For survivors, there was always the pen. This offered the educated elite a weapon once an emperor deemed ‘bad’ by these strata was safely dead. Most writers of contemporary or recent history in imperial times were either senators – like Tacitus – or knights. One modern school of thought wonders if some of the outlandish stories of imperial excess – the consulship which the third emperor, Caligula, was said to have conferred on his horse, for instance – might not have been, as we now say, fake news. As seen with Alexander, ancient monarchs, living as well as dead, were vulnerable to this kind of libellous treatment.
Piso’s widow lived on for thirty or so years, a pillar of respectability. The society gossip of a Roman letter-writer of the time recounts this great lady’s vulnerability as she died. A conman inveigled his way to her bedside. Claiming astrological expertise, he predicted her recovery, went away, and returned to announce that a soothsayer on inspecting a sacrificial liver had agreed with him. Suffering and credulous, she called to alter her will in his favour, but then died anyway. Shorn of Roman detail, this story of legacy hunting is not so different from the testamentary dramas of today’s rich and infirm.
Verania came from a different background from her husband. There is no record of the blue-blooded Piso deigning to hold public office before Galba singled him out. In terms of social background, his father-in-law, Quintus Veranius, was more typical of the Senate under the emperors. He earned his consulship in AD 49 through dutiful service. His career included appointments to two provinces at opposite ends of the empire – opposites too in history, culture and climate.
In recent years Turkey’s longest beach has been regularly hailed as ‘unspoilt’. On long walks across the sands of Patara on the south-west coast I like many have seen the evidence for why this beach has protected status – tyre-like tracks left by the flippers of the logger-head turtles who haul themselves ashore here to lay their eggs. Beyond the sand dunes edging the beach lies another sight, the impressive ruins of a Roman provincial city.
These ruins tick boxes in any list of the standard amenities of a Roman town of the first two centuries or so AD. There is a large theatre for open-air shows; a paved high street flanked by colonnades sheltering shops, the portal of one of them protected by a carving of an erect phallus; the mighty portal of a temple; Turkish-style public baths; a roofed council house; a handsome triple arch spanning an approach road; and stretches of an ancient pipeline once bringing fresh water under pressure to city fountains.
The summer visitor willing to brave the heat can tramp pathways to two rarer types of Roman monument. When I visited one in 2011, it was completely deserted. Dug out of the dunes, this stub of what was once a tall cylindrical tower encasing a spiral staircase is nothing less than a lighthouse erected in the name of the emperor Nero, as the remains of an inscription in big bronze letters tells us.
The other monument is reached by following the edge of what now looks like a swampy lake, in fact an ancient harbour, now landlocked. This large and well-preserved building, divided into compartments, declares its ancient purpose ‘on the tin’, or rather in a Latin inscription on the façade.
This states that the emperor Hadrian had built a granary here (AD 129). Experts debate whether Hadrian meant this as a benefit to the provincials. Perhaps he intended imported grain to be stockpiled here, or to encourage commerce by providing storage space for local merchants to rent. Lighthouse and granary bear witness to the seaborne trade that supported Roman city life, and specifically to ancient Patara’s importance as a port, before windblown sands eventually blocked up the harbour mouth.
The Turkish archaeologists who work here have not yet put all their finds on display. In 1993 a mysterious act of arson set fire to the undergrowth that still covers much of this sprawling expanse of ruins. The fire exposed by chance a mediaeval wall built from inscribed blocks taken from the dismantling of a pillar-like monument of Roman date.
This find has caused a stir among specialists: there is nothing quite like the subject matter of the inscription. Picked out in red, the letters on the pillar recorded a quintessential feature of Roman imperial rule – road-building, in this case ‘throughout all Lycia’, as the Romans, following the Greeks, called this part of their empire. The inscription then records regional roads and their distances, as if there had been a concerted programme to measure existing roads, and to construct at least some new ones.
The monument also sheds light on how the Romans came to impose direct rule on the region. Almost certainly, it once supported a statue of the emperor Claudius (reigned AD 41–54). On the main face the Lycians, or those who now spoke for them, enthusiastically describe themselves as ‘Rome-loving and Caesar-loving faithful allies’. They thank the Roman emperor as the ‘saviour of the [Lycian] nation’.
This was because he had rescued the Lycians from an outbreak of ‘faction, lawlessness and brigandage’. In this crisis the emperor’s agents had stepped in to transfer control of the league of Lycian cities away from the ‘rash majority’ to ‘councillors drawn from among the best people’. It is not hard to see the imperial interest in the region’s roads at this juncture as a reflection of security concerns. Roman roads above all were military and strategic.
One thing that the Romans did not do for the empire was to support democracy. The verbiage of this monument masked what seems to have been a popular movement with anti-Roman undertones. This challenged the usual political dominance of the region’s pro-Roman upper stratum. To sort out the mess, Claudius sent in Quintus Veranius in AD 43. Quintus’s solution was to form a new council of local oligarchs. This was to run the Lycian federation in place of an assembly with a broader social base that was now discredited in Roman eyes. Quintus oversaw this enforced stability by remaining for four years as Lycia’s first Roman governor.
