^^^^g^.

HISTORY OF ROME
HISTORY OF ROME
Michael Grant
In this, most ambitious and comprehensive book to date, Michael
his
Grant recreates the evolution of this astonishing city and community, de-
scribing in detail the individuals and events that made Rome a political
and cultural conqueror and defining the circumstances of her eventual
decline and fall.

He portrays not only the cynosures of the Roman world, such as Caesar,
Augustus, and Constantine, but also lesser-known figures, reassessing their
impact upon both the character of Roman society and the development of
her empire. Rome's artistic achievements, especially in literature, archi-
tecture, sculpture, and painting, are discussed and the economic
in depth
and social conditions of hfe for the ordinary subjects of the empire fully
explained. The changing relationships between Rome and the peoples of its
provinces are closely examined, as is the ultimate disintegration or trans-
formation of the western empire. This is a unique book, encompassing all
aspects of one of the most fabulously rich and diverse civilizations in
history.

Michael Grant, past President of the Classical Association (1977-78), was

formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Humanity
at Edinburgh University, and President and Vice-Chancellor of the
Queen's University, Belfast. He has been President of the Virgil Society
and Royal Numismatic Society, and holds doctorates from Cambridge,
Dublin, and Belfast. Among his many books are The Ancient Historians,
Roman Myths, The Army of the Caesars, Julius Caesar, Nero, The Twelve
Caesars, St. Paul, and Jesus.

With 170 b/w illustrations Illustration : Cameo of Augustus by

27 maps Dioscorides (courtesy of the Paul Hamlyn
Library)
6 genealogical tables

ISBN D-D5-3M5blD-fl
HISTORY OF
 MICHAEL GRANT

CHARLES SCRIB
Copyright © 1978 Michael Grant

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Grant, Michael, 1914-
History of Rome.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Rome — History. I. Title.

DG209.G75 1979 945'. 632 78-12966

ISBN 0-684-15986-4 ( cloth
ISBN a-D5-3MSblD-fi (paper)

This book published simultaneously in the

United States of America and in Canada-
Copyright under the Berne Convention

All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced in any form without the
permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

Designed by Jacques Chazaud

357 9 " 13 15 17 19 F/C 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 64

II 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12 10

Printed in the United States of America

 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

List of Maps and Tables xvi

Foreword xviii

I ETRUSCAN ROME
1. Rome and Etruria 5

2. The Etruscan Monarchy 18

II THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

3. The Unification of Italy 4^
4. The Class Struggle (5/

III ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

5. First Wars against Foreign Powers 8y
6. The Changing Roman World loi

7. The Invasion by Hannibal ///

IV THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

8. "Our Sea" 131

9. The New Society 146

Vi / CONTENTS
V THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
10. Reform and War in Italy i6g

11. Reaction and Breakdown i8j

VI CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

12. Caesar 2/5

13. Augustus 242

VII THE IMPERIAL PEACE

14. The Inheritors of Empire 2jy
15. Imperial Society ^o^
16. The Jews, Jesus, and Paul ^34

VIII TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

17. Collapse and Recovery 555
18. The Climax of the Pagan Empire S77
19. The Supreme State and Church ^g^

IX THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

20. The Fall of the Western Empire 42^
21. The Fatal Disunities 4^j
11. The Aftermath 462

Epilogue 4JI
Notes 4jj
Ancient Sources ^08
Bibliography ^11

Table of Dates ^16

Index 525
 List of Illustrations

The Alban Mount and aqueduct of Claudius. (Wadsworth Title page,

Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut) i6o
Wolf with Romulus and Remus. (Palazzo dei Conservatori,
Rome) 2
Cremation um in the form of a hut. (Werner Forman Ar-
chive, London) 9
The Great Drain (Cloaca Maxima). (Alinari-Editorial
Photocolor Archives) 16
Latin inscription recording ritual law beneath Black Stone.
(Werner Forman Archive, London) 22
Brone-fittingon Etruscan war chariot. (Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, New York) 27
Etruscan war chariot from Monteleone. (Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1903) SO
Reconstruction of an Etruscan temple. (Photo of the Istituto
di Etruscologia e Antichita Italiche of the University of
Rome) 31
Silver denarius of Augustus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 34
Brass medallion of Antoninus Pius. (Biblioteque Nationale,
Paris) 35
Etruscan relief from Chianciano showing battle scene.
(Museo Barracco, Rome) 36
Etruscan bronze helmet dedicated at Olympia by Hiero I of
Syracuse. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of The
British Museum; Ahnari) 38
Painting of Vestals fleeing Rome by Hector Le Roux. (New
York Public Library, Picture collection) 40
Etruscan warrior supporting wounded comrade. (Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1947 48
Handle of Etruscan bronze chest: soldiers carrying a dead
comrade. (Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, Rome) 50
Funeral stele from Felsina. (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bo-
logna) 53
The walls of the ancient Latin colony of Signia. (Alinari) 60

vii
via / ^

Relief of walled hill-town from Avezzano. (Museo Torlonia,

Rome) 62
Silver denarius of P. Licinius Nerva. (Reproduced by Cour-
tesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) jo
German engraving of the Triumph of Scipio Africanus. (New
York Public Library) 84
Heavy bronze as of Rome. Helmeted heads of Roma. (Re-
produced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Mu-
seum) go, gi

Silver shekel of Carthage. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the

Trustees of the British Museum) 9^
Base silver double shekel of Libyan rebels against Carthage.
(Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British
Museum) gg
Bronze statuette of Etruscan peasant ploughing. (Museo Na-
zionale di Villa Giulia, Rome) 104
Bust of Gallic warrior. (Musee Archeologique, Nimes) jo6
Statuette of Gaul. (Staatliche Museer zu Berlin) 108
Roman cultivation around Lugo near Ravenna. (Fototeca
Unione) log
Silver double shekel of Spanish mint. (Reproduced by Cour-
tesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) //j
Silver double shekel of Carthago Nova. (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) //j

Saguntum in Spain. (Spanish National Tourist Office, Lon-

don) 114
View of Lake Trasimene. (Fototeca Unione) iij
Bronze coin of Carthago Nova showing head of Scipio
Africanus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Museum) 121
Denarius of Osca in Spain. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 122
Bronze coin perhaps of Arretium in Etruria. (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) /2j
Two paintings of Scipio Africanus the Elder. (New York
Public Library) 128
Silver tetradrachm of the Seleucid King Antiochus IIL (Re-
 / ix

produced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Mu-

seum) 1^8
Silver tetradrachm of the Macedonian King Perseus. (Repro-
duced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) /jp
Sarcophagus of Lucius Comehus Scipio Barbatus. (Vatican
Museum; AUnari) i^j
Wax diptych: guardian appointed to a woman by Aemihus
Satuminus. (Bodleian Library, Oxford) 752
Arched gate of S. Maria di Falleri. (Josephine Powell) 158
Plan of House of Menander, Pompeii. (London Imperial
Tobacco Company, Ltd.) 161
Participants in Mystery Rites at Pompeii. (Alinari-Editorial
Photocolor Archives) 166
Plinth of a statue commemorating Cornelia. (Capitoline Mu-
seum, Rome) lyo
Silver denarius of the Italian rebels in the Social (Marsian)
War. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the Brit-
ish Museum) 182
Silver tetradrachm of Rome's enemy Mithridates VI Eupa-
tor. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British
Museum) 184
Silver denarius of Q. Pompeius Rufus. (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 188
The Tabularium begun by Sulla. (Werner Forman Archive,
London) igo
Painting by Samuel Prout showing Tabularium in back-
ground. (City of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol) igi

Reconstruction of Temple of Fortuna Primigenia. (Fototeca

Unione) 192
Marble bust of Cicero. (Wellington Museum, London) ig8
Manuscript of Cicero's book On the State. (Vatican Mu-
seum) 200
Bronze bust of Cato the Younger. (Volubilis Museum, Mo-
rocco) 202
Wall painting from villa at Oplontis near Pompeii. (Pompeii
A.D. 79 Exhibition, London; Imperial Tobacco Company,
Ltd.) 204
Pompey the Great. (Museo Archeologico, Venice) 20
X /

Antony and the dead Caesar. (New York Public Library) 210
Silver denarius depicting Pompey the Great after his death.
(Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British
Museum) 2/9
British helmet of bronze. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 220
Gallic coin showing Vercingetorix of the Arverni. (Photo
Biblioteque Nationale, Paris) 222
Monument of the Julii at Glanum. 22^
Relief of Barbarian prisoner on triumphal arch. (Alinari-
Editorial Photocolor Archives) 224
Silver tetradrachm of Orodes I of Parthia. (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 226
The Forum of Julius Caesar and Temple of Venus Genetrix.
(Fototeca Unione) 255
Bust of Julius Caesar. (Vatican Museum) 2^8
Silver denarius of Julius Caesar. (Reproduced by Courtesy of
the Trustees of the British Museum) 259
Silver denarius of Brutus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 240
Silver tetradrachm of Antony and Cleopatra VII. (Fitzwil-
liam Museum, Cambridge) 244
Reconstruction of bridge at Augusta Praetoria. (Alinari-
Editorial Photocolor Archives) 246
Silver coin (denarius) of Augustus. (Sale catalogue) 24 j
Diploma of Hadrian conferring Roman citizenship on sol-
dier. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the Brit-
ish Museum) 248
Statue of a Roman nobleman carrying the busts of his ances-
tors. (Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome) 2^0
Silver coin of Claudius at Ephesus. (Reproduced by Courtesy
of the Trustees of the British Museum) 2^1
Silver coin (denarius) of Augustus as father of his country.
(Sale catalogue) 2^1
Gravestone of the centurion Marcus Caelius. (Rheinisches
Landesmuseum, Bonn) 2^^
Beginning of Latin text of the Res Gestae of Augustus. (Deut-
sches Archaologisches Institut, Rome) 2^g
 / xi

Head of Augustus from Aricia. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston) 262
Head of Augustus from Pergamum. (Topkapi Museum, Is-

tanbul) 262
Augustus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Museum) 262
Reconstruction of Forum of Augustus and Temple of Mars
Ultor. (Alinari-Editorial Photocolor Archives) 26^
Painting of light Roman warships. (Museo Archeologico Na-
zionale, Naples) 264
Road between Antioch and Beroea. 26^
Manuscript of Virgil's Aeneid. (Vatican Museum) 2jo
Cybele on processional carriage drawn by two lions. (Metro-
poUtan Museum of Art, Gift of Harry G. Marquand, 1897). ^74
North wall of the Praetorian Camp. (Fototeca Unione) 2jg
The Fosse Way, frontier of Claudius's British province.
(Aerofilms, Ltd.) 281
Bronze coin of Cunobelinus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 282
Relief of Roman soldier on the base of the Column of Nero.
(Alinari-Editorial Photocolor Archives) 28J
Painting by Ducros of the Arch of Titus. (Courtauld Institute
of Art, London) 2go
Brass sestertius of Vespasian. (Reproduced by Courtesy of
the Trustees of the British Museum) 2gi
Muleteer who succumbed to fumes at Pompeii during erup-
(Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples;
tion of Vesuvius.
Werner Forman Archive, London) 2^2
Trajan. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the Brit-
ish Museum) 294
Brass sestertius of Trajan. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 2^5
Reliefs from Column of Trajan: heads of Dacian and Roman
soldiers. (Conte Niccolai Gamba) 2g6, igj
Brass sestertius of Trajan. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 2g8
Gold death-mask of a chent-king. (Hermitage Museum,
Leningrad) 2g8
xii / *

Brass sestertii of Hadrian. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the

Trustees of the British Museum) 2gg
Hadrian. (By Courtesy of the Israel Department of Antiqui-
ties and Museums) ^oo
Gem-portrait of Antoninus Pius. (Museum Carnuntium, Pe-
tronell, Austria) jo/
Reconstructed section of Hadrian's Wall. (T. Middlemass) J05
Ceiling of villa at Oplontis. (Bongers) ^06
Relief from Column of Trajan, Rome. (Mansell) ^oj
Stucco relief of athlete from Villa di San Marco, Stabiae.
(Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples) ^og
Mosaic at Emporiae in Spain. (Spanish National Tourist
Office, London) j/o
Mosaic showing the first wine drinkers. (Cyprus Museum,
Nicosia) 5//
Inlaidpolychrome marble of Venus doing up her sandal.
(Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples) j/2
Warehouses at Ostia. (Alinari-Editorial Photocolor Archives) 5/5
Interior of Hadrian's Pantheon. (National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.) ^16
Temple of Bacchus-Dionysus at Heliopolis. (National Coun-
cil of Tourism, Lebanon) ^18
Mosaic of two gladiators from Curium, Cyprus. (K. Niko-
laou and M. Loulloupis) 5/9
Relief of gladiator from Ephesus. (Alinari-Editorial Photo-
color Archives) j20
Amphitheatre at Capua. (Fototeca Unione) 52/
Bronze coin of Tiberius. (Miinzkabinett, Berlin) ^^^
Public lavatory at the Hadrianic Baths. (German Archaeo-
logical Institute, Rome) ^22
Thamugadi in north Africa. (Fototeca Unione) 324
Temple at Sufetula. (Photo: Direction du Tourisone-
Tunis) ^24
Painted shop sign of cloth merchant and felt maker. (Alinari-
Editorial Photocolor Archives) 527
Relief of men towing boatload of wine on River Durance.
(Musee Calvet, Avignon; photo: R. Viollet) 327
 / xiii

Letter on papyrus from Theon to his father. (Bodleian Li-

brary, Oxford) ^2g
Bronze coin of Augustus at Nicopohs. (Thorvaldsen Mu-
seum, Copenhagen) jj5
The Redeemer on the Throne. (Ahnari-Editorial Photocolor
Archives) j^p
Relief of beheading of German prisoners. (Mansell/Alinari) jjo, ^86
Brass sestertius of Commodus. (Reproduced by Courtesy of
the Trustees of the British Museum) ^^^
Bust of African. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu) 55 (J
Bronze head of Septimius Severus. (by permission of the
Director of Antiquities and the Cyprus Museum,
Nicosia) 55^
Julia Domna. (Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome;
Alinari) ^60
Base silver denarius of Decius. (Reproduced by Courtesy of
the Trustees of the British Museum) 5(5j

Man and two women in Pannonian costume. (National Mu-

seum, Budapest) ^64
Gravestone of Yorkhai, son of Ogga, and his daughter Balja.
(Portland Art Association) jdj
Fort at Qasr-al-Her. (Institut Fran^ais d'Archeologie, Bei-
rut) 367
Bronze coin of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. (Sale catalogue) 368
Gold stater of Ardashir. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 368
Silver drachm of Persian King Sapor L (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 569
Bronze head of Claudius II Gothicus. (Comune di Brescia,
Brescia) 57/
Gold coin of Aurelian at Siscia. (Sale catalogue) j 72
Gold medallion of Gallienus. (Biblioteque Nationale, Paris;
photo: J. M. C. Toynbee) 374
Relief from funeral monument at Noviomagus. (Alinari-
Editorial Photocolor Archives) 375
Papyrus recording the purchase of seven-year old slave boy
Abba. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Museum) 379
xiv / .<

Reconstruction of Baths of Caracalla (in foreground).

(Museo della Civilta Romana, EUR, Rome) j8o
Reconstruction of Baths of Caracalla (interior). (Museo della
Civilta Romana, EUR, Rome) j8i
Gold bust of Marcus Aurelius. (Musee Cantonal D'Ar-
cheologie, Lausanne, Switzerland) 5^5
Philip the Arabian. (Vatican Museum; Alinari) j88
Egyptian mummy-protrait. (Lowie Museum of Anthropol-
ogy, University of Cahfornia, Berkeley) ^8g
Head of a Roman. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu) jgo
Silver head of Persian king. (Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Fletcher Fund, 1965) ^g6
Etching by E. du Perac. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Har-
ris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936) 400
Gold medallion of Diocletian. (Reproduced by Courtesy of
the Trustees of the British Museum) 401
Reconstruction of Milvian Bridge, Rome. (Josephine
Powell) 406
Arch of Constantine. (Anderson) 408
Silvered bronze coin of Constantine the Great. (Reproduced
by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 409
Bronze coin of Philip the Arabian in Phrygia. (Reproduced
by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 411
Jewish sarcophagus from Vigna Rondanini Catacomb with
Menorah. (Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome; Alinari) 411
Constantine the Great. (Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori,
Rome; Werner Forman Archive, London) 41J
Basilica Nova at Rome. (Werner Forman Archive, London) 414
Bronze medallion with heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. (Vati-
can Museum) 41^
Silvered bronze coin of Julian the Apostate at Sirmium. (Re-
produced by Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Mu-
seum) 418
View of Ancient Rome by Samuel Palmer. (City of Birming-
ham Art Gallery) 420
Silver dish. (Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva) 42^
on ivory diptych. (Cathedral Treasury, Monza,
Stilicho Italy;

Hirmer Fotoarchiv) 428

 / XV

Gold medallion of Priscus Attalus. (Reproduced by Courtesy

of the Trustees of the British Museum) 4J0
Relief of imperial official traveling with his staff. (Museo
Archeologico Aquileia, Italy) ^40
Dog-tag fastened round the neck of a slave. (Fototeca Un-
ione) 442
Mosaic of wounded huntsman. (SCALA Istituto Fotografico
Editoriale di J. Clark & C.) 44^
Gold medallion of Valens at Treviri. (Reproduced by Cour-
tesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 44g
Gold coin of western emperor Anthemius. (Reproduced by
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 45/
Mosaic depicting St. Ambrose. (Basilica de S. Ambrogio,
Milan) 4^^
S. Sabina church at Rome. (Alinari-Editorial Photocolor Ar-
chives) 4^6
Basilica Liberiana at Rome. (Alinari-Editorial Photocolor
Archives) 4^y
Disc showing two young men. (Museo Civico Archeologico,
Bologna) 461
Seal of Alaric II. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 46^
Page from manuscript showing Cassiodorus's monastery.
(Staatsbibliothek, Hamburg Germany) 46
Gold medallion of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. (Museo Na-
zionale delle Terme, Rome) 466
Bronze coin of Justinian I. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 46y
Gold medallion of Justinian I celebrating reconquest of
North Africa. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the Trustees of
the British Museum) 468
Print of the Roman Forum. (Reproduced by Courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum) 472
 List of Maps
and Tables

Etruria /2
Latium 2g
Regal and Republican Rome jj
Central and Southern Italy ^8
Rome's Conquest of Italy 64
The Wars Against Carthage 92
Spain, 3rd-2nd Centuries B.C. 112

The Eastern Mediterranean 1^2

The Family of the Scipios /jj
The Roman Provinces, 100 B.C. 180
The Family of Caesar 214
Gaul 216
The Civil Wars 230
Italy 243
The Family of Augustus 254
The Provinces at the Death of Augustus, A.D. 14 258
The Roads of the Roman Empire 263
The Roman Legions in A.D. 23 2j8
The Empire in the ist and 2nd Centuries A.D. 283
Palestine in the Time of Christ 2gg
The Journeys of St. Paul 325
Britain
jj7
The Provinces at the Death of Antoninus Pius, A.D. 161 346
The "Barbarian" Invasions of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries
A.D. ^^4
The Family of Septimius Severus 361
The Administrative Dioceses of Diocletian j97
The Family of Constantine 40J
Imperial Rome 41J
The Family of Valentinian I 424

XVI
 / xvii

in the 4th and 5th Centuries A.D. 4^^

The Empire
The "Barbarian" Invasions of the 5th Century A.D. 4^9

After the Fall of the Western Empire in A.D. 426 435

The Byzantine Empire at the Death of Justinian I, A.D. 565

469
 FOREWORD

1 I
^he Romans are difficult to assess today. They employed
what they accomplished by the use of it has never been equaled. For
J-L Rome conferred, indeed imposed, upon the Mediterranean area and
force; yet

upon vast hinterlands on three continents, a unity that these regions had
never known before. And will they ever regain it? So far they have not.
But that is by no means all. For although Rome forms part of a larger
Greek-Roman story, it possessed a potent individuality of its own. The
notion, which is still sometimes aired, that Roman culture was merely an
imitation of its Greek models is outworn and misguided in almost every
field. On the contrary, in the literary and visual arts alike, as well as in law

and the governmental sciences, Rome's achievement was of singular origi-

nality and distinction.
Ancient Rome is also unparalleled among the great communities of the
Western world because it lasted for so long. No other occidental civilization
or major political unit has so far rivaled its millennial duration. For the
historian it is infinitely useful that this continuously evolving society should
be available for his investigation at every phase of its growth, vigorous
existence, and eventual transformation.
The Roman experience is useful for two reasons. First of all, it is wonder-

fully worthwhile to attempt to recreate this unique phenomenon just as it

was, leaving our own modern concerns out of the matter altogether. The
study of such an exciting and distinctive historical process is amply justified,
purely and simply on its own account. Yet at the same time this interest
takes on a new dimension when it is remembered that we ourselves, whether
we like it or not, are Rome's heirs. In a thousand different ways, the Romans
are permanently and indestructibly woven into the fabric of our own exist-
ences. They lived through many events and developments that resembled,
prefigured, and caused what has happened, is happening, and may happen
in the future to our own communities and our own selves.
The circumstances and backgrounds, it goes without saying, are in some

XVlll
 FOREWORD
respects radically different. But to conclude that people today cannot profit
from this ancient history, that Rome is unable to communicate to us any
relevant lessons or warnings — to use that old-fashioned phrase — is a mis-
take. For the past is deeply and unavoidably engrained in our own lives. It

is therefore plain common sense to turn this inescapable possession to our

advantage. For can show us the good and bad and strange things of which
it

humanity has proved to be capable, and is therefore capable still; and

besides, as the philosopher George Santayana pointed out, those who can-
not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We admit that, when
faced with a decision in our personal lives, we are habitually guided by the
recollection of things that we ourselves have done or experienced at an
earlier stage of our own lifetimes. But why limit this to our lifetimes? Why
assume that we cannot also learn from the experiences and decisions and
achievements and mistakes of those who have lived before?
First, then, Rome should be studied entirely on its own account, and
every endeavor should be made to extract its own peculiar quintessence,
regardless of any guidance may have to offer to ourselves. Yet, at the same
it

time, nothing will be lost, and perhaps much gained, by seeking analogies
with our own experiences as well. For both these reasons, the effort to find
out as much as we can about this unique segment of world history needs
no further justification.
However, the task of pursuing such an aim is far from easy. This is mainly
for two reasons —
which at first sight seem to contradict each other. To
begin with, the ancient sources, literary and archaeological alike, are often
tantalizingly inadequate and uninformative. A great many of the documents
that once existed have been lost, and those that survive are often enigmatic,
biased, and neglectful of many matters that we should dearly like to know
about. And yet the second reason why this task is so difficult is because the
quantity of this material, however unsatisfactory, is nevertheless so colossal,
which is hardly surprising since it encompasses a thousand eventful years.
There are, of course, countless modern histories of ancient Rome, and to
many of them I owe a profound debt. Yet they have not prevented me from
persisting with this new attempt, because however far it will fall below the
greatness of the theme, I believe there is room for another book on this
subject at the present time, one of approximately this size and scope, one
that will take into account, insofar as this can be done, the researches,
discoveries, and insights contributed by scholars in recent years.
But, given all this what principles of selection and omission
material,
ought to be adopted? First, would it be better to write a narrative story, or
divide the book according to subjects? Both approaches seem equally neces-
sary. Narrative history may be unfashionable, but a history of Rome makes
no sense without it. If it is nothing but narrative, however, it will miss some
 FOREWORD ^

of the major developments, so it will be necessary to pause from time to time

to discuss matters in greater depth. Among these matters for discussion will
be social, economic, literary, and and an effort will be made
artistic topics,

to relate these to the multiracial Roman Empire as well as to Rome itself.

For those who want additional names, details, and comments, I have pro-
vided supplementary material in the notes. The most difficult task is to
establish an appropriate balance between different epochs. In particular, it
is important not to neglect noncentral periods that were vital to Rome's

growth or transformation, even though the quantity of trustworthy evi-

dence available about them is sometimes relatively small.
And what about our moral judgments? Are the Romans "good" because
of all their positive achievements or "bad" because of their unmistakable
brutalities? One cannot keep moral judgments out of it altogether because,
as Cicero pointed out, it remains objectively true, in spite of debatable
marginal cases, that some sorts of behavior are good, and others bad, and
no vicissitudes of taste or special circumstances can make them otherwise.
But when we pass on to intellectual judgments, for example, concerning the
political wisdom or unwisdom of actions taken by this or that personage,
the historical task becomes more delicate still. It is easy enough to sit in
one's study, and perhaps never leave it, and pronounce that Scipio or Caesar
or Marcus Aurelius acted sensibly or otherwise; yet chair-borne hindsight
of this kind can never be based on a knowledge of all the circumstances and
facts. Nevertheless, modern historians owe it to their readers to stand up
and be counted and express a certain number of personal views. True, this
may turn out to reveal less about ancient times than about the historian's
own environment and the prejudices it has instilled in him. However, if

some of these perconceptions are consciously held, so much the better,

because then at least they will be under some control. But other unconscious
preconceptions, despite all vigilance, will creep through as well.
This is another way of saying that we cannot claim to be as objective as
we would like to be. Like others, I have tried, and no doubt without as much
success as I should have wished. But at least one result of this attempt,
which I believe to be good, has been the conclusion that I cannot subscribe
to any unitary, all-explaining theories of Roman history. There is too much
of it, and it is too varied for any single, dominant theme to be conceded a
monopoly. Just as attempts to find any one cause for what is described as
—
Rome's Decline and Fall are doomed to failure as one might surely expect
—
when so elaborate an institution is concerned so, too, all overall explana-
tions of its earlier development, including theories of inevitable cycles, are
doomed to failure because there are always too many loose ends. Perhaps
ifone were dealing only with political history one could write it around the
single guiding theme of imperial unity, and approaches to this unity and
 FOREWORD
failures to achieve it. But in the wider field of the whole civilization of the
Roman World, there is no single formula that will cover Fabius Maximus
and Catullus and Plotinus, for they are so totally different —manifestations
of a fabulous diversity and richness. If I have succeeded in giving even a
hint of this richness in the present book, I shall be pleased.
I owe acknowledgments to the following: Professor Fergus Millar and
Messrs. Duckworth and Co. Ltd., and to Professor R. M. Ogilvie and
Fontana Paperbacks and the Harvester Press, for allowing me to see copies
of their books. The Emperor in the Roman World and Early Rome and the
Etruscans before publication; and to Mr. Edward de Bono and Messrs.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson for permission to reproduce a passage from their
volume, The Greatest Thinkers. And I want to thank Miss Christine Sande-
man and Mrs. Susan Loden of the same firm for all the work they have done
to prepare the book for the press. I also appreciate greatly the constructive
encouragement I have received from Mr. Charles Scribner, Jr., the helpful
editing of Miss Edith Poor and Miss Helen Mclnnis of Charles Scribner's
Sons, the many valuable suggestions provided by Mr. Palmer Bovie, and I
record with very great gratitude the help my wife, Anne-Sophie, has given
me at every stage.

Michael Grant
Gattaiola, 1978
HISTORY OF ROME
Preceding page:
Wolf with Romulus and Remus
 1

Rome and Etruria

Italy and Rome

taly's central position in the Mediterranean is a call to self-assertion,
suggesting many promising opportunities if and when its population is

capable of grasping them. For instead of forming a barrier between the

eastern and western reaches of the sea, the country serves as a link between
them, open to maritime channels on either side. Moreover, the curiously
elongated shape of the peninsula provides, next only to Greece, the longest
coastline in Europe. There is a mile of shore for every fifty-nine square miles
of land, whereas Spain, for example, has only one for one hundred and
forty-five square miles. Besides, Italy is significantly placed in relation to the
continental lands to its north. It is far enough removed from them to escape
many of their turmoils, yet near enough to gain a share of whatever cultural
advances are in the making.
At least three-quarters of Italy's territory consists of hills. They rise into

the harshly ribbed vertebrae of the Apennines which dominate the whole
land, curving down from the northwestern seaboard to the eastern, Adriatic
coast, and then back again to Italy's toe. Yet there are also plains at the foot
of this mountainous mass; they provide convenient inland corridors, and for
the most part enjoy a relatively temperate and humid climate, which in
early times opened up possibilities of agriculture on a scale that no other
Mediterranean country had ever before been able to attempt. In comparison
with other parts of the world, and particularly with the little, less bountiful
plains of Greece, these regions seemed welcoming indeed.
The greatest of the plains is the Po Valley in the north between the
Apennines and the Alps. However, that region, known to the Romans as
Gaul this side of the Alps (Cisalpine Gaul), is part of the continental
landmass rather than of the peninsula itself, and throughout more than half
the period covered by this book it was not yet regarded as part of Italy at
all. Yet in the south, too, even more fertile districts are to be found, espe-
6 / ETRUSCAN ROME
cially along the west coast which was more attractive than the east because
itsmountains are not so steep and recede further from the sea. On this shore
there was above all the Campanian plain, centered around the Gulf of
Cumae (Bay of Naples), and to its north the two hundred and thirty-mile
stretch of lowland Latium; and then, north of Latium, there was Etruria,
separated from it by the river Tiber, which, although smaller than the Po,
is the largest river of peninsular Italy and possesses the most extensive

drainage area.
Descending from the central massif, the Tiber becomes navigable in its
lower reaches, like so many other rivers of the world on which important,
durable settlements have likewise been founded. And fifteen miles from the
Mediterranean, or twenty for those traveling on its stream far enough to —
provide warning of maritime raiders, but near enough to give it ready access
to the sea —was the lowest of the river's feasible crossing points: at Rome.
This crossing, close to an island in the river, linked together the lowest
ground on either bank, at the point where the Tiber turns
stretches of firm
and breaks through a low range to the marshy coastal plain before debouch-
ing at the only possible harbor for many miles in either direction.
It was a crossing of vital importance since it coincided with the most
convenient of the few longitudinal routes of Italy, a route that provided the
main line of communications along the whole of the western and more
populous flank of the country. Moreover, like London and Paris, the site
commanded easy progress not only across the river, but along its course as
well. Both upon its waters and by the road that lay beside it there was access
to precious, rare salt pans on the shore, and inland the continuation of the
same road up the Tiber valley led by fairly easy passes into the central

regions of the land.

Once the inhabitants of Rome became strong enough, they would be able
to dominate these vital passages in all directions. However, this potentiality
was a challenge and a peril as much as an advantage. People at an important
junction are as likely to reap suffering as profit, and the men and women
who came and lived here were open to aggression from all sides and needed
all the protection they could get.
They got from the cliff's on which they planted their settlements, for
it

the river lay in a deep trough at this point, and the settlers came to live on
the hills and hillocks above its southern bank. These heights were between
a hundred and three hundred feet above sea level —
a series of flat-topped
spurs projecting, more sharply than now, towards the Tiber and safely
raised above the floods to which its valley was exposed. Ravines, former
tributaries of the river, divided the hills from one another and to a lesser
extent from the main plateau of the hinterland as well.
 ROME AND ETRURIA //
The site of Rome enjoyed a good water supply at all seasons and was
within easy reach of fertile soil. It had seen human occupation, at least at
sporadic intervals, from a very early date. The skull of a single-tusked
elephant that lived some two million years ago has been found in its alluvial
sands, and the beneath a suburb has yielded a Neanderthal man's skull
soil

more than thirty thousand years old. Other discoveries include the flint and
copper implements of people who lived in the place early in the second
millennium before our era.

Not long afterwards, in about 1600 B.C., men and women with unfamiliar
customs made their appearance in Italy. They buried (inhumed) the bodies
of their dead, practiced a seminomadic pastoral economy, and made excel-
lent bronze work and decorated pottery. These settlers are described as
representatives of the "Apennine culture" because they lived on either side
of that range, to its north in the valley of the Po and to its south in Etruria,
which extended down as far as Rome's river, the Tiber. Contrary to the view
that prevailed until recently, the Etruscan sector of the culture probably
developed more rapidly than the other. Moreover, from ca. 1400 B.C.
onwards this culture gained strength on the south bank of the Tiber too and
left traces inside Rome itself, where objects that belonged to them have been
found on the low ground near the river upon the site of the Forum Boarium
—
or Cattle Market to which they may have been transported from a neigh-
boring hill.

It is possible, though not certain, that the men and women who
on lived
the site of Rome at that time were already speaking the Indo-European
speech that later became Latin and Italian. And there is also quite a likeli-
hood that from the time of these Bronze Age settlers onwards habitation
continued without a break: in other words, the city that exists today was
founded by the middle of the second millennium B.C.
A new phase, archaeologically better documented, began early in the last
millennium B.C. when new groups of migrants gradually moved to this
location. These were the descendants of men and women who had probably
been settled for some generations in the area later called Latium and now
the southern part of Lazio, a roughly triangular, well-watered country
and undulating folds. Some
consisting of rolling plains furrowed into gullies
thirty miles deep and sixty miles long, Latium extended from the borders
of Campania as far north as the Tiber and the site of Rome. Before 1000
B.C. the populations that had established themselves in this region had
apparently been joined by immigrants of mixed origins coming by sea from
the Balkans in small, isolated, pioneering groups.
Whatever may have been the case with their predecessors, these settlers
probably spoke a primitive dialect related to Latin. They engraved bronze
skillfully but supplemented this talent by a growing familiarity with the use
8/ ETRUSCAN ROME
of iron, a knowledge they had acquired along the sea routes from the
Aegean. In contrast to their predominantly pastoral forerunners, they
ploughed the soil with light ploughs and did not bury but burned (cremated)
their dead. They form one of the mainstreams of Iron Age history. But
another, too, became increasingly apparent, for Latium also contained peo-
ple, coming perhaps originally from southern Italy, who like the Bronze

Age people of the previous millennium did not cremate their dead but
buried (inhumed) them. This element gradually became dominant in
Latium and greatly increased its prosperity.
One of the nuclei of these Latin communities was the Alban Mount
(Monte Cavo), thirteen miles southeast of Rome. Its peak was a natural
fortress some three thousand feet in height, dominating a semicircle of
cone-shaped hills. The Alban Mount was a former volcano that had ceased
to be active in about the fourth millennium B.C. By that time, however, its

eruptions had guaranteed the future wealth of the area by covering the
marshy clay plain for miles around with layers of new soil containing
phosphates and potash. This mixture, with the addition of decaying leaves
from the forest of fir, pine, chestnut, and beech that still covered the
territory, made the sodden clay especially fertile when it was drained.
. By the early years of the first millennium, the settlement of the Alban area
and of Latium was nearing completion, and nomadism was finally giving
way to intensive cultivation. It was at this juncture that the Iron Age settlers
moved in to Rome. Groups of shepherds and farmers gradually moved
across from the Alban region until they came to the Tiber and built their
huts upon the Roman hills, which were particularly attractive because they
provided communication with Etruria beyond the river. First of all the —
latest archaeological discoveries indicate a date during the tenth century
B.C. — groups of these people settled on the level summit of the isolated and
well-protected Palatine Hill and in the marshy, moatlike valley of the
Forum, which lay between the Palatine and the Quirinal, Esquiline, and
Capitoline Hills. Next, in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. more immi-
grants came and settled on the Quirinal, guarded by steep ravines on three
sides; and then others established themselves on the Esquihne as well. The
precipitous Capitoline and the Caelian, rising northwest and east of the
Palatine respectively, also received inhabitants in an early period, though
at what stage cannot yet be determined.
And these people not only dwelt on the hills and the Forum that lay
between them, but they also deposited the remains of their dead near their
dwellings. Cremation and inhumation, the two types of interment charac-
teristic of the two groups of Iron Age settlers, are both found. The crema-

tors dug small, deep, circular pits within which they placed large globular
jars that had stone slats as lids. Inside the jars were urns in which the burned
 ROME AND ETRURIA / 9

Cremation urn in the form of a hut. Later eighth century B.C.

ashes of the dead person were laid. Often the urn was a littlemodel of one
of the huts in which the people themselves lived — a design that seems to
have originated in Latium. As for the inhumers, they buried the bodies in
hollowed-out logs or rough stone sarcophaguses, which they laid in long
rectangular pits or trenches sometimes lined with stones. Cremation and
inhumation are sometimes found side by side on Roman sites and even, on
occasion, in such close proximity that graves of the two kinds actually cut
into one another. But whether the practitioners of these two customs diff-
ered from one another in race we cannot say. All that it is safe to conjecture
10 / ETRUSCANROME
from these first Iron Age cemeteries at Rome is that the two groups,
whoever they were, gradually mixed and amalgamated both with each other
and with whatever sparse populations they already found living on the
hilltops when they arrived.

Rome, according to the traditional belief, was founded 753 B.C. But
in

the date is wholly mythical —too late for the first regular settlements and
too early for the time of true urbanization. It is worthwhile to note how this

fictitious date came to be fixed. In the first place, the city's period of
monarchic rule was widely, and probably correctly, believed to have come
to an end in the last years of the sixth century B.C. To fill the preceding
period, later Romans could muster the names of only seven kings of varying
authenticity. To accommodate these seven kings, and the more or less
legendary events associated with them, it seemed necessary to suppose that
their reigns had covered two or three hundred years, which, working back
from their expulsion shortly before 500 B.C., fixed the foundation of Rome
in the ninth or eighth century.
And so one later historian favored 814 B.C. for this foundation —on an
entirely erroneous principle, because his only aim was to synchronize the
event with the origin of Rome's later archenemy Carthage, which was
believed to have been founded at that date. Another writer preferred 748-
—
747 instead on the equally fallacious grounds that this provided a conve-
nient period of exactly four hundred years before a recorded celebration of
the Secular Games, a religious festival that marked periods of time, often
centuries, and had been celebrated, it was believed, in 348 B.C. However, an
alternative date for the foundation, favored by another ancient historian,
—
was 751 the move from 748-747 being made to permit the interpolation
of certain names that this author wished to insert in the list of annually
elected consuls. And then a writer of the first century B.C., Varro, needing
two more years for the same sort of reason, fastened upon 753 instead. That,
ultimately, became canonical, but it is as wholly speculative and unsound
a date as any of the others.
Thus, when we seek to reconstruct the early history and chronology of
Rome, its abundant patriotic and partisan myths and legends have to be
distrusted. And yet these, unfortunately, are the only literary materials that
we possess for all these early centuries before any reliable historical facts
are available. The mythsimmensely important because they tell us what
are
later generations of Romans believed about their country and how their
minds worked. But to find out what actually happened in early days we are
compelled, for the most part, to have recourse not to these stories but to
archaeological excavation; and the record that this provides for us is some-
times entirely different from the stories told by the mythographers.
 ROMEANDETRURIA ///

The Etruscan City-States

Another example of the same difficuhy is provided by Rome's Etruscan
period. Rome was at one time, as archaeological evidence reveals, a largely
Etruscan city. Its myths do not deny that this was so. Yet the strange
love-hate attitude that later Romans exhibited towards the Etruscans (and
that is apparent, for instance, in many passages of Virgil's poetry) reflects
such great discomfort about this period of foreign domination, far back in
the past though it was, that most of the salient facts are obscured and can
only be partially recovered by painstaking archaeological research.
In the first place, this tells us, and is telling us in ever greater detail
year by year, who the Etruscans were. Their city-states flourished in the
seventh and sixth centuries B.C. in a homeland that roughly corre-
sponded with what is now southern Tuscany and northern Lazio, cover-
ing a highly varied territory stretching two hundred miles from the
Arno to the Tiber and inland as far as the Apennines. The Etruscan
people inhabiting this region called themselves "Rasenna" and displayed
an art with pronounced oriental characteristics. Their splendid gold jew-
elry, for example, and the architectural themes and techniques that they
employed to spectacular effect (preserved nowadays, when their cities

have otherwise scarcely survived, mainly in grandiose rock-cut tombs)

were strongly reminiscent of the near east — to some extent Asia Minor,
but also the coastlands of Syria and Phoenicia (Lebanon) and historic
Mesopotamia and Assyria beyond them.
Now similar trends were also apparent in the art of Greece during its

"orientalizing" phase which was precisely at the time of the greatest Etrus-
can art. Orientalizing tendencies had first begun to pervade Greece late in

the eighth century B.C. because the country's isolation, following its so-
calledDark Age during the convulsions at the beginning of the millennium,
was beginning to come to an end. The virtual monopoly of eastern Mediter-
ranean trade, which had passed during the previous chaotic period from
Mycenae and other and Sidon
places in Greece to the Semitic cities of Tyre
in Phoenicia, was at this time challenged once again by the Greeks. Greek
ships, as well as those of the Phoenicians, began to bring home objects of
eastern trade and workmanship, thus causing oriental motifs to flood into
Greek art. The lead was taken by the maritime isthmus city of Corinth,
whose artists, as well as those from its offshoots or colonies on either side
of the Adriatic, extensively painted eastern themes on their vases. In these
polychrome paintings, new patterns of animals and winged monsters re-
place the former geometric designs. This representational, illustrative type
of art had long been familiar in Syria and Egypt and Assyria. But in Greece
the introduction of such tendencies proved epoch-making, releasing novel
12 / ETRUSCAN ROME

creative forces and endowing the rising civilization with a new and distinc-
tive personality.
And Greece in turn played a great part (though not necessarily, as we
shall see, the only part) in conveying the new orientahzing influences to
Etruria, both directlyfrom the mainland and indirectly through the colo-
nies of Magna Graecia in south Italy. Etruria became one of the chief export
markets of the Greeks, whose painted vases filled with amber, tin, lead, and
luxury goods, flooded into the country. The Etruscans employed immigrant
craftsmen from Corinth and its colonies, and Etrusco-Corinthian pottery
dominated the local markets from ca. 600 B.C. when a Greek-speaking
community made its appearance at Gravisca (Porto Clementino), the port
of the Etruscan city of Tarquinii (Tarquinia).
Etruscan art absorbed this Greek influence thoroughly. Yet the result
seems strangely diff'erent and individual, just as Etruscan society, too, is in
 ROMEANDETRURIA //J
many ways alien from the Greek (for example, in its strange mixture of
intense religious feeling with brutal physical force, and in the prominence
it accorded to women, almost unparalleled in western lands until the pre-
sent century). At its more pedestrian levels, the art of Etruria merely'./
resembles an off-beat provincial variation of Greek art, such as could be
found in other fringe areas of Hellenic culture in Europe and Asia. At its

best, on the other hand, it achieves authentic, imposing originality.

The most typical features of Etruscan temples, their lofty platforms and
roomy colonnaded porches, are clearly un-Greek. Moreover, an Etruscan
statue like the Apollo of Veii (Veio, ca. 500 B.C.), though largely Greek in
shape and manner, displays an un-Greek gross and forceful abundance of
life,and an unclassical treatment of detail. These are partly the artist's own
contribution, but they are also based on an apprehension of the eastern past
that was more direct among the Etruscans than among the Greeks, for the
orientalizing tendency is unmistakably sharper and deeper in Etruria. And
this must have been the result of links with the near east so strong that they
are best explained (with due respect for strenuous modern proposals to the.
contrary), not merely by indirect contacts with that area through trade with
orientalizing Greek cities, but also by the supposition that the Etruscans' ^
leading men possessed oriental and connections because they ^
affinities

themselves had originally been of eastern origin. This tradition was believed
by them and accepted by the Greek historian Herodotus, who regarded the
Etruscans as immigrants from Lydia in Asia Minor. It is true that the origin
of the Etruscans is not the most important thing about them; what is
important is the way in which their independent city-states developed in
Etruria. Nevertheless, their origin remains of some interest; and the likeli-
hood that they originated from some region of the near east whether —
—
Lydia or elsewhere is demonstrated not only by the artistic echoes and
parallels, but also by other evidence. For example, their belief in revealed ^
religion and in specific methods of divination seems to go back to that part
of the world. Moreover, their mining of metals was highly reminiscent of
Asia Minor and regions beyond.
They exploited this activity on a scale that, by ancient standards, was
prodigious. Indeed, it was the copper available locally to the people of
coastal Populonia, from which they could make bronze, that evidently first
brought these adventurers to the country and, supplemented later by exten-
sive iron, gave them their huge prosperity and the weapons to maintain it.
Moreover, their success was further guaranteed by extremely effective agri-
culture that made use of sophisticated methods of drainage and soil conser-
vation recalling the techniques of Mesopotamia. And there is epigraphic
evidence of eastern connections too, since inscriptions from the Aegean
island of Lemnos reveal that its people spoke a language resembling Etrus-
 V V li'v)'' rf.s; '
V \ i^'&^i Md-i

14 / ETRUSCANROME
can. (And Thucidydes believed that the Etruscans had once Hved there.)
We can read the twenty-six characters of the alphabet used by the Etrus-
cans, which they developed from the letters employed by Greek colonists
in southwestern Italy. However, our fifty bilingual inscriptions in which
Etruscan is juxtaposed with another language unfortunately fail to disclose
V the nature of this tongue, or even to show whether it forms part of the
Indo-European stock to which Greek and Latin belong. But that now seems
. on the whole improbable, a conclusion which suggests that the language of
the Etruscans, like so many of their institutions, came from the east, thus
confirming the view that they themselves, or their governing class, were
/ likewise of eastern origin.

If so, it may be supposed that in the years around 700-675 B.C. — at a time
when Asia Minor and the lands beyond it were suffering from especially
troubled conditions —a succession of small bands of immigrants from some
unidentifiable eastern territory, following perhaps in the wake of reconnais-
sances by earlier traders, arrived upon the shores of Etruria. Running their
ships aground on the flat, gray-black beaches, they seized the hill spurs
nearby, fortified them with wooden palisades, and established upon them
in due course the powerful city-states that we know as Etruscan. They did
so with the collaboration, willing or forced, of the peoples whom they found
already in residence there; for, despite the sudden upsurge suggestive of a
new cultural element, there is also a strong measure of archaeological
continuity on the sites. Indeed, the whole trend of modern research insists

that they should be seen in the context of their Italian forerunners and
neighbors.
The Etruscans owed to their eastern forebears, as well as to the Greeks
when they subsequently got to know them, a marked talent for urbaniza-
tion, and was encouraged by the compulsion, imposed by Italy's geogra-
this
phy, to cluster together on the relatively few sites that were eligible and
attractive. And so the Etruscans created their cities, first near the coast, and
then on inland sites towards the middle course of the Tiber. Traditionally
there were twelve such communities in Etruria, though it is hard to draw
up a complete list for any given time, and archaeology has revealed a
number of townships far exceeding that total. But twelve was the approxi-
mate number of their major city-states.
In spite of traditions that there had once been a single king over the whole
country, each of these cities seems to have been fully independent of all the
rest. Once a year (at least in later times) they sent delegates over their
excellent roads to a joint gathering at the shrine of the divinity Voltumna,
which has not yet been identified but was probably not far from Lake
Volsiniensis (Bolsena). Yet the political initiatives that this loose cult union
 1
ROMEANDETRURIA //j

attempted were apparently rare and generally ineffectual. True, its membet
citiesno doubt maintained shifting patterns of alliances with one another.
But they had grown up in physical isolation, kept apart by the wooded and
hilly country that surrounded them. In consequence, each city usually

tended to act on its own. ^

And indeed these states were not only independent but also highly indi-
vidual and distinguished from each other by sharp political, social, and
cultural differences — almost as great perhaps as those that distinguished,
say, Athens, Corinth, and Sparta in Greece. This point, too rarely ap-
preciated, is of major importance to early Roman history, for Rome was
influenced at most significant junctures not by the Etruscans as a whole, but
by this or that Etruscan city-state. Owing to the inadequate state of our
sources,we cannot always say which of these cities exercised such effect at
any given moment. But obviously, to a large extent Rome is likely to have
been most greatly influenced by the southern communities, which lay so
close to the Tiber. They were Tarquinii (Tarquinia), Caere (Cerveteri), and
Veii (Veio), only forty, twenty, and twelve miles distant respectively from
Rome. These south Etruscan standing on their hilltops in close
cities,

proximity to the coast, were and more cosmopolitan, more open and
livelier

receptive to Greek and other foreign contacts than their middle and north
Etruscan counterparts, which lay beyond almost untouched forests in the
interior. And so it was they, Tarquinii, Caere, and Veii, that developed a

particularly brilliant and prosperous culture in ca. 670-630 B.C. and sup-
plied the formative stimulus and inspiration that transformed Rome from
a huddle of hut villages into a city. \'^ \ ^ ^^ *r^

Earliest Rome
By the early seventh century B.C., the communities on the several spurs
of the Palatine, Esquiline, and Caelian had joined together at least for
religious purposes and perhaps politically as well. The unit they now formed
was the Septimontium or Seven Hills (different from, and smaller than, the
later Seven Hills of Rome). Then, perhaps in Ca. 625-620, the low-lying
area later known as the Forum was systematically drained, and it was
probably at this juncture that Rome's Great Drain, the Cloaca Maxima,
—
was dug through it at first in the form of an open trench. Thus the Forum
was able to start its long career as a meeting place and market for the unified
Roman Within another quarter of a century, the momentum quick-
hills.

ened still further. The Forum, and the Sacred Way that connected it with
the other quarters of the town, received their first permanent pavements,
and the Forum Boarium (Cattle Market) near the river was also regularly
laid out.
i6 / ETRUSCAN ROME
And it was at about the same time that a further decisive step was taken
towards the unification of the city. For now the northernmost spurs, the
Quirinal and Viminal, joined the growing community. Before long, the
expanded township began to make use of the rocky Capitohne as a common
citadel. Whether the earlier, smaller amalgamation, the Septimontium,
had
only been for purposes of common worship or had been more comprehen-
sive, this new and larger Rome of the Four Regions as it was called was

a completely unified entity, its boundaries marked with a sacred furrow by

a bronze ploughshare drawn by a white bull and white cow.
It still cannot be proved for certain that these developments were directly

due to the example or counsel of Rome's Etruscan neighbors, but this seems
highly probable. The appearance of such rapid internal changes, accom-

The Great Drain (Cloaca Maxima), by which Forum was drained in eighth
the
century B.C., entering the Tiber (its from about the time of
vault dates
Augustus). Above it is the Cattle Market (Forum Boarium), including a round
unidentified temple ("of Vesta") of second/first century B.C., reconstructed
under Hadrian.
 ROMEANDETRURIA ///

panied, as excavations show, by the transformation of a purely domestic

economy community of professional handicrafts, suggests that some
into a
such powerful external agency was at work. Moreover, contacts between
Iron Age Latium and southern Etruria were nothing new; they had been
taking place from the mid-eighth century onwards, and Rome had par-
ticipated in them almost from the start, progressively assimilating its mate-
rial culture to that of Etruria. And it is in the last quarter of the seventh
century B.C., at just about the time when the Forum was drained, that the
first pottery and metalwork from the nearby Etruscan cities of Caere and
Veii begin to appear at Rome. The place is evidently on the way to becoming
an Etruscan town.
 2
The Etruscan Monarchy

Etruscan Rome
hat interested the Etruscans about Rome in the first place
was not its attractions but its position on the way south to
the uniquely inviting land of Campania. For behind this
same coast, starting ninety miles beyond Rome, lay the Campanian plain,
incredibly favored by nature. Traversed by two rivers and fanned by moist
winds, this territory of spongy volcanic earth enjoyed relatively mild and
short winters. Moreover, its soil, retaining enough of the abundant seasonal
rainfall to resist three months of summer drought, became capable of pro-
ducing in some districts as many as three grain crops every year, in addition
to a catch-crop of vegetables as well.
But the Greeks reached Campania before the Etruscans, for in the eighth
century B.C. Greek colonists, attracted by the fertility of the area as well —
as by the possibility of trading with Etruria —
chose Cumae, on the coast just
northwest of the gulf named after it (now known as the Bay of Naples), for

their settlement on the mainland of Italy. Cumae became a great center for
the sale of grain and the diffusion of Greek influence over the greater part
of south Italy and Sicily, known to the ancients as Magna Graecia for this
reason. But before 600 (or perhaps a good deal earlier, according to some
interpretations) the travelers, or armies, from certain Etruscan city-states
—
made their way into Campania, and founded or refounded the leading —
city of the fertile lowlands, Capua (Santa Maria Capua Vetere), seventeen
miles north of Neapolis (Naples). From Capua the Etruscans began to
extend their domination over the greater part of the Campanian plain,
though they did not succeed in controlling Cumae itself.
Whether they had first come to Campania by land or by sea cannot be
determined. But in any case they rapidly found it desirable both to create
a land route to these new southern dependencies and to possess harbors on
the way to them as well. That brought them into Latium, which lay between

18
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY //p

Campania and themselves; so that during the seventh century many leading
Latin towns became subject to Etruscan city-states, at least to the extent
that these city-states controlled their communications and imposed ruling
classes upon them. And above all, it was the Etruscans who stimulated an
enormous development of Latium's agriculture, introducing, after the
model of their own country, a system of irrigation based on drainage
channels (cuniculi) about five feet deep and two or three feet wide. Because
the surface loam was very precious and needed to be saved, rainwater had
to be poured into the channels with great speed. Cut into the volcanic soil
over almost the whole Latin plain stretching northwards from Campania
and southwards from Rome, they made it practicable for this potentially
fertile region to be cultivated with unprecedented intensity —
and the entire
territory rescued from the marsh, just as the Dutch later reclaimed their
lowlands from the sea.
It was impossible for the Etruscans to hold Latium without also taking

Rome which lay between Latium and themselves. The town was on their
very borders, and its river crossing was essential for their access to the Latin
plain. There was also the added attraction of Rome's proximity to the salt
pans at the mouth of the Tiber (first exploited on its north bank), since salt
was essential to the Etruscan cities and they could not obtain it from any
other source.
These then were the reasons why Rome came under Etruscan influence.
As we saw in the last chapter, when discussing the stages of its urbanization,
the decisive period of that process seems to have been the last quarter of
the seventh century B.C. Nor was it long before influence took the form of
overt political control, and Rome, as its own subsequent writers were
obliged to admit, came under the rule of an Etruscan monarch.

Early Roman Religion

What sort of a place did he find? Above all else, it was a religious
community. The Romans had from the earliest period cherished a powerful, i
pervasive, and peculiar rehgion. Centuries later, Cicero praised their con-
tinuing conviction that everything is subordinate to divine rule and direc-
tion. Roman religion was based on mutual trustfulness (fides) between the

divine powers or gods, on the one hand, and men and women on the other.
—
The trust accorded by the gods, and their benevolence what was called the
peace of the gods (pax deorum), a balance of nature in which divine powers
—
and human beings worked in harmony could be secured by meticulous
ritual and not so much, as more recent religions would maintain, by good
moral behavior, since for centuries there was no very prominent moral
element in Roman religion. Nevertheless, this idea of the divine peace
20 / ETRUSCAN ROME
moral influence, since the respect that it induced for
indirectly exercised a
vows made to the gods was extended, in the course of time, to vows made
to other human beings as well.
Yet the individual human being was not what mattered in the religion
of the Romans, for they saw this as a group affair, not a matter for individu-
als. And indeed the same applied to the whole of Roman life, in which

individuality was submerged in family, clan, and state. As in other ancient

Indo-European-speaking communities, the family or household, and the
clan (gens) or group of households, were of overriding importance. The
head of the family (pater familias), any male citizen who had no living
ancestor in the main line, was absolute; there is nothing, perhaps, in any
other known culture quite as extreme as this long-lasting patriarchal asser-
tion. Although \ht pater familias might call in, by custom, a council of male
relatives, and although he habitually left the running of his house to his
wife, it was he who monopolized all rights. In the home, his word was
literally law —
and so long as he remained alive, his sons never came of age.
Thus he controlled, among much else, domestic cult, which played a
mighty part in daily life. The household deities were worshiped every day
and at every meal, and no important family event could take place without
securing divine approval. Whether domestic or communal worship came
earhest is disputed; but in any case the latter was a magnified version of the
former. Vesta, worshipped by her Vestal Virgins, beside the Forum, in her
round straw hut which later became a temple, was the hearth goddess of
the Roman state. But she was equally prominent in family cult as well,
symbolizing the solidarity of the home as well as the nation.
Roman religion possessed no sacred writings except invocations and
prayers, and its priests were not a caste set apart, but men following secular
careers. Yet it was nonetheless real for all that. "To understand the success
of the Romans," declared the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus
at the turn of our era, "you must understand their piety." The gods were

national, invisible, potent citizens of whatever country they favored, and the
Romans, duly performing manifold observances towards them, believed
that they favored Rome.
Yet these powers that inspired their awe and reverence, which is what
religio meant, were regarded as mysterious and unknowable, and for a long
time were scarcely seen as personal beings. In the earliest times, the Ro-
mans, like many other Italians, lacked the Greek taste for seeing their
deities in personalized anthropomorphic form, so that the temple of Vesta
contained no image at all. They also in those early days lacked the desire
to clothe their gods and goddesses in a mythology. Instead, they were
inclined to see divine force, or divinity, operating as pure function or act,
both in human activities like opening doors or giving birth to children and
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 21

in natural phenomena, such as the movement Q ^jJ\^sun and stars and the
seasons of the soil.

Yet this impersonal concept was already becoming gradually modified

from a very ancient date, when Greek ideas first began to come in, both
directly and through the medium of Etruria. For example, Vesta, even
though she lacked a statue, was the same, etymologically and by assimila-
tion, as the Greek Hestia. And Mars, the first god recognized by the

Romans (and by other Italians too) as chief of all the divinities, was iden-
tified with the Greek Ares. Nevertheless, Roman religion retained its inde-
pendence because its deities remained somewhat different from those of the
Greeks. Mars, for example, was not entirely a war god like Ares, since he
was rather the protector of the whole people, in agriculture as well as war.

Indeed, he shared an ancient sanctuary in the Forum, known as the Regia,

with the power of fertility. Ops Consiva. The first on the Regia
cult building
site, replacing earlier huts and burials, was a stone-founded and stone-
walled precinct dating from the later seventh century B.C. It contained a
monument of which the purpose is still unknown; perhaps it was dedicated
to Mars. As the name Regia suggests, early Rome was a monarchy. The
word comes from rex ("king") and the Regia was therefore, in all probabil-

ity, the building in which the king had his residence.

The Structure of
the Earliest Roman State

That Rome had by kings was unanimously asserted

originally been ruled
by its subsequent historians. Before Etruscan rule began, there had already
been, according to this tradition, four non-Etruscan monarchs. Most or all
of these four names are either of dubious historicity or downright fictitious
—notably the alleged city founder Romulus, which just means "the man
of Rome." Yet the memory that Rome had been a monarchy was authentic
and is confirmed by the survival of the royal title rex into later times, after
the kings had gone, when it came to be borne by a priest known as the rex
sacrorum, "king of religious affairs" — residing, as the early monarchs had
apparently resided, in the Regia. We know practically nothing about the
most ancient phases of this kingship except that, as the survival of the rex
sacrorum suggests, it included religious duties. The office, perhaps, was not
necessarily hereditary or adoptive, but elective, as in the city-states of
primitive Greece.
From the beginning, so later tradition maintained, the Roman state was
divided into three units known as tribes (tribus). Some scholars suggest that
this division represented a racial distinction, corresponding to three differ-

ent components in the original Roman state; but this is uncertain, and they
22 / ETRUSCAN ROME

Inscription in early Latin recording ritual law and "a King" (rex) beneath the
Black Stone (Lapis Niger) in the Forum Romanum (550-500 B.C.).

may instead have been groups of clans without any clear ethnic differentia-
tion. In any case, the threefold division is likely to have been made in the
first place in order to facilitate military and financial censuses of the people.
The names of the three tribes are Etruscan, and this could mean either that
they are Etruscanized designations of units that had already existed under
differentnames before the Etruscan monarchy, or, alternatively, that they
were new institutions that the Etruscan monarchy first brought into exis-
tence. The latter is the more natural interpretation; and if we accept it, these
tribes may reasonably be ascribed to the earlier times of Etruscan influence,
perhaps towards the end of the seventh century B.C.
The three tribes were subdivided into ten curiae or wards (from co-viria,
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 2^

gathering of men), each comprising a number of clans or groups of famihes

(once again, not necessarily differentiated by race); a similar kind of organi-*
zation seems to have existed in other Latin towns, and perhaps in Etruscan
communities as well. It was upon these curiae, and upon the tribes into
which they were grouped, that the earliest recognizable Senate was based,
for it contained three hundred members, that is to say thirty from each curia
and one hundred from each tribe. These senators were selected by the kings
—
from the patres familias the heads of the clans and of their component
families —and were known as patres conscripti; how freely they debated
under the monarchy we cannot tell. The curiae also met together in a body
to form the earliest Assembly Rome possessed, the Comitia curiata. Proba- it

bly this merely ratified decisions that had been made by the king, perhaps
after he had consulted with the Senate, though when a king died, the
Assembly may have played a part in electing his successor. The curial i

system also seems to have been the basis of Rome's most primitive military
organization. This comprised an army or legion (legio) of three thousand $
infantry and three hundred cavalry, that is to say, one thousand and one
hundred respectively from each of the tribes, and one hundred and ten
respectively from each curia.
Owing to the Etruscan tribal nomenclature on which these developments
are based, it is possible that they ought to be synchronized with the fifth
name on Rome's traditional king list,was Etruscan and brings us to
for he
firmer ground since he represents the Etruscan takeover of Rome, which
is a historical fact. Roman legend tells that this first of the city's Etruscan
kings succeeded peacefully to the throne —though such a tradition may be
merely a patriotic device to scotch the idea that Rome had ever been
forcibly subjected to foreigners. His name was said to be Tarquinius Priscus
(i.e., the Elder, in contrast with his son Tarquinius Superbus, who became
king later), and his origin was attributed to one of the earliest Etruscan
cities, Tarquinii, on a high plateau not far from the sea, forty miles north-
west from Rome. Some have felt homeland was invented for him
that this
by later historians because the record of a Roman monarch named Tar-
quinius so obviously recalled the name of the place and the Tarquins —
really came from Caere, which was closer to Rome and more intimately
connected with it; moreover, the mausoleum of their family had been dis-
covered there, with their name "Tarchna" Latinized as "Tarquitius." But
the name is not uncommon, and it seems better not to abandon the view
that the Tarquins came from Tarquinii.
The traditional dates of Priscus's reign are 616-579 B.C., and here tradi-
tion harmonizes for the first time with the findings of archaeology, which
ascribe the decisive stages of Rome's urbanization to the last quarter of the
seventh century. The Etruscans may, then, have established political con-
24 / ETRUSCANROME
trol of the city at precisely that time; though some would argue, instead,
that theirmonarchy only started in ca. 575. But it is not at all certain that
the legends are right when they tell of f wo Etruscan kings of Rome bearing
the name of Tarquin. There may have been more than two; or there may
have been only one, retrospectively subdivided into two so as to attribute
good deeds to the first, and bad, tyrannical deeds to the second (Superbus
meaning "the arrogant"), under whom the monarchy was believed to have
come to an unlamented end.
It was apparently in this Etruscan period that the rulers of Rome quit

their earlier royal residence in the Regia and established themselves instead,
and on the precipitous, defensible Capitohne Hill, while their
built a citadel,
followers settled between the Capitoline and Palatine in "Etruscan Street,"
the Vicus Tuscus. Moreover, excavators' reports of the destruction in ca.
600 of small towns including Pohtorium (Castel di Decima) ten miles south
of Rome may bear witness to a territorial drive by the Etrusco-Roman
monarchy in this direction.

