Chapter 17

The Five Good Emperors

In This Chapter

How a stopgap emperor saved the Empire from another civil war (AD 96–98)

Trajan makes the Roman Empire as big as it ever got (98–117)

Why Hadrian stopped conquest and fixed the frontiers (117–138)

How Antoninus Pius managed to be so nice (138–161)

Marcus Aurelius’s admiral reign – and unfortunate choice of successor (161–180)

After Nero died in 68, the civil war and three disastrous emperors (Galba, Otho, and Vitellius), one after another, took Augustus’s world to the brink. Fortunately, Vespasian came next. His common sense, patience, and hard work saved the day. Vespasian’s son Titus continued to provide competent leadership and stability. When Titus died, his brother Domitian took over. Domitian might have been a bad emperor in some ways, but like his brother Titus and his father, he was really a competent ruler. Not only that, but by the end of the first century AD, no-one could really imagine the Roman world without an emperor, most of all the provincial senators who now packed the benches in the Roman Senate.

After Domitian’s death the Senate had a choice: restore the Republic or pick another emperor. The Senate went for emperor, and what followed was a series of rulers called the Five Good Emperors. It was the climax of Rome’s power, when the Empire was at its richest and most settled.

Edward Gibbon, the famous historian, in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, talked about the time of the Five Good Emperors as ‘the most happy and prosperous’ in all human history. Maybe Gibbon was right, but what is certain is that when Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five emperors, died in AD 180, the Roman Empire was on the long road into decline.

We’ve now passed the time of the last, greatest Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius. As the second century opened, they were busy writing down their work, much of which has survived. But no-one wrote anything quite so detailed after that – at least, nothing that has survived. So instead, we have to fall back on what’s left of Dio Cassius’s history, occasional other histories, biographies of emperors written hundreds of years later, inscriptions, and scattered other bits and pieces. If that sounds a lot, it isn’t – at best the sources are patchy; at worst they’re non-existent or chronically unreliable.

Nerva: A Good Stopgap (AD 96–98)

In AD 96, the senators got together to find a new emperor instead of fantasising about restoring the Republic. They came up with a veteran Senator called Marcus Cocceius Nerva. He was the first of what are now known as the Five Good Emperors, whose rule covered the climax of Rome’s power, when the Empire was at its richest and most settled.

As a young man Nerva had been a close friend of Nero’s, but he was trusted by Vespasian and Domitian to serve as consul. Nerva might have been in on the plot to assassinate Domitian. No-one knows, but as he was made emperor the same day, he must have known about it. He also must have been politically astute – perfect to calm the crisis down.

Nerva was 64 years old when he became emperor, and he was just a good stopgap. He didn’t have foolish ambitions, nor did he have children, but he did have the necessary political and administrative experience for the job.

As luck would have it, Nerva and the next three emperors would be childless (or outlive their sons), giving them all the luxury to choose the right successor, rather than passing on the Empire to an unsuitable son.

Smart moves and good deeds

After the nastiness of Domitian’s reign and its violent end (refer to Chapter 16), Nerva had to restore public confidence in the position of emperor. He wanted to show that an enlightened emperor could do good things for the people of Rome and Italy and make their lives better. His policies addressed the following:

Public funds: Nerva saved on public spending by cutting back on the gladiatorial games and religious sacrifices. He sold off imperial treasure and appointed a commission to find different ways of saving money. Because of the economies, he was able to cut taxes. He also abolished the way local communities had to pay for the imperial post (the communication system introduced by Augustus; see Chapter 6 for details).

Public policy: Nerva probably introduced the alimenta, a scheme to finance the education and welfare of poor Italian children, which was developed further by Trajan, Nerva’s successor (see Chapter 2 for how it worked). Nerva also spent a huge sum of money on buying land to give in allotments to poor Romans. And, best of all, Nerva restored free speech.

