitable frontiers quickly. In 25 BC an expedition under Aelius Gallus opened the Red Sea to Roman use and simultaneously revealed the Arabian Desert as an unsurpassed and, indeed, unsurpassable boundary. The same year Gaius Petronius, the prefect of Egypt, tightened Rome’s grip as far as the First Cataract and established a broad military zone beyond it. The vast region north of the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains was also secured (c. 25) after a series of punitive raids against native tribes and the annexation of one client kingdom (Numidia) and the creation of another (Mauretania). Three legions, two in Egypt and one in Africa (a senatorial province), policed the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
In the west, consolidation was extended to the Atlantic. Gaul, Julius Caesar’s conquest, was organized as four provinces: senatorial Narbonensis and the imperial three Gauls (Aquitania, Belgica, and Lugdunensis). In Spain, after Agrippa successfully ended in 19 BC the last campaign that Augustus had launched in person in 26, three provinces were formed: senatorial Baetica and imperial Lusitania and Tarraconensis. Three legions enforced Roman authority from Gibraltar to the mouth of the Rhine. Augustus ignored the advice of court poets and others to advance still farther and annex Britain.
In the east, Parthia had demonstrated its power against Crassus and Antony, and Augustus proceeded warily. He retained Antony’s ring of buffer client kingdoms, although he incorporated some, including the most celebrated of them, Judaea; he made it a province in AD 6, respecting, however, some of the customs of its Jewish inhabitants. Augustus stationed four legions in Syria and obviously envisaged the Euphrates River and the northern extension of the Arabian Desert as the desirable frontier with Mesopotamia. Farther north, however, no such natural line existed. North of the Black Sea the client kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus, under its successive rulers Asander and Polemo, helped to contain southward and westward thrusts by the Scythians, an Iranian people related to the Parthians, and this provided protection in the north for Anatolia and its provinces (senatorial Asia and Bithynia-Pontus and imperial Cilicia and Galatia, the latter a large new province created in 25 BC out of Amyntas’s client kingdom).
By a show of force, Augustus’s stepson Tiberius, in 20 BC, recovered the standards lost at Carrhae and installed Tigranes as client king of Armenia. Although Augustan propaganda depicted this as a famous victory, strategic considerations inevitably obliged the Parthians, once they settled their internal, dynastic dissensions, to dispute Roman control of Armenia. Thus it can hardly be said that Augustus settled the eastern frontier. Missions were sent to the East repeatedly (Agrippa, 17–13 BC; Gaius Caesar, AD 1–4; Germanicus, 18–19), and Armenia remained a problem for Augustus’s successors: Tiberius successfully maintained Roman influence there, but Gaius and Claudius failed to do so, leaving Nero with a difficult situation.
In the north, too, there was difficulty. The Alps and their passes were finally subjugated early in Augustus’s reign. This enabled Tiberius and his brother Drusus between 16 and 8 BC to conquer all the way to the great rivers of central Europe. New provinces were created in the Alps and Tyrol (Maritime and Pennine Alps, Raetia, Noricum) and also farther east (Pannonia, Moesia). Stability along the Danube was precariously maintained, under Augustus and later, by means of periodical alliances with Maroboduus and his successors, who ruled Germanic tribes such as the Marcomanni and Quadi in Bohemia to the north of the river, and by the existence of a Thracian client kingdom to the south of its lowest course.
The push across the Rhine began in 12 BC. Although it reached the Elbe, consolidation beyond the Rhine proved elusive. A revolt in Pannonia (AD 6–9) interrupted it, and, in AD 9, German tribes under Arminius annihilated Quinctilius Varus and three legions in the Teutoburg Forest. This disaster reduced the number of legions to 25 (it did not reach 28 again until half a century later), and it disheartened Augustus.
Old and weary, he withdrew to the Rhine and decided against all further expansion, a policy he urged upon his successor. For the watch on the Rhine the military districts of Upper and Lower Germany were created, containing eight legions between them. Another seven garrisoned the Danubian provinces. These figures reveal imperial anxiety for the northern frontier.
Although widespread, Augustus’s wars chiefly affected the frontier districts. Elsewhere, peace prevailed. Indeed, never before had so large an area been free of war for so long. This state of affairs helped trade. The suppression of piracy and the use of military roads, which the frontier warfare itself brought into being, provided safe arteries of commerce. Stable currency also aided economic growth. Activity directly connected with the soil predominated; but there were also many establishments, usually small, engaged in manufacturing, and such products as textiles, pottery, tiles, and papyrus were turned out in surprising quantities. Advanced techniques were also known: glassblowing, for example, dates from the Augustan age. Most products were consumed locally, but the specialties or monopolies from any region usually exceeded local needs, and the surplus was sold elsewhere, generating a brisk interchange of goods.
Some traveled great distances, even beyond the empire: trade with India, for example, reached respectable proportions once the nature of the monsoon was understood, and the Red Sea was opened to Roman shipping. Merchants, especially Levantines, traveled everywhere, and fairs were frequent. The Mediterranean world was linked together as never before, and standardization made considerable headway. In Augustus’s day Italy was economically the most important part of the empire. It could afford to import on a large scale, thanks partly to provincial tribute but above all to its own large productivity. The eastern provinces, for their part, recovered rapidly from the depredations of the civil wars and were industrially quite advanced. The other provinces were less developed, but they soon ceased being mere suppliers of raw materials; they learned to exploit their natural resources by using new techniques and then began overtaking the more advanced economies of Italy and the Greek-speaking regions. The importance of trade in unifying the empire should not be underestimated.
In 17 BC Rome held Secular Games, a traditional celebration to announce the entry into a new epoch (saeculum). New it was, for, although Augustus preserved what he could of republican institutions, he added much that was his own. His Rome had become very Italian, and this spirit is reflected in the art and literature of his reign. Its greatest writers were native Italians, and, like the ruler whose program they glorified, they used the traditional as the basis for something new. Virgil, Horace, and Livy, as noted above, imitated the writing of classical Greece, but chiefly in form, their tone and outlook being un-Hellenic. It was the glory of Italy and faith in Rome that inspired Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid, Horace’s Odes, and the first 10 books of Livy’s history.
In Augustan art a similar fusion was achieved between the prevailing Attic and Hellenistic models and Italian naturalism. The sculptured portraits on the Ara Pacis (Altar of the Augustan Peace) of 9 BC, for all their lifelike quality, are yet in harmony with the classical poise of the figures, and they strike a fresh note: the stately converging processions (Rome’s imperial family and magistrates on one side; senators, equites, and citizens on the other) became the prototypes for all later processional reliefs. Augustan painting likewise displays a successful combination of Greek and Roman elements, to judge from the frescoes in the house of Livia on the Palatine. In Augustan architecture, decidedly conservative and Hellenic, the potentialities of curving and vaulted spaces that had been revealed in the earlier first century BC were not realized. Building was, however, very active and widespread.
The culture of the age undoubtedly attained a high level of excellence, dominated by the personality of the emperor and his accomplishments. Imperial art had already reached full development, a matter of no small moment, because Rome’s political predominance made the spread of its influence inevitable. The Mediterranean world was soon assuming a Roman aspect, and this is a measure of Augustus’s extraordinary achievement. Yet it was an achievement with limitations. His professed aim—to promote stability, peace, security, and prosperity—was irreproachable, but perhaps it was also unexciting. Emphasizing conservatism by precept and his own example, he encouraged the simpler virtues of a less sophisticated age, and his success made this sedate but rather static outlook fashionable. People accepted the routine of his continuing rule, at the cost, however, of some loss of intellectual energy and moral fervour. The great literature, significantly, belongs to the years near Actium, when people’s imagination still nursed heady visions of Roman victory and Italian destiny. After the Secular Games the atmosphere became more commonplace and produced the frivolities of Ovid and the pedestrian later books of Livy.
The sculpted portraits of imperial house members, including Emperor Augustus, adorn a wall of the Ara Pacis (“Altar of the Augustan Peace”). Roger Viollet/Getty Image
Augustus’s position as princeps cannot be defined simply. He was neither a Roman king (rex) nor a Hellenistic monarch (basileus), nor was he, as the 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen thought, a partner with the Senate in a dyarchy. He posed as the first servant of an empire over which the Roman Senate presided, and it would appear that his claim to have accepted no office inconsistent with ancestral custom was literally true. Proconsular imperium was a republican institution, and, although tribunician power was not, it contained nothing specifically unrepublican. But, while precedents can be cited for Augustus’s various powers, their concentration and tenure were absolutely unparalleled. Under the republic, powers like his would have been distributed among several holders, each serving for a limited period with a colleague. Augustus wielded them all, by himself, simultaneously and without any time limit (in practice, at least). This fact made him an emperor, but it did not necessarily make him a military tyrant.
In discharging both military and civilian functions, Augustus was no different from republican consuls or praetors. Admittedly his military power was overwhelming; but, if he chose not to brandish it, the tone of his reign could remain essentially civilian. Constitutional safeguards were indeed lacking; everything was at the emperor’s discretion, and even Augustus passed legislation that made anti-imperial behaviour, real or suspected, treasonable (men were, in fact, executed for conspiracy during his reign). But there had been no constitutional safeguards in the republic, under Sulla, Pompey, the triumvirs, or even Julius Caesar. Augustus’s improved police services probably made lower-class Romans at least feel safer under him. The senatorial class, however, contained a minority resentful of the sheer undeniable preponderance of the princeps’ power, and he was the target of several unsuccessful plots against his life.
The principate was something personal, what the emperor chose to make it, and the relations prevailing between emperor and Senate usually indicated what a reign was like. In Augustus’s case they reveal a regime that was outwardly constitutional, generally moderate, and certainly effective. But, as he himself implied at the end of his life, he was a skillful actor in life’s comedy. Later emperors lacked his sureness of touch.
