Pax Romana

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  This peace was a Roman Peace brought by Augustus. First and foremost it came from the end of civil war. The poet Horace spoke of his own ‘unholy generation whose blood is accursed’ turning on each other and threatening to bring Rome down.

  Why are you drawing swords that have only just been sheathed? Has too little Latin blood been shed on land and sea – not to enable the Roman to burn the arrogant stronghold of jealous Carthage, or to make the Briton, so long beyond our reach, walk down the Sacra Via in chains, but to ensure in answer to the Parthians’ prayers this city shall perish by its own hand?11

  He and the other poets rejoiced when civil strife was ended through the final victory of Augustus at the Battle of Actium. Ovid described the ara pacis Augusti wreathed in ‘Actian laurels’, and for all its echoes of civil war, Actium was evoked time and time again in art, literature and in trophies and symbols on buildings.12

  Peace came from victory and strength, and prestige so overwhelming that in future no aggressor would dare risk going to war. This was how Augustus had ended civil war, and this was how he and the Romans would eventually achieve peace in the wider world. Fond of reintroducing archaic ritual as part of his religious, cultural and moral revival of Rome, Augustus took great pride in a ceremony to close the gates of the Temple of Janus, a god with two faces, one looking back and one forward. The doors of this small shrine were shut when the Roman people were not at war, a rite performed just twice before Augustus. Under his leadership the Senate three times gave orders for this to be done, although in the third case news of a fresh outbreak of war on a distant frontier prevented it. On both of the other occasions the doors were reopened within barely a year. For all the talk of peace, Rome under his leadership was almost permanently at war somewhere in the world, just as it had been under the Republic.13

  Much of this warfare was aggressive, taking the legions into regions never before entered by the army of the Roman people. Augustus added more territory to the empire than anyone else in Rome’s history. Often this involved difficult campaigns in harsh terrain. Thus he conquered the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Alps, stopping the local tribesmen from extorting money from travellers. The campaigns in the Balkans were similarly hard-fought and involved significant Roman losses, but these extended Roman control up to the River Danube. Further north, the legions crossed the Rhine and began to set up a new province reaching as far as the Elbe. Elsewhere Augustus’ commanders went down the Nile and struggled through the deserts of Arabia, although in this case the territorial gains were minimal.14

  The professional army created by Augustus provided his regime with victory after victory. After 26 BC, when he had fallen ill during operations in Spain, the princeps never again commanded an army in the field, but he was often in the wider theatre of operations. In almost every major conflict command went to a family member, most of all his old friend and eventually son-in-law Agrippa, and his stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus. Smaller-scale operations were entrusted to legates, but in every case the credit for victory went to him. On fifty-five separate occasions the Senate ordered public thanksgiving to commemorate a fresh victory, amounting to a total of 890 days of celebration. In the Res Gestae divi Augusti, the list of his own achievements Augustus wrote and ordered to be set up outside his mausoleum, he listed his many victories, and the same poets who sang of peace also sang of victory. Virgil boasted that it was the Romans’ destiny and great art ‘to spare the conquered and overcome the proud in war’. Horace claimed that

  Augustus will be deemed a god,

  on earth when the Britons and the

  deadly Parthians have been added to our empire.15

  Victory followed victory, and defeats were avenged by eventual success. At the heart of the Forum of Augustus, dedicated in 2 BC, was the Temple of Mars Ultor – the war god Mars in his role as ‘the avenger’, in this case both of the murdered Caesar and of the Roman people as a whole. The empire grew larger and by AD 14 there were twenty-five provinces in total, with seventeen allocated to the princeps and eight under senatorial control. Even so, as in the past, not every successful war led to territorial gain. Nor, in spite of the enthusiasm of the poets, did Augustus invade Britain to follow in Julius Caesar’s footsteps or attack Parthia as Caesar had planned to do. Instead the princeps ignored Britain and used diplomacy backed by a substantial display of military force to negotiate a treaty which was presented as the king of Parthia submitting to Rome. The precious eagle standards lost by Crassus and Mark Antony were returned and eventually deposited with great ceremony in the Temple of Mars Ultor.

  Pride was restored, a defeat avenged, and a former enemy made humble acknowledgement of Roman superiority – turning the Parthians from the proud who needed to be overcome into the conquered who should be treated with mercy. As in the past, Rome’s victory did not require permanent occupation of territory unless this was considered to be advantageous. Displays of submission did not need to yield significant profit or have concrete results, and the res gestae listed people such as the Indians and Britons as part of Rome’s empire simply because they had sent embassies to Augustus.16

  The princeps expanded the empire where he felt this was necessary or for the common good and did so over almost half a century of military activity. If it were not for what happened under his successors when conquest all but came to a halt, we would not trouble too much about his motives. Rome had fought wars for many centuries and had expanded, even if provinces were only added every now and then. In the first century BC, men like Pompey and Julius Caesar had gained unprecedented resources and long terms of command and had overrun large areas quickly and turned them into provinces. Augustus did much the same, and had even greater resources, far more time and the freedom to act as he wished. He claimed that his wars were just, responding to past or current aggression, much as Pompey and Caesar had done, and by Roman standards they probably were.