Pliny the Younger, writing a letter to a friend, captured the mood of the times: ‘Liberty was restored,’ he said. Tacitus, delighted by the new freedoms, said, ‘It’s the rare fortune of these times that a man can think what he wants and say what he thinks.’

Public works: Nerva appointed Sextus Julius Frontinus to sort out Rome’s water supply system (described in Chapter 7).

Foiling plots and picking a successor

Nerva wasn’t completely up to the job. A tactful coin issue bearing the legend Concordia Exercituum (‘The harmony of the army’) and showing a pair of clasped hands couldn’t conceal the fact that he had no military credentials to impress the soldiers, and his old age meant he wasn’t likely to be around for too long. So there was a danger the soldiers would hunt around for a successor of their own choosing. Told of a plot against his life hatched by a senator called Calpurnius Crassus, Nerva invited the conspirators to a public event and even offered them swords. Stunned by his coolness, Calpurnius Crassus abandoned the plan.

Nerva solved the problem of the army and the succession a year into his reign by adopting Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, then aged 41, as his heir in October 97, who was then commanding the army in Upper Germany and had just won a victory. It was a brilliant move. With Trajan’s protection, Nerva could rule safely for the last four months of his life. He died on 25 January 98.

Trajan: Right Man for the Job (AD 98–117)

Nerva’s selection of Trajan as his successor was a delight to the Senate and the army, but it was a good deal more radical than it first appears. If the year 68 (the Year of the Four Emperors; refer to Chapter 16) revealed that an emperor could be made in a place other than Rome, then the year 98 revealed that the emperor didn’t have to be Roman or even Italian. In fact, Trajan’s remote family origins were in Umbria in Italy, but his ancestors had settled at Italica in Spain, and his mother was Spanish. Unthinkable as little as a generation earlier, Trajan’s succession was a major innovation.

Italica

Scipio Africanus, the great hero of the Second Punic War back in the days of the Roman Republic (refer to Chapter 12), founded Italica in Spain as a Roman colony. Scipio couldn’t possibly have imagined that he had created the future home of two of the greatest of all the Roman emperors: Trajan and Hadrian (see the section ‘Hadrian, Artist and Aesthete’, later in this chapter), and much later the emperor Theodosius I (AD 379–395), who would hold the Empire together in its darkest days (see Chapter 21).

Trajan in Rome

Trajan didn’t rush to Rome. He made sure everyone knew he was in charge and started with the army. He made certain the Rhine and Danube frontiers were safe and secure first, reduced the bounty to soldiers before having any troublesome praetorians forced into retirement or executed, and confirmed all the Senate’s privileges.

Once in Rome, Trajan took care to guarantee the corn dole to the Roman mob. The alimenta, which might have been started by Nerva, was certainly operating now and improved the lot of poor Italian families. Taxes were reduced and another vast programme of public building initiated, including baths on the site of Nero’s Domus Aurea, a new aqueduct, and a forum. Large parts of the Forum of Trajan can still be seen in Rome today, including its multi-level terraced shopping precinct.

War with Dacia and Parthia

Trajan paid for the tax reductions and costly building programme from the booty earned by going to war with Dacia and Parthia. Dacia and Parthia were the Roman Empire’s furthest boundaries (see Figure 17-1).

Fighting the Dacians

Trajan resented the large subsidies being paid to Decebalus, the Dacian leader, to keep peace with Rome (refer to Chapter 16). In AD 101, Trajan crossed the Danube to finish off Decebalus, who was building up Dacian power.

By AD 104, Trajan had defeated Decebalus and installed garrisons in Dacia. A magnificent bridge across the Danube designed by the architect Apollodorus gave Trajan access into the Romans’ newly won territory, but in AD 105, Decebalus restarted the war with Rome. Trajan marched back into Dacia and destroyed Decebalus’s army (Decebalus committed suicide in shame). Trajan turned Dacia into a Roman province and took over Dacia’s rich mineral mines.

