The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Repeatedly, Pliny commended simplicity, the values of little Italy up near Comum, away from corrupting Rome. Here there was an emphasis which the first Christians had not yet cultivated. 'Simplicity' meant country life, in charmed settings whose peace and quiet were upheld as blessed escapes from business down in Rome. Here a man could rest and write in peace, away from the bother of clients and the dependants whom he professed to find so tiresome. Here he could hunt wild boar in the woods (Pliny was keener on this sport than his throw-away remarks at first imply). Here, too, he could lay out a garden. The early Christian contribution to garden history is precisely zero, but Pliny is our great spokesman for the Italian ideals of villa life.

  By the beautiful lake at Como, he had two particular villas, one by the lakeside called Comedy, one on a hill overlooking it called Tra­gedy. They were named not for alternating moods, but for the beloved theatrical world. Comedy was low-lying, like the flat shoes of a comic actor, whereas Tragedy was perched high up, like the high heels of the tragic actor's boots. Pliny also had another villa on the coast just south of Rome, where Aeneas' Trojans were alleged to have landed and where senators had country bolt-holes within a twenty-mile range of the city. On the borders of modern Tuscany and Umbria (just north of Citta di Castello and south of San Sepolcro), Pliny had yet another villa, fanned by a cool breeze in summer. His description of it is the most influential letter to have survived from the Roman world: it can now be matched with archaeologists' continuing excavations of the site at San Giustino.8

  Behind Pliny's country homes stretched some three hundred years of Roman experience in smart villa life. Cicero had already loved his various houses and, like contemporaries, kept a keen eye on possible buys: he was never one to have two homes when as many as eight might do. In country settings, villas were low and spreading buildings, usually without the tall eighteenth-century symmetry of our Georgian homes. Pliny's villas extended at odd angles and we need to remember that his stylish letter is not concerned to describe their full extent. He says nothing about the site's former owners and builders (archaeolo­gists can now point to Granius Marcellus before Pliny). He says nothing about their slaves' quarters or kitchens or the probable use (as at Pompeii) of his garden porticoes for storing the fields' important crops: the 'productive' buildings have begun to be known through recent archaology. He emphasizes other aspects. Like so many promi­nent Romans, Pliny liked the challenge of an assault on nature. Like many country gentlemen ever since, he designed his garden and bits of his villa himself. When he dwells on this part of his villas' charms, he is aware, correctly, that he is breaking new literary ground. For the first time in world literature, hunting, gardening and country-house design appear as life's heavenly trinity, a non-Christian Paradise on earth.

  Pliny's Tuscan garden had a terrace and colonnades, clipped box hedging and enclosed courtyards with fountains. Its special distinction was a 'hippodrome outside', a miniature version of Rome's racecourse, the Circus, perhaps in imitation of Domitian's hippodrome on Rome's Palatine hill. It was shaded by surrounding cypress trees and was wittily planted with the staple plants of so many Italian gardens since: clipped box, fruit trees, laurels, plane trees (up whose trunks ivy climbed) and glistening acanthus whose leaves seemed 'smooth' to Pliny's eyes. There was no racing in such a 'hippodrome' and, to our taste, the planting was rather spotty. But the evergreens (not yews) were clipped into shapes and letters, including the initials of family-members and working gardeners. At one end, fine marble pillars shaded an area for dining, where male and female guests, as always at Rome, reclined on couches. Water ran merrily through the mock hippodrome and fed the fountains and a marble basin beside the dinner-guests, in which the dishes were floated during meals. In the early sixteenth century Pliny's letter on his garden was rediscovered and shown to Raphael, who used it as the backbone for his most influential garden, the Villa Madama in Rome.9 Viewed from the house, the supporting countryside seemed to Pliny to be like a paint­ing, while the meadow was 'jewelled' with flowers. These ways of viewing landscape would also have a long history in garden design.

  Pliny's praises of rural simplicity, his home and villa life were not unusual in the era. We find them in contemporary poems, especially those of his friend Martial. Martial, too, had prospered under Domi-tian, but he then left Rome in the new era of the late 90s and kept his praises of country living for his years of retirement back in Spain.10 He had delighted Pliny by comparing him with Cicero. There was a real similarity of themes in the two friends' writings: Martial's coarse epigrams suggest what Pliny is likely to have written in some of his risque verses.