How Etruscan did Rome now become? Opinions differ. As inscriptions

sihow, there was a Latin-speaking population under an Etruscan-speaking
ruling class. Nevertheless, it has been argued recently that there was deep
interpenetration and fusion between the two ethnic and linguistic groups,
and that Rome did, at this time, turn into a more or less homogeneous
Etruscanized city. Support for this view from later Roman historians can-
not be expected because it would have been unacceptable to the national
pride. Yet to a certain extent at least, that is what must have happened, for
Romans still continued to embody highly impor-
the later institutions of the
tant Etruscan features. Their religion contained much that was Etruscan,
including the calendar. Their mythology, too, when they came to have one,
owed much to the same source; for example, the adoption of Aeneas as
Rome's precursor, perpetuated by Virgil who was himself partly Etruscan,
is traceable back to the city's occupation by that people among whom

Aeneas was revered.

Moreover, whereas the Etruscans had taken their alphabet, with modifi-
cations, from Greece, either directly or through the medium of the Greek
city of Cumae in Campania, the Romans then proceeded to borrow their
own, after further changes, from their Etruscan neighbors and overlords.
That is why, like the Etruscan alphabet, it is short in vowels and redundant
in the C, K, and Q group, and the letterforms of the earliest Latin inscrip-
tions bear the same witness to Etruscan origins. And from the same source
once again came much Roman ceremonial, and the names of families and
localities, and many architectural achievements (gateways, bridges, arches,
designs of houses), numerous styles and themes of pictorial art, and highly

developed agricultural methods.

 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 2^

True, most of these borrowings, except for the last, had Httle effect on the

ilhterate, impoverished majority of the population of the region, who had

to live as always not far from the borders of bare subsistence. But at all
higher levels the influence of the Etruscans was deeply pervasive, which is

scarcely surprising since it was only due to them that Rome had become
a city at all.

''Servius Tullius''

Midway Tarquinian regime, and, to be exact, between the suspect

in the
pair of Tarquins, legend inserted the mysterious king Servius Tullius. The
dates given for his reign are 578-535 B.C., but they are entirely unreliable,
and indeed this monarch is more richly encrusted with fictitious myth, if

possible, than any of the kings who supposedly came before or after him.
Servius Tullius was said to be a Latin, although a rival theory declared him
to be Etruscan. But his name is Latin, and he is best thought of as a member
of the native population that dated back to pre-Etruscan times. However,
he apparently pursued the development and expansion of Rome on the lines
of his Etruscan predecessor; and indeed, he was credited with a thorough
overhaul of the institutions of the Roman state. Many object that the
reforms attributed to him, like so much else in the historians' account of
the kings, ought instead to be assigned to a date perhaps as much as two
centuries later. Yet these measures are appropriate to the stage of evolution
that the community seems to have reached in his day, and may be discussed
at this point.
\ What happened was that the three original tribes of Rome were replaced
t'by twenty-one new ones, four in the city and seventeen in Rome's rural n
> f\l appendages. These new tribes represented local, geographical divisions, and
T<5»,^ the urban tribes correspond with the Four Regions of Rome, which seem
^ to have been established slightly earlier, in about 600 B.C. Even if it is not <at

i V**' quite certain that the three earlier tribes had been instituted for census ^
yc' reasons, this was surely the purpose of Servius's twenty-one new ones: they
^ were basic units for raising levies and collecting taxes. As for the rural tribes
'.t — of which the geographical delimitation remains uncertain sixteen out of —
the seventeen of them were known, at least in later historical times, by the
names of families that were eminent at Rome, and it is possible that these
names go back to Servian times. Nevertheless, if this was so, the choice of
such designations was not much more than a sop to the aristocracy, for the
novel insistence on a territorial residential basis meant a diminution of
family loyalties and enabled the enfranchisement of Etruscan and other
immigrants who lacked these allegiances and reserved their allegiance not |^

for any family but for the monarch^jji^

\S^ ^ ^^ ITA V\0 ^c

^
26 / ETRUSCAN ROME
Moreover, under the same king, or at least at the same period, a com-
pletely new military system was inaugurated, according to which the size
of the army was doubled to six thousand and based no longer on the curiae
or the tribes but on sixty "centuries" of one hundred men each.
This change had highly important effects both of a political and of a
military nature. On the political side it meant that the Assembly of curiae,
the Comitia curiata, was replaced for most practical purposes by a new
Assembly of centuries, the Comitia centuriata. This made for greater effi-

ciency since the curial system, having been based on wards, had proved
unadaptable to an expanding city; for example, it cannot have worked well
when citizens moved, and was ill adjusted to dealing with individual
it

immigrants. After the monarchy was over, it would become the official duty
of the Comitia centuriata to elect chief magistrates and to decide on peace
or war. What powers it already possessed under the kings we cannot tell,
and although they were broader than those previously enjoyed by the
Comitia curiata, they were probably still not large. It seems likely that only
the king or his nominee decided what measures should be brought before
the centurial Assembly, and that when this was done it could only accept
or (less likely) reject them without debate. In other words, the Comitia
centuriata was a useful organ of the monarch's authority and might have
some say in state decisions, but still was not a particularly democratic
institution. Besides, the ruler tried to eHminate alternative loyalties by
making these assemblymen, in their capacity as soldiers, take the oath to
himself.
Moreover, there was no question of *'one man, one vote." Voting was not
by heads but by groups, and the procedure was so organized that the richer
groups were predominant. The new army on which the centurial Assembly
was based consisted of property owners graded according to wealth. On this
basis, the infantry were divided into five classes, of which the first and
richest provided no fewer than eighty of the one hundred and ninety-three
centuries of voting units, while those, richer still, who could pay for horses,
provided another eighteen —so that the wealthy or relatively wealthy filled
more than half of the total number of centuries of which Assembly was the
constituted. Here then was a political system in which, while birth was no
longer the dominant consideration, it had given place not to democracy but
to property ownership.
This manning of the new army by property owners, men rich enough to
provide their own arms and armor, directly echoes changes in military
organization that had been occurring elsewhere, Greece and then in
first in

Etruria. From about 750 B.C. the Greeks had begun to develop heavy
infantry equipment, partly under Assyrian influence and partly through
contact with the metalworkers of central Europe. And thereafter, more
 two
Bronze-fitting on Etruscan war chariot from Monteleone showing
Etruscan style. (550-530 B.C.).
combatants heavily armed and armored in the
28 / ETRUSCAN ROME
completely from about 675, Greek military history had shown a slow and
—
piecemeal adoption of this sort of equipment round shield, defensive metal
body-armor, and thrusting spear —with the tactical corollary that these
heavily armed soldiers (hoplites, from hopla, "arms") fought in a closely
knit line or phalanx. They were all men who possessed sufficient property
of their own to equip themselves with the full array of this personal armor.
Then from about 650 B.C. the hoplite shield began to appear in Etruria too,
as archaeological finds and vase paintings reveal, and during the course of
the sixth century the full set of hoplite arms came into standard use among
the Etruscans.
And so this military innovation arrived at Rome as well. Its attribution
to Servius Tullius, or at least to the general period during which he appears
to have ruled, finds confirmation from an Esquiline tomb of the early sixth
century B.C. in which was discovered a bronze shield like those adopted in
the hoplite reforms of Greece and Etruria. Such were the arms of the men
who provided Rome with its greatly enlarged reservoir of recruits, who were
to achieve such astonishing military triumphs in the years to come. And
each spring before setting out to war, they sat and deliberated in the Comitia
centuriata and endowed it with a military esprit de corps; it was the Roman
Army in Assembly, orderly obedience its second nature.
This was then, to a large extent, a middle-class army, containing the men
whom the prosperity of Etruscan Rome had
encouraged to flourish. But it
was also still an aristocratic army to the extent that the land-owning noble
clans, being the richest section of the population, continued to play a
prominent part in themanning of the infantry. And the eighteen centuries
of cavalry {equites, "knights"), who formed the richest group, no doubt also
consisted chiefly of nobles. Yet the reforms of the middle-class hoplite
infantry gradually deprived these horsemen of a dominant role in military
operations, though it may be conjectured that they remained the personal
bodyguard of the kings.
Servius encircled at least the northern part of his city of the Four Regions
with a rampart. This was not what is now known
"Wall of Servius
as the
Tullius," which encircles the larger area of later Rome and does not go back
further than the fourth century B.C. Yet surviving remains of another
earthwork can be attributed to a considerably earlier date than the wall
since they are partly built over sixth-century tombs and were found to
contain a fragment of Athenian pottery datable, at the very latest, to ca. 470
B.C. and perhaps to a period two or even five decades earlier. Traditionally,
as we have seen, Servius died in 535, but there is no firm basis for that exact
date, and the earthen defense-work may reasonably, if conjecturally, be
ascribed to him, not only on the somewhat vague grounds that he was
believed to be the builder of such a wall in ancient times and that this
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 29

'^V SAB 1 N 1
30 / ETRUSCAN ROME
here known as Jupiter Latiaris. On the slopes of the mountain was the town
of Alba Longa (Castel Gandolfo), famous in Virgil's legend as the parent
city of Rome, although this is unconfirmed by archaeology. Whether Alba
Longa founded other towns of Latium as further legends recount, and if so,
how many, must remain equally uncertain. But its headship of a loosely knit
league of Latin towns from about the tenth century B.C. onwards, when it
began to control the main inland route to the south, deserves acceptance.
The towns of Latium, being grouped in inward-looking fashion around a
plain, were readily inclined to form associations of this kind, of which there
seem to have been several; and Alba Longa, on the lake near the revered
Alban Mount, was eminently suited to take the lead of one of them.
However, Alba Longa was only about twelve miles from Rome, and with
aggressive monarchs on the Roman throne a clash was bound to come. It
came, and Rome won. Legend ascribes the victory to a pre-Etruscan king
of the city, and archaeology confirms that the balance of power between the
Albans and Romans was already beginning to shift from the ninth or eighth
century B.C. But the final echpse of Alba Longa, and of other towns of
northwest Latium as well, may be regarded as forming part of a general
Roman expansion at about the time of Servius TuUius, during the sixth
century. There no reason to doubt the tradition that after the decisive
is

confrontation, some of Alba's leading families soon came to Rome and were
admitted to its aristocracy, and that other Albans were settled upon the
Caelian hill.

Etruscan war chariot from Monteleone.

 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 3'

Reconstruction of an Etruscan temple as described by Vitruvius.

And while extending their rule in this northwesterly direction, the Ro-
mans of this epoch seem to have expanded the same distance southwest-
also
wards as far as the coast, and to have established the port of Ostia at the
—
mouth of the Tiber beyond Politorium which had already been reduced
—
earlier in order to exploit the adjoining salt beds. This event too was
attributed by tradition to an earlier king but once again may tentatively be
ascribed to the time of Servius Tulhus. It is true that archaeological evi-
dence on the site of Ostia itself has so far totally failed to reveal any
settlement whatsoever dating back to the time of the kings. But this may
be only because the settlement in question was located outside the later

Roman harbor town, on ground that has not yet been fully explored. The
"regal" Ostia probably existed.
And Rome's first wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius replacing the island
ford, may well belong to the same time as this first Ostia. For when the salt
had been collected at the river mouth, it was hard work to convey it to the
city by river, which meant taking it upstream. This was, it is true, sometimes
done with the aid of tow ropes, but cargoes also frequently had to be
J2/ ETRUSCANROME
transported by land, along the left bank. The Romans needed the bridge to
move the salt across the Tiber, to their Etruscan purchasers and others
beyond.

Servius Tullius, if such innovations are to be attributed to him personally,

again had the outside world in mind when he added an appendage to Rome
of the Four Regions. This he did by building an important temple on the
Aventine Hill which lay just beyond the city's boundaries to the south. It
—
was a shrine of Diana "the bright one" same time
like Jupiter, and at the
a goddess of forests who helped women by giving them
had been
children. It

believed until recently that Servius, by constructing this temple, was delib-
erately superseding a similar, widely frequented, cult of Diana near the
Latin town of Aricia, in an old volcanic crater valley at the foot of the Alban
Mount sixteen miles southeast of Rome. But now this view needs modifica-
tion since, although the Aventine shrine cannot yet be completely recon-
structed, archaeologists have offered reasons for believing that its Arician
counterpart was probably the later of the two. Nevertheless, the Aventine
shrine may well have been intended, if not to eclipse Aricia, at least to
attract dispossessed immigrants from its territories and other parts of

Latium, and that could well be why it was located outside the boundaries
of the city. Evidently it enjoyed considerable prestige in the area, since its

regulations, we learn, were accepted by other Latin towns, for example,

Tibur (Tivoli).
But the inspiration for the Aventine cult may have come not from
Latium but from Greek cities whose federal worships Servius Tullius
was seeking to imitate. And, in particular, his model is likely to have
been Massilia. This great and influential port on the southern coast of
France, founded in ca. 600 B.C. (under the name of Massalia) by Greek
seafarers from Asia Minor, had come to dominate the Mediterranean
shores from southern Spain to where the border between France and
Italy exists today. Its settlers had borrowed and imported the worship
of their goddess Artemis from its world-center at the ancient Greek city
of Ephesus (Sel^uk) on the coast of Asia Minor and with this Ephe- —
sian sanctuary the Roman cult of Diana, who was early identified with
Artemis, possessed a manifest connection. For the Aventine shrine of
the goddess was the possessor, perhaps from the outset, of a statue of
the many-breasted type that was peculiarly characteristic of Ephesus;
very probably the Romans obtained it from Massiha. At all events, its
introduction to Rome represented a decisive step, a more decisive step
than earlier cults of Mars and other deities, towards the personal, an-
thropomorphic interpretation of gods and goddesses.
The importation of this statue of Artemis-Diana is significant for another
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 33

REGAL AND REPUBLICAN ROME

Colline Gate

1000

Septimontium

reason. It confirms that early Rome did not obtain all its Hellenic influences
through the medium of Etruria but derived some of them directly from the
Greeks who were strugghng with the Etruscans for the dominance of the
western Mediterranean. This is confirmed by the geographical situation of
the Aventine temple, standing guard over the river wharves of the Tiber,
which formed a center for Greek (as well as eastern) traders very early on.
And below the northwestern end of the Aventine stood a very ancient altar
(the Ara Maxima) which tells the same story. It was dedicated to Hercules,
who was identified with the Greek god of traders, Heracles, and the location
of his altar at that spot meant he was to preside over these commercial
activities.

But another, even greater, new Roman shrine was more Etruscan
than Greek. This was the temple of Jupiter the Best and Greatest, and
of Juno and Minerva, on the Capitoline Hill, beside the citadel where
^4 / ETRUSCANROME

Silver denarius of Augustus moneyer C. Antistius Vetus),

(i6 B.C.,
celebrating Tarquinius Superbus's treaty with the Latin town
of Gabii (FOEDVS Populi Romani CVM GABINIS)

the Etruscan kings resided. According to tradition the two Etruscan

monarchs Tarquinius Priscus and his son Tarquinius Superbus, who
reigned before and after Servius Tullius respectively, each played a part
in the foundation of the temple. Priscus dedicated it and got the work
started, and Superbus completed its construction. But the involvement
of Priscus may only be a retrospective fiction designed to ascribe the in-
ception of this great project to the "good" monarch rather than to his
"bad" disgraced son; the truth of the matter probably is that the temple
was entirely due to the initiative of Superbus. If so, then it belongs to
the very end of the Etruscan monarchy, traditionally placed in the last
years of the sixth century B.C. The temple was, for the most part, in the
Etruscan manner, with a terracotta statue of a fully personalized Jupiter
executed by a famous Etruscan sculptor.
Jupiter the sky god was called Best and Greatest, said Cicero, be-
cause he makes us prosperous, but also because, under Etruscan influ-
ence, he was now the successor of Mars as the principal god of the Ro-
mans. When he first began to assume this function, at a somewhat
earlier date, he had still been associated with Mars and with another
antique Italian god Quirinus, the god of the Quirinal Hill; they formed
a triad or trinity. But now the triad were Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.
The names, in these forms, were Italian, but they had Etruscan (as well
as Greek) counterparts,and the linkage of these three divinities is
Etruscan. was a grouping that may have been seen in other parts of
It

Rome already. But it was here that it became famous, on the Capitol,
where the trinity was worshipped in a shrine divided into three sections
(cellae), such as are also found at other Etruscan centers.

But the most significant feature of the Capitoline temple was its ex-
traordinary size and grandeur. It had a deep, Etruscan porch of three
rows of six columns, and a row of free-standing columns down each
side (not found in smaller Etruscan temples). It measured one hundred
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / 35

Brass medallion of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138-6 1) celebrating the legendary

defense of Rome's bridge (Pons Sublicius) by Horatius Codes against Lars
Porsenna of Clusium.

and eighty feet in width and over two hundred feet in length, as its six-
teen-foot-high stone platform, so characteristic of Italian as opposed to
Greek temples, reveals. Much of this still survives,though little more of
the original structure is now to be seen. These huge dimensions made it,
as far as we can tell, the largest temple of its time in the entire Etrus-
can sphere; not many exceeded its size even in Greek lands. And al-

though in the Etruscan fashion the superstructure was only made of

wood, the building was of marvelous splendor, colorfully decorated with
lavish paint work and many monuments, including a statue of the god
by Vulca of Veii.
36 / ETRUSCAN ROME
The Fall of the Monarchy
And then, perhaps almost immediately after the dedication of this glitter-
ing temple, the Etruscan monarchy of Rome, in the person of Tarquinius
Superbus, from power. Superbus had made a treaty with strategic Gabii
fell

(Castiglione) ten miles to the east, the site of abundant recent archaeological
discoveries; he had also apparently planted garrisons a good deal further
afield. But in the end he was overthrown. The traditional date of his expul-

sion, 510 B.C., must be regarded with grave suspicion because that is also
the year in which the last tyrant of Athens was expelled from his city, and
Greek historians could not resist inventing the coincidence.* But Tar-
quinius Superbus probably fell more than three or four years afterwards,
not
and a rival theory that the Etruscan monarchy at Rome did not end until
the 450S has gained little support.
In other parts of Italy too, including Etruria, monarchies were losing
their grip and collapsing in these last years of the sixth century B.C. More-
over, it was a period when the Etruscan city-states in Latium and Campania
were generally in retreat, hard-pressed by their enemies the Greeks. In
particular, Aristodemus of the Greek city of Cumae, the bitter rival of the
city-states of Etruria, in 529 had repulsed Etruscan and other attackers in
the marshes and woods north of his native city. Nearly twenty years later

Etruscan relief from Chianciano showing battle scene. Fifth century B.C.

*The Table of Dates on page 516 synchronizes some of the major events in Roman and Greek
history.
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / J7

he may have helped the Latins to defeat Etruscan forces once again, this
time at Aricia, a victory which, according to one interpretation, enabled
him become the autocratic ruler of his home town. The first of these
to
engagements weakened Etruscan power in general and probably helped, in
the long run, to undermine Tarquinius Superbus. The second clash seems
to have taken place shortly after Superbus's expulsion and to have made it
more difficult for him (or for any other Etruscan) to seize control of Rome
ever again.
Incidentally, this second battle also gave the town of Aricia, which had
helped in the successful fight, the temporary headship of a loose religious
and perhaps also pohtical confederation, such as Alba Longa had possessed
in earlier years. The preeminence of Alba had been based on the worship

of Jupiter Latiaris, and Aricia's was founded on its shrine of Diana over-
looking Lake Nemorensis (Nemi), to which reference was made above. Alba
Longa had succumbed to the Romans; but this time Rome, its monarchy
fallen, was no longer in a position to oppose or suppress the Aricians, who

were therefore able to exploit their cult of Diana, deliberately seeking to

outbid the Roman shrine of the same goddess on the Aventine. Nor did
Aricia have to worry too much about possible encroachments from other
Etruscan-dominated cities either, since Rome was not the only Latin town
where the Etruscans had lost their authority, or were rapidly losing it. Their
defeat at Aricia was part of a general collapse of their rule over wide areas
of Latium. Latins and hill tribesmen profited from the Etruscans' troubles
and moved in across their lines of communications; other Latin cities in
addition to Aricia were recorded as conducting successful rebellions
Etruscan power in Latium was broken. Moreover, archaeologists have now
shown that the life of certain towns in Etruria itself now came to an end
at about the same time.

Such then was the fall of Rome's Etruscan rulers. However, despite the
equal misfortunes of their compatriots in other parts of Latium, and in
Campania as well, they did not, during the troubled years that followed,
accept their ejection by the Romans as final. In the first place, Tarquinius
Superbus tried, unsuccessfully, to engineer his own return. And Lars Por-
senna of the inland Etruscan city-state of Clusium (Chiusi), acting indepen-
dently of the Tarquins for he was by no means their friend, marched eighty
miles southwards upon Rome and attacked it in asudden raid. Moreover,
contrary to the patriotic legend enshrined in Thomas Macaulay's Lay of
Horatius, defender of the Sublician bridge, it appears that Lars Porsenna
actually captured the city and held on to it for a time, until the setback at
Aricia (in which his son commanded the defeated army) compelled him to
leave.
3S / ETRUSCAN ROME

#<'-*

._^V->^>#;'Jl

^k..

':-,"n'->.

5^> .<-.:.

Etruscan bronze helmet dedicated at Olympia by Hiero I of Syracuse to

celebrate his victory over the Etruscans and Carthaginians off Cumae in

474 B.C.

Nor was Porsenna the only Etruscan adventurer who briefly forced his
way into the disorganized towns; indeed, some of these raiders were even
able to settle with their troops inside the boundaries upon the Caelian Hill.

So Rome had good reason to remain highly apprehensive of continued and

renewed raids from Etruria, which lay so close. And such raids, from time
to time, continued to occur, while inside the city, too, Etruscan influence
still remained strong. Nevertheless, no really serious attempt was made by
any of the Etruscan states to recover Rome or Latium, or even the greater
lost prize of Campania beyond. Indeed, the latter country became even
more manifestly irrecoverable after Syracuse, the greatest Greek city in
Sicily, had subjected the Etruscans (and their Carthaginian allies) to an-
other defeat off Cumae in 474 B.C.
Yet their lack of perseverance in the south did not by any means signify
that this remarkable people was exhausted. The reason, strangely enough,
why they were willing to turn away from Campania and Latium was that
 THE ETRUSCAN MONARCHY / jg

certain of their city-states were, at this very period, launching a massive

fresh drive in the opposite direction, north of the Apennines in the region
that the Romans later called Cisalpine Gaul. The Etruscan city-state that
took the was Clusium, and the main center of this northern sphere
initiative

of influence was Felsina (Bologna), refounded on the site of an ancient town;

Marzabotto, seventeen miles to its southwest, gives us a unique picture of
what an ancient Etruscan city looked like; Virgil was descended from
Etruscan forebears who had founded Mantua; and the Greek ports of Adria
(Atria) and Spina on the mouths of the Po are shown by excavations to have
—
possessed substantial Etruscan trading communities the enmity between
Greeks and Etruscans, which was so vigorous on the west coast of Italy,
apparently being absent. This new, northern enterprise of the Etruscans,
though it survived long enough to bring writing and civilization to continen-
tal Europe, did not last for more than a hundred years. But for the time
being it increasingly absorbed all their energy and attention. As far, there-
fore, as the menace from Etruria was concerned, Rome found itself able to
enjoy a respite.
 THE
II.

UNITY OF ITALY
AND ROME
Preceding page:
The College of Vestals fleeing Rome after capture by the Gauls, from a painting
by Hector Le Roux.
 The Unification of Italy

Rome's Hostile Neighbors

nn he worst of the grim difficulties that descended upon the Romans
after the fail of the Tarquins still remain to be described. For,
although the Etruscan menace soon declined for the time being, the
city continued to suffer from an abundance of other enemies eager to take
advantage of its diminished position. In consequence, the greater part of the
two centuries that now followed witnessed constant, uphill fights against
each one of them, in turn, or often simultaneously; sometimes they were
fights upon which the very survival of Rome depended.
In the first place, its immediate neighbors and relatives, the Latins, once
the power of the Etruscan Tarquins was removed, immediately became
recalcitrant. For it was at about this time that the legend-encrusted town
of Lavinium, near the sea sixteen miles from Rome, threw off its allegiance
to the Romans and asserted its claims as common sanctuary of a group of
Latin coastal towns. This union, or league, conflicted with Roman interests,
and in ca. 496 a memorable battle was fought beside the volcanic depression
of Lake Regillus (Pantano; now drained). Regillus belonged to the territory
of Tusculum (near Frascati) which, in conjunction with the Arician League,
took the military lead in resisting the Romans. However, in the engagement
that followed, Rome's heavy armed infantry, supported by its mounted
knights (equites), proved superior to the old-fashioned Latin cavalry and
won a decisive victory. As a result, the Romans incorporated in their own
religion two deities who had been worshiped in Tusculum since very early
times —a borrowing characteristic of their religious practice, intended to
transfer and attract to themselves the power and following of the divinities

The twin gods thus acquired after Regillus were Castor

of defeated states.
—
and Pollux, the Greek Dioscuri horsemen who were believed to have
helped the Romans magically in the victorious battle and who from now
on became the patrons of the cavalry or knights of Rome.

43
44 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
But the batfte may not have been as'Sfecfsive as the lejgehds 6F the Romans
subsequently reported, since soon afterwards they made a treaty with the
Latin towns on a basis not of superiority but of equality. Rome was only
to provide the combined army with its general when its turn to do so
arrived; on this understanding the treaty provided for reciprocal support in
war against common enemies from the neighboring hills. And it probably
also stipulated mutual recognition of private rights —
a foretaste of the
sensible, statesmanlike measures that were destined, in later years, to take
the Romans step by step to imperial power. But they had no such power
yet; otherwise they would not have agreed to such an equally balanced

arrangement. Nevertheless, this was not equahty with each and every Latin
city individually, since Rome made its treaty with these communities jointly
and as a whole. This imphed that the Romans, though no longer forceful
enough to dominate Latium as they had under the Etruscan monarchy,
were still sufficiently strong to be recognized as the equal of the principal
Latin cities combined.
And before long the balance began to tilt further in favor of the Romans.
The first about 415 B.C. when they
sign of their superior pretensions came in
were entrusted with the organization of the Latin festival on the Alban
Mount. And very soon afterwards, profiting by a quarrel between Aricia
and another Latin city, Ardea (a primitive port), Rome moved ahead fur-
ther by signing treaties with at least one, and perhaps both, of them sepa-
rately and with Lavinium as well. This did not mean that it now considered
that these towns, or any one of them, had now become its equal; it meant
instead that it was prepared to flout the Latin League by making private
arrangements, advantageous to itself, with any one of the league's individual
members with which it desired to associate in this way. This was a foretaste
of further Roman encroachments to come. But, for the most part, the
equilibrium was still not openly upset.
This relative harmony with the Latins was imperatively needed since the
menace from the Apennines, to Latins and Romans alike, was severe. Their
remote valleys, deep glens, and high plateaus fostered isolated shepherd
communities, speaking Oscan which was an Indo-European relative of
Latin. These pastoral peoples, living tough lives wholly lacking in Mediter-
ranean amenities, greatly coveted Latium's access to the sea, superior fertil-
ity, and winter pastureland. And and more after the
so, for a century

downfall of the Tarquins, they attacked the Latins and Romans and en-
gaged in many fluctuating seesaw struggles for the critical mountain passes.
The tribes that led these persistent onslaughts were the Volsci and Aequi.
The main threat came from the Volsci who had come down from the heavily
forested central Italian mountains during the sixth century B.C. and had
established themselves in the middle reaches of the Liris (Garigliano) valley
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 4^

in southeast Latium, which provided the main inland route down into
Campania. Then, tempted by the maritime plain, they moved right up to
the regions southeast of the Alban Mount, on the very doorstep of Rome's
Latin allies. From 494 B.C. onwards these Volsci looted and raided Latm
and Roman territory almost every year. They weakened only after Rome,
in about 377, had captured their coastal stronghold Antium (Anzio), the
only really useful port of Latium, protected by a promontory from the
northwest winds. Nevertheless, Antium was then lost by the Romans again
and had to be recaptured in 338 when the ships the Volsci had based on the
port were captured. This was the termination of their independent exis-
tence. As time went on, they succumbed gradually to Romanization and
almost ceased to exist as a separate entity.
The highland Aequi also came down from the hills, compelled by the
overpopulation of their meager slopes northeast of Rome. In about 484 they
captured and fortified Algidus, a narrow strategic pass on the east side of
the Alban Mount, through which passed the inland Via Latina, for many
years the only road from Rome to the south. Then, for fifty years or more,
sometimes allied with the Volsci or others, they waged unceasing strife

against the Latins and Romans. At last, however, in about 431 they were
dislodged from Algidus, retiring gradually to their central Italian fastnesses,
where they too, within the course of the following century, were eventually
—
Romanized by virtual extermination.
The chief interest of these petty, repetitive, and for many years incon-
clusive wars against the Volsci and Aequi lay in the invention by the
Latin League in the 490s, or even before, of federal Latin colonies.
These were not whole territories like Britain's "colonies" in North
America and elsewhere, but were towns, with tracts of cultivable land
—
around them settlements of farmer-soldiers, to whom newly acquired
or recovered lands were allotted on lease or by freehold gift. These colo-
nies, somewhat resembling in this respect the kibbutzim of modern Is-

rael, were intended to provide potential Latin bases against external ene-

mies and to influence local life in favor of pacific agriculturalism. At

first they were established on the eastern borders of Latium, and the

next century and a half witnessed the foundation of fourteen such settle-
ments in these and other regions. Although the strategic points at which
they were established were no doubt selected by the Latin League only
after consultation with Rome, these were Latin and not Roman founda-
tions, and the Roman citizens among their settlers had to forfeit that
status and become citizens of the Latin League instead. It was not until
a good deal later that the Romans borrowed for themselves this fruitful
idea that was to play such an immense part in their future development
of Italy.
46 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
The enemies against whom the Latins and Romans joined forces also
included the Oscan-speaking Sabines, who lived in independent Apen-
nine hilltop villages north-northeast of Rome. Once again they had long
coveted the superior resources of the plain of Latium. In later Roman
tradition they were famed for their courage, strong morality, and reli-
gious devotion. In due course some of them adopted a rudimentary
urban life, notably at sites whose strategic location revealed their desire
to secure a supply of Ostian salt —
a desire that was highly distasteful to
Rome, which had made a treaty with Gabii to keep them at bay. How-
ever, only a very few years after the start of the Roman Republic, one
of the leaders of the Sabines, Attus Clausus, was so eager for a share of
Rome's amenities that, with the agreement of its authorities and pre-
sumably of its Latin allies as well, he moved his whole clan of four
thousand or more relatives and supporters to Roman territory, where he
settled them and became the founder of Rome's great Claudian clan (ca.

505 B.C.). Similar Sabine origins were later claimed by other Roman
clans and families as well. At first, however, Roman hopes that by ad-
mitting these immigrants they had scotched the menace of the Sabines
were disappointed, because their raids continued almost without inter-
mission. In about 496 B.C. the raiders reached the city's ramparts, and
about thirty-six years later their successors even briefly occupied the
Capitoline citadel itself before an army from the Latin city of Tusculum
helped to eject them.
Then in 449 Rome defeated the Sabines severely, following this up, as
it liked to do,by assimilating a Sabine god Sancus under the name of
Dius Fidius who was given the significant function of watching over
—
oaths and treaties and good faith between nations a matter presided
over by priestly officials (fetiales) who, by proving that all Rome's wars
were just, exercised from this time onwards an excellent effect upon
Roman morale. Thereafter, during the next one hundred and fifty years,
hostilities with the Sabines diminished and vanished, and the amalgama-

tion of the two peoples was gradually accomplished, to a large extent

because of the mutual advantage of transferring sheep between summer
(Sabine) and winter (Latin) pasturage.
It had been a major piece of good fortune to Latium and Rome

(helped on by able diplomacy) that these hostile Volscian, Aequian, and

Sabine neighbors were too poorly organized ever to unite eff*ectively

against them, for that could have meant the reduction to impotence of
Latins and Romans alike. And this was all the luckier, as far as Rome
was concerned, because the gravest of all the threats to its existence
came, at the very same time, from yet another and all too familiar
source —Etruria just across the Tiber.
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 4J

Victory over Veil

The termination of the Etruscan kingship in Rome had been followed by

a period of confusion during which, in addition to all the other enemies of
Rome, Etruscan adventurers made raids upon the city, sometimes success-
fully; and yet, at the same time and despite the ejection of the monarchy,

Etruscan influence in Rome itself continued to linger on. In the end, the
peril proved greater than the influence, for one Etruscan city-state, Veii, was
intolerably close, only twelve miles away. This extremely short distance
between the two places meant that neither could ever feel safe from the
other. Veiiwas powerful and its geographical position extremely strong. It
was situated on a steep, sheer plateau and surrounded on three sides by a
moat of running water, including, beneath the eastern end of the citadel,
the River Cremera (Valchetta) which went on to flow into the Tiber five
miles north of Rome.
Originally, like Rome, a group of hut villages that amalgamated into a
single Iron Age settlement, Veii had become by 600 B.C. not a symbiotic f
Etruscan-Italian community, such as Rome
seems to have been, but a
purely Etruscan city, and a city whose wealth and culture, during the
century that followed, contributed greatly to the rising prosperity of Etrus-
canized Rome, which was linked to by the Sublician Bridge.
its territory
These extensive possessions of Veii were guarded by a ring of bulwark
colonies and peripheral bases fed by roads for heavy-wheeled traffic leading
in every direction —including the direction of Rome. Furthermore, Veii |^
excelled in the Etruscan techniques of cultivation and irrigation and sup-
plied agricultural exports over a wide area.
In comparison with the various hill tribesmen who subjected Rome to
harassment, it more formi-
found these powerful, advanced people infinitely
dable rivals. Given such extreme proximity, their competing demands for
markets, land, and coastal salt were bound to lead to serious clashes and
had probably done so as early as the seventh century B.C. For the Tiber was
a highway that had to be controlled either by Veii or by Rome; in the long
run, no compromise was possible.
In the later 480s, the recently established Roman Republic had been
mainly controlled by the clan of the Fabii. They were traditionally con-
nected with Etruria and owned land towards Veii; in consequence they were
recognized by their fellow Romans as the defenders of the Etruscan frontier,
which they guarded with a private army of their own. So it was now against ^
the threat from Veii that the Fabii threw this semifeudal force into the field.
At first the hostilities amounted to little more than an exchange of cattle
raids, but by setting up a blockhouse near the Cremera, to command the
stream and adjoining roads, the Fabian clan transformed this minor skir-
4S / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

Etruscan warrior supporting wounded comrade.

Bronze finial of candelabra. Early fifth century B.C.
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY /^p
But in the disastrous battle of the Cremera that
mishirtg ihtb^op^ii warfare.
ensued (ca. 476-475), three hundred members and dependents of the Fabii
perished, and the blockhouse was destroyed by the enemy. The whole west
side of the Tiber was now impregnably in the hands of the Veians, and they
may even have occupied the Janiculum Hill which rose above its bank and
looked straight across at Rome.
But next, after the Etruscans' crushing defeat by the Greeks in 474, Veii
felt it advisable to make a truce with its Roman neighbors across the river,
undertakmg and money. Then, after the middle of the
to deliver grain
century, the balance of power contmued to shift in Rome's favor, and it
began to prepare for a final showdown. One of the principal bones of
contention was the town of Fidenae (Castel Giubileo) on the south (Latin)
bank of the Tiber just opposite the spot where the Cremera joins its larger
stream. This place was the first station on the salt road (Via Salaria), and
the hill on which it stood controlled the lowest river ford above Rome. So
Fidenae was a highly strategic post, which neither Veii nor Rome was
willing to allow the other to possess; and it apparently changed hands more
than once, first in earlier times and then in the first part of the fifth century
B.C.
In about 444, theRomans seemed aware that a major war with Veii lay
ahead. They now made a radical change in their government, replacing the
two annually elected consuls (instituted at the beginning of the republic) by
three (later six) army
officers with consular power (tribuni militum con-
sulari potestate), anarrangement that was retained for most of the next
eighty years*; the character and rank of these officials show that military
needs were the primary consideration. And in the following year a new
magistracy, the censorship, was created. Its two joint occupants, men of
very senior status, were to be elected for eighteen months every four years
in order to make up and maintain the official list of citizens. Once again the
primary purpose was military, for the censorship was intended to facihtate
recruitment, which had become a complicated matter owing to the proper-
ty-holding qualifications required for those serving in the army.
by these preparations, the Romans now felt ready to move
Fortified
against Veii, and they were all the more eager to do so because they
themselves were suff'ering from famine and pestilence and stood in urgent
need of new land. So in about 435 or 425 they passed to aggressive action
and once again occupied Fidenae. An appeal directed by Veii to the Etrus-
can confederation met with no response. This was a significant proof of the
country's lack of unity, which was to prove suicidal. Its immediate result

•For a slightly earlier intermission in the consulship, when the consuls were temporarily
replaced by decemviri, see p. 75.
 50 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
was prompt tlieVeians to strengthen their natural defenses against Hkely
to
Roman attacks. Wherever possible, the cliffs on which the city stood were
cut back to make them more precipitous, and around other parts of the
480-acre periphery an earthen rampart with a stone breastwork was con-
|. structed.
The occupation of Fidenae by the Romans meant full-scale war; it was
probably the most fateful of all the wars they ever fought since their very
existence depended on the outcome. It was they who took the initiative, and
they placed Veii under siege. The fighting, conducted with unprecedentedly
large forces, seems to have gone on intermittently for at least six or seven
years, though perhaps not for the ten described by tradition. In the end, the
Romans succeeded in advancing on the northward side of the walls and
^ occupying the only neck of territory that offered level access to the city.
Now this piece of land happened to contain one of the agricultural drainage
tunnels that irrigated the whole of this territory; coming in from the open
country it passed under the walls and thus entered into Veii itself. This
tunnel, then, the Romans cleared, using it to mQ3^ asmall body of men into

Handle of Etruscan bronze chest from Praeneste (Palestrina): soldiers carrying a

dead comrade. Fourth century B.C.
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY /j/

'the middle of the enemy which in this way fell into their hands. The
city,

hero of the day was Camillas, who, despite the mythical nature of many of
his alleged exploits, nevertheless emerges as a partially historical figure, the
earliest the republic can offer. Shortly before the siege began, he had com-
pelled the Romans to adopt continuous military service, without intermis-
sions for harvesting, and he had introduced regular pay; and it was he who
carried the campaign to its triumphant conclusion.
The Romans severely damaged and partly destroyed the captured strong-
hold, razing its defenses and turning out many or all of its inhabitants. This
elimination of a city-state's independent existence was a sinister innovation
in Rome's military history and a sign of the critical gravity of the war. In

keeping with the religious solemnity of their victory, the Romans, as on

other occasions, took over the defeated enemy's patron deity as their own,
establishing her cult on the Aventine Hill just outside the walls of their own
city. She was Juno, who was already worshipped as an associate of Jupiter

on the Roman Capitol but at Veii enjoyed an independent and magnificent

cult, with the special title of Regina, the Queen. As in other parts of early

Italy, she stood for vitality and youthfulness and thus for political and

military strength; and from now onwards she would no longer watch over
Veii but over Rome.
The downfall of this first great Etruscan city to succumb to the Romans
was a turning point, for not only did it remove an enormous, hampering
obstacle to their progress, but it almost doubled the size of their territory
as well. The newly conquered lands, linked by the excellent Etruscan road
system, were distributed as individual allotments to Roman citizen-farmers,
without very much consideration being given to the Latin confederate cities,
which were shown by this largely Roman victory to be outmatched, both
singly and corporatively, by the victors. Moreover, Rome's fame was
spreading to new lands. After the victory Camillus dedicated a war memo-
rial, a golden bowl, in Apollo's oracular sanctuary at Delphi in Greece. As
an intermediary in this enterprise he probably employed the Etruscan city-
state of Caere, which alone of nearby cities had close connections with
Delphi; it had failed to help its neighbor and compatriot Veii in the siege.

And so the triumphant Romans began to appear in a wider context than

Italy, among the nations of the world.

The Gallic Invasion

and its Aftermath
However, a formidable setback was on the way at the hands of the Celtic
Gauls. Celtic-speaking peoples, in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., had
moved out of central Europe as far as Spain and Britain, and then during
^2 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
the fifth century, they graHiially crossed the Alps and expeired~the'Etruscan
settlers from most of northern Italy which was henceforward known as
"Gaul this side of the Alps," or Cisalpine Gaul. Some of the Celts who
spread through Europe lived peacefully and even luxuriously; and they
developed a lively, swinging, swelling art, based principally on the free use
of contemporary Greek and Etruscan models but also echoing eastern
influences, But the Gauls who
notably from Scythia (south Russia).
swarmed into the valley of the Po were more warlike. They had developed
a frightening, if somewhat barbaric, military organization, including cav-
alry with iron horseshoes —an innovation in ancient warfare —and infantry
carrying finely tempered, slashing broadswords.
In about 387-386 B.C., under their king Brennus, thirty thousand of these
immigrants drove southwards from the Po valley into the Itahan peninsula
itself, in the hope of acquiring additional land and plunder. Learning of this
move, the Romans may have sent a reconnaissance force to the inland
Etruscan Clusium (Chiusi), which the Gallic force was threatening.
city of
At all events, the Gauls decided to abandon their attack on Clusium and
moved rapidly down against Rome itself. Only eleven miles from the city,
beside the Tiber's little tributary, the Allia (Fossa della Regina), they were
confronted by an army of ten thousand to fifteen thousand Romans.
Whether some Latins, too, formed part of these troops is uncertain; but in
any case it was the largest force Rome itself had ever put into the field.
However, in the battle that followed, the Roman phalanx of heavily armed,
spear-carrying soldiers was rushed by the much faster cavalry and infantry
of the Gauls and outreached by their swords. The Roman army was routed,
and most of its soldiers plunged into the nearby stream and were drowned.
The blackest of all days in the history of Rome left it wholly without any
men to defend it.

Brennus and his men marched on and three days later arrived at the city,
which, with the possible exception of the Capitol, they proceeded to over-
run, setting its buildings on fire, burned debris at the edge of
as a layer of
the Forum still shows today —broken roof
and carbonized wood and
tiles

clay. Rome had fallen to its first barbarian conquerors, something that was
not to happen again for eight hundred years. The Romans never forgot this
horrifying and humiliating event, and, like their successful siege of Veii a
few years earlier, it brought them to the attention of the outside world for
it attracted the notice of Greek historians. Yet the Gauls were soon bought

off and departed because they had received news that their own lands in the
north were threatened by external foes. And henceforward, despite the
occasional raids that they still launched into the peninsula, the Gallic
peoples lacked the stability to off'er a permanent threat.
In this crisis, the Romans owed a debt to their surviving Etruscan neigh-
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 53

Funeral from Felsina (Bologna) showing journey to the underworld

stele
(Celtic) footsoldier.
(center) and combat between Etruscan horseman and Gallic
End of fifth century B.C.
54 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
bor, the city-state of Caere. was situated on the edge of bare downland
It

a mere twenty miles from Rome, very close to the sea where it possessed
three little ports. The Caeritans had gained great wealth and importance
both from their metalworkings and their widespread Greek and oriental
connections. It was these links that had enabled them to confer substantial
commercial and cultural benefits upon Rome during its monarchy, includ-
ing the vital use of its ports. And then, later, they had acted as intermediary
with the pan-Hellenic shrine of Delphi in the celebration of Rome's victory
—
over Veii a victory that they themselves had helped to bring about by
failing to support their own besieged compatriots, with whom they had long
been on bad terms. Now, during the invasion by the Gauls, they had helped
Rome once again, not only by giving refuge to the sacred objects from its
temples, but also by exerting military pressure to hasten Brennus's depar-
ture. They were glad to help the Romans because Greek threats and raids
that menaced their own seacoast meant that they needed Roman assistance
in their turn.
Responding to this friendly attitude, Rome
seems to have granted Caere
a novel, privileged status (ca. 386?). This hospitium publicum, as it was
called, entitled its people to come to Rome on terms of equality with Rome's
own citizens in matters of private jurisdiction, and to enjoy freedom from
local taxes, as Romans would likewise at Caere. This proved a historic
formula because Rome later extended it, with adaptations, to many other
cities also. For the present, however, this understanding was intended to
safeguard the new frontier line that the conquest of Veii had enabled the
Romans to push forward into Etruria. Nevertheless, in Caere had
ca. 353,
the temerity to reverse its friendly policy, joining its sister-state of Tarquinii
in objecting forcibly to what was by now a too painfully manifest inferiority
to Rome. But the rising was soon brought to order, and the Caeritans were
forgivingly accorded a hundred-year truce.
After the onslaught of the Gauls theRomans no longer considered their
city sufficiently protected by the old earth rampart of Servius Tullius. So
in 378 B.C. they erected a massive new wall, one of the great defensive works
of the age; the large portions of it that can still be seen today bear the
erroneous name of the "Wall of Servius Tulhus." It was made of volcanic
stone from recently captured Veii and planned by contractors whom ma-
sons marks show to have been Greeks. More than twelve feet thick and
twenty-four feet high, the new wall enclosed a larger area than the previous
rampart, including the historic Seven Hills of Rome: and
the Palatine
Caelian, and the adjacent and independently fortified Capitol; the whole of
the Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills to the north (which had only
partly been included in the old perimeter); and the newly included Aventine
to the south, together with the adjacent Circus Maximus where chariot
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY /jj
races were held. This fourth-century wall encompassed an area of over one
thousand acres. This meant that the new Rome possessed by far the largest
perimeter of any city in Italy, being more than twice the size of recently
demolished Veii and more than four times the dimensions of Caere. A
prominent part in the creation of the wall is likely to have been played by
Camillus, who had been the hero of the siege of Veii and who later, after
the grave setback of the Gallic invasion, led the Romans into a rapid and
vigorous recovery.

The Romans
in Latium and Campania
But Rome's major problem now was its Latin confederates. Between
these ostensibly equal partners, the pendulum had already begun to swing
in the direction of the Romans before the fifth century was half over, and
then, after the conquest of Veii, their monopoly of the conquered farmlands
had emphasized their growing superiority rather crudely. Under the shock
of the subsequent Gallic invasion, however, Rome decided to display tact
to the Latinsby giving them, after all, a share in the settlement and defense
of the newly conquered Etruscan lands, in which, accordingly, two Latin
colonies were planted.
Yet the sentiments of the cities of the Latin confederacy towards Rome
were deteriorating. They had not, it is true, been disloyal for the most part
during the Gallic invasion, since they had been just as alarmed as the
Romans, but several of the largest Latin towns now began to prefer indepen-
dence to their Roman alliance. Thus in 381 the citizens of Tusculum, al-
though wholly surrounded by Roman territory, seemed on the verge of
hostile action. But at this juncture Rome successfully wooed them with an
offer of incorporation into itsown state and full Roman citizenship into the
bargain. This was a fruitful —
new idea for the future a Latin city had been
given all Rome's privileges and transformed from a Latin into a Roman
community, while nevertheless retaining its own city organization and self-
government.
Significant, too,was the whole concept that Roman citizenship could be
extended in such a way; Athens and Sparta and Corinth had never effec-
tively learned such a lesson, and a Greek monarch later noted that this sort
of arrangement was a peculiar source of Rome's strength, providing invalu-
able numerical superiority over its successive enemies. In the previous
century no city or individual would have found it attractive to change Latin
for Roman But now that the Romans were stronger than the Latins,
status.
feelings had changed. For one thing, possession of Rome's citizenship was
a safeguard against arbitrary violence on the part of its officials; and the
 5(5/ THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
theXalTh towns were not averse to such mergers since
local aristocracies of
they often possessed intimate links with their Roman counterparts already.
Indeed, the Tusculan nobles adapted themselves so enthusiastically to the
new order that they henceforward supplied Rome with numerous consuls
—a greater number, over the course of the years, than any other single city.

In 366 the consuls, now definitively revived after eighty years of intermit-
tent military government, were given a junior colleague, the praetor, to
relieve them of much civil jurisdiction so that they could have a freer hand
for the warfare that still seemed likely to lie ahead. For hostile attitudes to

Rome were now spreading among the Latin communities. One of their
leading malcontents was Praeneste (Palestrina). This princely ancient town,
on the Apennine spur dominating a major road to Campania, had formerly
been an important outpost of the Etruscans, who gave it a lavish prosperity
own homeland. And the place also pos-
rivaling that of the cities of their
sessed a great shrine and oracle of Fors Fortuna, the bringer of increase,
from which Rome had derived its cult of that goddess. During the fourth
century B.C. the Praenestines may have remained outside the Latin League;
at any rate they relished the growth of Rome so little that they sided with

f its Volscian enemies and even employed Gallic mercenaries to fight against
its troops.
Another unsatisfactory Latin city from the Roman point of view was the
no less antique Tibur (Tivoli), eighteen miles from the city. Like Praeneste,
this town dominated an important road, from its high hill above a Tiber
tributary, and it became a powerful member of the Latin League, sur-
rounded by several dependent communities. During the fourth century,
however, it appears to have engaged in frequent skirmishes against the
Romans and may even have severed relations with them altogether. But in
358 Rome succeeded in reimposing the old treaty upon and other Latin
this
cities, probably on less favorable terms involving a measure of military
control.
The Romans also took a decisive step by extending their sphere of influ-

ence into Campania. Its leading town Capua (Santa Maria Capua Vetere),
thirteen miles inland, was the second city in all Italy, enriched by the great
fertility of the region and destined to become famous for its skillful working

of bronze. It had been the capital of an Etruscan empire in Campania during

the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but thereafter its Etruscan rulers were
replaced by the Samnites. Descended from the Sabines and speaking a form
of Oscan akin to theirs, these rough hill-men, of whom more will be said
shortly, had come from fortified strong points high up in the center of the
peninsula. As their population increased, they began to covet the productive
Campanian lowlands, and not only Etruscan Capua but Greek Cumae fell
into their hands (ca. 438-421). Before long, these Samnite immigrants con-
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY /j/
trolled a league of Campanian cities, Greek and
readily absorbing the
Etruscan flair for business and becoming a Campanian nation, less
distinct
warlike than their invading forebears. In about 343, the members of this
confederation, threatened by fresh waves of invasions from Samnium, took
the fateful step of appealing under Capua's leadership to the Romans.
Thereupon Rome, in the hope of agricultural benefits, decided to make its
entrance into this large, rich area and responded to the Campanian appeal,
an event that set up a whole series of chain reactions affecting much larger
areas.
At first, however, things did not go smoothly for the Romans since their
army mutinied at having to fight so far afield (342). Moreover, Capua soon
regretted its appeal to them and sided with the Latins instead who had —
now become openly hostile to Rome. The Latins had interpreted the Roman
intervention in Campania as a menacing attempt to encircle them, and,
when the operation seemed to be failing, they felt encouraged to ask the
Roman government for a full restoration of their own previous parity and
equality. These proposals were sharply rejected, and war between Rome and
the Latins soon followed.
It was one of the bitterest wars the Romans ever had to fight and the —
first in which they can be seen to have employed a well-planned, long-term

strategy. This eventually brought catastrophe to the Latins and their Cam-
panian allies, whose cavalry, fighting poorly, suffered a heavy defeat at
Trifanum, not far from Capua. At this point, the Campanians made a
separate peace with Rome, which proceeded to assert control over the
northern part of their country. And then over the next two years, the Latin
cities, too, were obliged to submit, one after another.

When the fighting had ended, the Latin League was broken up (338). It
had lost the struggle because its members were too disunited. A very long
—
epoch had come to an end the day of the Latins was done forever, except
as a component of Roman power.

But Rome now showed a gift for conciliatory organization that no impor-
tant states of the ancient world, including those of the otherwise cleverer
Greeks, had ever displayed before. The Romans dealt with the defeated
Latins not in a spirit of vindictiveness, which would have defeated its own
purpose, but with cool common sense; and it dealt with them not by
imposing any overall, bureaucratic solution, but by making piecemeal ar-
rangements with each individual city, as the facts of every separate case
seemed to require.
In the first place, Aricia and three other places near Rome were granted
full Roman citizenship like Tusculum nearly half a century earlier. Roman
territory was thus expanded to forty-five hundred. square miles, with a
5S / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

population of at least a million. Secondly, Tibur and Praeneste, although

deprived of some land, retained formal independence, and their earlier
alliances with Rome were confirmed. Thirdly, the other ancient Latin cities,

while likewise permitted to retain their former status, were allowed treaties
only with Rome and not with each other; and Rome granted the male
inhabitants of this category of city a new sort of right, citizenship without
franchise (civitas sine suffragio). This was, in effect, a partial, halfway
Roman citizenship, by virtue of which the men of these places, while not
normally given the "public" right to vote in Rome's elections (which they
could in any case rarely have exercised since they lived too far away), were
granted "private" rights, notably the right to enter into contracts with a
Roman according to Roman law (commercium) and the entitlement to
marry a Roman without forfeiting inheritance of paternity rights
(conubium). This idea, apparently developed from the guest-right privilege
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY /jp
granted to Etruscan Caere some forty years earlier, wason tried out first
the member towns of the Campanian League and a Volscian group; and
only then, after these experiments, was it extended to the Latin cities and
later to the Sabines as well.
It was an ingenious and not unattractive arrangement. Admittedly, it was
imposed on a unilateral basis by the dominant Romans, who unlike their
partners were free to enjoy their own civic rights in all the cities with which
they were associated. Furthermore, these communities had to follow
Rome's foreign policy and were also obliged, in the event of war, to raise
—
and pay a quota of troops for "mutual defense" which meant, in effect,
the service of Rome's needs, though it was assumed that these would
coincide with their own. Yet these soldiers were allowed to serve in their
own cities' contingents, under commanders of whom half were their own
compatriots; and the Romans avoided the Greek error of imposing standing
garrisons. Indeed, except in times of crisis, they had little cause to make
demands or interfere, secure in the knowledge that the Latin cities were
ruled by landed nobilities allied with their own. Nor did these communities
have to pay the tax on property (tributum) that fell upon Roman citizens
in times of emergency.
For a long time, therefore, this halfway Roman citizenship escaped the
slur of inferior status, and it worked. The outstanding political acuteness
of the Romans enabled them to get the balance right. Their aim was to
maintain control over the Latins and others without offending local feeling;
and that, as the relative contentment of these associates amply demon-
strated, is what they for the most part achieved over a prolonged period of
time. Indeed, Latium from now on was so closely and inseparably knit
together with Rome that Virgil could later write of the Latins, in addition
to the Romans, as the rulers of the world.

Among the Latin "colonies" established during the previous century and
a half, seven were authorized by Rome to retain special privileges, but the
rest, like other Latin cities, received the novel halfway status. Hencefor-
ward, there was an ever-growing number of such colonies, which were
bulwarks of empire carefully located so as to guard the possessions
effective
of Rome and its associates from external enemies and prepare the way for
future forward leaps.
Typical of these new Latin was Cales (Calvi, near Capua), which
colonies
now became a center of Roman authority in Campania. Plots of land at this
settlement were allotted to more than two thousand families Latin, —
Roman, and Campanian settlers. Far distant from the capital by the colo-
nizing standards of the time, Cales became a pattern for future extensions
—
of "Latinity" which now meant Roman power. Another somewhat later
6o / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

The walls of the ancient Latin colony of Signia (Segni).

Probably fourth century B.C.

foundation of the same type, Cosa (Ansedonia) on the mid-Etruscan coast

(273 B.C.), shows not only the earliest known Roman harbor but the remains
of capacious cisterns, a neatly rectangular street plan modeled on Greek
urbanism in south Italy and Sicily, the remains of a voting place for the
annual elections of local officials, and strong polygonal walls with eighteen
towers and three main gates. For it was upon these Latin colonies that the

task of defense chiefly fell, and they were planned to form an iron ring
around Rome's remaining enemies in central Italy.
But a further and at first secondary, though in the long run more durable,
instrument of power invented in the later fourth century B.C. was the purely
Roman colony, including no allies among its settlers but Roman citizens
only. Colonies of this type were once again placed at skillfully selected,
strategic vantage points; for example, all the earliest foundations of this type
were planned on the sea, to serve as coast guard stations. These Roman
colonies were always linked directly to Rome by a solid and continuous
stretch ofRoman territory, which meant that they needed fewer defenders
and could therefore operate with a much smaller quota of settlers than their
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 6l

Latin counterparts. Rome did not want to send too many potential fighters
so far afield, and in any case, there were not all that many families willing
where their metropolitan citizen rights hardly seemed
to go to such places,
to count any longer. So these Roman colonies comprised only three hun-
—
dred families each only a seventh as many as there were to be at their large
Latin counterparts such as Cales.
One of the very first Roman colonies, sent out perhaps a decade or so
before the final downfall of the Latin League, was at Ostia, beside the mouth
of the Tiber. Ostia had probably first been taken control of by the Romans
some two centuries earlier, but now a more determined elfort to occupy the
place was made. One of these groups of three hundred Roman citizen-
families was sent to settle in a rectangular fort of five acres, designed like
a camp with two geometrically planned intersecting main streets and a
strong stone wall that three hundred male settlers could man if they stood
six feet apart. The colony's primary function was to defend the Tiber mouth

from maritime enemies and pirates, thus saving Rome from the necessity
of maintaining a permanent fleet, which is still wanted to avoid. But al-

though there was scarcely a harbor at the mouth of the delta-forming river,

Ostia also regulated trade, supervised the collection of salt, exacted the
payment of customs, and stored grain and other foodstuffs that could then
go on by road or river up to Rome.
Twenty-seven miles further down the coast, Antium too, after its final
capture from the Volscians in 338 was given a Roman colony, appar-
B.C.,

ently augmented by native settlers; and in 317, in response to complaints,

the place was granted autonomous local government like the Latin colonies,
thus establishing a new and permanent precedent for these much smaller
Roman citizen foundations. Thirty-eight miles lower down again, at the
remotest extremity of Roman territory, a third maritime Roman colony was
established in 329 at another former Volscian town, Tarracina (Terracina),
each settler being allotted one and one-third acres of land. By 218 B.C. the
number of coastal Roman colonies had risen to twelve, and by this time
there were more than number again maintaining guard over river
that
crossings, exits from mountain passes, and road centers. They were all
potential sites for army bases and were often resented by their neighbors,
so that the colonists had good reason to remain loyal to Rome.
Altogether, if we include not only the two types of colony but individual
allotments outside colonies as well, sixty thousand holdings were estab-
lished between 343 and 264 B.C., so that the area thus occupied was multi-
phed threefold, to a total of some fifty thousand square miles; and the
settlers who manned them provided a mighty contribution not only to
agriculture but to defense —and further aggression.
62 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
The Samnite Wars
Outstanding among the enemies whom these colonists had to confront
were the Samnites, warHke peasants and herdsmen who hved in unwalled
villages throughout the landlocked valleys and gray limestone uplands of
the Apennines. The Samnite nation in this central Italian homeland was
divided into four large tribes which were linked together in a loose but
sometimes militarily effective league and which sent delegates to a federal
assembly. In the middle of the fourth century B.C. these Samnites were
Italy's largest political unit, possessing twice the territory and population
of the Romans.
was pressure of population, with inadequate agricultural land to feed
It

it, that had brought some of their compatriots down into Campania. But

now the separate confederacy which they formed in that country had been
overwhelmed by Rome; and this the Samnites who had remained in central
Italy could not tolerate. The Latin colony of Cales also provoked them, and
so did another established in 328-327 at Fregellae (Opri) on the river Liris,
(Garigliano), which was their border with the Romans. So the Samnites
now took advantage of internal dissensions at one of the chief cities of
Campania, the ancient Greek foundation of Neapolis (Naples), to occupy
it —
with a garrison which the Romans drove out, thus precipitating the long
and complicated Second, or Great, Samnite War (327-304).
Its first important campaign, in 321, inflicted upon the Romans their

worst defeat for over sixty years, the entrapment and humiliating surrender

Relief of walled hill-town from Avezzano.

