What, in the 500-odd years of its existence, had the Roman Republic achieved? The first thing to remember is that the Romans always saw themselves as heirs of the Greeks. Since the second century BC in the eastern Mediterranean the two civilisations had existed side by side, and though politically they might take very different forms, culturally the Romans liked to think that they were continuing the Greek tradition. In literature, for example, the two greatest Roman writers, Virgil and Horace–both of them, incidentally, personal friends of Octavian–openly acknowledged their debt to their Greek predecessors. Virgil’s tremendous epic, the Aeneid, is clearly inspired by Homer (though the style and language are more sophisticated) and embodies the all-important myth of the city’s connection with Troy–through the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped at the time of the Greek conquest and after many wanderings made his way to Italy, where his descendants, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome. The Eclogues and Georgics too, even if they cannot be traced directly back as far as Hesiod, follow a venerable Greek bucolic tradition. Horace, born in 65 BC (five years after Virgil), had actually studied in the Academy of Athens before fighting on the side of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. His family property in Apulia had been confiscated by the victorious Triumvirate, but his friend Maecenas (to whom he had been introduced by Virgil), a patron of almost legendary wealth and generosity, brought about his reconciliation with Octavian and gave him the farm in the Sabine hills where he settled happily for the rest of his life. It was there that he wrote his celebrated Odes,26 which he proudly claimed to have modelled on early Greek lyric poets like Alcaeus, Pindar and Sappho. Prose writers were restricted by the fact that the novel had not yet been invented, but there were brilliant letter-writers like Pliny, orators like Cicero, and above all the great historians: Livy, Tacitus and–by no means least–Julius Caesar himself.
In the visual arts the same influences are clearly traceable. Such was the Roman admiration for Greek sculpture that the Emperors and nobles filled their palaces and gardens with copies of statues by Phidias and Praxiteles; many famous Greek works of art are nowadays known only by their Roman copies. Original Roman sculpture, splendid as it could often be, admittedly never quite succeeded in capturing the spirit of the Greek: there is no Roman equivalent of the Elgin Marbles, let alone of the greatest piece of classical sculpture in existence, the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul.27 In the art of painting a fair comparison is a good deal harder, if only because–apart from those on vases–so few Greek examples have survived. Of Roman paintings–if Roman they can be considered–by far the most astonishing are those funerary portraits, mostly dating from the first and second centuries AD, found in the region of Fayum, some eighty miles southwest of Cairo. Together, these portraits constitute the most outstanding body of painting to have come down to us from the ancient world.
But the Roman achievement extended well beyond the field of the arts. The Romans were legists, scientists, architects, engineers and of course soldiers. It was in these last two capacities that they built up their astonishing network of roads the length and breadth of Europe, with the primary object of getting an army to its destination in the shortest possible time; if these were to be passable in all weathers it was essential that they should be properly paved, and it was self-evident that they should run, wherever possible, in a dead straight line. The first stretch of the Appian Way was finished as early as 312 BC, and the year 147 BC saw the completion of the Via Postumia, running from sea to sea–from Genoa on the Tyrrhenian to Aquileia on the Adriatic. Such communities as these, and countless others like them which in the early days of the Republic had been little more than settlements, were now prosperous cities, with temples and public buildings conceived on a size and scale unimaginable in former times.
All this had been made possible by perhaps the single most important discovery in the history of architecture. To the ancient Greeks, the arch was unknown. All their buildings were based on the simple principle of a horizontal lintel laid across vertical columns; although they were able to use this principle to create buildings of surpassing beauty, such buildings were severely limited, both in their height and in their ability to carry weight. With the invention of the arch and its extension, the vault, vast new possibilities were opened up; we have only to think of the Colosseum, or those mighty constructions like the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or the tremendous 119-arch aqueduct at Segovia in Spain, to understand the size and scale of the architecture of which the Romans were now capable.
Thoughts of the Colosseum, however, evoke other, less happy associations. The Romans were talented, efficient and industrious; they produced fine artists and writers; they spread their remarkable civilisation across much of the known world. Why, then, did they display such a passion for violence? Why did they flock, in their tens of thousands, to witness gladiatorial contests which were invariably fatal to at least one of the participants, to cheer while innocent and defenceless men, women and children were torn to pieces by wild animals, or as those animals in their turn were subjected to slow and hideous deaths? Has any European people ever, before or since, publicly demonstrated such a degree of brutality and sadism? Nor are we speaking exclusively of the mob; the Emperors themselves, over at least the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, again and again descended to levels of depravity which may occasionally have been matched elsewhere, but have certainly never been surpassed. The historian Suetonius tells us gleefully of the pederasty of Tiberius who, during his years of retirement in Capri, trained young boys to swim around him and nibble his most sensitive areas under the water; of the gluttony of Vitellius, who according to Gibbon ‘consumed in mere eating, at least six millions of our money in about seven months’;28 of the brutality of Caligula–his nickname means ‘little boot’–who, not content with incest with one of his sisters, regularly offered the other two ‘to be abused by his own stale catamites’,29 set up a public brothel in the imperial palace and had innocent men sawn in half to entertain him at lunch.
