Pax Romana

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  The Treveri and the other peoples of Gallia Belgica lived within easy reach of the strong garrisons in the Rhineland and so were vulnerable to reprisals. The Aedui lived far from any major concentration of troops and had the additional advantages of considerable numbers and greater wealth. Sacrovir rallied enough supporters to seize the tribal capital at Augustudunum (Augst) – the city founded by Augustus to replace the old oppidum of Bibracte. Young aristocrats from all over Gaul received a properly Roman education in the city, and Sacrovir took these as hostages, hoping to persuade their families and home communities to join him – an echo of the Aedui seizing the hostages in Caesar’s baggage train in 52 BC. Soon the rebel army numbered some 40,000, but of these barely 8,000 were properly equipped in Roman style. Apart from a contingent of gladiators under training who were freed and enlisted, the rest of the army wielded hunting spears and whatever other weapons could be improvised. As we have seen, the Romans did not actively disarm provincials, but as society became more peaceful, military equipment naturally became rarer. In Gaul aristocrats competed through priesthoods, local magistracies, property and wealth as well as imperial service, and no longer based their status on the number of warriors in their household. Although Sacrovir had arranged for arms to be manufactured in secret, the need to avoid suspicion had limited what could be achieved.34

  The numbers were impressive, but experience was in as short supply as proper equipment. Some encouragement came when the legates of Upper and Lower Germany bickered over who should take charge of the campaign, delaying the Roman response. Tacitus says that in the neighbouring areas there was private sympathy, but a fear of open commitment to rebellion. Some of this was no doubt a pragmatic calculation of its chances of success. Yet it also suggests that debt and resentment were not so widespread, or at least not to a degree that made the entire population desperate enough to seek any way out regardless of the risks. When the Roman commanders sorted out their differences, a force was sent from the garrisons of Upper Germany and hastened to Augustudunum. In a hopelessly one-sided battle, the rebels were routed and the rebellion ended in a matter of hours. Sacrovir committed suicide. In Rome, Tiberius had made no formal announcement of the revolts in Gaul, allowing wild rumours to flourish. He waited until news of the victory reached him before writing to the Senate to tell them of both the revolt and its utter defeat.35

  This was the last rising in Gaul where there was any real attempt to rally the tribes en masse, and even then only two of the four Gallic provinces were involved and the enterprise failed utterly. In fact, after this there is little evidence for any revolts even of individual tribes. In AD 69 the temples on the Capitoline Hill in Rome were set on fire during the fall of the Emperor Vitellius and all, including the hallowed shrine to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, were seriously damaged. As the news spread, Druidic prophecies of the end of the Roman Empire circulated widely in Gaul. They were repeated with great enthusiasm, but did not prompt rebellion. The year before, Mariccus of the Boii had raised some 8,000 followers, proclaiming himself to be a god and the ‘champion of Gaul’. He was not from the aristocracy of the tribe, and instead seems to have been a mystical leader. Significantly, this rising was defeated mainly by the aristocrats of the Aedui, who organised a tribal militia backed by some auxiliary cohorts. Mariccus was thrown to the wild beasts in the arena, and his reputation briefly revived when these refused to harm him. Vitellius, on his way from the Rhineland to make himself emperor, watched as the rebel leader was then executed by more mundane means.36

  The Batavian rebellion in AD 70 was a more serious matter, which began as part of the Roman civil war and grew into a self-proclaimed Gallic Empire. It did not spread much beyond the Rhineland, and even there many communities and individual leaders remained loyal to Rome. The rebels gained more allies from the German tribes beyond the frontiers than from the provinces themselves, and within little more than a year the rising was put down. It does appear that a province on the frontier was less stable for much longer than one surrounded by other parts of the empire. Once the heavy Roman military presence was established on the Rhine, Gaul became much more peaceful, in spite of the loss of the German province in AD 9. Some regions, for instance parts of North Africa or northern as opposed to lowland Britain, never achieved this stability, but elsewhere there simply does not appear to have been any serious prospect of large-scale rebellion against Roman rule. Later, especially from the third century AD onwards, revolts were not anti-Roman, but efforts to make a locally popular leader emperor.

