Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  Thus the rounds of partying, pleasure-making and pursuing the arts continued. Nero was on the trip of a lifetime. He plundered many of Greece’s most famous works of art in a nakedly imperialistic fashion, and the subject Athenians emblazoned their emperor’s name in bronze above the entrance to their most treasured and sacred building, the Parthenon.39 In early AD 68, however, Nero was abruptly brought down to earth with a bump when a visitor arrived from Rome with some bad news.

  Although Helius had for some weeks been sending Nero messages that a rebellion was being organized, it took his arrival in person to convince the emperor to return urgently to Rome and face the crisis. In Nero’s absence, Gaius Julius Vindex, the Roman governor of a province in Gaul, had sounded out opinions of Nero among other commanders in the provinces. Word had got back to Helius in Rome, and now here he was, face to face with Nero, telling him that Vindex’s rebellion was serious. Nero dismissed the idea. Vindex, a Romanized Gaul, had no real aristocratic pedigree to mount a serious challenge to the emperor; and anyway, he had no army at his disposal. Nonetheless, Nero agreed to return to Rome ahead of schedule. It was a return that the Roman people would not quickly forget.

  Just as Nero had left Rome to conquer his rivals through art, so he now returned as though from war in a spectacular parody of the triumphal procession usually reserved for great generals. This was a triumph to match those awarded to Pompey for his conquest of the east, or to Caesar for his conquest of Gaul. In his lavish train, men carried the crowns that Nero had won, while banners of wood bore the name of the festival and the contest in which he had been victorious. As the herald announced that Nero had won 1808 crowns during his tour, his cries were reciprocated with shouts of ‘Hail Olympian victor! Hail Pythian victor!’ from the crowds who filled the streets. The finishing touch was Nero’s specially chosen vehicle – the triumphal chariot of Augustus, in which the first emperor had celebrated his many military victories.

  In all the excitement a theatre producer offered Nero one million sesterces if he would perform in public, not in the state festivals organized by the emperor, but in the producer’s private theatre. Nero agreed to appear, but refused the money on grounds of principle – although Tigellinus promptly took the producer aside and demanded the money anyway ‘as the price of not putting him to death’.40 However, behind the warm welcome for the emperor, Rome, half rebuilt and with the scaffolding around its reconstruction lying abandoned, showed signs of financial suffering. Worse was to come. Although the plebs welcomed Nero as a popular saviour, he would soon prove otherwise, for his first decision upon reaching impoverished Rome was to leave it for some more fun in the most Greek of Italian cities, Naples. This was the breaking point.

  Vindex now publicly declared his rebellion in Gaul. He minted local coins with the slogans ‘Liberty from Tyranny’ and ‘For the Salvation of the Whole Human Race’. It was clear his cause was not to promote Gallic nationalism and a secession from the Roman empire, but simply the removal of Nero. Of course, Nero had heard all this before. The critical development, however, and the key difference from previously was that Vindex had support on a massive scale: he was able to raise a local army of 100,000 Roman Gauls. Clearly, Vindex was tapping the deep well of hatred accumulated over the previous four years when Nero had raised taxes and plundered the wealth of the provincial élites. He had done so not as a thoughtful king making difficult decisions, but as a wilful, capricious tyrant more interested in his performing career. Now, in Gaul, he was paying the price. Yet when news of the rebellion was whispered to him, Nero blithely showed no concern; in fact, he said he was pleased because it would give him the opportunity provided by the laws of war to despoil Vindex’s province even further. Nero returned to watching the athletic competition at hand, stung less by the news of the rebellion than by an insult Vindex had levelled at him: that he was terrible lyre player.41 But a week later he would be genuinely rattled for the first time.

  The news that caused Nero to collapse in a heap and lie paralysed as though dead was that five other provincial commanders had joined Vindex’s campaign. Foremost among them were his old friend Otho, governor of Lusitania (modern-day Portugal), and Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of the Spanish provinces and figurehead of the rebellion. The elderly and arthritic Galba was an aristocrat from an ancient patrician family that had long moved in the most elevated circles of Roman society. Although he was not a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he stood for core, old-fashioned values and a connection with Rome’s traditions and history in a time of turmoil, decadence and amorality that was characteristic of Nero’s regime. Galba’s army proclaimed him ‘legate of the Senate and people of Rome’ on 2 April AD 68. The rebellion had finally found its leader.

