Antoninus probably rejoiced to hear it, as he had little interest in things military. His generals settled border problems in Dacia and Mauretania. The major effort came in Britain, where they put down a revolt and advanced into southern Scotland and built the Antonine Wall, a turf-wall companion to Hadrian’s brick wall farther south. But Rome abandoned the wall less than ten years after it was completed, evidently concluding that the attempt to add territory was too ambitious.
Marcus praised Antoninus in the Meditations, calling him a man who was devoted to the empire’s needs, energetic and hardworking, rational and reliable, modest, indifferent to honors and immune to flattery, tolerant and compassionate, and orderly but decisive. In a word, he was indomitable. Yet Marcus made no mention of military affairs, an extraordinary silence about a Roman emperor—and probably not a compliment. A storm was gathering across the border, and in retrospect, Antoninus did nothing to prepare Rome for it.
JUSTICE AT HOME
Antoninus died on March 7, 161, in his country villa. Supposedly his last word was equanimity—that is, keeping an even mind under stress. It was good advice for his successor.
In many ways, Marcus had superb preparation for the throne. His education gave him first-class training in rhetoric and philosophy, and he had as good a character as any man who ever ruled Rome. Before becoming emperor, he served in all the important public offices in Rome. Yet he suffered glaring deficiencies too. Antoninus kept Marcus on a tight leash and by his side in Italy. Marcus is said to have spent only two nights away from Antoninus during the latter’s twenty-three-year-reign. By the time Marcus became emperor, he had never commanded an army or governed a province. Astonishingly, he had never left Italy. By contrast, Augustus had had considerable military and diplomatic experience by the age of twenty-one.
Although Hadrian made Antoninus adopt both Marcus and Lucius Verus, Antoninus clearly intended Marcus to be emperor. Yet Marcus surprised many by making Verus his coruler. Marcus served as senior partner. He was older, more respected, and the sole holder of the office of chief priest. Verus had a well-deserved reputation as a luxury-loving lightweight, although not a vicious man like Nero or Domitian. Still, there had never been co-emperors before.
Why Marcus chose a coruler is much debated. He might have wanted to respect Hadrian’s wishes, or perhaps what Marcus really wanted was time to pursue philosophy. Even when emperor, he still attended philosophy lectures. Possibly Marcus feared Verus’s powerful family and preferred to have them in the tent and happy than outside fighting to get in. But perhaps the real reason is that, as a philosopher, Marcus saw clearly that the emperor’s job was too much for one man. If so, Marcus was ahead of his time. His immediate successors did not follow his practice, but, a little more than a century later, it became standard for Rome to have two emperors.
Another factor may have been Marcus’s health, which worsened as he got older. Symptoms included chest and stomach pains, spitting blood, and dizziness. The emperor had the advice of one of the most famous doctors in history, Galen, a Greek who lived in Rome. Once, after Galen cured an aging Marcus, the emperor proclaimed him “first among physicians and unique among philosophers.”
For the emperor’s long-term care, Galen prescribed theriac, a drug consisting of various natural ingredients combined into a pill and taken with wine. The finishing touch, added by Galen to the pill, was opium. Whether the doctor added enough opium to addict Marcus is a distinct possibility, although we cannot be certain.
Marcus proved popular in his early years as emperor. Unlike Hadrian, he was no scheming courtier. He was straightforward and open, at least for a politician. Marcus was thoughtful but not, he wrote, quick witted. He tolerated dissent and even insult. He worked very hard. Early in his reign, Marcus wrote to Fronto that he found it difficult to relax, and it’s not hard to understand why, with his conscientious approach to business.
Marcus proved exceptionally careful and judicious when it came to the law. He took special interest in the manumission of slaves, the appointment of guardians for minors and orphans, and the selection of town councilors for local governments in the provinces. He earned a reputation for being firm but reasonable. Like his predecessor, Marcus ruled in favor of a slave’s freedom whenever possible.
