Rome Victorious: The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire (Library of Classical Studies) 9781780762746, 9781780762753, 9781786735393, 9781786725394, 1780762747

Citation preview

Rome Victorious

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Also available from Bloomsbury Augustan Rome by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill Rome after Sulla by J. Alison Rosenblitt Rome in the Late Republic by Mary Beard and Michael Crawford

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Rome Victorious The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire Dexter Hoyos

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Dexter Hoyos, 2019, 2023 Dexter Hoyos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Roman civilization, 3rd century AD, Grande Ludovisi sarcophagus, front marble relief depicting a battle between Romans and Goths, c. 260 Detail: fighting scene (photo by DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images) Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947858 ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-7807-6274-6 978-1-7807-6275-3 978-1-7867-3539-3 978-1-7867-2539-4

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Roman First Names Roman Emperors

vi ix xv xv

Introduction: Rome and her Imperialism

1

Chapter 1:

Rome Before Empire: Hegemony Over Italy

6

Chapter 2:

Mediterranean Hegemony and the First Provinces

18

Chapter 3:

The Provinces of the Republic

40

Chapter 4:

The Political Impoverishment of the Imperial Republic

63

Chapter 5:

Augustus: The Greatest Imperialist

84

Chapter 6:

Imperial Takings and Leavings, ad 14–212

103

Chapter 7:

The New Romans

124

Chapter 8:

Governing and Misgoverning

143

Chapter 9:

Judging the Empire: Romans and Others

158

Chapter 10: Resistance

170

Chapter 11:

178

How Roman Was the Roman Empire?

Conclusions

193

Appendix: The Ancient Sources

201

Abbreviations in the Notes and Referenced Works Notes Referenced Works Index

220 222 235 246 v

Illustrations

Maps 1.

Rome’s Republican Empire

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2.

The Empire of the Caesars

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Plates 1.

Census scene, altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, late second century BC: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

2.

Mithridates VI, first century ad bust: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Eric Gaba (User: Sting). Downloaded 17 March 2018.

3.

Tabula Contrebiensis (Botorrita, Spain), 15 May 87 bc: Museo de Zaragoza, Spain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: ecelan. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

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Model of the Pillar of the Boatmen (Pilier des Nautes), Musée de Cluny, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CLUNY-Maquette_pilier_nautes_2.JPG. Author: Marsyas. Downloaded 29 October 2018.

5.

Marble bust of Cicero: Vatican Museums. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Rabax63. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

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Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License. Author: Manfred Heyde. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Statue of Augustus, found at the Villa of Livia, Prima Porta, near Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

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Roman Carthage, streetscape. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Patrick Giraud (Calips). Downloaded 17 March 2018.

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Claudius’ British triumph, de Britannis ad 43, from Caesarea in Cappadocia. Claudius in four-horse victory chariot. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Classical Numismatic Group. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

10. Speech of Claudius to the Senate, the Tabula Lugdunensis: Musée Gallo-Romain, Lyons. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Claudian_table_IMG_1073-black. Downloaded 29 June 2017. 11. Agricola’s reconstructed Basilica inscription, AD 79 or 81: Verulamium Museum, St Albans (16192740628). Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017. 12. Marcus Aurelius receives the surrender of German peoples: marble relief, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Jean-Pol Grandmont. Downloaded 17 March 2018. 13. Legio II Augusta wintering at Leugaricio (Trenčin, Slovakia), ad 179–180. Source: Wikimedia Commons, full permission. Downloaded 17 March 2018. 14. Façade of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, second century ad, photographed in 2010. Source: Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Author: Benh. Downloaded 10 April 2017. 15. Bust of Caracalla: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons: GNU Free Documentation License. Author: Rama. Downloaded 17 March 2018. 16. Tombstone of Zabdibol, Palmyra. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession #02.29.1, www.metmuseum.org/

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art/collection/search/322375. Public domain free of copyright. Downloaded 17 February 2017. 17. Central Rome in the time of Constantine the Great. Italo Gismondi, Il Plastico di Roma Imperiale: Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Carole Raddato, Frankfurt. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Alex Wright and I.B.Tauris for initiating this book and then encouraging me for much longer than expected as I worked on it amid the distractions of other tasks. As always, I have the pleasure of acknowledging my Affiliateship in the University of Sydney as Honorary Associate Professor, which began with my retirement in 2007 and without which I could not have continued scholarly study and publication. My special appreciation is offered to Sydney University Library, which opens to its members access to a steadily growing range of online books, journals and databases, maintained by always supportive librarians and IT specialists. I am deeply grateful to the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina, which promptly and amicably granted permission for me to download their Physical Mediterranean map, drawn by Tom Elliott, as the basis for my sketch maps of the Roman empire in Republican and Imperial times. I am no less grateful to Dr Camilla Norman, of the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia at our university, for making those sketch maps into the elegant creations that accompany my text. I am sincerely grateful, too, to my copy-editor Chris Reed, whose searching eye saved my text from all too many faults. As always, too, my greatest thanks and gratitude go to the five persons who adorn my life and put up so generously with my baffling ancient pursuits: Jann Hoyos, Camilla and Anthony Padula, and two ebullient grandchildren, Scarlett and Henry. I dedicate this book to them.

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Map 1. Rome’s Republican Empire 1 2 3 4 5

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Numantia Gracchurris Saguntum Valentia Corduba

6 7 8 9 10

CITIES AND TOWNS Italica 11 Cremona Narbo 12 Parma Tolosa 13 Mutina Panormus 14 Bononia Placentia 15 Aquileia

16 17 18 19 20

Naples Tarentum Messana Syracuse Agrigentum

21 22 23 24

Utica Dyrrhachium Actium Athens

25 26 27 28

Sparta Pergamum Smyrna Ephesus

29 30 31 32

Miletus Nicomedia Byzantium Antioch

33 Jerusalem 34 Cyrene 35 Gades

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Map 2. The Empire of the Caesars (see p. xiv for key)

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Map 2 key 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Eburacum Deva Isca Silurum Camulodunum Londinium Lutetia Burdigala Lugdunum Vienna Narbo Nemausus Massilia Forum Julii Tarraco Flaviobriga Olisipo Emerita Ilipa Hispalis Corduba Gades

CITIES AND TOWNS 22 New Carthage 23 Colonia Ara 24 Augusta Trevirorum 25 Moguntiacum 26 Arae Flaviae 27 Vindobona 28 Poetovio 29 Aquincum 30 Sarmizegetusa 31 Adrianople 32 Philippi 33 Thessalonica 34 Athens 35 Corinth 36 Sparta 37 Byzantium 38 Nicomedia 39 Ephesus 40 Miletus 41 Aphrodisias 42 Sagalassus

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Ancyra Caesarea Samosata Tarsus Antioch Caesarea Jerusalem Petra Cyrene Lepcis Magna Carthage Carales Panormus Syracuse Cirta Ammaedara Thamugadi Lambaesis Volubilis

A B C D E F G H I

Tarraconensis Lusitania Baetica Belgica Lower Germany Upper Germany Agri Decumates Rhaetia Noricum

J K L M N O P Q R

PROVINCES Upper Pannonia Lower Pannonia Dalmatia Moesia Thrace Macedonia Achaia Crete & Cyrene Asia

S T U V W X Y Z

Bithynia Galatia Cappadocia Cilicia Mesopotamia Judaea Arabia Petraea Numidia

Roman First Names (almost always abbreviated, even in private letters) A. C. Cn. D. L.

Aulus Gaius Gnaeus Decimus Lucius

M. M’. P. Q.

Marcus Manius Publius Quintus

Ser. Sex. T. Ti.

Servius Sextus Titus Tiberius

Roman Emperors Augustus to Gordian III Augustus 31 bc–ad 14 Tiberius 14–37 Gaius Caligula 37–41 Claudius 41–54 Nero 54–68 Galba 68–69 Otho, Vitellius 69 Vespasian 69–79 Titus 79–81 Domitian 81–96 Nerva 96–98 Trajan 98–117 Hadrian 117–138 Antoninus Pius 138–161

Marcus Aurelius 161–180 Commodus 180–192 Pertinax, Didius Julianus 193 Septimius Severus 193–211 Caracalla 211–217 (Geta 211) Macrinus 217–218 Elagabalus 218–222 Severus Alexander 222–235 Maximinus 235–238 Gordian I, Gordian II 238 Pupienus, Balbinus 238 Gordian III 238–244

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INTRODUCTION

Rome and her Imperialism

R

ome’s is the classic empire. A small city founded by adventurers and desperadoes beside the River Tiber grew to become ruler first of Italy, then of all the lands ringing the Mediterranean, and even of lands beyond such as the Crimea, Mesopotamia and Britain. Roman images are cherished – capricious Caesars in purple robes and laurel wreaths facing their anxious toga-clad senators, gladiators clashing sweatily in the Colosseum, charioteers in the Circus, centurions and legionaries marching in steel breastplates and nodding plumes, and majestically columned temples ringing a broad and crowded Forum under bright sunshine, not to mention mighty provincial works such as Hadrian’s Wall holding the line against predatory barbarians outside. Some images are more faithful than others, but all attest to the power of Rome’s memory. And properly so, for a political creation that not only bound together the whole Mediterranean world for six centuries but transmitted to posterity a sophisticated blend of cultures, above all Roman and Greek, merits remembering. The Romans’ drive to imperialism is assessed by modern observers from several, often fiercely debated, viewpoints – as defensive responses to real or supposed external threats, as deeply ingrained aggressiveness, or as the Mediterranean outcome of international power politics’ ingrained dog-eat-dog typology; or arising from economic greed and aristocratic glory-hunting, or, like Sir John Seeley’s British empire, occurring simply in ‘a fit of absence of mind’ 1

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following the defeat of imperial foes. Not all of these explanations are mutually exclusive, though each has or has had its champions. In the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, historians’ views of Rome and her empire were generally favourable, even admiring. She had accomplished a great civilizing mission, conferred 400 years of pax Romana on previously war-torn lands and peoples, been the incubator of Christianity, and left a profound legacy of law, literature and language to her successor-states. The unravelling of European colonial empires after 1945, and a livelier appreciation of economic history and theory, prompted a repainted picture. Its hues are now darker, harsher and often hostile – Rome was an avidly aggressive and exploitative power, her conquests inflicted slaughter and upheaval across the three continents, rapacious Roman rule benefited few apart from her aristocratic elite and their equivalents dominating provincial communities, as well as the pampered inhabitants of Rome itself (pampered even amid the ruins of empire in the sixth century). In sum, it has been argued, the empire amounted to an enduring rape of the peoples it subjugated.1 The contexts and course of Rome’s territorial acquisitions varied over the four-and-a-half centuries that elapsed between her takeover of most of Sicily in 241 bc to that of Mesopotamia in ad 200. Sicily, for instance, fell to her following the First Punic War against Carthage (264–241 bc, the longest war in Roman history), which had been fought mostly in and around the island. Alexander the Great’s ancient kingdom of Macedon was taken over in 148 bc after 70 years of alternating conflict and ill-tempered coexistence, while three decades later southern Gaul (modern Provence and Languedoc) was at last occupied after nearly a century of serving merely as a land route between northern Italy and the province of Nearer Spain. In the first century bc Pompey the Great rounded off a final war with one of Rome’s most enduring and ambitious opponents, Mithridates the Great of Pontus in northern Asia Minor, by adding much of Asia Minor’s coastlands to Rome’s existing possessions and making the cities and kingdoms left outside these into firm satellites. His ally, father-in-law, and then rival Julius Caesar’s conquest of the rest of Gaul in the 50s was Caesar’s unprovoked project, as was the invasion of Britain in ad 43 launched by Caesar’s adoptive

INTRODUCTION

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descendant the emperor Claudius. Trajan’s conquest of Dacia at the start of the next century could claim at least some strategic justification – united under their vigorous king, Decebalus, the Dacians troubled the Danube frontier and at times leagued with other restless border peoples – whereas his initially triumphant, but finally thwarted, annexation of most of the western territories of Rome’s powerful neighbour, Parthia, in 115–117 unnecessarily (it could be argued) ended 40 years of reasonable coexistence with that empire. Parthia’s own imperialist fancies, especially over the kingdom of Armenia in the mountain lands between the two empires, led to further second-century wars, all victorious, and finally to Septimius Severus’ acquisition of Mesopotamia (a gain that a perceptive observer, the historian Dio, severely criticized). Roman motives for expansion, like the circumstances and the personalities, surely varied over the centuries; it is not likely, either, that most annexations were monocausal. Whether the causes can, at least in places, be matched with those behind European imperialism and, more specifically, European colonialism is a widely held and regularly disputed issue, like the more simplistic question of whether the empire was a good thing or bad. These debates are not likely ever to be settled. A crucial outcome of imperial power, and one not always given due weight, was that as the empire grew, so did the numbers, origins and whereabouts of its ruling people. ‘The Romans’ came to embrace not only the residents of the City but also the other peoples of Italy by Cicero’s time, and later still whole populations abroad. Occasional grants were made to a few non-Italian individuals from as early as 219 bc, and although the Romans stopped making new grants to their fellow Italians during the third and second centuries, as the profits of empire became obvious, between 90 and 81 bc political and military pressure forced them to do exactly that. This made the entire peninsula part of the res publica populi Romani. From early times, on the other hand, they were willing to grant citizenship (civitas Romana) to their own slaves when they set them legally free. One of their most eminent enemies, King Philip V of Macedon in Hannibal’s time, perceptively judged this one of their strengths.

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Caesar as dictator in the early 40s bc granted provincials either civitas Romana or the rather less-privileged status called the Latin right (ius Latii) – grants that were not novel but simply more large-scale than those which other contemporary grandees such as Pompey had been authorized to make. The emperor Augustus and his successors were generous in their turn: in ad 73 Vespasian went as far as to confer the Latin right on all Spanish communities still holding merely provincial status. The magistrates of Latin towns, in turn, acquired civitas Romana through holding office (Chapter 7). Provincials who signed up for military service in various sectors of the imperial armies became citizens on discharge. In effect, Rome evolved. Provincials became Romans; non-Italian aristocrats joined Italians in governing the empire, even in ascending the imperial throne – for some of Rome’s most famous emperors, such as Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius (and some of the most infamous too) were from her provinces. An unusual but intriguing result followed: technically at least, the Roman empire ceased to be an empire long before the last western emperor was deposed in ad 476. For if ‘empire’ succinctly means subject peoples and lands ruled by a dominant state or people, then when in ad 212 the North African emperor Severus’ son Caracalla granted citizenship to all provincials still lacking it, he legally created a purely Roman state (it was still termed the res publica populi Romani) stretching from the Atlantic to the Parthian frontier and from Hadrian’s Wall in Britain to the cataracts of the Nile. Save for a few limited exceptions in Caracalla’s edict, the only non-Romans left in the empire were the slaves; and they too could be manumitted into citizenship. In reality, being a Roman citizen was by 212 overshadowed by class-based inequalities which had come to be recognized in law: a poor citizen even in Rome had fewer rights (and suffered more severe punishments) than a rich one in London or Antioch. Nonetheless the steady spread of Roman status, added to the already powerful influence of Roman culture over the western and central provinces, and of Roman-tinged Greek culture across the eastern Mediterranean, built a sense of imperial solidarity which held the empire together during the near-lethal crises that were to hammer it during the later third century.

INTRODUCTION

5

Even more important historically, this solidarity, allied with the dominance of Christianity from the fourth century on, imbued ensuing ages and their successor cultures (east and west) with the idealized memory and model of a once unified grand community. That would colour international politics, political (not to mention religious) thinking, and cultural expression until modern times. For these many reasons Rome’s rise to empire – what happened, how it happened and what effects it had on its subjects, victims and neighbours – remains an eventful and instructive theme for study.

CHAPTER 1

Rome Before Empire: Hegemony Over Italy

T

he City, Urbs Roma, was founded on the northern edge of the plain of Latium and at a major crossing of the River Tiber, traditionally in 753 bc. Beginning on the broad Palatine hill, with the steep Capitoline close by as its citadel, by the fourth century bc the city extended over the other low heights of Seven Hills fame: Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine, forming a defensible walled semicircle beside the Tiber. This was a large circuit for an ancient city, even if much of the enclosed ground was effectively rural till much later. The city’s surrounding territory, the ager Romanus, grew too: the combative Romans fought, defeated and incorporated more and more of their neighbours, including Alba Longa – the legendary birthplace of the city’s founders Romulus and Remus, on the Alban Hills 30 kilometres south-east – and, after an epic siege fondly if falsely remembered as lasting ten years, the great Etruscan city of Veii 20 kilometres to the north. Even though Rome itself was looted in a lightning summer raid by a marauding army of Gauls in 387 bc (390 in traditional chronology), the Romans’ energies continued unchecked during the fourth century. By its end they were close to dominating the entire Italian peninsula and their territory was the vastest of the peninsula’s city-states. Rome and Latium’s other cities had been bonded from time immemorial in a religious and military association called by moderns the Latin League. Other members included Tibur, Praeneste and Tusculum in the highlands to their east, cities once powerful 6

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enough to challenge Rome for Latin supremacy. Romans and Latini enjoyed reciprocal rights of intermarriage and business dealings in one another’s cities; all spoke the same language, if with regional variations, and acted together against the many warlike peoples around them – the Aequi, Hernici and Volsci of the mountains to the east and south, the Sabines of the upper Tiber country, the powerful southern Etruscan cities, and later the stubborn Samnites of the central Apennines. The League often consolidated successes over these neighbours by placing settlers at strategic sites to form Latin colonies (coloniae Latinae). The earliest were close by and small, such as Antium on the coast; later colonies would be further and larger, such as Venusia in Apulia and, one day, Placentia and Cremona in Cisalpine Gaul. By then most settlers at Latin colonies were Roman citizens, a crucial feature that explains the colonies’ dogged loyalty in wars to come. As the League’s largest and strongest member, Rome early on took the lead: a treaty of 493 bc (its text still on display in Cicero’s time) confirmed it. No other Italian city-state was anywhere as large in size or territory. The census figure reported for 323 bc – 150,000 male Romans over the age of 16 – is plausible enough. Crucially, wars and peacemaking were decided by Rome alone, under Roman consuls as commanders. After 387 Rome’s renewed vigour, not to mention assertiveness, goaded the discontented Latins finally to war in 340, seeking equality. They lost: in 338 Rome broke up the Latin League, incorporating its smaller cities into the res publica populi Romani but leaving some larger ones autonomous – notably Tibur and Praeneste – and also leaving intact their rights at Rome. Even before this, in 343 Rome formed a different sort of partnership with the wealthy city of Capua and its dependent towns in Campania. Seeking protection against the assertive Samnites across the mountains, these became Roman citizens, but without the right to vote, hold public office or be senators at Rome – and vice versa. This unusual union lasted more than a century. In the end, like the old Latins before them, the Campanians’ growing irritation at being subordinate led them into joining the invader Hannibal’s side in 216. They too lost; yet after a due period of punishment the

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survivors were finally reincorporated in 188 into the res publica as ordinary citizens. By then Rome was a Mediterranean colossus. Roman wars widened after 338. Over the next seven decades she fought every other powerful Italian people: Etruscans, Samnites, Umbrians, and then southern Italian Greek city-states – wars invariably due (her historical traditions insisted) to their provocations. Despite intermittent defeats such as an entrapped Roman army in Samnium having to capitulate in 321, the Romans prevailed over all. Livy’s history recounted huge, if implausible, numbers of beaten Italians captured and enslaved. Even a grand coalition in 295 of Samnites, Etruscans, Umbrians and even Gauls from Cisalpina failed. By 283 they had all been forced to become allies subordinate to the res publica, whose dominance over the peninsula was thus almost complete. Southern Italy, notably the populous regions of Lucania and Bruttium and the many Greek cities along its coasts (a few of them already Roman allies, such as Thurii), was brought into the network by 270. The powerful and still ambitious city of Tarentum – almost certainly provoked by Rome – called over the adventurerking Pyrrhus from Epirus in Greece in 280 to champion them, but despite his expensive ‘pyrrhic’ early victories he found the Romans too strong, tried and failed likewise in Sicily against Carthage, and in the end sailed home, leaving Tarentum to surrender to its besiegers in 272. Like all the other Italian states, Tarentum became an obedient ally of Italy’s new hegemon. The Romans took pride in the wars that made them masters of Italy. Admired fourth-century leaders such as Camillus, Papirius Cursor and Decius Mus were above all military commanders. The emperor Augustus would give heroic generals pride of place in his great temple of Mars Ultor along with his own ancestors; Roman inscriptions and literature celebrate them as models of citizenship. War leadership was reinforced by Rome’s dynamic military system, which required every able-bodied male citizen between the ages of 16 and 46 to be liable for service and organized them, under ferocious discipline, in the flexible divisions called legions. Alongside these served similar bodies of allied troops who fought under Roman

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command. As the number and range of Italian allies grew, therefore, so did Rome’s military capabilities. By 264 the territories of the Roman state itself, the ager Romanus, extended over about one-fifth of the peninsula, from Picenum and the Sabine country north of the city, across much of southern Etruria and most of Latium, to northern Campania. The rest of Italy consisted of the Latins – officially termed the Latin Name, nomen Latinum, and now including more than 20 Latin colonies – and the other Italian allied peoples, the socii Italici. Save for religious associations, all other regional unions had been dissolved. Not only did Rome’s nearer neighbours and trading partners, such as Carthage and Syracuse, take a close interest in this unparalleled rise to peninsular dominance but so did Ptolemaic Egypt, one of the three principal kingdoms that had formed from the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire. Ptolemy II in 273 exchanged friendly embassies with the republic, a friendship that was virtually Rome’s first recognition by a powerful Hellenistic Greek state – and this would have important consequences for the Ptolemies themselves later. The Romans did not organize an Italian federation or confederation. Each allied state had its own link with Rome – former enemies usually were bound by treaties – but not with any others; there was no representative congress (such as that of Sparta’s old Peloponnesian league); and the Romans took it very badly if any allies, even Latins, dared to hold independent consultations among themselves. Foreign relations and military activities were decided solely by Rome. Allies could not opt out – when Falerii north of Rome tried this in 241, it was demolished and the inhabitants removed to a new and less defensible lowland site. The allies’ essential duties to Rome were military or naval service and supplies. Coastal cities such as Naples and Tarentum had to provide ships and sailors once Roman wars involved the sea; other states supplied fully equipped troops plus munitions. The details were specified in a list, the ‘register of toga-wearers’ (formula togatorum; the toga was the formal attire of Romans and Italians), regularly revised. This political and military structure proved flexible, resilient and almost unbreakably tough. The benefits to the allies were limited

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but real: Italy’s endemic intra-state wars were over, the peninsula’s security was strengthened, and non-Roman soldiers received shares in the plunder from successful wars. Italian merchants along with Roman ones were looked after by Rome if foreign mistreatment occurred – as happened in 240 involving Carthage, and in 229 over Illyrian piracy in the Adriatic. The dominant elites in Italian, and especially Latin, cities could develop close ties of guest-friendship with their Roman counterparts (even if these were always socially grander). Some allied aristocratic families moved to Rome and became part of the Roman elite: the Fulvii and later Porcii from Tusculum, for instance, the Licinii probably from Etruria, and the Aurelii from the Sabine country. The ager Romanus in 265 bc comprised about 24,000 square kilometres or nearly 10,000 square miles. That year Rome’s census, at least according to the late Roman writer Eutropius, registered 292,234 male citizens aged over 16. The rest of Italy had probably about twice as many, to judge from a census-survey of 224 transmitted by Polybius: 273,000 Romans and half a million Latins and other allies (the lower Roman total perhaps due to losses in the recent war with Carthage). On conservative estimates, such figures would suggest that Italy in 224 had 2½ to 3 million inhabitants, along with an unknown number of slaves. Other leading Mediterranean powers had similar or bigger populations, but few could maintain, reinforce and replace large military forces as regularly and effectively. Later Romans liked to visualize their ancestors as sturdily unsophisticated sons of the soil, untouched by luxury, riches or the temptations of trade. Reality was different. Not only was Rome itself one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean by 264 bc but it also housed busy traders and manufacturers. Archaeological finds show that black-glazed pottery emanating from Rome and its surrounds took grain and oil to Punic Sicily, North Africa, southern Gaul, and the old Phoenician city of Gades in south-west Spain. Polybius quotes (in Greek translation) two treaties between Rome and Carthage, generally dated to around 509 and 348 bc, which regulated traders’ dealings and entitlements. The Roman side was more regulated than the Carthaginian: the second treaty, for example, banned Romans from sailing to southern Spain where

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Carthage had a virtual trade monopoly. By the 230s, and probably much earlier, Roman and Italian merchants were busy around the Adriatic too.1

◆ After Rome’s early monarchy was overthrown around 509 bc by the city’s powerful aristocrats, called patricians, they replaced it with elected executive offices at first largely held by themselves – but over time opened (grudgingly) to the other citizens, the plebeians, who were the great majority of the Roman population. In the same way the Senate, an already old advisory council, came to have plebeian as well as patrician members. Until expanded in the first century bc it had some 300 members, appointed for life by the five-yearly censors. Senators were recruited from former magistrates and other men judged morally and socially suitable (poor Romans need not apply). That the Romans also called their state Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome – in later times abbreviated to SPQR – and only rarely reversed the word order, marked the stature of their oldest consultative body. SPQR was governed by ‘colleges’ of annually elected executives called magistrates, formal assemblies of citizens to elect them and enact laws, and the Senate. Needless to say, voting and all public offices (except for the Vestal virgins, Rome’s female priesthood) were closed to women. Ultimate authority rested with the People but was delegated by the People’s command to the magistrates, who in turn consulted the Senate on all matters. The Senate’s ancient and ritual status, as old as Rome herself, made it revered in spite of members’ unfailingly numerous shortcomings – and occasional crimes – which Roman and Greek critics down the ages were happy to point out. Senators could discuss any matter great or small raised by a magistrate, and could pass decrees (senatus consulta) on proposals put by him. A senatus consultum was legally only an advisory opinion needing ratification by the People in assembly, but by 264 bc it was unusual (though not unheard of) for the People not to ratify. The Senate operated by consensus. As a debate progressed, opinion tended to gravitate towards the viewpoint most persuasively

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argued or to the speakers of greatest standing and influence, or to those strongly backed by the presiding magistrate. Seniority ruled, with past consuls by far the most authoritative: the most eminent men in the res publica, its principes viri, were nearly all former consuls. They did not invariably agree – in 264, for example, the Senate reached impasse over an appeal for help from Messana in Sicily and the consuls took the question to the People – but deadlock was unusual. The complex hierarchy of annually elected magistrates at Rome had evolved down several centuries. The two consuls stood at its head. They held imperium, the power to command – a word and concept with a future – in both civil and military affairs. They led the main armies of the state, and at home co-operated with Senate and People on matters of major moment. From 326 bc a consul on campaign might, if the Senate so judged, have his imperium extended for another year (or longer) as a ‘proconsul’: a practice increasingly frequent as the empire grew, though a proconsul’s imperium was always subordinate to a nearby consul’s. Another magistracy, the praetorship founded in 367, held a lesser imperium, dealt with judicial matters, and could also command forces (smaller ones) when needed. Of the other magistrates the most powerful were the ten plebeian tribunes, tribuni plebis, originally elected by plebeian citizens in the fifth century bc to defend plebeian rights and interests against the dominant patrician elite. A tribune was physically sacrosanct while in office – if he suffered violence, the assailant could be killed without trial by any citizen – and he had the right to veto any action proposed by a magistrate (even another tribune), by the Senate, or even by the People in assembly, if he judged it wrong. It was, fortunately, a power not often exercised. Tribunes consulted the body that elected them, the Concilium Plebis open only to plebeian citizens, and could propose resolutions to it. One striking success came in 287 bc: a law was passed that effectively made a Concilium Plebis resolution, a plebiscitum, as binding as a law enacted by the whole People (a lex). In time tribunes also gained the right to convene meetings of the Senate and seek its advice. They continued their watchdog role in public affairs and from time to time continued to irritate established interests – even though they

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themselves practically always came from well-to-do or elite families – for instance with proposals for distributing tracts of state-owned land to impoverished citizens, and for improving ordinary citizens’ civil rights. Being a plebeian did not automatically mean being poor: it simply meant not being a patrician. Leading plebeians could be as well off as patrician Romans. As a result the tribunate quite early became a regular stage in a plebeian leader’s public career; a plebeian consul almost always had been a tribune earlier. Thanks in great part to tribunes, by 287 the position of plebeian Romans was legally far better than before, while in politics and social relations affluent plebeians were themselves now part of the dominant elite, even though the small (and shrinking) number of patrician houses continued to be disproportionately influential and electorally successful. Although the first plebeian consuls won their office in the mid-fourth century, not until 171 were there two in the one year, and that still remained a rare combination. Every five years two censors were elected for 18-month terms to scrutinize the condition of the res publica. They reviewed Senate membership and senators’ performance (errant senators could be expelled), took the census of all citizens – registering income and material possessions as well as persons – and arranged for collecting the taxes and other dues that citizens had to pay. Censors also organized necessary public works projects, from temples, roads and fortifications to drainage and sewers. One final office needs mention: in any military emergency that baffled the consuls, or for tasks such as presiding over elections if the consuls were preoccupied, a dictator holding supreme imperium would be nominated by one consul authorized by the Senate; he then chose a lieutenant called the master of horse (magister equitum). The dictatorship, in effect a momentary restoration of the old Roman kingship, was to evolve spectacularly in the last days of the Roman Republic – and point the way to a new monarchy.

◆ Male Romans past the age of 16 had voting rights in a fairly extensive range of political assemblies. The very oldest of these survived only

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in fossilized forms until Augustus’ era. By contrast, since Rome’s earliest army, the ‘levy’ (legio), marshalled for training and war on the Campus Martius just outside the city, it also became Rome’s principal voting assembly: the Comitia Centuriata. This was organized according to the legion’s basic unit, the centuria originally of 100 men. In historical times this Comitia’s 193 centuriae were highly unequally arranged. The entire assembly was stratified into five main ‘classes’ plus several extra centuries: notably 18 for senators and for other wealthy citizens who were expected to serve as the army’s cavalry, called equites. Nearly half the centuries’ total (88 at least) were for citizens classified by censors as affluent, whereas Romans lacking any landed property – in Cicero’s time about half of all Romans – were assigned to a single century. Each century had one vote, decided by the majority of the members present; and voting stopped once a majority of centuries was reached in an election or in legislation. Thus the lower-class centuries rarely, if ever, had their votes counted. A second assembly was the Comitia Tributa, whose units were based on the territorial districts or ‘tribes’ (tribus, plural) of the ager Romanus – 35 by 241 bc. After 241, new incorporated regions were ascribed to various existing tribes. Each tribe likewise voted as a unit but with no formal distinctions of status among its members, in an order determined each time by lot (the lot being the gods’ prerogative). These two assemblies elected Rome’s magistrates. The Centuriata chose the consuls, praetors and censors, the Tributa the lesser officials, notably the quaestors in charge of the Roman treasury (the aerarium), and the aediles who tended public amenities such as the temples, markets and streets. Each Comitia could enact (or reject) proposed laws put to it by a senior magistrate or a tribune; the Centuriata could also act as a judicial court. Nevertheless, as the voice of the Roman People both were sharply limited. Both of them, in structure and in practice, favoured richer Romans. Not only was this bias obvious in the Comitia Centuriata, but in the Tributa all citizens living in the City were registered in just four ‘urban’ tribes, which meant too that Romans in the 31 ‘rural’ tribes (some of them very distant from Rome) who wanted to vote had to find time and means to travel to the City and back. In the

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Tributa too, voting ended as soon as a majority of tribes concurred, and it became common that the tribe chosen by lot to vote first was followed in its decision by its fellows: so that if the next 17 tribes did, the issue was resolved. In both assemblies citizens could debate only proposals put to them by the convening magistrate. He also decided who (if anyone) could speak on the question; nor could voters move amendments. The same procedures applied in the Concilium Plebis, itself organized by tribes. Romans saw no problem or contradiction in these aspects: the decision of the properly convened voters was always accepted as the voice of the entire Roman People, even though it was almost always a small minority of Romans who actually voted. This complex political system worked, thanks to everyone’s willingness to give as well as take, and (no less importantly) to put up with exceptional measures from time to time – Fabius the Delayer’s dictatorship against Hannibal in 217, for instance, or the People’s choice in 210 of a junior senator (P. Scipio, later Africanus) to retrieve a catastrophic defeat in Spain. Romans were not against temperate innovation either. The number of praetors went up to two in 241, six from 197 on, to cope with the expanding demands of judicial cases, warfare and provincial rule; aediles and quaestors too increased in number over time. A former aedile such as Scipio could be given imperium as a proconsul and hold it for several years. In 149 a reforming tribune’s law set up procedures for a special court of senators to be jurors in prosecutions of misrule by provincial governors. Changes and reforms were frequent in the last century of the free Republic, even if they did not always succeed in practice. The Senate exercised auctoritas, moral authority, which rested not just on the eminence of individual members but also on its religious role. It was the ultimate guardian of the auspices (auspicia), the right to learn the will of heaven through signs and prodigies – a right which magistrates had only when in office. Individual Romans possessed social auctoritas, matched with dignitas: the regard in which a Roman was held by his fellow Romans and which defined how he saw himself. The more eminent a citizen, the greater his auctoritas and dignitas. For an ambitious Roman, preserving dignitas

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could almost literally be a question of life or death: in 49 bc the proconsul Caesar, under threat from his political foes, crossed the Rubicon to seize power because (he himself wrote) his dignitas was more precious than his life. For attaining and enlarging these qualities, public office carried at least as much weight as birth and wealth, sometimes more. The highest magistracies, especially the consulship, and major priesthoods – pontiffs and augurs above all – brought the highest dignitas and auctoritas. There were no separate clergy; only a very few priesthoods prevented their holders from trying for regular public careers. Exploits in war brought the priceless added advantage of military renown (gloria) and, if a successful general’s soldiers chose to acclaim him, the honorific title imperator (‘victorious commander’). One of the greatest days in a Roman consul’s or proconsul’s life was when he led his returning army through the City in his triumph, triumphus: a religious and military procession showing off the wealth and captives they had taken in war. These were then divided up: some booty dedicated to Jupiter and other gods, some delivered to the state treasury, and the rest shared among the commander, his officers and (much the least) their men. Leading patrician and plebeian families came to be informally called nobiles (‘notables’), or collectively the nobilitas, their ancestry adorned by consuls, dictators and triumphators. Nobiles enjoyed special regard from voters. Yet vigorous and popular men without nobilis forebears could also attain consulships and make a mark on history: Cato the Censor in the early second century, and C. Marius and Cicero in the first, were only the most noteworthy of a lengthy series of what Romans termed ‘new men’, novi homines. Political success had to be striven for. Not every aspirant, nobilis or newcomer, gained its consular acme: Africanus’ ailing son and Caesar’s father did not. Lengthy generation gaps between the senior magistracies, consulships above all, could erode a family’s standing – as the Julii, for instance, found in the third and second centuries.2 Political as well as social eminence arose out of, and depended on, networks of relationships: both those that linked men of more or less equal status, and the ties between leading Romans and men, Romans and others, lower in social ranking. Public life was inevitably a busy

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round of such networking. As imperialism brought provinces and dependent states with new opportunities for wealth and prestige, networking became ever more demanding and its rewards all the greater. By 150 bc, Roman nobles such as Africanus’ grandson Scipio Aemilianus, destroyer of Carthage, could have cities, regions, even whole provinces and foreign kings under their patronage. When political struggles at Rome sharpened from the 130s on, the empirewide resources of principes viri would have an unprecedented impact on the fate of the res publica populi Romani itself.

CHAPTER 2

Mediterranean Hegemony and the First Provinces

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upposedly Pyrrhus of Epirus on leaving Sicily in 276 bc exclaimed, ‘What a wrestling-ground we are leaving to the Romans and Carthaginians!’ The wrestling started soon enough. By 270 Rome’s dominance extended from the edge of Cisalpine Gaul to the toe and heel of Italy. There was no obvious reason why it should permanently stop at any of these edges and foreign states were taking notice even in the Hellenistic east: as mentioned above, in 273 Ptolemy II accepted a friendship treaty, a costless but valuable gesture. Left to themselves the Romans more likely would have moved north into Cisalpina, for as recently as the 280s they had been at war with its Gauls, allies of Etruscan cities against Roman power. New developments took them south instead. In 264 bc both they and Carthage (the hegemon of western Sicily) were drawn into supporting Messana, facing the toe of Italy, when its Campanian occupiers the Mamertines faced destruction from Syracuse. A surprising sequence of events saw Carthage first saving Messana from Syracusan attack, then allying with Syracuse against Messana, while Rome persisted in supporting the Mamertines to the point of fighting both Syracuse and then Carthage. So began the First Punic (that is, Carthaginian) War. Although Polybius and most other ancient writers, followed by some modern historians, blamed it on danger to Italy from an 18

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expansionist Carthage, a view now widely accepted is that Rome was the aggressor, avid for Punic plunder and territorial expansion, not to mention the gloria to be won by successful commanders. This was urged by the third-century Sicilian historian Philinus, whose work does not survive but was reported and rejected by Polybius a century later. For Polybius the causes were that Rome feared Carthaginian expansionism and the Roman hoi polloi craved ‘great and clear rewards’ (meaning booty) to compensate them for past hardships. The events of 264 were more nuanced. At first the consul sent to rescue Messana tried to negotiate terms with the Syracusans and Carthaginians besieging the place. Rebuffed, he succeeded in crossing the straits, drove off both hostile armies – and then concentrated his attention on Syracuse. Although he failed, both consuls of 263 continued the effort until its king Hiero, unaided by Carthage, made peace, whereupon half the Roman forces went home. Now the Carthaginians did decide to confront the Romans, which predictably prompted these to respond in renewed strength. Only in 262 did the war at last become actually Punic, whereas the military events of 264–263 strongly imply that Syracuse was the enemy originally in Rome’s sights. Syracuse, the dominant power in Sicily and southern Italy until the 280s, was being revitalized by Hiero, though on a lesser scale. Rome had only within the previous decade brought southern Italy, including its Greek cities, under her hegemony. The most obvious threat on foreign encroachment there would be from Syracuse, not Carthage. Similarly with the report that ordinary Romans had expected helping Messana to bring big rewards: wealthy Syracuse was an easier target than Carthage across the sea in Africa. Rome neither had a war fleet in 264, nor decided on building one until 262. That was also the year when, according to Polybius, she at last resolved to expel the Carthaginians from their territories in Sicily. The sharp change from the war started in 264 to the much greater war that after 263 lasted for 22 more years arguably left later Romans (with an occasional exception) believing that from the start their forefathers had expected – and resolved – to clash with Carthage. Moreover Sicily itself became Rome’s first extra-Italian possession

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as a result of the Punic war. In effect, that befell the island as the portentous result of an unexpected war with an unintended enemy.1

◆ Until 100 bc or so provincia meant not an extent of territory but the duties, civil or military, that the Senate assigned to an incoming magistrate. Since this could involve a military theatre, the word eventually gained an added territorial sense. But what the Romans in 241 called their new possession Sicily (Hiero’s now-allied kingdom apart) is not recorded. Sicilian cities, including those like Panormus and Selinus in the old Carthaginian-ruled territories, remained self-governing and a few, such as Messana (another formal ally) and Segesta in the west (supposedly of Trojan ancestry like Rome), enjoyed special privileges. The rest, ultimately covered by the inaccurate but polite term of ‘allies’, socii, may have been subject to demands for funds and supplies when Rome required them – for instance when Italy was invaded by a massive Cisalpine Gallic army in 225 – but this was not regularized until 210, during the great war with Hannibal which dragged in the whole island. Even a regular governorship, in the shape of a new yearly praetor, was not started until 228.2 The same held true of Sardinia and Corsica, which Rome forced the Carthaginians to concede in 237 along with a very large sum of money (1,000 Greek talents). The seizure was morally indefensible, as Polybius stressed; it was no good for later Roman tradition to pretend that the two had also been conceded by Carthage, for that was false. The likeliest explanation for 237 was that Carthage had just crushed a great rebellion by its African subjects and was rebuilding its military strength, prompting a suspicion – unfounded – that Sardinia might be used as a base for a recovery attempt on Sicily. Having annexed it and Corsica the Romans did even less with them than with Sicily. The governors from 228 on – praetors or sometimes consuls – held the coastal towns and territories, and clashed intermittently with the warlike natives inland. At least this gave the consuls the chance for some military gloria.3 Although the last two decades of the century would be dominated by the harrowing Second Punic War, fighting Carthage afresh was

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far from Rome’s agenda in the 230s and 220s. Cisalpine Gaul was one concern: its Gallic peoples launched their just-mentioned invasion of the peninsula in 225, and once that was defeated a series of consuls from 225 until 221 carried Roman power across Cisalpina and beyond, to Istria at the head of the Adriatic, to curb the warlike locals who were harassing Rome’s non-Gallic friends the Veneti. Even earlier, the lower Adriatic region became another concern. When the Ardiaei, a powerful but piratical Illyrian people, plundered not only nearby Greek city-states such as Epidamnus and Corcyra but also Italian merchant shipping, a powerful military and naval expedition under both consuls of 229 put a stop to it and installed a friendly Greek leader, Demetrius of the island of Pharos, as effective ruler of the Ardiaei. Ten years later, when Demetrius picked up where his Illyrian predecessors had left off by encouraging more and lengthier raids, even into the Aegean Sea, the consuls of 219 with another large armament got rid of him, earning plaudits from a number of Greek states – though not the king of Macedon, their traditional hegemon. Strikingly, the Cisalpine campaigns led to the region’s annexation, loose though this was, whereas intervening across the Adriatic did not. Instead the Romans put compliant rulers in charge of defeated states and expected them to give no further trouble. Rome had rather similar feelings about Carthage. There was occasional anxiety: when the Gallic invasion loomed in 225, Roman forces were sent to Sicily and Sardinia (evidently not to guard against Gallic attacks). But the Romans showed no worry over the spreading and wealthy territorial dominion in Spain that Carthaginian generals – including Hannibal – conquered between 237 and 220. It was different when Hannibal, Carthage’s new leader from 221, defied a Roman demand the following year that, in effect, he halt any further Spanish expansion. To underline his and Carthage’s defiance he attacked and sacked Saguntum, a small coastal town friendly with Rome, in 219. This offered Rome the pretext for a new Punic war – a move which had not been planned, any more than the previous one had been. Hannibal spent seven months of 219 bogged down outside Saguntum, a static target for Roman intervention (they had a huge navy), yet the Romans preferred to swat down a lesser defier,

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Demetrius of Pharos. But the sack of Saguntum was a blow to Rome’s dignitas and auctoritas, with the Greek world looking on. As soon as spring 218 arrived, a Roman embassy delivered the war declaration to Carthage. What ensued, contrary to the Romans’ clear expectations, was a titanic conflict that came near to overwhelming them. Hannibal’s victories in Italy between 218 and 216 opened fissures in Rome’s Italian hegemony, for many central and southern allies, and even her Campanian co-citizens, defected to his side. Philip V, king of Macedon, judged it the ideal opportunity to ally with Carthage, followed by Syracuse (the loyal Hiero died in 215). Nevertheless the almost shattered republic regrouped, captured Syracuse in 212 and Campania’s Capua in 211, kept Philip at bay in Illyria, and in 210 found its own Hannibal in the person of young P. Cornelius Scipio. He drove Carthaginian forces out of Spain by 206, in 204 as proconsul invaded North Africa, and by destroying Hannibal’s army at the battle of Zama in 202 finished Carthage as a great power. Under the peace of 201 it kept its African territories, but Punic Spain was conceded to Rome, and Carthage ceased to have any independent foreign policy. The Numidian peoples to its west were now united under a pro-Roman king, Masinissa. Philip V had already made a compromise peace, in 205 – which did not save him from lasting Roman rancour. At enormous cost in lives, devastation and money the Roman republic was now the dominant power across the western Mediterranean.4

◆ One immediate task was to restore control over Cisalpina, whose Gauls had defected to Hannibal’s side in 218. Once a new series of campaigns from 200 to 191 subdued the Gallic peoples, the Romans reinforced the River Po’s Latin colonies at Placentia and Cremona (originally founded just before Hannibal arrived) and built highways across the Cisalpine plain, most memorably the Via Aemilia from Ariminum on the Adriatic to Placentia; the region is still called Emilia. The resubdued Gauls were harshly handled, much of their land confiscated for new Latin and Roman colonies – Parma, Mutina (Modena) and Bononia (Bologna) – south of the Po, along with

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small market centres along the highways. Land grants to individual citizens and Latins followed in 173. The upshot was that by 150 most of the old Gallic lands were in the hands of Romans and Italians. At the head of the Adriatic beyond the loyal Veneti a new Latin colony, Aquileia, was set up in 181 to hold off incursions on that side (a migrant Transalpine Gallic people had recently been driven away), although the Istrians to the east were left independent. Save for the Latin colony of Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic, founded in 181, there were still few formal Roman settlements beyond the Po, but the transformation of Cisalpina into a virtual extension of Italy was well under way. The peoples who remained intermarried with the peninsular newcomers to produce a vigorous economy, population and culture with historic impact. The same held for the Iberian peninsula. Rome’s new territories extended from the Pyrenees along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts to the mouth of the River Tagus and inland for varying distances, especially in the regions of the Ebro and Baetis (Guadalquivir) rivers. In 197 a series of ad hoc governors was replaced by two annual praetors: one governed the Mediterranean coastlands called unfussily Nearer Spain (Hispania Citerior), his colleague the south and west, Further Spain (Hispania Ulterior). Their dividing line lay just west of the city of New Carthage, founded in 228 by the Carthaginians. The Spaniards did not take to their new rulers with enthusiasm. Full-scale revolt blew up in 197, bringing over M. Porcius Cato (the later censor) in 195 as consul to deal with it and – despite his own loud claims of success – dragging on for several years after. Because the revolt drew in some of the free Celtiberians and Lusitanians outside the provinces, the 180s then saw repeated campaigns against them by praetors who all claimed stunning victories and submissions, none of which impaired the Spaniards’ fighting powers. Peace was at last gained in 179–178 by a pair of able praetors, Ti. Sempronius Gracchus and L. Postumius Albinus, through reasonable treaties with the free Spaniards. They also improved – at least from Rome’s point of view – how the Spains were administered. A more positive Roman contribution to Spain was to found cities, some with a notable future. Scipio settled discharged Roman and

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Italian veterans in 206 at a hilltop town near the middle Baetis, significantly naming it Italica. Gracchus founded a town for loyal Spanish followers in the middle Ebro valley and modestly called it Gracchurris. A few years later, in 171, a new Spanish phenomenon came to Roman notice: 4,000 bastard sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women petitioned the Senate for a town of their own. They were granted Carteia (close to the Strait of Gibraltar) to share with its existing residents and, strikingly, the place was made a Latin colony: the first outside Italy and a precedent for the future. Probably in 151 another consul operating in Spain, M. Claudius Marcellus, settled a mixed body of Romans (and no doubt Italians) and Spaniards at a key crossing over the middle Baetis, called Corduba. When the next round of Lusitanian wars closed in 138, the consul D. Iunius Brutus gathered disarmed land-hungry Lusitanians – or on another view chose some of his own veterans – for a settlement on the east coast just south of Saguntum, naming it Valentia. Just 15 years later another consul, Q. Caecilius Metellus, found enough Romans in Spain to furnish 3,000 settlers for two colonies, Palma and Pollentia, on the just-conquered Balearic island of Mallorca.5

◆ A Greek statesman, Agelaus of Naupactus, warned a diplomatic conference in 217 of the peril to Greece from ‘the clouds gathering in the west’ whichever side won the Hannibalic war. His prophecy came true with dismaying speed. Rome defeated Macedon in a new war of only three years from 200 to 197, destroying its dominance over Greece and the Aegean. She went on to shatter the greatest power in the Hellenistic east, the Seleucid empire which stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, when its ambitious king Antiochus III sought to replace Macedon as Hellenistic hegemon: his Roman war lasted just over three years too, from 192 to 188, and he lost Asia Minor. Even though both kingdoms remained vigorous and even ambitious thereafter, supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean was suddenly in the hands of the newcomer from the west. Why Rome, fresh from the draining war with Carthage, should have moved so swiftly into the east was debated from the start and still is. That it was a ‘sentimental’ defence of revered Greek states

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(Athens and a weakened Egypt among them) which the rapacious Macedonian and Seleucid kings threatened, plus anxiety over their possible aggression against Italy, was urged at the time (by the Romans) and may still have supporters. By contrast, Roman greed for plunder, aristocratic gloria, and dominance over other powers is now widely identified as the motive. A third view sees the republic intervening to restabilize a Hellenistic world deranged by ruthless Macedonian and Seleucid expansionism against Egypt and smaller states such as Pergamum and Athens. Huge quantities of booty and money were indeed gathered in both wars, especially Antiochus’ colossal war indemnity of 15,000 talents (though he had 30 years to pay it off). A few Roman commanders won gloria to rival that of Scipio Africanus – especially T. Quinctius Flamininus, whose victory at Cynoscephalae in 197 ended the Macedonian war. On the other hand the wars were fought entirely beyond the Adriatic, with little likelihood from the start that Italy would be attacked – in fact when Hannibal, now in exile at Antiochus’ court, proposed just that, he was politely ignored. The supposed allure of booty was not enough to make the war-wearied Roman People vote for war against Philip in 200 bc until the consul Galba raised the (highly exaggerated) alarm about a Macedonian invasion. Again, after the peace with Antiochus Rome fought no eastern wars for 17 years, even though pretexts could have been manufactured to give some dozens of consuls, and thousands of potential soldiers and officers, fresh opportunities for booty, triumphs and military renown. Stability in the Hellenistic world was indeed restored by 188, but not in the old tripartite form of Macedon, the Seleucid empire and Egypt. In July 196 Flamininus, to general Greek astonishment and joy, proclaimed at Corinth that, by decree of the Senate, all Greeks were now free from any hegemon. Many Greeks, even the hard-nosed Polybius, wanted to believe it. In reality Rome treated Greek freedom as disposable – offering Antiochus, in 193, continued rule over the Greeks he ruled in Asia Minor if he agreed to stay out of eastern Europe, and during the war with Antiochus keeping Philip V compliant by condoning conquests he made in Greece itself. The rest of the Hellenistic states, including Egypt and medium-ranking

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Pergamum, Rhodes, and the Achaean League in Greece, naturally treated Rome as their new hegemon. Embassies bearing requests and complaints – mainly against other Greek states – flowed regularly to Italy; in turn Roman ambassadors intermittently toured Greece and the Aegean to investigate, listen and sometimes adjudicate.

◆ It is hard to suppose that in and after 200 bc Rome’s leaders – men such as Scipio, Flamininus and the formidable Cato, each a match in subtlety and insight for any Greek statesman – expected different results from Rome’s eastern triumphs. To defeat the great monarchies, garner booty and indemnities, then totally withdraw and leave the east again to its own divisive devices would be a guarantee of further trouble, not to mention a waste of the lives and effort that the wars had cost. Nor did the Romans opt for simply staying out of the east altogether and guarding Italy’s Adriatic side. The decision to take on Macedon and the Seleucids was effectively, and consciously, a decision to extend Roman military and political influence into the Hellenistic world – necessarily on Rome’s terms. It was influence, though, not control. Roman forces went home both in 194 and after 188. The pro-Roman kingdom of Pergamum was vastly enlarged, up to the borders of Galatia in central Asia Minor, and Rhodes, another loyal ally against Antiochus, received valuable tracts of nearby mainland to exploit (including some other Greek cities). The Achaean League in the Peloponnese gathered up Sparta, Messene and other (generally unwilling) neighbours, to control virtually the whole region. All these states were supposed to respond by staying peaceful; the Romans had no desire to keep sending forces over. Repeated embassies from the Achaeans, Spartans and other Peloponnesian states, defending or decrying Achaean dominance over the region, aroused minimal interest – far less sympathy. Nor did the Romans prevent Philip V and his successor Perseus from rebuilding Macedon’s resources and military strength, or Perseus from cultivating warm relations with Greek states and the Seleucids – not, that is, until 172, when Eumenes of Pergamum finally stoked enough suspicion and anger to arouse them to act against Macedon.

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The Third Macedonian War from 171 to 168 ended in utter disaster for that ancient kingdom. This outcome was very likely intended from the start. When Perseus used an early victory to offer negotiations, he was rebuffed. After his army was annihilated by the consul L. Aemilius Paullus in 168 at Pydna, near Mount Olympus, he was deposed. Macedon was divided into four small republics, any contacts between them forbidden, and a yearly tax had to be paid to the Roman People. Once more the war booty was immense – so great that the only direct tax levied on citizens, tributum, was abolished. This war revealed a Rome disturbingly changed from the plausibly altruistic liberator of 196 bc. Brutal harshness and bitter spite dominated. Even some Roman allies, such as Chalcis in Euboea, were plundered and their people enslaved. To punish pro-Macedonian sympathies in Epirus, Aemilius Paullus in 167 sacked 70 towns and enslaved 150,000 Epirote men, women and children. For trying to broker a compromise peace late in the war, Eumenes of Pergamum narrowly avoided Perseus’ fate and the Rhodians a war declaration. Cato the Censor’s oratory saved them, but Rome made the sacred isle of Delos near Athens a free port, almost annihilating Rhodes’ chief income, its merchant harbour dues. The Achaeans had to surrender 1,000 citizens suspected of pro-Macedonian or neutralist sympathies for detention in Italy; only in 150 were a surviving 300 allowed home. Paradoxically one was Polybius, whose friendships with Roman aristocrats such as Scipio Africanus’s grandson P. Scipio Aemilianus eased his lot and made him a lifelong, though not uncritical, admirer of Roman qualities and government. Even in saving her old friend Egypt from Seleucid conquest in 168 Rome showed her new temperament. Antiochus IV, an official ‘friend of the Roman People’ and (like Polybius) admirer of Roman ways, was ordered out of Egypt by a Senate decree handed to him at Eleusis, outside Alexandria, by the arriving Roman envoy C. Popillius Laenas. Popillius drew a sand circle with his vine-staff around the hesitating king and told him to respond before stepping out of it. Both men knew that Macedon had just fallen. Antiochus obeyed, but the ‘day of Eleusis’ was an unnecessary humiliation. Worse, it nudged the Seleucids another step towards a decline and fall that would have serious future consequences for Rome herself.

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Other kings chose to abase themselves to their testy hegemon. Prusias of Bithynia, an old foe of Eumenes, depicted himself to Roman ambassadors as their freed slave, then at Rome bowed to the ground in the Senate and addressed the disgusted senators as ‘saviour gods’ – epithets used of Hellenistic kings. Masinissa of Numidia sent a son to assure the Senate that he was merely superintendent of a Roman-owned kingdom. Around 155, a surviving letter of Eumenes’ successor Attalus II reveals, Pergamum gave up plans for an enticing war against the Galatians when one royal counsellor, wiser than the rest, reminded everyone that it would give the Romans an excuse to exploit their lingering resentment against the kingdom.6 Yet, as before, their hegemony continued indirect and fluctuating. When they intervened it was through envoys and one or more local allies. Stopping the feisty Prusias’ war against Pergamum in the 150s took a series of embassies and, finally, soldiers and ships gathered from Pergamum, Rhodes and others. The warring Egyptian brothers Ptolemy VI and Ptolemy VIII paid minimal attention to various Roman missions from the 160s to the 140s. In the west, military interventions were occasional outside Spain: an expedition against Dalmatia north of Illyria in 156 was sent, officially, because the Dalmatians were harassing Rome’s Adriatic friends and had threatened Roman envoys – but the Senate’s real motive, Polybius affirmed, was fear that lengthy peacetime was sapping Italy’s warlike fibre. Two years later a consul rescued Rome’s old ally Massilia, and other Greek coastal colonies in southern Gaul, from predatory nearby Ligurians, but neither war was long or involved annexations even though southern Gaul, at least, was important for Rome’s communications with Spain. Even in Spain, clashes with the free Spaniards were few until a new series of wars began in 154–153; these too ended in the 130s without added expansion. A quarter-century of consuls, praetors and potential soldiers thus largely missed out on wars, plunder and gloria – obviously not because Rome had run out of lands to conquer or because the men of Italy had become effete, but because Rome was not bent on conquest for conquest’s sake nor even for booty and glory at any convenient turn.7

◆

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In the late 150s Roman attitudes to foreign states shifted again. The Senate, suspicious of the current Seleucid king Demetrius, sponsored a successful rival, ushering in a long era of internal strife in the shrinking kingdom. Across the Adriatic a certain Andriscus, proclaiming himself a son of Perseus, was welcomed as ‘Philip VI’ by the discontented Macedonians in 149, reunited the kingdom, and destroyed a Roman army. When the praetor Q. Caecilius Metellus overwhelmed and captured him a year later, the Romans took a decision that they had rejected in 167: to bring Macedon under direct rule. The province of Macedonia, as it may now be called, was the imperial republic’s fateful first annexation east of the Adriatic – the first in what would be a long series. The Achaeans also fell foul of Rome when the assertiveness of new leaders aroused her suspicious annoyance. When Rome backed Sparta’s latest secession attempt in 147 and encouraged other non-Achaean League members to break free, the League went to war (nominally against Sparta). It was overwhelmed. In 146 – the same year that Rome destroyed Carthage – the consul L. Mummius sacked and burned Corinth because Roman envoys had been manhandled there. The League was dissolved, though thanks to Polybius’ intervention its cities remained self-governing. Polybius set up constitutions that gave power to obediently pro-Roman oligarchies, all supervised from Macedonia. Nonetheless the ‘freedom of the Greeks’, so loudly proclaimed and acclaimed exactly half a century earlier, was effectively finished. Harshness and violence pervaded still other regions. In Spain both the Lusitanians in the west and the Celtiberians in the northeast, fortified by a quarter-century of general peace, came to blows with the provinces’ governors in 154–153 and after. The Lusitanians invaded Further Spain repeatedly, especially from 147 to 139 when led by Viriathus, survivor of a treacherous Roman massacre. The Celtiberians by contrast fought against attacks prompted by Roman dislike of their military strength, but were never united in resisting. By the mid-140s the war narrowed into expeditions against the small but resourceful Celtiberian city of Numantia, on the plateau south of the middle Ebro. In 137 the Numantines even captured, bloodlessly, an entire Roman army complete with the consul Mancinus, freeing

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them in return for peace – only for the Senate to denounce the peace, hand over Mancinus in compensation (the Spaniards freed him again), and grind the Numantines down into surrendering in 133, another victory for Polybius’ friend Scipio Aemilianus. The Spanish provinces, all the same, were not extended territorially – even if Rome liked to view the rest of Spain as under Roman power and later wars with its peoples as rebellions. More than one governor behaved scandalously during these wars. Viriathus’ massacred Lusitanians had surrendered to the praetor Sulpicius Galba in 150 when promised land; Galba enslaved survivors and looted Lusitanian territory. The year before, the consul Licinius Lucullus had marched further north to loot and slaughter the entirely peaceable Vaccaei dwelling around the River Duero. Q. Pompeius Rufus, consul in 141, was accused of taking a Numantine bribe a year later to make a favourable peace – a peace rejected at Rome just as Mancinus’ would be. Servilius Caepio, Further Spain’s praetor in 139, bribed three of Viriathus’ lieutenants to assassinate him so as to wind down the Lusitanian war. Mancinus’ colleague in 137, Aemilius Lepidus, made unauthorized war again on the Vaccaei, only to be defeated and in 136 deprived of his command and fined. This penalty was a first in Spanish annals – Galba had been accused but let off, causing an outraged tribune in 149, L. Calpurnius Piso, to carry a law to prosecute charges of corruption. The law was hedged with limitations – only governors (not their subordinates) could be prosecuted, the prosecutor must be a senator, and also the jurors themselves. Still it was significant that officials’ behaviour by mid-century was sometimes unscrupulous enough to stoke outrage at home and a wish to curb it. Rome’s renewed harshness towards former foes was most ominously shown in her destruction of Carthage. A weak and obedient satellite, protected until the mid-160s from Masinissa’s repeated efforts to seize territory from it, Carthage for obscure reasons then incurred Roman distaste. New land grabs by Masinissa were condoned, and when in 151 the Carthaginians finally fought back the Senate decided on war under the strident persuasion of the aged Cato. In 149 the Carthaginians offered capitulation when both consuls invaded Africa, but on being ordered to abandon their

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city and migrate inland they went to war. Against incompetent commanders they made unexpectedly dogged resistance both in Carthage and outside. Only when Scipio Aemilianus took command in 147 was Roman victory ensured. With his friend Polybius by his side, Aemilianus stormed the city in early 146, sold 50,000 surviving Carthaginians as slaves, put the site to the flames and ritually cursed it forever (without using salt, a modern myth). Carthage’s remaining territory was parcelled out, some to Masinissa’s heirs, some to other cities such as Utica which had taken Rome’s side, the rest annexed as the provincia Africa: Rome’s first possession on that continent. Why Rome dealt thus with her hapless former enemy was debated at the time and still is. Economic motives – jealousy at Carthage’s renewed prosperity, greed for its riches and fertile territories – have been urged. Other suggestions include fear of an over-powerful Numidia should Masinissa conquer the city, the Roman elite’s relentless craving for gloria, obsessive hatred of Hannibal’s people, or increasingly unbridled lust for territorial expansion – or several together. None is fully satisfying. It belied economic greed or territorial lust to leave Carthage’s destroyed site desolate for a hundred years more (a project in 122 to refound it with Roman colonists was bitterly opposed and failed), give away much of its territory, and make Utica and the other defectors tax-free. Giving some of Carthage’s territory to Numidia indicates that Rome had no suspicions of its rulers. When Masinissa died in 148 (aged 90), his family’s hereditary patron Scipio Aemilianus was asked to decide Numidia’s future, and instead of dividing it among Masinissa’s sons he simply shared out its administration among them. As for gloria from a war which all Romans in 149 expected to be short, it would have been garnered only by that year’s consuls, neither of them very eminent – and Polybius, Aemilianus’ very informed friend, believed until the last minute that the Carthaginians would not in fact fight. The most pressing advocate for war was the octogenarian Cato, and his most pressing opponent Aemilianus’ relative P. Scipio Nasica, a former consul and general, and father of ambitious sons. One feature of 149 was expectations of rich plunder from a supposedly easy prey. Whereas levying soldiers for the harsh wars

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in Spain was acrimoniously unpopular, the consuls Manilius and Marcius were flooded with volunteers: Romans supposed that physically liquidating Carthage would release seven centuries’ accumulation of booty. Another feature was Rome’s demand that the Carthaginians move inland; supposedly Marcius admitted that this would end their seagoing. This and the site’s ensuing dereliction signal that Romans’ motives were self-servingly negative. They held that a maritime Carthage ‘ought not to exist’, as Cato repeatedly insisted (later misquoted as ‘Carthage must be destroyed’), and nothing take its place – not even a Roman city that could exploit the site’s advantages. In 146, too, the same fate and plunder befell wealthy Corinth even though it had never fought or competed with Rome. Resentment, opportunism, and destructive assertiveness – even worse than in 167 – played a part in both annihilations.8

◆ With provincia Africa the empire crossed out of Europe. Within another decade and a half it reached into a third continent. In spring 133 bc Pergamum’s last king, Attalus III, bequeathed his territories – Greek cities excepted – to the Roman People. Even without its wealthy cities – such as Ephesus, Smyrna and Miletus – this was a phenomenally rich acquisition. Yet the one immediate use made of it was to sequester Attalus’ royal treasury to finance a scheme enacted by a tribune, Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, son of the pacifier of Spain, to distribute farmland in Italy to needy Romans and perhaps Latins. Although the Senate did issue basic instructions in 132 about handling the new province (an inscriptional copy survives), a serious rebellion by a self-styled kinsman of Attalus, Aristonicus, delayed proper annexation until 129. As in Punic Africa, Rome gave away much territory: Eumenes’ inland acquisitions went to Pontus, Cappadocia and perhaps Bithynia, whose kings had helped defeat Aristonicus. Why the Romans accepted Attalus’ will is not obvious. His treasure apart, the province brought no huge growth in Roman revenues: existing rents and taxes continued and the Greek cities enjoyed immunity. But because Aristonicus lacked urban support and came to depend on the oppressed rural population and slaves, the Romans feared potential social upheaval – especially as a great

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slave rebellion had just been crushed in Sicily. Moreover to parcel the whole kingdom out among its neighbours risked encouraging fractious ambitions. Placing Pergamum’s original territory under direct rule seemed a safer choice (in 120 Rome even made Pontus hand Phrygia back). Then in 123 Ti. Gracchus’ brother Gaius as tribune enacted that contracts for collecting the province’s taxes be competed for at Rome instead of locally. The private consortia which made the successful bids would now be Roman: groups of equites Romani, as rich non-senators were starting to be termed (eques Romanus in the singular), with much greater financial resources than even rich provincials – a system very convenient to Senate and People but with abuses that emerged later (Chapter 4).9 Around the same time the republic took up new territories in the west, for strategic reasons rather than profit-hunting. Fresh military help to Massilia in 125–124 against predatory Gallic neighbours brought on war with the Gauls of the Rhône region, until by 121 the whole area was subdued – not only the lands between the western Alps and the Rhône but those beyond, as far as the Pyrenees – mainly by two energetic proconsuls, Domitius Ahenobarbus and Fabius Maximus. A hundred years after Rome first sent military forces from Italy to Spain, Domitius developed the traditional route (the so-called ‘way of Hercules’) into a major all-weather highway, the Via Domitia, marked out with milestones. In the new province, named Transalpine Gaul or Transalpina, two important new cities were founded: Aquae Sextiae, today Aix, just north of Massilia, and (for Roman citizens only) colonia Narbo Martius, now Narbonne, close to the Pyrenees. Although Transalpina began as little more than a military zone, its resources, population and nearness to Italy drew growing numbers of Roman and Italian traders and settlers, who would transform the region. The empire could have continued to expand steadily had the Romans so chosen, for half the Iberian peninsula was still independent; so too the entire Alpine chain, Dalmatia across the Adriatic, and the remaining city-states and kingdoms in the east. Nor did Roman wars stop. A large body of migrating northern German peoples, the Cimbri, Teutones and smaller groups, threatened Italy itself as they moved around its periphery. In 113 they destroyed a

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Roman army near the upper Danube, and in 106 annihilated two more at Arausio (Orange) in Transalpina. Only in 102 and 101 was Italy finally saved: first the Teutones and their allies were destroyed in Transalpina, then the Cimbri and theirs in western Cisalpina, each time by the Romans under the inspired general C. Marius, unprecedentedly consul every year from 104 to 100. Marius had come to prominence in an earlier war against Rome’s own client-kingdom Numidia. Jugurtha, one of Masinissa’s grandsons, objected to sharing the kingdom with his two cousins, so liquidated each in turn, but foolishly included Roman and Italian supporters of the second in the culminating massacre. Reversing earlier indulgence towards him, the republic opted for punishment. The resulting war went spectacularly badly between 112 and 109 – Jugurtha even forced a Roman army to capitulate without a fight early in 110, then let it go as the Numantines had done – and led to furious popular allegations of corruption against many principes viri and finally to Marius, a non-nobilis from Arpinum in Latium, being elected consul for 107. By 105 he had occupied all Numidia and captured Jugurtha with the aid of his able quaestor L. Cornelius Sulla – just in time to be re-elected year after year to face the wandering Germans. Instead of annexing Numidia, Rome handed its western regions to neighbouring Mauretania and entrusted the remainder to other relatives of Jugurtha, with only the (admittedly large) booty from the war itself as profit. As in the 120s, security concerns brought two other areas under control late in the century. An inscription mentions an eastward extension of provincia Macedonia to the sea of Marmara, because of constant harassment from Thracian border peoples. Around 101 or 100 the coasts of Cilicia in southern Asia Minor – no longer under Seleucid rule – were declared a provincia too (in this case, a military zone) to deal with increasing eastern Mediterranean piracy. Yet this did not lead to regular Roman attention there, nor were the remaining regional navies, such as that of Rhodes, equal to the job. Even so it was another 30 years before Cilicia became a proper territorial province with a governor.10 More peculiar were two cases of abstention. Cyrene, a rich mini-realm ruled by a Ptolemaic branch dynasty, was bequeathed

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to Rome by its last king in 96 – or at any rate the royal estates were, copying Attalus III: a bounty ignored by Senate and People until 74, when funds were needed for another war with Mithridates of Pontus. More surprising still was Rome’s refusal to accept wealthy Egypt when the hapless Ptolemy X made the same bequest in his own will before dying in 88/87. What complicated the situation was that Egypt was actually in the hands of his brother and foe Ptolemy IX, and Rome was in the throes of a civil war between the military grandees Marius and Sulla. Yet Sulla’s ultimate victory in 81 still left Egypt untouched and, in spite of repeated pressure over ensuing decades from powerful parties eager to exploit its near-fabulous wealth, so it remained. Again, despite serious wars in Spain from 100 bc on, the reach of its provinces hardly changed. D. Brutus, founder of Valentia, had forayed into the north-west as far as the Atlantic near Cape Finisterre, but neither he nor later governors imposed or aimed to impose permanent rule. The civil wars won by Sulla left a Roman opponent, Q. Sertorius, in control of parts of the provinces to lead a self-proclaimed counter-regime (complete with other exiles as magistrates and a senate) from 80 until 72, when his jealous deputy murdered him. Of the two Roman proconsuls sent against Sertorius the young Cn. Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great, already one of Sulla’s leading generals, earned the greater gloria, returning to Rome to be elected to his very first magistracy: the consulship of 70. Although he and the other proconsul in Spain, Metellus Pius, settled the affairs of both provinces, founding new cities – Pompaelo (Pamplona) near the Pyrenees, Metellinum (Medellín) in the west – and dispensing citizenship to loyalists, Spain’s effective frontiers stayed the same. The Lusitanians, many Celtiberians and the peoples further north-west remained independent, the ready targets of Roman governors seeking loot and more gloria. One such, in 61–60, was the ambitious, still young C. Caesar.

