The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Still, in time they did come to crystallize a sense of this imperium as a geographical space with limits. To their north, they conceived the Danube and the Rhine as two great rivers at the southern and western edges respectively of a vast area largely beyond their empire, and to a large extent their ken. They called it ‘Germania’.

  Around AD 100, this region was the subject of what one twentieth-century ancient historian called ‘among the one hundred most dangerous books ever written’. What attracted German nationalists of more recent times to this work, Nazis included, was the way in which its Roman author – Tacitus again – presented the Germanic peoples as independent and, after their fashion, moral, as well as being truly Germanic. Supposedly they had always lived where they did.

  This was not unstinting admiration, it must quickly be added. Tacitus did full justice to the Roman stereotype of the Germanic ‘barbarian’ who had once annihilated a Roman army led by a kinsman of Augustus himself:

  The Harii, besides being superior in strength to the tribes just enumerated, savage as they are, make the most of their natural ferocity by the help of art and opportunity. Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They choose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance.

  By Hadrian’s time there was already a history of migrating Germanic tribes seeking Roman lands on which they could settle. In their heyday, the Romans had a history of refusing these requests, probably from wariness about sharing land with unconquered and independent people from outside their empire. When they did do so, they presented the action as a form of subjection. So a Roman general boasted how, governing what is now Serbia in the AD 60s, he ‘transplanted – and forced to pay tribute – more than 100,000 Transdanubians with their wives and children, chiefs and kings’.

  A generation after Hadrian, his successors had to confront a major crisis on the Danube. In the mid-160s an alliance of tribes from the other side crossed the river and plundered Roman territory to the south. The situation worsened before it improved, with the enemy reaching as far south as Aquileia, an Italian city at the head of the Adriatic Sea that now found itself under siege. In the capital there was such ‘terror’ that the emperor Marcus Aurelius summoned non-Roman priests from all over the empire to do their best.

  In 1890–91 a French archaeologist recovered twenty-four pieces of a marble inscription broken up as building material for a mediaeval wall some 50 miles north-west of Athens. The Ancient Greek text records ‘the names of the young soldiers who left voluntarily on campaign for the very great and very divine Emperor Caesar M[arcus] Aurelius Antoninus Augustus’. There follows a list of the eighty local men together with their doctor – a large corps of able-bodied youth from what was only a country town, a place called Thespiae. Although called volunteers, these were in fact conscripts levied by the Romans as part of the massive recruitment for an imperial fight-back on the Danube.

  As well as levies in peaceful provinces like Greece, we hear of gladiators, brigands and slaves being pressed into service. The emperor Marcus Aurelius helped fund this emergency army by selling off the family silver, or rather, the luxuries of the imperial court – ‘besides clothes and goblets and gold cups he even sold gold statues, together with paintings by great artists’.

  In Rome an ancient column still stands in its original place, less famous than its older sibling, Trajan’s Column. The so-called Column of Marcus Aurelius is decorated with a narrative spiral that celebrates victory in the ensuing war, and what Romans must have hoped was a permanent restoration of the security of the northern limits.

  One peculiar scene is of greater historical interest than a first sighting suggests. It shows a long-haired, bearded divinity of enormous size from whose head and outstretched arms wavy lines flow onto the battle scene below – envisaged rather predictably by the sculptor as an orderly grouping of Roman troops and a pile of Germanic bodies. What is depicted is a moment – famous at the time – in the emperor’s northern wars, when a Roman army snatched an unexpected victory over a Germanic one.

  Hemmed in by the enemy in the heat of the summer and cut off from drinking water, the parched Roman troops were starting to fail, ‘when suddenly many clouds gathered and a mighty rain, not without divine interposition, burst upon them’. A child at the time, the Roman historian Cassius Dio also recorded the tale that an Egyptian magician in the emperor’s entourage had employed his arts to alter the weather. On the column, what is pouring off the colossal winged figure is the victory-bringing rainwater.

