In a political manoeuvre not without modern parallels, the imperial team on the other hand put the blame for economic hardship on the greed of businessmen. They were especially concerned about the suffering caused to one section of society in particular:
Who therefore can be ignorant that an audacity that plots against the good of society is presenting itself with a spirit of profiteering, wherever the general welfare requires our armies to be directed, not only in villages and towns, but along every highway? . . . that sometimes by the outlay upon a single article the soldier is robbed both of his bounty and of his pay, and that the entire contributions of the whole world for maintaining the armies accrue to the detestable gains of plunderers, so that our soldiers seem to yield the entire fruit of their military career, and the labours of their entire term of service, to these profiteers in everything . . .?
The military recovery of the Roman Empire at the end of the third century AD made one thing clear – the Roman war machine was still proving its superiority centuries after Roman ancestors had turned the Mediterranean into mare nostrum, or ‘our sea’. Self-evidently, the welfare of the army was an affair of state at the highest level. A verbal exchange which happens to have come down to us during a visit by the emperor Constantine to some of his veterans shows the close relationship between emperor and soldiers at this time:
The assembled veterans cried out, ‘Constantine Augustus! To what purpose have we been made veterans if we have no special privilege?’ Constantine Augustus said, ‘I should more and more increase rather than diminish the happiness of my fellow veterans.’
On the south bank of the River Danube lies modern Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, overlooked by the site of a Roman fort helping to guard this part of the empire’s border area. In the local museum here you can see an impressive Roman helmet from this period. Made of iron coated with gilded silver and studded with glass and gems, it is a parade version of what archaeologists call a ‘ridge helmet’.
The military fight-back at this time triggered a large-scale reorganization of the army. Among the innovations was new equipment including this type of helmet, so-called from the central ridge joining the two half-bowls that form the head piece. In its basic form it was well suited to mass production. There was also restructuring of the army:
Constantine did something else which gave the barbarians unhindered access to the Roman empire. By the forethought of Diocletian, the frontiers of the empire everywhere were covered, as I have stated, with cities, garrisons and fortifications which housed the whole army. Consequently it was impossible for the barbarians to cross the frontier . . . Constantine destroyed this security by removing most of the troops from the frontiers and stationing them in cities which did not need assistance.
Here too there is more than a whiff of religious bias. This extract comes from a Roman history by another writer whose pagan sympathies prejudiced him against a Christian emperor. Change in the army establishment under Diocletian and Constantine there certainly was, however. A distinction now emerged between field armies, elite troops stationed inside the empire and commanded by the emperor in person, and garrison troops stationed in border regions like Hadrian’s Wall. These mobile striking forces were meant to speed up the military response to any breach in the empire’s security.
The Romans may have adapted the so-called ridge helmet from the armour of an eastern neighbour. The ‘Arch of Khosrau’, or Tāq i Kisrā in Arabic, is an ancient ruin some 15 miles south of Baghdad. An online photograph dated 2009 shows American army officers and Iraqi officials standing in front of it while they discuss post-war renovations.
Muslim writers used to admire this gravity-defying archway of fired brick as a wonder of the world. It once ornamented the palace of the great power that arose on Rome’s eastern border early in the third century AD. Persian in origin, the kings of the Sasanid line were as aggressive as the Romans. It was partly to counter their threat that Constantine seems to have taken the other fateful decision for which his name is still remembered.
In old Istanbul you can catch the tram to Çemberlitaş Square, where pigeons peck around the base of an ancient column. Its lower part sheathed in a stone buttress of Ottoman date, its upper part blackened by fire and reinforced with iron hoops in the 1970s, this battered monument suggests glorious origins only in the stone from which its drums are quarried: porphyry, the hard purple stone from Egypt which the Caesars favoured as a symbol of their rank.
