Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  The rebellion of the Jews had been crushed. The insurgents who had fought on in the inner court now burst through the ring of assault surrounding them, and fled into the upper city. The killing squads of Roman soldiers clambered awkwardly over the layer of dead bodies covering the floor of the outer court and gave chase in a blind bid to hunt them down. John and Simon, however, managed to escape. As a mark of Roman supremacy, pagan standards were brought into the Temple complex and erected opposite the east gate. Sacrifices were offered to the emperor and a single cry hailed the victor, Titus. As the city blazed, raucous shouts of ‘Commander! Commander!’ rose up. Each soldier was so laden with loot that when they later sold their gold for cash, they flooded the market and the value of gold in Syria was halved.41

  Inside the upper city John, Simon and the Jewish survivors were themselves trapped by the Roman circumvallation. Unable to escape from Jerusalem, they had no option but to ask Titus to talks. Many of their followers, their spirits at last broken, hoped for a pardon. The hardline leaders, however, wanted to leave the city to the Romans and live peacefully in the desert with their fellow survivors. The Roman general was furious. The enemy had been defeated, yet here they were brazenly asking for terms as if they were victors. Taking his stand on a wall that linked the Temple with the upper city, Titus kept his composure as he spoke to John and Simon. He berated the Jews for their ingratitude to Rome, to the power that ruled Judaea.

  You were incited against the Romans by Roman kindness. First we gave you the land to occupy and set over you kings of your own race; then we upheld the laws of your fathers, and allowed you complete control of your internal and external affairs; above all, we permitted you to raise taxes for God and to collect offerings, and we neither discouraged nor interfered with those who brought them – so that you could grow richer to our detriment and prepare at our expense to make war on us! Then, enjoying such advantages, you flung your abundance at the heads of those who furnished it, and like beasts you bit the hand that fed you! . . .[When my father came into the country] he ravaged Galilee and the outlying districts, giving you time to come to your senses. But you took generosity for weakness, and our gentleness only served to increase your audacity. . . Most unwillingly I brought engines to bear on your walls. My soldiers, ever thirsting for your blood, I held in leash. After every victory, as if it was a defeat, I appealed to you for an armistice. . . After all that, you disgusting people, do you now invite me to a conference?42

  The Jews had broken the pax Romana. Nonetheless, Titus made a final offer: if the surviving rebels now surrendered, they would at least be spared their lives. When John and Simon defiantly reasserted their wishes, Titus gave the rest of the city over to his soldiers. The command was to sack, burn and raze.

  EPILOGUE

  Over the next few days, the principal buildings of Jerusalem, including the Council Chamber, were all destroyed, the remaining treasures were handed over, and the survivors of the Roman terror were rounded up in a part of the Temple complex known as the Court of the Women. The old and sick were killed, and thousands of insurgents were executed, taking the total of those killed in the siege to 1,100,000, according to Josephus. The rest, numbering 97,000, were sold into slavery. The young were sent to hard labour in Egypt, or to become fodder for the gladiators and beasts of Roman arenas throughout the empire. The tallest and most handsome of the rebels, however, were saved for the triumph back in Rome. After hiding in the sewers for weeks, John and Simon eventually surrendered and joined them.

  Back in the capital city, the emperor Vespasian was reunited with Titus to the rapturous joy of the Roman crowds. They streamed into the streets to get a view of the victorious general. In the imperial entourage entering the city was Josephus. He would soon be rewarded with Roman citizenship, a handsome pension and lodging in the house in which Vespasian had lived before he became emperor. Here he would sit down to write his history of the Jewish Revolt. A few days after Titus’s return, father and son enjoyed their reward too: a magnificent triumph.

  Wreathed in crowns of bay leaves and dressed in the traditional purple robes flecked with silver stars of the triumphal general, they rode at the centre of a spectacular procession. They stopped first at the portico of Augustus’s sister Octavia, where the senators and knights awaited them and a stage had been set up. Vespasian mounted it and brought the booming shouts of the soldiers and crowds all dressed in their best clothes to a complete hush. With his toga covering his head in the manner of priests, he offered up prayers to the gods.

