SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  96. Hadrian’s Pantheon with the exotic Egyptian columns supporting the porch. It is a deceptive building. Although in its present form it was built by Hadrian, the bronze letters across the gable proclaim that it was the work of Augustus’ colleague Marcus Agrippa. He certainly was behind an earlier version of the temple, but Hadrian’s new build was entirely new – and his reference to Agrippa was public piety.

  They also hint at the enormous effort, time and money that the emperors were prepared to devote to displaying their control over their distant possessions. To take just one example: supporting the porch of the emperor Hadrian’s Pantheon, finished in the 120s CE, were twelve columns, each 40 Roman feet high (roughly 12 metres) and carved from a single block of Egyptian grey granite. This is not to modern eyes a spectacular material, but it was an extremely prestigious stone used in many imperial projects, partly because it was found only in one faraway place, 2,500 miles from Rome, Mons Claudianus (the ‘Mountain of Claudius’, named after the emperor who first sponsored work there) in the middle of the eastern Egyptian desert. It was only with immense difficulty and a huge investment of labour and cash that columns of this size could be quarried and transported to Rome in one piece.

  Excavations at Mons Claudianus over the past thirty years have revealed a military base, small villages for the quarry workers and a supply and transport centre; and they have turned up many hundreds of written documents, often scratched on recycled broken pieces of pottery (a workable alternative to wax tablets), that give a hint of the organisation and its problems. The provision of food and drink was only the first. There was a complicated supply chain of everything from wine to cucumbers, which did not always work (‘Please send me two loaves of bread, for no grain has come up here for me so far,’ reads one begging letter), and water was rationed (one document is a water distribution list that numbers 917 people working in the quarries). The work was laborious. Every one of the Pantheon columns would have taken three men well over a year to hack out and trim down, and occasionally, as some of the documents attest, a half-prepared monolith would crack and they would have to start again. Transport was the next hurdle, especially as the quarries were almost 100 miles from the Nile. One letter on papyrus from Mons Claudianus begs a local official to send grain supplies, as the quarries had a column of 50 Roman feet (weight: 100 tons) ready to go, but the food for the pack animals to get it to the river was running out. Even in the case of the Pantheon, it is clear that not everything went to plan: some slightly awkward design features of the finished building make it seem likely that Hadrian’s architects had banked on getting twelve 50-foot columns but had to adjust at the last minute when twelve 40-foot columns were all that the quarry could provide.

  97. The site of Mons Claudianus, where the famous grey granite (granodiorite) for the Pantheon columns was quarried; 30 miles away in the desert another quarry, Mons Porphyrites, was the source of the porphyry also used in major Roman building projects. These were literally military operations, serving the construction needs of the Roman state.

  The stone transported from Mons Claudianus is an unusual case of the movement of goods around the Roman world. It was largely in the hands of the imperial administration, backed up by soldiers; and is hard not to suspect that it was intended in part as a display of Rome’s ability to pull off the virtually impossible – a reductio ad absurdum of Roman power. But in many other markets, from absolute staples to more affordable luxuries, trade and profits boomed in the empire. Vivid snapshots survive of men who struck it very lucky in all sorts of commercial enterprise. One papyrus of the mid second century CE lists the goods, with their cash value, which came on a single ship from southern India to Egypt, presumably destined for Rome. It was worth, after tax, more than 6 million sesterces, the equivalent of a decent senatorial estate in Italy at the time (Pliny had bought a large but slightly run-down property, plus land, for 3 million), and the cargo included a hundred or so pairs of elephant tusks, boxes of oils and spices and very likely vast quantities of pepper. A man called Flavius Zeuxis was not quite in that league, but his epitaph, found in the ancient textile town of Hieropolis in what is now southern Turkey, boasts that over his career he made seventy-two journeys around Cape Malea, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, on his way to Rome to sell his fabric. It is not clear whether his seventy-two trips were single or return voyages, but either way this was a lifetime’s achievement worth parading.