  At long last Nero took action. He proposed a military expedition to tackle the rebellion head-on, made himself sole consul and, with the agreement of the Senate, which remained notionally loyal, declared Galba an enemy of the state. The emperor gave orders to organize a military line of defence along the river Po, deploying units from Illyricum, Germany and Britain, as well as a legion from Italy. Nero placed all these troops under Petronius Turpilianus, the senator who had helped uncover the Piso plot. Crucially, however, Nero did not take command of the forces himself.

  Perhaps as a result of this, a rumour went around Rome describing the following fantasy. Nero was preparing to go to Gaul unarmed and show the rebelling armies his tears in the hope that this would persuade them to recant. Another rumour had it that he hoped singing a victory ode would do the trick. Finally, to quell the crisis, the emperor had settled on an equally fantastic solution – a full-scale drama production. He would ride out with an army of mythical Amazons (actually prostitutes and actresses dressed up and equipped with bows, arrows and axes), and the vehicles accompanying the expedition would carry not provisions and supplies, but stage machinery.42 Although the Senate and Praetorian Guard had so far remained nominally loyal, now they waited, primed for the moment to jump. That moment came in May, when the crisis reached its climax in a series of damaging blows.

  First, the Roman governor of North Africa, Clodius Macer, joined the rebellion by shutting down the grain supply to Rome. The city was already suffering a shortage of food, and the corn supply was its lifeline. Macer was backed by his one standing Roman legion, an auxiliary force and an alternative provincial senate. They were motivated perhaps by Nero’s murder of six North African landowners, who between them owned half of the agricultural land.43 The prefect of Egypt, the other granary of the Roman empire, also wavered in his allegiance. Then news came that the army once loyal to Nero in Gaul, which had even fought Vindex’s recruits on his behalf, had now switched its allegiance to Galba. The final blow was the discovery that Turpilianus, the commander of the armies defending Italy from Galba, had now sided with him. When Nero heard this, while he was having his lunch, ‘he tore up the letters brought to him, overturned the table, and hurled to the ground two of his favourite goblets, which he called his “Homerics” as they were decorated with scenes from Homer’s poems’.44

  Tigellinus, now ill, had long realized that Nero was doomed. While in Greece he had lost control of the Praetorian Guard to his colleague Nymphidius Sabinus, and now, in secret, he secured a neat exit (as well as his safety) by ingratiating himself with Galba’s envoy in the city.45 The Senate waited for the Praetorian Guards to declare their position. Sabinus bribed them with money given in the name of Galba, and with that they abandoned their loyalty to the emperor. As with Nero’s coronation, so it was with his downfall: the Senate soon followed suit, this time declaring Nero an enemy of the state.

  After considering various options for escape, Nero put off his decision until the following day. In the early hours of 9 June, however, he woke up in his palace alone. He quickly realized that the Praetorians had indeed defected. Further investigation of the rooms and corridors showed that his friends and even the caretakers had gone. There remained only four loyal freedmen for company, among
them Sporus, Epaphroditus and Phaon. When Nero said that he wanted to hide somewhere, Phaon suggested his own villa 6 kilometres (4 miles) outside the city. The emperor, shoeless and dressed in a plain tunic covered by a dark cloak to avoid being detected by the search parties now looking for him, mounted his horse and set out with the others.

