Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  The Romans had sealed their victory. What was utterly striking about the aftermath of the ruthless sack of Carthage, however, was the reaction of Aemilianus. The moment was not cause for thoughtless, impulsive celebration but pessimism, doubt, even guilt. Polybius, an eyewitness to the events, recorded it. Aemilianus took him into his confidence, climbed to a point where he could survey the spectacular devastation below and burst into tears. He even quoted some lines from the Iliad, the ancient Greek poem of Homer:

  A day will come in which our mighty Troy,

  And Priam and the people over whom

  Spear-bearing Priam rules, shall perish all.21

  When Polybius asked him what he meant, Aemilianus replied that one day Rome would meet the same fate as Troy and its king, Priam. The ancient city of Carthage, after all, had been the centre of an empire that had lasted seven hundred years. It had ‘ruled over so many lands, islands and seas, and was once as rich in arms and fleets, elephants and money as the mightiest empires’.22 Now, however, it lay in ruins. It is astonishing that a Roman general should respond so differently from his all-conquering ancestors. He reflected not on the glory of Rome, not on the success of the just and free republic but on its future and inevitable demise. The echo of Homer’s poem was poignant for another reason. The sack of Troy was the moment that had provoked the flight of the Trojan Aeneas. That flight had resulted in the legendary foundation of Rome. The ‘Trojan’ Romans, said Aemilianus, would go the same way not just as the Carthaginians but as their distant ancestors too.

  Over the next few days, Aemilianus reserved much of the city’s gold, silver and sacred objects for the Roman state. He made sure too that none of his friends and associates participated in excessive looting so that neither he nor they could be accused by their political rivals in Rome of privately profiting from the war. Such behaviour would be tantamount to dishonour, the great mistake of putting one’s own interests above those of the republic. Only after the richest slice of the plunder had been saved for Rome, did Aemilianus turn over the remainder of the city to the grasping hands of the Roman soldiers.

  Ten commissioners soon arrived from Rome with one final request for the great conqueror. Nothing of Carthage, they said, should remain. So, after the city was burnt for ten days and demolished stone by stone, brick by brick, the Roman army concluded the most comprehensive, painstaking eradication of a city and its culture in all of ancient history. Archaeological evidence of the burning and demolition can be seen to this day. From a city of approximately a million inhabitants, the surviving 50,000 Carthaginians were sold into slavery. The towns that had supported the city were likewise destroyed, while those that had sided with Rome were rewarded. The new Roman province of North Africa was now established. It was, however, becoming harder to see where were those ancestral virtues of piety, justice and honour and what role, if any, they played.

  In the same year as Carthage was razed to the ground, the rich city of Corinth in Greece was also methodically sacked by the Romans. It was punishment once again for challenging their power in the region. The two events took place within months of each other and for this reason the year 146 BC would prove a major watershed in Roman history. Across the breadth of the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to Greece’s border with Asia Minor, Rome was now the supreme master. It could do anything it wanted to whomever it chose and it could do so without fear of reprisal. It did not even have to keep its word. In the war with Carthage, the ancient virtue of fides had been violated and yet, in spite of this, Rome was still victorious. The Roman gods still seemed to smile with favour and grant success.

  Before leaving North Africa, Aemilianus attended to one last duty. Tiberius had been popular and held in affection by the soldiers. Now the young man’s success in the war was capped when Aemilianus awarded his cousin the Mural Crown for his courage in being the first over the walls of Carthage.23 In years to come, however, the consequences of destroying Carthage would haunt those who had carried it out, both the doubting general and the seventeen-year-old, decorated soldier. Indeed, with time, the cost of this Roman atrocity would tear the cousins apart.

  CRISIS IN ROME

  When Tiberius returned to Rome he stepped into glory. Wearing his golden Mural Crown, the young idealist walked through the main streets of the city as one small part of a grand procession. All the temples were open and filled with garlands and incense. Sunlit rose petals streamed down from the rooftops, and the attendants of officials did their best to control the tide of the crowds. For pouring into the streets, cheering, laughing and embracing each other, was the multitude of the Roman people.24 All this excitement and celebration was in honour of one magnificent event: Aemilianus’s triumph, the illustrious prize awarded by the Senate to honour the general’s victory in Carthage.