When Augustus died, the Senate unhesitatingly pronounced him divus—the deified one who had restored peace, organized a standing army to defend the frontiers, expanded those frontiers farther than any previous Roman, improved administrative practices everywhere, promoted better standards of both public and private behaviour, integrated Rome and Italy, embellished Rome, reconciled the provinces, expedited Romanization, and above all maintained law and order while respecting republican traditions.
Augustus’s luck was hardly inferior to his statecraft. Despite indifferent health, he headed the Roman state in one capacity or another for 56 years. His rule, one of the longest in European history, consolidated the principate so firmly that what might have been an episode became an epoch. At his death there was practically no one left with any personal memory of the republic, and Augustus’s wish came true: he had fashioned a lasting as well as constitutional government. The principate endured with only minor changes for about 200 years.
Like any great Roman magnate, Augustus owed it to his supporters and dependents to maintain the structure of power that they constituted together and which would normally pass from father to son. In accepting the heritage from Caesar, he had only done the right thing, and he was respected for it by his peers. None of them would have advised him later to dismantle what he had since added to it. When, for instance, he was away from Rome, rather than accepting a diminution in his prerogatives of administration, a senator as city prefect was deputed to represent him. Consequently, Augustus began thinking early about who should follow him. The soldiers’ views on legitimacy reinforced his own natural desire to found a dynasty, but he had no son and was therefore obliged to select his successor. Death played havoc with his attempts to do so. His nephew Marcellus, his son-in-law Agrippa, his grandsons Gaius and Lucius (Julia’s children by Agrippa), were groomed in turn; but they all predeceased him. Augustus, finally and reluctantly, chose a member of the republican nobility, his stepson Tiberius, a scion of the ultra-aristocratic Claudii. In AD 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius as his son and had tribunician power and probably proconsular imperium as well conferred upon him. This arrangement was confirmed in 13, and, when Augustus died the following year, Tiberius automatically became emperor.
Tiberius (ruled 14–37), during whose reign Christ was crucified, was a soldier and administrator of proved capability but of a reserved and moody temperament that engendered misunderstanding and unpopularity. Slander blamed him for the death in 19 of his nephew and heir apparent, the popular Germanicus; and, when informers (delatores), who functioned at Rome like public prosecutors, charged notables with treason, Tiberius was thought to encourage them. By concentrating the praetorian cohorts in a camp adjoining Rome, he increased the soldiers’ scope for mischief-making without building any real security, and in 26 he left Rome permanently for the island of Capreae (Capri), entrusting Rome to the care of the city prefect. Tiberius heeded the aged Augustus’s advice and did not extend the empire. (The annexation of Cappadocia, a client kingdom, represented no departure from Augustan policy.) In general he took his duties seriously; however, by administering the empire from Capreae he offended the Senate and was never fully trusted, much less really liked. At his death he was not pronounced divus. His great-nephew, Germanicus’s son Gaius, succeeded him.
Gaius (better known by his nickname, Caligula, meaning “Little Boot”) ruled from 37 to 41 with the absolutism of a monarch. His short reign was filled with reckless spending, callous murders, and humiliation of the Senate. Gaius’s foreign policy was inept. Projected annexation proved abortive in Britain; it touched off heavy fighting in Mauretania. In Judaea and Alexandria, Gaius’s contemptuous disregard of Jewish sentiment provoked near rebellion. When assassination ended his tyranny, the Senate contemplated restoration of the republic but was obliged by the Praetorian Guard to recognize Claudius, Germanicus’s brother and therefore Gaius’s uncle, as emperor.
Claudius I (ruled 41–54) went far beyond Augustus and Tiberius in centralizing government administration and, particularly, state finances in the imperial household. His freedmen secretaries consequently acquired great power; they were in effect directors of government bureaus. Claudius himself displayed much interest in the empire overseas; he enlarged it significantly, incorporating client kingdoms (Mauretania in 42; Lycia, 43; Thrace, 46) and, more important, annexing Britain. Conquest of Britain began in 43, Claudius himself participating in the campaign; the southeast was soon overrun, a colonia established at Camulodunum (Colchester) and a municipium at Verulamium (St. Albans), while Londinium (London) burgeoned into an important entrepôt. Claudius also promoted Romanization, especially in the western provinces, by liberally granting Roman citizenship, by founding coloniae, and by inducting provincials directly into the Senate—he became censor in 47 and added to the Senate men he wanted, bestowing appropriate quaestorian or praetorian rank upon them to spare the maturer ones among them the necessity of holding junior magistracies; lest existing senators take offense, he elevated some of them to patrician status (a form of patronage often used by later emperors).
Claudius’s provincial policies made the primacy of Italy less pronounced, although that was hardly his aim. In fact, he did much for Italy, improving its harbours, roads, and municipal administration and draining its marshy districts. The execution of many senators and equites, the insolence and venality of his freedmen, the excessive influence of his wives, and even his bodily infirmities combined to make him unpopular. Nevertheless, when he died (murdered probably by his fourth wife, Julia Agrippina, Augustus’s great-granddaughter, who was impatient for the succession of the 16-year-old Nero, her son by an earlier marriage), he was pronounced divus.
Nero (ruled 54–68) left administration to capable advisers for a few years but then asserted himself as a vicious despot. He murdered successively his stepbrother Britannicus, his mother Julia Agrippina, his wife Octavia, and his tutor Seneca. He also executed many Christians, accusing them of starting the great fire of Rome in 64 (this is the first recorded Christian persecution). In Rome his reliance on particular favourites and his general misgovernment led to a conspiracy by Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, but it was suppressed, leading to yet more executions; the victims included the poet Lucan.
The empire was not enlarged under this unwarlike emperor, but it was called upon to put down serious disorders. In Britain in 60–61 the rapacity and brutality of Roman officials provoked a furious uprising under Queen Boudicca; thousands were slaughtered, and Camulodunum, Vernulamium, and Londinium were destroyed. In the east a major military effort under Corbulo, Rome’s foremost general, was required (62–65) to reestablish Roman prestige. A compromise settlement was reached, with the Romans accepting the Parthian nominee in Armenia and the Parthians recognizing him as Rome’s client king. In 66, however, revolt flared in Judaea, fired by Roman cruelty and stupidity, Jewish fanaticism, and communal hatreds; the prefect of Egypt, Julius Alexander, prevented involvement of the Jews of the Diaspora. An army was sent to Judaea under Titus Flavius Vespasianus to restore order; but it had not completed its task when two provincial governors in the west rebelled against Nero—Julius Vindex in Gallia Lugdunensis and Sulpicius Galba in Hispania Tarraconensis. When the praetorians in Rome also renounced their allegiance, Nero lost his nerve and committed suicide. He brought the Julio-Claudian dynasty to an ignominious end by being the first emperor to suffer damnatio memoriae—his reign was officially stricken from the record by order of the Senate.
Portrait of Emperor Nero committing suicide after the Roman army had overrun the city in 68 AD. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Nero’s death ushered in the so-called year of the four emperors. The extinction of the Julio-Claudian imperial house robbed the soldiers of a focus for their allegiance, and civil war between the different armies ensued. The army of Upper Germany, after crushing Vindex, urged its commander, Verginius Rufus, to seize the purple for himself. But he elected to support Galba—scion of a republican patrician family claiming descent from Jupiter and Pasiphae—who was recognized as emperor by the Senate. However, the treasury, emptied by Nero’s extravagance, imposed a stringent economy, and this bred unpopularity for Galba; his age (73) was also against him, and unrest grew. Early in January 69 the Rhineland armies acclaimed Aulus Vitellius, commander in Lower Germany; at Rome the praetorians preferred Marcus Salvius Otho, whom Galba had alienated by choosing a descendant of the old republican aristocracy for his successor. Otho promptly procured Galba’s murder and obtained senatorial recognition; this ended the monopoly of the purple for the republican nobility.
Otho, however, lasted only three months; defeated at Bedriacum, near Cremona in northern Italy, by Vitellius’s powerful Rhineland army, he committed suicide (April 69). The Senate thereupon recognized Vitellius; but the soldiers along the Danube and in the east supported Vespasianus, the commander in Judaea. In a second battle near Bedriacum, the Rhineland troops were defeated in their turn, and on Vitellius’s death soon afterward an accommodating Senate pronounced Vespasian emperor.
On Dec. 22, 69, the Senate conferred all the imperial powers upon Vespasian en bloc with the famous Lex de Imperio Vespasiani (“Law Regulating Vespasian’s authority”), and the Assembly ratified the Senate’s action. This apparently was the first time that such a law was passed; a fragmentary copy of it is preserved on the Capitol in Rome.
Vespasian (ruled 69–79) did not originate from Rome or its aristocracy. His family came from the Sabine municipality Reate, and with his elevation the Italian bourgeoisie came into its own. He and his two sons, both of whom in turn succeeded him, constituted the Flavian dynasty (69–96). Vespasian faced the same difficult task as Augustus—the restoration of peace and stability. The disorders of 69 had taken troops away from the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Thereupon, the Danubian lands were raided by Sarmatians, a combination of tribes who had overwhelmed and replaced the Scythians, their distant kinsmen, in eastern Europe. The assailants were repelled without undue difficulty; but the Sarmatian Iazyges, now firmly in control of the region between the Tisza and Danube rivers, posed a threat for the future.
Developments in the Rhineland were more immediately serious. There in 69 a certain Civilis incited the Batavians serving as auxiliaries in the Roman army to rebel. Gallic tribes joined the movement, and the insurgents boldly overran all but two of the legionary camps along the Rhine. Vespasian sent his relative Petilius Cerealis to deal with the rebels, who, fortunately for Rome, were not united in their aims; by 70 Cerealis had restored order. That same year Vespasian’s elder son, Titus, brought the bloody war in Judaea to its end by besieging, capturing, and destroying Jerusalem.
