Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  Caesar ordered his men to storm the fortifications of the enemy camp. The Pompeian cohorts guarding it either joined the flight or surrendered. Once inside Pompey’s camp, Caesar’s soldiers saw the evidence of a final hubris committed by the senatorial faction. A victory banquet had already been beautifully laid out on silver platters in arrogant expectation of a victory celebration. Every tent was decorated with wreaths of myrtle, the dining couches were strewn with flowers, and drinking vessels were filled to the brim with wine.76 But now it was not the aristocratic faction, the fathers and sons of the wealthy Roman élite who sat down to feast. That privilege now fell to Caesar and his men.

  EPILOGUE

  The next day 24,000 of Pompey’s army surrendered to Caesar, throwing themselves on the ground, weeping and begging for their lives to be spared. Of the estimated 15,000 dead, 6000 were Roman citizens. To the enemy Romans who survived, Caesar showed clemency once again in a first step to heal the sick republic. He also pardoned the noblemen who had fought against him.77 Many of them, however, had fled in an effort to reorganize and retrench. Pompey reunited with his wife and set sail from Cyprus, seeking refuge in Egypt. Perhaps he could raise a new army there and fight Caesar another day? Caesar followed him in pursuit. As Pompey stepped ashore at Alexandria, however, he was assassinated. An influential eunuch in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh had decided that the best way to make a friend of Caesar was to murder his adversary. Nothing could have been further from the truth. As Caesar looked on the decapitated head of his old ally and friend and then at his signet ring, which depicted a lion holding a sword, he burst into tears. This was no honourable, dignified way for a great Roman to die.78

  Although the battle of Pharsalus had decided the civil war in Caesar’s favour, it would take further campaigns in North Africa and Spain to mop up the pockets of senatorial resistance. On his return to Rome in 46 BC, Caesar celebrated four lavish triumphs; his veterans were given a lifetime’s salary, and there was a gift of money for every Roman citizen. Between 49 and 44 BC Julius Caesar was voted four consulships and four dictatorships. With the power that these offices granted him, he honoured his pledges to reform the republic and restore the liberty of the people. Legislation, ranging from the suspension of rent for a year to the settlement of veterans and the urban poor in Italy and in colonies abroad, was enacted, but it was by no means the revolutionary, radical overhaul that the conservatives feared. Indeed, Caesar could be equally repressive. In a bid to curb the power of the mob in the future, for example, he put a stop to the practice of people gathering in clubs and colleges unless they had a licence.

  The dictator also increased the number of senators and knights filling those ranks with new men from ordinary families. As it was Caesar who had made their social rise possible, these men willingly heaped more and more honours on him. In January 44 BC he ostentatiously rejected the title and crown of a king, yet a religious cult and statues suggest that he accepted deification. When, in February, he agreed to the office of dictator in perpetuity, it was hard to escape the reality that Caesar now ruled as an autocrat, as Rome’s first emperor. It seemed that rather than reforming the republic by building a relationship with the new senatorial élite, and governing with them towards genuine reform of the republic, Caesar ultimately cared more about his patrician dignity and the honours accorded it than the liberty of the people.

  The end of the civil war, therefore, did not mean the end of the debate about liberty. Indeed, Caesar’s perpetual dictatorship fanned its flames once more. In mid-March 44 BC, Mark Antony suddenly found himself having a long conversation with a senator outside the Senate House built by Pompey. A strong, physically imposing man, he did not realize that he was being deliberately detained. Inside a group of senators made a pretence of petitioning against Caesar. They approached him and soon they were hemming him in. Then, one of the men broke cover, flashed the blade of his dagger and plunged it into the dictator. The others piled in, frenetically pulling at their togas to release the weapons hidden in their folds. They stabbed their political enemy twenty-three times. Brutus, who was a close family friend of Caesar but who had fought on the side of Pompey at Pharsalus, delivered one of the blows. Afterwards he left the Senate House in the company of some of the conspirators. Their bloody knives still in their hands, they marched to the Capitoline Hill and called out to the people. ‘Liberty,’ they cried, had been ‘restored’.79