 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 6^

of a whole army Caudine Forks, east of Capua. After this disaster

at the

they were obhged to evacuate Cales and Fregellae and stopped fighting
altogether for five years. Moreover, on the resumption of the fighting, the
Samnites won further victories, which culminated in an alarming incursion
into Latium itself. Yet in the end they could not prevent Rome from
refounding the two Latin colonies they had lost and settling five others as
well— further fetters upon Samnite expansion.
Rome also created a potent new instrument of warlike policy by building
the Via Appia (Appian Way) traversing the one hundred and thirty-two
miles from Rome to Capua, mostly across the coastal plain. The more
ancient Via Latina, following an upper inland route, was uncomfortably
vulnerable to attacks from Samnium, to which the new Via Appia was not
exposed. The forerunner of so many other Roman roads on three conti-
nents, weapons of peace as well as war, this "Queen of Roads" was con-
structed, as far as possible, on a straight course, with bridges or paved fords
to carry it across rivers, while viaducts spanned marshy territory. By such
means, the Second Samnite War was eventually won by the Romans. Their
success left their enemies firmly excluded from southern Italy and much
inferior to the victors in land and population alike.
But a Third Samnite War (298-290) was still to follow. In 296 the
Samnite commander broke out northwards to join forces with a frightening
—
combination of anti-Roman allies Gauls, Etruscans, and Umbrians. But
while the Etruscans were kept at home by a diversion, the Roman army won
an important battle at Sentinum (Sassoferrato) in the Apennines. It was one
of the most northerly points that their soldiers had ever reached, and never
before had so many been engaged. But the victory was not decisive, because
hostilites still continued for another six years. Fortunes varied, but finally

the territory of the Samnites was penetrated by the Roman forces and
ravaged from end to end, so that they had to give in.
Rome's success in this war decided the whole future fate of peninsular
Italy. It had been a ferocious, patient struggle, in which the Samnites had

clung to valley after valley with dogged determination. But the Romans had
learned to exploit their interior lines in order to split the enemy into isolated
blocks, and the Latin colonies that they had continued to found served the
same purpose of dividing the central Italian tribes one from another. And
so the enemy were gradually worn down, and driven up the hills away from
their winter pastures.
In the process, the Roman army had become a good deal larger than
before. It was now subdivided into two Each legion was a master-
legions.
piece of organization, more mobile than the Greek phalanx which had
served as the original model, because a legion contained an articulated
group of thirty smaller units (maniples), each of which could maneuver and
64 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

ROME'S CONQUEST OF ITALY

Mediolanum

^H Roman and Latin territory 298 B.C.

=^ Roman gains 298-263 B.C.
||/?omo/7 allies 298 B.C. SICILY
I I

mi Roman allies 298-263 B.C.

^ annexations 241-218 B.C.

miles
100

fight separately on itsrough mountainous country as well as on the

own, in
plains, either in serried ranks or open order, thus combining compactness
with flexibility. Moreover, every maniple was formed into three lines, each
of which could advance in turn through the line ahead, replacing it and
enabling it to draw back for rest and replenishment. This new manipular
legion, tested to the utmost against the Samnites, was to prove the key to
Rome's future success.
Earlier in the century, the Roman state had begun to provide standard
weapons and equipment, an important stage towards the creation of a
professional army. And so, all legionaries wore helmets, breastplates, and
leg guards (greaves) and carried swords; and thrusting javelins had been
superseded by javelins for throwing, more than six feet long, half wood and
half iron. This new weapon had probably been introduced during the Sam-
nite wars. Those campaigns, coming on top of the Romans' ceaseless hostili-
 THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY / 6§

ties with sDTnany of their neighbors during the previous two centuries and
more, had forged their army into a terrible weapon. It was perfectly suited
to the dour perseverance that characterized the citizens of Rome, enabling
them to respond so efficiently to each successive external threat — real or
imagined since, as their sphere of interests continually was hard
widened, it

to know whether the threats were authentic or imaginary. However, the

Romans were so amply fortified by their religious leaders with the belief that
all their ways were just that they could never suppose that the military

measures they were taking might be morally wrong. And that being so, as
the great Greek historian Polybius noted, they were generally not reluctant
to employ force when they felt that force was needed.

They were also capable of atrocious cruelty. But what made the Romans^
'
so remarkable was the combination of these unpleasant traits with a talent
for patient political reasonableness that was unique in the ancient world.
They had displayed this gift before, and now they showed it once again; for
in spite of all Rome's raw wounds from the recently ended hostilities, the
defeated Samnites were offered the same treaty terms that had been pro-
posed to them at the end of the previous (second) war. Rome's treaties with
other states were either "equal" or "unequal." But the latter formula,
explicitly stating the inferiority of the other party, was increasingly becom-
ing the choice the Romans preferred, and it was this type of "agreement"
that was accorded the defeated Samnites. In 280 the Romans also made
treaties with seven Etruscan cities in order to make them part of the defense
—
system against the Gauls similar arrangements were made in more distant
parts of Italy as well.
Such treaties, intended for peoples not close or reliable enough to be
accorded the half citizenship of the Latins, were an integral and essential
part of Rome's Italian system and explain why its dependents and subjects
were regularly known as "allies" (socii). Yet, as the treaties entered into by
the Romans were bilateral, their allies were not normally permitted to be
allies with one another as well; in this sense, there was no confederacy in
Roman Italy. Like the Latins, these other had to provide troops if
allies

requested, and when their treaties with Rome were "unequal," the requests
were likely to be somewhat more peremptory. Yet their aristocracies, even
if somewhat less close than the Latin nobilities to the Roman governing

class, were generally known personally to its members and regarded by

them with sympathy; and this sort of friendly link with municipal leader-
ships was Rome's blueprint for its imperial future. The Romans protected
the rulers of these allied towns from internal revolutions and left them alone
to rule their own peoples according to their own laws and with a minimum
of conformity; and the peoples in question could be reminded that, without
66 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
having to pay taxes to Rome, they were securing from it protection and

peace. Besides, from about 289

drawing on their extensive spoils of
B.C.,

Itahan bronze, the Romans developed from earlier experiments a coinage

to meet the common commercial and industrial needs of the area. In this,
as in other respects, association with the Romans proved beneficial rather
than restrictive.

On the whole, Rome found it advisable, and was encouraged by its

religion, to keep its bargains with its allies, displaying a self-restraint, a

readiness to compromise, and a calculated generosity that the world had
never seen. And so the allies, too, had little temptation to feel misused. The
proud Samnites, was true, had lost a considerable amount of their land
it

to Roman and among them disaffection still continued to linger

settlers,

beneath the surface. But they were only a few out of a grand total of one
hundred and twenty Italian communities with which Rome, in due course,
formed perpetual alliances. After the end of the Samnite wars a network of
such agreements was extended across the whole of central Italy.
The whole Roman approach was empirical, working from precedent to
precedent according to each individual case, the relationship with every
community in turn being considered on its own complex multi-
merits. This
plication of differing agreements seems like a classic example of the cynical
principle "divide and And so it was. But like the earlier understand-
rule."
ings with the Latins, was reckoned and weighed out so acutely, with that
it

instinctive, hard, practical Roman genius for common-sense statecraft, that

the system, unhke any of its partial Greek models, proved successful for
generation after generation. That was how the Romans accomplished their
first major historical achievement, the creation of Italy. They could speak

on behalf of the country and claim to represent it as no other ancient

city-state had ever before been able to be spokesman for the territories it
had brought under its control. And so, as we shall see, when a major
military crisis arose later in the century, Rome was able to muster nearly
four hundred thousand Roman and allied troops —
and even under supreme
pressure most of them would still remain conspicuously loyal.
 4
The Class Struggle

The Early Republic

uring these one hundred and seventy years of almost incessant
fighting, the Roman community had found itself racked by the
gravest internal disturbances it was to experience for many centu-
ries to come.
When the Etruscan dynasty of the Tarquins was overthrown shortly
before 500 B.C., tradition maintained that the headship of the state had
immediately passed from the expelled monarch to a pair of consuls elected
every year. Efforts have been made in modern times to dispute this view and
speak of an interim period lasting for some decades, or even for a century
and a half, in which there was indeed a new republic, but a republic**
governed initially not by two such annually elected functionaries but by a f
single one chosen, with subordinates, for one or two years at a time, on the
analogy of certain Etruscan cities that were likewise moving at this time :*
from regal towards republican government. But this is somewhat unlikely.
Certainly there was provision in the Roman constitution for the nomination
of a single, autocratic dictator in an emergency —
but only temporarily, for
a period of six months at most, and never in any continuous succession. It
seems therefore that we must instead accept the strong tradition, based on
the lists (Fasti) which purport to record all these appointments, that main-
tained that there were pairs of top officials from the beginning of the
republic; though for one hundred and fifty years or more, these pairs were
probably not yet called consuls but praetors, from prae-ire, "to march
ahead" or "precede."
However, let us, for the sake of convenience, describe the two colleagues
as consuls from the beginning. The character of consular office was signifi-
cant and contradictory because it sharply combined supremacy and hmita-
tion. The consuls were supreme in that each of them was invested with
absolute imperium, the administrative power conferring command of the

67
68 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
army and the interpretation and execution of the law. In Rome, therefore,
unHke modern Britain, the center of poHtical gravity lay not in the legisla-
tive but in the executive, and this executive was not "responsible" to the
community or Senate or Assembly from day to day, but "representative,"
limited only by law. In these respects the United States of America is
—
somewhat closer than Britain to ancient Rome whose ideas it deliberately
—
borrowed in that the power of the American president, despite sharp
modem disputes on the subject, is likewise limited by nothing but the law.
In ancient Rome, however, the "magistrates," as these officials were called,
as well as the relatively few lesser magistrates added later on, were subject
to fewer limitations than the president of the United States. (To take a single
example, they enjoyed immunity from prosecution while in office.) This
state of affairs corresponded with the Romans' marked respect for lawful
public authority and their inherited, disciplined conviction that it ought to
be obeyed. And this large power vested in the executive obviously gave it
a greater possibility of getting things done. But on the debit side, the
situation, though it admittedly did not silence criticism of the consuls,
inhibited the development of democracy in any modem Western sense.
Yet although responsible to no one, and limited only by the law in the
exercise of their duties, the consuls nevertheless were subject to two practi-
cal restrictions. In the first place, they were elected for only a single year.
And, secondly, being a pair, they were subject to one another's vetoes. Since
the power of each was all-pervading, neither one could prevail over the
other; if they disagreed, it was understood that the colleague who was
against action could veto his fellow consul who was for it. The retention of
a negative veto of this kind was not altogether inadvisable since the annually
elected consuls might be stupid or incompetent, or arrogantly obstinate. Yet
they also possessed the inherited training of their class, which very often
produced a remarkable spirit of consensus and an attitude of selfless sac-

rifice to the needs of the community as a whole. The consuls also possessed
the opportunity, generally if not always advantageous, of being able to
consult the other representatives of their own experienced clique, since
these were their fellow members of the Senate.
The members of this body, which retained its numerical strength of three
hundred for nearly half a millennium,had naturally gained more say in
affairs after the monarchy was expelled, an act in which they surely played

a substantial part; and from that time onwards they allowed officials and
other notables to join the heads of the families who had formerly monopo-
lized their ranks. The Senate possessed no executive powers. But it advised
the elected magistrates on domestic and foreign policy, finance, and reli-
gion, and counseled them on legislative proposals as well —
though it was
generally willing enough to give a free hand to these officials, who were their
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE / 6()

fellow senators and belonged to the same clans and families as themselves.
And the consuls on their side, despite their extensive constitutional powers,
were likely enough to defer to the Senate's advice for the same reasons
and also because the brief annuality of their own office made them vulnera-
ble after it was over. Besides, the senators were endowed with redoubtable
prestige due to their positions and family traditions and achievements. The
Latin word for this prestige, auctoritas, conveyed a very urgent call for
respect and deference, and the individual auctoritas of each senator com-
bined to form a corporate influence that, in a county dependent to an
exceptional extent on collective endeavors, remained strong enough to sur-
vive all the growing pains of the republic and keep on guiding its policies
for centuries.
That is not, of course, to deny that there were dissensions within the
ranks of the Senate itself. No doubt there were, at all periods. Yet for a very
long time there was nothing resembling a divergence of party programs. It

was rather a matter of shifting networks of personal and collective associa-

tions, as clans, families, or sometimes individuals combined temporarily
with one another in rival groups. But any disagreements that thereby arose
did not greatly inhibit the effectiveness of the early republican Senate as a i

whole, even in the face of a whole host of foreign and internal oppositions
and problems.

Since the Senate remained in law purely advisory, was not the body that
it

elected the consuls year by year. This was the Assembly of Roman citizens
(comitia centuriata), which had received its shape, it was said, from King
Servius Tullius. However, this assembly had been weighted from the begin-
ning so that the centuries of the well-to-do possessed far greater voting
power than the poor. Moreover, candidates for the consulship were pro- ,

posed to the Assembly by the senators, from their own ranks. The Assem-
bly, it is true, enacted laws, declared war and peace, and conducted trials.
Yet the senators, with their superior prestige and wealth, controlled its
votes on all such occasions. In many respects, therefore, the legal appear-
ance of democracy was sharply corrected by what in fact happened.
The Greek historian Polybius, keenly studied and followed by the makers
of the American Constitution, looked back from the second century B.C.
and enormously admired the Roman state for the internal equilibrium that,
despite all its problems, it had maintained over so many hundreds of years;
and this he ascribed to Rome's system of mutual automatic balances and
checks between its legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Yet the
equilibrium to which he devoted this praise rested on a quaint cluster of
unspecific, impalpable, illogical customs and conventions that were called
into play empirically and pragmatically as each successive situation de-
JO / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

Silver denarius of P. Licinius Nerva (113/112 B.C.) showing

two voters in the Assembly with an attendant.

manded. Indeed Polybius himself appreciated this, pointing out that the
system had developed "not according to a theory but through frequent
conflicts and practical crises." Yet there was not any authentic "balance"
at all, since the Assembly's formal power so greatly exceeded any power it
possessed in reality.
This curious gulf between fact and appearance was created by one of the
most important factors in Roman life, which continued to influence it

profoundly for centuries. This was the institution of clientela. Roman soci-

ety was a structure composed of powerful patroni and their dependent

clientes. The client was a free man who entrusted himself to the patronage

of another and received protection from him in return. The client helped
his patron to succeed in public life and furthered his interests by every
means in his power, and in return the patron looked after his client's private
affairs and gave him financial or legal support.

Such mutual arrangements are not unparalleled in other societies, but the
Roman institution was remarkable for its all-pervasiveness and binding
cogency. Clientela was hereditary; it was also heavily charged with feeling
and emotion. A man was supposed to rate his clients even before his own
relations by marriage. A law of the mid-fifth century B.C. damns and curses
any patron who behaves fraudulently towards his client. Clientela, it is true,
was probably not enforceable by legal sanctions. But that was immaterial
beside the powerful quasi-religious force it had attained by long and univer-
sally respected custom. The keynotes of this force were fides, mutual good
faith — worshipped as a goddess, according to tradition, from the dimmest
early past— and pietas, the dutiful respect owed to patrons just as it was
owed to parents, fatherland, and gods.
Here was another reason why the Assembly, for all its impressive demo-
cratic-sounding "powers," could never be a truly democratic body. Not
only were its richest members in possession of disproportionate voting
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE ///

power, but those assemblymen who lacked wealth were, for the most part,
clients of rich men and senators in whose favor, therefore, or in favor of
whose friends and relations, they were in duty bound to cast their votes in
the annual elections to state offices. On the credit side it might be said that
a poor client's relationship to his patron, based on inescapable ties of good
faith, gave his meaning and security that poor people in other coun-
life a
tries have frequently lacked and still lack today. Nevertheless, clientela

acted as a powerful brake on democratic development and indeed helped

to prevent it from ever taking place.

Patricians and Plebeians

For one thing, this relationship between patrons and clients reflected the
basic division of Roman society, existent when the republic started or earlier
between patricians and plebeians (plebs). After the beginning of the
still,

republic, as we have seen, although the Senate was apparently not increased
in size, it came to include not only heads of families (patres familias) but
other prominent personages as well. And since these were very often the
sons, descendants, or relatives of the patres familias, they became known
because of this relationship as patricii.

The patricians exercised power not only through their clients but by
virtue of a monopoly, hallowed by custom, of inherited religious rights,
including the administration of major cults and the power to consult the
gods (auspicia), as well as the control of law and the calendar, which were
both religious in character. During the fifth century B.C. some fifty-three
patrician clans (centes) are known — less apparently than there had been
under the kings, though some names may be lost —comprising a closed body
of not more than one thousand families. At the outset of the republic there
was a small inner ring of especially powerful patrician clans, notably the
Aemilii, Cornelii, and Fabii. And to these were added, after their immigra-
tion from Sabine territory, the Claudii as well.
However, these patricians comprised less than one-tenth of the total
citizen population of Rome, and possibly not more than one-fourteenth.
The remaining large majority of the inhabitants (apart from a number of
slaves, a normal feature of ancient societies) were the plebeians, and the
sharp political and social distinction that separated them from the patri-
cians was the outstanding feature of early republican social history. To some
extent clientela kept the plebeians happy, since their patrons were obliged
by insistent moral sanctions to give them help. But although all clients were
plebeians, not all plebeians were clients; immigrant traders, for example,
were left out in the cold. Besides, the most that a patron could do, or was
willing to do, was not always enough to prevent discontent. For one thing,
J2 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
the plebeians were completely excluded from influential positions, including
the consulships, and initially from membership in the Senate. This was a
point that irritated the more powerful and prosperous of the plebeians
who alone among that order could aff'ord the costs of holding office, so that
it was they who were often seen leading movements of plebeian protest. To
this extent, successive Roman attempts at social reform or revolution were
merely the endeavors of the influential men at the top of the plebeian class
to climb to higher status, sometimes with the support of this or that oppor-
tunistic patrician.
But there was a great deal more to the internal disturbances of the early
republic than that. While exclusion from office was only frustrating for the
prominent plebeians at the top, the remaining plebeians, who covered a very
wide spectrum ranging right down to the bottom of the "free" social scale,
did not want power so much and protection from the abuses of
as rescue
power that were being committed by others. Many of these men had suf-
fered grievous impoverishment from the abrupt fall in Rome's prosperity
and resources after the expulsion of the Etruscan monarchs. When this
happened, the city had sunk right back to the status of a purely agrarian
community operating at a low subsistence level; and what with the active
competition offered by their Latin allies, and harassment from enemies on
every side, there just was not enough tolerable soil available, on the small
territory of the early republic, to give everyone a living. Besides, much of
this territorywas public land (ager publicus), inaccessible to the plebeians;
and even if one of them did possess land of his own, he very often had to
go and fight in one of the unceasing frontier wars, and when he came back,
his farm had gone to ruin in his absence.
In these conditions, crippling grain shortages occurred time after time.
They brought famines, and to ward them off*, the Romans founded a temple
of the grain goddess Ceres (ca. 496 or 493). The worship of Ceres was
essentially a cult of the plebeians. It was borrowed from the Greek city of
Cumae, where her Greek counterpart Demeter was one of the leading
divinities. This Greek origin was significant since the Roman temple was

located beneath the Aventine Hill, in an area near the Cattle Market and
the river wharves that was a center for Greek traders. And it was to the
Greeks that the poor of Rome, as of other places, looked for ideas of
—
democracy and sometimes for ideas of popular, plebeian-based, one-man
rule, for which would-be autocrats allegedly made three separate bids at
Rome during these early years of the republic. The economic situation in
the fifth century was grim, due not only to the shortages and famines but
to the shattering epidemics that came in their wake. And in the hope of
removing these further terrible accompaniments to all their internal and
external troubles the Romans continued their religious borrowings by tak-
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE //J
ing over the great Greek healing god Apollo, in whose honor they built a
temple in about 431 B.C.

As a result of the disastrous agricultural situation, a large number of

plebeians fell desperately into debt. All debt legislation of the ancient world,
in which rates of interest were very high indeed, seem to us alarmingly
stringent; and the Roman laws were no exception. Worst of all, if a man
could not pay his debts, and had exhausted other means of raising money,
he had only his own body left to pledge, and so he became, on default, not
indeed precisely a slave but a "man in fetters" (nexus), whose position
amounted in practice to very much the same thing: a chattel and prisoner
reduced to inherited serfdom to his creditor, with little hope of ever recover-
ing his lost freedom again. In the first century of the republic, as very often
later, debt was a crucial and catastrophic problem. Indeed, it must be
regarded as the chief reason for the bitter hostility that now developed
between the plebeians and their patrician governing class; for it was the state
authorities' unjustand arbitrary enforcement of the laws of debt that caused
the plebeian indignation and sense of grievance to reach the boiling point.
Yet the patrician government could not do without the plebeians, since
those of them who possessed the requisite property qualifications were
needed as soldiers; and this consciousness that they were indispensable
encouraged the plebeians to resort to collective protests. Since trade unions
and general strikes had not been heard of, their protests took the form of
secessions. Secessio signifies their "retirement" from the rest of the Roman
community, in the sense of a literal physical departure. To suggest that all

the recorded secessions were threats that were never carried out is uncon-
vincing, since the tradition to the contrary is too persistent. What we are
told is that the plebeians, or a proportion of them, moved away from the
city —presumably with their families — to one of the hills beyond its periph-
ery, a remarkable example of organized collective bargaining that virtually
created a temporary state within a state and split the nation in two. What
is more, the plebeians were reported to have made withdrawals of this kind
no fewer than five times during the first two and a quarter centuries of the
republic. It is true that since later historians made a practice of inventing
duplicates and mirror images of recent events and inserting them into their
picture of the distant, httle-known past, there probably were not as many
as five of these secessions. Nevertheless, to reject all but the last of them y
is still unduly seems reasonable to accept, tentatively, the very
sceptical. It 1

earliest secession as well, since the new social and economic problems at the %
outset of the diminished, embattled republic must have been acute.
What seems to have happened, then, on the first of these occasions (494
B.C.) was that a body of plebeians marched up the Aventine Hill, which was
 J4 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
Still outside the walls of Rome at this time and belonged, as we have seen,
to an area frequented by Greek traders familiar with democratic ideas. And
once there, following an old Italian formula, the plebeians all swore to one
another a corporate oath of mutual support. Their secession, followed by
this oath, proved effective because, in order to prevent the nation and the
army from disintegrating, the patrician authorities felt obliged to grant their
main request. This demanded the creation of a small number of functiona-
ries to represent plebeian interests. These tribunes of the plebeians or of the
people (tribuni plebis), as they were called, would have the duty of interced-
ing against the acts of any state official in order to protect plebeians from
execution, arrest, or molestation —including a takeover by their creditors.

.^\ The tribunes, who thus became the defenders of the plebeians just as patrons
.
^y were obliged to defend their clients, did not draw their power from any law
V Xl V — they were not state officials or magistrates —but derived it from an oath
Q j\ sworn by the plebeians to safeguard their inviolability, any infringement of
\ yi which would provoke a curse and incur pain of death. The first holders of
V these tribunates were plebeians of substance and ambition. Their office was
a strange and unprecedented institution with a long, varied, and fateful
future, during which it sometimes contrived to protect the private rights of
its constituents —
though not always, and it never succeeded in making
Rome into a democracy.
Shortly after the establishment of the tribunate, a quarrel developed
about the land owned by the state (ager publicus). The patricians preferred
to maintain this public ownership, which enabled them to settle on such
territory and treat it as their own, while the plebeians on the other hand
wanted it to be distributed among themselves. While this dispute was still
under way, constitutional agitation in 471 obliged the state authorities to
agree to the establishment of a special Council of which the members were
to be exclusively plebeians (Concilium plebis). It was the task of the tribuni
plebis to summon this Council, tribe by tribe, to meetings at which the
annual elections of their own successors took place, various kinds of mea-
sures (plebiscita) were moved and passed, and lawsuits and trials of certain
categories were conducted. This existence of the plebeian Council created
what seems to modern students an almost ludicrously complicated state of
affairs according to which, in addition to the Comitia centuriata and its

semiobsolete predecessor, Comitia curiata, there was now what amounted

virtually to a third Assembly. But the Concilium plebis was not, initially,
an official organ of the Roman state, since it was only about two centuries
later that its enactments came to be accorded equal validity with the laws.
Until then, they were merely expressions of the plebeians' will and intent
and were noted as such by the government —which generally found it

advisable to accept them.

 THECLASSSTRUGGLE //J
The Twelve Tables
All this was being done against a background of famine, pestilence, and
savage frontier warfare against numerous enemies. In these desperate cir-

cumstances, the plebeians, who bore the brunt of the miseries and the
more discontented than anyone else, out of the conviction that
fighting, felt
every privilege that they had so far attained was merely formal and that
nothing substantial had been done to relieve their social and economic
miseries. Nor did they really know, legally speaking, how they stood, since
the laws were not written down and were interpreted by the college of
priests (pontifices), who at this time were all still was this issue
patricians. It
that played a dominant part in the plebeians' next demands and these —
demands became so violent and pressing that in 451 B.C. the normal appoint-
ments to consulships were temporarily suspended and a commission of ten
patricians, the decemviri, under the chairmanship of Appius Claudius, was
appointed to write down a collection of laws. The product of their labors
was enacted by the Assembly of the centuries as a statute and openly
published for all to examine as had never been done before, on tablets that
were set up in the Forum: the Twelve Tables. The original tablets were
destroyed in the invasion by the Gauls some sixty years later, but considera-
ble and apparently typical portions of the texts have come down to us in
scattered and often reedited quotations by later authorities.
In demanding that such a step should be taken, the plebeians were
inspired by the Greek ideas they had heard around the Aventine and its
wharves, for the establishment of a code of laws as a means of political
compromise was an expedient very familiar to the Greeks. Indeed, tradition
maintained that before carrying out their work the decemvirs had made a
—
journey to Athens which is unlikely, though they may have visited the
Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily or at least studied their procedures.
True, whether the Twelve Tables ought to be regarded as displaying any
extensive or specific Greek influence at all is far from certain, especially as
they do not constitute a Greek-type code but are a mosaic of varied, incom-
plete provisions. However, much that we find in them is attributable in a
general way to Rome's contacts with Greek thought, directly and through
Etruria, over the previous one hundred one hundred and fifty years.
The surviving excerpts and adaptations of the Twelve Tables constitute
by far our most precious information about Rome of the fifth century B.C.
Their field is the civil law, the law regarding the rights and duties of Roman
citizens (cives Romani) and the relation of one citizen to another which —
continued to be the only law Rome had for many centuries. The contents
of the tables form a strange mixture of widely ranging principles and minor
details, of private, public, and criminal law, of rules about matters ranging
j6 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
from communal hygiene to personal safety. What is quite clear, however,
even from the somewhat modernized Latin in which these regulations have
come down to us, is that the men who originally framed and drafted their
short, gnomic sentences were hard practical thinkers who were able to
express themselves in terse, plain, and almost painfully exact language and
who already possessed in full measure that unparalleled talent for precise
legal definition that is one of Rome's greatest gifts to humanity.
The impact of the Twelve Tables upon later generations was enormous.
After their disappearance in the Gaulish invasion they were meticulously
reconstructed and remained legally vahd. Indeed, they were traditionally
seen, with a measure of respectful exaggeration, as the source of much or
most of the whole body of Roman law; and for century after century they
retained a dominant position in the education of every Roman citizen.
This massively triumphant subsequent career of the Twelve Tables might
lead us to conclude that the efforts of the decemvirs who drew them up had
been successful. Paradoxically enough, however, their initial publication of
the tables was extremely badly received —
by the very plebeians for whose
benefit the entire exercise had been conducted. For the decemvirs had not,
to any significant extent, regarded it as part of their job to introduce into
their compilation any new measures to improve the plebeians' lot. On the
contrary, their duty, as they interpreted it, was merely to reduce to visible
statute form the most important regulations of the already existing custom-
ary law, with only insignificant additions or adjustments. By carrying out
this task, and thereby publishing abroad the more socially significant and
controversial of the rules that had hitherto been known only to the patri-
cians, they beheved they had done quite enough to satisfy plebeian demands
— and that they could, therefore, in the interests of the patricians, safely
evade having to do anything more. But plebeian contentment was not
forthcoming.
Nevertheless, we who scrutinize the tables today find it impressive that
a people at such a relatively early stage of development were so clearly able
to disentangle law from religion, deriving the sanction of their legal pro-
nouncements not from any divine or wholly or partly legendary lawgiver,
as so many of their predecessors in other places had done, but rather from
a sense of justice and equity, still narrow yet already strong. The Twelve
Tables also show a surprisingly precocious clarity of conception in dealing
with contract and property. And they proposed, as we saw earher, a death
penalty for any patron who cheated his client —though that, like the rest
of these provisions, was presumably nothing new.
Moreover, in the measures regarding marriage, archaism is not untem-
pered by liberalism. In the earliest days Roman matrimony granted every
husband the power of manus, which bestowed on him the same rights over
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE / JJ

his wife as his status as father of the family also gave him over their children.
But a weakening of the husband's authority was already sanctioned
slight

by the Twelve Tables, according to which his wife, after she had reached
the age of twenty-five, retained possession of her own property. This right,
it is true, was still subject to formal control by father or guardian (according
to the type of marriage), and the Twelve Tables gave a mother no right of
succession to an intestate son. However, despite such official limitations, the
mater familias enjoyed, by custom, great respect and influence, being re-

quired to supervise, for example, the education of her young children. On

the lips of men, it is was much stress on women's place and duties
true, there
in the home. But women and went out and about with a liberty that
lived
far exceeded the conditions of their Greek counterparts and instead recalled
the freedom enjoyed by the women of Etruria. The Twelve Tables give some
idea of how far this movement towards emancipation had gone. By another
law of the tables, a wife could avoid her husband's legal control by passing
three nights each year away from his house. In due course there also
developed free marriage, based on mutual consent, which gave the husband
no authority over his wife.
Up to a point, too, though the details are much disputed, the tables
safeguarded a Roman citizen's capital rights, for they confirmed that the
only court that might hear a capital charge and impose a death sentence
—
was the Comitia centuriata which at least meant that he could not incur
this peril from any other court. But that might not be particularly comfort-
ing, especially as summary capital jurisdiction by officials was not ruled out.
Nor was the ferocious severity of the law of debt sufficiently mitigated. It
was all very well adding, as was done, that the execution of a court order
against debtors must be delayed for thirty days and that the creditor must
feed them adequately and not overload them with chains. But it was not
yet made clear that there must always be a court order before the creditor
took forcible action; and above all the bitter fact remained that he was still
eventually permitted to take his debtors over as permanent serfs. Moreover,
the very fact that the tables defined these and other already existing social
hardships, far from improving the atmosphere as had been hoped, meant
that when people saw in writing all the rules and sanctions that had been
imposed on them and were still in force, they felt appalled.

Social Appeasement

The decemvirs therefore failed to win the approval of the plebeians, as

indeed the legends surrounding their endeavors faithfully recall, though
they add numerous melodramatic embroideries. The decemvirate continued
into a second year of office, during which a veto on intermarriage between
jS / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
patricians and plebeians was apparently confirmed. But then the decemvirs
fell from power, and the normal succession of consulships was restored.

Their downfall was achieved by a second secession in 449, once again, it

would appear, to the Aventine, which had been allocated to them as agricul-
tural or building land some seven years earher in an attempt at conciliation
under pressure. The years 449 and 447 also witnessed legislative measures
in favour of the plebeians that strengthened and confirmed certain of their
existing institutions; but these were exaggerated by later historical tradition
because the fall of the decemvirs seemed, retrospectively, such an important
and progressive landmark. Then, in 455, the ban on intermarriage between
patricians and plebeians may have been lifted. Or more probably —
since the
patricians, backed by their clients, continued for years to fight every posi-
tion foot by foot —this was only an attempt to remove it, which did not
prove successful. This conclusion is suggested by the continuing decline in
the number of patrician families who carried their persistent distaste for
intermarrying to the lengths of class suicide.

In the following year the succession of consuls was temporarily broken

when groups of army officers were appointed instead. This was primarily
for military purposes (p. 49). But the new system, which continued not
merely for a year or two like the earlier substitution by decemvirs, but for
nearly eighty years (with interruptions), also served the cause of the plebei-
ans, who were able to gain an occasional place among these military officers,
a place that they had not yet succeeded in gaining among the consuls. But
the most prominent member of the new leadership was the winner of the
war against Veii, Camillus, who was a patrician.
Towards the end of Camillus's career, however, the consulate was re-
stored; and after a prolonged struggle two tribunes of the people,
Licinius and Sextius, reelected, it was said, for as long as ten years
(376-367), at last carried a proposal one of the consuls could
that
henceforward always be a plebeian. Very soon, individual plebeians were
attaining positions of great and long-lasting political power; and only
twenty-five years after the Licinian-Sextian measure, the inclusion of a
plebeian among every pair of consuls became obligatory. The censor-
ship, too, (p. 49) became by 351 at the latest, and
accessible to plebeians
in 339 it was decreed that one censor must always come from their
ranks. The effect of these changes was to create a new ruling class, no
longer an entirely patrician aristocracy but a nobility consisting of those
men, patrician and plebeian alike, whose ancestry had included consuls
—
or censors or dictators which is what the term "noble" came to mean.
And within the next century plebeian clans such as the Marcii and
Decii and Curii, in addition to those who had come from Tusculum and
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE //p
elsewhere, succeeded in establishing themselves among the leaders of
this new oligarchy of nobles.
Plebeians of lesser rank were aided by the creation of a new office of state,
the praetorship, in 366. This "urban praetor" was to undertake legal and
other civilian functions in order to leave the two consuls free for military
duties. But this intervention also helped the plebeians since the interests of
the underprivileged were benefited by the successive praetors' yearly
"edicts." Higher officials of the Roman state were accustomed to proclaim
by edict, on annual appointment to their office, the major policies that they
proposed to follow as its occupants. Among such edicts those of the praetor,
owing to his legal responsibilities, were of special significance for the devel-
opment of private law, and ultimately they became even more important
than the Twelve Tables and the source of a great deal of later legislation.
It was true that like other senior functionaries, praetors were merely sup-

posed to apply regulations that were already in force rather than institute
new ones; but in fact their edicts formulated a multitude of new rules and
improvements adapted to the increasing complexity of society. They in-
cluded many remedies for unfairness and abuse and were guided, subject
to a certain latent and not always conscious class bias, by tolerant flexibility
and massive fairness, the "equity" of which the Twelve Tables had already
shown signs.
Nevertheless, such improvements only became apparent over the years.
For the time being, even if the annexations of Veii and its territory meant
that more land was now available, many people remained in the grim
clutches of poverty and debt. Licinius and Sextius tried to do something
about this by providing that the interest that a debtor had already paid
should be deducted from the amount of debt he still owed. Although the
tribunes added, in order not to distress creditors too much, that this balance
must then be repaid in annual installments within a period not exceeding
three years, their proposal was by ancient standards radical; it reminded
conservatives of alarming demands for a clean slate that had become a
feature of Greek city-states. For such reasons, these relief enactments evi-
dently remained ineffective, for we hear of no fewer than four further
endeavors to mitigate debt hardships within the course of the next fifty

years. There was even an attempt to veto borrowing on interest altogether

(ca. 342). Its aim was to prevent hardships and abuses; but it must also have m»,

made it much more difficult for impoverished people to secure the loans
they wanted.
Licinius and Sextius also established limits on the amount of land that
could be owned by any one person. This was intended to appease the land
hunger of the poor and to make sure that they secured an adequate share
of conquered territories; but the measure seems to have become a dead letter
8o / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
before long. Nevertheless, the endeavors of these two tribunes of the people,
dim figures though they are, to ease the conditions of the plebeians, were
unprecedented and impressive — the most important internal reforms since
the foundation of the republic. And it wasthough perhaps still
fitting,

overoptimistic, that in the crisis year of their principal measures Camillus

vowed a temple to Concord, thus echoing the ideal and desideratum often
invoked by Greek cities, under the name of Homonoia, in order to end their
internal disharmonies.
The next decades witnessed further perceptible advances in social prog-
ress and unity, so that Rome went into its decisive struggle against the Latin
cities (Chapter 3) with a reasonable degree, if not of concord, at least of
public acquiescence. Whatever the deficiencies of the system from a demo-
cratic viewpoint, it proved of decisive importance for the future that Rome,
convulsed by these social dissensions same time as it was attacked
at the
by foreign foes on every had prevented the internal strife from reaching
side,
suicidal proportions; it was thus given a free hand to suppress each of its
foreign enemies in turn, vastly expanding its territory and resources in the
process.

Yet emergency of the Second and Great Samnite War (327-

in the acute

304 B.C.), fresh measures of social appeasement still seemed urgently neces-
sary in order to ensure that Rome's plebeian soldiers continued to fight. The
most far-reaching step was taken by the consul Poetelius, probably in 326
B.C., shortly after the beginning of the war. As we have seen, there had

already been many measures designed to relieve the position of debtors

earlier in the century; but the reforms of Poetelius, although obscure to us
today, were apparently more comprehensive and effective. True, the suppo-
sition that he altogether abolished the ancient custom by which a debtor
could be sold and become the permanent hereditary bondman of his credi-
tor seems unlikely. Yet he improved on the Twelve Tables by insisting that
in all circumstances a court judgment was necessary before this extreme
step could be taken. He may also have enacted that loans could be made
on the security of the property of the borrower instead of his person; and
that creditors, therefore, must be prepared to accept whatever property
debtors offered as a payment. Although this was not the end of the problem,
since it was destined to recur even more urgently within not many decades,
these measures were evidently far more important for most Romans than
any military or political developments of the day and almost significant
enough to justify the later enthusiasm of the historian Livy, who declared
that the legislation of Poetelius inaugurated a new era of liberty for the
Roman plebeians.
Of outstanding importance, too, though scarcely less enigmatic, are the
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE / 8l

social reforms introduced shortly afterwards by the first of all Romans who
can be regarded as a historical personage, Appius Claudius, censor in 312
B.C. —
Appius Claudius, known as Caecus ("blind") which he became in his
old age —
must have been a remarkable man. For one thing, he was the
writer of a series of pungent moral sayings in verse, thus becoming the first
known personage in Latin literature. Furthermore, during his censorship he
inaugurated two mighty engineering and building traditions by construct-
ing, first, the precursor of Rome's aqueducts, the Aqua Appia, which
brought water from the Sabine hills to the city in an underground tunnel
(including one mile of overground conduit), and, secondly, the Via Appia
or Appian Way which was to play an active part in the strategy of the
Second Samnite War.
Moreover, although himself a patrician, Appius Claudius employed his
censorship to increase the part played by the plebeians in public life. A
desire to secure their effective service in the armies fighting the war may
have also been in his mind. But his principal aim was to further the interests
of a class disqualified from army service, the landless urban population
whom no previous reformer had ever tried to help. Appius's intention was
probably to avoid discontent and turbulence on the home front; but at any
rate, whatever his motives, he helped these city poor. In the long run, his
eff'orts on their behalf enjoyed some success; from then on the plebeian
Council felt a special responsibility for this section of the population,
though the effects of his reforms were by no means conspicuous immedi-

ately, since some of them were rescinded only eight years after they had first
been enacted.
As Appius Claudius also admitted the sons of former slaves
censor,
(freedmen) to the Senate, a step that even many centuries later would still
have seemed revolutionary and was in fact reversed by the consuls of the
following year. More lasting in its beneficial eff*ects on the plebeians was a
further development that Appius appears to have instigated in 304 B.C. by
a calculated indiscretion. This was the publication by his secretary, Cnaeus
Flavius, who had become a state official, of a manual of correct forms of
legal procedure. Despite the disclosure of laws in the Twelve Tables, the
knowledge of these technicalities had hitherto still remained a monopoly of
the patrician college of priests (pontifices). But now their publication made
them available to future generations of lay jurists. This event, and the
powerful opposition it aroused in conservative circles, created an atmos-
phere of perilous tension; and Flavius, the perpetrator of the courageous
deed, like Camillus before him, dedicated a shrine to the spirit of Concord.
It was probably no coincidence, or at least part of the same series of

progressive events, that a law of 300 B.C. gave all citizens the right to appeal
(provocatio) against capital sentences imposed by any official; another law
82 / THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME
of the same date made membership of the pontifices plebeian.
half the
In 298 the third and last Samnite War began, and it lasted for eight years.
The ferocious struggle ended in victory, but also in financial exhaustion.
The plebeians of middle rank serving in the army had done so, like many
before them, at the cost of the prosperity of their farms, which often fell into
decay, so that despite the Poetelian law, they fell heavily into debt. So
restless did they become, and so grave was the consequent friction, that in
accordance with the constitution a dictator, Quintus Hortensius, was ap-
pointed (287 B.C.) as a temporary expedient to meet the emergency.
What economic measures Hortensius took, we are not sure. But it is
at least known that he passed a law of a constitutional nature in favor
of the plebeians, providing that the resolutions of their Council, the
Concilium plebis, should have the force of law and be binding upon the
whole community, patricians and plebeians alike, without the need for
the National Assembly, the Comitia centuriata, or Senate to concur.
Thus a right that had been claimed for more than one hundred and fifty
years was conceded, and the decisions of the plebeians were now every
bit as valid as those of the executive. At very long last, the struggle be-
tween the orders had ended. The Roman people, acting through the As-
sembly, had already been sovereign at a much earlier date in the eyes of
the law, but not in reality. Now, when the plebeians' measures had
gained full legal acceptance —and and a half these
for the next century
enactments provided the greater part of Rome's legislation it might —
seem that the people's sovereignty had been brought to completion; and
the Hortensian law that produced this result has sometimes been hailed
as the triumph of democracy.
But that it was not, for three reasons. In the first place, whatever meas-
ures Hortensius may have taken to clear up the debt situation did not prove
permanently effective, any more than the enactments that had gone before
them, so that democracy in the economic and social fields was still out of
reach and sight. Secondly, the plebeian Council, though it could on occasion
be swayed by agitators opposed to the establishment, was normally con-
trolled by its richest members just as thoroughly as the National Assembly
was. And, thirdly, the Council's guiding spirits, the tribunes of the people
who possessed the power of vetoing the actions of all Roman magistrates,
were cleverly won over by the other side. This happened by gradual stages.
First —the dates are uncertain —
they were allowed to sit in the Senate and
listen to debates. Next, they received the right to put motions to the Senate.

And finally, and this had happened before the end of the century, they were
even authorized to convene the Senate and preside over its sessions. None
of this was unacceptable to the tribunes themselves, for they were often men
who wanted to pursue official careers. This they were finally in a position
 THECLASSSTRUGGLE / 8j

to do, now that Rome possessed a dominant nobility composed of plebeians

as well as patricians.
If things had gone the other way, and the tribunes of the people had
continued to develop their formal powers of obstruction, the whole machin-
ery of government might well have been paralyzed —and that, at least, was
a result that their transformation from protesters into henchmen of the
government prevented. Yet, from the standpoint of the oppressed plebeians,
this development signified that the struggle between the orders, though won
in a formal sense, had in other and more important respects been lost. It
proved harder for the poor, henceforward, to find champions, for the new
sort of progovernment tribunes placed their vetoes at the disposal of the
—
Senate instead and the Senate was glad to use them for its own purposes,
not only in order to keep their fellow plebeians down, but also to prevent
ambitious state officials from getting out of hand.
By ancient and modern standards alike, the Roman class struggle had
been impressively peaceable. True, it had not been quite as "reasonably"
conducted as patriotic ancient historians later maintained; the threats of
secession, for example, were open blackmail. Nevertheless, the struggle had
at least been carried on for all these long years with a minimum of physical
violence and through due process of law. Its termination has been called by
some the high-water mark of the republic's political achievement. Yet,
instead, it has been found disappointing by revolutionary or liberal histori-
ans, who look for continuous social progress and do not find it here. How-
ever, its absence is hardly surprising given the highly conservative character
of the Roman people —patricians and plebeians alike —whose whole society
depended fundamentally upon and ancestral tradition, and the
clientela,

habit of obedience to authority, group, and community. Besides, this sys-

tem, patched together by what may seem to us a peculiar and unsatisfactory
series of compromises, at least passed the pragmatic test because it worked.
Indeed, it continued to work, with relatively little change, for at least as long
as any politico-social system has ever worked in the history of the Western
world. And in the process, despite all its manifest faults, this system enabled
Rome to face its mortal enemies with an imposingly united front such as
few modern states could display today.
 '
' - '^r*"^ T

-'1..
-I /.

.1 JC-
 in.
ROME AGAINST
i

CARTHAGE

tiHa4:HI^i <J#
Preceding page:
German engraving of the Triumph of Scipio Africanus, who crushed Hannibal in
202 B.C.
 First Wars against
Foreign Powers

The Invasion of Pyrrhus

p=i n he Greek cities, which so abundantly filled southern Italy and Sicily
that they were described as Magna Graecia, did not have much to
^ do with the Romans before 300 B.C. But the end of the Samnite wars
brought the territory of Rome's subject allies far down towards the south,
within easy range of some of these Greek towns. The most important of
them on the mainland was Taras, the Roman Tarentum, now Taranto on
the gulf of that name. Tarentum lay astride an isthmus, between a shallow
protected bay and a tidal lagoon, and possessed an almost impregnable
citadel. Larger than Rome in the early third century B.C., the city based its

great prosperity on the wool from its winterland, dyed with purple from the
murex mussels in the city's harbor. From this port, the safest and most
spacious on any Italian coast, the dyed wool was profitably exported to
Greece and elsewhere, and so was grain, another product of the Tarentines'
considerable and fertile inland possessions. They were governed by a de-
mocracy that, although somewhat aggressive, displayed relative stability by
Greek standards. They possessed the largest fleet in Italy and an army of
fifteen thousand men, but since their expansionist tendencies were not

matched by military talent, they often supplemented this force by hiring

mercenaries. The duty of these was to protect the frontiers of Tarentum
from its Lucanian neighbors (related to the Samnites) by keeping them in
a state of semidependence.
The Tarentines had an old agreement with Rome, according to which the
latter undertook not to send ships into their gulf which they regarded as
their own sphere of influence. Nevertheless, an eventual confrontation
looked inevitable after Rome in 291 B.C., during the last days of the Samnite
wars, founded a Latin colony of exceptionally large dimensions at Venusia
(Venosa), near the far end of defeated Samnium. Surrounded on three sides
by deep ravines, and dominating the most considerable river of southern

S7
88 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
Italy from its lofty ridge, Venusia was primarily designed by the Romans
to split off the Samnites from their Lucanian neighbors. But it was also
fewer than ninety miles from Tarentum, whose ruling democratic party
regarded its establishment as a strong provocation; Rome seemed to be
deliberately setting itself against the freedom of the Tarentines to extend
their possessions in southern Italy any further.
This growing tension came to a head in 282 when the Greek city of Thurii
(Terranova di Sibari), on the southern side of the Tarentum gulf, was
attacked by Lucanian raiders and appealed to the Romans; and they, after
hesitation, responded and duly sent a fleet to place a garrison in Thurii.
Tarentum regarded this as a clear breach of the agreement not to send ships
into its gulf, but the Romans considered that this agreement had become
obsolete through lapse of time. Such were the misunderstandings, often
genuine enough, that continually accompanied Rome's half-conscious im-
perial advances from this time onwards.
The Tarentines sank the Roman fleet, killing its admiral; and they drove
the off'ending garrison out of Thurii, jeering at the bad Greek spoken by
Rome's envoys. They also applied for help, as was Greek
their custom, to a
military adventurer, in this case King Pyrrhus of Epirus just across the
Adriatic. Pyrrhus, who claimed descent from Alexander the Great, was one
of the foremost of the minor rulers and rent-an-army generals who had
proliferated since Alexander's death half a century earlier. Accepting the
invitation from Tarentum, he proclaimed that he would put an end to the
Roman power threatening the liberty of the western Greeks. Then he set

sail for south Italy, taking with him twenty-five thousand mercenaries, the
most highly esteemed professional soldiers of their day, many of them
veterans of extensive military experience. And so the Romans had to pre-
pare for the first battles they had ever fought against a Greek army and a
Greek state.

The basis of Pyrrhus's force was a phalanx of twenty thousand men. In

battle, lined up in depth, they displayed a front that bristled with the heads
of their long lances, as impenetrable as a barbed wire entanglement; and
their task was to hold the Roman army while their cavalry on the wings
turned its rear or flank. Pyrrhus also brought with him a contingent of
twenty, frightening, Indian war-elephants, which he used not frontally like
tanks as was the custom, but laterally, so that they could join the horsemen
in attacking the enemy's flanks.
His first battle against the Romans was fought at Heraclea (Policoro), a
coastal colony ofTarentum lying to its west. The legions stood up well to
Pyrrhus's phalanx, which proved somewhat unwieldy. But his elephants
—
routed the Roman horses which could never have faced these animals
—
untrained and then charged the flank of the legionaries, putting them to
 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS / 8g

though at a heavy cost of Epirote as well as Roman lives. Thereupon,

flight,

joined by Samnites and Lucanians, the king marched right on up into

Latium; but in the disappointing absence of further defections to his cause,
he soon decided to fall back again. In the next year, with a larger force, he
won another of his costly victories, known henceforward as "Pyrrhic," in
a battle near Ausculum (Ascoli Satriano) in northern Apulia. The Romans
resisted his phalanx for a whole day, but on the following day, with the help
of his elephants, he forced them back, though they avoided total disaster
by regaining their fortified camp. At this point, Pyrrhus made an offer of
peace, demanding httle more than freedom for Tarentum and its allies. But
at the instigation of the aged Appius Claudius the Blind, the proposal was
turned down, for he saw a great future for the Romans in southern Italy.
And he also believed that they should never treat with an enemy while he
was still faring reasonably well.
Next, in autumn 278, Pyrrhus moved on to Sicily; probably he had always
intended to do this, seeing the island as a base for further Mediterranean
conquests. Once again, he scored mihtary successes —
and once again they
were without any definitive result. So, three years later, he returned once
again to the Italian mainland. There he engaged a Roman army at Beneven-
tum (Benevento) in western Apulia, formerly a Samnite town. But the result
of the battle went against him, or was at best inconclusive and damaging,
because the Romans had by now discovered that elephants, if wounded by
javelins, got out of control and could be made to trample their own soldiers.
After this engagement, Pyrrhus's force had been reduced to only one-third
of its original size. In order, therefore, to avoid being caught between two
Roman armies, he felt obliged to draw back to Tarentum. And from there,
before long, he evacuated Italy altogether and returned to Greece, where
he was killed two years later at Argos by a tile thrown down from a
housetop by a woman.
Pyrrhus was a clever tactician but lacked persistence and long-term
concentration, embarking on too many mutually inconsistent projects and
oscillating between excessive hopefulness and gloom. Moreover, although in
south Italy and Sicily the Romans were fighting farther from homeland
their
than he was, his excellent Greek professional army was no match for the
combined military resources of their astutely unified and abundantly popu-
lated allies and colonies. The outcome of the war had effectively demon-
strated that the Greek states of south Italy could no longer stand against
Rome; and in 272 the Tarentines accepted the alliance that was proposed to
them. The Romans were becoming conscious of their imperial responsibili-
ties; it was probably in this decade that some south Italian mint, so far

unidentified, produced the first silver coinage to be issued in their name,

followed in about 269 by issues minted at the capital itself
po / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

Heavy bronze as (I = the unit) of Rome, 269-266 B.C. Helmeted heads of Roma
(above, right).

And so, within four generations after the lowest point in Rome's for-
tunes, the whole of peninsular Italy down to the southernmost regions
had come under their control. Moreover, this victory won by the repub-
lic in its first war against a Greek army had been noted in the wider

Greek lands of the east, where Pyrrhus's defeat was rightly seen by per-
ceptive observers as a portent of things to come. For the first time
Rome was recognized, among these nations, as a powerful military
state; and one of the great successor kingdoms of Alexander, Egypt of

the Ptolemies, now proceeded to establish diplomatic relations with its

government, by a treaty negotiated in 273. •

 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS / <)1

Carthage
Rome's war with Pyrrhus had also brought it into much closer contact
than ever before with the largest western Mediterranean power, Carthage
in north Africa, in the country that is now Tunisia. And from now onwards
the problems threatening the peaceful coexistence of the two powers rapidly
multiplied.
During the later eighth century B.C., when most Mediterranean trading
was in the hands of the Semitic Phoenicians living on the coastland of
Lebanon, one of their leading cities, Tyre, founded an offshoot on these
shores far to its west, calling it the "New City" of Carthage (Kart-Hadasht).
Probably the proximity of purple beds contributed to the selection of the
()2 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
site. But it was also well chosen, like other foundations of the Phoenicians,
so as to safeguard vital points along their western maritime lifelines. In this
chain, Carthage was of exceptional importance because of its position at the
narrow waist of the Mediterranean. Situated on a peninsula in the recesses
of the Gulf of Tunis, it was well protected from the interior by steep hills;
and among its several beaches a long, narrow bay behind a small headland
provided a spacious and sheltered port, later amplified by two artificial
harbors, half a mile from the citadel hill.
For three-quarters of a century Carthage was simply a colony of Tyre,
but from then onwards, apart from nominal and decreasing ties, it became
an independent republic. By the early third century B.C. its population was
three times that of Rome. Its inhabitants, allowed a share of the city's
commercial profits, were content to remain sluggishly nonpolitical, while
the government owed its stability and strength (much admired by the

THE WARS AGAINST CARTHAGE

Syracuse
 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS / gj

Greeks) to the small, tenacious, cautious, money-making ruling class which

—despite keen internal jealousies —exercised control like the directorate of
a big commercial company. These rulers were served by a navy and an army
largely composed of Africans and mercenaries, since it was considered
advisable to exempt the Carthaginians themselves from military service, so
as to leave them free to conduct their trading. Under this regime, by 650
B.C., Carthage had taken over and greatly enlarged the old Phoenician

trading posts and settlements all around the western Mediterranean. And
they created many new posts too, selecting, like their predecessors, carefully
spaced-out anchorages on offshore islands or promontories or river estuar-
ies with suitable sheltered beaches.
Above all, like their fellow Phoenicians before them, these Carthaginian
seafarers urgently wanted metals. Now the country best able to provide
these was Spain. But to sail due westwards in that direction without any
intermediate stopping places would have incurred all the hazards of an
unwelcoming north African coast and a hostile current, so they needed
bases upon the islands on the way. A particularly vital link in this chain
was western Sicily, where Carthage assumed leadership of the already
existing Phoenician colonists, establishing its main base at Panormus
(Palermo), which commanded a superb harbor and fertile hinterland. Greek
attempts to dislodge the settlers were unsuccessful, and henceforward for
three hundred years it remained the firm policy of the Carthaginians to
retain this Sicilian foothold. In Sardinia, too, they inherited and developed
at least four ports, confirming their power in the region by a naval victory
over their Greek rivals off Corsica (ca. 535). The possession of all these
island bases also enabled them, for a time, to keep the Greeks away from
Spain, their principal objective, where Carthage was consequently able to
take over and develop important Phoenician settlements at Malaca
(Malaga) on the Mediterranean and even on the Atlantic coast at Gades
(Cadiz), which had easy access to the southern Spanish mines.
Moreover, the Carthaginians' strong points in Sardinia gave them access
to a second important source of metals also, namely, Etruria. In their
victorious naval battle against the Greeks off Corsica, they had been allies
of the Etruscans, and they even had a share in two of the ports of Etruscan
Caere. At one of them, Pyrgi, bilingual Etruscan and Phoenician inscrip-
tions have been found. The other was called Punicum —the Latin for "Car-
thaginian*'.
And meanwhile they were extremely active in Africa as well. Among
their leadership, there was a traditional difference of opinion about the
relative merits of maritime and continental ventures, and at different times
both policies resulted in large extensions of their influence in Africa. By sea,

the west coast of the continent was explored as far down as Sierra Leone.
g4 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
And the land empire established by Carthage in north Africa was larger
than that of any previous Mediterranean state, only Egypt excepted. De-
spite the deserts adjoining its territory, Tunisia has large alluvial pockets
rich in natural phosphates and highly productive of wheat, vines, olives, and
fruit, all of which the Carthaginians cultivated with unprecedented skills,

recorded in famous agricultural handbooks. By the fifth century B.C., they

had taken over and developed the entire twenty thousand square miles of
this plain —
thus enabling Carthage to push westwards into Algeria and
Morocco and open up a land route into the interior of Africa.

The First Punic War

It was only a matter of time before this empire came into conflict with
the new Mediterranean power of the Romans. Carthage was only one
hundred and thirty miles across the strait from Sicily, and its settlements
at the harbor of Etruscan Caere were barely thirty miles distant from Rome;
moreover, at that city itself there is also likely evidence for early trading by
the Carthaginians. Indeed, they were believed, perhaps correctly, to have
signed an agreement with the Romans at about the time of the foundation
of the Roman Republic; seems to have confirmed Carthage's monopoly
it

of the western Mediterranean, but to have guaranteed Italian coast towns

against its attacks. Another treaty is datable to 348 B.C. and it was renewed
in 279, this time because the Carthaginians shared Rome's hostility to
Pyrrhus.
Once he had left Italy, however, relations between the two powers sharply
deteriorated. The breaking point came when the local ruling group at
Messana (Messina), situated on the straits separating Sicily from the Itahan
peninsula, invited the Carthaginians to occupy their city and help them
suppress the internal and external opponents of their regime; and the invita-
tionwas accepted. But this upset the Greek cities of south Italy that had
now become aUies or dependents of Rome, since they saw Carthaginian
domination of the narrows as a menace to their own safety and prosperity.

Silver shekel of Carthage. Early third century B.C.