To rehabilitate the public finances, Vespasian introduced new imposts, including a poll tax on Jews, and practiced stringent economies. With the Senate he was courteous but firm. He allowed it little initiative but used it as a reservoir from which to obtain capable administrators. To that end he assumed the censorship and added senators on a larger scale than Claudius had done, especially from the municipalities of Italy and the western provinces. Already before 69 an aristocracy of service had arisen, and the provincialization of the Roman Senate had begun; thereafter this development made rapid headway. Besides the censorship, Vespasian also often held the consulship, usually with Titus as his colleague. His object presumably was to ensure that his own parvenu Flavian house outranked any other. In this he succeeded; the troops especially were ready to accept the Flavians as the new imperial family. On Vespasian’s death in 79, Titus, long groomed for the succession, became emperor and immediately had his father deified.
Titus (ruled 79–81) had a brief reign, marred by disasters (the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum and another great fire in Rome); but his attempts to alleviate the suffering and his general openhandedness won him such popularity that he was unhesitatingly deified after his early death.
Domitian (ruled 81–96), Titus’s younger brother, had never been formally indicated for the succession; but the praetorians acclaimed him, and the Senate ratified their choice. Throughout his reign Domitian aimed at administrative efficiency, but his methods were high-handed. For him the Senate existed merely to supply imperial servants. He also used equites extensively, more than any previous emperor. He held the consulship repeatedly, was censor perpetuus from 85 on, and demanded other extravagant honours. On the whole, his efficiency promoted the welfare of the empire. Above all, he retained the allegiance of the troops. Although scornful of the Senate’s dignity, he insisted on his own and mercilessly punished any act of disrespect, real or fancied, toward himself. He became even more suspicious and ruthless when Saturninus, commander in Upper Germany, attempted rebellion in 89. He crushed Saturninus; executions and confiscations ensued, and delatores flourished. The tyranny was particularly dangerous to senators, and it ended only with Domitian’s assassination in 96. The Flavian dynasty, like the Julio-Claudian, ended with an emperor whose memory was officially damned.
The disorders in 69 were the cause of some military reforms. Under the Flavians, auxiliaries usually served far from their native hearths under officers of different nationality from themselves. At the same time, the tasks assigned to them came increasingly to resemble those performed by the legionaries. The latter grew less mobile, as camps with stone buildings came to be the rule; and it became common for detachments from a legion (vexillationes), rather than the entire legion, to be used for field operations. This army of a new type proved its mettle in Britain, where the advance halted by Boudicca’s revolt was now resumed. Between 71 and 84 three able governors—Petilius Cerealis, Julius Frontinus, and Julius Agricola, the latter Tacitus’s father-in-law—enlarged the province to include Wales and northern England; Agricola even reached the Scottish highlands before Domitian recalled him.
Along the Rhine, weaknesses revealed by Civilis’ revolt were repaired. Vespasian crossed the river in 74 and annexed the Agri Decumates, the triangle of land between the Rhine, Danube, and Main rivers. To consolidate the position, he and Domitian after him penetrated the Neckar River valley and Taunus mountains, and fortifications began to take shape to the east of the Rhine, a military boundary complete with strongpoints, watchtowers, and, later, a continuous rampart of earthworks and palisades. Once Saturninus’s revolt in 89 had been suppressed, Domitian felt the situation along the Rhine sufficiently stable to warrant conversion of the military districts of Upper and Lower Germany into regular provinces and the transfer of some Rhineland troops to the Danube. To the north of this latter river, the Dacians had been organized into a strong kingdom, ruled by Decebalus and centring on modern Romania; in 85 they raided southward across the Danube, and in the next year they defeated the Roman punitive expedition. Domitian restored the situation in 88, but Saturninus’s rebellion prevented him from following up his success. Domitian and Decebalus thereupon came to terms: Decebalus was to protect the lower Danube against Sarmatian attack, and Domitian was to pay him an annual subsidy in recompense. The Danubian frontier, however, remained disturbed, and Domitian wisely strengthened its garrisons; by the end of his reign it contained nine legions, as against the Rhineland’s six, and Pannonia was soon to become the military centre of gravity of the empire.
The Flavians also took measures to strengthen the eastern frontier. In Asia Minor, Vespasian created a large “armed” province by amalgamating Cappadocia, Lesser Armenia, and Galatia; and the whole area was provided with a network of military roads. South of Asia Minor, Judaea was converted into an “armed” province by getting legionary troops; and two client kingdoms—Commagene and Transjordan—were annexed and added to Syria. Furthermore, the legionary camps seem now to have been established right on the Euphrates at the principal river crossings. This display of military strength kept the empire and Parthia at peace for many years.
Marcus Cocceius Nerva, an elderly senator of some distinction, was the choice of Domitian’s assassins for emperor; and the Senate promptly recognized him. The soldiers, however, did so much more reluctantly, and, because the year 69 had revealed that emperors no longer needed to be Roman aristocrats and could be chosen in places other than Rome, their attitude imposed caution.
Nerva, who ruled from 96 to 98, adopted a generally lavish and liberal policy, but it failed to win the soldiers over completely, and he proved unable to save all Domitian’s murderers from their vengeance. Unrest subsided only when, overlooking kinsmen of his own, he adopted an outstanding soldier, Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, who was governor of Upper Germany, as his successor. Nerva himself died a few months later.
Trajan (ruled 98–117) was the first and perhaps the only emperor to be adopted by a predecessor totally unrelated to him by either birth or marriage. He was also the first in a series of “good” rulers who succeeded one another by adoption and for most of the second century provided the empire with internal harmony and careful government; they are collectively, if somewhat loosely, called the Antonine emperors. More significantly still, Trajan, a Spaniard, was also the first princeps to come from the provinces; with the greater number of provincials now in the Senate, the elevation of one of them, sooner or later, was practically inevitable. Throughout his reign, Trajan generally observed constitutional practices. Mindful of the susceptibilities of the Senate, he regularly consulted and reported to it. Modest in his bearing, he did not claim ostentatious honours such as frequent consulships or numerous imperial salutations, and he mixed easily with senators on terms of cordial friendship. This reestablished mutual respect between princeps and Senate. Empire and liberty, in Tacitus’s words, were reconciled, and the atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and terror surrounding the court in Domitian’s day disappeared. Trajan endeared himself also to the populace at large with lavish building programs, gladiatorial games, and public distributions of money. Above all, he was popular with the armed forces; he was the soldier-emperor par excellence. Understandably, he received the title Optimus (Best), officially from 114 on (and unofficially for many years earlier).
Yet Trajan was a thoroughgoing autocrat who intervened without hesitation or scruple even in the senatorial sphere, whenever it seemed necessary. His aim was efficiency; his desire was to promote public welfare everywhere. He embellished Rome with splendid and substantial structures, and he showed his care for Italy by refurbishing and enlarging the harbours at Ostia, Centumcellae, and Ancona. He sent officials called curatores to Italian municipalities in financial difficulties and helped to rehabilitate them. He greatly expanded an ingenious charity scheme probably begun by Nerva: money was loaned to farmers on easy terms, and the low interest they paid went into a special fund for supporting indigent children. Nor did Trajan neglect Italy’s highway network: he built a new road (Via Traiana) that soon replaced the Via Appia as the main thoroughfare between Beneventum and Brundisium.
Interest in Italy implied no neglect of the provinces. Curatores were also sent to them; to rescue Achaea and Bithynia, senatorial provinces, from threatened bankruptcy, Trajan made them both temporarily imperial, sending special commissioners of his own to them. His correspondence with his appointee in Bithynia, the younger Pliny, has survived and reveals how conscientiously the emperor responded on even the smallest details. At the same time, it reveals how limited was access to the central government and, consequently, how great a latitude for independent decisions must be left to the governors who lacked some special claim on the emperor’s attention. Trajan’s day was too short to hear every speech of every delegation from the provinces, every recommendation to bestow favour or grant promotion, and every appeal to himself as supreme judiciary. To assist him, he had a “bureaucracy” of only a few hundred in Rome and a few more hundred serving in various capacities in the provinces—to direct the lives of some 60 million people. Clearly, most government must in fact rest in the hands of local aristocracies.
In the military sphere, Trajan’s reign proved a most dynamic one. He decided to strengthen the dangerous Danube frontier by converting Dacia into a salient of Roman territory north of the river in order to dismember the Sarmatian tribes and remove the risk of large, hostile combinations to a safer distance. Bringing to bear a force of 100,000 men, he conquered Decebalus in two hard-fought wars (101–102; 105–106) and annexed Dacia, settling it with people from neighbouring parts of the empire. On the eastern frontier he planned a similar operation, evidently in the conviction, shared by many eminent Romans both before and after him, that only conquest could solve the Parthian problem. Possibly, too, he wished to contain the menace of the Sarmatian Alani in the Caspian region. In a preliminary move, the Nabataean kingdom of Arabia Petraea was annexed in 105–106. Then, in 114, Trajan assembled another large army, incorporated the client kingdom of Armenia, and invaded Parthia.
After spectacular victories in 115 and 116, he created additional provinces (Northern Mesopotamia, Assyria) and reached the Persian Gulf. But he had merely overrun Mesopotamia; he had not consolidated it, and, as his army passed, revolts broke out in its rear. The Jews of the Diaspora and others seized their chance to rebel, and before the end of 116 much of the Middle East besides Parthia was in arms (Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, Anatolia). Trajan proceeded resolutely to restore the situation, but death found him still in the East.