  Other people had strong convictions about where divine responsibility alone could lie for what was understood by contemporaries as a miracle: ‘The Germanic drought was removed by the rains obtained through the prayers of the Christians who chanced to be fighting under him [the emperor].’ Also a child at the time, this writer – called Tertullian – grew up to be a prolific author of Christian tracts.

  What is striking is the indeterminate identity of the divinity on the column. It was as if the sculptor deliberately sought to portray not a recognizable Roman god such as Jupiter helping the Romans in their peril, as you might expect, but an undefined deity, one whom viewers of different religious persuasions could identify according to taste. In the late second century AD, the tectonic plates of ancient religion were shifting, and official Roman art here seems to take account of it. The next chapter will say more about the rising sect of the Christians.

  When I was a PhD student I spent many weeks in southern Greece studying the remnants of ancient Sparta. A nineteenth-century creation, today’s town of Sparti partly overlies its more famous forebear. A wander round the back streets takes you past building sites where work is held up by the discovery of ancient remains. These are likely to be Roman. Dusty plastic coverings may well protect mosaic floors, or hypocausts, the underfloor heating system of Roman baths. In their copper age, the descendants of the famous Spartans of old survived as a prosperous town of the Roman Empire.

  In these later times the Spartans were as fond of carving inscriptions as any other Greek provincial city. On the northern outskirts of the town you can walk through olive groves to the ancient theatre – in the monumental form you see today, with seating of local marble, a Roman creation of the time of Augustus. Here you can stand in front of a masonry wall covered with inscribed records of proud town councillors.

  At Sparta as elsewhere, fluctuations in this ‘epigraphic habit’, as experts call the ancient world’s enthusiasm for writing on stone, can be a barometer of the larger mood of the times.

  The Romans themselves held that their empire enjoyed its golden age under the rule of a series of five ‘good’ emperors. On the death of Marcus Aurelius, an emperor was succeeded for the first time since the reign of Titus, who died in AD 81, by his own flesh and blood. Of this moment the Roman senator and historian Cassius Dio wrote, ‘Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.’ This was Dio’s perspective half a century later, after living through turbulent times, including the reign of the vicious son of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and then a civil war ending with the advent of a new imperial lineage of mixed North African, Syrian, and perhaps Italian, heritage.

  Judging from what has survived, Sparta’s town councillors were at their most lively in flaunting their parish-pump politics on stone during the first sixty years of the second century AD. Under Marcus Aurelius, whose reign, despite his ‘goodness’, was a time of insecurity for the Roman Empire, as we just saw, Sparta’s epigraphic appetite fell off. It was as if sombre events in the wider world had punctured their parochial enthusiasms.

  If so, the Spartan mood might have lifted under the new emperor. In my studies I re-examined two inscribed blocks found in the 1960s during the building of modern Sparti’s vegetable market. They belonged to what was once an imposing monument, a base perhaps 25 feet long, supporting a lost row of statues. This must
have been the commission of all time for their local sculptor.

  The life-size images showed a new imperial family. There was the emperor Septimius Severus, who ruled from AD 193 to 211 and came from a family based in Roman Africa, his Syrian wife Julia Domna, their two sons and their daughter-in-law. The empress’s title shows how close relations were between this new imperial family and the army. She is styled ‘Mother of the Camp’.

  In AD 235 the murder of a teenage emperor and his mother brought the Severan lineage to a violent end. In this youth’s name his generals had waged war to protect the empire both in the east and the north. The deed was done while the emperor – Alexander Severus was his name – was with his troops on the west bank of the Rhine preparing for war with Germanic tribes. A senior army officer, the instigator of the murders, had already been hailed by Roman troops as emperor. He inaugurated a new breed of Roman ruler, as this snobbish assessment by a contemporary writer conveys:

  . . . by his birth and normal behaviour he was a barbarian. Possessing the bloodthirsty temperament derived from his ancestors and his country, he devoted himself to strengthening his rule by cruel actions. He was afraid that the senate and his subjects would despise him, forgetting his present good fortune and fixing their attention on the humble circumstances of his birth. There was a scandalous story widely circulated that he was supposed to have been a shepherd in the Thracian mountains until he offered himself for service in the small, local army because of his physical size and strength. It was the hand of chance that had brought him to rule the Roman empire.