  Beyond these individual entrepreneurs, the bigger picture is revealed in the much less glamorous but even more impressive facts and figures of basic supply. A little hill on the bank of the river Tiber in Rome, now known as Monte Testaccio (‘Broken Pot Mountain’), conjures up better than anything else the scale of the trade in staple foodstuffs that kept the million people who lived in the city alive, and the network of transport facilities, shipping, warehousing and retailing required to sustain it. Despite its appearance, this is not a natural hill at all but the remains of a man-made Roman rubbish dump, the broken fragments of 53 million containers of olive oil, pottery amphorae with a capacity of about 60 litres each. These had almost all been imported from southern Spain over a hundred years or so, from the mid second to the mid third century CE, and had been dumped as soon as the oil was decanted. This was one part of an enormous export trade that changed the economy of that part of Spain into an agricultural monoculture (nothing but olives and more olives) and delivered to the city of Rome just some of what it needed to survive. At a rough estimate, that basic requirement amounted to 20 million litres of olive oil per year (for lighting and cleaning, as well as cooking), 100 million litres of wine and 250 tons of grain. Almost all of this came to Rome from outside Italy.

  The mobility of empire, however, was not restricted to the axis between the metropolitan centre and the rest of the Roman world. One of the main developments in the empire of the first two centuries CE was that it became a territory through, around and within which people moved, often bypassing Rome; the traffic did not simply flow between centre and periphery. There are many ways of tracking this movement. The most up-to-date involves looking at the evidence of human skeletons, particularly their mouths, in ever more precise ways. Modern scientific analysis has shown how the distinctive imprint of the climate, water supply and diet of the growing child leaves traces in the teeth of the adult, giving hints about where any particular dead person grew up. The studies are still very provisional, but they seem to show that a substantial proportion of the urban population of, for example, Roman Britain grew up in a different climatic region from the one in which they died – whether that was the warm south coast of Britain versus the chilly north or the balmy south of France, is so far hard to tell.

  98. Monte Testaccio is one of the most surprising hills, and rubbish dumps, in the world – being made up almost entirely of broken amphorae, which once carried Spanish olive oil. They could not be re-used because the oil seeped into the fabric of the vessel and turned rancid.

  Some of those journeys can be traced in the stories of the people who ended up near Hadrian’s Wall. The picture often conjured up of a miserable bunch of soldiers from sunny Italy being forced to endure the fog, frost and rain of northern Britain is very misleading. The garrison was largely made up of forces recruited in equally foggy places across the English Channel, in what are now Holland, Belgium and Germany. But at all levels of the Wall community, individuals came from much further afield, even from the opposite ends of the empire. These range from Victor, an ex-slave of a cavalry soldier, whose tombstone identifies him as a ‘Moor’, to one of the grandest Romans in the province, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the governor of Britain between 139 and 142 CE. Thanks to some lucky survivals we can still identify both the building work he sponsored in northern Britain and the family tomb he commissioned at the other end of the Roman world, in his home town (of Tiddis, as it is now called) in northern Algeria.

  Most evocative of all is the story of a man from Palmyra in Syria, Barates, who was working ne
ar Hadrian’s Wall in the second century CE. It is not known what brought him the 4,000 miles across the world (probably the longest journey of anyone in this book); it may have been trade, or he may have had some connection with the army. But he settled in Britain long enough to marry Regina (‘Queenie’), a British woman and ex-slave. When she died at the age of thirty, Barates commemorated her with a tombstone, near the Roman fort of Arbeia, modern South Shields. This depicts Queenie – who, as the epitaph makes clear, was born and bred just north of London – as if she were a stately Palmyrene matron; and underneath the Latin text, Barates had her name inscribed in the Aramaic language of his homeland. It is a memorial which nicely sums up the movement of peoples and the cultural mix that defined the Roman Empire, and raises even more tantalising questions. Who did Queenie think she was? Would she have recognised herself as that Palmyrene lady? And what would this couple have thought about the ‘Rome’ in whose world they lived?

