The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Not long after arriving in Syria, Germanicus died, leaving behind him his wife and young son Caligula. The people of Rome began to whisper that Tiberius had ordered his murder. Since Tiberius had been behind Germanicus’s rise to power—preferring him over his own son Drusus, who was neither as handsome nor as popular—this was an unlikely accusation. But it took root. Tiberius was morose, unattractive, and heavy in speech; the man who kept power as emperor in all but name clearly needed to be personally magnetic, in order to paper over the crack between the appearance of republic and the reality of empire. Tiberius had none of the celebrated Caesarian charm.

  Drusus, who lacked it as well, now became both consul and heir apparent. But in AD 23 he too died, apparently of stomach troubles. At this, Tiberius seemed to lose heart. He left Rome a little less than three years later and went first to Campania, and then to Capri. Here he remained, managing Roman affairs from a distance and never even visiting the city.

  This kind of distant hand on affairs was not what the Senate had bargained for. The senators had given up their own authority so that a single authoritative presence could prevent civil war and revolt. But Tiberius was down in Capri, bathing in the surf with a gaggle of naked small boys whom he called his “minnows.” He was inclined more and more to spend his days in pleasure, and since he was now emperor (in all but name) he had the wealth to make this pleasure quite extraordinary. He built little caves and grottoes all over his private island and hired boys and girls to dress up like nymphs and Pan; these he called his “haunts of Venus,” and carried on in them exactly as the name suggests. He bought a famous work of pornography and kept it in his library “so that an illustration of the required position would always be available if anyone needed guidance in completing their performance.”3 The locals called him “that old goat.” He was the third Roman princeps, and the first to indulge himself in the indiscriminate fulfillment of all his desires. It had not taken long for that particular power to corrupt its officeholders.

  Meanwhile the Senate was doing the work of keeping the city running. And civil war seemed to be looming. Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the commander of the new Praetorian Guard (that standing “private army” of the princeps) was angling to seize power as soon as Tiberius died.

  But in 31 Tiberius found out, in a way unrecorded by Tacitus, that Sejanus was not only the lover of his dead son Drusus’s wife, but that the two of them had conspired to poison Drusus. He ordered Sejanus arrested and tried. Sejanus was convicted, and a purge ensued that swept up hundreds of citizens of Rome, including his own young children and even the son of the dead Germanicus, who starved to death in prison. From that time on, Tiberius’s self-indulgence began to turn into cruelty: “He spared no one torture or execution,” writes Suetonius.

  81.1 Rome Under Tiberius

  WHILE TIBERIUS was troubling the Romans at home, a wandering prophet named Jesus, down in Galilee, annoyed a large and powerful group of priests in Jerusalem by challenging their right to control the religious life of the Jews.229 Since the abolishment of the office of High Priest and Ethnarch, the priests no longer had any political power, and they were particularly sensitive to guarding the religious power that remained to them.

  But in order to silence Jesus, they needed help from the Romans. They had to maneuver him into looking guilty of some political offense in front of Herod Antipas, the vassal king who reported to Rome. The accusation they came up with was that Jesus had called himself “King of the Jews,” something which was bound to irritate Herod.

  But Herod, who had probably heard of the purges going on in Rome, was not about to do anything that smacked of independence; not when Tiberius was busy wiping out resistance. He sent Jesus directly to the Roman procurator who had replaced his brother Archelaus, with the message that the Romans, not he, had better do something about this problem.

  This procurator, Pontius Pilate, was actually no surer of his own safety than Herod was. He too did not want to be suspected of doing anything that might undermine the power of that distant, angry, unpredictable princeps. A revolution in Palestine on his watch was not going to do him any good. So he agreed to execute Jesus, who had not contradicted him when Pilate had asked whether he was, in fact, claiming to be the king of the Jews. The method chosen, crucifixion, was the standard Roman punishment for revolutionaries; Spartacus’s followers had also suffered it.