Before his last illness he had not formally indicated his successor. But high honours and important posts had been accorded his nearest male relative, Publius Aelius Hadrianus, the governor of Syria; and, according to Trajan’s widow, Hadrian had actually been adopted by Trajan on his deathbed. Accordingly, both Senate and soldiers recognized him. Trajan’s posthumous deification was never in doubt.
Hadrian (ruled 117–138), also a Spaniard, was an emperor of unusual versatility. Unlike Trajan, he was opposed to territorial expansion. Being himself in the East in 117, he renounced Trajan’s conquests there immediately and contemplated evacuating Dacia as well. Furthermore, four of the consular generals particularly identified with Trajan’s military ventures were arrested and executed “for conspiracy”; Hadrian claimed later that the Senate ordered their deaths against his wishes. The only heavy fighting during his generally peaceful reign occurred in Judaea—or Syria Palaestina, as it was thenceforth called—where Bar Kokhba led a furious, if futile, Jewish revolt (132–135) against Hadrian’s conversion of Jerusalem into a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina.
Instead of expansion by war, Hadrian sought carefully delimited but well-defended frontiers, with client states beyond them where possible. The frontiers themselves, when not natural barriers, were strongly fortified: in Britain, Hadrian’s Wall, a complex of ditches, mounds, forts, and stone wall, stretched across the island from the Tyne to the Solway; Germany and Raetia had a limes (fortified boundary) running between Mainz on the Rhine and Regensburg on the Danube. Within the frontiers the army was kept at full strength, mostly by local recruiting of legionnaries and apparently of auxiliaries, too (so that Vespasian’s system of having the latter serve far from their homelands gradually ceased). Moreover, the tendency for auxiliaries to be assimilated to legionaries continued; even the officers became less distinguishable, because equites now sometimes replaced senators in high posts in the legions. To keep his essentially sedentary army in constant readiness and at peak efficiency (no easy task), Hadrian carried out frequent personal inspections, spending about half his reign in the provinces (121–125; 128–134).
Hadrian also was responsible for significant developments on the civilian side. Under him, equites were no longer required to do military service as an essential step in their career, and many of them were employed in the imperial civil service, more even than under Domitian. By now the formative days of the civil service were over; its bureaucratic phase was beginning, and it offered those equites who had no military aspirations an attractive, purely civilian career. Formal titles now marked the different equestrian grades of dignity: a procurator was vir egregius; an ordinary prefect, vir perfectissimus; a praetorian prefect, vir eminentissimus, the latter title being obviously parallel to the designation vir clarissimus for a senator. Thenceforth, equites replaced freedmen in the imperial household and bureaus, and they even appeared in Hadrian’s imperial council.
Hadrian also improved legal administration. He had his expert jurists codify the edictum perpetuum (the set of rules gradually elaborated by the praetors for the interpretation of the law). He also appointed four former consuls to serve as circuit judges in Italy. This brought Italy close to becoming a province; Hadrian’s intent, however, was not to reduce the status of Italy but to make all parts of the empire important. For one part of his realm, he was exceptionally solicitous: he spent much time in Greece and lavishly embellished Athens.
Hadrian maintained good relations with but was never fully trusted by the Senate. His foreign policy seemed to be unheroic, his cosmopolitanism to be un-Roman, and his reforms to encroach on activities traditionally reserved for senators. Moreover, in his last two years he was sometimes capricious and tyrannous. Like Augustus, he had no son of his own and conducted a frustrating search for a successor. After executing his only male blood relative, his grandnephew, in 136, he adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, renaming him Lucius Aelius Caesar. The latter, however, died shortly afterward, whereupon Hadrian in 138 chose a wealthy but sonless senator, the 51-year-old Titus Aurelius Antoninus. Evidently intent on founding a dynasty, he made Antoninus, in his turn, adopt two youths—Marcus Aurelius (the nephew of Antoninus’s wife) and Lucius Verus (the son of Aelius Caesar) 16 and 7 years old, respectively. When Hadrian died soon thereafter, Antoninus succeeded and induced a reluctant Senate to deify the deceased emperor. According to some, it was this act of filial piety that won for Antoninus his cognomen, Pius.
Antoninus Pius (ruled 138–161) epitomizes the Roman Empire at its cosmopolitan best. He himself was of Gallic origin; his wife was of Spanish origin. For most men his was a reign of quiet prosperity, and the empire under him deserves the praises lavished upon it by the contemporary writer Aelius Aristides. Unlike Hadrian, Antoninus traveled little; he remained in Italy, where in 148 he celebrated the 900th anniversary of Rome. Princeps and Senate were on excellent terms, and coins with the words tranquillitas and concordia on them in Antoninus’s case mean what they say. Other of his coins not unreasonably proclaim felicitas temporum (“the happiness of the times”). Yet raids and rebellions in many of the borderlands (in Britain, Dacia, Mauretania, Egypt, Palaestina, and elsewhere) were danger symptoms, even though to the empire at large they seemed only faraway bad dreams, to use the expression of Aelius Aristides. Antoninus prudently pushed the Hadrianic frontiers forward in Dacia, the Rhineland, and Britain (where the Antonine Wall from the Firth of Forth to the River Clyde became the new boundary) and carefully groomed his heir apparent for his imperial responsibilities.
Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161–180) succeeded the deified Antoninus and more than honoured Hadrian’s intentions by immediately co-opting Lucius Verus as his full co-emperor. Because Verus’s competence was unproved, this excess of zeal was imprudent. Fortunately, Verus left decision making to Marcus. Marcus’s action was also dangerous for another reason; it represented a long step away from imperial unity and portended the ultimate division of the empire into Greek- and Latin-speaking halves. Nor was this the only foreboding development in Marcus’s reign—formidable barbarian assaults were launched against the frontiers, anticipating those that were later to bring about the disintegration of the empire. Marcus himself was a stoic philosopher; his humanistic, if somewhat pessimistic, Meditations reveal how conscientiously he took his duties. Duty called him to war; he responded to the call and spent far more of his reign in the field than had any previous emperor.
At Marcus’s very accession the Parthians turned aggressive, and he sent Verus to defend Roman interests (162). Verus greedily took credit for any victories but left serious fighting to Avidius Cassius and the army of Syria. Cassius succeeded in overrunning Mesopotamia and even took Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital; he was therefore able to conclude a peace that safeguarded Rome’s eastern provinces and client kingdoms (166). In the process, however, his troops became infected with plague, and they carried it back with them to the west with calamitous results. The Danube frontier, already weakened by the dispatch of large detachments to the East, collapsed under barbarian assault. Pressed on from behind by Goths, Vandals, Lombards, and others, the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi and the Sarmatian Iazyges poured over the river; the Germans actually crossed Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia to raid northern Italy and besiege Aquileia. Marcus and Verus relieved the city shortly before Verus’s death (169). Then, making Pannonia his pivot of maneuver, Marcus pushed the invaders back; by 175 they were again beyond the Danube. At that moment, however, a false report of Marcus’s death prompted Avidius Cassius, by now in charge of all eastern provinces, to proclaim himself emperor. The news of this challenge undid Marcus’s achievements along the Danube because it took him to the East and reopened the door to barbarian attacks. Fortunately, Cassius was soon murdered, and Marcus could return to central Europe (177). But he had barely restored the frontier again when he died at Vindobona (Vienna) in 180, bequeathing the empire to his son, the 19-year-old Commodus, who had actually been named co-emperor three years earlier.
Commodus (ruled 180–192), like Gaius and Nero, the youthful emperors before him, proved incompetent, conceited, and capricious. Fortunately, the frontiers remained intact, thanks to able provincial governors and to barbarian allies, who had been settled along the Danube with land grants and who gave military service in return. But Commodus abandoned Marcus’s scheme for new trans-Danubian provinces, preferring to devote himself to sensual pleasures and especially to the excitements of the arena in Rome, where he posed as Hercules Romanus and forced the Senate to recognize his godhead officially. He left serious business to his favourites, whose ambitions and intrigues led to plots, treason trials, confiscations, and insensate murders. Commodus’s assassination on the last day of 192 terminated a disastrous reign; thus the Antonines, like the Julio-Claudians, had come to an ignominious end. And there was a similar sequel. Commodus’s damnatio memoriae, like Nero’s, was followed by a year of four emperors.
The century and three-quarters after Augustus’s death brought no fundamental changes to the principate, although so long a lapse of time naturally introduced modifications and shifts of emphasis. By Flavian and Antonine times the principate was accepted universally. For the provinces, a return to the republic was utterly unthinkable; for Rome and Italy, the year 69 served as a grim warning of the chaos to be expected if, in the absence of a princeps, the ambitions of a few powerful individuals obtained unfettered scope. A princeps was clearly a necessity, and people were even prepared to tolerate a bad one, although naturally they always hoped for a good one.
The princeps, moreover, did not have to be chosen any longer from the Julio-Claudians. The great achievement of the Flavians was to reconcile the soldiers and the upper classes everywhere to the idea that others were eligible. The Flavians’ frequent tenure of consulship and censorship invested their family, although not of the highest nobility, with the outward trappings of prestige and the aristocratic appearance of an authentic imperial household. The deification of the first two Flavians contributed to the same end, and so did the disappearance of old republican families that might have outranked the reigning house (by 69 most descendants of the republican nobility had either died of natural causes or been exterminated by imperial persecution). After the Flavians, the newness of a man’s senatorial dignity and the obscurity of his ultimate origin, whether it was Italian or otherwise, no longer forbade his possible elevation. Indeed, Domitian’s successors and even Domitian himself in his last years did not need to enhance their own importance by repeated consulships. The Antonine emperors, like the Julio-Claudians, held the office infrequently. They did, however, continue the Flavian practice of emphasizing the loftiness of their families by deifying deceased relatives (Trajan deified his sister, his niece, and his father; Antoninus, his wife; and so forth).