  The lifeless, bleeding body of Caesar now lay alone in the Senate House, the very building that his adversary had paid for and bequeathed to Rome. Indeed, the spot where he had fallen was at the foot of a statue of Pompey. While it might be thought that with this murder Pompey had got his revenge, the truth was that the republic was dead. Although Brutus and all the other patrician senators who wanted to end the ‘tyranny’ of Caesar and bring back the old idealized republic did not yet know it, Caesar had correctly seen the future. Popular elections and votes in the assemblies of Rome were no way to successfully govern a vast Roman empire. That could only be done by a single head, one ruler – an emperor.

  Peacefully winning over both the aristocratic élite and the Roman people to that view, and persuading them to accept that liberty was finished for all of them, was a gargantuan task that required a clever political vision and a clinical, glacial ruthlessness. It was a happy coincidence, then, that the task fell to Augustus. This man’s genius for politics would perhaps surpass that of all Romans who came before and after him. So too, however, would his capacity for cruelty, his assiduous ability to do whatever it took to seal power.

  Augustus

  In the year 17 BC, between 31 May and 3 June, the city of Rome witnessed the greatest show on earth. The Games of the Ages was a festival the likes of which no Roman had ever seen before, nor would ever see again. The buzz surrounding them had been building for weeks. Heralds in ancient, traditional dress had taken to the streets of Rome and had announced in advance the extraordinary scale of events to come: three days of visually spectacular sacrifices at sanctuaries and cult places around the city, followed by seven days of chariot races, tragedies and comedies in Latin and Greek, plus stunning exhibitions of trick riders, animal hunting and mock battles. A special song had been composed for the occasion, and it was to be sung on the last day by two choruses – one of twenty-seven boys and one of twenty-seven girls – all dressed in white. The anticipated mood was of celebration, euphoria and unbounded optimism. Rome, they said, was at peace, prospering and enjoying a new golden age. But the preparations for the games hinted at a more serious purpose at work.

  On the day before festivities began the priests went to the top of the Aventine, one of the seven hills of Rome, and received from citizens there the first fruits of the year. These they would distribute to the thousands of Romans attending the festival. But the fruits were not the only handout. They would also dole out sulphur, tar and torches. These were to be burnt by every citizen in a private religious ritual so that every Roman citizen might cleanse himself before the celebrations got under way. The carefully contrived publicity stunt caught on. Behind the public relations drive, however, was a powerful political idea. The real theme of the festival, indicated these preliminary activities, was systematic regeneration, mass renewal, and the purification of the whole Roman state.

  The stage manager, host and master of ceremonies was Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. The theme of expiation and regeneration was for him the perfect message, the apposite note to strike. For these games would mark a watershed in Roman history. This was the moment at which Romans not only celebrated a new regime of peace and stability, but healed themselves from what had gone before: at least two decades of brutal civil war. From the moment in 49 BC that Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon until 31 BC Rome had been devastated by an apocalyptic period of social and political meltdown, a time in which the vast expanse of the Roman empire had seen battlefield after battlefield blackened with blood. It was blood spilt by Romans, not at the expense of their barb
arian enemies, but from the veins of their very own Roman friends, cousins, brothers and fathers.

  Beyond the aim of healing, however, Augustus ensured that the festival delivered a second, highly sophisticated political message. The key to it lay in the theme of history. For the Games of the Ages were celebrated by Romans every 110 years. They connected the present glorious moment with the very earliest period of the Roman republic. On the one hand, their celebration inspired a belief in Roman citizens that the republic had been ‘restored’, that there existed a harmonious continuity between Rome’s cherished ancient history and the present golden age of Augustus. On the other hand, buried deep in this message, was a quite different reality. The central, most prominent part played at the games was that played by Augustus. It was he who gave the festival to the Roman people. It was he who paid for it. It was he, above all, who at night and before a mass audience took the central role when he sacrificed a pregnant sow to Mother Earth. This starring performance communicated to the Roman people – through their emotions, through their hearts – a completely new political reality. The games were at once traditional and a highly inventive, contemporary take on tradition.