◆ Central and eastern Asia Minor around 100 bc was still an assortment of states medium-sized or small, one of them Pontus beyond Bithynia on the Black Sea. The dynamic Mithridates VI

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started from 110 onwards to build a local empire that took in Colchis (land of the Golden Fleece, roughly Georgia), the small Greek and semi-Greek states in the Crimea, and for a few years Galatia and Cappadocia as well. Unconcerned about his more distant acquisitions, Rome paid attention only to his ventures within Asia Minor, ordering him out of Galatia and Cappadocia around 95, then out of Bithynia when he seized that kingdom in 90. Mithridates was obedient until, a year later, Rome was engulfed at home in political discord and at war with her own discontented Italian allies. When corrupt Roman envoys made the Bithynian king counter-invade Pontus (they coveted Pontic plunder), Mithridates struck. He seized not only Bithynia and Cappadocia but provincia Asia too. Many or most cities there welcomed him as a liberator, a measure of the bitterness that four decades of Roman taxation had provoked; so did a number of Aegean island states, and even Athens in Greece. To cement his victory, in 88 he ordered the province’s cities to kill every resident Roman and Italian on a stated day, a massacre now nicknamed the ‘Asiatic Vespers’. Not all complied, yet enthusiasm was vigorous even at Pergamum and Ephesus: ancient estimates of victims ranged between 80,000 and 150,000 men, women and children. Whatever the total, the ‘Vespers’ revealed horrifically the provincials’ hatred of exploitative Roman rule. Pontic forces then crossed into Macedonia and Greece to spread the promised liberation. This First Mithridatic War lasted until 84. The king’s stunning successes were overturned by L. Sulla, who came east in 88. Repeatedly defeated and facing invasion, Mithridates was saved by Sulla’s need to return home to fight his own political foes: the proconsul left him his kingdom, exacted limited reparations and freed him to retake his rebelling outer territories. Over the next ten years Mithridates rebuilt his resources, easily repelling a stupid looting attack in 83–82 by Licinius Murena, governor of provincia Asia (the Second Mithridatic War). Then in 74 he yet again seized Bithynia, bringing on a third and – for himself – catastrophic war. A past lieutenant of Sulla and an equally formidable general, L. Licinius Lucullus (consul in 74), drove him even out of Pontus by 70 to seek help from his ambitious son-in-law Tigranes, king of Armenia.

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Tigranes was a successful imperialist: he had spread his dominions to the edges of the Parthian empire and had annexed most of Syria, the last remaining Seleucid territory. But when he came to blows with Lucullus in 69–67, and then with Lucullus’ successor Pompey, he lost everything south of Armenia. Mithridates fared worse, committing suicide in his last fortress – in the Crimea – in 63 to escape a rebel son. Not only a brilliant general but a superb organizer, Pompey had put an end to Mediterranean piracy, resurgent since the First Mithridatic War, in a three-month naval drive in 67. Instead of slaughtering or enslaving the surviving freebooters he settled them in Bithynia and Cilicia in 39 towns (his figure; some he named Pompeiopolis and Magnopolis) to afford them non-criminal livelihoods. In ending the Third Mithridatic War he took Rome’s most decisive imperialist step since the 120s. Bithynia with part of Pontus, Syria with Phoenicia, and a much-enlarged Cilicia now became taxpaying provinces. Asia Minor’s remaining assortment of states were now fully Roman satellites from the northern Black Sea down to Judaea, among them Armenia and a diminished Pontus. On returning to Rome in 62 Pompey boasted that he had added annual revenues of 85 million denarii to the state’s previous 50 million.11 It is not clear that Romans expected so thorough a reworking of the east. When Pompey, now the republic’s most illustrious general, sought to have his arrangements ratified in 61 and 60 he met sustained opposition in the Senate, though much of it arose from political animosity – he had supplanted Lucullus, making that grandee and his friends mortal enemies. Many other Romans feared that he would misuse his huge wealth and influence unless firmly curbed. In the end Pompey could achieve ratification only through a noxious political bargain with two other prominent, frustrated and unscrupulous nobiles, Crassus and Caesar, a pact with ominous implications for the health of the Roman republic (Chapter 4).

◆ The annexation of swathes of the east opened a new and violent era of imperialism. The great increases in public revenues were treated as resources simply for the Roman People, not for all the empire. Of

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course a project undertaken outside Italy for Roman benefit might also incidentally be good for provincials too: in provincia Asia after 129 the Romans built a network of roads to improve communications, while Pompey’s suppression of piracy made everyone’s travel and trade safer. But Attalus III’s treasure went to pay the costs of settling needy citizens on farms in Italy, the huge new revenues garnered in the 70s and 60s were largely used for Rome’s own needs, and in 57, instigated by a demagogic tribune, she annexed Cyprus, another Ptolemaic kingdom, to appropriate its royal treasury for financing free handouts of grain at Rome (the deposed king killed himself). Equally – or more perniciously – the eastern wars brought unparalleled riches and gloria to the victorious generals, especially through the repeated plundering of Asia Minor. Eagerness for these rewards increased the lack of scruple in public affairs. In 88 Marius and Sulla, both in high repute through victories over rebel Italian allies, clashed murderously over who should be appointed against Mithridates. Three civil wars ensued until Sulla’s victory in 81. The brief Second Mithridatic War was partly due to Murena’s greed for Pontic loot. Pompey’s ambition (at Lucullus’ expense) for the Mithridatic command was richly rewarded with material profits, even though these made him plenty of political enemies. The most shameless proconsul of all was Caesar, whose governorship of Further Spain in 61–60 earned him useful gloria and freed him from massive debt, thanks to attacking and plundering the free Lusitanians. Far finer opportunities arrived after his consulship in 59, for he moved on to be proconsul for five years in Cisalpina, Illyricum (as the Adriatic coastlands, by now a military zone, were called), and – due to the original appointee’s death – Transalpina too. Fatefully, Caesar switched his intentions from Illyricum to Gaul. By finding one reason after another for campaigns across central and northern Gaul from 58 to 51, and by applying calculated violence and genocide on an unmatched scale – a million enemy fighters killed and another million enslaved (he claimed), and towns, temples, shrines and their treasures systematically ransacked – he conquered the entire land mass from the Atlantic to the Rhine, throwing in famous forays into Germany and Britain. A broad rebellion in 52 across central Gaul

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against the conqueror, led by the Arvernian lord Vercingetorix and joined even by Rome’s old, but disenchanted, friends the Aedui, was bloodily crushed and other resistance smashed in 51. From the devastated Gauls Caesar amassed a colossal fortune, plus immortal gloria and fanatically loyal soldiers, all of which enabled him to rebel against the authorities at Rome in early 49 and win the resulting civil wars. When he was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 bc, Rome ruled 16 or 17 provinces on three continents: from his new Gallic acquisitions (three provinces soon named Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica) to Syria, and from the English Channel to Numidia (annexed by him in 46) and Cyrene. Already 200 years old, this empire remained a patchwork with plenty of unannexed though mostly dependent states lying within or just outside – such as the many small communities in hard-to-access Alpine valleys, tolerated so long as they left merchants and travellers alone, and at the other extreme a still barely independent Egypt. But only the civil wars that followed the dictator’s death put a stop – albeit temporary – to Rome’s new fervour for imperial conquest.12

CHAPTER 3

The Provinces of the Republic

T

he republic’s empire had not come about by design. Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica and the two Spains had been taken originally to keep the Carthaginians from coming back. Rome then showed no hurry for annexing other places: provincia Africa, provincia Asia and Transalpine Gaul had to wait until the second half of the second century. Nor was there a template for turning annexations into provinces. Sicily had no regular governor before 228 or receive regular taxation until repacified after 210, when the conquered Syracusan kingdom’s carefully designed system of tithes and half-tithes, based on produce, was applied island-wide. The Spains, Nearer and Further, were treated at first more as occupied lands open to plunder and ad hoc levies: copious quantities of gold, silver and coinage were delivered by returning governors to the aerarium down to the year 168, while regular taxes on mining and produce came in only by stages from the 190s on. Cisalpina, studded between 191 and 173 with Roman and Latin colonies and flooded during the century by further migrants from peninsular Italy, was not taxed as the overseas provinces were, and instead of annual or biennial governors it enjoyed (or suffered) the regular presence of consuls or praetors whose main business was fighting recalcitrant peoples on its periphery, especially the northern Apennine Ligurians.1 The later second-century acquisitions were similarly opportunistic. Provincia Africa was annexed – though much territory was 40

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gifted to pro-Roman cities within it and to Numidia – to appease Rome’s refreshed resentment of her old enemy Carthage, and Transalpine Gaul to assure the land route to Spain and also, perhaps (we have no explicit evidence), to make the region more accessible to Roman merchants and land-seeking settlers. These swiftly moved in, so that within 40 years the new province was filled with Romans. Provincia Asia, the richest region in the Mediterranean, was another matter: an unexpected windfall, though one (as noted earlier) that Rome took some years to annex at all, and then several more to exploit properly. In the first century, by contrast, most acquisitions were intentional: the sweeping territorial takeovers by Pompey in the east and then Caesar in Gaul, and even that of little Cyrene in 74 bc and Cyprus in 57, were done to improve imperial security (allegedly, at any rate), engorge the successful generals and their officers with plundered riches and gloria, and expand the revenues of the republic; not necessarily in that order. Terms for the subject lands took time to develop. Provincia first meant not a territory under Roman rule, but the tasks assigned to an incoming magistrate. Thus in Rome the quaestors in charge of the treasury, aerarium, had this as their provincia, and the City province, urbana provincia, belonged to the praetor hearing citizens’ court cases. Since military operations assigned to a consul or praetor – in Italy or beyond – were his provincia, by the end of the second century bc this also became the term for a conquered region. In fact Transalpine Gaul, taken over in the 120s and soon plentifully penetrated by Roman settlers and culture from nearby Italy, came to be called just ‘the Provincia’ by its residents (and remains Provence). It took longer for imperium to add ‘empire’ in the territorial sense to its basic meaning of ‘power to command’. In the second century the regions under Rome’s rule were referred to with phrases such as ‘those under the Roman People’s authority’, as in surviving treaties (in Greek) with two small Aegean city-states, one from 165 bc, the other from 105. In Latin a reform law of 122 penalized provincial governors’ financial mistreatment of ‘those who are under the direction, sway, power or friendship of the Roman People’, in arbitratu dicione potestate amicitiave populi Romani – the first three

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terms meaning, in effect, the empire. But by the first century bc imperium, or sometimes the phrase imperium populi Romani, could also mean ‘the power of the Roman people’ over foreign lands, and occasionally is found shading across towards the territorial meaning. A Ciceronian-era handbook of rhetoric speaks of the role of Rome’s allies in helping ‘to preserve our imperium’, while Cicero’s own famous tale of the dream of Scipio Aemilianus (set in 129 bc) has Scipio visiting heaven and seeing how ‘our imperium’ accounts for barely a dot on the earth’s surface below. In turn, Caesar records German spokesmen in 55 warning him not to cross the Rhine because this was the boundary of ‘the imperium of the Roman People’. In such cases imperium can mean either the power – or rule – of Rome or the territories under that power, or conceivably both. Finally in Augustus’ day imperium populi Romani did take on the further meaning of territorial ‘empire’, as when that emperor writes that he added Egypt to it.2

◆ From the start, this growth of empire inflicted hardship on those annexed, first of all because warfare nearly always preceded, and warfare was ruthless. Agrigentum in Sicily, as one example, was sacked in the First and again in the Second Punic War, each time with the survivors – 25,000 in 261 bc, an unknown number in 210 – sold as slaves. Sicily as a whole, in the Second even more than the First, was scorched by ruthless sieges (that of Syracuse the most famous), devastation and enslavements. Nor did the Senate and commanders shrink from outright barbarity when they thought it worthwhile, as when they devastated Epirus in 167 and rained down destruction on Carthage and Corinth two decades later. Similarly, governors faced with resistance within or outside their provinces could go to extremes. The much-admired Ti. Gracchus, consul in 177, campaigned so forcefully in Sardinia in 177–176 that the 80,000 prisoners he reportedly fed into the slave markets prompted a suitably sardonic proverb, ‘cheap Sardinians, each more worthless than the other’. It did keep the remaining Sardinians quiet for a generation. A few years later M. Popillius Laenas, consul in 173, dealt with a vexatious Ligurian mountain people, the Statellates, by

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promising fair treatment if they disarmed, then selling them all as slaves; it took intervention by outraged tribunes to push the Senate into having as many of them as possible freed. Not being vexatious did not always safeguard regions from lucrative assault either. Manlius Vulso, consul in 189, preyed profitably on Galatia after missing out on the war against Antiochus III, nor was punished even though his unauthorized campaign was harshly criticized. The robbery campaigns of Galba, Lucullus and others in non-Roman Spain have already been mentioned, and those territories continued to have looting appeal. Finding an excuse to attack someone for plunder could even be joked about: in Plautus’ comedy Epidicus, of the late 190s, that clever slave short of money muses, ‘Now I’ll convene my internal consultative Senate to decide whom best to declare war on, so I can snatch their silver.’ In all, thanks chiefly to the figures in Livy’s history, the total value of the war booty brought to Rome in the 50 years after 200 bc has been estimated or guesstimated at some 415 million denarii. Plunder remained normal, and grew in quantity. Julius Caesar, going out – loaded with debt – to Further Spain in 61 as praetor, found both solvency and early gloria by shredding the Lusitanian communities on the Atlantic coast. A greater achievement of his followed from 58 to 51: the thorough ransacking of Gaul beyond Rome’s Transalpine province. Most of free Gaul was economically developed, populous and full of lavishly endowed sacred shrines, so that plundering it made Caesar at least as wealthy as his rival Pompey, whom the opulence of the eastern Mediterranean had enriched. In his propaganda Caesar flinched not at his Gallic wars’ demographic cost, which he himself estimated at 1,192,000 Gallic soldiers dead (as noted earlier) and a second million taken as slaves – rather he saw this as an element of his gloria – but at intimating the total of Roman dead in his ensuing civil wars, a much more sensitive theme. Between 99 and 50 bc (it has been estimated) 220 million denarii came into Italy as plunder.3

◆ Human plunder too – war prisoners taken for slavery – featured distinctively in imperial expansion. Enslaving beaten enemies and

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even whole populations was normal for ancient states, and in their Italian wars the Romans had practised it regularly. Outside Italy sizeable numbers are reported from time to time: thus in 261, on taking Agrigentum in Sicily after a long siege, the consuls carried off 25,000 emaciated survivors; when Panormus, also in Sicily, was captured in 254 the civilian prisoners numbered 27,000 of whom 13,000 were sold as slaves (the others bought their freedom for 2 minae each, equal to about 2,000 asses of Roman money at the time or 200 of the denarii introduced later in the century). Tarentum in southern Italy, retaken from Hannibal in 209, lost 30,000 of its people to the slave markets, Sardinia 80,000 thanks to the elder Ti. Gracchus in 177, and Carthage 50,000 in 146, while the greatest single mass enslavement in Rome’s history occurred when in 167, as mentioned earlier, 150,000 people were seized in Epirus because their king had favoured Macedon rather than Rome. The many wars, large or small, that Rome fought in one region or another of the Mediterranean, from 264 on, helped feed slave markets both in Italy and elsewhere. So too did piracy at various periods, as well as slave traders – including the unscrupulous Romans who kept raiding the kingdom of Bithynia for its ablebodied men until the Senate stopped them in 104. Once the isle of Delos near Athens became a duty-free port in 167 by Rome’s fiat, a giant slave market developed, selling as many as 10,000 human beings on a single day in its heyday (this ended once Mithridates devastated the isle in 88). Most of these slaves, the Augustan-era geographer Strabo notes, were bought for western lands, while inscriptions show that Roman and Italian merchants formed one of Delos’ chief resident groups. In turn the depopulation which slave-hauls visited on some cities and territories – Carthage and Sardinia for example, not to mention Epirus and later the Gauls taken by Julius Caesar – often left behind long-term demographic and economic damage. Tarentum never recovered its old primacy in southern Italy, nor did Agrigentum in its part of Sicily; Carthage of course was razed, not to revive until 46 bc in Roman dress. Even Athens, whose ruler Ariston unwisely sided with Mithridates in 88, was shattered and partly depopulated by the proconsul Sulla two years later.4

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In and after the second century Italy and Sicily built up large and often discontented slave populations, prompting constant anxieties about unrest. These were proved true from time to time. As early as 196, then again in 185, the authorities in Rome had to act against restive slave movements in Italy itself; then in the 130s a mass rebellion swept across Sicily under a charismatic Syrian slave named Eunus (who took on the royal Seleucid name Antiochus), not crushed until 132, while over in the just-annexed kingdom of Pergamum the pseudo-royal rebel Aristonicus attracted slaves as well as oppressed rural folk to his movement, terming them charismatically ‘citizens of the Sun’, Heliopolitae. Another massive Sicilian slave revolt from 104 till 100 under a pair of leaders – Salvius, who took the name Tryphon, and Athenion – ravaged the island, as both slaves joining the revolt and discontented or opportunistic free Sicilians took advantage of the chaos to practise banditry and violence. The most famous slave revolt scoured the Italian countryside from 73 to 71 under the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, to be quelled only when the later plutocrat M. Licinius Crassus was given command as praetor (only for some of the credit to be annexed by Pompey the Great, returning from Spain). How large a slave population was in any region or at any time is not documented, but on all surviving evidence it could be plentiful. Italy certainly had the greatest concentration, with perhaps 2 million around 30 bc alongside 5–6 million free residents, but large numbers both proportional and absolute existed in some provinces, notably Sicily where rebel slaves’ forces, given widely varying numbers by ancient sources (from 20,000 to 200,000), were at any rate large enough to face and sometimes beat regular Roman armies. Around 150, the silver mines at New Carthage in southern Spain were worked by 40,000 slaves. Caesar’s million Gallic prisoners in turn would have hugely enlarged slave numbers in the regions that acquired them, especially Italy again, while at the same time draining his new provinces of a huge part of their people – which helps to explain why on the whole they gave Rome little trouble during the civil wars that ensued. On the other hand it is not likely that the slave populations simply grew with newcomers adding to the existing total. They must in fact

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have fluctuated. Sickness or old age would in time thin the numbers on an estate or in a household. So did a growing habit in Roman owners of setting some slaves free, especially household slaves since they would know them best, and legal manumission conferred citizenship. A letter of Philip V of Macedon to a Greek state in 214 mentions the Romans’ habit (unusual to Greeks) of freeing slaves – he thought that it helped populate their colonies – and in 129, the year he died, Scipio Aemilianus sneered at a hostile Roman crowd as men for whom Italy was merely ‘a stepmother’ (because they had arrived as captives and been freed). Even though slaves sometimes were allowed to form families, and even though infants abandoned by impoverished parents might sometimes be taken up as slaves, Rome’s slave supply came mainly from wars – which did not invariably lead to large hauls – and from traders such as those at Delos, who could not guarantee a steady supply even if there was regular demand. Thus, for example, once the quarter of a million or so enslaved from Sardinia and Epirus had passed away over the following decades, it cannot be assumed that another quarter-million was on hand to keep total slave numbers, in Italy or the provinces, at the same level. The upheavals of foreign and civil wars from 91 onwards, by contrast, must have seen slave numbers rocket again.5

◆ To administer a province the normal procedure was for a praetor to be assigned, and so between 241 and 197 the number of annual praetors grew from one to six. Only four of these received territorial provinces, as the oldest praetorships – the ‘city’ and ‘foreign’ pair – ran judicial business at Rome, and so before long a provincial praetor usually had his legal power, imperium, extended for a second year; he was then termed a propraetor. Should a serious revolt or invasion afflict a province, one of the year’s consuls could be sent out as the praetor’s superior: thus in 195 Cato took charge of both rebellious Spanish provinces, and in 74 Cilicia and Asia were assigned to L. Licinius Lucullus for the Third Mithridatic War. In line with centuries-old procedure, a consul whose imperium was extended beyond his year of office – almost always to carry on a war, seldom just to govern a province – was termed a proconsul.

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A governor’s supporting staff was small and generally amateur. A quaestor, one of Rome’s lesser elected magistrates, usually went with him to look after his finances (even though quaestors were young men starting their political careers). In addition the governor could take one or more senatorial friends as deputies or lieutenants, legati. They would all be accompanied by personal freedmen and slaves and perhaps some friends, but no regular state employees existed: as agents a governor used military officers, his own retinue and – as the Roman settler population grew – leading local Romans and Romanized provincials. In practice, therefore, Roman administration remained a fairly ad hoc procedure very much dependent on a governor’s abilities (or lack of them), character and whims. He and his helpers were unpaid, though it became normal for the Senate to vote him ample funds, called viaticum or vasarium, for expenses. Thus one consul in 58, L. Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, was granted a vasarium of 18 million sesterces, or 4½ million denarii, on setting out for Macedonia (Cicero claimed that he invested it all at Rome instead). Necessarily, most day-to-day administering was left to the local authorities in the provincial towns and countryside. It was their job to maintain local order, arrange the local details of tax collection, keep up the fabric and amenities of the towns and their surrounding territory, and carry out whatever orders came from the governor. The Romans interfered very little with local cultures, although in western provinces they expected local magistrates to understand Latin, and in the east assumed that they knew Greek like themselves. Inevitably, of course, the impact of Roman rule and influx of Roman settlers did influence many provincial communities and individuals, especially in the west, to adopt some Roman ways, as we shall see. Once established, Roman rule followed three essential principles: maintaining order, judging legal cases and levying taxes. Even in territories initially annexed for strategic reasons, the Romans also appreciated their value for revenue and resources (the standard attitude in all conquest societies). Once Sicily and the Spains had settled down, regular taxation was devised: in Sicily the relatively fair Syracusan system of tithes and half-tithes was applied islandwide probably from 210 on; in Spain a series of taxes which are

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less fully recorded but included a half-tithe on grain (a twentieth, vicesima) and duties on the return from the peninsula’s silver and other mines. Provincia Africa, annexed in 146, paid a poll tax (an impost on individuals) and a land tax (on produce), inherited from its previous Carthaginian rulers. Later acquisitions were taxed in similar ways, though close details are not always available – for example on how the 40 million sesterces (10 million denarii) a year that Caesar laid on his Gallic conquests were calculated, shared out locally, and collected for delivery to Rome. Even at Rome, public projects – temples, streets, bridges, sewers and the like – were built and public revenues collected by private individuals or consortia (societates). Consisting of equites Romani, Rome’s non-senatorial aristocrats, they operated under contracts let out by the censors after competitive bidding, for fixed periods such as five years. The successful bidders were called publicani because they handled state business matters (publica). Tax contractors paid into the aerarium an amount based on their assessment of the tax yield to come, and then they or their agents collected the actual taxes directly from the public: the standard expectation was that these payments would prove larger than the sum remitted to the aerarium. In other words the extra amount was legal profit, while the benefit to the aerarium was to receive large and regular sums to meet state expenses. Since virtually every state tax and building project was run through contracts, there were plenty of these to be competed for (as Polybius noted in the mid-second century).6 In the provinces, governors could let out taxation and other contracts (such as for mines) to affluent locals, but the profits to be made in some fields soon drew Romans and Italians too. The rich silver mines in southern Spain, for example, attracted numbers of these in the second century; Diodorus recorded their ruthless treatment of the slaves forced to work the mines. Polybius noted that in his day (around 150 bc) the mines near New Carthage alone brought a daily 25,000 drachmas, or denarii, to the Roman People. How much the mining contractors made in their turn we are not told. In provincia Asia, local tax contractors had only a few years of opportunity once Roman rule was confirmed, because in 123 Asia’s contracts for taxes payable to Rome – harbour dues and the

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rents from the extensive royal lands – were transferred to Roman publicani by the reformist tribune C. Gracchus. The yearly value of Asia’s revenues to the state may have been as high as 2,400 talents, or 14,400,000 denarii. The provincials paid out more, of course, as the publicani required profits. That a provincial tax should be used, even partly, for the province’s benefit seems not to have occurred to anyone. As noted earlier the royal treasury of Pergamum in 133, the new tax arrangements for provincia Asia ten years after, and in 57 the Cypriot kingdom’s treasury – to name just three examples – were treated as perquisites of the Roman People. Cicero in 66 might declare that, Asia apart, the provinces’ revenues barely paid the cost of defending them, but he was pleading a case (for appointing Pompey proconsul against Mithridates). In reality, by then few provinces needed much military defence, and the revenues from the Spains, Transalpina, Sicily and provincia Africa certainly exceeded any local military costs.7

◆ In collecting Rome’s revenues, governors and private contractors had few guidelines and not many more scruples. As early as 171 bc Spanish provincial delegates presented to the Senate a roster of serious complaints: illicit exactions of money by governors, military officers (praefecti) imposed on towns to gather funds, governors deciding – in advance of the harvest – the value of the 5 per cent grain tax and having private contractors collect it instead of using the local communities. The complainants found the Senate evasive over dealing with their case, nor did they win restitution of the funds improperly gouged; but at any rate a couple of past and guilty governors took voluntary (comfortable) exile in towns just outside Rome, the Senate did decree an end to the abuses, and as noted above the worst excesses of later governors in Spain were inflicted outside the two provinces. By 149, moreover, thanks to those excesses the Romans took their first legislative step towards disciplining all governors. Even so it was regularly taken for granted by administrators that they could practise self-enrichment from provincial assignments. M’. Aquillius, who as consul in 129 ended resistance to Roman rule

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in the new provincia Asia, amassed riches from it and was acquitted when prosecuted on his return. When young C. Gracchus returned from a year as quaestor in Sardinia to seek election as a tribune for 123, he emphasized his own scrupulousness: he had come back, he told voters, with an empty moneybelt whereas others brought back wine-jars filled with silver – nor had he had truck with comely boys or whores. No doubt there were other equally honest officials, but unedifying scandals kept cropping up. Q. Servilius Caepio, when consul in 106, stripped rebellious Tolosa in Transalpine Gaul of its stupendously huge temple treasures (over 200,000 Roman pounds’ weight of gold and silver), only for these mysteriously to disappear on their way to Rome. Facing trial for theft and treason, he fled into exile abroad in 103. Around 82 an insufferably corrupt governor of provincia Africa, Fabius Hadrianus, so incensed even the Romans residing at Utica, then the provincial capital, that they set fire to his house with him inside. About the same time C. Verres, a nondescript minor aristocrat but with powerful connections, used his position as deputy (legatus) to a corrupt governor of Cilicia to shame and scandalize eminent provincials in several eastern provinces, thieving artworks and molesting men’s daughters. Cicero’s Epicurean target L. Piso – grandson of the Piso who had carried the first extortion law a century before – invested his more than handsome expenses grant of 18 million sesterces at Rome and recouped his costs in his province of Macedonia (or, according to Cicero, shamelessly plundered Macedonia). Cicero himself, though politically no friend of Julius Caesar, could nevertheless look forward to sharing in the proceeds of Caesar’s invasion of Britain in the year 54 – to wit, a batch of newly enslaved Britons promised by his brother Quintus, one of Caesar’s legati (though there is no word of him ever receiving them). He was quite disillusioned to learn afterwards that the expeditions yielded not a shred of booty. How far a scruple-free governor and his satellites could go was illustrated most vividly of all when for three years, 73 to 71 inclusive, Verres misruled Sicily. Cicero’s searing denunciation, the Verrines (published after Verres’ abortive trial in 70), immortalizes the praetor’s shameless thefts, embezzlements, bribe-takings,

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rigged trials and judicial murders even of Romans who vexed him. Not even a Senate decree of 72 bc, aimed at checking his judicial excesses, had the slightest effect. Prosecuted on behalf of the angry Sicilians by Cicero in 70, Verres nonetheless had the patronage of the powerful Metelli family and was defended by another leading orator (and friend of Cicero), Q. Hortensius, who became consul the following year. Overwhelming as the evidence against him was, the imperturbable former praetor simply took himself and his plunder into leisured exile at Massilia.8 These scandals showed that the processes for curbing maladministration did not always work. In having the taxes of provincia Asia auctioned at Rome, C. Gracchus aimed to secure the fullest returns for the aerarium and, by extension, to apply these to his varied and expensive projects for improving Roman citizens’ job opportunities and their supply of affordable grain. Provincial governors letting out contracts were open to local bribery and favouritism – flaws already prompting concern at Rome, especially among would-be reformers like Gracchus – whereas at Rome the process was (ideally) under the eye of the Senate and People. The reverse of this coin was that the wealthy societates of Roman publicani could put pressure on Senate and magistrates in the City and, thanks to their wealth and connections, on Asia’s governors too if they felt their own interests threatened or profits impeded. It was all the more possible because by Cicero’s day, at least, shares (partes) in the societates were regularly bought by senators too. C. Gracchus’ brainwave stored up trouble for the future. Gracchus’ famous reform of how charges of provincial extortion were to be tried excluded senators from the juries involved, replacing them with panels of equites Romani (seen as more impartial). Yet in a sharp historical irony, his transfer of Asia’s tax collection to consortia of equites led to abuses benevolently overlooked – or worse, connived at – by governors. Their and their agents’ predatory harshness became an open scandal. It was they who raided the adjoining kingdom of Bithynia to enslave inhabitants, at least until an embarrassed Senate decreed in 104 that enslaved citizens from all allied states should be released (so Bithynia was not the sole sufferer, nor the publicani in Asia the sole offenders). Within

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provincia Asia they had an almost free hand for years, a situation finally tackled by a principled consul of 95, Q. Mucius Scaevola, who governed the province in the following year. Aided by his respected legatus P. Rutilius Rufus, also a former consul, he imposed a set of administrative reforms stringent enough to infuriate both current and prospective publicani. Their revenge was taken out on Rutilius (Scaevola was too eminent): in a sensational case in 92 the extortion court, empanelled as usual from equites, convicted him of taking bribes from the provincials. Rutilius went into exile – in provincia Asia.9 How loathed the Roman administration had become was shown only four years later in the ‘Asiatic Vespers’ massacre: tens of thousands of Romans and Italians – not only tax-collectors, and not only males – were slaughtered by provincials at the behest of Mithridates of Pontus (Rutilius escaped). A few communities did disobey the order: the island states of Chios and Rhodes, for instance, and the inland city of Aphrodisias. The Roman proconsul Sulla punished the rest savagely after defeating the king. Mithridates’ supporters were executed, still-recalcitrant cities sacked, and the war-ravaged province hit with a fine of 20,000 talents (120 million denarii) – far more than it could pay. Inevitably it fell into the clutches of Roman financiers (equites again). Its resulting debts skyrocketed 600 per cent, until a decade and a half later the then proconsul Lucullus scaled them down to manageable levels. This sensible policy rebuilt the province’s stability and some prosperity, but predictably earned him the financiers’ bitter hatred which, in 66 bc, contributed to his being replaced in the eastern command by Pompey the Great. The lesson of the Asiatic Vespers did not last either: 20 years later the greedy high-handedness of Roman tax-collectors imposed on (among others) the coastal Black Sea city of Heracleia (Ereğli) in Bithynia led its exasperated citizens to murder them all.10 The financial societates whose business, in tax contracts and private loans, now ranged across the Mediterranean – not only in Roman provinces – did not employ funds invested solely by equites. Although senators were legally barred from commerce and business, they had little trouble using equites friends and agents as middlemen

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for their affairs and, as mentioned above, often bought themselves shares in financial consortia. Senators and equites were often closely linked, socially and financially, like Cicero and his lifelong friend, the rich T. Pomponius Atticus, and Cicero’s surviving letters include a portfolio politely recommending other equites friends to governors of provinces where equites Romani were pursuing business. Senators’ investments in contracts and loans could, in turn, cause problems for even a well-meaning governor. The principled Cicero experienced this when he became the (very unwilling) proconsul of Cilicia and Cyprus in 51–50. A financier named M. Scaptius had gone to inhuman lengths to force repayment of loans in Cyprus: in the city of Salamis he had even locked up the local councillors in their council house until five starved to death. When Cicero moved to rein him in, he found that Scaptius not only wanted 48 per cent compound interest paid (the legal rate was 12) but was in fact merely an agent of the eminent senator M. Junius Brutus – the later much-admired slayer of Julius Caesar. Embarrassingly Brutus was firmly backing the extortions, and Cicero’s best friend Atticus too. Scaptius was at the same time pursuing Deiotarus, king of Galatia in Asia Minor, over debts to Brutus. Brutus being another personal friend, Cicero left the disputes to be decided by the next governor (who turned out likewise to be a friend of Brutus).11

◆ Yet the other side of the coin is also important. Roman authorities and voters did acknowledge the principle of moral responsibility to subject peoples and satellite states. C. Lucretius, who as praetor in 171 not only victimized captured cities in central Greece during the Third Macedonian War, but then let his forces run viciously riot in the allied city of Chalcis in Euboea, was prosecuted by tribunes on his return in 170 and heavily fined (1 million asses or 100,000 denarii – a large sum then). As mentioned above, in 171 too the Senate, under some pressure, decreed curbs on the tax-gathering excesses of officials in Spain, and in 149 L. Piso’s already mentioned tribunician law was a response to Sulpicius Galba’s genocidal crimes against the Lusitanians and to the aged Cato’s bitter attacks on Galba.

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These measures, it must be noted, were taken by plebeian tribunes, with the Senate as a body rather less eager to discipline one of their fellows. Under Piso’s law a former governor charged with extorting money would be tried by a jury of senators; it sometimes meant that guilty defendants still got off, such as Aquillius after his governorship of provincia Asia, and it was the Aquillius case that finally prompted the next major move against provincial abuses: the ‘recovery law’ (lex de rebus repetundis) of 123, devised by another tribune, the reformer C. Gracchus – so called because its crucial thrust was to recover and restore extorted funds. Many of its detailed provisions survive in a damaged bronze inscription: extortion became a criminal offence, the juries were to be drawn from lists of available equites Romani (Piso’s juries had been recruited from senators), charges could be laid either by Romans or by foreigners representing the aggrieved provincials, and careful regulations were stated for how cases were to be brought, heard and decided, with a guilty verdict imposing a penalty of double the extorted amount. The juries were to be very large, 450 strong, with a simple majority deciding the verdict.12 There were still inadequacies, as just mentioned. Only senators and their close relatives were liable for prosecution, even though equites were already playing a role in state contracts – a role that would grow thanks to Gracchus’ changes to the tax regime for Asia. Laying charges of misrule against governors had to be done by individuals, whether citizens or foreigners, since Rome had no state prosecutors: thus there was often a chance that accusers might be intimidated or bought off if the former governor was well connected or rich, or both. Occasionally it went the other way, as in 92 when Rutilius Rufus became the victim of tax financier outrage over how he and Scaevola had curbed their exploitation of Asia. In 70, to launch his prosecution of Verres on behalf of the Sicilians, Cicero first had to convince the presiding praetor against accepting a rival would-be prosecutor – Verres’ own former quaestor, Caecilius – whose plain purpose was to take on the case to lose it. And even if the defendant was convicted, or abandoned his defence like Verres, he had the option of leaving Rome for exile in some comfortable provincial city with his fortune intact.

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The lex de rebus repetundis nonetheless marked a critical step in the Romans’ attitudes to imperialism and empire, not only reinforcing the principle of a duty of care to their subjects, but also laying down a procedural map for remedying abuses. Measures to curb maladministration were taken further in later decades. For instance, the funds to be repaid after a guilty verdict were raised from double to two-and-a-half times the extorted amount, capital punishment (in practice, exile) befell serious offenders, and third parties benefiting from extorted moneys could be prosecuted too, as could jurors who accepted bribes in a case. Detailed rules were enacted – particularly in the lengthy and elaborate lex de rebus repetundis carried by Julius Caesar as consul in 59 – to limit the goods and services that governors could requisition in, and en route to, their provinces, to require them to supply documented records of expenses when their governorship ended, and to ban a governor from leaving his province or waging war outside it unless authorized by Rome. Often as these and other provisions were flouted – impressively by Caesar himself – they remained in force, with further amendments or additions, for centuries to come. The conduct of C. Gracchus, Scaevola and Rutilius, Lucullus and (up to a point at least) Cicero shows that there were Roman officials who practised greater integrity. An earlier example was Ti. Gracchus, the reforming praetor in Nearer Spain in 179 (and C. Gracchus’ father), whose honoured memory among Spaniards saved the army that capitulated near Numantia 40 years later. His contemporary, Cato the Censor, was notoriously scrupulous with public money, as was the Censor’s grandson M. Cato the Younger in Cicero’s and Caesar’s day. A less famous example of public service is the quaestor M. Annius, sent to Macedonia in 120–119 and thanked, as a surviving inscription shows, by the city of Lete near Thessalonica for his energetic protection – told in detail – of the province against invading barbarians after the governor was killed in battle. Even the ineffable Verres in Sicily had to contend with, and at times circumvent, two upright legati, Cervius and Tadius: he cut them out of his otherwise subservient advisory council.13

◆

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The provinces had to contend not only with governors of one character or another but also with growing numbers of arrivals from Italy. In the second century and after, Roman and Italian merchants (negotiatores) fanned out over the Mediterranean, not only taking up contracts for mines and taxes but investing in agriculture and other food products such as grain, oil, wine and the hugely popular pickled fish sauce garum. By 100 bc they dominated maritime trade in the Aegean especially, as a wealth of inscriptions from the commercial hub on the isle of Delos illustrates. They were busy in countries outside the empire too, for instance at Carthage before 149 and at Numidia’s capital Cirta by 112 (to be massacred wholesale by Jugurtha); while, as noted above, the Senate in 104 learned of Bithynians being kidnapped into slavery by negotiatores.14 Until the 80s Italians abroad included Latins and socii Italici as well as Romans, distinctions that ended when civitas Romana was conceded to all Italy. In Cisalpine Gaul the Latin and Roman colonies founded between 218 and 191, the land allotments of 173 and further immigration made the region by Cicero’s day a virtual extension of Italy – at the expense of the earlier inhabitants – so that it was natural for Latin status and then Roman citizenship to be given to residents, followed in 42 by the province being incorporated into Italy. The Spains received Italian settlers early with Scipio’s foundation of Italica in 206; with Roman armies and traders coming and going during the following centuries, other comers too preferred to stay on – leading to the part-Roman petitioners placed at Carteia in 171, Corduba being founded around 151 with Roman and native settlers, and the 3,000 Romans (so Strabo termed them) from mainland Spain colonizing Mallorca’s Palma and Pollentia in 123. The 70s foundations Pompaelo and Metellinum were probably of mixed Roman and Spanish populations again. Q. Varius, the controversial tribune in 90 and the first provincial Roman known in a City magistracy, hailed from Sucro near Valentia: some people insultingly nicknamed him ‘Hybrida’. The petitioners of 171 were living evidence that unions (legal or not) between male Roman and Italian settlers and Spanish women were common less than half a century after the first Roman forces arrived in 218. Before too long, some unions could be legal: Varius

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was not a bastard (he would not be a citizen if so) and Romans could marry women from provincial communities with conubium, the right of intermarriage. As a Latin colony Carteia held conubium; whether Sucro did is not known. Spanish Romans acquired the description Hispanienses – native Spaniards were Hispani – and would have descendants with momentous roles in history (such as the emperor Trajan). Unions between peninsular migrants to Cisalpine Gaul and local people are not well documented; but Polybius’ claim, that by his day (around 150) all the province’s native dwellers had been driven back to the edges of the Alps, cannot be taken literally. To an even broader extent than in Spain, a blend of populations developed in Cisalpina which would have noteworthy impact on Roman culture and history. The same process occurred in Transalpine Gaul where, within a few decades after its conquest, Romans and Italians became landowners, traders and moneylenders on a large scale (so large, Cicero claimed in 69, that not a coin changed hands without involving a Roman banker). Migration to provinces had virtually no curbs, although obviously a migrant needed sufficient personal resources to travel and settle. Sometimes too emigration was prompted by the Roman state, for instance Cisalpina’s colonies and land grants early in the second century, then later C. Gracchus’ planned refounding of Carthage as a Roman colony to be named Junonia – in the end, it was not built but the colonists chosen received land grants in provincia Africa – and, around 118, the decision to found Narbo Martius in western Transalpina to be, in Cicero’s words, ‘a watchtower and bulwark of our imperium’. As this comment shows, such creations included security aims; but several (the Cisalpine land grants and those around Carthage, for instance, and projects by Caesar and Augustus a century later) aimed too at opening opportunities for citizens in new lands.15 The size of a colony varied with locale and needs. In Italy, Latin colonies had received 2,000–4,000 settlers with their families, Roman citizen colonies far fewer. In Cisalpine Gaul, Placentia and Cremona each had 6,000 settler families in 218 because they lay in newly conquered territory (even so they had to be replenished after

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the Hannibalic war), Mutina and Parma 2,000 and Bononia 3,000 in 191. Carteia in Further Spain 20 years later became a Latin colony for the 4,000 Roman-Spanish petitioners plus its existing dwellers, to a total of 6,000 or more. C. Gracchus’ bold scheme for Junonia envisaged the same again, but for Romans only. Colonists always received grants of land varying in size, according to the site and the status of recipients. Evidence is limited, but remarkable variations occurred in Cisalpine Gaul if Livy is accurate: from a skimpy 5 iugera, 1.25 hectares, per colonist at Mutina to 50 iugera at Aquileia for an ordinary settler, 100 for each former centurion, and 140 apiece for men ranking as equites. The colonists from C. Gracchus’ Junonia project received up to 200 iugera each (as the text of a surviving land law reveals), which fits the claim by his biographer Plutarch that he was aiming for ‘the most respectable’ settlers.16 Latin and Roman colonies were self-governing entities, as were provincial communities. As a result they were attractive models for provincials to copy: each began with settlers from Italy, was Latinspeaking, had a senate (called an ordo) and limited-term magistrates elected by the colony’s citizens, used Roman legal practices, and automatically enjoyed favour from the governor and his agents. Another strong impact on provincials was made by Romans residing among them as tax contractors, merchants and landowners: these might form conventus civium Romanorum, associations of Roman citizens, who often elected their own unofficial magistrates and exercised a dominant influence in a provincial town even if they numbered only some dozens or a few hundred. Sicily possessed a range of Roman estate owners by the time of the reprehensible Verres, as Cicero’s prosecution case in 70 made clear, and they were there as early as the 130s. Perhaps one of them even then was the respected eques Romanus Q. Lollius who, when nearly 90, would be abused by a vicious henchman of Verres.17 Lands outside direct Roman rule but within her hegemonial reach – Greece and the Aegean, Asia Minor, Egypt and North Africa – also received large numbers of merchants, moneylenders, tax-collectors and land investors from Italy as long-term or permanent residents. In and around provincia Asia in the same decade, Mithridates’ supporters found 80,000 or more Romans and Italians to massacre.

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In the civil war 40s the Romans of southern Spain were wealthy enough to suffer heavy exactions of funds and supplies imposed by Caesar’s opponents in 49; four years later one of the legions which these led against him consisted of Roman settlers. Cicero’s friend C. Rabirius Postumus could even become finance minister of Egypt – if briefly – because of his business importance (Chapter 4). In the second and first centuries, on Aegean islands such as Delos and Cos, residents from Italy made religious dedications and paid honours to Roman leaders as organized bodies on an equal footing with the Greeks there.18 Roman businessmen’s conventus in client states and provinces could be powerful bodies. At Cirta in Numidia in 112 bc the businessmen, Roman and Italian, led the defence against its king’s rival Jugurtha (and paid for it with their lives when the city fell). At Utica in provincia Africa it was the conventus that lynched the corrupt governor Hadrianus in 82. In Sicily, Cicero complained later, Verres ignored its many distinguished conventus and chose cronies as his agents – or else selected only the most unsavoury Romans from the conventus. During Caesar’s civil wars, the conventus at Corduba and at Illyria’s Lissus took control of those cities for him in 49, while three years later Utica’s powerful conventus, nicknamed ‘the Three Hundred’, sided with the propraetor Cato the Younger, Caesar’s bitter enemy. They, and conventus at some other towns in the province such as Hadrumetum, literally paid for this after Caesar’s victory – Caesar hit the Three Hundred alone with a heavy fine of 50 million denarii. On the Aegean island of Cos, by contrast, ‘the Roman citizens doing business’ (its conventus civium Romanorum, in other words) were happy to thank him early in 44 for some act of kindness, their inscription hailing him not only as ruler but also as divine – anticipating his formal deification by two years. As grants of citizenship spread through the provinces, conventus of resident Romans merged with the new Roman locals. In Augustus’ time, south-western Spain’s wealthy island city of Gades had as many equites Romani – 500 – as Cisalpine Gaul’s Patavium (birthplace of the historian Livy); the people of Gades together with several more Spanish communities, like all of Cisalpine Gaul, had by then become Roman. Intermarriage had long created growing numbers, too, of

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Roman-descended provincials (Varius the inquisitorial tribune of 90 bc, for example): future co-rulers of the empire.19

◆ The presence of ever more numerous Roman settlers naturally influenced provinces. Especially in the west, locals started to acquire Latin. Latin literature had found non-Roman contributors as early as the third-century poet Livius Andronicus, a Greek immigrant from Tarentum in south Italy, and the multitalented Q. Ennius from Calabrian Rudiae, in the heel of Italy. The provinces soon added more, notably Ennius’ contemporary Caecilius Statius, a playwright from Cisalpine Gaul, and the playwright Terence (P. Terentius Afer), supposedly a freed slave from Carthage, who died still young in 158. Cisalpina would follow up with Cicero’s contemporaries Catullus, from Verona, and the scholarly Cornelius Nepos, both of at least partly Gallic ancestry. The philosopher-poet Lucretius, in one theory, was another Cisalpine. It is no great surprise to find Corduba in Spain graced with a coterie of floridly enthusiastic Latin poets in the 70s (condescendingly mentioned by Cicero). Even earlier, around 100 bc, some Spaniards were interested enough in Greek rhetoric and philology to study under a visiting Bithynian scholar, Asclepiades.20 From early on, Roman officials expected provincials, or at any rate their leaders, to know Latin. The Latin colony at Carteia must have used the language, officially at least, from its beginning. Still earlier, in January 190 or 189, L. Aemilius Paullus (the later conqueror of Macedon) as praetor of Further Spain issued an edict, still surviving on a bronze tablet – the oldest Latin document from Spain – which declared free a slave or serf community previously ruled by nearby Hasta. Another praetor’s bronze decree in the province, issued in 104, allowed a surrendering rebel community (name illegible) near modern Alcántara to keep its lands and laws under strict conditions. Copies of such decrees were no doubt kept by the recipients as proof of their new situation. Over in Cisalpina in 117, two commissioners (brothers named Minucius) issued a long and careful adjudication which also survives, applying Roman legal principles to a land dispute between Genua (Genoa) on the coast and its rural neighbours the Langenses Viturii.

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In Spain, communities too were now adopting various Roman ways. An inscription from Italy shows a group of Spanish cavalrymen from Ilerda in Nearer Spain (today’s Lleida/Lérida) bearing Roman-derived names, such as Cn. Cornelius and P. Fabius, even before they became Roman citizens in 89 as reward for valour in a ‘Salluitan squadron’. The naming practice must have started 20 to 30 years before: their fathers, also named, bore Celtiberian names as did the Ilerdans’ fellow riders who became Romans too. Another inscription, discovered in Spain, reveals Contrebia Belaisca (a small town just south of the middle Ebro) arbitrating over water rights disputed between three neighbouring rural communities, with the Roman governor approving the judgement. Dating itself by the Roman calendar to 15 May 87 bc, not only is the arbitration in Latin with proper Roman legal phrasing, but it shows that Contrebia now had a senate (so termed) and two chief magistrates called praetors, all while they and their lesser colleagues bore Celtiberian personal names.21 Granting Roman citizenship to provincials had started in the late third century. A highly esteemed Greek doctor, Archagathus, was made a citizen in 219, and a City surgery bought for him too. Two renegade officers from Carthaginian armies in Sicily, Moericus and Mottones, followed a few years later, rewarded for their services in the war with Hannibal. Mottones became M. Valerius Mottones (his sponsor was the proconsul M. Valerius Laevinus) and prospered: he became an honorary representative of Rome at Delphi during 190–189 along with his four sons Publius, Gaius, Marcus and Quintus, all listed as Romans. As his example shows, recipients would adopt their sponsor’s first and family names but, like former slaves, could keep their own as a cognomen. Their descendants of course were citizens too. Grants of citizenship still remained rare because the Romans were unwilling to offer it even to their fellow Italians. In the provinces the first block conferral of higher, though not Roman, legal status was the Latin right for Carteia and the Roman-Spanish petitioners in 171. Valentia on Spain’s east coast, founded in 138 as an ordinary provincial city, nonetheless around 50 was calling itself a colonia – a surprise, since the city had sided with Sertorius’ rebel movement in

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the 70s, but possibly the victorious proconsuls Pompey and Metellus refilled it with loyalists or discharged veterans and obtained for it ius Latii or (less likely) the status of a Roman colony. With all Italy given citizenship by 81, and at the same time Latin right extended en bloc to all of Cisalpine Gaul south of the River Po, both statuses were now more widely granted in the provinces too. Pompey and Metellus were certainly empowered to grant civitas Romana to particular Spaniards for loyal service: the best-known beneficiary being the very rich man of Gades who, as L. Cornelius Balbus, became (ironically enough) a confidant of Pompey’s foe Caesar and, after Caesar’s assassination in 44, one of the key backers of his ambitious heir Octavian. Four years later he became Rome’s first provincial-born consul.22 By then the provinces were playing major roles in Rome’s politics as well as culture. They became involved in the repeated civil wars from 91 on, and not just passively. They supplied military forces, such as the Salluitan squadron in Italy and a contingent of Gallic cavalry accompanying the proconsul Crassus’ disastrous Parthian invasion in 53. Caesar’s Fifth Legion, nicknamed Alaudae, ‘the Larks’ (so called from their helmets’ bird feathers), was recruited from Gauls, while 10,000 Spanish and Gallic cavalrymen shared in Mark Antony’s equally disastrous attack on Parthia in 36. Provincial Romans, both of migrant and of native ancestry, became senators and office-holders: under Caesar’s rule Romans in the City joked about him promoting captured Gauls from his triumphal parade into the Senate house, a sour exaggeration of his encouragement of men from Transalpina and the Spains to enter the corridors of power. The poet C. Cornelius Gallus, an eques Romanus – military protégé of Caesar, Virgil’s close friend and the first governor of annexed Egypt from 30 to 27 – was from Caesar’s town-foundation Forum Julii (Fréjus) on Transalpina’s coast. Few saw it at the time, but the integration of Rome and her provinces had, however slowly and fitfully, made a start.

CHAPTER 4

The Political Impoverishment of the Imperial Republic

D

uring the second century bc some Romans began to worry about what the republic’s massive extension of power across the Mediterranean was doing to their society. The evergrowing interest in Greek culture was one target. Cato the Censor, himself knowledgeable in Greek literature and history, complained about the influx of Greek ideas and practices from philosophical theories to doctors (whom he forbade his son to consult), and in a fit of frustration reviled Greeks as ‘a race worthless and unruly’. In 186 bc senatorial unease at the popular and charismatic, but allegedly obscene, cult of Dionysus-Bacchus (another eastern though not specifically Greek import), led to a decree severely regulating – but not proscribing – it, with a ban on Romans becoming Bacchic priests; this senatus consultum is the earliest that survives. The diplomatic démarche that in 172 reassured Perseus of Macedon, lyingly, that Rome was not intending war was denounced by some senators as an un-Roman piece of ‘new and over-clever wisdom’ – a snipe at the new popularity of philosophy. Romans met a notorious example of Greek subtleties in 155 when the eminent sceptic Carneades, on a diplomatic mission to Rome, gave a sensational pair of lectures on ‘justice’: on the first day defending the concept with well-established arguments; on the next, and just as cogently, demonstrating that it existed only in the 63

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minds of people keen to justify their self-righteousness. Carneades so affronted his self-righteously prickly listeners that at Cato’s behest the Senate banished philosophers from Italy. A few years later Cato’s strident demand that ‘Carthage ought not to exist’ was countered by the equally eminent Scipio Nasica, who held that Rome must always allow a rival power to exist to deter the res publica from arrogance and self-indulgence. It was the same Nasica who in 154 pushed the Senate to have Rome’s first stone-built theatre demolished – on the grounds that encouraging Romans to sit at shows sapped their moral fibre.1 Early Romans (so their descendants liked to imagine) had prided themselves on their abstemious principles: for instance Cornelius Rufinus, ancestor of the dictator Sulla, was supposedly expelled from the Senate in 275 for owning 10 Roman pounds’ weight of silverware. This genteel frugality was lovingly overstated by later moralists. When in 211 a special levy was placed on Romans of means for financing naval operations, its highest category comprised citizens with an economic worth of over 1 million bronze asses – equivalent to 100,000 denarii in the new silver coinage. Such a capital base would have yielded perhaps 5,000 denarii a year on rough estimate, over 40 times a legionary soldier’s 120 denarii. The fine imposed on the vicious propraetor Lucretius in 170 (a million asses) was thus a meaningful one. But as wealth flowed into the res publica in the shape of war booty, money from indemnities and provincial taxes, the returns from trade and investments, and slaves, the incomes and conspicuous consumption by the social elite grew fast.2 Conspicuous consumption troubled moralizing Romans. They reacted by enacting intermittent laws, beginning in 215 with restrictions on women owning gold and luxury goods. Though this was repealed in 185 – against Cato the Censor’s urging – a rather less ambitious law of 182 limited the number of dinner guests. Then the lex Fannia, carried by a consul of 161, regulated how much one could spend on a banquet and was extended in 143 by a tribune’s lex Didia. Legislative attacks on luxurious living widened later still, most notably those by the dictators Sulla and Caesar. The fact that more and more such laws were enacted – not to mention the plentiful archaeological and literary evidence for luxury goods – shows that

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they were regularly flouted. Indeed few prosecutions are heard of unless politically motivated. Laws against luxury, against usury and against senators involving themselves in commerce (this ban went back to 218: one of various ‘ancient and dead laws’ as some in Cicero’s day called them) were helpless before the opportunities that world power offered Rome’s elite. Interest in moral philosophy did not guarantee actual morality either. The famous M. Brutus’ love of it did not interfere with his extortionate provincial moneylending, nor Cato the Younger’s with ruthlessly fulfilling his mission in 57 to confiscate the royal treasure of Cyprus for Romans’ benefit, and a few years later Cicero relished contrasting his nobilis critic Piso’s passion for Epicureanism with Piso’s equal (or greater) passions for luxury and money.3 From the early second century on, the Roman elite enjoyed not only growing wealth thanks to Rome’s expanding power but also status and honours abroad. The Hellenistic east, accustomed to kings’ and dynasts’ fondness for praise, heaped similar encomia on victorious proconsuls such as Flamininus, Scipio Aemilianus, Sulla and Pompey – statues, gushing decrees, festivals (Titeia for Flamininus, for example), even honours as quasi-gods. When highranking Romans came over, such as an embassy including Scipio Aemilianus in 140–139 to inspect affairs from the Aegean to Egypt, the envoys were lavishly received everywhere; the fortunes of some states, and even some thrones, depended on it. Even a Roman of less lofty dignitas and auctoritas expected consideration. Some like Verres shamelessly abused it, but a more endearing case was L. Memmius, a senator whose tourist visit to Egypt in spring 112 drew solicitous attention from royal officials. A surviving papyrus from Alexandria to officials in the Fayum district, near the pyramids, instructed them to receive Memmius ‘with special magnificence’ (including gifts and accommodation), even down to providing him with titbits for feeding the sacred crocodiles. In Spain, as mentioned earlier, keen local poets at Corduba in the 70s were showering exuberant praise on their proconsul. By then, mere kings were far from being equals of Rome’s principes viri.