  The Christians' green landscape, by contrast, was Paradise, waiting in the world to come. Villa life was way beyond most of their member­ship's social status; however, Pliny's views on public shows would be very congenial to their taste. The deaconesses would have agreed with his moral dislike of pantomime-dancing and the 'corruptions' of naked Greek athletics. Pliny also found chariot racing 'boring', though there were many keen Christian fans of the sport who would long disagree over this." His views on rank and class were also quite Church-compatible. For Pliny, 'equality' was proportional to an individual's social standing: it varied for each of us according to our rank. Spiritu­ally, the Gospels took a contrary view, but although Christians were said to be 'one' in Christ Jesus, 'unity' did not entail worldly equality. Distinctions of worldly class persisted, therefore, among Christian believers: they were irrelevant, merely, to the life to come.

  Here, the deaconesses would have found Pliny very under-informed. The one route to immortality, in his view, was literary work. He could entertain the idea of ghosts, but he had no expectations of a life after death: his uncle even considered the afterlife a fable which restrained old people from a noble death by suicide. Bodily resurrection would have seemed completely absurd to both of them. Unlike the brave deaconesses, Pliny was certainly not cut out for martyrdom, either. Like many other Christians, he would have lapsed when investigated and would have sought forgiveness later. But as a writer-up of others' martyrdoms, he would have been second to none, even among authors in the early Church.

  In Pliny's values, there was one glaring absentee: humility. He professed 'modesty', but it was not the same thing, least of all when he used it to set off his own unfailing virtues. For Christians, but not for Pliny, humility belonged with something else, with the need for redemption as humans created by God.

  Three centuries later, in a Christian Empire, the Christian Augustine would withdraw to just such a villa in 'little Italy', near Milan, in the wake of his conversion from sex and worldly ambition. In marbled homes like Pliny's, there were bishops meanwhile who shared many of Pliny's tastes, the hunting, the landscape, the rural ease. There were even those who wrote scurrilous verses and built grandly with rare stones.12 Far into the Middle Ages, one part of the future lay in a blend of Pliny's values with a flexible Christian faith.

  54

  Regime Change, Home and Away

  Then Trajan came down to the very Ocean and when he learned about its nature and saw a boat sailing to India, he said, 'I would certainly have crossed to the Indians as well, if I was still a young man.' For he started to think about the Indians, and to bless Alexander . .. He used to say that he had gone even further than Alexander and he wrote this to the Senate, though he could not even retain what had been sub­dued. Among much else, he was granted triumphs for as many nations as he wished: because of the number which he kept on writing about to them, the senators were unable to understand some of them or even name them properly.

  Cassius Dio, on Trajan in Mesopotamia, Epitome of his Histories 68.29

  'Your only relaxation', Pliny assured the Emperor Trajan in his speech as consul, 'is to range through forests, beat out wild animals from their lairs, scale immense mountain ridges and set foot on awesome rocks.'1 With Trajan, the man from Spain, hunting returned as the active sport of an ancient ruler. 'For him, the sweat of catching and finding is
equal': unlike 'hunters' in the Roman arena, Trajan went after free-range prey, a passion which was shared by his successor Hadrian. For the events of Trajan's reign bring us, at last, to Hadrian's own times and to stories which he knew much better than we can. When Trajan took power, Hadrian was aged twenty-two.

  Trajan (ruling 98-117) was styled the 'most excellent', but to us, as to Hadrian, he presents a mixed picture. On the one hand, he showed civility, or moderation, in his dealings with the Senate and the upper class. Sound judgement also shows in many of his answers to Pliny's fussing letters from his province. On the other hand, there was a decided intemperance. Trajan drank heavily (he even took to beer): Hadrian admits in his autobiography how he, too, had to drink heavily with Trajan on campaign. Like Hadrian, Trajan was conspicuously keen on sex with young men. They included actors and the young son of an Eastern dynast who danced for him by the Euphrates and was teased about his gold earrings. The major legacies of Trajan's reign were two vast military invasions and the most mass­ive building projects in Rome. The buildings endured for centuries (Trajan's Column is still a landmark in Rome), but the invasions proved more difficult. Their most positive effect (fostered by Hadrian) was to discredit Roman attempts at military expansion for another fifty years.