Trajan’s letters

Trajan was a hands-on ruler, and there’s no better evidence for this than the unique series of letters exchanged by him and Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia and Pontus. They show that Trajan was constantly personally consulted on almost every aspect of provincial government, whether that meant enfranchising a soldier’s daughter, arranging for new architects to oversee inept local building projects, or dealing with Christians who were refusing to go through the motions of paying homage to the imperial cult (for more on the tension between Christianity and the Roman state, see Chapter 9).

To make navigation on the Danube safe, Trajan’s military engineers in AD 101 dug out a canal to bypass the lethal rapids of the Iron Gate gorge. The construction of the canal is just one of the Roman’s phenomenal engineering achievements. No-one else was able to rival the skill of the Romans until the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century.

Figure 17-1: The Roman Empire in AD 116, at its greatest extent.

Parthian problems

Parthia in the East was a constant irritation to Rome. The Parthian king Osroes threw out the client king in Armenia, and Trajan set off for Parthia in AD 113 to defeat Osroes. Within a year, Trajan had recaptured Armenia and made it into part of the province of Cappadocia. By AD 115, Trajan had captured the Parthian capital at Ctesiphon; the next year, he crushed a revolt.

Trajan’s legacy

As Trajan was travelling home from his victory over the Parthians, he had a stroke and died on 8 August AD 117.

Trajan never abused his power and treated his position as a privilege and a responsibility. Although Trajan spent much of his reign away from Rome, his authority was so respected that the machinery of government throughout the Roman Empire went on working efficiently without his presence in Rome.

Trajan created the archetype Roman emperor: powerful, paternal, able, and effective. The Senate awarded Trajan the title Optimus Principorum, ‘the best of princes’. However, Trajan’s territorial ambitions left the East far from settled, and the Empire was becoming overstretched. The Roman Empire had now reached its territorial limit.

The Vindolanda archive

Vindolanda, the British fort in Northumberland, was used during Trajan’s reign, and amazingly some of Vindolanda’s archives survived. The story of Vindolanda is written down on wooden writing tablets, and no other place in the Roman world has records to match the Vindolanda archive. The archive survived because the waterlogged conditions in the remote north British fort preserved the wooden tablets. Dozens of wooden tablets from Vindolanda have been dug up and studied. The Vindolanda archive gives a unique picture of Roman frontier life around the years AD 95–105. The tablets record the arrangements to celebrate a commanding officer’s wife’s birthday, food supplies, a list of the troops and the reasons for absence, from sickness to being posted away, and even a complaint about poor roads. One of the units based at Vindolanda was the Ninth Cohort of Batavians, who pop up almost 400 years later as the last-ever-heard-of-unit of the Roman army in the West (see Chapter 5). You can see the Vindolanda archive in the British Museum in London.

Here’s a quote from one of the tablets:

‘Octavius to his brother Candidus . . . send me some cash as soon as possible . . . I would have already been to collect the [hides] except that I did not care to injure the animals while the roads are bad.’ (For more on Roman roads, see Chapter 6.)

Trajan’s column, one of Rome’s most famous monuments, celebrates Trajan’s greatness. Trajan’s cremated remains were buried in its base. The column is decorated with a continuous spiralling relief from top to bottom, and illustrates Trajan’s campaign against the Dacians, including Trajan’s journey, warships, sacrifices, forts, battles, and prisoners. The column is one of the most valuable sources of information on the Roman army. It’s hard to see detail on it today, because the surrounding Roman library with its viewing galleries has long gone, but you can go to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and see full-size plaster casts of the column taken long ago before modern traffic pollution damaged the original. In the sixteenth century, the statue of Trajan on top of the column was replaced by one of St Peter.

Hadrian, Artist and Aesthete (AD 117–138)

Publius Aelius Hadrianus is one of the most famous Roman emperors of all. He was a highly intelligent man who took a great interest in military discipline and organisation, architecture, and Greek culture. He travelled throughout the Roman world, visiting as many provinces as possible, and made the crucial decision to end the conquest of new provinces. His reign represents a turning point in Roman history.