  Augustus was a Roman aristocrat, and so like all his class craved glory – military glory most of all. For a man who had seized power by force during a civil war, victories over the foreign enemies of all Romans offered clean honours untainted by the blood of fellow citizens. Augustus conformed to tradition in proving his worth by defeating the enemies of Rome. This was service to the state and, as with victors in the past, the spoils of successful wars were spent in public works in Rome itself. The princeps built temples, monuments, aqueducts, bath houses and entertainment venues in the City and, as with so much that he did, it was only the scale that outstripped his predecessors.

  Glory was important, and no doubt he was sometimes an opportunist in seizing a chance to add to his achievements, but there does seem to have been more thought to his war-making than this. Similarly, while Virgil promised the Romans imperium sine fine, Augustus’ restraint in not invading Britain or Parthia makes it clear that he did not invariably want war, even if many Romans felt that it would be justified. Some of what he did made the empire more coherent and secure, and the disposition of the army is a guide to the areas considered most likely to see fighting in the future. The conquest of Spain involved at least five legions, but within a few years of its completion the garrison of the entire Peninsula was reduced to three, and would then drop to one under his successors. Permanent occupation of the Alps greatly improved communications, and it was only his campaigns in the Balkans that created a secure land route to the eastern provinces. Augustus probably was not operating to a rigid plan, but there is no doubt that these accessions of territory made the empire a more coherent unit. On the other hand it is harder to say whether a frontier based on the Elbe rather than the Rhine would have been more secure since it lasted such a short time. The first may look neater on a map, but it is unclear how well the Romans understood the physical geography of the world, and they certainly paid far more attention to the political geography of tribes and peoples.17

  LIMITS

  Augustus suffered many disappointments, most of all the premature deaths of so many close famil
y members, and the scandals that led him to exile his daughter and only legitimate child, Julia, and later two of her children; but his sorest military trials came in the last years of his life. In AD 6 his armies had already begun a great advance into what is now Bohemia when rebellion erupted in the Balkans, forcing a withdrawal so that troops could be sent to deal with this. It was not an easy task, and there were heavy Roman losses and three years of tough fighting before the revolt was suppressed. At one point no fewer than ten legions, along with numerous auxiliaries, were concentrated in a single camp – a force representing more than a third of the entire army. Then, when the war was finally won, rebels in the new province of Germany ambushed and killed the provincial legate Publius Quinctilius Varus, wiping out three of Augustus’ legions, the XVII, XVIII and XIX. The Romans fell back to the Rhine and launched a succession of punitive expeditions over the years to come, but they never retook the lost territory. For the first time, a province rebelled against Rome and won permanent freedom.18

  Augustus was in his seventies, his health already failing, and this blow struck him very hard – a man whose whole career had been based on victory after victory struggled to cope with defeat. He did not shave for weeks, and is said to have wandered the palace calling out ‘Quinctilius Varus, return my legions!’ When he died five years later he left written advice for his adopted son Tiberius to ‘keep the empire within its present boundaries’. The cynical historian Tacitus, himself a senator, tells us of this, wondering whether it was ‘through fear or jealousy’. Tiberius succeeded to Augustus’ position and powers, many of which he had already been awarded, and largely followed this suggestion. The same was true of most of his successors.19

  In AD 43 the Emperor Claudius launched an invasion of Britain and created a province in the southern part of the island. Expansion continued on and off there for the remainder of the century, but there was never permanent occupation of the very north of what is now Scotland, and much of the Lowlands were only occupied for a few decades. In AD 101–102 the Emperor Trajan attacked the strong kingdom of Dacia (an area roughly equivalent to modern Romania), and created a new province there after winning a second war fought in AD 105–106. He also added Arabia to the empire and invaded Parthia, intending to create provinces of Mesopotamia and Media. However, his hold on these new conquests was shaky and he was soon faced with a spate of rebellions. In AD 117 Trajan died of natural causes while trying to suppress these revolts, and his new eastern provinces were abandoned. Marcus Aurelius also appears to have intended creating one or two new provinces, in this case in central Europe, but again the plans were abandoned at his death in AD 180. Earlier in his reign he had added some Parthian territory to Syria. At the end of the second century AD Mesopotamia was made a province by Septimius Severus.