Glorification of the reigning house, together with a document such as Vespasian’s Lex de Imperio, helped to advertise the emperor’s position; and under the Flavians and Antonines the principate became much more like an avowed monarchy. Proconsular imperium began to be reflected in the imperial titulary, and official documents started calling the emperor dominus noster (“our master”).
The development of imperial law-making clearly illustrates the change. From the beginnings of the principate, the emperor had had the power to legislate, although no law is known that formally recognized his right to do so; by Antonine times, legal textbooks stated unequivocally that whatever the emperor ordered was legally binding. The early emperors usually made the Senate their mouthpiece and issued their laws in the form of senatorial decrees. In fact, by the second century, the emperor was openly replacing whatever other sources of written law had hitherto been permitted to function. After 100 the Assembly never met formally to pass a law, and the Senate often no longer bothered to couch its decrees in legal language, being content to repeat verbatim the speech with which the ruler had advocated the measure in question. After Hadrian, magistrates ceased modifying existing law by their legal interpretations because the praetors’ edictum perpetuum had become a permanent code, which the emperor alone could alter.
By 200, learned jurists had lost the right they had enjoyed since the time of Augustus of giving authoritative rulings on disputed points (responsa prudentium). Meanwhile, the emperor more and more was legislating directly by means of edicts, judgments, mandates, and rescripts—collectively known as constitutiones principum. He usually issued such constitutiones only after consulting the “friends” (amici Caesaris) who composed his imperial council. But a constitutio was nevertheless a fiat. The road to the later dominate (after 284) lay open.
Nevertheless, the autocratic aspect of the Flavian and Antonine regimes should not be overstressed. Augustus himself had been well aware that it was impossible to disguise permanently the supremacy that accumulation of powers gained piecemeal conferred; his deportment in his last years differed little from that of Vespasian, Titus, and the so-called five good emperors who followed them. Nor had other Julio-Claudians hesitated to parade their predominance—Claudius, by centralizing the imperial powers, reduced their apparent diversity to one all-embracing imperium; Gaius and Nero revealed the autocracy implicit in the principate with frank brutality.
What impresses perhaps as much as the undoubtedly autocratic behaviour of the Flavians and Antonines is the markedly civilian character of their reigns. They held supreme power, and some of them were distinguished soldiers; yet they were not military despots. For this the old republican tradition—whereby a state official might serve in both a civilian and a military capacity—was largely responsible. Matters, however, were open to change after Hadrian separated the two realms of service. Actually, the third century soon showed what it meant to have a princeps whose whole experience had been confined to camps and barracks.
As imperial powers became more concentrated, republican institutions decayed; the importance of imperial officials grew, while the authority of urban magistrates declined. Quaestorship, praetorship, and consulship (the last-named now reduced to a two-month sinecure) became mere stepping-stones to the great imperial posts that counted most in the life of the empire. Governors of imperial provinces and commanders of legions were Roman senators; but they were equally imperial appointees. Clearly, the emperor was the master of the Senate; and it was disingenuous for him to get impatient, as some emperors did, with the Senate’s lack of initiative and reluctance to take firm decisions of its own. The emperor might not even consult the Senate much, preferring to rely on his imperial council, in which equestrian bureau chiefs over the course of the second century came to constitute an established element.
The Senate, however, at least until the reign of Commodus, was treated courteously by most Flavians and Antonines. They recognized its importance as a lawcourt, as the body that formally appointed a new emperor, and as a sounding board of informed opinion. Senators came increasingly from the provinces, and, although this meant preeminently the western provinces (the Greek-speaking East being underrepresented), the Senate did reflect to some extent the views of the empire at large.
The equites, meanwhile, steadily acquired greater importance as imperial officials. In newly created posts they invariably became the incumbents, and in posts of long standing they replaced freedmen and publicani. During the second century equestrian procurators increased markedly in numbers as the direction of imperial business came to be more tidily subdivided. Four grades of service distinguished by salary were established. While the government assumed a more rational flow and outline, its total number of employees nevertheless remained quite tiny, compared with that of the fourth and later centuries.
By the second century the city of Rome had attracted freeborn migrants from all over the empire; it housed, additionally, large numbers of manumitted slaves. These newcomers were all assimilated and diluted the city’s Italian flavour. The vast majority of them were poor, the handful of opulent imperial freedmen being entirely exceptional. But many were energetic, enterprising, and lucky, able to make their way in the world. Freedmen laboured under a social stigma, although some of them managed to become equites. Their sons, however, might overcome discrimination, and their grandsons were even eligible for membership in the Senate.
Inevitably, there was extensive trade and commerce (much of it in freedman hands) in so large a city, which was also the centre of imperial administration. There was little industry, however, and the urban poor had difficulty finding steady employment. Theirs was a precarious existence, dependent on the public grain dole and on the private charity of the wealthy. Large building programs gave Flavian and Antonine emperors the opportunity not only to repair the damage caused by fire and falling buildings (as stated, a frequent hazard among the densely packed and flimsily built accommodations for the urban plebs) but also to relieve widespread urban unemployment. They also made imperial Rome a city of grandeur. Augustus’s building program had been vast but mostly concerned with repairing or rebuilding structures already existing, and his Julio-Claudian successors had built relatively little until the great fire made room for the megalomaniac marvels of Nero’s last years. It was under the Flavians and Antonines that Rome obtained many of its most celebrated structures: the Colosseum, Palatine palaces, Trajan’s Forum, the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’ Angelo (Hadrian’s mausoleum), the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Aurelius’s Column, as well as the aqueducts whose arches spanned across Campagna to keep the city and its innumerable fountains supplied with water.
Italy was much less cosmopolitan and sophisticated and, according to literary tradition, much more sober and straitlaced than was Rome. It was the mistress of the empire, although the gap between it and the provinces was narrowing. Hadrian’s policies especially helped to reduce its privileged position. His use of circuit judges was resented precisely because with them Italy resembled a province; actually, Italy badly needed them, and their abolition by Antoninus Pius was soon reversed by Marcus Aurelius. Also, in Aurelius’s reign a provincial fate overtook Italy in the form of barbarian invasion; a few years later the country got its first legionary garrison under Septimius Severus.
The remains of Rome’s famed Colosseum, built as part of a work project designed to stabilize the economy and help the city return to its former glory. Shutterstock.com
The economic importance of Italy also declined. By the end of Augustus’s reign, the ascendancy of its wine, oil, marble, and fine pottery in the markets of Gaul and Germany had already begun to yield to the competition of local production in the West; and, by Flavian times, Italy was actually importing heavily not only from Gaul (witness the crates of yet-unpacked Gallic bowls and plates caught in the destruction of Pompeii) but also from Spain. The latter province was especially represented by its extraordinarily popular condiment, garum; its olive oil, too, was a sizable item on Italian tables after AD 100, only to yield its primacy there, by the mid-second century, to oil from northern Africa. By then, Spanish, Gallic, and African farm products all outweighed Italian ones in Ostia and Rome. Against such tendencies, the emperors did what they could: Domitian, for example, protected Italian viticulture by restricting vine growing in the provinces; Trajan and his successors forced Roman senators to take an interest in the country, even though it was no longer the homeland of many of them, by investing a high proportion of their capital in Italian land (one-third under Trajan, one-quarter under Aurelius).
The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon’s famous description of the second century as the period when men were happiest and most prosperous is not entirely false. Certainly, by then people had come to take for granted the unique greatness and invincibility of the empire. Even the ominous events of Aurelius’s reign failed to shatter their conviction that the empire was impregnable, and the internal disturbances of the preceding reign had not given cause for much alarm. The credit for the empire’s success lay less with what its rulers did and could do than with what they did not do: they did not interfere too much. The empire was a vast congeries of peoples and races with differing religions, customs, and languages, and the emperors were content to let them live their own lives. Imperial policy favoured a veneer of common culture transcending ethnic differences, but there was no deliberate denationalization.
Ambitious men striving for a career naturally found it helpful, if not necessary, to become Roman in bearing and conduct and perhaps even in language as well (although speakers of Greek often rose to exalted positions). But local self-government was the general rule, and neither Latin nor Roman ways were imposed on the communities composing the empire. The official attitude to religion illustrates this—in line with the absolutist trend, emperor worship was becoming slowly but progressively more theocratic (Domitian relished the title of god, Commodus demanded it). Yet this did not lead to the suppression of non-Roman or even outlandish cults, unless they were thought immoral (like Druidism, with its human sacrifice) or conducive to public disorder (like Christianity, with its uncompromising dismissal of all gods other than its own as mere demons, and wicked and hurtful ones at that).
While there is no indication that the central authorities consciously opposed the increase of governmental personnel, the number of government employees certainly grew very slowly. Thus the responsibilities of the magnates in provincial cities were correspondingly great. In parts of southern Spain or in the area south of the Black Sea, for example, where the extent of the territories dependent on cities stretched out over many scores of miles into the surrounding landscape, city senators had not only to collect taxes but also to build roads and carry out much rural police work. Within their cities, too, senators had to see to the collection of taxes and tolls. As a group, they had to oversee and assign the income from municipal lands or buildings rented out and from endowments established by generous citizens. They had to authorize the plans and financing of sometimes very elaborate civic structures—an aqueduct, an amphitheatre, or a temple to the imperial family—or of great annual festivals and fairs or of ongoing amenities serving the public baths (free oil for anointing oneself, heating, and upkeep) or the public markets. In the eastern provinces, they had to replenish from time to time the stock of small local bronze coins, and they had to insure that magistracies were effectively staffed, even though there usually was no salary of any sort to attract candidates. Magistrates and city senators generally had to pay handsomely for their election and thereafter make further handsome contributions, as need arose and so far as they could afford, toward the adornment of their community.