  Trumpeters led the way, sounding out the same martial music with which they had previously roused the soldiers to war. Oxen, their horns gilded and bearing garlands, were present too. Some soldiers, in their finest armour, held aloft models, plans and pictures depicting the city they had conquered and critical scenes from the war. Behind them others carried a forest of placards inscribed with the names of foreign places now subdued. After the parade of captive Carthaginians, the spoils of their city and the piles of their armour, came Aemilianus on his chariot. He wore a purple toga into which silver stars had been woven, and his face was daubed with red paint. Thus attired, he was the personification of Jupiter, the greatest of the gods who protected Rome. However, there was no question about the conqueror’s quasi-divinity. The state slave, standing behind him, may have held a heavy gold-leaf crown over Aemilianus’s head, but every time the crowd cheered, he murmured to the general: ‘Remember you are only a man.’

  The procession ended with a ceremony at the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the place from where Aemilianus had set out the year before. The chief prisoners from Carthage were dragged to the prison at the foot of the hill and executed. Once their deaths were confirmed, Aemilianus supervised the sacrifice. He climbed the temple steps, poured wine over an ox’s brow, sprinkled its back with salted flour, then traced a knife slowly along its spine. Then, as a signal to the attending slaves to slit the animal’s throat, he pulled a loose fold of his toga over his head in the manner of a priest, and the beast was duly killed. The sacrifice was perhaps a way of giving thanks to Jupiter for Aemilianus’s success in Africa, something he had promised to do before he left Rome. That promise now fulfilled, the triumphal procession came to a close with celebratory banquets and feasting.

  With her heroic son Tiberius now safely back in Rome, Cornelia would have encouraged him to accompany her to the dinner parties and social gatherings hosted by the élite. To help his career progress, the young man now needed to network voraciously, gain more military experience in the company of great generals like his cousin Aemilianus, and build on the prestige of the Mural Crown he had won at Carthage. A political ‘career’ for a young aristocrat in the Roman republic of the second century BC was not in any sense like a modern career. There was no salary for holding office. There was no nine-to-five routine or basic five-day week. All prospect of success in a Roman aristocrat’s political life depended on one narrow window of opportunity: winning an election for an annual public office.

  Once successful in discharging the duties of that office, the holder found that rewards flowed freely – fame, glory, prestige and the possibility of great wealth. As a result, the competition was intense, and increased even further as the offices higher up the chain of magistracies became fewer and thus harder to obtain. Aemilianus had reached the top. Now it was the turn of Tiberius. Indeed, Cornelia was so famous for reproaching both her sons that she was still referred to as the mother-in-law of ‘Scipio Aemilianus’ rather than as the mother of ‘the Gracchi’.25 However, while his networking and nascent political career may have been on his mother’s mind, there was one debate in Roman high society that would perhaps have interested the young Tib
erius a great deal more. It centred around the wealth that everyone had just witnessed flowing into Rome.

  The booty from the cities of Carthage and Corinth, the tribute from the new provinces of Sicily and Sardinia, and the income from the mines of Spain brought a massive injection of money into the city, so Rome was flourishing. The city became a hive of industry and expenditure: new docks and markets were constructed, the water supply was doubled, and large building projects sprang up. And yet, despite Rome’s new-found prosperity, not all sections of the population shared in its wealth. The city that Tiberius found on his return to Rome reflected the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

  Rome during this period was not yet the glorious, marbled city of the high empire, of organized public spaces and cool colonnades. It was a city of extremes and contradictions. As soon as Tiberius strayed from the Forum, temples and public assembly areas, leaving behind the main thoroughfares of the Via Sacra and Nova Via, he could easily have got lost in the warren of chaotic, claustrophobic streets. Alleys were so narrow that houses with balconies and upper floors almost touched; from their windows people would throw out waste and sewage. In very poor districts, such as the Esquiline, houses built from cob and wattle were so rickety that they often stood up only by leaning against each other for support. As a result, they regularly collapsed or burnt down when fire spread rapidly from building to building. The sight of a charred house standing next to a temple beautifully restored by a wealthy aristocrat was nothing out of the ordinary.

