SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  These local rebels almost certainly did not utter any such fine phrases on the eve of battle. And the Roman historians who coined them could not possibly have known what was said on those occasions in any case and would have dreaded the thought of living under a Boudicca. But they knew exactly what the political objections to Roman rule might be and how to express it. While we must regret not being able to read the authentic views of the provincial dissidents of the empire, the idea that Roman writers could imagine what it was like to be in opposition to their own imperial power is perhaps even more important, and it is a distinguishing feature of Roman culture and power. At the end of the first century BCE, the historian Sallust, looking back, saw Rome’s destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE as a turning point towards Roman decadence and could try to reconstruct some of King Jugurtha’s views of the Romans (as power hungry, corrupt and irrationally opposed to monarchy). A century or so later Tacitus and others imagined in vivid detail what the script of those provincials who rebelled against Rome might be. No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman imperial power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.

  Christian trouble

  The problems with understanding the conflicts between the ancient Romans and the troublesome Christians are the exact opposite. The victory of Christianity, which in the fourth century CE became the ‘official’ religion of the Roman Empire, ensured that there is an enormous amount of surviving evidence, argument and self-justification from Christian Roman writers and almost nothing from their traditional, ‘pagan’ Roman opponents outlining their objections to the new religion. The letters between Pliny and Trajan amount to one of the most loquacious non-Christian discussions of the new religion to survive. The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners. They construct a triumphalist history of Christianity as victorious both against its pagan rivals, despite cruel persecution by the Roman state, and against all the internal variants (‘heresies’, as later Christians defined them), which challenged what came to be Christian orthodoxy.

  The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.

  From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived un-troubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally scapegoated, as when Nero decided to shift the blame for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE on to them. They were plausible candidates perhaps, as some Christians were prophesying that the world would shortly end in flames. The letters between Pliny and Trajan suggest that there was some Roman legislation that, whether explicitly or implicitly, outlawed the religion, though we know no more than that. Pliny’s uncertainty and puzzlement are reflected on some other occasions when Romans chose to punish Christians in different parts of the empire, from Gaul to Africa.

  One particularly revealing moment is described, in the account of her own trial, by a Christian woman who was sent to be killed by wild beasts in the amphitheatre in Roman Carthage in 203 CE. Vibia Perpetua, a newly converted Christian, was aged about twenty-two, married and with a young baby, when she was arrested and brought before the procurator of the province, who was acting in place of the governor who had recently died. Her memoir is the most lengthy, personal and intimate account by a woman of her own experiences to have survived from the whole of the ancient world, dwelling on her anxieties about her child and the dreams that she experienced in prison before she was sent to the beasts. Even in this account the frustration of her interrogator comes across, and his keenness to get her to recant. ‘Have pity on the white hairs of your father, have pity on your tiny baby,’ he urged her. ‘Just make a sacrifice for the well-being of the emperor.’ ‘I will not do so,’ she replied. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he asked, now putting the formal question. When she said she was – ‘Christiana sum’ – she was sentenced to death. The procurator was obviously baffled, and so it seems was the crowd who watched her die in the amphitheatre. Roman blood sports obeyed a rather strict set of rules. It was animals and criminals and the slave underclass who met their deaths, not young mothers. In fact ‘the crowd shuddered at the sight’, when they saw that Perpetua’s fellow martyr Felicitas had breasts dripping milk. So why on earth were the Romans doing this?

  Whatever the letter of the law or the precise circumstances of any individual trial, there was an irreconcilable clash between traditional Roman values and Christianity. Roman religion was not only polytheistic but treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation. As far back as the takeover of Veii in the early fourth century BCE, Rome had regularly welcomed the gods of the conquered. There were from time to time controversies and anxieties about this; the priests of the Egyptian goddess Isis found themselves expelled from the city of Rome on more than one occasion. But the basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities. Christianity was, in theory, an exclusive monotheism, which rejected the gods who for centuries had guaranteed the success of Rome. In practice, for every Perpetua who went bravely, or in Roman eyes stubbornly, to her death, there were probably hundreds of ordinary Christians who chose to sacrifice to the traditional gods, cross their fingers and ask for forgiveness later. But on paper there could be no accommodation.