What attracted candidates in adequate numbers were most often three inducements: the feeling of community approval and praise, offered in the most public ways (described by writers of the time with striking psychological penetration); the enhancement of personal influence (meaning power) through the demonstration of great financial means; and finally, the social and political advancement that might follow on local prominence through attracting the attention of a governor or of the emperor himself. It was from the provincial elite that new Roman senators were made.
Cities, through their elite families, competed with each other across entire regions. City rivalries in northern Italy or western Anatolia happen to be especially well reported. Within individual cities, elite families were often in competition as well. In consequence, the standards of municipal beneficence rose, encouraged by a populace who on public occasions assembled in large numbers in the theatre, demanding yet more expenditure from their leaders. The emperors, who realized that the well-being of cities, the jewels of their realm, depended on such munificence, increasingly intervened to insure a continued flow of good things from the rich of a community to their fellow citizens. Legislation might, for example, specify the binding nature of electoral campaign promises or of formerly voluntary contributions connected with public service. As a consequence, in the second century consideration must for the first time be given to the local aristocrat unwilling to serve his city; the series of imperial pronouncements exerting compulsion on such a person to serve was to stretch far into the future, with increasing severity. Attempts to stabilize the benefits arising from ambitious rivalries thus had an oppressive aspect.
As to the lower orders, their voice is rarely heard in surviving sources, except in acclamation. So long as the rich voluntarily covered the bulk of local expenses and so long as they commanded the leisure and knowledge of the world to give to administration unsalaried, the poor could not fairly claim much of a right to determine the city’s choices. Thus they acclaimed the candidacies of the rich and their gifts and otherwise gave vent to their wishes only by shouting in unison in the theatre or amphitheatre (in between spectacles) or through violent mob actions.
As noted above, the poor routinely solved the problems of daily life by appealing to someone of influence locally; this was true whether in Palestine, as indicated in the Talmud, or in Italy, as is evident from Pliny’s correspondence. The higher one looked in society, the more it appeared crisscrossed and interconnected by ties of kinship or of past services exchanged. It was at these higher levels that answers to routine problems were to be sought. Appeal was not directed to one’s peers, even though trade associations, cult groups of social equals, and burial insurance clubs with monthly meetings could be found in every town. Such groups served social, not political or economic, purposes, at least during the principate.
Accordingly, society was ordinarily described by contemporaries simply in terms of two classes: the upper and the lower, rich and poor, powerful and dependent, well known and nameless. The upper classes consisted of little more than 600 Roman senators, 25,000 equites, and 100,000 city senators; hence, a total amounting to 2 percent of the population. This stratum, from the mid-second century defined in law as “the more honourable,” honestiores, was minutely subdivided into degrees of dignity, the degrees being well advertised and jealously asserted; the entire stratum, however, was entitled to receive specially tender treatment in the courts. The remaining population was lumped together as “the more lowly,” humiliores, subject to torture when giving witness in court; to beatings, not fines; and to execution (in increasingly savage forms of death) rather than exile for the most serious crimes. Yet because of the existing patterns of power, which directed the humiliores to turn for help to the upper stratum, the lower classes did not form a revolutionary mass but constituted a stable element.
The pyramidal structure of society suggested by the statistics given above is somewhat obscured by the reality and prominence of the urban scene. In the cities the harsh outlines of the distribution of wealth were moderated by a certain degree of social mobility. No class offers more success stories than that of freedmen. Especially in the West, freedmen are astonishingly prominent in the record of inscriptions and proverbial for what the upper classes called unprincipled enterprise and vulgar moneygrubbing. Artisans and tradespeople—lowly folk, in the eyes of someone like Cicero—in fact presented themselves with a certain dignity, even some financial ease. At the bottom, slaves were numerous, constituting perhaps one-tenth of the population in at least the larger towns outside of Italy and considerably more in Italy—as much as one-quarter in Rome.
In the cities many of them at least enjoyed security from starvation and had a good roof over their heads. When one turns to the rural scene, however, one encounters a far larger, harsher world. In the first place, nine-tenths of the empire’s people lived on the land and from its yield. Where details of their lives emerge with any clarity, they most often tell of a changeless and bleak existence. The city looked down on the countryside with elaborate scorn, keeping the rural population at arm’s length. Very often people in the country had their own language—such as Gallic, Syriac, Libyphoenician, or Coptic, which further isolated them—and their own religion, marriage customs, and forms of entertainment. In time, the very term “country dweller,” paganus, set the rural population still further apart from the empire’s Christianized urban population.
In the overall context of Western history, the degree to which the Mediterranean world during the period of the empire became one single system, one civilization, is a matter of the greatest importance. Clearly, one must distinguish between the life of the rural masses and that of the urban minority. The former retained many traits of a way of life predating not only Roman conquest but, in the East, the conquests of Alexander the Great centuries earlier. However, the device of organizing conquered territories under cities responsible for their surrounding territory proved as successful under the Romans as under the Greeks. The intent of both conquerors may have been limited to ensuring political control and the yield of tribute; however, in fact, they achieved much more: an approach to uniformity, at least in the cities.
The first thing to strike the traveler’s eye, in any survey of the second-century empire, would have been the physical appearance of urban centres. Whatever the province, many of the same architectural forms could be observed: The suburbs tended to have aqueducts and racetracks and the cities a central grand market area surrounded by porticoes, temples, a records office, a council hall, a basilica for judicial hearings and public auctions, and a covered market hall of a characteristic shape for perishable foods (a macellum, as in Pompeii, in Perge on the southern coast of modern Turkey, or in North African Lepcis). There also would have been public baths with several separate halls for cold or hot bathing or exercise, a covered or open-air theatre, grand fountains, monumental arches, and honorific statues of local worthies by the dozens or even hundreds. Eastern centres would have gymnasia (occasionally Western ones as well) and Western cities would have amphitheatres (occasionally Eastern ones as well) for the imported institution of gladiatorial combats. Throughout the Western provinces, public buildings were likely to be arranged according to a single plan—more or less the same everywhere—in which a grid of right-angle streets was dominant, at least toward the central part of the city.
In the West, as opposed to the East, a great deal of urbanization remained to be done and was accomplished by the Romans. The grid plan, its particular mark, can be detected at the heart of places such as Turin, Banasa (Morocco), and Autun, all Augustan foundations, as well as in Nicopolis (Bulgaria), Budapest, and Silchester, all later ones. As noted above, orthogonal town planning was not a Roman invention, but the Romans introduced it to new regions and with a particular regularity of their own. Moreover, the grid of the central part of the city was matched, and sometimes extended on the same lines, by another grid laid across the surrounding territory. The process, referred to as centuriation, typically made use of squares of 2,330 feet (710 metres) on a side, intended for land distribution to settlers and general purposes of inventory. Signs of it were first detected in northern Africa in the 1830s, through surviving crop marks and roads, and have since (especially through air photography) been traced in the environs of Trier and Homs (Syria) and large areas of northern Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere. In the placing of cities and roads and property boundaries, the Romans of the empire therefore left a nearly indelible stamp of their organizing energies on the map of Europe; they also established the lives of conquered populations inside their own characteristic framework.
The ancient Roman city of Thamugadi in northeastern Algeria, founded by Trajan in AD 100. Fototeca Unione
The special burst of energy in the Augustan colonizing spread abroad not only the visible elements of a ruling civilization but the invisible ones as well. Colonies and municipalities received Roman forms of government according to their charters, they were administered by Roman law in Latin, and they diffused these things throughout the general population within and around them. In frontier areas such lessons in an alien civilization were pressed home by garrison forces through their frequent contacts with their hosts and suppliers. By the second century considerable Latinization had occurred in the West. Modern Spanish, Portuguese, and French show that this was particularly true of the Iberian peninsula, which had been provincial soil ever since the Second Punic War, and of Gaul, where Latin enjoyed the advantage of some relationship to Celtic. In these regions, except in the less accessible rural or mountainous parts, even the lower orders adopted Latin. Today one can find in Romania the tongue that is the closest to its parent, Latin, even at so great a distance from its home. And Latin can be found not only in Romance languages; it has left its mark on languages such as Basque and German.
Inscriptions represent the most frequent testimony to linguistic allegiance; more than a quarter of a million survive in Latin from the period of the empire, the vast majority of them being funerary. The number of inscriptions per year increases slowly during the first century and a half AD, thereafter ascending in a steep line to a point in the second decade of the third and then falling off even more steeply. The curve is best explained as reflecting pride in “Romanness”—in possessing not only Latin but full citizenship as well and, thereby, admission to a group for whom commemoration of the deceased was a legal as well as a moral duty. Over the course of time, by individual gift from the emperors, by army service, and by election to magistracies or simply to the city senates of colonies and municipalities, a growing proportion of the empire’s population had gained citizenship; moreover, their children were citizens, whose descendants in turn were Romans in the legal sense. By AD 212 this accelerating process had advanced so far that the emperor Caracalla could offer the gift of incorporation to the entirety of his subjects without much notice being taken of his generosity—it was already in the possession of most of the people who counted and whose reactions might be recorded. Once citizenship was universal, it ceased to constitute a distinction; thus the declaration of it through the custom of funerary commemoration rapidly passed out of favour.
One great flaw in the picture of the empire as one single civilization by 212, triumphantly unified in culture as in its political form, has already been pointed out—what was achieved within the cities’ walls did not extend with any completeness to the rural population, among whom local ways and native languages persisted. Peasants in fourth-century Syria spoke mostly Syriac, in Egypt mostly Coptic, in Africa often Punic or Libyphoenician, and in the Danube and northwestern provinces other native tongues.