  Expansion did not stop with the death of Augustus, but it did become far less common, and the contrast with the intense bout of expansion under the first emperor is striking. Augustus’ reign was in this respect much like the last decades of the Republic. Pompey and Caesar were also great conquerors, but then the political situation gave them unprecedented opportunities in their commands. Then and earlier the vast majority of senators who fought campaigns as provincial governors dealt with unrest within a province or raiding from the outside. Many attacked peoples outside the empire, but the aim – apart from the acquisition of personal wealth and glory – was to make these enemies submit, not to annex them. Wars of this sort had become the most common form of conflicts as soon as the Romans took and held overseas provinces, and they continued under the Principate. In this sense Augustus was the anomaly, as were Pompey and Caesar to a lesser extent, in presiding over so much acquisition of new territory. Even so, far less expansion occurred after AD 14 than in the third and especially the second centuries BC. Allied kingdoms were turned into provinces until almost all of the lands in the empire were directly ruled, but to a very great extent its size stayed much the same as it had been under Augustus.20

  Something had changed, but there has been very little agreement over what it was and why this happened. It is unclear precisely what Augustus meant in his advice to Tiberius, and whether he felt that the empire should never again expand or should not do this for the moment. The big rebellion in AD 6 and the loss of Germany in AD 9 inflicted heavy casualties on the Roman army which could not be easily replaced. On both occasions Augustus purchased male slaves and freed them so that they would serve as distinct units in the army. These conflicts came after decades of almost constant warfare, during which he had already increased the length of military service from sixteen to twenty years, and finally to twenty-five years to save on the costs of discharge and also to retain experienced manpower. The military resources of the empire were at a low ebb after such heavy employment. Tiberius ordered three campaigns across the Rhine at the start of his reign, but at the end of AD 16 he called a halt to these operations. One of the reasons was that Gaul and the other western provinces were no longer capable of supplying the army with replacement cavalry mounts and pack and draft animals. For the moment, there were simply not the resources to continue such intensive campaigning, and hence there was a need to consolidate.21

  This would explain a temporary reduction in Roman aggression, but not a long-term change, and some scholars have wondered whether the empire had reached its natural size. An older view was that Augustus conquered so that he could establish the best and most defensible frontiers, and that once that was achieved, then further expansion was neither necessary nor desirable. This is an extension of the old view of defensive imperialism and so jars with the more recent emphasis on Roman aggression. At the very least the willingness to accept the loss of the German province suggests that any such design changed with circumstances. More importantly, there is no direct ancient evidence for such a plan, and many scholars question whether the Romans possessed the geographical knowledge and had the capacity to think and plan on such a grand scale of strategy. (We shall return to this question when we look at how the frontiers functioned.)

  An alternative view is to see the empire as having reached its natural limits, even though no one understood this. Some suggest that the Roman army could not operate as effectively in the Parthian deserts or in Germany and central Europe, where the population did not tend to live in cities but was scattered in many small settlements. Such enemies were harder to find and defeat, and did not produce enough of an agricultural surplus to feed the legions sent to conquer them. Yet the Romans did fight and win in similar circumstances elsewhere, and their military machine was extremely flexible and ready to adapt to local situations. At other times they were able to supply armies for very long periods in unproductive country. Another argument is that even if the legions won the war in such places, the political and social organisation of the peoples there made it impossible to incorporate them into the Roman system of rule. Again, the theory is undermined by the success the Romans had in absorbing such a wide variety of cultures elsewhere.22

  It is unlikely that the Romans could not have conquered more territory. The Greek author Strabo, writing under Tiberius, saw the end of expansion as a matter of choice. Concluding the seventeen books of his Geography, in which he described the lands and peoples of the known world, he noted that ‘the Romans occupy the best known portions of it’. Elsewhere he claims that

  Although the Romans could have possessed Britain, they scorned to do so, for they saw that there was nothing to fear from the Britons . . . No corresponding advantages would arise from taking over and holding the country. For at present more seems to accrue from the customs duties on their commerce than direct taxation could supply, if we deduct the cost of maintaining an army to garrison the island and collect the tribute.23

  A century or so later, Appian, also a Greek and someone who worked in the imperial administration at Rome, expressed a similar sentiment: ‘Possessing the best parts of the earth and sea the Romans have, on the whole, aimed to preserve their empire by the exercise of pru
dence, rather than to extend their sway over profitless tribes of barbarians.’24

  Similar sentiments were voiced on other occasions, and many may have felt that there was little to be gained from further expansion. Yet in spite of Strabo’s judgement, Claudius did invade Britain. It was rumoured that Nero thought about abandoning the island because the garrison was too expensive compared to the revenue from the province, but he decided against it. The balance of profit and loss could be overruled by other concerns, and the glory of victory and conquest remained admirable motives for the actions of an emperor.25

  The Principate was a monarchy, and it was the emperor who controlled the army and made the key decisions over whether or not to expand. Augustus justified his rule through service to the state, and most of all through victories in foreign wars. At the start many people disliked him, remembering his bloody climb to power, but they were willing to accept that he led Rome well, that there was internal peace and prosperity and external success, and over time they became accustomed to his dominance and the existence of a princeps. After forty-four years it had become the natural order, since no one could remember a Republic that had functioned well. A princeps was necessary, and he was expected to guide the state. All took the title imperator and were expected to be victorious in war, whether via their legates or in person. The aristocracy felt a deep nostalgia for the days of the Republic, when their class had led the state and no one man stood out from them, but nobody expected those days to return. After the murder of Caligula in AD 41, the Senate debated a restoration of the Republic for just a few hours before they turned instead to choosing a replacement for the emperor from their own ranks.26