 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS /pj
When, therefore, the men in charge of Messana changed their minds and
appealed to Rome and the south Itahan cities added their own
instead,
urgent persuasion, the Roman government accepted the challenge (264); the
Senate had been hesitant but was overruled by the Assembly, which wanted
plunder. So war became inevitable. Its ostensible aim was to decide the
future of Messana; the huge ramifications of the hostilities that this was
going to involve could not be foreseen.
For this First Punic War, which side was to blame? Surely both.
Rome had pushed its territories forward to a point where supposed
threats directed against themselves or against their allies by this neigh-
boring great power could all too easily be made into a pretext for a
clash; while at Carthage, too, there was a powerful element that would
stop at nothing to secure more trade. Had its leaders in 279 received an
informal Roman assurance of a free hand in Sicily? Perhaps they had,
and perhaps thiswas what had prompted Carthage to intervene at Mes-
sana. But in any case it and Rome were so divergent in culture, so mu-
tually uncomprehending, that differences were almost impossible to
bridge over by diplomatic methods.
So, Rome as well as Carthage having responded to Messana's appeal, the
Romans successfully transported two legions across the strait to occupy the
Sicilian city, and the Carthaginian admiral who had failed to stop them was
crucified by his own government. But the focal point of this initial phase
of the First Punic War was the Greek city-state of Syracuse, on the east
Sicilian coast. The most populous city in the Greek world, Syracuse stood
on the side of a deep bay; the bay was partly closed by its island-citadel,
which was joined to the rest of the city by a mole and dominated the
entrances to active ports on either side. The Syracusans were the leaders of
a flourishing mercantile society and issued a particularly spectacular silver
coinage to serve their commercial operations.
It was for protection against the king of Syracuse, Hiero II, that Messana-

had initially appealed to the Carthaginians, and it was in order to thwart

his expansion that they had accepted the appeal. It is therefore surprising
to find that Hiero, at the outset of the First Punic War, entered into an
alliance with Carthage against Rome. For, even apart from what had hap-
pened at Messana, this was a strange decision for a Sicilian Greek and a
Syracusan, brought up to regard Carthage as the enemy. Yet Hiero must
have believed Rome to represent, ultimately, an even greater peril than the
traditional Carthaginian foe. However, driven back by a strong Roman
military offensive, he almost immediately went into reverse and sought for
peace with the Romans They responded prudently, requiring an
after all.

indemnity and perhaps tribute, but conceding him a fifteen-year alliance

and the control of thirty miles of territory. He remained Rome's loyal ally
 g6 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
and a new institution had come into
until his death forty-eight years later,
— being: the foreign "client" kingdom, beyond the frontiers of the Roman
state, but its dependent —
an extension of the custom according to which,
in the Roman community, individual clients depended on their individual
patrons.
In spite of further victories in the following year, the Romans rapidly
came to the conclusion that the limited war they had originally launched
would settle nothing and that a satisfactory peace could be achieved only
by driving the Carthaginians out of Sicily altogether. Yet this could not be
—
done unless they had a navy which they did not possess and never had
possessed on any substantial scale. So they now proceeded to construct a
fleet from virtually nothing, built of the timber that Italy provided in far

greater quantities than Carthage. This enterprising decision to challenge the

naval supremacy of the Carthaginians, who had been sending ships as far
as Sierra Leone before the unseamanlike Romans knew anything about
nautical matters at all, was the most extraordinary feature of the war. It
lasted for no fewer than twenty-three years, and for the greater part of this
time the Romans were maintaining a fleet of more than two hundred
warships.
In 260 B.C. they began by constructing a
flotilla one hundred and forty

strong. The modeled on one they had captured from the

ships they built,
Carthaginians, were massive quinqueremes; this was the standard type of
war vessel of contemporary Greek states, carrying marines and a crew of
three hundred sailors, divided into groups of five to an oar, of whom only
one or two had to be skilled. In order to frustrate the superior naval
^ dexterity of the enemy by making the sea fights as much like land battles
as possible, the Romans equipped their craft with "ravens" (corvi). These
were boarding bridges or gangways tied to the mast with a rope and hinged,
or more probably slotted, so that they could be released and let drop on the
enemy's decks. Fixed underneath the corvus was a heavy iron spike or beak
which crashed through the planks of the Carthaginian ship, thus holding
it fast for boarding by the marines.
Equipped with these instruments the Roman fleet embarked on the sec-
ond phase of the war, which witnessed the largest naval engagements that
the Greco-Roman world had ever seen or would ever see again. The first
of these clashes was at Mylae (Milazzo) off the northeast coast of Sicily. The
ravens worked well, and fifty enemy ships were destroyed (260); but the
Romans did not yet possess the nautical knowledge to follow up their
success. Then, four years later, off" Cape Ecnomus in southern Sicily (near
Licata), they won the most grimly contested naval battle ever fought in
ancient times in western waters. After the warships in the Roman center
had moved forward and become perilously enveloped, those on the wings
 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS / ()J

managed to extricate them by determined grappling and boarding, and the

enemy was very badly mauled.
This victory inaugurated the third phase of the war, for it threw the north
African shores wide open to the Romans. Their general, Regulus, made an
unopposed landing and advanced to within a single day's march of Carthage
itself. Then, seeing that the Carthaginians were harassed by a rebellion in

the interior, he seized the opportunity to offer them peace. But his terms
were so stringent that the fighting continued: and the Carthaginians now
made good use of a Spartan mercenary leader, Xanthippus. In spring 255,
the two armies clashed in the Bagradas (Medjerda) valley. There Regulus's
force, punctured by the enemy's elephants and encircled by their cavalry,
was annihilated, and he himself was taken prisoner. A Roman fleet came
to retrieve the situation and won a preliminary victory, but was unable to
rescue him; and on the way home, it was wrecked by a storm and lost more
than two hundred and fifty ships.
After these disasters the attempt to invade north Africa was abandoned,
and the war entered its fourth and last phase, in which the Romans, with
one new fleet after another, renewed their attempts to gain victory in Sicily.
This new period began well for them with the capture of Panormus, which
confined the Carthaginians to the western tip of the island. Nevertheless,
hostilities dragged on for another thirteen years — to a large extent because
of the Romans' further enormous, exhausting losses from storms, due to the
inexperience of their admirals. Eventually however, with the aid of a forced
loan from its richest citizens, Rome raised yet another fleet; but this time
the ships were lighter quinqueremes, without the corvi which had proved
perilously top-heavy. The Romans were nearly exhausted, and this was the
very last fleet they could ever have aff'orded to raise; but it proved successful.
With its help, they completed the investment of the main surviving Car-
thaginian strongholds in western Sicily, and then they won an easy, total
naval victory near the off'shore Aegates (Egadi) Islands. Thereupon Car-
thage was forced to accept peace and soon afterwards, fittingly
(241);
enough, the unit of the Roman bronze coinage began to display a ship's
prow as its design.
The Greek historian Polybius war the fiercest and
called this prolonged
bloodiest struggle that had ever been fought; both sides had lost appalling
numbers of men and ships. Although the Romans could call on the services
of sailors and shipbuilders from Greek south Italy and Etruria, in every
branch of expertise and tactics, especially engineering, the Carthaginians
were still superior. And yet they had lost. They had lost partly because of
the grave initial failure of their commanders to prevent the Romans from
crossing into Sicily. It was true that the Roman command system, too, was
faulty because the consuls were very often incompetent to manage a fleet,
g8 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
and besides, one of them was recalled home every year to preside at the
annual elections and was accustomed to take his army with him —half the
total Roman But every Carthaginian general suffered from an even
force.
more if he was defeated, he might be crucified by his
intractable dilemma:
government; and if he won, it suspected his future intentions so deeply that
reinforcements often failed to reach him. Besides, that government was
deeply divided within itself, with the major landowning group far less
interested in the war than in developing the continental territory of Africa.
For these reasons, the Carthaginian generals could never deliver the final
blow and had to settle for a war of exhaustion. But in that sort of fighting
they proved to be at a disadvantage against Rome, since their mercenaries
lacked any patriotic incentive to fight; the Roman legions were manned by
men who belonged to a political system that had been welded into an
effective unity.
Defeated Carthage was not yet removed from the face of the earth. But
it was forbidden to send ships into Italian waters ever again and was
compelled to pay a large indemnity over the next ten years. And, above all,
it was obliged to evacuate Sicily altogether. The Romans felt that they must

take it over in order to forestall an eventual return of the Carthaginians,

which would have threatened Italy once more. And Rome was eager to lay
hands on the abundant Sicilian grain. So with the exception of Hiero II's
state of Syracuse and a few other cities, which remained officially indepen-
dent as client allies, the Romans now proceeded to annex the whole of the
island. In order to recoup their war losses and cover the expenses of the
administration, they borrowed Hiero's efficient and famous tax system in
order to levy direct taxation or tribute in the form of tithes (a tenth part
of the crop). Even though most of Sicily was now part of their own territory,
they decided that its people, being foreigners unfamiliar with Roman ways
— —
and only mediocre soldiers should commute the military service re-
quired of other subjects and allies by paying tax instead.
This annexation of Sicily was a fateful step, for it brought the Romans
outside Italy, of which the island was not in ancient times a part, and gave
them their first overseas province. An entirely new and lasting stage in
—
Roman history had begun the epoch of imperialism outside the mother
country. It was appropriate enough that some forty years later a Latin poet
named Naevius, who came from near Capua, chose this war among all
others as the theme of his epic glorifying the power of Rome.
Yet it was unfortunate for the Romans that their first province had
belonged to Carthage. In annexing this island, Rome also took over the
Carthaginian mercantile idea that such possessions were intended to be a
source of profit, of which the provincial governor could take his share. In
227, it was decided that this official should be an additional praetor ap-
 FIRST WARS AGAINST FOREIGN POWERS / gg

pointed each year for the purpose. But, as the term provincia (sphere of
mihtary command) indicates, the Romans evolved no specific theory of
provincial merely prolonging wartime conditions in
administration,
amended form and providing the governor with only a very small staff.
Indeed they did not envisage the province as a unit at all. Instead, it

remained a group of city-states that enjoyed various different relations with

the Romans, but in general, although paying them direct taxation were
themselves permitted to levy indirect taxes from their own subjects. In
addition, the Sicilian province, like other provinces after it, included a fair
amount of public land confiscated by the Roman state, which then very
often leased it out to the cities or their inhabitants.
The loss of Sicily, then, was the gravest of the damages imposed on the
Carthaginians after their defeat. Yet such losses, though enormous, were
still less serious than new disasters in which they found themselves involved

in the very next year after the First Punic War had come to an end. At this
juncture twenty thousand of their mercenary troops who had been brought
back to north Africa broke into violent mutiny because their pay was in
arrears. Then this polyglot mass of warriors, from more than half a dozen
different peoples, proceeded to declare themselves an independent state,
issuing a wide range of separatist coins; and they marched inland upon
Carthage itself. Moreover, at the very same time, the subject races of the
African hinterland likewise seized the chance to take up arms against their
oppressors. It was not until after more than three years of this Mercenary
("Truceless") War, comprising the most savage fighting and most inhuman
atrocities ever recorded, that the mercenaries were finally annihilated.
Now, during these convulsions, the Romans, who had so recently been
the enemy of Carthage but were now bound to it by an agreement, came
readily to its assistance; they regarded the mercenaries in Africa as an

Base silver double shekel of the Libyan rebels against Carthage

in the Truceless War, 241-238 B.C. Head of Zeus; bull.
700 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
international danger threatening to unleash general anarchy. But when
immediately afterwards in Sardinia the fellow soldiers of these rebels broke
into revolt against the Carthaginiansand appealed to Rome (238), it became
clear that the attitude of the Roman government had radically changed. It
now proceeded to send troops to the island's southwestern coast to help the
dissidents —and to seize control of the Carthaginian fortresses. Carthage
could do nothing, and the Romans went on to annex Sardinia and Corsica,
just as they had annexed Sicily earlier, adding insult by demanding a further
indemnity.
Whatever explanations were offered at the time, this forcible annexation
of Sardinia and Corsica was the act of a nervous bully and showed that the
famous Roman "good was nonexistent, or at least was regarded as
faith"
inapplicable to non-Italians. Nor was the annexation justified on economic
grounds, since, although use was made of Sardinia's grain, little was done
to develop its important mineral resources for a long time to come. Rome

was acting out of pure opportunism, seizing the chance to guard against a
possible resurgence of warlike feeling at Carthage —
a shortsighted measure
since in fact their aggressive action did everything possible to revive such
emotions among its Carthaginian victims. The two islands were made into
a second, single Roman province, whose people paid a tithe Hke the Sicil-
ians' and a new praetorship was created (227), once again, to supply the
province with annually appointed governors. The only comfort for Car-
thage, a small one, was that although the people of Sardinia, who were of
mixed non-Italian were greatly despised by the Romans, it took the
stock,
Roman authorities well over a century to pacify the mountainous interior
of this newly acquired territory.
 The Changing Roman World

An Age of Innovations
n a bid for popularity, designed to keep up morale at the outset of the
First Punic War, the government of Rome had introduced an institu-
tion of horrifying brutality that retained an enormous following
throughout the whole of the subsequent history of the city: the gladiatorial
combat —a national sport and a psychological safety valve. It is possible that
duels of this kind were an invention of the Etruscans, who had employed
them in the first instance as religious ceremonies involving the sacrifice of
war prisoners to the spirits of their own fallen warriors; and then they kept
the contests on for amusement, recording them on grave urns of the third
century B.C.
Earlier, however, than any Etruscan artistic representations of such fights
are Samnite wall paintings depicting them, which date from not long after
400. It may well, therefore, have been from Samnium rather than Etruria
that Rome learned to stage these entertainments; indeed, for a long time the
Romans themselves regarded "gladiator" and "Samnite" as synonymous
terms. But, if so, there were probably intermediaries in this borrowing,

namely the Samnite settlements in Campania, in whose chief city Capua

(long renowned for its leadership in this grisly activity) appeared early
paintings of armed, helmeted gladiators scarred by wounds and dripping
with blood.
In any event, in 264 B.C. similar fights were first seen at Rome. At a
funeral in the Cattle Market in that year, two sons of the dead man ex-
hibited three simultaneous gladiatorial —
combats a figure that was to
rise, within the next half century, to twenty-two such contests staged on
a single occasion. The ferocious cruelty of these sports betrays the exis-
tence of a powerful streak of sadism in the ancient Roman and Italian

character.

TOI
I02 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
But if the First Punic War was the occasion for this sanguinary innova-
tion, it also witnessed, paradoxically enough, many novel humanizing influ-
ences derived from the Greek world. The ties linking Rome to that world
went back hundreds of years, but they had remained somewhat tenuous,
and the Romans had remained more or less immune to the profounder
effects The war, however, provided many new contacts with
of Greece.
south Italy and Sicily and brought from those parts a considerable number
of Greeks, who contributed an influx of Greek culture.
For example, Greek works of art were shown at Triumphs in 272 and 264.
And then Livius Andronicus, a Greek or half-Greek who had come as a
prisoner of war from the principal Greek city of south Italy, Tarentum,
opened up altogether new ground. He seems not only to have become the
first, or one of the first, teachers of Greek literature at Rome, but also,

though little of what he wrote has survived, to have virtually invented

Roman poetry as well. Adjusting the clanking Latin tongue to Greek verse
forms, he wrote tragic dramas based on classical Athenian models; and one
of them was performed, by a remarkable innovation, at the Victory Games
of 240 B.C. He Homer's Odyssey into Latin,
also wrote an adaptation of
which, although his style was by later standards somewhat craggy, evi-
dently displayed considerable skill. With Livius, two thousand years of
—
Latin literature had vigorously begun and it had begun on a characteristic
note, combining Greek influence and inspiration with the very different
Latin language and the Roman, Italian ethos that it reflected. In other
words, the Greek world had created the climate in which those who wrote
Latin found themselves able to develop their own unquestionable original-
ity.

Advances in Roman Law

The period of the First Punic War also produced two landmarks in the
evolution of Roman law. The first started from what seemed an insignificant
happening. In 253 B.C. the chief priest (pontifex maximus) Titus Corun-
—
canius the first plebeian to hold that office —commenced the practice of
admitting his students to his legal consultations; and perhaps he admitted
members of the general public as well. This step carried further forward the
reform of fifty-one years earlier by which the publication of the forms of
judicial procedure had broken the monopoly of such knowledge previously
enjoyed by the college of priests. This disclosure had created a new need
to interpret the law, and now, therefore, Coruncanius began the training of
the first men who would serve as Roman lay jurists (iurisprudentes).
These personages, whose long line was thus inaugurated, did not usually
practice as advocates (this was left to professional orators), but were advis-
 THE CHANGING ROMAN WORLD //OJ

ers, teachers, writers, and public They exercised their legal influence
figures.

at every point, counselling praetors and other officials and judges, assisting
individual citizens in a wide variety of matters, and giving answers (responsa
prudentium) on questions of law submitted for their attention. The best of
them responded to these queries with a combination of steadying legality
and liberal equity —a Roman blend that appeared also in the court decisions

that bore their mark. In these secular lawcourts it became established over
the years that legal rules could not be laid down merely by the arbitrary
act of the public officials who presided over them —
men not likely to be
learned in the law. So the jurists sat in on the trials and judgments and made
their own vital contribution. In court and out of it, they had to ask them-
selves what was implied in the ordinary informal acts and happenings of
everyday life, and what the normal effect of these happenings would be; and
on these conclusions they ruled. The gradual public recognition of their
rulings as valid and efficacious was one of the lasting triumphs of Roman
civilization.
Since they were not advocates, the detachment of these lawyers from the
practical results of any lawsuit raised their pronouncements above mere
partisan biases. True, working from customs, precedents, and experience as
they did, this famous objectivity, hke that of other, non-Roman legal per-
sonages before and after them, was sometimes limited, whether they real-
ized it or not, by the feelings, attitudes, and aims of the oligarchy to which
they belonged. This is why so much of Roman law is concerned with
maintaining the rules of private property. Nevertheless, it was these jurists

who huge part of the imposing structure of

directly or indirectly built a
Roman law. Their interpretations, revisions, and enlargements of the
Twelve Tables and other statutes and praetors' edicts, and their legal formu-
lations of many customs that had never been formulated before, advanced
Rome's previous legislative creations at innumerable points. And so the
jurists became the central figures of Roman law for many successive genera-
tions, during which time they did much to create the way of life that the
Western world has followed ever since.

Other far-reaching legal developments originated from a further event of

the First Punic War: namely, the establishment in 242 B.C. of a second
praetorship at Rome to supplement the much older city praetorship estab-
lished in 366 B.C.* This new official was the praetor peregrinus (ca. 242).
Itwas his task to deal with legal cases in which at least one of the contest-
ants was a non-Roman (peregrinus), that is to say, either a foreigner or a

*The praetors appointed to govern Sicily, and then Sardinia-Corsica, added a third and fourth
to the total number.
I04 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
subject of Rome who did not possess Roman citizenship — a category that
would soon display continuous increases in size, corresponding with each
successive overseas annexation.
The concept behind this new peregrine praetorship had never found legal
expression before, because hitherto Roman law, as formulated in the Twelve
Tables and other legislative pronouncements, had all been civil law (ius
civile), and as such had dealt exclusively with the relations between one
Roman citizen (civis) and another. Foreigners were, strictly speaking, with-
out rights. The new post of the praetor peregrinus, therefore, represented
a major enlargement of this previously nonecumenical Roman viewpoint,
extending it, in —
due course, to wider issues of many kinds the sort of issues,
inevitably, in which the constructive, equitable methods of the rising lay
jurists were relevant and helpful. So the law that the peregrine praetor
administered might be described as civil law with its more formal parts
omitted; stress was laid on its universal implications rather than narrowly
national aspects.
The creation of this new office also contributed largely to the evolution
of one of the most potent and effective ideas that the Romans ever origi-
nated. This was the 'iaw of nations" (ius gentium), the history of which.

Bronze statuette of Etruscan peasant ploughing (the figure of Minerva is a

subsequent addition), sixth century B.C.
 THE CHANGING ROMAN WORLD //OJ

involving various changes of meaning, has extended right up into our own
times. In the period when the term first began to be formulated, during the
later third and second centuries B.C., it defined those portions of the Roman
law that were open to citizens and noncitizens alike: that is to say, those
branches with which the new peregrine praetor was concerned. Both his
office and the concept of the ius gentium that it helped to develop evolved

out of the growth of commercial, social, and political relations between

Rome and other states.
Legal ideas of this sort were not altogether new to the world. Other
ancient nations also, although they likewise had originally thought in terms
of a law applicable only to their citizens, had evolved rough-and-ready
codes for the benefit of their traders; and besides, from early times onward,
specific treaties between one Greek city-state and another had sought to
guarantee the mutual protection that these commercial interests required.
And then Rome, too, although not directly copying Greek influences, had
proceeded along somewhat similar lines when it granted its subject allies a
sort of half citizenship that conferred trading and matrimonial rights. But
now, in addition, as the peregrine praetorship continually extended its
scope, many questions of marriage, status, and succession, and points relat-
ing to contracts for sale and hire and work and services, gradually received
legal definition in relation to noncitizens even if they possessed no such
special allied rights at all.

Later jurists attributed the obligatory force of this application to "the law
of nations." In employing this concept, they were making the large assump-
tion that it rested on some corpus of legal principles that was universally
acceptable. In consequence, as more time passed, ius gentium came to be
elevated into a philosophical ideal of "natural law" interpreted as a set of
precepts vahd everywhere in the world. Later still, the ramifications of the
term became even more immense since it was held to signify the various
rules governing relations between states — rules which are now grouped
together under public international law.
This ius gentium was stimulated and rendered inevitable by the peregrine
praetorship; and then was further developed by provincial governors. It
it

demonstrated that a body of law could be established upon a foundation

acceptable to the members of diff'erent peoples and races at any and every
phase of social, economic, and political evolution; and so it brought the laws
of the Romans nearer to universal applicability than any others that have
ever been devised, and it uniquely displayed their genius for social organiza-
tion. Above all,gentium was redolent of common sense, which is,
ius
indeed, characteristic of Roman law as a whole. Its exponents, like English
lawyers later on, were often reluctant to specify the principles that guided
them. Yet a Roman jurist was boldly prepared to off'er generalizations, not
 io6 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

Bust of Gallic warrior. Third century B.C.

indeed for their own sake, but in order to solve each specific set of problems
that had to be confronted, thus striking the shrewdest balance between
% theory and practice and having the best of both. Moreover, the great major-
ity of these generalizations have never, in all the intervening centuries, been
discredited or discarded —andmost cases not even reformulated, since
in
they had been set out by the Romans, from the first, in carefully thought-out
language of a clarity and sharpness that could not be improved upon.
Roman law was much superior, in precision and substance alike, to the legal
systems of the Greeks, in spite of their rich jurisprudence.
Nevertheless, law is one thing and litigation is another, and even the
Romans found that perfect fairness in regard to the latter was hard to come
by. Despite the impressive laws and concepts the ancient Roman lawcourts
(indicia publica) were called on to put intoeffect, it would be unrealistic

to see their processes in too rosy a hght. They were still, in the second
century B.C., more or less improvised, being formed as the occasion arose.
Besides, these courts, like the people who worked for them, consciously or
 THE CHANGING ROMAN WORLD / lOJ

unconsciously served the ruling class; furthermore, there was no real profes-
sional tradition of impartial justice and no organized police to enforce it,

any more than could be found in any later Western country until well after
1800. Roman litigants also experienced many vexatious delays, though even
the twentieth century a.d. still has its share of these. And the limits of free
speech and free political action would have seemed to us excessively narrow.
Nevertheless a great proportion of Rome's available intellectual power and
subtlety, throughout the whole millennium of antiquity, was poured into
the development of its law, and since then it has continued to have a history
lasting for two further millennia. Moreover, in the course of that prolonged
period, it has often seemed that the whole principle of order as a bulwark
against chaos, indeed the very survival of civilization itself, depended upon
the maintenance of the legal structure the Romans left behind them.

The Challenge of Flaminius

In the last chapter it was pointed out that the Roman class struggle had
ended in formal victories for the plebeians, but that these ostensible suc-
cesses were, in practical fact, converted into a victory for the nobility
instead — not indeed the ancient patrician class, but the new nobility of those
men, patricians and plebeians ahke, who belonged to famihes that could
boast at least one consulship at some time in the past. In this new order,
the plebeian Council (Concilium plebis), which had now gained full validity
for its decisions, played an effective and essential part. Yet the poor pos-
sessed very little say in those decisions since they were formulated by nobles
— and besides, the Council's membership, like that of the National Assem-
bly (Comitia centuriata), was dominated by the middle class of substantial
peasants.
This middle class included many men who, like the poor, were clients of
dominant noble patrons. Other members of this same intermediate cate-
gory, however, were sufficiently independent to stand up, from time to time,
for the underprivileged. Thus, on one notable occasion in the 230s they
directly challenged the wishes of the nobility in the interests of those who
were impoverished and landless. The clash originated from an event that
had taken place half a century earlier, in 283 B.C.: Rome's annexation from
the Gauls of the Ager Gallicus, the Adriatic coastal district south of the Po.
Yet this territory, together with the area that lay north of the river,* had
never been made part of Italy. Apart from the foundation of a Roman and
a Latin colony, Rome had made extremely little use of its lands, initially
because there had been no demand for them. Yet later the situation had

•Cispadane and Transpadane Gaul respectively, the joint comix)nents of Cisalpine Gaul.
io8 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

Statuette of Gaul found near Rome.

changed, because the First Punic War produced ex-soldiers who had seen
their farms gone to ruin while they were away on active service and who
therefore demanded to be given new land to replace what they had lost. As
a result, during the difficult decade that followed the conclusion of the
Carthaginian war, there was intense popular pressure for the breakup of the
Ager Galhcus into small, individual allotments.
The agitation was led by a tribune of the people, Gaius Flaminius, a "new
man" outside the patrician-plebeian nobility. But the senators, who held
valuable leaseholds in this region, objected to any such distributions; where-
upon Flaminius, with the aid of other "new" gentry whose public careers
he agreed to assist, carried the proposal through the plebeian Council over
 THE CHANGING ROMAN WORLD / log

the heads of the protesting Senate. This high-handed action was beheved
to be without precedent in recorded Roman history; Flaminius had dis-
closed the secret that pohcy could, against all tradition, be made outside the
Senate. What he had done was censured by later conservative historians
since it set the precedent, a century later, for a whole mass of other agrarian
measures. Indeed, during that future period there were no fewer than forty
such proposals, which in some cases were much more revolutionary in
character than Flaminius's bill and were blamed for the downfall of the
republic. More radical writers, on the other hand, beheved he had struck
a valuable blow against oppression.
However at this juncture a new generation of Gauls was threatening to
avenge their defeat of half a century which had led to the loss of
earlier,

those Adriatic lands. In consequence, Flaminius's proposed distribution of

the Ager Gallicus was denounced by his Roman opponents as a gratuitous
act of provocation against the Gauls because it introduced substantial

Roman around Lugo near Ravenna. The large

cultivation (centuriation)
divisions measure about 800 yards square.
no / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
Roman manpower into this delicate border area. In 225, therefore, a coah-
tion of GalHc tribes sought to remedy this situation by violent means,
launching an army of seventy thousand with powerful cavalry and war
chariots, in an attack that penetrated deep into the peninsula. But at Tela-
mon (Talamone), halfway down the Etruscan coast, this force, while re-
treating in order to store its plunder in safety, was hemmed in between two
Roman armies; and in the subsequent engagement the Gauls, fighting back
to back, were almost annihilated. Never again did an army of their people
cross the Apennines, though the Romans never forgot the first terrible

onslaughts of these naked warriors, with their flashing gold necklaces and
bracelets.
Flaminius did not hold a command at the time of the victory, but he
succeeded, in spite of his nonnoble background, in winning a consulship in
223. And after that, he marched north —regardless of a senatorial order to
come back to Rome —and led the first army ever to cross the Po, the
precursor of later expeditions that would eventually transform this area into
a populous and flourishing part of the Italy from which it had so long been
excluded.
 The Invasion by Hannibal

Carthaginians in Spain

t was not the Gauls, however, who offered the gravest menace to Italy
in the 220s B.C., but once again the Carthaginians. This time the threat
bi. came from the armies they maintained in Spain. Their dominant posi-
tion in that peninsula was a new phenomenon, or rather the revival of an
old one, for Carthage had earlier possessed a Spanish coastal empire. Dur-
ing the middle years of the third century B.C., when it lost the First Punic
War and was expelled from Sicily and Sardinia and Corsica, it had also,
under pressure from Greek Massilia (Marseille) which competed for the
western Mediterranean ports, been deprived of almost the whole of its

former Spanish dominions until finally little more than Gades (Cadiz) and
the Straits of Gibraltar remained in its hands. But after putting an end to
the ferocious mercenary revolt, the Carthaginians achieved a startling re-
vival and, employing their subject lands in Algeria and Morocco as stepping
stones, soon proceeded to build up a Spanish empire all over again. The
agents of this recovery were the most able family Carthage ever produced,
the house of the Barcids. In spite of determined pohtical opponents, they
had gained an impressive position at home, and now they settled themselves
for several decades in Spain, establishing a hereditary line of semi-indepen-
dent governors.
The first of the family to set himself up there was Hamilcar Barca, who
had played a distinguished part in the First Punic War, when he earned
substantial credit for the resistance that postponed his side's defeat. Next,
when the war was over, and when he had again fulfilled a leading role in
the suppression of the rebellious mercenaries, he was authorized by his
government in 237 B.C. to proceed to Spanish waters; his task was to
recapture territories and resources in compensation for the loss of Sicily and
the other islands. His successes in Spain were impressive. Starting from
Gades, he reconquered most of the southern and eastern regions of the

///
112 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

country as far north as Cape Ifach and Cape Nap, halfway up the coast;
and near the hmits of this occupation, beside lands that recalled the most
fertile territories of north Africa, he established a port and capital at Acra
Leuce, the White Promontory (Alicante). Already the Spanish territories
he had occupied were larger and richer than those the Carthaginians had
ruled before; and the Spaniards, men of mixed Celtic and Iberian stock
famous for their physical endurance, provided him with a new army the —
best Carthage had ever possessed throughout its history. The finely tem-
pered Celtic swords that these soldiers carried were products of the im-
mensely rich mines the conquests included. A share in the revenues from
these mines went to Hamilcar's political enemies at Carthage and induced
them not to obstruct him.
In 229, however, he was drowned. His son-in-law Hasdrubal, who suc-
ceeded him, moved his headquarters further south, in order to be near his
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / 113

Silver double shekel of Spanish mint showing Hamilcar Barca as

Melkart-Heracles (237-228 B.C.).

home base. The site he chose, CarthagoNova or New Carthage (Car-

tagena), stood on a peninsula commanding one of the best harbors in the

world; and was protected from the interior by a lagoon, though a valley
it

provided access to the abundant silver mines its townsmen exploited. Yet
although Hasdrubal had selected this more southerly capital, he pushed the
frontier of the new Carthaginian Spain a long way to the north, advancing
to the banks of the River Iberus (Ebro), halfway up to the Pyrenees. And
he also expanded his conquests deep into the interior, arranging a coor-
dinated series of alliances and treaties, such as the Greeks who had settled
in the same country had never succeeded in achieving.
Then Hasdrubal was murdered (221) and the command passed to his
brother-in-law Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar Barca who had originally
brought him out to Spain. Hannibal pushed still further inland as far as the

Silver double shekel of Carthago Nova (Cartagena) showing Hannibal as

Melkart-Heracles (221-218 B.C.).
 114 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
River Douro and beyond the Tagus; and his diplomatic methods earned him
considerable popularity among the Spaniards. However, one coastal
town
south of the Ebro, Saguntum (Sagunto), decided to resist him. With the
Romans, on the other hand, this place was more friendly, and indeed, under
the direction of an anti-Carthaginian party, it may have formed some sort
of alliance with them. At all events, it was to Rome that the Saguntines now

—
appealed perhaps not for the first time. And Rome, its war party led by
the Aemilii and Scipios, took the fateful step of responding favorably.
Before long its delegates were on their way to Hannibal at Carthago Nova
in order to transmit the Senate's command that he should keep his hands

off Saguntum. A peace party at Carthage was in favor of complying, but

Hannibal rejected the ultimatum and pressed on with the blockade of
Saguntum, which fell to him (219) after a savage eight months' siege. The
Romans angrily ordered the Carthaginian government to hand Hannibal
—
over to them a demand that was predictably turned down. Debate in the
Senate about what should be done next was keen and bitter; but finally the
Roman envoy told the Carthaginians that their refusal to surrender Hanni-
bal meant war. The curtain was now going up for the most terrible of all
—
Rome's struggles and the most far-reaching in its results the Second Punic
War (218).

Saguntum in Spain, of which the capture by Hannibal in 219 B.C. precipitated

the Second Punic War.

r-^/ f ^^. t^ •..

•
^t .
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / 11^

The and wrongs of the war are hard to determine since much
rights
hinges on an obscure treaty that Rome had made with Hasdrubal in 226.
According to the Greek historian Polybius, it was agreed, at this meeting,
that the Carthaginians were not to cross the River Ebro in arms. This was
a point on which Rome must have been eager to insist, in order to calm the
apprehensions of Massiha, which was its long-standing ally and an ally of
Saguntum as well. This Greek city, as it had shown by its hostility towards
the earlier Carthaginian empire in Spain, had long been anxious for the
safety of its own trading stations on the east coast; and it still possessed
Spanish outposts north of the Ebro. Moreover, there was a second and more
direct reason why Rome did not want the Carthaginians to cross the river.
This was because of the fear that they might march right up the Pyrenees
and across them, traverse the south of France, and move down into Cisal-
pine Gaul (north Italy), where they could help the Gauls against Rome.
And it appears that in 226 Hannibal agreed to the urgent Roman stipulation
that he should not march north of the Ebro. But he would never have
consented to such a restriction unless the Romans, at the same time, had
agreed that they themselves would not interfere south of the river — at

Saguntum, for example. There must, therefore, have been a second clause
in the Ebro agreement to this effect.
But, if that was so, how did the Romans justify their subsequent breach
of the understanding? Probably on the grounds that the treaty of 226 had
been negotiated with Hasdrubal himself on a personal basis only and had
never been ratified by the Carthaginian government. And that may well
have been the case. Nevertheless, the real, underlying motive of the Ro-
mans' action, as so often in their subsequent history, was a profound suspi-
cion of the foreigner — in this case, of Hasdrubal's successor Hannibal,
whom they suspected of planning a major campaign across the Ebro. As to
his own attitude, he must have known that his siege of Saguntum, whether
it violated a formal Carthaginian treaty with the Romans or not, involved
a serious risk of war against them. The legend, which may be true, was that
his father had once made him swear eternal hatred towards the Romans.
But, in any case, he evidently felt determined to avenge his country's defeat
in the First Punic War, and Rome's perfidious behavior after it had ended.
And he believed that the new Spanish empire his family had won, rich in
minerals and warriors, gave him his opportunity to carry out these plans
of vengeance and reversal.

The Victories of Hannibal

But the Romans, too, were confident in their human resources, and so now
Il6 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
they declared war.They intended to send forces to Spain via the land route
and Massilia and to send them to the north African homeland of Carthage
as well. -^^

However, both these designs were forestalledby Hannibal's audacious

decision to invade Italy. This came as a surprise to Rome, which knew he
had constructed no fleet. But instead he made for Italy by the difficult land
route. He took with him, on the final stage of the march, some forty
thousand men, comprising well-trained, Carthaginian-officered Spanish in-
fantry and excellent African (Numidian) cavalry, with thirty-seven ele-
phants. And he confidently hoped to augment this army on arrival in north
Italy by winning over anti-Roman Gauls and Rome's Italian subject allies;
in this way he would be able to cut off" the vast reservoir of Roman-Italian
manpower before it could ever be drawn upon.
In April 218 B.C., brushing aside native opposition, he transferred his
army across the Rhone, and then in the early autumn he crossed the Alps.
The mountains were treacherous going because of premature falls of snow,
but Rome's belief that they would stop an army from getting through
proved mistaken. Nevertheless, when Hannibal came down into the Po
valley, men left, and the Senate's generals
he had only twenty-six thousand
hoped wear him down by a series of delaying actions. But they were
to
almost at once defeated in two successive battles, on a northern and then
a southern tributary of the Po. First, on the River Ticinus (Ticino), where
they tried to engage Hannibal's tired army before it could recover, a skir-
mish between advance guards displayed his cavalry's superior speed, equip-
ment, and training so clearly that the Romans fell back across the river to
the Apennine foothills. There, on a rough, snowy December day their
commanders, instead of staying on the higher ground as they should have
done, were induced by a feigned Carthaginian flight to order their forty
thousand legionaries to wade across the swollen waters of the River Trebia
(Trebbia), and attack him. But the morale of the Roman soldiers was low
because they had had no breakfast, and in the morning mist an ambush
from the reed beds took them by surprise in flank and rear, so that they were
overwhelmed and only a quarter of their numbers escaped the subsequent
massacre.
And so already, within only two months, Hannibal had overrun the
whole of northern Italy, with the isolated exception of two newly founded
Latin colonies at Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona, which stood firm. It

was true had lost most of his elephants; and the help he received
that he
from the local Gauls was not all he had hoped for. Yet as a result of his
victories, he was able to increase his force to a total strength of fifty thou-
sand. And now, from his new north Italian base, he believed the time had
come to incite Rome's Italian allies to revolt. Meanwhile at Rome itself, the
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / IIJ

more prosperous among the plebeians, who controlled their own Council
and the National Assembly, were infuriated by the bungling that had lost
them the north Italian lands they had fought so hard to win; and their
appointment of the reformist "new man" Flaminius to a second consulship
in 217 was a criticism of the Senate's conduct of the war.

Flaminius tried to block the Carthaginian army's southward advance, but

early in the year they evaded him by breaking through an unguarded
Apennine pass; and then they pressed on through marshy country, in such
rough conditions that Hannibal, riding on the sole surviving elephant, lost
the sight of an eye through exposure to the icy cold. However, as he ravaged
Etruria and seemed to be making for Rome, he drew Flaminius after him
and on a foggy April morning trapped his army in a defile between the hills
and Lake Trasimene. Surrounded on all three sides, most of the soldiers of
two Roman legions were killed, and Flaminius himself was among the
fallen. This victory presented Hannibal with an open, undefended road to

Rome itself. However, he did not take the opportunity. This was partly
because the total destruction of Roman power might not have been in his
own country's interests, for it would only have introduced rival powers
from the eastern Mediterranean to fill the vacuum. But in any case, he
lacked good siege equipment; and in its absence, the walls of Rome could
not be breached by any attacker, especially without a supply base nearby.
And no such base existed because, to Hannibal's acute disappointment, not

View of Lake Trasimene, where the Romans were disastrously defeated by

Hannibal in 217 B.C.

r;^
Il8 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
one single town of central Italy defected to his side. Rome's system of
colonies and allies stood this searching test with admirable firmness.
So Hannibal swerved aside from the cityand instead decided to seek allies
in the southern part of the peninsula, which, for the most part, was non-
Italian and un-Romanized. As he marched through Campania and Apulia,
relying on their grainlands for food and on their ports for contact with
Carthage, his army was shadowed by a veteran Roman general, Fabius
Maximus, now dictator. Fabius's reappointment had been arranged, with
the concurrence of the Senate, by the unusual procedure of election in the
Assembly, since one of the consuls who should have nominated him was
dead and the other was cut off from the city. Fabius was a Roman of the
old and canny type, and the strategy he now put into effect avoided risking
his hastily recruited new armies in any further pitched battles —
a policy that
—
earned him the nickname of Cunctator (Delayer) while instead he cut off
the enemy's supplies by devastating the surrounding countryside. But this
policy of caution and destruction was understandably hated by many Ro-
mans and Italians and lost him the popular support that had brought him
to power.
In the following year, therefore, the generalship was removed from him
and bestowed on two inexperienced consuls, who were entrusted with the
largest army Rome had ever put into the field; they were placed in joint
command of the force as consuls had never been before, since it had hitherto
been the custom for each to command his own separate army. In a supreme
effort to end the war at a single blow, they accepted battle on a smooth open

plain near Cannae, a small fortress near Italy's heel. Hannibal had provoked
them to this by seizing the place, which contained a valuable depot of stores;
and then he chose an open plain for the battle to show the Romans they
had nothing to fear from reserves. Believing that their numerical superiority
would tell, they attacked, and Hannibal allowed his convex crescent or
echelon to become concave under the pressure of their center. But the
prevailing hot sirocco wind blew blinding clouds of sand into the faces of
the Romans, and they found themselves caught in a pincer movement by
the enemy's light troops on either flank and cavalry in the rear. Wedged
tight in these hopeless conditions, the Roman army, after savage resistance,
was almost wholly destroyed. This battle, the bloodiest defeat Rome ever
suffered, provided an unprecedented example of a smaller force successfully
enveloping a larger one on both sides, a tactic that required perfect coordi-
nation and was admired by the German general von Schlieffen and studied
in the First World War in 1914.
One of the consuls was killed in action, but the other, although a nominee
of the Assembly and consequently blamed for everything by later conserva-
tive historians, received a courteous reception at Rome from his fellow
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / IK)

senators who thanked him for not despairing of the republic — for in the
city, despite this catastrophe, morale remained indomitable. Indeed, even
before the end of the very same year, under a government now unquestion-
inglyleft in the hands of the Senate, Rome's terrible losses were already

more than made good by further recruitment, so that Hannibal's victory

had failed to repair his numerical disadvantage. Moreover, in order to avert
further disastrous pitched battles, Fabius's strategy was seen to have been
good after all, and was revived; the Roman armies were divided into a
number of small pack of dogs circling
forces distributed at vital points, like a
around a lion. Yet Cannae had led, at last, to some of the defections Rome
—
had feared not, indeed, among its subject allies in the center of the penin-
sula, but in the geographically remoter and culturally more alien areas of
south Italy and Sicily, where the vitally important cities of Capua, Syracuse,
and Tarentum all successively went over to the invader (216-213). These
desertions, and above all the defection of Capua, gave Hannibal sorely
needed men, weapons, bases, and supplies. Nevertheless, by a series of
mighty sieges, conducted by double cordons of troops supplied with the
most scientific equipment, all the rebellious towns were gradually won back
again, Capua and Syracuse in 211, and Tarentum in 209.
In 213 or 212, despite all these troubles, Rome emphasized its status as
a major power by issuing for the first time, on a large scale, its historic silver
coin the denarius which provided a much improved means of meeting the
state's financial needs. Nor was it of any avail, in 211, for Hannibal to

advance to the outskirts of Rome itself. Accompanied by an escort of

cavalry, he rode slowly around the walls on his black horse, watched by the
inhabitants on the walls. At that very moment, as it happened, the site of
his camp, three miles away, came up for auction in the city and was duly —
sold at a normal price. Nothing could have shown him more clearly that
the Romans, in spite of all the disasters they had suffered at his hands, were
still determined to survive and win.

The Scipios in Spain

Because of the remarkable dramas of Hannibal's Italian invasion, the

Second Punic War is often looked at as a war fought primarily on Italian
soil, with a secondary sphere of operations in Spain. But the Spanish cam-
paigns fought during the same years were a deciding factor in the outcome
of the war. Although the Romans had failed to keep Hannibal from crossing
the Pyrenees and marching on Italy, they nevertheless succeeded in prevent-
ing his younger brother Hasdrubal Barca, whom he had left behind to rule
Carthage's Spanish empire, from sending him any reinforcements. This they
120 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
did by making the fateful decision to fight an active war in Spain itself,

despite all the crises that they were undergoing in their homeland.
Rome's Spanish armies were commanded, for the first seven years of the
war, by two men named Scipio, the father and uncle of the great Scipio
Africanus. In spite of initial offensives by Hasdrubal Barca, the Scipios
gained a number of successes that enabled them to gain control of the
Mediterranean seaboard of the country, moving gradually southwards
along its coast until in 211 they captured Saguntum, the original bone of
contention, which they then made preparations to use as a base for further
advances. Because of these setbacks Hasdrubal Barca failed on several
occasions in attempts to break out across the Pyrenees. Moreover, succes-
sive drafts of recruits, who would have been very useful to Hannibal's
Italian campaigns, had to be diverted from north Africa to his brother's
Spanish army instead. Yet the diversion of these troops, which gave such
an invaluable breathing space to the hard-pressed Romans in Italy, caused
the downfall of the Scipios in Spain, for in 211 both the brothers were
successively defeated and died in battle.
The Carthaginians were now able to take back the regions they had lost
south of the Ebro. Yet they did not cross the river. After their losses of
Capua and Syracuse in the same year, they did not feel confident enough
to tackle the defenses, somewhat feeble though they were, that the Roman
survivors of the Scipios' defeats had erected along its banks. Moreover, as
soon became clear, Rome had by no means finished with Spain. In 210 the
Assembly, at last reemerging from the timidity imposed by its earlier fail-
ures against Hannibal, induced the Senate to acquiesce in the appointment
of a new and surprising general to command the Spanish armies. This was
Publius Cornelius Scipio (later Africanus), son and nephew of the com-
manders who had perished in Spain the year before. Publius Scipio was only
twenty-five. He had therefore held none of the senior offices regarded as
necessary prerequisites for such an appointment. Yet he was not untried in
war, and his exploits had inspired the conviction that he was the right man
for the job.
Once in Spain, he reverted to the attacking strategy of his father and
uncle. He chose as his target the enemy headquarters and arsenal at Car-
thago Nova. While assaulting the town from the land side, he profited by
a squall, which had blown up and lowered the level of the lagoon, to send
his troops through the shallow waters and scale the fortifications that were
—
undefended on this side and by this means the whole of Carthago Nova
fell into his hands (209). In the following year, he marched into the interior

of the country and engaged Hasdrubal Barca's smaller army at Baecula

(Bailen) on the upper Baetis (Guadalquivir). Compelled to fight quickly
because he feared the arrival of enemy reinforcements, Scipio divided up his
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / 121

Bronze coin of Carthago Nova showing head of Scipio

Africanus after he captured the city in 209 B.C. Horse
and palm tree (Carthaginian types).

main force and, using his light troops as a screen, fell on the enemy's flanks.
This striking demonstration of a novel flexibility in Roman tactics, which
showed how carefully Scipio had studied Hannibal's Italian victories, won
him the battle.
Yet Hasdrubal Barca escaped and at last got out of Spain altogether,
taking an unexpected land route around the western extremity of the Pyre-
nees and proceeding onwards to Italy, with the intention of joining his
brother Hannibal there. His escape transformed the battle of Baecula from
a tactical victory into a strategic defeat. And Scipio did not try to pursue
him. Probably his orders from Rome did not allow him to; but even if they
did, —
he was right not to make the attempt since, if he had done so, he
would have exposed himself in difficult country too far from his base and
would thus have risked losing Spain altogether; and besides, he would never
have caught Hasdrubal Barca in any case. As it was, the departure of
Hasdrubal Barca's army insured final Roman success in the Spanish cam-
paign. This was sealed by a huge battle in 206 against his successors, fought
at IHpa (Alcala del Rio, near Seville). Here Scipio introduced a sophis-
ticated variation into his outflanking tactics by reversing the usual battle
order and moving his light auxiliaries from the flanks to the center of his
Hne. This meant that the men now located on the flanks were his best troops,
the legionaries; it was they who now found themselves entrusted with the
encirclement of the enemy force, and they carried out their task trium-
phantly. This time, the victory was conclusive. Many native princes aban-
doned their alliances with Carthage. And by the end of the year, it had lost
its Spanish possessions forever.
And so these most valuable portions of the Iberian peninsula had fallen
into the hands of Rome, which annexed them and converted them into two
new provinces: the eastern coastal strip of Nearer Spain, and beyond it.
Further Spain (Baetica) comprising the southern coast and the valley of the
Baetis (Guadalquivir). Eight years later, the Roman government appointed
122 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

Denarius of Osca (Huesca) in Spain, minted from local

silver for the payment of tribute. Second century B.C.

two new praetors to administer these territories. A five percent tribute was
imposed on grain, resembling the taxes earlier instituted in Sicily. But
otherwise, the pattern was different, for it seemed practicable in this more
warlike country to add the duty of mihtary service, so that the country's
manpower resources could provide auxiliary units to supplement the le-

gions. Moreover, the Romans developed and expanded Carthaginian min-

ing in the country, which was rightly said to overflow with metals; at
Carthago Nova alone, the capital of the Nearer Province, the silver mines
subsequently employed as many as forty thousand workers at one time. And
so a fixed sum in silver was levied on the population in addition to the
tribute.
In 206 Scipio established a new town named Italica (Santiponce, near
Seville), where were given grants of land. Although Italica was
his veterans
not granted colonial status, the foundation of such an Italian-style commu-
nity overseas established a novel and far-reaching precedent. The purpose
of the place was to serve as a fortress against the tribesmen who dwelt in
the hinterland, for in this fierce country the Romans still had an immense
military task ahead —which took them two hundred years to complete. So
it is doubtful if even the large revenue they soon found themselves able to
pay for the costs of occupation. Yet at least the Car-
collect sufficed to
thaginians had been expelled from this enormously important and strategic
territory.

The Triumph of Scipio Africanus

Nevertheless, the events that had led to their expulsion seemed, at first,

to bringthem certain compensating advantages, for the removal of Hasdru-

bal Barca's army from Spain was Hannibal's gain in Italy. And it came at
a very appropriate time. For in spite of their successes in south Italy, the
Romans were almost end of their resources. In 209, twelve Latin
at the
colonies out of the existing thirty had declared their inability to supply any
more troops, or the money to pay for them. They had been bled white and
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / ^23

could fight no more. Moreover, Etruscan were beginning to be

cities, too,

disaffected. And now the arrival of Hasdrubal, fulfilling hopes that Car-
thage had been cherishing for eleven years, caused alarm throughout Italy.
After crossing southern France and the Alps unopposed, he descended into
the Po where new Gaulish recruits raised his numbers to thirty
valley,
thousand. Then the two Carthaginian brothers moved towards one another,
intending to join forces.
Meanwhile the Romans, after mobilizing massively yet again, and in spite
of their exhaustion, had an army in the north of Italy and an army in the
south. At this juncture they benefited from a great stroke of luck: captured
dispatch riders of Hasdrubal revealed to them that his meeting place with
Hannibal was to be in Umbrian territory. On receiving this news, the
southern Roman commander Gaius Claudius Nero, leaving a force to
watch Hannibal, undertook a rapid six-day, two-hundred-and-forty-mile
march up the Adriatic coast to the Umbrian river Metaurus (Metauro). On
the following morning Hasdrubal heard a double bugle call from the camp
of the Romans, which told him that their two armies had united. This meant
that he was outnumbered by at least ten thousand men. In a desperate
attempt to slip through and join forces with his brother, he moved up the
Metaurus valley after nightfall. But he lost his way in the dark and was
overtaken among the gorges and slippery crags, and died fighting and —
almost all his men died with him.
For the first time during the entire long period of the war, the Romans
had won a pitched battle in their homeland, and the end of Hannibal's
occupation of Italy was now only a matter of time. He learned what had
happened when his brother's head was hurled into his camp. Then he
withdrew into the mountains of Italy's toe and stayed there, without emerg-
ing, for another four years.

Bronze coin perhaps of Arretium (Arezzo) in Etruria, planning rebellion

against Rome in 209/208 B.C. (or to herald arrival of Hasdrubal),
with pro-Carthaginian type of elephant.
124 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
When two of these years had passed (205), Scipio, fresh from his Spanish
victories, was elected consul and asked the Senate for permission to invade
Africa and attack Carthage directly. The senators were very reluctant, since
they still felt apprehensive of Hannibal's continued presence in Italy and
were anxious not to impose further burdens on the allied towns. But when
Scipio appealed over their heads to the Assembly, promising vengeance on
the Carthaginians for all the sufferings they had inflicted, the Senate gave
way, somewhat grudgingly. That is to say, it agreed that, whereas Sicily was
to be his province, he could also sail to Africa if the interests of the state
required it, with two legions in addition to whatever volunteers he could
collect. He recruited seven thousand of them, thus bringing his total army
up to thirty thousand, and with this force landed in north Africa some
twenty miles from Carthage (204). There he was joined by a neighboring
prince Masinissa, ruler of part of Numidia (eastern Algeria), who had
changed sides along with his excellent cavalry.
In the next year Hannibal returned from Italy, his fifteen-year-long inva-
sion at an end. His early victories in Italy had temporarily silenced his
political opponents at home. After the Capua, however, they had
loss of
begun to be much more vociferous. And now, finally, Carthage had begun
negotiations for peace with the Romans and the discussions had reached an
advanced stage. Nevertheless, Hannibal was still able to persuade his gov-
ernment to break these talks off. Thereupon Scipio moved inland to sever
the enemy capital from its agricultural supplies, and in 202, near Zama,
seventy-five miles from the city, the final battle of the war was fought. It
was not a real climax because the eventual outcome of the campaign could
be in no doubt. But it achieved great fame owing to the caliber of the rival
—
commanders and before the engagement, the two men had a famous
meeting about which nothing is known, except that it was unproductive.
When the battle began, neither side succeeded in outflanking the other,
for both were by now thoroughly familiar with tactics of this kind. But the
issue was decided by the horsemen of Rome's new Numidian allies, who
broke off their pursuit of the enemy's cavalry wings and fell on their rear,
achieving total victory. There were few Carthaginian survivors, but Hanni-
bal was one of them. He recommended to his government that peace should
be made immediately, and this was done. The terms were less favorable than
they would have been in the previous year if negotiations had not been
suspended. The indemnity to be paid by the Carthaginians was doubled;
their fleet was limited to ten ships instead of twenty; and Masinissa, who
became king of all Numidia, was rewarded with part of their western
borderlands. And finally, they were forbidden, henceforward, to engage in
any war without the prior consent of Rome.
They had already lost Spain, and now they had ceased to be a major
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / 12^

power and would never become one again. So the Romans had victoriously
completed the most decisive single phase of their rise to domination. The
Second Punic War had made it certain that they would remain in control
of the entire western Mediterranean region for many hundreds of years to
come. For the West, therefore, with the possible exception of the struggles
of the twentieth century A.D., the Second Punic War proved to have been
the most momentous war of all time.
But victory had only been won by feats of unprecedented endurance. In
spite of initial disastrous defeats, the Italian dominion built up with such
patience by Rome had, on the whole, resisted the temptation to defect, fully
justifying the Roman system. Even in the gravest peril Roman and Italian
morale and discipline had stood firm, leaving memories of this supreme test

which later writers were never tired of recalling. The solid virtues of many
Romans and Italians, working together as loyal, obedient partners within
a tradition built up over many had prevailed and won the day.
generations,
They won partly, as the historian Polybius says,because no comparable
cooperation was to be found among the enemy's mercenaries, who were
exploited by their bosses much worse than the Romans exploited the Itali-
ans and in consequence lacked the same incentives to loyalty. And another
reason why the Romans and Italian soldiers won was because there were
more of them. Moreover, their numbers were greatly increased because the
property qualification formerly required before a man could become a
legionary had been reduced, so that much poorer men could now be called
up at public cost. These "proletarians," as they were called (from proles,
"offspring," since children had hitherto been the only contribution they
were able to make to the state), were recruited between the ages of eighteen r
and forty-six and served in the legions for an average of seven years, so that
the old city militia was turning into something like a professional army.
The men who had officered this new army gave close, hard attention to
technical innovations in soldiering, of which Scipio Africanus was the
principal author, first in Spain and then in north Africa. His achievements
show the careful attention he paid to the tactics that Hannibal had displayed
in Italy, and how he even improved on them. He also drilled his army in
tactical methods, based on Rome's experience of small-unit hill fighting
during the Samnite wars. The knack was to allow the three lines of the
maniple (of which there were thirty in a legion) to act more or less on their
own. Yet there were occasions when the independent action of these three
lines, or even of the maniple itself, risked excessive dispersion, and so Scipio

also experimented in Spain with a unit combining three maniples, the

cohort, which provided greater cohesion but at the same time still allowed
greater flexibility than the larger legion itself. There were improvements in
the construction of the throwing javelin. But the legionaries were also
126 / ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE
armed with the heavy, excellently made, Spanish cutting swords, which
became their most important weapon.

The career of Scipio, on whose was done, revealed that

initiative all this
the times when all Roman anonymous, brief-tenured
leaders were almost
representatives of a team had begun to come to an end. Scipio was a new
phenomenon. It was symbolical that he was the first of Rome's generals to
—
be known by the name of the country he had defeated Africanus. He was
also the first to enjoy so long and close a relationship with his army, during
the unprecedented ten years when he held high command at the Assembly's
wish. His final triumph raised him to the most powerful position any
Roman general had ever possessed, pointing manifestly, as later historians
commanders who would use such
noted, to the eventual emergence of other
powers to become But Scipio himself did not do so; probably he
autocrats.
never thought of doing so, for the time had not come for such thoughts.
Yet already there was something special and distinctive about him. He
was a man and a general of rare imagination and initiative which he —
employed in the skillful management of men. Sympathetic to the growing
influx of Greek culture, he was not afraid to show an un-Roman love of
splendor and display, which was deplored by senatorial opinion but pleased
ordinary people; on the coins of captured Carthago Nova his own portrait
seems to appear, which was something that had never happened to a Roman
before, though individual portrait busts in bronze and marble began to come
into their own in this century. And Scipio appears to have possessed that
mystical assurance of a direct, personal line to the gods which is always so
formidable and infuriating a feature in a statesman or soldier. Such convic-
tions made Scipio impatient of petty Roman restraints. Yet at the same
had a keener sense of humor than most Romans. And in
time, he also a war
scarred bymany atrocities, he was unusually kind to his defeated enemies.
He was an unfamiliar sort of Roman, replacing traditional prudence by a
novel individualism, a spirit of adventure.
The enemy Hannibal was a greater general even than his father Hamilcar,
and greater even than Scipio, indeed one of the outstanding commanders
of all time. That he placed beyond doubt, first, by his initial successes in
Italy and the brilliant methods he used to win them, and then by the almost
incredibly daring feat of maintaining himself in that hostile, populous coun-
try, so far from his home base, for no less than fifteen years. During this

period there was ample detailed evidence of his almost unique excellence
as a planner and fighter of battles. Employing the Greek device of joint
enveloping movements by infantry and cavalry, and adding the Spanish
tactics of ambush and lightning attack, he set the stamp of his own personal
genius on both these inheritances. And, above all, he was a leader of men
 THE INVASION BY HANNIBAL / I2J

SO inspired that, throughout all those foreign years, he never experienced

a mutiny. This was astonishing since, as we have seen, his multiracial,
polyglot armies had little reason to feel allegiance to Carthage — they fol-

lowed him for himself alone.

It is only as a strategist in the larger sense that the impertinence of
hindsight makes it possible to criticize Hannibal. Lack of siege equipment
was what caused his ultimate failure; and, even if he could not take this to
Italy in the first place, it is hard to see why he could not somehow have
secured it afterwards. Moreover, since he needed reinforcements from
abroad so acutely and the land route from Spain remained blocked to him
for so many years, it seems surprising that he did not challenge Roman
naval supremacy by building a fleet — for, after all, the Carthaginian tradi-
tion was essentially maritime. But perhaps he was merely realistic in assum-
ing that rivalry with the Romans at sea was out of the question. And maybe,
also, he could not persuade his government to construct a fleet for him or

underwrite him if he constructed one himself

In the large sphere where military and political activities merge, this was
one of the things that went wrong for him —he did not receive enough
backing from the authorities at Carthage. Worst of all, they could not, or did
not, send him sufficient reinforcements. It is possible that he miscalculated by
supposing that they ever would. And he had made another miscalculation as
well. Although his insight into the Romans was often keen
psychology of the
enough, he proved mistaken in his belief that, after he had won battles, their
allies and subjects would defect to him en masse. This may have been a

deliberate gamble; and so may have been the assumption that such defec-
tions, when they occurred, would in the end persuade his government to give
him fuller support. But if so, neither gamble came off".
Twenty-nine years old when he came to Italy, Hannibal was a wiry,
athletic man, trained to run and box and endure hardship, possessed of an
iron self-restraint. He was fanatical and superstitious like most of his coun-
trymen. Yet all the same, not only his talent, but also the integrity of his
personal character, caught the fancy of subsequent ages, despite virulent
Roman propaganda to the contrary. His final confrontation with Scipio in
battle preceded, it was
by that mysterious meeting, could not fail to
said,

stir people's imaginations forevermore. Yet for most of the war it was not

only Scipio he had been fighting against but also the corporate strength and
endurance of all Rome and its allies.He is one of the world's most noble
failures, an altogether exceptional man who took on, in deadly warfare, a
nation empowered with rocklike resolution —and that nation proved too
much for him. emerged hardened from the supreme test, and ironically,
It

his most lasting achievement was to confirm and magnify its confidence and
power.
 THE IMPERIAL
REPUBLIC
I
1^
^rZZhcZury Paintings of Scipio Africanus
his Accusers:
Scipio Africanus and
the Elder Left: Uternum.
Retirement a,
R^h, Scipio Africanus in
visited by Pirates.
 —

8
"Our Sea"

The Eclipse of the Greek Kingdoms

'
^he happenings of the third century B.C. had brought Rome into
forcible contact not only with the Carthaginians but with the Greeks
^ in southern Italy and Moreover the same period had inaugu-
Sicily.

rated its relationships with the Greeks of Greece itself, with repercussions
upon the whole future history of the Mediterranean, which within a remark-
ably short time became a Roman lake.
When Alexander the Great (d. 323 B.C.), king of the Macedonians, con-
quered gigantic territories far to the east, the ancient city-states of the Greek
—
homeland already brought under Macedonian suzerainty by his father
had still retained their formal independent status but had for the most part
faded into relative insignificance. Instead, the important Greek political
units of the "Hellenistic" age now beginning were three great monarchies
carved out of Alexander's dominions after his death. The rulers of these
were: Antigonids in Macedonia; the Seleucids, whose dominions extended
from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush; and the Ptolemies, who reigned over
Egypt and the lands and seas around it. Upon the peripheries of these vast
kingdoms, however, there were other much smaller units. It was with these
that Rome first came into collision —
and first of all, with the states that were
its nearest neighbors.
One of these was Epirus (northwestern Greece), whose king Pyrrhus had
unsuccessfully invaded Sicily and south Italy in 280-275 B.C. The next
trans- Adriatic state that the Romans encountered was the monarchy of the
half-Hellenized Illyrians, who controlled the coast of what is now Dalmatia
(Yugoslavia) and expanded southwards into Albania in about 260 B.C. The
Illyrians must have been alarmed by Rome's establishment in 246 of a Latin
fortress-colony just across the strait at Brundisium (Brindisi), located on
two arms of the sea penetrating deeply into the land, and possessing the
finest harbor on the east coast of Italy. This was during the First Punic War,

'3'
132 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

and the principal intention of the Romans was to close the Adriatic to
Carthaginian shipping. But the new foundation was likely to restrict the
Illyrians as well; and sixteen years later, when Rome demanded satisfaction
for their assaults on its envoys and assassinations of Italian merchants, their
queen, regent Teuta, a determined and practical ruler, rejected the request.
So the Romans sent troops and ships to bring her to order. This attack,
their first direct dealing with a state across the Adriatic, put a stop to
Teuta's plans for further expansion and established a Roman protectorate
over Greek towns and tribes on the east side of the strait, which had been
grateful for this intervention. Then in 220-219 a Greek adventurer in the
area, Demetrius of Pharos, tried to exploit, for his own advantage, the
Romans' preoccupation with the coming Second Punic War. But he was
expelled by their forces and had to flee from his country. Significantly for
the future —
for others, too, were often to make the same mistake Deme- —
trius had believed himself to be a free agent, whereas the Romans saw him
as their client, on the analogy of the patron-client relationship that played
such a large part in Roman society.