  At some point, Nero’s horse suddenly reared. It was shying away from the stench of a dead body abandoned on the road. ‘Nero’s face was exposed and he was recognized and saluted by a man who had served in the Praetorians.’46

  The last part of the journey was undertaken on foot. The emperor and his petty entourage reached Phaon’s villa via a path overgrown with thickets and brambles. A robe was laid on the ground so that Nero could protect his feet. The path eventually led to a back wall. While Nero waited for a hole to be made in it, he picked out the thorns from his torn cloak; then he climbed through the narrow passage. Once inside the villa, the freedmen pleaded with him to put himself beyond the reach of his enemies by killing himself. It was the opportunity for one last piece of stage management – his own death scene. Nero gave instructions about making a grave and the disposal of his body, all the while repeating the words, ‘What an artist dies with me’.47

  Despite news that the search party was getting closer and that he would be punished as an enemy of the state, Nero procrastinated further. He directed Sporus when and how to weep, and begged the others to set an example first. Finally, as the sounds of horsemen drew near, Nero, aided by Epaphroditus, drove a dagger through his throat. He was thirty-one years old. His dying wish for a funeral was granted, and his blotchy, full body was afterwards cremated. At the ancestral monument of his natural father’s family, the Domitii, Nero’s nurses and his former mistress Acte buried the remains of the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

  EPILOGUE

  Nero left no heir or successor, so control of the Roman empire was now up for grabs. Between the summer of AD 68 and December AD 69 Rome was shaken by a civil war in which contenders staked their claim to the empire. Hoisted on a tide of support from their armies, three provincial commanders – Galba, Otho and another old friend of Nero’s, Vitellius – became emperor in quick succession, only to be defeated by a stronger candidate a few months later. What is striking is that, despite the meltdown of effective government in the empire, there was no suggestion during this time of once again making Rome a republic. Now, as in 31 BC and the end of the great civil war, everyone seemed to agree that in exchange for peace and stability, power had to reside in one man. But what kind of man?

  Certainly not an aristocrat of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Few now existed, for Nero had killed most of them during the last bloody years of his regime. Indeed, the tide of opinion was turning away from the idea that the royal bloodline was the best measure of who should be emperor. While the hereditary principle would in part remain, the élite believed it should be secondary to a new basis on which to choose future emperors: merit. In his history of the civil war of AD 68–9, Tacitus touches on this significant shift. In choosing a successor, the short-lived emperor Galba wanted to cast the net wider than a single aristocratic family: ‘. . .my introduction of the principle of choice will represent a move towards liberty.’48 These were the words that the historian Tacitus, writing less than forty years later, put in Galba’s mouth. Whether or not Galba was really able to conceptualize the problem as clearly as this at the time is open to dispute. However, it is revealing that, even with hindsight, the historian was able to pinpoint the change in the tide’s direction.

  The move away from birth as the criterion for selection was also reflected in the reality of the civil war. Galba, Otho and Vitellius could all claim some high-born ancestry, and this would have pleased some conservative senators. However, what the civil war would show was that their opinion was increasingly irrelevant: it was not the senators who were putting forward candidates to be emperor, but the armies in the provinces. The deciding factor in who should be the next emperor was force of arms and success on the battlefield. The general who could command the greatest and widest support among the army would not only win the civil war, but would also be victorious in becoming emperor.

  The Senate and the Roman people would come up with a means of explicitly conferring the supreme power. Where Augustus and his descendants had disguised that power to varying degrees, it was now to be made public and explicit, as an inscription of the time reveals. The new emperor would be conferred ‘the right and power. . .to transact and do whatever things divine, human, public and private he deems to serve the advantage and overriding interest of the state’.49 This blunt statement perhaps made up for the prestige and authority that the new dynasty, which had risen by merit alone, lacked through ancestry. But there was a more important lesson to be learnt from Nero’s life: the successor dynasty to the Julio-Claudians would need to put that power to a different end; it would need to create a new image for the position of emperor.

  The new emperor of Rome might not use his power to become a gift- giving monarch or an aristocrat vaunting his generosity to his subjects and asserting his eminence above them and the institutions of the state. Rather, he might become an executive of the Roman people – a man who would restore to them what was theirs by right.50 In particular, after Nero’s extravagance, the new emperor needed to be an efficient administrator and organizer, a leader who could bring discipline to the armies after the civil war, and a statesman who could balance the books of Rome’s economy by raising money judiciously and spending it wisely. Part of his proving ground would be the fate of Nero’s hubristic folly – the Golden House.