◆

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Landed property remained the bedrock of economic and social life: the most opulent aristocrats were opulent landowners, even if they were also bankers or publicani. Cato’s manual On Agriculture, written in old age for prosperous farmers such as his son, envisaged medium-sized estates of 100–240 iugera (25–60 hectares), largely worked by slaves, but took for granted that the reader would own several. Such properties figure significantly in archaeological surveys from the second century bc on, rather than vast estates called latifundia. Expensive furniture and housewares were other indulgences: as early as the 120s Fabius Allobrogicus, one of the conquerors of Transalpine Gaul, owned 1,000 Roman pounds’ weight of silver (so wrote Pliny the Elder) – the first Roman to achieve that milestone. Very many senators and equites Romani by 100 bc owned country houses (villae) and estates (praedia) – farms, sheep and cattle ranches, vineyards, orchards, fisheries – across Italy and overseas. By then 100,000 denarii (400,000 sesterces) was the minimum economic worth expected of an eques: this, on approximate estimate, would provide an annual income of 5,000–6,000 denarii or 20,000– 24,000 sesterces. In sharp contrast, Cicero in a philosophic essay judged a yearly income of 600,000 sesterces luxurious and – in his ex-consul’s view – one of 100,000 ‘slight’. He envisaged the 600,000sesterces man owning country mansions, marble floors, statuary, paintings, and costly garments and furnishings. As mentioned earlier, a legionary soldier’s yearly pay was just 120 denarii (Caesar doubled it in 46 bc). Cicero’s theoretical rich man could pay 1,250 legionaries, almost a small army. The multimillionaire M. Crassus, Pompey’s and Caesar’s wary political ally in the 50s, liked to boast that you could not be rich unless you could afford exactly that. Not all senators or equites had such incomes, but in his day virtually all were much richer than even their recent ancestors. Some were seriously rich indeed. Cicero’s friend the apolitical eques Atticus was worth 12 million sesterces, or 3 million denarii, when he died in 32 bc; along with investments and banking, he owned properties in and around Rome, and in Epirus across the Adriatic. Cicero himself was probably wealthier. Like his friend, he owned properties at Rome (including slum dwellings), in Italy and abroad;

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he also had income from fees as an advocate (legally classed as gifts from clients) and, like Atticus again, bequests from time to time. As governor of Cilicia in 51–50 he saved 550,000 denarii from his official allowance, and when his son Marcus was studying at Athens in 44 he gave him 19,000 denarii to pay his way. One of their richest contemporaries, mentioned above, was the remarkably busy eques C. Rabirius Postumus: not merely a partner in various tax collection consortia, he personally owned a cargo fleet for his import–export business, lent money widely especially in the eastern provinces, acted as a top financial agent abroad for Pompey the Great, and through this link even became – briefly and unpopularly in 55–54 – Egypt’s minister of finance.4 Even these fortunes were nothing compared with the grandest few of Cicero’s contemporaries. Crassus’ wealth was over 8,000 talents (48 million denarii) in 55 bc when, as consul, he dedicated a tenth of it to Hercules and made lavish donations to the residents of Rome, still leaving him (he reckoned) with 7,100. His rival Pompey’s fortune, despite Caesar confiscating much of it later, was still large enough for Pompey’s surviving son to receive some 70 million sesterces ten years later, perhaps one-third of the original. Much of this immense wealth came from eastern conquests and much was reinvested there, including as loans. Cicero in Cilicia found that Deiotarus, king of Galatia (who also owed money to M. Brutus), was being harried by Pompey’s agents for a debt repayment – and the 33 talents, or 198,000 denarii, that the hapless king could scrape together per month did not cover even the interest. The greatest plutocrat of all, by 50 bc, was the conqueror of Gaul, whose remorseless ten years of plundering meant he could lavish gifts and loans to friends and potential supporters. The tribune Curio was won over for 10 (or maybe 50) million sesterces; one consul of 50 bc, L. Aemilius Paullus, received 36 million – for what proved ineffective support. Even after three years of expensive civil war, Caesar at his Gallic triumph in 46 boasted of booty amounting to 65,000 talents (1,560 million sesterces), gold crowns weighing over 20,000 Roman pounds in all, and a million enemies enslaved. His share of their sale money is not recorded. In his will he bequeathed 300 sesterces to each (male) citizen, and there were at least 900,000

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of these; or at the very least his gift went to the 150,000 actually in Rome who were eligible for his grain handouts. Yet he also left a colossal fortune to his chosen heir Octavian, enabling that young man’s skyrocketing ascent to political power in 44–43.5

◆ The proceeds of empire also trickled down to ordinary Romans – at any rate, those living in or near the City and those in Rome’s armies. It was standard practice that part of the plunder from wars should fund public festivals and entertainments, and part be paid as bonuses, donativa, to the officers and soldiers who had fought. Scipio Africanus at his triumph in 201 gave 40 denarii to each legionary (and probably more to centurions and cavalrymen, as was normal), his brother L. Scipio 25 per man at his in 189, after the defeat of Antiochus III – and in 167 the conqueror of Macedon, Aemilius Paullus, had to give 100 to each legionary (with 200 per centurion and 300 per cavalryman) to pacify them after a first, stingy offer was met with furious protests. The great conquests of the next century lifted donativa far higher. Pompey’s glittering triumph in 61 for his eastern wars netted his legionaries no less than 1,500 denarii each, equivalent to more than 12 years’ basic pay. Far from outdone, Caesar in his even more splendid three-day triumph 15 years later lavished 5,000 on each man. The civil wars from 49 to 29 brought most soldiers donativa rather less exalted but more frequent, to keep them loyal – generally 500 to 1,000 denarii each time. Further proceeds from plunder might go into building commemorative temples, public works or monuments, meaning in turn jobs for labourers and artisans. When as censor C. Flaminius in 221–220 built a stadium near the Tiber, the Circus Flaminius, and the great highway to the north, the Via Flaminia, at least some of the funds must have been booty from his recent Cisalpine victories. After the annexation of Macedonia in 146 its conqueror Metellus Macedonicus had a colonnade built embracing Rome’s first marble temple, dedicated to Jupiter Stator. Even before he had finished subduing Gaul, Julius Caesar used some of his enormous Gallic plunder to fund – for example – a new forum, the Forum Iulium, at the foot of the Capitoline hill; and some years later he added to it a

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temple for Venus Genetrix, his divine ancestress. In 51 he had also bankrolled 9 million denarii for his political ally Aemilius Paullus’ lavish basilica alongside the old Forum (its foundations still to be seen there). Naturally then, for Romans the revenues from provinces were their property too, to be used for their benefit. Polybius mentions that in his time (around 150 when he visited Spain) the silver mines outside New Carthage brought in 25,000 denarii a day, meaning 9,125,000 a year ‘to the Roman people’; whether any Spanish mining proceeds at all stayed with the Spanish peoples is not recorded. As soon as the reformer-tribune Ti. Gracchus in 133 learned that Attalus III’s Pergamum had been bequeathed to Rome, he carried the law mentioned earlier, earmarking Attalus’ treasure for his land grants scheme in Italy. Ten years on, his brother Gaius was equally inspired by the prospect of exploiting provincia Asia’s riches for his own much more expansive projects – none of them, of course, meant for provincial taxpayers either. Just so again, the confiscation of Cyprus’ royal treasure in 57 (enacted by the tribune P. Clodius) paid for free grain handouts to City residents, replacing a subsidized cheap price originally established by C. Gracchus. Ordinary public works in Italy, too, will have been financed wholly or in part by provincial revenues. The great Aqua Marcia aqueduct, built in 144–140 by a praetor Marcius Rex, 91 kilometres long (the first aqueduct in a century and a half), brought to Rome 187,000 cubic metres a day of exceptionally pure water, enlarging the City’s total inflow by 42 per cent, and it cost 180 million sesterces (45 million denarii), no doubt paid from Carthaginian and Corinthian booty.6

◆ Rome’s inflow of wealth from the Second Punic War onwards inevitably provoked envy, and later on complaint, from her fellow Italians. Their territories had taken the brunt of the devastations during Hannibal’s invasion, their troops were generally more numerous than Rome’s in the armies that ranged victoriously across the Mediterranean after 201; yet increasingly their self-governing status was infringed or ignored by Rome’s magistrates and Senate – as an early example, the decree curbing the Bacchus cult in 186 was

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imposed directly on all Italy – while booty and revenues were more or less monopolized by Rome. C. Gracchus the reformer told citizens of how a recent consul, visiting Teanum Sidicinum in Campania, had a local magistrate publicly flogged for not having the men’s public baths cleaned and readied for his wife’s use, and at Ferentum in Latium another magistrate killed himself for a similar transgression. By the 120s, Italians had come to feel that they too should have Roman citizenship. The Romans had no enthusiasm for this even though it was how the res publica had grown in past centuries. At its lowest level, the reluctance was plain selfishness: as the consul Fannius put it to alarmed voters when C. Gracchus proposed citizenship for Latins in 122, ‘if you give citizenship to the Latins, do you believe that you’ll have a place to stand in the assembly as you do now, or will have a share in games and festivals? Don’t you think they will take over everything?’ – and Gracchus’ proposal failed. Rome’s political elite had other fears: competition for office and gloria from ambitious Italian aristocrats, hordes of new voters whose ties to Rome’s senatorial families were sparse, and the spoils of war and empire having to be shared out across thrice the existing population of the res publica.7 As a result repeated moves to grant citizenship, even to Latins alone, were thwarted: in 125 when a consul, M. Fulvius Flaccus, urged it; so too his friend C. Gracchus’ bill in 122 for the Latins, with other concessions to the socii Italici; and after M. Livius Drusus, a rival tribune, vetoed this, likewise a more modest proposal by Drusus himself. Italian frustration was hardly appeased over the next three decades by token measures such as rewarding with citizenship Latins who won prosecutions in extortion cases (a law of 101) and allowing the eminent general Marius to give it to a few deserving allied soldiers. Romans’ stubbornness persisted. In 95 the consuls L. Licinius Crassus and Q. Mucius Scaevola, men of unusual repute and sense, nonetheless carried a law expelling from the city and in some cases prosecuting non-Roman Italians pretending to be citizens. Few were actually prosecuted, but the provocation to the exasperated Italians was bitter. Finally in 91 Livius Drusus’ son and namesake, pushing a new reform programme as tribune in 91, proposed allied citizenship yet again, only for this – with all his other

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measures – to be cancelled by order of the Senate. Soon afterwards he was assassinated. This reactionary inflexibility defeated itself. So many of Rome’s oldest and most warlike fellow Italians took up arms that during 90 and 89, as bitter war spread across Italy – the war in which Spain’s Salluitan squadron figured – citizenship had at last to be offered: first to the Latins and other Italians who had remained loyal, then to the rebels. Despite initial attempts to gerrymander them all into just a handful of the 35 voting tribes, and even though repeated Roman civil wars intervened, by 81 at latest the whole peninsula was Roman and the new citizens were fairly distributed. Roman, too, was now the southern half of Cisalpine Gaul and other loyalists such as the cavalrymen from Spain. Nevertheless Italy’s historic, and long overdue, incorporation into the res publica populi Romani did not ease the many other stresses beleaguering the imperial republic.

◆ From the 150s on, those stresses had grown as a direct result of empire. To defend and extend its territories and confront other powers, armies were constantly needed: even during the relatively peaceful years of 167–154 there were four to six legions in service (of course with Italian complements), and during the again relatively peaceful 90s five, six or even seven. Legions were, by law, recruited mainly from Rome’s farmers as recruits had to be landowners; farmers’ numbers started to worry various leaders in the late 140s and after. Although the recorded census totals of male citizens were much higher than in the third century – from 214,000 in 204 to 337,000 40 years later, and still 318,000 in 135 – farmers’ numbers were falling because of pressures from wealthy land speculators and from military service. So at least many Romans believed, although we have no farming statistics to check. At the same time the city of Rome itself was growing fast (as the Aqua Marcia showed): residents rose from an estimated 150,000 in 200 bc to perhaps 375,000 a century later, and up to a million by Augustus’ time. An increasing City population meant increasing need for services and jobs. It meant too that more citizens lived within walking distance of magistrates’ public meetings (contiones) and the formal assemblies

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for laws and elections. Some leading Romans believed as well that the state needed to revise and improve its procedures in law and administration – as for example in collecting provincial taxes and dealing with bribery and extortion.8 Ideally none of these issues should put serious stress on a wealthy and mature body politic. For more than three centuries, the most fundamental disputes among Romans – plebeians versus patricians, harsh penalties for debtors, magistrates’ powers – had been settled by compromise or by one side or other conceding. No Roman had been murdered in the course of politics since a semi-legendary episode in 439. Yet from 133 on this happened often. The aristocratic and moneyed elite showed itself strongly, even viciously, unwilling to give up, or even pare back, long-established assets which Rome’s imperial power had enhanced: their virtual ownership of extensive leased public lands (ager publicus); unchallenged patronage of the existing body of Roman citizens, whose votes they relied on; aristocrats’ zealous hunt for the gloria which low-paid soldiers gained for them; the Senate’s and magistrates’ almost unhampered authority over state finances, administration at home and abroad, and public order; and Rome’s exploitation of Italy with decreasing benefit for Italians. Many Romans added to this a firm conservatism which judged land grants, subsidized cheap grain and (later on) drastic reductions to private debts as close to, if not actually, criminal. When tempers rose over such issues, too often a violent flashpoint arrived. It was not a class struggle, for the leaders of such confrontations were invariably members of the elite, some of them (such as the brothers Ti. and C. Gracchus, and later on Julius Caesar) in fact nobiles, elite Romans with consular ancestors. The notion already popular in later Rome – that by making equites the jurors in extortion cases the younger Gracchus created lasting enmity between that element of Roman society and the Senate, and gave equites Romani enduring political power – is not well founded. Jury membership (incongruously, to most moderns) did become a prestige tussle for half a century, but at the same time equites often enough sided with the conservative elements hostile to change. As early as 121, some rallied behind the consul Opimius to slaughter C. Gracchus and his supporters, as they did again (for example) behind the consul Marius

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in 100 to suppress genuine sedition. When the equites jurymen in 92 farcically convicted Rutilius Rufus of extortion, it caused a sensation: until then the extortion court had done its work to overall approval. Nor was there a broad clash of ideologies. Most of the contentious laws between 133 and 101 remained in force or were replaced by similar ones. Hostility to change and, more personally, to the changers did not translate into blind revisionism of their work until 100, when conservative reaction sharpened. About the sole reform which from the start most principes viri and most ordinary Romans refused to accept was citizenship for their fellow Italians. By Cicero’s time if not earlier, would-be reformers were nicknamed Populares (because they demanded measures favouring the Roman People), while the resisters bore the self-congratulatory epithet Optimates, ‘the best people’. All the same, a politician pushing one Popularis issue did not necessarily back others, or continue to push them for the whole of his public career. The nobilis Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus as tribune in 104 made electing pontifices a Comitia matter (previously it was by internal co-optation), but was a steady conservative thereafter – when censor in 92 he even banned the teaching of Latin rhetoric. The subsidized grain to the City, abolished in 80 by Sulla, who died in 78, was gradually brought back over the following decade by the principes viri of his dominant faction – no Populares, but alert to popular discontent. Similarly the increasingly powerful M. Crassus and Pompey pushed Popularis measures when it suited their aims, as in restoring tribunes’ full authority in 70 (it had been truncated by Sulla); but at other times helped themselves, for example arranging for themselves and their ally Caesar in Gaul fresh five-year military proconsulships in 55 – and in Crassus’ case launching unprovoked war with the Parthians, against a tribune’s opposition. Ideology, not to mention idealism, played only one part in the varied calculations of Roman leaders. Violence, however, had its own part to play in political life. It accompanied – and was usually provoked by – controversial proposals such as land grants to poor or landless citizens, new Roman colonies (many of them in western provinces) for citizens including army veterans, stronger legal protections for citizens and misgoverned provincials, subsidies for providing grain to

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City residents, and putting magistrates and senators under more searching scrutiny for corruption, arbitrary decision-making or perceived incompetence. Most – though not all – of these recurring demands were pushed by activist tribunes, themselves members of the elite, who blended (to varying degrees) desire for reform with ambition for political success. In turn they were always strongly resisted by many or most of each generation’s principes viri and other senators. Clashes, sometimes even at Comitia meetings, occurred for example in 133, 121, repeatedly between 104 and 100, in 91, 88–87, 78, and intermittently but often until the great civil wars ended in 30 bc.9 Unlike in the past, using serious violence to settle arguments was novel. Most novel of all was how one side or other sometimes coped with political opponents by murdering them. The earliest victims, the brothers Ti. and C. Gracchus, sons of the scourer of Sardinia, were killed in street fighting launched by their opponents, Tiberius in 133 and Gaius 12 years later (Gaius committed suicide rather than be murdered). Three hundred of Tiberius’ followers and 3,000 of Gaius’ were slaughtered too, with no one punished for the deaths. Two decades on, the assertive L. Appuleius Saturninus, tribune in 103 and 100, and his ally P. Servilius Glaucia (praetor in 100), took up violence with vigour to intimidate opponents of their proposals – only to overreach themselves in 100 by murdering rival candidates for office. They in turn were lynched on 10 December that year by a furious mob of senators and equites defying the consul Marius’ promise of protection. Violence in 91 helped the reform-minded tribune, M. Livius Drusus, to carry laws that added select equites to the Senate and gave the Italians citizenship, only for the hostile consul L. Marcius Philippus (after being half-throttled by the enraged tribune) to regain the initiative and have the Senate invalidate all the legislation. When Drusus was murdered by an unknown assailant in a crowd, many exasperated Italian states launched the war that after great bloodshed (300,000 lives according to the Augustan writer Velleius, whose great-grandfather was in it) won Italy Roman citizenship. As it ended, a friend of Drusus, P. Sulpicius Rufus, as tribune in 88 likewise carried laws by beating up opponents – paradoxically

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in pursuit of moral aims: to end the gerrymandering of the new Italian citizens and penalize senators who went deeply into debt – but was killed when the antagonized consul Sulla brought up his army from Campania to occupy Rome and hunt down opponents. As soon as Sulla then headed east against Mithridates, Sulpicius’ surviving backers, C. Marius among them, came back with their own armed forces to reseize the city and slaughter opponents in their turn. This period of vicious strife ended only with Sulla’s own return in 83, victory in fresh civil warfare, and massacre of several thousand actual or alleged Roman enemies in 81.

◆ From 133 Rome’s Mediterranean affairs, too, began to influence and disrupt politics. When Ti. Gracchus earmarked Pergamum’s royal treasure it was because the Senate, against convention, had refused funds for his legally enacted grants scheme. After 118 the Romans had to cope with the unscrupulous ambition of Jugurtha in Numidia: efforts between then and 112 to bridle or appease him went nowhere, lavish bribery of Roman embassies was suspected, and when the resulting war led to him capturing and releasing an invading Roman army in early 109, an unholy furore erupted. A tribune, C. Mamilius, legislated a special inquiry court, a quaestio, to ferret out which ambassadors, magistrates and generals had taken Jugurtha’s money. Since the suspects were all senators, the jurors were all equites Romani, much to Cicero’s and others’ later annoyance. Even so it was hardly a witch-hunt: the chairmen of the three jury panels were senior senators, including the honorary leader of the Senate (princeps senatus) M. Aemilius Scaurus – himself a suspect, yet never charged – and only five men were convicted. Nevertheless the Jugurthine War deepened scepticism about the elite, so that the general who ended the war in 105 and brought the fallen king to Rome for execution was the non-nobilis C. Marius (he and also Cicero came from the small city of Arpinum, south-east of Rome). Marius was unprecedentedly re-elected consul from 104 to 100 inclusive, because citizens trusted that he would defeat the wandering Germanic peoples who eventually invaded Roman territory. The nobiles holding military commands under or alongside

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him, such as Sulla (his quaestor in Numidia) and Catulus (his consular colleague in 101), did his bidding. For a time this made him the most eminent of the period’s principes viri, although – like previous ‘new men’, novi homines, in the consulship – he needed equally energetic allies whether nobiles or lesser aristocrats. As the most energetic proved to be the violence-prone Saturninus and Glaucia, he lost this pre-eminence after 100, but regained some of it by able generalship during the allies’ war of 91–89. Yet this brought disaster on the res publica in that war’s aftermath. He and his former friend Sulla, consul in 88, clashed over Sulpicius Rufus’ reform programme. Sulpicius therefore legislated to take from Sulla the new command against Mithridates to appoint his backer Marius instead; and Sulla’s reaction was the de facto army coup to regain the command as well as liquidate Sulpicius and his reforms. Justified or not, Sulla’s coup marked the entry of organized military force into Roman politics. As consul in 107 Marius had disregarded the already low property requirement to accept landless volunteers for the Jugurthine War. This largely solved recruitment problems, but once it became general practice it meant that veterans approaching discharge wanted land grants to become farmers. In 88 soldiers reasserted Sulla’s and his consular colleague’s authority over (in their view) seditious opposition. Next, in 87, Sulla’s enemies Marius and L. Cornelius Cinna, then in 83–81 the returning Sulla, used it in turn to seize power against elected magistrates. Soldiers were now mainly poor or landless men, readier than farmers of old to back their preferred general: partly thanks to loyalty forged in war, partly (and perhaps more importantly) hopeful of booty – the reason why Sulla’s men followed him in 88 – and of post-war benefits such as land. With all Italians being citizens after the 80s, separate allied army contingents disappeared, but now it was up to each recruiting commander to look after all his men. Saturninus had won Marius’ support till almost the end by legislating veterans’ grants in provinces such as Cisalpina, Africa and Sardinia. Once Sulla won the civil war of 83–81, he in turn had to provide farms for no fewer than an estimated 120,000 veterans (by contrast, after peace with Carthage in 201 the res publica had to provide for only 40,000). He confiscated lands from cities around

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Italy that had supported the beaten regime, leaving the dispossessed landowners to fend for themselves, but in time many of his soldier-farmers themselves fell on hard times and into crushing debt, partly because of the great slave and gladiator revolt in Italy led by Spartacus from 73 to 71. Poverty, debt, and discontent made the new Roman Italy prey to further troubles during the 60s.

◆ Sulla himself, dictator in 81 and consul again in 80, put a still more unforgettable stamp on Rome’s history of political mayhem through his extrajudicial massacres: supposedly of political foes whose names were put up on public notices (proscriptiones), but often extending to innocents who were listed so that their property could be grabbed cheaply by their personal enemies. At least 40 senators and 1,600 equites were murdered, but probably also thousands more around Italy. The most famous innocent victim was Sex. Roscius, an apolitical friend of Sulla’s supporter Q. Metellus Pius and his family – two of Roscius’ own cousins wanted his 13 farms, had him murdered and his name added to a proscription list, then tried to get his son convicted of the killing. Luckily for Roscius junior, he engaged the young orator Cicero to defend him. Sulla struggled to be a constructive if conservative reformer too. He ruled tribunes out of virtually all political roles, abolished the cheap grain subsidy, enlarged the depleted Senate with selected equites (as Drusus had wanted), and enacted fresh – and as usual rather hopeless – laws to curb luxury spending (funerals included). More progressively he enacted tighter regulations for governing provinces; increased the permanent courts, called quaestiones, to seven to hear specific types of case (bribery, violence, assassination, forgery, provincial extortion, peculation and treason); and multiplied the number of quaestors and praetors, with former quaestors now automatically becoming senators. He then resigned office and soon died. His changes aimed at reinforcing Senate dominance of affairs under the principes viri, while modernizing how the res publica was run. Impossibly, though, they depended on permanent co-operation between all principes plus lasting submissiveness by everyone else. Neither endured. Tribunes’ powers were gradually brought back,

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cheap grain had to be provided when famine threatened the City, and tolerating criminal governors such as C. Verres defaced the Senate’s reputation. The reformed regime’s greatest weakness even so was military. Army recruitment remained the task of each consul or proconsul appointed for a war, nor was there any standing security force for Italy or for Rome itself. Neither problem was beyond solving – Augustus would one day achieve both – but they were beyond Sulla or the next series of principes. Troops had to be levied anew for crises in Italy like Spartacus’ rebellion and then the debtors’ insurgency in 63–62. When Cicero as consul in 63 acted against the debtors’ champion Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina) and his aristocratic friends for – allegedly – plotting a civilian coup at Rome, he had to rely on bodies of armed equites Romani to patrol the City, while his colleague Antonius raised a hasty army to defeat Catiline’s poorly armed farmers in the Etruscan countryside. This was not because Rome was bereft of seasoned troops but because these were spread across the Mediterranean from Spain to the Parthian frontier. In the late 70s up to 40 legions were in service (150,000–200,000 troops), during the 50s still 15 to 21; but Italy itself had none. The size of Rome’s military forces, and their politically powerful leaders, were potential problems in themselves. Legionaries and other fighters had to be paid – a 5,000-man legion cost over 6 million denarii yearly – and be given land or other rewards on discharge. Their commanders thus had a claim on their loyalty which could be put to political use. As a modern master has noted, Sulla, who marched on Rome twice, could not abolish his own example. In 71, with Crassus victorious over the Spartacus rebels and Pompey returning from victory over Sertorius, some Romans feared that they would repeat that example; there were similar worries in 62 as Pompey returned triumphant from reorganizing the eastern world.10 Nothing of the sort did happen then, but over the next decade both men were by far the most potent and most courted of the principes viri – even though Pompey was away again from 67 until 62, first suppressing the pirate plague and then finishing off Mithridates, while Crassus’ only further magistracy was as a (notably unsuccessful) censor in 65. Rising aspirants such as

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Cicero and Caesar cultivated one or both. There was still effective opposition from other principes: they thwarted Crassus twice – in 65 from having Rome annex Egypt, or at any rate its treasury, and in 61–60 from gaining reductions to the overconfident sums to which current publicani consortia had committed for provincia Asia’s tax contracts. The returned Pompey’s efforts in 61–60 to have his eastern annexations, arrangements and reorganizations ratified, and have his veterans granted land, were battled to a standstill by opponents led by his embittered predecessor against Mithridates, Lucullus, and the younger, exceedingly morally rigorous M. Cato, descendant and imitator of the Censor. But frustrating Crassus and Pompey was effectively the last victory of other principes viri over their two over-mighty peers. Late in 60 the pair teamed up with the amorally ambitious Caesar, forming a political compact sometimes informally called the ‘First Triumvirate’. Pompey even married Caesar’s only daughter, Julia. Bribing his way with his allies’ money to the consulship for 59, Caesar used all necessary violence with voters (Pompey’s veterans supplied it) to give his partners what they had been denied, and, as mentioned earlier, took for himself Cisalpina, Illyricum and – almost as an afterthought when its designated proconsul died – Transalpina for a five-year governorship. His Gallic conquests duly followed. The Caesarian method at Rome was infectious: during the years that he was away, violence on a Saturninus scale repeatedly perverted the course of public life and government, practised most notoriously by the patrician-turned-plebeian Popularis tribune P. Clodius in 58 and after (Clodius forced Cicero into exile and funded his free grain law by confiscating Cyprus’ royal treasury), but also by other rivals such as P. Sestius and T. Annius Milo, whom Cicero defended in court. Eminent senators like Cicero could venture out only with armed bodyguards. The dominance enjoyed by the Three – though none of them trusted the other two – was made staggeringly clear in April 56. When they met at Luca (Lucca), just within Cisalpina, to resolve their differences, some 200 senators – magistrates and proconsuls among them – trooped along as well to curry favours. The conference’s upshot was that Pompey and Crassus had themselves elected

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consuls for 55 – after violently delaying elections until 55 opened – and parcelled out the empire between themselves and Caesar. He would keep his provinces until 50, Crassus would take Syria (he planned to invade Parthia) and Pompey both Spains; but Pompey would run them through deputies, legati, so that he could stay in Italy. This was a portent for the future of imperial rule. After 55 – even as the rest of the aristocracy flailed, fought, competed and complained – the res publica populi Romani, which ruled the Mediterranean world and was reaching out beyond, was overshadowed by the political stature of three, and after Crassus’ disappearance in 53 just two, super-powerful principes. The hectic intermittent conflicts of opportunistic Populares with tenacious Optimates were sidelined and then burnt out in their struggles. Meanwhile the super-powerful principes were pragmatic: if they improved administrative efficiency at Rome and abroad, arranged land grants or colonies, and promoted newcomers to high office and the Senate, they also supported conservative measures and values. Caesar when dictator would ban private guilds (collegia) of craftsmen and professionals, and like Sulla crack down on conspicuous lifestyles. What they could not do was co-operate or see each other as anything but a rival. Once Clodius got himself killed in fresh disturbances in 52, Pompey – unprecedentedly elected sole consul (this avoided the unpopular term dictator) – swiftly restored peace in Rome. His domestic supremacy was indisputable. But Caesar’s pending return meant that it must soon be either shared or fought for. Nobiles of grander lineage – Aemilii, Caecilii, Cassii, patrician and plebeian Claudii, Cornelii, Fabii, Junii and Servilii among others – were now in practice clients of one or the other. When the two fell out in 50–49 and a new civil war exploded, almost every nobilis house, Caesar’s included, had members on both sides. Naturally, lesser aristocrats were no more independent even though some, such as Cicero, tried to be neutral. Pompey and Caesar had attained primacy among their peers because by 50 bc they were by far Rome’s richest citizens, were politically ruthless (even if Pompey was more restrained than Caesar), had entire provinces and suites of satellite kings and states as personal

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clienteles, and held long-term commands over the res publica’s main armies, with soldiers ready to obey them even against the state’s authorities. It was not that Rome’s city-state political system had become inadequate to her needs (the common explanation). Any state in which a few citizens gained excessive personal resources and lacked willingness to abide by the norms under which they had grown up would face the same threat, as Rome herself was to find in later centuries under her emperors. The supremacy of Pompey and Caesar had been won through their military abilities and territorial conquests. It amounted, in fact, to the victory of Rome’s imperialism over the Roman Republic.

◆ The civil wars of 49–45 bc ended with the brief triumph of Julius Caesar and the collapse of the free Republic. The rocket-like rise of a middling senator (as Caesar was before 60) from a middle-level aristocratic family had been unforeseeable before 59. That changed within a decade when, with Crassus gone, he shared dominance solely with his fellow ‘triumvir’. Then Pompey was defeated at Pharsalus in Greece in August 48 and killed when he fled to Egypt, his remaining supporters and sons were in turn crushed in Africa and then Spain in 46–45, and Caesar became effectively permanent dictator and consul (early in 44 permanent dictator officially). In contrast to Sulla, he avoided proscriptions or extensive confiscations, insisting on merciful pardon, clementia, towards Roman foes (they were not Gauls); and was accepted by his fellow aristocrats – very unhappily – as de facto monarch. As ruler, he had ideas for efficient government and social palliatives, using traditional measures but on an unprecedented scale. From Rome 80,000 civilians, along with thousands of demobilized veterans, were eventually sent to found colonies abroad, including a refounded Carthage and Corinth. Major public works were launched (the Forum Iulium was one), citizenship conferred on cities such as Gades in Spain and even entire provinces – Cisalpina beyond the Po, Sicily – and Latin right on many other cities, notably in Transalpina and Spain. The Senate was again enlarged, now to almost 900, and this time with men from all over Italy plus a few provincials, and various

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magistracies multiplied (over a dozen praetors, for example). Caesar confirmed a strict provincial government law he had enacted in 59; had the Alexandrian mathematician Sosigenes put right the now chaotic calendar (46 bc had to be extended to 445 days for a start); and as mentioned above legislated further against luxurious spending, as well as abolishing most private craftsmen’s associations, collegia, because they were prone to inconvenient (in aristocratic eyes) political enthusiasms. He briefly eased the still widespread debt problem – without solving it – and slashed by more than half the numbers of the City’s free grain recipients, from 320,000 to 150,000. Some of these measures were visionary and have won Caesar much acclaim – especially the grants which made so many provincials citizens of the state which had conquered them. But others, such as his colonies, works projects and one-year debt relief, were essentially short-term acts that left the essential issues unsolved. While almost doubling legionary pay from 120 to 225 denarii (900 sesterces) a year, like Sulla he left untouched the crucial matter of recruiting and demobilizing armies – no small matter when in 44 bc, despite discharges, Rome still had 35 legions in service. Equally fatefully, Caesar alienated many of his peers even though he could not run Rome or the empire without them. Rewards and clementia were not enough when he accepted colossal – even divine or near-divine – honours and increasingly flaunted his supremacy (for instance, in February 44 changing his dictatorship from a ten-year term to perpetuity). He was also setting off – aged 56 and in dubious health – for ambitious new wars far outside the empire, first beyond the Danube and then against Parthia. He was thus leaving his projects incomplete, his main lieutenants M. Aemilius Lepidus and M. Antonius locked in acrid rivalries, and civil war embers still flickering in Spain. The assassination on the Ides of March, at the hands (literally) of both pardoned former foes such as M. Brutus and C. Cassius Longinus and disenchanted supporters such as Brutus’ cousin Decimus and C. Trebonius, quite possibly prevented a catastrophic implosion of both the res publica and its empire. Of course the Ides did not save the free Republic. The last champions of egalitarian oligarchy, Caesar’s assassins, were eliminated mostly in the next civil war, at Philippi in eastern

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Macedonia in 42, by his inheritors. These were his deputies Antonius (Mark Antony) and Lepidus, whom everybody knew, and also his quite unexpected heir, his very young great-nephew C. Octavius, whom no one did. Adopted in the dictator’s will, Octavius became C. Caesar Octavianus (he never used the third name), and late in 43 allied with his rival Caesarians to make themselves an official – but militarily imposed – Triumvirate: ringed by legions, the Comitia voted them in. Proscriptions came back with a vengeance, most famously claiming Cicero who had tried to use Octavian against Antony to save the Republic. Fresh and massive land confiscations befell Italy after Philippi, for the Triumvirs had to satisfy some 170,000 veterans eager for farms. The renewed civil wars themselves inflicted savage extortions on the eastern provinces and client states. Brutus and Cassius extracted some 150 million denarii to fund their armies between 44 and 42. Next Mark Antony forced provincia Asia to pay nine years’ worth of taxes in two. Over the next decade a great Parthian invasion of the Roman east in 40–38 (Parthia’s delayed response to Crassus), then, after its defeat, Antony’s disastrous counter-invasion of Armenia in 36, intermittent naval strife in the Mediterranean with Pompey’s younger son Sextus until 36, and the final civil war between Antony – with Cleopatra VII of Egypt as his ally – and Octavian added to the sufferings of the same regions. As had been the case for a century already, and now on a still grosser scale, the hapless lands of the empire were forced to subsidize their rulers’ political and military interests with no benefit to themselves. The naval defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in western Greece in September 31, and their deaths at Alexandria 11 months later (Lepidus had been shunted into retirement in 36), left the young Caesar in sole control of the Roman world: pre-eminent princeps vir, military commander (imperator), uniquely also son of a god – Julius, deified in 42 – and de facto monarch. He had the onerous task of empire-wide rehabilitation and a new season for Rome’s imperial expansion, under a revised and unique name: Imperator Caesar Augustus.

Chapter 5

Augustus: The Greatest Imperialist

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he empire benefited from young Caesar’s victory; more precisely, from the ending of the civil wars. The suicides of Antony and Cleopatra at Alexandria in 30 BC ended the wars; equally beneficially – to Rome and Octavian – Egypt at last became a province along with the heaped treasures of the Ptolemies. Whatever the legal niceties at Rome, the conqueror was presented to Egyptians as their new pharaoh. At Rome on 16 January 27 he accepted a new extra name, Augustus, that combined the concepts of ‘well-omened’ and ‘revered’. For the next 40 years his official name was Imperator Caesar Divi filius Augustus, ‘Commander Caesar Augustus, son of the Deified’, a combination unique in Rome’s history. Imperator, the military honorific, in time would become the standard term for Roman ruler, ‘emperor’. However, Augustus and his successors for the next three centuries used the civilian word princeps (leaving lesser principes viri to find other terms for themselves). This new era can therefore conveniently be called the Principate. Tacitus affirms that the provinces accepted this new regime because ‘they mistrusted the rule of Senate and People, due to powerful men’s rivalries and magistrates’ greed, with feeble aid from laws that were deranged by violence, corruption, and lastly by money’. Corruption and misgovernment did not stop – the ruler’s own procurator (tax commissioner) in Gaul around 16 bc, 84

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his freedman Licinus, was notoriously acquisitive and had to be recalled – but nonetheless, as time went by, governors and officials were more fully supervised from Rome, began to be paid salaries (sizeable ones), and could not start wars or plundering raids as they chose. Instead of huge armies’ pay entailing heavy provincial taxes (as well as requisitions and forced labour), and instead of them campaigning destructively across provinces, the number of legions and provincial auxilia was cut, most army groups positioned near or at frontiers like the Rhine and Euphrates, camps and billeting controlled, and settling discharged veterans was regularized: they received plots of land in Italy or abroad, or lump sums in lieu – although the government did not always play fair, to save money. At home the princeps and his narrow circle of confidants effectively ran politics, decided on legislation and controlled who would be elected to office, sit in the Senate, govern provinces, work directly under Augustus and command the armies around the empire. In a public edict he declared that he wanted to be remembered as ‘the sponsor of ideal government’, optimi status auctor. Cassius Dio 200 years later summed up the reality – the Senate met as before, the People’s assemblies voted as before, but ‘nothing was done that did not please Caesar’.1 Through the 20s bc the princeps tested different ways of integrating his mastery of the res publica into its political structure. The virtually dictatorial imperium of his Triumviral period, from 43 to 33, was replaced by regular consulships from 32 to 23 – by 23 his total, 11, far outdid Marius’ seven – and from 27 he held Spain, Gaul, Syria and Egypt as his consular provinciae. After a break of some years when he avoided further consulships (it made his supremacy too obvious) but held on to his provincial commands and the armies in them as proconsul, in 18 he adjusted matters one more time. A proconsul could, in theory, be given orders by a consul, so Augustus innovated. He had the People make his imperium equal to that of the consuls – without needing to hold consulships and for repeated ten-year or sometimes five-year terms. Already in 23 he had taken the full authority, potestas, of a tribune for life, even though as a patrician (through Caesar’s adoption) he could not actually hold a tribunate. Finally in 12 he was elected chief priest of Rome, pontifex maximus.

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As virtual consul and tribune Augustus had all the legal powers he needed, plus intangible but potent supremacy in dignitas and auctoritas over even the grandest of his fellow aristocrats. He boasted in his official memoir, the Res Gestae, that only in auctoritas did he outdo others. Still, most of Rome’s armed forces were in his own provinces, with the few remaining legions elsewhere under proconsuls who, when not his relatives – such as his comrade and son-in-law Agrippa, his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, or Drusus’ son Germanicus – knew their place. Legions were recruited in Italy but none were kept there. In and near the City, Augustus alone commanded troops: six City cohorts as police (cohortes urbanae, 3,000 strong), the first regular security force in Rome’s history; and seven large militia-type cohorts called vigiles (the night watch – 7,000, mostly freedmen), essentially a permanent fire brigade, a first for an ancient city. And, most important of all, barracked in nearby towns was an elite bodyguard of nine cohorts, the Praetorian Guard (praetoriae cohortes): some 4,500 highly paid troops commanded by two praefecti. He also kept a personal protection force of entirely non-Roman soldiers (usually Germans), as did his immediate successors. The Roman world was thus ruled by a monarch who had no formal title and whose collection of legal powers could – in principle – be cancelled by the Senate and People if they chose, but who in reality decided how the res publica would function and who would be its functionaries. Nor did Augustus disguise his rule, as often supposed. From the start Romans recognized and saluted him as ruler. The poet Horace in one of his earliest odes identified him enthusiastically as the god Mercury come to save the world. Vitruvius the architect, early in the Principate, acclaimed Augustus’ ‘divine mind and genius’ and his commanding nod – a standard allusion to the dominant god Jupiter – and rejoiced that the Senate and people were ‘governed by your wide-ranging counsels and judgements’, accolades similar to those penned by Horace a few years later in his last book of odes. Before long people could (and were expected to) pay religious honour to the princeps’ Genius, his guiding spirit. Flattery in Italy used other expressions too. Thirty years after Vitruvius, Ovid, in hapless exile by the emperor’s personal fiat,

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judged it flattering to say that ‘the res publica is Caesar’ (a sentiment one day to be echoed by Louis XIV). When in ad 4 Pisae in Etruria officially lamented the passing of Augustus’ grandson and adopted son Gaius Caesar, it called the princeps ‘the guardian [custos] of the Roman empire and protector [praeses] of all the world’. From the start of his rule provinces in the east, then later those in the west too, accorded him honours as a living god (Chapter 11). Egyptians could equate him with Zeus Eleutherius (the Liberator); Halicarnassus in Asia Minor was far from alone in hailing him as the author of peace and plenty worldwide, the father and saviour of the human race.2 As Cassius Dio pointed out, the institutions of the res publica went on as before. What mattered now was that a single interest group effectively ran them, Augustus at its centre. For success, even men of the oldest elite – Cornelii, Aemilii, Valerii and their peers – had to have his backing, and they shared it with a steadily growing variety of novi homines, many from the regions of Italy enfranchised after the Allies’ War of 91–89. Augustus’ innermost circle included, from his earliest political years, the general and administrator par excellence M. Vipsanius Agrippa (whose second wife Julia was the princeps’ only child) and the subtle Etruscan eques C. Maecenas who never held an office. Over the decades, others joined or replaced them: his stepsons Ti. and Drusus Claudius Nero (sons of his wife Livia’s first marriage to a Claudius, divorced from her by Octavian’s Triumviral fiat in 38), Drusus’ elder son Germanicus, the emperor’s kinsmen Sex. Appuleius and Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, another eques Sallustius Crispus (the historian Sallust’s great-nephew and adopted son, and Augustus’ most trusted private counsellor after Maecenas died), and novi homines such as T. Statilius Taurus, M. Lollius, P. Sulpicius Quirinius (the Gospels’ ‘Cyrenius’), and C. Sentius Saturninus. The two equites apart, all these commanded armies and aided Augustus’ imperial expansion; many gained direct links to him through marrying his daughter, his nieces or cousins. The monarchic colouring was heightened by his relentless cultivation of intended successors: first his nephew M. Claudius Marcellus (who soon died) and stepson Ti. Nero, then Julia’s and Agrippa’s eldest sons whom the emperor promptly adopted as his own. As Gaius and Lucius Caesar

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they received extraordinary privileges, Gaius becoming consul in ad 1 aged 20, and even before that acting as virtual viceroy over the eastern provinces. In a letter to him in ad 1 Augustus mentioned how one day the boys would take over his ‘sentry duty’, meaning rulership of the empire. Their early deaths, Lucius in ad 2, Gaius two years later, devastated the ageing ruler. Glumly he adopted Tiberius, his only remaining stepson since Drusus’ death 13 years before: the no less gloomy adoptee became Ti. Julius Caesar and adopted Germanicus. Monarchic patronage had risks. Virgil’s friend C. Cornelius Gallus, the Transalpine Gaul and first governor (praefectus) of Egypt from 30 to 27 bc, somehow lost favour, was recalled, and committed suicide in 26. Contrary to the relentlessly burnished publicity, Augustus was ruthless in reacting to any perceived challenge: not only were various supposed plotters exposed and executed from time to time, especially in the first decade after 27, but his own daughter Julia, by then Tiberius’ wife, in 2 bc and then, in ad 8, her daughter and namesake were banished for life, their alleged adulterous lovers put to death – even Iullus Antonius, Mark Antony’s son whom Augustus had treated as a stepson, made a consul and had married to a niece – or, if luckier, banished like the younger Julia’s husband Aemilius Paullus. It was officially for shameless adultery (save for Paullus), earlier made a capital crime by the prudish Augustus, but as likely or more likely for planning how the now-ageing princeps might be sidelined or removed for the benefit of the new generation. Even Tiberius fell out with him for a decade over Augustus’ blatant grooming of the adopted sons. Tiberius exiled himself to Rhodes from 6 bc until ad 2 and for a time feared for his life, until recalled and in 4 adopted. Under the emperors that followed, dynastic dysfunction would plumb much worse depths.3

◆ Rome’s 60 legions in service in 30 bc were slimmed to 28, while the discharged veterans were settled at colonies in Italy and the provinces. Augustus stressed in his Res Gestae that he paid all the costs – there were no confiscations – to a total of 600 million sesterces (150 million denarii) for lands in Italy and 260 million

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in the provinces. Only a few of the continuing legions were based outside his multiple provinces, and over a couple more decades all but one such area, Numidia, and its one legion were added to his (Numidia’s anomaly was ended later by his great-grandson Caligula). As Pompey had done with the Spains, most of the emperor’s provinces were actually governed by legati, all of them senators. Former consuls ran militarily important provinces such as Syria, Nearer Spain and later on Britain; former praetors ran quieter ones such as Illyricum, Lusitania (this western half of Further Spain became a separate province), Aquitania in Gaul, and Galatia. Naturally these arrangements could vary if circumstances demanded it. Galatia was ruled by the former consul Sulpicius Quirinius for a decade or so after 12 bc to fight the troublesome peoples of the Taurus mountains and Pisidia, while from 12 to 9 bc the Three Gauls (the provinces annexed by the Divine Julius) and their legati answered to the emperor’s stepson Drusus as he pushed forward the subjection of Germany. Sardinia-Corsica, at first under a former praetor, late in the reign switched to an imperial praefectus to fend off pirate attacks and suppress local unrest. Such praefecti were equites Romani working directly for the emperor; they were mostly put in charge of territories too limited for a senator’s dignity, such as two in the western Alps annexed in 15–14 bc and Judaea, annexed in ad 6. But so was Egypt, a possession so strategic that senators needed Augustus’ permission even to visit. The provinces under the Senate’s theoretically direct control were all or nearly all the peaceable ones large and small away from the frontiers, such as Sicily, Baetica (the wealthy southern half of old Further Spain), provinciae Africa and Asia, Bithynia, and CreteCyrenaica (combined since the 30s bc). These still received former consuls and former praetors, all now impartially termed proconsuls, but of course the reality was that the Senate’s control went as the emperor wished. Occasionally he would switch the governorship to a legatus or prefect for more direct control, as with SardiniaCorsica and as Trajan would do with Bithynia in ad 110. There were times too when he intervened personally in a ‘senatorial’ province, as with a series of edicts of 7–6 bc regulating judicial matters in Cyrene, and in a stern letter (6 bc again), again on a judicial affair,

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to the authorities of the self-governing island state of Cnidos in the Aegean. Within each province the communities continued to be selfgoverning. Towns and cities predominated in urbanized areas such as Sicily, Baetica, Transalpina (now renamed Narbonensis) and many eastern lands from Greece to Syria. Other communities were rural cantons, usually with a small town developed by the Roman authorities to be the administrative centre (the Vocontii in Narbonensis had the unusual luxury of two capitals, Lucus Augusti and Vasio). As inscriptions and texts such as Pliny the Elder’s geographical survey show, most communities remained ordinary taxpaying units (civitates stipendiariae), while a few (termed liberae et immunes) enjoyed freedom from taxation and – in principle if not always in practice – from the governor’s interference. In most provinces there was a growing number of still more privileged centres, coloniae Romanae founded by the Roman state, oppida Latina (provincial towns granted Latin right), and – still not many in Augustus’ day, but increasing over time – provincial towns given civitas Romana such as Gades in Spain. This mixture, along with the spreading numbers of non-Roman provincials who served in the army’s auxilia, strongly encouraged provincial communities in western and Danubian lands, during and beyond Augustus’ time, to adopt more and more forms of Roman culture themselves (Chapter 8).

◆ As son, namesake and successor of the Divine Julius, Augustus even as Triumvir had to earn gloria through war and conquest. The civil war against Antony was metamorphosed and glorified as a national crusade against a decadent yet imperialistic Egypt, which through heaven’s support fell before Rome’s might. The truly major enemy (one entirely of Roman making) was Parthia, but that was effectively off-limits. A Parthian war, as Crassus’ and Antony’s disastrous invasions – and the Parthians’ counter-invasion between the two – had shown, was too unpredictable to risk. Instead the regime played up a diplomatic settlement, which young Tiberius arranged with Parthia in 20 bc, as a great victory, with coins struck to depict a

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Parthian kneeling to hand back legionary eagle standards captured in 53 (as does the later Prima Porta statue of Augustus). There were plenty of other regions for safer wars and, as Augustus saw it, safer expansion. Illyria and Dalmatia were traditional areas for gloria-hunting – one of Virgil’s patrons, the consular historian Asinius Pollio, earned some in Illyria in 39 – so Octavian in the later 30s campaigned there to subdue the coastlands and penetrate some way inland (incidentally making sure he met with an honourable wound – on the knee). This paved the way for further expansion later. Meanwhile important supporters earned untaxing triumphs as proconsuls over both Spains from 40 to 29 and, it seems, pushed permanent control up to the edges of the Asturian and Cantabrian mountains in the north-west. In 29–28 the proconsul of Macedonia – M. Crassus’ grandson and namesake – extended Roman hegemony into neighbouring Thrace and up to the Danube, a region of warlike peoples on both sides of the river long given to harassing Roman governors as they once had Macedon’s kings. Crassus even slew the Bastarnian king in personal combat, which in olden days (but not, as Crassus learned, under Augustus’ new political dispensation) would have entitled him to the coveted honour of spolia opima. His achievements were perhaps too successful for the princeps’ pleasure: Crassus was granted a triumph and never held another command. Imbroglios with warlike peoples across the frontiers were common, and not just in Europe. North African peoples – the Garamantes, Gaetuli and others – outside the provinces there clashed from time to time with the Roman authorities. It was for subduing the Garamantes (not lastingly, all the same) that Cornelius Balbus’ nephew and namesake in 19 bc held the last triumph awarded to a Roman who was not a member of the new ruling dynasty. Nubians and Ethiopians south of Egypt, under the arresting leadership of a one-eyed queen named or titled Candace, fought the first praefectus Aegypti Cornelius Gallus and his successors during the 20s before agreeing to peace. Over in southern Asia Minor, the rugged Taurus range’s truculent Isaurian Homonadenses – the slayers of Amyntas of Galatia – were subdued by Sulpicius Quirinius only with effort at the end of the first century bc, and again not permanently.

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In Europe, both the Rhine borderlands and the Balkans were often troubled from outside. Raiding by the trans-Danubian Bastarnae into Thrace had led to Crassus’ campaigns there. Dacians too more than once surged over the Danube and had to be driven out. The Sugambri from beyond the Rhine inflicted a rude shock on north-east Gaul in 16 bc by capturing a legion’s sacred standard (it was eventually recovered) and from then on harassing the region for years. Similarly, Pannonian peoples from the middle Danube regions periodically pestered Dalmatia and Istria, for instance in 16 bc, until they in turn were annexed. Local discontents could be stoked by outsiders too – more than once (in 39–38 and 20) M. Agrippa put down revolts in northern Gaul encouraged by the Sugambri and others across the Rhine. Vexations like these helped to prompt the new expansion of the Augustan age.

◆ The regime was only recently in place when the moves began. The opening ones were limited. In 25 bc Augustus himself briefly tackled the Cantabrians and Asturians of northern Spain (more gloria) but it was not until the inexorable Agrippa in 19 crushed their resistance, in a classic application of Tacitus’ dictum about making a desert and calling it peace, that Rome at last ruled the entire Iberian peninsula. As Velleius Paterculus would point out, the process had taken fully 200 years. Again in 25 Aelius Gallus, the second prefect of Egypt, was sent down the Red Sea against the wealthy kingdom of the Sabaeans (modern Yemen) – apparently a plain plundering expedition, which came to no good and had to retire – while Galatia in central Asia Minor was annexed (also in 25) after the Homonadenses killed its king, Amyntas. In the western Alps, a decade of campaigns led by 16 bc to the stubborn mountaineers’ final conversion into subjects in three new provinces, the Maritime Alps, Cottian Alps and, furthest north, the Graian Alps. King Cottius, previously lord of the mountain lands that still bear his name, submitted and was kept on as the local Roman praefectus, M. Julius Cottius. As always in Roman military conquests the human cost – to the conquered – was hard: of the Salassi in the

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Graian Alps, we are told by Strabo, 16,000 non-combatants were sold into slavery along with 8,000 captured fighters.4 These various annexations essentially rounded out long-established territorial interests, for Galatia too had become important to eastern security once Rome made Parthia an enemy. The years from 16 bc on launched an entirely different imperialist programme. It focused on Europe, and on a vast scale. First Augustus’ stepsons crossed the northern Alps to impose Rome’s control over the lands beyond, as far as the upper Danube. Conquering the Vindelici, Rhaeti and Norici created the provinces of Raetia and Noricum, roughly western Austria today, an annexation Horace dutifully celebrated in his Odes. In 13, Drusus took charge of Gaul in preparation for military operations across the Rhine as far as the Weser and Elbe. These were the lands of peoples well acquainted with Rome, among them the Chauci (their name means ‘the high ones’) on the North Sea coast and beside the River Elbe, the Chatti (whose name survives as Hesse), the troublesome Sugambri, the Cherusci whose leader one day would be Arminius, the Batavi dwelling on islands at the mouth of the Rhine, and the Ubii whose chief town Oppidum Ubiorum would one day become Colonia Ara Agrippinensis. Preparing the military invasion of Germany coincided, with fine if unintended irony, with the Senate voting to honour its master with an altar dedicated to the fruits and joys of peace: the Ara Pacis Augustae, authorized on 4 July 13, and grandly consecrated on 30 January 9 bc. Peace of course was a bounty to be enjoyed by the empire, but not necessarily by those who were its targets. Drusus’ bases on the Rhine were Fectio (Vechten) close by modern Utrecht, Castra Vetera (Xanten) opposite the point where the river was joined by its tributary the Lippe, and Moguntiacum (Mainz) where the middle Rhine bends westward for a short distance. The forces for them were moved up from north-eastern and central Gaul; they totalled maybe as many as eight legions and auxilia (but figures are scarce). In 12 Drusus himself entered northern Germany at the head of at least four, punishing the Sugambri and then executing a sweep northwards to the coast, accompanied by warships and with the coastal Frisii as valuable allies, to assault the Chauci. This was only to keep this powerful people quiet, to enable a more systematic

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series of campaigns across northern and central Germany from 11 to 9 bc. His line of advance in 11 was along the Lippe as far as the River Weser, then in 10 (it seems) from Moguntiacum along the River Main to strike north at the Chatti and the irrepressible Sugambri. An important and thoroughly excavated fort at Haltern, on the Lippe, was set up in these years: it and others in the same area and further south (notably at Rödgen, 30 kilometres above the Main) mark the progress of Drusus’ German war. In 9 he followed the same route to attack the Chatti again, next the Marcomanni to their east, and then north across the Weser for a blow against the Cherusci. After that he went further, marching to the middle Elbe – at least 160 kilometres beyond the Weser – before turning back for the Rhine. A story was told that at the Elbe a woman of supernatural stature confronted him with a command to go no further; rather likelier, he had run out of supplies (as he had done at the Weser two years before). Drusus’ victories brought him triumphal honours and then a consulship, but they were not easily won. Germany was well forested, the river valleys often marshy or flooded, and the Germans disinclined to accept defeats. In 11 bc they almost trapped him and his troops in ‘a narrow pass’ (perhaps near Bielefeld, north of the River Lippe which he had crossed earlier) and only their own carelessness then let the Romans escape. In 9 a much worse blow struck down Augustus’ stepson: he fell from his horse on the return march, the injury gangrened and he died a month later. His elder brother Tiberius, up to then employed crushing the Dalmatians and Pannonians, took over. He spent the following year and part of 7 bc defeating, or overawing, supposedly the whole of Germany; he dealt with the defiant Sugambri and others by forcing 40,000 of them to migrate to the western side of the Rhine. According to his exaggeration-prone admirer Velleius, Germany was now made ‘almost’ a tribute-paying province – but ‘almost’ was a well-chosen term. In reality proper taxation and administration were a long way off. German resistance to Rome was sustained, but the empire kept coming. Roman troops remained in the existing forts in Germany and some further operations are heard of, though our sources

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thin out between 6 bc and ad 7. Sometime after 6 bc L. Domitius Ahenobarbus (a grandfather of the emperor Nero), governor either of the German ‘province’ or more likely of Illyricum, marched deep into Germany from the Danube, crossed the Elbe to strike up friendships with some of the eastern German peoples and to set up an altar to Augustus (who could be treated as divine outside Italy), then on his return march crossed swords with the still militant Cherusci. They made things unpleasant enough for him to decide to hasten west and winter on the Rhine. This left the next commander in Germany, M. Vinicius, the task of dealing with troubles and defiances among the Germans, but details are lacking. In practice the armies followed lateral, west-to-east lines of advance – the valleys of the Lippe and Main – and along the North Sea coast with an accompanying fleet (Domitius’ intervention from the Danube region was unique). In spite of serious new warfare over much of the country between ad 4 and 6 which called for more of Tiberius’ attention (in fact he passed the winter of ad 4 on the Lippe), by ad 6 several forts and camps were maintained along the Lippe, and near the Main at least two others, at Rödgen near Frankfurt and Marktbreit near Würzburg. The coasts were obedient from the Rhine’s mouths as far as Friesland (the land of the friendly Frisii). Some Roman-style civilian life was starting up too, to judge from the civil structures uncovered at Waldgirmes just west of Rödgen. Augustus was to claim that he pacified all Germany up to the Elbe’s mouth. The habit grew for the commanders and their legions to spend the summer in Germany campaigning or patrolling; then, leaving the garrisons in their forts, to return with the main army to winter comfortably on the Rhine. In reality, despite the armies ranging widely across parts of western and northern Germany and the fleet coasting even up to Jutland (sometimes running into storms), Rome’s trans-Rhine military occupation was focused largely on the Lippe and Main regions. One of the fortresses furthest from the Rhine, 170 kilometres away at Anreppen on the upper Lippe, still lay 60 kilometres short of the Weser – and 300 kilometres west of the Elbe. Marktbreit’s double-legion camp among the friendly Hermunduri, 180 kilometres east of Moguntiacum and 150 north

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of the Danube, seems likewise to mark Rome’s furthest secure reach in the south. Powerful peoples outside these garrisoned regions, notably the Chauci and Cherusci east of the Weser and the Chatti between the Lippe and Main, professed obedience (or at least alliance) but ran their own affairs, while south-west Germany between the upper Rhine and upper Danube seems to have been largely left alone, and so too – for a while anyway – the powerful new kingdom of the Marcomanni in Bohemia, north of the middle Danube. This was created by their ruler Maroboduus after his people exited the eastern Main area around 8 bc to avoid further Roman attentions, with their old homeland replaced rather later, thanks to Domitius Ahenobarbus, by the equally displaced Hermunduri from further north.5

◆ Augustus’ government was at least equally interested in the lands south of the Danube, an immense region extending from Noricum to the Black Sea. Pannonians had encouraged the people in Noricum to resist Roman annexation, and by once again threatening Roman territory in 14 bc made their conquest – at any rate in the Roman government’s eyes – inevitable. Because Agrippa, the first commander appointed to the task, died in untimely fashion in 12, operations were entrusted to the princeps’ elder stepson Tiberius Nero, thanks to whom the broad expanse of Pannonia, between the rivers Sava and Danube, was largely subdued by 9 bc. When the new subjects tried a rebellion the following year they were firmly put down by Tiberius’ successor, and Augustus’ nephew, Sex. Appuleius. This was not the end of Danubian disturbances. Roman forces repeatedly crossed the Danube to punish raids – the Bastarnae and Dacians were much given to these – and advertise the empire’s long-distance reach. M. Crassus did so in 29–28; two decades or so later an unknown commander, perhaps Sulpicius Quirinius but more likely another Augustan favourite, the already mentioned M. Vinicius, defeated the Bastarnae again as a broken inscription records. He then showed off Rome’s military power by marching north or north-west into central Europe as far as the iron-smelting Cotini by the Tatra mountains that divide Slovakia from Poland.