  The same was true, in a sense, of Judaism. But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents. All kinds of mystical moments of enlightenment might attract new worshippers to (say) the religion of Isis. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for. All these factors help to explain the worries, confusion and hostility of Pliny and others like him.

  At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas. The irony is that the only religi
on that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.

  Citizens

  So was Christianity really a Roman religion? Yes and no. For it obviously depends on what we mean by ‘Roman’ – a malleable and elusive adjective that can be used in many senses, from political control to style of art, from place to period of time. The right answer to the question of how many ‘Romans’ lived in ‘Roman Britain’ could well be ‘about five’, if we mean only those born and bred in Rome. It could equally well be ‘around 50,000’, if every single soldier plus the small staff of the imperial administration, including slaves, are all deemed to count. It would be more like ‘3 million’ if we reckon that all the inhabitants of the Roman province were now in a way Roman, even though most of them, outside the towns, would probably not have known where in the world Rome was and would have had no more direct contact with Roman power than the occasional bit of loose change in their pockets.

  One important definition still rested in Roman citizenship. For an increasingly large number of the inhabitants of the empire, becoming Roman meant becoming a Roman citizen. Throughout the provinces in the first two centuries CE, there were many ways in which this happened. Non-citizens who served in the Roman army were made citizens when they completed their terms of service; local officials in towns across the empire were more or less automatically granted Roman citizenship; whole communities or individuals (like Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus) were made citizens for special services they had rendered; and slaves of Roman citizens wherever they lived became Roman citizens if and when they were freed. There were none of the tests or examinations that we have come to associate with acquiring citizenship, no saluting the flag, swearing loyalty or paying a fee. Citizenship was a gift, and by 200 CE, according to the best recent estimate, roughly 20 per cent of the free population had become citizens. To put it another way, there were probably at least 10 million provincial Roman citizens.

  Citizenship brought with it all kinds of specific rights under Roman law, covering a wide range of topics, from contracts to punishments. The simple reason that, in the 60s CE, Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded was that Paul was a Roman citizen. For a few, citizenship was the first step in joining the elite of the central Roman government, on a journey that even led to the senate and imperial palace. Several emperors in the second century CE had origins outside Italy, from Trajan, whose family came from Spain, to Septimius Severus, who ruled between 193 and 211 CE and was the first emperor from Africa.

  More and more senators were also of provincial origin. They included Lollius Urbicus, the governor of Britain from North Africa; Agricola, whose family came from southern Gaul; and many more, who proudly displayed their achievements in the capital (‘the fifth man ever to enter the senate from the whole of Asia’) in inscriptions in their home towns. Some emperors promoted the trend. In his speech in 48 CE which advocated admitting to the senate men from northern Gaul (‘hairy Gaul’, as the Romans called it), Claudius explicitly justified the proposal by looking back to Rome’s openness to foreigners from its earliest days and forestalling one obvious objection: ‘If anyone concentrates on the fact that the Gauls gave Julius Caesar, now a god, such trouble in war for ten years, he should consider that they have also been loyal and trustworthy for a hundred years since then.’ By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first ‘foreign’ emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather than ‘native’, but not all, or even most. In effect, the provincials were now ruling Rome.

  That does not mean the governing classes of Rome were part of some warm, liberal cultural melting pot. In our terms, they were relatively race blind. The reason that we can still debate the ethnic origins of the African emperor Septimius Severus is that ancient writers made no comment on them. But the Roman elite were certainly snobbish about senators from the provinces. People joked about them not being able to find their way to the senate house. Even Septimius Severus is supposed to have been so embarrassed by his sister’s bad Latin accent that he sent her back home. And Claudius’ speech arguing in favour of admitting ‘hairy Gauls’ to the senate was prompted by widespread senatorial objections to the proposal. Yet, at least by the second century CE, at the centre of the Roman world were a substantial number of men and women who saw the empire from both sides, who had two homes – Roman and provincial – and who were culturally bilingual.

  Gaius Julius Zoilos

  It is with the story of one of those bilinguals that we end this chapter. Gaius Julius Zoilos is not a familiar name. He was no Polybius, Scipio Barbatus, Cicero or Pliny; he has left no writing (except a few words on stone) and is never once mentioned in the surviving literature of the Roman world. But different periods of Roman history are captured by different kinds of people. Zoilos, an ex-slave, imperial agent and wealthy benefactor of his home town, stands for many of the themes of the Roman Empire. At the same time he is a powerful reminder of those many Roman life stories that are almost hidden from history and are still being pieced together.