There was still another great flaw: The empire was half Roman (or Latin), half Greek. The latter was hardly touched by the former except through what may be called official channels—that is, law, coinage, military presence, imperial cult, and the superposition of an alien structure of power and prestige, to which the elite of the Eastern provinces might aspire. On the other hand, the Roman half was steeped in Greek ways. Apuleius, for example, though born and reared in a small North African town of the second century, was sent to Athens to study rhetoric. On his return he could find not only an audience for his presentations in Greek but ordinary people in the marketplace able to read a letter in that language. In Rome the Christian community used Greek as its liturgical language well into the third century, and the crowds in the Circus Maximus could enjoy a pun in Greek. An aristocrat such as the emperor Marcus Aurelius could be expected to be as bilingual as was Cicero or Caesar before him or even, like the emperor Gallienus, help the Greek philosopher Plotinus found a sort of Institute for Advanced Studies in the Naples area.
Greece continued to supply a great deal of sculpture for Western buyers or even the teams of artisans needed for the decoration of public buildings in third-century northern Africa. By such various means the division between the two halves of the empire was for a time covered over.
Among the institutions most important in softening the edges of regional differences was the cult of the emperors. In one sense, it originated in the fourth century BC, when Alexander the Great first received veneration by titles and symbols and forms of address as if he were a superhuman being. Indeed, he must have seemed exactly that to contemporaries in Egypt, where the pharaohs had long been worshiped, and to peoples in the Middle East, for similar reasons of religious custom. Even the Greeks were quite used to the idea that beings who lived a human life of extraordinary accomplishment, as “heroes” in the full sense of the Greek word, would never die but be raised into some higher world; they believed this of heroes such as Achilles, Hercules, Pythagoras, and Dion of Syracuse in the mid-fourth century BC. Great Roman commanders, like Hellenistic rulers, had altars, festivals, and special honours voted to them by Greek cities from the start of the second century BC.
It was not so strange, then, that a freedman supporter of Caesar’s erected a pillar over the ashes of the dead dictator in the Forum in April 44 BC and offered cult to him as a being now resident among the gods. Many citizens joined in. Within days Caesar’s heir Octavian pressed for the declaration of Caesar as divine—which the Senate granted by its vote in 42. By 25 BC the city of Mytilene had organized annual cult acts honouring Augustus and communicated their forms and impulse to Tarraco in Spain as well as to other Eastern Greek cities. By 12 BC divine honours to Caesar and Augustus’s genius were established through the emperors’ initiative both in the Gallic capital, Lugdunum, and in the neighbourhood chapels to the crossroads gods in Rome.
From these various points and models, emperor worship spread rapidly. Within a few generations, cities everywhere had built in its service new temples that dominated their forums or had assigned old temples to the joint service of a prior god and the imperial family. Such centres served as rallying points for the citizenry to express its devotion to Rome and the emperor. To speak for whole provinces, priests of the cult assembled during their year of office in central shrines, such as Lugdunum, as delegates of their cities, where they formulated for the emperor their complaints or their views on the incumbent governor’s administration. Whether these priests were freedmen in urban neighbourhoods, municipal magnates in local temples, or still grander leaders of the provinces, they perceived the imperial cult as something of high prestige and invested it and Roman rule with glory.
The emotional and political unification of the empire was further promoted by submissive or flattering forms of reference or address, adopted even by the highest personages when speaking of the emperor, and by portraits of the emperors or their families with attendant written messages. Of these two most obvious means of propaganda, the first survives in the texts of many panegyrics delivered to the throne, rhetorical disquisitions on monarchy, and prefatory announcements accompanying the publication of government edicts. They established a tone in which it was proper to think of Roman rule and government. Portraits, the second means of propaganda, included painted ones on general display in cities, sculpted ones, especially in the early years of each reign, based on official models available in a few major cities (hundreds of these survive, including at least one in gold), and engraved ones on coins. Imperial coins offered a more rapidly changing exhibition of images than even postage stamps in the modern world. Because the dies soon wore out, many scores of issues had to be brought out each year, in gold, silver, and bronze. While the images (“types”) and words (“legends”) on them tended to repetition, there was much conscious inculcation of topical messages. For example, in the short and rocky reign of Galba in AD 69, one finds the legends “All’s well that ends well” (bonus eventus), “Rome reborn,” “Peace for Romans,” and “Constitutional government restored” (libertas restituta, with iconographic reference to Brutus’s coins of 43 BC) and superlative portraits of Galba himself. In other reigns, the legends, enriched with suitable symbolism, read “the soldiers loyal,” “Italy well fed,” and fecunditas of the royal family and its progeny. So far as it is possible to comprehend the mind of the empire’s populace, there was no significant opposition to the government by the second century; instead, there prevailed a great deal of ready veneration for the principate as an institution.
Economic factors, to the extent that they were favourable, played an obvious part in promoting both cultural and political unity. So far as acculturation was concerned, a limit to its achievement was clearly set by the amount of disposable capital among non-Romanized populations. The cost of such luxuries as schooling in Latin or frescoes on one’s walls were high. But more and more people could afford them as the benefits of Roman occupation were spreading. The rising levels of prosperity did not, however, result from a special benevolence on the part of the conquerors, intent as they were (and often cruelly intent) on the pleasures and profits of physical mastery over the conquered. Rather, they can be explained, first, by the imposition of the Pax Romana, which gave urban centres surer access to the surrounding rural areas and rural producers access in turn to convenient, centralized markets; second, by the sheer attractiveness of imported articles, which intensified efforts to increase the power to buy them; third, by the economic stimulation afforded by taxes, which had to be paid on new earnings but which remained in the provinces where they were raised.
In the fourth place, prosperity also rose in the regions least Romanized. This can be explained by the fact that they tended to be heavily garrisoned and the soldiers spent their wages locally. So far as they could, they bought goods and services of a Roman sort and generally attracted concentrations of people likely to develop into cities of a Roman sort. The economic impact of army payrolls was all the greater because of the cash added to them from taxes raised in other, more developed provinces in the East. Much of the urbanization and enrichment of the western and northern provinces can be explained by these four factors.
The sources for studying the economy of the empire were insufficient until the mid-20th century. The archaeological sources were too scarce and heterogeneous to be of much help, and the written ones contained barely usable amounts of quantified data; economic analysis without quantification, however, is almost a contradiction in terms. Thus discussion was obliged to limit itself to rather general remarks about the obviously wide exchange of goods, the most famous points of production or sale of given articles, techniques of banking, or commercial law. This is still the case with regard to the Eastern half of the Mediterranean world, where excavation has made relatively little headway; but, for the West, archaeological data have greatly increased in recent decades in both quantity and intelligibility. As a result, a growing number of significant statements based on quantification can now be made. They are of special value because they bear on what was economically most important—namely, agriculture. Like any preindustrial economy, that of the empire derived the overwhelming bulk of its gross national product from food production. One would therefore like to know what regions in what periods produced what rough percentage of the chief comestibles—wine, oil, wheat, garum, or legumes. Thanks to techniques such as neutron activation analysis or X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, the contents of large samples of amphorae at certain market junctures can be identified, dated by shape of vessel, and occasionally ascribed to certain named producers of the vessel, and the information drawn into a graph; or, the numbers and find-spots of datable fine “china” (so-called Arretine ware or later equivalents) or ceramic oil lamps from named producers can be indicated on a map of, say, Spain or France. The yield of such data underlies statements made above regarding, for example, the supersession of Italy as producer of several essential agricultural products by the mid-first century ad, the concurrent transformation of Gaul from importer to exporter, and the emergence by the third century of northern Africa as a major exporter of certain very common articles. Information of this general nature provides some sense of the shift in prosperity in the Western provinces.
In the age of the Antonines, Rome’s empire enjoyed an obvious and prosperous tranquility; modern consensus has even settled on about AD 160 as the peak of Roman civilization. Whatever measurement may be used in this identification, however, an economic one does not fit very well. Evidence, as it accumulates in more quantifiable form, does not seem to show any perceptible economic decline in the empire as a whole after roughly 160. Rather, Italy had probably suffered some decrease in disposable wealth in the earlier first century. Gaul’s greatest city, Lugdunum, had begun to shrink toward the end of the second, and various other regions in the West suffered setbacks at various times, while all of Greece continued to be poor. Other regions, however, had more wealth to spend, and as is manifest in major urban projects of utility and beautification or in the larger rooms and increasingly expensive decoration of rural villas. Roman rule also brought extraordinary benefits to the economies of Numidia and Britain, to name its two most obvious successes.
To the extent the empire grew richer, modern observers are likely to look for an explanation in technology. As noted above, in Augustus’s reign a new mode of glassblowing spread rapidly from Syria to other production centres; Syria in the third century was also the home of new and more complicated weave patterns. Such rather minor items, however, only show that technical improvements in industry were few and insignificant. The screw press for wine and olive oil was more efficient than the levered variety, but it was not widely adopted, even within Italy. Waterwheels for power, known in Anatolia in Augustus’s reign, were little used; a few examples in Gaul belong only to the later empire. Similarly, the mechanical reaper was found only in Gaul of the fourth century. Perhaps the most significant advances were registered in the selective breeding of strains of grains and domestic animals: for example, the “Roman” sheep (which had originated in the Greek East) spread throughout Europe, banishing the inferior Iron Age species to a merited exile in the Outer Hebrides (the Soay sheep of St. Kilda island). What is vastly more significant, however, than these oddments of technological history is the minute subdivision of productive skills and their transmission from father to son in populations adequate to the demand—for iron ore from Noricum, most notably, or for glass and paper from Alexandria. Specialization in inherited skills produced a remarkably high level of proficiency, requiring only the security of the Pax Romana for the spreading of its products everywhere—transport itself being one of those skills.