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Other Augustan legati, Aelius Catus and Cornelius Lentulus, were kept busy along the Danube in Augustus’ later years. Lentulus earned triumphal honours by beating off the Getae, dwellers on the transDanubian plains beside the Black Sea, sometime in 9–6 bc. Catus 15 or 20 years later brought over 50,000 of them to settle in Moesia, the lands along the 800-kilometre lower Danube which from 12 bc became a province. Thrace and eastern Macedonia, bounded by Moesia and the Haemus (now the Balkan) mountains on its north, and on the south by the Greek cities of the Aegean coast, had already been confirmed as a client state under its long-lived king Rhoemetalces I, who astutely made sure to aid Roman commanders in their Balkan campaigns down the decades. All the same the lower Danube frontier remained precarious enough to worry the poet Ovid, exiled to the Greek city of Tomis (Constanța in Romania) on the Black Sea coast in ad 8 for inexplicably angering the princeps. He spent the last decade of his life there vainly asking for recall and lamenting the dangers from its barbarian neighbours.6 By ad 6 Augustus had more or less doubled the size of the empire. The Pannonian and Dalmatian peoples, much to their growing anger, were taxed and subjected to levies of auxiliary troops. Now he took the decision to make Germany – at any rate the occupied regions – equally provincialized, with regular taxation and law courts. More empire building was in train: Maroboduus and his Marcomanni in their new Bohemian lands, at peace with Rome, were nevertheless an attractive target for gloria. Maroboduus had the confidence to do his dealings with Rome as an equal, much to the disgust of Velleius Paterculus (an officer in the Danubian army at the time) and still more so to his emperor. With a trained army of 70,000 foot and 4,000 horse he posed a strategic threat – at any rate the Romans claimed he did – to all their newly annexed lands. Augustus and his advisers decided that Bohemia needed annexation too. The ambitiously planned pincer thrust against the Marcomanni in ad 6 involved no fewer than 12 legions: Tiberius Caesar (as he now was by adoption) advanced from Carnuntum in Pannonia and C. Sentius Saturninus from Moguntiacum on the Rhine. It was to be the high point of Augustan expansionism – but it ended abruptly, cancelled just after it began. The inland Dalmatians had revolted in

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disgust at the heavy-handed treatment by their new masters. Early victories, under a chieftain named Bato, against the totally surprised Romans then brought in the Pannonians whose rebel leader was another Bato. When it broke out, with massacres of Roman detachments and merchants and with the rebels supposedly (though no doubt exaggeratedly) capable of fielding 200,000 infantry and 9,000 cavalry, panic erupted at Rome. The equally panicked princeps announced that the Dalmatians could be in Italy in ten days. He was driven to hold emergency levies of veterans, freed slaves and funds. His biographer Suetonius was to comment, maybe rightly, that this war was Rome’s severest challenge since the days of Hannibal. Poor co-ordination by the two rebel movements, the Romans’ painfully held grip on the crucial fortress sites of Siscia (guarding the routes to Italy; today Sisak in central Croatia) and Sirmium (Sremsa Mitroviča in Serbia), the concentration of more and more armies – so many, in fact, that eventually Tiberius sent those from Moesia and the eastern provinces back – plus dissension among the rebels (the Pannonian Bato was eventually killed by his Dalmatian namesake) and remorseless scorched earth treatment of rebel regions wore the insurrection down. Yet it took Tiberius, his nephew and adopted son Germanicus (the son of Drusus), and other generals three years to do it.7

◆ No sooner was victory complete in the Balkans than disaster struck in Germany. The stricter regime that Augustus’ kinsman by marriage P. Quinctilius Varus was ordered to bring in as legatus from ad 7 sharpened the Germans’ discontent. Varus decreed taxes (their details are unknown), pushed forward town building and regional trade, and imposed Roman law and courts which must have been presided over by military officers. While these methods of provincializing subjects were becoming normal – Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola would apply them in Britain 70 years later, but tactfully – Varus’ mistake was to be in a hurry; and he was also accused (after his death) of greed and stupidity. In summer of ad 9 the governor and his three legions were near the Weser in the territory of the Cherusci, now supposedly

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transformed into peaceable and even cheerful provincials. One of their younger leaders, still in his 20s, was C. Julius Arminius, a Roman citizen and an experienced and trusted cavalry officer close to Varus. He and other leaders had covertly encouraged a rising of northern peoples – the Bructeri, Angrivarii and Chauci, perhaps – to draw Varus with his army into wooded country between the Lippe and the Ems, not far north of Osnabrück. This was the Teutoburg forest (Tacitus’ name for it: saltus Teutoburgiensis). There, over three rain-drenched September days, German assaults on the marching columns killed or captured almost the entire army of 18,000– 20,000 men, as well as servants and camp-followers. Varus and his remaining officers killed themselves to avoid the victors’ gruesome attentions. Since 1987 plentiful Roman military and civilian goods of late Augustan date – from belt buckles and slingshot bullets to cooking and even medical utensils – have been found along a narrow route threading between a hill called Kalkriese and a tract of marshland, about 17 kilometres north-east of Osnabrück. They almost certainly mark the line of march where the army of Germany disintegrated. This was the empire’s greatest military disaster since Crassus’ annihilation in the Syrian desert. The three lost legions, XVII, XVIII and XIX, were never reconstituted, their numbers never reused. It could have been still worse, but two other legions, based at Moguntiacum under L. Nonius Asprenas, marched up to block the victorious Germans from attacking Gaul, while the coasts from the Rhine’s mouths, where the loyal Batavi lived, to the territory of the friendly Frisii remained under control. Over the next seven years Tiberius Caesar and then Germanicus ranged far and wide over northern Germany in campaigns of vengeance and deterrence. Germanicus, an attractive if not overly competent general, came close to losing part of his army to another ambush and then did lose much of his fleet in a storm, but succeeded in smashing Arminius’ forces in an open battle which the German prince was unwise enough to fight in ad 16, at Idistaviso, thought to be just outside Minden and 60 kilometres east of Osnabrück. Germanicus’ forays into northern Germany from 12 to 16, each time returning to winter by the lower Rhine, were bloody in the

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standard fashion: no pity shown to unarmed men, to women or the aged (Tacitus wrote), fire and sword ravaging the countryside, sacred shrines desecrated. They did sate the Romans’ thirst for avenging Varus, although in 17 the emperor Tiberius recalled his nephew and discontinued the war because – as was clear to him if not to Germanicus – genuine conquest did not offer lasting gains. Arminius’ rebel alliance fell apart; he himself was murdered by his own people in 21 when suspected of seeking monarchic power. Nonetheless the Teutoburg disaster was the end of provincia Germania. The Rhine, like the Danube, would be the effective demarcation line of empire, however much and often the Romans would intervene across it in future. The Balkan and German rebellions laid bare the limitations of Augustan imperialism. In Pannonia during the winter of ad 7–8 some 100,000 troops were concentrated, briefly, against the rebels: this was more than a third of Rome’s entire military establishment. After ad 9 the three legions slaughtered in Germany were not replaced. To bring the total now stationed along the Rhine to eight, legions were transferred from Spain and elsewhere, while for years the number of legions in service stayed at 25. Costs, war-weariness in Italy, and disillusion in the ageing princeps led him to recommend henceforth ‘restricting the empire within its limits’, a precept that his successor Tiberius, though not every later emperor, obeyed.8

◆ Why Augustus and his fellow countrymen pursued expansion so resolutely is much debated. In his own Res Gestae the ruler stated, ‘I extended the borders of every province of the Roman People where the neighbours were peoples that did not obey our imperium.’ Tacitus reported admirers at the emperor’s funeral in ad 14 listing, as part of his legacy, how he had ‘barricaded’ the empire with the Atlantic ocean and distant rivers. Other post-Augustan writers, for instance Suetonius and Cassius Dio, likewise maintained that his policies had been defensive or forced on him by hostile outsiders. That Augustan imperialism was essentially a defensive programme is still accepted by many moderns. One influential interpretation is that the emperor wanted a secure military route to the eastern provinces through

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the Danube lands because the existing route included sea-crossings, always risky in bad weather and every winter. An extended version of this is that, until the disasters of ad 6 and 9, the Romans intended to shorten and rationalize the empire’s European frontiers by running them along the Elbe and through Bohemia to the middle Danube and the Black Sea.9 The opposite view, now equally widespread, sees the renewed expansion as returning to the conquest mentality of the 60s and 50s, but with even grander goals: the total conquest of Europe, if not of the whole Eurasian landmass. This would not have been quite as megalomaniac a goal as it might seem: some Romans and Greeks (not all) thought the Caspian Sea an arm of the encircling Ocean, and the River Tanais (the Don) the furthest stream before Ocean was reached. Poets of Augustus’ time, Virgil and Horace in the forefront, harped on new victories and conquests both actual and – with Britain, Parthia and even China – fancied, while the Aeneid’s Jupiter famously promises Rome ‘imperium without end’: boundless in space as well as time. The heading over the text of the Res Gestae calls this a record of how Augustus ‘subjected the world to the imperium of the Roman People’ – an obvious exaggeration, but no support for the idea of defensive imperialism.10 Between defensive and aggressive is a view that Augustus’ imperial policy was pragmatic: that he, his male family members and their close allies needed gloria to validate the post-civil-war political settlement, while at the same time Rome had to deal with repeated instability from outside raids and provincials’ restiveness, especially along the empire’s European edges. Imperial aims, on this evaluation, varied with circumstances and temptations, even if imperial propaganda blared the themes of victories on every continent, military renown and Rome’s supremacy over all other peoples – always under the exemplary guidance of her princeps. No doubt pragmatism and opportunism did fuse. A vast scheme of European (still less Eurasia-wide) conquest is implausible – no matter how underestimated was its eastern geography. Even after 20 years the German provincia reached only the Weser at best, with much of the claimed province still independent in practice. Beyond the 2,800 kilometres of the Danube Roman forces penetrated only

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sporadically, yet the Hungarian plain and uplands of western Romania – the sweep of territories within the semicircle of the Carpathian and Tatra ranges – would have been graspable by a resolutely expansionist regime, and still more so the much smaller and strategic region between the lower Danube and the eastern Carpathians. Some, though not all, of these areas would be annexed by the warlike Trajan after another century of confrontations with trans-Danubian peoples. By contrast the Augustan regime was uninterested in annexing any, even if raids by the outsiders intermittently unnerved Ovid and fellow residents of the Black Sea coast. Augustus was just as uninterested in Britain, even if poets thought it would be another prize. It was enough for British kings to offer friendship, which Rome viewed as accepting her hegemony. The possibility of pearls and slaves, which Cicero and others had found appealing at the time of Caesar’s invasion, were not enticing to his successor, who reckoned British trade and the customs dues from it more than satisfactory. Nor, as noted above, had war with Parthia any attraction. The uneasily enthroned king Phraates IV was willing to hand back Crassus’ captured standards in 20, ten years later even sent his four sons to Rome to clear the way for a bastard fifth to succeed him, and grudgingly tolerated Rome’s (admittedly light) hegemony over the in-between kingdom of Armenia, as did his son, murderer, and successor Phraates V: facts easy to present as Parthian submissiveness. When in 2 bc the princeps dedicated his new Augustan Forum and temple of Mars Ultor (the Avenger), he revealed a row of statues of famous triumphal imperatores who had raised the empire to greatness – these, he declared in an edict, would ensure that he and later principes would be required by their fellow citizens to match such exemplars. In other words he expected (or claimed to expect) leaders after him to have opportunities, too, to extend the imperium. This would indeed happen. None, all the same, would equal the acquisition glories of the first emperor.11

Chapter 6

Imperial Takings and Leavings, ad 14–212

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rom ad 14 to 68 Rome and the empire were ruled and misruled by members of Augustus’ family, nicknamed by moderns the Julio-Claudians and one of the most dysfunctional dynasties in world history. His adopted son Tiberius, who – maybe – had not wanted to be emperor and (perhaps) was not as debauched as later tradition made out, nonetheless degenerated into a suspicion-laden and reclusive inquisitor who used treason and adultery charges to get rid not only of suspect members of the aristocracy but even members of his own family, such as the widow of Germanicus, Agrippina (daughter of M. Agrippa and Augustus’ daughter Julia), and two of her sons. The surviving son, young C. Caesar (nicknamed ‘Caligula’ as a baby and by moderns), taking over in 37, began well but very soon indulged his penchant for fickle tyranny – consciously or unconsciously playing out the well-established role of capricious Hellenistic kings such as the Ptolemies – and paid for the mistake of turning not just the aristocracy against him but Praetorian Guard officers too. They hacked him down near his own palace on the Palatine hill in January of 41. Although various former consuls thought it was time to restore the oligarchic Republic, the Guard knew better (it would only have meant more civil wars): it hailed the last surviving adult male of the family, Germanicus’ obscure and academic brother Ti. Claudius Drusus, as the new princeps. He reigned until 54 with a mixture of intelligence, cowardice, ruthlessness and ‘submissiveness to his 103

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wives’ authority’ (as Tacitus put it) – though he executed one, Valeria Messallina, when she plotted to remove him. Sensible Claudian measures in administration, and new imperial annexations such as Britain, were accompanied by more treason trials and banishments of aristocrats – including the steadily thinning ranks even of remoter descendants of Augustus – if they antagonized him, his successive wives or his favourite freedmen. By marrying Germanicus’ last surviving daughter Agrippina the younger after executing her sisters, he ensured his own demise, so that her son (born L. Domitius Ahenobarbus but adopted by her uncle-husband to become Nero Claudius Caesar) could replace him in October 54. The spectacular principate of Nero remains the exemplar of indulgently gaudy tyranny. Not yet 17 at his accession, he took selfinterest to truly Ptolemaic (or Borgian) extremes: killing Britannicus his stepbrother, his mother, two wives – one of them the notorious Poppaea Sabina – and every surviving kinsman of the dynasty, along with plentiful senators and equites in the usual fashion (his old moral tutor the philosopher Seneca among them) as invented or genuine plots were discovered. It seemed natural to his fellow Romans to blame him for the Great Fire that burned most of the City to ashes in July 64, especially as he then lavished millions on building his Domus Aurea (Golden House) in its charred centre. Nor did performing on stage and in chariot-racing impress his fellow aristocrats. But it was again the Praetorian Guard, galvanized by a rebellion in Gaul against him even though that was quickly crushed, which brought him down. In June 68, declared an enemy of the state by the briefly galvanized Senate, he killed himself. Nero ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty, in every sense. Matters did not go well right away. The peril avoided in 41, of not having a clearly acceptable claimant to imperial office, brought calamity: the elderly nobilis Ser. Sulpicius Galba who replaced Nero proved too strict in economizing, antagonized the praetorians, and was killed in the Forum in January 69, in favour of a past friend of Nero, M. Salvius Otho – who was challenged by the Rhineland armies, invading Italy to make their regional commander A. Vitellius emperor, was defeated in April, and killed himself. Vitellius soon had a rival of his own in T. Flavius Vespasianus, the general fighting

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the rebellion in Judaea, acclaimed by not only the eastern legions but those along the Danube. These invaded Italy in their turn, defeated Vitellius’ army, captured Rome in December and cut the fallen emperor to pieces in the Forum. Amid all this chaos, restive peoples in north-east Gaul and the Rhineland rebelled, the Jewish war went on, trans-Danubian cavalry raiders invaded Moesia, and some communities within the empire (for instance Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul) found it an ideal opportunity to wage their own mini-wars. It fell to Vespasian to stabilize the upheaved empire, which with his elder son and successor he did remarkably effectively during the 70s. While the history of the Julio-Claudians and Year of Four Emperors owes its vivid – not to say lurid – fame particularly to the accounts of Tacitus and Suetonius, by contrast the century and more from 70 to 180 was recorded in source narratives surviving in far less length and cohesion (Appendix). Moreover its principes and politics – with a few dramatic exceptions – were more subdued. Political persecutions, murderous dynastic infighting, coups d’état and military revolts were not unknown, but they were fewer than in any other century between the first bc and the fifth ad. Vespasian’s second son T. Flavius Domitianus did revert to JulioClaudian-like suspicions and repression – Tacitus lamented 15 years lost to silence and fear – and paid for it in 96 with his own assassination in his bedroom. But the elderly stopgap M. Cocceius Nerva, his brief successor, lanced the resulting political boils by adopting a moderately eminent senator – and, more important, army commander on the upper Rhine just across the Alps – M. Ulpius Traianus, then passing away early in 98 to leave Rome and the empire for nearly 20 years in the hands of one of its most famous rulers and conquerors. Even though the succession of Trajan’s kinsman P. Aelius Hadrianus in 117 was controversial – not everyone believed he was Trajan’s choice – another lengthy and well-run principate followed under a monarch mercurial, much-travelled and exquisitely cultured. By adopting as his heir T. Aurelius Antoninus, a former consul in his 50s, Hadrian gave the empire the longest-ruling Caesar since Tiberius, from 138 to 161. Antoninus Pius, as he came to be called,

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was succeeded by his own adopted sons M. Aurelius Antoninus and L. Aurelius Verus, men of important senatorial families close to Hadrian. By Marcus’ own choice in 161 and unprecedentedly, the easy-going Lucius was accorded the same powers and titles as his much older brother, so that the empire enjoyed two equal (though not equally hard-working) emperors until Lucius died in 169. The second-century adoptive habit on the other hand was broken when Marcus later advanced his own son – whom he had named L. Aurelius Commodus for family reasons – to the same equality, even though Commodus was a mere 16 at the time, and 19 when Marcus left him sole emperor in 180. Almost predictably Commodus (the first Caesar born to a reigning princeps) reverted to JulioClaudian type with political persecutions, executions (including a sister) and showmanship. Predictably again he met his end in a palace coup on 31 December 192, this time in his bath, and a new and more violent age began for Rome and the empire.1

◆ Augustus’ advice from the grave to ‘restrict the empire within its limits’ suited his cautious and unenthusiastic successor Tiberius, who in ad 16 shut down Germanicus’ unproductive and disasterprone incursions into northern Germany, then ignored a breakaway revolt 11 years later by the Frisii as repressing it was not worth the expense. In the east a confrontation with Parthia in 34–6 was defused without fighting: Parthia gave up challenging Rome’s hegemony in Armenia in return for Tiberius ceasing support for a rival royal claimant. Not everyone was delighted at this incessant calm: Tacitus a century later caustically termed Tiberius an ‘emperor with no concern for expanding the empire’. Yet Tiberius’ successor Gaius Caligula also avoided expansion even though he was young and could benefit from acquiring gloria. His displays of military might in Gaul, supposedly portending expeditions across the Rhine or into Britain, were mere shows.2 Rome’s first military conquest in 50 years was launched by Claudius. Middle-aged, long disregarded, and eccentric, the new emperor needed gloria as much as he needed to stress his link with

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Augustus’ dynasty. He achieved the link easily by annexing the extra name ‘Caesar’ (Tiberius and Gaius, patrician Claudii by ancestry, had become Caesars through adoptions), and the gloria rather more arduously by annexing southern and midland Britain, ignoring Augustus’ dictum against further extensions. As well as gloria, a second reason for intervening came from newly unstable conditions in southern Britain after the death in about ad 40 of its dominant king Cunobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline). One exiled son of Cunobelinus had crossed to Gaul to appeal to Gaius, then another refugee named Verica, from a subordinate kingdom in Hampshire, arrived in Rome in 42 with a similar plea to Claudius. The Roman government may have worried that British restiveness could cross the Channel into northern Gaul. Surely more important, though, was Britain’s growing prosperity and productivity, shown for instance in Cunobelinus’ widespread high-quality coinage – and the Romans knew that the island had resources of silver, copper, lead and even gold. The invasion, begun in 43 by A. Plautius (with a fleeting look-in by the unwarlike Claudius himself), imposed Roman control from the River Severn to the Humber estuary by 47. Behind it was built a military road, now called the Fosse Way, which ran diagonally across central Britain from army bases at Isca (Exeter) in the south-west to Lindum (Lincoln). The conquest was a success where Claudius’ annexed ancestor Caesar had failed, and he marked it by taking the triumphal name Britannicus not only for himself but for his newborn son. His government was interested only in the settled lowlands, as the demarcation line in 47 shows. Even south of it some regions remained technically independent allies and not taxpaying subjects: the Iceni in Norfolk until 61 and probably the Atrebates in Hampshire under their long-lived king Cogidubnus (or Togidubnus), famous for his palace at Fishbourne. Londinium on the lower Thames developed fast as the major port for the new provincia Britannia, while to its north the town of Verulamium at some early moment even became a proper Roman municipium, and at Camulodunum (Colchester, previously Cunobelinus’ chief town) Claudius in 49 planted a colony of discharged veterans. A decade and a half of consolidation and police work followed ad 47. The tireless opponent of conquest,

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Cunobelinus’ son Caratacus, carried on resistance from Wales leading the warlike Silures until defeated in 51. He fled for refuge to the Brigantes of Yorkshire and Northumbria, but was unsympathetically handed over to the legatus Ostorius Scapula by their queen Cartimandua. She herself had to be repeatedly shored up by Roman troops, between 48 and 69, against restive Brigantian subjects, and both royals ended their lives under Rome’s protection – Caratacus and his family actually in Italy, pardoned and pensioned by Claudius. Under Nero a fresh surge started in 61 with a campaign into north Wales by a new legatus, C. Suetonius Paulinus. He crossed to the isle of Mona (Anglesey) to destroy Britain’s last independent stronghold of Druids – a cult already proscribed in Gaul for alleged human sacrifices and anti-Roman subversion – but any broader expansion plan was frustrated by the great rebellion led by Boudica, widow of the newly deceased king of the Iceni in Norfolk. Perhaps to help pay the costs of the renewed advance, perhaps partly to benefit himself, the imperial procurator declared the kingdom part of the Roman province; much worse, the kingdom and even the royal mansion were looted by army personnel, who did not hold back from outrageous mistreatment of the queen and her two daughters (Chapter 10). Plentiful grievances already existed not only among her people but among neighbours too, especially the Trinovantes who had been forced to put up with the greedy colonists at Camulodunum, and everybody was being exploited by officials and moneylenders (the worst of whom, according to Dio, was Nero’s philosophy mentor and tutor, Seneca). With Roman forces widely separated and in other parts of Britain, this mass rising almost brought imperial rule in Britain down. A legion rashly marching on its own to confront the rebels was badly cut up, Camulodunum, Verulamium and Londinium were utterly destroyed (the ash layer of ad 61 still exists under the City of London), and wide-ranging slaughter and destruction – 70,000 or more Roman and loyalist Britons were killed in gruesome ways – engulfed the south-east. Suetonius Paulinus had only one full legion and part of another (legiones XIV and XX respectively) and units of auxilia, yet eventually succeeded in drawing Boudica’s army into battle and inflicting devastating slaughter which broke

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the rebellion. This was followed up by vengeful reprisals across rebel territories – probably much broader than just the lands of the Iceni and Trinovantes, though these alone are named – until belated common sense prevailed thanks to a new and ethical procurator, C. Julius Alpinus Classicianus. He had Paulinus recalled and a more conciliatory governor took over.3 According to the biographer Suetonius (no known relation to the governor) the rebellion even made Nero briefly consider abandoning the province. Instead another decade of military inactivity followed, marked only by the final rescue of Cartimandua who now lost her throne to her estranged husband Venutius. A fresh forward policy did not open until Vespasian came to power. Between 71 and 83 (or 84) a series of energetic governors – his kinsman C. Petillius Cerealis (commander of the legion savaged by Boudica), then Sex. Julius Frontinus, and after him Tacitus’ father-in-law Cn. Julius Agricola – imposed direct rule on previously independent peoples such as the Brigantes in Yorkshire and those of north Wales, including Anglesey again, and established forts and camps as far north as Caledonia (Scotland). Permanent bases came into being for the Britannic legions: Isca Silurum (Caerleon) in south Wales, Deva (Chester) created probably by Cerealis, and Eburacum (York) probably by Agricola. Auxilia from other parts of the empire and later on units recruited in Britain itself manned lesser forts, notably in the far north edging Caledonia: Vindolanda is the best known. Occasional risings within provincia Britannia and clashes with the Caledonians required regular forces in the island, and these were remarkably large throughout imperial history: around 30,000 troops (at any rate when at full strength), some one-tenth of the empire’s soldiery. In the end, and in spite of Agricola’s victory in 83 or 84 over a grand Caledonian coalition at the still-debated site of Mons Graupius or (more accurately) Craupius, somewhere in northeastern Scotland, effective control seldom moved past the Scottish lowland forts at best. This reality was recognized in the early 120s when Hadrian’s Wall was constructed after a visit by the emperor, stretching from the neighbourhood of modern Carlisle (Luguvallium) over to Newcastle, and confirmed when a short-lived

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line between the firths of Clyde and Forth – an earthen rampart and ditch constructed in 139–40 under Antoninus Pius – was abandoned after only 20 years. And though the emperor Severus and his sons personally campaigned north of the Wall from 208 to 210, any plan (if one existed) of subduing Caledonia ended with Severus’ death at Eburacum in February 211.

◆ While Britain was not Rome’s sole acquisition during the first century ad, others required less strife. A number of technically independent states still existed within or alongside the Augustan and early first-century empire: Greek states such as Athens, Sparta, Rhodes and Cnidos in the Aegean, and Massilia in Transalpine Gaul; Damascus in Syria and Palmyra in the desert beyond; the Judaean kingdom until ad 6 (and briefly again from 41 to 44); and for some decades in post-invasion Britain the Iceni in Norfolk, the Brigantes in Yorkshire, and the Atrebates in Hampshire ruled by their renowned king Cogidubnus. The historic Greek states were left alone, legally at least, but one client-kingdom after another was turned into a province as time passed, for reasons military, financial or dynastic. Galatia’s metamorphosis in 25 bc was mentioned above; Judaea followed in ad 6 because its ruler, Herod the Great’s son Archelaus, proved viciously incompetent. Then in 18 Tiberius took over Cappadocia because its aged king (another Archelaus) was a personal foe – and the new province’s taxes enabled the Roman sales tax to be halved to 0.5 per cent. Gaius Caligula in 40 took over Mauretania in the style of P. Clodius’ annexation of Cyprus: to appropriate its treasury. By curious parallel both the king of Cyprus and that of Mauretania were Ptolemies (the Mauretanian Ptolemy was also Caligula’s halfcousin), and both died violently – the first a suicide, the second summarily executed. Three years after invading Britain Claudius peacefully made a province of Thrace, another client-kingdom since Augustan times. Thrace suffered dynastic instability inherited from earlier ages, and the current king Rhoemetalces III (like Caligula, Claudius himself, and Ptolemy of Mauretania a descendant of Mark Antony) had just

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been murdered by his queen Pythodoris (another descendant). Thrace provided some revenues to the imperial treasury, but the main reasons for annexing it were to burnish Claudius’ expansionist reputation a little more and to fix a firmer grip on the region, now that Rome controlled the entire length of the Danube with plenty of recurrently fractious peoples beyond. These peoples were regular offenders. One legatus of Moesia in Nero’s time, Ti. Plautius Silvanus, boasted in his career inscription of beating back threatened attacks by Sarmatians, Bastarnae and Roxolani, taking their kings’ sons hostage, pacifying the region and – a particularly striking measure – moving more than 100,000 Transdanubian folk to settle in Moesia, an act reminiscent of that by Aelius Catus under Augustus. By implication there was still room in Moesia for new settlers while, temporarily anyway, the move calmed matters beyond the Danube. For his efforts Silvanus was rewarded (though he had to wait until Vespasian’s reign for them) with triumphal insignia and the eminent post of prefect of the City. Frontier safeguarding was again the impetus for the next expansion, a limited move into south-west Germany begun in 73 or 74. Tacitus called the new acquisition the Agri Decumates: it was the partly forested and hilly territory between the upper Rhine and Danube, largely Baden-Württemburg, with no large or organized population (Tacitus scoffed at its occupants, ‘thoroughly volatile Gauls’). A highway built across it shortened communications between the army bases and forts along the two rivers; a town, Arae Flaviae (Rottweil), was soon founded beside the River Neckar as its focus. The first stage of annexation took the border eastward to the Main and Neckar; in Hadrian’s time and after, this advanced from the southern Agri Decumates across to the Danube north-east of Raetia’s Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg): the full length was over 550 kilometres. A regular system of strongpoints and watchtowers, linked together by sturdy timber palisades, developed over time to shield the increasingly prosperous enclave, which remained part of the empire until heavy and constant inroads from Germanic peoples in the later third century made it too great a liability.4

◆

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Rome’s Rhine and Danube neighbours were never entirely quiet. During the first century ad different peoples in free Germany tried their luck from time to time raiding across the Rhine (the Frisii and Chauci in 47, the Chatti in 50 and 82), or trying to migrate into Roman-held territories (as the Frisii and then another people, the Ampsivarii, did in 57; both were ejected), or joining in northern Gallic and Rhineland rebellions. Chatti, Bructeri and other Germans supported for a time the ‘Gallic Empire’ revolt of 69–70 (Chapter 10), and in 88 the irrepressible Chatti – recently warred on by Domitian – backed the over-ambitious legatus of Lower Germany, Antonius Saturninus, in a brief and inglorious revolt. Yet by the 90s the military forces along the Rhine were reduced from eight legions to six, with those frontiers calmer than for a long time past, while serious troubles now afflicted the lower Danube. The uneasy relations between Rome and her Danubian neighbours worsened after Plautius Silvanus’ time. Horse-riding and mail-clad Roxolani raided Moesia in 69 and again in 70, killing its legatus in battle, and had to be driven out by his successor. Their example was followed in 85 by a Dacian army which killed the next governor. The Dacians, united by a vigorous new king, Decebalus, thus became a lasting worry along the lower Danube. In 86 they even annihilated an invading Roman army led, very unusually, not by a senatorial legate but by Domitian’s praetorian prefect Cornelius Fuscus. Although heavily defeated by a new Roman invasion under L. Tettius Julianus two years later, they were saved from worse damage by Saturninus’ Rhineland uprising – a reminder of the problems that the empire always faced when there was disruption on more than one frontier at the same time. Domitian offered Decebalus unusually mild terms, even paying him a yearly subsidy and sending Roman technicians to bolster Dacia’s defences. Decebalus behaved himself for a decade. During the empire’s taxing war in the early 90s against the middle-Danube Marcomanni, Quadi and their allies, in which Pannonia was invaded and – to Roman horror and shame – a legion was destroyed and its sacred eagle standard lost, he let a large Roman expeditionary force pass through Dacia to attack them: elements of nine legions commanded by an experienced military man, C. Velius Rufus. Yet the scope of

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his ambitions, or what the Romans saw as his ambitions, extended well beyond Dacia. Notably, he had contacts with the Parthian king, and by 98 he was viewed again as a threat to the Danubian provinces. Once peace was regained along the middle Danube and an assertive emperor, Trajan, came to power, a new Dacian war – the first of two – was inevitable. At this period the Danube frontier from Pannonia to the Black Sea was held by nine legions, together with several dozen regiments of cavalry and infantry auxilia: if all were reasonably up to strength, the emperor could draw on over 90,000 troops for a Dacian war. In practice he could field only some, for the Marcomanni and the other former enemies west of Dacia had to be watched, but four or five of the legions and large numbers of the auxilia could be used. The first of Trajan’s Dacian wars began in late spring 101 and was finished late in the following year. A double advance into the kingdom, Trajan from the west and one of his generals, M’. Laberius Maximus, from the lower Danube northwards, drove Decebalus back on his capital Sarmizegetusa, deep in the Transylvanian Alps. Trajan won an expensive victory, apparently on the same site as that of Tettius Julianus in 88, and diversionary raids by Sarmatian allies of the king into lower Moesia were thrown back. In mid-102 he was forced to seek terms. These were stringent: along with handing back deserters, his military technicians and all weaponry, he was to level Dacia’s forts and, worst of all, cede a broad arc of his southern lands to the empire. None of this was to the king’s liking. His kingdom had lost productive territory, was watched by Roman forces on three sides – and a humiliated vassal king had a limited life expectancy in his nobles’ eyes unless he asserted himself afresh. After a year or two Decebalus began rebuilding forts in his remaining territories, encouraged Roman army deserters, seized land from unfriendly neighbours such as the Jazyges, and even opened contact with the Parthian king Pacorus. In 105 he provocatively launched hit-and-run raids on Roman outposts in the annexed regions. If he hoped that this would press Trajan into concessions he was badly wrong. A huge concentration of Roman might was formed along the lower Danube in 105 – up to 13 legions including two newly

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created ones – and a memorable stone bridge was erected over the Danube by Trajan’s prime architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, to enable the army to cross securely. Though the invasion was launched only in early 106 and met desperate resistance, Dacia was swiftly overrun, this time without major battles. In the end Sarmizegetusa was captured in midsummer and, after holding out for a time in the Carpathian mountains to its north, Decebalus committed suicide just as the cavalrymen of a veteran officer, Ti. Claudius Maximus, caught up with him. Maximus could do no more than take the heroic king’s head to the emperor. The dramatic scene of his death is depicted both on Trajan’s Column at Rome, erected in 113 in his new Forum, and on the personal monument (found in 1965) that Maximus set up when he retired to Philippi in Macedonia after 118. Trajan annexed Decebalus’ kingdom, and – as also depicted on the Column – expelled many Dacians to make way for colonists from elsewhere. Dacian war prisoners, who in the usual way were sold as slaves, numbered 50,000 according to Trajan’s own doctor and historian, Statilius Crito. Crito recorded too the immense treasures of Dacia – 500,000 Roman pounds’ weight of gold, twice that of silver – which the emperor brought home to spend on great building projects such as his forum, column and libraries, and on lavish shows and gifts to the City’s residents. Booty on this scale had not been seen since the days of Pompey and Caesar. The 20 years of Danubian wars under Domitian and Trajan revealed simultaneously the strength and the limitations of imperial Rome. With 29 legions in the 70s rising to 30 under Trajan and 32 by ad 200, plus roughly equal auxiliary forces – so about 320,000 men in all, at least on paper – Rome could hold the frontiers and mass troops for major conflicts. Trajan gathered nine legions and perhaps 90 auxiliary units for the First Dacian War, and Hadrian 12 legions or detachments of legions to repress the great Jewish rebellion 30 years later. Thirty legions involved not very much greater manpower than those levied by the Roman Republic at the height of the Hannibalic war or in some ensuing major conflicts, and far fewer than the 50 to 60 during the civil wars of 49–30 bc. On the other hand, those efforts had been largely repaid by the plunder and indemnities

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that followed; or in the civil wars by ruthless provincial extortion. The wars of the emperors did not invariably pay for themselves: Augustus’ annexation of north-west Spain, which opened access to huge gold mines, and Trajan’s conquest of Dacia and its mineral wealth, were exceptions rather than the rule. The slow conquest of Britain, after any plunder from its first few years, yielded likewise slow profits at best, while on the debit side the province always supported the sizeable military establishment mentioned above. And if financial benefits accrued from the many German and Danubian wars they can, at best, barely have covered the costs of waging them. Given the size and expense of the military, every emperor knew how risky it was to face more than one serious war at a time. Until the 80s ad Rome had the relative luxury of being able to choose where to fight and when – though competition with Parthia over Armenia, which broke into intermittent hostilities from 48 until 63, may help explain the standstill in Britain after 47 and the brief temptation to abandon the island after Boudica’s revolt. Domitian’s troubles first with the Chatti in Germany and then with Dacia prompted the halt to Agricola’s campaigning (Tacitus later claimed caustically, and exaggeratedly, that ‘Britain was totally subdued and instantly given up’), and once rebellion and war flared on the Rhine and middle Danube, Domitian settled the Dacian war in turn. Only with calm re-established in those areas was Rome able to take on Dacia again; and only because calm thereafter reigned across all frontiers could Trajan envisage a new great war against Parthia.5

◆ Ever since Crassus’ disastrous invasion, Parthian relations with Rome oscillated between hot wars and cool peacetimes. After stunning but short-lived Parthian successes in the late 40s bc, and Antony’s own disastrous reinvasion in 36, eight decades followed of sometimes testy calm until the two empires’ jousting over who should dominate perpetually unstable and strategically positioned Armenia. Although in 62 the Parthians outmanoeuvred a Roman army there, forced it to capitulate and (like the Numantines and Jugurtha) humiliatingly released it, the entirely sensible upshot was that the Parthian king’s half-brother Tiridates ruled Armenia but travelled to Rome

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to undergo Nero’s lavishly expensive ‘confirmation’ in 66. Despite occasional tensions in Vespasian’s time, this arrangement lasted for nearly half a century, until a new quarrel over Armenia’s kingship incited Trajan – almost 60 but still combative – to mount a massive invasion of Armenia and Parthia in 114. The motives are varyingly interpreted: for instance, that he aimed at taking over Parthian trade routes, both the Silk Road from China and the Persian Gulf seaway to India, or at pushing forward the entire eastern frontier to weaken Parthia and give Rome’s eastern provinces a much broader buffer. Contrastingly Cassius Dio, member of a well-established Bithynian family, viewed the cause as Trajan’s personal wish for fresh and grander gloria. A purely economic explanation rests on scattered facts: in 106 the legatus of Syria, A. Cornelius Palma, provincialized the Nabataean Arab kingdom as Arabia Petraea (its main city was ‘rose-red’ Petra) and built a road, Via Nova Traiana, through it to link Syria with the gulf of Aqaba; in 116, with Parthia seemingly crushed, Trajan went down to the shore of the Persian Gulf and wished aloud that he could sail to India like the merchant ship he saw setting out. An ancillary theory is that the rich desert city of Palmyra, a crossroads of trade routes, guided his policies. Strategic motives could of course coexist with gloria-hunting, but how necessary or even useful it was to add trans-Euphrates territories to the empire can be doubted. Very soon after Trajan died his successor (and kinsman) Hadrian abandoned them and renewed peace with Parthia. Peace then endured for over 40 years. To be sure, Senate and People were stunned at the spectacular victories of 114–16: Trajan overthrew the new Parthian-appointed king of Armenia, annexed both Armenia and northern Mesopotamia to its south, then in 116 captured the Parthian capitals Seleuceia and Ctesiphon, and declared Adiabene to the east of Mesopotamia a province too (as ‘Assyria’). Having driven out the Parthian king Osroes, he grandiosely proclaimed a pro-Roman son of the king, Parthamaspates, as ruler of what remained of the kingdom (all of this announced on Trajanic coins). Yet the grand conquests came to nothing. The Parthians mounted furious and widespread counter-attacks into the new provinces,

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buoyed too by widespread rebellions there. Rome’s troubles on the overstretched eastern front were soon hampered even more by serious uprisings of Jews in Alexandria, Cyrene and Cyprus, who came to blows with their Greek fellow residents amid bloodshed and destruction. Trajan himself spent the later part of 116 or early 117 fruitlessly trying to take the strategic fortress city of Hatra (and nearly getting himself killed), while his generals – most notably the Mauretanian prince Lusius Quietus – more or less restored the situation elsewhere. Ill with dropsy and a stroke, the elderly emperor left the war to them to die en route to Rome in August 117. By 118 both the war and the annexations were over.6 Hadrian rejected advice to pull out of Dacia too, for occupation and settlement there were now well advanced. Under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, though, military expansion was avoided save for the short-lived extension of Britain’s frontier to the Antonine Wall, between the firths of Clyde and Forth. Military operations were still needed from time to time: most notably those from 132 to 135 against the great Jewish revolt in Judaea, a challenge to Roman rule as stressful as the Pannonian and Dalmatian rebellion in ad 6–9 (Chapter 10): it left the province (thereafter renamed Syria Palaestina, and Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina) ravaged and depopulated. Also in the 130s, in Cappadocia the governor and future historian L. Flavius Arrianus had to deter an army of Alani, nomadic horsemen from beyond the Caucasus fond of destructive raiding like the trans-Danubian Sarmatae and Roxolani. A coin of around 141 announced in headline style ‘King Given to Quadi’, Rex Quadis Datus, probably marking a settling of troubles across the middle Danube that had flared up in 137–38. Antoninus’ reign too faced revolts or raids in Mauretania (where it seems incursions from the Berber desert fringes were endemic), Spain and Dacia, all poorly recorded like everything else in his long reign.7

◆ These relatively easy times had begun to change when Marcus Aurelius became princeps in 161. The philosopher-emperor suffered a seemingly endless succession of wars and stresses. Internal outbreaks added to his woes. Mauretanian insurgents even invaded southern Spain, and

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in the Nile delta in the early 170s discontented farmers nicknamed boukoloi, ‘cattlemen’, raised a serious revolt (they menaced Alexandria) until suppressed by C. Avidius Cassius. Yet the worst internal calamity by far was the outbreak of plague, supposedly brought back from Parthia by Rome’s victorious armies in 165. This was perhaps smallpox or typhus: it ravaged much of the empire, including Italy and – worst of all for military security – army camps, lasted for well over a decade (Marcus himself may have died of it), and killed apparently as much as 10 per cent of the empire’s entire population. At the same time virtually the entire two decades of Marcus’ reign were taken up by wars. In 161 the Parthians provocatively put one of their princes onto the Armenian throne again (the same tactic as in Trajan’s time), destroying a legion that tried to intervene – it may have been the famous ‘lost legion’ IX Hispana – and its commander M. Sedatius Severianus, the legatus of Cappadocia. They then menaced the Euphrates frontier, though in the event they came no further and perhaps supposed they had taught the Romans a lasting lesson. The lull left the way clear for the empire to retaliate, with armies nominally under the overall command of Marcus’ genial if unmilitary co-emperor Lucius Verus. Able subordinates, Avidius Cassius, P. Martius Verus and M. Statius Priscus, launched successful operations in 163 to reoccupy Armenia, then in 165–6 to take control over all the territories between the Euphrates and Tigris, capture and sack Seleuceia and Ctesiphon, and even cross the Tigris to win a victory in Media (north-west Iran). Although the war thus ended in Parthia’s complete defeat, there were no annexations this time. Not only had Marcus’ government learned the Trajanic lesson about eastern overextension, but by 166 war with the increasingly turbulent Marcomanni, Quadi, Jazyges and other trans-Danubian peoples could no longer be staved off.8 The European borders had been largely quiet since the Dacian wars, despite intermittent disturbances. In the 160s came dramatic change. The Rhine and Gaul’s north-east coast were sporadically harassed by Germans such as the Chatti and Chauci. Pressed by other peoples wandering or migrating across eastern Europe, perhaps too by growing populations of their own, Marcomanni, Quadi and others pushed into the provinces at various times, intent

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on raiding and – some at least – on settling, and unworried at the plague that continued to rage across the Roman world. The first serious blow was struck by a force of Langobardi (a people later to be known more famously as Lombards) and Obii raiding Pannonia in 166. They were driven out, but the much more dangerous Marcomanni and Quadi now clamoured to be allowed across the Danube to settle. Instead the imperial authorities strengthened the middle Danube defences, among other measures raising two new legions called II and III Italica. A powerful army was readied during 169 to subdue the troublesome lands beyond the river, and it crossed the Danube the following year under Marcus Aurelius’ own command – to meet catastrophic defeat. The contemporary writer Lucian of Samosata afterwards claimed that nearly 20,000 men were lost; if even roughly correct, that would account for half, more or less, of Marcus’ forces. The direct outcome was that the barbarians surged into Pannonia, through that province, and over the eastern Alps into Italy. Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic repelled them but Opitergium (Oderzo) 80 kilometres to its west was, wrote the fourth-century historian Ammianus, ‘wiped out’.9 Luckily for the empire, this time the invaders were satisfied with spending the year raiding and looting. Marcus was able to reorganize Roman counter-efforts, with the sterling aid of his eminent son-in-law Ti. Claudius Pompeianus and able subordinates such as M. Valerius Maximianus (a Pannonian himself) and P. Helvius Pertinax. In 171 the emperor defeated the retiring Marcomanni as they sought to recross the Danube (and even recovered the booty they had taken) and pushed the Quadi to make a separate peace. Strikingly the terms included their handing back well over 13,000 prisoners (who must have been scooped up in their raids) and deserters, a token of the upheaval wrought by the invasion. A year later, though, they were back in arms, then accepted peace again in 173 (the Marcomanni had done so already), and broke it again in 174 together with the equally hard-nosed Jazyges of the Hungarian plains. But both peoples and their allies finally came to terms in 174 and 175. The Jazyges, Dio recorded, handed back 100,000 captives – an extraordinary number if rightly transmitted – and all the defeated peoples had to provide military forces for tasks in other regions.

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The lower Danube also suffered. In 170 northern raiders called the Costoboci, apparently Sarmatians from beyond Dacia, broke into Moesia, defeated and killed the governor Fronto, and then ranged at will southwards through Thrace and Macedonia and deep into Greece. They reached as far as Eleusis, outside Athens, and sacked the sacred shrine of the Eleusinian Mysteries before withdrawing. It cannot have been much consolation to the stripped and harried provincials that in the meantime the Romans had induced neighbours of the Costoboci, the Asding Vandals (another name with a future), to seize the absent warriors’ lands. In 175 Marcus needed peace because his trusted friend Avidius Cassius, legatus of Syria and effectively the viceroy of the east, declared himself emperor on a report that Marcus was dead. Avidius was killed by his own men when the news proved false, ‘after a dream of empire lasting three months and six days’, wrote Dio, but his rebellion affected operations on the Danube frontier: Marcus had been considering a plan, or had accepted it, to annex the broad territories of the Marcomanni, Quadi and Jazyges as two new provinces, but he shelved it to deal with the eastern coup.10 As swiftly as that rising subsided, nonetheless it seems to have encouraged the peoples of the upper and middle Danube to take the field again. They may have had word, or simply feared the possibility, of Roman intentions to annex. The Balkan provinces meanwhile were in turmoil, overrun by brigands who must have been mainly looted and uprooted provincials, along with bands of invaders who had managed to stay behind (Chapter 10). By 178 the military situation was dangerous enough for the already ageing and unwell Marcus to return to the region, this time accompanied by his teenaged son and fully equal co-emperor Commodus. The Jazyges yet again sought and were granted peace, while Roman forces in strength crossed the Danube to occupy Quadic and Marcomannic territory. By the winter of 179–80 there were 20,000 troops garrisoning Bohemia and equally many among the Quadi. A rock inscription at Laugaricio (Trenčín, 130 kilometres north of the Danube at Bratislava) records an 850-strong unit of Legio II Augusta stationed there under its legate Valerius Maximianus.

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Marcus may once more have intended to annex the entire swathe of territories dwelt in by the defeated peoples: so Dio and the much later author of the Historia Augusta insisted. Dio and others blamed Commodus for supposedly being too eager to return to Rome’s fleshpots after his father died in March 180. Yet Marcus’ experienced counsellors, including Claudius Pompeianus and the praetorian prefect P. Tarrutienus Paternus, made no known protest. Significantly too, the Danube frontier then had almost 60 years of peace. Even so that need not be the sole point to make. To extend the frontiers to the mountain ranges around northern Bohemia and to the Carpathians – if that was Marcus’ intent – would have given the empire a deeper buffer zone facing the peoples on the move across eastern Europe (Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, Heruli and more). At the same time it could have eventually provincialized the Marcomanni, Quadi and other annexed peoples, much as the Pannonians, Dalmatians, Moesians and Dacians had been, and added them to Rome’s potential recruitment pool for soldiers and civic leaders. Whether such incorporations would have averted the eventual collapse of the western Roman empire, 300 years in the future, can never be known.

◆ Commodus proved to be a Nero-style dynastic disaster and was eliminated in a palace coup, promoted by his praetorian prefect and his mistress, on the last day of 192. The eventful year 193 elevated and then destroyed first a strict reformist emperor, Marcus Aurelius’ veteran general P. Helvius Pertinax, who like Nero’s overstrict successor Galba fell foul of the Praetorian Guard; then a rich former consul M. Didius Julianus who, notoriously, bought the throne via the murderous praetorians with a colossal bribe of 25,000 sesterces per man, about six years’ pay. This earned him a reign of 66 days, late March until early June, until a military coup by Upper Pannonia’s legatus, L. Septimius Severus, struck him down. Over the next four years Severus in turn had to deal with two would-be rivals, C. Pescennius Niger in the east in 193–4 and D. Clodius Albinus (another North African) in the west in 196–7: in this way Rome and

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the empire suffered, and on a still greater scale than in 69, a new series of destructive civil wars that set a precedent for the coming century’s mayhem. Severus, the first emperor from North Africa, lasted until 211, died in his bed at Eburacum in Britain, and left a dynasty which endured until 235. One of his unusual public relations devices was to adopt himself retrospectively into Marcus Aurelius’ family: he renamed his elder son M. Aurelius Antoninus (we call him Caracalla, a nickname the Roman commons gave him) and made the two boys’ ‘brother’ Commodus a god, thus annexing a pedigree back to Trajan’s adoptive father Nerva. He outdid his adopted father Marcus by making both sons his co-emperors, Caracalla in 198 and Geta in 209. This did not long preserve Geta after Severus died, for his intolerant brother personally murdered him in the palace at Rome – in fact as their mother desperately tried to protect him – at the end of the same year. Severus relied on the support of the armies more openly than any of his predecessors: his deathbed advice to his sons was ‘stick together, enrich the soldiers, despise all others’. Civil war victories being dubious recommendations, he resorted like so many predecessors to Parthian confrontation. Between and after liquidating his rivals, he launched a new eastern war in 195 and then a second in 197–8. He claimed that the Parthians had supported Niger, but the stronger motive – as his contemporary Dio stressed with disapproval – was to gain proper gloria. His successes were spectacular: once more, for the third time since 115, Mesopotamia was overrun, the lands between Euphrates and Tigris were invaded, and legions captured Ctesiphon and Seleuceia. Like Trajan and unlike Marcus Aurelius, Severus decided on annexing territory; unlike Trajan, it was on a smaller and more tenable scale. Northern Mesopotamia – essentially the small kingdoms of Osrhoene and Adiabene, Trajan’s ‘Assyria’ – became Rome’s newest province. It was also the last. The province with its powerful fortress city of Nisibis was to remain part of the empire until 364 – longer than Dacia, which was given up after 270 under heavy barbarian pressure. Yet in the end the Severan conquest was self-defeating. Dio recognized this: it was costly (he wrote), yielded little revenue and

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led to repeated new wars with Parthia. Worse, Rome’s repeated blows to the Parthian monarchy helped to bring it down in 224 – Dio was still alive to see it – to be replaced by a resurgent native Persian dynasty, the Sassanids, who over the next four centuries inflicted far greater damage on the Roman empire.11 In the year 200 the empire stood at its greatest enduring extent. Roman power and government stretched from Spain’s Atlantic coasts to the Crimea, the upper Tigris and the highlands of Armenia, and from the north of Britain to the Sahara and the southern edges of Egypt. A large proportion, maybe more than half, of free provincials were now Roman citizens and the rest were to follow in the next decade thanks to Caracalla. The citizen legions holding the frontiers consisted mainly of provincials, as indeed did many of the army’s auxilia; even Severus’ Praetorian Guard was formed from non-Italian Romans. Rome’s ruling elites – senators and equites – were as much provincial as Italian. So too the imperial dynasties: Severus was from Lepcis Magna in provincia Africa, his wife Julia Domna from Syria; their contemporary and historian Cassius Dio was a Bithynian; 35 years later a Thracian-born general, C. Julius Maximinus, would be princeps. This empire would have been unthinkable to the Roman imperialists of Scipio Africanus’, Polybius’ or even Cicero’s time, for whom Romans were precisely inhabitants of Italy with (by Cicero’s day) some kinsmen beyond. Now an integrated polity on a scale unexampled in Mediterranean history, Rome was to face no less unexampled stresses in the century that opened in 201.

CHAPTER 7

The New Romans

B

y the time Tiberius replaced Augustus as princeps in ad 14, the empire was beginning to change its character. The largescale, almost industrial-level exactions and plunders of the late Republic had ended. Governors received salaries and were scrutinized from Rome. Romans seeking public careers had to be beholden to Rome’s ‘guardian and protector’, but there were more public offices and ensuing appointments than ever: 20 quaestors and 12 praetors yearly, 25 legions requiring commanders (legati), and governorships of all but a few provinces. A career in public life by ad 14 had an increasingly regular structure while facing at least a measure of competitiveness – even if competition was now between individuals and groups vying for the ruler’s favour. And across the Roman world the number of cives Romani was growing remarkably. Whereas 910,000 had been registered in 69 bc (although this almost certainly did not represent the full total), Augustus’ three censuses between 28 bc and ad 14, far more thoroughly carried out, showed just over 4 million in the earliest and just under 5 million in the last; Rome’s final recorded census figure, taken in ad 48–9 by his great-nephew Claudius, was 5,984,072. The rises were due less to simple population growth (though no doubt this contributed), and more to grants of Roman citizenship by Caesar, Augustus and their successors, especially to western provincial cities and communities but also to selected communities and persons east of the Adriatic.1 When the Greek orator P. Aelius Aristides addressed his Roman audience in Antoninus Pius’ time, he was especially lyrical about 124

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how they welcomed deserving people into citizenship (this included himself): Dividing into two groups all those in your empire – and with this word I have indicated the entire civilized world – you have everywhere appointed to your citizenship, or even to kinship with you, the better part of the world’s talent, courage and leadership.

He went on: ‘In your empire all paths are open to all. No one worthy of rule or trust remains an alien’, and so ‘you have caused the word Roman to be the label, not of membership in a city, but of some common nationality.’ And – tellingly – ‘the men of greatest standing and influence in every city guard their own fatherlands for you. And you have a double hold upon the cities, both from here and from your fellow citizens in each.’ Aristides, an aristocrat from Asia Minor, chose to applaud how Rome conferred citizenship on the provincial elites around the empire, since he held the firm belief that the dominance of elites over their communities made for the best of all possible worlds. In reality, new Roman citizens belonged to every social level, as they had from the start. In the fourth and third centuries bc, when the republic was expanding its hegemony through one part of Italy after another, it had sometimes incorporated defeated cities and communities rather than making or renewing treaties with them. Paradoxically, this had been a way of keeping such places under control and the new citizens did not always appreciate it – Tusculum, for example, enfranchised in 381 bc, nonetheless took part in the revolt by Rome’s Latin allies in 340 and was punished. Likewise the Campanians who became ‘citizens without the vote’ in 343 found their status increasingly irksome, joined Hannibal’s side in 216, and likewise suffered punishment afterwards. By contrast, once the res publica grew into a hegemonial and then an imperial power its citizenship became something to value, until by the start of the first century bc it was coveted by both the Latin and allied peoples of Italy (with a few exceptions, such as Naples). Citizen numbers had always grown in other ways too. Citizens of Latin towns and colonies were entitled to settle at Rome and be

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entered on the census registers; after the Second Punic War so many did that, in 187 bc, the Senate ordered no fewer than 12,000 back to their home towns. The movement soon restarted, for ten years later the order was repeated with probably no greater effect. Still more important, slaves of Roman citizens, when set free under due process before a praetor, were from then on Romans themselves. They had to bear some restrictions, for instance owing obligations to their former masters (now their patroni) and being barred from office. But children born after they gained freedom had no such trammels; Horace the poet was one. Slaves before 264 were – largely anyway – Italian war captives, which no doubt made transition to citizenship culturally easier. After 264 it was partly the wars overseas and north of the Italian peninsula that fed the slave supply; but another source was the commercial market fed – partly at least – by wholesale kidnappings from coastal regions by pirates and even by Roman negotiatores, about whom the harassed king of Bithynia complained in 104. The slaves likeliest to earn manumission worked in their owners’ households. Slaves on farms, in mines and other drudgeries seldom had hope of it. On being freed the former slave libertus acquired his patron’s first and family names (praenomen and nomen), while keeping his own name as a cognomen or taking on a more Latin one. Freed Greeks usually opted to preserve their own names, one of them perhaps the third-century bc poet Livius Andronicus, and likewise the Augustan-age baker M. Vergilius Eurysaces whose grandiose monument still stands beside the Porta Maggiore in Rome. The best-known examples of former slave Romans are M. Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s highly educated and devoted secretary – whom the orator had inherited from his father – and, a century earlier, the playwright P. Terentius Afer whose cognomen referred to his birth land and whose master Terentius Lucanus had freed him while he was still a youth. Another new Roman of Terence’s time was Cn. Publicius Menander, perhaps a former state-slave, servus publicus (his nomen implies this) – so valued as an interpreter for Roman envoys to Greece that a special law protected him should he revisit his home town, for otherwise he would have forfeited his Roman citizenship.2 Manumissions had already become plentiful. In 217 bc Philip V of Macedon, trying to encourage his Greek allies to build up their

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citizen populations, singled out how willing the Romans were to enfranchise even freedmen and (he added inaccurately) how this had enabled them to found 70 new cities. Scipio Aemilianus’ supposed insults to an abusive crowd at Rome in 131 were probably exaggerated later – ‘you for whom Italy is a stepmother’ and ‘whom I brought in bonds to Italy’ (there is no record of captive Carthaginians and Spaniards being freed and enfranchised en masse, still less that they formed virtually the entire citizen body) – but there may well have been enough new Romans then, from all sources, for Scipio to sneer at them when booed. Slaves freed in their late owner’s will were plentiful enough, in turn, for the Augustan-era Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus to disapprove (too many, he argued, were vicious), and for Augustus to back a consuls’ law of 2 bc strictly limiting the numbers who could be so freed – half a household if the owner possessed two to ten, rising to 100 at maximum should he own over 500. Ex-slaves, if freed informally by owners – through a simple declaration before witnesses, for instance – gained a legal status modelled on ius Latii, called ‘Junian Latinity’, but if a Junian Latin married an ordinary Latin or Roman wife and they had a child who lived beyond one year, the whole family could become Romans. A group of wax tablets from Herculaneum in Campania neatly shows the rather elaborate procedure: in July ad 60, L. Venidius Ennychus and his wife Livia Acte, both Junian Latins, announced before witnesses that they had a daughter; one year later Herculaneum’s senate apparently recognized the little girl’s survival (though the tablet is fragmentary), and so early in 62 the City praetor at Rome declared them cives. In a province, the final declaration would have fallen to the governor. More civitas grants may have been made during the second century bc (evidence is sparse); from around 100 bc they greatly increased. Spain’s Salluitan cavalrymen enfranchised in Italy in 89 have already been mentioned; as their commemorative bronze tablet states, they were awarded civitas Romana ‘for valour’ (virtutis caussa). In 72 Pompey the Great, victorious in Spain, was authorized by a special law to confer it on provincials for loyal efforts in the long war against Q. Sertorius. The historian Pompeius Trogus’

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grandfather was a beneficiary, but the most notable one was Balbus of Gades.3 In 90–89 came the great enfranchisements of the Latins, socii Italici, and Cisalpine Gaul south of the River Po (Cispadana), while the Cisalpine communities beyond the Po became Latins like Carteia in Spain. Surviving census figures are notoriously debatable, but the rise from that of 115 bc (394,336) to the total recorded for 69 must reflect, if incompletely, how peninsular Italy was transformed into the expanded res publica populi Romani. The boyhood of Cicero, Pompey and Caesar therefore saw a crucial innovation: civitas, or what was now its next-best companion, ius Latii, being extended en bloc to whole territories. Next, the new monarchs Caesar and Augustus spread both widely through Rome’s oldest western provinces by awarding one or the other to numerous and no doubt deserving communities. They also settled large numbers of discharged veterans in western lands, especially Transalpine Gaul, Spain and North Africa.