  99. The figure of Regina on her tombstone is similar to many found in Palmyra. But the Latin text beneath explains that ‘Barates the Palmyrene put this up for Regina, ex-slave and wife, aged thirty, of the Catuvellaunian tribe’. It is not made absolutely explicit, but she had almost certainly been his own slave. The production of the memorial is an interesting puzzle. Did Barates provide a sketch of what he wanted to some local sculptor? Or was there a craftsman at South Shields already familiar with this style?

  They create desolation and call it peace

  There was certainly some strong opposition to aspects of Roman rule. Integration, mobility, luxuries and commercial profit were only one side of the story of the empire. The other side included disobedience and tax dodging, passive resistance and popular protests, often aimed as much at the local elites as at the Romans. But open, armed rebellion against Roman ‘occupation’ seems to have been rare over the first two centuries CE. Some brave, though ultimately always doomed, rebels against the invincible power of Rome have become the legendary heroes and heroines of modern nations, whether ‘Herman the German’ or Boudicca, whose regal bronze statue stands proudly outside the Houses of Parliament on the banks of the river Thames. And the fortress of Masada, where in 73 CE 960 Jewish rebels opted for suicide rather than submission at the end of a long siege, is now an Israeli national monument. But these are the exceptions. The Roman Empire does not appear to have been an empire of insurrection.

  That impression may be slightly misleading. Roman authorities, like many modern states, had a vested interest in writing off principled political rebellion as if it were treachery, riot or simple crime. It is impossible to know the aspirations of the so-called bandits who troubled Roman governors in many parts of the world or to pinpoint where exactly the boundary lay between highway robbery and ideological dissidence. And when the Jews in Jerusalem took to violence in the reign of Claudius after a Roman soldier exposed himself in the Temple, was that just a riot? Or should it be seen as the spark of an incipient rebellion, quashed by the Roman authorities in the province at the cost of thousands of Jewish lives? Besides, emperors hungry for military glory could find it convenient to represent the suppression of internal insurrection as if it were external conquest in the old tradition. The arch erected to commemorate the triumph of Vespasian and Titus over the Jews in 71 CE, before the final Roman victory at Masada, offers no clue that the victory was against armed internal rebels, not a foreign foe.

  The rebellions that we know about were not the work of high-principled, or narrow-minded, nationalists. Getting rid of the Romans was never the same as an independence movement in the modern sense. Nor were they driven by an excluded underclass or religious zealotry. Religion often confirmed the aspirations of the rebels and provided unifying rituals and symbols – from the messianic hopes of the Jews to the human sacrifices reputedly carried out by Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest – but rebellions were not specifically religious uprisings. They were usually led by the provincial aristocracy and were a sign that the relationship of collusion between the local elites and the Roman authorities had broken down. To put it another way, they were the price the Romans paid for their dependence on collaboration. Rebellions were usually sparked by some isolated inflammatory or offensive act on the part of the Romans which upset the delicate balance of power.

  100. The arch near the Roman Forum to commemorate the victory of Vespasian and Titus over the Jews. This sculpted panel in the passage through the centre of the arch shows the triumphal procession, with the menorah that had come to Rome as part of the spoils carried aloft.

  The Jewish revolt, which began in 66 CE, stemmed largely from divisions in the ruling class in Judaea and the mutual distrust between them and the Roman authorities. The governor’s order to flog and crucify a number of Jews in the province, who were also Roman citizens, was one powerful provocation. Most of the best-known rebel leaders in other parts of the world had very close connections with the Roman administration. Arminius, who massacred Varus’ legions in 9 CE, and Julius Civilis, who led another German rebellion in 69 and 70 CE, were both Roman citizens and ex-soldiers in the Roman army, as well as being members of the local aristocracy. Even the uprising of Boudicca in Britain in 60 CE fits this pattern.