  As far as we can tell, after the phase of conquest, which might be quick as in Britain or take generations as in Spain and Gaul, there was often a major rebellion before the province was fully secure. After that, serious revolts were extremely rare and did not occur in most provinces. Tiberius concealed the risings in Gaul until they were defeated and later hid the seriousness of the reverse at the hands of the Frisii, prompting some scholars to wonder whether revolts against Roman rule are under-reported in our sources. An obvious weakness of this theory is that we are told what he did by one of these very sources. It is certainly true that the literary evidence is poor for many periods, including the bulk of the second century AD. Yet it strains belief that major rebellions would not be mentioned or leave some other trace. Smaller risings like that of Mariccus might well vanish from the record, and we only know of it because Tacitus wrote a detailed account of the period of the civil war after Nero’s death which has survived – unlike the remainder of his Histories, which carried on from AD 70 to the death of Domitian in AD 96. Thus it is possible that incidents on this scale in other years and provinces do not appear in our sources. Such things did not threaten Roman rule, and indeed may often have been aimed at defeating local leaders rather than the empire as a whole.37

  None of the rebellions against Roman rule won universal support in an entire province. Even when led by local aristocrats who had profited from the alliance with Rome, but now shifted in their allegiance, there were always significant numbers of similar men who remained loyal. It does not much matter whether these acted from genuine affection for Rome, from fear of the consequences of revolt, from rivalry and dislike of the rebel leaders or because they hoped to be rewarded. Roman rule was never so unbearable to everyone in a province that all chose to reject it. Over time, in each area it looks as if fewer and fewer were inclined to risk active rebellion. Once again we must remind ourselves of the absence of something akin to a sense of nationalism in the provinces. Equally, there is no trace of fellow feeling between different provinces uniting in hatred of the imperial power. If the army was seen to be weak or was simply thought to be too busy elsewhere, rebels were encouraged to see an opportunity to act, but their aims remained local. There is no evidence for co-ordinated planning to divide the resources of the empire or for any active assistance capable of matching the force the empire was able to wield. Individually, even if a rebellion managed to include the bulk of the population, no single province could cope with the military might of Rome.

  In AD 9 Arminius managed to win a great enough victory to push the Romans back to the Rhine, and in the years that followed he avoided a decisive defeat until Tiberius called a halt to operations. It was possible to abandon a province on the edge of the empire. Had Vercingetorix or Boudicca matched Arminius’ success then it is possible that the Romans would not have returned to conquer Gaul and Britain. Under the Principate the key to this was the attitude of the emperor, and his willingness to pour resources into regaining lost territory. Germany was not reconquered, but provinces in the heartland of the empire were a different matter, and it was unlikely that their loss would ever be accepted. It might take time, until the manpower and logistic support were available, but there was simply no prospect of giving up a lost province.

  The historian Josephus, who had himself joined in a rebellion against Rome before changing sides, attributed a speech to Herod Agrippa II in which the king tried to persuade the people of Jerusalem not to rebel
in AD 66. The principal argument is that the might of Rome made any such revolt doomed to defeat and ghastly retribution. It would be folly to go to war simply because of a cruel and rapacious governor. ‘Granted that the Roman governors are intolerably harsh, it does not follow that all Romans are unjust to you any more than Caesar.’ Tacitus makes the man who suppressed the Batavian rebellion express similar sentiments. Rome was too powerful to defeat, and although there were bad and rapacious governors there were good ones as well. Fear, and a sense that Roman rule was usually tolerable even if it was more or less oppressive, may well have convinced most provincials against rebellion.38

  A STRONGER SENSE OF IDENTITY?