◆ How many Romans there came to be during the Principate is equally debated, as is whether Augustus continued the practice of registering men aged 16 and above, or started a new and broader count to embrace all Roman men over the age of one – or women as well as men. Moreover the true citizen population was almost certainly larger at any time, for some level of undercounting must be assumed as in many modern censuses: at least 5 per cent, perhaps more. If only adult males were registered still, in ad 48 they plus their wives and children will have numbered some 20–21 million persons. By contrast, if males aged one and above, and at least some female citizens (those of independent means for instance), were counted, the final total of Romans in Claudius’ empire would be lower, somewhere on either side of 10 million. Whatever the detailed breakdowns, a 47 per cent growth in the recorded totals over these 75 years, and 21 per cent between ad 14 and 48, are hard to account for simply as due to natural increase – or even to natural increase plus Romans’ slave manumissions. It must reflect the extensions of civitas abroad too. For Augustus’ time one (ambitious) estimate

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reckons provincial citizens at about 7 million strong, but a much more conservative estimate, of provincial adult male Romans only, offers 375,000 to half a million.4 By ad 14 the provinces were dotted with Roman and Latin cities alongside ordinary provincial ones: municipia of Romans, oppida Latina (the two terms were not always consistently used) and coloniae Romanae, all of them privileged centres alongside the provinces’ ordinary communities. Coloniae Romanae had begun, in Italy, as small settlements of citizens founded at strategic sites, but in provinces they were larger and could involve either civilians – such as C. Gracchus’ thwarted plan for Junonia at Carthage, and Transalpina’s more successful Narbo Martius – or discharged veterans, or both. Caesar and his successor regularly set up colonies at or alongside provincial cities, which often brought citizenship to the locals too (as had happened at Latin Carteia back in 171). Properly speaking, a municipium civium Romanorum was a provincial community awarded civitas as a body: Gades, for example, rewarded by Caesar in 49 bc no doubt through Balbus’ lobbying. By Augustus’ day southern Spain, now the separate province of Baetica, had nine other municipia besides Gades, while provincia Africa could boast 15. Nearer Spain, now called Tarraconensis after its administrative capital Tarraco, was also well furnished with them, yet not so Transalpine Gaul where cities of Latin status were plentiful.5 Latin right was another path to citizenship for the men elected to Latin towns’ yearly magistracies and their families. This privilege seems to have developed in the later second century bc, perhaps a concession to the elites of the Latin towns growing restive at their subordination. At first it was a town’s principal pair, usually called duoviri, who benefited; later on so did the lesser pairs, termed aediles and quaestors like those at Rome. In the second century ad all members of the town senate (its ordo) acquired civitas (this wider version of Latin right was termed Latium maius), at least if the ordo petitioned the emperor successfully, such as the prosperous North African town of Gigthis west of modern Tripoli in Antoninus Pius’ time. Meanwhile the most notable block award of ius Latii was by Vespasian to Spain in ad 73, turning all Spain’s remaining ordinary

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provincial communities into Latin towns – the fashionable term was by then municipia Latina – although surviving inscriptions show that setting up proper Latin constitutions took them a decade or more.6 Strikingly, east of the Adriatic Sea municipia Romana were few, Roman colonies fewer than in the west, and towns with Latin right non-existent. Egypt, together with Asia the wealthiest province in the empire, had none of any type. However, individuals in eastern lands did receive grants of civitas as rewards for service to Rome: an early example was the naval commander Seleucus of Rhosus (a coastal Syrian city), whose award from Octavian as Triumvir – it included his wife, children and other kinsfolk – was set out in a lengthy edict of 41 bc or so, and confirmed in further edicts down to 30. By Aristides’ time this was common for wealthier easterners, as he stressed. Professional military service was a major avenue for ordinary provincials to become Romans. Whereas in the Republic’s era only citizens could be recruited for the legions, the rule was relaxed in the civil wars of the 40s and 30s. Caesar’s famous Transalpine legion V Alaudae was an early example, while a Galatian unit originally raised by its king Deiotarus (M. Brutus’ debtor in Cicero’s time) became legio XXII Deiotariana after Galatia was annexed, then was transferred to Egypt where it was still serving under Trajan. The permanent army of the Principate, with legions stationed in longlasting camps in distant provinces, not only enlisted cives Romani and recruits from oppida Latina, but in the eastern provinces ordinary provincials (socii or peregrini) too, who were accorded citizenship on joining up. Provincials recruited for the auxilia and the fleets became Romans after 25 years’ service, as surviving bronze discharge tablets now called diplomata militaria show, and with the serviceman his wife and any future children.7 With something like a quarter to a third of a million men in the armies and fleets during the first and second centuries, the number of new Romans created in these ways added substantially to the total of cives generation by generation. Some 7,000 army veterans each year (on estimated average) received honourable discharges and about half were from the auxilia. As time passed and military bases

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became fixed, veterans tended to settle down with their families near their old camps, or in provinces nearby, or in new colonies such as Emerita Augusta in Spain and Camulodunum in Britain. Towns such as Isca Silurum (Caerleon) and Deva (Chester) in Britain, Legio (León) in northern Spain, Bonna (Bonn) and Moguntiacum (Mainz) in the Rhineland, and Vindobona (Vienna) and Aquincum (Budapest) on the middle Danube began from army camps. Former soldiers were important members of any community, enjoying privileged exemptions from unpleasant duties (such as billeting and forced labour) and from various taxes – but could be obnoxious members too, such as the unscrupulous Camulodunum colonists. Even though civitas was less widely spread in the eastern half of the empire, there too a very large proportion of the peoples under Roman rule were Romans themselves by ad 200. Aelius Aristides had already exulted in this decades earlier. Meanwhile inscriptions indicate that the proportion of Italians joining the army steadily lessened: from about 65 per cent under Augustus and Tiberius to not much over 20 per cent a century later – then to hardly 1 per cent during the second century. In the second century, Italians were recruited mainly for the Praetorian Guard and for new legions (for example, two each by Trajan and M. Aurelius, and three by Severus – who cashiered the volatile Italian-born Praetorians in 193 and opened the Guard to selected provincial legionaries). Even by Trajan’s time the Roman empire was defended, and from time to time extended, by the descendants of the peoples whom Rome had once conquered. Caracalla’s citizenship decree of 212 was an unsurprisingly logical next step.8

◆ The conventions for Roman names illustrate how and when citizenship spread. In Italy, Latins and socii Italici simply maintained theirs on becoming Romans. Outside Italy, few peoples used more than a single name in ordinary life: as mentioned above, a foreign new Roman would take his sponsor’s praenomen and nomen, keeping his own as a cognomen or adopting a Roman one. Citizenship conferred in Republican times therefore reflected the name of a Roman patron, as illustrated by M. Valerius Mottones, Pompey the

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Great’s friend and personal historian Cn. Pompeius Theophanes of Mytilene, and a Sicilian friend of Cicero named P. Cornelius Demetrius Megas who owed his civitas and Roman names to the orator’s son-in-law P. Cornelius Dolabella. Pompey’s Gaditane friend Balbus apparently took his first names from a legatus of Pompey in Spain, L. Cornelius Lentulus; his cognomen was probably a Latinized form of his Punic name which paid homage to the Phoenician and Punic god Baal. In turn the provincials, western and eastern, made Romans by Caesar and Augustus mostly took the first names C. Iulius: C. Julius Alpinus Classicianus, the conciliatory procurator of Britain in ad 61, was no doubt a descendant of one, so too his wife Julia Pacata. Tacitus’ father-in-law was another (Agricola’s praenomen, though, was Gnaeus). Notable other examples included Julius Eurycles, despot of Sparta under Augustus until he lost favour and was banished, and Julius Aquila from Asia Minor who was prefect of Egypt around ad 10. The German princes Segestes and his son-in-law Arminius – one a steadfast Roman loyalist, the other the great rebel – were no doubt Julii. The royal Gallic ancestor of Julius Vindex, the legatus of Aquitania who rebelled against Nero in ad 68, had earned civitas from Caesar himself. Julii again were the leaders of the attempted breakaway in the Rhineland and north-west Gaul a year later, all descended from similar recipients: the one-eyed Batavian Civilis and the northern Gallic aristocrats Classicus, Tutor, Sabinus and Valentinus. Thousands of inscriptions and other documents in turn show the same first names widely spread over every province and social level. As one princeps succeeded another, appropriately different first and second names appeared among new citizens: Ti. Iulius for persons enfranchised by Tiberius, then Ti. Claudius in the reigns of Claudius (and perhaps Nero). Vespasian and his sons created citizens named T. Flavius, including the Jewish historian Josephus. From Trajan new Romans took the names M. Ulpius; Hadrian’s new citizens, like Aristides, used P. Aelius. As most emperors during the rest of the second century bore the family name Aurelius, this in turn was taken by successive series of new citizens. Finally, because Septimius Severus’ elder son L. Septimius Bassianus (later

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nicknamed ‘Caracalla’) became M. Aurelius Antoninus for dynastic propaganda purposes, his edict in 212 proclaiming civitas Romana for every remaining non-Roman provincial (with just a few exceptions) made the names ‘Aurelius’ – and in particular ‘M. Aurelius’ – sweep across the empire in immense volume: immense enough to begin transforming styles of naming.9 Not every Roman provincial bore imperial nomina. Some were descendants of men granted citizenship under the Republic through proconsuls, governors or patrons. Claudius’ doctor C. Stertinius Xenophon of Cos, the Aegean island with a famous medical school, may have been one, Nero’s first praetorian prefect Sex. Afranius Burrus, from Vasio in Transalpina (Vaison-la-Romaine), another. The forebears of two eminent physicians from Caria in southern Asia Minor, T. Statilius Crito who ministered to Trajan, and his younger kinsman T. Statilius Attalus, doctor to Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, must have become citizens through the Augustan grandee Statilius Taurus or one of his first-century descendants. Moreover the nomina of several old Roman noble houses, especially Aemilius, Cornelius, Fabius and Valerius, appear plentifully in provincial Romans during later centuries. The nomen Cassius, deriving very possibly from one or another member of that Roman consular family – Caesar’s assassin, for example, had plentiful links to eastern provinces – reappeared in the Bithynian historian L. Cassius Dio and his father Cassius Apronianus, both of them leading senators and consuls (Dio twice, in 204 and 223); perhaps too in Marcus Aurelius’ faithless friend, the Syrian general C. Avidius Cassius: if so through his mother’s family, for his father had been an Avidius Heliodorus, drawn probably from another personal patron. For some provincial Romans, an old local or family name might be adapted to Roman form: Burrus’ friend and fellow townsman L. Duvius Avitus, governor of the lower Rhineland province in 57–8, bore a seemingly Gallic nomen, and so too a mid-third-century Gallic grandee, T. Sennius Sollemnis, whom – technically a mere eques – even imperial governors chose to cultivate. At a much lower social level can be found L. Reburrinius Candidus, a soldier from Ara Agrippinensis (Cologne) around ad 80, bearing a nomen

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possibly from Celtic Spain (if not coined from a later Latin word reburrus, ‘prickly’).10 By contrast the descendants of Romans and Italians settled abroad kept their old family names – the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca and his father, and the emperor M. Ulpius Traianus were Spanish Romans with Italian ancestors (Cassius Dio wrongly termed Trajan a pure Spaniard). This had no social or legal implications: Romans in Italy, and Italian-descended provincial Romans, were not distinct or separate from provincial Romans of native ancestry. Trajan’s wife Pompeia Plotina, from Nemausus (Nîmes), bore a nomen that went back to Pompey the Great’s grants in Transalpina. The briefly reigning emperor in 193, P. Helvius Pertinax, a Cisalpine Italian, had as father-in-law a Cretan grandee, T. Flavius Sulpicianus, whose first names proclaimed an ancestor enfranchised under Vespasian or his sons. Sulpicianus was one of the two bidders – his competitor another Cisalpine Italian, M. Didius Julianus – in the infamous ‘auction of empire’ after Pertinax’s murder in March 193, when each tried to win the praetorians’ support by offering more and more massive bribes. Luckily for Sulpicianus, he lost.

◆ The emperor Claudius, who was also a historical scholar, reminded the Senate in ad 48 that Rome’s ruling elite had always evolved, even at its highest level, in response to changes and opportunities. As Roman territory expanded in Italy, this gave local aristocrats in the annexed Italian communities the opportunity to seek office at Rome, an opportunity successfully taken for example by the Fulvii and Porcii of Tusculum, later by C. Marius and the Cicero brothers, all from Arpinum. During the civil wars of 49–30 bc other ‘new men’ from now enfranchised parts of Italy arrived, such as C. Asinius Pollio (a consul, general and historian) from central Italy, the Lucanian T. Statilius Taurus, Q. Poppaeus Sabinus from central Italy (grandfather of Nero’s notorious empress), and – from somewhere in Italy he never publicized – Augustus’ indispensable friend, colleague and son-in-law M. Agrippa. Other Italian aristocrats sought not magistracies but posts in the emperor’s service: tax-collecting procuratores in his provinces, praefecti governing smaller territories such

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as Alpes Maritimae and Judaea (for instance Pontius Pilatus, another central Italian), and – the highest levels of equestrian office – the prefects of Egypt and of the Praetorian Guard. The new monarchy thus marked the rise of aristocrats from all parts of Italy to eminence and power. Consulships and governorships were replete with Italian novi homines as well as members of old Roman families. In fact ancient nobilis families such as the Cornelii and Caecilii slowly dwindled. The incorporation of once-allied Italy into the res publica populi Romani was symbolically complete when, one year after Nero’s suicide, three former consuls of regional Italian ancestry were in turn acclaimed emperor: Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian – each admittedly through a bloody sequence of coups and civil wars. By ad 69 too, they and their fellow Italians in the ruling elite had been joined by growing numbers of Romans from abroad.11 By the middle of the first century ad provincial Romans were plentiful both in the Senate and as equites in imperial service, whom Tacitus called ‘the equestrian nobilitas’. As mentioned earlier (Chapter 3), the first provincial senator of any note had emerged by 90 bc in the shape of Q. Varius from Sucro in Spain. Others followed as the century moved on, Cornelius Balbus among them, one of the very few so early to reach a consulship. The oldest continental provinces – the Spains (now Tarraconensis, Baetica and Lusitania) and Transalpina-Narbonensis – supplied the largest numbers at first. From the 70s and 80s senators and equites from North Africa and Asia Minor, too, started to appear at the highest levels. This broadening of the power elite was due, as within Italy, to the Principate’s need to reward loyalists and develop support in the steadily growing citizen regions beyond. Although Italian-born senators remained the majority in that body until at least the early third century, provincial Romans long before then attained equally high office and power. Their progress in the Senate, early on at least, caused some resentment among their Italian confrères: Claudius’ history-laden speech in 48 was due to the (still largely Italian) Senate’s dislike of his bringing in young aristocrats from Gaul beyond Narbonensis – this even though many Narbonese and Spanish aristocrats were already senators. By the

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time that Trajan from Baetica became princeps – if not sooner – being from Italy was no longer a particular advantage to an official or political career. The Principate itself was the most vivid example. Chosen as heir by the Italian Nerva, Trajan began an adoption-based dynasty of Spaniards and Narbonese that lasted until the erratic Commodus was murdered on New Year’s Eve 192. That dynasty was swiftly replaced, though soon borrowed back, by that of Septimius Severus, a fusion of African provincials (on his side) and Syrian (on his wife Julia Domna’s) that endured from 193 until 235 – with a short-lived interruption in 217–18 by the Mauretanian M. Opellius Macrinus, the first non-senator to take the throne (he soon lived to regret it). A military non-senator from Thrace, C. Julius Verus Maximinus, overthrew the last Severan, the anaemic Severus Alexander, in 235, to open a half-century procession of brief emperors – himself included – and would-be emperors who originated from practically every region of the empire save Britain and Egypt. It was an unexpected side-effect of Caracalla’s universal enfranchisement. Provincial emperors were merely the top of the new Roman iceberg. Other provincials were ministers, confidants or kinsmen of rulers, many of them playing notable roles in history. Seneca and Burrus largely ran the empire for Nero from 54 to 62; in the next decades C. Licinius Mucianus and (a relation?) L. Licinius Sura, two senatorial grey eminences behind Vespasian and Trajan respectively, had links to and perhaps originated from Tarraconensis. A couple of decades on, Hadrian’s teenaged great-nephew Cn. Pedanius Fuscus belonged to another Tarraconese family, and Spanish too or else from Narbonensis was the young man’s aged grandfather, the emperor’s brother-in-law L. Julius Ursus Servianus. It was Servianus’ over-ambitious hopes for Pedanius that brought their shared destruction in 136. North Africa’s first consul was Q. Aurelius Pactumeius Clemens in 80, one of a family from Cirta in Numidia prominent over the next 100 years. The nearby town of Tiddis in its turn produced a secondcentury grandee, Q. Lollius Urbicus, consul in the 130s and legatus of Britain from 139 to 142: he built the Antonine Wall. The North African emperor Septimius Severus’ distinguished grandfather and

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namesake, lauded by the poet Statius around ad 95, was Punic by ancestry – but totally Roman in soul and intellect, insisted Statius – and an inscription set up at the family’s home city of Lepcis Magna in 202 tells how this grandfather was the first in the family to become a Roman citizen and (like Claudius’ Alpine beneficiaries, but legally) serve on prestigious juries at Rome.12 Another Lepcis kinsman and trusted friend of his, C. Fulvius Plautianus, then became the emperor Severus’ praetorian prefect, all-powerful minister and finally son-in-law – until the resentful Caracalla murdered him in the palace at Rome in front of the emperor, early in 205. Severus’ western rival in 193–7, D. Clodius Albinus, was yet another North African, from Hadrumetum (Sousse in Tunisia). Neither these two failures, nor the short and ill-judged reign of Macrinus the Mauretanian a few years later, lessened the success of North Africans in administration, government and the civil arts. An impressive body of North African writers, jurists and then Christian church fathers, such as Tertullian, Cyprian and St Augustine, made major contributions until the end of the western empire. The eastern Mediterranean, where Greek was the dominant language, achieved civitas Romana more slowly. Roman colonies for veterans dotted eastern provinces from Macedonia to Syria, and Roman emperors founded or redeveloped plenty of cities of ordinary provincial status – commonly naming these after themselves, such as Claudiopolis in Galatia, Traianopolis in Thrace and Hadrianopolis (Adrianople-Edirne) again in Thrace – but there were very few Roman municipia; Stobi in north-western Macedonia was long the sole one. Instead individual easterners of note were regularly awarded citizenship. The philosopher-essayist and biographer Plutarch, of Chaeronea in Boeotia, became L. Mestrius Plutarchus in the 70s, through the good offices of a consular friend of Vespasian. An older contemporary of Plutarch was Ti. Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt in the stressful years 68–70 and the first high official to proclaim Vespasian as emperor (on 1 July 69); he was Jewish, a native of Alexandria and a nephew of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo. The earliest easterner to hold the consulship was a Pergamene grandee with a double name, C. Antius A. Julius Quadratus in 94

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and again in 105 (double or more names were becoming frequent as a way of showing ancestry), directly followed by an energetic military man and probable cousin, C. Julius Quadratus Bassus, later in 105. Also during Vespasian’s dynasty citizenship was given to the father or grandfather of the historian and philosophic writer L. Flavius Arrianus from Bithynia, consul in 129 and historian of Alexander the Great. Marcus Aurelius’ respected son-in-law, one of his ablest military advisers, came from still further east: Ti. Claudius Pompeianus was a Syrian of Antioch whose first two names pointed to citizenship going back to Claudius. In 213 Egypt, at long last, had a consul too: a favourite of Caracalla named P. Aelius Coeranus, ‘P. Aelius’ suggesting an enfranchised Hadrianic forebear. The only major province in the Roman empire never to show a consul, or even a senator, was (inexplicably) Britain.

◆ In military affairs – the field of Rome’s greatest renown and the engine of her imperialism – provincial Roman generals matched and eventually outdid Italians. Duvius Avitus was a relatively modest early example, whereas his contemporary and probable fellow Narbonese Cn. Domitius Corbulo shone. In Claudius’ reign he enforced peace along the Rhine; under Nero, given extensive authority over the eastern provinces he campaigned in Armenia against the Parthians, until in 63 they agreed to the power-sharing deal mentioned earlier. Corbulo in fact was more than just an eminent commander. Like other provincial Domitii, whose nomen seems due to the Domitius Ahenobarbus (an ancestor of Nero) who had shared in the conquest of Transalpina-Narbonensis, he and his family were remarkably conversant with the perilous corridors of Roman power. Thanks to his six-times-married mother Vistilia, he was the brother-inlaw of Gaius Caligula (until his half-sister Caesonia was murdered along with her husband) and half-brother to no fewer than three consuls, two Pomponii Secundi and a Suillius Rufus. He held a consulship himself in Caligula’s reign, married the daughter of the most eminent jurist of the time – a namesake descendant of Caesar’s assassin Cassius – but was forced to commit suicide in Greece by

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a less than grateful Nero in 67. Even so his daughter Domitia later married her near-namesake, Vespasian’s son and second successor Domitian (whose murder in 96 she arranged to avert her own). Britain’s best-known governor, Cn. Julius Agricola, was another man from Narbonensis. Though from one of Caesar’s Roman colonies there, Forum Julii (Fréjus), the Julian family nomen – his mother too was a Julia – indicates Gallic ancestry. Agricola married Domitia Decidiana, the daughter of another Narbonese Domitius, and married their daughter to a Cornelius who was either from Narbonensis or Cisalpina – his future biographer Tacitus. Second-century military men were even more varied in origins. Lusius Quietus, a native lord in Mauretania, was one of Trajan’s ablest generals – too able and perhaps too ambitious for Hadrian’s praetorian prefect in 118 to risk letting him live. Under Hadrian, Arrian of Bithynia governed Cappadocia where, as mentioned earlier, he saw off a threatened invasion of Alani in 135. Another Hadrianic commander, Sex. Julius Severus, hailed more unusually from Dalmatia: he headed the massive forces that crushed the Jewish rebellion of 132–5, then – perhaps more successfully than Pliny the Younger under Trajan – reformed the corrupt local administration of Bithynia, much to the admiration of the later Bithynian Dio. Less able was M. Sedatius Severianus from Limonum (Poitiers) in Gaul, of note partly because Gauls from beyond Narbonensis remained fairly rare in high imperial positions, but more noteworthy because in 161 ‘that foolish Celt’ – the satirist Lucian’s dismissive phrase – was trapped and annihilated with his legion in Armenia (Chapter 6). Marcus Aurelius’ hard-working generals fighting Parthia and then operating in the long wars on the Danube included the Syrians Claudius Pompeianus and Avidius Cassius (the would-be emperor), M. Claudius Fronto from Pergamum, and a remarkable cavalry general from Poetovio in Pannonia, M. Valerius Maximianus. He is known not from the wars’ thin written sources but chiefly from a pair of inscriptions put up by soldiers he had led. Maximianus commanded the Laugaricio garrison north of the Danube in winter 179–80; earlier he slew Valao king of the Naristae, an invading horde, in personal combat, cleared the uplands of Moesia and Macedonia of marauding ‘Brisaean brigands’ (Chapter 10), and was rewarded

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by Marcus with senatorial rank as an honorary former praetor (he later held a consulship too). Of much murkier provenance was P. Valerius Comazon – possibly a freedman early in life, later a navy conscript, and in 218 a general in Syria who organized the new emperor Macrinus’ overthrow to install on the throne Caracalla’s relative Varius Avitus Bassianus, hereditary child-priest of Baal at Syrian Emesa (notorious as the emperor ‘Elagabalus’). Twenty years later C. Furius Sabinius Aquila Timesitheus, from the Balkans or Asia Minor, attained still greater prominence: his long administrative and military career (like Valerius Maximianus he was an eques, not a senator) climaxed in 241–3 as praetorian prefect, father-in-law of the boy-emperor Gordian III, and generalissimo against the invading Persians, whom he expelled and counter-attacked before dying near the Tigris. For that brief period Timesitheus was in effect the real ruler of the empire.13

◆ In the footsteps of the middle Republic’s Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Terence and Caecilius Statius, Latin literature continued to benefit from provincial Roman creativeness and energy. Cisalpine Gaul – which did become part of Italy in 42 bc – blazed with genius in the century of Cicero, above all in the oeuvre of Catullus, Virgil and Livy. This evolution continued. From the middle of the first century ad half or more of Rome’s poets, historians, philosophers and specialists writing Latin were (where origins are known) Cisalpine again or provincial. Cisalpina and Spain stood out at least until Hadrian’s time: Cisalpina the homeland of the elder Pliny, his nephew, and perhaps Tacitus; Spain that of the Annaei (Seneca, his namesake father who wrote on rhetoric, and his nephew Lucan), Martial the epigrammatist and Quintilian, the classic authority on Latin oratory. Later in the second century, Africa and neighbouring Numidia took over provincial primacy in Latin literature. North African authors included L. Apuleius of the inland city of Madauros (Mdawrush in Algeria), famous for his oratorical skills and still more for his novel The Golden Ass, and M. Cornelius Fronto from the Numidian capital Cirta, who tutored the future emperor Marcus

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in boyhood and (like Apuleius) enjoyed fame as a leading orator. In Severan times a new field of Latin literature was invigorated by other Africans, such as the brilliantly controversial Christian theologian Tertullian – in full Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus, born at (and immensely proud of) Carthage. In his time too a remarkable work narrated the arrest and execution at Carthage, in 203, of a young matron, Perpetua, her servant, Felicitas, and several other Christians; the tale is told partly in Perpetua’s own words while in prison. Another early Christian apologist, Minucius Felix, may again have been North African; so was Cyprian (Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus), the martyr bishop of Carthage whose letters and spiritual writings bring to life both the vigour of the African church in the 240s and 250s and the troubles then afflicting the western empire. Another field of Latin writing taken further by provincial Romans was legal literature. Although already treated over centuries by many jurists born at Rome or in Italy, legal studies were produced by second- and third-century specialists from the wider empire, with lasting impact. North Africa contributed Q. Cervidius Scaevola, P. Salvius Julianus and Aemilius Papinianus. Julius Paulus’ nomen indicates a provincial origin though none is specified, while Ulpius Marcellus’ family originated from Asia Minor and that of Domitius Ulpianus from Tyre in Phoenicia. Both Papinian and his successor Ulpian ended their careers as praetorian prefects, a position by then evolving into the chief legal office of the empire – but with tragic effect on both, for Papinian was killed by Caracalla in 212 for refusing to condone the emperor’s murder of his younger brother Geta, and Ulpian 11 years later by mutinous praetorian troops. Thanks to the copious selections from their works made by the compilers of Justinian’s 48-book Digest of Roman law 300 years later, these jurists, along with their (probably) Italian second-century colleague Gaius, became the paramount authorities on law for later Roman and European civilization. Greek letters and arts, the dominant culture east of the Adriatic, adapted fairly comfortably to the supremacy of Rome. Writers and intellectuals had been impressed, or troubled, by Rome’s rise as early as Lycophron and Polybius. Their continuing responses to it were greatly eased by the Roman elite’s own enthusiasm for Greek

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civilization (even the censorious Cato could quote the Odyssey) which encouraged elite patronage of interesting Greek poets, philosophers and historians. Panaetius of Rhodes, the leading Stoic philosopher in the second century bc, influenced Cicero’s moral thought, and Cicero counted as friends two Syrian intellectuals, Archias of Antioch and the Stoic and polymath, Posidonius of Apamea. Archias became a Roman citizen, A. Licinius Archias, and celebrated the exploits of eminent commanders such as his patron Lucullus, the bane of Mithridates. From now on, notable sectors of Greek literature concerned themselves with Rome. Historical writers naturally did, such as Livy’s contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus, narrator of Rome’s early history (and at much greater length than Livy), and Nicolaus of Damascus, one of Augustus’ first biographers; and after them followed the celebrated chain that included Plutarch, Arrian, Appian, Dio and Herodian, the historian of the stressful era from Commodus to Maximinus. Strabo from Amaseia in Pontus, best known as the Augustan author on world geography – he wrote histories too, but they do not survive – fully accepted Rome’s rule as preserver and furtherer of civilization (Greek civilization especially), a theme celebrated at its most ecstatic by Aelius Aristides a century later, as noted above. Other authors in Greek also accommodated themselves to Rome: the Jewish intellectuals Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, the Bithynian showpiece orator Dio Cocceianus in Vespasian’s and Trajan’s time, and in the middle to later second century the philosophical satirist from Commagene on the upper Euphrates, Lucian of Samosata. Many such men entered imperial public service: Arrian and Cassius Dio held consulships and provincial commands; Appian was appointed to an imperial procuratorship and Lucian to a (perhaps honorary) senior position in Egypt late in life – as Aelius Aristides too could have been but for his chronic ill-health – while later in the third century another historian, Herodian, had a career in the bureaucracy at Rome, possibly in the imperial palace itself. By his day Greek literature and thought were as integrated into the structure of Roman imperialism as writings in Latin.

Chapter 8

Governing and Misgoverning

‘T

he ensuing winter [of ad 78–9] was taken up with most beneficial policies’, wrote Tacitus in his Life of his fatherin-law Agricola, governor of Britain from ad 77 to 84. ‘To cause scattered, barbarous, and thus readily aggressive people to adapt to peace and repose, he encouraged them personally and aided them officially to put up temples, marketplaces, and mansions, praising the enthusiasts and berating the laggards; prestigious rivalry replaced coercion.’ These were Agricola’s efforts to inspire provincials – those of high status at any rate – to embrace Roman culture. Fragments of a large inscription at Verulamium, already a Roman municipium by then, confirm Tacitus’ mention of public buildings: between 79 and 81 Agricola built and dedicated there a major project: a temple, basilica or the forum itself. ‘Also he educated aristocrats’ sons in liberal studies [liberalibus artibus] and extolled Britons’ natural abilities over the studiousness of Gauls, so as to prompt men who recently were rejecting the Roman tongue into a passion for eloquence’: for eloquence, meaning rhetoric or oratory, was the culmination of a liberal studies education. The same British passion was jokingly confirmed, in Tacitus’ later lifetime, by another writer: ‘eloquent Gaul has taught barristers in Britain; now Thule [the northern edge of the earth] talks of engaging a rhetorician’, laughed Juvenal the satirist. ‘Then too’ (Tacitus wrote of his father-in-law’s efforts) ‘came esteem for our type of dress, and our toga was widely seen’: in other words, 143

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Agricola was able to confer citizenship widely, for only Romans could legally wear the toga. These were not his only achievements. A year or so earlier, on arriving in the province, he had taken steps to end, or at least curb, the extortionate racketeering once again infecting its Roman officials in their collection of tax payments and requisitioned goods. Although Agricola also spent every summer of his unusually long tenure making war on increasingly northerly tribes of Britons (Chapter 6), over most of the empire emphasis had begun shifting to consolidation and development. This had started as early as Augustus’ reign, with governors and other officials under closer control from Rome, citizenship and Latin right granted to more provincials, and a stable military system organized – recruitment and maintenance regularized, legions and their supporting auxilia mostly stationed near or on the main frontiers from the North Sea to the Euphrates. Just as the Roman aristocracy accepted Augustus’ principate as a relief from civil war and as a securer, even if constrained, path to wealth, office and dignitas, Rome’s subjects too (Tacitus emphasized) were satisfied: Nor did the provinces reject that system of affairs, they mistrusted the rule of Senate and People, due to powerful men’s rivalries and magistrates’ greed, with feeble aid from laws that were deranged by violence, corruption, and lastly by money.

This model picture of reform and improvement is outmatched by Aelius Aristides’ halcyon scene in the 140s, of a Rome that fostered the interests of all peoples and embraced their ‘better’ elements as citizens. Yet Tacitus took care to reveal darker sides to the rule of Rome over subject peoples. The Britons rebelled in 61 because of officials’ extortion and physical outrages; despite the efforts of the new procurator Classicianus, less than two decades later Agricola (as just mentioned) had to attack rampant abuses by the current crop of officials, too keen on personal profits to learn any lessons from recent history. Even Agricola’s constructive efforts earned an acerbic postscript from his son-in-law: ‘Little by little they [the Britons] deviated to vices’ allurements: colonnades and baths and

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refined dinner-parties. That, for the unsophisticated, was called culture [humanitas], whereas it was an element of their enslavement.’ Tacitus’ surprisingly sharp sneer echoed a literary cliché popular among well-off ancient moralizers and satirists – insidious civilization versus the rough purity of hardy barbarians – and certainly Romans (or at any rate Roman intellectuals) liked at times to sneer at Rome’s culture. The historian, already preparing his study of Germany’s peoples and their plain and corruption-free lifestyle, let it briefly colour his view of even Agricola’s provincials.1 As already noted, provincials everywhere ran their own affairs in practice. Cities and rural communities had their own magistrates and ‘senates’, as at Contrebia Belaisca in 87 bc. In the eastern provinces such institutions went back long before Rome’s hegemony. Some larger cities, such as Nemausus in Narbonensis and Cirta in Numidia, headed a surrounding network of dependent lesser towns, a relationship going back before Roman rule and allowed to stand by the conquerors. When a city was promoted to Latin status, it further regularized its institutions, as shown in the so-called ‘charters’ found in Baetica at Malaca, Salpensa and (most recently) the otherwise unknown Irni: all of them long, carefully written and thorough documents, though now only partly preserved. Coloniae Romanae were given similar constitutions: the foundation law of one of Caesar’s civilian colonies, again in Spain at Urso (Osuna), survives though again only in part. Governors made sure that taxes were paid, heard court cases brought to them by aggrieved or feuding provincials, and where necessary carried out military or police actions; they seldom interfered with local self-rule – unless greedy, overzealous like the L. Piso to be mentioned below, or specially commissioned to clean things up, like Pliny the Younger in Bithynia under Trajan. There the problem was precisely that the wealthy cities had for too long been allowed to do much as they pleased. Women, slaves and citizens from other places could not vote locally any more than they could at Rome. Local elections, senates and affairs were always controlled by the local aristocrats, such as the Lollii at Numidian Tiddis (Chapter 11), the Baebii and a few other families at Saguntum in Spain, and the families of Dio Chrysostom and Cassius Dio among others at Prusa in Bithynia. They were prone

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to compete vigorously, sometimes bitterly, among themselves (Dio Chrysostom was exiled from Prusa for nine years) in the endless hunt for offices, honours, the favour of Roman governors and, whenever possible, that of the emperor. Nor did they form a fixed and changeless caste: newcomers were always rising from lower social levels, such as Sennius Sollemnis in third-century Gaul, or immigrating from other centres.

◆ Roman imperial officials were – from the viewpoint of provincials – unpredictable entities. Formal training in administration, law or finance did not exist, any more than in generalship or diplomacy. Instead, Roman senators learned on the job, starting as junior army officers (as Agricola did in Britain in ad 60–1), then lesser magistrates and working up. Bureaucrat equites also started with minor military positions, such as cavalry prefects, and then lesser procuratorships could open the way to greater things. Naturally not every beginner made it through to the higher, and still fewer did to the highest, appointments – and it always helped to have an influential senior relative or friend. Whom a province received as its next governor or procurator was thus something of a lottery. That provincia Asia in Augustus’ or Tiberius’ day set up statues to Vespasian’s procurator father Flavius Sabinus, to celebrate his impeccable probity, testified both to his own virtue and to implied unhappy experiences with some of his predecessors there. The work of Agricola in Britain and Pliny the Younger in Bithynia does show that some, and maybe many, imperial officials were honest and hard-working. In Britain again, after Boudica’s revolt the new tax commissioner Classicianus stopped the governor’s savage reprisals; though earning Tacitus’ annoyed criticism, more relevantly he eased the provincials’ burdens – for a time. Probity had hazards. A century after Agricola, the future emperor Pertinax won a reputation for stern integrity in a long public career, a sternness that nearly cost him his life at the hands of mutinous soldiers when governing Britain in the mid-180s – and did end it for similar reasons after three months as emperor in 193. Equally upright and honoured, as well as luckier (he died of old age), was

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his contemporary Claudius Pompeianus, Marcus Aurelius’ son-inlaw. The historian Dio found military strictness no less dangerous as governor of the Danubian province of Pannonia Superior. His angry soldiers urged their Praetorian Guard friends in Rome (luckily without success) to murder him when he went back to be consul in 229 with the emperor Severus Alexander. Sternness, even if in devotion to duty, was not always welcome to Roman subjects either: in Tiberius’ time L. Calpurnius Piso, the governor of Tarraconensis, was murdered by a rural Celtiberian while overzealously probing for public funds embezzled by the murderer’s fellow townsmen of Termes, south-west of Numantia.2 Exploitation persisted in every age, defying good intentions, laws and imperial supervision. At times the imperial government itself was extortionate. Nero and his ministers squeezed huge sums out of both Italy and the provinces to pay for rebuilding Rome, after the Great Fire in July 64 left more than half the city in ashes. Cassius Dio, Caracalla’s contemporary, asserted that the emperor’s true motive for the mass enfranchisement of provincials in 212 was to make everyone liable to pay the inheritance and slave manumission taxes: these applied only to citizens – and Caracalla had doubled them, to 10 per cent. Governors could be as corrupt under the Caesars as under the Republic. That more and more of them were Romans of provincial origin was no guarantee of a proconsul’s, legatus’ or prefect’s correct behaviour if he chose otherwise. There were men to match the Republic’s Verres: for example L. Valerius Messalla Volesus, proconsul of Asia around ad 13, who exulted in his ‘royal act’ of executing 300 men on one day; and Tiberius’ notorious prefect of Judaea from ad 26 to 36, Pontius Pilatus, who dealt with a suspicious gathering of religious enthusiasts on Mount Gerizim, in Samaria, by launching troops against them for mass slaughter. Brutal measures by a later prefect there and his superior, the governor of Syria, lit the flames of the great Jewish War of ad 66–70 (Chapter 10). A kleptocratic and murderous proconsul of provincia Africa under Nerva and Trajan, Marius Priscus (like Trajan a Spaniard), though successfully prosecuted in ad 100 by senators no less illustrious than Pliny the Younger, a consul that year, and the consular

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historian Tacitus, still proceeded into a luxurious life in exile while the plundered province could only lament its losses. Juvenal the satirist taunted: What matters infamy, if you keep your cash? Exile Marius boozes from lunchtime and revels in the gods’ wrath. You, Province, won but you weep.3

Yet not all administrators were corrupt or vicious. No biography of an official survives except Agricola’s: it would be rash to suppose that, therefore, his qualities were unique or rare. Marcus Aurelius’ tutor and friend Fronto, appointed proconsul of Asia in the late 150s, took careful steps to recruit competent and reliable staff for his many varied duties – though, Fronto being Fronto, ill-health promptly struck him down and he never took up the post. Occasionally, unexpected qualities might emerge: T. Vinius, the emperor Galba’s chief confidant in his short reign and a man of flexible morals, had nonetheless been an outstanding proconsul of Narbonensis. So too his contemporary the elegantly epicurean Petronius Niger (probable author of the famous novel Satyricon) as proconsul of Bithynia – even though when back in Rome and as a favourite of Nero he ‘reverted to his vices, or to pretending them’. Suetonius, though mostly critical of the domineering Domitian, still averred that this emperor kept strict control over governors as well as City magistrates, ‘so that they were never more temperate or more principled’ (while adding that afterwards many went bad – perhaps he had Marius Priscus in mind). Nor were the imperial authorities at Rome largely lax in dealing with senators or imperial equites charged with misrule. When such charges were brought against officials, even an eminent defendant could be found guilty: a survey of the 41 trials of accused officials recorded from Augustus’ time to that of Trajan shows that 28 defendants were convicted – or committed suicide to avoid it – while seven were found not guilty (the other five verdicts are not recorded). Messalla Volesus was one of the convicted, despite his ancient nobilitas. These were, of course, not the sole trials that

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occurred during the period; our ancient sources are incomplete and, even where extant, are limited in what they report. Yet it is not likely that unrecorded trials mostly let guilty men go free. That there were numerous convictions is the more noteworthy because, after Augustus’ reign, major cases of maladministration and extortion were judged by the Senate instead of the public quaestiones. In other words senators, many of them past or future governors, were entrusted with judging fellow senators and well-connected equites employed by the emperor, and as a rule did not let guilty ones off.4

◆ All the same probably a greater benefit to provincials than good governors – given their limited tenures and the uncertainty about who would come next – was the steady improvement of infrastructure under the emperors. Some major routes had of course been built before: Cisalpine Gaul, like peninsular Italy, had received a series of highways in the course of the second and first centuries bc, while the earliest known Roman road in Sicily dated as far back as the First Punic War. Control of the new provincia Macedonia was bolstered by the Via Egnatia, started by the praetor Cn. Egnatius in the 140s bc, which ran from the Adriatic at Dyrrhachium and Apollonia via Thessalonica to the then border with Thrace; a century later it extended as far as Byzantium on the Bosphorus to remain, until relatively modern times, the major route linking the Adriatic with the Black Sea. Another notable road (supposedly following the track of Hercules from Spain to Italy) was Transalpina-Narbonensis’ Via Domitia, named after its initiator Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus. Stretching from the eastern Pyrenees and Narbo over to Cisalpine Gaul via the Montgenèvre pass, this was built and marked out with milestones soon after that region became Roman, around 120 bc (Polybius, who died in 118, knew of it). The administrators of Augustus and his successors became busier in provinces both new and old, as literary mentions and inscriptions (particularly milestones) show. His son-in-law Agrippa, for instance, had a series of roads constructed in 20–18 bc to link Lugdunum, the administrative centre of the Three Gauls, with the coast of Aquitania, the English Channel and the Rhine. Over in Asia

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Minor, once Pisidia in mountainous southern Galatia was pacified a decade later, Galatia’s legatus Cornutus Aquila commemorated the opening of a Via Sebaste through the territory in 6 bc (Sebastos being Augustus’ name in Greek). In Spain a Corduban milestone of 2 bc marks the building of a road from the source of the River Baetis, marked by a shrine of ‘Augustan Janus’, to the Atlantic, part of a growing network that would connect the developing cities of the Spanish provinces effectively enough to remain in use long after the empire had vanished. Tiberius’ reign in turn opened new roads in the recently conquered Balkans – for example from Salonae on Dalmatia’s Adriatic coast into the rugged interior – and during the following century the road systems grew across the region to link the Adriatic with the Danube frontier (which in turn was paralleled by highways along virtually its whole length), and Aquileia in north-eastern Italy with Moesia and Macedonia. Roman road-building in North Africa is first attested in ad 14 when the men of legion III Augusta finished one connecting Tacapae, on the gulf of Sirte, and the inland military base at Ammaedara 320 kilometres to the north-west. Two centuries later provincia Africa, Numidia and Mauretania were traversed by an estimated 19,000 kilometres of roadways. On the northern edge of the empire, once Claudius launched the conquest of Britain in ad 43, that province too began to be crossed by a series of roads including the so-called Watling Street that ran from Londinium to Deva (Chester), and the Fosse Way from Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) to Lindum (Lincoln), to form a 3,000kilometre network that had penetrated into the Scottish lowlands by Hadrian’s day. Under Hadrian’s predecessor, Claudius Severus, legatus of Trajan’s newly annexed Arabia Petraea, built the highway Via Nova Traiana mentioned earlier ‘from the borders of Syria to the Red Sea’, an addition to the already complex system in the Near Eastern provinces.5 Roman roads in the provinces primarily served military and government users: troops and their suppliers, imperial couriers (the system called the cursus publicus, initiated like so much else by Augustus) and officials. Nonetheless they were open to civilian travellers and traders. As thousands of surviving milestones and

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other inscriptions attest, imperial and local authorities exerted themselves to keep the highways in good order and repair them when necessary. The task was expensive probably everywhere, and as a result maintenance could fall behind: an inscription of ad 123, on the Via Appia in mountainous central Italy, records repairs to just 15.75 Roman miles, ‘worn away through lengthy age’, at a cost of 1,718,090 sesterces (just under 430,000 denarii) – of which 569,090, about a third, were contributed by the local landowners. Local people were regularly called on to carry out maintenance too, and also to provide travelling imperial officials with vehicles and transport animals for specified distances from their village or town. For these services they were normally entitled to be paid but, like compulsory public labour in any age, the requirements were very unpopular. When the emperor Nerva abolished compulsory transport provision, vehiculatio, for Italy in 97, he happily commemorated it on coins (they engagingly depict two mules grazing beside an upended cart). On the other hand, neither vehiculatio nor compulsory road maintenance could be abolished in the provinces. The best that could be done there was for the Roman authorities to lay down rules and limitations on who was liable and for how much work, and – ideally – how much they should be paid. These regulations, predictably, were endlessly violated by officials and other Romans on the spot, as will be seen.6 Provincial bridges and ports, as well as roads, were cultivated by the Romans. The Augustan-era bridge over the River Guadiana at Emerita and Trajan’s famous bridge over the Tagus near Alcántara still stand (much repaired): the latter at least, as an inscription records, was paid for by communities in that region of Lusitania. The impressive, now sunken, harbour-works at Caesarea in Judaea were part of Herod the Great’s refoundation of an old Phoenician port which, sensibly, he named after his august patron. Carthage, Julius Caesar’s – in practice Augustus’ – refoundation, maintained its old Punic port facilities, such as its concealed harbours, and extended the waterfront along the shoreline. At Lepcis Magna further east, some first-century ad port structures were later outdone by grand installations in Septimius Severus’ time (Lepcis was his birthplace).

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Londinium, though burned down in ad 61 by Boudica’s rebels, a few decades later gained impressive port facilities including a 500 metre oak beam embankment; in the east, another famous port, Ephesus, was fitted out during the later first century and into the second with a new harbour as well as a complex of public buildings – gymnasium, baths and extended theatre, as well as an augmented water supply for the constantly growing population. Since most, sometimes all, of the funding for provincial infrastructure came from the Roman treasury – which in turn relied largely on revenues from the provinces – at least some provincial taxes and dues came back to pay for these public projects, much more than in Republican times.7

◆ Tacitus’ account of Agricola encouraging temples, marketplaces and (less pleasingly to his biographer) baths in Britain reflects a major feature of Roman imperial administration. Much of the empire, especially the areas further from Mediterranean coastlands, was largely rural. Sizeable inhabited centres were few before Roman times: Britain for example had hamlets, villages and a few larger fortified settlements (Camulodunum, before it became a Roman colonia, had been the Trinovantes’ chief centre). So did the Danubian lands, Numidia away from the Phoenician-settled coasts, and likewise much of inland Asia Minor. The Romans were used to this – even in Italy and Greece up to 90 per cent of the population was rural – but they equally took for granted that it was important to have various urban centres, furnished with supervised marketplaces, solid public structures such as basilicas, baths, markets and temples, and defined administrative institutions, meaning annual magistrates, an ordo, a citizen assembly, regular revenues, and a written charter expounding these details. Thus imperial authorities encouraged urbanization around the empire. The spread of Roman colonies has been mentioned already: by ad 200 the empire had a mesh of them stretching from Eburacum and Deva in Britain and Flaviobriga and Emerita in Spain to Thamugadi in southern Numidia, Heliopolis in Syria, Bostra in Arabia Petraea and (from Hadrian’s reign on) Aelia Capitolina

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founded on the site of Jerusalem. Privileged in status but interacting with the local communities around them, colonies tended to impress neighbours with their Roman cultural amenities – even without governors’ efforts. Strabo the geographer noted this for Baetica in southern Spain, a province now well urbanized: The Turdetanians [his term for the peoples of Baetica], however, and particularly those that live about the Baetis, have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more. And most of them have become Latins, and they have received Romans as colonists, so that they are not far from being all Romans.

This was in contrast, he noted, to the Celtic Spaniards further north who in Augustus’ time were still mainly village dwellers. Nor were colonies the only urban creations of imperial authorities. Legionary bases in frontier regions accumulated civilian settlements around them, called canabae, which often grew into enduring cities. As examples, Britain’s Eburacum and Deva, Bonna and Moguntiacum in the Rhineland, Vindobona and Aquincum on the middle Danube, Legio in north-western Tarraconensis and Lambaesis in Numidia continue today as York, Chester, Bonn, Mainz, Vienna, Budapest, León and Tazoult. Besides military bases and Roman colonies the imperial authorities from time to time also founded, or enlarged, ordinary provincial cities, sometimes blessing them with an imperial name. Augustus’ plentiful creations or enlargements included Juliobriga in newly subdued north-west Spain, Augustodunum in central Gaul (now Autun) as the new capital of the Aedui, superseding their old nearby mountain stronghold of Bibracte, and for the Arverni further south – Vercingetorix’s people – Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand). Vespasian planted Iria Flavia on north-west Spain’s Atlantic coast and Arae Flaviae in the just-annexed Agri Decumates, where it became the node of the ensuing roads system. In Trajan’s time Thrace was improved with a trio of cities named after the emperor, his sister and his wife: Traianopolis, Marcianopolis and Plotinopolis. These in turn were outdone by Hadrian’s creation Hadrianopolis

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(Adrianople-Edirne), one of a series of foundations to commemorate him (he named another ‘Hadrian’s Hunts’, Hadrianoutherae, to immortalize a spectacularly successful hunting expedition in Aelius Aristides’ home region of Mysia). He also created a new city, again not a colonia Romana, at a village beside the middle Nile where Antinous, his youthful beloved, drowned in 130. Antinoopolis prospered under imperial favour; it even became a Christian bishopric two-and-a-half centuries later. Many other existing cities, towns and even villages in the provinces acquired emperors’ names too, framed in one style or another and denoting a reward for loyalty, enthusiasm or perhaps a generous imperial visit. Augustobriga in central Spain, Augustoritum in Aquitania, and Dea Augusta and Lucus Augusti among the Vocontii of Narbonensis, for instance, point to favour from the first emperor. Later on Claudius sprinkled his own family name widely: a Bithynian city, Bithynium, became Claudiopolis – it was the birthplace-to-be of Hadrian’s Antinous – as did Mazaca, an old provincial town in Cilicia, while in central Gaul there was a Claudiomagus (still a small town, Clion-sur-Indre). Such places did not obtain citizenship or Latin right automatically, but through their amenities and imperial encouragement they too earned prestige and could improve their links to their province’s governors and other Roman grandees, always an advantage in a status-conscious world. Client kings needed little prodding, either, to promote the founding of cities. The highly cultivated Juba II of Mauretania (a favourite of Augustus and husband of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s daughter Cleopatra Selene) corrected Iol, the name of his chief city, to Caesarea (Cherchel in Algeria) and developed it as a showpiece of Greek and Roman culture: baths, temples, a theatre and, in Juba’s day or later, a 7-kilometre circuit of walls. With the same eye for imperial patronage, Herod of Judaea founded Caesarea Maritima late in the first century bc, replacing an old Phoenician port with a magnificent Hellenistic creation that later became the administrative seat of annexed Judaea. Around the same time his fellow monarch Archelaus of Cappadocia, perhaps anxious not to be left behind, changed his already ancient capital’s name to Caesarea (it survives as Kayseri), another city with a flourishing Roman and

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post-Roman future. When the emperor Commodus in the last months of his life rechristened Rome itself as Colonia Lucia Aurelia Nova Commodiana, he was just turning this well-worn practice on its head.8

◆ Several cases separate in content, time and space throw light on the efforts that both governors and the authorities at Rome could put into conscientious ruling, and how far they might (or might not) succeed. In July 68, the new prefect of Egypt, Ti. Julius Alexander, issued an edict at Alexandria which illustrates vividly the pressures put on ordinary people, and governors’ efforts to relieve them. Alexander acknowledged a flood of complaints from ‘the most respectable people here in the city and those who farm the countryside’. Among the staggeringly many abuses, people were being forced by local officials to take on tax-collecting duties or leases of public land, including citizens of Alexandria living in the countryside and legally exempt from country burdens; some officials had taken over outstanding loans and then hounded the debtors for payment – even illegally imprisoning some; people who had purchased confiscated lands from the state were still being pursued to pay rent for them; legal cases completed by the prefect were being brought back to courts by persistent accusers colluding with judicial officers; and farmers, and even residents in the suburbs of Alexandria, were being confronted with new exactions of grain and money on top of old ones. All the abuses were banned forthwith, with stern words of warning to the local bureaucrats. But Ti. Alexander was not the first prefect to tackle such bureaucrats’ misdeeds, and was not the last either. Another problem for governors in all ages was local communities bickering over coveted land or amenities. The inscription from Contrebia (Chapter 3) illustrated one such contest in early first-century bc Spain. A Sardinian inscription put up in March ad 69 announced that, by decree of the then proconsul Helvius Agrippa, the Galillenses (a community in the uplands north of Carales, today’s Cagliari) must give up land properly belonging to

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another community, the Patulcenses Campani, because these held title to them under an earlier proconsul’s adjudication – very much earlier, in 114 bc. The Galillenses had long enjoyed effective, and at times violent, possession of the area, and they had driven Helvius like several of his predecessors almost to distraction with excuses, assurances and prevarications. Now he gave them just 18 days, until 1 April, to give up the lands or face punishment. Whether they obeyed is unknown – quite conceivably yet another, still undiscovered, inscription may turn out to record some later governor’s frustration. When the hard-working Pliny the Younger went to Bithynia around 110 to sort out the province’s messy affairs, one of the lesser yet convoluted issues he came across concerned a Flavius Archippus of Prusa (plainly a Bithynian granted citizenship by a Flavian emperor). Both a philosophy professor and a convicted – but escaped – forger, Archippus wanted his old status recognized and at the same time claimed to be exempt from jury service at Prusa. Contrastingly his original accuser Furia Prima, and others, wanted him sent back to serve his sentence in the mines. Pliny was confronted with a string of documents: imperial letters of both Domitian and Nerva honouring the philosopher (despite his conviction and escape), a subsequent Prusan decree also honouring him, a petition by Archippus himself to Trajan, and a counter-petition from the aggrieved Furia – all of which he forwarded to his emperor and requested a ruling. Trajan decided to let the importunate philosopher have what he wanted, but (clearly still suspicious) told Pliny to let any future accusations proceed.9 Another fertile field for corruption was transport for official persons or goods, called vehiculatio. It kept exercising Roman authorities across the centuries. A lengthy litany of documents from many provinces and periods attests this, however much the emperor and his agents thundered. In the earliest known case, around ad 18–20, the legatus of Galatia, one Sex. Sotidius Strabo Libuscidianus, issued a edict in Greek and Latin detailing the vehiculatio regulations applying to the important Pisidian city of Sagalassus. For example: ‘to a senator of the Roman People are supplied no more than ten carts, or three mules in place of a cart,

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or two donkeys in place of a mule, subject to their paying what I have prescribed’; a smaller number of such items could be hired by an eques Romanus in the emperor’s service, fewer still by a centurion; but any extra carts or animals must be paid for at the fees charged by the locals. That vehiculatio was open to misuse is clear not only from the same edict – Sotidius forbade unauthorized persons to demand such facilities – but several others. In December 48 the then prefect of Egypt, Cn. Vergilius Capito, banned very similar malpractices there and promised restitution to sufferers; his inscription stands in the same oasis temple as that of Ti. Alexander, 20 years later, promising an end to corrupt practices. Four decades on, a missive of Domitian instructed his procurator in Syria to stop unauthorized persons from forcing provincials to rent out beasts of burden, or from simply commandeering (that is, without paying for) the use of animals and their peasant owners. Unauthorized persons will have been the usual types: Roman officials and soldiers, and visitors, local magistrates and other local grandees. In another document, of December 238, the residents of Scaptopara, a village in Thrace, complained bitterly to the boy-emperor Gordian III – in practice, no doubt, to his praetorian prefect Timesitheus – that they were being hounded for free lodgings and transport by soldiers and other people visiting Scaptopara’s hot springs and a nearby annual fair, and that complaints to the governor of Thrace had brought only brief respites. Scaptopara had the good luck to have a local landowner, Aurelius Pyrrhus, serving in the praetorian guard at Rome – yet Gordian’s or Timesitheus’ reply was simply to tell the petitioners to go back to the governor for redress. As with the long-aggrieved Patulcenses in first-century Sardinia, whether things improved for them once the inscription with these texts was set up is not known. Jesus’ forbearing advice on forced vehiculatio – ‘if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles’ – reflected a tough reality.10

Chapter 9

Judging the Empire: Romans and Others

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omans in the empire’s early centuries do not seem to have thought of their wars and conquests as much more than machinery for booty, profits and career advancement. Military campaigns were accompanied by troupes of traders (and often less savoury hangers-on) to sell goods to, and buy plunder and prisoners from, the soldiers. It drew notice when the elder Cato in 195 bc and Scipio Aemilianus in 134, both in Spain, banished them in the name of efficiency and discipline. The joke by Epidicus in Plautus’ comedy – he would convene ‘my internal consultative Senate’ to decide on a target for some new war ‘so I can snatch their silver’ – was rather close to home not only in the 190s. Decades later, recruiting men to fight in Spain’s now-arid wars brought on bitter controversy, but volunteers almost simultaneously flocked to join up against Carthage because that promised (falsely) to yield easy returns. Wars and annexations were defended at the time or in retrospect as being necessary to avert potential attack or protect attacked allies – or ‘allies’, for it was not always clear (then or now) whether states benefiting from Rome’s protection actually had that status. Questions could be asked, for instance, about the Saguntines in 218 bc, the trio of Athens, Pergamum and Rhodes in 200, or the Aedui in Gaul in 58 whom Caesar could characterize only as Rome’s ‘brothers and kinsmen’ as his excuse for fighting their German enemies. The following year, his argument for invading northern 158

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Gaul was simply that the peoples there were readying themselves in case he invaded. For his adopted son Augustus, avenging the brief Rhineland victory of raiding Sugambri in 16 bc over a Roman legion – V Alaudae, in fact – was enough justification for subduing western Germany, while Claudius’ British offensive in ad 43 was based on his regime’s political needs (gloria and exploitation, as in the old days) more than on any strategic pressures. Rome’s repeated and largely futile wars with Parthia began with Crassus’ gloria-hunting aggression in 54 bc, while Trajan’s war a century and a half later was an overblown reaction – essentially a search for fresh gloria for an ageing regime – to the breakdown of a 40-year-old compromise over Armenia. And the Dalmatian war in 156 bc, at least according to Polybius, was meant to shore up Italian manliness after 12 years of unaccustomed peace.1 Other conflicts and acquisitions did have justifications. It was the overconfident Syracusan monarchy in 214 bc, and Antiochus the Great and his clients the Aetolians in 192, who ignited wars with the republic. Mithridates’ responsibility for launching war in 88 far outweighed the provocation of the unscrupulous plundering raid into his territory. In ad 161 the Parthians cancelled another period of coexistence by invading Armenia. Final success eluded them all and the benefit was Rome’s, save in the Parthian war of ad 161–6 which led not to new territorial gains, but to the plague that ravaged the empire. It did not all the same deter Severus, a generation later, from launching Rome’s last triumphant war against Parthia – a triumph with the double edge noted above. Early territorial acquisitions such as Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, Cisalpina and the Spains were not viewed as signs of a destiny of world rule but as military necessities – to keep the Carthaginians away or (in Cisalpina) the Gauls and Ligurians obedient – and as useful sources of plunder and supplies. None was regularly taxed until some time had passed: Sicily from around 210 BC, the Spains in stages from 195 and then 179, Sardinia and Corsica probably from the early second century too. The inhabitants in Cisalpina may eventually have been taxed too, but evidence is thin, partly at least because that province drew ever-growing numbers of Roman and Italian migrants, from the 190s on, to new colonies

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and other settlements. There is no record of Rome paying locals there, or elsewhere, for lands taken to found such settlements: at best they might be allowed to stay on, as at Carteia in Spain in 171, but evidence for other places is again scarce until much later times.

◆ That Rome had shown her superior qualities by conquering other peoples, and was therefore entitled to rule them – an echo of Aristotle’s case for Greeks owning slaves – was widely held by Romans. They saw their dominance as the gods’ reward for their piety and virtue. A praetor, M. Valerius Messalla, stressed it in 193 bc (during the diplomatic standoff with Antiochus the Great) when writing to the small Asia Minor city of Teos a happy notification of Rome’s goodwill: ‘that we wholly and constantly have attached the highest importance to reverence of the gods one can estimate from the goodwill that we have experienced on this account from the supreme deity’. In the next century Cicero’s many writings exemplified the same theme. In his public pronouncements he of course extolled the empire: it was due to the will and favour of the gods. Pompey (he told the Senate in 56) had extended Rome’s imperial boundaries to the ends of the earth; Caesar’s ongoing campaigns in Gaul too, he said (admittedly under political pressure), were to Rome’s benefit because they completed the pacification of the Mediterranean world. Personally too Cicero judged Rome’s dominion to be founded on justice and humaneness, even if it had flaws. Until the time of Sulla the dictator kings, peoples and nations had found a safe haven in the Senate, and Roman magistrates and generals had sought renown solely through defending provinces and allies with integrity and honesty. Rome’s dominance ‘could more truly be termed a protectorate over the world than an empire’ – at any rate until the recent civil wars oppressed Romans and provincials together.2 That the empire was not just glorious for Rome but was also beneficial to Rome’s subjects – or ought to be – was a pleasing belief for Romans. In 60 or 59 Cicero wrote a lengthy letter to his brother Quintus, propraetor of provincia Asia, on how Quintus should govern (he surely intended a wider subsequent readership too). He

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stressed the need for probity, restraint and empathy towards the inhabitants, ‘the most cultured of all peoples’, and stressed too that, ‘in my view, this must be the entire goal of those who are in charge of others: to ensure that those under their authority [imperium] should enjoy the greatest happiness possible’. In fact ‘it is the task not only of the man in charge of provincials and citizens, but of one in charge of slaves and dumb animals, to serve their welfare and advantage’. Of course the Asians in return had to play their part: even if they complained about Rome’s taxes: let Asia ponder this – that it would have avoided no catastrophe from foreign war or home-grown conflicts were it not held by this empire. As the empire cannot possibly be maintained without revenues, [Asia] should be content to finance, with some of its output, its permanent peace and ease.

The ideal of empire, unsurprisingly, was that it should be good for both rulers and ruled. The most famous proclamation of Rome’s beneficently imperial mission was given by Virgil to Aeneas’ father in Elysium: Rome’s destiny was ‘to crown peace with law, to spare the conquered, and subdue the proud’. Equally enthusiastic about Rome’s beneficence was Pliny the Elder around ad 75. Italy was the nurse and mother of all lands, chosen by divine grace: to bring together scattered dominions, to civilize manners, to gather up into discourse the clashing savage tongues of so many peoples through shared speech [i.e. the Latin language] and confer refinement on mankind; in short, to become the single homeland of all races on the entire globe.

