In earlier times I used to help set questions on Roman Britain for the pre-university exam in British secondary education. A favourite was on the lines of ‘How widespread was the use of Latin in Roman Britain?’ The underlying aim was to get candidates thinking about the cultural impact of the Roman occupation on the indigenous population. The Chichester inscription shows the early appearance of Latin as the public language of a British tribal centre, as Noviomagus was.
Another tribal centre outside Reading, in the Thames valley, has produced Latin graffiti left by the town’s artisans in the clay of roof tiles and building bricks. One brick, broken, is incised with the Latin word puellam, ‘girl’. As a book on Roman Britain published in a politer age puts it, it is ‘part of an amatory sentence otherwise lost’. It is interesting to find literacy among the town’s brickmakers, not to mention a knowledge of Latin, absorbed perhaps from the concentration of Latin-speakers in this centre of local administration, as Roman Silchester was.
A smattering of Latin hardly proves that the lower orders of society in Roman Britain felt shared interests with the occupying power to the same degree as a rich and powerful Briton like Togidubnus. Some archaeologists talk about the ‘creative’ blending of cultures in the hands of natives who – possibly – were far from bending over backwards to adopt Roman ways.
So with diet: domestic rubbish from Romano-British sites produces evidence for an ancient fusion cuisine – meals of native mutton accompanied by the so-called ketchup of the Roman world, a mass-produced fish sauce. Still, archaeologists realize that inferring a political outlook from a food recipe is not straightforward.
Under the emperors the officials sent out to govern provinces were by and large no longer as oppressive as in the bad old days of the republic. Caesar had mostly abolished the system of tax-farming, in which governors often colluded. When they were not fighting wars, governors spent much of their time presiding as judges in periodic courts held around the towns of their province. Around AD 100 a Greek writer nicely caught the bustle of the annual governor’s assizes in a town in the province of Asia (western Turkey): ‘The courts . . . bring together an innumerable multitude of people – litigants, judges, orators, governors, attendants, slaves, pimps, muleteers, shopkeepers, prostitutes, and craftsmen.’ This was a system of justice which looks impressive on paper, but which in practice, as in other pre-industrial empires, was easier to access for the better off, who had the time and means to make the – often long – journey to the governor’s court, not to mention pay the legal costs of preparing for an appearance before his tribunal.
Even in assize towns (the minority in a province), most people probably relied on the extensive powers of local magistrates where petty disputes and crimes were concerned. These two jurisdictions operated different legal systems, local law on the one hand, Roman on the other. It is easy to imagine the chaotic co-existence of overlapping or even conflicting legal rights. The Romans were less concerned about this than they were in monopolizing the right to impose the death penalty – the power of the governor that the Romans grimly termed the ‘right of the sword’.
A modern judge describing his day is likely sooner rather than later to mention the paperwork – the papers for the day’s cases, the writing of judgements and so on. Egyptologists and amateurs rifling the waste paper, or rather papyrus, of Roman Egypt have opened a vivid window onto the workings of the courts in this corner of the empire with their finds of thousands of ancient legal documents.
The mature system is illustrated by this extract dating from AD 245. It formed part of a petition by an Egyptian woman to the governor of Egypt, sitting in Alexandria as he had done since Octavian’s conquest in 30 BC:
To Valerius Firmus, prefect of Egypt, from Aurelia Arsinoe. I ask, my lord, that you grant me as guardian in accordance with the Julian and Titian Law and decree of the Senate Aurelius Herminus. [Year] 2, 26th [day of the Egyptian month] Pachon. Sheet 94, Roll 1.
The sheet number identifies the place of the document in the governor’s archive. Here legal papers were arranged in numbered ‘sheets’, each sheet made up of a series of ‘rolls’, the end of one glued to the start of another. So here is a hint of what once must have been a governor’s dusty archive in Alexandria, filling up with shelves of legal papyri.