But there were good Emperors too. The golden age of the Roman Empire extended from 98 to 180 AD, when ‘the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.’30 It began with Trajan, who broadened the frontiers of the Empire to cover Dacia (embracing roughly the present territory of Romania) and Arabia Petraea, which extended from Phoenicia in the north down to the shores of the Red Sea. He also enriched his capital with some of its most magnificent buildings, and governed his vast empire with decency, firmness and humanity–qualities all too seldom seen in first- and third-century Rome. It continued with his successor and fellow-Spaniard Hadrian,31 perhaps the most capable Emperor ever to occupy the throne, who spent much of his twenty-one-year reign visiting every corner of his vast empire–including Britain, where in 122 he ordered the construction of the great wall from the Solway to the Tyne which still bears his name. Then, with Hadrian’s death, came the Antonines: first Antoninus Pius, whose long, peaceful reign gave the Romans a welcome breathing space after the endless exertions of his two predecessors, and finally the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations–written in Greek, probably during his long campaigns against rebellious German tribes–is the only work in existence which allows us an insight into the mind of an ancient ruler.32 But alas, that golden age ended as suddenly as it had begun, with the succession of Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus who, with his harem of women and boys–300 of each–returned Rome to the worst days of imperial degeneracy.
The story of the Roman Empire in the third century makes unedifying reading. Historians tell of the blood-lust of Caracalla–declared Caesar at the age of eight–who in 215 ordered on a whim a general massacre in Alexandria in which many thousand innocent citizens perished, and of the sexual ambivalence of his successor, Elagabalus, who took his name from the Syrian sun god (with whom he identified) and who in 219 made his ceremonial entry into Rome rouged, bejewelled and dressed in purple and gold. He it w
as of whom Gibbon wrote:
A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions. The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex, preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonoured the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor’s, or as he more properly styled himself, of the empress’s husband.
With rulers like these, the corruption inevitably spread downwards through Roman society, to the point at which law and order broke down almost completely and the government was in chaos. It is a sobering fact that the Emperor Septimius Severus, expiring at York in 211, was the last Roman Emperor for eighty years to die in his bed.
Just ninety-five years later, that same city of York was the scene of another imperial death, the consequences of which were considerably more important to world history. The reigning Emperor at the time was Diocletian, who had soon found his empire too unwieldy, his enemies too widespread and his lines of communication too long to be properly governable by any single monarch. He therefore decided to split the imperial power into four. There would be two Augusti–himself and an old and beloved comrade-in-arms named Maximian–and two rulers with the slightly inferior title of Caesar, who would exercise supreme authority in their allotted territories and would ultimately become Augusti in their turn. The supremacy in northwestern Europe–with special responsibility for the reimposition of Roman rule in rebellious Britain–he entrusted to one of his most successful generals, Constantius Chlorus, who became one of the first two Caesars. The other Caesar was Galerius, a rough, brutal professional soldier from Thrace, who was given charge of the Balkans.
Then, in 305, there occurred an event unparalleled in the history of the Roman Empire: the voluntary abdication of an Emperor. Diocletian decided that he had had enough. He retired to the enormous palace he had built for himself at Salona (the modern Split) on the Dalmatian coast, and forced an intensely unwilling Maximian to abdicate with him. Overnight, Constantius Chlorus found himself the senior Augustus, but he was not to enjoy his inheritance for long. A few months later, on 25 July 306, he died at York, his son Constantine at his bedside. Scarcely had the breath left his body than his friend and ally, the delightfully named King Crocus of the Alemanni, acclaimed young Constantine as Augustus in his father’s stead. The local legions instantly took up the cry, clasped the imperial purple toga round his shoulders, raised him on their shields and cheered him to the echo.
At this time Constantine was in his early thirties. On his father’s side his lineage could scarcely have been more distinguished; his mother, Helena, on the other hand, far from being–as the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth (and, more recently, Evelyn Waugh) would have us believe–the daughter of Coel, mythical founder of Colchester and the Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, was almost certainly the offspring of a humble innkeeper in Bithynia.33 (Other, less reputable historians have gone so far as to suggest that as a girl she had been one of the supplementary amenities of her father’s establishment, regularly available to his clients at a small extra charge.) Only later in her life, when her son had acceded to the supreme power, did she become the most venerated woman in the Empire; in 327, when she was already over seventy, this passionate Christian convert made her celebrated pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there miraculously to unearth the True Cross and thus to gain an honoured place in the calendar of saints.
But let us return to Constantine. The first thing to be said is that no ruler in all history–not Alexander nor Alfred, not Charles nor Catherine, not Frederick nor even Gregory–has ever more fully merited his title of ‘the Great’; for within the short space of some fifteen years he took two decisions, either of which, alone, would have changed the future of the civilised world. The first was to adopt Christianity–the object, only a generation previously, of persecutions under Diocletian more brutal than any that it has suffered before or since–as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second was to transfer the capital of that empire from Rome to the new city which he was building on the site of the old Greek settlement of Byzantium and which was to be known, for the next sixteen centuries, by his own name: the city of Constantine, Constantinople. Together, these two decisions and their consequences have given him a serious claim to be considered–excepting only Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed and the Buddha–the most influential man who ever lived.