  The history of Judaea and the other substantial Jewish settlements in the east seems to provide a partial exception to the pattern seen elsewhere. Varus, as legate of Syria, intervened in Judaea twice in 4 BC, and one of his successors in the post did the same in AD 6. This latter disturbance was provoked by anger at the imposition of the Roman census. Judaea was an equestrian province governed by a prefect who did not command any legionary troops and instead had a force of around six or seven auxiliary units. These were locally raised from Samaria and the Gentile population of the region and Syria. On numerous occasions they fought short, usually one-sided, operations to suppress a mixture of charismatic religious leaders and men dubbed as bandit chiefs. Deep-seated hostility between Jewish and Samaritan communities, or between Jewish and Gentile communities, especially in Caesarea on the coast of Judaea and in Alexandria in Egypt, sometimes spilled over into violence on a grand scale, leading to heavy-handed military intervention.

  In AD 66 – sixty years after the imposition of direct Roman rule – there was a major rebellion, which began with fighting between Jew and Gentile in Caesarea and Alexandria. The governor – by now called a procurator rather than prefect, but distinct from the procurators of major imperial provinces – was unpopular and brutal. He had been sent by Nero with explicit orders to increase the revenue from the province, probably as part of the same desperate need for money that helped to provoke Boudicca’s rebellion. He handled the situation badly, and was defeated and forced to withdraw from Jerusalem. The amount of inter-communal violence rapidly increased, spreading around the wider area. When the legate of Syria mustered all available soldiers, including allied contingents, and marched on Jerusalem he encountered more resistance that he had expected. As he withdrew, his column was badly cut about, losing more than 5,000 men and the eagle of Legio XII Fulminata. Judaea was a Mediterranean province and not on some distant frontier, and so in AD 67 a new commander, the future emperor Vespasian, was sent with a much stronger and better prepared army to begin its reconquest. Delayed by the outbreak of civil war a year later, in which he emerged as the eventual victor, Jerusalem was not taken until AD 70 and the last strongholds were only mopped up a few years later.39

  For a while there was an independent Jewish state, minting its own coins – and spending a good deal of its time and resources in wasteful power struggles. In AD 66 many members of the Jerusalem aristocracy centred around the high priestly families chose to join the rebels – the young Josephus among them. Even so, not everyone was ever fully committed to the revolt. In Galilee some communities with significant Jewish populations fought against the rebels, while others capitulated as soon as possible. The rebels were never able to form an effective field army, and relied on the small, highly motivated bands of the main leaders backed by large numbers of undisciplined, untrained and poorly equipped volunteers from the wider population. In the open they could not hope to stand against even small numbers of Roman regulars. The lost province was recaptured in a succession of sieges, and the area controlled by the rebels steadily shrank. At each stage the Romans followed their usual practice of encouraging defection and surrender wherever possible. When it was not, engineering skill and determined aggression took each fortified place in turn, including Jerusalem after a three-month siege in which the Temple was destroyed. The siege-works at Masada by the Dead Sea give a good impression of the doggedness of the Roman army. Wherever the rebels went, and no matter how strongly fortified a position they held, the legions would come and would destroy them.

  From AD 115 to AD 117, the Jewish populations of Egypt, Cyrenaica and Cyprus rebelled in a war marked by atrocities and allegations of cannibalism. The spark seems to have come once again from mutual animosity with their Gentile neighbours. It took considerable resources, at a time when most of the army was heavily committed to Trajan’s eastern expedition, but once again the rebellion was crushed. There is no evidence for any fighting in Judaea or Galilee and it looks very much as if the communities there remained peaceful. Judaea rebelled again in AD 132–135 under the leadership of the charismatic Bar Kochba. The sources are poor, but there seem to have been heavy Roman losses – the Emperor Hadrian is supposed to have written to the Senate omitting the conventional formula of ‘I am well, and so is the army’. This independent Jewish state lasted less time than in the earlier rebellion, but for a while minted coins and organised some basic bureaucracy. It does look as if Galilee largely remained free of rebellion in these years, and the archaeology suggests that the communities there suffered little and continued to prosper. In Judaea itself the Romans wore down the rebels in a long succession of raids and sieges of walled towns and villages – Dio claims that fifty towns and 985 villages were stormed and razed to the ground. Jerusalem was turned into a Gentile city, with the cult of Jupiter established on Temple Mount, causing the spiritual heart of Judaism to shift to previously marginal Galilee.40