  Pilate went on following a better-safe-than-sorry policy. Not too much later, in 36 AD, he reacted to a similar mild threat from a bunch of rebelling Samaritans by executing them all. This produced a backlash of anti-Roman sentiment in Palestine. The Roman governor of Syria, Pilate’s superior, yanked him off the job and sent him back to Rome in disgrace.

  IN 37, TIBERIUS DIED OF ILLNESS; it had taken him a long time to breathe his last, and someone finally smothered him. When Rome learned that he was safely dead, the people ran through the streets shouting, “Into the Tiber with Tiberius!”4

  Neither Tiberius nor Augustus had ever claimed a royal title, but the transfer of powers was becoming a little more regal. Tiberius had chosen as his heir one of the dead Germanicus’s sons, young Caligula.230 But he had not bothered to go through the parade of making Caligula joint proconsul; Caligula had been given the job of quaestor (financial official) four years before, but never got any other title. The Senate awarded him the title of princeps, the authority of the Pontifex Maximus, and the military power of imperium without recognizing him first as the surviving member of a joint proconsulate, and without the formality of his surrendering his powers.

  Caligula started off by relieving the grim suspicions that so many Romans were still living under, in the wake of Tiberius’s purge. He pardoned all prisoners, invited exiles to return to the city, and made a few tax reforms that helped out poorer Romans.

  But the good beginning was deceptive. Ancient accounts are divided about Caligula’s behavior; some say that he was vicious from the beginning, but concealed it long enough to strengthen his power (Suetonius even says that his hand smothered Tiberius), while others claim that he suffered through a serious illness early in his reign and then emerged with a new personality. All of the accounts list shocking crimes: he murdered his cousin, his grandmother, and his father-in-law; he slept with all three of his sisters, as well as male and female prostitutes and other men’s wives; he had a senator torn apart and his pieces dragged through the street; he forced his bodyguards to play war with him, and killed them when they hesitated to strike him; he raised taxes and then spent money wildly. Rumor said that he intended to make his horse a consul, and certainly he had no respect for the office. In 39, he fired both of the consuls and dissolved the Senate by force.

  In less than a century, Rome had travelled a very long way from the city where the senators had killed a man because he might possibly want to be emperor. Now Rome was tolerating an unheard-of autocracy. The problem with Caligula’s disintegration is that it didn’t inconvenience everyone equally; he lavished money and privileges on those who managed to stay on his good side. So there were always tongues ready to carry reports of treason to the princeps, and Caligula’s punishments were so inventively painful that few wanted to risk them.

  This would not save him forever, although for a time he kept Rome’s eyes fixed on him, waiting for the next outrage. But the business of empire had not stopped while the empire’s central figure fell apart.

  On Rome’s eastern border, the Parthian king Artabanus III, son of the patriot who had taken the throne away from the Romanized Vonones I, ruled over Parthia with a restored nationalism. He appears on his coins (many of them found in Ecbatana) with the ancient square-cut Persian beard, and his traditionalism was matched by his attempts to reassert strong control over the Parthian cities; he put his kinsmen, now princes of a royal family, on minor thrones to rule over regions of his kingdom and report to him, in a system copied from the old Persian satrapies.

  Pliny says that there were eighteen of these mini-kingdoms in Parthia, and Ar
tabanus III had his eye on making Armenia the nineteenth. Armenia, which had once belonged to the Seleucid empire, lay as a buffer state between Parthia and Rome. It was not exactly a free country. Since the reign of Augustus, Armenia had been what was euphemistically called “Roman protected,” meaning that Roman troops were propping up rule by a Roman-sympathizing king. Artabanaus planned to put his son Arsaces on the Armenian throne and make the state “Parthian protected” instead.

  He attacked Armenia sometime in the thirties, with the help of hired Scythian troops from the north. Fighting in the capital city ended with Arsaces dead; Artabanus, unwilling to give up, seems to have made another assault with plans to crown another son.