  Then the procession continued. In addition to the thousands of captive slaves, there were also grand floats wrought with gold and ivory, some of them three or four storeys high. On them were borne aloft large tableaux dramatizing scenes from the war in Judaea so that all Rome bore witness to them, as if the people had been there themselves and could rightly share in the celebration of the Roman victory. The crowds gasped too at the spoils. It was as if an exquisite river of gold and silver flowed through Rome. Most prominently displayed were the treasures from the Temple and a scroll of Jewish law known as the Torah.

  The parade now approached the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. It was still presumably in a state of ruin following the violence before Vespasian’s forces had entered Rome and concluded the civil war a year earlier. The procession halted and waited for news from the Forum. Here, according to Roman custom, Simon ben Gioras was dragged out of the Mamertine prison in the northwest corner, beaten up and executed. The sentence on John of Gischala had been more lenient. He faced a regime of hard labour and captivity for the rest of his life. The news of Simon’s death was now brought to Vespasian on the Capitol, sacrifices were offered and a rich public feast was devoured.

  The imperial public relations machine did not stop there, however. The new dynasty of the Flavians was being founded and legitimized in stone too. Profits from the war in Judaea were ploughed into building the Colosseum. Constructed in part from money raised by the sale of Jewish slaves, it was completed after Vespasian’s death by Titus in AD 80, and remains one of the most enduring symbols of Roman power. Vespasian also reconstructed the area around the Capitoline Hill with a glorious temple complex and forum. The message to the Jews – indeed, to any rebels throughout the length and breadth of the empire – could not have been clearer: we destroyed your most holy places, it said, now you can pay for the rebuilding of ours. The emperor dedicated his new temple to peace. Finally, when Titus too passed away after a brief and popular reign of two years, his brother, the emperor Domitian, built the Arch of Titus in his honour. The memory of Rome’s insult to Jewish independence was thus kept alive to this day.

  In Judaea, Roman mopping-up operations continued until perhaps as late as AD 74. None of the remaining strongholds of rebellion posed any real threat to Rome, but still Vespasian ordered them to be stamped out. The most dramatic conflict was at Masada. Here a Jewish group known as the Sicarii, led by Eleazar ben Yair, took refuge in the fortress perched upon a spectacular outcrop of rock. They held out for years until the Romans built a massive siege ramp that gave access up the steep slope to the top of the rock. But by the time the soldiers reached the fortress, they discovered that all 966 rebels had committed mass suicide rather than become slaves to Rome. Only a woman and her five children survived to report what had happened. The determination of Vespasian in bringing about a total annihilation of Jewish resistance is brought vividly to life today by the extraordinary archaeological remains of the Roman operations at Masada.

  When the war was finally over, Roman administration of Judaea was upgraded. A permanent garrison was established and the desolate province became the responsibility of a legate of the emperor. Jerusalem itself was not rebuilt as a civilian settlement for sixty years. In due course, rabbis established new ways to worship without the Temple. Indeed, the situation deteriorated under the emperor Hadrian. When he planned to found a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem, a second rebellion had to be suppressed in A
D 135 and, according to Christian sources, the Jews were permanently excluded from the Holy City.

  By that time, however, the Roman empire was thriving in a glorious golden age of peace.

  Hadrian

  In AD 76, the seventh year of Vespasian’s rule, Publius Aelius Hadrianus was born in Rome. Although he had no connection to the Flavian dynasty under whose rule he entered the world, just over forty years later Hadrian would become the fourteenth emperor of Rome. He would at that time also become the first emperor in its history to sport a beard. It was close-cropped and carefully trimmed, but unmistakably a beard. Although he was said to have grown it in order to hide the blemishes on his face, Hadrian’s beard would become a defining symbol of his age. In microcosmic form it described another revolution – another key transformation in the long life of the Roman empire. It epitomized, as we shall see, the age of the ‘good emperors’, the high point of the Roman commonwealth, the age of peace that lasted, with the exception of one period of crisis, for over 140 years. The seeds of the shift that heralded this ‘golden age’ were sown in the reign of Hadrian’s predecessor – his beardless cousin Trajan.