Marcus went out of his way to show respect to the Senate. He extended that body’s judicial powers and deferred to it even in cases that the emperor had the right to decide. He made a point of attending Senate meetings whenever he was in Rome. If any senator stood accused of a capital crime, he examined the evidence in secret before sharing it in public.
Marcus endeared himself to the people in other ways as well. He ignored professional informers. He improved welfare arrangements for poor children and paid careful attention to the grain supply. He kept the streets of Rome clean and in good repair. He made sure that town councils in Italy had full staffs and functioned effectively. However, one thing that Marcus did was probably not popular: he so disliked bloodshed that when he watched the games, he made gladiators use blunt swords. The public preferred blood.
Like his predecessor, Marcus practiced thrift. By the same token, he found quickly that military spending swamped other priorities. It’s no surprise, then, that, like Antoninus but unlike Hadrian, he did little building. In Rome, Marcus raised a monumental column to mark Antoninus’s deification and one or more triumphal arches. We don’t know whether Marcus or his successor began the column that still stands in Rome and celebrates Marcus’s military success; it wasn’t completed until more than a decade after Marcus’s death. The famous statue of Marcus on horseback, now so prominent, was modest compared with what certain other emperors erected. The statue celebrates a victory over the Germanic tribes and probably went up late in Marcus’s reign or shortly afterward.
PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE
Like Hadrian, Marcus married into the emperor’s family, but he stepped onto a higher level of nobility, so to speak. Hadrian married the emperor’s grandniece, while Marcus married the emperor’s daughter. Although Hadrian had named Marcus his eventual successor, Antoninus could have revoked the proclamation after Hadrian’s death. Instead, he affirmed it by giving Marcus his daughter’s hand. Marcus was his wife’s nephew.
Anna Galeria Faustina, Marcus’s bride, could hardly remember a time when she didn’t live in a palace and enjoy its privileges, since her father became emperor when she was eight. Her mother, Faustina the Elder, was a very wealthy woman who was named Augusta when Antoninus became emperor. Two years later, when Faustina was ten, her mother died and was proclaimed a goddess. Antoninus set up a charitable institution for the daughters of the poor known in his wife’s memory as Faustina’s Girls. A temple in Faustina the Elder’s honor would soon rise on the edge of the Roman Forum.
Five years later, Faustina married Marcus. He was twenty-four, she, fifteen. Two years after that, immediately following the birth of her first child, a girl, her father gave Faustina the title of Augusta. Marcus was only a Caesar, so Faustina outranked him. But Antoninus felt devoted to his daughter. He said he would rather live in exile on a bleak island with her than live in the palace at Rome without her. On his deathbed, Antoninus committed the state and his daughter to Marcus. He died on March 7, 161.
When Marcus became emperor, Faustina became the first Roman woman to follow her mother as empress. Six months after Marcus took power, she gave birth to twin boys, which made Faustina the first empress since Nero’s wife Poppaea to give birth while her husband was emperor. Fourteen years after bearing her first child, Faustina was still having children. In the end, Faustina bore fourteen children. It was a remarkable record, and the palace’s propaganda machine featured it prominently on coins. Fewer than half of the babies survived childhood, which is a bleak reminder of a world that knew high infant mortality rates.
Not only was the young Faustina noble, rich, and fertile, but she was also beautiful, as her portrait busts show. Coin images associated her with Venus, the goddess of
love and sex and also victory. The austere Marcus probably limited his interest in things amatory to procreation. He had prided himself on having not lost his virginity any earlier than necessary. Nor was the heart the only organ in regard to which the two differed; they disagreed about the head as well. Faustina did not leave politics to her husband. She plotted and pushed against some of the very men in high office whom Marcus supported. Faustina wanted to have fun, and she wanted her way. Marcus was all business. It is doubtful that the two had an easy relationship.
The Roman rumor mill ground out gossip that an unhappy Faustina had a series of affairs, and not just with aristocrats but also with low-life characters. His friends told Marcus that while at her seaside villa, she slept with gladiators and sailors. The same friends encouraged him to divorce if not execute Faustina. He supposedly replied, “If we send our wife away, we must also return her dowry.” That is, the empire, which he had inherited from his father-in-law.