A dodgy succession

Like Trajan, Hadrian was Spanish and came from Italica. Hadrian’s father died when he was young, and he was taken on by the childless Trajan and his wife Plotina. Hadrian took up a high-profile career, making his mark in senatorial magistracies and military posts. By AD 114, he was governor of Syria and was left in charge of the East when Trajan set out for home. But Trajan made a bad move: He never publicly named Hadrian as his successor.

Hadrian’s succession was anything but smooth. The day after Trajan’s death, Trajan’s wife and her lover (a former compatriot of Trajan’s) made an announcement that Hadrian had been adopted by Trajan on his deathbed. At the time plenty of people, including Roman historians, thought the whole thing had been made up; nevertheless, the Senate agreed to accept Hadrian as Emperor.

Hadrian was Plotina’s favourite, despite other more senior men pushing to be Trajan’s successor. Unfortunately, Trajan hadn’t specified his intentions for the succession, and there were several other possible candidates, all of whom were more experienced. The last thing the Empire needed was a disputed succession – look what happened in 68–69 (refer to Chapter 16). Hadrian moved quickly to secure the Senate’s approval. But his reign started badly because the Senate had four alleged conspirators executed on his say-so, though Hadrian blamed this on the praetorian prefect. Fortunately, civil war was avoided because Hadrian had moved so fast. Hadrian had to promise the Senate never to have anyone executed again without the Senate’s approval.

Hadrian in Rome

Hadrian’s rule was remarkably successful, but he faced an instant problem: tying up Trajan’s affairs. Hadrian had to suppress another revolt on the Danube frontier before reaching Rome to establish himself as emperor. Arriving in Rome, Hadrian put on public entertainments, provided handouts to the mob, and gave a general pardon to debtors, celebrating his generosity by throwing all the relevant paperwork onto a bonfire in the Forum.

Hadrian, like Trajan, spent little time in Rome (his travels are detailed in the next section), but his administration was well set up and worked effectively without him. He generally carried on the work of his predecessors, for example Trajan’s alimenta, and kept extortion in the provinces to a minimum. He also encouraged the use of equestrians, rather than freedmen, as administrators.

Enough’s enough: Touring the provinces

Hadrian called a halt to further expansion of the Roman Empire. Augustus, more than a century before, had held the view that the Empire should stay within its borders. Conquests by Claudius, Vespasian, Domitian, and especially Trajan, had broken that rule and left the Empire struggling to maintain its frontiers.

Hadrian decided enough was enough: The Empire would expand no longer. He set out on a famous tour of the provinces, the only emperor ever to do so, reviewing the army and the frontiers. Under Trajan, there’d been a series of governors being prosecuted for extorting their provinces, so it was clearly time for some hands-on attention from the emperor. The travel was part supervisory, part sightseeing, and part military. The journey was commemorated on a remarkable, unparalleled series of coins that show Hadrian being greeted by each province he visited.

Restoring military discipline on the frontiers

Hadrian was an absolute stickler for military discipline and swept away any nice, relaxed frontier living amongst garrison troops, especially in Germany and Britain during AD 120–122 where he tightened things up and had the frontiers redesigned, building his famous Wall across Britain (see Chapter 5 for more on that). He was particularly annoyed to discover the soldiers had nice dining rooms and ornamental gardens. He had no time for fancy imperial dress himself and went about in the most basic clothing he could get his hands on.

Giving back provinces and hostages

By 123 Hadrian had headed to the East. Provinces which he decided were a step too far, like Armenia and Mesopotamia, he simply gave up. The Parthian king’s daughter, taken hostage by Trajan, was returned.

When in Greece . . .