Demetrius fled to the king of Macedonia, Philip V, who received him

(219). So now Rome, at the outset of Hannibal's invasion of Italy, was
 "
•*
OUR S EA / /jj

one of the three major Greek powers, the nearest to

directly involved with
Italy. And Macedonia still possessed many of the resources that had led it

to Alexander the Great's astonishing victories only a little more than a

century earlier. Its territories and dependencies abounded in minerals, tim-
ber, grain, and wine. Its peoples, too, were fierce and warUke and could put
a large army into the field —even if not as large as the potential strength of
the Romans. though impetuous in his political judgments
Besides, Philip V,
and capable of wanton atrocities, was a successful commander of troops
who had raised his country to its greatest power since the time of Alexander,
so that he was once again exercising control, directly or indirectly, over
most of the southern regions of the Balkan peninsula.
Naturally enough, he regarded the expansion of the Romans, just across
the narrows, with the gravest distrust, and these suspicions were confirmed
by the experiences of Demetrius that had obliged him to take refuge at the
Macedonian court. And then Philip decided that the Romans' crushing
defeat by Carthage at Cannae had given him the opportunity to check them;
so he concluded a treaty of mutual assistance with Hannibal (215). In fact
neither of the two new allies gave any useful help to the other, Hannibal
because he was without a fleet and Philip because his fleet could not stand
up against Rome's. Moreover, Roman warships now proceeded to appear
in the Adriatic and landed men in Greece to foment desultory local hostili-
ties against Macedonian allies and outposts. In 205, therefore, when the

victory of the Romans in the Second Punic War was already a foregone
conclusion, Philip decided he had better make peace with them for the time
being after all. This disillusioned his Greek supporters, without, however,
as was soon clear, closing his account with Rome. For one thing, the
Romans provoked him by taking over some of the allies who had become
estranged from him, notably the Aetolian confederacy in central Greece.
This was one of the leagues of city-states that had grown up in recent years
as attempted counterpoises to the power of one or another of the large
Greek kingdoms, in the present case its neighbor and natural enemy Mace-
donia; and by now the Aetolians were the dominant power in central
Greece. This was the first formal alliance the Romans had ever entered into
on Greek soil. It did not last for long, it is true, but long enough to give
them a permanent footing in the country.
The worst problem of the three Greek empires, the Antigonids, Seleucids,
and Ptolemies, was the debilitating strife and tension that so frequently
bedeviled their mutual relations. Philip, still deeply distrustful of the Ro-
mans, clearly perceived the perils of these inter-Greek tensions and there-
fore concluded a secret treaty with his Seleucid fellow ruler. Despite its lack
of tight organization the enormous Seleucid monarchy, which had intro-
duced numerous Greek settlers into its Syrian capital Antioch and other
IS4 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
cities, was potentially the most formidable of the three great states. More-
over, current ruler, Antiochus III, had earned himself the title of "the
its

Great" because of the vast conquests by which he had pushed his frontier
northwards and eastwards in a desire to imitate Alexander, a good measure
of whose speed and dash in warfare he had inherited.
In 203-202 Philip combined with Antiochus to make a joint attack upon
the third major monarchy, Egypt of the Ptolemies, at that time ruled by a
boy-king whose overseas dominions the other two kings now began to divide
up between themselves. Governed from its capital Alexandria, the greatest
commercial port and cultural center in the world, this Ptolemaic kingdom
was run by an unparalleled, highly profitable system of centralized state
control; and it presented a particularly tempting target to attackers, owing
to its abundance of grain, gold, copper, iron, building stones, and marbles
and its monopoly of the growth and export of papyrus.
But this sinister alliance between Macedonia and the Seleucids, designed
to eliminate the power of Egypt, greatly disturbed the Greek city-states,
which were convinced that the next to suffer would be themselves. Particu-
lar alarm was felt by the two principal second-class powers of the time,
which were Rhodes and Pergamum (Bergam). The island of Rhodes, just
off Asia Minor's southwest coast, was an extremely prosperous mercantile
republic with a large and efficient trading fleet. The Rhodians habitually
steered their own course in foreign affairs and were mainly concerned to
preserve the freedom of the seas from aggressors and pirates, while remain-
ing on good terms with everyone else. In this situation, since their island
lay so close to the Asian continent from which the great powers could so
easily oppress them, they had welcomed the estrangement that normally
existed between the Seleucids and Antigonids. They felt correspondingly
threatened by Antiochus's alliance with Philip, whom they detested, in any
case, because of his brutal enslavements of defeated populations. In conse-
quence, they now turned to Rome and make it share their anxie-
sought to
ties. Further persuasion was added by Pergamum, the civilized capital of

another very prosperous second-category state, controlling much of western

Asia Minor and deriving substantial wealth from its exploitation of natural
resources. The royal house of Pergamum, the Attalids, had broken away
from the Seleucid empire in the previous century and were justifiably afraid
that it would one day try to take them back again. So their current monarch,
Attains I Soter, took the same line as the Rhodians and joined them in
urging Rome to force the Macedonians and Seleucids apart. At the same
time both Pergamum and Rhodes started military action against Philip.
Their motives were understandable, yet the outcome of their appeals to
Rome was to be the collapse, only a few decades later, of the entire interna-
tional Greek system of which they formed so prominent a part.
 " "
OU R S E A / ^35

It seems possible that until it heard the envoys from these states, the

Roman Senate was not aware that Phihp and Antiochus had entered into
an understanding. In any event, the Pergamenes and Rhodians did not find
it too hard to convince them that it existed and was undesirable, for if two

of the major Greek powers could make friends with one another in order
to attack the third, then it seemed that having eliminated it, they might well
feel inclined tocombine again to attack Rome as well.
This nervous attitude was significant for the future because it remained
the characteristic motive of many of Rome's military moves from now
onwards. These actions would often look like naked imperialism, and in a
sense that is how they could be described. But they were caused by fright-
ened and often mistaken Roman suspicions, directed afresh at one new
foreign neighbor after another following each successive expansion of
Rome's sphere of action and influence. Or rather, the suspicions were
mainly felt by the upper classes, the Senate and nobility, and it was they
who were in favor of fighting the war against Philip. The members of the
Assembly, on the other hand, exhausted by the recently concluded eighteen-
year-long Second Punic War, at first voted solidly against fighting a new foe.

But the Senate's warlike policy prevailed, and an ultimatum was delivered
^
to Macedonia.
It must have been a difficult document to frame, especially for the Ro-

mans who habitually tried to describe their wars as just, because Philip had ^
done them no direct injury at all. What they demanded, therefore, was that
he should indemnify Pergamum and Rhodes; and they insisted also that he
should abstain in future from any hostilities against Greek states. This was
a startling piece of interference, implying that Macedonia, one of the three
great Greek empires, was, like Carthage, no longer entitled to have any
foreign policy of its own; in other words, that it was a client of the Romans,
taken unilaterally under their supervision. There had been hints of this
doctrine before, in their dealings with the lUyrians, but never before had it
been applied to a major Greek power.
Philip rejected the demand as an impertinence, and so Rome's first im-
portant war on Greek soil was under way (200). It was a historic clash
between the only military powers in Europe. The first two years' campaigns
in Macedonia and Thessaly brought little substantial progress. But then it
became clear that the Roman commander Flamininus, consul at the age of
only twenty-nine, intended to eject the Macedonians from their three princi-
pal fortresses in Greece and then drive them out of that country altogether,
forcing them to retire to their own homeland.
But Philip decided not to await this attack, since he was aware that a war
of attrition would show up his numerical inferiority. Instead, therefore, he
himself moved to the offensive, and at the ridge of Cynoscephalae (Dog's
1^6 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
Head), now Karadag in eastern Thessaly, forced a battle upon Flamininus.

Philip's right wing charged successfully downhill but was then engaged in
the rear by the Romans and routed, and the Macedonian cause was lost.
In this first direct conflict between two different military traditions, the new
flexibility taught by Scipio Africanus had made the legions more than a

match for the tightly packed and relatively immobile Greek phalanx. In its
defeat, the future of the east Mediterranean world could be read without
too much difficulty, although in this particular battle the Romans had had
the better of the ground, so that the major issue of military principle might
still be regarded by Greek optimists as open.
Nevertheless, the war was over. After his defeat, Philip was not
obliterated by the Romans because they felt they might need him as a
bastion against the Seleucids. But he had to give up his and his fleet

fortresses and accept the total exclusion of Macedonian influence from

Greece. Flamininus filled the vacuum by declaring, at the Isthmian Games
in the great mercantile city of Corinth, that the Greek cities were hencefor-
ward to be free. This famous Act of Liberation, which could be compared
with many similar declarations by Greek monarchs in the past, harmonized
with the brilliant young general's respect for Greek culture, since like Scipio
Africanus whom he claimed to rival, he was that new type of Roman who
felt an inclination to phil-Hellenism. But sentiment, insofar as it entered
into the matter at all, coincided with interest, since the pronouncement was
also based on that peculiarly Roman interpretation, concerning which we
have already had other recent hints, of what "freedom," as applied to such
communities, really meant. The Greeks might like to interpret it as com-
plete independence of action. But to the Romans, while it prompted their
military evacuation of Greece and ensured its local communities the privi-
leges of self-government, the term was only intended, once again, to mean
freedom in the sense of the relationship that a "free" client possesses with
his patron. This was to be the cause of many misunderstandings. But it was
clearly understood in 167 B.C. by King Prusias II of Bithynia, in northern
Asia Minor. As he entered the Senate house at Rome, he fell on his face
and cried "Greetings, savior gods!"

Meanwhile, however, the Declaration of Freedom roused the Greeks to

such excitement that the birds, it was said, were stunned by the shout of
jubilation that arose. This joy was not, however, universal, since Rome's
former allies, the Aetolian League, felt none of it at all. Alone of the Greeks,
they had given substantial assistance to Rome, and yet because of the
general liberation they had been allowed to annex only an insignificant
amount of territory as a reward. In their disappointment, they turned
to Antiochus and invited him to bring a Seleucid army to Greece so as to
 " "
OUR S EA / i^j

drive out what they described as the new despotism of the Romans (193).
At this time Antiochus's relations with the Romans were poor, since they
had told him firmly to keep out of Europe. This was a repetition of the
overbearing tactics they had employed in dealing with Philip, though it may
have been softened on this new occasion by the hint or suggestion that, if

he complied, they themselves would not set foot in Asia. Nevertheless,

Antiochus ignored their demand, crossing over into European soil and
seizing the Propontis (Gallipoli) peninsula in Thrace, which he claimed for
himself as territory once owned by his ancestors and belonging by right to
the Seleucids as the leading power of the east Mediterranean.
What is more, Rome's ancient enemy Hannibal was now at the Seleucid
court. After the Second Punic War, he had led Carthage into an impressive
revival; but the Carthaginians had become tired of his strong leadership,
and Antiochus allowed him to reside in Seleucid territory. This caused deep
suspicion among the Romans; and it was carefully fostered and intensified
by the king of Pergamum, now Eumenes II, who deliberately poisoned their
relationship with Antiochus just as his father, Attalus, had upset their
relations with Philip. This time, in dealing with Antiochus, the Roman
Senate did not want war. Yet, as negotiations dragged on, in an atmosphere
of increasing tension, it was he who finally lost patience, and he decided to
accept the Aetolian invitation. Whereupon in March 192, not content with
the corner of Europe he had occupied already, he extended his invasion to
Greece itself, although by doing so he made it inevitable that the Senate,
for all its would send armies to resist him. As it turned out, the
reluctance,
Aetolian appeal was imprudent and Antiochus's response to it the height
of unwisdom, since both provoked the Romans to further expansion. But
he probably felt that they must be stopped now or never.
Despite his vast potential reserves of manpower, Antiochus's conduct of
the war found him no match for them. Defeated heavily at the historic pass
of Thermopylae (191), he was forced to evacuate Greece. Then, in the
following year, the Romans defeated him again, this time at sea. It was the
last notable naval victory over a foreign enemy they were ever called upon

to win; and its immediate result was that they were enabled to land troops
in Asia, which they had never done before. And so came Antiochus's final
confrontation with the Romans, a land battle at Magnesia (Manisa) in
western Asia Minor (190 B.C.). Scipio Africanus's brother was the nominal
Roman commander, but Africanus was there, too, as his adviser; he had
remained politically powerful and believed strongly that the Greeks should
be protected against Antiochus. On the day of the battle, however,
Africanus was ill, and the most heroic part was played by Eumenes of
Pergamum. It was he who broke the heavily armored Persian horsemen on
the left flank of the enormous army of Antiochus; and then the Seleucid
138 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
elephants, stampeded by javelins, charged backwards through their own
central phalanx, and the Romans had won an overwhelming victory.
Rhodes and especially Pergamum were its chief beneficiaries, while the
Aetolian confederacy, which had invited and helped the defeated monarch,
was forced to accept a treaty involving the loss of its independence. As for
Antiochus, he had to pay the largest indemnity ever demanded by the
Romans, and they expelled him from Asia Minor altogether. This, there-
fore, was one of the decisive wars of ancient times because the Seleucid

monarchy, though remaining a continental power in the middle east, ceased

forever to be a Mediterranean state —
leaving the vacuum to be filled by
Rome.
Within only a very short time, therefore, the two most powerful Greek
kingdoms had been separately engaged and invaded by the Romans, suffer-
ing extremely heavy reverses. Nevertheless, the setback experienced nine
years earlier by Philip V of Macedonia had not proved fatal or final after

all. In the war that had just been concluded he had fought against Antio-
chus's Aetolian associates as an ally of Rome, which consequently allowed
him to maintain and even partially improve his position.
But then in 179 B.C. Philip died and was succeeded by his thirty-five-year-

old son Perseus. He renewed his father's treaty with the Romans, whom he
had no desire to offend. But, at the same time, he took numerous steps to
strengthen Macedonia's influence among all its neighbors. Moreover, at a
time when Greece was plunged into an economic emergency, he showed
sympathy to its many bankrupts, declaring an amnesty for debtors. This
could be magnified by the ill-intentioned into an act designed to promote
social revolution and undermine the Roman arrangements in Greece. Fore-
most among those who spread this hostile view abroad was Eumenes II of
Pergamum, who, not content with his earlier criticisms of Antiochus, still

Silver tetradrachm of the Seleucid King Antiochus III "the Great,"

defeated by the Romans atMagnesia in 190 B.C.
 OUR SEA / 139

carried on his father's feud against the Macedonians as well. Indeed in 172,
he visited Rome in person in order to denounce Perseus before the Senate.
His denunciation was successful, and in the following year the Romans
drifted once again into war against Macedonia. The feeble pretext was that
Perseus had attacked some border chiefs who possessed ties of friendship
with Rome. But the real reason was the anxious fear, among its authorities,
that he might make a move to disrupt their entire settlement and policy in
Greek lands.
As in the previous Macedonian war, the first campaigns were irresolute
and inconclusive. Perseus, though vigorous enough in the field, was too
indecisive to take his chances, and the Romans, as often, were slow to get
going. But by the fourth year of hostilities, the king had finally been obliged
to withdraw from his frontier lines, so that the consul Paullus was able to
establish himself on the Macedonian plain itself, where he forced the enemy
to give battle at Pydna. At first, the assault of Perseus's weighty phalanx
of twenty thousand men drove the Roman legionaries back. But, as the
phalanx charged, gaps opened in its line and into these gaps small Roman
units insinuated themselves, while others simultaneously enveloped the
Macedonian flanks, where their slashing swords inflicted catastrophic losses
on the opposing spearmen. The inferiority of the phalanx to the legions had
now been demonstrated even more conclusively than before; and the
Macedonian army had ceased to exist.

Imperialistic Policies

Perseus surrendered and went on show in Paullus's triumph, and his

officials were deported wholesale from the country. Moreover, his monar-

Macedonian King Perseus,

Silver tetradrachm of the
defeated by the Romans at Pydna in 167 B.C.
140 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
chy was abolished, and the country was divided into four separate
itself

republics. This decision, overriding Macedonian nationhood in the roughest

and most sweeping fashion, was momentous, for it was the first time that
one of the three great successor states of Alexander had succumbed to total
destruction at Rome's hands. The recent shift in the relative strength of
Romans and Greeks had been displayed with grim directness. Moreover,
the new Macedonian republics found themselves bound by an ominous new
principle according to which the "freedom" that they still possessed did not
necessarily mean immunity from taxes. Nevertheless, the financial condi-
tions imposed on them were not excessively severe, and at least the Romans
had still refrained from straightforward annexations. They were not yet
wilhng to apply to the east the provincial system they had inaugurated in
western lands. They lacked the administrative machinery needed to impose
such a step and dreaded the responsibility it would involve, still preferring
for the time being to act as patrons to client states that remained technically
free.

Nevertheless, this was an ominous landmark. Within the space of a single

generation the Greek world, hitherto dependent on the balance of power
among three large empires, had been irremediably transformed and ruined
by the utter defeat of two of those states, one of which had been obliterated;
and their place was filled by the Romans who had entered the lands sur-
rounding the Aegean and were there to stay. Furthermore, another signifi-
cant move was to follow. Immediately after Pydna, a Roman envoy ordered
Antiochus Ill's successor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had captured
Alexandria, the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, to evacuate the city, thus dis-
playing that Rome's conception of its intimate interests now extended to
major successor
this third state of Alexander as well.
Moreover, owing to the Rome's leaders there
irritable suspiciousness of
were further tough results of the Macedonian war. Eumenes II of Per-
gamum, though he had at first been in favor of Rome's hostilities against
Perseus, was later suspected by its leaders of having secretly engaged in
negotiations with him, a charge that was probably without foundation; but
the suspicion was there all the same. And Rhodes, too, worried about the
effect of the war on its maritime trade, had certainly had the effrontery, as

the Romans saw it, to offer its services to both parties as mediator in the
hope of restoring peace. After the fighting was over, both Pergamum and
Rhodes felt the Senate's displeasure. As for Pergamum, the Romans started
to undermine Eumenes's position in favor of his brother, though they did
not persist in this. But Rhodes suffered much more disastrously, since Rome
proceeded to convert another island, Delos, into a rival free port, whose
rapid rise to commercial supremacy almost completely ruined the trade of
the Rhodians. Nor were they any longer in a position to police the seas
 " "
OU R S E A / 141

against pirates — to the eventual great discomfort of Rome itself, which had
brought about this result.
Such was the treatment handed out to two loyal, longstanding allies
which had momentarily ventured to differ from the Romans about policy.
Moreover, others who had actively supported Macedonia were penalized
even more harshly by Rome, which perpetrated enslavements in Epirus and
massacres in the Aetolian League. At the same time its Achaean counter-
part in the Peloponnesus, which had likewise incurred Roman displeasure,
had to hand over a thousand detainees who were taken to Italy, including
the historian Polybius. All in all, during the first half of the second century
B.C. and particularly as a result of these depredations, Greece lost a quarter
of all its inhabitants.

In the years that followed, the attention of the Romans was largely
focused on a country at the other end of the Mediterranean, namely, Spain.
This was, however, nothing new. In the very year in which additional
praetors were created to govern the two newly annexed provinces (197),
revolts had broken out in each of them, to the south and east of the country.
The rebels in both cases received assistance from the warlike, well-armed
Celtiberians who lived on hilltops in the northeastern hinterland. Two years
later the consul Cato, of whom more will be said later, was sent out to
assume the supreme command in Spain; and after extensive operations he
succeeded in opening up new hnes of communications between the two
provincial territories. Yet the Celtiberians still remained defiant; and they
were joined by the Lusitanians of Portugal and western Spain. Open hostili-
ties continued at frequent intervals until the father of the famous Gracchi

pacified the territory of the Celtiberians in 179, by fighting combined (as was
unusual at this time) with friendly approaches designed to win the inhabi-
tants' confidence. For the next quarter of a century his settlement held.
But in this "Wild West" of the empire which invited unscrupulous exploi-
tation, Rome's government was heavy-handed, and in 154-153 both major
groups of tribes broke out into rebellion once more; and it was exacerbated
by a whole series of murderous breaches of faith by Roman governors over
the following years. Moreover, before long a particularly grave situation
arose because the Lusitanians found a guerilla leader of genius. This man,
a shepherd named Viriathus, for the first time mobilized all their tribes into
an effective coalition. Next, by the use of small armed bands skilled in

making sudden raids and then vanishing, he began to gain repeated victories
against the Romans, penetrating their provinces time after time over a
period of five years. Yet he failed to achieve the peace terms he wanted, and
finally, as a result of two further acts of perfidy by a Roman general, he

came to a violent end (140).

142 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
In the meantime, however, the Celtiberians had once again joined the
insurgents. Their main base was the hill fortress of Numantia, the key to
the upper Douro region, at the junction of two rivers running between
deeply cut banks through heavily forested valleys. From Numantia the
Spaniards withstood Roman attackers for nearly a whole decade. Finally,
after a historic eight-month siege, they were starved out by a force of sixty
thousand Roman under the command of Scipio Aemilianus,
soldiers
Africanus's adoptive grandson (133). Eighty-five years of fighting in Spain
were finally over, and the frontier was pushed up to the high tablelands of
central Spain and the line of the middle Douro. The Romans had always
been interested in the country as a recruiting ground for excellent auxiliary
soldiers,and now this much larger territory was available for the purpose.
But the Spanish campaigns that at long last achieved that end had been
mainly notable for two disastrous features. One was the unusual military
incapacity displayed by Rome, which gave its leaders cause for anxious
thought. The other was the horrifying manner in which their commanders,
one after another, had gone back on their sworn agreements with the
Spaniards, a procedure that even some of the most xenophobic senators
found impossible to condone.

One reason for Viriathus's early triumphs had been his successful exploi-
tation of simultaneous Roman crises in the Balkans and north Africa in the
140S B.C.
After the lastwar against the Macedonians, the division of the latter's
kingdom into four autonomous but obedient republics had successfully
ensured that they should be too weak to do Rome any further harm. But
it had also made it certain that they would be too weak to protect them-

selves; and so it turned out. In 150 a certain Andriscus announced, errone-

ously, that he was the son of the late king Perseus, and then, meeting only
feeble resistance from the republican militias, he successfully reunited
Macedonia and revived the kingship in his own person. The Romans had
to intervene to expel him and run him down (148).
And at this point they set their sights upon a major revision of policy.
Since their previous device of partitioning Macedonia into dependent repub-
lics had broken down, the whole concept of encouraging Greek communi-

ties to become their "free" but dependent clients —

the policy they had been
—
following since the beginning of the century now seemed ripe for aban-
donment. It was decided that the principle of direct annexation, which had
provided four provinces in the west, must be imported to these ancient
eastern regions as well. It had already caused widespread horror when one
of the great Greek monarchies, Macedonia, was destroyed in 167; and now
there was a further shock when the republics into which that country had
 " "
OUR S E A / ^43

been divided were directly annexed by Rome. Within this new province a
major road was constructed, the Via Egnatia, following an ancient route all
the way from the Adriatic to the northern Aegean. This was the first
important Roman road in the East. It linked the Macedonian cities to one
another and to Italy and formed part of this new Roman possession's
defense system against barbarian incursions from the north.
On Macedonia's southern flank, in Greece itself, the Romans belatedly
sent back to the Achaean League in 150 B.C. the survivors, three hundred
in number, of the thousand hostages they had deported seventeen years
earlier. Not long afterwards, however, they infuriated the members of the

league once again by allowing the city-state of Sparta, which the Achaeans
had earlier compelled to join their confederation, to terminate its member-
ship. This led to violent anti-Spartan and anti-Roman feeling at the league
capital, Corinth, a large industrial harbor and key fortress; and when
Roman envoys came to the city they were beaten up. However, Achaean
hopes that the Romans were too heavily committed elsewhere to be able to
retaliate proved misplaced, since the Roman consul Mummius came down
from Macedonia with four legions and captured Corinth (146 B.C.).
By order from his government, the whole place was razed to the ground
and all its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery, while its abundant
artistic treasures were shipped off to Rome. This drastic treatment of the

city was partly intended as an insurance against social revolution, since the
Romans preferred Greek towns to be governed by oligarchies hke their own,
a preference to which Corinth, dominated by a turbulent proletariat, had
failed to conform. But the Romans' brutality was also a demonstration that
they would not allow quarreling Greeks to mishandle their envoys and flout
their will. Yet,however much Greece had fallen from its high estate, it was
a terrible sign of the new times that one of the most ancient and distin-
guished centers of Greek and Mediterranean civilization should be blotted
out of existence in this way.
The Achaean League, was abolished, and Greece and its cities, after
too,
the installation of suitable local regimes, were amalgamated with the new
province of Macedonia and made to pay tribute. The long centuries of
Greek independence had been brought to an abrupt and violent end.

And in the very same year the independence of the Carthaginian state,

too,was likewise terminated by the Romans, and its ancient capital suff"ered
the same fate as Corinth.
Rome's defeat of the Carthaginians fifty-five years earlier, while eliminat-
ing their international power, had not prevented them from making a
remarkable recovery, initially under the guidance of Hannibal. They had
won back a considerable part of their trade and had employed improved
144 ^ THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
agricultural methods to increase the profits from their African territories.
But the fatal impediment to this revival proved to be Masinissa, the violent,
ambitious ruler of neighboring Numidia, who held his throne as a client of
Rome and was eager to build up his empire. Throughout half a century,
following the Second Punic War, Masinissa encroached unscrupulously on
Carthage's coastal colonies and wheat lands, while at the same time insuring
that Rome failed to arbitrate with any effectiveness to stop him. Finally in
150 the Carthaginians, driven to desperation, took up arms against him,
although their treaty with the Romans had forbidden them to engage in
independent warfare. And when Masinissa appealed to Rome, the aged
Cato insisted repeatedly to his fellow senators that Carthage must be de-
stroyed. Even if its government's resistance to Masinissa's provocation had
technically amounted to an infringement of the treaty, Cato's attitude dis-
played an irrational vindictiveness and jealous fear based on senile reminis-
cences of his own soldiering against Hannibal. But so harrowing were the
memories of that dreaded name that the Senate, in spite of strong opposi-
tion, gave in to him, and war was declared.
The Carthaginians, in this hopeless situation, asked for peace. But as
Rome repeatedly raised its price, they instead chose to offer a desperate
resistance, which continued for four years. It was terminated in 146 by
Scipio Aemilianus*, who, after receiving a special appointment from the
Assembly in advance of the statutory age, brought the siege of Carthage
itself to a successful, bloody conclusion. Its survivors were sold into slavery;
the whole city was demolished, and salt scattered on the site so that it

should remain barren and accursed forevermore. This was a measure of the
traumatic effect Hannibal had exercised on the minds of the Romans. All
that remained now was to decide what
do with the African territory that
to
had fallen into their hands. Masinissa had died, and they did not want to
give these lands to his sons. And so, instead, as in Macedonia and Greece,
they decided on a policy of annexation. Thus, while a number of its cities
were allowed to retain nominal independence as Roman clients, the Car-
thaginian homeland as a whole was converted into the province of Africa,
corresponding with the northern part of Tunisia today. The new province
possessed immense agricultural wealth. True, it was for psychological
rather than economic reasons that this third Carthaginian war had been
launched. Yet the African territory won by the Romans as a result was so
overwhelmingly rich in grain that it gradually succeeded Sicily as their
principal granary.
This ruthless obliteration of Carthage, perpetrated in the very same year
as the destruction of Corinth, sent a shudder throughout the civilized

*For his later successes in Spain, see p. 142.

 " "
OU R S E A / ^45

Mediterranean world. Roman imperialism could now be seen by all, in its

nakedly unconcealed and cynical form. It was a policy that went by the
name of the "New Wisdom." And, for all its moral defects, its growing

employment had achieved astonishing practical results, for within the space
of a few years the Romans had become dominant in almost the whole of
the Mediterranean —it was indeed Mare Nostrum, Our Sea.
 9
The New Society

Senate and Nobles in Charge

HHhe foreign policy of these decisive first decades after zoo B.C., when
ferocity and authoritarianism were on the increase all the time, was
still directed, except on very few occasions, by the Roman Senate

and nobility, that is to say, by those men, patricians and plebeians alike, who
numbered consuls among their ancestors.
In the latter part of the previous century, during the Second Punic War,
the Assembly had on certain rare occasions asserted itself against the Sen-
ate, most conspicuously by insisting upon the appointment of Scipio

Africanus, in which the senators prudently decided to concur. But on the

whole, the first two Carthaginian conflicts had greatly strengthened the
oligarchy's control of affairs. Shortly before these wars had started, the
embryonic Roman social revolution had petered out when the tribunes of
the people became agents of the nobility instead. And then later on, too,
after Hannibal had been defeated, there was a widespread feeling that it was
this nobility, operating through the Senate, that deserved the credit for
eliminating the gravest danger Rome had ever undergone and gaining for
it, in the process, extensive and prosperous new territories overseas. Once

won, these provinces came completely under control of the Senate, which,
according to a practice that now became normal, appointed as their gover-
nors men who had just served as consul or praetor at Rome, a procedure
known as prorogatio. But this senatorial grip on the expanding empire was
only part of a general phenomenon, for as the third century passed into the
second, the Senate's control of all Roman policy remained as firm and
thoroughgoing as ever before, despite occasional interventions by the As-
sembly.
This is confirmed by the statistics of elections to the offices of state: "new
men," without consular ancestry, remained extremely rare, and government
was virtually run by a closed, clublike circle of about two thousand men

146
 THE NEW SOCIETY / 147

belonging to fewer than twenty families. Philip V of Macedonia expressed

envious amazement at the friendly solidarity among these nobles and sena-
tors. True, the career and character of Scipio Africanus had introduced
strains into the amicable atmosphere, suggesting that it might not last
forever. But so far no substantial deterioration was to be seen.
Indeed, the family of the Scipios themselves was still a living illustration
of the system's narrow base. In fewer than a hundred years the members
of this single family alone gained as many as twenty-three consulships for
themselves. And overwhelming emphasis not
their surviving epitaphs place
only on public office and military success, but also on genealogical descent
as well. These great aristocratic houses kept in their cupboards the wax
masks of their ancestors who had held high office. The masks were arranged
as a family tree and received religious worship; in family funerals, they were
worn by actors engaged to walk in the procession. At such funerals, there

Sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (consul 298 B.C.), one of the
23 consuls of the Scipio family (the bust is a later addition).

iiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiifiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiimilil

f1#lllM#tW@illtillfeill
148 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
were speeches in praise of the dead man and his ancestors, and they have
provided us, directly or through intermediaries, with much historical infor-
mation, highly tendencious though it often is.

Tradition, therefore, remained all-important in Roman education, as

Cicero was never tired of emphasizing. And tradition implied reverence not
only for people of bygone times but also for seniority in the living. Thus,
although men could and did hold
office fairly young a praetor at about —
forty —
and a consul two or three years later ex-consuls spoke first in any
debate in the Senate, and their experience, which after the wars of the third
and second centuries was likely to be considerable, earned deeper respect
than ever before.

by these men, the Senate reinforced its influence and in the

So, guided
absence of any effective counterblast retained a position of virtually irre-
sponsible supremacy, becoming even more exclusive and conservative in the
process. And this, as we have seen, displayed itself in an ever tougher
foreign policy, based on suspicious, ungenerous, and often unfounded anxie-
ties. Meanwhile, even if the Assembly might occasionally make itself felt,
the vast majority of the people, as usual, were content to leave politics to
the politicians.
Yet the nobles remained very vigilant against possible unrest, as a curious
religious crisis now revealed. During the emergencies of the Punic wars the
Senate had several times provided an outlet for popular hysteria by the
importation of exciting eastern cults more likely to distract the public from
its hardships than the dry Roman ritual could ever have done. Once intro-
duced, the new cults could be toned down and domesticated. But then in
186 B.C. stringent measures were taken to control the emotional, mystic
worship of Bacchus (Dionysus). His the Bacchanalia, made known by
rites,

Roman soldiers returning from the

had spread extensively throughout
east,
Italy and were especially common in the south of the peninsula. Conducted
by conventicles or secret societies, these practices were beheved to be the
focus point not only of sexual immorality but also of crime and public
disorder. However, the worship had become so deeply rooted that the
government saw no possibility of stamping it out. Instead, therefore, they
ordered that not more than five persons should be allowed to celebrate the
Bacchic cult together, and then only after obtaining the Senate's permission.
The nobility, well aware of the importance of religion to its overall
control, at all times meticulously directed and exploited this vital area of
social behavior, and one way in which they chose to do so was by declaring
undesirable religious practices, like the Bacchanalia, to be politically con-
spiratorialand subversive. Such an attitude, however, was ominous for the
future since it produced arbitrary reinterpretations of the law. And what
 THENEWSOCIETY / 149

alsoseemed alarming was the unprecedented scope of the police action by

which they enforced these restrictions upon the Bacchic ceremonies
throughout allied as well as Roman territory.

The Rise of Latin Culture

In the literary field, too, the nobles and Senate became sensitive about
suspected attempts to undermine their supremacy. One of those who suff-
ered was the versatile poet Naevius (b. ca. 270-d. 201 B.C.), a Roman citizen
from near Capua. Naevius wrote patriotic works, of which only fragments
survive today; they included original tragic dramas about Roman history
and legend and a pioneer epic dealing with the First Punic War, in which
he himself had served. But in about 204 B.C. he committed some fault for
which he was imprisoned and went into exile. Perhaps one reason was that
the ohgarchy still remembered the offense he had caused over thirty years
earlier when he criticized one of the greatest plebeian noble families, the
Caecilii Metelli.
Naevius's native ebullience also led him to write comic plays. But here
he was outshone by Plautus (b. ca. 254-d. 184). With Plautus, who came
from backward Sarsina (Mercato Saraceno) in Umbria, we have already
reached the precocious zenith of Latin verse comedy; and twenty of his
complete plays (with one incomplete) have survived. His models, like those
of his few Latin forerunners, were the sophisticated products of the Greek
New Comedy of fourth-century Athens, familiar to many educated Romans
now that contacts withGreek south Italy and Sicily had multiplied. Yet
Plautus rewrote these plays and made them almost unrecognizable in the
process. Not only was he able, by an astonishing tour de force, to weld the
still gracelessly cumbrous Latin tongue into the meters of the totally differ-

ent Greek language, but he also wholly abandoned the subtlety of the
original Greek comedies in order to give free rein to his own explosive
genius for wild, quick-firing, slapstick buffoonery. His success, in the centu-
ries tocome, was enormous. And even during his lifetime, although his
audiences comprised people at a wide variety of cultural levels, they were
prepared to abandon the rival attractions of boxers, dancers, and chariot
races in order to come and laugh at what they heard and saw on Plautus's
temporarily erected stages.
Moreover, his plays are filled, for all their farcicality, with oblique but
telling social criticism. It takes the form of an exuberant inversion of tradi-
tionalmoral standards: a carnivalesque upturning of reverence for parents
and matrimonial respectability, and conventional depreciation of women
—
and clients and especially slaves, to whom he gave much larger roles than
they had enjoyed in the Greek New Comedy. Yet Plautus, unlike Naevius,
/JO / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
escaped upper-class retaliation. He was careful to claim that his characters
and their backgrounds were not Roman but foreign and Greek; so that,
superficially at least, it was not Roman institutions at all that were coming
under fire.

About fifteen years younger than Plautus was another poet, Ennius
(b. 239-d. 169 B.C.), who, like him, avoided getting into any trouble
with the rulers of Rome —though he not only wrote moralizing "satire,"
but also ventured to rationalize the traditional mythology and even Ju-
piter himself, the national god of the Roman state. Bom at Rudiae
(near Lecce in southeast Italy), a place where Greek, Latin, and Italian
cultures converged and endowed him, as he said, with three hearts, En-
nius served as a soldier in Sardinia at the end of the Second Punic War
and then on the staff of the Aetolian campaign of 189, subsequently
gaining the reward of Roman citizenship. A poor man who enjoyed so-
cial life, he was said to have died of gout; but "unless I have gout," he

had remarked, "I never write poetry". More industrious, however, than
this saying implied, and warmhearted and enthusiastic as well, he was
the first professional literary man Rome ever possessed and the first to
naturalize Greek literary culture.
This was achieved, above all, by his rough, vigorous, colorful Annals, an
epic poem following the tradition estabhshed by Naevius, in which, momen-
tously adapting the Greek heroic meter —
the hexameters of the Homeric
—
poems he chronicled the entire course of Roman history up to his own
day. Only a few hundred lines now survive, but they reveal how he gave
distinctive expression to the proud, virile energy and sagacious good sense
of the imperial republic of Rome at its best. His compatriots of later genera-
tions saw him as the father of Latin poetry, and he exercised a profound
effect on subsequent historians and literary critics as well.

Ennius had been brought back to Rome from Sardinia in 204 B.C. by Cato
the Elder 234-d. 149) who was born at about the same time as the elder
(b.

Scipio (Africanus), and although a "new man" without consuls among his
ancestors, became one of the outstanding politicians of his time. But they
were also embittered rivals, for the comparative harmony that had hitherto
prevailed among senators was coming to an end. There had always been,
along with the harmony, struggles for office and prestige, in which each
great man's claims were vigorously furthered by his chents, but when such
diverse personalities as Cato and Scipio were involved, this competitiveness
was sharply intensified.
Cato, taking his stand on antique tradition and rallying the support of
many conservative landowners of the day, profoundly objected to the exces-
sive personal reverence accorded to Scipio, whom he regarded as a careerist.
 THENEWSOCIETY //j/

Cato also deplored Greek affairs and debilitating Greek

his interest in
culture (exemplified by his adoption of the Greek practice of close shaving).
Ever since the Greco-Roman contacts of the Second Punic War and increas-
ingly after it had ended, Cato saw this Hellenism as an evil influence
pervading every corner of Roman life; it seemed to him outrageous when
Scipio's brother brought back from the war against Antiochus the first
bronze couches, bedcovers, ornate tables, fine cooking, and cabaret girls
ever to be seen in Rome. And Cato had his way, for not long afterwards,
in 184, he drove both the Scipios out of public life into retirement; and
Africanus died soon afterwards.
Cato's election to the censorship of 184 seemed a remarkable achievement
for a "new man" and earned him the name of Cato the Censor ever after-
wards. It also brought the term "censorious" into our language. The office
enabled him to intensify his attacks on Hellenism, and he disguised his own
versatile knowledge by inflicting a deliberate manners on
pose of boorish ill

his increasingly cultivated fellow senators. As censor he introduced numer-

ous measures of moral and economic reconstruction and purification.
Among them was the imposition of new taxes on the extravagance he so
greatly deplored. They were designed to ensnare his personal enemies but
also, in more general terms, were based on a belief, revived at intervals for

hundreds of years to come, that sumptuary legislation of this kind could

prove eff'ective.

Cato was also opposed to current tendencies towards the emancipa-

tion of women, complaining that wives tyrannized their husbands. Since
the previous century a much freer form of marriage had become habit-
ual; and the influx of wealth meant that women began to dress and

adorn themselves more luxuriously. Moreover, in certain important

families, casualties during the wars had wiped out the male line, so that
estates came under female control. This brought heavy frowns to the
faces of traditionalists, and in 169 a tribune, strongly supported by Cato,
carried a bill insisting on the ancient limitation of women's right to in-
herit. But the law was easily evaded by nominal transfers of property to

collusive trustees; and the "guardians" through whom women (except

Vestal Virgins) were still legally obliged to conduct public business fre-
quently cooperated with their wards, so that unattached women were,
in fact, able to control their own affairs.

They were also permitted to attend public entertainments, and, in the

more prosperous households at least, they were taught not only the tradi-
tional household skills more academic subjects. Thus Cornelia, the
but also
daughter of Scipio Africanus, in addition to managing her own estates but
presided over a sort of intellectual salon. And women of her rank now
played a vital part in political life as well because their marriages formed
 752 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

^^mi^^^^^":^!^^
5>T 6-f.V:
i

i>'\^ <
V. ;«-, -"i^lS.-

Wax diptych: guardian appointed to a woman by Aemilius Satuminus, prefect

of Egypt, A.D. 199.

the Unks in the chains uniting the various groups of political allies; and the
important meetings between one politician and another took place in their
houses.
Cato's disapproval of Cornelia's father was equaled only by his distaste
for enlightened women whole way of life was based
like herself. Indeed, his
on the single aim of protecting the traditional social values from further
contamination. He himself, although he came from farming stock at Tus-
culum in Latium, had been brought up in the country of the Sabines, to
whose traditional harsh discipline and austerity he ascribed what seemed
to him the best features in the character of himself and all Romans, includ-
ing, above all, their courageous endurance and loyal service to the state.
This litigious and vindictive, red-headed farmer with the piercing gray eyes
was also the epitome of puritanical reaction. But his obsessions were in vain,
for although he may have done something, for a time, to reestabhsh moral
responsibility and postpone the lowering of standards, his program could
not, in the long run, succeed.
 THENEWSOCIETY / ^53

Apart from a work on agriculture, very little of what he wrote has

survived. Yet his status as a writer enormous and secure. The gravest
is

loss is his seven-book Origins, a history of Rome. Written in Latin, not

in Greek like all its predecessors, it was the first major achievement in
this field and virtually inaugurated Latin prose as a literary medium.

Yet, despite Cato's distaste for the growing intrusion of Greek educa-
tion —read a bit of Greek literature, he taught his son, but beware that
perverse and corrupting race! —
he was prepared to supplement his na-
tive Italian trenchancy by certain Greek styhstic features and methods
of arrangement; this was scarcely surprising after his patronage of the
phil-Hellene Ennius.
Nevertheless, Cato always insisted that the Romans were basically differ-

ent from the Greeks. In contrast to Greek states, he pointed out, Rome
owed its national successes not to a few individuals but to the combined
genius of a host of different people living and working together with one
another. So great was his distaste for the Scipio-type personality cult that
in his Origins he actually suppressed the names of great Roman command-
ers altogether, preferring instead, when describing the Second Punic War,
to mention the name of a Carthaginian elephant, Surus. And he correctly
identified a very real fault of Roman historiography when he blamed writers
for glorifying their own families.
History was closely linked with the government of the Republic —and so
was public speaking, at which Cato likewise excelled, exploiting his quick
and biting wit to survive no fewer than fifty political prosecutions. This art
was the mainspring of Roman public life and education, and, as in his
historical authorship, Cato was not entirely immune from Greek influence,
in this case the rhetorical "art of persuasion" and the technicalities that it
imparted. These influences combined with the urgent practical exigencies
of speaking in the Assembly, Senate, and lawcourts to create that most
formidable of instruments, Latin oratory, of which Cato was a pioneer
exponent.
As orator, statesman, and defender of austere but narrow morality, Cato
remained greatly to the fore throughout these years. His foreign policies
were predictably narrow, and under the guise of sagacious common sense
he sponsored many of the aggressively chauvinistic measures of the epoch,
notably the move to obliterate Carthage. At an earlier date, it is true, an
equally vindictive proposal to declarewar on Rhodes had not met with his
approval.* Yet this, we may be sure, was not because of any sympathy with
the island's Greek inhabitants, but because (in contrast to his late enemy

*Cato had also deprecated the repeated cheating of the Spaniards by Roman commanders. See
page 142.
154 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
Scipio Africanus) he was opposed to further Eastern interventions, with all

the insidious influences they brought in their wake.

In the campaign against Macedonia that had led to the disgrace of the
lukewarm Rhodians, one of the youngest Roman officers was Africanus's
grandson by adoption, Scipio Aemilianus (b. 185/4-d. 129 B.C.)- He indulged
even more than Africanus in the new Roman taste for Renaissance-style
individualism that Cato so greatly deplored. And time after time, in the
years to come, it was Aemilianus that the Romans turned in a
to Scipio
crisis. It was he, in Cato's old age, who won the Third Punic War (146), and
then it was he again who finally defeated the Spaniards (133); and for nearly
twenty years of Roman history, although never unchallenged, he remained
its key personality and outstanding statesman. He was a man of numerous

contradictions, reputedly idle when young, yet formidably active in later

years. As a speaker he was excellent, as hehad to be; and, although not a
brilliant general like Africanus, he was an organizer with plenty of drive.
Moreover, despite an ironical wit that was inclined to cause offense, he
lavished on his friends and on the general public, when he wanted to impress
them, a great deal of personal charm. But what was most important about
him was his deserved reputation for decent behavior: he was regarded as
a person of integrity in an age that needed this and knew it.

Yet the career of Scipio Aemilianus, though advancing ambitiously from

one honor to another, remained curiously negative all the same. For the
troubles of his age, the troubles of a city-state that had become within a
short space of time the capital of a vast empire, he had no creative solutions
to offer. It seems a missed opportunity that this most brilliant man of his
age did not supply some of the reforms that he alone might have succeeded
in introducing. Yet this negativeness also had its good side, for it meant that
he never attempted to break out of the republican system in order to
—
dominate it himself as, once again, he probably could have if he had tried,
and as other men did after him. True, his rabble-rousing exploitations of
popular appeal, in defiance of the Senate, were a sinister example to those
who came after —and aupon the constitution. Yet, like Africanus
strain
before him, he was still content to work inside the framework.
An intellectual sympathetic to Hellenism, Scipio Aemilianus had been
educated by a variety of Greek tutors and was deeply interested in Greek
literature and philosophy, and indeed, although there may not quite have
been the "Scipionic circle" of which Cicero later spoke, men who were in
touch with him played a large role in the partially Hellenized Roman
culture of the time. They included not only Greek men of letters whose
philosophy was sometimes stretched to provide or imply an idealistic justifi-
cation for the emerging Roman commonwealth, but also a distinguished
THE NEW SOCIETY / '55
1^6 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
Latin dramatic poet, the short-lived Terence (b. ca. 190-d. 159 B.C.), one of
Plautus's successors on the comic stage. As his last name "Afer" indicates,
Terence came from northern Africa. He became the slave of a Roman
senator, who set him free; and he gained the friendship of Scipio
Aemilianus, who was even rumored, probably wrongly, to be part-author
of his plays. All six of these survive. They display a constructional skill that
left on the future theater of Europe. Their writer is seen
a strong imprint
to be not only gentler and more contemplative than Plautus, but also closer
to his Greek models and therefore farther away from popular taste. Terence
young heroes with a fashionable philosophical
depicts his realistic, amoral,
humaneness beneath which runs an undercurrent of social criticism, more
unobtrusive than the running commentary of Plautus but persistent all the
same.
This same note recurs in Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca (Sessa) in Campania
(b. ca. i8o-d. 102), another of Scipio Aemilianus's proteges, who served in
his cavalary in Spain. Lucilius turned his exceptional gifts into the channel
its modern sense, he was virtually the founder. Ennius
of satire, of which, in
had written moralizing verses of a mildly satirical kind, but it was Lucilius,
as the thirteen hundred somewhat rough, crude lines surviving from his
thirty books reveal, who brought his varied and salty mockery to bear upon
contemporary hfe and letters. A rich and well-connected man, he was no
friend of those who fell from the social standards he upheld. Yet his sharp,
incisive mind and irreverent, exuberant humor cut sharply through the
shams and futilities he detected in the contemporary scene. He sensed the
wind of change, and even if he did not hke it altogether, it found him better
prepared than most, and he lived on until the time when it had gained a
fuller strength.

Roman Wealth and New Buildings

During these years, an ever-increasing stream of coin and bullion flowed
into the Roman treasury from countries overseas. In the year after the
brother of Scipio Africanus brought back his immense booty from Asia
Minor, the Galatians in the center of that peninsula once again yielded
enormous loot (179). Then, in 168, the three-day triumphal procession of the
victor of Pydna, Paullus, includedtwo hundred and fifty wagons of spoils
and three hundred crowns made of gold. It was a metal that, for the first
time, was becoming familiar in Rome, in this form of massive indemnities
paid by its defeated foes. And a very large proportion of these new riches
found its way hands of the senatorial nobility.
into the
The gulf between rich and poor was becoming enormous; and in order
to do a little to counteract this trend, the Senate, after Pydna, decided to
 THE NEW SOCIETY / ^SJ

make an impressive public gesture. Until now, all Roman had been
citizens
liable to pay the state a direct property tax or tributum, which had been
levied frequently in emergencies and with particular severity during the
Punic Wars. But the Roman public, although prepared to pay indirect taxes
(which were not very large), did not consider direct taxation a regular or
reasonable part of their obligations as citizens; they would have agreed with
Cicero that "it is a statesman's duty not to impose a property tax upon the
people" — that is to say, not to impose it upon Roman citizens, for the
corollary was that all necessary direct taxation should be extracted from
Rome's subjects in the provinces. When, therefore, the Galatian loot was
brought back, the Senate repaid to individual Romans a substantial part or
even the whole of the tribute that had been levied on them or their families
in theSecond Punic War. And then, in 167, the plunder seized after Pydna
enabled this form of taxation to be abolished altogether, and it was not
reimposed for more than a century to come. This was a popular measure
that must have done at least something to lessen discontents arising from
the increasing disparities of wealth.
Rome already exceeded all the other cities of the Western world in size,
and as this influx of foreign wealth continued, its buildings began to assume
a monumental appearance. Greek influence was manifest in a new taste for
free-standing porticoes and for the basilicas or public halls that replaced the
old rows of shops beside the Forum and served as markets, meeting places,
and courts of justice. The earhest extant example of an Italian basilica
happens to be not in Rome itself, but at the Campanian town of Pompeii
(?I20 B.C.). It is a large rectangular structure with internal colonnades,
which seems, originally, to have possessed a flat wooden roof. The earliest

Roman construction of the same type, which has not survived, was the
Basihca Porcia (184 B.C.) built by Cato the Censor despite his suspicions of
Greece. And other basilicas at Rome followed not long afterwards, in
partial imitation.
At a later date, in the first century B.C., these large halls were recon-
structed with rounded arches, instead of the rows of flat-architraved col-
umns which had characterized the original basilicas. Although there had
been timid earlier attempts at the theme in Greece and Etruria, the arch was
a preeminently Roman structural form. It could also be created in isolation

from arcades and could even be detached from buildings altogether. The
result of the latter process was another typical Roman creation, the free-
standing monumental or commemorative arch. Its first recorded examples
at Rome, no longer standing today, date from 196 B.C., when two such

monuments were erected to celebrate victories in Spain. Later in the century

there were others. They were the forerunners of the magnificent imperial
triumphal arches that can still be seen in many cities today.
158 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

Arched gate of S. Maria di Fallen (Falerii Novi), 241-200 B.C.

These developments and arcades, and of the

in the construction of arches
curving apses, niches, and vaults which are Hkewise among the supreme
architectural achievements of the Romans, were made possible by the dis-
covery of concrete, the most revolutionary of all their revolutionary struc-
tural inventions. Its earliest uses were traditionally attributed to the final
quarter of the second century B.C. But recent excavation appears to have
ascribed this innovation to a date as early as the first decade of that century.
Extensive employment of concrete has been detected in a large market hall
and granary beside the Tiber and the Aventine. This is identified, with
probability, as the Porticus Aemilia, built in 193 B.C. and restored in 174,
though concrete was still not used very widely until a generation or two
later.
 THENEWSOCIETY / ^59

Adhesives of sand, mixed with lime and water, had been known to Greeks
in the previous century. But it was only now that the serious exploitation
of such materials began, after the Romans had detected the admirable
properties of a material available in the soil, a natural, pulverized, volcanic
blend of cinders and clay. It is known as pozzolana because of its
abundance
at Puteoli (Pozzuoli, near Naples), but quantities are also found close to

Rome itself. When good, unadulterated lime was mixed with this product
in a kiln, the molten mass became an exceptionally consistent and coherent

concrete. This was poured over a rubble "aggregate" made from chips of
stone, or brick, or pumice, and skillfully graded by weight. The result was
a compact, monolithic, almost indestructible mass, extraordinarily resistant
to strains and stresses, impervious to water, and exerting no lateral thrust.
It could be concealed from the viewer by the surface application of facings
of marble or stone, and this was usually done. But the facings were purely
superficial and not structurally essential. Gradually, and by a long series of
cautious experiments, successive generations of Roman would
architects
awake to the breathtaking potentialities of this concrete medium and em-
ploy it to build their soaring curvilinear marvels of the future.
But meanwhile, had been achieved, arches had to
until this confidence
be built more cautiously without using the material. Thus in 144 B.C. a
praetor built Rome's first aqueduct to include arched high-level sectors of
appreciable length, the Aqua Marcia, which supplied the city with water
from a source thirty-six miles distant; its channel was lined with concrete,
but it remained for future aqueducts to embody the material in their arches.
This was only the first stage of a long process of such construction, at the
end of which Rome's abundance of running water would be unequaled in
its lavishness; nor has any other city ever put it to more spectacular public

use, while the provinces, too, would be furnished with aqueducts on a

magnificent scale. The Aqua Marcia exemplified the special concern of the
Romans of this time for public works of soHd, material utility. There was
also extensive building of Italian roads; and in Rome itself the streets,
although nothing was done to increase their narrow width, were paved with
blocks of durable lava from the Alban Mount. The old wooden bridge (Pons
Sublicius) across the Tiber, too, was supplemented in 179 B.C. by the Aemil-
ian bridge resting on piers made of stone, to which an arched superstructure
was added in 142.
The growing population of the capital, however, was accommodated in
lofty, rickety, jerry-built wooden blocks, lacking adequate light, heat, cook-
ing arrangements, or water supply, and subject to frequent destructive fires
and floods. For the houses of the rich, on the other hand, wall facings of
dressed stone were coming into use. No examples from such an early date
survive at Rome itself, but their plan can be recovered from elegant, luxuri-
i6o / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

The Alban Mount and aqueduct of Claudius (Aqua Claudia), painted by

Thomas Cole (1801-48).

ous houses of this and previous periods at Pompeii. The houses presented
plain facades to the street, or let off sections of this frontage space as shops.
The rooms are grouped around a central atrium, a blend of courtyard and
front hall which is of Italian, and reputedly Etruscan, origin. It was ap-
proached through an entrance passage and covered by a roof containing,
normally, a central aperture. The atrium housed the family altar and stat-
ues. Beyond it were the living and domestic quarters, which might include
different dining rooms for summer and winter; they were often grouped
around a colonnaded court (peristyle) containing a small garden though —
sometimes the main garden was beyond. Dwellings of this type, which in
some regions of Italy continued to be constructed and reconstructed over
many generations, were notable for their wall paintings, of which the earli-
est surviving examples go back to about 100 B.C., though they must have

had forerunners. Glazed windows were known but little used except in the
public bathing establishments that developed later on. Although the provi-
sion of water was conceived primarily as a public rather than a private
service, the supply directed to the baths and fountains of the towns could
 THE NEW SOCIETY / l6l

also be siphoned off into leaden pipes leading to the better class of private
houses.

Agriculture and Slavery

The wars that transformed Rome by their plunder also brought sweeping
social changes throughout Italy. In some areas of the country, the devasta-
tions and confiscations during the fifteen years of Hannibal's invasion elimi-
nated many small landholders altogether. And their ruin was also assisted
by other factors that continued to operate throughout the Mediterranean

Plan of House of Menander, Pompeii (from third century B.C. onwards); with
surrounding houses.

nprr^

20m
_J
162/ THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
wars of the second century B.C. In this endless succession of foreign cam-
paigns numerous Itahan soldier-farmers were killed; and among those who
returned, some brought which made many areas uninhabitable,
in malaria,
and others could not face the prospect of going back to farming and gravi-
tated instead to the war industries of the towns. But above all, whether they
returned or not, it was the endless conscription, involving prolonged ab-
sence on meager pay, that set the seal on the collapse of their small proper-
ties. Every qualified citizen between the ages of seventeen and forty-six was

liable to serve for sixteen years, or even twenty years in emergencies. Be-
tween 200 and 168 B.C. some forty-seven thousand soldiers were in the field
each year; if one included and south Italian Greeks, the total came
Italians,

to one hundred and ten thousand or one hundred and thirty thousand. Nor
were the numbers much fewer thereafter. And all these men were lost to
their farms at least long enough for their land to fall into ruin; and very
often the decay proved irreparable.
Much of the soil thus vacated passed in due course into the hands of
theRoman state, which came to own, by this means, one-fifth of the
whole Italian peninsula. Once in possession of such a piece of public
territory, (ager publicus), the government could let it out again to pri-
vate individuals. Those who occupied public land in this way were sup-
posed to pay rent to the state. But its collection was lax, and a large
number of the tenants held on to the properties they had acquired with-
out paying any dues at all. A certain number of these fortunate lessees
were small holders, but many others were large-scale landowners who
either took over single big tracts (later known as latifundia) or amal-
gamated a whole network of medium-sized farms. These were men who,
during the foreign wars, had accumulated sufficient money to keep up
these great estates or groups of properties and could afford to wait pa-
tiently until their endeavors yielded profits. Meanwhile, the ancient legal
limitations on the amount of public land any one citizen was permitted
to lease were regularly evaded or ignored. So holdings of hundreds of
acres became an increasingly prominent feature of the Italian scene; and
their wealthy proprietors continued to expand further at the expense of
the harassed small holders in the area, by methods ranging from pur-
chases and mortgages to physical violence.
In certain areas of Italy this new phenomenon of the large landowners
brought changes in preferred types of agricultural production. The rising

populations of the towns off'ered them an increased market for their crops,
and they responded to the challenge by transforming the traditional modest
subsistence farming into large-scale, mixed, intensive cultivation for pur-
poses of commercial gain. This cultivation was undertaken with the aid of
new scientific methods, such as crop rotation and manuring, new deep-
 THENEWSOCIETY / i6^

cutting ploughs, and a new systematic selection of seeds. The city of Rome,
where people had begun to eat baked bread instead of porridge, still relied
on obtaining its wheat from Campania, which also outstripped Etruria as
the industrial center of Italy. But in certain other parts of the peninsula, the
growing of grain, which had remained the staple crop for so long, at last
began to lose its supremacy.
Secondary reasons for this development included competitive importa-
tion from the granary provinces and erosion of soil. But, above all, the
switch from grain was due to a new preference for other farm products that
earned more money. From the middle of the second century B.C. onwards,
grapes had become a more important crop than grain, and olives too were
in lucrative demand; the ruin of Carthage made Italy the chief wine and oil

producer for the West. Vegetables were also important. But the largest
agricultural development of the age, especially in southern Italy, was huge-
scale farming and breeding of cattle to produce meat, cheese, wool, and
leather. These were enterprises that only the biggest estates were able to
undertake, since they alone could provide both the upper and lower grazing
required for seasonal migration.
We learn about the agriculture of these years from Cato the Elder's
treatiseOn Farming (De Agricultura), the earliest Latin prose work to have
come down to us intact. To own a mixed ranch, insists this hard-bitten
farmer-politician, and to work it scientifically is much the best way to make
money. And in this survey, ill-arranged though it is, he provides a vivid
picture of the novel enterprises of the day which combined agriculture with
commerce, banking, and various kinds of industry. The way to run these
estates, Cato maintained, was by making good use of slaves. Enormous
numbers of these were now available. Slavery had been a recognized institu-
tion since the remotest past. Its large-scale exploitation had been introduced
to Europe at an early date by the Phoenicians and then became familiar to
the Greeks. Subsequently, as a result of the victorious campaigns of the
third and second centuries B.C., slaves flooded into Rome: seventy-five
thousand as prisoners in the First Punic War, including twenty-five thou-
sand from Agrigentum (Agrigento); thirty thousand from Tarentum alone,
among the numerous captives of the Hannibalic war; huge numbers of
Asiatics after the victory over Antiochus III; and one hundred and fifty
thousand from Epirus in 167 B.C. They were sold in the great slave markets
of Capua and Delos. These enclosures were capable of handling twenty
thousand slaves a day. They were kept well stocked not only by the fighting
against foreign states but also through kidnappings by pirates, who, ever
since Rome's unwise reduction of their enemy Rhodes, had infested the
eastern Mediterranean. They were supported more or less secretly by emi-
nent Romans for profit.
164 / THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
Slaves lacked all human rights; and the dramatist Plautus, although
expressing himself obliquely, indicated sympathy for their defenseless posi-
Yet household slavery could be relatively humane and it
tion in society. —
provided one of the principal channels by which Greek culture came to
Rome, supplying the city with its secretaries, teachers, and doctors. In the
countryside, on the other hand, slaves fared a great deal worse. Cato es-
timated that they ought, on the whole, to receive much the same treatment
as farm animals, though more careful attention should be devoted to the
care and welfare of an ox, which was not so good at looking after itself as
human beings. Often these rustic slaves were kept in chains, and when they
became too old to earn their keep by working, Cato was prepared to let them
perish. Yet he goes on to say that the most efficient principle of management
is to treat both animals and slaves well enough to enable them to work as

—
hard and as long as they can which meant giving them more food than,
for instance, a "free" Egyptian peasant was getting. And Cato was gracious
enough to permit his male and female slaves to have sex with one another
provided they paid him a fee. Furthermore he lent them money to buy slaves
of their own, whom they could train, at his expense, and then sell very —
often to himself. And the slave children of his household were suckled by
his wife.
Other employers of slaves on the large plantations were as callous as
Cato, but less sensible, and subjected them to appalling ill-treatment. As a
result, in spite of the danger of death that this involved, many slaves

deserted from their masters and went underground. This was one of the
reasons why, at certain periods of the second century B.C., the whole struc-
ture of the classical Greco-Roman society seemed as if it might crack up
and disintegrate. All over the Mediterranean area social strains were acute;
and in Italy, in particular, slave disturbances recurred at regular intervals

from 198 B.C. onwards.

But the first major crisis erupted in the ranches of Sicily. At the slave
barracks of that island, dangerous groups of fellow nationals had been
imprudently concentrated; and in 135 their inmates broke out into large-
scale rebellion. One of its leaders, a talented, mystical Syrian named Eunus,
collected an army of seventy thousand of his fellow slaves, issued coins

describing himself as King Antiochus, and seized a very large part of the
island, which he held for no less than three years. Finally the revolt was
put down with great slaughter. But meanwhile ithad triggered off other
disturbances in various territories of the east, from which most of the slaves
in Sicily had originated. These outbreaks included a formidable rising at
Pergamum. Its last monarch had bequeathed his kingdom to Rome (133)
precisely in order to avoid that sort of revolutionary development, but in
vain. A certain Aristonicus led a nationalistic, popular, Pergamene revolt
 THENEWSOCIETY 7/^5

that attracted and enlisted many slaves, as well as free men, before the
Romans were able to suppress him.
Nevertheless, despite all these troubles, it was the slaves who made Italy's
agricultural plantations work and prosper, so that the rich became a great
deal richer. However, in certain regions of Italy, the effect of this on the
"free" rural poor was disastrous. From ca. i8i B.C. the foundation of new
colonies, which might have received them, ceased for many years; and not
only were they harassed by debt and dispossessed of their small holdings,
but on the large estates which had amalgamated and supplanted these little
properties, they could not get work. EarHer many poor people had migrated
to the cities in order to take up industrial jobs, and now immigrants of a
more desperate kind were continually doing the same, but after they had
moved in, they still remained jobless and impoverished and ready to make
trouble. When they had merely been destitute in the remote countryside,
the Roman government, rarely noted for its humanitarianism, might remain
unmoved. But their presence as potential rioters in the capital carried
worrying political implications that meant that something had to be done.
And there was another even more alarming aspect, this time of a military
nature. Recruits to the legions had to have certain property qualifications,
which this whole considerable section of Roman manpower, seeing that it
—
had become destitute, no longer possessed so that now, at a time when
Rome needed recruits in many different regions, there was a serious dearth
of them. Reforms, then, were seen by many to be imperative, and an attempt
to provide them could not be long delayed.
 ^i^PHyt" 'JP^IJC^* ^

s«*%^
it.JL

t
ii i Wm irojw

3« '
^^^
^

^^^(^ass^^^ki
Preceding page:
Participants in Mystery Rites at Pompeii.
 10
Reform and
War in Italy

The Gracchi
n ^iberius and Gaius Gracchus, young tribunes of the people, now
made spectacular attempts to cure the many ills from which Rome
and Italy were suffering. They came from the highest nobility; it
would have been impossible for anyone but an influential noble to get far
with such an enterprise.
During the middle years of the second century B.C. the tribunate had
begun to revive some of its earlier powers; certain tribunes were now
seen asserting themselves against the Senate. Tiberius Gracchus's brief
career came at a time when this revival was under way. He was an ide-
alist. Yet he was also not immune to the characteristic personal hostili-
ties of faction life, since he entertained a private grudge against his
cousin and brother-in-law Scipio Aemilianus. However, when Tiberius
assumed his tribuneship in 133 B.C., Scipio was still absent in Spain, so
the new tribune was able to bring forward a measure although Scipio
regarded it as unduly radical. This provided for the creation of individ-
ual allotments to be carved out of the extensive Italian public land that
had come into the possession of the Roman government since the Sec-
ond Punic War. Of this territory he proposed to leave only three hun-
dred acres apiece in the hands of the existing tenants, which was said to
be the maximum they were allowed to hold by the terms of a long-
ignored law; the blow was softened by the allowance of an additional
one hundred and fifty acres for every child in the families of these occu-
pants. The rest of the public land was to be distributed in small parcels
to poor citizens from Rome. But although the relief of urban poverty
may have formed part of Tiberius's intention, his main purpose, against
the alarmist~^ackground CJfToirfemporary slave risings, was to increase
the number of free men possessing enough property to qualify them for
military service. He was shocked by the growing shortage of such re-

i6g
ijo / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Plinth of a statue commemorating Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus and

mother of the Gracchi.

cruits, as well asby the ineffectiveness of the Roman army, notably in

Spain where he himself had been serving four years earlier.
The measure could not be described as overwhelmingly radical; and
Tiberius had the support of many leading men, including his father-in-law,
the leader of the Senate, and one of the consuls, as well as the consul's
brother who was the richest man in Rome. However, there was also strong
opposition to the sort of plans Tiberius had in mind, noTohly frqm^Scjpio
Aemilianus who was far away, but from senators who were active in the city
itself, and provoked him to pass on to more high-handed
their objections
behavior. At the suggestion of his advisers he decided to short-circuit
obstruction to his bill by presenting it directly to the Assembly, without
prior reference to the Senate. This was not illegal and not wholly without
precedent: it had been done by Flaminius a century earlier. Yet that had
been an exceptional event, and the procedure remained contrary to custorn,
which played so great a part in Roman politics.
Moreover, when the measure was vetoed by a fellow tribune, Oc-
tavius, Tiberius induced the Assembly to depose him from his office.
Such a motion was wholly without precedent. However, Tiberius, whose
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / IJI

counsellors included Greek philosophers familiar with their own coun-

try's doctrines of popular rights, could argue that Octavius's veto, flout-
ing the will of the people, was equally unprecedented —as indeed it was,
even if Octavius was technically within his rights. At all ev ents^jhe
agrarian was now passed. In order to bring it into effect a perma-
bill

nent commission was set up, including Tiberius, his younger brother
Gaius, and Tiberius's father-in-law.
The Senate then tried to frustrate Tiberius by withholding any substantial
financial backing from the commission. But meanwhile it became known to
him, through the channels of his family's hereditary chentships in Asia, that
the last king of Pergamum had died and left his kingdom to the Roman
people. Thereupon Tiberius proposed, or threatened to propose, that the
Assembly should be requested to make part of the enormous revenue from
this property available to the colonists the commission was hoping to settle.