This is almost the only visible memory today of the founder of Constantinople. Originally the column supported a golden statue of Constantine and stood in the forum of his new Roman capital, created here in 324 by rebuilding an old Greek settlement, Byzantium. By this time, Constantine had emerged as sole ruler of a unified empire after years of struggle with rivals. Diocletian’s collegiate system of four emperors was dead.
Apart from chasing his own glory, as the name of the new city makes clear enough, the emperor was now thinking strategically. Military roads on both sides of the Bosporus linked Constantinople to vulnerable Roman borders to the north (the Danube) and the east (the Sasanians). This was to be both a base and bulwark of imperial power. Spear in hand, Constantine himself paced the line of the wall which he hoped would protect his new foundation on its one vulnerable side, the landward approach from the west.
Constantine also had novel ideas about his image. In one of Rome’s treasure houses of ancient art, the Palazzo dei Conservatori, lined up in an inner courtyard, is a row of supersized body parts. Carved in marble, they include a hand, an elbow and an eye-catching head of an adult male, about eight times life-size, exuding calm command.
This colossal statue of Constantine – for it is he – shows him clean-shaven, the first emperor to revive this look after a long series of soldier-emperors portrayed as hard men with stubbly beards and cropped hair. Perhaps he wanted to remind people of the founding father of the Roman Empire, the beardless Augustus, also depicted, like Constantine here, with hair combed forward and ever youthful – or of Alexander, the original beardless wunderkind. But the eyes tell a different story, and a new one. They are enormous, as if all-seeing, and they gaze upwards, like a ruler whose absolute power is sourced from a higher realm.
Constantine’s recipe for stabilizing the state included the familiar one of handing power to his family. A son succeeded him as emperor, called Constantius (reigned 337–361). An ancient description shows Constantius apparently trying to embody his father’s image of all-powerfulness in real life.
In 356, aged thirty-nine, he appeared in the streets of Rome alone in a golden chariot, surrounded by troops in parade armour. The emperor himself, this writer says, was ‘shining with all kinds of precious stones which seemed to spread a flickering light all around’. Commenting on an exhibition in 2009 at Versailles of the similarly bejewelled costumes of the old French court, the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld observed: ‘Dazzling the people was the best way to keep them at a distance. This type of costume created virtually insurmountable barriers.’ In the case of Constantius, the real coup de théâtre was his extraordinary comportment on this occasion. As with some heads of state today, the effect could have been comical, if it weren’t so frightening:
For though he was a man of short stature, yet he bowed down when entering through the city’s high gates, looking straight ahead, as if he had his neck in a vice; he turned his eyes neither to right nor left, as if he were a graven image of a man; nor did he sway when jolted by the wheel of his chariot, nor was he ever seen to spit or wipe or rub his face or nose, or to move his hands about.
The ducking beneath gates is particularly striking – as if the vertically challenged Constantius even so saw himself as superhumanly tall by virtue of his godly office. This new image of the fourth-century Roman emperor included a spiky crown, something carefully avoided by earlier emperors as smacking too openly of one-man rule and therefore likely to upset traditional Roman values.
The military instability of
the third century had prompted radical solutions. What had emerged under Diocletian and Constantine was a new kind of Roman Empire. This reformed state needed to be much stronger and more centralized to do what had become the much more demanding job of keeping Romans safe. To this end, the old provinces had been divided up into a hundred or so smaller units to enable a greatly enlarged bureaucracy – between 30,000 and 35,000 personnel on one estimate – to extract more tax from provincials.
These personnel mainly came from the social stratum beneath the old senatorial aristocracy, namely, the knights. More numerous than the more exclusive senators, and more adaptable to the managerial ethos increasingly called for in running the state, knights now more or less replaced senators as a specialized professional class of imperial administrators.
This bigger tax pot in turn funded the larger defence budget that the empire now needed. To legitimize these expanded powers of the state, the image of the figure at the pinnacle of the system needed reinvention. He was now conceived as an autocrat whose authority was limitless, universal and divine.