The health of the economy no doubt helps to explain the political success of the empire, which was not disturbed by frequent revolts or endemic rural or urban unrest. On the other hand, there were limits in the economy, which expressed themselves through resistance to taxation. Tax levels settled at the enforceable maximum; but revenue fell far short of what one might expect, given the best estimates of the empire’s gross national product. The basic problem was the tiny size of the imperial government and the resulting inefficiency of its processes. Moreover, it could not make good its inadequacies by borrowing in times of special need; Nero’s need to harry his millionaire subjects with false charges of treason in order to pay for his incredibly expensive court and spendthrift impulses reflects the realities of raising revenue. So do the very cautious experiments of Augustus in setting army pay and army size. Ultimately, the military strength of the empire was insufficient—inadequate for emergencies—because of these realities.
The army that enforced the Pax Romana had expanded little beyond the size envisaged for it by Augustus, despite the enlargement of the empire by Claudius, the Flavians, and Trajan. It reached 31 legions momentarily under Trajan, but it usually numbered 28 under the Flavians and Antonines until the onset of the frontier crisis in Aurelius’s reign brought it to 30. Without raising pay rates to attract recruits more easily, a large force was seemingly beyond reach—which probably explains why Hadrian, and later Commodus, halted further expansion.
The army was used not to prop up a militarist government but to defend the frontiers. Shifts in enemy pressures, however, caused the legions to be distributed differently than in Julio-Claudian times. Under Antoninus Pius, the Danubian provinces (Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia) had 10, and the East (Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt) had 9, and both regions also had supporting naval flotillas; of the remaining 9 legions, Britain contained 3 and the Rhineland 4. Tacitus in his Annals (4.5) rates the auxiliary troops near the turn of the era as being about as numerous as the legionnaries. But they soon outnumbered them: that is, whereas legions contained somewhat more than 5,000 men each if they were at full strength and thus totaled roughly 150,000 in the mid-second century, the auxiliaries numbered 245,000—again, if at full strength. Recent estimates put the actual figure for the entire army at 375,000 to 400,000.
Two reasons, military and financial, explain the growing use of nonlegionnaries. Mustered in units mostly of 500, they were easier to move around and could be encouraged to maintain the special native skills of their inheritance—as slingers from the Balearic Islands or Crete, in camel corps from Numidia, or as light cavalry from Thrace. In addition, they could be recruited for lower wages than legionnaries. As regards recruitment for the legions, even that higher rate proved less and less attractive. Whereas legions in the early empire could be largely filled with men born in Italy and southern Gaul, by the second half of the first century most of the men had to be drawn from the provinces; after Trajan, they were largely natives of the frontier provinces. Young men from the inner parts of the empire, growing up in successive generations of continual peace, no longer looked on military service as a natural part of manhood, and the civilian economy appeared attractive compared to the rewards at some frontier posting. Peace and prosperity thus combined to make the army less and less Roman, less and less of the centre, and more and more nearly barbarous.
The troops’ loyalty did not suffer on that account. The men were no more ready to mutiny or to support a pretender around AD 200 than they had been in the early empire. However, experience especially in the year of the four emperors (AD 69) did suggest the desirability of splitting commands into smaller units, which, in turn, involved splitting up provinces, the number of which was constantly growing; by Hadrian’s day subdivision began to anticipate the fragmentation later carried out by Diocletian.
The literature of the empire is both abundant and competent, for which the emperors’ encouragement and financing of libraries and higher education were perhaps in part responsible. The writers, however, with the possible exception of Christian apologists, were seldom excitingly original and creative. As Tacitus said, the great masters of literature had ceased to be. Perhaps Augustus’s emphasis on tradition affected more than political ideals and practice. At any rate, men of letters, too, looked often backward. At the same time, they clearly reveal the success of the empire in spreading Greco-Roman culture, for the majority of them were natives of neither Italy nor Greece. Of the writers in Latin, the two Senecas, Lucan, Martial, Columella, Hyginus, and Pomponius Mela came from Spain; Fronto, Apuleius, and probably Florus and Aulus Gellius, from Africa. Tacitus was perhaps from Gallia Narbonensis.
The Latin writers in general sought their models less in Greece than in Augustus’s Golden Age, when Latin literature had reached maturity. Thus, the poets admired Virgil and imitated Ovid; lacking genuine inspiration, they substituted for it an erudite cleverness, the fruit of an education that stressed oratory of a striking but sterile kind. Authentic eloquence in Latin came to an end when, as Tacitus put it, the principate “pacified” oratory. Under the Flavians and Antonines, an artificial rhetoric, constantly straining after meretricious effects, replaced it. The epigrammatic aphorism (sententia) was especially cultivated; the epics of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius are full of it, and it found a natural outlet in satirical writing, of which the Latin instinct for the mordant always ensured an abundance. In fact, Latin satire excelled: witness Martial’s epigrams, Petronius’s and Juvenal’s pictures of the period, and Persius’s more academic talent. For that matter, Tacitus’s irony and pessimism were not far removed from satire.
In the East the official status of Greek and the favour it enjoyed from such emperors as Hadrian gave new life to Greek literature. It had something in common with its Latin counterpart in that it looked to the past but was chiefly written by authors who were not native to the birthplace of the language. The so-called Second Sophistic reverted to the atticism of an earlier day but often in a Roman spirit; its products from the Asian pens of Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides are sometimes limpid and talented tours de force but rarely great literature. In Greek, too, the best work was in satire, the comic prose dialogues of the Syrian Lucian being the most noteworthy and original literary creations of the period. Among minor writers the charm of Arrian and Pausanias, Asians both, and above all of Plutarch abides (although Plutarch’s talents were mediocre, and his moralizing was shallow, his biographies, like those of his Latin contemporary Suetonius, are full of information and interest).
Imperial encouragement of Greek culture and a conviction, no longer justified, of its artistic and intellectual superiority caused the East to resist Latinization. This attitude was bound to lead to a divided empire, and thoughtful observers must have noted it with misgivings. The split, however, was still far in the future. Meanwhile, there was a more immediate cause for disquiet. The plethora of summaries and anthologies that appeared implies a public progressively indifferent to reading whole works of literature for themselves. In other words, the outlook for letters was poor, and this had an unfortunate effect on the scientific literature of the age, which was in itself of first-class quality. Dioscorides on botany, Galen on medicine, and Ptolemy on mathematics, astronomy, and geography represent expert scholars expounding carefully, systematically, and lucidly the existing knowledge in their respective fields. But their very excellence proved fatal because, as the reading public dwindled, theirs remained standard works for far too long; their inevitable errors became enshrined, and their works acted as brakes on further progress.
Stoicism was the most flourishing philosophy of the age. In the East a sterile scholasticism diligently studied Plato and Aristotle, but Epictetus, the stoic from Anatolia, was the preeminent philosopher. In the West, stoicism permeates Seneca’s work and much of Pliny’s Natural History. Evidently, its advocacy of common morality appealed to the traditional Roman sense of decorum and duty, and its doctrine of a world directed by an all-embracing providence struck a responsive chord in the second-century emperors, though they deeply disapproved of its extremist offshoots, the cynics: Marcus Aurelius, as noted, was himself a stoic.
Imperial art, dealing above all with man and his achievements, excelled in portraits and commemoration of events; Roman sculpture and presumably Roman painting, also, owed much to Greek styles and techniques. It emerged, however, as its own distinctive type. The Augustan age had pointed the way that Roman art would go: Italian taste would be imposed on Hellenic models to produce something original. The reliefs of the Augustan Ara Pacis belong to Rome and Italy, no matter who actually carved them. By Flavian times this Roman artistic instinct had asserted itself and with it the old Roman tendency toward lively and accurate pictorial representation. It can be seen from the reliefs illustrating the triumph over Judaea in the passageway of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. The narrative description dear to Roman art found its best expression in the great spiral frieze on Trajan’s Column, where the emperor can be seen among his soldiers at various times in the Dacian campaigns; the story of the war plays a most important part, although, like most imperial monuments, the column is meant to exalt the leader. Under Hadrian a reaction made sculpture less markedly Italian, as if to be in conformity with the slow decline of Italy toward quasi-provincial status. Also under Hadrian, the figure of the emperor was more prominent—bigger and more frontal than the other figures—as if to illustrate the growing monarchical tone of the principate. This tendency continued under the Antonines, when there was a magnificent flowering of sculpture on panels, columns, and sarcophagi; but its exuberance and splendour foreshadow the end of classical art.
The artistic currents that flowed in Rome were felt throughout the empire, the less developed areas being influenced most. In the West, provincial sculpture closely resembled Roman, although it sometimes showed variations, in Gaul especially, owing to local influences (the native element, however, is not always easy to identify). The Roman quality of portraits painted on Egyptian mummy cases shows that the Greek-speaking regions were also affected, although generally they maintained their own traditions. But by now the Greek East had become rather barren; much of its production was imitative rather than vitally creative. Greece proper contributed little, the centre of Hellenism having shifted to Anatolia, to places such as Aphrodisias, where there was a flourishing school of sculpture.
In at least one respect the East was heavily influenced by Rome. The use of concrete and cross vault enabled Roman architects and engineers to span wide areas. Their technological achievements included the covered vastness of the huge thermal establishments, the massive solidity of the amphitheatres, and the audacity of the soaring bridges and aqueducts. The East was greatly impressed. Admittedly, the agoras and gymnasiums in Greek towns are hardly Roman in aspect, but, for most structures of a practical utilitarian kind, the Greek debt to Rome was heavy. Sometimes Roman influence can be seen not only in the fundamental engineering of such buildings as market gateways, theatres, and amphitheatres but even in such decorative details as composite capitals as well. Roman features abound in exotic Petra, Palmyra, Gerasa, and Baalbek, and even in Athens itself.