This claim of worldwide mastery was an established one, even though everyone knew quite well that it was hyperbole. As early as 202 bc (wrote Polybius), Scipio Africanus told his army before Zama that victory would make Rome mistress of the rest of the world – an obvious rhetorical flight, but an exhilarating notion for troops on the edge of battle. On returning from the east, Pompey, in an inscription about his victories quoted by Diodorus, put the grandiose claim

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that ‘he extended the borders of [Rome’s] dominion to the borders of the world’ (Cicero echoed this a few years on). Virgil’s Jupiter promises ‘empire without end’ in space and time to the Romans, ‘the lords of the world, the people of the toga’, and Anchises prophesies that Augustus – Virgil’s chief patron – will achieve it. Horace soon after depicted the entire world obeying the emperor’s decrees: even the ‘faithless Persians’ and, still more boldly and improbably, the Chinese. A generation later the heading to Augustus’ Res Gestae offered the same deliberate flight of fancy: he had ‘subjected the world to the imperium of the Roman People’. The theme was now commonplace enough for the historian Josephus to make the Jewish prince Agrippa II (a Roman citizen himself) stress it repeatedly when he strove – unsuccessfully – to dissuade his fellow Jews in ad 66 from rebelling against Rome’s rule, however harsh it might be.3 Later opinion continued to see the empire as a good. Pliny the Elder coined a phrase much quoted ever since: immensa Romanae pacis maiestas, ‘the boundless grandeur of Roman peace’, which made it possible to appreciate the wondrous variety of the world. The Roman communities and individuals beyond Italy took the same view, though not always uncritically. Pliny’s younger contemporary Tacitus, of Cisalpine or Transalpine family, was well aware of imperial faults and used the allegedly unsophisticated and unsullied Germans as a foil to satirize imperial decadence. Even so he upheld Rome’s ideals and deplored threats to the integrity of the empire: the recent massacre of the Bructeri by their own German neighbours, he suggested in the same work, showed heaven’s favour towards Rome, for ‘with the destinies of the empire pressing hard’, discord among her enemies was her best safeguard. The Germans – he forecast presciently – were her most dangerous enemies. In his surviving works the most striking defence of Roman imperialism is the speech in ad 70 attributed to Petillius Cerealis, Vespasian’s legate in the Rhineland, addressing the surrendered Gallic rebels. The Gauls, said Petillius, had fought incessantly among themselves or with German invaders before the Romans came; now they enjoyed peace and Rome held the Rhine to guard them, imposing only necessary taxes (a claim similar to that of Cicero about Asia) because ‘peace among nations cannot be maintained without arms, nor arms without

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soldiers’ pay, nor pay without taxes’. Gauls too were now Roman citizens, sharing command of armies and provinces; they benefited equally when emperors were virtuous whereas ‘the savage ones harass those closest by’. And were Rome’s rule to end, endemic wars would return. ‘The fortune and discipline of 800 years have built up this structure; it cannot be dismembered without destroying its dismemberers.’ One-sided as the oration was, as in Petillius’ claim that Rome had entered Gaul by Gallic request to protect it from German invaders (nor were Gallic-born governors or generals very plentiful during the first century ad), nevertheless it is the most forthright surviving Latin justification of Rome’s rule over others.4 In Tacitus’ time too, Plutarch judged the empire a divinely crafted ‘hearth for all humankind, both holy and beneficent, a steadfast cable, a principle abiding forever’. In the 140s or 150s, in his public encomium to Rome, Aelius Aristides lavished praise on her worldwide and heaven-blessed sway bounded by the Ocean, the Red Sea and the cataracts of the Nile. Although this dominion obviously still left out vast regions of the globe, Aristides was happy that Roman power embraced the world’s civilized parts and that Roman wisdom had walled these round with strongpoints and garrisons: ‘an encamped army like a rampart encloses the civilized world in a ring’. So too affirmed the Egyptian Roman, and retired procurator, Appian of Alexandria: Rome’s was the greatest empire ever known, the achievement of prudence, good fortune and wisdom; thanks to two centuries of peace and security the Romans now possessed the finest parts of land and sea, ringing them with great armies like a fortress (the same simile as Aristides’). Nor had they any interest in extending their rule to poor and profitless barbarians beyond – indeed Appian at Rome had seen envoys from such peoples asking to be ruled, only to be turned down. A few decades later Tertullian, the combative Christian theologian of Carthage, while discussing the nature of the soul added a slightly barbed paean to the spreading prosperity, safety and wealth of the Roman world – benefits causing, in his view, an ever-growing population burden.5

◆

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Foreigners did not invariably view Roman mastery with admiring eyes. Carneades’ demolition of Rome’s Mediterranean hegemony as unjust unnerved his hearers in 155 bc – even if Carneades himself meant it merely as an academic showpiece balancing his previous day’s encomium (Chapter 4). Polybius too was ambivalent. Lauding his Roman hosts’ admirable state institutions and private morals, viewing some of their wars as justified or at any rate necessary – the first one against Carthage, those with the Illyrians, and later even the war with his own state the Achaean League – yet he suggested that others failed the test. Even the struggle with Hannibal and Carthage was caused chiefly (in his view) by Rome’s seizure of Sardinia, which gave Carthage rightful reason to fight. Still more so the war on Perseus of Macedon – it was Rome’s unilateral decision – and the attack on Carthage in 149. In fact, by the time he came to narrate his own era Polybius had grown distinctly cooler towards Rome. Some foreign observers were much more bitter. A furious oracular diatribe, originating from the author Antisthenes of Rhodes (an older contemporary of Carneades) prophesied the ruin of Italy as punishment for the plundering of Asia. Another equally bitter Greek text, supposedly an oracle and apparently a Jewish work from the early first century bc, foretold how Asia would loot thrice as much wealth from Rome as Rome had filched from it, enslave 20 times as many Italians and ‘make of Rome a roadway’. The historian Dio mentions how another oracle drew the emperor Tiberius’ annoyed notice by prophesying that after ‘thrice three hundred years’ Rome would be destroyed by civil war – and how after the Great Fire of Rome in ad 64 it emerged again.6 Among Romans as much as outsiders, praise and admiration were always tempered by awareness that imperialism entailed not just flaws but actual crimes. Romans were sensitive to the charge of self-interest and always anxious to rebut it: as early as 190, Scipio Africanus and his brother L. Scipio Asiagenus, en route to confronting Antiochus in Asia Minor, assured the pro-Roman people of Heraclea, near Miletus, of Rome’s care and concern for their and all other Greeks’ welfare. Caesar, like Petillius Cerealis later, claimed in effect that Gaul was conquered to protect the Gauls, while Augustus’ admirers held that the emperor’s conquests were

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to give the empire secure boundaries and that he forbore wider but unneeded acquisitions.7 At the same time Romans were often ambivalent about their wars and hegemony. Plautus not only penned Epidicus’ cynical joke but made a canny slave in another play sniff satirically at how commonplace triumphs have become: ‘Folks, don’t be surprised at me not holding a triumph. Everybody does it – and I’m not interested.’ The Roman elite of his day was both fully alive to the mounting rewards from wars, booty and provincial revenues, and at the same time anxious to keep the hunt for these rewards from getting out of hand: hence the punishment of C. Lucretius in 170 for outrages in Greece, the Senate ordering curbs in 171 against oppressive taxation in Spain, then later in the same century L. Piso’s and subsequent laws against misgovernment. Concern, like abuses, did not go away. At a citizens’ assembly as consul-elect in 71, Pompey’s acknowledgement that the provinces were misgoverned, and his promise of reform, met loud and enthusiastic acclaim. Even so, politics and influential connections never made it easy to convict even blatant offenders such as Spain’s misgovernors Lucullus and Galba in 151–150, Caepio the looter in 106 of the Tolosa treasures, Sicily’s tormentor Verres who, like Caepio, went into exile to avoid a verdict (Pompey, consul that year, did nothing to help the prosecution despite his earlier speech), and the notorious Catiline who misruled provincia Africa in 68–67. In the case of M. Fonteius, governor of Transalpina in the mid-70s bc, the rights or wrongs of his doings were of less account for his counsel Cicero than the artificially outrageous fact that his accusers were provincials – Gauls who had been conquered only a few decades before.8 Cicero’s writings reveal a similar ambivalence – or double standard – about Roman imperialism itself. While extolling publicly and privately its glory and benefits, he was equally well aware of its faults. His prosecution of Verres in 70 offered a numbing parade of the defendant’s unpunished misdeeds preceding as well as during his Sicilian governorship. Three years later, urging voters to give Pompey an unprecedentedly broad command to crush piracy, he told them frankly that past governors in the east had made Roman

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rule hated. His late work On Duties again and repeatedly acknowledged that the provinces were too often robbed and misruled – a complaint he had made to the Senate itself when governing Cilicia in 51–50. As proconsul there he had to cope with the embarrassingly ruthless Scaptius, debt-collector for M. Brutus, and found that neither the noble Brutus’ friendship with Cicero nor Brutus’ philosophical principles would interfere with his backing Scaptius and criticizing Cicero’s well-meant efforts to palliate that man’s outrages (Chapter 3).9 Other Romans too recognized flaws in Rome’s treatment of provinces and peoples. Cicero’s younger contemporary Sallust, a severe moralist in his later years (while living in luxury in his mansion and gardens by the Quirinal hill), castigated the Romans – especially the elite – for robbing and oppressing subject peoples and Rome’s own commoners alike. He was of course less upset about how these factors damaged provincials than how they damaged his fellow Romans. Once the annihilation of Carthage ended all external danger, ‘Fortune began to rage and embroil it all.’ First the nobiles, next ordinary soldiers in victorious armies, and finally even the poor at Rome opted for wealth and luxury – and it meant the downfall of the Republic. Livy a decade later prefaced his monumental history with comments on the grandeur of his theme but also on what it warned: virtue had made Rome great and established the empire, but wealth brought ever-growing corruption, ‘until we have reached this era in which we can tolerate neither our vices nor their cures’. Other writers too penned diatribes about the corrupting force of empire. Lucan, the philosopher Seneca’s nephew and (for a time) Nero’s favourite poet, began his epic Pharsalia about Caesar’s civil war with a vivid catalogue, echoing Sallust, of Rome’s self-obsessed failings in Caesar’s time, all caused by Roman conquests. Thanks to world mastery and capricious Fortune, Romans had coveted corrupting wealth, luxury and licentiousness, and the result was hatreds and mutual slaughter (a denunciation echoed in the mini-epic on the same topic by his fellow Neronian, Petronius).10 At the start of the second century ad Tacitus made it clear that, even though the new monarchic regime was less exploitative than

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that of the old Republic, opportunities for exploitation were plentiful – sometimes with the imperial government’s connivance, sometimes not. Misrule could lead to major revolts, as in Gaul in ad 21, by the Frisii in 28 and in Britain under Nero. In these and other cases he set out the all too predictable grievances – harsh governors and officials, corruption, heavy taxation. He also recorded details of charges laid against corrupt governors, the trials that often (though not always) ensued, and the sometimes ambivalent role of emperors or their ministers. A century later, Dio in turn frankly reported imperialist misconduct – Romans oppressing the Pannonians, Illyrians and Germans under Augustus, for instance, and the Britons in Nero’s time, then Domitian’s cool genocide of the Nasamones nomads in North Africa, and in his own time Caracalla’s massacre of the citizens of Alexandria in reprisal for their insults.11

◆ Roman and Greek historians were also, if surprisingly, willing at times to allow voice to bitter critics. Caesar himself used a feature rare in his writings – a full-scale oration – to record one of the Gallic hero Vercingetorix’s lieutenants in the great revolt of 52 bc, Critognatus, urging the Gauls besieged with him in Alesia to fight to the death. Caesar termed the speech uniquely and viciously cruel because Critognatus urged cannibalism as a last resort in resistance, yet in writing it he gave it a firmness and nobility – and rhetorical force – that would do credit to a Roman in similar straits: What else do they seek or wish than, led on by envy, to settle in the lands and states of men of whose noble renown and martial strength they have learnt, and to shackle unending slavery upon them? On that single principle they have always fought their wars.

Sallust in turn had Mithridates of Pontus denounce the Romans for having ‘one inveterate motive for making war on all nations, peoples and kings: namely, deep-seated desire for dominion and riches’. Everything they ever possessed they had stolen: home, wives, lands and empire. They had been ‘created to be the scourge of the whole world’, they seized and destroyed even allies and friends and

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considered as enemies every government that did not serve them. ‘The Romans bear arms against everyone, the sharpest against those whose defeat brings the greatest booty. Boldness, treachery and continuous wars have made them great.’ A few decades later the Pontic king was pressed into service again, by Pompeius Trogus in his history of the world, to denounce the bulk of Roman history as a record of crimes, opportunism and greed. Rome’s founders had been suckled by a she-wolf and ‘the entire race had the souls of wolves – insatiable for blood, hungry and greedy for power and riches’. Tacitus and Dio continued the practice. Tacitus let the oppressed Britons speak repeatedly. In the biography of his own father-in-law, the Britons of Boudica’s day vent their bitterness to one another before breaking out in revolt; in the Annals, Boudica before the final clash reminds her Britons of their wrongs and their right to vengeance. Most famously of all, the Caledonian general Calgacus, about to join battle with Agricola’s legions, excoriates the vices and greed of imperial Rome in brilliant rhetoric: They are looters of the globe; once their universal plundering has left them nothing more on land, they probe the sea. Rapacious if their foe is rich, power-hungry if poor, the east has not glutted them, nor has the west: alone among men they lust equally avidly after plenty and penury. Looting, butchering, robbing – they lie and call it empire. And when they create a wilderness, they call that peace.

Dio, treating the British revolt under Boudica, gave the queen a full-throated philippic, impassioned and sarcastic, against Roman imperialist oppression and moral degeneracy (Nero’s degeneracy in particular). The themes were the same as those of his predecessors, less from literary imitation than because the grievances, century after century, remained the same. It is not likely, of course, that these invectives closely reproduced actual statements, even if a prisoner of war or two might pass on the gist of what they had heard or read. As compositions by the historians themselves, they are significant. Even though well disposed to imperialism, they were willing to make themselves and

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their readers at times view it from the standpoint of peoples who suffered, rather than benefited, by it. In so doing, naturally, they also advertised their literary skills. These outright denunciations were rare, but they matched and brought more fully to life the historians’ willingness to expose Rome’s imperial shortcomings, so persistent in spite of the Romans’ own serious efforts to cure them.12

Chapter 10

Resistance

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ith its mix of virtues and vices, Roman imperial rule was never free from challenge or defiance. Resistance took varied forms, the sharpest as rebellion. Few decades from Augustus’ time on were free of revolts small or serious. The Three Gauls conquered by Caesar – Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica – were not immediately obedient: Augustus’ son-in-law and enforcer Agrippa put down revolts in Aquitania in 38 bc and in the north-east ten years later; next, in 27, a regime favourite, M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus (a distant older relative of the abysmal Volesus), celebrated his own victories over restive Gauls. Two generations on, in ad 21, harsh pressures of debt on Gallic aristocrats – debt clearly owed to Roman financiers – led to a serious though short outbreak among several peoples, including Rome’s old ‘brothers and kinsmen’ the Aedui of central Gaul, and in the lower Rhineland the Treviri, both of them powerful peoples. Family pride rather than historical precision moved the emperor Claudius to insist to the Senate in 48 that after Caesar’s conquest the Gauls had given Rome ‘one hundred years of steadfast loyalty and obedience’. The first decades of a new conquest were often punctuated by revolts, as far back as 197–195 bc in Spain, and under Augustus in Egypt (put down by the poet-prefect Cornelius Gallus, one of whose boastful inscriptions about it survives). Between 50 and 28 rebellions erupted in Gaul, from ad 6 to 9 in Pannonia and Dalmatia, and then most famously among the Germans. The German freedom coup of ad 9 was preceded by the uprisings in recently conquered Dalmatia and Illyricum – each under a local leader named Bato – which 170

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Augustus’ heavy demands for auxiliary recruits and taxes had provoked (Chapter 5). According to Dio, the Dalmatian Bato after surrendering explained, ‘You Romans are to blame, for you send to guard your flocks not dogs or shepherds, but wolves’: a sound description of what caused all too many revolts in Rome’s history. This war of ad 6–9 was described by Suetonius the biographer as the greatest of Rome’s struggles since Hannibal’s war. And as soon as it ended, Germany rose. As these rebellions and other cases show, imperial taxes – and how they were gathered – were common causes of unrest, even if this did not always escalate into a major challenge to imperial rule. Many uprisings are known only scrappily, as for example one in Claudius’ time in Mauretania – always a troubled region with its partly autonomous nomads and Atlas mountain-dwellers – which (an inscription attests) won Roman citizenship for the helpfully loyal city of Volubilis. A second in the same province around ad 80 was defeated, as his posthumous inscription records, by the able prefect C. Velius Rufus (mentioned earlier in connection with Domitian’s Danubian wars), with troops from provincia Africa and Numidia. The generally peaceable mid-second-century reign of Antoninus Pius was punctuated by flare-ups in a surprising range of provinces: not only Mauretania again but also Dacia, Judaea, Egypt and even Greece, though details are lacking. Mauretania, as mentioned before, was even more rebellious in Marcus Aurelius’ reign and similarly Egypt, where the Nile delta herdsmen rose up in force, perhaps against efforts to tax – or overtax – them or take over their habitat. Avidius Cassius crushed them, but Egypt-wide discontent at heavy taxation and forced labour demands – it was the most oppressively taxed and exploited province of the empire – persisted into late Roman times.1 Not long after Augustus’ death, anger at Roman encroachments on the semi-nomad border populations of Numidia and provincia Africa grew into a tenacious resistance movement from ad 17 to 24. Its leader was Tacfarinas, an army deserter whose tribe, the Musulamii, were rural dwellers in those provinces’ southern areas. It was not the first (or last) rising by the Musulamii, but was the most serious: joined intermittently by other frontier folk from as far

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afield as Mauretania, they raided the provinces and attacked Roman forts. Tacfarinas’ overture of peace to Tiberius in ad 22, demanding lands for himself and his followers, indicates their grievance: Roman pressure on their traditional lands, for tax purposes or to benefit provincial landed interests. Unsurprisingly, Tiberius rejected the overture. Once the rebellion was crushed, in fact, trouble along the vast extent of frontier from the edges of Cyrenaica to the Atlantic was only intermittent over the following centuries. The Musulamii were in arms again in Claudius’ reign but after that settled down, while other clashes involved mostly peoples further south. These dwelt in well-irrigated lands (today much more barren) along the edges of the desert: notably the Garamantes, Gaetuli and Nasamones, all of whom were at times tempting targets for imperial tax-levying. As usual, Roman handling of them could be harsh – the Nasamones’ revolt in 85 or 86 was so bloodily crushed that Domitian boasted to the Senate, ‘I have forbidden the Nasamones to exist’ (fortunately, he exaggerated).2 At a lower but constant level of unrest there was brigandage, for the empire was no freer from it than other eras or states. Italy itself was troubled: Octavian, when triumvir in the mid-30s bc, had to mount a large-scale operation there to end a serious problem that had developed because of the civil wars (including kidnappings of free citizens), but brigands and bandits could never be put down totally in the peninsula. One friend of Pliny the Younger – whom Pliny had unwisely gifted with 40,000 sesterces in cash – disappeared on a journey from Comum to Rome, and Pliny was worried about another who (he feared) might just recently have suffered the same fate in Umbria. Also in Italy, a century later, a charismatic leader named (or nicknamed) Bulla Felix and his 600-strong band harassed the routes linking Rome and Brundisium. His followers included not only runaway slaves but (according to Cassius Dio) pauperized imperial freedmen, no doubt from country areas: at one point Bulla sent a message to the authorities, ‘feed your slaves, so that they don’t turn to brigandage’. His plunderings went on for two years, around 203–5, before he was captured and executed. Travellers slaughtered by bandits, latrones, are mentioned distressingly often on tombstones all over the empire. A retired

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army engineer, Nonius Datus, nearly met the same fate in 150 or 151: early in an inscription mainly about how he reconstructed an ill-designed aqueduct at Saldae on the Mauretanian coast (now Bejaia in Algeria), he mentions almost casually that after setting out for Saldae from Lambaesis (300 kilometres south), ‘on the route I suffered from [i.e. was assailed by] bandits. Naked and wounded, I escaped with my team and came to Saldae.’ In the same decade, when Fronto was making his careful preparations for governing provincia Asia, he nominated to his staff a military friend with expertise in quelling banditry. Not even one of the most peaceable lands in the empire was free of the scourge.3 The great Danubian wars of Marcus Aurelius’ time, with the Balkan provinces attacked and their armies badly strained, encouraged serious outbreaks in which marauding barbarian bands could join up with resentful locals for plunder and mayhem. In the 170s the varied tasks of Marcus’ redoubtable general Valerius Maximianus included defeating the invading Naristae and then ‘driving away a band of Brisaean bandits’ from the mountainous border regions of Macedonia and Thrace. The Brisaei, it seems, lived in those regions and had no doubt been disrupted by invaders such as the Naristae and the Costoboci; some may have been part of the ‘brigands from Dalmatia and Dardania’ – Dardania was an area of Thrace close to Macedonia – recruited for the legions by the hard-pressed imperial authorities in the same period. The stresses from the long northern wars, far though these were from Gaul and Spain, contributed to troubles in those lands too: notably to the meteoric career of Julius Maternus, a Gallic army deserter who in the 180s built up a steadily growing body, or virtual army, of brigands who raided widely over Gaul and even Spain, and reportedly became strong enough to capture cities (though none are named). They were suppressed only when Maternus tried a hare-brained scheme of infiltrating a festival in Rome to assassinate Commodus, only to be betrayed by his henchmen; without him the brigand army collapsed.4

◆ From time to time after Augustus’ death the empire was shaken by much greater outbreaks. Early Roman Britain underwent two, due

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(as so often) to ham-fisted exploitation. In ad 47 the legatus Ostorius Scapula’s decision to disarm the just-conquered peoples of the south brought down on him the wrath of the powerful Iceni of Norfolk, joined by others. To quell the trouble Ostorius had to use conciliation as much as force, for instance leaving the Iceni as independent allies. Fourteen years later, when their king Prasutagus died, conciliation was thrown aside – the kingdom seized and plundered by the unscrupulous procurator Catus Decianus, and the widowed queen Boudica and her daughters treated vilely. Other grievances – the aggressively greedy colonists at Camulodunum, southern British aristocrats’ heavy debts to Roman financiers such as Seneca the multimillionaire philosopher – incited the famous revolt under Boudica’s leadership. Yet this seems to have been Britain’s last great native uprising against Rome. Corruption and arbitrary treatment did not stop – as Agricola, who had served as a legionary officer there in 61, found when he in turn became legatus – but it did not check Britain’s growing prosperity. The expanding and steadily more acculturated British elites, benefiting from citizenship grants and governors’ encouragements, had fewer reasons for opposition than in the early age of conquest. As a result, later rebellions were made by ambitious governors who ogled hopes of becoming emperor, such as Septimius Severus’ rival Clodius Albinus in 193–7 or, a century after him, the breakaway ruler Carausius (neither of them a British Roman). No less serious than Boudica’s, and lengthier, was the revolt or pair of revolts in the lower Rhineland and north-eastern Gaul launched during Rome’s civil war year, ad 69. Angered at excessive demands for their expert auxiliary cavalry, the Batavians of the Rhine delta, led by a charismatic one-eyed aristocrat Julius Civilis (immortalized by Rembrandt’s painting), rose against the thinned-out Roman forces along the lower reaches of the river. With the bulk of the Rhineland legions and auxilia away fighting for their emperor Vitellius in Italy, Civilis’ movement won successes striking enough to attract help from German tribes beyond the frontier and, less willingly, from some Rhinelanders such as the Ubii of Colonia Ara Agrippinensis. This inspired the Treviri, Lingones and some of their smaller neighbours in north-eastern Gaul to declare their own independence

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from Rome, and even to proclaim that they were founding an ‘empire of the Gauls’, imperium Galliarum – for like the Batavian Civilis, the rebellion’s chiefs were well-Romanized local aristocrats. This was especially true of the Treverans Julius Classicus (who apparently aspired to be the Gallic emperor) and Julius Sabinus, who claimed bastard – and quite possibly genuine – descent from a Gallic mistress of Julius Caesar. The high point of the Rhineland revolt came when the weakened and demoralized legions facing it not only capitulated but took an oath to serve the imperium Galliarum (for this they were afterwards cashiered). All the same the movement, despite its grandiose name and claim, hardly spread farther into the Three Gauls. Once Vespasian won the final civil war at the end of 69, his kinsman Q. Petillius Cerealis and another commander moved north with powerful fresh legions and ended both risings within a year, apparently via judicious mildness, on Ostorius’ model, as much as military force. The Batavians came to terms and even kept their special status. It was also Gaul’s last provincial uprising, though later on – as in Britain and elsewhere – army revolts by ambitious commanders occasionally broke the general peace. One such was L. Antonius Saturninus, legatus of the new Rhineland province, Lower Germany: in 89 he rose against Domitian, only to be snuffed out in three weeks by the unsympathetic legatus of Upper Germany. The next breakaway Gallic ‘empire’, in an entirely different context, did not come until 260.

◆ Much more destructive rebellions were launched by Jewish populations in the east between the reigns of Nero and Hadrian. In Judaea, angered and mistreated by a series of prefects – Pontius Pilatus only the most notorious but probably not the worst – and not mollified by the province’s short-lived resurrection from 41 to 44 as a clientkingdom under Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa, the provincials at last rose up in 66 against high taxation, accompanying social stresses, murderous flare-ups of conflicts between Greeks and Jews – especially at Caesarea Maritima – and against the violence-prone prefect Gessius Florus, who tried to confiscate treasure from Jerusalem’s Temple to make up for unpaid taxes.

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Religious revolutionaries, called Zealots by Josephus and eager to bring about the earthly kingdom of God, added to the upheaval, with bitter infighting among various rebel groups even while they had to fight the Roman counter-attack. Although a competent imperial general, T. Flavius Vespasianus, took command with five legions in 67, the counter-attack was slow. Vespasian’s methodical campaign methods, plus the series of coups and civil wars in Italy in 68 and 69 – which led to his own acclamation as emperor in July 69 and civil war victory five months later – meant that the Jewish War lasted until 70. Jerusalem was thoroughly sacked by Vespasian’s son Titus and the Temple destroyed, never to be rebuilt. Some isolated fortresses held out longer, most famously Masada, the desert stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea, but they made little difference. The price paid by the province was extensive – much of Judaea wrecked by sieges, land-ravagings and large-scale enslavements. A second Jewish rebellion broke out half a century later near the end of Trajan’s reign, not in Judaea but in the neighbouring lands of the Diaspora – Cyprus, Cyrenaica and Egypt – where the Jewish and the dominant Greek residents came to blows again. It took efforts by one of Trajan’s best generals, Q. Marcius Turbo, to crush the rising in Egypt. Though events are only scrappily recorded in surviving ancient writings, papyrus documents and some inscriptions throw light on how intense the upheaval was: public buildings in Cyrene and roads around the city demolished, civil officials in central Egypt called into military service against local insurgents, battles fought by the militia of Hermoupolis in that region, and former soldiers afterwards sent as new colonists to Cyrene and elsewhere to offset population losses. Over in Cyprus, the ancient city of Salamis was destroyed. Even though Dio’s claims of 220,000 people massacred by the rebels in Cyrene and 240,000 in Cyprus must be gross exaggerations, no doubt the loss of life on both sides was great. So too in newly annexed Mesopotamia, where Jewish residents joined the rest of the inhabitants in revolt in 116 and Trajan needed another leading general, the Mauretanian Lusius Quietus, to put an end to it, again with slaughter. Lusius, it seems, was then made legatus of Judaea itself, apparently to prevent that province erupting too, but

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did not stay long (he was one of the four suspect Trajanic generals executed in 118). The relative peace there lasted only another decade and a half. The third great Jewish revolt was fought from 132 to 135. Its sole literary record is a brief summary in Dio’s epitome, but coins of the rebels and some cached letters of its leader Simon bar Kochba survive to add important light. Its claimed provocations were that Hadrian had decreed a ban on circumcision (a claim some scholars doubt) and in 131 had founded a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, plus a temple of Jupiter, on the razed site of Jerusalem. Messianic religious fervour was another factor: the spiritual head of the rebellion was Rabbi Akiba, already a seminal figure in Jewish religion and theology, who proclaimed its military leader Simon son of Kosiba as the messiah Bar Kochba, ‘son of the star’. The star was also stamped on rebel coins, along with legends proclaiming the liberation of Jerusalem. On existing evidence, the revolt occurred mostly in southern and central Judaea, less so in the north in Galilee. In spite of early victories, one of which (apparently) virtually destroyed the legion XXII Deiotariana, the movement could not hold out against a massive imperial response. Twelve legions or parts of legions, drawn from as far away as the Danube frontier, were concentrated in Judaea under Hadrian’s ablest general Sex. Julius Severus, transferred from Britain. Again Roman repression was methodical, until by 135 the rising was over apart from a few hold-outs in the desert. None of the Jewish leaders survived; Bar Kochba died in battle, Akiba was put to death. Fifty cities and 985 villages, Dio wrote, were destroyed, 580,000 men killed in the fighting and the land left desolate. If his total of dead, no doubt a Roman estimate, in reality covered not only battle deaths but others due to the war, it may well be believed. Judaea was shattered, much of its surviving population outside Galilee dispersed or enslaved, and Aelia Capitolina barred to the rest save for one day a year. The province itself lost its name, to become Syria Palaestina. There were no further great Jewish rebellions under Roman rule.5

Chapter 11

How Roman Was the Roman Empire?

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acitus’ account of Agricola’s cultural programme in Britain is the only report in ancient literature of Romans encouraging provincials to adopt Roman ways, though Pliny the Elder’s encomium (Chapter 9) clearly implies it. With no other biography of a governor or high official surviving, debate about whether or not Agricola was a rare – even unique – phenomenon remains insoluble and perpetual. But that the imperial government saw advantage in displaying Roman ways to provincials is shown by Tacitus’ statement of why the colony of veterans at Camulodunum was founded in ad 49: ‘as a reinforcement against rebels and to initiate the provincials into their lawful duties’ – even if both functions failed abjectly at first (the arrogant colonists and their city being annihilated by Boudica in 61). Colonia Ara Agrippinensis in the Rhineland, founded next year at Oppidum Ubiorum, the chief town of the Ubii, was a bigger success from early on. Although forced to join the Batavian revolt in 70, the townspeople refused to harm the Roman colonists, pointing out that intermarriage had made the native and settler communities one; as soon as it could, Colonia Ara reverted to its Roman allegiance. Tacitus made it clear that his father-in-law found plenty of eager (to Tacitus, overeager) British compliers. For provincial communities, taking up at least some of their rulers’ cultural ways promised to earn approval (and might favour them in disputes with less adept neighbours). Besides, as Tacitus conceded, many features of Roman 178

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and Greek civilization were attractive in themselves. By 100 bc Greek studies – which naturally led to rhetoric – attracted aspiring southern Spaniards to be taught by the Bithynian grammarian Asclepiades. Roman legal language and concepts influenced Celtiberian Contrebia in the same period, with the blessing of Nearer Spain’s governor. Corduba, in the 70s bc still only a provincial town of mixed native and Roman population, nonetheless had its own home-grown but adequately educated poets to extol the proconsul Metellus. Urban amenities on the Roman model were a ready way for local grandees to foster favour and prestige, as Agricola’s British elites did. In ad 36 the city of Thugga (Dougga today), 120 kilometres south-west of Carthage, was lavishly endowed with a forum, temple square, an altar of the now-divine Augustus and other fine structures by its patron L. Postumius Chius, a Roman citizen but fairly certainly a local, ‘at his own expense’ as the dedication proudly records. Three hundred kilometres to Thugga’s west and close to Numidia’s capital, Cirta, the little town of Tiddis on a very steep hillside was adorned in the second and third centuries with public buildings and statues by its local elite, the most eminent of whom was the builder of the Antonine Wall, Q. Lollius Urbicus. He also built his family’s circular mausoleum, still standing outside the town on what must have been the family estate. The name of another benefactor of Tiddis a century later, M. Cocceius Faustus, signals an ancestral citizenship going back to the emperor Nerva between 96 and 98. Such liberalities were common across the empire until its difficult later days: a recently found inscription of 211 at Sardis, one of the prime cities of provincia Asia, celebrates that funds for painting in gilt the exterior of a grand bath-gymnasium complex were donated by two ladies of consular ancestry, Antonia Sabina and Flavia Politta.1 The old view that the imperial government deliberately applied a programme of ‘Romanization’ in the western provinces and in North Africa and the Balkan lands is not now taken for granted. Provincials choosing to adopt Roman ways, language especially, were active in older provinces as early as 100 bc. With settlers from Italy making their homes in the provinces, with a long succession of Roman colonies and other urban centres being founded in every

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part of the empire, and with grants of both Latin right and Roman citizenship to individuals and communities outside Italy increasingly plentiful from Caesar’s time on, models were plentiful for provincials keen to acquire and show off humanitas. It was natural for them, in turn, to expect to be recognized and rewarded as time passed.2 When recognition might come, and what type of reward it brought, much depended on who was in power at Rome – and it often helped to have one or two rich and eminent members influential at Rome. As mentioned earlier, Caesar’s citizenship grant to Gades in 49 bc was surely influenced by (if not entirely due to) the close friendship of its leading man Balbus with the dictator. Around ad 40, Vienna in Transalpine Gaul gained ‘the solid boon of Roman citizenship’ (as the emperor Claudius called it) probably through its dominant grandee D. Valerius Asiaticus, consul in 35 and 46 – and kept it even though Asiaticus himself fell fatally foul of Claudius later. Claudius was also pleased to grant citizenship and privileges to Mauretania’s Volubilis in 44 in reward for its help against the local rebels, when its leading man M. Valerius Severus (whose father Bostar bore a Punic name) went to Rome to petition for it. Spain’s ordinary provincial communities may have owed their rise to Latin status in 73 to Vespasian’s close friend and counsellor C. Licinius Mucianus, probably a Spaniard himself as noted earlier. In the 140s Gigthis on the gulf of Sirte in provincia Africa, already a municipium Latinum, profusely thanked its principal townsman M. Servilius Draco Albucianus for gaining Gigthis the right of Latium maius, which made all municipal senators (not just the magistrates) cives Romani.3 Conferring citizenship or Latin right – actions by the imperial government, and better attested than governors’ cultural efforts – shows what Rome’s authorities were interested in above all: political obedience by provincials and, better still, co-operation. The more proficient a community in Rome’s language, legal usages, educational regimens and religious forms, the more it could be relied on to pay its taxes regularly and enforce essential Roman laws (particularly for property, inheritance and commerce). Since communities everywhere in the empire, urban and rural, were ruled by their elites, these elites formed the focus of imperial encouragement.

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Both Agricola and his biographer took this interplay for granted, the governor with his emphasis on liberales artes, especially rhetoric, and Tacitus with his sarcastic catalogue of resulting ‘vices’. Colonnades (shorthand for luxurious mansions), baths and refined dinnerparties could be afforded only by wealthy Britons, and the toga was an expensive garment now worn chiefly on official occasions. It was of course useful, too, if ordinary townsfolk became conversant with at least simple Latin, Roman bronze and silver coinage and other imperial features – Roman measurements and building techniques, for instance – necessary for dealing with Roman traders and officials. No doubt governors and local elites expected and were happy with this trickle-down effect, but Romanization at such levels was left to personal enterprise. It scarcely passed down to the 90 per cent or more of a province’s population that lived outside towns: their contacts with Roman authorities and culture were very limited. For ordinary provincials, and especially country dwellers, the most widespread vehicle for acquiring some Latin and a modicum of Roman ways was through army enlistment in the auxilia, or in eastern provinces even as legionaries. Nearness to Roman communities encouraged acculturation too. An edict of Claudius in ad 46, preserved on a bronze tablet, announced that he was granting civitas to three small Alpine communities north of Tridentum (modern Trento) – on the far northern edge, therefore, of the old Cisalpina. Not only had the communities long seen themselves as Roman, but they had been so accepted by the Tridentines ‘that they cannot be withdrawn from them without serious injury to that splendid municipality’. In fact, Claudius added, men from the communities were serving as army centurions, others served (he had been told) in his Praetorian Guard, including some as centurions, and a few (obviously wealthy men) were enrolled in Rome’s prestigious jury panels. All this came as a surprise to the emperor – nor, quite clearly, had his predecessors known of it either.4

◆ Greece and the Near East already practised a long-dominant Hellenistic culture, Greek-speaking and, especially in the coastal

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lands of the Mediterranean, extensively urbanized. Roman ways – themselves long influenced by Hellenistic Greece – therefore made a different, more select impact. They were conveyed via Italians visiting or residing in the eastern Mediterranean, settlers in Roman colonies there, eastern provincials visiting Italy or serving in legions or auxilia, and the need for provincials to deal with their – often, but not always, well-disposed – Roman rulers both at home and in Rome. The cult worship of the emperor, itself drawn from Greek and eastern models, was the most visible feature (below), along with the spread of civitas Romana and the entry of easterners into the senatorial and equestrian elite. The cultural dualism of writers such as Plutarch, Arrian, Appian and Dio was taken for granted: as members of the eastern Romanized Greek upper classes, they associated easily with Italian and western grandees, took on public or priestly roles, often onerous, in their homelands, and also (Plutarch apart) held high Roman official positions. Another Roman easterner was Marcus Aurelius’ tutor in Greek, friend, and perhaps the richest Athenian in history, Herodes Atticus (in full, L. Vibullius Hipparchus Ti. Claudius Atticus Herodes; like many Romans of his time, he had two full sets of names) whose busy life embraced the consulship in 143, a wife, Appia Annia Regilla, from second-century Rome’s highest social level (her relatives included the wives of both Antoninus Pius and Marcus himself), a scandal over her violent death, generous patronage of the Panathenaic and other festivals, staggeringly munificent building projects for cities and cult centres all over Greece (the now restored Odeon below the Acropolis in Athens was one), and sterling fame as an orator and intellectual. Herodes’ almost exact contemporary, Alexander of Abonoteichus, though not apparently a Roman citizen, was the charismatic and highly successful founder of a snake-oracle cult at that coastal town in Asia Minor (now Inebolu on the Black Sea). He was revered not only by regional enthusiasts but by many eminent Romans, such as the unfortunate Sedatius Severianus (Chapter 6) and, supposedly, Marcus Aurelius’ commanders in the Danubian wars – although, according to the sceptical satirist Lucian, his optimistic prophecies led to Roman disasters. Clearly Alexander, whose oracular snake was named Glycon, was at ease with easterners and westerners alike;

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moreover, dedicatory inscriptions and coins picturing Glycon attest that the cult not only was revered as far as the Danubian provinces and Syria but also survived the prophet (and presumably his original snake) into the third century.5 Urban amenities such as baths and gymnasia had long characterized Greek cities, but they grew in size, number and facilities under Roman rule. The long peace across most of the eastern Mediterranean, from the age of Augustus to the mid-third century, encouraged grand public projects especially from the second century on: for instance, Ephesus’ 500-metre-long central avenue, the one at Antioch which was over four times as long, and at Ephesus again the library of Celsus built in Trajan’s time by an Ephesian, Ti. Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, consul in 110, named for his father who in 92 had been one of the earliest consuls from provincia Asia. The small and prosperous city of Gerasa (Jerash) in southern Syria by ad 200 enjoyed its own colonnaded main street, a new temple of Zeus, a huge temple dedicated to the city’s divine patron Artemis (both built in the later second century), two Roman-style theatres with raised podiums, and two monumental arches put up in Hadrian’s reign or before. Like these and other eastern centres, Palmyra, the ancient oasis city further east, boasted its own grand and arch-adorned avenue, and impressive temples – the Palmyrenes worshipped a catholic pantheon of Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Arabian, Greek and Roman deities – built or enhanced in the first to third centuries. Some eastern cities, not just Roman colonies, also took to another Roman pastime, gladiator shows: a few with amphitheatres (a Roman invention) as at Corinth, Pergamum, Sagalassus, Antioch and Alexandria, but others in existing theatres modified for the purpose – even the theatre of Dionysus at Athens, to the disgust of Pliny’s and Plutarch’s contemporary, the rhetor and philosopher Dio Chrysostom.6

◆ Influences and borrowings from Rome coexisted and often blended with the continuing vigour of regional cultures. In both east and west, local styles in art took on Roman influences when these were wanted, just as Greek motifs had been. In Caria in Asia Minor, the

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old city of Aphrodisias 150 kilometres inland from Ephesus, blessed with plentiful Carian marble deposits plus Roman favour from early times, not only produced an efflorescence of fine sculptures and buildings until the fifth century ad (including evocative portrayals of Julio-Claudian family members such as Claudius, Agrippina the Younger and Nero) but also exported sculptors as far as Olympia and Rome. Less sophisticated styles, but equally vigorous, appeared in frontier regions such as the Danubian territories: for example, the energetic and detailed battle scenes of Trajan’s Dacian Wars on the massive cylindrical monument set up in 109 at Tropaeum Traiani in Moesia (Adamklissi, near the Danube delta), which present a different yet equally Roman glorification of imperial war-making and conquest. In much of Gaul and the Rhineland in the late first century ad a new blend of Celtic and Roman religious building evolved, now conventionally called a fanum. Planted on existing Celtic sacred sites – but most of them identified only through aerial photographs – these shrines varied in size but invariably consisted of a circular, square or eight-sided tower, surrounded by a four-sided roofed colonnade. They are commonly thought to be descended from simpler, pre-Roman constructions in wood, with the Romanstyle colonnades built for ritual processions around the sacred tower; however, debate continues, and nor are the rituals and beliefs practised in them known for certain. Not debatable, though, is the Roman date of the fana, almost entirely late first-century or else second-century according to archaeological evidence, and their number: over 800 (so far).7 At a more detailed level, artworks of the second and early third centuries likewise illustrate blendings of Roman and other styles. An appealing example is a sculptured second-century eastern gravestone, apparently Palmyrene: on this the deceased, named in Palmyrene script as Zabdibol of Palmyra, and his three named children face their viewer full-frontally (a fashion familiar in the east and generally seen as Persian-influenced) but are sculpted with Graeco-Roman spatial depth and detail. Monuments portraying a reclining deceased were a very old sculptural theme (Etruscan art had been fond of it too). The youthfully depicted Zabdibol wears a

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Greek synthesis (banqueting robe), holds a decorated drinking-cup and reclines on a decorated couch preparing for his eternal feast as his mourning children stand behind. In northern Britain around ad 200 a comely gravestone, simpler than Zabdibol’s, was set up for Victor the Moor, the obviously mourned 20-year-old freedman of Numerianus, an Asturian Spanish cavalryman serving in the province. Victor reclines on a couch, in dining dress and this time grasping a drinking-cup in one hand and a small bunch of leaves in the other; the leaf motif suggests that the sculptor may have been from Palmyra, making the stone a testament to the human and artistic cosmopolitanism of the empire as the third century opened. Even more eloquent is another gravestone from the same part of Britain depicting Regina, freedwoman-wife of Barates – another Palmyrene – seated in formal dress and with her jewellery, wool-basket and loom. The widower added a phrase of mourning in Palmyrene, ‘Regina, the freedwoman of Barate, alas!’, beneath his Latin epitaph, which itself records that Regina (who died aged only 30) was a Catuvellaunian, in other words a member of the same southern British people as Rome’s great early foe Caratacus. A processional frieze on Septimius Severus’ triumphal arch at his home city, Lepcis Magna in Africa, represents the emperor, his family and attendant senators as very Roman figures sophisticatedly sculpted, but they face their viewers full-frontally. Similarly the ‘Severan tondo’, a brightly painted wood-panel portrait (probably done in Egypt) shows the same ruler, his wife Julia Domna and their two sons gazing directly at the viewer in a blended eastern and Roman portrait style, though the head of Geta, the younger son, is blank – painted over after his brother Caracalla butchered him in December 211.8

◆ Latin and Greek were the linguae francae of the empire, with Latin of course its official language, but other languages were not silenced. In fact multilingualism was no worry to Roman legal authorities: thus Septimius Severus’ jurist Ulpian stressed that fiduciary trusts, fideicommissa, could be bequeathed using any language, ‘not only Latin or Greek, but also Punic, Gallic or that of any other people’.

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East of the Adriatic, Greek was normal for administration at every level (even in Roman administration), but local tongues thrived. Aramaic was virtually the standard language of Syria, Judaea and their neighbours along the Euphrates frontier – indeed its western form, Syriac, would become a major language of the Christian church in Syria during late Roman and early Byzantine times. In a different connection, Ulpian mentioned Assyrian as another living tongue (his point was that it might not be legally acceptable in an investigation). In Cappadocia, annexed in ad 18, the local language was still the norm in the fourth century ad, the time of the Christian theologian Basil of (Cappadocian) Caesarea, just as Celtic held out in Galatia until the late empire if not into Byzantine times. Western, African and Danubian provinces likewise enjoyed a flourishing linguistic variety. Punic, the Phoenician-descended language of old Carthage, had long been common in North Africa from Lepcis Magna to Numidia. Apuleius in the mid-second century ad sniffed that his (hostile) stepson Sicinius Pudens knew only Punic, with a bit of Greek, but of Latin not a word. Half a century later the embarrassed Septimius Severus, himself fluent in Latin, Greek and Punic (like the ancestor lauded by the poet Statius), allegedly sent his sister back to Lepcis from Rome because of her atrocious Latin. St Augustine two centuries later met Punic speakers in both rural and town congregations, and Punic remained widespread in North Africa as late as the 530s where it was heard by Procopius, the historian of Justinian’s reconquest of the region. Spain’s native languages – Iberian, Celtiberian and Lusitanian – are attested at least into the early first century ad, while in Gaul forms of Celtic endured longer: even second-century potters at La Graufesenque, for instance, used it to inscribe details of their tasks and their names on some of their wares, along with writing Latin on others.9 The empire’s religious multiplicity was equally unworrying. Rome had a long tradition of adding foreign deities to her pantheon, building a temple or shrine to each in the City and arranging for the cults’ practices to be properly maintained. Greece’s Asclepius, god of healing, and Asia Minor’s Great Mother or Cybele had been adopted during the third century bc – Asclepius becoming Aesculapius,

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and the Great Mother (an ecstatic cult served by eunuch priests) strictly regulated to avoid any scandal. The Egyptians Serapis and Isis, though at times banned from worship in the City, later on won followers too, enjoying patronage from rulers such as Vespasian, Hadrian and Severus. In the second century ad another eastern deity, Mithras from India via Parthia, grew increasingly popular with an appeal notably (though not solely) to soldiers. His cult’s underground shrines around the empire numbered over 400, many at or near Rome with many others in the European frontier lands – Britain included, as London’s notable Mithraeum illustrates. Celtic gods and goddesses retained their role in their northwestern provinces. As with deities in other regions, they were commonly treated as the equivalents of Greek and Roman divinities: thus Sul, goddess of healing springs with her chief shrine at Aquae Sulis in Britain (modern Bath), was identified with Minerva; and the war god Camulos – whose name was given to colonia Camulodunum – with, naturally, Mars. Jointly honoured Roman and regional gods – Jupiter, Tarvos Trigaranus, Vulcan, Esus and others – are a feature of the Gallic ‘Pillar of the Boatmen’, a tall square-sided stone column made up of four tiers of carefully incised bas-reliefs and inscriptions of the deities. It was set up in the time of the emperor Tiberius by the nautae Parisiaci, the boatmen plying the River Seine up to Lutetia, capital of the Parisii people whose name was to become that of their city. The Celtic horse-goddess Epona had no Roman alter ego, but was enormously popular with people in both western and Balkan lands (and with at least one first-century Roman consul, according to a disdainful Juvenal). Other, less prominent divinities abounded, for instance the triads of Matronae revered in Gaul, Cisalpina and the Rhineland (where their most notable form was the Matres Aufaniae); the Lusitanian god Endovellicus; and Nehalennia of north Germany, another mother goddess. Most are known from cult sites with votive inscriptions in Latin, another sign of easy coexistence with Rome.10 Monotheism also existed, even if (like Tacitus) Romans and Greeks might look at it with slightly baffled interest. It was unusual that Caligula took umbrage that, as he told Philo of Alexandria and other Jewish envoys in ad 40, Jews would not take part in

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formal worship of him as divine; after all, other provincials did. He ordered his statue to be placed in the holy of holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, but was fortunately assassinated before he could enforce this. Jewish communities in Italy occasionally suffered mistreatment, as in ad 19 when Tiberius had Jews and Egyptians in Rome expelled for practising their rites: 4,000 Jewish freedmen were sent off to fight, or be killed by, brigands in Sardinia; all other practitioners had to forswear their beliefs or leave Italy. The expulsion all the same did not last, for 30 years later Claudius ordered Jews (or some Jews – or possibly Christians) out of Rome again because, Suetonius recorded without details, they had fomented disturbances. Like other bans and expulsions from the City down the centuries, the ban soon lapsed again. Otherwise attitudes to Jews were generally benign, save for Alexandria in Egypt where the majority Greek citizenry and Jewish minority often rioted against each other – making Claudius, for example, irate enough to lecture them both directly in a lengthy edict in 41: I simply tell you that unless there is an end to this destructive and remorseless anger of yours against each other, I will be forced to show what kind of a person a benevolent leader can be when he has been turned to justifiable anger.

Of course they did not stop for long, as we have seen.11 Jewish religion was not only tolerated but given concessions by various rulers, as early as Julius Caesar. Jews outside Judaea were – until the great revolt of 66–70 – permitted to send money for the upkeep of the Temple in Jerusalem, a permission more than once reiterated because the cities they lived in sometimes tried to take over the funds; and were guaranteed the right to practise their ancestral customs. They could not, for instance, be summoned before a magistrate on the Sabbath. From 43 bc on, moreover, Jews were exempted from military service, a remarkable concession. Despite the serious revolts between 66 and 135 their religion was not proscribed, and persecution of it started only after the empire became Christian-dominated two centuries later. A few Romans became (or were believed to have become) followers of Judaism:

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notably Nero’s mistress-turned-wife Poppaea Sabina, who used her influence to win concessions for Jews in the 60s ad, and Domitian’s cousin Flavius Clemens and Clemens’ wife Domitilla, who were punished – Clemens with execution – allegedly for ‘atheism’ in 95, though in reality for political reasons.12

◆ A few religions or cults did draw Roman hostility. The Bacchic cult, another import from the east, was put under severe restrictions – but not banned – in 186 bc because of its secret and supposedly orgiastic rituals (Chapter 4). Two-and-a-half centuries later the Druid religion in Gaul and Britain suffered proscription because (Romans and Greeks claimed) it involved human sacrifice, though another irritant seems to have been that Druid priests intermittently encouraged resistance or revolt, as when Suetonius Paulinus attacked the isle of Anglesey in ad 61 and during the Batavian and imperium Galliarum revolts in 69–70. Despite bans by Tiberius and Claudius and punitive actions such as that of Suetonius, Druids all the same continued their rites – no doubt more discreetly – even after Rome’s fifth-century fall.13 Another religion viewed askance by Rome and intermittently attacked was, notoriously, Christianity. Spreading from first-century Judaea to small and secretive enclaves in several cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and at Rome, the sect was soon viewed as suspect. Tacitus saw it as ‘a destructive superstition’ that hated the human race; 80 years later Tertullian complained that any and every public calamity prompted furious demands for throwing ‘Christians to the lion!’ Intermittently and inconsistently over 250 years emperors or governors launched assaults on Christians, empire-wide or in various provinces. The claimed reasons were not always the same. Nero made his victims scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome in ad 64, while popular assaults on notable Christians at Smyrna in provincia Asia in 155 and Lugdunum in 177 claimed that the religion involved obscene and cannibalistic rituals. The major persecutions by the emperor Decius and many of his successors in the later third century alleged that their impiety or atheism was turning the gods against the now-embattled empire.

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Behind it all was a conviction that the sect – even as it grew, spread and won upper-class as well as less grand followers – taught alien attitudes and threatened the well-being of the empire. The proof, to Roman administrators and also to ordinary non-Christians, was their solid refusal to join in the common (but to Christians idolatrous) rituals of their fellow citizens – especially the formal worship of the ruling emperor as divine. This stubbornness and ‘unbending perversity’ irritated even normally well-meaning governors and rulers, such as Pliny the Younger and Trajan around 112 (Pliny had to investigate the sect in Bithynia) and Marcus Aurelius 60 years later in his Meditations. Yet persecution was erratic, intermittent and often selective. Christian communities, such as that of Lugdunum before and indeed after 177, might exist untroubled for decades. The execution in 203 of a group of Christians at Carthage, immortalized in an account partly written by one martyr, the young matron Vibia Perpetua, seems to have broken a period of toleration and did not bring down other openly practising Christians such as Tertullian (who may have edited Perpetua’s account). Even before 200 there were Christians and Christian sympathizers even in high places: for instance, the mistress of the emperor Commodus, Marcia Aurelia Ceionia, whose religious principles did not keep her from arranging his murder on the last day of 192 to forestall her own. It would, of course, have stunned Tertullian and any other Christian of that time to learn that, little more than a century later, theirs would become the official religion of the empire.14

◆ The second significant new cult to develop during the Principate – Romans would have seen it as the most significant – was emperorworship. It was not a religion in the usual sense: rather a politically meaningful set of rituals that grew out of Hellenistic Greek and perhaps also Egyptian habits of showing enthusiastic veneration for monarchs. ‘Roma’, the divine essence of the Roman state, won Greek cult worship from the early second century bc on. The ‘liberator of Greece’, T. Flamininus, was the first individual Roman to receive cult honours, with a priest for the festivals held in his memory (called

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Titeia, and still celebrated in Plutarch’s day). Pompey the Great became another Greek divinity, and Julius Caesar after his victory over Pompey was acclaimed a god by more than one eastern polity, as well as by the already mentioned Roman business community on Cos in the Aegean. Augustus neatly combined the two forms of public cult into worship of Roma et Augustus, first in the eastern provinces and, before long, also in the west. Coins struck in 18 bc at Pergamum depict the temple set up by the commune Asiae, the religious association (koinon in Greek) of the cities of the province. The temple dedicated to Rome and Augustus in Ancyra, Galatia, still stands, its walls inscribed with the Greek and Latin texts of his testament to posterity, his Res Gestae. In the west, Tarraco and Emerita in Spain established altars, arae, for the cult around the same time as Pergamum’s temple; Tarraco followed up with a temple to Augustus in ad 15, after his death made him officially a Roman deity. (Augustus did not take provincial worship entirely solemnly – when Tarraco flatteringly reported that a palm tree had sprouted on his altar, he commented ‘It’s clear how often you use it.’) In 12 bc the emperor’s younger stepson Drusus founded an ‘ara of the Three Gauls’ facing Lugdunum across the River Saône, appointing one C. Julius Vercondaridubnus (a grandee of the Aedui) as the first Gallic priest of Roma et Augustus. Before he died in 9 bc Drusus likewise set up an altar at the town of the Ubii on the Rhine, the centre that later joined up with Colonia Ara Agrippinensis. Narbonensis, the former Transalpina, took longer, but near the end of Augustus’ life, in ad 11, the Roman colony of Narbo put up an altar to Augustus’ numen, his innate divine spirit, as two surviving inscriptions show along with details of its rites. A province’s communities would elect high-ranking representatives as members of its concilium provinciae to perform the necessary ceremonies at the annual gathering, with the grandee chosen to head the concilium being termed the flamen (or in Gaul sacerdos) provinciae. The posts were prestigious, especially the flaminate or, in eastern provinces, the archierosyne (‘chief priesthood’) which holders took pride in recording on their inscriptions. It naturally opened ways for provincial grandees to add to their standing among

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their peers – and to compete with them. A concilium equally acted as a representative body of the province, able to offer suggestions, complaints or congratulations to the governor or the emperor. In Nero’s reign a Cretan magnate, Claudius Timarchus, boasted that it was he who decided whether or not the province’s concilium would offer the customary vote of thanks to a departing governor – an unwise revelation that brought down the Senate’s wrath on his head, but an illustration of provincial realities. The even more influential Sennius Sollemnis in the concilium of 230s Gaul was mentioned earlier (Chapter 7). The army, and no doubt navy too, carefully observed imperial cult, as shown in detail in the Feriale Duranum, the early thirdcentury calendar found at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates. The property of a Palmyrene auxiliary cohort stationed there in 223–7 when young Severus Alexander was emperor, the papyrus lists every day of the year on which a sacrifice and prayers had to be performed – at least seven in January, for example (the text is very damaged), five in April including Rome’s birthday on the 21st, another five in September, and so on. Along with divinities such as Mars and Minerva, and the current dynasty’s members (all officially divine), deified rulers as far back as Caesar, Augustus and Trajan received cult honours; so too the emperor Claudius, his brother Germanicus who had died in ad 19, and Trajan’s sister Matidia. Each day’s rite, with few exceptions, required the sacrifice of an ox, bull or cow: imperial cult was expensive (though the men, along with their priest, could then eat the slaughtered meat). Across the vast empire, with its cornucopia of languages and cultures, the worship of the ruler (however artificial it might seem even to Romans themselves) constituted one of the key bonds of overt loyalty. Unlike Jews, Christians who refused to participate opened themselves to criticism and intermittent attack. Yet even after Constantine and his successors became Christians, the longestablished cult epithets of rulers – ‘divine’ and ‘sacred’ – continued to be used (the empire’s head of finances and thus tax-gathererin-chief engagingly became ‘the count of the sacred largesses’): a testament to the impact of the cult that had begun with Julius Caesar.15

Conclusions

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ithout intending it, Roman imperialism built up an integrated, large-scale geopolitical structure which in the end absorbed and changed its imperialists. Whether or not the second-century and first-century bc Romans deliberately schemed to subject the Mediterranean world to their rule, no one surely envisaged that within little more than another century their progeny would be sharing that rule with broadening cohorts of descendants of the Spaniards, Gauls, Africans, Greeks and other peoples whom they had comprehensively humbled; or that the empire would be defended largely by men whose forebears had once fought (and failed) to repel it. The popular idea of ‘the Romans’ as more or less the same people, born and raised throughout history in or near the City on the Tiber, leads (for instance) to the fey image of ‘the Romans’ finally pulling out of Britain in ad 410 and leaving the hapless Britons to their own sad native devices. In 410 the Britons were as Roman as St Augustine and young Flavius Aetius from Moesia, one day to be the last saviour of the western empire. A no less false image sees an empire of powerless subjects ground down from first to last beneath the heels of an unchanging caste of central Italians. That the empire’s peoples were indeed ground down much of the time – and not only in the provinces – is true enough, but that was thanks to their own local elites as much as to the imperial authorities, the two of whom in time overlapped extensively. Opinions about Rome’s imperialism and the impact of empire, as noted earlier, continue to divide moderns. The all-beneficent portrayal, going back in essence to Pliny, Aelius Aristides and his peers, has been tempered as the evidence both literary and 193

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documentary has undergone closer scrutiny. Though still widespread – notoriously turning up even in a Monty Python film in 1979 – it is less impressive to scholars. Instead, as noted earlier, for some modern observers the entire empire can be characterized as one great system of robbery or rape: a verdict owing much to another ancient authority, St Augustine. ‘Once you take justice away,’ he wrote, ‘what are kingdoms if not great robberies? Because what are robberies, in turn, if not little kingdoms?’ – arguing that an accumulation of successful robberies can eventually create a kingdom and in it impunity will second success.1 By ad 212 Roman rule had achieved its final reach: it now extended from the edge of the Atlantic to the River Tigris. Over the four-and-a-half imperialist centuries viewed in this book, from the annexation of Sicily to Caracalla’s universal grant of Roman citizenship, the Romans – a body of people who over the same centuries evolved from a particular city-state population to a multiethnic legal and cultural identity – set up a Mediterranean-wide organization which itself evolved from largely acquisitive, often violent and altogether self-centred beginnings into a lasting regime. This regime within its frontiers maintained general peace, built (and encouraged its subjects to build) useful infrastructure (if to the disgust of the great Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai), made the Mediterranean world safe for the propertied elite all over the empire, failed to eradicate endemic corruption among its functionaries, very often mistreated and exploited the empire’s peoples even after these became Romans themselves, developed and refined a system of law and legal practice open – theoretically but imperfectly – to every man and woman in the empire, did not always take effective steps to curb or punish its own oppressive officials (even those of very high rank), savagely repressed real or supposed troublemakers and rebellions, allowed land and sea trade, travel and prosperity to flourish under ‘the boundless grandeur of Roman peace’, taxed much of that trade and prosperity, imposed savagely cruel punishments on criminals real and alleged (including at times convicted Christians), opened a stable (and usually safe) career path for able-bodied men prepared to serve for several decades in the imperial army and navy,

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imposed no known ban or bar based on people’s skin colour or origin, and tolerated all but a few religions and philosophers. This deliberately mingled catalogue of actions, achievements, faults and failures explains why Rome’s imperialism and empire will always be judged in whatever ways both admirers and critics prefer.

◆ In past admiring days, Roman imperialism was often compared with modern, especially British and French, imperialism as the exemplar par excellence of enlightened rule over more primitive peoples. Comparisons naturally ignored the slaughters that marked so much of Rome’s imperial expansion and the exploitation that so often disfigured her ensuing rule (partly because modern colonial powers had little to boast about in the same fields). Another feature sharply differentiated Rome’s empire from modern colonial ones. Modern states on the periphery of Europe exercised a long-range mastery over territories nearly all separated from them by vast reaches of ocean – in Africa, Asia and the Pacific – and subdued them through superior military technology, above all gunpowder. By contrast, Roman military technology was not very superior to that of most of her opponents, except perhaps the hardy but poorly equipped peoples of free Germany, Caledonia and the northern Sahara (who even so were impossible to subdue permanently). Some enemies, such as the Carthaginians and the Parthians, were as efficiently equipped and disciplined as the legions: Roman discipline, tenacity and resourcefulness, as Sallust stressed, were the key to imperial victories.2 Still more crucially Rome’s was essentially a land empire, even if it surrounded a great sea, and (until times changed dramatically in the late third century) Rome, the seat of government, stood in the centre. Except in a few wars that had to use large naval forces, such as the first two against Carthage, Pompey’s pirate sweep in 67 bc and the civil wars against Pompey’s younger son Sextus (master of Sicily from 43 to 36), nearly all Roman wars were fought on land, with military movements going, as much as possible, overland or by river. So did imperial couriers and agents, using the relay service called the cursus publicus. Communications were slow since, as in

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early modern overseas empires, they depended on human, animal and wind propulsion. News travelling around the empire could sometimes take as long a time as from London to Calcutta or Manila to Madrid before steam and the telegraph: when the emperor Domitian died at Rome in September ad 96, the news seems to have taken 99 days (over three months) to reach central Egypt. A rescript of Hadrian dispatched from Rome on 1 March ad 127 took 75 days to reach Stratonicea in Caria, a city not far inland from Pergamum. As in far-flung European empires, therefore, all but essential decisions were left to the proconsul or legatus (who might of course have to answer for them later). However hampered, it was a system which endured for up to 600 years, a good deal longer than any European empire.3 The inhabited bulk of the Roman empire, moreover, was the broad and wide semicircle of western and southern Europe, and the Near East, on the northern side of the Mediterranean. The southern Mediterranean provinces were certainly populous and economically vital to Rome’s well-being, but throughout the empire’s history Africa’s 5,000-kilometre frontiers took up at most only as many legions and auxilia as the single province of Britain. Geography imposed strategic needs and choices on the Romans that were altogether different from those which European imperial states faced (save perhaps for Sweden’s short-lived seventeenth-century Baltic dominion) and were, if anything, more akin to those of the Southern Song dynasty in eleventh-century China, a continental state under constant challenge by unruly neighbours to the north – who in the long run overthrew it. Another point of difference was that the Romans did not try to impose their own ancient, complex and deeply ritual religion on other peoples. They did not even privilege it over others; rather, they were ready enough to equate their deities with those found elsewhere and – for political and cultural, not religious, reasons – to encourage provincials to add imperial cult to their observances. The missionary zeal of Spain and Portugal in their sixteenth-century empires, and of nineteenth-century Western powers striving to spread one or other form of Christianity both into imperial colonies and equally into countries under fluctuating Western influence (China and Japan

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the most obvious examples), lacked Roman antecedents – at any rate before Christian zealots, in the western empire’s last century, took up the challenge of converting the Germans, Goths and other barbarian peoples looming on the endangered borders. The greatest difference between Rome’s empire and modern ones (except that of Russia, another continental power) is that almost from the start non-Romans were admitted as citizens, just as legally freed slaves had always been. Provincial Romans could hold office if affluent and enterprising enough: some became senators, others high equestrian bureaucrats, and of course from ad 98 onwards an exceptional few became emperors (and after that – most of them – gods). While the Spaniard Varius might be disdained by the patrician former consul Aemilius Scaurus in 90 bc, 200 years later Rome’s elite, the old aristocrats and the new alike, were united in extolling their benign princeps, the Spaniard Trajan. Macrinus, the short-lived successor of Caracalla in 217, was a Mauretanian ‘of most obscure parents’ (Dio sniffed), perhaps a genuine Berber – his ears were pierced in Moorish fashion – but it was not his race but his repeated political miscalculations that led to his ruin in 218, in favour of a spoilt Syrian teenager. Those Roman citizens who emerged from military service could return home to be important members of their communities, or do the same in the colonies where they settled, and their sons and descendants might do even better – Tertullian was a centurion’s son. The military martinet Maximinus (emperor from 235 to 238) supposedly started as a common legionary. In the overseas European empires, on the other hand, African, Asian or Indonesian colonial subjects might have the right to travel to and settle in the ‘mother country’ but it was always rare for any, however able or princely, to hold metropolitan office, still less become prime minister or, in France, president. There was another feature, a damaging one, that distanced the Roman empire from any modern successors. Hardly more than a century and a half from its start in 241 bc, it became prey to military violence. Once the thwarted consul Sulla in 88 bc led his six legions from Campania to Rome to smash his political enemies, armed clashes repeatedly disfigured the working of the res publica

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populi Romani during the Republic and then under the Principate: Catiline’s rising in 63–62 bc, Caesar’s in 49, that of the soon-to-be Triumvirs Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus in 43, later on ad 69’s violent series of emperors from Galba to Vespasian, Septimius Severus’ march on Rome in 193, Macrinus’ overthrow in 218, and the extraordinary Year of Six Emperors in 238. It was above all imperialism – possession of empire and wealth, and prospects for gaining more – that caused the Republic which had launched it to metamorphose, via epic violence, into a monarchy thinly whitewashed as the Principate, and savaged too often by fresh military explosions. After 238 a plague of army coups, counter-coups, civil wars and separatisms wrecked the stability of the empire, exactly when fresh and formidable attacks from outside were striking it on almost every frontier from the North Sea to the Euphrates and even Egypt. The putsches and failed putsches, at least before 238, were due not to crises in economy or society but to the self-interested ambitions of unscrupulous aristocrats, generals and their coteries, and to the no less self-interested hunger for booty and bribes energizing the troops under their command. Modern empires were spared this disease. No rebel colonial expedition sailed to Paris, London, The Hague or even St Petersburg to put its rebel nominee into power. The only roughly comparable event would be the Spanish dictator-to-be Franco flying his colonial army over to Seville in July 1936 from nearby Morocco, a lingering remnant of Spain’s old empire, to fuel the Spanish civil war. Equally unhelpful, though symptomatic of severe regional stresses, were the occasional short-lived breakaways from rule from Rome which exacted effort and expense to put down: Sertorius’ counter-regime in Spain in the 70s bc, the imperium Galliarum of Classicus and Sabinus in ad 69–70 and, after a 200-year recess and part of the traumas of the later third century, a torrent of temporarily successful defections – a second ‘Gallic empire’ of the 260s and 270s, Palmyra’s brief eastern hegemony in the same decades and, for ten years from 286 to 296, the autonomous British regime of Carausius and then his killer Allectus. Yet all of these claimed to be as truly Roman, with ‘true’ emperors at their head, as the truncated imperial government at Rome. Even the famous Septimia Zenobia, queenregent of Palmyra, took the title Augusta for herself and Augustus

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for her son. That all these regimes claimed Romanness attests how strong the concept of an imperium Romanum remained. So too the further fact that, after reunification was achieved between 273 and 296, the next separatist events did not occur until the fifth century; and then the chief separators were the Germanic peoples flowing irremovably into the Roman west.