  THE LAST CONQUEROR

  Pliny the Younger, a senator and provincial governor who corresponded regularly with the emperor, described Trajan as of ‘splendid bearing, tall stature’ with a ‘fine head and noble countenance’. Even that head’s receding hairline only enhanced ‘his look of majesty’.1 It was a portrait that fitted the image. Trajan was of the old school. He was an exceptional and heroic military commander, an imperator, holder of the supreme military authority with which emperors ruled the known world. Indeed, on his accession in AD 98 Trajan had a lot to live up to. His father had distinguished himself under Vespasian and Titus as commander of the tenth legion in the Jewish Revolt and had gone on to become governor of the strategically important province of Syria. Appropriately, the way in which Trajan chose to live up to his father’s achievements was old-fashioned Roman expansion and conquest. The ripe territory that would be plucked and fall within his grasp was the kingdom of Dacia.

  Located in eastern Europe, north of the river Danube, Dacia possessed every ingredient that made it magnetically attractive to the steely embrace of the pax Romana. It was an independent kingdom ruled by Decebalus, though Rome of course interpreted that independence as a threat. It was sophisticated and wealthy, thanks to its productive gold and silver mines, which were eyed enviously from afar. Finally, it had made an elementary mistake in offering Rome a case for war. During the reign of Domitian, the last of the Flavian emperors, Decebalus had shown barefaced cheek in crossing the Danube and attacking Roman territory. In the brief war that resulted two Roman commanders had been killed, and Domitian eventually concluded a dishonourable, unsatisfactory peace. Trajan now sought to rectify that. Rome wanted revenge, the exaction of ‘justice’, the requiting of what was its due.

  Between 101 and 106 Trajan launched two wars against the Dacians. When he set out he had no military successes of his own to date; by the time he returned that was no longer the case. The war he waged was the greatest act of aggression since Claudius’s conquest of Britain. No one, however, would guess how utterly ferocious these campaigns would be. In an already crowded field, their unstinting brutality was rarely equalled in all Roman history. They far exceeded the ‘regime change’ goal of toppling Decebalus. The Dacian wars were devoted to nothing less than genocide – the eradication of an ancient ‘barbarian’ culture, the installation of proper, loyal and civilized colonies of Roman citizens, and the plunder of the region’s riches for the betterment of the empire. The complete story is pithily told in Dacia’s modern name: Romania.

  Only the Romans could celebrate the ‘victory’ with such extravagance, pride and magnificence. The wealth garnered by Trajan from the war was ploughed into a new harbour at Ostia, the port of Rome. Here was space for concrete moorings and ramps, warehouses and wharves, administrative offices for the provinces (each endowed perhaps with a fitting mosaic to describe the nature or origin of the produce it dispatched), and the wholesale fish, wine and oil markets. The seating capacity of the ancient Circus Maximus was once again expanded, this time to hold 150,000 people. In the heart of the city a magnificent Roman shopping centre went into construction. The expansive marbled piazza was designed to house the rows of temporary stalls, and enclosing it were elegant semicircular tiers of shops and offices terraced into the hillside. This was not, however, the most eye-catching monument to the victory over Dacia.

  Trajan’s Column, still standing in Rome today, is 30 metres (100 feet) high, made from twenty massive blocks of Carrara marble and is carved with a long, upwardly spiralling series of 155 scenes illustrating the Dacian campaign. The attention to detail is exquisite; almost no set piece is overlooked. Here Trajan addresses his troops, there the soldiers sacrifice a boar, a ram and a bull to purify themselves before battle. Elsewhere the army ships its supplies and builds a fort, and in many other scenes the soldiers pelt their enemy with ballistas fired from their artillery engines and bury their swords deep into Dacian bodies. The Romans are methodical; the Dacians – such as the messenger who appears to fall off his horse – ramshackle. It’s a macabre celebration of genocide, but also a highly useful historical document. It reveals the sheer scale, organization and ambition lying behind a Roman military conquest. Inside the column there is further skilled craftsmanship to admire: a spiral staircase winds its way to the top and the chamber at its base would later become the conqueror of Dacia’s tomb.