Hadrian reached Greece in 125 and visited again in 128. He loved Greece and all things artistic, as well as mathematics and architecture. It affected his dress and appearance – he grew a beard as Greeks did (though apparently this was to cover blotches on his face), a fashion followed by his successors and many men of rank throughout the Empire. He was also responsible for great building projects like the Temple of Olympian Zeus and a library in Athens.

The Bar Cochba Revolt

During AD 132–135, Hadrian had to deal with a major revolt in Judaea led by Bar Cochba. Trouble started under Trajan when Roman troops were diverted to the war in Parthia. The trouble was suppressed, and generally Hadrian was enlightened and tolerant towards the Jews. But he came up with the foolish idea of forcing the Jews in Palestine to be assimilated – in 131 BC, for example, he declared circumcision to be illegal. That provoked Jewish nationalist hopes which threatened to destabilise the Roman East. (For more on Bar Cochba himself and the revolt, see Chapter 25.) After Hadrian put down the revolt, the Jews lost their land and became nationless. The historian Dio said ‘Judaea was made desolate’.

Building more than walls: Hadrian the architect

Hadrian seems to have been behind the reconstruction of the Pantheon in Rome. Built originally by Agrippa in Augustus’s reign, the Pantheon was rebuilt as a magnificent domed structure with a vast pedimented façade supported by Egyptian granite columns. Agrippa’s original dedication inscription of 25 BC was modestly reproduced with no mention of Hadrian. Incredibly, the building survives virtually 100 per cent intact in Rome today, having been used as a church in the Middle Ages. Hadrian also built the Temple of Venus and Rome, and a new imperial mausoleum in Rome, which survives today as the Castel San Angelo (it was turned into a castle in the Middle Ages). To the east of Rome at Tivoli, Hadrian built his vast sprawling villa covering 160 acres (65 hectares), known today as the Villa Adriani. An almost endless complex of buildings, each of which was individually designed by Hadrian to reflect his interests or the places he had visited around the Empire, it was where he spent most of the last part of his life. Today the Villa is in ruins, but large parts of it can still be seen and enjoyed.

Hadrian and Antinoüs

Hadrian, on his grand tour of the provinces, reached Egypt in AD 130. Egypt was where Hadrian’s favourite, a youth called Antinoüs, had drowned in an accident. Hadrian may well have had a homosexual relationship with Antinoüs, but what is known is that Hadrian was absolutely devastated by the loss of Antinoüs and was said to have ‘wept for him like a woman’. Hadrian founded a city called Antinoöpolis in Antinoüs’s memory.

Hadrian was married to Trajan’s great niece, Sabina. No-one knows what Sabina thought of Antinoüs. Popular gossip had it that Hadrian’s marriage to Sabina was unhappy, but there’s no evidence, and Hadrian granted Sabina all the usual honours, as well as striking coins with Sabina’s portrait on them.

Growing ill in mind and body

As Hadrian grew older, his health began to fail. All Hadrian’s travelling caught up with him. He seems to have lost his reason because there are various stories about him ordering the death of various people, including a would-be successor called Servianus (though this is impossible nonsense as Servianus was over 90 years old) and even possibly his wife Sabina. The signs had been there already though. He’d been keen for years on using imperial spies (frumentarii) to keep him fully informed about the private business of people in court, his friends, or, in fact, anyone.

Hadrian also suffered from oedema (a build-up of water in the body) and felt so ill that he asked a slave to stab him to death. Antoninus, the senator Hadrian appointed as his successor (see the next section, ‘Choosing a successor’), stopped the slave, but Hadrian hadn’t much longer to live anyway.

Choosing a successor

Hadrian, racked with illness, had to choose a successor. Like Trajan before him, Hadrian had no children. Hadrian’s first choice was Lucius Ceionius Commodus (renamed Lucius Aelius Verus Caesar), whom Hadrian adopted in AD 136. Aelius was made a consul and given a governorship. Unfortunately, Aelius was a sick man and died on 1 January AD 138, after taking too much medicine.