The petitioner shows familiarity with the specifics of Roman law – she cites the legislation that gave Egypt’s Roman governor the competence to appoint guardians. Roman law traditionally saw women as legally impaired by their lack of good sense, so the unmarried Arsinoe needed a male guardian to run her affairs now that her father was dead. Ruled by the Romans for over 250 years, Egyptians like Arsinoe had become increasingly familiar with how to operate the Roman legal system.
She needed to be, because she was a Roman citizen. So were all Egyptians by AD 245. Three decades previously a Roman emperor had decided that all free men and women in the empire were to enjoy this status (the so-called Antonine Constitution). The long-term effect was to promote a shared Roman identity throughout the empire.
In other ways too Arsinoe lived in a Roman world undergoing rapid change. At the date of her petition the ruling emperor, despite his Greek name (Philip), was a Roman of Arabian heritage from what is now southern Syria. At exactly this time of growing unity in diversity that Philip’s accession seems neatly to symbolize, however, the cohesion of the empire began to be tested by mass migration.
A growing levelling of Roman and non-Roman, as well as concerns for the empire’s security, had older roots. To think more about these matters, I return now to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138).
CHAPTER 18
‘BARBARIANS’ AT THE GATE
At the time of writing an outlay of around £480 or US$600 buys a nice silver coin of the emperor Hadrian, presenting him in the role of peacemaker. Minted at Rome, this was an issue showing on one side a bust of Hadrian in the guise of a victorious general, and on the other a draped woman whom the Latin legend identifies as ‘PAX’, Peace. She holds a horn-shaped container overflowing with natural produce. This ancient symbol of abundance and prosperity was called a cornucopia, meaning ‘horn of plenty’.
The symbolism here is not subtle. By his feats of arms the emperor as commander-in-chief keeps the empire safe from enemies. The resulting state of peace brings prosperity for the empire’s inhabitants. Although this is a positive image of peace as something more than the absence of war, the coin also emphasizes the martial success of the emperor that alone made peace possible.
Military victory was the demonstration of Rome’s supremacy from which all else flowed – the empire of peace and the orderly life which it permitted, as well as imperial displays of clemency for the conquered, humiliation for impertinent people daring to challenge Roman power, and so on.
Tacitus wrote that Augustus ‘won over everyone with the sweetness of repose’. He meant provincials as well as the Romans of Rome and Italy. Had he been more interested in the provinces, Tacitus might have expanded on the sheer extraordinariness of the lengthy peace which much of the Mediterranean had enjoyed for nigh on four generations by his day. Surely this was the greatest boon of the ancient Romans to their subjects.
Peace did not just promote greater prosperity. It also spread a psychological sense of the world as a more stable place to a degree that must have been unprecedented in antiquity. The great outpouring of inscriptions on durable stone and of monumental architecture in town after town of the Roman Empire during the first two centuries AD had something to do with this sense of a securer future into which the pax Romana had lulled many people.
The Romans inherited a them-and-us division of the world from the Greeks. Outside the empire were the so-called barbarians, savage and insolent until humbled by Roman arms. In 122 the emperor Hadrian visited Britain. Here he did something that the Romans had never done before.
When I taught a course on Hadrian at Newcastle University I used to take the class into the archaeological museum
on the campus. It includes a collection of artefacts from the line of Hadrian’s Wall, which runs less than a mile away. Here I showed them a not especially impressive block of Roman masonry with this Latin inscription: ‘[Work] of Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus. Legion II Augusta [built it] under Aulus Platorius Nepos, propraetorian legate.’ The wording underlines that this was a project dear to the heart of Hadrian – a personal commission. Squads of legionaries working in sections built a continuous wall – not terribly well, the archaeologists say – in what is now northern England running from one side of the island to the other. It was no light undertaking: the wall covered a length of 74 miles. While half of it was built of turf, the other half was stonework 10 feet thick and perhaps 12 feet high.