This meant bypassing the Senate once again; and the suggestion struck a
grave blow at senatorial control of foreign and financial aff'airs, which,
although not based on any explicit legal sanction, was hallowed by tradi-
tion.
Then, in order to safeguard his legislation against the strong probabil-
ity of subsequent annulment, Tiberius offered himself for immediate ree-
lection to the tribunate. Now, according to the strict letter of the law, a
reelection of this kind, without an interval, was not specifically ex-
cluded. It was forbidden for senior magistracies (oflfices of state)^ but the
tribunate, being an office not of the state but of the plebs, was not a
magistracy in the technical sense. Nevertheless, the proposed reelection,
like Tiberius's way of presentingwas a comple t e departure from
his bill,
custom. Moreover, as the time for the vote approached, it became clear
that he had made too many enemies to win. Under the influence of con-
servative opinion, people were beginning to suspect that his high-handed
actions were directed towards seizing personal, autocratic control of the
state. When, therefore, the Assembly began its electoral meeting on the
Capitol, a violent quarrel broke out concerning the legahty of the pro-
ceedings. Physical br awling-soQa-ibllowed, and a crowd of senators and
their clients, with an ex-consul at their head, marched on the Assembly
and clubbed Tiberius and three hundred of his supporters to death.
It was the first time for nearly four hundred years that blood had been

shed in Roman civil strife. Tiberius had not, perhaps, actually broken the
constitution; but under provocation he had subjected it to a variety of
strains that senators felt they could not endure. Although, therefore, his
intentions and reforms were not revolutionary, he had suffered a violent
—
death and this was a deeply ominous model for the future. In his brief
period of activity, Tiberius Gracchus had initiated, for good or evil, some-
 IJ2 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
thing that he surely did not want: the disintegration of the Roman oli-

garchic system.

Scipio Aemilianus was glad of and the Senate moved into_

his death;
ruthless action against his partisans. Moreover, a number of its members,
including Scipio Aemilianus, who had welcomed Tiberius's fate, tried to
terminate the activities of the land commissioners. But in this they did not
.succeed. Friction, it is true, continued, but the efforts of the commission,
as inscriptional evidence shows, were actually supported by certain conser-
vatives who hoped for popularity among the poorer Romans and wanted
to demonstrate that their opposition had not been directed against the law
itself but only against Tiberius's high-handed methods. And so the commis-

sioners were able to carry on with their work; and their achievements even
did something to retard the ruin of the small farmers in certain parts of
Italy.

Then one of the commissioners. Gains Gracchus, was elected tribune

^,£31^123. He built many myths on the career of his elder brother
Tiberius, but his own aims were more far-reaching. Ingenious, subtle,
energetic, and passionate. Gains was a most accomplished orator and
used and diplomacy to win support from any and every di-
his oratory
rection. His brother had preferred not to abandon "the art of the possi-
ble" unless he had to. Gains had no such qualms. And he was able to
improve on Tiberius!s_record _by securing his own immediate reelection
to a second tribuneship unopposed. The controversy over his brother's
efforts to achieve the same end had apparently led to the eventual ad-
mission that this was permissible after all. Indeed, there may have been
legislation to that effect during the intervening decade. This, however, is

uncertain. And some uncertainty about the distribution of

there is also
Gaius's measures between his two tribunates. But in all probability a
good many of them were put forward during the first of the two years,
and almost at its outset.
G.aius began, apparently,by reaffirming his brother's agrarian enactment,
supplementing it by a measure providing for the foundation of Roman
colonies at centers including Tarentum and Capua and Carthage. The
Carthaginian proposal, which perhaps came later than the others, was a
complete novelty, since overseas colonization was a Greek idea unfamiliar
to the Romans, and many of them found it unwelcome. These colonies, to
judge from their locations, were in some cases commercial rather than
agricultural, being designed, apparently, for colonists from the urban poor
of Rome. Yet Gains did not cherish the false illusion that all the poor people
of the capital could be sent away to become farmer-colonists; and for the
benefit of those who remained in the city, he brought forward a law securing
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / H^
the provoskuixtLwlieat at a reasonable price, which would be insured by an
official subsidy. This, too, had been customary in the Greek city-states. But

although moderately framed and a far cry from the mass bribery of later
legislators, the proposal was seen by conservative Romans as alarming state
socialism.
G^us also arranged for the passage of highly controversial bills concern-
ing the law courts. In 149, as a result of many political scandals, a new court,
the quaestio de repetundis, had been established to investigate alleged abuses
of power by Roman provincial governors, including illegal confiscations
and the acceptance of bribes. In the intervening period, however, many such
officials had been far too readily acquitted by the courts, since its jurymen,

like the defendants, were all senators. In consequence, Gain^ Grarphii<i

promoted a measure providing that the juries should henceforward com-

prise not only senators but knights, that is to say, men possessing the
property qualification next below the senators. And then this idea was
shelved in favor of a law providing that all the jurymen should be knights
without any senators at all.

The rise of the knights had been a major phenomenon of recent

years. In ancient times, they had been horsemen of the Roman cavalry,
as their designation as equites indicated. But when in the third century
B.C. this branch of the citizen army was largely replaced by auxiliaries,
the knights retained their social position but changed their function,
becoming officers in the legions, for example, and functionaries on the
staff's of provincial governors. They did not, however, at this stage form

a single homogeneous sector of society, being roughly divided into two

categories. The first consisted of prosperous landowners, men who
resembled senators except that they were slightly less wealthy. The sec-
ond group, however, engaged in financial operations —from which the
senators were officially debarred in the vain hope of insuring that their
political functions should remain uncorrupted. These financial knights
had a good deal to do. Since Republican Rome virtually lacked a civil
service, the collection of public revenues —for instance, indirect taxes
(customs dues, etc.) and the income from public land — was habitually
contracted out by the state to the highest bidder, who was then at lib-

erty to reimburse himself as profitably as he could. Such bidders were

normally knights; they were known as publicans. They also set out to
gain contracts for the construction of pubhc buildings and works and
the provision of army and by using the proceeds from such en-
supplies;
terprises to buy tax contracts, the knights who engaged in such activi-
ties could make impressive fortunes.
Conflicts with the Senate sometimes arose, especially when the publicani
tried to make too much money from these activities, thus impoverishing the
IJ4 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
and leaving too little loot for the senators. But until the time of
provincials
Gains Gracchus, such attempts on the part of the knightly financiers were
curbed without too much difficulty. An entirely new situation, however, was
created by Gaius's new court consisting wholly of knights, especially as
many of its members belonged to the category whose principal interests
were financial. Indeed, his action could be said to mark the beginning of
what was later called the Equestrian Order as a separate and significant
class of knights in the state, whose interests would inevitably clash with
those of the senators, so that the governing cadre of the state would no
longer be a homogeneous whole.
Gains then struck a further blow for the knights in connection with
the recently annexed province of Asia, the former kingdom of Per-
gamum. Tiberius Gracchus had wanted to divert its great revenues for
the benefit of his land law. And his brother, too, needed money very
pressingly for his expensive schemes for wheat subsidies and colonies.
When the territory had first been annexed, tax immunities had been
granted to many of its cities, but Gains now canceled them. Since, how-
ever, that still did not bring in enough money, he put the collection of
Asian taxes up for auction in the capital, thus granting a monopoly of
this highly profitable activity to the tax-farming knights or publicani.
Gains no doubt believed that this arrangement would benefit the trea-
sury because of the enthusiasm with which these men would extort the
required taxes — from the opera-
since they themselves stood to profit
tion. Indeed, the immense amounts they now proceeded to gain through

his measure greatly encouraged the evolution of the publicani into pow-
erful companies. This did a great deal to insure the subsequent growth
of the knights into a class separate from and hostile to the Senate.
Finally, Gains Gracchus tackled a perilously heated question: the status
of Rome's Latin and Italian associates or subject allies. Many of them were
laboring under bitterly felt grievances that had gradually been accumulating
for a good many years. In the previous century, the allies had played a
massive part in the winning of the Second Punic War, and after it was over,
the time had been ripe for their admission to Roman citizen rights, or at
least to some more equal form of partnership. But the Senate had no desire

to bestow the Roman franchise on men whose votes it could not control
since they lived so far away. So nothing was done to improve their position.
On the contrary, from the i8os and 170s onwards, there had been various
signs of increased encroachment by Rome. In particular, arbitr ary measures
had been taken by Roman officials, from whose heavy-handed treatment the
allies now felt an urgent desire to seek protection.

Scipio Aemilianus, who had commanded Latin and Italian soldiers in

addition to Romans, showed himself to be in favor of the allies' claims. And
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / HS
that was one of the reasons why he had been against Tiberius Gracchus's
land law. His opposition was not based solely on plain conservatism; the
measure would require many Italian allies to hand over public land they
were occupying in excess of the legal limit. They were already upset by their
heavy-handed treatment by Roman officials, and this would upset them still
further. And that was one of the reasons why, after Tiberius's death, Scipio
tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the land commission to an end.

But such efforts, while endearing Scipio to the Italians, made him ex-
tremely unpopular with the urban poor of Rome who had hoped to take
over public land. And when he died in 129 there were even rumors that with
the connivance of his estranged wife, the sister of the Gracchi, some of these
angry Romans had murdered him, though such suspicions were probably
unfounded.
An effort was made to appease the Italian allies by proposing that they
should have a share of the small holdings now to be created out of the pubhc
land, but the government refused to allow the commissioners to take this
step. In consequence, one of their number, the distinguished commander
and scholar Fulvius Flaccus, brought forward an alternative proposal (125
B.C.). What he suggested was that any Italians who wanted Roman citizen-

ship should be given it —

which would make them eligible for inclusion in
the land distribution —while those who still remained non-Romans should
at leastbecome entitled to appeal against oppression by Roman officials. But
these ideas, too, came to nothing. However, the Italian question had been
well and truly introduced into Roman politics —
and the situation was very
tense.
Gaius decided that he could not evade the issue; and so in the second year
of his tribuneship (122) he put forward a modified version of the proposal
of Flaccus, who was now According to the new scheme
his fellow tribune.
Roman citizenship should be conferred upon
all Latins, whereas other

Italian communities should be granted the Latin right, which provided that
the local civic officials should become Roman citizens. The status was thus
a halfway house to the full franchise. But this statesmanlike measure was
cunningly outbid by a conservative nominee, Marcus Livius Drusus the
Elder, who passed a law providing for the total exemption of holders of the
Latin right from capital or corporal punishment by Romans, together with
a farmore ambitious colonial policy than anything Gaius was proposing.
No effort was made to carry this program out. But Gaius had been under-
mined, and when he went to supervise his new foundation at Carthage,
malevolent rumors about the ill-omened site,which had been dedicated to
eternal destruction after the final defeat of the Carthaginians, weakened his
position still further.
In consequence, when he tried to secure reelection to a third tribu-
Ij6 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
nate in 121, he was rejected. Andsoon afterwards the end came. His po-
Htical enemies now set out to cancel the Carthaginian colonization alto-
gether; and when opposed this, a servant of
his supporters vociferously
one of the consuls, Opimius, was killed in a scuffle. Thereupon Opimius
persuaded the Senate to pass a declaration of public emergency pro-
nouncing that the government was imperiled and charging the consuls
and other high officials "to see to it that the state took no harm." On
the strength of this injunction he personally led a crowd of senators and
knights in a physical attack on Gaius and Flaccus, who were both
killed; and then some three thousand of their supporters were executed
after perfunctory trials. The decree that led to these actions, later
known as the senatus consultum ultimum, was to become a feature of
the many disturbed decades that now followed, in which it was re-
garded by some as a necessary instrument of state and by others as a
weapon of illegitimate repression.
Those who held the former view, tlie-Genservatives, called themselves the
optimates (best men); whereas the opposition to emergency decrees was
directed by men who were known as populares, on the grounds that, follow-
ing the example of the Gracchi, they were prepared to bypass the Senate
working through the Assembly of the Roman People (Populus
in favor of

Romanus). Yet the old system of shifting, personal alliances based on

and custom continued to exist even if somewhat
kinship, clientship, favor, —
shaken by the Gracchan insistence on points of principle; and the populares
came forward only intermittently in support of particular measures. That
is two groupings never achieved the clear-cut status of opposed
to say, the
political parties in the modem sense. But the rival tendencies persisted and
intensified, and this polarization was another of the results of the activity
of the Gracchi.
Because of such developments and the further weakening of the structure
owing to the new split between Senate and knights, the demolition of the
old constitutional system, which had been started involuntarily by Tiberius,
accelerated under Gaius. After their deaths, it appeared at first that they
had failed. For the time being repression held the field, and their plans
seemed to have gone completely awry. But the land commissioners were
still not prevented from carrying on with their work, and, moreover, there

were soon going to be other populares ready to widen the breaches the
Gracchi had opened. And so the two brothers left their ineffaceable and
permanent mark on the history of Rome, with the result that within a
hundred years after their brief careers the republic had fallen apart and was
no m.ore.
 •

REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / IJJ

Marius
Nevertheless, during the final years of the Gracchan crisis the attention
of Romans was not exclusively focused on the capital but was also directed
towards Gaul across the Alps, into which they were now decisively drawn.
In the previous century their ally in that country, the Greek city-state of
Massilia (Marseille), had brought pressure on them to go to war against
Hannibal. Now in 125 B.C. Massilia. not for the first time, appealed to Rome
for help against another set of enemies, the Ligurian tribes of the French
The Senate responded and duly suppressed the recalcitrant tribes-
Rivier a.
men. But in so doing they also came into contact with Celtic tribes of the
hinterland and fought against two of them, the Allobroges and the more
'^
powerful Arverni (after whom the Auvergne is named); and they heavily
defeated each of these in succession not far from the river Rhone in 121.
Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who won the first of these battles, stayed
on and completed the annexation of the whole of southern Gaul, between
the Cevennes and the Alps, with the exception of Massilia and its territory,
which remained free. A major road, called the Via Domitia after Ahenobar-
bus, was constructed right across the territory, thus linking Italy by land
with Spain, and within the next generation the whole region was converted
into a province known as Gallia Narbonensis after its capital at Narbo
(Narbonne).
But meanwhile a more serious operation had to be undertaken on the
opposite coast of the Mediterranean, in north Africa. There, in the client
—
kingdom of Numidia flanking the Roman province of Africa the succes- —
sor of King Masinissa had died, and Rome divided the countrv bgtWf p" tw o
young prin€€S_(n8). One of them was Jugurtha, who had served under
Scipio Aemilianus. He was a noted athlete and horseman and a born soldier,""
whose mask of breezy bonhomie concealed deep resources of calculated '""
cunning and treachery. The Roman partition had given him only the west-
em and more primitive part of the country, and henotonly rejected this

Numidia.
——
settlement but also ordered his troops to massacre the Italian residents in
...^ ^
Rome declared war on him; but its first two expeditionary forces achieved
nothing at was widely believed that Jugurtha, who became known as
all. It

the lion of the desert, had bribed the Roman generals. This was not, how-
ever, necessarily true because they may have been merely inefficient. But in
any case, a much more competent general now had to be dispatched (109).
He was Quintus Metellus, an excellent disciplinarian, who transformed the
demoralized Roman army into a powerful machine. But_£ven he, after two
years of successful campaigning, failed to induce his enemy to surrender,
and Roman public opinion, not appreciating the diflficulties of this desert
Ij8 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
warfare, secured the appointment of one of his deputies over his head. This
was Gaius Marius, a "new man" of middle-class origins from the citizen
community of Arpinum east of Rome, who had amassed wealth as a knight
and publicanus and had built up useful political support. Now, by foment-
ing the popular discontent against his own chief, he obtained for himself the
consulship for 107 and the supreme command. These appointments were
made by the assemblies, which overrode the Senate's contrary wishes, thus
foreshadowing the overthrow of the oligarchic government during the
decades that were to follow.
In order to recruit troops for the war, Marius ignored the property
qualifications for military service (which had already been lowered in the
Second Punic War) and called up propertyless volunteers on an extensive
scale. This inaugurated a period in which volunteer and conscript soldiers
alike, on discharge, began to look to their general to use his own power to

gain them rewards, since they had no land or money of their own and could^
not rely on getting any from the Senate, which viewed them with suspicion
as potential instruments of sedition. On arrival in Numidia, Marius won
impressive successes that showed him to be an exceptional military com-
mander. Yet even so he could not bring about the final defeat of his enemy.
In the end, however, Jugurtha was captured through the treachery of an
African ally, arranged by Marius's lieutenant Sulla; and the Romans put
him to death (104).
Public impatience at the slow course of the Jugurthine War was
heightened by alarming developments beyond the northern frontiers.
For, despite the establishment of Roman power in southern France
(Gallic Narbonensis), become gravely
the land defenses of Italy had
threatened by two groups of German tribes, the Cimbri and Teutones.
Forced to migrate from their homes in Jutland by overpopulation and
the encroachments of the sea, these masses of tribesmen spent long
years roving along the Elbe and Danube and then, over a period of
on several Roman armies north and west of
eight years, inflicted defeats
the Alps. The culminating setback was a battle with the Cimbri at
Arausio (Orange), at which two incapable and quarrelsome consuls suff-
ered Rome's most serious military disaster for over a hundred years
(105). Next, the Germans moved on to Spain, still not venturing to in-
vade Italy which was thus granted a respite of three years. During this
period, Marius made ready to confront them. Then, fully prepared, he
crushed the Teutones in a bloody engagement at Aquae Sextiae (Aix en
Provence), where three thousand of his men concealed on high ground
won the day by unexpectedly launching an attack on their rear (102).
Then, in the next year, he fought a torrid, dusty battle against the Cim-
bri on the Camp Raudii in north Italy (probably near Ferrara, not Ver-
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / Ijg

celli as supposed), in which shattering casualties were inflicted on them.

And was the end of the German threat.
that
Yet the war had instilled in the Romans a terror of the northern barbari-
ans which they never again wholly lost. Moreover, it had brought about
other consequences also. It had given Marius, elected consul year after year,
the opportunity not only to achieve unprecedented power for himself, but
also to raise the Roman army's equipment and organization to a new level
of efficiency. The pilum or thrusting spear which all legionaries carried was
now fitted with a wooden rivet that broke on impact so that the enemy could
not throw the spear back. There were also important developments in
military tactics; in particular, the supersession of the maniple, implying
dispersion, by the larger cohort, providing concentration, was now com-
plete. Each cohort contained six centurions of different grades who pro-
vided the necessary continuity: men of formidable courage, experience, and
initiative, generallypromoted from the ranks, who combined the functions
and prestige of a modern company commander and a senior sergeant. Each
cohort had military standards of its own, and each legion possessed its own
silver eagle, the emblem of Rome. Everyone of these units was animated by

a new feeling of esprit de corps: a feeling, however, that as we have seen,

was increasingly directed by these landless volunteers to the commander
hin^self rather than to the state, so that his soldiers became known as
"Marius's Mules."
Their dependence upon him was immediately put to the test. After their
military service was ended, land had to be found to reward them, in the face
of senatorial opposition. To find this land became the task of a popular
speaker named Saturninus, for Marius invoked his help, thus revealing the
potentialities of an alliance between a thwarted military leader and a dema-
gogue. Elected tribune of the people in 103 and 100 B.C., with some support
from the nobility, Saturninus arranged for Marius's veterans to be assigned
large allotments in north Africa and then in southern Gaul, while others
were settled in colonies in Sicily, Greece, and Macedonia. This overseas
colonization was modeled on the policy of Gaius Gracchus, whose system
of monthly grain distributions Saturninus also revived.
He innovated by forcing the senators to agree to his program under pain
of exile. But the most significant feature of his activity was the violence he
organized at meetings and in the streets; this marked the beginning of a new
epoch which such disorders were to
in become habitual. In this spirit,
Saturninus smoothed the way to Jus,.own reelection by hiring toughs to
murder one of his competitors; and then he had a candidate for the consul-
ship assassinated as well. But by now Marius, consul for the sixth time, had
had enough and withdrew his cooperation. In support of the Senate's decla-
ration of an emergency, Marius personally raised an improvised force and
i8o / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

THE ROMAN PROVINCES 100 BC

500 miles

led it into action against Saturninus and his friends, who were arrested and
shortly afterwards died by lynching in prison.
This intervention by Marius's soldiery was ominous, for showed gener-
it

als of the future they could enlist armies of their own troops and veterans,
who were virtually their personal dependents; and they might choose to do
this to secure absolute power for themselves. But Marius, although full of
ambitions of a more orthodox nature, had no such desire to become an
autocrat. He was already, it is true, a portentous and exceptional figure,
because no man lacking a consular ancestry had ever before reached such
heights. And he adopted a tough, rough manner befitting his self-made
career. But he never became the first of the dictator-generals, for their time
had not yet arrived. He was rather the last of that series of great command-
ers, men like the two Scipios, who were still prepared to work within the

system. Yet there now followed a period, the opening decade of the first

century which Marius, having offended both sides in turn, was

B.C., in

discarded and played scarcely any part in Roman politics, his heroic foreign
wars almost forgotten.
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / l8l

The War With the Italians

It was a time which the claims of the Itahan alhes, which had waxed
in

so strong in the time of Gaius Gracchus, were strongly revived, while the
Senate did virtually nothing to deal with the problem. These allies had made
a full contribution to the fighting against the Numidians and Germans and
had expected to benefit largely from the colonial schemes of Saturninus. But
the plans had been allowed to lapse, and the numerous Italians who flocked
to Rome to riot in favor of their revival had been repressed. That was in

95 B.C.; four years later matters came to a head, when Marcus Livius Drusus
the Younger, son of the man of the same name who had opposed Gaius
Gracchus, was elected to a tribunate like his father. A person of ostentatious
rectitude, the son now proposed a decisive measure granting the full Roman
franchise to the Italian and they, in enthusiastic response, proclaimed
allies;

that he was their patron, and swore an oath declaring that they would be
his loyal clients forever. He also claimed, grandiloquently, to be the patron
of the whole Senate as well. But neither the senators nor the knights
supported his bill, since another proposal he had made, to the effect that
the courts should be shared between both of these groups, was satisfactory
to neither. And he was also opposed by the urban voters, who did not want
to share their privileges with Italians. Nor did the violent gangs, which, like
other politicians of this period, he felt constrained to employ, help to inspire
confidence in his moderation or diplomacy. His program was rejected, and
an assassin fatally stabbed him.

The failure and death of Drusus created feelings of such desperate disap-
pointment among the already disaffected Italians that they now plunged the
peninsula into an unparalleled and terrible war (90-87 B.C.). It was known

to posterity as the Social War (from socii, allies) and sometimes, too, as the
Marsian War after one of the central Italian tribes that formed the core of
the rebel confederacy.
These peoples, for the most part, wanted full Roman citizenship. But the
revolt was also joined by the Samnites and their associates farther south.
They still remembered their defeats by the Romans two centuries earlier
and increasingly formed much wider aims directed at nothing less than the
restoration of their complete independence. Backed by fighting men of
excellent quality and experience, the rebels formed a government at Corfi-
nium (Corfinio), a natural center of mid-Italian communications. And there
they struck silver coins inscribed with the word "Italia," which was the
name they gave to the city. The name was written in the Oscan letters of
the oldOscan language of Italy.
The Romans were caught by surprise in the first year of the war, and their
l82 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

"^SJ*^*"-

Silver denarius of the Italian rebels in the Social (Marsian)

War, minted at their
capital Corfinium (renamed ITALIA). Soldiers are shown swearing an oath over
a pig.

enemies were thus able to maintain the initiative in both the central and
southern war zones, failing, it is true, to inflict any crippling blow but
pursuing an effective strategy of exhaustion. As for the Romans, for a time
they employed Marius as a general, but only as one among others, so that
despite successes he soon withdrew in a huff" because he had not been
granted a special overriding commission. Thereafter they relied on other
commanders. And these fought dourly back, helped by the Roman and
Latin fortress-colonies, which did not join the rebels and provided the
legions with the breathing space they needed. Yet the Romans were increas-
ingly racked by fears that the spread of the rising would threaten their
communications with their recruiting ground of Cisalpine Gaul. It may
have been made a separate province at this very time so that the area could
be given a governor to direct mobilization. If the contacts of the Romans
with Cisalpine Gaul were interrupted, they would be hard put to it to find
enough troops to place in the field.
The Roman authorities therefore decided, in mid-war, that the major
political concessions that theyhad so catastrophically failed to offer in time
of peace could not be delayed any longer. So in consequence one of the
consuls of the year, Lucius Juhus Caesar, brought forward a bill conferring
the Roman citizenship upon all Italians who had remained loyal, as well
as on those who had revolted but were now prepared to lay down their arms.
This concession halted the impetus of the rebellion, and in the following
year the Romans followed it up by measures extending the franchise to
every free man south of the Po, while those communities in Transpadane
Gaul (the Cisalpine region lying north of that river) that had not gained
privileged status already were raised to the halfway Latin status that con-
 REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / iS^

ferred citizenship on their elected officials. Fighting continued for the next
two years on several fronts, but from now on the revolt stood no real chance
of success, and in the end the war petered out.
It had been a traumatic convulsion, threatening not only the very ex-

istence of Rome's Mediterranean empire but also the survival of the city
itself as the center of Italy. In the long run, the results of the rebellion
were mixed, for whereas Lucius Caesar's law marked a large step to-
wards the unification of Roman Italy as a nation, it also meant that,
when the bulk of Roman citizens could no longer make visits to the
capital, the old city-state government had become obsolete. On the short
term, the Social War caused ruinous damage around the countryside. It
also produced a whole further generation of ex-soldiers who would men-
ace the stability of the state unless they were amply rewarded. And it

taught soldiers of the future how to fight against their own comrades on
behalf of dubious ideals.
Moreover, the concessions extracted by the Italians during the stress
of hostilities proved, on closer inspection, to be inadequate and illusory.
They had provided that the new citizens should be restricted to only
eight, or at most ten, of the thirty-five electoral tribes, thus insuring
that their voting power could always be defeated by the other Roman
citizens. This was presumably a last-ditch obstruction by the reactionar-
ies, and in the military crisis of 90 B.C. the Italians do not seem to have

fully appreciated the disabilities it imposed on them. But as the war

began to draw to an end, this unfairness became a vital grievance.
In 88 B.C., the problem was tackled by the tribune Sulpicius Rufus.
He was a friend of the younger Drusus, whose efforts had failed three
years eariler; and he was a member of the same circle of wealthy, bril-
liant young nobles. He was also an orator of incomparable dignity, a

master of tragic effects. Relying, then, on these advantages and on de-

voted groups of armed men parading the streets, Sulpicius put forward
a proposal that the newly enfranchised Italian allies should be dis-
tributed among all the thirty-five tribes —and he even extended this pro-
vision to include freedmen (ex-slaves), who had rarely received any such
consideration before, but who might, once included, considerably shift
the balance of voting strength. Not surprisingly, Sulpicius's measure en-
countered the So he turned away from his more con-
fiercest opposition.

servative friends to Marius, who had been skulking disregarded in the

wings. And he proposed, in exchange for political help, to secure
Marius the supreme command in an important Eastern war.
i84 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Silver tetradrachm of Rome's enemy Mithridates VI Eupator,

King of Pontus (120-63 ^.c.)

Sulla in the East

This was to be fought against King Mithridates VI of Pontus in northern

Asia Minor —the first of several wars against that monarch, extending over
a period of twenty-five years. A noted hunter, lover, and warrior, Mithri-
dates affected Hellenism but was of Persian descent, and the governing
nobility of his rich countrywere Iranian or Iranized, providing fine soldiers
from their feudal estates, and especially horsemen. Mithridates had inher-
ited from his father a policy of territorial expansion, and early in his reign,
he himself extended his kingdom with great vigor. The kingdom of the
Cimmerian Bosphorus (Crimea), enormously rich from south Russian
grain, fell under his control, and the Black Sea became almost a Pontic lake.
He thus became an active, aggressive rival of the Romans, whose frontiers
matched his own in Asia Minor.
But Mithridates's attempts to annex the neighboring kingdom of Bi-
thynia, a client of Rome, proved unsuccessful; and Bithynian counterraids
inspired by the Romans caused him such anger that in 88 B.C. he invaded
the province of Asia. And there he caused eighty thousand of its Italian and
Italian-Greek commercial representatives to be massacred by the local city
authorities. He had encouraged Asian debtors to kill their Itahan creditors,
and their willingness to comply was a shocking demonstration of Roman
unpopularity. Moreover, such Italian businessmen as survived the holo-
caust were bankrupted by Mithridates's seizure of the province; and the
debacle was profoundly felt in Rome
where the reserves of the treas-
itself,

ury, which had been greatly dependent on Asian revenues, fell almost to
nothing.
 —

REFORM AND WAR IN ITALY / l8§

After thus gaining control of large regions of Asia Minor, Mithridates

crossed the Aegean and occupied Athens and other parts of Greece, so that
Roman military retaliation became an even more urgent necessity. The
supreme command was entrusted to the fifty-year-old patrician Lucius
Cornelius Sulla, a man who, after a debauched but financially profitable
youth, had distinguished himself in the Jugurthine and Social wars and now
assumed the consulship for 88. But the tribune Sulpicius Rufus, by forcible
methods, secured Sulla's supersession in the conduct of the Mithridatic
campaign by his own new ally, the half-forgotten Marius. However, Sulla,
refusing to accept this dismissal, fled to the troops he had been destined to
command in Asia Minor (his old soldiers in the Social War) and instead led
them successfully in an attack upon Rome itself. It was a fateful moment
in history. This was the first march on the capital, the first civil war, and

the first clear example of troops acting out of loyalty to their commander
to defy the government. Moreover, Sulla created another precedent by
declaring Sulpicius (whose legislation was rescinded) to be an outlaw, and
Marius another. A price was set on their heads, and Sulpicius was hunted
down and put to death. But Marius escaped, amid great perils, and hid in
north Africa.

Meanwhile, Sulla left where he twice defeated a general of

for Greece,
Mithridates and then captured the city of Athens, wrecking its port, the
Piraeus. Next, remaining aloof from other Roman troops in the area
—
whose commanders were opposed to him politically he crossed over into
Asia Minor. But once there, instead of pursuing the fight against Mithri-
dates, he negotiated an agreement with him at Dardanus near Troy (85).
Although the monarch was obliged to evacuate his conquered territories
and pay an indemnity, the terms were mild for a Roman peace since he
secured recognition as ruler of Pontus and a friend and ally of the Romans
— the major punishment, instead, falling on the wealthy cities of Asia which
had collaborated in the murder of Roman citizens and were now made to
pay enormous reparations.
The fact was that Sulla could not afford to expend his troops on prolong-
ing the war, for Rome itself had fallen into the hands of his poHtical
enemies. Its government was led, for the next four years, by the patrician
Cinna. Like Sulla, whom he now proceeded to outlaw, he had fought
creditably in the Social War; and as soon as Sulla had left for the East, he
again followed in his footsteps by marching on Rome. Marius, too, came
back from his refuge in north Africa to join him and took the lead in
political reprisals, comprising by far the bloodiest civilian massacres that
Rome had ever experienced. And shortly afterwards, with his mind partly
unhinged, he died (86). His brutal ineptitude had given a classic demonstra-
l86 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
tion that military attainments were not always matched by political skill.
Thereafter Cinna's rule became a good deal better than a largely hostile
conservative tradition subsequently admitted. He had to grapple with a
grave debt problem caused by the convulsions of the past few years. This
crisis, reviving a theme dominant in earlier Roman had come to a
history,
head three years earlier when creditors pressing for repayment murdered
a praetor who tried to apply old laws against usury; and the situation was
aggravated by Mithridates's occupation of Asia, which caused many of the
Italian businessmen he had ruined to recall loans and resort to panic-
stricken hoardings of whatever money they could collect, thus withdrawing
cash from circulation. But in 86 a radical bill, remitting three-quarters of
all outstanding debts, came into force Rome. The new law was, inevita-
at

bly, unpopular among that important section of the knights whose financial
activities included the launching of loans. But they were appeased by an
additional measure directed against another of their grievances: this was a
current depreciation of the silver denarius, which had meant that the loans
they had made good coin were repaid in bad, with the result that they
in
incurred enormous losses. To meet their complaints, Marius's nephew Mar-
cus Marius Gratidianus initiated a "good money" policy insisting on a
sound denarius, and unofficial exchange rates were banned. This began to
win a good deal of support. But it was cut short because in early 84 a mutiny
broke out, in which he himself was killed; and the authority of his successors
abruptly dwindled.
 11
Reaction and Breakdown

The Dictatorship of Sulla

k t this
invaded
juncture Sulla, outlawed in Rome, openly
The disintegrating administration of the city
Italy.
rebelled and
was
supported by the Samnites— still smarting from memories of the
Social War —
and the combined force made a final stand against Sulla
outside the CoUine Gate of Rome (82). But the outcome was catastrophic
to the defenders, and the Samnites fell to a man during the engagement and
the butchery of prisoners that followed. Nor were they by any means the
only people to be slaughtered, since Sulla organized a mass murder of his
enemies that left even Marius's precedent far behind. With the help of a
bodyguard of ten thousand men known as "Cornelii," he proscribed and
executed a total scarcely short of that same number, including forty sena-
tors and sixteen hundred knights. Their lands, too, were avidly confiscated
by Sulla, to be given to one hundred thousand of his retired legionaries,
settled in numerous large Roman colonies forcibly imposed on the Italian
countryside. His nonchalant, devil-may-care manner had always appealed
to his soldiers, and now their loyalty in following him against the govern-
ment was rewarded.
And meanwhile he set about realizing his own highly personal vision
of how the nation ought to be reconstructed. For himself he chose the
obsolete position of dictator. This office had been incorporated in the
earliest republican constitution in order to deal with emergencies; it was
not envisaged that its holders would remain in power for more than six
months. However, the dictatorship had been abolished at the end of the
third century B.C., owing to the fear that it might encourage autocracy.
Now Sulla unearthed and revived it for the novel purpose of "making
—
laws and setting up the state" and with the equally novel absence of
any maximum duration, so that he was completely immune from any
checks from any quarter. Yet he chose to pass his laws in proper form

187
l88 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Silver denarius of Q. Pompeius Rufus

showing his grandfather Sulla as consul.

through the Assembly. And they were numerous. They were also almost
uniformly conservative, for Sulla's solution for the troubles of the com-
munity, thought out carefully on the advice of his supporting faction,
envisaged the restoration of the Senate's flagging authority. There was a
certain irony in this because he himself had earlier taken the most deci-
sive step possible to break senatorial power by the naked militarism of
his march on Rome. But he was determined that no one else should
ever do the same again.
To this end, he decided that one of the principal needs was to break
the power of the tribunes of the people, who in recent years had so
often challenged senatorial control. Henceforward they were not allowed
to move any law whatever without the prior approval of the Senate.
Moreover, their veto was abolished in criminal cases and limited in
other contexts as well, and they were debarred once they had held office
as tribune, from subsequently holding any of the major offices of state,
so that the tribunate would cease to attract able and ambitious politi-
cians.
But the most impressive and lasting of Sulla's prosenatorial achieve-
ments was the reconstitution of the law courts (quaestiones), of which
the number was increased to at least seven, each dealing with a separate
range of crimes. Gaius Gracchus had given the original extortion court
to the knights, but Sulla excluded them from it altogether, making the
quaestiones into a senatorial monopoly. However, Sulla was not an
enemy of the knights, and this blow was mitigated by the admission of
many of them into the Senate, which he doubled in size to six hundred,
introducing many of his own Roman and Italian partisans.
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / l8g

The rules governing the Senate's membership were also overhauled.

Men who had held the junior office of quaestor were to become senators
automatically, though the quaestorship could not be held until the age
of thirty and the praetorship not until forty-two, so that the rise of dan-
gerous young careerists would be slowed down. And Sulla, remembering
the illegalities of himself and others, took steps to bring provincial gov-
ernors under firm senatorial control. In particular, they were forbidden
to make war outside the province allotted to them, or indeed to depart
for any reason beyond its borders, without previous authorization from
the Senate or Assembly. One of the principal weapons against those
who strayed was a law of treason, maiestas— a crime that had been first
defined in loo B.C. and was now handled by one of Sulla's new law
courts.
seemed paradoxical that these measures to shore up the ancient oli-
It

garchy should be taken by a man who had revived the office of dictator,
and who, moreover, surrounded himself superstitiously with the mystic
personality cult of an autocrat. And besides, he lavishly sponsored the
vast building activities that traditionally went with this sort of mo-
narchic role, including the construction of the Record Office
(Tabularium) of Rome and the rebuilding of the Roman Senate house
and of the great precinct of Fortuna at Praeneste (Palestrina), the site
of one of his civil war victories. These were projects reminiscent of
Eastern princes. Nevertheless, Sulla still stopped short of complete abso-
lutism. Instead, he decided to abdicate from his dictatorship, becoming
consul in 80 and returning in the following year to private life in Cam-
pania, where he died a year later.

But the memory of this mulberry-faced man, so self-indulgent and yet so

energetic, easily moved to laughter and tears, who claimed he never forgot
a friend or a foe, remained alive. This was not so much because of his
elaborate constitutional scheme. Although he was not blindly intolerant of
recent developments, his measures in this field were a putting back of the
clock that failed to deal with Rome's essential economic and social prob-
lems. Moreover, his assumption that the restrictions imposed on governors
and commanders would prove sufficient turned out to be wrong since in the
years to come it was they, and not the state, who could mobilize powerful
armies and make use of them for their own ends. After all, that was just
what Sulla had done himself; and that, in the long run, was why he was
remembered, because of the callous horrors of his rise to power. Nor were
these recollections of his ruthlessness entirely without good eff'ects, for at
least they deterred the Romans from repeating large-scale civil war for

thirty years.
igo / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

The Tabularium (Record Office) begun by Sulla (the upper stories belong to the
Renaissance Palace of the Senators).
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / 191

Painting by Samuel Prout (1783-1852) showing the Tabularium in the

background.
192 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Reconstruction of Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, Praeneste (Palestrina).

The Rise of Pompey

The failure of Sulla's constitutional reconstruction was demonstrated
without the slightest delay. When one of his former officers, Marcus Lepi-
dus, a man of patrician but liberal family with extensive noble backing,
became consul in 78 B.C., he employed his term of office to bring forward
an opportunistic program for the restoration of the tribunate, which Sulla
had so deliberately weakened. Lepidus staked his chances on a possible
mass rising of Italians dispossessed by the proscriptions, in which he himself
had amassed a fortune. In 77, supported by another disaffected officer in
Cisalpine Gaul, he led a considerable force of Etruscan and other malcon-
tents in a dash for the capital, where an emergency decree was passed by
the Senate. His way was barred by an army of the government, and he was
defeated at the Milvian Bridge; and shortly afterwards he died.
Far more able was another anti-SuUan, Sertorius, a Sabine who set up an
independent government in Spain, where he won over the whole of the
eastern seaboard. He also enjoyed widespread support from local tribesmen,
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / ^93

among whom his enhghtened methods gained him unrivaled popularity,

handing on to the future the idea that it might pay after all to treat the
provincials decently —
and attempt their Romanization. He maintained con-
tact with Lepidus, whose followers to the number of twenty thousand fled
to his colors after the collapse of Lepidus's rising in Italy. The men under
Sertorius's command swore an oath that if he fell, they would not survive
him.
The Senate dispatched an army against them but were forced at the end
of 77 to supplement it by sending out substantial reinforcements which they
placed under the command of a general only twenty-nine years of age. This
was Pompey (Cnaeus Pompeius), who already enjoyed a considerable repu-
tation. His father had been one of Rome's principal officers in the Social
War, and Pompey, after serving with him, had built up a strong personal
following in central and eastern Italy. When Sulla arrived from the east,
Pompey, who was married to his stepdaughter, had joined forces with him.
He had then gone on to win victories on Sulla's behalf in Sicily and north
Africa, and the dictator had felt reluctantly obliged to grant him a triumph,
although according to all the rules he was not even old enough to be a
senator. This, then, was the young man who was now sent to Spain against
Sertorius. At first, he achieved no result. But finally, Sertorius was mur-
dered at a banquet by his own undistinguished lieutenant, whom Pompey
then defeated without difficulty and put to death. In this somewhat un-
meritorious fashion he had increased his military renown.

Meanwhile in Italy an event had occurred that inspired great terror

among the Romans. It was the last of the series of slave wars extending back
to the previous century. But this was a slave war of a special character,
because it took place on the Itahan peninsula itself and the principal rebels
were professional gladiators. The outbreak began at Capua, home of one of
the largest gladiatorial schools and barracks. It was led by a Thracian
named Spartacus, a man of courage and humanity, who had served as a
Roman auxiliary soldier. Slaves of all kinds flocked to join him, and within
the space of two years they defeated no fewer than four Roman armies.
Spartacus's hope, in conducting these operations, was that his men might
seize the chance to break out and make their way across the Alps, after
which they could seek their own homelands in freedom. However, they
made no serious attempt to carry out these aims, preferring instead to
plunder the rich Italian countryside.
Business interests were gravely damaged by their looting; but the military
respite it provided was turned to good account by the Roman authorities.
They entrusted the command against Spartacus to the ex-praetor Crassus;
he was a former subordinate of Sulla, amiable and flattering, easy of access,
1^4/ THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
a talented wire-puller, who had vastly increased his hereditary wealth in the
course of the proscriptions. After meticulously training a force of forty
thousand men, Crassus attempted in vain to catch Spartacus in the toe of
the peninsula but finally cornered and killed him in Apulia, crucifying six
thousand of his slave followers along the Appian Way (71 B.C.).
Meanwhile Pompey had been summoned back from Spain to help con-
duct the operations, and he arrived just in time to take part in the final
manhunt, which he and his friends magnified into a major military success,
eclipsing the victory of Crassus.

At this point thetwo ambitious men, each with his own army, might well
have come to blows. But Crassus, though a daring financial speculator, was
a cautious politician; and Pompey, in spite of many irregularities during his
earlier career, showed few signs of openly unconstitutional behavior. Al-
though harboring strong mutual suspicion, they did not clash but instead
came to an understanding according to which they would jointly demand
election to the consulships of the year 70. Legally speaking, both were
unqualified because neither had disbanded his army as consular candidates
were required to do, and besides, Pompey, who had not even taken his seat
as a senator, was debarred on grounds of his youth. Nevertheless, the Senate
had to give way, thus reveahng for the attention of future politicians how
a resolute combination of ambitious men could frustrate the republic. And
so the Assembly duly elected them as consuls.
Setting their disagreements aside, they devoted their year of office to the
overturning of Sulla's constitution —a program that gained them considera-
ble popularity, except, of course, in the Senate. Moreover, its members also
had endure the condemnation of one of their colleagues,
to Verres, whose
prosecution for gross dishonesty during his governorship of Sicily was
triumphantly undertaken by the rising orator Cicero. In the same anti-
Sullan spirit Crassus and Pompey encouraged the censors of the year to
They
expel sixty-four senators. also supported a bill reducing the senatorial
membership of the jury panels to and a law proposed by Pompey
one-third,
relieved the tribunate of all the restrictions placed upon it by the late
dictator. Almost the whole of Sulla's activity in favor of the traditional
order was therefore obliterated, and the old flexibility and anarchy of
Roman politics had been fully restored.
During the years that immediately followed, Crassus remained content
to stay at home, increasing his financial resources and political influence.
But Pompey was waiting for a chance to eff'ect some spectacular increase
in his military reputation, and the opportunity was not long in coming. It
was provided by the scandalous prevalence of Mediterranean piracy. Ever
since Rome in the previous century had shortsightedly weakened Rhodes
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / ^95

and its naval police force, pirates had been conducting their operations
unimpededly, with the connivance of Roman slave-purchasing interests.
Efforts by the government to destroy their harbors on the coast of Asia
Minor had not proved effective (102), and during the wars of the eighties,
their raids had become more and more audacious. Cyrenaica (eastern
Libya) had been annexed and made into a new province in order to provide
bases against the pirates, but in vain; and now they were directly menacing
the grain supply of Rome itself. In 67, therefore, over the heads of the
Senate, a tribune put through a bill that entrusted Pompey with the task
of suppressing them and conferred on him for this purpose an overriding
Mediterranean command, with one hundred and twenty thousand infantry
and five hundred ships at his disposal. He carried out this enterprise in an
operation of lightning rapidity lasting only three months, during which time
he and his officers totally cleared the seas of pirates.
Thereupon another tribune presented a further bill to the Assembly,
granting Pompey a general commission to settle the affairs of the Near East,
and in particular to terminate the hostihties that were still dragging on
against Mithridates VI of Pontus. The bill was made law despite the undi-
minished reluctance of the Senate, whose dominant position, it was now
clear, had virtually ceased to exist. After the peace of 85, Mithridates had
rapidly recovered, repelling the officer left behind by Sulla and building up
stores of money and supplies, so that when Rome decided to annex adjacent
Bithynia in 74, he had marched into that country to forestall them, leaving
it garrisoned by a Pontic army. But then the Romans had sent out a general

of great ability, a former supporter of Sulla named LucuUus, who expelled

the king from Bithynia and even from his own homeland of Pontus (74-70),
forcinghim to flee to his eastern neighbor and ally Armenia, a country
almost new to world history, which had recently become a considerable
empire.
Lucullus occupied the Armenian capital; but in 68 his troops refused to
carry on. This was partly because he had arranged a reorganization of Asian
finances in which Roman business interests had not been allowed to profit
as much as they wanted; and at had earned him many foes, who
home this
played their part in instigating the mutiny in his army. But on the spot, too,
the weather conditions his soldiers had to contend with were intolerable,
and above all, Lucullus, for all his military talents, was an aristocratic
disciplinarian who lacked the ability to get on with the rank and file. In all
these unfavorable conditions, his army virtually fell apart. One of the
Roman leaders who had
accelerated its disintegration from afar was Pom-
pey, an old political enemy, and now it was he who took over the command.
On arrival in the field, he proved outstandingly successful though his —
strategic gifts were scarcely put to the test. Mithridates was deserted by his
ig6 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
Armenian allies, was possible to defeat him immediately. He
so that it

contrived to escape to the Cimmerian Bosphorus (Crimea), but there, faced

by a rebellion led by his son, he committed suicide. His fight against the
Romans had lasted, with intervals, throughout a quarter of a century. It had
been important because it involved them in their most intractable wars of
the age. Moreover, these recurrent crises exerted various other impacts on
the Roman scene as well. For example, they forced the government to create
long-term, semi-independent commands, with all the attendant perils they
posed for the central authority. And Rome's continuing involvement with
Mithridates, and its outcome, enormously expanded its commitment in
eastern lands.
Pompey, after sensationally exploring and opening up the hitherto un-
known region of the Caucasus (65), now put into effect a sweeping settle-

ment of the affairs of western Asia, involving an immense amount of de-

tailed planning. Pontus was annexed and united with Bithynia to form a
single province. In Syria, the last feeble Seleucid monarch was removed, and
his country also, with its great city of Antioch, was taken over and made
a province —so that out of the three great successor states of Alexander,
Macedonia, the Seleucids, and Egypt, only the last named now remained
in a condition of formal independence, although it too was already largely
subservient to Rome. In the small Judaean kingdom, where there had been
dynastic disputes, Pompey captured the ancient capital Jerusalem, causing
great and lasting Jewish distress by walking into the Temple; but a member
of the reigning Hasmonaean (Maccabee) dynasty was still allowed to rule,

as one of Rome's dependent client-monarchs.

This extension of Rome's ancient clientela principle to foreign states was
nothing new. But Pompey enlarged its application greatly. The client kings
were tied to the service of Rome in and serve
order to defend its frontiers
as listening posts to the outside world. In return, they were supported by
the Romans against internal subversive movements and allowed a free hand
inside their own countries. Thus Rome was spared the trouble and expense
of administering these territories; and the formula worked well. Only in
Armenia, perhaps, was Pompey mistaken in retaining the local prince
instead of annexing the country, for he left it as a future bone of contention
between the Romans and the powers that lay farther to the east.*
On the site of his victory over Mithridates, he created the new town of
Nicopolis, settling a mixed population of veterans, wounded soldiers, and
local inhabitants. But that was only one of the forty cities he founded or
restored throughout the East, in pursuance of the actively urbanizing tradi-
tion of the Greek monarchies. Under upper-class leaderships approved by

* First Parthia (p. 218) and then Persia (p. 367).

 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / igj

Rome, the cities, new and old alike, were to provide convenient nuclei, not
of Romanization because their culture normally remained Greek, but of
Roman political influence and clientela.

Pompey's reconstruction of the Near East far exceeded anything of the

kind that any Roman had ever performed before, showing him to be an
administrator of the very first order. Indeed, although he still had fifteen
years to live, this was easily the greatest achievement of his career, massively
standing the test of time and forming the basis of all future reorganizations.
And the spectacular honors he received from the eastern communities
likewise foreshadowed the imperial personages to come. Moreover, his
arrangements were immensely lucrative, both to himself and to Rome. As
for his own gains, the spoils of war and gifts from grateful or anxious
monarchs and removed many of their tax immunities) made him
cities (he
—
an even richer man than Crassus who had hitherto been the wealthiest
—
man of the day and gave him a larger host of dependents. And his settle-
ment also vastly enlarged the resources of the Roman treasury, raising the
annual revenue of the state by no less than forty percent. The triumph at
his homecoming was celebrated with unprecedented splendor.

Cicero

While Pompey was away in the East, there had been an uneasy air of
suspense at Rome, where people remembered the autocracy Sulla had estab-
lished when he returned from the same lands. Now they feared that history
would repeat itself. Intrigues multiplied, largely prompted by Crassus. He
did not act directly against Pompey but financed various needy characters
who might work to increase his own personal influence.
One such figure who acquired a good deal of notoriety was Catiline, an
impoverished patrician who had supported Sulla but now offered hopes to
Sullans and anti-Sullans ahke who had become destitute and angry and
eager to repair their damaged fortunes. As an undischarged prisoner on an
embezzlement charge, Catiline was debarred from becoming a candidate for
the consulship of 65, and there were rumors that he and others plotted to
murder the men who secured election in his place. He was also disqualified
from standing for 64 but was admitted to the competition for 63. At this
stage Crassus was apparently still willing to back him; but a wide range of
conservative senators, and some of their less conservative colleagues as well,
were alarmed by the possibility that he might get in. He seemed to them
a flashy and ungovernable person ready for any kind of unscrupulous action
that might reverse the setbacks his career had suffered.
In consequence, this large and varied group of worried men banded
together to put up a candidate to stand for the consulship against him. The
 .^SJgffT^y^

">?.

Marble bust of Cicero.

 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / ^99

man they selected was Cicero, from Marius's hometown Arpinum (Arpino).
Cicero came of a family that had never provided a consul before, and such
"new men" found it notoriously difficult to gain the office; indeed none seem
to have done so for the previous thirty years. On the other hand, he was
an orator of unique brilliance in a society in which oratory was the major
part of politics. He had scored a first-class success in 70 in convicting the
corrupt governor of Sicily, Verres; and after that he had backed the assign-
ment of the eastern command to Pompey, who, despite occasional interrup-
tions and reservations, continued to be his favorite statesman from then
onwards.
These activities, like his undistinguished origins, might have seemed by
no means useful recommendations to the favor of old-fashioned republi-
cans, or even middle-of-the-road members of the Senate. Nevertheless, men
of both these categories rallied to his support against Catiline, whom they
regarded as a grave threat to social So Cicero duly won the
stability.

consulship for 63. His colleague was an insignificant character who had
privately favored Catiline but was then persuaded not to support his can-
didacy.
At the elections held in 63 for the consulships of the following year,
Catiline made a further attempt to gain office, this time with a program
sensational enough to confirm the worst fears, proposing not only sweeping
land distribution but a general cancellation of debts. This program was
designed to appeal to bankrupt nobles, veterans, and urban poor —indeed,
displaced and discontented persons of every sort. But such proposals scared
off not only all conservative and moderates, but Crassus as well; and Cicero,
who equated debt cancellation with what he considered the worst of all

evils, the destruction of private property, helped to secure Catiline's defeat

once again. And so now and disappointed man, estimating
that defeated
that his chances of reaching the top of the tree by legal, constitutional means
had vanished forever, began to move outside the law instead and plan the
subversion of public order. His intention now was that a force of his discred-
itable supporters in Etruria, which was full of discontented men ready for
violence, should march on Rome in October of this year, 63 B.C.
However, six days before the date fixed for the coup, rumors of its
imminence leaked out, and the Senate passed an emergency decree. Never-
theless, in the absence of concrete proof of his seditious intentions, Catiline
himself, protected by influential friends, was still left and
at large in the city

went on plotting revolution. But when Cicero, in the first of his four mag-
nificent Catilinarian Orations, proceeded to unmask and denounce his aims,
Catiline felt it advisable to withdraw from the capital and left to take
personal command of his followers in Etruria. Rome had become increas-
ingly uncomfortable for him. Cicero had won back a number of his support-
 UllSUWt i

».c,n4>o
- e«l^^la•lco.ve^.l:.cc^ll'lel^.^l!'f•\'CJ.1ln*>«'

tew^qo

lOfUlCWf

Manuscript of Cicero's book On the State (De Republica) on parchment re-used

in eighth century a.d.
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / 201

ers by claiming that Catiline intended to burn the city down; and then by
a great stroke of luck he obtained written evidence of Catiline's revolution-
ary intentions from Gallic envoys visiting Rome. Thereupon Cicero pro-
ceeded to seize five of the leading conspirators in the city, including men
of very high rank, and obtained the Senate's approval of their execution,
—
which was immediately carried out on his orders.
The legality of this step was widely disputed. Cicero himself maintained
loudly for the rest of his life that his action had been necessary in order to
check an imminent rebellion, and that it was warranted by the Senate's
concurrence, as well as by their former emergency decree. On the other
hand the Senate was an advisory body, not an executive one, so that the deed
still remained the responsibility of the consul. And it could be argued
against him that this order violated a Roman and
citizen's right to be tried,

that citizens who were not actually caught red-handed under arms, and
were not therefore an immediate source of danger, did not look like the
enemies of the state against whom alone such summary treatment would
have been justified. It seemed, therefore, that Cicero had acted illegally; and
this behef among his compatriots affected much of his future career. But
in any case, the Catilinarian plot was not the tremendous crisis from which
he claimed, for evermore, to have saved the state, but a relatively minor
upheaval. It was only important because of the incomparably eloquent
speeches and writings Cicero devoted to it, magnifying and defending his
own role.

In the final senatorial debate preceding the execution of the plotters, two
statesmen of the future expressed their views. Cato spoke up in favor of
Cicero's proposal that they should be killed, and Julius Caesar against it.

Cato, the great-grandson of the censor of the same name who had been a
leading politician of the previous century, was a man of thirty-two, formida-
ble, inhumanly unforgiving, a heavy drinker, and uncompromising in his

opposition to all who appeared not to measure up to the traditional system.

Gaius Julius Caesar, five years older, was a patrician linked by marriage ties
with Marius and Cinna. After a rather late start in Roman public life, and
a period in which his shaky finances were bolstered up by Crassus, he had
staged a trial demonstration against senatorial abuses of the emergency
decree (63). In the same year he had obtained, at the cost of heavy outlay,
the chief priesthood of the Roman state, an office that without interfering
with its occupant's political career, was a source of extensive prestige and
patronage. At the end of the same year, Caesar was about to become
praetor. It was at this juncture that he cast constitutional doubts on the
propriety of putting the Catilinarians to death. His opinion did not prevail,
but he gained valuable allies among those who were afraid of what such
high-handed acts might lead to.
Bronze bust of Cato the Younger.
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / 20J

For the time being, however, Cicero's poHcy seemed vindicated because
Catihne moved into open rebeUion at the head of his troops. But now that
his friends in Rome had been overwhelmed, he no longer had any hope of
marching on the city and instead tried to flee northwards out of the Italian
peninsula. But two armies sent by the government, one at either end of the
Apennines, caught him in a trap, and he and his followers were destroyed
near Pistoria (Pistoia) in January 62 B.C. Cicero was now, for a brief
moment, the hero of the hour.

Cicero became famous in later generations and epochs as the most articu-
late representative of a remarkable upper-class society that pursued a highly
cultured and luxurious way of life derived from the immense accretions of
wealth by the imperial republic and its leaders. The orator himself possessed
a mansion on the Palatine Hill and at least eight houses in the country, some
just places of rest as he journeyed from place to place, but others elegantly
furnished and adorned by wall paintings, and floor mosaics and housing
notable collections of Greek art. Yet, he had not been bom to this grandeur
and lacked the wealth needed and maintain all these properties;
to purchase
that is to say, he did not himself possess the means to pursue a successful
pohtical career. But he was extremely fortunate to have the close friendship
and support of an enormously rich knight and banker, Atticus, who helped
him in very many diff'erent ways and evidently believed in his political and
intellectual aims.
Cicero owed his rise almost exclusively to one single quality. He was one
of the most persuasive orators who has ever lived, in an age in which the
very core of politics was oratory. The combination of his inborn talents with
an elaborate education and training equipped him to speak and write that
incomparably eloquent, rotund Latin that persuaded and overwhelmed his
listeners in Senate, Assembly, and lawcourts alike, and laid the foundations
of the subsequent prose of all Europe. His speeches, of which fifty-eight out
of over a hundred survive, reflect all and strains of the crum-
the stresses
bling republic, in which for three decades he lived and worked at the center
of events. They also reveal Cicero the man, and so, even more remarkably,
do his eight hundred unique letters, written to Atticus and other friends.
The personage who emerges is humorous and warmhearted, extravagant,
as unable as the next man to see how to make a city-state govern an empire,
overrespectful to the nobility to which he did not belong, and intensely
eager to tell everyone of his success in stifling Catiline's second-rate coup
—an excusable form of self-praise because, being a "new man," he enjoyed
no built-in backing of his own. Moreover, Cicero, despite his occasional
political successes, did not have the right temperament to be a first-class
Roman politician. For one thing, he always took too rosy a view of his own
204 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Wall painting from villa at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata) near Pompeii. First
century B.C.
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / 20^

position and influence. And, worse still, he possessed a fatal lawyerlike

ability to see both sides of every question and lacked the ruthless decisive-
ness that Roman public life on two or three occasions in his
required. Yet
lifetime, by an excruciating effort, he screwed up his courage to abandon
vacillation and stand up and be counted against tyranny, and the last of
these stands cost him his life.
Cicero, despite all his own faults and the faults of his age, had accepted
the Greek idea, now current among Roman jurists and other thinkers, of
a natural law (ius naturale), which was a corollary of the admission of
noncitizens to Rome's legal system (ius gentium) and which ought to be
observed by all mankind. That is to say, he was convinced that right is right
and wrong is wrong objectively, and that no pronouncements or laws can
make them otherwise. And what was most wrong of all, he believed, was
for one person to tyrannize others. Following up the precepts of the Stoic
philosophy founded two and a half centuries earlier, he accepted its injunc-
tion that men and women should treat one another generously and honestly.
They must do so because all human beings have their own personal value
and importance. This is because, according to Stoic doctrine, all individuals
share a spark of divinity that makes them akin to each other, irrespective
of race or status or sex, in the universal brotherhood of humankind.
That was one of the principal elements in the humanitas upon which
Cicero insisted, in a series of wonderfully well-written treatises on moral
themes. Shunning dogma (in accordance with the views of the contempo-
rary Athens Academy), these essays adapted Greek philosophy to Roman
life and both exemplified and demanded an enlightenment of mind and

character, a recognition not only of one's own unique personality but also
of the personalities of others. This was the most civilized ideal, for practical
purposes of living, that the world had ever seen; it has deeply influenced
Western thought from his time to our own. And Cicero stressed this ideal
with all the more fervent conviction because he believed that the man best
equipped to teach the good life was the public speaker. As he explains in
a number of analyses of that art, every orator must not only be a man of
wide and liberal culture, but, if he is to do his job properly, he must also
behave decently and well.
Fired by such ideas, and by the momentary acclaim that greeted his
victory over the Catilinarians, Cicero adopted a political program that
seemed to him to give practical expression to these doctrines. It envisaged
a concept that had been discussed more than once in the previous years, a
Concord of the Orders, in which the senators would be permanently allied
with the knights of all Italy, municipal men like himself who had become
increasingly influential in the state and had backed him strongly against the
antisocial projects of Catiline. Cicero himself, however, inadvertently did
206 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
more than anyone else to ruin the chances of any such concord becoming
a practical possibility. When Pompey returned from his unparalleled east-
ern successes, Cicero promptly offended his vanity by reiterating his own
achievements as savior of the country, at a moment when the other man
was prepared to think of no other triumphs but his own.