Marcus presumably understood, if others did not, that the empire was a family business. Powerful people attracted malicious rumors, and that went double for powerful women, given the extent of Roman misogyny. Besides, if true, the rumors would cast into doubt the legitimacy of his children. So Marcus had every reason to deny stories about his wife’s infidelity. In any case, the emperor felt real affection for Faustina. He described her in Meditations as obedient, affectionate, and straightforward.
Marcus was nothing if not a man who loved his children. He called his little daughter Faustina, for instance, “a cloudless sky, a holiday, hope close at hand, a wish come true, a total joy, an excellent and flawless source of pride.” He makes several references in his book to the pain of losing a child.
VICIOUS CIRCLE
Foreign affairs soon turned Marcus’s attention away from his family. Indeed, the cycle of war overshadowed everything else in his principate. It turned him from an enlightened reformer in the sunshine at home to an embattled warrior in a twilight struggle on the frontier. And it forced a man with almost no military background to become a field commander. Naturally, he made mistakes.
A two-front war was the empire’s enduring security problem, and Rome confronted it for the first time during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The first crisis came in the East, where the Parthians detected Roman weakness. No doubt they knew that it had been decades since a military man led. They attacked Armenia and drove out its pro-Roman ruler in favor of a pro-Parthian. When a Roman general counterattacked, the Parthians wiped out his legion, and the general committed suicide. The Parthians invaded Syria next and routed its governor.
This serious a situation required the emperor’s presence in the war zone. Neither Marcus nor Verus had military experience, but Verus was younger and physically more robust, so Marcus sent him. No one would miss Verus in Rome, nor was he likely to threaten Marcus on his return. Verus would be more or less a figurehead in the east, where seasoned generals would serve as the real commanders.
To face the Parthians, Marcus withdrew three legions as well as other troops from Rome’s western front. It was necessary but dangerous because it tempted a restive enemy that lay north of the Danube River. But Rome had no strategic reserve, a fundamental weakness that left the emperor with no choice but to move legions as needed.
Those legions proved effective. The war against Parthia took four years but resulted in complete victory. Rome reconquered Armenia and installed a highly appropriate man as the new king: a Roman senator who also had Parthian royal blood. The Romans then drove deep into Mesopotamia, where they burned a Parthian palace and, disgracefully, sacked a friendly city.
In 164 Marcus gave Verus his daughter Lucilla in marriage. She was fourteen at the time, while her husband was thirty-three. The girl had to make the long journey from Rome to the East, where the marriage took place. It was wartime, though, and everyone had to sacrifice. Perhaps as a consolation, Marcus made her an Augusta immediately, even before she gave birth to a child, which had not been the case for her mother, who received the title only after bearing a child.
Parthia would not challenge Rome again for thirty years. All was not quiet on the western front, however. In 166 and 167, Germans attacked Rome’s provinces along the Danube. It marked a milestone in the empire’s history. Rome had not faced a serious German threat in many decades, but now the Germans exploded into action. They would continue to threaten the empire on and off for centuries, until eventually they brought it down in the West. To make things worse, the invaders of 166–167 were themselves being pushed by other peoples on the move farther north. It was the beginning of a major migration of historic proportions.
The invaders took advantage of the reduced Roman military strength in the West. Marcus tried to compensate for the three legions that joined Verus in the East by raising two new legions. They lacked experience, however, and were insufficient in numbers.
Before Marcus could react to the invasion, a new problem assailed the empire in 167: plague. So the ancient sources call it, but the disease was probably smallpox. Modern historians call it the Antonine plague or the Great Pestilence. Antiquity witnessed many major epidemics. It’s not clear whether this was one of the worst or just one of the best documented. Accurate mortality figures are not available, but it’s clear that nearly a million people or perhaps many millions died.