  The Jews had a sense of identity which long predated the arrival of Alexander the Great, let alone the Roman Empire. Their faith bonded them and reinforced their sense of nationhood, while providing examples of miraculous victories over stronger enemies and escape from slavery. Jewish ritual made it harder for them to be absorbed into the Roman system – for instance they were exempt from military service, ending quite a long tradition of providing mercenaries. Some of this sense of their own difference may well have already begun to grow stronger before the arrival of Rome, and the belief in their ability to overthrow a conqueror was greatly reinforced by memory of the Maccabees’ victory over the Seleucids in the second century BC which established the Jewish kingdom of the Hasmoneans. By any rational calculation, the people of Judaea, even if united and able to win over all the Galileans and Idumaeans – and doing all of this was unlikely, to say the least – could not hope to defeat the power of the Roman Empire. They were bound to lose, which was of course the argument Josephus put into the mouth of Agrippa II in AD 66. It is possible that they hoped for aid from the Parthians, for there was a substantial Jewish population in Babylon and elsewhere, and until the destruction of the Temple many of these travelled to Jerusalem for the great festivals. If so, then this hope was never realised, and it should be remembered that the Parthians were never able to take and hold permanently any part of the Roman Empire.41

  The Jewish religion was not incompatible with living as subjects of Rome. After AD 135 there were no more revolts, and even before that most of the time Jewish populations in Judaea and the wider empire did not teeter on the brink of revolt. The outbreak in AD 66 was far from inevitable. Attitudes hardened after that rebellion, but before it there is little trace of strong anti-Semitism in Roman society and especially in the attitudes of its elite, which is better characterized by disinterest or mild amusement at their curious practices. It is quite likely that there were serious social and economic problems in first-century AD Judaea, creating a desperate rural population willing to risk rebellion whenever strong leaders emerged, but difficult to know whether the situation there was so much worse than in other areas where rebellion did not occur. The cost of rebellion was dreadful, yet it is harder to see permanent devastation of much of the country in the archaeological record. The Jewish population was not removed from Judaea after the rebellions, although losses were terrible and some went abroad. Galilee remained ope
nly Jewish, especially in the countryside, and in both areas this population never again rebelled on any major scale.42

  The three major Jewish rebellions at first sight appear to show a significantly more protracted and determined struggle to win freedom from Roman rule compared to other provinces. Yet if the Trajanic revolts are treated as separate, then the difference is much less striking. Ultimately, the Jewish subjects of the Roman Empire accepted imperial rule and ceased to rebel. Even during the revolts, it does appear that as much or more of their hostility focused on non-Jewish neighbours rather than on the empire.

  IX

  RESISTANCE, RIOTING AND ROBBERY

  ‘The people called the Bucoli began a disturbance in Egypt and under the leadership of one Isidorus, a priest, caused the rest of the Egyptians to revolt. At first, arrayed in women’s garments, they had deceived the Roman centurion, causing him to believe that they were women of the Bucoli and were going to give him gold as ransom for their husbands, and had struck him down when he approached them. They also sacrificed his companion, and after swearing an oath over entrails, they devoured them. Isidorus surpassed all his contemporaries in bravery.’ – Dio Cassius, early third century AD.1

  ‘PEACEFUL AND QUIET’

  Over time major rebellions against Roman rule ceased, even if this took a little longer in Judaea. Small-scale revolts did occur in a number of provinces, although even these were rare. In AD 171 or 172, a group called the Boukoloi (or Bucoli) – ‘cowboys’ or ‘herdsmen’ – rebelled in the Nile Delta. Our sources are poor, with the fullest little more than a paragraph from a much later epitome of Dio’s account, whose collator focused on the lurid and bizarre. He claims that some of the Boukoloi disguised themselves as women, so that they could get close to the centurion sent to collect money from them. The Roman officer was taken by surprise and hacked down, and a companion butchered as a sacrifice, his entrails being eaten to bind the rebels in a dreadful oath.