  The Roman commander, who did not necessarily want to carry on an out-and-out war so close to Rome’s far eastern border, offered peace talks. In AD 37, Artabanus agreed to meet a Roman diplomat right on the Roman-Parthian border—the middle of the Euphrates. Both men, unwilling to set foot in the other’s territory, walked forwards onto a bridge spanning the water, and carried on their negotiations right at the center. At the end, both Parthian and Roman troops had been committed to a partial withdrawal; Armenia would remain as a buffer state, with a certain shaky independence of its own.

  Artabanus III wanted a pitched war with Rome as little as his Roman counterpart. Parthia was facing another enemy on its eastern border: the kingdom of Kushan.

  The people of Kushan had originally been Yuezhi nomads. After the Yuezhi had invaded and broken down Greek Bactria, one Yuezhi tribe to the south had stretched its influence out over the clans around it, and had coalesced slowly into a country. The Kushan were an Asian people, but they used Greek script on their coins, learned on their journey south through Greek Bactria. The coins have Zeus on one side, and on the other a cross-legged seated figure who may be the Buddha; Kushan, which soon spread down as far as Gandhara, was woven through with influences from both west and south.

  Around AD 30, the Kushan kingdom came under the rule of an ambitious man named Kujula Kadphises. Not a great deal is known about him, except that he held onto his throne for almost fifty years, and that during this time Kushan grew west far enough to start pushing on the eastern border of Artabanus III’s Parthia. The ancient Chinese chronicle Hou hanshi says that he “invaded Anxi” (Parthia); the “invasion” seems to have been more of a taking away of territories on the east which had not been a full part of the Parthian system. “Gaofu,” where Kabul now stands, is one of them. The Kushan, the Hou hanshi adds, became “very rich.”

  81.2 Kushan

  The growth of Kushan under Kujula Kadphises was abruptly checked when another warrior emerged from the shadows, conquered the area of the Punjab (which had been under Kushan’s control), and spread his own new kingdom up as far as the modern valley of Kabul. His name was Gondophernes.

  We know of him mostly through a story written a century or so later: the Acts of Thomas, a text written by scholars who belonged to a theological offshoot of orthodox Christianity called Gnosticism. The story was first told in Syria, and relates the journeys of Thomas Didymus, the disciple of Jesus who is remembered in the New Testament gospels for refusing to believe in the Resurrection until he could see Jesus in the flesh. (This earned him the nickname Doubting Thomas.)

  The story of Thomas’s journey to meet Gondophernes begins, in the Acts of Thomas, at Jerusalem. Jesus, after being crucified, has risen from the dead and appeared to the disciples, giving them the task of spreading the news about him throughout the world. Thomas draws the job of going to India. He isn’t enthusiastic about this, until he has a vision: “The Saviour appeared unto him by night and saith to him: Fear not, Thomas, go thou unto India and preach the word there, for my grace is with thee.” Not long afterwards, Thomas encounters by chance a merchant “come from India whose name was Abbanes, sent from the King Gondophernes.”5

  The merchant agrees to be his guide into India. Eventually Gondophernes himself hears rumors of Thomas’s arrival, since various miracles have surrounded him. He summons Thomas into his presence and asks him, as a holy man, to bless his daughter and her brand-new husband; the two have just celebrated their marriage. Thomas agrees to pray for the royal bride and groom, after which Jesus appears to the two in their bedchamber and tells them that if they abjure delights of the flesh (“abstain from this foul intercourse”) and have no children, they will find enlightenment (a staple of gnostic theology). Both are convinced and become converts to Thomas’s brand of gnostic Christianity. When Gondophernes learns, however, that the two have decided to live in chaste harmony (which meant “no heirs”),

  he rent his clothes and said unto them that stood by him: Go forth quickly and go about the whole city, and take and bring me that man that is a sorcerer who by ill fortune came unto this city; for with mine own hands I brought him into this house.6

  Thomas manages to get away, and after various adventures makes his peace with the king, who is eventually converted and baptised himself.

  For centuries, this story was dismissed as entirely mythical. But the discovery of Gondophernes’s coins reveal that he did indeed exist, and that he ruled in the north of India. And the story suggests that his kingdom had a great deal of interaction with lands much farther to the west.