There is reason to think the disease began in Central Asia and first spread eastward to China before traveling the Silk Road, the trade route to the Middle East. Roman soldiers first caught the illness in Mesopotamia and brought it back with them to every part of the empire, with merchants spreading it as well. The same well-paved roads and safe seas that brought glory to the Roman peace now became the deadly vectors of infection. It was a universal epidemic for a universal empire, and it is the ancient epidemic of which we have the most knowledge. Reports survive of suffering and death in Egypt, Asia Minor, Gaul, Germany, Italy, and particularly in Rome—all roads led there, after all.
Conditions became so bad in Rome that the famous physician Galen left for his home in Asia Minor in fear of infection. Meanwhile, in the Greek cities of the East, people inscribed a verse above their doorways asking for Apollo’s protection, but it tended to have the opposite effect—perhaps because people became overconfident and stopped taking precautions. A survivor of the disease remembered the sound of wailing and groans, the sight of the dead lying before their front doors, and the fact of doctors having to double as attendants because the illness had killed their slaves.
Marcus wanted to go north in 167, but he stayed in Rome to deal with the epidemic. In 168 he finally left for the front, joined by Verus. It was Marcus’s first trip outside Italy, and it succeeded in restoring order temporarily. On their return, the two emperors stopped in northeastern Italy. Galen joined them there and discovered that the epidemic was rampant. Marcus and Verus went back to Rome with a small group of soldiers. Most of the army stayed in the north, and most of them died, as winter made it even more difficult to survive the disease. Galen barely escaped with his life. Verus proved unlucky. On the way back to Rome in early 169, he died, possibly of smallpox. Marcus accompanied the body back to Rome, where Verus was buried in Hadrian’s mausoleum and declared a god.
Meanwhile, the crisis on the northern frontier continued. Rome had lacked soldiers before the epidemic; smallpox reduced its manpower even further. The government had to levy new troops, but paying them was expensive. So Rome resorted to unsatisfactory solutions. Once again, as under Antoninus Pius, Marcus reduced the amount of silver in his coins. Furthermore, the state turned to slaves, gladiators, so-called bandits (well, thugs at any rate), and police forces from the Greek cities and enrolled them in auxiliary units.
Marcus’s daughter Lucilla was only twenty when her husband, Verus, died. Marcus wanted her to remarry Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus, a senior senator and ex-consul. He was fifty years old and from Syria. It seemed a big step down from her status as the co-emperor’s wife, and both Lucilla and her mother,
Faustina, opposed it. But Marcus prevailed. Lucilla gave her new husband a son who went on to a career in public life until, many years later, the son was executed by order of a later emperor.
In autumn 169 Marcus went back north. The next spring he launched a major offensive across the Danube. It began in farce, with the emperor agreeing to put two lions in the river to win the gods’ support; the beasts just swam to the other side and were clubbed to death by the enemy. The battle ended in tears, with the Romans suffering a major defeat, with possibly twenty thousand casualties. Then enemy troops managed to outflank the remaining Roman army and burst into northern Italy. They burned one city there and besieged another. Other invaders raided Greece as far south as the outskirts of Athens, where they destroyed the shrine of the Mysteries.
For the first time in almost three hundred years, foreign forces had attacked Italy. Rome’s defenses on the frontier had failed. In retrospect, it should not surprise. The Danube front had witnessed a decline in the number of soldiers. The Great Pestilence weakened Rome everywhere. Marcus himself had no experience as a military commander. Many of his troops were new and still raw, while even veteran soldiers on the frontier had experienced little fighting during the long years of peace.
The next year, 171, the situation began to improve. A Roman army under Marcus’s new son-in-law, Pompeianus, drove the invaders out of Italy and destroyed them in a battle on the Danube. Meanwhile, Marcus stood on the frontier, negotiating with German ambassadors and trying to set enemy tribes against one another. In 172 he launched a new invasion across the river. He continued to campaign on the far side of the Danube through 175.
Ten Caesars Page 24