As seen, Constantine’s conversion had introduced into the heart of the Roman state something entirely new – an exclusive monotheism. Constantine held synods of bishops to try to get agreement on what all Christians believed about their faith. At the first of these, convened in 325 at Nicaea, modern Iznik in north-west Turkey, the council of prelates – over three hundred of them – agreed on a general statement of Christian tenets. This was the first version of what is now known as the Nicene Creed. His son and successor Constantius was also Christian.
This new visibility of Christians both at court and in society at large was not a neutral development for the other religions of Rome. In the second and third centuries AD pilgrims flocked to a mighty building on the west coast of Turkey. Inside, the god Apollo was believed to give oracles by communicating through his priestess. Today’s visitor can still admire the fine ashlar passageways and the vast open courtyard of what was once a Greek temple so ambitious in scale that the builders were still at work when Constantine first came to power, half a millennium after the monument was begun.
A few years earlier, an undecided Diocletian had consulted Apollo’s oracle here at Didyma about whether to proceed with persecuting Christians. A Christian writer describing this episode not long after writes that the oracle responded to the diviner sent by the emperor as ‘one would expect of an enemy of God’s religion’.
Ten years later, when the religious boot was on the other foot, there was an unprecedented turn of events – Christian reprisals. In 313 Christians instigated the arrest of a senior priest at Didyma, one of the men who turned the prophetess’s meandering utterances into graceful Greek. He was among a number of prophetic personnel at this time who ‘under cruel tortures before the Roman courts declared that the whole delusion was produced by human frauds, and confessed that it was all an artfully contrived imposture’.
This too is a Christian voice – that of Eusebius once more, a member of Constantine’s circle. No doubt it suited him to see the persecutions as part of a conspiracy against Christians in which traditional oracles of the gods had connived. In fact the priestly establishment at Didyma – no matter what might be confessed under torture – could simply have been seeing the world in their traditional way when they gave Diocletian the god’s reply.
When the norms of the community seemed to be threatened, the suspicions of the Roman authorities were aroused. From Constantine’s time these ‘norms’ were Christian, now that the emperor had officially sanctioned Christianity and redirected imperial patronage towards Christian churches. In this revolutionary period for Christians, most people were probably not interested in stirring up disturbances on religious grounds. Still, a relatively small number of zealots can cause a lot of trouble for the many. A new guardedness can be detected among practitioners of the old religion as the fourth century got under way.
Dominating the Greek island of Patmos in the eastern Aegean is a Greek Orthodox monastery dating from the eleventh century. It is dedicated to the early Christian saint who supposedly authored the New Testament’s Book of Revelation in a nearby cave around AD 90, John the Evangelist.
Among other sights, visitors to this monastery get to see a well laid-out museum. Amid the chrysobulls and firmans of imperial patrons, the mediaeval manuscripts and all the liturgical paraphernalia, somewhat incongruously a corner of the display is devoted to finds from the island’s pre-Christian past. Here there is one inscription which far surpasses the neighbouring fragments in historical interest.
Attached to the museum wall, a more or less intact slab preserves a sixteen-line poem in Ancient Greek. The inscription is hard to date, but the style of the lettering could be as late as the early fourth century AD. An unknown poet was commissioned to celebrate the good works of a woman called Vera in the service of the goddess Artemis, who had a shrine on the island.
As the inscription recounts, she was the daughter of a successful doctor, born on the island but brought up on the nearby mainland of Asia Minor. She returned to Patmos to serve the goddess as her priestess. As the poet graphically describes, the first duty of her office was ‘to sacrifice by the altar the foetus of goats slaughtered in the proper way and just twitching, to the Patmian goddess’. The poet doesn’t say as much, but this Vera presumably wielded the sacrificial knife herself. This was a traditional role for priestly personnel in the old cults. The odd thing about the inscription is that it puts so much emphasis on this perfectly normal act of Greek and Roman religion in the first place.
