Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  On Hadrian’s travels, the heritage city of Athens, that ancient centre of learning, was of course his favourite destination, and here he made three visits. ‘In almost every city he constructed some building and gave public games,’ says one account of his rule.9 The building programme in Athens alone testifies to his favour and philhellenism. He endowed the city with a grand library, a brand new forum and a glorious marble gate. The ancient heart of the city was thus redesigned and made Roman, but Hadrian’s fingerprints made an indelible mark in other ways too. The most famous sanctuary, for example, was to Zeus, the greatest of the Greek gods, and the equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter. This temple had been started at the very beginning of the classical period in the sixth century BC; in AD 132 it was completed and dedicated in person by the man whose rule bookends that age. The achievements of the two cultures, one ancient, the other of the imperial present, were fused and celebrated as one.

  The classical temples, buildings and monuments he inaugurated (not just in Athens, but in places as far apart as Smyrna in modern Turkey and his family’s town of Italica in Spain) were branded with the emperor’s name and an inscription. In response, the leading town councillors of the imperial cities that Hadrian had endowed repaid the compliment with the erection of statues, shrines and busts of the emperor. They were to be found in houses, temples and marketplaces. In his beloved Athens there was a statue of Hadrian erected in the Theatre of Dionysus. Even in those places that fell outside Hadrian’s favour, the leading citizens honoured the cult of the emperor god. It was a way of demonstrating their loyalty, improving the standing of their community in the emperor’s eyes, and putting the emperor under an obligation to help them. Through these symbols of the imperial cult the high profile of the emperor was sustained, even in places where his fondness for travelling did not take him. The same can also be said of the coins, stamped with the emperor’s image, that changed hands across the breadth of his empire.

  CIVILIZATION AND SLAVERY

  Hadrian’s Wall, then, encompassed at a northerly point an empire not just of common currency, but of common languages and a classical Greek-Roman civilization. Inside its boundaries the Romans spoke Latin and Greek; outside was the ‘bar-barbar’ of the barbarians. (The Greeks had long ago given this name to those outside their civilization because of the incomprehensible sounds they made, and the Romans had followed suit.) The 270,773 adult citizen males of Rome in 234 BC, the era of the first great revolution in Roman history with which this book started, had boomed in Hadrian’s time to a staggering figure 320 times greater. With short life expectancy and low population growth, the life of the empire depended on new blood and the critical willingness of the Roman state to absorb new peoples.

  In Britain, for example, Tacitus painted a jaundiced picture of how his father-in-law Agricola had ‘Romanized’ the sons of the British élite. Under his energetic governorship, Britons had, he said, learnt to speak the language of the Romans, to adopt the toga ‘frequently’ and had become seduced by the Roman ‘vices’ of bathing, relaxing under colonnades and attending dinner parties. The Roman culture was in fact nothing more than slavery by another name, said Tacitus. The new ‘civilization’ had a price tag.10 By contrast in the east ‘Romanization’ was really ‘Hellenization’: men from the eastern élites used their education and the legacy of Greek philosophy, oratory, letters and art to win political power in Rome. That Greek-Roman civilization belied, however, a world of barbaric cruelty and harsh contrasts.

  The civilized, cultured Hadrian, for example, was also an avid hunter. His taste for the ancient aristocratic sport was translated into popular form in the spectacular, bloody games he held during his reign. On the occasion of his birthday in January 119, the Romans celebrated by witnessing the killing of a hundred lions and a hundred lionesses. At the high point of the empire the bar for thrilling audiences at Roman games was always being raised in an unending cycle of one-upmanship. The peg holes marking where the bar rested were set to a sliding scale of exotic wild animals provided for metropolitan amusement from the extremely varied geography of Rome’s provinces.

  Lions and tigers, for example, came from Syria and the Roman east, wild boars from Germany and Gaul, bulls from Greece, horses from Spain, camels and rhinos, leopards, wild asses, giraffes and gazelles from North Africa. Trajan had a fondness for crocodiles from Egypt, and once flooded the Colosseum so that gladiators could do battle with them. There was no end of opportunities for such extravaganzas: under Hadrian, the Roman empire enjoyed more holidays than at any other time in its history. At the end of his birthday games there was a final flourish to the bloodthirsty spectacle: in the theatre and the Circus Maximus he organized a lottery. Hopeful men and women went home clutching their tickets in the shape of small wooden balls.11

  Other stark contrasts of the time were of a much more sobering nature. Hadrian’s prosperous, peaceful empire was, above all, one of extremes of inequality. For example, slaves significantly outnumbered citizens, and this simple fact made the latter nervous. If slaves could organize, they could become a powerful collective force. Another fault line was property. The massive polity primarily served and protected the interests of landowners rather than the peasants who worked the land. While the rich few exploited the well-worn trade routes of the Mediterranean and wowed their friends at dinner parties with a menu of peacock from Arabia, the majority of the poor lived meagrely on what could be produced locally. The rights of citizens too set apart the haves from the have-nots; those without Roman citizenship could earn it, but for most that meant a lifetime of military service in the Roman army.