  Before Trajan died, however, he had one more ambitious military campaign in him, one more figure to measure up to. Having quite spectacularly outstripped the career of his father, he now wanted to emulate none other than Alexander the Great. To do that he turned his gaze east. The territory of the rich Parthian state stretched from Turkey and the border of Roman Syria all the way across Iraq (Mesopotamia) and into Iran and Afghanistan. A war against Rome’s great nemesis would thus take Trajan too on a road of conquest in the direction of the limit Alexander reached: India. The excuse justifying war was a familiar one. The Parthian ruler was interfering once again in Armenia, the buffer-state-cum-client-kingdom loyal to Rome. The balance of power on Rome’s eastern frontier was again in jeopardy. Action was urgently required.

  In 114 Trajan and his army marched east. The king of Armenia quickly capitulated, and his kingdom soon became a Roman province; so too did northern Mesopotamia, the land en route to a Roman foray into Media (the north of modern Iran). By 116 Trajan was again expanding Roman control and breaking new ground. In that year he reached the westernmost nook of the Persian Gulf, stopped at the shore and stared out to sea. He was looking towards the iconic land he had thus far only imagined. Were he a younger man, he said despondently, he would have followed Alexander’s footsteps to India.2Now, exhausted by two years of campaigning in the unforgiving heat of the Arabian deserts, he had to concede that the Greek conqueror was the greater man. Nonetheless, there were extraordinary achievements to note. In his dispatches back to the Senate in Rome the long list of incomprehensibly named peoples whom he had conquered en route was translating into the prospect of an unprecedented glut of triumphs in the metropolis. Trajan, however, would not live to celebrate even one of them.

  The collapse of Trajan’s achievements happened even faster than their accomplishment. The further east he had ventured, the more exposed and difficult to retain became those places he had already subdued. In 117 Trajan fell ill. His entourage and a column of soldiers made a sombre, mournful retreat back to Italy. By August the supine emperor had reached Selinus on the coast of southern Turkey. There he suffered a stroke and died. He was in his early seventies and left behind no children. He did, however, leave an heir.

  That, at least, was the story circulated immediately by those at Trajan’s bedside – his wife Plotina and his niece Matidia – the ink of their signatures still wet on the official document specifying the succession. Trajan’s adopted son and nominated
successor, they announced, was the then Roman governor of Syria. That man was by turns Trajan’s cousin, a close companion of Plotina, and the husband of Matidia’s daughter Sabina.

  A NEW DIRECTION

  When the army recognized Trajan’s nominee and hailed him emperor, Hadrian’s claim to the throne was, if not exactly impeccable and unrivalled, certainly solid. Just to make sure, however, a pragmatic safety measure was required. Although Hadrian denied any involvement to the end of his days, four men in Rome – all influential, able senators and ex-consuls – were murdered within days of the announcement of the new emperor’s accession. A story went around that they had been plotting to overthrow Hadrian; according to Dio, however, it was the threat which their wealth and influence posed that was their real undoing.3 Hadrian’s inauguration took place in the Syrian capital of Antioch on 11 August 117.

  With his position secured as supreme leader of the vast Roman world, Hadrian took his time journeying from the province of Syria to the capital of what was now his empire. The man who travelled in imperial splendour was fifty-one years old, tall and cut a novel figure for an emperor. Like Trajan, Hadrian’s family background was highly unusual. He came not from Rome or even Italy, but from an old, moneyed Italian family who lived in southern Spain near Seville. His ancestors were Roman colonists who had settled there during the Roman conquest of Spain at the turn of the third and second centuries BC. They had invested their money in agriculture and the local silver mines, and the fortunes they made set them up as the bedrock of the wealthy local Roman élite. Hadrian’s parochial origins were evident in his voice. When he spoke Latin he did so with a heavy provincial accent, a fact of which he was embarrassed. As Trajan’s speech-maker earlier in his career, he had been laughed at whenever he uttered a word. There was also the matter of his beard.