Some scholars wonder if Vera’s action was stressed in this way because, at the date of the poem, blood sacrifice was no longer quite so routine as it used to be. Vera and her co-religionists might have travelled to sleepy Patmos because they were frightened of performing blood sacrifice in the mainland towns of Asia Minor. Under Constantius, for instance, ancient writings record attacks by Christian zealots on pagan temples in the eastern half of the empire, sometimes in collusion with Roman officials.
It is usually a good sign of the subject’s historical liveliness when a Roman ruler attracts the novelist. The American writer Gore Vidal tackled the emperor Julian (ruled 361–363) in a historical novel published in 1964. One of its reviewers described the genre of historical fiction as ‘not history but imaginative re-creation; a kind of dream-edifice’. It could be said of Julian himself that he was hard at work on a similar project: ‘a kind of dream-edifice’.
Constantine’s nephew, Julian was another member of the family ‘of short stature’. He ruled for a mere sixteen months before being killed in battle with the Persians in 363, aged thirty-two – around the same age as Alexander the Great when he too died in Mesopotamia. In another respect there was more a touch of Hadrian about Julian. Carefully educated, he admired Classical Greece’s legacy, including the Spartans and, especially, the Athenians.
Julian was an idealistic young ruler who set about shaking up the status quo. A contemporary writer, an admirer, describes how he attacked soft living, cutting down luxury among the eunuchs at court and restoring the discipline of the army in the best traditions of old-fashioned Roman morality. Unexpectedly, he also turned out to want to interfere in religion, on the side of the gods. A secret pagan in a Christian family, he ‘came out’ when on the throne.
Not least because he inherited power through the fluke of birth, experts are not sure how popular his plans for Roman religion were – or indeed, quite what they were. He passed decrees, we are told, which ‘ordered the temples to be opened, victims brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored’. This fight-back chimes with a definite impression from the ancient sources that by this date Christian encroachment on the old religion was worsening.
Julian was told, for instance, that Christians had been bringing the relics of their holy people near, or right into, the oracles of the gods in an apparent bid to silence them by putting the divinity off his stride. At Didyma he responded by h
aving churches near Apollo’s temple in which relics were being placed for this purpose burnt to the ground.
What we call religious intolerance was on both sides. Even the admiring Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus thought that Julian, his contemporary, went too far when he barred Christians from teaching literature or public speaking. Here Julian’s Machiavellian aim seems to have been to restrict Christian influence on future generations of young people from the elite classes of society.
Experts wonder if he had more ambitious plans to ‘reform’ paganism. This debate is bound up with the murky problems of his personal religious attitudes, about which we know quite a lot from his own writings, which survive. Suffice to say that in his day, for a sophisticated mind like Julian’s, the old religion had come a long way since the 600s BC, when a devotee in central Greece had an inscription incised on a bronze figurine which he offered to Apollo: ‘Mantiklos donated me as a tenth to the far shooter, the bearer of the Silver Bow. Do you, Phoebus [Apollo], give something pleasing in return.’ This crude ‘I give so that you may give’ was a core creed of the old religion, channelled through offerings of all sorts, including countless generations of animal victims like Vera’s kid and its mother. By Julian’s time, for the educated few, more esoteric fare was on offer from ‘those who wear the long cloak and look supercilious’.
Thus did a Christian writer of the fourth century AD offer a fairly typical ancient caricature of philosophers. Their shabby cloaks – hommage to the frayed and dirty garb of Socrates – were almost a professional uniform.
One ancient writer met the philosopher with whom the young Julian had studied. By then an old man, this Maximus still made a great impression, especially his speech:
His voice . . . was such as one might have heard from Homer’s Athene or Apollo. The very pupils of his eyes were, so to speak, winged; he had a long grey beard, and his glance revealed the agile impulses of his soul . . . In discussion with him no one ventured to contradict him, not even the most experienced and most eloquent, but they yielded to him in silence and acquiesced in what he said as though it came from the tripod of an oracle; such a charm sat on his lips.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 37