Toward the First Triumvirate

Pompey was arrogant, shifty, and aloof. Yet none of the gloomy predic-
tions of his desire to become an autocrat proved correct. Instead, as soon
as he landed in Italy, he duly disbanded his troops. By so doing, he indicated
clearly that despite his unquestioned desire for the greatest admiration and
position that republican Rome could bestow upon him, he entertained no
ambition to become a dictatorial tyrant. Moreover, as Cicero noted, Pom-
pey was now showing a certain readiness to abandon the anticonservative
faction that had given him his appointments since 70, and to side with
orthodox senators instead. But at this stage he had two requests to make
from them. The first was an application for land to settle his impatient
veterans. This must have been foreseen and was reasonable. His second
request was that all the actions he had performed in the East should be
ratified as decisions of the Roman state. This was equally predictable. It
could be criticized, certainly, on the grounds that he had acted largely
without the customary consultations with Rome. All the same, by straining
the tradition a little, his wish might have been granted in view of the gigantic
gains he had brought to Rome.
Nevertheless, a series of obscure metropolitan intrigues now got under
way, during which it emerged that very many leading conservatives pre-
ferred to take a short-term view and oppose his demand. They regarded his
recent failure to consult the government when he was in the East as just
another in a prolonged series of high-handed and illegal acts. One of their
number, the former general Lucullus, added his own vindictive feelings of
personal affront because Pompey had superseded and humiliated him in
Asia Minor. Cato, who became tribune in 62, was another of Pompey's
opponents. It was true that when Cato wanted to increase the existing free
distributions of grain to keep the metropolis quiet while Catiline was still
at large, he was willing enough to make use of Pompey's huge new eastern
revenue for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, he also used his tribunate
to block Pompey's two proposals, deploying his extraordinary powers of
obstruction to the full. In the face of this pressure, the Senate continually
delayed its decision about Pompey's requests; and few things contributed
so greatly to the fall of the republic, which was shortly to follow, as this
refusal to give him what he wanted.
Pompey the Great.
208 / THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
The senators also made two further ominous decisions. One of these was
in relation to Crassus. After acting ambiguously towards Pompey while he
was away in the East, Crassus had come to resent him greatly after his
triumphant return; and now he was fully prepared to join with the Senate
in blocking his two claims. Yet, in spite of this heaven-sent opportunity to
enlist Crassus's support, the senators rebuffed him instead. This happened
in regard to a financial matter in which he declared an interest. At the end
of 6i, a company of tax gatherers, who were now the most important
pressure group among the knights, were claiming a rebate on the purchase
price of Asian revenues they had contracted to collect, since these were
proving disastrously less profitable than they had expected. They persuaded
Crassus, as the most influential patron of business interests, to back their
request. But Cato, not unreasonably this time, saw their appeal as an
outrageous attempt to bend their perfectly clear agreement with the state
— merely because it had not brought them as much profit as they had hoped.
And so he persuaded the Senate to kill the proposal.
Pompey and Crassus, then, had both been snubbed. And now Caesar was
snubbed as well. He had been serving as governor of Further Spain (Ba-
etica), from which he returned to Italy in 60 to become a candidate for the

consulate. But because of minor military victories won during his governor-
ship, he had also been awarded a triumph, and he wanted to celebrate it.
His right to do so, however, would have been forfeited by law if in the
meanwhile he had entered the city. So he asked leave to stand for the
consular elections by proxy instead of in person. Cato, however, insured
that this application should be rejected. And that was not all. It was the
practice at this period for the Senate to allocate to the consuls of any given
year, even before their election took place and their names were known, the
provinces they would be sent to govern at the conclusion of their term of
office. And so now the provinces that would go to the consuls for 59 B.C.

were duly allotted, and it was decided that they should not be ordinary
provinces at all, but merely "the forests and cattle drifts" of Italy. This was
an abnormally trivial assignment, expressly designed for one possible, or
probable, contingency: that one of the consuls about to be elected would
turn out to be Caesar. In other words, it was a deliberate affront directed
against him personally.
The Senate had thus opposed and offended Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar
— all three of them at once. Evidently its members no longer possessed the

acute judgment that had won them the Mediterranean world. What hap-
pened next, therefore, seems by hindsight inevitable. The three men who
had all received this treatment buried their differences with one another and
joined forces against those who had insulted them. Their agreement took
the form of a coalition, informal but potent, at first secret and before long
 REACTION AND BREAKDOWN / 20()

publicly known, that historians describe as the First Triumvirate. Caesar

asked Cicero to join this compact, but to his credit he refused. The Triumvi-
rate was painfully from the Concord between the Orders which he
different
had been advocating. Far from becoming a partner in the agreement, the
Senate was going to be its target and victim; it was so severely weakened
that it first time, a mere political group instead of the
became, for the
effectivegovernment of the empire.
Later historical writers saw the event as the end of the Roman Republic,
or at least as the beginning of its end. Some modern researchers have
questioned this, pointing out that the triumvirs' control was not absolute,
and that the traditional political activities, including more or less freely
contested annual elections, still continued for another decade. Yet they
continued only under the heaviest of shadows; and the oligarchy never
recovered its power again.
mm n-^^:.

M %
.W^^'

y<L
^. 1.x

»i;«i:^.v:. l'^
ts^-^'

CAESAR AND
AUGUSTUS ^f

i*

n
Preceding page:
Antony and the dead Caesar.
 12
Caesar

The First Consulship of Caesar

hen Caesar was elected to the consulship for 59 B.C., the
republic was still able to exhibit faint signs of life by electing
an extreme conservative, Bibulus, as his fellow consul.
Nevertheless, Caesar at once pointed the way to Rome's autocratic future
by pushing through a series of measures in favor of the triumvirs, Pompey,
Crassus, and himself, in total disregard of the opposition.
One of his first actions as consul was to satisfy Pompey's veterans by a
land bill. When his archenemy, Cato, blocked the measure in the Senate,
Caesar secured its acceptance in the Assembly by forcible methods, which
were held against him for the rest of his These methods even included
life.

the beating-up of his fellow consul. He was supported, however, by his

fellow triumvirs, so that his alliance with them came to be revealed, and
Pompey married his daughter Julia. Caesar then went on to insure the
ratification of his new son-in-law's eastern arrangements and shared with
him an enormously lucrativereward for shoring up a distressed king of
Egypt. He also formed the habit of inviting Pompey to speak first in the
Senate, rather than Crassus. Nevertheless, Caesar also satisfied Crassus by
securing a generous financial concession for his friends the tax-collecting
knights, who had been unsuccessfully demanding a rebate on their Asian
contracts. And he arranged that in future the proceedings of the Senate (as
well as of the Assembly) should be published openly, so that its members'
freedom to conduct secret intrigues against him was severely restricted.
It was now up to the other triumvirs to help Caesar in his own political

career. The governorship of Further Spain from which he was recently

returned had convinced him that he possessed exceptional military talents,
and these he was now eager to exploit in order to fulfill his growing ambition
to become preeminent in the state. Instead, therefore, of the ridiculously

unimportant province the Senate had assigned to the consuls for this year,

213
214 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
 CAESAR / 21$

he got himself allotted an more significant province consisting of

infinitely

Cisalpine Gaul (north Italy) combined with lUyricum (Dalmatia). His ini-
tial purpose was apparently to lead Roman armies northeastwards, as far
as the rivers Save (Sava) or Drave (Drava) in what is now Yugoslavia.
At this juncture, however, occurred the death of the governor of Transal-
pine or Narbonese Gaul (southern France). This was a remarkable piece of
good fortune for Caesar, who saw that region as a far more promising
starting-off point for military conquestsand arranged for it to be added to
the province already assigned to him. He knew it would be best to assume
office as provincial governor as soon as his consulship was over, and to

retain the job without a break for an indefinite period, since, if he became
a private citizen, he would be liable to prosecution for the violent acts he
had committed as consul. Before leaving Rome, however, he formed an
alliance with a young politician named Clodius, a talented, eccentric radical
freelance who he hoped would look after his interests in the capital, with
the help of numerous inherited clients, urban gangsters, and trade corpora-
tions or guilds (collegia), whose mobilization and exploitation Clodius
made into a fine art.

The Gallic War

In many huge unconquered tribal territories lying north of
parts of their
the Transalpine province, the Gauls practiced advanced agriculture, animal
breeding, and working of metals. But in spite of fine cavalry, their capacity
in battle was limited: once the initial charge of their horsemen and sword-
bearing infantry had been held up, their attacks soon degenerated into
anarchic disorder. And political cohesion between the tribes and inside each
of them was weak.
Between the River Seine and the Roman province lived two hundred
tribes of Celtic race. The most important of them, each surrounded by a ring
of lesser dependent peoples, were the Arverni (Auvergne) based on their
fortress Gergovia; the Aedui, who had succeeded them as the principal
allies of the Romans and had their capital at Bibracte (Mont Beuvray above

Autun); and the Sequani, who were centered upon Vesontio (Besangon).
While the shifting relationships among these leading tribes made it clear
that Galhc unity was out of the question, their side-by-side existence at least
created a certain precarious balance and, for considerable periods, a sort of
peace.
This, however, was now imperiled by the Helvetii, a Celtic people of
Germany who had been driven out of their homes into Switzerland and had
then decided to migrate westwards, intending to traverse the whole of Gaul
until they reached the Atlantic coast, where they hoped to settle. Certain
2l6 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
Roman leaders, however, decided that this mass migration must be stopped,
since it would threaten the security of the Transalpine province. That was
Caesar's ostensible reason for securing the inclusion of that province in his
own command. And once his consulship had come to an end, he and the
army he had got together hastened northwards.
We know a great deal about the operations that followed from his own
Gallic War. was the best account of warfare that had ever been written
It

by a Roman and retained this supremacy for at least another four centuries
to come. This work and his subsequent Civil War were entitled "Commen-
taries," a term that intentionally falls short of "Histories," denoting rather
a commander's dispatches or memoranda, amplified by informative mate-
rial and speeches (intended, as always in antiquity, to convey background

rather than the actual words employed). Caesar's formidable intellect and
lucid, concise Latin transform these ostensibly modest works into master-
pieces. His unique inside knowledge carries extraordinary authority, though
at the same time the prescribed literary form, as well as his own inclination,
encouraged an egotistic approach, allowing little credit to the immense,
efficient staff work behind each of his operations, or to the subordinates who

conducted it and commanded his legions. Moreover, Caesar's desire to

refute his political enemies at Rome leads to a good deal of distortion, not
 CAESAR / 2/7

SO much of the actual historical facts (which Caesar, an excellent propagan-

dist, prefers not to falsify), but of motives, impressions, and implications.
At the outset, his numerous critics maintained that the movements of the
Helvetii were no concern of Rome and that his attack on them was a piece
of unprovoked aggression without precedent in the whole of Roman his-

tory.But his desire for military prestige left him unmoved by such argu-
ments, and at Armecy beside the River Arraux he wiped out tens and
perhaps hundreds of thousands of the Helvetii, while the survivors turned
back into Switzerland.
Next, in the same year, he dealt with a rather more plausible menace. The
Sequani, at odds with the Aedui, had imprudently invited Ariovistus, chief
of one of the tribes of west Germany, to come to their aid, and in 61 B.C.
he had fought the Aedui and heavily defeated them. Two years later,
Ariovistus secured recognition as king and ally of the people: andRoman
at the time, Caesar favoredBut soon afterwards the chiefs territorial
this.

ambitions began to cause widespread alarm among the Gauls, who appealed
to Rome; whereupon Caesar, scenting the prospect of another and more
dramatic military campaign, reversed his favorable attitude to Ariovistus
and declared that the Gallic appeal must be accepted. At first he was
somewhat worried by political disloyalty among some of his own junior
officers; but before long he stamped this out. Then, on the plain of Alsace,

he engaged the Germans and put them to flight. Ariovistus escaped but died
soon afterwards, and Caesar's friends declared him the triumphant succes-
sor of his relative Marius as destroyer of menacing western barbarians.
North of the Seine were the numerous and warlike Belgae, Germans by
origin, intermarried with Celts. At first they had been content to see the
Helvetii and Ariovistus defeated. But when Caesar established his winter
quarters on Gallic territory, the Belgae grew deeply suspicious of his inten-
tions and began to mobihze their war potential of three hundred thousand
men. Thereupon Caesar raised two new legions in Cisalpine Gaul, bringing
his total up to eight, and prepared to tackle the combined Belgic force. It
soon became clear, however, that this had fallen apart, owing to the failure
or virtual nonexistence of supply services; and in the end only the most
powerful of these tribes, the Nervii, were still able to keep an army in the
field. They possessed unusually good infantry, but in 57 Caesar annihilated

them on the River Sambre, after a desperately hazardous battle. As a result

of only two seasons of military operations, Gaul already looked incapable
of offering any further resistance.

In Rome, Pompey proposed a thanksgiving of unprecedented duration to

celebrate these victories of his fellow triumvir Caesar. Even the republican
Cicero felt able to second the proposal. But he did so out of gratitude not
2l8 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
to Caesar but to Pompey, for Cicero had been in trouble. The executions
during his consulship had not been forgotten, especially by Clodius, who
also nursed a strong personal grudge against him. As tribune Clodius,
dominating the streets and guilds of Rome with his gangs, succeeded in
driving Cicero into exile (58). But in the next year he went too far. For one
thing, he introduced an unlimited distribution of grain to the population of
Rome, entirely without payment, a measure that heavily outbid Cato's
earlier measure of the same kind and seemed to many people excessively
radical. And then he showed signs of turning against Pompey, who sus-
pected instigation from Crassus and, looking around angrily for new allies,

recalled Cicero from his banishment.

He came back jubilantly and hoped that the triumvirate was breaking
apart. But disappointment awaited him. In 56 the three leaders met together
at Luca (Lucca) —a place which was just inside Cisalpine Gaul (part of
Caesar's command), and which was chosen for the meeting because Caesar
did not want to leave his province and face prosecution. At their conference
the triumvirs came to a complete agreement once again and decided how
to fulfil their future ambitions. Pompey and Crassus were to become consuls
together for the second time in 55. Then Crassus, who was envious of his
colleagues' military triumphs, would take up a command against Parthia,
an Iranian feudal empire beyond the Euphrates, which had broken away
from the Seleucids in the third century B.C. and was the only substantial
foreign power confronting Rome anywhere in the world. Pompey was
awarded the rich provinces of Spain for five years and, by a concession
anticipating the future arrangements of Roman emperors, was allowed to
govern them in absentia through subordinates, while he himself remained
at Rome and virtually controlled its administration. Caesar's provincial
command was likewise prolonged for a further five years, so that he could
extend his new conquests in Transalpine Gaul.
However, it at once became apparent that
this country was not yet fully
conquered after For the Veneti of western Brittany, a people with a
all.

powerful fleet, were in rebellion. In the previous year, they had duly sur-
rendered to one of Caesar's officers, a son of Crassus. But then they learned
with anger that Caesar was planning an invasion of Britain, which would
seriously upset their control of cross-channel trade. As a protest, they
placed Caesar's requisitioning officers under arrest. But he sent a fleet

against them, and they were crushed Quiberon Bay (56).

in a battle in
Expeditions dispatched to Normandy and Aquitania (southwestern Gaul)
were equally successful, and then early in the next year, Caesar threw back
a German migration from the east, as he had already done three years
before, but with even greater slaughter.
He had prepared for his attack on these Germans by a treacherous breach
 CAESAR / 2ig

Silver denarius issued in Spain depicting Pompey the Great

(CN. MAGNVS IMVerator) after his death.

of faith that caused Cato at Rome to remonstrate, though his motives were
pohtical rather than humanitarian. In any case his objections were not
widely shared. Moreover, Caesar at this juncture greatly impressed metro-
politan opinion because he built a bridge over the Rhine and led a force
across it for a brief stay on the other side, where no Roman commander
or troops had ever set foot before. The bridge was a display of his army's
superb engineering, but it was also a demonstration that there were no
bounds to the frontiers of Rome and his own ambitions.

This last purpose was once again in his mind when, as the Veneti had
foreseen, he launched his first expedition to Britain. A subsidiary motive
was his desire to lay hands on the considerable, somewhat exaggerated,
if

wealth of the country, particularly in metals. And he also wanted to harry

certain local Belgic rulers —
on the island men descended from migrants
from northern Gaul who had formed important tribal groupings in Britain
and had supported their continental kinsmen against Caesar. But his main
purpose was to eclipse Pompey as a leader of armies to hitherto unknown
lands.
Pompey, not to be outdone, later objected that the English Channel was
merely an insignificant mudBut Caesar had reason to disagree. When,
flat.

after embarking from Portus Itius (Boulogne or Wissant), he had landed

near Walmer or Deal on the southeast coast of England and had put two
220 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

British helmet of bronze, probably of first century B.C.

legions ashore, many of his eighty ships were heavily damaged on the beach
by high tides that he had not foreseen. The ambush that this encouraged
the British to attempt was duly beaten off. However, the entire Roman force
sailed back to Gaul only eighteen days after its arrival.
The British tribal leaders had agreed to provide hostages. But very few
of them were handed over or dispatched, and nothing else had been
achieved either. So in the following year, Caesar, after cowing the recalci-
trant Belgic Treviri on the Moselle, led a second and larger expedition to
Britain. This time he took five legions and two thousand cavalry on eight
hundred ships — by far the largest fleet the Channel had ever seen and larger
than any it was to see again until 1944. Embarking same point as
at the
before, he landed a little farther north, near Sandwich, and at once marched
into the hinterland. But history repeated itself, for a storm in the night
destroyed forty of his ships and disabled most of the rest. So he had to return
to the coast to organize repairs, reinforcements, and protective measures.
 CAESAR / 221

Meanwhile the British tribes, dropping their habitual feuds for the moment,
had appointed King Cassivellaunus of the Catuvellauni (Hertfordshire) as
commander in chief of their united forces. But Caesar, beating off guerrillas
as he went, forced his way Thames — the
across the British tribes in his rear
failing to provide a diversion —and stormed the king's Wheat- capital at
hampstead, near St. Albans. Then, after a stay of three months on the
island, he and his army were transported back to Gaul.
Meanwhile, Cassivellaunus had formally surrendered, given hostages,
and promised tribute, and when Caesar told Rome that such remote and
exotic peoples had submitted, it made impressive propaganda. But he also
hoped that he had established a network of client and semiclient states
beyond the imperial frontiers, as Pompey had done in the East. Time
showed, however, that this had not been achieved, and as for direct control,
Rome did not succeed in annexing any portion whatever of Britain for
nearly a hundred years to come.

When Caesar returned to the mainland, he planned to split up his army

at anumber of separate winter quarters in different regions of Gaul, for it
had now become even clearer than before that the conquest of the country
was far from complete.
The first trouble that occurred was among the Carnutes, a tribe in the
wooded interior around Cenabum (Orleans). Their territory was of particu-
lar importance because it contained the principal meeting place of the
Druids, religious leaders who dominated civil and legal and educational
affairs throughout Gaul. Among the Belgae, too, in the northern part of the
country, outbreaks of rebellion indicated the dismaying possibility that
detachments of Caesar's army might be isolated and cut to pieces; one tribe
revolted, another massacred a garrison of one and a half legions, and a
further garrison under Cicero's brother was only narrowly saved from a
hostile horde at Samarobriva (Amiens). And it was in that town that Caesar
decided to spend the next winter, instead of moving into Cisalpine Gaul as
had been custom at the end of each previous campaigning season. Then
his
in 53, at Samarobriva and elsewhere in the north, he summoned three
conferences of Gallic chieftains in an endeavor to stamp out disaffection.
Nevertheless, in the following year the Gauls rose in general revolt. They
conferred the supreme command on the only talented leader they produced
in these wars, Vercingetorix of the tribe of the Arverni in central Gaul. That
winter Caesar had returned to the Cisalpine part of his command. But now,
on hearing the news of the rebellion, he hastened back across the Alps with
unexpected speed; and Vercingetorix decided that the only way to stop him
was by a scorched-earth policy of destroying every Gallic settlement that
might provide the Romans with supplies. Caesar directed his attack against
222 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Gallic coin showing Vercingetorix of the Arverni,

who led the revolt against Julius Caesar in 52 B.C.

the chief fortress of the Arverni, Gergovia. But there he received his first

serious setback of the war and was compelled to break off the siege, while
the other principal tribe of the region, the Aedui, was encouraged by his
discomfiture to join the insurrection. Caesar had sent his deputy Labienus
to the north, but now he summoned him back. Together, they besieged
Vercingetorix who, by an unwise decision following a defeat, had retired
behind the walls of the fortress of Alesia (Alise Sainte Reine). Huge rein-
forcements came to relieve him, and for four days Caesar's army had to
resist an attack from both directions. But then the Gallic relief forces were
routed, and although there were still resisters to mop up —a process accom-
panied by grim atrocities —the Great Revolt was at an end.
The Gauls had, on And
the whole, failed to unite with any effectiveness.
the losses they had suffered were appalling: at least a third of all their men
of military age were killed, and another third sold into slavery. And now
their large territory, reduced to subject status, was assessed for Roman
tribute, at first as a series of client states dependent on the old Transalpine
province in the south, and subsequently as three separate new provinces. By
the annexation of this land which forms a bridge between the Inner and the
Outer Seas, the whole concept and character of the Roman Empire had
been transformed. It was no longer a purely Mediterranean dominion any
more, since a vast conglomeration of territories in continental and northern
Europe had now been opened up to Romanization.
Caesar had shown himself to be one of the supreme military commanders
of all But was he a highly original general, or one who perfected a
time.
machine he had inherited from earlier commanders? The truth lies some-
Monument of the Julii at Glanum (Saint Remy in S. France).
Second half of first century B.C.
 Relief of Barbarian prisoner on triumphal arch at
Carpentorate (Carpentras). Probably of Augustan date.
 CAESAR / 225

where between the two views. He learned from others all that could be
learned about the workings of the Roman army, but he also left his own
stamp on every part of the machine. His powers of endurance were phenom-
enal. A first-class horseman, he also thought nothing of covering a hundred
miles a day in a light carriage on terrible roads —
while all the time dictating
official letters or literary works to relays of secretaries. But his outstanding

personal qualities as a commander were speed, timing, and adaptability to

rapidly changing circumstances. His generalship was breathtakingly quick
in mind as well as in movement — far too quick for his enemies.
Sometimes this brilliant rapidity produced alarming mistakes and perils.
But he became used to extricating himself from such hazards and achieving
total victory by the narrowest of margins. His "Commentaries" pay tribute
to the luck for which he was famous. But a commander has to harness the
lucky odds in his favor, and that is what Caesar almost invariably achieved.
He attracted unbounded admiration from his legions, whom he often ad-
—
dressed with great eloquence for he was second only to Cicero as an
orator. And he linked them to himself still more firmly by doubling their
pay.

In Rome, however, during the last four years of his Gallic campaigning,
the political situation imposed by the triumvirate had gradually fallen to
pieces. As always, Caesar was keeping the closest possible eye on the city
through his numerous and and by a massive correspondence
effective agents
passing between Rome and Gaul more rapidly, sometimes, than letters do
today. But the news that reached him from the capital became increasingly
disquieting, since, although Pompey remained nearby, incessant disorders,
largely fomented by Clodius, virtually reduced its pubhc life to chaos.
Moreover, Julia, Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife, died in 54, so that
the links between the two leaders were seriously weakened. And then the
triumvirate ceased to exist because its third member, Crassus, in his attempt
to overcome the Parthians, met with total disaster. At the town of Carrhae
in Mesopotamia (Haran in southeastern Turkey), his army was totally
defeated by a highly trained force of ten thousand Parthian horse archers;
and when he went to negotiate with their commanders, they put him to
death (53). This meant that Pompey and Caesar, with their rival aims and
ambitions, now stood alone in direct confrontation.
Early in the following year, Clodius was murdered, and in the resulting
emergency Pompey assumed his third consulship, holding the office for
some months without a colleague. Some detected in him a taste for perma-
nent one-man rule; but there is no real evidence that this is what Pompey
had in mind. In order to retain his friendship Caesar suggested new mar-
riage ties between their families. But Pompey now took a significant deci-
226 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
... ^.'WWtt

Silver tetradrachm of Orodes I of Parthia, whose general Surenas

killed Crassus at Carrhae in 53 B.C. Fortune is shown
offering the seated king a palm branch.

sion by rejecting Caesar's proposed bargain and marrying Cornelia, daugh-

ter of the highly aristocratic whom he elevated to become
Metellus Scipio,
his fellow consul. Conservatives such as Metellus were willing enough to
form an association with Pompey, at least until Caesar was got rid of,
though they hoped to put him in his place later on. And he in his turn, as
this new marriage alliance revealed, was no longer averse to them either.
That is to say, he was moving away from Caesar, of whom he was increas-
ingly frightened and jealous, though he still could not bring himself to
alienate him completely.
As for Caesar's aims, it remained essential to his career, and perhaps even
to his survival, that his present governorship should not be followed by a
period without office, during which he could be subjected to prosecutions.
According to the existing law the earliest year for which he could aim at
a second consulship was 48, so he had somehow to retain his command right
up until then. In consequence, he expressed the desire to become a candidate
for that consulship, when the time came, Pompey obligingly
in absentia.
agreed to this —while at the same time arranging for his own absentee
governorship of Spain to be extended for another five years. But very soon
afterwards, he allowed himself to be pushed by his advisers into less friendly
measures towards Caesar; and these culminated in a decision that the
appointment of a new provincial commander to replace him should be
allowed to come up for discussion in the Senate in March 50 B.C.
But Caesar had the backing of a young tribune. Curio, who persistently
vetoed demands that any such successor should be appointed. And then
Curio himself produced an alternative suggestion: that Caesar should, in-
deed, resign from his post, but that Pompey should simultaneously resign
 CAESAR / 22J

from his absentee Spanish governorship. This idea seemed attractive to

numerous senators, but a small group of diehards insured its rejection. Near
the end of the year, however, the proposal came up for a second time, and
Curio induced the Senate to agree to it by a very large majority, whereupon
the diehard faction vetoed it once again. The deadlock was complete, and
on the following day one of the consuls, an ultraconservative, called on
Pompey to take up the command of all the forces of the republic. Pompey
accepted the commission, "unless a better way can be found," and took over
two legions had been about to depart for Syria.
that
Negotiations continued; but when a message from Caesar arrived in
Rome, the young tribune Antony (Marcus Antonius), who had succeeded
Curio as his representative, could scarcely induce the senators to allow it
to be read. They proceeded instead to pass their emergency decree with
Caesar as its target, and Antony and a colleague hastily left Rome for the
north. Then on the night of January lo, 49 B.C. Caesar crossed the small
river Rubicon, which formed the border between Cisalpine Gaul and east-
em Italy. When he moved across this bridge, taking a single legion with
him, he was breaking Rome's law of treason which forbade a governor to
lead his troops outside his province —a law that Sulla had formulated
precisely with the aim of curbing such acts against the government.
And so, as Caesar himself declared, the die was cast, and the crossing of
this little stream was one of the formal turning points in Roman history.
It meant that the nation was plunged into an empire-wide civil war for

which neither side was ready. Yet, in a sense, the real turning point had
come a decade earlier, when the republic was already to a large extent
superseded by the autocratic triumvirate. During the intervening years, its
inevitable disintegration had accelerated; and now it had entered a catas-
trophic, terminal phase.

Catullus and Lucretius

But the fifties B.C. had not all been war and politics. For example, this
was also the time when two of the world's outstanding poets completed
much or most of their work. The twenty-three hundred surviving hnes of
Catullus (b. ca. 84-d. 54 B.C.) were found inscribed on a manuscript discov-
ered at Verona. This had been his native city, for he, like other writers of
Latin poetry at this time, was a product of Cisalpine Gaul. For their formal
inspiration, these men went back whose learned,
to the poets of Alexandria
individualistic, sentimental tendencies had dominated Greek literature dur-
ing the previous two centuries. Yet the new, Latin Alexandrian movement
differed considerably from its Greek predecessor in purpose. The function
of the latter had been to revive a tired culture by injecting novel and topical
228 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
elements; whereas Roman poetry, despite certain achievements in the past,
was still raw and unrefined when these influences overtook it, preparing the
way for the technical perfection of Catullus.
Yet although this formal mastery is fully displayed in his jewel-like

miniature epics, it was not by these longer poems that he influenced the
world of the future, but by his shorter pieces. Some of these give expression
to a heartbroken and heartbreaking intensity —inspired by his love for the
hopelessly unfaithful "Lesbia," who was really called Clodia and may have
been a fashionable, immoral sister of the politician Clodius. Casting himself
free of the impersonal objectivity of the Greeks, the poet feels an irresistible

excitement, which he compels his readers to share; and the virtuosity and
precision of his language heighten the forcefulness of its impact. Catullus
is the product of agonizing tension between a powerful mind and tormented
emotions. He responds to the demands of love with an unprecedented
seriousness, veering between ecstasy and desperation; and both are com-
municated with a total intimacy designed for an elite circle of close, like-
minded friends. Thus, although his verses fully reflect the lively, dangerous,
immoral, and precarious social scene of his day, the service of the commu-
nity no part of his aim and the service of its leaders even less: Caesar and
is

Pompey he mentions briefly and contemptuously as irrelevancies, introduc-

ing them only because of his fastidious distaste for the upstarts who gained
power as their supporters.
His older contemporary Lucretius (b. ca. 94-d. 55 B.C.) does not mention
these great men by name at all. It was an extraordinary age that could
produce two such totally different poets. Lucretius was an adherent of the
philosophy of the Athenian Epicurus (b. 341-d. 270 B.C.), who had sought
to prove that the universe was completely material, consisting of nothing
but atoms and the space in which they move. The Epicureans were an
austere, unpretentious, and unambitious sect who had gained a certain
amount of support in Italy, and now had adherents in Rome. But Lucretius,
with startling incongruity, transformed the philosopher's undistinguished
Greek prose into a burningly impassioned Latin poem on the nature of the
universe. About Reality, or How Things Are (De Rerum Natura) the only —
philosophical poem of antiquity that has come down to us in its complete
form.
It offers a flashing profusion of visual images, for this poet was a vivid
panoramic painter of words. The scientific doctrine he presents is of no
more than historical interest today, as a link between Greek and modem
atomists. Yet its presentation displays Lucretius as the most original, adven-
turous, imaginative, and dedicated thinker of his day, and perhaps the most
formidable intellectual ever to write in the Latin tongue. His interpretation
of the universe in a wholly materialistic fashion prompted him to declare,
 CAESAR / 22g

like Epicurus but with a great deal more vigor, that fear of the gods, and
above all fear of death, is completely unwarranted and pointless. Yet even
if the world is merely a chance pileup of atoms streaming in a meaningless
void, they do not move, Lucretius feels, in a totally predetermined fashion,
but on the contrary show independence of movement and sometimes swerve
—
unpredictably which means, he concludes, that individual persons are not
slaves to fate but remain free agents; and his picture of the triumphs of the
human brain and will, which have created civilization, is one of the supreme
expositions of what men and women are capable of achieving. Our purpose
in life, Lucretius and his master declare, should be happiness. This assertion
has damned the Epicureans in the eyes of posterity on the grounds that they
are advocating sensuous pleasures —a mistaken conclusion since, like other
philosophies of the day, they equated happiness with something altogether
different, namely, freedom from disturbances (ataraxia), only procurable
by the acquisition of the right kind of knowledge.
Caesar and Pompey, the poet must clearly have thought, did not possess
this kind of knowledge at all, and it was therefore predictable that he should

not refer to them. But he expresses, in forthright terms, the poorest possible
view of all the politicians whose rat race was dragging the Roman Republic
down to its final extinction:

Men lost.

Confused, in hectic search for the right road.

The strife of wits, the wars for precedence,
The and day,
everlasting struggle, night
To win towards heights of wealth and power.

The Civil War

After crossing the Rubicon, Caesar moved forward rapidly into the cen-
ter of Italy. He divided his small force into two columns, one of which he
himself led to Ariminum (Rimini), where he was joined by the friendly
tribunes from Rome, Curio and Antony; and then both his columns pressed
on, and one town after another opened its gates to them.
His enemies included most of the senior senators and indeed, theoreti-
cally, the greater part of the empire; and this made them too confident. They
were also too jealous of Pompey and would not allow him the powers a
commander needed; and they had totally underestimated Caesar's capacity
to complete a rapid invasion of Italy. His troops were highly experienced
after all the battles of the Gallic war, whereas Pompey's veterans, on the
other hand, had become less efficient during twelve years of peace, and his
best legions were in Spain, unable to give him any help. So, in the face of
230 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
Caesar's advance, he retreated southwards through the Itahan peninsula,
while his uneasy allies, the consuls, fled from Rome, departing in such haste
that they even failed to take the reserve treasury with them.
At Corfinium, however, east of Rome, the wealthy nobleman Ahenobar-
bus, disregarding Pompey's order to retreat and join up with him, endeav-
ored to make a stand against Caesar, whom he detested. But he was soon
compelled to surrender, whereupon Caesar allowed him and the fifty sena-
tors and knights who were with him to go free. It was a novel and striking
display of clemency to Roman citizens, very different from his earlier
treatment of Gauls and Germans. Then in March, only sixty-five days after
the campaign had begun, his enemies evacuated Italy altogether; the consuls
set out across the Adriatic, followed by Pompey himself who skillfully

evaded attempts to blockade him Brundisium harbor. He was probably

in
right not to persist in forlorn efforts to fight Caesar in Italy and justified also
in making for the eastern provinces, for his favorite strategy was always to

fight from carefully prepared positions of superior strength, and in the East

he had huge resources to draw upon, which even outweighed his military
power in Spain. Cicero, however, thought his decision to leave Italy was
wrong. But all the same, after an inconclusive personal interview with
Caesar and prolonged waverings, he decided that Pompey's side was the
 CAESAR / 2JI

lesser of the twoand obeyed his injunction to join him at Thessalonica

evils

(Salonica) in Macedonia.
Caesar could not pursue his opponents yet, for the command of the sea
was in their hands and threatened the grain supply of Italy. So Curio, acting
on his behalf, seized the wheat-producing island of Sicily, though he was
then defeated and killed in north Africa. Meanwhile, Caesar himself, after
convening Senate and Assembly meetings at Rome, set off by land to attack
Spain, the chief remaining Pompeian stronghold in western Europe; and
once there, he cornered and overwhelmed the enemy forces near Ilerda
(Lerida).
Meanwhile, in southern Gaul, the Greek city-state of Massilia, which had
entrusted its defenses to Ahenobarbus was forced to sur-
after his release,
render to Caesar, who allowed the place to remain autonomous but, in fact,
brought its long career of independent statehood to an end. He was still
there when he learned that a mutiny was threatening among four of his
legions at Placentia (Piacenza) in Cisalpine Gaul —
a painful incident omit-
ted from his Civil War. One of the troubles was that the soldiers deplored
his policy of clemency, since it deprived them of their loot. After quelling
the mutiny by an oration, he paid his second visit of the year to the capital,
where he assumed for a brief period his first tenure of the post of dictator,
which Sulla had revived thirty-two years earlier. This enabled him, during
an eleven days' stay in the capital, to fulfil his long-standing ambition of
arranging to become consul in the following year. And his brief dictatorship
also gave him a chance to make a start with some of his gravest administra-
tive problems.
Then, finally, he moved against his opponents in the Balkans, eluding a
flotilla intended to stop him; and after a nerve-racking delay of three
months, Antony managed to reach him from Italy with reinforcements.
Caesar endeavored to blockade Pompey's key base Dyrrhachium (Durres
in Albania), but the attempt was a disastrous failure, and he recoiled inland
into the Thessalian plain. There, in the largest battle ever fought between
Romans, his superior generalship won the day near Pharsalus (48). Pompey
himself escaped, first by land and then by sea, and after abortive attempts
to land at Aegean ports, decided to proceed to Egypt; he chose it because
the government of the boy-king Ptolemy XIII had backed him against
Caesar in the civil war. But as Pompey landed on the Egyptian coast, he
was struck down and assassinated, for the Egyptian politicians intended to
be on the winning side.
They also wanted to leave Caesar no excuse for staying in Egypt, for he
was known to be on his way, in hot pursuit of Pompey, and very soon
afterwards he arrived. His intention was to extort an enormous sum from
this wealthy and still ostensibly independent country. But the official reason
2^2 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
for the visitwas to arbitrate between the monarch and his half-sister Cleopa-
tra VII who had been driven into exile. When, however, Cleopatra, a highly
intelligent twenty-one-year-old charmer, secretly came to see him in Alex-
andria, Caesar, over thirty years her senior, took her into the palace and
lived with her as her lover. Thereupon he found himself perilously besieged
by the royal army, which favored the king. It was not until March of the
following year that the arrival of a relief force enabled him to bring his
Egyptian enemies to battle south of the delta of the Nile. Ptolemy XIII was
defeated and killed, and Caesar confirmed Cleopatra as queen of Egypt and
a client of Rome and of himself. Then, after a five-day campaign against the
son of Rome's old enemy Mithridates VI, in Pontus, culminating in total
victory at Zela (Zile), Caesar at last returned to Italy and the capital.
He had been away for a long time, much too long. Antony, his deputy
at Rome, had not been able to stop some of his fellow nobles from getting

out of hand; and Caesar also had a second threat of mutiny to deal with.
He averted it only just in time, for Pompey's death had not meant the death
of his cause, and his sons Cnaeus and Sextus, supported by many prominent
Romans in north Africa and Spain, were now ready for battle. At the height
of winter Caesar crossed over to north Africa, and after a campaign involv-
ing many hardships fought a totally successful battle on the isthmus at
Thapsus (Ras Dimas). The enemy commander Metellus Scipio, Pompey's
father-in-law, killed himself, followed shortly afterwards by Cato, whose
suicide at Utica provided the republicans with a martyr and a saint.
After a magnificent triumph in Rome, Caesar left the city again before
the year was over and made at once for southern Spain. There, in the
following spring, he won a grim and horrifying soldier's battle at an uniden-
tified place named Munda. Labienus, who after serving as his deputy

throughout the Gallic campaigns had joined the other side in the civil wars,
fell in the holocaust, and Pompey's son Cnaeus was caught and killed soon

afterwards. His brother Sextus got away and lived on to plague Caesar's
successors; but as far as Caesar was concerned, the gigantic and immeasura-
bly costly convulsion of the civil war was over.
Henceforward he employed the title Imperator as a special, personal
appellation, not with the meaning of its later derivative "emperor," but to
show that he was the military commander who totally surpassed all others.

The Dictatorship of Caesar

During the brief intervals between these campaigns and then, when they
were over, in the single year of life that still remained to him, Caesar began
to show that he was a genius, not only as a commander, but, as an adminis-
trator as well.
 CAESAR / 2jj

The first need, as always in these times, was to reward his ex-soldiers,
whose loyalty, in spite of near-mutinies, had gained him his victory. So
Caesar, who now possessed enormous wealth, settled these retired legio-
naries in thousands. In the first place he established colonies for them
in Italy. But there, if he was to pursue his much-heralded policy of
clemency, he could procure only a limited amount of land. So he also
initiated at least forty such foundations in the provinces. Among these
new colonies were settlements at Corinth and Carthage, both rising
again out of their destruction just a hundred years earlier, and both des-
tined to become impressive cities once more, Corinth as the capital of
Roman Greece and Carthage as its counterpart in Africa and the larg-
est city of all the western provinces.
The colonies of Caesar included veterans who could always be called out
again for military service, so that these towns became important bastions
of imperial defense — and of potential support for Caesar's regime. But the
settlements were not intended for veterans alone. The most original feature
of his foundations was the inclusion of civilians as well — including eighty
thousand of the capital's penniless unemployed. As well as helping to break
down old barriers between Romans and provincials, this meant that Caesar,
like no one else before him, had seriously begun to tackle the obstinate
problem of the impoverished workless population of the city.

Having founded his colonies, Caesar laid down for them a standard
system of local government on Roman lines. The colonies in the East, of
which besides Corinth there were relatively few, remained isolated outposts
of Romanism in areas that remained predominantly Greek. But more than
three-quarters of the new foundations were in the West, and throughout
these regions they acted, during the centuries to come, as potent instru-
ments of Romanization. Caesar also gave citizenship liberally on an individ-
ual basis —
for example, to men who practiced medicine at Rome.

But the greatest of his achievements, though lacking in melodramatic

glamour, was probably his long and patient handling of the problem of debt.
This had been an intractable difficulty, time and time again, for more than
four centuries. But it had never been so painful and hazardous was now.
as it

Owing to the disturbances of the past fifty years, many Romans had fallen
more grievously into debt than ever, and in spite of sporadic attempts at

mitigation over the years, the harsh laws that were still in force cast many
of these debtors into total destitution. Caesar, who had been heavily in debt
himself, knew very well how things stood; he had seen how the Catilinarian
conspiracy was largely supported by desperate debtors, and then he himself
had been obliged to grapple with such problems on behalf of the provincials
when he was governor in Further Spain.
2^4 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
Yet would-be reformers in this field, as his knowledge of Roman history
could warn him, had always found themselves caught in a dilemma. Some-
thing had to be done for the victims of the system, whether their misfortunes
were their own fault or not. On the other hand, as Cicero was always saying,
anything approaching a general cancellation of debts would destroy private
property — and thereby usher in chaos.
At the beginning of the civil war the debt had entered a new and
crisis

even graver phase because of a shortage of currency. Much coin had been
hoarded against better times, and most of what remained was gone to pay
the armies. This meant that whereas men were being urgently requested by
their creditors to repay what they had borrowed —
and were eager enough
to do so, since interest rates had risen from four percent to nearly twelve
— they could not find the money and had to raise it by seUing everything
they possessed, at the wretched prices that were all they could get in the
prevailing emergency. So Caesar, in 49, started upon a long, patient series
of attempts to deal with this harrowing situation. First, the hoarding of coin
—
was forbidden a regulation, admittedly, that could scarcely be enforced,
though it did put more cash into circulation. Secondly, creditors were
compelled by a new measure to accept any land or other property offered
them in repayment of their loans and to accept it at prewar prices assessed
by special commissioners. Of course, they complained bitterly, whereas the
debtors, on the other hand, felt that Caesar could have done a great deal
more to help them. However, the fact that both sides were dissatisfied
suggests that his proposals were not unreasonable. Yet they caused severe
tension at Rome, and he himself was by now at Alexandria, unable to deal
with it. Taking advantage, therefore, of his prolonged absence, a trouble-
making praetor advocated a moratorium on all repayments of debt and
payments of interest; and then another politician, a tribune, made the classic
revolutionary proposal that all debts should be completely canceled. How-
ever the praetor came and the tribune's proposals were
to a violent end,
halted at the instance of Antony, Caesar's deputy in Italy, by police meas-
ures costing eight hundred hves.
On his return, Caesar, far from pleased, was forced to conclude that his
earlier measures, like those of so many previous reformers, had not gone
far enough to satisfy the debtors' violent grievances. He therefore decided
to cancel all interest due since the beginning of the civil war —
insofar as it
had not yet been paid, whereas the equivalents of payments that had already
been made were to be deducted from future capital repayments. These
measures, we are told, wiped out one-quarter of all debts at a single blow.
Once again, a serious loss had been inflicted on creditors. Yet they were
obliged to admit that they would never have seen the rest of the money
—
anyway and that Caesar was not the destroyer of private property his
 CAESAR / ^35

enemies had made him out to be. Indeed, it was a significant feature of the
civil war that the most able financiers, unlike senior senators, had mostly
chosen to take his side. After his new came into force, financial
regulations
confidence began to come back, and once more money was freely lent and
borrowed. In this field, Caesar had achieved more than any previous Roman
statesman; he had broken the back of the republic's most unmanageable
problem.

That was hard, laborious, unspectacular work, but Caesar also had all the
appetite of great potentates for splendid spectacles to distract the people
from their hardships. Moreover, huge portions of the wealth he ac-
cumulated in his victorious wars were spent not only on celebrating tri-
umphs but also on erecting magnificent buildings. A great new hall for
public business, the Basilica Julia, was under construction in the Roman
Forum; and close by another Forum named after Caesar himself began to
take shape. Its colonnaded precinct flanked a shrine of Venus the Mother
(Genetrix), since it was from this goddess, through the mythical Aeneas,
that the Julian family claimed to be descended.

The Forum of Julius Caesar and Temple of Venus Genetrix at Rome.

2^6/ CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
He placed a statue of Venus in the temple and beside it a gilt bronze statue
of Queen Cleopatra VII was also installed. She could see it for herself,
because in 46 she arrived in the city, with her surviving thirteen-year-old
half-brother (with whom she officially shared the throne) and her infant son
Caesarion whose paternity she ascribed, perhaps rightly, to Caesar. The
ostensible purpose of her visit was to confirm her father's treaty of alliance
and friendship with Egypt's patron Rome. And thereafter, while she stayed
on at the capital for the rest of Caesar's life, it is possible to identify certain
of his actions that show the influence of herself and her country. For one
thing, his plan to establish magnificent public libraries at Rome was based
on the world-famous library of the Ptolemies attached to the museum at
Alexandria. Secondly, his ambitious, though uncomplete, projects to dig a
canal through the Pomptine (Pontine) marshes, south of Rome, and another
through the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece, must have owed a great deal to
Egypt, which was the home of these skills. Furthermore, Caesar's revision
of the gravely dislocated Roman calendar, a reform that with minor adjust-
ments has survived until the present day, was directed by an Alexandrian
astronomer.
Besides, Cleopatra, to whose Ptolemaic mind the Roman nobleman's
ideal of free speech and action seemed absurd and undesirable, may have
helped to prompt a trend towards autocratic impatience which people were
noticing in the supreme imperator. It was true that in his administrative
activities he could not, and did not, act alone but needed the assistance of
the Senate. But it was a Senate modeled according to his own wishes and
intentions. Raising its membership from six hundred to nine hundred, he
—
enrolled the men who had helped him to gain power bankers, industrial-
ists, and army officers —
and this influx permanently transformed the Sen-
ate's character. He was also able to include in its ranks an unprecedentedly

large number of men who had held state offices. This was because he had
increased the number of state posts in order to meet the greater needs of
the expanded Roman world —
and their holders automatically became
members of the Senate. They, like the other new senators, were men who
were loyal to himself, since, although the annual elections to consulships
and other offices still continued, the successful candidates were almost
invariably the people he wanted.

The point was emphasized by the depiction of his own head on the
national currency, the first portraits of any living man or woman ever to
appear on a Roman coin. And Caesar's rising personality cult was stressed
still further by the large number of were made and
his portrait busts that
distributed around Italy and the provinces. This marked an important stage
in the development of one of Rome's outstanding art forms. It was an art
 —

CAESAR / 2^7

that had first developed among the Greeks of recent centuries who were
interested in personahty and Uterary biography. Like biographers, the
Greek sculptors had increasingly desired to stress the unique, private, pat-
tern of the personage they were depicting, and when he was a ruler, it was
their function to show him to the world as a great man but also as a
distinctive individual.
And then the Romans, in their turn, very often employing Greeks or
Orientals to do the job, but relying also on native Etruscan and other Italian
sculptural traditions,showed themselves extremely receptive to these same
aims, which coincided with their own interest in national and family history
and moral character. From the third century B.C. onwards, the sculptural
portrayals of individuals had received increasing attention in the city; and
after loo, Roman portraiture began to become a major art. Portraits also
started to appear on the national coinage of the period, which was issued
by a committee of three young mint officials of leading families elected each
year. Imitating bronze or marble busts or statues, now lost, the designers
of these coins first selected early or legendary Roman heroes for portrayal
in imaginative fashion; and then with greater boldness and a closer ap-
proach to realism, the recently dead, including Sulla. But it marked a
decisive step forward when heads of the living Caesar appeared on his coins,
in January or February 44 B.C.
—
They imitated sculptural portraits some of which still survive today. It
was Caesar himself who gave these sculptors their first really important
opportunity. His fine sensitive features brought out the best in them and —
skillful artists could even capture the piercing gaze of his dark eyes. Their

task was vitally important because his great position in the state demanded
an interpretation of his personality in all its aspects. In this way, then, was
launched the great series of portraits of the rulers of the empire, which are
among its principal artistic gifts to Europe.

The few examples of his surviving busts that can be dated to his lifetime
cunningly blend realism with grandeur — for Caesar was as grand as any
king. Yet he had no intention of reviving the ancient Roman kingship in
his own family, since it was traditionally equated with tyranny. Instead, the
constitutional status he chose for himself was the dictatorship, like Sulla
before him. From 49 onwards, Caesar was reappointed to this post a num-
ber of times, and in 46, by an innovation, for as long as ten years. But then,
in February 44 B.C., he was appointed dictator for the rest of his life
PERPETVO, was an exceedingly
as his coins unequivocally assert. This
grave step to have taken. The conversion of what had originally been
intended as an emergency, short-term oflfice into a permanent autocracy
meant that the other nobles, however many consulships and other offices
Bust of Julius Caesar.
 CAESAR / 239

they might be permitted to hold, would never again be able to get their
hands on the real controls and profits of public life.

But their resentment, evidently, did not weigh with Caesar, who was
forming plans that he considered to be of immeasurably greater significance.
Above all, he wanted to leave the intrigues of the capital and get back
among his admiring, incomparable army. He was consumed by a desire for
further military glory, and it had to come soon since he was fifty-six and
suffered from precarious health, being susceptible, apparently, to epileptic
attacks. But there was still time for him to rival Alexander the Great and —
in the same part of the world that Alexander himself had invaded, since
Crassus's defeat and death at the hands of the Parthians nine years earlier
urgently needed to be avenged. However, a considerable Roman force was
first detached to eastern Europe in order to cow the powerful kingdom of

Dacia, whose rulers had recently extended their sway from the national
homeland in Transylvania (Rumania) as far as the Black Sea. The role of
these legions was preparatory; once Caesar had suppressed the Parthians
and perhaps extended his conquests like Alexander into the remotest re-
gions of the Orient, it was believed that he intended to wheel back through
southern Russia and continental Europe, completing the annexation of
Dacia and further vast territories on the way.

But the East was Caesar's first objective, and its provinces witnessed the
marshaling of the great Roman army to await his arrival. He was to leave
the city on March 18, 44 B.C. When this became known, the news brought
the growing hostility of the nobles to a head. It was distasteful enough to
be governed by a perpetual dictator on the spot, but the prospect of govern-
ment by his aides or secretaries in his absence was nothing less than intoler-

Silver denarius of Julius Caesar

as perpetual dictator (DICT. PERPETVO), 44 B.C.
240 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
able, for it was they who were going him and enforce his orders
to represent
during his prolonged forthcoming absence abroad; and the two chief secre-
Oppius and Balbus, were not even senators.
taries,

There had been suggestions of conspiracies against his life before. But
now planning began in earnest. Its chief instigator was Cassius, a proud man
who had come over to Caesar in the civil war but did not feel he had been
sufficiently rewarded. And Cassius won over another personage who had
likewise changed sides, his less dynamic and more philosophically minded
brother-in-law Marcus Brutus, who although a special protege of Caesar
was obsessed by the glory of his own legendary forebears as liberators of
the republic. Another leading conspirator was Brutus's distant relation
Decimus Brutus Albinus, who had been one of Caesar's principal com-
manders in the Gallic war and was designated by the dictator for a consul-
ship in the future. With these and others to lead them, the various small
separate groups of malcontents coalesced into a single body of sixty deter-
mined plotters.
Caesar was perfectly well aware that many noblemen detested him. But
a mixture of fatalism and contemptuous pride caused him to ignore the
evident threat. Since he had restored the Roman world to prosperity and
peace, and since, if he ceased to be at the helm, these benefits would
disappear, he professed himself unable to believe that anyone could seri-
ously want him out of the way. Indeed, so little was he concerned with the
evident danger to his life that he even disbanded his personal bodyguard of
Spaniards and refused to agree to suggestions that he ought to reengage
them.
Then, three days before he was due to depart for the east, the Senate
gathered for a meeting in Pompey's theater; and there the conspirators
surrounded him and stabbed him to death. Not long before, all senators had

Silver denarius of Brutus issued in the east (43-42 B.C.),

commemorating Caesar's murder on the Ides of March (EID. MAR.)
by daggers and Cap of Liberty. The moneyer is L. Plaetorius Cestianus.
 CAESAR / 241

sworn an oath of allegiance to the father of their country, as Caesar had

now come to be called; they were clients bound to protect their patron, just
as a son is obliged to protect his own father. But at the moment of supreme
reckoning they rushed out of the building, and Caesar lay where he had
fallen.

For immeasurable abilities as a general and administrator, he had

all his

failed,and would probably have continued to fail, to rescue Rome from its
major dilemma. It was this: the republic, obviously, had become impotent,
and because this was so, there was no practical alternative to one-man rule.
Yet one-man rule was just what the nobles, although themselves incapable
of ruling any more, categorically refused to accept; and so they put Caesar
to death. It seemed an insoluble problem. Yet there now came another sort
of man altogether, who performed the seemingly impossible task of finding
a solution after all; he was the nineteen-year-old Octavian, grand-nephew
of Julius Caesar who had adopted him in his will as his son.
 13
Augustus

The Second Triumvirate

fter Caesar's murder, his right-hand man Antony, consul in 44
B.C., used a variety of methods, including the falsification of the
dead man's papers, to gain control of events; and he took steps
at the same time to arouse the people against the assassins, Brutus and
Cassius, who before long retreated to the east. Yet for all the growing power
and popularity of Antony, who in spite of a taste for riotous living was a
politician and general of considerable gifts, Cicero, true to his distaste for
autocrats large and small, attacked him fiercely in a series of brilliant
speeches, the Philippics. And with Cicero's encouragement the young Oc-
tavian, exploiting his testamentary adoption by his murdered great-uncle
Caesar, gradually emerged as a rival to Antony and gained the support of
the Senate.
In April 43 a senatorial coalition including Octavian defeated Antony at
Mutina (Modena) in Cisalpine Gaul and compelled him to withdraw into
the Transalpine (Narbonese) province. There, however, he was joined by a
number of commanders, including Lepidus (son of the consul of 78 B.C.),
a henchman of Caesar who had succeeded him in the chief priesthood of
the state. In November, Octavian, smarting from an unwise snub by the
Senate, became reconciled with Antony and Lepidus at a conference in
Bononia (Bologna), and the three men were granted a five-year autocratic
—
appointment with the task of reconstituting the government the Second
Triumvirate which, unlike the first, was a formal creation of the state. The
institutions of the republic, from the consulships downwards, still continued
to exist. But the power lay with the triumvirs, and this was ratified by law.
After a holocaust of their political enemies, in which three hundred
senators and two thousand knights were proscribed and hounded to death,
Antony and Octavian crossed the Adriatic and won two battles at Philippi
in Macedonia against Brutus and Cassius, both of whom committed suicide

242
 AUGUSTUS / 24S

^i
-
'/

(42 B.C.). Antony was the main victor, though Octavian's prestige was
enhanced by the recognition of Juhus Caesar as a divinity of the Roman
state, since this made his adoptive child the son of a god. Antony assumed

control of the eastern provinces and Octavian took over most of the West;
but in these regions he encountered serious opposition, first from Pompey's
second son Sextus, who was conducting piratical attacks from Sicily, and
then from a brother of Antony in Italy itself. Antony and Octavian, how-
ever,came to a fresh agreement, confirming the division of the empire
between them (40 B.C.)
But their relations with one another showed increasing signs of strain.
This was partly because off'ense and suspicion were caused in the west by
Antony's queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII. In recent years,
liaison with the
Rome had become familiar with feminine power. During the last decades
of the republic, women lived in complete freedom. They owned wealth in
244 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
their own names and looked after it themselves. And this liberty was
reflected in their socialand domestic arrangements; for instance, they now
reclined at dinner like the men. Clodius's sister Clodia had been a famous
beauty who lived hard and fast. And Roman women exerted greatly in-
creased political influence, too. After Caesar's death, Brutus's mother held
a conference to decide what her son and his friends should do, and Brutus
also received exhortations from his masterful wife. But the most strong-
willed of all was Antony's wife Fulvia, who without consulting her husband
had joined his brother in rebelling against Octavian. However, she died, and
in 40 Antony married Octavian's sister, Octavia, and in these circumstances
his simultaneous association with Cleopatra, a descendant of formidable
queens who had more ambitious ideas than any Roman matron, was unac-
ceptable not only to Octavian, whose family was insulted, but also to
conservative Roman opinion in general. Caesar's aff^air with Cleopatra had
passed muster because was he who remained in control. But people
it

suspected that the more easy-going Antony, by whom she had two boys and
—
a girl, was under her thumb and Octavian spread the word that this was
so.
In 37 a second partial reconciliation between the two men provided for
a five-year renewal of the triumvirate. But the understanding proved short-
lived, since henceforward Antony, abandoning Octavia, lived openly with
Cleopatra, who built up under his overlordship an extensive imperial system
of her own including many client states. Soon afterwards, however, the
balance of Roman power began to change in Antony's disfavor. An expedi-
tion he launched against the Parthians, in the hope of annexing Armenia,
proved unsuccessful, though he rectified the defeat later. Octavian's fleet,
on the other hand, under his former schoolmate Agrippa, who although
unpopular with the nobles was a commander of genius, totally defeated
Sextus Pompeius's fleet off" Cape Naulochus (Venetico) in Sicily (36). At this
point, too, the third triumvir Lepidus, seeking to contest Octavian's western

Silver tetradrachm of Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt, 34-33 B.C.

 AUGUSTUS / 24^

supremacy by force, failed to command the support of his own legions and
was disarmed and forced into retirement. He was allowed, however, to
retain his chief priesthood until his death in 12 B.C.
Octavian's deliberate rivalry with Antony for the eventual mastership of
the Roman world was becoming increasingly apparent, and in 33 the two
leaders exchanged propaganda attacks. As this barrage continued with
unprecedented virulence into the following year, Antony formally divorced
Octavia, whose brother thereupon retaliated by publishing what purported
to be Antony's damaging evidence, probably forged, of the
will containing

ascendancy exercised over him by the foreign queen Cleopatra. Each leader
induced the populations under his control to swear allegiance to his cause
and his person, like the oaths sworn by clients to their patrons (32). The
oath sworn by the Italians on this occasion to Octavian (coniuratio Italiae)
became a famous precedent for the emperors of the future. But it scarcely
availed to conceal grave dissatisfaction aroused by his exactions throughout
the Italian peninsula.
Having raised as much money war not
as he could, Octavian declared —
indeed against his compatriot Antony, but against Cleopatra. With her as
his companion —
and she provided a substantial proportion of his ships and
supplies —
Antony had brought up his navy and army to guard strongholds
along the coast of western Greece. But at the beginning of 31 B.C., while it

was still mid-winter, Agrippa succeeded in sailing from Italy across the
Ionian Sea and capturing decisive strongpoints along the Greek coast, and,
after Octavian had also arrived, Antony was finally cornered in the Gulf of
Ambracia (Arta). At the battle of Actium, just outside the gulf, he tried to
extricate his ships in the hope of continuing the fight elsewhere. But al-

though Cleopatra, and then Antony himself, succeeded in breaking out,

only a quarter of their fleet was able to follow them.
Both fled to Egypt. When the country fell to Octavian (30 B.C.), they
committed suicide at Alexandria. Their conqueror declared the country a
Roman possession, thus eliminating the last survivor of the three Greek
monarchies that had succeeded to the heritage of Alexander; and he made
it a unique sort of province, under his own direct control. His seizure of

Cleopatra's treasure made him wealthier than the Roman state itself. Above
all,it enabled him to pay off" his veterans, for whom in due course he
founded no fewer than seventy-five colonies, mostly in the West.
The battle of Actium had not been a very spectacular engagement in itself
had already been settled elsewhere. Nevertheless it
since the strategic issue
was hailed by subsequent writers as one of the most decisive battles ever
fought because it established Octavian's position as master of the entire
Greco-Roman world. It also meant that this empire would be dominated,
for a very long time to come, by the West, and not the East. By the "East,"
246 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Reconstruction of bridge at Augusta Praetoria (Aosta), where Augustus founded

a veteran colony to protect the passage of the Alps (3 B.C.)-

we should understand in this context not the sinister Orient which Oc-
tavian's propagandists equated with Antony's dominions, but Rome's east-
ern provinces and chent states in which the ruling classes were Greek.
Actium firmly kept this Greek half of the empire in second place. If Antony
had won, there might well have been some sort of partnership between
Romans and Greeks under his overall rule. Instead, the future political
leadership of the empire lay with Italy and Rome, as Virgil a few years later
unequivocally pronounced while paying tactful tribute at the same time to
Greek cultural supremacy. It was not until another three hundred years had
passed that the Greeks started to get some of their own back, after the
capital had been shifted to Constantinople and Greek began to replace Latin
as the official language of the Byzantine Empire.
 AUGUSTUS / 247

The Principate of Augustus

From now on, by a long and gradual series of tentative, patient measures,
Octavian established the Roman government that,
principate, a system of
while not dispensing with republican forms, ultimately depended on himself
as the first man of the state (princeps) and enabled him to maintain in all
essentials absolute control over its affairs.