  In spite of their poor quality, the houses were divided into apartments so that tenants could crowd into attics, basements and even shacks on flat roofs. Romans advertised rental property by painting ‘For Rent’ on the outside of the building, and the rents they charged were increasingly exorbitant. Those who could not afford to pay them set up lodgings in the nooks and crannies of public buildings, under stairs or even in large tombs. As there were no kitchens in the cheap tenement housing, the activity of Rome’s poor citizens and slaves spread out to the streets, and the numerous bars and restaurants heaved with people. And all this activity took place against a background of mayhem and constant noise from carts, wagons, litters and horses. Rome at the end of the second century BC really was a city that never slept.

  Into the pulsing metropolis the majority of Rome’s population, which was approaching one million, was crammed. The aristocratic élite, however, in whose circles Tiberius moved, had a very different experience of the city. While the air was suffocating down in the crowded, messy streets, up on the Palatine Hill it was fresh and clean. It was to these exclusive heights that the wealthy and aspirational, borne aloft in litters, retreated to their luxurious villas and colonnaded gardens. The style of these new residences was strikingly innovative. Empire-building had not only made the élite lots of money, but it had opened their eyes to foreign influences. Greek style had the greatest cachet, as Roman aristocrats admired Greece’s ancient, sophisticated and aesthetic civilization.

  Befitting Rome’s position at the heart of the new empire, the city now became the centre through which Greek art and influence circulated and gained value. The conquering aristocrats beautified not just the city, but also their homes with Greek-influenced monuments, temples and porticoes. Keeping up with the Fabii or the Claudii or any of the aristocratic families was a trick accomplished only by the conspicuous display of an exotic mural of Hellenistic inspiration, or a chic marble statue from Greece. Tiberius’s mother caused quite a sensation when she inherited from her uncle Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedon, Rome’s largest library of Greek manuscripts.

  Such conspicuous displays of prosperity and success served a dangerous purpose. They were not only a manifestation of a nobleman’s prestige and political standing. They were a spur, an incitement to others too. When, for example, an aristocrat such as Aemilianus returned from conquest abroad, he might put his new wealth towards a grand monument, a luxurious work of art, or use it to influence his political associates and woo the Roman people. A new benchmark was set. Now other aristocrats had to play catch-up or else lose status. The only way for them to achieve that was to run in elections and win further office. A praetorship might win the successful candidate a chance to profit personally from administering a province. Winning a consulship, of course, was to hit the jackpot. It provided the chance to command the republic’s armies and clean up by conquest. Only by holding such an office did an aristocrat stand a chance of matching his rival’s success; only in this way could he hope to put his family’s status on a par with theirs. Where the families of the Cornelii Scipiones, the Aemilii Paulli or the Sempronii Gracchi blazed a trail, their aristocratic rivals had to follow.26 By the 140s BC, however, the pattern of self-serving competition was, so it was said, corrupting the republic.

  For the more the élite vied with each other for office and prestige, the blinder they became to the growing poverty in Rome. The gap between rich and poor grew wider and wider as the spoils of the empire were unevenly divided. Some feared that the élite would become ever more selfish and grasping, and that the mob of Rome would run riot, frustrated by their own grievances and offended by the greed of the rich.27 In other words, the great and noble ‘free’ republic was on the verge of a precipice. It was about to tear itself apart. How had it come to this?