  Trajan's wars have a decidedly modern ring to them. Rome was the dominant military superpower and any defeats of her were temporary setbacks, always duly avenged. Trajan himself was a Roman 'natural' for aggression. He was a military man, but unlike his father he had yet to win a significant victory. The groundwork for one was probably laid during his first eighteen months and then, from spring 101 to December 102, Trajan took a huge army into Dacia in eastern Europe (in part, modern Romania). In the mid-50s bc, Julius Caesar had toyed with suppressing the Dacian 'threat'. Trajan now made the long-planned suppression a reality. There was a previous Roman defeat to avenge here (under Domitian), and as Trajan advanced, the Dacians had no option but to send him an ultimatum. As a sign of their uncouthness, they sent 'long-haired' envoys; their barbarian allies even sent an enormous mushroom, inscribed with a message in Latin. In the course of their advance, the Romans built a huge bridge over the Danube, so strong that its pillars are still standing. Many lives were then lost until the most prominent Dacian king, Decebalus, agreed to surrender all his siege-equipment and weapons of destruction, to demolish his forts and not to shelter deserters from Rome. In return, Rome would help him with subsidies.

  Inevitably, reports then came that Decebalus was rebuilding his forts and luring military experts over from the Roman sector. In June 105 Trajan attacked yet again, with about 100,000 men and the aim of annexation. Eventually Decebalus killed himself, and his corpse was decapitated in the Roman camp.2 A wide expanse of Dacia became a Roman province for the first time.

  As so often, conquest was the prime source of growth for an ancient economy. Dacia produced vast quantities of slaves and spoils and gave access to metals including new gold-mines. Back in Rome, the recent economic weakness was reversed (the Roman coinage had just been debased) and so Trajan could afford to build in style. Within Rome, therefore, his reign is the summation of the despotism of a 'First Citizen'. Although Hadrian would add big temples to Rome, neither he nor his immediate successors built any more secular build­ings. From Trajan onwards, the job had been done: rulers could now travel for years outside the city of Rome without needing to 'benefit' its people in this particular way.

  Since Vespasian's coup, the senatorial class had acquiesced in the emperors' legality: 'you bid us be free', as Pliny told Trajan. Lawyers did not question the limits on this 'freedom' or the right, historically, by which the emperors' 'bidding' was being exercised. There were reasons for this significant silence. In Italy, nobody was being 'imposed on' to pay new taxes or conscripted to fight wars. Taxation and conscription are the acts by which rulers do most to raise questions of their subjects' rights and liberties. Neither occurred in this period in imperial Rome.

  Instead, the eternal city wore prominent marks of its subservience: it had grown to be punctuated by so many dynastic buildings, by temples to deified members of Vespasian's dynasty and by the emperors' personal forums, each of them built since Julius Caesar's own. Trajan's wife, sister, niece and great-niece would all be commem­orated at Rome; there was the predictable concern to adjust Roman opinion to a new 'dynasty'. The imperial women's elaborate new hairstyles certainly made them unmistakable. Trajan's sister Marciana favoured tight spiralling curls in rows leading to a big nest of hair at the back of the head. These time-consuming styles even required wire frames underneath as supports. In more durable materials, coins and inscribed titles, buildings and posthumous cults were deployed to publicize a family image. Remains of them are the ancient ruins which are nowadays the most conspicuous in the city of Rome's centre. But once again the 'other Rome', the people both 'sordid' and 'well connected', were not unwilling spectators of this public programme. There were proven ingredients for winning their support: the food-supply, blood sports and (when possible) baths. Trajan excelled in all three, the summation of the process which we have followed from Augustus onwards. He was rightly looked back on as the ruler whose 'popularity with the people nobody has excelled and few have equalled'.