  Here are the ingredients for the following half-century of Roman history. External enemies on more than one front put the defences of the empire under increasing threat. A mounting atmosphere of military crisis favoured the careers of talented soldiers no matter what their background, and could take them to the very top, as here. Lacking legitimacy among the traditional stakeholders of the imperial system, notably the senatorial aristocracy and the Roman plebs, men swept by the military tide into the highest office relied on the fickle loyalty of the soldiers.

  Here is the end of this Thracian ex-shepherd (if he really was), just three years later (AD 238), at the hands of his own soldiers:

  With great daring the men went to Maximinus’ tent about mid-day, and tore down his portrait from the standards with the assistance of the bodyguards. When Maximinus and his son came out of their tent to try and negotiate, the soldiers killed them both without listening. Their bodies were thrown out for anyone to desecrate and trample on, before being left to be torn to pieces by dogs and birds.

  The Spartan town councillors felt less optimistic now. Under mounting financial pressure from the state, they also went in for cost cutting. Whereas once they honoured a dignitary with a full-length statue of bronze or marble on a stone base, now, when they bothered at all, they tended to make do with a squared shaft of stone with a carved head on top. By the later 240s, the local masons who used to cut inscriptions were more or less out of work.

  After the mid-third century, the Athenians too become a dramatic gauge of a changing world. Rule by Roman emperors had been good for Athens as for Sparta. The descendants of Themistocles, Pericles and the like, as members of the aristocratic lineages of Roman Athens styled themselves, had seen their city outgrow its former walls. There were many new amenities, not all of them gifts of emperor Hadrian.

  In the middle of the AD 200s this sense of relative well-being late in the life of ancient Athens evaporated when the Roman emperors no longer seemed able to deliver protection. Visitors to the Acropolis begin their visit by passing through an ancient gateway flanked by two towers. They may notice that the ill-fitting blocks look as if the ancient builders reused them. Closer scrutiny shows that they did so with some art. They flanked the portal (for instance) with a decorative band of grey marble that contrasts with the surrounding white.

  In a way, the building of this defensive work in the later third century AD was a case of the Athenians closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. In recent years Austrian scholars using digital technology have performed the heroic feat of reading the earlier Greek writing on a manuscript in a Vienna library which eleventh-century scribes had recycled for a fresh text. Underneath the scholars discovered a fragment of an ancient account of barbarian invasions of Greece early in the AD 260s.

  We learn that the invaders moved southwards through Greece intending to plunder the rich sanctuaries of Athens and elsewhere. With no Roman troops in sight, the Greeks elected their own generals and prepared to block the invaders at the historic pass of Thermopylae. One of the generals harangued this Greek home guard with stirring talk: ‘Your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state, for they fought bravely in the Persian wars . . .’ This time the invaders turned back before reaching Athens. What happened a few years later, in AD 267/8, we already know from ancient writings: the luck and pluck of the Athenians failed them.

  The Heruli, a migrant people originating in Scandinavia, captured the city despite stout resistance from the locals. Modern excavations show that the ancient civic centre, the agora, full of historic and famous buildings, now reached the end of its long life. Devastated by the Heruli, it was left as a quarry of ruins. Reusing whatever they could, the Athenians now fortified a shrunken core of their city, including new defences for the Acropolis. This was the diminished urban pattern of the future in many parts of the empire.

  In the following two decades or so a continuing combination of military crisis and political instability threatened to break up the empire. On the south-eastern edges of the Roman province of Syria an ancient oasis city flourished under imperial rule thanks to its location on caravan routes servicing the trade in luxuries between the Roman Empire and the east. This was a place of mixed population, culture and language, where Greek-speakers lived alongside speakers of a Semitic tongue, Aramaic. As Pope Francis reminded Israel’s prime minister in 2014, this would have been the everyday language of Jesus.