Immediately after his acclamation, Constantine had naturally sent word to his co-Augustus Galerius, now ruling from Nicomedia (the modern Izmit) across the Bosphorus; but Galerius, while very reluctantly agreeing to acknowledge him as a Caesar, refused point-blank to recognise him as an Augustus, having already appointed a certain Valerius Licinianus, called Licinius, one of his old drinking companions. Constantine did not seem particularly worried. Perhaps he did not yet feel ready for the supreme power; at all events, he remained in Gaul and Britain for another six years, governing the two provinces on the whole wisely and well. Only after the death of Galerius in 311 did he begin preparations to assert his claim, and not until the summer of 312 did he move across the Alps against the first and most immediately dangerous of his rivals, his brother-in-law Maxentius, son of Diocletian’s old colleague the Emperor Maximian.34
The two armies met on 28 October 312 on the Via Flaminia, some seven or eight miles northeast of Rome where the Tiber is crossed by the old Ponte Milvio.35 This Battle of the Milvian Bridge is principally remembered now for the legend related by Constantine’s contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea–who claims to have heard it from the Emperor himself–according to which
at about midday, just as the sun was beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription ‘Conquer by This’ [hoc vince]. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also.36
Inspired, it is said, by this vision, Constantine soundly defeated the army of his brother-in-law and put it to flight, driving it southward towards the old bridge. This was extremely narrow, and Maxentius had somewhat pessimistically constructed next to it another, broader one on pontoons, on which he could if necessary make an orderly retreat and which could then be broken in the middle to prevent pursuit. Over this the remains of his shattered army stampeded, and all might yet have been well had not the engineers in charge of the bridge lost their heads and drawn the bolts too soon. Suddenly the whole structure collapsed, hurling hundreds of men into the fast-flowing water. Those who had not yet crossed made wildly for the old stone bridge, but this too proved fatal. Such was its narrowness that many were crushed to death, others were trampled underfoot, still others flung down by their own comrades into the river below. Among the last was Maxentius himself, whose body was later found washed up on the bank. His severed head, impaled on a lance, was carried aloft before Constantine as he entered Rome the following day.
His victory at the Milvian Bridge made Constantine absolute master of the western world from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains. Whether it also achieved his conversion to Christianity is unclear; it certainly marked the point at which he set himself up as protector and active patron of his Christian subjects. On his return to Rome he immediately subsidised from his private purse twenty-five already existing churches and several new ones; he presented the newly elected Pope Melchiades with the old house of the Laterani family on the Coelian hill, which was to remain a papal palace for another thousand years; and next to it he ordered the building, once again at his own expense, of the first of Rome’s great Constantinian basilicas, St John Lateran, still today the cathedral church of the city. It is all the more surprising to find his coins for another twelve years associating him not with Christianity but with the then popular cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered S
un, and refusing to accept Christian baptism, which he was to continue to postpone until he was on his deathbed a quarter of a century later.
This same note of caution is evident in the Edict of Milan, which Constantine promulgated jointly with his fellow Augustus (and by now another brother-in-law)37 Licinius in 313, describing its purpose as that of
securing respect and reverence for the Deity; namely by the grant, both to the Christians and to all others, of the right freely to follow whatever form of worship might please them, to the intent that whatsoever Divinity dwells in heaven [my italics] might be favourable to us and to all those living under our authority.
The two Augusti might have spoken with one voice on religious toleration, but they agreed on little else, and another ten years of civil war were necessary before Constantine could finally eliminate his last rival. Not until 323 was he able to establish peace throughout the Empire, under his rule alone.
Constantine by now seems to have been a Christian in all but name, but at this point the Christian Church was split by the first great schism in its history. This was the work of a certain Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, who held that Jesus Christ was not co-eternal and of one substance with God the Father, but had been created by Him at a certain time as His instrument for the salvation of the world. Thus, although a perfect man, the Son must always be subordinate to the Father, his nature being human rather than divine. The ensuing dispute quickly became a cause célèbre, which Constantine resolved to settle. He did so by summoning the first universal Council of the Church, which was held between 20 May and 19 June 325 at Nicaea (the modern Iznik), with some 300 bishops taking part. The proceedings were opened by the Emperor himself, and it was he who proposed the insertion, into the draft statement of belief, of the key word homoousios–meaning consubstantial, ‘of one substance’–to describe the relation of the Son to the Father. Its inclusion was almost tantamount to a condemnation of Arianism, and such were the Emperor’s powers of persuasion that by the close of the conference only seventeen of the assembled bishops maintained their opposition–a number that the threat of exile and possible excommunication subsequently reduced to two.
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