The names are known of many men and women from the class of people whom Veranius put back in local control. One Greek inscription that visitors to Patara can easily see still occupies its original place on the wall of the theatre, where it was framed for greater publicity in a panel recessed into the stone. After a loyal dedication to the emperor of the day (AD 147), a certain Vilia Procla, ‘citizeness of Patara’, proclaims a generous gift to her fellow citizens. She completed expensive repairs to the earthquake-struck theatre begun by her late father.
These two rich donors claimed a Roman as well as a Lycian identity. They literally had dual citizenship, Roman as well as Pataran. Both of them also bore names that were Roman, not local. They admired Roman ways of doing things. The inscription translates into Greek letters the Latin word for one of their embellishments – Roman-style ‘vela’. How welcome these often brightly dyed coverings could be in the Mediterranean heat is suggested by a story about the alleged cruelty of an early Roman emperor, Caligula (reigned AD 37–41). Sometimes during gladiator shows in the capital he supposedly had the awnings retracted while the sun was hottest ‘and gave orders that no one be allowed to leave’.
Modern visitors to Roman city-sites through much of the Mediterranean can see traces of a similar way of life from Spain to Syria. Socially, local government mirrored the plutocracy of the empire’s service elite. Well-off town councillors meeting a property qualification ran local services, including the collection of Roman taxes. A skeleton staff of higher officials sent from Rome, sometimes but by no means invariably backed up by troops, kept a collusive eye on them.
Rich men and women in the provinces engaged in an ancient version of Victorian ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in towns like Patara, where poverty and plenty must have rubbed shoulders. Augustus and his successors had rebuilt Rome as an architectural showcase reflecting the majesty (that word ‘greater-ness’ again) of Roman power. Local benefactors like Vilia Procla hoped to curry favour with Roman patrons, not to mention the distant emperor, by promoting a scaled-down version of the same urban vision.
The values motivating her might also have included true feelings of patriotism towards her ‘dearest fat
herland’, as she calls not Rome but Patara in her inscription. But putting money into immortalizing her name in marble did not make Procla a Florence Nightingale. Charity in the Christian sense lay in the future, even if the inhabitants of Patara enjoyed shows in the local theatre and other amenities, including the dubious benefits of the public baths.
In 2014 I heard an illuminating lecture by a Finnish expert in public health with a sideline in ancient sanitation. His essential point was that neither Greeks nor Romans had a concept of waterborne disease. So dysentery, typhus and diarrhoea must have been major killers. He noted that Roman cities often placed public toilets near or in the bathhouses and private facilities next to the kitchen.
Patara’s impressive Roman baths with their Turkish-style suites of rooms would have been unhealthy unless the authorities maintained a constant throughput of clean water. With no understanding of these health risks, they had other priorities when they built the aqueduct fetching water from 12 miles away. This would have been a status symbol for the town as much as anything. In sum, we should not be too rose-tinted about Roman sanitation. It is not clear that it contributed to higher standards of living in the cities of the empire.
After Lycia, Quintus Veranius died serving the next emperor in a very different province:
Veranius, after having ravaged the Silures in some trifling raids, was prevented by death from extending the war. While he lived, he had a great name for manly independence, though, in his will’s final words, he betrayed a flatterer’s weakness; for, after heaping adulation on Nero, he added that he should have conquered the province for him, had he lived for the next two years.
Tacitus had a sharp eye for the necessary vice of flattery. It was part of the performance which men of his class felt obliged to put on to convince the emperor of their loyalty. As for this last posting of Veranius, the Silures were Britons inhabiting what is now the county of Monmouthshire in south Wales. For today’s second homeowners from London this is an under-three-hour commute by motorway. Local shops stock the same luxuries as those of the capital. It is hard to put ourselves in the place of the Romans. Before they conquered it, Britannia was so remote as to be almost a land of legend.
But conquer it they did. In AD 43 Claudius, a mere step-grandson, not a direct descendant, of Augustus, decided to continue where Julius Caesar had left off in order to burnish his credentials as emperor. After his death, his successors persevered with the fighting. A Roman emperor campaigned in Scotland as late as AD 208. By then the Romans had largely contented themselves with the annexation of most of what is now England and Wales.
I recently visited the archaeological site in south Wales which the Romans called ‘Isca of the Silures’. In recent times the staff here have offered a range of children’s events linked to the Roman finds. A ‘Summer of Stories’ features the Roman fortress and baths. Children can paint a Roman actor’s mask, or use stickers to make their own Roman gladiator, an activity referencing the most imposing monument here, an earthwork amphitheatre.
These children’s activities do indeed convey something about the Roman way of life of the legion stationed here from around AD 74. Isca was a Roman army camp guarded by a strong wall of stone. The rural landscape hereabouts, part of the borderlands between what is now England and Wales, suggests the fertile – and taxable – terrain which the Romans were mainly interested in holding in their island possession.
The Romans would have seen a real difference between Britons and Lycians. We have seen how the latter, an indigenous Anatolian people, were early adopters, and adaptors, of Greek culture. Four centuries later, Romans could lump them together with their Aegean neighbours as ‘Greeks’. Local benefactor Vilia Procla did not need reminding of the benefits of the Roman way of life. So much of this, as we have seen, was anyway Greek-inspired.