Within a few weeks of Aelius’s death, Hadrian adopted as his successor a senator and distinguished governor of Asia, with the exaggerated name of Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus. In AD 138, shortly after Antoninus’s nomination, Hadrian died.

The frumentarii

No self-respecting totalitarian state could do without its spies. Originally, frumentarii (imperial spies) were soldiers in charge of the corn stores, but the frumentarii ended up being used as couriers on imperial business. Emperors, by Hadrian’s time, were using the frumentarii to spy on anyone and everyone. They were a gift to bad emperors, like Commodus (see Chapter 18), but the frumentarii became so unpopular that Diocletian (see Chapter 20) had to get rid of them.

Antoninus Pius: Nice and Vice-free (AD 138–161)

Antoninus succeeded as Antoninus Pius, a name he acquired either because of the honours he heaped on Hadrian after his death or because he took great care of his aged father-in-law. He certainly had to persuade the Senate to make Hadrian a god, which they were reluctant to do after all the carryings-on at the end of Hadrian’s reign.

Antoninus in Rome

The most remarkable thing about Antoninus Pius is that he really was apparently without any vices whatsoever. He was the last word in decency and honesty and scrupulously respected the Senate. Even a senator who confessed he had killed his own father was marooned on an island instead of being executed. When there was a shortage of wine, oil, and wheat, Antoninus bought in extra stocks at his own expense and gave them out for free. He refused to travel abroad on the grounds that putting up an emperor and all his entourage cost the provinces far too much. He placed a maximum cost on gladiatorial games to save cash, which helped him finance new public buildings and the repair of old ones.

Antoninus adored his wife Faustina and set up an order of homeless girls called the Faustinianae in her honour. When Faustina died in AD 141, Antoninus issued a magnificent series of coins commemorating her life. How much nicer can you get?

Largely as a result of this, practically nothing of any great note happened during Antoninus Pius’s reign, especially in Rome, apart from a disastrous collapse of a stadium (probably the Circus Maximus) causing the deaths of more than 1,000 spectators. There were no proscriptions, no executions, no sexual scandals, no vice. Nor were there any significant innovations in imperial government, though he did establish some important legal principles concerning inheritances, adoptions, and the treatment of slaves.

Whenever he could, Antoninus Pius avoided war. His favourite saying was that he would ‘rather save a single citizen than a thousand enemies’, a quote he apparently found amongst the sayings of Scipio Africanus.

On the borders

Out in the provinces life wasn’t quite as settled. In Britain, a northern war led to the temporary abandonment of Hadrian’s Wall and a trial new frontier made of turf called the Antonine Wall farther north. But after little more than a generation, this was given up and the garrisons returned to Hadrian’s Wall. Various other risings in Numidia, Mauretania, and Egypt all had to be suppressed, and Dacia had to be divided into three provinces to settle it. None of the rebellions were very serious, but together they gave a hint that had any or all of them blown up into something really dramatic, the Empire would have been hard put to cope. That was really the key to stability under Antoninus Pius: He had the good luck to rule over a world largely at peace.

Smelling the Storm Brewing: Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–180)

Marcus Aurelius was the son of Antoninus Pius’s brother-in-law and came from a family of Spanish origin. He’d been educated under Hadrian’s supervision and married Antoninus Pius’s daughter Faustina the Younger in 145.

Mr Sensitivity

Marcus Aurelius was, by nature, a man of peace. He wasn’t paranoid like some of his predecessors, such as Domitian, who saw conspiracies everywhere. Aurelius always tried to think well of everyone. He avoided executing or imprisoning Avidius Cassius’s co-conspirators (see the section ‘Marcus the warrior’ for details on this episode). Although Aurelius’s wife Faustina had been implicated in the same plot, she died soon afterwards, and Aurelius burned all Faustina’s papers to avoid reading about the plot, because it could force him to hate the conspirators. Even at the games, Aurelius couldn’t bear the idea of gladiators getting hurt and made them fight with blunt weapons.