  All we know about Zoilos has been revealed in excavations, mostly over the past fifty years, of the small Roman town of Aphrodisias, in what is now southern Turkey, which must have been his original – and final – home. His elaborate tomb has been discovered there, which gives a glimpse of his appearance, though tantalisingly most of his face has not survived. He is mentioned in a letter from the future emperor Augustus, written in 39 or 38 BCE and inscribed on stone by the Aphrodisians in their city centre: ‘You know how fond I am of my Zoilos’ are the exact words. And building projects that Zoilos sponsored in the town, from a new stage at the theatre to a major restoration of the main temple, blazoned his name as benefactor and philanthropist. From all these it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his career.

  He was almost certainly born free, just plain Zoilos, sometime in the first half of the first century BCE but was taken into slavery – likely by pirates or people traffickers but possibly as a prisoner of war in one of the many conflicts of the period. He ended up in Rome as a slave, and agent, of Julius Caesar, who gave him his freedom and with it Roman citizenship and the Roman name of Gaius Julius Zoilos. He went on to work closely with the first Augustus, who knew him well enough to claim fondness, before returning to his home town as an extremely wealthy man, probably enriched by the booty from Caesar’s campaigns, which trickled down even to slaves and ex-slaves. There he built himself into prominence in the traditional way and at his death, probably sometime in the reign of Augustus, was given a monumental tomb at public expense. If an epitaph found in Rome to a ‘son of Zoilos’ refers to his son (there were other men called Zoilos in the Roman world), then some of his family did not return to Aphrodisias with their father. For this ‘Tiberius Julius Pappus, son of Zoilos’ is commemorated as the head librarian of the emperor’s libraries in the mid first century CE, through the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius and Claudius.

  102. A reconstruction of the sculpture of Zoilos’ tomb, with the best preserved figure of the man himself (left). On the left hand side of the sculpture he appears in markedly Roman idiom (orating and clad in a toga). On the right hand side he is very much the Greek.

  It is Zoilos’ tomb at Aphrodisias that captures the culture of empire best, a vast square pile decorated with an elaborate sculptured frieze around its base, which even in the fragments that survive features Zoilos more than once, in crucially different guises. On the best-preserved side of the monument were two images of the dead man, clearly named, being crowned. On the left, he is being honoured by the very Roman figures of Virtus, with her shield, and Honos (‘Manly Heroism’ or ‘Prestige’). On the right, it is the turn of his local ‘people’ and his ‘city’. But it is the diff
erences between the two outfits of Zoilos that are the key. On the left he is dressed in a distinctively Roman toga, one arm is raised as if to address an audience, and in the other hand he probably held a scroll. On the right he is shown in a Greek cloak, or chlamys, with a characteristically Greek hat on his head.

  The monument underlines Zoilos’ success, his wealth, his social mobility and his mobility across the Roman world. But most of all it shows him creating his identity in two very different forms, here seen side by side. In the culture of the Roman Empire, it was possible to be both Greek and Roman.

  1. Maccari depicts an implausibly lavish senate house for Cicero’s appearance on 8 November 63 BCE. It emphasises the isolation of Catiline (bottom right), from whom all the other senators keep a careful distance. That evening he left Rome to join his army.

  2. Cicero’s conflict with Catiline has been the source of modern humour. Thirty years before Maccari’s tribute to Cicero, under the same title ‘Cicero denounces Catiline’, the scene was given a comic spin. Cicero is a parody of nineteenth-century political outrage, Catiline a gangster – and a few of the senators are already asleep.

  3. In Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ (1637–8), Romulus on the left calmly commands the scene from above. But Poussin makes clear the terrified and resistant women are being dragged off in what is little short of a violent battle. Pablo Picasso (1962) intensifies the horror of the story. The almost disintegrating bodies of the woman make a bitter contrast with the larger than life Roman warriors and their trampling horses.

  4. Titian’s version of ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ (1571) confronts, rather than sanitises, the brutality of rape. Lucretia is presented as vulnerable, with tears in her eyes; Tarquin as a violent aggressor (with his jabbing knee and glinting dagger). Just emerging from the curtain in the background is the hand of the young slave whom Tarquin threatened to kill along with his victim, to make them look guilty of shameful adultery.