  The single inflammatory issue on which the rich and poor were growing increasingly divided was land. It was a source of tension closely connected to the problem of military service. In the second century BC the Roman army was not, as modern armies have become, a professional standing army paid for by the state. It was a temporary militia made up of Roman citizens and allies from Italian communities throughout the peninsula. Participation in the army was the key obligation of being a Roman citizen, and as Rome conquered Italy, it imposed this obligation on those outside the city too. To qualify for service in the army, a citizen had to be able to meet a minimum property requirement. The logic behind this qualification was that ownership of property gave you a stake in the republic, which, as a free-born citizen, it was your duty to protect through service in the army. As a result, the army was made up principally of smallholding farmers.

  While Rome fought short, local campaigns in Italy, the system of citizen-soldiers worked well because it allowed the men to return to their farms at regular intervals. However, with the conquest of the Mediterranean, the Roman armies found themselves serving for long periods of time in Spain, Africa or the east. Commanders of the armies also made the problem worse by continually choosing the most experienced soldiers. As a result, these soldiers were kept in the army year after year. Some eventually returned to their land, but many others never did. Inevitably, the farms suffered: they fell into disuse and neglect, and the family members still living on them faced accumulating debt and starvation. To alleviate the pressure, small landowners or their families were forced to sell or abandon their holdings.

  The smallholders’ loss became the aristocrats’ gain. In the Roman republic the safest investment for capital was land. As the élite grew rich from the spoils of conquests and the subsidiary businesses of empire-building (such as state contracts for roads, sewers, buildings and aqueducts, arms manufacture, provisioning of the army and navy, the leasing of mines and quarries), they used their wealth to take advantage of the desperate smallholders and acquire their land ‘partly by purchase, partly by persuasion and partly by force, cultivating wide estates instead of single farms’.28 Exacerbating the problem was another hard fact of empire-building: it made financial sense for the élite to employ gangs of slaves imported from all corners of the Mediterranean as herdsmen and fieldworkers. As a result, even the possibility of work as hired hands on the large estates was closed to free-born smallholders.

  Deracinated and dispossessed, some peasants survived on small, marginal plots of land, eking out an existence from what they could produce and from seasonal work, such as harvesting. Others, however, drawn by the prospect of employment in an arms
manufactory, in construction or in shipbuilding, increasingly went to where they believed the streets were paved with gold: Rome. They were to be rapidly disappointed. The industries were not big enough to absorb the large influx of peasants, while other potential avenues of employment were off limits too: the expert work of the potter, the textile worker and the artisan was better accomplished by the slaves who came from the skilled, sophisticated societies of the east, and who could provide Rome cheaply with desirable and fashionable goods for the consumer market. For these reasons the unemployed mob of Rome began to swell. The real trouble, as Tiberius would quickly find out during his time back in Rome, was that the aristocratic élite were utterly divided on how to resolve the growing crisis.

  Take Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, a cousin of both Aemilianus and Tiberius. Waspish, arrogant and a highly practised politician, he was in his fifties and a leading senator of the day. As one of the Roman élite’s largest landowners, he was interested in maintaining the status quo. His view was clear. Material benefits flowed through to the lower orders just as they had always done: through the goodwill and generous patronage of the élite. The traditional system worked perfectly well.29 Aristocratic patrons, he argued, provided the lower orders with large gifts of money for public buildings, food schemes and entertainment, such as gladiatorial games and chariot races. What more could they possibly want?

  Others took quite the opposite stance. What was required to resolve the problem, they said, was not the laissez-faire attitude of the conservatives in the Senate. The remedy was active reform and new laws. One advocate of this approach was the senator Appius Claudius Pulcher. He was a passionate, philosophical and ambitious elder statesman, as well as a descendant of one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. The republic, he said, depended upon the concord between the orders, between the Senate and the people. The crisis over land was destroying that concord, and action was now urgently needed. In 140 BC the two factions came to blows. A senator called Gaius Laelius was appointed consul for that year, and in this capacity he put forward a proposal for land reform in an attempt to redress the grievances of the increasing number of landless peasants. When he took it before the Senate, however, the bill was met with such outrage by the majority whose interests were threatened that Laelius abandoned it. For this decision he was rewarded with the name Laelius the Wise.