  For the truth was that Augustus had not restored the republic, but had achieved just the opposite. He was in the process of ending the political freedoms of the republic. He was rebuilding the Roman state around himself and his power. He was, with subtlety and deft political skill, forging a new age – the age of the Roman emperors. The Games of the Ages in 17 BC were just one example of an extraordinary sleight of hand. They celebrated the arrival of the greatest revolution in all Roman history: Augustus’s transformation of the Roman republic into an autocracy – rule by one man.

  To achieve this feat he used a whole raft of means, sometimes force, sometimes law. His preferred instrument, however, was persuasion. He deployed it to such effect that the Roman people and the élite of Roman senators and knights would give up their cherished freedoms willingly and hand over power to a single head. It was a brilliant political manoeuvre, the greatest political trick ever to be pulled off in Roman history.

  ACTIUM

  The anaesthetic which dulled Augustus’s surreptitious surgery of the Roman state was peace. In bringing about this peace after so many years of war, Augustus had played a key role too. His part in concluding the civil war was far more gruesome than the one he would later like to play as emperor. Nonetheless it was a role he inhabited with commitment and will power from the very start.

  When Augustus heard the news of Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 BC, he was known as plain old Gaius Octavius. He was nineteen years old and cut a surprising figure for someone who would eventually win the twenty-year-long civil war. His small, weak frame was prone to illness, his blond hair was unkempt, and his teeth were full of gaps.1 He was the son of an undistinguished ‘new man’, but that relatively humble connection to the senatorial élite was dramatically outshone by another family tie. Through his mother Atia, Octavian (as we call him) was the great-nephew of Julius Caesar. More importantly, he was also Caesar’s adopted son and heir. Claiming revenge for his adoptive father’s assassination, Octavian reignited the civil war in 43 BC. In reality he was making a bid for power.

  His first move was bold and calculated. He started calling himself ‘Caesar’. In the eyes of the people, the powerful, magnetic brand of Caesar’s name had been confirmed by a comet which was sighted just before sunset for seven consecutive days in 44 BC.2 To most it was proof that Octavian’s adopted father was indeed divine. After an initial period of rivalry, Octavian eventually joined forces with the dead dictator’s political ‘heir’, Mark Antony, and together they went to war with Caesar’s assassins. As a soldier Octavian was dwarfed by the giant, heroic figure of his new ally. A story did the rounds that at one battle of the civil war Octavian disappeared for two days and cowered in a marsh. He even stripped off his armour and discarded his horse, perhaps to avoid detection. He did return to his army, but long after the action had been decided.3 Behind the young man’s unswaggering manner, however, there was a vicious sting. The puny constitution of Caesar’s young heir belied the ruthlessness of his mind and the cold-blooded ease with which he took violent measures.

  During the renewed civil war, for example, Octavian (along with Mark Antony) had overseen a notorious wholesale cull of their enemies in the political élite. Some three hundred conservative senators and 2000 knights were named on a proscription list, hunted down and executed.4 That is just one grim statistic provided by the ancient sources; one can only imagine the severity of punishment meted out to their other enemies. By 42 BC Octavian and Mark Anthony finally defeated the assassins of Caesar at the battle of Philippi. Brutus’s severed head was sent to Rome and thrown at the foot of Caesar’s statue. With their opponents crushed, the two men had become masters of Rome and her empire. It was only a matter of time, however, before the victorious allies turned rivals again and fought each other for sole control of the Roman world.