  The empire might have enjoyed a long period of peace, but it remained a dangerous, precarious world too. Away from the big cities and local town councils many areas of life were unpoliced and unpoliceable. The mechanics of Roman justice did not help. The system favoured those with money; redress was produced mainly for advantaged people who had the ability, time and resources to pursue their case. This reality found its way into the Roman code of law. Under Hadrian a disturbing two-tier justice system now began to develop, which distinguished between two kinds of people. The legal punishments of, for example, flogging, torture, beheading, crucifixion and deportation were reserved only for the propertyless ‘humble’ citizens; more ‘respectable’ army veterans, town councillors, knights and senators were, by contrast, protected from the sharp edge of Roman law.12 This divide would become only more acute with time.

  In other ways too the golden age of Hadrian’s empire had by no means shaken off the rigorous social hierarchy characteristic of the old Roman republic of two hundred years earlier. Despite the homogeneity of language spoken across it, the majority of the Roman world was illiterate. While many had the necessary knowledge for handling army records or an artisan’s business accounts, and city dwellers evidently had sufficient understanding to write graffiti and find it amusing, the ability of the minority to write and communicate fluently in the empire’s currency of letters gave them a significant advantage over others. However, a closer inspection of the social hierarchy offers surprises. The wealthy élite prided themselves on their private libraries. To cultivate them, slaves were often required to copy texts and act as secretaries. As a result, the unfree were sometimes far more educated and skilled than the millions of poor but free Roman citizens. Cicero’s secretary Tiro was one such person; he became a close friend of the Roman senator, held an influential position in his house and was eventually freed. Under Hadrian, some 150 years later, there were many more wealthy ‘Ciceros’ – not new men from the Italian provinces of Rome, but from her empire-wide territories. Each would have had a small coterie of well-educated ‘Tiros’.

  The end of Hadrian’s reign was marked by sadness. While travelling with Antinous in Egypt in 130, his young lover drowned in the Nile in a mysterious boating accident. To assuage his grief, Hadrian marked the death of the love of his life by founding a city there called Antinoöpolis and by announcing the young man’s
deification. Henceforth Antinous was worshipped as a god across the empire. Hadrian’s travels came to an end in 132. Thereafter he retired to his sumptuous new villa complex at Tivoli, 25 kilometres (15 miles) outside Rome. It was a fitting place to see out his reign. Exquisitely, playfully, artistically its layout forms a grandiose map of the places he had visited in his life. Here there were some buildings called the Academy, after Plato’s philosophy school in Athens; there one might while away the hours at a place called Canopus, a sanctuary in Alexandria. The religious afterlife, which fascinated Hadrian, was represented too in places that he named after the domains of the underworld: the ‘Elysian Fields’ and ‘Hades’. In addition, the complex boasted a Greek theatre, a colonnade, some baths, a lavishly endowed private library and a fish pond that housed colourful and novel specimans from across the empire. No expense had been spared in its construction, and this at least 100-hectare (250-acre) retreat had taken as long to complete as his wall in Britain.

  The rich and complex golden age enjoyed by the empire girded by that wall continued long after Hadrian’s death in 138. Under the emperor Antoninus Pius there was further peace and stability, but in the rule of Marcus Aurelius, another bearded philosopher-emperor, the pax Romana was thrown into jeopardy by waves of German invaders. Aurelius’s story is full of bitter irony: the man of peace found that in order to save his empire, he had to be almost continuously at war with barbarian armies attacking from the north. The succession of his son Commodus, an indigent, flighty emperor more interested in games and gladiators than Roman security, only saw his father’s success in the German wars collapse. In 193 the dynasty founded by Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, ensured that Hadrian’s golden age was revived once again. But it was not enough to halt an inevitable slide into decline. By the middle of the third century AD Rome was catapulted into a new period of total crisis and near collapse.

  To pull the empire back from the brink, the man responsible for Rome’s next great revolution needed, above all, martial prowess and the assured ability to command armies. With his rise to power, one fashion among emperors died abruptly. Beards were out. The clean-cut, close-shaven soldier-emperor was back in style.

  V

  CONSTANTINE

  In the distant province of Bithynia-Pontus a trial was causing the Roman governor a headache. Pliny the Younger was a wealthy senator, a refined man of letters, and an enthusiastic gardener. Back in Italy he owned three beautiful villas set amid ideal countryside (two near Lake Como and one in Umbria), and he was considered an enlightened master of no fewer than five hundred slaves. However, now, in AD 111, in the backwaters of Asia Minor close to the Black Sea, those delights of home must have seemed a lifetime away. The tricky case brought before him was proving quite a nuisance.

  While Pliny was touring the province to hear legal cases, a group of people had been brought before him and denounced by some locals. Their alleged crime? Being Christians. Pliny gave them every opportunity to prove their innocence. When he interrogated them, however, some confessed that they were followers of Christ. So he gave them another chance after reminding them that the punishment for their crime was death. Again, after the second and third interrogations, they showed not repentance but ‘stubbornness’ and an ‘inflexible obstinacy’. Their faith, he concluded, was ‘madness’.1 The governor was left with no choice: of the guilty, those who were Roman citizens were sent to Rome for an official court hearing, while the non-citizens were executed there and then. If Pliny the Younger thought that would be the end of the matter, however, he was to be sorely disappointed.