  Whether Gondophernes actually became a Christian is unknown; but Christianity itself was beginning to take shape, in the first century, as a new means of identity. The Jewish theologian Paul, a Roman citizen, was writing about the death and resurrection of Jesus as a process that is repeated in the lives of Christian believers. Conversion, he says in a letter written to the Christians at Rome, brings death to an old corrupt self, and the power of Christ then raises it back up, restored and new. “Count yourselves dead to sin,” Paul exhorts his readers, “but alive to God. Offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.”7 The spreading cult of Christianity gave its adherents a brand-new identity in place of the old.

  But the old identity, though it may be transformed, does not completely disappear. In another letter, to Christians in Galatia, Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Jesus Christ.” Yet elsewhere his letters make quite clear that Christians remained Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, not to mention male and female. A Christian had his (or her) core identity as a follower of Jesus Christ, but orthodox Christians did not relinquish their old nationalities, or their gender, or their place in the social hierarchy.

  Christianity had, after all, originated in a conquered land—Judea—which had been allowed to keep its identity while donning another one at the same time. The Jews of Judea were Jews, not Romans; but they were also subjects of Rome, and some of them were even Roman citizens.

  All Roman provincials faced this problem of balancing two different identities at the same time, but for Jews the problem was particularly acute. There was nothing inherently contradictory about being Roman and Christian, or Roman and Galatian, or even Roman and Egyptian. But Caligula was about to make it impossible to be both Roman and Jewish.

  By AD 40, Caligula had decided that he was divine. He ordered statues of himself set up for worship: “He wished to be considered a god,” writes the historian Josephus, “and to be hailed as such.”8 Caligula’s decree stretched across the entire Roman domain. But in Jerusalem, the Jews, who were forbidden by their own laws to worship images, pled with the local Roman commander not to force them to do honor to Caligula’s statue.

  The commander, a reasonable man named Petronius, agreed to send a letter to Rome asking whether worship of the statues was really necessary. But the word that came back from the capital city was unexpected: Caligula was dead. The Praetorian Guard had finally murdered him. He had been princeps for three years and ten months.

  Twenty-seven days after the news of Caligula’s death arrived, another letter arrived: from the dead Caligula, threatening to put Petronius to death if the statues were not set up. The ship that carried the letter had
been passed at sea by the faster ship bearing news of the madman’s end.

  THE SENATE now considered doing away with the office of princeps altogether, and dividing the powers which had been temporarily united in the person of the princeps back into their old republican offices. But two forces prevented them. Caligula’s uncle Claudius, the brother of the dead Germanicus, had set his sights on the power of the princeps. The Praetorian Guard was willing to be bribed into supporting him; these elite soldiers had more say in Roman affairs now than soldiers had ever been granted before, and the restoration of the Republic would probably end in the guard’s dissolution. Under a republic, they would lose their jobs, their livelihood, and (most seductive) their power.

  Within a matter of days, Claudius had his power as princeps, Pontifex Maximus, and imperator firmly in his hands; he had paid off the guards, ordered the murderers of Caligula killed (everyone was grateful to them, but leaving them alive established a bad precedent), and planned out his next acts.

  He had decided, apparently, on a combination of fear and mercy to establish his position; he gave back land Caligula had confiscated, and pardoned all those whom Caligula had suspected of treason. His mercy also extended a form of amnesty to those Caligula had convicted, by burning the records of their trials.

  The mercy only extended to the point that he feared for his own life, however. Between 41 and 42, he executed senators and Roman aristocrats indiscriminately if he thought he might be in danger. In this he was encouraged by his wife Messalina, whose affairs were matched only by her willingness to denounce her enemies to her husband for execution.

  CLAUDIUS’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT was in Britain, where a king named Caratacus had risen to challenge the power of the Romans. For some time, legions in Britain had been busy helping the little tribes in the southeast fight off takeover by Caratacus. This didn’t commit Roman prestige to a full conquest of the island, but it did manage to keep Caratacus’s kingdom from gaining so much power that it might be impossible, down the road, to begin such a conquest.