  Today Actium is located on the tree-lined coast of northwestern Greece, north of the island of Leukada. Over 2000 years ago, on 2 September 31 BC, those silent, green hills bore witness to one of the most pivotal moments in Roman history. This was the battle of Actium. It pitted the navy of Octavian against a combined fleet of Mark Antony and his ally Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. She was now both Mark Antony’s lover and his wealthy benefactor. Since the time of her liaison with Caesar, she had realised that the future prosperity of her country depended on a favourable alliance with Rome. After Caesar’s death, she had tied her colours to Mark Antony’s mast. Now she was about to find out if her gamble would pay off. For the result of this one battle would not only bring the long civil war to a conclusive end. Actium would also decide the destiny of the Roman empire.

  The scale of the encounter was indeed huge: 230 of Mark Antony’s ships were blockaded in an expansive bay by an even greater fleet under the command of Octavian’s admiral Agrippa. The ninety largest of Mark Anthony’s ships were equipped with a state-of-the-art weapon: a pure bronze ram weighing 1.5 tonnes and mounted on the prow. In ancient Rome naval conflicts were won or lost by driving these warheads into enemy ships and sinking them. In spite of this technological advantage, Mark Antony’s force was weakened by malaria and desertions: the political tide of support in Rome was turning away from him in favour of Octavian, and Mark Antony’s soldiers knew it. Octavian’s military steel had improved considerably since his first taste of battle. He was also the greater tactician. After patiently reeling the enemy fleet into action, he now took clinical advantage of its weaknesses.

  Octavian and Agrippa first sent in volleys of catapult balls that had been set on fire. Then they surrounded the bronze-prowed ships of Antony and Cleopatra, trapped them with grappling hooks and used their superior numbers of soldiers to dash on board and overpower the enemy force. The battle itself was fast becoming a rather anticlimactic, one-sided engagement. Indeed, Mark Antony’s battle plan was perhaps nothing more ambitious than to break through Octavian’s blockade. He really wanted to escape to Egypt to create a stronger position from which to win the war. Once Cleopatra had successfully peeled away with a key portion of the fleet, however, the break-up of his allied fleet single-handedly took the teeth out of Mark Antony’s naval charge and brought about its complete collapse. There was no epic struggle, only a deflated, easy victory.

  A Roman of the time would not have known this from the hype with which Octavian before and afterwards infused the ‘titanic’ encounter. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem of the Augustan age, Cleopatra’s escape was famously cast as a panic-stricken flight, typical of a weak foreigner. But that was just one element in the grandiloquent war of words. The battle of Actium was billed as nothing less than a fight between western and eastern values, between Octavian’s vigorous, pious Romanness and the immoral debauchery of Antony and Cleopatra’s union. It asked Romans to answer one simple question: did they want the vast empire to be saved by a traditi
onal, steadfast Roman military hero, or to become the plaything of an emasculated, oriental king enslaved to a depraved exotic queen? It was presented, in short, as a worldwide clash of civilizations. By winning it, Octavian won something even more important than the military victory. He won the victor’s privilege of explaining the meaning of the war’s outcome.

  THE SPOILS OF WAR

  The rich seam of political capital that Octavian drew from his victory was mined immediately. He founded a new Roman city near the scene of battle and called it Nicopolis, the ‘City of Victory’. At his old campsite he also ordered the construction of a massive victory monument, from the remains of which archaeologists have recently produced new information. Beautifully carved scenes depict the battle and also the triumphal procession in Rome with which Octavian celebrated his victory in 29 BC. Part of the monument was a 6-metre (20-foot) high wall which contained visually stunning ‘souvenirs’. Thirty-six of Mark Antony’s bronze prows were set in concrete and fastened on to the limestone blocks that made up the wall. The ‘beaks’ of the enemy’s ships were thus set into the landscape on a hill overlooking the site of the victory. It must have been a spectacular display befitting a spectacular triumph – one never to be forgotten. For although the limp victory did not live up to Octavian’s propaganda, its consequences certainly did.