◆ The four-and-a-half centuries from 241 bc thus radically changed both imperialism’s originators and the peoples whom they had overcome. Originally driven by many interacting thrusts – bootyhunger among elite and ordinary Romans alike, suspicion and rancour towards potential or past enemies, aristocrats’ appetite for gloria, and the enduring energy of a population capable of projecting tens of thousands of its male citizens (together with matching numbers of its allies) into years of warfare on many fronts – Rome’s imperialism shifted gear in the first century AD. Despite even greater resources of manpower and a yet wider range of potential theatres for action, it undertook only intermittent territorial quests in order to quash supposed threats to existing provinces, or bolster a ruler’s gloria, or seize on new sources of booty and revenue, or all three. Otherwise, imperial policy focused on keeping control of the vast regions brought under Roman sway and regulating – as far as it could – Roman relations with the peoples around the empire’s periphery. Territories that a current regime judged unproductive or dangerous were let go, such as the Frisii by Tiberius and Trajan’s new provinces beyond the Euphrates by Hadrian (who initially thought of lumping Dacia in with them); in related fashion, Marcus Aurelius’ reported plan for annexations beyond the Danube was dropped after he died. As was noted in the Introduction, once every remaining free provincial became a civis Romanus in ad 212 arguably the Roman ‘empire’, in a true if technical sense, ended. Instead of one ruling state and people exercising mastery over an array of subjects, long before Caracalla’s day Romans in Rome and Italians across Italy were ruled as much by provincial-born emperors, senators and officials as by those whose homeland was Italy, and were defended

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by armies and fleets manned increasingly by servicemen from outside the peninsula. Certainly, by 212 universal citizenship had lost much of its value as status distinctions grew sharper. Better-off Romans, conventionally termed honestiores (‘more honourable’), were becoming legally entitled to milder punishments for offences than their social inferiors, humiliores. Yet people’s awareness that all were Romans, entitled to fair and even compassionate treatment from Roman authorities, continued to be strong, as for instance Scaptopara’s petition shows. This was one source of the strength that sustained the empire during the misfortunes of the later third century. Often violent and sometimes vicious, open to officials frequently incompetent, unscrupulous and corrupt, slow and neglectful of subjects’ needs as often as it was responsive to them, Roman imperialism also established a dominion which, for the only time in history, brought the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa under a single political system. In principle, and quite often in practice, this system was subject to the rule of law while at the same time allowing flexibility for local and regional variants. With limited exceptions, religions and other modes of thought were free to flourish or decline. The long stretches of time under Pliny the Elder’s immensa pacis Romanae maiestas released the energies of Rome’s subjects as well as Romans themselves to practise trade, farming, manufacturing and other pacific pursuits on a scale previously rare in the Mediterranean world. Roman administrators sometimes keenly, at other times with lethargy – and sometimes not at all – oversaw these activities, and if they chose, or were ordered by higher authority, helped to promote them with infrastructure projects. Even allowing for the disturbances that so often affected one or more regions over the centuries, the conditions of large-scale peace and visible overall prosperity that marked the Mediterranean world from the age of Augustus onwards made an enduring impact on the peoples who experienced them; and long after the empire that created them was gone they were still remembered, and regretted.

Appendix: The Ancient Sources

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oman imperialism and the tricontinental empire that resulted are well, but unevenly, recorded across a stimulating range of sources. Roman and Greek writers presented their own interpretations, often colourful and usually biased in Rome’s favour. They focused largely but not exclusively on politics, personalities, warfare and morals. Complementing and at times contrasting with these essentially elite themes is a great and growing volume of documentary sources. Inscriptions in Latin and Greek were set up, generally on stone or bronze, in all parts of the empire – from Hadrian’s Wall to the Nile’s cataracts – by individuals from every social level, by local communities and by the Roman government, to enshrine private lives, personal careers, religious rites, local regulations and state laws, decrees and treaties. Coins were issued by Rome and, for some while, by many self-governing cities, marking important events both religious and secular. Papyrus documents, chiefly found in Egypt, range from official enactments and correspondence to private letters and tax or business receipts. So too, on a smaller scale, do the remains of wooden writing tablets discovered at the volcano-destroyed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and along Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, and equally important, the archaeological sites on the empire’s three continents provide steadily growing volumes of physical evidence for the ordinary lives, cultures and amenities of its peoples.1

Literary sources: the Republic Surviving Roman and Greek literary works, though a fraction of what once existed, offer a broad spectrum of materials: histories 201

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and biographies the most immediately obvious, but along with them poetry and oratory, philosophy, technical treatises including encyclopedias and (later on) Christian theology. Their authors (all male) were thoroughly varied in origins and experiences; on the other hand, by definition they belonged to the empire’s educated minority whose interests, concepts and biases they largely took for granted. The earliest extant account of Rome’s rise to Mediterranean dominance was written by a Peloponnesian Greek, Polybius, whose enforced but easy-going stay in Italy from 167 to 150 bc (his home state, the Achaean League, had offended Rome) paradoxically led him to admire the political, moral and military practices of the Roman republic. To answer the famous question that he himself posed – who would not want to know how ‘almost the entire known world was conquered and brought under a single empire, the empire of the Romans, in less than 53 years?’ – he wrote 40 books of Histories covering not only the crucial 53 years, from 220 to 167, but also a briefer background account of the preceding decades and afterwards an extension to take his narrative down to 146, the year that the Romans ended the independence of Greece and sacked their old rival Carthage (Polybius witnessed the sack). The work recorded not only Rome’s rise to Mediterranean mastery but, so as to place this in context, the affairs of the Hellenistic Greek world in equal detail. Like most other lengthy Greek and Roman histories, that of Polybius has not survived complete: only the first five books in full, then a profusion of extracts large and small made in medieval Constantinople, from most of the rest. An ancient ‘book’ was a scroll of length varying according to each writer’s wishes: Polybius’ five are each quite lengthy. Carefully researched and detailed, the Histories are also liberally interlaced with personal comments and digressions on topics that he thought important, such as practical lessons that history can teach, military topics and Mediterranean geography. His Book 6, substantially preserved, gives a famous description of second-century Rome’s political and military systems; in his view, the Romans had evolved an admirably ‘mixed’ constitution balancing the roles of magistrates, Senate and People – not that he thought the balance would last forever. Despite gaps and flaws, the work’s

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narrative and analysis, by an observer from a culture itself ancient and assertive, make the Histories the single most important source for the era of Rome’s ascent to dominate most of the Mediterranean world.2 Latin literature, vigorously developing in Polybius’ time, had various things to say about the same phenomenon, from the comic playwright Plautus’ jokes about making war on foreigners to steal their wealth to the speeches and other writings of M. Porcius Cato (‘the Censor’). Cato’s history of Rome and Italy, called Origins, was the first to be written in Latin; earlier ones, starting about half a century earlier, had used Greek in imitation of leading Hellenistic historians such as Ephorus and Timaeus. None of these, Cato’s included, survive all the same, except for quotations by much later authors. Nor do any of Cato’s successors, who in the later second and the first century bc produced long and sometimes imaginative accounts of Rome’s history from mythical times onwards, but they like Cato were used by and influenced writers whose works we do possess. The first century bc, a distressed yet exciting age that ended in a new Roman monarchy, was the lifetime of Rome’s greatest orator and thinker, M. Tullius Cicero, most of whose writings did survive beyond ancient times. Many of his speeches, both in courts and in the Senate, dealt with imperial issues – corrupt (or wrongly prosecuted) governors, misruled provinces, Roman power endangered or expanding – and so did a plentiful number of the letters that he wrote to, or received from, other Romans including Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, whose duelling collapsed the Republic. Caesar’s own war Commentaries, on his conquest of Gaul in the 50s and his ensuing first civil war, were famous from the moment they were published. So were two short monographs of the late 40s by one of his lesser supporters, Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus): the first on the alleged conspiracy in 63 bc of the frustrated politician Catiline, then on Rome’s chequered relationships half a century before with an equally frustrated client-king, Jugurtha of Numidia, which culminated in a difficult war. In both works, Sallust not only presented readers with an excitingly new Latin historiographical style, trenchant and artfully rugged, but insisted that both

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episodes were due to the corrosive moral effects of imperialism itself: a verdict that fascinated, attracted and irritated readers who could not put the books down. A much longer work, a general history of the decade 78–67, had similar literary and moralizing qualities but only some extracts outlasted Roman times – one being Mithridates’ supposed letter denouncing Rome’s greed-fuelled imperialism. Sallust’s Greek contemporary Diodorus of Sicily compiled a less exciting, but invaluable, history of the world which he called A Historical Library, using mainly previous Greek authors (Polybius included). Of its original 40 books the second half, going down to Caesar’s day, survives only in extracts in Byzantine collections, but these include items on Rome’s age of expansion and the reactions to it by other states in the Mediterranean world.3

Literary sources: the Principate The post-Caesarian age and then that of Augustus fell within the lifetime of Livy (T. Livius), the prime historian after Polybius of the first era of Roman imperialism. In the usual fate of long historical works by Greeks and Romans, barely a quarter of his 142-book From the Foundation of the City (Ab Urbe Condita) is left, its first ten books and then Books 21 to 45 – and the last few of these barely scraped through in damaged condition. Still, 21–45 are the fullest source for the momentous period from 219 to 167 bc which Polybius’ muchtruncated work also narrated, and Livy (very fortunately) chose Polybius as one of his principal authorities. Other sources he used, Latin or Greek, are much harder to pin down because little of them is left. There remain also, from late Roman times, a set of précis called periochae of almost all books of From the Foundation (two are missing), which like Diodorus’ extracts offer some added information on the centuries after 167.4 Diodorus was not alone in producing a world history. So did a provincial Roman, Pompeius Trogus, whose Augustan-age Philippic Histories in 44 books were doubly unique: he deliberately made the Mediterranean’s other peoples and states the focus rather than Rome; and the work survives only in a complete précis by a later writer, Justin (datable anywhere from ad 200 to post-400), and in a set

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of contents lists. Justin’s Epitome turned out to be one of the Latin histories most widely read in medieval times. In Trogus’ time, short works relevant to imperialism were the two-book Compendium (summary) of Roman history published in ad 30 by a militaryminded middling aristocrat, C. Velleius Paterculus – only the start of Book 1 and all of 2 remain – and nine books of Famous Deeds and Sayings, a compilation chiefly from Livy prepared by one Valerius Maximus, another derivative piece of huge popularity.5 Non-historical authors, too, preserved important material. Strabo of Amaseia in Pontus was a historian and geographer contemporary of Livy, whose 17-book Geography (his one surviving work) described the entire known ecumene. Many of his sources were much older, but much else was up to date, supplying extensive information on the empire in Augustus’ era. The Jewish Greek philosopher Philo of Alexandria vividly recorded a bizarre audience that he and other Jewish petitioners had in ad 40 at Rome with a fidgety Caligula. More details about society, government and Caesars come in the voluminous writings of the younger Seneca (L. Annaeus Seneca, philosopher, natural scientist, Nero’s multimillionaire tutor and later chief minister – and finally victim) and from Pliny the Elder (C. Plinius Secundus, the best-known victim of the Vesuvius eruption in 79), in his completely preserved encyclopedia of general knowledge in 37 books, the Natural History. The Jewish former rebel Josephus (who became T. Flavius Josephus) wrote a seven-book history of the origins, course and aftermath of the great revolt of 66 to 73 in Judaea, in which he himself began as a rebel leader before changing sides, and later an ambitious 20-book narrative called Jewish Antiquities telling the story of the Jews from the Creation down to the outbreak of the great revolt. Plutarch of Chaeronea in Greece (his Roman name was L. Mestrius Plutarchus), another polymath-philosopher like Seneca, composed a sequence of Lives of the emperors from Augustus to ad 69 – only two brief ones, of Galba and Otho, remain – and then the famous cycle of Parallel Lives, varying in extent but none lengthier than a single book, which matched one historic Greek leader with a Roman of roughly similar character and career (at least as Plutarch saw it); all of course were men. Urbane, humane, civilian and quite reliant on

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his variety of past Greek and Roman sources, Plutarch stressed the moral – sometimes immoral – character and doings of each figure, who included imperialist power figures such as Marius, Pompey, Caesar and Antony.6 By the later first century, Romans writing literature were just as likely to be provincial-born as Italian (Seneca was a provincial Roman, Tacitus probably another), for citizenship grants to provincials had been frequent since Julius Caesar’s time. Growing numbers of Greek authors were among them, although this encouraged few, apart from legal specialists, to prefer writing Latin to their own language. The same held, of course, for Hellenized non-Greeks such as Lucian of Samosata, in Commagene, the satirist of philosophy and philosophers. What developed in sources for imperial history, then, was a vigorous blending of traditional Roman themes, assumptions and sometimes prejudices, with other perspectives especially among Greek writers and thinkers – and Christian authors in their turn, such as Tertullian of Carthage. Two historical writers of the age of Trajan and Hadrian are crucial to the records of first-century imperialism. The consul and orator P. (or C.) Cornelius Tacitus’ works were written between 98 and about 120: the Life of his father-in-law Agricola, Britain’s most famous governor, an ethnographic study (Germania) of the free Germans beyond the Rhine, and the two great narratives of the periods 69 to 96 and then 14 to 66 (the Histories and Annals). Originally 30 books in all according to the fourth-century St Jerome, they suffered the usual fate of partial extinction – of Histories only the first four-and-a-quarter books remain, covering 69 and 70, and of Annals most of 1 to 6 and then the second half of 11 to the first part of 16. Nonetheless these works, Annals above all, form the high point of Roman literary and analytical history-writing. In style and language Tacitus progressively sharpened a Sallustian approach into a lean, compressed and also poetic medium which no later author ventured to challenge. In content and analysis, he treated emperors with caustic cynicism – Augustus included – and balanced pride in Rome’s imperial greatness with frank revelations of the greed and harshness that so often maintained it.

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C. Suetonius Tranquillus, a high imperial bureaucrat (at least until losing his job as chief of Hadrian’s official correspondence in 121), wrote eight books called Lives of the Twelve Caesars in a biographical style and format very different from those of Plutarch and Tacitus. Written in a cool and rather flat literary style very far from Tacitean colour, the bulk of each Life records its subject’s public activities, then personal habits, virtues and – notoriously – vices in thematic sections; Suetonius used ordinary narrative only for the ruler’s life before accession and finally for his (often spectacular) demise. Emperors being emperors, despite the Lives’ close personal has amuch focus each has muchtotoreport reportabout abouthow howits its man man dealt dealt with the empire over which he presided. Meanwhile nine books of selfselected Letters published by his and Tacitus’ joint friend Pliny the Younger, nephew and adopted son of the encyclopedist, have much to say about the social and cultural world of the empire’s governing class in the early second century. A tenth book too was posthumously published, of official letters and reports from him to Trajan – and Trajan’s replies – when Pliny was governor of the harassed province of Bithynia in 110–12. It thus forms a priceless archive of imperial administration at the highest level, including the first official discussion about how to handle the emerging, and to Pliny perplexing, sect of early Christians.7 The history of Roman imperialism was recorded in his own way by the late second-century Alexandrian Greek Appian and, in the 220s, by another retired consul and senator, L. Cassius Dio of Bithynia, probably a descendant of Dio Chrysostom, who likewise wrote in Greek. These, and a younger Greek contemporary of Dio named Herodian, were the last major historians of Rome before the late fourth century whose works we have. Appian, a former bureaucrat like Suetonius, chose to tell of all Rome’s wars down to 31 bc region by region – one book for all the wars in Spain, for example, one for the North African theatres of all three Punic Wars, and one for the three wars against Mithridates of Pontus from the 90s to the 60s bc. Five more books covered Rome’s own civil wars from 49 to 35 bc and these all survive; not all of the regional books do. Appian’s historical quality depended quite heavily on whatever sources he was using. Fortunately, for the last of the Punic wars, the

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Mithridatic and in particular the civil wars he decided to follow good ones. Cassius Dio produced a complete Roman History on an almost Livian scale, 80 books from the foundation of the City to his own day. As usual it has not come through unscathed. Besides Byzantine extracts from the first 20 or so books, Books 36 to 60 survive complete for the momentous era of the fall of the Republic and Augustus’ reign, and a twelfth-century Byzantine monk named Xiphilinus made a précis of 36 to 80. The most vivid feature of all is a set of large extracts from Books 78 to 80, when Dio was an adult and senatorial eyewitness under a succession of stressful emperors from Commodus to the notorious Elagabalus. Much less skilful and rather less sophisticated than Tacitus, and devoted to literary stylistics and rhetoric, Dio all the same personified the blend of Greek culture and Roman pride that characterized the empire’s eastern elite by the start of the third century. So too on a less erudite level did Herodian, apparently a very minor retired official, whose eight-book History of the Empire After Marcus recorded, rather erratically, events during his lifetime from 180 to 238. Though uncritical about evidence and surprisingly ill-informed about politics, warfare and geography, Herodian did marshal enough detail to complement Dio’s account, and then is valuable as a contemporary narrative of the years that followed – including the upheaval ‘Year of Six Emperors’ which concludes it.8 The only other sizeable narrative source relevant for the imperialism of the second and early third centuries is the peculiar, and still much argued over, collection of short imperial biographies termed the Historia Augusta. Claiming to be the work of six authors of the early fourth century, but on analysis turning out to be a single, unknown writer’s late fourth-century creation, the lengthy sequence from Hadrian to ad 284 includes vignettes of heirs, rivals and usurpers. Its author was increasingly given to inserting fictitious documents, invented names and imaginary events into a basically factual narrative. By choice or luck, the earlier Lives from Hadrian to Severus are the most reliable: the author drew on Herodian and Marius Maximus, a senatorial biographer contemporary with Herodian and Dio, whose (unsurviving) work apparently followed

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the Suetonian model. Also from the late fourth century come two much briefer, but useful, collections of imperial mini-biographies, first A Book About the Caesars by a high official, Sex. Aurelius Victor, the other a still shorter Epitome based mainly but not wholly on Victor. The emperors from Augustus to Constantine’s son Constantius (Victor) or Theodosius (the epitome) receive a paragraph apiece, some longer than others; short and derivative though both are, they include various items mentioned nowhere else but apparently reliable – for instance the epitome’s statement that Trajan’s ancestral home was Tuder in Umbria. Yet another short composition of that era has various helpful items (such as some census figures and dates): the Summary of Roman History (Breviarium Historiae Romanae) by a high-ranking official named Eutropius. Other surviving literary materials illustrate, in various non-narrative ways, Rome’s imperial rule in the second century and the problems it faced. A Bithynian intellectual famous at Rome as well as in the east, whom Pliny the Younger knew, was Dio Cocceianus, nicknamed Chrysostomus or ‘golden-mouthed’, one of the countless practitioners of display speeches and discursive philosophic essays – usually termed sophists – who populated the secondcentury Roman empire. Quantities of Dio’s 80 surviving orations offered advice to the Greek city-states of his day on how to manage their internal affairs under the eye of their provincial governors and the emperor. Four essays On Kingship proffered hopefully sage advice to Trajan in turn on how to be a good ruler (advice couched in wholly Hellenistic philosophical terms). Dio Chrysostom’s younger fellow Bithynian Arrian (L. Flavius Arrianus), the biographer of Alexander the Great, produced several short important documents based on his 130s governorship of the large frontier province of Cappadocia, in north-eastern Asia Minor: a coastal survey of the Black Sea, an essay on military tactics (only its chapters on cavalry remain) and an account, The Array Against the Alans, that sets out vividly how he deployed his army to repel an incursion of horse-riding nomads from the Caspian region. Two of Lucian the satirist’s essays from the later half of the century make informative fun of other sophists – a self-styled prophet

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and faith healer named Alexander and a wandering sophist and one-time Christian, Peregrinus, who ended an eventful life in 165 by committing suicide on a funeral pyre at Olympia. A third essay, How to Write History, lampooned the alleged exaggerations and inventions of recent narratives of the just-concluded Parthian War of the 160s. Three North Africans of those times contribute similarly: L. Apuleius of Madauros in his novel The Golden Ass and in a florid speech in court (Apology) defending himself when prosecuted for using magic to ensnare a wealthy widow’s love; and M. Cornelius Fronto of Cirta – a much grander personage, tutor and friend of the emperor Antoninus Pius’ sons and successors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus – in letters to and from all three that were rediscovered only in 1815 in a severely damaged manuscript. The third North African of note was Tertullian of Carthage (Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus), the first of a series of brilliant apologists for Christianity that would climax in St Augustine 200 years later. Among other writers who add to what we know of the secondcentury empire and its problems was the already much-mentioned Aelius Aristides, whose abilities as an orator and intellectual took him around the Greek world and to Rome. His panegyrics To Rome and To Athens, delivered to admiring audiences in those cities, his many essays on philosophy, rhetoric and religion, and six books of Sacred Tales – on his many illnesses and ceaseless efforts to find divine cures for them – all bring to vivid life the intellectual concerns of the so-called Second Sophistic flowering of Greek literature at the high point of the Roman empire. So too do the works of the Pergamene philosopher-physician Galen (Aelius Galenus), who became doctor to Marcus Aurelius and his family. Galen’s enormous output, still not fully edited or commented on, included information on the catastrophic plague of 165–168; and also a coolly precise account of how ‘in many provinces’ city-dwellers during a famine commonly took away the accumulated food stocks from the surrounding countryside, leaving the hapless peasant farmers to live on pulses and then starve on roots and shoots of trees. The emperor Marcus’ personal philosophic meditations, now called To Himself, were written during his laborious campaigns on the northern

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frontiers between about 170 and 180; although he made almost no mention of current events, the 12-book work (never meant for publication) reveal his dutiful, devoted and Stoic mind in a way unique among Roman rulers and in a period of historic imperial crisis. One further source is quite different: the Digest of Roman Law, the work of commissioners appointed by the emperor Justinian in 530 to select the best sections (in their judgement) from all previous writings on Roman law to form a massive 50-book collection organized by topics. They completed this extraordinary task in exactly three years. The great bulk of the excerpts, though by no means all, came from the legal luminaries of the later second century and the reign of Septimius Severus – Gaius, Papinian and Ulpian especially. The predictable result was that very little of those authors’ original works survived (basically just the Institutes of Gaius, an introductory manual to Roman law), but the readings preserved in the Digest include important material relevant to the history of Rome’s imperialism; the collection also, of course, became the foundation of modern adaptations of Roman law.

Inscriptions, papyri and coins Until early modern times, literary works were almost the sole sources available for Roman imperialism and its impacts. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, founded at Paris in 1663, was the first institution to develop systematic scholarly interest in ‘hard copy’ written evidence: inscriptions and coins. The number and range of both is not only vast but steadily growing, thanks to archaeology. Coins, adorned with both pictures and writing, presented themes and claims which the imperial government and authorized local bodies wanted to push. Inscriptions, tituli, embody not only propaganda aimed at the literate population, but – equally if not more instructively – the utterances of tens (or in fact hundreds) of thousands of Romans and provincials of all social levels. There are also quantities of papyri, chiefly found in Egypt at ancient garbage sites just outside the cultivated Nile valley, but also in other dry places such as the Jordanian desert (and in the carbonized library of Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri). Like inscriptions, they

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cover virtually every type of communication from emperors’ and governors’ decrees to private letters, receipts and petitions; unlike inscriptions, some have brought to light literary works too. The Romans, more than the Greeks or even the Egyptians, enthusiastically practised the ‘epigraphic habit’ (as it has been called). The authorities at Rome, in provinces and in local communities had the texts of their laws, decrees, regulations and religious activities inscribed or engraved on hard surfaces such as stone, tufa, concrete, bronze, iron and lead – hard enough to survive millennia. Latin inscriptions predominate in Italy, western lands and the Balkan and Danubian lands; those in Greek are spread across the eastern Mediterranean world, where Greek was the culturally dominant language. Western tituli in local languages, such as Celtic or Punic, also occur but in far fewer numbers, disappearing after roughly the first century ad; eastern items (in Syriac, for example, and Aramaic) endured until the late Roman empire or beyond.9 Something like 300,000 inscriptions in Latin had been found by the start of the twenty-first century, but new finds continue – by another estimate, as many as a thousand a year in either language. Most are, from one point of view, humdrum: epitaphs above all, and votive offerings, prayers and other religious items. But their details add incrementally to knowledge of ordinary life and culture in every part of the empire. Those set up by soldiers or their heirs, for example, are essential for the history of the Roman army. The epitaphs of senators and other members of imperial and local elites (city magistrates, for example, such as those at Pompeii) evolved in the later Republic and early Empire periods into often elaborate listings of a dead man’s official career, sometimes with a succinct narrative of one (or more) of its highlights – a habit imitated by others of lower social rank such as army officers and prosperous former slaves. The edicts of proconsuls and emperors, decrees of the Roman Senate and laws passed by the Roman People were inscribed for display in marketplaces, temples or public buildings where literate people could read them (and relay them to interested but illiterate fellow citizens). Similarly, over several centuries from the mid-first to the early fourth, the details of honourably discharged soldiers

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from various units – notably the non-legionary formations called auxilia, and also the special cohorts stationed at Rome such as the Praetorian Guard – and of discharged sailors from the imperial fleets were displayed on bronze plates on the Capitoline hill. These did not survive ancient times, but as mentioned earlier each veteran was entitled to a certified copy on two small bronze tablets fastened together, and some hundreds of these diplomata militaria have been recovered. They give valuable details of the men’s units, the date, where the honourable discharge (honesta missio) took place, and so on. There are problems with using inscriptions. Not many are found intact, as they are generally unearthed at archaeological sites amid fallen buildings or under packed soil. Even inscriptions on structures still standing may be damaged by time: Augustus’ official memoirs in Latin and Greek (the Res Gestae Divi Augusti), on walls of his temple at Ankara in Turkey, have plentiful gaps where the masonry has broken. Uniquely and luckily there, most of the damaged wording in one version can be reconstructed from the other (the gaps rarely match), or from fragments of the memoir found elsewhere as at the Roman city of Antioch in Pisidia, 300 kilometres to the south-west. Quite differently damaged is another imperial pronouncement, the text of a speech of Claudius to the Senate in ad 48, found around 1524 in a field outside Lyon (Roman Lugdunum, his birthplace). This 200-kilogram bronze plate is broken into two roughly equal halves and has lost its entire top part, seemingly hewn or chiselled off before the plate was discarded. Even so the great bulk of the speech – one of Claudius’ particularly inimitable utterances – is preserved with its fine, originally gilded lettering, to convey a remarkable range of information: not only what Claudius thought about aristocratic provincials becoming senators but also (bizarrely but happily) obscure yet momentous details about the early kings of Rome, which he had discovered in his historical researches and used to back his case – all in some 690 Latin words. Since any inscription is focused on its subject figure or topic, its details can open as many questions as those it solves. The earliest surviving Latin inscription from outside Italy, a small bronze tablet engraved ‘in camp’ in January 189 bc, announced that the then

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governor of southern Spain (Aemilius Paullus, later conqueror of Macedon) had granted freedom and continuing land tenure to the ‘slaves [servi] of the Hastenses’ dwelling at a place called Turris Lascutana, ‘so long as the People and Senate of Rome may wish’. Why he freed these ‘slaves’ (had nearby Hasta rebelled and the Lascutans stayed loyal?), and what in fact freedom meant for them – they already owned property and a town – is hardly clear; Livy and other literary sources are no help. A three-part inscription of 27 bc found at Cyme, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, starts with a decree in Greek by the year’s consuls Augustus and Agrippa, regularizing issues about sacred temple properties in the province of Asia (western Asia Minor); then continues with an edict by the governor Vinicius stating in Latin and Greek how this affected a particular temple at Cyme. Clear enough as the topic itself is, for Augustus and his right-hand man Agrippa to issue orders as consuls to the provinces, in the decade after the civil wars had ended, raises important questions about what kind of civil, and supposedly traditional, regime Augustus claimed to be restoring after two decades of virtual dictatorship by Caesar, Antony and himself. Just as controversial (or even more so) is the Senate decree of December ad 20, on the case of Cn. Piso senior, another massive bronze inscription over 2,000 words long. The main copy, unearthed in 11 pieces from an Andalusian site in the 1980s and helped by additional fragments from nearby find-spots, records in fulsome and flattering vein how the Senate, under the heavenly guidance of the emperor Tiberius and his mother (Augustus’ widow Livia), dealt with the crimes of Piso who as governor of Syria had defied his superior, the imperial heir Germanicus, and after Germanicus’ death had gone on to levy war against the new authorities in that province. How the crimes were committed, who had helped and what penalties were to be imposed on Piso’s estate and family (he himself was now dead by suicide), are set out in elaborate detail – nearly all of it expressed in that bane of Latin students, indirect statement. The controversial aspect is that many of the details in the decree are at odds with the historian Tacitus’ own account of the events – even the date, for the Senate’s vote is stated as 10 December

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whereas Tacitus put the decree in the previous May. The questions that such discrepancies raise are fundamental: they involve Tacitus’ reliability or lack of it, his use of sources (clearly he ignored this Senate decree, even while elsewhere claiming to use the Senate’s own records), the nature and aims of official imperial propaganda (how far can this obsequiousness-laden decree be trusted?), and the relationships between emperor, Senate, aristocracy and imperial provincial rule in the early first century ad. Events not recorded in surviving literary sources are sometimes brought to light by inscriptions: thus the lengthy Greek decree of 119 or 117 bc which Lete, a small city in Macedonia province just north of Thessalonica, set up to honour a Roman quaestor, M. Annius, who valiantly and successfully defended the region against repeated attacks by marauding barbarians from Thrace and elsewhere. Frontier defence, wherever a given frontier might be, was a crucial task for governors and their subordinates like Annius throughout the history of the empire. Three hundred years later another long honorific inscription, in Latin, was set up in Numidia by military settlers to honour their old commander and current provincial governor, M. Valerius Maximianus – an irrepressibly energetic cavalry general during the long-drawn-out Danubian frontier wars of the 170s ad. Repelling repeated barbarian incursions and hunting down brigand bands, Maximianus even slew the king of one invading horde in hand-to-hand combat. The veterans’ eulogy adds crucial details to the very limited other evidence for the Danubian wars which disrupted the vital northern frontiers, subjected their provinces to unprecedented upheavals and helped bring the emperor Marcus to an early death at Vindobona, now Vienna. Yet until 1954 when this text was found, Maximianus was only known (thanks to a titulus on the castle rock of Trenčín in Slovakia) for commanding a legionary force that wintered in Bohemia, deep in hostile territory, in 178–9, and, from consular lists, for holding an absentee consulship four or five years later. No literary source mentions him. For the history of Rome’s imperialism provincial inscriptions, individually and in quantity, also bring out features and processes more penetratingly than literary sources. In the later second century bc and during the first, large numbers of Italian

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and Roman merchants, negotiatores, pursued business activities in Greece, the Aegean and the Adriatic – including the most unpopular of all such activities, banking and tax-collecting – and left behind plentiful inscriptional records of themselves in both Latin and Greek to instruct modern scholars. Over in Spain, the local decree of Contrebia Belaisca, of 87 bc, shows the authorities at that rural town bearing Latin titles, using Latin and applying Roman legal principles to arbitrate a neighbourhood dispute (Chapter 3), thereby contributing unintentionally to ongoing scholarly debate about Romanization of the provinces. In southern Spain again, a number of ‘town charters’ (as they once were called) survive, none complete: they are the constitutions enacted by the towns’ self-governing authorities after Vespasian granted them Latin status, ius Latii, in ad 73, most famously those of Salpensa, Málaga and an otherwise very obscure place called Irni. All follow a standard pattern setting out the functions of a town’s magistrates, senate (called the ordo) and citizen body, as well as the procedure for local elections and much more. A quite different but no less suggestive document was put up by the villagers of Scaptopara in Thrace in ad 238 – the petition that they had submitted to the then boy-emperor Gordian III at Rome for relief from constant exploitation by officials and even ordinary soldiers (Chapter 8). It is one of many examples of the exploitative troubles that regularly beset towns as well as countrysides and frustrated even emperors anxious to do the right thing. Papyrus texts cover the same wide range of ordinary and public life as inscriptions. Papyrus was plentiful, and used pieces and sheets could be disposed of, along with other rubbish, in dumps in nearby desert or for wrapping up mummies. Even some literary works have been recovered: not only Aristotle’s history of classical Athens’ constitution and the only complete play by Menander, but fragments of an epitome of Livy from an ancient edition different from that of the complete set mentioned earlier. Important papyri from Roman times include Augustus’ edicts (Chapter 5), a admonitory letter from the emperor Claudius in ad 41 to the misbehaving citizens of Alexandria; a lengthy edict by the prefect of Egypt in 68 criticizing, and (as always) promising to end, corruption; and – this time

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from the fortress city of Dura-Europos on the River Euphrates – an early third-century Latin calendar (the Feriale Duranum) listing the numerous days on which military units observed rites and festivals honouring particular gods and past and present imperial families. Outnumbering such official papyri are private letters, wills, memoranda by local officials, contracts, petitions and other items. As with inscriptions and coins, more keep coming to light through archaeological projects (and occasional serendipitous finds). The letter to local Egyptian officials about a coming visit from the senator L. Memmius in 112 bc (Chapter 4) is an engaging example. From another era and area, a major find in 1961 was Babatha’s archive, a collection of legal documents involving contracts, property transfers, loans and the like dating between ad 96 and 134. Belonging to a wealthy and independent young Jewish woman in the province of Arabia Petraea, these throw unprecedented light on Jewish society, property and litigation in the early second century. The leather bag holding them was left in a cave (now called the Cave of Letters) overlooking the Dead Sea, where it seems Babatha and others took refuge – and may have died – during the great Jewish revolt of 132–5 (Chapter 10). Found in the same cave in 1960 were letters, mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, form the rebel leader Simon bar Kochba to some of his lieutenants, as well as coins struck by the rebel movement. Ordinary Egyptians’ daily doings and struggles come to life in plentiful letters and other private documents. Three examples may hint at the variety. In 1 bc Hilarion, a husband at Alexandria, wrote to his wife Alis, at Oxyrhynchus by the middle Nile, that ‘if by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out’. In ad 46 in the Fayum district, 14 spokesmen for a pair of villages declared under oath before the district administrator (the nomarchus) that they had never and would never catch two types of local fish, which were venerated as sacred. And sometime in the second century ad a very contrite son, Antonius Longus, begged his mother Nilous to forgive some misdeed – ‘I go about in filth; I wrote to you that I am naked … I have received a fitting lesson.’10 Coins were struck not only by the Roman state (beginning in the early third century bc) but by others, especially in the eastern

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Mediterranean where coinage had originated. In western lands local issues imitated Greek, Punic or Roman models, but by the mid-first century ad they ceased as Roman money came to dominate; in the east, cities were striking their own coins (more for show than ordinary use) until the third century. Roman issues came in gold aurei (struck only for special occasions and of course accessible only to quite wealthy people), silver pieces of varied denominations – the denarius and its subdivisions, sestertii, were the commonest until the third century – and bronze coins. Like inscriptions, coin finds occur all over the empire, quite often in hoards buried by owners in troubled times (as in the Cave of Letters). While one side of each coin, the obverse, bore a profile portrait of the emperor (a practice begun by Caesar as dictator, imitating the Hellenistic monarchies), the reverse was stamped with changing motifs. In 29 bc Octavian, as he then was, put the words Ob Civis Servatos, ‘for saving citizens’, within a laurel wreath to mark the close of 20 years of civil war; 30 years later his grandsons, adopted as his own sons and future rulers, appeared on an aureus with shields and spears. Vespasian celebrated the defeat of the first Jewish revolt with issues depicting, in various ways, a captive female beneath a palm tree with the legend Iudaea Capta, ‘Judaea subdued’, while Hadrian commemorated his incessant travels around the empire with a famous series of coins that portrayed each province – Judaea included, this time making a pious offering – with an identifying symbol or motif. Propaganda could be hopeful or misleading. During 69 a series of coups d’état put first Otho, then Vitellius and finally Vespasian on Rome’s unsteady throne, each in turn having to confront rival contenders. Otho struck aurei proclaiming Victoria Othonis, ‘Otho’s victory’ (he was soon crushed), followed by Vitellius with ones announcing Fides Exercituum, ‘Loyalty of the armies’, and sestertii with a similar victory motif to Otho’s – all this as legions backing Vespasian bore down on Italy. A century and a half later, in 217 and 218, another coup-maker, Macrinus (a civilian), asserted Fides Militum, ‘The soldiers’ loyalty’, and, a while later, Felicitas Temporum, ‘The happiness of our times’; he and his young son were overthrown soon after. As the turbulence of the later third century progressed,

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such whistling-in-the-wind themes became even more frequent even as the value of the steadily debased coinage sank to disastrous levels. Coins occasionally convey events not mentioned in other sources: in the early 140s Antoninus Pius happily announced, on sestertii, that Rome had ‘granted’ kings to the Quadi (a powerful German people on the middle Danube, later to give much trouble to Marcus Aurelius) and the Armenians (which irritated the Parthian king, again leading to later trouble for Marcus). More often they illustrate known events. For example a denarius struck in 58 bc by two aediles shows a recent exploit by one of them, M. Aemilius Scaurus: as a subordinate of Pompey the Great in the east, some years before, he had received the submission to Rome of Aretas, king of the Arab Nabataeans, and so his side of the coin portrays the king kneeling beside his camel and offering an olive branch, with a surrounding legend making clear what was happening. The same theme, but marking a grander event, recurs on a denarius issued for Augustus in about 18 bc. Thanks to a diplomatic agreement with Parthia negotiated by his stepson Tiberius in 20, Rome regained the legionary standards (which were sacred objects) and prisoners of war captured from the Roman army which had invaded the kingdom three-and-a-half decades earlier. The emperor, keen for fresh – if confected – military gloria, depicted a Parthian, presumably the king, on one knee holding out a standard: a motif of submission once more. (The scene is likewise shown on his famous Prima Porta statue, though there the Parthian is standing.)11 Inscriptions, papyri and coins were meant for the literate members of the public. What proportion they formed of the whole population is not known and debates range widely, but nothing suggests that even in a large city more than 20 per cent of men, at most, and many fewer women could both read and write. The rest required guidance from their lettered neighbours or professional scribes (one of the 14 Fayum fishermen mentioned above was also the local scribe, for instance). Yet the entire empire was run through written documents and communications. These records, together with the all too variable remains of literary sources, are the materials that make it possible to study, analyse and appraise the rise of republican and imperial Rome.

Abbreviations in the Notes and Referenced Works

Literary Sources Caesar, BCiv, BGall

de Bello Civili, de Bello Gallico (Civil War, Gallic War)

HA Antoninus (etc.)

Historia Augusta, life of Antoninus Pius (etc.)

Livy, Epit.

Livy, Epitome (also called Periochae)

Pliny, NH

Pliny the Elder, Natural History

RGDA

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Sallust, BJug, Hist.

Jugurtha, Histories

English-language translations of the ancient literary sources can be found in several series. The fullest range of authors comes in the volumes in the Loeb Classical Library series (ongoing), which offer the original Latin or Greek text on one page and the translation on the opposite page. A varied range of authors is appearing in the Oxford World’s Classics series, often with substantial annotations, and a still broader range in Penguin Classics. Some translations of Latin and Greek works, usually older ones, can be found online. Translated documents – inscriptions, papyri, coins – are now available in some quantity, but the sheer volume of these items means that only selections exist in translation. See (e.g.) Levick, Lewis and Reinhold, Sherk, and Select Papyri in the Referenced Works below. Greek and Latin texts themselves are published in several major series: Oxford Classical Texts (OUP), Teubner (Leipzig) and the Collection Budé (Paris; with accompanying French translation). The vast and always increasing numbers of ancient inscriptions are collected in the volumes of long-established, and regularly expanded, series such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and Inscriptiones Graecae, some more narrowly focused (The Roman Inscriptions of Britain for instance). Recently found inscriptions appear in the journal L’Année Épigraphique (Paris). Ancient coins have their own collections in series such as The Roman Imperial Coinage, and papyri in, for instance, the ongoing Oxyrhynchus Papyri series.

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ABBREVIATIONS

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Modern abbreviations AÉpigr

L’Année épigraphique

CAH2

Various eds. 1970–2005. The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd edn. 14 vols. Cambridge: CUP

CUP

Cambridge University Press

ed., edn, eds

edited by, edition, editors

EJ

V. Ehrenberg and A.H.M. Jones. 1976. Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, 2nd edn with addenda. Oxford: Clarendon

ESAR

T. Frank (ed.). 1933–40. An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome. 5 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP

FGrH

F. Jacoby et al. 1923–. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, multiple vols. Berlin: Weidmann

ILLRP

A. Degrassi. 1965. Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae, 2nd edn. 2 vols. Florence: La Nuova Italia

ILS

H. Dessau. 1892–1916. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. 3 vols in 5. Berlin: Weidmann

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

NP

H. Cancik, H. Schneider and C.F. Salazar (eds). 1996–. Brill’s New Pauly Online: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill,

OUP

Oxford University Press

RIC

H. Mattingly, C.H.V. Sutherland, R.G. Carson, et al. (eds). 1923–94. The Roman Imperial Coinage, 1st and 2nd edns. 11 vols London: Spink & Son

SIG3

W. Dittenberger (ed.). 1915–24. Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, 3rd edn. 3 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel,

s.v., s.vv.

sub verbo, sub verbis (= entry, entries)

tr.

translated (by), translation, translator

UP

University Press

Notes

Introduction: Rome and her Imperialism 1.

Seeley 1914, 10. On differing views of the empire and its impacts: Hingley 2005; Eckstein 2006, 2009; Gardner 2013; Hoyos 2013b; Mills 2013. Roman empire as rape: Mattingly 2011, 94–121. Other hostile verdicts: Wells 1984, 269–78 (Rome relied on ‘institutionalized terror on a scale unknown to the modern world, except in Soviet Russia’, 278); Morley 2010, 69 (‘a transMediterranean kleptocracy’).

Chapter 1: Rome Before Empire: Hegemony Over Italy 1.

Census of 265: Eutropius 2.18; Brunt 1971, 13, 30–2. Size of ager Romanus: Brunt 1971, 30. Estimated population in 225 bc: Brunt 1971, 44–60; Scheidel 2004, 1–5; Hin 2008, 187–201. Early Roman economy and trade (to 133 bc): Morel 2008. Early Roman–Carthaginian treaties: Polybius 3.22–5; Scardigli 1991. 2. Caesar’s dignitas: BCiv 1.9. Auctoritas, dignitas and other civic values: Earl 1967; Rosenstein 2006.

Chapter 2: Mediterranean Hegemony and the First Provinces 1.

Plutarch, Pyrrhus 23.6; Polybius 1.10–11. Philinus of Agrigentum: Polybius 1.14–15. Both sides felt mutual fear and greed: Dio, frg. 43.1–4. Syracuse the target: Silius Italicus, Punica 1.662–3 (epic poem of c. AD 100 on Hannibal’s war). 2. Imperium populi Romani and provincia: Richardson 2008; Edwell 2013a. 1,000 talents: 1 talent was equivalent to 6,000 drachmas, and to 6,000 Roman denarii when the silver denarius was introduced around 210 bc. The denarius was worth 4 sesterces. Around 150 bc a Roman legionary was paid 120 denarii a year; by ad 100 he earned 300. In early twenty-firstcentury terms the buying power of 1 sesterce was (very roughly) US$10–20 and of 1 talent about US$240,000–480,000.

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3. For E.S. Staveley (CAH2 7.432) and Prag 2013, 58, Roman struggles against the Ligurians caused them to annex Sardinia and Corsica because of Ligurian piracy; but the connection is not obvious. 4. The Punic Wars: Lazenby 1996, 1998; Huss 1985, 216–457; Goldsworthy 2000; Miles 2010; Hoyos 2011, 2015. 5. Town-foundations in Spain: Richardson 1986; López Castro 2013. Petitioners in 171: Livy 43.2. Palma and Pollentia: Strabo 3.5.1 C168. 6. Epirus: Waterfield 2014, 201–4. Rhodes impoverished: Polybius 30.31.12. The ‘day of Eleusis’: Polybius 29.27; Livy 45.12. Prusias’ behaviour: 30.18. Attalus’ letter: Austin 2006, 424–5. 7. Rome and western Mediterranean after 167: Dyson 1985; Richardson 1986; Harris 1989. Dalmatian campaign: Polybius 32.13.4–8. Rome and eastern Mediterranean states down to 146: Sherwin-White 1984, 1–80; Gruen 1984; Eckstein 2008; Burton 2011; Waterfield 2014. 8. Carthage’s fate: Harris 1989; Miles 2010, 324–51; Hoyos 2015, 229–76. 9. Pergamum decree: Sherk 1984, no. 40; Austin 2006, 434–5 no. 251; Wörrle 2000. Provincia Asia established: Gruen 1984, 592–608; C. Habicht, CAH2 8.578–80; A. Lintott, CAH2 9.33–5. 10. Macedonia extended c. 102: Sherk 1984, no. 55 (the ‘Piracy Law’ of 101/100 bc), lines 28–9. 11. Pompey’s eastern arrangements: Plutarch, Pompey 45.2–3; Badian 1968, 78–9; T.P. Wiseman, CAH2 9.165. Another interpretation sees him adding only 35 million: Kay 2014, 72. 12. Caesar’s Gallic war damage and deaths: Pliny, NH 7.92; Plutarch, Caesar 15.5; Suetonius, Caesar 54.2; Appian, Celtica 1.6.

Chapter 3: The Provinces of the Republic 1. Loot from Spain: Van Nostrand 1937, 128–9. 2. ‘The Romans and those subject to them’: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 35, no. 823 (165 bc), with Richardson 2008, 45 n. 103; Sherk 1984, no. 53, lines 32–3 (105 bc). ‘Those who are under the direction’: Warmington 1967, no. 59 line 1; Prag 2013, 53–4. Allies preserving imperium: Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.13. ‘Our imperium’ as mere dot: Cicero, Republic 6.16. Rhine as boundary: Caesar, BGall 4.16. Egypt added to imperium: RGDA 27. 3. Cicero, ad Familiares 7.24; Livy 42.7–10, 21–2; Plautus, Epidicus 159–60. Booty 200–157: ESAR 1.141; Kay 2014, 30, 323 (slightly higher estimate). Caesar tacit on civil war deaths: Pliny, NH 7.92. Booty 99–50 bc: Kay 2014, 323. 4. Delos: Strabo 14.5.2 C668; Kay 2014, 191, 197–203. Roman and Italian merchants in Aegean: Wilson 1966, 85–152. In provinces generally: Brunt 1971, 209–14. 5. Slave risings: Livy 32.26, 33.36, 39.29 and 41; Diodorus 34/35.2–46; 36.3–10. Aristonicus: SIG3 694 = Austin 2006, no. 250 (circa 129 bc); Diodorus 34/35.2.26; Strabo 14.1.38 C646. New Carthage mines: Polybius 34.9.8–9.

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

Rome Victorious Philip V’s letter: SIG3 543 = Austin 2006, no. 74. Aemilianus’s sneer: Velleius 2.4.4; Valerius Maximus 6.2.3; Plutarch, Moralia 201F. Piso’s vasarium: Cicero, in Pisonem 35. Provincial taxation: Lintott 1993, 70–96. Publicani: Badian 1972. Value of Asia’s revenues: ESAR 1.229. Around 63 bc the contract for the taxes from one city, Tralles, went for 225,000 denarii, or 37.5 talents (Cicero, pro Flacco 91). Aquillius: Appian, Civil Wars 1.22.92. C. Gracchus: Gellius, Noctes Atticae 15.12.2–4. Tolosa treasure: Strabo 4.1.13 C188; Dio, frg. 90. Fabius Hadrianus: Broughton 1952, 69. Cicero and British booty: ad Q. Fratrem 3.9.4; ad Atticum 4.18.5. Publicani enslaved Bithynians: Diodorus 36.3. ‘Asiatic Vespers’ (nicknamed from the 1282 Sicilian Vespers massacre): Brunt 1971, 224–7; Mayor 2010, 13–26, 169–75, 383–6. Heraclea: Memnon (Heraclea’s later historian), FGrH 434, F27.5–6 = Sherk 1984, no. 68. Scaptius affair: ad Atticum 6.1–6.3; Badian 1968, 84–5. ‘Recovery law’: Warmington 1967, no. 59. Curbing governors: Lintott 1993, 97–107. Annius: Sherk 1984, no. 48 (= SIG3 700). Cervius and Tadius: Cicero, II Verrines 2.49, 5.114. Negotiatores at Carthage and Cirta: Polybius 37.7; Appian, Libyca 92.434; Sallust, BJug 26. Garum: Lipiński 1992, 184–5. Negotiatores: Wilson 1966; Harris 1979, 93–101; Kay 2014, 192–3. Town-foundations in Spain: Brunt 1971, 584–8, 590–3; Richardson 1986, chs. 5–7. Narbo, and bankers in Transalpina: Cicero, pro Fonteio 11, 13. Mutina, Livy 39.55; Aquileia, 40.34. Junonia: Warmington 1967, no. 60 (lex agraria, 111 bc), line 61; Plutarch, C. Gracchus 9. Cicero, II Verrines 3.61–2 (Lollius). Conventus (same in both singular and plural) civium Romanorum: e.g. II Verrines 2.32–4, 70, 189; Caesar, BCiv 2.19, 3.9, 3.29, 3.40 (Corduba, Dalmatia); ILS 206, 629; Wilson 1966, 13–18; Brunt 1971, 220–4. Wealthy settlers in Spain: Caesar, BCiv 2.18; de Bello Hispaniensi 7 (settlers’ legion). Conventus in 49–46: de Bello Alexandrini 43; de Bello Africo 90; Plutarch, Cato the Younger 59, 61–7, 71. Romans on Delos and Cos: Wilson 1966, 111–18, 135–6. Caesar as ‘god’ at Cos: ILLRP 40. Gades’ and Patavium’s equites: Strabo 3.5.3 C169; 5.1.7 C213. Lucretius: Holland 1979. Corduba’s poets: Cicero, pro Archia 26. Asclepiades: Strabo 3.4.3 C157. Livius Andronicus gained citizenship either through being freed after war-enslavement, or after settling in Rome as a freeborn migrant (Goldberg 1995, 28–31; W. Suerbaum, NP Livius III.1, A). Aemilius Paullus: ILLRP 584. Alcántara bronze: Hoyos 1989. Minucius brothers: ILLRP 517. ‘Salluitan squadron’: ILLRP 515. Tabula Contrebiensis: Richardson 1983 (three other bronze tablets of the same period are in a Celtiberian language).

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22. Archagathus: Pliny, NH 29.12. Moericus: Livy 25.30–1, 26.21. Mottones (also spelled Muttines, Myttones): Walbank 1957–79, 2.150; Huss 1985, 369, 378; at Delphi in 190–189, SIG3 2.585, lines 85–8. Also enfranchised was Sosis, a pro-Roman Syracusan in 212 bc (Livy 25.25.3, 26.21.10). Valentia a colonia: ILLRP 308. Balbus’ citizenship was defended by Cicero in 56 (Cicero, pro Balbo).

Chapter 4: The Political Impoverishment of the Imperial Republic 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Cato on Greeks: e.g. Pliny, NH 29.14 (quoting Cato); Astin 1978, Chapter 8. ‘New and over-clever wisdom’: Livy 42.47.9. Carneades: Plutarch, Cato the Censor 22; Lactantius, Divine Institutions 5.15, 17–18. Nasica in 154: Livy, Epit. 48. Cornelius Rufinus: Livy, Epit. 14; Valerius Maximus 2.9.4. Naval levy in 211: Livy 24.11. ‘Ancient and dead laws’: Cicero, II Verrines 5.45 (quoting others). Piso’s delinquencies: in Pisonem 22, 66–72, 86–91. Conspicuous consumption, moralizing unease: Lintott 1972; Levick 1982; Edwards 1993, 173–206. Fabius Allobrogicus’ silver: Pliny, NH 33.141. Cicero on incomes: Stoics’ Paradoxes 49. Atticus: Nepos, Atticus 5, 12; Kay 2014, 197. Rabirius: Kay 2014, 193, 238–9. Crassus’ wealth: Plutarch, Crassus 2; Pliny, NH 33.134. Pompey’s: Badian 1968, 82–3; Kay 2014, 194–5. Deiotarus: Cicero, ad Atticum 6.1.3. Caesar’s wealth: summarized by Badian 1968, 89–90. Aqua Marcia: Pliny, NH 34.41–2, 36.121; Frontinus, Aqueducts 1.7, 2.67; Richardson 1992, 17–18. C. Gracchus’ story: Malcovati 1955, 191–2. Fannius: ibid., 144. Numbers of legions, 167 to 91: Brunt 1971, 432–3 (table). List of violent acts, 287–44 bc: Lintott 1999, 209–16. Men under arms, 70s–50s bc: Brunt 1971, 446–72 (table, 449). Syme 1939, 17: ‘But even Sulla could not abolish his own example.’

Chapter 5: Augustus: The Greatest Imperialist 1.

‘They mistrusted’: Tacitus, Annals 1.2 (my tr.). ‘Sponsor of ideal government’ (optimi status auctor): Suetonius, Augustus 28.2. ‘Nothing was done’: Dio 53.21.6. 2. Horace, Odes 1.2.41–52; Vitruvius, de Architectura 1, preface; Horace, Epistles 2.1.1–4; Ovid, Tristia 4.14.15 (‘res est publica Caesar’); ILS 69 (Pisae); EJ 116 (Egypt), 98a (Halicarnassus); Ando 2000, 320–1; Woolf 2005. 3. Dio on Augustus’ regime: 53.12.1–3, 17.1–3. Young Marcellus: Virgil, Aeneid 6.860–86. Letter to Gaius Caesar: Gellius, Noctes Atticae 15.7.3 (‘sentry duty’, stationem meam). Cornelius Gallus: Syme 1986, 32; J.S. Crook, CAH2 10.80–1; E.S. Gruen, ibid., 148–9; Goldsworthy 2014, 252–3.

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4. Army discharges: RGDA 3, 16. Cyrene edicts, Sherk 1984, no. 102; Cnidos, ibid., no. 103. Parthian obedience coins: e.g. RIC 12.288, 315, 416; Cooley 2009, 242–5. Desert equals peace: Tacitus, Agricola 30 (Calgacus’ speech). Salassi enslaved: Strabo 4.6.7 C206. Other Salassi, no doubt pro-Roman loyalists, joined the new Roman colony of Augusta Praetoria, modern Aosta (ILS 6753). 5. Augustus’ German wars: Wells 1972; Gruen 1996, 178–88; Murdoch 2006; Bleicken 2016, 514–30, 537–45. Horace lauds the conquest of Rhaetia: Odes 4.4. 6. The Balkan conquests: Gruen 1996, 171–8. Sulpicius Quirinius or Vinicius on the Danube: EJ 43a = ILS 8965), a fragmentary inscription with only ‘… cius’ legible from the legatus’ name; Syme 1971, 26–9. Ovid’s barbarian fears at Tomis: e.g. Tristia 2.1; Ex Ponto 4.9. 7. The great Dalmatian and Pannonian revolt: Gruen 1996, 176–8; Bleicken 2016, 530–7. 8. Arminius and the Varian disaster: Wells 2004; Murdoch 2006. ‘Restricting the empire within its limits’ (consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii): Tacitus, Annals 1.11 (Augustus’ posthumous message to the Senate). 9. ‘I extended the borders’: Augustus, RGDA 26.1. ‘Barricaded’ the empire: Tacitus, Annals 1.9. Augustan imperialism essentially defensive: Suetonius, Divus Augustus 21; Dio 53.10, 54.41; Syme 1934, 10.351–5, 380–1; Meyer 1961, 1–13; Wilkes 1969, 48–9; Alston 2013; Bleicken 2016, 504–9, 553–6. 10. ‘Imperium without end’: Virgil, Aeneid 1.278–9. ‘Subjected the world’: RGDA preface. Europe-wide (or world) conquest: Brunt 1963; Wells 1972, vii–x, 3–13, 219; Luttwak 1976, 49–50, 60; Brunt 1990a, 451–68; Mattern 1999, 88–90; Zecchini 2010, 187–90. Views about the Caspian: Diodorus 18.5.4; Strabo 2.5.18, 11.1.5, 11.6.1; Pliny, NH 6.36 (arm of Ocean); Ptolemy, Geography 7.5.4 (inland sea). 11. Pragmatic imperialism: Gruen 1996, 147, 169, 186–97; Southern 1998, 155–6; B. Campbell 2013; Britain: RGDA 32 (suppliant kings); Strabo 2.5.8 C115, 4.5.3 C200 (conquest unnecessary). Edict in 2 bc: Suetonius, Augustus 31; Brunt 1963, 172.

Chapter 6: Imperial Takings and Leavings, ad 14–212 1.

Dynasties and dysfunction in the first and second centuries ad (naturally a vast literature): particularly useful are CAH2 vols 10 and 11; Syme 1939, 1958b; Garzetti 2015; Baldwin 1980; Wells 1984; Alston 2014. 2. Imperial expansion briefly but vividly told: D.B. Campbell 2013. Tiberius’ unconcern, Annals 4.32; indifferent to barbarian raids, Suetonius, Tiberius 41. Caligula in Gaul: T.E.J. Wiedemann, CAH2 10.226–8. 3. Britain ad 43–61: J. Wacher, CAH2 10.503–16; Hinds 2007; de la Bédoyère 2013, 23–41. Auxilia were the auxiliary units recruited from provincials.

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4. Silvanus: ILS 986 (family mausoleum outside Tivoli). ‘Thoroughly volatile Gauls’: Tacitus, Germania 29. Agri Decumates: K. Dietz, NP s.v. 5. Roman force under Velius Rufus passing through Dacia: ILS 9200 = Sherk 1988, no. 109; D.B. Campbell 2013, 78–80. Decebalus’ Parthian link: Pliny, Letters 10.74. Ti. Claudius Maximus: Speidel 1970, 1971. Crito’s figures (preserved erratically by the sixth-century author John Lydus): Sherk 1988, no. 118. Tacitus’ dictum on Britain: Histories 1.2. 6. Young 2001, 181, and Fitzpatrick 2011, 39–40, 42 (Trajan had economic aims); Lepper 1948 and Bennett 1997, 188–90 (military and strategic), cf. Isaac 2013; Edwell 2013b, 258–62, and Alston 2014, 377–8, 380 (continuing goal of world conquest). Personal gloria: Dio 68.7, 17. Campaigns and annexations: Lightfoot 1990; Bennett 1997, 190–202. 7. Arrian and the Alani: Bosworth 1977; Goldsworthy 1998, 107–9, 228–33; cf. Colombo 2011. Rex Quadis Datus: RIC 3.110 no. 620. 8. The great plague under Marcus Aurelius: B.W. Frier in CAH2 11.815–16; Lo Cascio 2012, notably the chapters by Harris (22–25 per cent mortality), Eck (devastation of the armies) and Bruun (sceptical of high mortality). Parthian war of 161–6: Birley 1987, 121–6, 128–30, 140–2, 144–5; Edwell 2008, 23–6. 9. Lucian, Alexander the False Prophet 48. Opitergium: Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History 29.6.1. The great northern wars: Birley 1987, 150–210, and in CAH2 11.165–76, 181–6; Pirson 1996. 10. A ‘dream of empire’: Dio 72.27.3. 11. Dio’s criticism of Severus’ eastern wars: 75.3.2–3. Parthian wars of Severus: Birley 1998, 129–35; Southern 2007, 318–21; Edwell 2008, 26–9. Severus and his dynasty: Campbell 2005.

Chapter 7: The New Romans 1.