  News of the case spread around the province. Pliny soon received an anonymous letter listing the names of hundreds of others apparently guilty of the same crime. To make matters worse, when they were brought before him they denied it. The governor, however, was not to be defeated in administering Roman justice. To weed out the guilty from the innocent, he came up with an ingenious solution. He dictated a prayer invoking the pagan Roman gods, asked the accused to repeat it, and requested that they offer up wine and incense to the emperor. The final part of the test was to curse Christ. Some of those who denied being Christian duly followed Pliny’s orders. Others revealed that they had been Christians in the past but were no longer and therefore they too agreed to do what Pliny asked of them. Even so, the test had not produced a conclusive verdict. Although some said that they were no longer Christian, did once having been a Christian constitute guilt? To get to the bottom of the crimes they had committed in the past, Pliny’s next move was to torture two female attendants of the early Christian Church, known as deaconesses. He found not stories of lechery and cannibalism, as his prejudices might have led him to expect, but only ‘depraved, excessive superstition’.2 What to do with these people? Were they guilty or not? Drawing a blank, Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan for advice.

  The emperor replied that even if there had been suspicions about their past, they should be pardoned. In addition, Pliny was urged not to conduct witch-hunts, not to deliberately seek out Christians. This decision would set the legal standard for ‘good’ emperors who followed after Trajan. However, the extraordinary exchange of letters between emperor and governor reveals much more. It shows that in AD 111 trials and executions of Christians were an accepted, if legally knotty, procedure.

  Persecution of Christians had begun approximately fifty years earlier with the trial in Rome of St Paul, the great first missionary who had taken the message of Christianity to the Roman east. Not long afterwards, the emperor Nero had made scapegoats of the growing community of Christians living in the imperial capital. Looking to take the sting out of the accusation that he himself had started the great fire of Rome in order to build a new palace, Nero famously had them crucified or burnt in the gardens of his residence. The emperor Domitian was accused of similar treatment of the Christians. Although Trajan was lenient in his judgment of Pliny’s case, the fact remained that the Christians posed a problem for the Romans. Banding together, worshipping the Christian God to the exclusion of traditional Roman gods was simply intolerable. Trials were brought against them and, if found guilty, the unfortunate believers in this alien religion were treated no better than criminals and prisoners of war. Indeed they often met a similar end – a gruesome death in the Roman arena.

  In spite of the hostility and penalties it provoked, Christianity grew and grew. By the beginning of the fourth century, it was an empire-wide phenomenon. It is estimated that at that time perhaps ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian; there were a growing number of churches to be found in all parts of the Roman world; a hierarchy of Christian bishops, presbyters and deacons was developing; and a significant variety of people – from slaves and the poor to the upper classes – were converts to the Christian faith.3 As a result of this increasingly strong organization, in 303 the Christians faced their greatest persecution yet. The emperor Diocletian issued an edict ordering churches to be destroyed, scriptures to be burnt, some Christians to be stripped of their offices and others to be made slaves.

  And yet, within twenty years of Diocletian’s persecution, all this changed. Christianity went through a revolutionary transformation in status, rising from being the most despised religion to the most favoured. By 324 it had become the official religion of the Roman world. Devotion to the traditional Roman gods had not disappeared, but, incredible as it would have seemed to people at the time, that religion was no longer a requisite part of what it meant to be a Roman.4

  The man who initiated this change was the emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor and the first emperor to publicly sponsor the Christian Church. His decision to support Christianity was perhaps the single most influential turning point in Roman history, if not the history of the world. It was because of Constantine that Christianity thrived throughout the Roman empire and transformed itself into the world religion it is today. The key to this revolution was the exclusiveness of Christianity, the idea that only one god could be wor
shipped. The one characteristic that had provoked centuries of persecution would, ironically, become for Constantine its most useful, cherished quality. By tapping into Christian faith, Constantine would allow the Roman empire to flourish one last time, and his regime would be hailed as Rome’s final golden age.

  But the man who was responsible for this religious revolution was not himself an exemplary Christian. Flavius Valerius Constantinus was a man of great contradictions, by turns a soldier, a brilliant general and an astute, dissimulating politician. But was he also a man of genuine faith? A sincere convert to the Christian God? Or was he really a self-interested opportunist and evil genius? Central to the problem of understanding his character are the ancient sources: the pagan authors are highly critical of him, while the Christian writers, particularly Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, and Lactantius, produced almost lyrical, heavily partisan hagiographies. Despite the conflicting nature of the sources, one clear picture of the emperor’s actions emerges.

  To seal his own power and at the same time establish the eminence of the Christian religion required less the Christian virtues of submissiveness, peace and trust than the old Roman virtues of cruelty, vaulting ambition and singular ruthlessness. The people who would fall foul of these characteristics would be not just Constantine’s political enemies, but the closest members of his own family.