  Great architecture sprang up at Palmyra, as did great ambitions among the leading families. They sensed an opportunity as Roman authority over the region faltered and the Roman subjects in these parts cried out for protection from the Sasanian Persians, a menacing new power with origins in what is now Iran.

  Out of this environment emerged Zenobia, widow of a Palmyrene prince with an Arabian name. She took Roman imperial titles, briefly turned Palmyra into an eastern Athens by attracting Greek intellectuals to her court, and invaded neighbouring Roman provinces, capturing Alexandria in 270.

  Later Roman writers claimed that she compared herself to Cleopatra. Certainly she must have been formidable. She seems to have aroused the same fears in Rome, fuelled by orientalism and misogyny, as the ‘Egyptian woman’ of three centuries earlier. Finally a Roman soldier-emperor marched out to suppress her.

  Franks, Sarmatians by the thousand, once and once again we’ve slain.

  Now we seek a thousand Persians.

  Supposedly Roman soldiers sang this song after an officer of humble origins led them to victory against the Franks, Rome’s name for a grouping of Germanic peoples who had invaded Roman Gaul. As a garrison commander on the Danube, Aurelian, as he was called, also killed in one day forty-eight Sarmatians – these were a nomadic people on the move under pressure from Germanic tribes. Other stories, possibly tall, accrued to this Aurelian. He was a stern disciplinarian in the harshest Roman tradition. The soldiers feared him. Hailed as emperor by his troops, he quickly moved against Zenobia.

  Defeating and capturing her, he returned again to extinguish a final flame of Palmyrene rebelliousness. A Roman tradition claimed that on this occasion Aurelian stopped the slaughter, asking, ‘To whom, at this rate, shall we leave the land or the city?’ In a curious foretaste of today’s concerns, he was also said to have given orders to use Zenobia’s treasure to restore Palmyra’s war-damaged monuments.

  In the chaos of the times
, there were chances too on the other side of the empire for would-be rulers of Roman-style breakaway states. In 2010 British media carried the story of the chance discovery in a Somerset field of a buried hoard of 52,000 Romano-British coins. First reports claimed that nearly eight hundred of these were minted under the authority of one Carausius.

  The thin written sources of the Romans about this man describe him as another soldier risen from the ranks. Roman tradition records his orders ‘to clear the sea, which the Franks and Saxons infested’ – the English Channel in other words. Supposedly to avoid the death penalty for misappropriating the booty from this campaign, Carausius seized Britannia, assumed Roman imperial titles as Zenobia had done, and for seven years ruled a breakaway domain until an underling murdered him (AD 293).

  What is interesting about Carausius – of whom little in truth can be known – is precisely his coins. Uniquely in Roman coinage, Carausius quoted the Roman ‘national’ poet. An example found in 2005, by a chap with a metal detector on land in Hertfordshire, depicts a rough-and-ready-looking Carausius with his usurped titles ‘Imp[erator]’ and ‘Aug[ustus]’. On the other side a woman, Britannia probably, and a Roman soldier clasp hands. The Latin legend reads ‘EXPECTATE VENI’.

  In effect a speech bubble for the female figure, this means ‘O longed for one, come!’ It took a good knowledge of Virgil’s long poem, the Aeneid, for a modern expert to recognize this legend’s seemingly deliberate echo of a question which Aeneas in Book 2 puts to a fellow Trojan in a dream: ‘From what shores do you come [‘venis’], longed-for [‘expectate’] Hector?’

  This is all very interesting. It shows that Carausius wanted to project himself as a man of (Roman) culture. If you contemplate who might be reassured by this display of refinement, and important enough to be targeted in this way, one constituency that springs to mind are the civilian owners of the rich villa-estates of Roman Britain – themselves, perhaps, a more cultivated class than we suspected.