Appointing a partner

Marcus Aurelius took over smoothly, but unlike his predecessors, he promptly organised the who-comes-next problem. He appointed Lucius Verus, son of Aelius (the designated heir of Hadrian who had died in 138 before he could succeed), his co-Augustus immediately. This was a radical step, placing the Empire under the control of two emperors of equal rank for the first time.

Lucius Verus’s position was enhanced when he was married to Aurelius’s daughter in 164. Great scheme, but like all the best ideas, it was susceptible to things going wrong. Verus was an effective military commander but had none of his colleague’s qualities. He was thought by some to be like another Nero but without the cruelty.

Marcus the warrior

Marcus Aurelius would definitely have rather spent his life poring over books and meditating rather than running an Empire. So it’s ironic that much of his reign was spent in war. Aurelius sent Lucius Verus to deal with the Parthians who had invaded Armenia and Syria, and by AD 166 the Parthians were defeated. A great triumph took place in Rome, but the war had terrible consequences. The soldiers brought a plague back with them to Rome, and large numbers of people died, causing a famine.

Tribes in Britain and the Chatti in Germany took advantage of Roman troops being away to fight the Parthians and rebelled, causing trouble for Aurelius. It was now clear that Rome could not deal with multiple frontier problems; the Empire simply did not have the manpower to cover distances that would challenge even a modern mechanised army today.

Although the German and British rebellions were put down, a major invasion by German tribes in AD 166 threatened Italy. The invaders were brought to terms by AD 168, but then Aurelius faced more trouble from the Sarmatians along the Danube. Worse, Marcus Aurelius had to deal with the troubles on his own because Lucius Verus died in AD 169 after suffering an apoplexy.

Next came a revolt in 175 by Avidius Cassius, commander in the East, who thought Aurelius was dead. Aurelius had to set out for Syria before news came that Avidius had been murdered. Another German invasion, by the Quadi and Marcomanni, followed and Aurelius headed out on campaign once more in 178.

Who comes next? Picking a successor

Marcus Aurelius didn’t get round to appointing a replacement successor until AD 177. Aurelius appointed his son Commodus as his co-Augustus. Commodus was fighting with Marcus Aurelius at Vindobona (Vienna), and with the war almost won, Aurelius passed away (although he took a week to do it) on 17 March AD 180, facing death like a true Stoic.

Unfortunately, Commodus didn’t have any of his father’s qualities, or any of those of the four emperors before Aurelius. With the death of Marcus Aurelius, the good days were over. The historian Dio Cassius said ‘our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust’. Dio Cassius should know – he watched the Roman Empire begin to decay with his own eyes.

Marcus Aurelius features in two epic movies: Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), starring Alec Guinness as the emperor (the film was a flop), and Gladiator (2000), starring Richard Harris as Aurelius and Russell Crowe as Maximus the Gladiator (a monster international hit). Fall of the Roman Empire wins the prize for historical accuracy, but Gladiator, which is only half true and half nonsense (Maximus didn’t exist), is rather less boring.

The End of the Good Old Days

Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were good and honourable men with exceptional qualities, and their reigns were the high summer of the Roman Empire. Antoninus and Aurelius had ruled over an Empire that stretched from northern Britain to Egypt. But all things must pass.

By the time Marcus Aurelius died, Rome had been ruled by emperors for nearly 200 years. The system had survived the die-hards who wanted to go back to the old days of the Republic, the reigns of Caligula and Nero, and the civil war of AD 68–69. Along the way there had been imaginative reforms, which now meant emperors of Gaulish and Spanish origin could rule the Roman world, while the Senate was filled with men from all over much of the Empire.

The Roman Empire was far from perfect but it was truly remarkable that, despite the frontier problems, a colossal land area was kept very largely at peace for two centuries. You have only to think of all the wars that have crippled Europe and the rest of the world over the past 1,500 years to appreciate that this was no mean feat. Of course, it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.