Hadrian’s Wall was the talk of this corner of the Roman Empire. Visitors wanted a souvenir. In the British Museum you can see a modern replica (the original is in private hands) of a remarkable bronze bowl. Around the outside runs an enamel-work frieze showing a battlemented wall and above it Latin letters spelling out the Roman names of forts on Hadrian’s Wall. The original once belonged to the owner of a Roman villa some 300 miles away in south-west England.
Specialists hotly debate Hadrian’s purpose in commissioning this wall, whether it was a defensive fortification to protect the province from northern ‘barbarians’, or more like a customs barrier, controlling the movement of people and goods, or mainly a massive show of Roman resources and will, meant to cow the enemy. Or even a training task for a frontier soldiery in need of discipline.
As well as being any or all of these things, I myself believe that Hadrian wanted news of his wall to filter back into the imperial heartlands to reassure provincials that the Roman emperor was primed to protect them against barbarians. A generation later a rich Greek landowner in Asia Minor seems to have got wind of the British wall when he praised the benefits of the Roman Empire in a public speech:
An encamped army like a rampart encloses the civilised world in a ring . . . [The walls] have not been built with asphalt and baked brick nor do they stand there gleaming with stucco. Oh, but these ordinary works too exist at their individual places – yes, in very great number, and, as Homer says of the palace wall, ‘fitted close and accurately with stones, and boundless in size and gleaming more brilliantly than bronze’.
The quotation from the great Homer is apt in a eulogy by a Greek magnate for the Roman frontier armies and barriers defending his way of life. The metaphor of gleaming metal is interesting too: it would suit Hadrian’s Wall if this was originally whitewashed, as some specialists think.
There are signs that some provincials under Hadrian were jittery about the Roman delivery of the empire’s main promise to conquered subjects – security. When he succeeded Trajan in AD 117, the middle-aged Hadrian, a seasoned Roman general, had to take immediate measures to restore ‘pax’.
These included an unheard-of thing – Hadrian evacuated the conquests of his predecessor on the eastern front. Here the Romans had as a troublesome neighbour on the east bank of the River Euphrates another warlike people, the Parthians, whose kings ruled a ramshackle empire stretching to Pakistan. To some onlookers this evacuation must have seemed like an admission that Rome had met its match.
Hadrian’s regime sought to offer reassurance. As seen in the prologue, Hadrian was the subject of a statue type popular in parts of the eastern Mediterranean. It shows him as a victorious general resting a foot on a prone captive, whose ‘barbarian’ trousers and a bow and arrows identify the figure as one of the Parthians. Notoriously Parthia’s mounted archers could turn and release ‘Parthian shots’ to their rear in mid-gallop – a redoubtable feat of horsemanship before the mediaeval invention of the saddle.
The regime probably approved of the lost prototype of the statue and made clear that it was its pleasure if eastern provincials took the initiative and created their own versions. Some in Hadrian’s circle might have hoped to reinforce an attitude of provincial confidence in the traditional claim of the Romans to an unbeatable supremacy. There were also ‘enemies’ within:
They would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing; many they sawed in two, from the head downwards; others they gave to wild beasts, and still others they forced to fight as gladiators. In all 220,000 persons perished. In Egypt too, they perpetrated many similar outrages, and in Cyprus . . .
This description belongs to a Roman historian’s account of a violent uprising by Diaspora Jews living in what is now Libya, then a Roman province. To Greeks and Romans these atrocities marked the rebels as barbarians, outside the pale of civilization.
The truth of this Roman account cannot now be established. But it is clear that this Jewish revolt two years before Hadrian’s accession was serious. There might have been a concerted plan among different Diaspora communities in Libya, Egypt and Cyprus. Some scholars think that the rebels had an ultimate aim, to wrest Jerusalem, the traditional centre of Jewish cult, from Roman control.
No other subject people still resisted Roman rule so long after conquest. The Jews inside the Roman Empire shared a uniquely strong identity. This was based on ethnicity, language and customs, and memories of a glorious history of independence under their own kings – David, Solomon and the rest. These markers of Jewish identity were all bound up with their distinctive religion, based on holy writings familiar to all Jews.