  Fortunately, he had an architectural genius to hand, the Greek-speaking Apollodorus of Damascus. Like Sinan, the great architect of the Ottoman Turks, Apollodorus had been a military engineer: it was he who had designed the big Danube bridge. On the coast near Rome, an improved harbour was built to cater for the safety of the city's imported grain, but in Rome itself, the wonder was Trajan's Forum. It was enough to take a visitor's breath away even three centuries later. The Forum took some of its proportions from Vespasian's temple of Peace. Like that temple, it included two library spaces (one library for Greek, one for Latin, in the Roman fashion) but Trajan's two libraries were much bigger, holding some 20,000 scrolls in all. There were fine colonnades with sculpted Dacian prisoners; there was a big statue of Trajan on horseback; above all, there was a massive hall in which to dispense justice. The form of these halls, or basilicas, would later influence the first big Christian churches.

  At the far end stood Trajan's Column whose sculpted panels (155 in all) are our most vivid evidence of the Roman army in action. Their subject is the Dacian campaign. They show Roman troops laying bridges over rivers, deploying siege-machinery (the frames of the cata­pults were changed from wood to metal under Trajan) and attacking Dacian women who were themselves torturing Dacian prisoners. At the top, much-discussed scenes show men, women and children on the move with their animals. Are they Roman settlers arriving in the new province or (more probably) Dacians being expelled? Either way, the scene is one of new-style 'direct rule' by Rome.

  Trajan also commissioned a nearby market, one of modern Rome's most conspicuous ruins: its brilliant use of changing levels is also due to Apollodorus' genius. After a fire on the Esquiline, he paid the overdue last rites to what remained there of Nero's preposterous Golden House and built an enormous set of public baths on top of its remaining West Wing, burying Nero's array of dining-rooms and concrete dome under a building of public utility. It was a good, popular move, and in 109 his 'blood sports' to celebrate the Dacian conquests were on an unsurpassed scale. Yet he was still not content. In the Near East, Rome's direct rule had already been extended to the Red Sea by the annexation (in 106) of Petra and its accompanying 'Arabian' (Nabataean) kingdom in modern Jordan. In 113, a year after his Forum's opening, Trajan set off eastwards, accompanied by Hadrian, to settle the one elusive old score in this sector: a conquest of Rome's Parthian neighbours, at least along the river Euphrates. They halted at Antioch in north Syria and up on the Jebel Aqra, the great pagan mountain of the gods which towers above the city, Trajan dedicated spoils from Dacia in the hope of winning divine favour for the coming campaign.'

  'Regime change' was now to be extended to the Near East. In 114 Trajan invaded Armenia with a huge army and refused to accept a cl
imb-down by its ruling prince. This poor fellow had been appointed by the Parthian king, but without the usual Roman approval. When he sought it, Trajan took over Armenia as a province instead. To protect it, he then headed south and invaded Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in another extension of 'direct rule'. He crossed the river Euphrates, imposed 'regime change' on the local princes and even crossed the river Tigris. Babylon was taken and Trajan then travelled down and captured the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. It seemed an amazing success. The people of Mesopotamia, the historian Sallust had written (c. 40 bc), are 'unbridled in sexual lust, in both sexes': Trajan sampled one sex, at least (the male).4 He also sailed victoriously on the river Euphrates in a boat whose sails displayed his name in gold letters. It was the peak of Roman conquest in the East, making Mark Antony's failures and Nero's hesitations seem paltry by comparison.

  In antiquity, historians credited Trajan with a nostalgia for Alex­ander the Great and even with thoughts of conquest as far as India. Perhaps Trajan really did wish to visit the house in Babylon where Alexander had died and to pay sacrifice in it: who would not? How­ever, Trajan was over sixty, and he was certainly no Alexander. The chronology of his three-year campaign in Mesopotamia is a key to his intentions, but it has often been misunderstood.5 After the first year's successes in Armenia, he had gone back to his base at Antioch for winter 114/5 and was lucky to survive a shattering earthquake there. In 115 he had his year of conquest through territory which is now Iraq. After taking Ctesiphon, he wrote tactfully back to the Senate for approval, just as he had asked for their approval in settling Dacia. He had had enough, he said, and the solution was now to put a client king on Ctesiphon's throne: 'this country' (our Iraq) 'is so immeasur­ably vast and separated from Rome by such an incalculable distance that we cannot administer it.' By early 116, the Senate received his letter and had time to write back from Rome and agree. There was no 'Alexander-mania' in these plans.