  Galba lived in Nero’s palace only briefly; Otho spent money putting the finishing touches to it; and Vitellius and his wife ridiculed its grandiose decoration. Nero’s ultimate successor, however, had the place demolished, keeping just a small section of it. The father of a new dynasty ordered the palace lake to be drained and here inaugurated the construction of a new, far more public building; a monument not to a private king, but to the Roman people: the Colosseum. The story of who that new emperor was and how he came to power is entwined with the next great revolution in Roman history.

  IV

  REBELLION

  In the southeast corner of the Forum in Rome today stands a triumphal arch dedicated to Titus, the tenth Roman emperor. At each corner of the pedestal are Ionic columns with flowering Corinthian heads, and above the monument’s beautifully sculpted cornice is the full, weighty mass of its lintel. It is believed that the arch was once crowned with a glorious statue of Titus on a chariot pulled by elephants. Worn and majestic, the solemn stones that remain of the original arch suggest to passers-by all that is austere, noble and beautiful about the classical world. And yet on the shaded inside of the arch lies a very different story. The ancient panel reliefs that line the passageway through the arch depict in detail one of the most violent, brutal and offensive acts of atrocity in the history of the empire: the Roman sack of Jerusalem in the summer of AD 70.

  The panels show Roman soldiers triumphantly carrying booty stolen from the most important site of the Jewish faith, the Temple of Jerusalem. In their hands are some of the most sacred Jewish treasures: the golden menorah (seven-branched candelabrum), silver trumpets and the table for the shewbread. These possessions were so holy that for centuries only priests were allowed to lay eyes on them. And yet depicted here, on the Arch of Titus, the hallowed objects are not only being stolen and defiled by Gentiles, but their theft is celebrated as the greatest triumph of Titus’s career. Just as the Arch of Titus has stood as a commemoration of that great Roman triumph throughout the centuries to this day, it also testifies to that cruel act of imperialism.

  The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem was the climax to one of the most dramatic turning points in the history of Rome. The Jewish revolt of AD 66–70 in the Roman province of Judaea involved the single greatest military campaign against a provincial people in the history of the Roman empire. In AD 66 R
ome controlled a territory that stretched from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea, and from Britain to the Sahara. Judaea had fallen under Roman control in 63 BC. And yet, as the imperial government of Rome was to find out in the rebellion of the Jews, the greatest challenge they faced was not conquering and creating their foreign provinces, but administering them. For the Romans, as for many imperial powers through the ages, winning the peace was a much more complex affair than winning the war.

  The rebellion of the Jews demonstrated the greatest problems of imperialism: the place, if any, of nationalism within the empire; the coexistence of two religions – emperor worship (a key part of Roman paganism) and Judaism; and, above all, the issue of money – who paid taxes to whom, who profited from the empire and who didn’t. Indeed, it was this last question of who really benefited from the celebrated pax Romana (Roman Peace), from the protection of being a province within the Roman empire, that would ultimately spark the revolt. The rebellion of Judaea raised all these questions in the most graphic and vivid way for one simple reason: between AD 66 and 70 they led to a war that became a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of people. The hard fact of Roman imperialism was that, if challenged and if necessary, the emperor was prepared to unleash a monster. To put down the revolt, the empire released the ferocity and firepower of almost a quarter of the entire Roman army.

  At the heart of the story, however, lie highly personal motivations and actions, and an extraordinary reversal of fortune. For the man appointed to command Roman forces in Judaea would seize the opportunity of the war to justify a bid for absolute power. His reward for crushing the Jewish rebels would be to rise from obscurity and disgrace to become emperor – at least that’s how he presented it. With his claim secured, he would found an entirely new dynasty and lay the foundations for Rome’s glorious golden age of peace. His name was Vespasian. However, success in the war against the Jews and the bid to win power in Rome was not achieved alone. For this Vespasian would come to depend on his son Titus, the man who would succeed him first as commander in Judaea and later as emperor. The legacy of father and son survives to this day, not only in the triumphant Arch of Titus, but also in one of the greatest symbols of Roman power – the Colosseum.