The Romans like the Greeks saw lands where this pan-Mediterranean lifestyle held little or no sway in a less favourable light. One of the more interesting archaeological finds of recent years is a wafer-thin writing tablet of wood from a Roman rubbish heap on Hadrian’s Wall (of which more later). On it a Roman of the military persuasion had penned a Latin letter to a comrade in the years around AD 90: ‘The Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords nor do the Brittunculi mount in order to throw javelins.’ In Latin ‘Brittunculi’ is an offensive diminutive. Modern translations include ‘nasty’ or ‘wretched little Brits’. Here we have what nowadays would be labelled casual racism. Like most Greeks, many Roman minds arranged the world into a hierarchy of ethnicities. Indigenous peoples whose way of life differed markedly from their own, where chiefs, tribes and buildings of wood replaced the familiar world of Mediterranean-style cities, many Romans viewed with less respect.
Tacitus for one thought that high-level encouragement to promote Roman civilization took place in conquered territories of this type. The passage is worth quoting in full:
To accustom to rest and repose through the charms of luxury a population scattered and barbarous and therefore inclined to war, Agricola gave private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and dwelling-houses, praising the energetic, and reproving the indolent. Thus an honourable rivalry took the place of compulsion. He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the ‘toga’ became fashionable. Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.
Here by the way is a wonderful example of why Tacitus remains so readable today. Tacitus was an imperial insider. This Agricola, governor of Britain from AD 77 to 84, was Tacitus’s own father-in-law, whom he respected and admired; he himself was a senator and proconsul. This did not prevent him from offering a cynical critique of methods of imperial pacification employed by people like himself. His critique is tinged, it will be noted, with condescension towards the Britons. He portrays their chiefly families as blinkered colluders with the occupying power.
Generally speaking, it is the leaders of a dominated society who are best placed, by their wealth and position, to mobilize resistance movements. Like Alexander with the Persian nobles, the Romans therefore favoured a collaborationist system of governing their provinces. All things being equal, they preserved and worked with traditional local hierarchies. They hoped that the prominent people with the most to lose would make their peace with the new ‘facts’ and set an example of peaceable co-existence with the newcomers.
In the portico of the Council Chamber in the town of Chichester in southern England the notice ‘No cycles’ aims to protect the object displayed on the wall just above it. This mutilated slab of Sussex marble has had a colourful afterlife. Found nearby in 1723, it was quickly purloined by the local duke to adorn his estate.
Having the taste for the antique of the men and women of his class and time, he built a folly which he called the Temple of Neptune and Minerva for the express purpose of displaying the slab. In 1907 the then duke returned the slab to Chichester after demolishing the folly, supposedly because King Edward VII complained that it blocked the view from his bedroom window when he came to stay.
The slab’s collectability comes from the fine lettering of its ancient Latin inscription, its great historical interest from the content:
To Neptune and Minerva, for the welfare of the Divine House by the authority of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, great king of Britain, the guild of smiths and those therein gave this temple from their own resources, Pudens, son of Pudentinus, presenting the site.
With its mention of mainstream Roman deities, the loyal wishing well of the imperial family, the artisans organized into a guild, the civic philanthropy of private donors, an
d the purely Roman names of this ‘Pudens son of Pudentinus’, here we have an inscription which on the face of it could come from any town – Chichester was once Roman Noviomagus – in the western, more Latin-using, parts of the Roman Empire.
The name and title of the authorizing grandee are another matter. Personal names beginning ‘Togi-’ are quite common in ancient Celtic. As the title leaves in no doubt, this is a friendly British chief transformed into a Roman client ruler of these parts. To judge from his additional names, Claudius in person had negotiated with him, sealing the political deal with a gift of the Roman citizenship to Togidubnus individually, in or around AD 43.
This Togidubnus also refashioned his cultural identity, along the lines that Tacitus’s father-in-law envisaged for leading British families. In the 1960s archaeologists dug up the remains of a luxurious Roman-style country house not far from the waters of Chichester harbour. Built in the AD 70s, the complex is so unexpected and so exceptional – over a hundred rooms, many Italian-style mosaic floors, formal gardens with water features and so on – that its original owner had to be someone of unusual eminence in the area. Togidubnus is the obvious candidate.
The Romans were used to encountering societies where inequality was the norm, like their own. A shared acknowledgement of high social status could bridge the cultural gap between a Veranius and a Togidubnus – especially if common pleasures were there to promote personal affinity. An unusual find from the villa site – called Fishbourne – suggests the possibilities.
This is a small piece of onyx, originally set into a ring to be worn on someone’s finger. Engraved into the stone is a horse and a palm frond – the symbol of victory in the Greek and Roman world. Given the date, the AD 60s, the excavators could not resist speculating: ‘It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that it belonged to the putative owner of the Palace, King Togidubnus. Perhaps future excavations should look for a racecourse!’ As for the Romans, a person only has to see a Ben Hur film to know something of their fanatical love of the horsey spectacle of chariot racing.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 32