  Boudicca, or Buduica (we do not know exactly how to spell the name, but neither, presumably, did she), was not an inveterate enemy of Rome but part of a family of elite collaborators. She was the widow of Prasutagus, a leader of the Britons in eastern England and a Roman ally: a Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus on a more modest scale. On his death, he left half his tribal kingdom to the emperor and half to his daughters, a sensible division intended to ensure peaceful continuity. In this case, according to Roman writers, it was the behaviour of some Romans in taking possession of the bequest that was the spark to the rebellion. They moved in with determined, or heedless, brutality: soldiers plundered the property of Prasutagus, raped his daughters and flogged his widow. In reaction, Boudicca raised her supporters and went on the attack.

  As usual in these rebellions, short-term success on the part of the insurgents and terror on the part of the Romans was followed sooner or later by a resounding Roman victory. Boudicca’s militia instantly destroyed three Roman towns in the new province, burning them to the ground and cruelly killing the inhabitants. One Roman historian, mingling fantasy – one hopes – with misogyny and patriotism, refers to Boudicca’s soldiers hanging up the enemy women, cutting off their breasts and sewing them into the victims’ mouths, ‘to make them look as if they were eating them’. But as soon as the news reached the governor of the province, who was fighting 250 miles away in Wales, he marched straight back and wiped out the British insurgents. Tacitus gives a boastful but highly implausible figure of 80,000 British casualties, as against just 400 Romans; Boudicca took poison and according to one tall story lies buried somewhere near Platform 10 of King’s Cross railway station in North London.

  What Boudicca’s aims were we can only guess. Her true story is clouded by ancient and modern mythmaking. For Roman writers, she was a figure simultaneously of horror and of fascination. A warrior queen, intersex, barbarian Cleopatra: ‘very tall in stature, with a manly physique, piercing eyes and harsh voice, and a mass of red hair falling to her hips’, as she was described centuries later by someone who could not possibly have known what she looked like. In Britain over the past few centuries she has not only been turned into a national heroine, on the optimistic assumption that her more unsavoury aspects were Roman propaganda; she has also been reinvented as the ancestor of the British Empire that one day outstripped ancient Rome. ‘Regions Caesar never knew / Thy posterity shall sway’ is the message carved on the plinth of her statue by the Thames: empire to – even bigger – empire.

  No word from Boudicca or from any of the other rebels has come down to us. The closest we have to such a perspective are the multi-volume Jewish histories by Josephus, the one-time insurgent against the Romans, who wrote his self-serving account of the rebellion that ended in the siege of Masada from th
e comfort of his study in Rome. Whether as traitor, asylum seeker or far-sighted politician, he had taken up residence there under the protection of the emperor Vespasian. But that is a very special and very partial case. The histories of Tacitus and other Roman writers do feature long speeches from many of the most prominent opponents of Roman rule. In them, Boudicca denounces the immoral luxuries of Roman ‘civilisation’ and the effeminacy of the Romans while lamenting the lost libertas of the Britons – a loss symbolised by the rape of her daughters and her own flogging. Julius Civilis in Germany rouses his followers by comparing Roman rule to slavery rather than alliance and lists the unfair exactions imposed by the imperial power. Most memorably of all, in Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law, one of Rome’s enemies, as part of a set-piece speech delivered before he enters battle with Agricola, challenges Roman rule and what it adds up to. The Romans, he insists, are the robbers of the world, insatiable for domination and profit. And in a much-quoted phrase that still hits home, he sums up the Roman imperial project: ‘they create desolation and call it peace’, ‘solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’.

  101. The statue of Boudicca (or ‘Boadicea’ as she is known here, in the Latin form of her name) on the Thames Embankment in London, by Thomas Thorneycroft. It is a wonderful image of a warrior queen, but almost every detail is archaeologically inaccurate, including the deadly scythes fixed to the chariot wheels. Started in the 1850s the sculpture was not put on public display, after much debate about where it should be placed, until 1902.