In an earlier revolt in the Roman province of Judaea itself, the Romans burnt down the Jewish Temple. In an annual day of fast, Jews to this day remember the destruction of AD 70, a half-century before Hadrian’s accession. To say that this Roman action would have appalled ancient Jews, wherever they lived, must be an understatement.
Hadrian did not just keep a weather eye on the Jews. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this intelligent but complex man provoked the Jewish revolt that broke out in AD 132. Traditionally Roman in so many ways, Hadrian was also said to be an amateur sculptor and architect. His admiration for Greek civilization extended to its cultural practice of pederasty. When he visited Egypt in AD 130, his travelling companion was Antinous, a comely youth of Greek heritage.
A Roman history of Hadrian’s reign compiled over two centuries later claimed that the Jews began this new war ‘because they were forbidden to practise circumcision’. Greeks saw circumcision as unsightly. Did the ‘Graecizing’ Hadrian share this aesthetic prejudice, as one scholar has suggested?
In addition, amid the rubble of Jerusalem he decided – provocatively as it transpired – to found a colony of Roman soldiers. A coin from the colonial mint, up and running almost at once, commemorates Hadrian in person marking with plough and oxen the limits of the farmland in a traditional Roman rite. He meant Aelia Capitolina – as he now renamed the place after himself (Aelius Hadrianus) and Jupiter (Capitolinus) – to be a Roman bridgehead in potentially hostile terrain.
The ensuing revolt developed into full-blown war. The rebels had a leader and claimed to be an independent state. Hadrian had to take command himself. When it finally came, Roman retribution was terrible. According to an ancient Jewish tradition this is what happened south-west of Jerusalem at ancient Bethar, where the rebels made their last stand:
Hadrian the blasphemer had a great vineyard of eighteen square miles, as much as the distance from Tiberias to Sepphoris. He surrounded it with a fence made from those slain at Bethar as high as a man with outstretched arms.
Again, it seems superfluous to judge with modern hindsight this iron-fisted episode of ancient imperialism. At much the same time as he was fighting this war, Hadrian himself seems to have authorized what experts call the ‘province’ coinage. This torrent of coin types issued at Rome in all the denominations of the official mint has a unity of theme and originality of subject matter that only the summit of power could have orchestrated. These coins are important because they show that Hadrian’s imperial thinking was running along new line
s.
On one side the different types all show the same head of Hadrian. On the other they celebrate different regions of the empire – twenty-five all told – and Hadrian’s visits and gifts to them. A typical example shows Hadrian dressed in his toga raising a kneeling woman, along with a Latin legend: ‘For the restorer of Gaul.’
What this coinage celebrated was the regional diversity of the empire and the equal care of the ruler for its constituent parts. This was a more benevolent image of Roman rule than the provincials were used to receiving from the centre of power. It was an official attitude tending to gloss over the traditional distinction Romans made between citizens and non-citizens: all were the concerns of the caring emperor. It was this idea of the Roman state as one huge unit which a later emperor took further in AD 212 by giving the citizenship to pretty much everyone of free status in the empire.
Hadrian’s concerns about the perimeter defences of the empire led him to undo an engineering feat of his predecessor. A century later even what was left, twenty stone arches ‘placed in a river so deep, in water so full of eddies, and on a bottom so muddy’, impressed Roman visitors. This great river was the Danube.
Walking its length in more recent times, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor relayed the local stories told him of the fishy invaders sometimes swimming upstream as far west as Vienna and even beyond. These included giant sturgeon-like creatures, their true home ‘the Black Sea and the Caspian and the Sea of Azov’. Trajan and Hadrian were concerned about invasive use of the river, not from the east, but from the north.
The Romans tended not to see their empire as the British saw theirs – a mass of territory colouring much of the known world in British pink. True to their militaristic ethos, the Romans thought more in terms of what they called their ‘imperium’, their power to order other people around, mainly thanks to their victories and conquests.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 33