‘Guardian and protector’: Augustus so termed by loyal Pisae in Etruria ad 4 (Sherk 1988, no. 19). Citizen numbers under Augustus: RGDA 8; Brunt 1971, 100, 113–21; Hin 2013, 20, 284–6, 345, 351–3. Claudius’ census: Tacitus, Annals 11.25; St Jerome’s Chronicle gives 6,844,000, perhaps a copying error. 2. Aristides, To Rome 59–64 (tr. Oliver 1953). Tusculum: Cicero, pro Balbo 31; Livy 6.26.8, 8.37.12. Forced citizenship: Livy 9.43.24–5, 45.7–8 (306 bc). Naples (and Heraclea) in 89: Cicero, pro Balbo 21. Publicius Menander: ibid. 28. Publicius a frequent nomen of freed state-slaves: Eder 1980, 116; K.-L. Elvers, NP s.v. 3. Aemilianus’ gibes: Velleius 2.4.4; Valerius Maximus 6.2.3; Astin 1960. ‘Vicious’ slaves: Dionysius, Roman Antiquities 4.24.4–8. Law of 2 bc (lex Fufia Caninia): Gaius, Institutes 1.42–6; Sherwin-White 1973, 328. Junian Latins: Bradley 1994, 157; Cooley and Cooley 2013, 213–15, translating AÉpigr 2006, nos 304–7. Trogus’ grandfather: Justin 43.5.11–12. 4. Citizen numbers debated: e.g. Brunt 1971; De Ligt 2012; Hin 2013, 261–97 (arguing for 375,000–500,000 cives outside Augustan Italy, 293–4); Alston 2014, 312–14. Seven million: Crawford 2008, 640–1.

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5. Roman municipia in Baetica and Africa listed: Pliny, NH 3.7; 5.29; figures for other provinces are set out in NH Books 3–5 (Pliny’s lists go back to Augustan surveys). Coloniae, municipia, oppida Latina in the Principate: Sherwin-White 1973, 221–394; Lintott 1993, 130–45; Edmondson 2010, 253–60. 6. Latin right: Sherwin-White 1973, 360–79; Edmondson 2010, 257–8. Gigthis: ILS 6779, 6780. Latium maius: Gaius, Institutes 1.96. 7. Individual citizenship grants: e.g. Millar 1977, 477–90. Seleucus of Rhosus: Sherk 1984, no. 86. V Alaudae: Keppie 1984, 132, 136–7, 140–2, 206–7. Military diplomata: Phang 2001, 14–15, 53–85, 410; Wesch-Klein 2007, 441–3. 8. Army recruitment: Webster 1996, 107–9; Wesch-Klein 2007, 435–50. Veteran settlers: Hanel 2007; Scheidel 2007. 9. Megas: Cicero, ad Familiares 13.36. Cognomen of Balbus (Punic Balberakh?): Zeidler 2005. Eurycles and his dynasty: Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 89–104, 163. Aquila: ILS 5797, 9370. Arminius: Velleius 2.118. Segestes: Tacitus, Annals 1.58. Provincial names and impact of Caracalla’s edict (the Constitutio Antoniniana): Salway 1994. 10. Doctor Xenophon: ILS 1841; Tacitus, Annals 12.61, 67. Burrus: ILS 1321 (L. Afranius had been a trusted legatus of Pompey in Transalpina and elsewhere). Duvius Avitus: W. Eck, NP s.v. Duvius. Sennius Sollemnis: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 13.3162; Saller 1982, 132–3, 192; other known Sennii were Gauls too (ILS 4711, 5768, 7279). Reburrinius: ILS 2573; Weisgerber 1968, 212, 239, 344, 413. Survival of local names as Romanized cognomina: Zeidler 2005. 11. Provincial Roman elites: Syme 1958a, 1–23 and 1958b, especially 2.585–624; Sherwin-White 1973, 221–63; Madsen 2013, 305–11. 12. Septimius Severus’ ancestor: Statius, Silvae 4.5; Smallwood 1966, no. 279; Birley 1998, 18–20. Claudius’ Alpine beneficiaries: Chapter 11. 13. Sedatius Severianus: ILS 9487; AÉpigr 1981 (publ. 1984), no. 640; Dio 71.2.1; Lucian, Alexander the False Prophet 26–7, and How to Write History 21, 25–6. Maximianus: ILS 9122; AÉpigr 1956, no. 124. Timesitheus: ILS 1330; J. Drinkwater in CAH2 11.34–7; Southern 2001, 64, 69–71, 306.

Chapter 8: Governing and Misgoverning 1.

Tacitus, Agricola 21 (my tr.); 19 (curbing corruption); Juvenal, Satires 15.111–12 (Thule: Courtney 2013, 535). Agricola at Verulamium: AÉpigr 1957, no. 169; Salway 2001, 101, 105. Germans’ virtuous simplicity: Tacitus, Germania 18–20; Birley 2009, 57. A strikingly similar sneer by the firstcentury ad Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, after a colleague praised Roman infrastructures: ‘they have built market-places to put harlots in, baths to rejuvenate themselves, bridges to levy tolls for them’ (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33, in Millar 1967, 206; Cuomo 2011, 153–4 – noting television’s Monty Python echo). ‘Toga’ = citizenship: Woodman 2014, 204. Effete sophistication versus tough barbarian virtue: Juvenal 8.113–24.

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2. Vespasian’s father: Suetonius, Vespasian 1. Classicianus: Tacitus, Annals 14.38–9; Smallwood 1967, no. 268 (his tombstone in London). Pertinax: Birley 1998, 63–7, 75–8, 84, 88–95. Piso’s murder ad 25: Tacitus, Annals 4.45. Dio endangered: 80.4.2–5.2. 3. Funds extorted after Great Fire: Tacitus, Annals 15.45; Suetonius, Nero 38; Dio 62.18.5. Dio on Caracalla’s enfranchisement: 78.9.4–5. Volesus: Seneca, de Ira 2.5.5; Elder Seneca, Controversiae 7.6.22; Tacitus, Annals 3.68. Pilate and Samaritans: Lémonon 2007, 128–9, 215–22. Maladministration in Judaea: M. Goodman in CAH2 10.750–61. Marius Priscus: Pliny, Letters 2.11; Juvenal, Satires 1.48–50 (my tr.), 8.119–20; Whitton 2013, 154–6, 160–1. 4. Tacitus, Histories 1.48 (Vinius); Annals 16.18–19 (Petronius). Suetonius on Domitian’s strictness: Domitian 7. Maladministration trials: Brunt 1990c, 90–5 (detailed list). 5. Via Domitia: Polybius 3.39.8. Agrippa’s Gallic highways: Strabo 4.6.11 C208. Via Sebaste: ILS 5828 = Levick 1985, no. 94. Baetis highway: ILS 102. Balkans: M. Rathmann, NP s.v. Roads, section V part J. Roads in Africa: ILS 151 (ad 14); Raven 1993, 66–70, 91. British roads: Salway 1984, 555–6, 562–71. Via Nova Traiana: ILS 5834. 6. Via Appia, ad 123: ILS 5875 (readings of the numerals vary slightly). Nerva’s coin: RIC 2.93 and 104 = Levick 1985, no. 92. 7. Bridge near Alcántara: ILS 287–287a. Caesarea: Holum 2014, 182–99. Carthage, Lepcis, and other Roman African ports: Stone 2014. Port of Londinium: Merrifield 1983, 90–6, 148–53. 8. Strabo 3.2.15 C151 (tr. Loeb). Cities and urban development outside Rome: e.g. Stambaugh 1988, 243–87; Edmondson 2010; Gleason 2010. 9. Ti. Alexander’s edict: Smallwood 1967, no. 391 = Levick 1985, no. 172 (inscribed on Hibis’ temple in the El-Kharga oasis, 800 kilometres south of Alexandria). Galillenses vs Patulcenses: ILS 5947 = Levick 1985, no. 53 (at Esterzili, 90 kilometres north of Cagliari). Archippus: Pliny, Letters 10.56–8. 10. Sotidius Strabo: Mitchell 1976; Levick 1985, 100–2; Judge and Harrison 2008, 348–59 (their tr.). Vergilius Capito: Smallwood 1967, no. 382 = Lewis and Reinhold 1990, 2.401–2. Domitian’s missive: Sherk 1988, no. 95. Lengthy litany: Mitchell 1976, 111–12. Scaptopara inscription: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 3.12336 = AÉpigr 1994, 1552; Williams 1986, 198–204. Jesus: New Testament, Matthew 5.41.

Chapter 9: Judging the Empire: Romans and Others 1.

Aedui ‘brothers and kinsmen’: Caesar, BGall 1.33. Argument for invading northern Gaul: BGall 2.1. Dalmatian war of 156–155 bc: Chapter 2. 2. Aristotle on slavery: e.g. Politics 1.1253b–1255b; so too Plato, Politicus 309a–b. Messalla to Teos: SIG3 601 = Sherk 1984, no. 8. Cicero’s praise for Pompey’s and Caesar’s conquests: pro Sestio 67; de Provinciis Consularibus 19, 29–34 (political pressure: ad Familiares 1.9.9–14). Cicero admiring the empire in

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Rome Victorious public and private: de Haruspicum Responsis 19; de Republica 3.35; de Officiis 2.26–7 (‘protectorate’, patrocinium), 2.84 (statesman’s duty); Philippics 5.48. Cicero, ad Quintum Fratrem 1.1.24, 34. Jupiter and Anchises: Virgil, Aeneid 1.278–82; 6.789–800 (Augustus), 851–3 (Rome’s tasks). Horace on world’s obedience: Odes 4.15.13–24. Pliny on Rome’s achievement: NH 3.39 (to be echoed three-and-a-half centuries later in Rutilius Namatianus’ famous verses: de Reditu suo 1.63–6). Scipio’s speech: Polybius 15.10.2. Pompey’s inscription: Diodorus 40.4. Text-heading of RGDA: Cooley 2009, 102–4. Agrippa II’s speech: Josephus, Jewish War 2.345–401; also Josephus’ comments on the vastness of the empire, 3.70 and 107. ‘Boundless grandeur’: Pliny, NH 27.2. ‘Destinies of the empire’: Tacitus, Germania 33 (urgentibus imperii fatis, a much-debated phrase; cf. Benario 1998, like many others seeing it as optimistic; contrastingly Thomas 2009, 65–6). Note too Germania 37, free Germany more dangerous than Parthia’s kings. Cerealis’ speech: Histories 4.73–4. Tacitus on the good and bad sides of empire: succinctly Syme 1958b, 2.527–33. Plutarch, Moralia 316f–317c, 323e (essay on ‘The Fortune of the Romans’); Aristides, Oration 26, To Rome, 28–33, 78–84 (tr. Oliver), 94–109. Discussions: Oliver 1953; Nutton 1978; Pernot 2008; Fontanella 2008. Appian’s praises: Preface 26–8, 43–4; Bucher 2000. Tertullian on current prosperity: On the Soul 30; also On the Mantle (de Pallio) 1.1, 2.7. Polybius on justified Roman wars: e.g. Histories 1.10.1–11.3 (First Punic); 2.8.1–14, 3.16.1–7 (First and Second Illyrian); 7.9.1–19 (First Macedonian); 38.3.8–13, 9.1–11.11 (Achaean). Rome ultimately responsible for Hannibal’s War: 1.88.8–12, 3.15.10–11, 3.30.4. Coolness towards Rome: 31.10.7–9, 11.10–12, 21.5–7, 25.2–7; 36.2.1–4; frg. 99B; Walbank 1972, 166–73; McGing 2010, 157–67. Antisthenes: FGrH 508; cited in Phlegon’s second-century ad Book of Wonders, tr. Lewis and Reinhold 1990, 1.405–8. Anti-Roman oracle: Sibylline Oracles 3.350–80; Bate 1937, 62–3. On both: Momigliano and Suárez de la Torre 2005. ‘Thrice three hundred years’: Dio 57.18.5, 62.18.3. Scipios’ letter to Heraclea: SIG3 618 = Sherk 1984, no. 14. Caesar protecting Gauls: BGall 1.33, 35, 45. Augustus’ conquests admired by many: Tacitus, Annals 1.9; Dio 54.9.1–2, 56.41.7. ‘Folks, don’t be surprised’: Chrysalus in Plautus, Bacchides 1070–3 (probably 180s bc); also Truculentus 486 (joke about invented victories); Burton 2013, 107. Pompey’s speech as consul-elect: Cicero, I Verrine 45. Cicero abusing Gallic complainants, pro Fonteio 26–37, 44–9; sneering at Sardinians, pro Scauro 38, 42–4; at Greeks and other easterners, e.g. pro Flacco 9, 11–12, 16–19; de Provinciis Consularibus 10; ad Q. Fratrem 1.1.19; cf. Syed 2005, 363–6. Provincials’ hatred of Roman rule: Cicero, de Imperio Pompei 65–6; pro Flacco 19. Provincials misruled: de Officiis 2.28, 75; 3.36; ad Familiares 15.1.15 (written to the Senate). Sallust’s criticisms: Catiline 10–13; 33; 36.4–39.4; BJug 4; 31; 41–2; Hist. 1.11–12; 16; 55.11–15 m. Imperial degeneracy: Livy, Preface 9–12; Lucan, Pharsalia 1.1–32, 158–82; Petronius, Satyricon 119, lines 1–60, 79–99.

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11. On oppression and revolts: Tacitus, Annals 3.40–7, 4.72–3, 14.29–39; Dio 55.29, 56.16, 56.18, 62.2, 67.5, 78.22–3. 12. Critognatus: Caesar, BGall 7.77; cf. Riggsby 2006, 89–91, 103–5, 107–18. Mithridates: Sallust, Hist. 4, frg. 97 m (tr. Loeb, adapted). Speech to army: Justin 38.3.10–7.10. Britons’ grievances: Tacitus, Agricola 15, 30–2 (Calgacus; cf. Woodman 2014, 20–5, 235–57); Annals 14.31–2, 35. Boudica’s speech: Dio 62.3–6. Compare the Rhineland Batavians’ grievances: Tacitus, Histories 4.14 (Civilis’ speech).

Chapter 10: Resistance 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

Claudius on obedient Gaul: ILS 212 = Sherk 1988, no. 55. Bato: Dio 56.16.3. Velius Rufus: ILS 9200. Unrest under Antoninus: HA Antoninus 5. Egypt’s taxation: Mattingly 2011, 156. Tacfarinas: Tacitus, Annals 2.52, 3.72–4, 4.23–6; Cherry 1998, 1, 37–40. Domitian on Nasamones: Dio 67.4.6. Bandits and brigandage: Shaw 1984, and 2000, 382–8; Isaac 1992; Grünewald 2004. Pliny’s friends: Pliny, Letters 6.25.1–4. Travellers killed by bandits: Shaw 1984, 10 n. 25 (a long list from Latin inscriptions); J.J. Wilkes in CAH2 11.603 n. 83. Nonius Datus: ILS 5795; Cuomo 2011. Fronto expecting brigands in Asia: ad Antoninum Pium 8.1 (166–7 in M. van den Hout, Teubner edn., 1988). Brisaei: probably Pliny the Elder’s Brysae or Brigae in that region (NH 4.40; NP s.v. Brisae 2). ‘Brigands from Dalmatia and Dardania’: HA Marcus 21.7; cf. Wilkes in CAH2 11.603 n. 83. Maternus: Herodian 1.10. Jewish rebellions: Josephus, The Jewish War; Tacitus, Histories 5.1–13; Dio 68.32, 69.12–13; Smallwood 1976; Sherk 1988, nos 83, 129 (documents); M. Goodman in CAH2 10.750–61, and 11.664–78; Millar 1993, 106–8, 372–4, 545–52; Isaac 1998, 211–56; Eck 1999. On Bar Kochba’s and others’ documents see also Appendix.

Chapter 11: How Roman Was the Roman Empire? 1.

Camulodunum: Tacitus, Annals 12.32. Ubii and Colonia Ara Agrippinensis: Tacitus, Annals 12.27 and Histories 4.65, 79. Thugga in ad 36: EJ 345. Tiddis: ILS 1065; Wells 1984, 245–8. Sardis ladies: AÉpigr 1993 (publ. 1996), no. 1505. 2. Disbelief in active Romanization: e.g. Barrett 1997; Woolf 1998, 1–23; MacMullen 2000, 134–6, also citing other sceptics. Romanization concept criticized and alternatives proposed, such as ‘globalization’: Versluys 2014, plus other contributions there. Synoecism instead of Romanization in Greece under Rome: Papaioannou 2016. Concept still vigorous in e.g. Fentress 2006 (criticizing its social and economic effects); Blażejewski 2011. Cf. Whittaker 1997; G. Woolf in Versluys 2014, 45–50. A feminist reappraisal: Revell 2010. 3. Narbonese Vienna’s ‘solid boon’: ILS 212; Vienna had ius Latii from Augustus, but apparently gained civitas as a colonia Romana from Caligula.

232

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Rome Victorious Asiaticus: W. Eck, NP s.v. Valerius II.1. Volubilis: Smallwood 1967, no. 407a, b = Sherk 1988, no. 50. Licinius Mucianus: Syme 1958b, 2.790–1. Gigthis: above, Chapter 7. Claudius’ Alpine edict: ILS 206 = Sherk 1988, no. 52. Herodes Atticus: E. Bowie, NP s.v. Herodes 16. Annia Regilla: Pomeroy 2010. Alexander the snake-prophet: Lucian, Alexander or the False Prophet (the chief source); D.S. Potter in OCD4 s.v. Alexander (13). Baths and other amenities in Rome’s eastern provinces: Sartre 2013, 283–4. Gerasa: Stillwell et al. 1976, s.v.; Liberati and Bourbon 1996, 262–3; Butcher 2003, 247–55 and colour plate 19. Palmyra: Stoneman 1994, 64–70; Liberati and Bourbon 1996, 7–8, 264–5; Ramage and Ramage 2000, 272–3. Palmyra and Rome: Edwell 2008, 31–66, 167–9. Gladiators at Alexandria: ILS 1397 (Augustan era); Wiedemann 1992, 44, 170–1. At Athens, theatre of Dionysus: Dio Chrysostom, Orations 31.121–3. Aphrodisias: e.g. Thommen 2012; ongoing New York University website at , accessed 7 July 2018. Adamklissi monument: Ramage and Ramage 2000, 198–9 (alongside two high-classical Trajanic friezes from Rome, for comparison). The Gallic fanum: Carpentier 2015. The partial remains of one tower, minus colonnade (the Tour de Vésone), stands in Périgueux, central France: , accessed 7 July 2018. Zabdibol gravestone: , accessed 7 July 2018. Palmyrene funeral art: Heyn 2010. Victor the Moor, Regina the Catuvellaunian: Roman Inscriptions of Britain 1064 and 1065 , accessed 7 July 2018, both from South Shields and perhaps by the same sculptor; de la Bédoyère 2013, 217, 227. Severus’ arch at Lepcis: Ramage and Ramage 2000, 265. Severan tondo (now in Berlin): Birley 1998, plate 16. Ulpian on fideicommissa: Digest 32.11 preface; Millar 1968, 130–1; on fideicommissa cf. D.E.L. Johnston in Hornblower et al. 2012, s.v. Use of Assyrian: Ulpian, Digest 45.1.1.6. Cappadocian: Strabo 12.1.2; Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 29.74. Galatian: Lucian, Alexander the False Prophet 51; St Jerome, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians 2.3. Punic: Apuleius, Apologia 98.8–9; Anon., Epitome de Caesaribus 20.8; HA Septimius 15.7; Procopius, Vandalic War 2.10.33; Millar 1968, 130–1. Spanish native tongues: Adams 2003, 279–83. La Graufesenque ware: Adams 2003, 687–719; Bémont 2004. ‘Foreign’ deities and cults: Warrior 2006, 80–92; Orlin 2010. Aesculapius and Cybele: Orlin 2010, 62–70, 76–84. Isis and Serapis: Takacs 1994; Orlin 2010, 203–7, 211. Pillar of the Boatmen (Paris): ILS 4613a–d; C. Goudineau in CAH2 11.488; cf. Béal 2005. Epona’s consular devotee: Juvenal, Satires 8.144–57. Inscriptional evidence for lesser-known deities: e.g. Rives 2014, 420–1; Fagan 2014, 506. Mother goddesses: e.g. MacKillop 2004, s.vv. Matres, Matrona, Suleviae.

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11. Caligula irritated: Philo, Embassy to Gaius 349–67. Expulsions from Rome: Tacitus, Annals 2.85; New Testament, Acts of the Apostles 18.2; Suetonius, Tiberius 36, Claudius 25; Smallwood 1976, 201–16. Claudius to the Alexandrians: Smallwood 1967, no. 370 = Sherk 1988, no. 44 (quoted). 12. Concessions to Jews: e.g. Smallwood 1976, 124–43, 147, 246, 383. Poppaea’s interest in Judaism: Josephus, Life 16; Jewish Antiquities 20.195–6. Flavius Clemens, Domitilla: ILS 1839; Suetonius, Domitian 15; Dio 67.14; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.18.5 (claiming they were Christians); W. Eck, NP s.v. Flavius II.16, Flavia II.3. 13. Druids: Caesar, BGall 6.13–18; Strabo 4.4.4 C197–8; Suetonius, Claudius 25.5; Pliny, NH 29.54, 30.13; Tacitus, Histories 4.54; HA Severus Alexander 60.6 (Druid priestess, ad 234); Syme 1958b, 1.457–8; Rankin 1995, 29–30; Webster 1995; W. Spickerman, NP s.v. Druids. 14. Tacitus on Christians: Annals 15.44. ‘Christianos ad leonem!’: Tertullian, Apologeticum 40.1. Persecutions: Goodman 1997, 324–9; Frend 2006. Christian stubbornness: Pliny, Letters 10.33–4, 96–7; M. Aurelius: Meditations 11.3. Lugdunum Persecution: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.1; Edwards 2005, 586–7. Martyrs of Carthage: J.N. Bremmer and M. Formisano (eds.), Perpetua’s Passions (Oxford and New York, 2012). Marcia Aurelia Ceionia: ILS 406 (generosity to Anagnia in Latium); Birley 1998, 79–90, 99. 15. Imperial cult: e.g. Fishwick 1978; Price 1984; Ridley 1987, 385–91; J.A. Crook, CAH2 10.133–7; S.R.F. Price, CAH2 10.837–47. Titeia: Sherk 1984, no. 7 g; Plutarch, Flamininus 16.3–4. Pompey and Caesar as gods: Sherk 1984, nos 75, 79. Goddess Roma: Price 1984, 40–3; and in NP s.v. Roma. Temple of Roma et Augustus at Pergamum: RIC 12.506; Kent 1978, no. 128 and p. 277. Augustus to the Tarraconensians: Quintilian 6.3.77. Drusus’ altars at Lugdunum: CAH2 10.98, 134. Vercondaridubnus: Livy, Epit. 139. Narbo: EJ 100 a–b.

Conclusions 1.

Augustine, City of God 4.4; adding the tale of the captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the only difference between his acquisitions and Alexander’s was that his were on a smaller scale; also 4.3, the Roman empire acquired and maintained by blood and slaughter. 2. Sallust, Catiline 8–9, 53. 3. Communication speeds: Duncan-Jones 1990, 7–29 (examples at 15, 26).

Appendix: The Ancient Sources 1.

Roman historians: Dorey 1966; Harrison 2005; Feldherr 2009. Greek and Roman historiography: Fornara 1983; Yarrow 2006. 2. Polybius 1.1.5 (quoted); Walbank 1957–79, and 1972; Davidson 2009; Baronowski 2011; Smith and Yarrow 2012.

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3. Early Roman historians: E. Badian in Dorey 1966, 1–13; Gotter 2009. Cicero: Lintott 2008; Steel 2013. Sallust: Syme 1964; Mellor 2002, 30–47. Diodorus: Sacks 1990; Yarrow 2006, 116–21, 152–6; Munz 2017, especially 1–26, 215–48. 4. Walsh 1963; Luce 1977; Chaplin and Kraus 2009; Mineo 2015. 5. Pompeius Trogus: Alonso Núnez 1987. 6. Strabo: S. Radt, NP s.v. 1. Plutarch: Swain 1996, 135–86. 7. Tacitus: e.g. Syme 1958b; Martin 1981; Woodman 2009; Pagán 2012. Suetonius: Wallace-Hadrill 1983; Power and Gibson 2014. 8. Appian, Cassius Dio, Herodian: Swain 1996; Millar 1964; Kemezis 2014. 9. Inscriptions: Gordon 1983; Cooley 2012. 10. Hilarion, Fayum fishermen, Antonius Longus: Select Papyri (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP), vol. 1, nos 102, 329, 120. 11. On coins see RIC; Carson 1976; Kent 1978; Howgego 1995.

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Index

Romans (except authors and emperors) are listed under their second, i.e. family, name Achaean League (Greece) 26–7, 29, 164, 202 Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) 117, 152, 177 Aelius Aristides, P. (author) 124–5, 130, 132, 142, 144, 163, 193, 210 Aelius Coeranus, P. 138 Aemilius Paullus, L. (conqueror of Macedon) 27, 60, 68, 214 Afranius Burrus, Sex. 133, 136 ager Romanus (Roman state territory) 6, 9–10, 14 Agri Decumates (south-west Germany) 111, 153 Agrigentum (Sicily) 42, 44 Agrippa. See Vipsanius Agrippina (the Elder) 103 Agrippina (the Younger) 104, 184 Akiba, Rabbi 117, 177 Alexander of Abonoteichus (holy man) 182, 210 Alexander the Great 2, 209, 233 Alexandria (Egypt) 27, 83, 117–18, 137, 155, 167, 183, 188, 216–17 Ammaedara (Numidia) 150 Andriscus (Macedonian pretender) 29 Annius, M. 55, 215 Antioch (in Pisidia) 213 Antioch (in Syria) 4, 142, 183 Antiochus III ‘the Great’ (Seleucid Great King) 24–7, 43, 68, 159–60, 164 Antius Quadratus, C. 137

246

Antoninus Pius (emperor) 105–6, 110, 117, 124, 129, 133, 171, 182, 219 Antonius, Iullus 88 Antonius, M. (Mark Antony) 62, 82–3, 84, 88, 110, 198, 206, 214 Antonius Saturninus, L. (rebel) 112, 175 Appian (historian) 142, 163, 182, 207 Appuleius Saturninus, L. 74, 76 Apuleius, L. (author) 140–1, 186, 210 Aqua Marcia (aqueduct) 69, 71 Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) 33 Aquileia 23, 58, 119, 150 Aquincum (Budapest) 131, 153 Arae Flaviae (Rottweil) 111, 153 Arausio (Orange) 34 Aristonicus (Pergamene rebel leader) 32, 45 Armenia (kingdom) 36–7, 83, 102, 106, 115–16, 118, 138–9, 159, 219 Arminius (C. Julius Arminius, German leader) 93, 99–100 Arpinum (Arpino) 34, 75, 134 Arrian (L. Flavius Arrianus, historian) 117, 138–9, 142, 182, 209 Asinius Pollio, C. (historian) 91, 134 Athens 25, 27, 36, 44, 67, 110, 120, 158, 182, 183, 210, 216

INDEX Attalus II (king of Pergamum) 28, 32 Attalus III 35, 38, 69 auctoritas (moral authority) 15–16, 22, 65, 86 Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg) 111 Augustus (C. Octavius, C. Iulius Caesar, Imperator Caesar Augustus) 4, 8, 42, 57, 71, 78, 83, 84–98, 100–2, 103–4, 106–7, 124, 127–9, 131–2, 134, 142–9, 191–2, 199, 200, 204–9, 213–16 Aurelius, Marcus. See Marcus Aurelius Aurelius Pactumeius Clemens, Q. 136 auxilia (army units) 85, 90, 93, 108, 113, 123, 130, 144, 174, 185, 196, 213 Avidius Cassius, C. 118, 120, 133, 139, 171 Bacchus cult 63, 69–70 Baetis (Guadalquivir) River 23–4, 150, 153 bandits, banditry 45, 172–3 Bastarnae (Danubian people) 91, 96, 111 Batavians 174–5, 178, 189 Bato (Illyrian and Pannonian leaders) 98, 170–1 Bithynia 28, 32, 35–7, 44, 51–2, 56, 89, 116, 123, 126, 138–9, 145–8, 154, 156, 190, 207 Bonna (Bonn) 131, 153 booty, loot, plunder 10, 16, 19, 25–8, 31–8, 40, 43, 67–70, 114–15, 119, 158–9, 198–9 Boudica (British queen) 108–9, 115, 146, 152, 168, 174, 178 bribery 51, 72, 75, 77, 121, 134, 198. See also corruption Brigantes (British people) 108–10 Brisaeans (brigands) 139, 173 Britain 1–4, 38, 50, 69, 98, 101–10, 115, 122–3, 138, 143, 146, 150, 152, 167, 173–8, 185–9, 193, 196

247 Bructeri (German people) 99, 112, 162 Brutus. See Junius Bulla Felix (Italian bandit) 172 Byzantium 149 Caecilius Metellus, Q. annexer of Macedon 29, 68 Metellus Pius 35, 62, 77, 179 Caesar (C. Julius Caesar) 4, 16, 35, 37–44, 48, 50–9, 62–8, 72–3, 79–84, 89–90, 124, 128–9, 132, 158, 164, 167, 170, 175, 188, 191–2, 203, 206, 214, 218 Caesar, Gaius and Lucius (adopted sons of Augustus) 87–8 Caesarea (Cappadocia) 154, 186 Caesarea Maritima (Judaea) 151, 154, 175 Caledonia, Caledonians 109–10, 168, 195 Calgacus (Caledonian leader) 168 Caligula (C. Caesar, emperor) 89, 103, 106–7, 110, 138, 187, 205 Calpurnius Piso, Cn. 214 Calpurnius Piso, L. (tribune 149 bc) 30, 50, 53–4, 165 Calpurnius Piso, L. (Epicurean) 47, 50, 65 Campania, Campanians (Italy) 7, 9, 18, 22, 70, 75, 125, 127, 197 Camulodunum (Colchester) 107–8, 131, 152, 174, 178, 187 Capitoline hill (Rome) 6, 68, 213 Cappadocia 32, 36, 110, 117–18, 139, 154, 186, 209 Capua (Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, Campania) 7, 22 Caracalla (emperor) 4, 122–3, 131, 133, 136–8, 141, 147, 167, 185, 194, 197, 199 Caratacus (British king) 108, 185 Carausius (rebel emperor) 174, 198 Carneades (philosopher) 63–4, 164 Carteia (Spain) 24, 56–8, 60–1, 128–9, 160 Carthage, Carthaginians 2, 8, 9, 10–11, 18–22, 29, 30–2, 41, 42, 44, 56, 60, 64, 81, 129, 141, 151,

248 158, 164, 166, 179, 186, 190, 195, 202 Cartimandua (British queen) 108–9 Catiline. See Sergius Catullus 60, 140 Celtiberia, Celtiberians (Spain) 23, 29, 35, 61, 147, 171, 186 censor(s) 11, 13–14, 16, 23, 48, 68, 73, 78 census, Roman 7, 10, 13, 71, 124, 126, 128, 209 Chatti (German people) 93–4, 96, 112, 115, 118 Chauci (German people) 93, 96, 99, 112, 118 China, Chinese 101, 116, 162, 196 Christianity, Christians 2, 5, 141, 188–90, 192, 194, 196, 210 Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero) 3, 47, 49–50, 53–9, 65–7, 77–80, 83, 102, 128, 140, 142, 165–6, 203 Cilicia 34, 37, 46, 50, 53, 67, 154, 166 Cimbri (Germanic people) 33–4 Cirta (Numidia: Constantine) 58–9, 136, 140, 145, 179 Claudius (emperor) 3, 103–4, 106–8, 110–11, 124, 128, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 150, 154, 159, 170–2, 180–1, 184, 188, 189, 192, 213, 216 Claudius Marcellus, M. (Augustus’ nephew) 87 Claudius Pompeianus, Ti. 119, 121, 138, 139, 147 Clodius Albinus, D. (rival emperor) 121, 137, 174 Clodius Pulcher, P. 38, 68, 75, 80 Cogidubnus (or Togidubnus: British king) 107, 110 cohortes urbanae 86 coins, coinage 40, 64, 90, 107, 116–17, 151, 177, 181, 183, 191, 201, 211, 217–19 Colonia Ara Agrippinensis (Cologne) 93, 174, 178, 191 coloniae Latinae (Latin colonies) 7, 9, 22, 24, 40, 46, 57–8, 80, 125, 159–60

Rome Victorious coloniae Romanae (Roman colonies) 22, 24, 40, 46, 57–8, 73, 80–2, 88, 90, 129–31, 152–3, 159–60, 179, 182–3, 196–7 Commodus (emperor) 106, 120–2, 136, 142, 155, 173, 190, 208 consul(s) 11, 13, 19, 23–31, 41–3, 46–7, 49–52, 55, 70–8, 80–1, 85–9, 105, 121, 136–8, 147, 165, 180, 183, 187, 197 Contrebia Belaisca (Spain) 61, 145, 179, 216 conventus civium Romanorum 58–9 Corduba (Córdoba) 24, 56, 59–60, 179 Corinth 25, 29, 32, 42, 69, 81, 183 Cornelius Balbus, L. 62, 128–9, 132 Cornelius Fronto, M. (author) 140, 148, 173, 210 Cornelius Fuscus 112 Cornelius Gallus, C. (prefect of Egypt, poet) 62, 88, 91, 170 Cornelius Scipio, P. (Aemilianus) 17, 27, 30, 31, 42, 46, 65, 127, 158 Cornelius Scipio, P. (Africanus) 15, 17, 22–3, 25–6, 27, 68, 123, 161, 164 Cornelius Scipio Nasica, P. 31, 64 Cornelius Sulla, L. 34–6, 38, 44, 52, 64, 65, 73, 75–81, 82, 160, 197 corruption 30, 34, 74, 144, 156, 166–7, 194. See also bribery Corsica 20, 41, 89, 159 Cos (island) 59, 133, 191 Costoboci (Danubian people) 120, 173 Cremona (Italy) 7, 22, 57 Crimea 1, 36, 37, 123 Ctesiphon (Parthian capital) 116, 118, 122 Cunobelinus (British king) 107–8 Cyprus 38, 53, 79, 117, 176 Cyrene 35, 41, 89, 117, 176 Dacia, Dacian Wars 3, 92, 96, 112–15, 117, 118, 120–2, 171, 184, 199

INDEX Dalmatia, Dalmatians 28, 33, 91–2, 94, 97–8, 117, 121, 139, 150, 159, 170–1, 173 Damascus 110, 114, 142 Danube River 3, 34, 82, 91–7, 100–2, 111–15, 117–21, 153, 177, 184, 199 Decebalus (king of Dacia) 3, 112–14 Deiotarus (king of Galatia) 53, 67, 130 Delos (island) 27, 44, 56 Demetrius of Pharos (Adriatic Greek leader) 21–2 Deva (Chester) 109, 131, 150, 152–3 dictator, dictatorship (Roman office) 4, 13–16, 39, 64, 77, 80–5, 160 Didius Julianus, M. (emperor) 121, 134 dignitas (social eminence) 15–16, 22, 65, 86, 144 Dio (L. Cassius Dio, historian) 3, 85, 87, 100, 108, 116, 119, 121–3, 133–4, 167–8, 171–2, 177, 182, 197, 207 Dio Cocceianus (Dio Chrysostom, orator) 142, 146, 183, 207–8, 209 Diodorus (historian) 48, 161–2, 204 Dionysius of Halicarnassus (historian) 127, 142 Domitia (empress) 139 Domitian (emperor) 105, 112, 114–15, 139, 148, 156–7, 167, 172, 175, 189, 196 Domitius Ahenobarbus, Cn. conqueror of Transalpina 33, 138, 149 relative of Augustus 87 tribune 104 bc 73 Domitius Corbulo, C. 138–9 Druids 108, 189 Drusus, Nero Claudius (Augustus’ stepson) 86–9, 93–4, 98, 191 Dyrrhachium. See Epidamnus Ebro River 23–4, 29, 61 Eburacum (York) 109–10, 122, 152–3

249 Egypt 9, 25–8, 35, 39, 42, 58–9, 62, 79, 81, 84–92, 130–8, 142, 170–1, 176, 185–8, 190, 201, 211 Elagabalus (Varius Avitus Bassianus, emperor) 140, 208 Emerita Augusta (Mérida, Spain) 131, 151–2, 191 emperor-worship. See imperial cult Ephesus 32, 36, 183–4 Epidamnus (Dyrrhachium, Dürres) 21, 149 Epidicus (comedy by Plautus) 43, 158 Epirus 8, 27, 42, 44, 46, 66 equites Romani (lesser aristocrats) 33, 48, 51–4, 58–9, 66, 72–5, 77–8, 89, 104, 123, 135, 146, 148–9 Etruria, Etruscans (Italy) 6–10, 18, 78, 87–92, 123, 132, 135–8, 142 Eumenes II (king of Pergamum) 26–8, 32 Eunus ‘Antiochus’ (Sicilian rebel leader) 45 Euphrates River 85, 116, 118, 122, 142, 144, 186, 192, 198, 217 Fabius Hadrianus 50, 59 Fabius Maximus, Q. (the Delayer) 15, 33 Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus, Q. 33, 66 fanum (Celtic religious site) 184 Flamininus. See Quinctius Flaminius, C. 68 Flavius Sulpicianus, T. 134 formula togatorum 9 Forum Julii (Fréjus) 62, 139 freedmen, freedwomen 47, 86, 104, 127, 172, 188 Frisii (German people) 93, 95, 99, 106, 112, 167, 199 Fulvius Plautianus, C. 137 Furius Sabinus Timesitheus, C. 140, 157 Gades (Cádiz) 10, 59–60, 81, 90, 128–9, 180 Gaetuli (North African people) 91, 172

250 Gaius and Lucius Caesar (Augustus’ adopted sons) 87–8, 218 Galatia, Galatians (Asia Minor) 26, 28, 36, 43, 53, 67, 89, 91–3, 110, 130, 137, 150, 156, 186, 191 Galba (Ser. Sulpicius Galba, emperor) 104, 121, 148, 198, 205 Galen (Aelius Galenus, physician) 210 Garamantes (North African people) 91, 172 Gaul (Tres Galliae provinces) 2, 20, 28, 38–9, 43, 67–8, 73, 84–5, 89, 92–3, 104–7, 139, 143, 153–9, 160, 164, 167, 170–4, 184, 186–9, 191, 203 Gaul, Cisalpine 7, 18, 21–2, 56–8, 62, 71, 128–9, 140, 149 Gaul, Transalpine 33, 38, 40–1, 50, 57, 59, 60, 66, 110, 128, 180 Germanicus Caesar 86–8, 98–100, 103–4, 106, 192, 214 Germany, Lower (province) 112, 175 Germany, Upper (province) 175 Geta (emperor) 122, 185 Getae (Danubian people) 97 Gigthis (near Tripoli, Libya) 129, 180 gloria 16, 19, 20, 25, 28, 31, 35, 38–9, 41, 43, 70, 72, 90–2, 97, 101, 106–7, 116, 122, 159, 199, 219 Gracchus. See Sempronius Great Fire of Rome (ad 64) 104, 147, 164, 189 Hadrian (P. Aelius Hadrianus, emperor) 4, 105–17, 132, 136, 139–40, 150–4, 175, 177, 183, 187, 196, 199, 201, 206–7, 208, 218 Hadrianopolis (Adrianople-Edirne) 137, 153 Hadrian’s Wall 1, 4, 109, 201 Hannibal (Carthaginian leader) 4, 7, 15, 20–2, 25, 31, 44, 58, 69, 98, 125, 164 Herculaneum 127, 201, 211

Rome Victorious Herod Agrippa II (king of Judaea) 175, 214 Herod the Great (king of Judaea) 110, 151, 154 Herodes Atticus (L. Vibullius Hipparchus Ti. Claudius Atticus Herodes) 182 Herodian (historian) 142, 207–8 Hiero II (king of Syracuse) 19, 22 Homonadenses (Isaurian people) 91–2 Iceni (British people) 107–10, 174 Illyria, Illyrians 10, 21–2, 28, 59, 91, 164, 167 Illyricum (Adriatic province) 38, 79, 89, 95, 170 imperator (honorific title, later ‘emperor’) 16, 83, 84 imperial cult 182–3, 190–2 imperium (power to command, later ‘empire’) 12–13, 15, 41–2, 46, 57, 85, 100–2, 161–2, 199 imperium Galliarum (rebel regime) 175, 189, 198 inscriptions 8, 32–4, 44, 54–9, 61, 111, 120, 130–2, 137–9, 155–7, 161, 170–3, 179, 183, 211–16 Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) 107, 150 Isca Silurum (Caerleon) 109, 131 Istria 21, 23, 92 Italica (Spain) 24, 56 ius Latii (Latin right) 4, 62, 127–9, 216 Jazyges (Danubian people) 113, 118–20 Jerusalem 117, 153, 175–7, 188. See also Aelia Capitolina Jews 117, 162, 175, 187–9, 205 Judaea 37, 89, 105, 117, 135, 154, 171, 175–7, 186, 188–9, 205, 218 Jugurtha (king of Numidia) 34, 56, 59, 75, 203, 110 Julia Augustus’ daughter 87–8, 104 Augustus’ granddaughter 88 Caesar’s daughter 79 Julia Domna (empress) 123, 136, 185

INDEX Julius Agricola, Cn. 98, 109, 115, 132, 139, 143–6, 152, 174, 178, 181, 206 Julius Alexander, Ti. 137, 155 Julius Alpinus Classicianus, C. 109, 132, 144, 146 Julius Aquila (prefect of Egypt) 132 Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, Ti. 183 Julius Civilis, C. (Batavian rebel leader) 132, 174–5 Julius Classicus (Gallic rebel leader) 132 Julius Eurycles, C. (despot of Sparta) 132 Julius Quadratus Bassus, C. 138 Julius Severus, Sex. 139, 177 Julius Ursus Servianus, L. 136 Julius Vindex, C. (rebel) 132 Junius Brutus, D. an assassin of Caesar 82 founder of Valentia 24, 35 Junius Brutus, M. (assassin of Caesar) 53, 65, 67, 82, 83, 130, 166 Lambaesis (Tazoult-Lambèse, Algeria) 153, 173 Langobardi (Lombards) 119 Latin cities and towns 4, 7, 9–10, 125, 129 Latin League 6–7 Latin right. See ius Latii; Latium maius Latins 7, 9–10, 23, 32, 56, 70–1, 127–8, 131, 153 Latium (Lazio) 6, 9, 34, 70 Latium maius 129, 180 Laugaricio (Trenčin, Slovakia) 120, 139 Legio (León) 131, 153 legionaries, legions 1, 8, 14, 64–8, 71, 78, 82, 85–6, 92–9, 100, 108–9, 112–14, 118–19, 130–1, 159, 173–7, 181 Lepcis Magna (Lebda, Libya) 123, 137, 151, 185–6 lex (statute law) 12, 54–5, 64 Licinius Crassus, M. (consul 70 and 55 bc) 37, 45, 62, 66–7, 73,

251 78–80, 81, 83, 90, 99, 102, 115, 159 Licinius Crassus, M. (consul 30 bc) 91–2, 96 Licinius Lucullus, L. (consul 151 bc) 30 Licinius Lucullus, L. (consul 74 bc) 36, 46 Licinius Mucianus, C. 136 Licinius Sura, L. 136 Lindum (Lincoln) 107, 150 Livia Acte 127 Livia Drusilla (empress) 87, 214 Livius Andronicus (playwright) 60, 126, 140 Livius Drusus, M. (father) 70 Livius Drusus, M. (son) 70–1, 74 Livy (T. Livius, historian) 8, 43, 58, 59, 140, 142, 166, 204, 205, 214, 216 Lollius, M. 87 Lollius Urbicus, Q. 136, 179 Londinium (London) 4, 107–8, 150, 152 Louis XIV 87 Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus, epic poet) 140, 166 Lucian of Samosata (satirical essayist) 119, 142, 182, 206, 209 Lucretius (poet) 60 Lucretius, C. 53, 60, 64, 165 Lugdunum (Lyon) 105, 149, 189–91, 213 Lusitanians (Spain) 23–4, 29–30, 35, 38, 53 Lusius Quietus 117, 139, 176 luxury (bans and criticisms of) 64–6, 77, 166 Macedon (later Macedonia province), Macedonian Wars 2–3, 21, 24–7, 29, 34, 36, 44, 47, 50, 53, 55, 60, 63, 68, 83, 91, 97, 114, 120, 126, 137, 139, 149, 150, 164, 173, 214–15 Macrinus (M. Opellius Macrinus, emperor) 136–7, 140, 197 Maecenas, C. 87 Manlius Vulso, Cn. 43

252 Marcius Turbo, Q. 176 Marcomanni (Danubian people) 94, 96–7, 112–13, 118–21 Marcus Aurelius (emperor) 4, 117, 119, 121–2, 133, 138–9, 147–8, 171, 173, 182, 190, 199, 210, 219 Marius, C. 16, 34–5, 38, 70, 72, 74–6, 85, 134, 148, 206 Marius Maximus (biographer) 208 Mars Ultor (temple in Rome) 8, 120 Masinissa (king of Numidia) 22, 28, 30–1, 34 massacres 29, 34, 36, 56, 71, 98, 167, 176 Massilia (Marseille) 28, 33, 51 Mauretania 34, 110, 117, 139, 150, 154, 171–2 Maximinus (emperor) 123, 136, 142 merchants 10, 11, 21, 39, 41, 44, 56, 58, 98, 116, 216 Mesopotamia 1, 2, 3, 116, 122, 176 Messana (Messina) 12, 18–19, 20 Miletus 32, 164 Mithridates VI (king of Pontus) 2, 35–8, 44, 49, 52, 58, 75, 76, 78, 79, 142, 159, 167, 204, 207 Moesia 97–8, 105, 111–13, 120–1, 139, 150, 184, 193 Moguntiacum (Mainz) 93–5, 97, 99, 131, 153 Mons Graupius or Craupius (Scotland) 109 Mummius, L. (sacker of Corinth) 29 municipium, municipia 107, 129–30, 137, 143, 180 Musulamii (North African people) 171–2 Naples 9, 125 Narbo Martius (Narbonne) 33, 57, 129, 149, 191 Narbonensis (province) 57, 90, 135–9, 145, 148–9, 154 Naristae (Danubian people) 139, 173 Nasamones (nomad people) 167, 172

Rome Victorious negotiatores 56, 126, 216. See also merchants Nero (emperor) 104, 108–9, 116, 132–3, 135–6, 138–9, 147–8, 166, 168, 175, 184, 189, 205 Nerva (M. Cocceius Nerva, emperor) 105, 122, 136, 147, 151, 156, 179 New Carthage (Cartagena) 23, 45, 48, 69 Nile River 4, 118, 154, 163, 171, 201, 211, 217 Nisibis (Mesopotamia) 122 nobiles, nobilitas (consular aristocracy) 16, 37, 72, 75–6, 80, 166 Nonius Datus (engineer) 171 Numantia (Spain) 29, 34, 55, 147 Numidia, Numidians 22, 28, 31, 34, 39, 41, 56, 59, 75–6, 89, 136, 140, 145, 150, 152, 153, 171, 179, 186, 203, 215 Optimates 73, 80 Ostorius Scapula, P. 108, 174–5 Otho (M. Salvius Otho, emperor) 104, 135, 205, 218 Ovid 86–7, 97, 102 Palatine hill (Rome) 6, 140 Palma and Pollentia (Mallorca) 24, 56 Palmyra 110, 116, 183–5, 198–9 Pannonia, Pannonians 92, 96–8, 100, 112, 119, 121, 139, 147, 167, 170 Panormus (Palermo) 20, 44 Parthia, Parthians 3–4, 37, 62, 73, 78, 80–3, 90–1, 101–2, 106, 113, 115–16, 118, 122–3, 136, 139, 159, 187, 195, 210, 219 patricians 11–13, 72, 79, 80, 85, 107, 197 Pedanius Fuscus, Cn. 136 Pergamum (city and kingdom) 25–7, 32–3, 36, 45, 49, 69, 75, 139, 158, 183, 191, 196 Perpetua, Vibia 141, 190 Perseus (king of Macedon) 26–7, 29, 63, 164

INDEX Pertinax (P. Helvius Pertinax, emperor) 119, 121, 134, 146 Petillius Cerealis, Q. 109, 162–4, 175 Pharsalus (battle) 81 Philip V (king of Macedon) 3, 22, 25–6, 29, 46, 126 Philo of Alexandria (philosopher) 137, 142, 187 ‘Pillar of the Boatmen’ (Paris) 187 piracy, pirates 10, 34, 37–8, 44, 78, 89, 126, 165, 195 Placentia (Piacenza, Italy) 7, 22, 57 Plautius, A. 107 Plautius Silvanus, T. 111–12 plebeians 11–13, 16, 54, 72, 79, 80 Pliny the Elder 66, 90, 140, 161–2, 200, 205 Pliny the Younger 139, 145, 147, 156, 172, 190, 207 Plutarch (L. Mestrius Plutarchus, biographer) 58, 137, 142, 163, 182, 205–6 Po River 22–3, 62, 81, 128 Polybius (historian) 10, 18–20, 25, 27–31, 48, 57, 69, 123, 141, 149, 159, 161, 164, 202–3, 204 Pompeius Theophanes, C. 132 Pompeius Trogus (historian) 127, 168, 204–5 Pompey (Cn. Pompeius Magnus) 2, 4, 35, 37, 41, 43, 45, 49, 52, 62, 65, 67, 73, 78–81, 89, 114, 127–8, 131–2, 134, 160–2, 165, 191, 203, 206, 219 Pomponius Atticus, T. 53, 66–7 Pontus (kingdom, later province) 2, 32–3, 35–7, 52, 142, 167, 205 Poppaea Sabina (empress) 104, 189 Poppaeus Sabinus, Q. 134 Populares 73, 80 population figures (including military) 7, 10, 24, 27, 31, 36, 42–5, 48, 56–8, 68, 71, 74, 76, 78, 81–3, 86, 93, 94, 97–100, 108, 111, 113–14, 119–20, 124, 126, 128–30, 176–7, 188 Porcius Cato, M. (the Censor) 16, 23, 26–7, 30–2, 46, 53, 55, 59, 63, 79, 142, 158, 203

253 Postumius Albinus (praetor) 23 Postumius Chius (at Thugga) 179 praetor(s) 12–15, 20, 23, 28, 29–30, 40–6, 50–1, 53–5, 59–60, 69, 74, 77, 80, 89, 124, 126–7, 160 Praetorian Guard (cohortes praetoriae) 86, 103–4, 121, 123, 131, 134, 141, 147, 157, 181, 213 praetorian prefect (praefectus praetorio) 112, 121, 133, 135, 137, 139–41, 157 princeps (civilian epithet of emperor) 83, 84–8, 91, 96, 97–8, 100–2, 103, 106, 117, 124, 132, 136, 197 principes viri 12, 17, 34, 65, 73–4, 76–80, 84 proconsul(s) 12, 15–16, 22, 33, 35–8, 46, 49, 52–3, 65, 78–9, 85–6, 89, 91, 147–8, 155–6, 166, 179 Ptolemy (king of Mauretania) 110 Ptolemy, Ptolemaic dynasty (Egypt) 84, 103 Ptolemy II 9, 18 Ptolemy VI, VIII 28 Ptolemy IX, X 35 publicani (state contractors) 48–9, 51–2, 66, 79 Publicius Menander, Cn. 126 Punic Wars First 2, 18, 149 Second 21–2, 24, 42, 61, 69, 114, 126, 164, 171 Third 30–2 Pyrrhus (king of Epirus) 8, 18 Quadi (Danubian people) 112, 117–21, 219 Quinctius Flamininus, T. 25–6, 63, 190 Quirinal hill (Rome) 6, 166 Rabirius Postumus, C. 59, 67 Reburrinius Candidus, L. 133 Red Sea 92, 150, 163 res publica populi Romani (the Roman State) 3, 4, 7–8, 12, 13, 17, 64, 70–1, 76, 77, 80, 82, 85, 86–7, 125, 128, 135, 197

254 Rhine River 38, 42, 92–7, 99–100, 105–6, 111–12, 118, 138, 162, 174, 191, 206 Rhineland 104–5, 131–3, 153, 162, 170, 174–5, 178, 184, 187 Rhodes 26–8, 34, 52, 88, 110, 142, 158, 164 roads, Roman 13, 38, 142, 150–1, 153. See also Viae Roxolani (Danubian people) 111–12, 117 Sagalassus (Pisidia) 156 Saguntum (Sagunto) 21–2, 24, 145 Salluitan squadron (Spaniards) 61–2, 71, 127 Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus, historian) 166–7, 195, 203–4 Sallustius Crispus, C. (Sallust’s greatnephew) 87 Salvius and Athenion (Sicilian rebel leaders) 45 Sardinia, Sardinians 20–1, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50, 74, 76, 89, 155, 157, 159, 164, 188 Sardis (Asia province) 179 Sarmatians (Danubian people) 111, 113, 120 Sarmizegetusa (Dacia) 113–14 Scaptius, M. 53, 166 Scaptopara (Thrace) 157, 200, 216 Seleuceia (Parthian capital) 116, 118, 122 Seleucids, Seleucid empire 24–7, 29, 34, 37 Seleucus of Rhosus 130 Sempronius Gracchus, C. 49–51, 54–5, 57–8, 69–70, 72, 74, 129 Sempronius Gracchus, Ti. (elder) 23–4, 42, 44 Sempronius Gracchus, Ti. (younger) 32–3, 55, 69, 75 Senate (Roman) 11–13, 15, 20, 24–5, 27–30, 32–3, 35, 37, 42–4, 49, 53–4, 56, 62, 64, 69, 71–8, 80–1, 84–6, 116, 126, 134–5, 144, 149, 165–6, 202–3, 212, 213–15 Senate decree (senatus consultum) 11, 25, 27, 49, 51, 63, 69, 214–15

Rome Victorious Seneca (L. Annaeus Seneca, philosopher) 104, 108, 134, 136, 174, 205–6 Sennius Sollemnis, T. 133, 146, 192 Sentius Saturninus, C. 87, 97 Septimius Severus, L. (emperor) 3, 4, 121, 132, 136, 151, 174, 185, 186, 198, 211 Sergius Catilina, L. 78, 165, 198, 203 Sertorius, Q. 35, 61, 78, 127, 198 Servilius Caepio, Q. (looter of Tolosa) 50, 165 Servilius Glaucia, P. 74, 76 Severus Alexander (emperor) 136, 147, 192 Sicily 2, 8, 10, 12, 18–21, 33, 40, 42, 44–50, 55, 58–9, 61, 81, 89–90, 149, 159, 194, 196, 204 Simon bar Kochba (Jewish rebel leader) 177, 217 slaves, slavery 3–4, 10, 31, 38, 43–8, 51, 60–1, 66, 77, 93, 114, 126–8, 145, 172, 176, 214 Smyrna 32, 189 socii Italici 9, 36, 38, 56, 70, 128 provincials 20, 130–1 Sosigenes (astronomer) 82 Spain (provinces) Further (later Baetica) 10, 23, 29–30, 38, 43, 45, 48, 58–60, 89–90, 117, 129, 135–6, 145, 153, 214, 216 Lusitania 135 Nearer (later Tarraconensis) 2, 23, 55, 61, 89, 129, 135, 136, 147, 153 Sparta 9, 26, 29, 110, 132 Spartacus (rebel leader) 45, 77–8 Statellates (Ligurian people) 42–3 Statilius Crito, T. (physician) 114, 133 Statilius Taurus, T. 87, 133–4 Stertinius Xenophon, C. (physician) 133 Sucro (Spain) 56–7, 135 Suetonius (biographer) 98, 100, 148, 171, 207 Suetonius Paulinus, C. 108–9, 187, 209

INDEX Sulpicius Galba, Ser. (massacrer of Lusitanians) 30, 43, 53, 165 Sulpicius Quirinius, P. (‘Cyrenius’ in Gospels) 87, 89, 91, 96 Sulpicius Rufus, P. (tribune) 74–6 Syracuse, Syracusans 9, 18–20, 22, 40, 42, 47, 159 Tacfarinas (rebel leader) 171–2 Tacitus (C. or P. Cornelius Tacitus, historian) 84, 98–100, 104–6, 109, 111, 115, 135, 139–40, 143–6, 148, 163, 178, 189, 206, 214–15 Tagus River 23, 151 Tarentum (Taranto, Italy) 8–9, 44, 60 Tarraco (Tarragona) 129, 191 Tarrutienus Paternus, P. 121 taxes, taxation 13, 27, 31–7, 40, 47–54, 56, 58, 64, 67, 69, 72, 79, 83, 84–5, 90–1, 94, 97–8, 107, 110, 131, 134, 144, 145–7, 152, 155, 159, 161–3, 165, 167, 171–2, 175, 180, 192, 194, 201, 216 Teos (Aegean island) 160 Terence (playwright) 60, 126 Tertullian (Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus, Christian writer) 137, 141, 162, 189–90, 197, 206, 210 Tettius Julianus, L. 112–13 Teutones (Germanic people) 33–4 Thrace, Thracians 34, 45, 91–2, 97, 110–11, 120, 136, 137, 149, 153, 157, 173, 215–16 Thugga (Dougga, Tunisia) 179 Tiber River 1, 7, 68, 193 Tiberius (emperor) 86–7, 90, 94–100, 103, 106–7, 110, 131–2, 146–7, 150, 164, 172, 188–9, 199, 214, 219 Tiddis (North Africa) 136, 145, 179 Tigranes (king of Armenia) 36–7 Tigris River 85, 118, 122–3, 140, 194 Tolosa (Toulouse) and treasure 50, 165 Trajan (M. Ulpius Traianus, emperor) 3, 57, 89, 102, 113–17, 122, 130–4, 136, 139, 145,

255 147, 148, 156, 176, 190, 192, 197, 206–7, 209 Trajan’s Column (Rome) 114 treaty, treaties (Roman) 7, 9, 10, 18, 23, 41, 125, 201 Treviri (Gallic people) 170, 174 tribes, Roman (voting districts) 14–15, 71 tribune, plebeian (Roman magistrate) 12–13, 14–15, 30, 32, 38, 43, 49, 50, 53–4, 56, 60, 64, 67, 69–70, 73–5, 77, 79, 85–6 Trinovantes (British people) 108–9, 152 triumph (military victory parade) 16, 23, 67, 68, 91, 165 Triumvirates First 79 Second 83, 85, 90, 198 Tullius Tiro, M. 126 Tusculum (Tuscolo, Italy) 6, 10, 125, 134 Ubii (German people) 93, 174, 178, 191. See also Colonia Ara Agrippinensis Umbria, Umbrians (Italy) 8, 172, 209 Utica (North Africa) 31, 50, 59 Valentia (Valencia) 24, 35, 56, 61 Valerius Asiaticus, D. 180 Valerius Maximianus, M. 119–20, 139–40, 173, 215 Valerius Mottones, M. 61, 131 Vandals 120–1 Varius Hybrida, Q. 56, 60, 135, 197 Velius Rufus, C. 112, 171 Venidius Ennychus, L. 127 Vercingetorix 39, 153, 167 Vergilius Eurysaces, P. 126 Verres, C. 50–1, 54–5, 58–9, 78, 147, 165 Verulamium (St Albans) 107–8, 143 Verus, Lucius (emperor) 106, 118, 210 Vespasian (T. Flavius Vespasianus, emperor) 4, 104–5, 109, 111, 116, 129, 132, 134–9, 142, 146,

256 153, 162, 175, 176, 180, 187, 198, 216, 218 Viae (Roman highways) Aemilia 22 Appia 151 Domitia 33 Egnatia 149 Flaminia 68 Nova Traiana 116, 150 Sebaste 150 Vienna (Vienne, Provence) 105, 180 vigiles (Rome’s night watch) 86

Rome Victorious Vindobona (Vienna) 131, 153, 215 Vipsanius Agrippa, M. 86–7, 92, 96, 103, 134, 149, 170, 214 Virgil 63, 88, 101, 140, 161–2 Viriathus (Lusitanian leader) 29–30 Vitellius (emperor) 104–5, 135, 174, 218 Vitruvius (architect) 86 Volubilis (Mauretania) 171, 180 Zabdibol (Palmyrene) 184–5 Zama (battle) 22, 161

1. Census scene, altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, late second century BC: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

2. Mithridates VI, first century ad bust: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Eric Gaba (User: Sting). Downloaded 17 March 2018.

3. Tabula Contrebiensis (Botorrita, Spain), 15 May 87 bc: Museo de Zaragoza, Spain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: ecelan. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

4. Model of the Pillar of the Boatmen (Pilier des Nautes), Musée de Cluny, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Marsyas. Downloaded 29 October 2018.

5. Marble bust of Cicero: Vatican Museums. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Rabax63. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

6. Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License. Author: Manfred Heyde. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

7. Statue of Augustus, found at the Villa of Livia, Prima Porta, near Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

8. Roman Carthage, streetscape. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Patrick Giraud (Calips). Downloaded 17 March 2018.

9. Claudius’ British triumph, de Britannis ad 43, from Caesarea in Cappadocia. Claudius in four-horse victory chariot. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Classical Numismatic Group. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

10. Speech of Claudius to the Senate, the Tabula Lugdunensis: Musée GalloRomain, Lyons. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Claudian_table_IMG_1073black. Downloaded 29 June 2017.

11. Agricola’s reconstructed Basilica inscription, AD 79 or 81: Verulamium Museum, St Albans (16192740628). Source: Wikimedia Commons. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

12. Marcus Aurelius receives the surrender of German peoples: marble relief, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Jean-Pol Grandmont. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

13. Legio II Augusta wintering at Leugaricio (Trenčin, Slovakia), ad 179–180. Source: Wikimedia Commons, full permission. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

14. Façade of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, second century ad, photographed in 2010. Source: Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Author: Benh. Downloaded 10 April 2017.

15. Bust of Caracalla: Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons: GNU Free Documentation License. Author: Rama. Downloaded 17 March 2018.

16. Tombstone of Zabdibol, Palmyra. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession #02.29.1, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/322375. Public domain free of copyright. Downloaded 17 February 2017.

17. Central Rome in the time of Constantine the Great. Italo Gismondi, Il Plastico di Roma Imperiale: Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Carole Raddato, Frankfurt. Downloaded 17 March 2018.