He gradually reduced his sixty legions to the relatively small figure of

twenty-eight, that is to say, to about one hundred and fifty thousand men,
which was all he felt he could pay for or recruit. In 28 B.C. he and Agrippa
conducted a census of the population for enlistment and taxation purposes,
the first of three censuses held during his reign. The soldiers of Augustus's
legions in the West were mostly Italians and therefore Roman citizens, but
in the East they included many provincials, granted the franchise unoffi-
ciallyon enlistment. These legionaries were supplemented by about the
same number of auxiliaries, drawn exclusively from the provinces; and there
were already the beginnings of a policy by which they were rewarded by
Roman citizenship on their discharge. This was all part of a quietly liberal
policy of enfranchisement, sponsored by Augustus. In an empire containing
between seventy and one hundred million inhabitants, he raised the total
number of Roman citizens, men and women, from about five million to
more than six, including an increase of citizens in the provinces from about
one million to nearly two.
Remembering that Caesar had been murdered because of his recourse to
naked power, he understood that the nobles would tolerate his autocracy
only if he concealed it behind acceptable repubhcan traditions. For the first

eight years after his victory at Actium, the constitutional basis of his power
remained a continuous succession of consulships. But in the middle of this
period, in 27 B.C., he pronounced "the transfer of the state to the free

Silver coin (denarius) of Augustus (28 B.C.) commemorating

the annexation of Egypt.

'%\^
248 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Diploma of Hadrian conferring Roman citizenship on auxiliary soldier on

retirement.

disposal of the Senate and people," thereby earning the misleading, though
outwardly plausible, reputation of the restorer of the res publico, or ances-
tral system. At the same time he was granted, for ten years, an area of
government comprising not only Egypt, which was his personal domain,
but also Gaul (with the Rhine commands of Upper and Lower Germany),
Spain, and Syria, the three territories containing the greater part of the
Roman army. He ruled this huge collection of ^'imperial" provinces
through governors who were his own subordinates (legati). Pompey, like-
wise in absentia, had governed Spain in similar fashion. The principal
 AUGUSTUS / 24g

remaining provinces remained "public," administered by nominees of the

Senate (proconsuls) in the old customary fashion, though with improved
efficiency —
and honesty since governors of all types, proconsuls and legati
alike, and the procurators who governed minor provinces, were now sala-
ried officials under close supervision from Rome.*
—
Octavian, however, believed and this belief was nearly always justified
— that the supreme prestige (auctoritas) to which his public offices and
achievements, and his sonship of the god Juhus, entitled him, were sufficient
safeguards against any defiance by governors or commanders. Besides, he
was always able, directly or indirectly, to control their appointments, just
as he was able, when he considered it desirable, to bring unobtrusive influ-
ence to bear on elections to the consulships and other state posts. These
offices continued to exist in ostensibly republican fashion; and, in order to
calm the ferocious in-fightings between families, groups, and factions which
still for a time remained a feature of public life, he contrived that the

occupants of the posts should comprise an appropriate blend of nobles and

Italian "new men," including in both categories those who had supported
him in the civil war.
Such were the members of Augustus's new Senate, which he reduced in
numbers from Caesar's nine hundred to the earlier figure of six hundred.
He was elected its president and overshadowed it by his grandeur. Yet he
did not diminish the Senate's functions but actually enlarged them, so that
it possessed, for example, its own high court of justice, alongside another
new "imperial" court presided over by himself. The was
Senate's strength
no longer political but administrative; the achievement of the new order was
to take politics out of administration for the first time in Roman history.
This was only one of the many acts of transformation that Augustus per-
formed, veiling them always under the guise of traditionalism.
Four days after the new political arrangements were announced in 27
B.C., the ruler's name "Caesar" was supplemented by the novel designation
"Augustus." was a word that carried venerable religious overtones, being
It

linked with the verb "increase" (augere) which was also the root oi auc-
toritas and probably of augurium, the practice of divination, which lay deep

in Roman tradition. The adoption of this term "Augustus" to define his new
status as the leader of the nation indicated his superiority over the rest of
humankind and yet avoided dictatorial or divine appellations that would
cause conservatives offense. It is true that, like other leaders before him,
Augustus did not refuse divine status in the provinces, although, officially
at least, his worship there was conducted in conjunction with the goddess

*The governor of Judaea, however, was still called praefectus; and so was the man in charge
of the major but peculiar new province of Egypt.
250 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Statue of a Roman nobleman carrying the busts of his ancestors. Early first
century a.d. (the head, though ancient, does not belong to the statue).
 AUGUSTUS / 2^1

Silver coin of Claudius (a.d. 41-54) at Ephesus depicting the temple of Rome
(left) and Augustus (right), where they were worshipped by the provincial
Council of Asia {COMmune ASlae).

Silver coin (denarius) of Augustus as father of his country (pater patriae) and
chief priest (pontifex maximus) (left, right).

Rome. was an imperial cult that served as an instrument for encouraging

It

loyalty and was subsequently adopted by the local communities of Italy

itself. Yet at the same time, the ruler also showed his patriotic reverence

for the ancient Roman religion not only, as we have seen, by adopting a
name reminiscent of augury, but also by reviving many ancient ceremonials
and repairing numerous temples that had fallen into decay during the
prolonged civil wars. He also became chief priest, though meticulously
postponing his assumption of this office until the death of its incumbent
Lepidus (12 B.C.).

Military operations continued in numerous and the eastern frontier

areas,
was pushed a large distance forward by the annexation of a huge area of
2^2 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
central Asia Minor under the name of Galatia (25 B.C.). At the other end
of the empire, however, Mauretania (Morocco and west Algeria) reverted
from provincial status to that of a client kingdom, for such dependent
monarchies were still relied upon to play a large part in frontier defense.
Augustus himself visited Gaul and directed part of a campaign in Spain
until his health gave out. In 23 B.C., he fell ill again and was thought to be
on the point of death. Believing, amid rumors of plots, that the constitu-
tional position was still unsatisfactory, he terminated his series of consul-
ships— which were unpopular with the nobles because they took jobs away
from themselves. But he retained his own provinces. Moreover, in order
that he should not be without ultimate sanctions in the senatorial provinces
as well, he was granted a power (imperium mains) that raised him above
their proconsuls. But this somewhat novel power, separated altogether from
office and its day-to-day preoccupations, was intended for only sparing

employment, particularly in crises or on personal visits, though it could also

be tactfully exercised on other occasions as well.
Another exploitation of this fruitful idea of authority without office was
his permanent assumption of the powers of a tribune of the people {tribun-
icia potestas, 23 B.C.). Earlier he had accepted certain privileges of the

tribunes. The fuller tribunician power he now assumed gave him the right
to convene the Senate, but above all, it enveloped him in a popular aura
because of the traditional role of the tribunes as defenders of the oppressed,
and he endowed it with special significance by using it to date the years of
his principate. It was the sort of reputation that Augustus needed, because,
in spite of legal reforms improving the lot of the poorer classes, he tended
to back the established order as the keystone of his political system and
wanted to counteract the impression that this was all he cared about.
Agrippa, too, was granted superiority over the proconsuls, presumably
to make sure that these provinces would remain under safe control in case
one of the ruler's recurrent illnesses proved fatal. The next to die, however,
was not Augustus himself but his young nephew Marcellus (23 B.C.), who
had been married to his daughter Julia and seemed destined for further
special favors. After his death, Julia became the wife of Agrippa, who
continued to travel and fight as the deputy of the princeps and even shared
his tribunician power (18 B.C.). And meanwhile Augustus, too, undertook
a fresh round of extensive journeys. Important reorganizations were set
afoot wherever he went. Moreover, immense popular satisfaction was
caused in 20 B.C. by an agreement with the Parthians, who not only re-
turned the legionary standards taken from Crassus thirty-three years ear-
lier, but also recognized (though only briefly) Rome's protectorate over

Armenia.
Then, in 19 B.C. there was some adjustment of Augustus's constitutional
powers to allow him to exercise them more freely in Italy, though still in
 AUGUSTUS / 25J

not too open or direct a fashion. And the following two years witnessed
social legislation vigorously seeking toencourage morality and marriage
and bring the family as an institution under public protection. These en-
deavors were immortalized by Virgil and Horace; but they did not enjoy the
resounding success of his measures in other fields.

We think of Augustus as the inaugurator of an imperial line, the first

emperor. Yet the conglomeration of powers that added up to his position

as princeps was something that could not, constitutionally speaking, be
handed on to any other single person after his death. Nevertheless, there
was obviously speculation that this was what must eventually happen as —
there had already been— while Marcellus was still alive, Since his death,
Agrippa must have seemed, even more than before, a likely candidate for
this succession and his powers continued to be renewed together with his
master's. But the nobles would never have accepted this "new man"; and
Augustus appeared to be indicating his own, alternative views regarding
likely eventual successors when he adopted, as his own children, Gaius and

Lucius, the sons of Agrippa and Julia. Yet they were only three years and
one year old respectively, and Augustus, as time went on, hedged his bets
in two ways: first by favoring the career not of one of them but of both, and
secondly by giving important mihtary employment to his grown stepsons,
Tiberius and Nero Drusus, the sons of his wife Livia by a previous marriage
to a member of the Claudian clan. Marching across the Alps, they occupied
large parts of what are now Switzerland, Austria, and Bavaria, annexing
these territories as the provinces of Noricum and Raetia (16-15 B.C.). By
such operations and others the empire was extended northwards and east-
wards from the Alps to its historic, long-lasting frontier along the Danube.
It was probably during this period that an executive committee (con-

silium) of the Senate was established in order to help Augustus to draft

senatorial business. His vast burden of work was also gradually lightened
by the expansion of his own staff to include, at the higher level, a number
of knights. Although this personal staff was still relatively small, its develop-
ment announced the beginnings of a civil service, which had never existed
during the republic but was destined to become a vital feature of the
imperial system. Gradually, too, and by patient trial and error, Augustus
reformed the administrative structures of Rome and Italy and the entire
empire. Once again, knights played a prominent part, serving not only as
the chairmen and members of important commissions at home, but also as
his financial agents (procurators) in every province, and as governors of
small provinces and even of one extremely important and special one,
Egypt.
In 12 B.C. Agrippa died — many hostile nobles absenting themselves from
his funeral —and Augustus, while still furthering the careers of the dead
2S4 /
CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

4>

II
c
o J/5

c .2
< 'c Q
II
o
c <
*> < -J
U
o 3
o
'E
fi:
£
n
'5.

c DO
C 3 <
'5.
T3
00
<

II

.2
>
ri 3
II
3

CJD i-
LU <<2

< C?

<
II

.S2
'E
o
o.
Q.

+5 I 3
 AUGUSTUS / 2^j

man's children, compelled his widow Juha to marry Tiberius, against the
wishes of both of them. During the next three years Tiberius returned to
military life, moving northwards the limits of the province of Illyricum
(Yugoslavia) and creating a new middle Danubian province of Pannonia
(Austria and Hungary; later in the reign, the frontier was extended to the
river mouth, providing yet another province, Moesia. At the same time his
brother Nero Drusus crossed the Rhine and invaded Germany as far as the
Elbe. This was the first step towards the annexation of the country, for it
was Augustus's ambition to replace the Rhine by the Elbe as the empire's
frontier, thus creating a much shorter boundary line within which huge
numbers of the previously free, warlike Germans were to be safely included
and absorbed.
Tiberius, who replaced Nero Drusus in Germany on the latter's death (9
B.C.), was elevated three years later to a share in his stepfather's tribunician

power. But shortly afterwards, at his own wish, he threw up all his laborious
responsibilities and withdrew into retirement on the island of Rhodes. This
dramatic step was ascribed to jealousy of his stepson Gaius, who was
introduced to public life amid great publicity in the following year; and so
was his brother Lucius three years But only a very short time after-
later.

wards, by an extraordinary chance, both of these young men were dead

(a.d. 4, 2). Augustus might have preferred, as hitherto, to keep several
potential heirs simultaneously in play, but he now had to reahze that this
could no longer be done. He may have harbored certain doubts about the
personality of Tiberius. But, if so, they had to be forgotten, for now there
was no other possible successor. So Augustus adopted him as his son, with
powers that, in everything except prestige, made the two men equal.
Tiberius's next task was to fill a large gap in the middle of the proposed
new Elbe-Danube line by taking over Bohemia, at that time the nucleus of
an unprecedentedly well organized German empire. In a.d. 6, a two-
pronged Roman invasion of Bohemian territory was already under way. But
then, suddenly, news came that the recently annexed regions of Illyricum
and Pannonia had broken into desperate rebeUion, which took three years
to suppress. And the reconquest of the area had only just been completed
when disaster struck across the Rhine as well; a talented German, Ar-
minius, a chieftain of the Cherusci and a Roman citizen, led his people
against the unwary Roman commander in the area. Varus, and killed him
and destroyed his three legions in the Teutoburg Forest near Detmold. The
result was that the annexation both of west Germany and of Bohemia had
to be postponed indefinitely — —
and, as it turned out, forevermore with
incalculable results for the future of Europe, since these millions of Ger-
mans remained outside the Roman world. Whether the annexation might
have been practicable before, when Augustus had twenty-eight legions,
2^6 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
remains an open question. But with only twenty-five, it was out of the
question.
Moreover, even with twenty-eight legions, he had never attempted to
supplement the frontier army by the maintenance of a central strategic
reserve that might have made it possible to deal with this sort of emergency.
That was partly because a reserve army of such a kind, if stationed for
example in north Italy, might be turned by some ambitious general against
himself Such a contingency was never far from Augustus's mind, or from
any later emperor's mind either. He sought to provide against attacks on
his own person by creating a permanent bodyguard. Earher Roman com-
manders had maintained personal guards, and Augustus developed these
precedents by the creation of a standing Praetorian Guard of nine cohorts,
which he stationed partly in Rome and partly in other towns of Italy. He
also established a city police at Rome consisting of three cohorts (cohortes
urbanae) under a newly appointed prefect of the city. A watch or fire

brigade (vigiles) was also instituted; from a.d. 6 it consisted of seven thou-
sand freedmen.
Yet meanwhile he was still finding difficulty in recruiting sufficient men
for his legionary force, reduced in size though it was. Nor did he find it easy
to pay their salaries or, on retirement, their rewards. These consisted ini-
tially of the traditional land allotments, largely in his Roman colonies, and
later, when land began to be exhausted, they had to be paid out in money
instead. In a.d. 6, therefore, he founded a new military treasury, the
aerarium militare, which was to defray legionaries' retirement pensions
from the proceeds of indirect was only one of a number of
taxes. This
administrative innovations that the aging and tiring ruler introduced during
the last decade of his life, with the help and perhaps the guiding initiative
of Tiberius.
In A.D. 13 Augustus deposited his will at the House of the Vestals at
Rome. It included a summary of the military and financial resources of the
empire, and an ingenious political testament, the Acts (Res Gestae) of the
Divine Augustus, known also as the Monumentum Ancyranum because its
best-preserved copy is on the walls of the temple of Rome and Augustus
at Ancyra (Ankara), capital of his new province of Galatia. Then, in the
following year, he died, and Tiberius became emperor.

After many earlier successes, Augustus's policy of mihtary expansion had

ground and he himself left Tiberius the advice
to a halt in his last years,
not to continue it. By his reorganization, on the other hand, of the entire
machinery of civilian government, he had proved himself one of the most
gifted administrators the world has ever seen and the most influential single
figure in the entire history of Rome. The gigantic work of reform that he
carried out in every branch of Italian and provincial life not only trans-
 AUGUSTUS / 257

i '
\r>:^ /
^^.'.(^••yi.^.

l:E(:;XilX^A^N-l:lij/^'^^
fFERf^E*ll(:FJ^,]T'[M;AF!WrT r i'V-i

:;€EAA>^'^rRAT[K'-n-(,i

.iif.i.

Gravestone of the centurion Marcus Caelius, who fell in Arminius's ambush of

Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in a.d. 9.
238 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

THE PROVINCES AT THE DEATH OF AUGUSTUS (A.D. 14)

formed the decaying republic into a new regime with many centuries of
existence ahead of it, but also created a durable efficient Roman peace. It
was this Pax Romana or Pax Augusta that insured the survival and eventual
transmission of the classical heritage, Greek and Roman alike, and made
possible the diffusion of Christianity, of which the founder, Jesus, was born
during this reign.
—
The dilemma Caesar's career had posed its demonstration that whereas
the empire needed one-man rule, the nobles would tolerate no such thing
—had been miraculously solved by Augustus. He had two things on his
side: the Roman people's utter weariness of civil war, and his own subtle
mastery of publicity in a wide variety of forms. Although, therefore, in every
respect that mattered he was scarcely less an autocrat than Caesar had been,
he contrived to cloak his absolutism in guises that looked old-fashioned
enough humble majority of the population of the
to pass muster. True, the
empire, who were concerned only with keeping life together, had no time
to care about such clever nuances, yet even they were able to appreciate the
diminished risks of sudden death. But the people who positively approved
of his republican facade included the nobles, or at least a substantial propor-
tion of their —
number despite occasional plots, when they reflected on their
loss —
of political power and above all others he gained and retained the
 AUGUSTUS / 2^g

loyalty of the knights and the middle class, whom this new regime notably
benefited and enriched.
Many of the satisfied beneficiaries were not Roman but Italian, for
Augustus feltand encouraged a new patriotic feeling for Italy, echoed by
Virgil's insistence on the country's identity, which he helped to make as
vivid as Rome's. This ideal was very different from the Greco-Roman
concepts of Antony and Cleopatra. Augustus's narrower view was based on
his own small-town Italian origins; and these origins were partly responsible
also for his puritanical social policy and his antiquarian attachment to the
ancient religion.
He summed up whole pro-Italian, pro-Roman trend of his policy by
this
the title that he chose to have conferred upon himself in 2 B.C. It was pater
patriae, father of his country; Caesar had experimented with the designa-
tion, and Augustus adopted it as the climax of all his endeavors and the final

expression of his regime. His proclaimed fatherhood of all Romans and

Italians went back to the most ancient roots of the community, in which
the pater familias had been the revered key figure. Moreover, by equally

The beginning of the Latin text of the Res Gestae of Augustus inscribed on the
walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ancyra (Ankara) in Galatia (the
Monumentum Ancyranum).

S7BIECIT' 'E

. /^r.^.^C1^t•/*:^vU'.^

ft ^4 i.
 a

26o / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

antique custom the patrons of clients were often described as their fathers;
and in this sense Augustus, by accepting the title of father of his country,
was following up the oath that all Italians had sworn to him in 32 B.C., and
asserting that all Roman citizens, without exception, were his clients and
that he was their patron — thus extending this traditional institution, in his

own interests and person, to the whole people of Italy and to the colonies
of Roman citizens in the provinces as well. And by implication he was
extending his patronage even more widely by suggesting that the whole
still,

empire, non-Roman and Roman alike, constituted his clients, and so did the
dependent kingdoms beyond. His sympathies, that were not so is to say,
narrowly Italian that he took no thought for his other subjects and allies.
Indeed, as befitted the author of a number of literary works (now all lost),
his chauvinism was modified by a well-informed admiration of Greek cul-
ture that Virgil and the other literary personages of the time entirely shared.
The conventional view of his character, in ancient times, differentiated
between his cruelty in his youthful years and his mildness when he was
older. But there was not so much need or occasion for cruelty in his later
career as there had been earlier on; and when, even towards the end of his
days, harsh measures were needed (for example, in the suppression of
alleged conspiracies), he often remained ready enough to apply them. But
nothing short of this degree of political toughness could ever have produced
such vast results.

His domestic life, though simple and homespun, was conducted on

too,
ruthless lines. Ittrue that, although unfaithful to his wife Livia, he
is

remained devoted to her. Yet when his daughter JuHa and granddaughter
of the same name moved in immoral smart circles suspected of subversion,
he exiled them one after another, without compunction, and his third
grandson, too, suffered banishment and perhaps violent death as well. And
as for his male relatives who acted as his principal helpers, he was loyal to
them but drove them as fiercely hard as he drove himself. He needed them
because the burden was so heavy, and he especially needed the exceptional
talents of Agrippa and Tiberius in the military sphere because, unlike most
famous Romans before him, he himself was not a particularly effective
general or admiral and could even be regarded as a coward. Be that as it
may, his physical condition was subject to a large number of recurrent
weaknesses and disabilities. They were intensified by a well-developed strain
of hypochondria; but his ill health was very real as well, and when he was
young, it was only his indomitable will that enabled him to survive —
strange preliminary to such a uniquely active career, lasting until the age
of seventy-six.
Augustus was short of stature, but his fine countenance with its calm and
mild expression proved a godsend to the best sculptors of the time, Greeks
 AUGUSTUS / 261

and Hellenized easterners who devoted to his features a remarkable series

of sympathetic, moving interpretations. These portrayals, displaying a dis-
creet blend of idealism and realism, were reduplicated throughout the em-
pire in thousands of busts, statues, and portraits on coins. Less successful
perhaps, though some think otherwise, is the majestic but somewhat stiff

Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis), consecrated in and dedicated in 9 B.C. Its

13

reliefs depict scenes from the patriotic Roman mythology and a religious
procession in which the leading figures of the state take a dignified part.
Augustus was also the greatest of all adorners of Rome. Something of the
monumental, classic grandeur of his buildings can still be seen today in the
Theater of Marcellus and the remains of the massive Augustan Forum.
Flanked by huge colonnades and side apses, the new precinct culminated
in the Temple of Mars the Avenger —
the avenger of his adoptive father, the
god Caesar, who had himself started this precedent of constructing new
Forums. Outside Rome, too, there were innumerable arches, trophies, and
other memorials of the Augustan age. And from his wife Livia's mansion
on the outskirts of Rome, at Prima Porta, comes a reminder that not all the
art of the period was formal and grandiose. One of the rooms is adorned
with wall paintings that create the illusion of an enchanted garden; beyond
a trellis are orchards and flower beds in which birds and insects perch
among the fohage.

The Economic Basis

This elegance, and the whole way of living for which it stood, was the
product of a new solidity in the finances of the empire. The relationship of
the central state treasury, the public aerarium, to the treasuries of the
provinces is still imperfectly understood. Augustus, it is true, proudly re-

corded his own gifts to the state. But the state's profits from running the
rich, peaceful, senatorial provinces must somehow have been pumped in the
reverse direction, so as to pay for the imperial frontier provinces which
required heavy expenditure.
The principal direct taxes paid by the population of the empire, other
than Rome and which enjoyed exemption, were two in number, a levy
Italy
on all occupiers of land (tributum soli) from which came the far greater part
of the revenue, and a poll tax (tributum capitis) collected in Egypt, Syria,
and certain other areas. These taxes were based on the results of censuses,
which Augustus organized throughout the provinces. The statistics thus
gathered made it possible to fix the sums the state required, so that Augus-
tus, pursuing further a tendency initiated by Caesar, was able to eliminate
private tax farmers from the direct taxation system altogether. Indirect
taxes, however —the only dues to which Roman citizens were liable —were
262 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Head of Augustus from Aricia near

Rome (above left).

Head of Augustus from Pergamum

(above).

^^ Augustus (left).
 AUGUSTUS / 263

Reconstruction of Forum of Augustus and Temple of Mars Ultor (the Avenger)

at Rome. Inaugurated 2 B.C.

THE ROADS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

500 mi/es

Still, farmed out to contractors as in the past. The most

for the time being,
important of these indirect levies were customs dues. But their rates, at two
or two and one half percent, were low enough not to hamper commerce.
Its free operation was insured by a system of fleets which, for the first

time, were organized to police the Mediterranean, so that maritime inter-

264 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
changes gained in speed and security alike. The principal naval bases were
on the west and east coasts of Italy at Misenum and Ravenna. But the most
important means of communication and organization was provided by the
comprehensive network of roads extending throughout Italy and the prov-
inces. By the second century a.d. there were more than fifty
thousand miles
of
of first-class roads in the empire and over two hundred thousand miles
lesser roads; and Augustus himself had played an enormous
part in extend-

ing these ramifications. The roads were systematically and

resourcefully
and drained, with careful adaptation to
distributed, designed, constructed,
local materials and conditions. They were made to span rivers by
the

creation of soaring powerful bridges; and they penetrated mountains by

tunnels that aroused admiration for centuries.
Already in the later republic, despite all the disturbances of that period,
the great increases in individual wealth had stimulated interregional trade,
and now, in the favorable circumstances created by Augustus— it became
solidly established as a significant economic factor: the normal rate of

interest fell to four to six percent, the lowest level of ancient times— Italy
stilltook the lead in commercial activity. A fine building at Pompeii,
constructed for the guild or corporation of the fullers, shows how efficiently
the men engaged in such businesses organized themselves. New industries

for woolen goods sprang up in other Italian cities as well, while metalwork-
ing at Rome and Capua flourished, and glassblowing became a prosperous
activity in Campania and north Italy alike. For the most part, relatively
small-scale enterprises were prevalent. But the pottery of Arretium
(Arezzo) was an exception, since these products, their red glazing a trade
secret, were widely exported outside the peninsula.

Painting of light Roman warships, probably Liburnians,

from the Temple of Isis, Pompeii.
 AUGUSTUS / 265

tj»—. ^i --^,

The road between Antioch and Beroea (Aleppo).

And Italy in return bought a large range of provincial wares, including

slaves, grain, metals, marble, linen, papyrus, furs, and ivory. The provinces,
too, displayed a greatly increased commercial activity, which is illustrated,

for example, by the impressive porticoed Augustan marketplace at Lepcis

Magna in north Africa. This trade was stimulated by intensified mining
operations, increasingly under imperial control. And it was also encouraged
by an impressive reform of the currency that retained the former gold and
silver but introduced a new token coinage in two attractive metals, yellow
brass and red copper. This coinage was primarily intended, as always, for
the needs of the army and the state. But trade benefited too, and coins of
Augustus in all metals are found abundantly throughout the western prov-
inces. Many bronze coinages of individual cities were also sanctioned, for
example in Spain at the outset of the imperial epoch and for a much longer
period in the eastern provinces, where they circulated alongside the imperial
gold and silver for three hundred years.
The currency in the precious metals is also found in considerable quanti-
ties outside the empire. There was a picturesquely varied influx of goods

from beyond its borders. For example, silk came from China to be woven
and dyed in Syria and combined with a linen warp on the island of Cos; and
266/ CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
large numbers of denarii found Coimbatore in southern India had been
at

brought there to pay for pepper. But these luxury imports from abroad were
much less important than exchanges within the empire itself.
Nevertheless, neither at this nor at any later period of antiquity did
trading ever become the economic basis of the Roman world, for it could
never achieve really large dimensions as long as the manufacturers showed
so little interest in productive expansion or the technological advances
required to achieve it. Instead, they were mostly content with the simple
satisfaction of their own material needs; and the continued employment of
numerous slaves made it unnecessary to save labor. Moreover, there was
never a real mass market to provide an incentive to large-scale endeavors,
and capitalism was still embryonic, so that no clear distinction was made
between capital and labor costs.
Besides, there were severe practical problems. Fuel was scarce; and trans-
portation, while risky and erratic by sea, was extremely slow and expensive
—
on land it did not pay, for example, to cart grain for more than fifty miles.
For all these reasons the entire commerce and industry of all the empire
together probably never amounted to more than ten percent of its total
revenue. All the rest came from agriculture, principally wheat, with barley
second. Here too, however, the prohibitively heavy cost of land transport
hampered development. Methods of cultivation, too, did not advance very
much further; and there was no planned reinvestment of agricultural profits.
Once again, there was more interest in mere acquisition than in better
production. For example, long-term loans to encourage improvements in
output were nonexistent; and state intervention to help agriculture remained
limited.
Nevertheless, the need to provide such support had to figure to a certain
extent in the calculations of emperors. This was because, to prevent unrest,
they considered it one of their most essential duties (as certain late repubh-
can politicians had already felt before them) to provide the people of Rome

with sufficient grain at cheap prices. Most of this was imported, especially
from north Africa (Tunisia), which had replaced Sicily as the granary of the
capital, and an increasing amount began to come from Egypt as well.
However, the great increase in the production of cereals in those and other
countries did little to improve the depressed situation of their cultivators.
The slaves remained slaves; and the huge "free" agricultural population of
the empire likewise did not benefit markedly from the Augustan peace. The
burden of the land tax, from which the state derived most of its funds, fell
mainly upon their shoulders. And even if it might be something of a relief
that the government no longer employed intermediaries to collect it, this
tax —
was not progressive in its operation that is to say, it fell with equal
percentual weight on large and small incomes, thus hitting the poor much
 AUGUSTUS / 2(5/

more heavily than the rich. And additional unfairness was caused by the
form of taxation to take account of
failure of this different qualities of soil
and of the fluctuations in annual yields.
So the great bulk of the "free" population of the Roman world, compris-
ing the inhabitants of the villages and rural areas, remained extremely poor,
living at bare subsistence level. They were also, politically, almost nonper-
sons. The political structure of the empire was still founded on its city-
states, no longer wholly independent like those of earher Greece but still,

subject to ultimate dependence on Rome, enjoying varying degrees of local

autonomy. Each city was allowed to control rural territories of its own, not
so large as the increasingly enormous lands that belonged to the emperors,
but nevertheless very often of substantial size; and they paid for their own
amenities by exploiting such possessions. Yet the inhabitants of these rural
zones lacked the privileges enjoyed by the citizens of the towns that ruled
over them.

For those citizens, the Pax Augusta was a splendid thing. It meant the
—
triumph of the bourgeoisie the businessmen and traders and all the people
who had a share in the city-state system everywhere and participated in its
profits. This whole section of the population had, in effect, taken over the

power previously wielded by the old political upper class. And, in Italy
especially, Augustus also paid particular attention to the very large, indeed
—
numerically preponderant, class of freedmen ex-slaves and their children.
By allowing them, in many cases, to intermarry with full citizens (i8 B.C.)
and by callingupon them to provide priests for the growing local imperial
cult, he found them a place in the social and civic system. And they gained
for themselves a considerable share in the universal middle-class well-being
—with the hope of even higher things, for not long after Augustus's time
they were becoming state secretaries, and Petronius's Satyricon tells how
they could make enormous fortunes. Such tycoons, it is true, were excep-
tional; but many other freedmen, too, fared better than they had ever fared
before.
And so, not indeed from the humble farm laborers, but from a considera-
bly wider section of the population than had ever flourished in the previous
history of Rome —or for that matter of any other country either —Augustus
deserved the compliment that was paid to him in the last days of his life.

As the ship on which he was traveling sailed beside the busy Campanian
port of Puteoli, it passed a merchant vessel that had just arrived from
Alexandria. Thereupon its crew and passengers, wearing white robes and
garlands, burned incense and offered a salute to the father of their country,
crying out that it was to him that they owed their lives, freedom, and
prosperity.
268/ CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
Augustan Literature
Alongside Agrippa, the most important of Augustus's advisers, especially
in the earlier part of the reign, had been the Etruscan Maecenas (d. 8 B.C.).
Through him, the ruler win the goodwill of some of the greatest
was able to
and most influential writers the world has ever known, and this approbation
they freely expressed, even though all of them displayed a strong vein of
independence as well.
Virgil was born70 B.C. near Mantua in north Italy, of a family that
in

seems to have been partly of Etruscan origin. Later, he moved to the region
of Neapolis (Naples), where his father, expropriated by the Second Triumvi-
rate (41 B.C.), came to join him. Virgil first astonished hterary circles in
Rome by the novelty of his Eclogues (Bucolics) (45-37 BC). These ten short
poems transmuted into a melodious, evocative Latin the pastoral themes
introduced to the Greek literature of Alexandria more than two centuries
earlier. This is a timeless, unreal Greek countryside, blended with Italian

elements, and designed for sophisticated townsmen; an idyllic rusticity that

conflicts in the poet's heart with the need to come to terms with imperial
Rome. The fourth poem in the collection, written in a euphoric moment of
reconciliation between Antony and Octavian (40 B.C.), reflects the wide-
spread belief that a savior was about to appear and rescue the world from
its prolonged miseries. He remains unnamed, but elsewhere in the Eclogues

the task of salvation is attributed specifically to Octavian, the future Augus-

tus.

The four longer Geor^/c5 that followed (36-29 B.C.), dedicated to Mae-
cenas, celebrated in verse of a new flexible subtlety the beauties and labors
and rewards of the and the glorious antiquarian, legendary past
rustic life,

of the rich Italian countryside. The Georgics are the supreme literary ex-
pression of that emotional love for Roman Italy which was a feature of the
times, and became the center point of Augustus's policy and peace: the
peace for which he is praised from the heart in these profoundly evocative
poems.
Next Virgil turned to heroic epic, in the tradition that went back to
Homer. But the sensitive subtleties of his Aeneid are very far removed from
Homer's balladlike extroversion. And so is the hitherto unimaginable
rhythmical elaboration and sonorous majesty of this poetry, extracting from
the Latin language its ultimate, complex potentialities of emotion and sound
and artifice. The Trojan Aeneas, escaping from the Greek sack of Troy, is
destined for many wanderings and adventures. In north Africa, he encoun-
ters the mythical Queen Dido of Carthage, and the sadness of their doomed
romance owes less to the Homeric epic than to the much more recent Greek
poetry of Alexandria, magically transformed. Finally Aeneas reaches Italy.
 AUGUSTUS / 26()

As he lands on its shores, he is taken down by the Sibyl into the underworld,
a scene in which the poet discloses his deepest reflectionsupon the nature
of the universe. Then, after a visit to the place that was later to become
Rome, Aeneas is compelled to join battle with the peoples of Italy. The wars
end in peace, he marries a Latin bride, and Rome's foundation will follow
— for this is what the poem is really about.
Its theme is largely war —
the Aeneid is an Odyssey followed by an Iliad,
this warlike section being indebted to the national, epic tradition of Naevius
and Ennius, who had first adapted the Homeric genre to Latin poetry. War
leads to peace, and it is the Augustan peace of which Virgil is thinking. His
age, following upon the prolonged nightmare epoch of civil strife, was one
of those times in the history of the world when order looked even more
important than liberty, and Augustus's feat in bringing peace seemed to
Virgil the greatest of all possible national gifts —
and most of his contempo-
raries agreed with him. Yet Aeneas in the poem wins his war, and becomes
a true exemplar of the virtues, only after he has suffered bitterly: and among
his most poignant ordeals is his parting from Dido, enforced by Jupiter and
destiny.
Dido is, in one sense, a symbol of Rome's most perilous enemy of the past,
her kingdom of Carthage; and those who listened to the poet reciting the
Aeneid must have thought of that other hostile queen of living memory,
Cleopatra. And yet, although Dido's efforts to detain Aeneas are against the
divine will, she is portrayed with heart-wringing sympathy —
it is almost as

if Virgil's sorrow at her tragedy has for the moment got the better of his
knowledge that Aeneas acts rightly, indeed inevitably, in leaving her. And
the same thing appears to happen again when the poet begins to describe
Turnus, the tough leader of Aeneas's Italian foes. For Turnus, too, is plainly
fighting against what is fated to happen, and yet he, too, is allotted almost
more than his share of nobihty.
Despite, therefore, the radiant future that will lie ahead for Rome after
Aeneas has prevailed, Virgil was telling us that wars turn to dust and ashes
and weariness. In the end, he reckoned military conquest lower than the
conquest by human beings of their own souls and hearts. He was a man
deeply divided within himself. The benefits Augustus had brought to a
war-torn world inspired him with deep gratitude. Yet he also knew better
than anyone else that such triumphs, like all the Roman triumphs that had
ever been, are built on pain.
In 19 B.C. he was in Greece, where Augustus, who happened also to be
there, persuaded him to sail back home in his company. But Virgil fell ill,
and after returning across the Adriatic to Brundisium he died. The Aeneid
was not quite completed, and before leaving Italy, he had made his literary
executor promise to bum it in the event of his death. Perhaps he felt that

4'
Manuscript of Virgil's Aeneid (fourth century a.d.),
showing Aeneas received by King Latinus.

poem apart were too much for its

the two conflicting ideals that tear the
unity. But when he was dead, Augustus gave orders that his wish should
be disregarded, and he had the Aeneid published just as it was.

The second of the outstanding Augustan poets, Horace, was bom in 65

B.C. at Venusia in Apulia, in southeast Italy. His father, who probably came
of the hillman stock of Italy's central highlands, had been a slave and
subsequently an auctioneer's assistant; he could afford to send his son to a
famous school at Rome, from which he moved on to the empire's most
favored center of higher education, the Academy of Athens. At the battle
of Philippi (42 B.C.) Horace served as an officer on the side of Brutus and
Cassius, but after their defeat he returned to Italy. There his family farm,
had been confiscated by the victorious triumvirs; but he ob-
like Virgil's,

tained a job at Rome and got to know Maecenas.

 AUGUSTUS / 2JI

His Satires (35 and 30 B.C.) reject careerism and advocate wisdom at-
tained through serenity, in the manner of a Greek philosopher. But they
vary in theme, and so does another of his poetic collections of this time, the
Epodes (ca. 30 B.C.), which sometimes assails social abuses with a bitterness
that is more than just Maecenas had given
a literary convention. Then, after
him a farm in the Sabine hills, Horace published
famous Odes (23 and
his

13 B.C.), treating of love, wine, nature, friends, moderation, and state affairs.
While representing himself, in these short poems, as the heir to the Greek
lyricists, he displayed a sensitive, economical mastery of words that is

wholly Latin and his own. And meanwhile he was also composing his
Epistles (ca. 20-15 B.C.), which were more profound and mature versions
of the Satires and incorporated some of the most influential literary criti-
cism the classical world ever produced. The man who emerged from these
later works is kindly, tolerant, humane, and mild, but by no means lacking
in strength, which reveals itself in a spirit of astringent, detached realism;
and Horace is a gentle but persistent mocker not only of others, but also
of himself.
Augustus, against whom he had formerly fought at PhiUppi, became his
friend, through Maecenas. Indeed, later he became virtually the court poet,
for in 17 B.C., two years after Virgil's death, he was asked to compose the
Carmen Saeculare, a hymn designed for the antique Secular Games, which
Augustus had revived to purge the state of the evils and crimes of the past
and provide a solemn, religious sanction for his regime and its moral re-
forms.
Nevertheless, when the ruler offered him the post of his private secretary,
he declined; and the praises of the new order throughout his poems are
interwoven with tactful but firm assertions of his own personal indepen-
dence. Horace was as ambivalent, in his own way, as Virgil. Like him, he
welcomed Augustus's attempts to revive the old Roman virtues and tradi-
and above all, he felt immense gratitude for his termination of the civil
tions;
wars. Indeed, after the prolonged convulsions of the recent past, this
achievement seemed so great to Horace that he had no eye for whatever
hardness the new regime might possess. All the same, he always remained
his own master and kept the core of his quiet but distinct personality intact.

Another member of Maecenas's circle was Propertius of Asisium (Assisi)

in Umbria, who was junior to Virgil and Horace by about fifteen and ten
years respectively. Like them, he had been impoverished by the civil wars
and had Augustus to thank for the revival of his fortunes. Unlike them,
however, he devoted his poetical genius and mythological learning, during
the greater part of his career, to a theme that had nothing to do with the
new regime —the passion of love. On thj^ subject, despite the usual claims
2J2 / CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS
to be Romanizing the Greeks, he wrote elegies of a new, obsessive subjectiv-
ity, spanning the shifting and obscure border of what is classic and what

is romantic. Only in his last writings did he turn to poems of public signifi-

cance, giving expression to the blend of myth and patriotic antiquarianism

that had so profoundly inspired Virgil.
This, again, was the inspiration of Livy of Patavium (b. ca. 59 B.c.-d. a.d,
17) throughout his entire life. His History of Rome from the earhest times
is an unparalleled achievement that took forty years to complete. It con-
sisted ofone hundred and forty-two "Books" (nearly one hundred and
seven of them are lost), which would have filled some twenty or thirty
modem volumes. Writing in fluent, lush prose and making loftily imagina-
tive, uncritical use of a wide variety of sources, he off'ers highly colored
evocations of the foundation and early epic age of Rome and provides many
rousing narratives, including a superb account of Hannibal's invasion.
Rome, as the chosen object and instrument of providential destiny, receives
its supreme from Livy; and so does the Roman character, for
glorification
it is to Livy more than any other writer that we owe our idea of what this

was, or rather of what he and his compatriots wanted and beheved it to have
been in the past. Rome's traditional heroes and their actions, as he so vividly
depicted them, were handed down to later Europe as revelations of what
the human spirit can achieve. And the most favored of these heroes was
Augustus, restorer of peace and of the republican moral standards still
greatly respected in the cities of Livy's own Italian northland. It was in this
traditional spirit that the ruler himself placed statues of all the victorious
Roman generals of ancient times in his resplendent new Forum; and to the
historian, whom he thus translated into sculpture, he was a friend.
Yet same time Livy, like Virgil and Horace, still retains a consider-
at the

able degree of detachment from the Augustan order. He always felt deep
sympathy with humble individuals caught up in the great warlike crises.
And when he dealt with the later years of the republic, we learn from
surviving abridgments that he expressed doubts whether Caesar's career
had been beneficial, and favored Caesar's enemy Pompey by glossing over
his youthful brutalities, so that Augustus, the adoptive son of the deified
dictator, half jokingly called him a "Pompeian." Besides, there are other
strange omissions from these summaries as well. For example, despite his
general approval of Augustus's endeavors to revive the old morality, we find
no appreciation of the specific reforms that the ruler had already begun to
set in motion very shortly after Actium.
On the contrary, Livy, in the introduction to his whole work, shows
notable caution about the feasibility of any real return to the glorious past.
"Our defects are unendurable to us," he declares, "and so are their cures."
At first sight this looks surprisingly unfriendly towards Augustus's aspira-
 AUGUSTUS / 27J

tions. However, such lack of interest in current changes combined with

nostalgia for the good old times was not as anti-Augustan as might be
thought, since it harmonized with Augustus's own claim that he was not,
formally speaking, an innovating autocrat at all, but the restorer of ancient
republican ways and customs. Livy was therefore free to pursue his roman-
tic idealization of the Rome that had vanished forever.

The poet Ovid of Sulmo (Sulmona in the Abruzzi) (b. 43 B.c.-d. a.d. 17)
was the only one of these writers whose aloofness veered over into catastro-
phe. Although only some twenty years younger than Livy, he belonged to
a very different generation, no longer brought up amid civil war and,
although able enough to turn out a patriotic poem, no longer much con-
cerned with Augustan nationalism or morality. Ovid's elegiac couplets look
at men and especially women with a not unfriendly or an altogether un-
tender gaze, although the humor to which his observations move him
sometimes seems cold-blooded or even clinical. Yet this astringency does
not strike a chill because of his incomparable genius for vivid description
and narrative, which has been one of the greatest influences Rome has
exerted upon the culture of the Western world. This gift as teller of stories
finds its fullest expression in the Metamorphoses, a vast Arabian Nights of
every sort of myth, folk tale, anecdote, written in a lighter version of Virgil's
epic meter.
In spite of occasional references to Augustus's glories in these poems, the
sort of poetry Ovid was writing did not much appeal to the princeps; and
so in A.D. 8 the blow fell, and the poet was exiled to far-distant Tomi
(Constanta in Rumania). He himself describes the charges that had led to
this disastrous result as "a poem and a mistake." The poem to which he

refers was perhaps The Art of Love, far too immoral for the tastes of
Augustus, who disapproved of the smart metropolitan society in which such
things were cynically talked and laughed about; Ovid's self-indulgent in-
dividualism, clashed sharply with Augustus's conception of his age. The
"mistake" may have had something to do with the banishment for adultery
of Augustus's granddaughter Julia, her lover being executed at the same
time for alleged plotting. Perhaps Ovid, the emperor suspected, had known
—
more than he should and ought not to have remained silent about it.
He was never recalled from Tomi; and nine years later he died, having
occupied his time in writing further, much sadder elegies in which he
obliquely contrasts the spiritual authority of poetry with the supreme tem-
poral power that had punished him. He is part of the reverse side of the
Augustan society: the member of the ruling class who rejected the values
the ruler decreed, the poet who was not serious or public-spirited enough
to live in this bracing climate of the new Rome, and survive.
 •%;

s!*!!'

, ^'-W^

.C
^^
Preceding page:
Goddess Cybele on processional carriage drawn by two lions.
 14
The Inheritors of Empire

The Successors of Augustus

^ iberius (a.d. 14-37),* whose unfair depiction is the most brilhant
achievement of the historian Tacitus, was a proud member of the
ancient Claudian clan who had a splendid record of military and
administrative achievement. But he was also grim, caustic, and suspicious
and lacked Augustus's talent for public relations. In particular, despite his
strongly emphasized desire that the Senate should play its part in imperial
decision making, he found it difficult to get on with senators, both individu-
ally and en masse.

During the first years of his reign, he employed as his principal generals
his nephew Germanicus —
whom Augustus had required him to adopt as his
—
son and his own son Drusus the Younger. Both were immediately en-
gaged in the suppression of legionary mutinies that had broken out after his
succession in Germany and Pannonia (northern Yugoslavia) respectively.
'Subsequently, Germanicus fought three massive but unproductive cam-
paigns against the Germans beyond the Rhine frontier, momentarily repeat-
ing the earlier Roman advance as far as the Elbe (a.d. 14-16). Then he was
transferred to a major appointment in the East. This terminated in his death
(19), which caused widespread sorrow. Four years later Drusus the Younger

also died, so that Tiberius had already lost his two principal heirs; there
were suspicions that both of them had been murdered, but probably they
died natural deaths.
Meanwhile a strong personal position was built up by Sejanus, prefect of
the praetorian guard. In 23, this astute Etruscan concentrated the guards-
men, previously dispersed around a number of Italian towns, within a single
new barracks at Rome itself The government displayed continual fear of
real or imagined conspiracies, which existing treason laws were employed

* Dates indicated for emperors and popes are those of their reigns.

277
278 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE
to suppress, amid complaints about the vagueness of the laws and their
perilous potentialities as weapons of tyranny. Sejanus took the lead in
initiating such accusations and became more powerful still after Tiberius,
in 26, retired from Rome to the Campanian island of Capreae (Capri), never
life. Sejanus also encouraged the
to set foot in the city for the rest of his
emperor Germanicus's evidently indiscreet
to detect seditious intentions in
widow Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippa. She and her two elder sons (the
heirs apparent) were arrested 29-30 and put to death or forced to
in a.d.
commit suicide during the following years, leaving a young third son Gaius
Caesar as the probable successor to the throne. He was known as Caligula
— "Little Boots" —because of the miniature military uniform he had worn
as a child.
Meanwhile Sejanus, with some difficulty, induced the emperor to promise
him a marriage connection; and although as praetorian prefect he had
previously been a knight and not a senator, he gained the consulship in 31
as the colleague of Tiberius himself. But his downfall promptly followed.
It appears probable that he was plotting against Caligula, whose succession

would mean an end of his ascendancy. At any rate that was the information
that came to Tiberius's ears; and so he secretly transferred the praetorian
command to his own confidant Macro, who arranged for Sejanus to be

ff.
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / ijg

* ,.- -^

The north wall of the Praetorian Camp, constructed by Sejanus in a.d. 23. The
upper part belongs to the city wall of Aurelian.

arrested in Rome during a meeting of the Senate. This was done, and its

members immediately ordered his execution, which was carried out and
followed by many other deaths among his political friends.
The empire as awhole was still governed well, though on the somewhat
stafic lines imposed by the conscious employment of Augustus as a model;

and the provinces scarcely felt these metropolitan tremors. Yet the career
of Sejanus had been instructive. It had displayed the need all emperors were
bound to feel for a helper they could trust; and it had underlined the
extreme peril they ran in trusting such a deputy too much and delegating
too much power to him. The crisis had also underlined the equivocal
position of the army and particularly of the praetorian guard, which was
intended to protect the ruler but might instead be employed by its prefect
to offer a lethal threat to himself or his relations. As it happened, however,
 —

28o / THEIMPERIALPEACE
the guard did nothing to help or avenge Sejanus, and under Macro's direc-
tion it remained loyal to the emperor.
Among was Caligula; and when in a.d.
Tiberius's entourage at Capreae

37, at the age of seventy-nine, the emperor died, it was he who became the
next emperor. The transition was arranged by the officers of the praetorian
guard, who thus launched their career as emperor makers. Their comman"^
der, Macro, however, did not long survive, nor did the late ruler's grandson,
who had been left a share of his personal estate, thus incurring Caligula's
animosity.
Caligula was the first emperor to show aversion to the long hours of
laborious duty needed to keep matters under control, preferring instead to
delegate work Greek or Hellenized ex-slaves who were his secretaries,
to the
so that he himself could concentrate on a round of amusements instead. The
turning point of his reign came in a.d. 39 when he formed a powerful dislike^
for the Senate, an attitude that became strongly accentuated when one of
their number, the commander in Upper Germany on the Rhine, was de-
tected in a plot. Caligula himself marched north to organize its suppression,
which was accompanied by executions and banishments in high places.
Irremediably frightened by this narrow escape, Caligula abandoned pro-
posed expeditions against the still unconquered "free" Germans across the
Rhine, and against the British, and returned to Rome (a.d. 40). There he
gave expression to far-reaching ideas for the conversion of the tactful
Augustan principate into a thorough-going autocratic system on the lines
of the absolute monarchies of Greece. Although honors were showered on
him with extravagant lack of restraint, conspiracies and rumors of conspira-
cies continued to abound, and security precautions around his person were
sharply intensified. Before long, however, the praetorian high command
decided that he was a bad risk, and early in the following year a group of
its officers murdered him, together with his wife and infant daughter.

After his death, his fifty-one-year-old uncle Claudius was hailed emperor
—
by the guardsmen. Handicapped by infirmity he was probably spastic
he had devoted his time to scholarly pursuits, obtaining no preferment until
belated consulship four years previously. But now, because he was the
brother of the much-loved Germanicus and the only surviving adult male
of the Julian and Claudian clans, the senior praetorian officers who killed
Caligula had insured that he should ascend to the throne in the dead man's
place. The Senate, however, which had discussed a possible restoration of
the republic after Caligula's murder, included many members unwilling to
accept Claudius, and in the year following his accession, they supported a
rebellion planned by the governor of Upper Illyricum (Dalmatia). This
terrified Claudius just as a similar seditious move had upset Caligula, and
 —

THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 281

the suppression of the plot was followed by another fierce tightening of

precautions and by further measures against senators of dubious loyalty
measures that in turn led to a fresh crop of real or suspected conspiracies,
followed by a renewed wave of treason trials.

At the same time, however, the government of Claudius was impressively

active in provincial and foreign affairs. Just a century after the reconnais-
sances of Julius Caesar on the island of Britain, the southern and central
regions of England were now occupied, in what was perhaps the best

The Fosse Way, frontier of Claudius's British province, at its intersection with
Watling Street at Venonae (High Cross).
282 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE
planned of all Roman
conquests, and their annexation as the province of
Britannia immediately followed. Claudius himself came to the country in
A.D. 43 for the decisive capture of Camulodunum which be-
(Colchester),
came new province. Mauretania and Thrace were also
the capital of the
taken away from client rule and added to the empire; and colonies were
established in the frontier zones and elsewhere. Moreover, there was a
conscious and perceptible liberalization of policies concerning enfranchise-
ments, admissions to the Senate, and appointments to offices of state, for
which Gauls, in particular,were now encouraged to apply. The emperor
also displayed considerable ability for long-term projects. For example, the
grain supply of the city was organized on a permanent basis, and the port
of Ostia underwent reconstruction to facilitate this traffic.
Claudius himself devoted unremitting absorption to the judicial duties
which were one of the most important functions of an emperor. His prede-
cessor's employment of Greek freedmen as advisers and imperial secretaries-
was continued and extended, and this was a period when certain of these
men, especially Narcissus and Pallas, rose to great power. However,
Claudius still kept such officials, for the time being, under his firm personal
control and employed a senator, Lucius Vitellius, as his principal counsel-^
lor. For a number of years, too, his young wife, Messalina, who had borne

him a daughter Octavia and a son Britannicus, remained more interested

in indulging herself than in exerting power. In 48, however, she was
charged, perhaps rightly, with conniving in an attempt by one of her lovers
to seize the throne or supplant Claudius by Britannicus; a nd both sh e and
,^^-' •^" -
her lover were put to death.

fin

Bronze coin of Cunobelinus (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)

at his capital Camulodunum (Colchester). After his death, Claudius
invaded England (a.d. 43).
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 283

The suppressing out this conspiracy had been taken by Nar-

initiative in
cissus. But his moment of power ended abruptly in the next year when
Claudius married again, selecting his niece Agrippina the Younger, who
had not been Narcissus's preferred candidate. For the rest of his reign the
aging emperor, overworked, worried about plots, and weakened by infirm-
ity and drink, increasingly lost his command of what was going on. The

—
government was in the hands of Agrippina and of Pallas who had sup-
—
ported her marriage to Claudius and of another of her proteges, the new
praetorian prefect Burrus, who came from southern Gaul. Stamping out her
opponents, Agrippina arranged in a.d. 50 that her own thirteen-year-old
boy, by a former marriage to a nobleman, should be adopted by Claudius
as his son, taking the name of Nero: so that it was evident that he, rather
than Britannicus who was four years younger, would eventually succeed to
^'am
the throne.

And then Claudius suddenly died (54). It is believed, probably with good
reason, that Agrippina had fed him poisoned mushrooms. With the help of
the praetorian commander and of his tutor, the leading writer Seneca, Nero
succeeded peacefully to the imperial throne. In view of his youth, it was
Agrippina herself who became the effective ruler of the empire. Her preemi-
284 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
nence, however, was brief, since already in the following year was rapidly it

becoming eroded, and Nero had started to assume his imperial duties. Yet
when certain liberal ideas he initially proposed, relating to tax reforms and
the prohibition of gladiatorial combats, proved impracticable, he lost inter-
est in public affairs, and felt that chariot racing, music, drama, and sex were
more rewarding activities. In consequence, the empire was largely governed
by the harmonious, efficient partnership of Seneca and Burrus, backed by
their senatorial supporters. At the same time, important military operations
against the Parthians took place under the empire's leading general, Cor-
bulo (58-60), and then in Britain the ferocious revolt of Queen Boudicca
(Boadicea) of the Iceni (East Anglia) in 60 was put down.
Meanwhile Nero, fearing that his mother, discontented with her retire-
ment, might encourage a conspiracy, had enticed her to the Campanian
coast, where he caused her to be assassinated (59). Seneca and Burrus may
or may not have been involved in her death, but from now on they found
it increasingly difficult to keep the emperor in order. In 62 Burrus died, and
Seneca, believing it impossible to carry on without his help, went into
voluntary retirement.
The emperor's chief counsellor was now Tigellinus, a seedy figure whom
he had made joint prefect of the praetorian guard; in this capacity he
presided over a revival of the treason law, under which a number of promi-
nent nobles, as in earlier reigns, were executed on suspicions of conspiracy.
Nero, long since estranged from his young wife Octavia, divorced her and
put her to death, marrying a famous beauty Poppaea —formerly his friend
Otho's wife —who before long bore him a short-lived daughter (63). In the
next year Rome was ravaged by a savagely destructive fire for which the
government penalized the small Christian movement as scapegoats. Suspi-
cions that Nero himself had been responsible for the fire were probably
unwarranted. But they gained strength when work was at once started on
his new palace, the Golden House, designed to extend with its parklands
over a wide area of the city and situated partly on the sites of houses that
had been gutted by the fire.
Furthermore, in 65 the emperor's reputation deteriorated further when
he carried out a long-cherished ambition by appearing in his first public
performance on the stage. Senators were profoundly shocked, and soon
afterwards the first was
of a series of plots, or alleged plots, against his life

detected and betrayed. One of its casualties was Seneca; and another was
Tigellinus's colleague as praetorian prefect, in whose place was appointed
a personage as sinister as Tigellinus himself, a certain Nymphidius Sabinus,
who claimed to be Caligula's illegitimate son. In the following year a new
security drive wiped out a group of senators of philosophical republican
inclinations, and leading military commanders, too, were compelled to kill
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 28^

themselves. They included Corbulo, who had become a national hero after
victories and negotiations that brought peace to the Armenian frontier for
half a century to come. But Nero was afraid of such outstanding command-
ers, and when a major revolt broke out in the turbulent minor province of

Judaea, he deliberately assigned its suppression to a man credited with only

moderate talents and ambitions, Vespasian.
Meanwhile, the emperor himself was conducting an extended artistic and
dramatic tour of Greece. It culminated in his ostensible liberation of the
country. This phil-Hellene gesture, echoing an earlier liberation more than
two and a half centuries earlier, did not, of course, restore political liberty
to the Greeks, but it brought them a welcome exemption from Roman taxes.
However, during Nero's prolonged absence from the capital, his position
became seriously undermined since provincial governors and army com-
manders, feeling that their lives were in danger, felt tempted to rebel. Soon
after he had finally returned to Rome, Vindex, the governor of Gallia
Lugdunensis (central Gaul), broke into open revolt (68). His insurrection,
however, was defeated by his colleague from Upper Germany in a battle at
Vesontio (Besangon), and he did not survive. But then Galba, governor of
Nearer Spain, whose bad relations with Nero's local agents had prompted
him to make secret contacts with Vindex, was hailed emperor by the sol-
diers of the single legion he commanded, and this was confirmed by the
Senate at Rome. Nero found himself abandoned even by the praetorian
guard, and in June he committed suicide.

The Year of the Four Emperors

Galba, who was about seventy-one years of age, came of a family of
resplendent nobility and wealth. Although he now assumed the titles "Cae-
sar" and "Augustus" which had been borne by emperors of the Julian and
the Claudian clans, he was not in any way and the fact that
related to them;
he was the first ruler to come from outside that imperial house is his
principal significance.
When he learned that Nero was dead, he marched slowly on Rome,
where in his absence an incipient coup by the praetorian prefect, Nym-
phidius Sabinus, was easily stamped out. But when the new emperor arrived
outside the city in October, he caused a bad impression by killing a number
of marines who had come to meanness over money,
meet him, and his
combined with an unwelcome choice of advisers, rapidly undermined his
security. The bad news traveled, and on New Year's Day, a.d. 69, the army
in Upper Germany overthrew his statues and called on the Senate and
Roman people to choose a successor. But on the following day, the Lower
German forces saluted an emperor on their own account, their governor
286 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
Vitellius, son of Claudius's chief adviser and the grandson of a knight in the
service of Augustus; and the garrison in Upper Germany then accepted
their choice.
On hearing what had happened on New Year's Day, Galba decided that,
lacking a son of his own, he must adopt an heir from outside his family to
offer hope of continuity. This was an important precedent for future emper-
ors, but of no avail to himself because the selection he made, a young man
of the same highly aristocratic background as himself, proved immediately
disastrous, for it earned the fatal displeasure of Otho. Aged thirty-seven at
this time, he had been a close friend of Nero until Nero had annexed his
wife Poppaea and sent him out to be governor of Lusitania (Portugal); and
in that capacity,Otho had been the principal supporter of Galba's revolt,
so that, although himself an Etruscan whose Roman nobility was of com-
paratively recent origin, he now expected the succession to the imperial
throne for himself and felt deeply disappointed that another man had been
preferred to him. On January 15, therefore, in singularly brutal circum-
stances, he had Galba put to death, thus earning notoriety as the first
emperor to arrange his predecessor's murder. And Galba's heir and advisers
were slaughtered on the same day.
Once these horrors were over, however, Otho's government displayed
signs of moderation. Egypt, north Africa, and the legions of the Danube and
Euphrates declared in his favor. Nevertheless, he must already have known,
when he seized power, that Vitellius had likewise been hailed as emperor
in Germany. And now Vitellius's legionaries, under his generals Valens and
Caecina, moved rapidly southwards in the direction of Rome. In early
March, they were already across the Alps; and they had reached the banks
of the Po before Otho's advance guard was ready to hold them up. Otho
himself left Rome later in the same month, and although reinforcements
from the Danubian legions were expected to join him at any moment, he
decided that the enemy must be engaged before they arrived. He himself
would remain back in reserve, while the action was fought by his generals.
However, in the ensuing engagement near Cremona, known as the First
Battle of Bedriacum, his commanders were resoundingly defeated. The
praetorian guard wanted to fight on in his cause; but he refused to permit
them to do so. and committed suicide. It was April 16, and he had reigned
for three months.
The Senate immediately recognized Vitellius as emperor, and he followed
his generals down towards Rome. Though a man of only average ability,
he was more than just the preposterous glutton of tradition since he had
certain ideas of his own. For example,
was only with reluctance that he
it

adopted the traditional titles "Caesar" and "Augustus," which had been
used by Galba and Otho but seemed to him too reminiscent of the defunct
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 2H7

Roman soldier on the base of the Column of Nero at Moguntiacum

Relief of
(Mainz) in upper Germany, a.d. 66.
288 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
Julio-Claudians. Instead, he preferred to emphasize the consulship, to be
held permanently, as the basis of his position; and he relied on being able
to found a dynasty since unlike so many of his predecessors he had a young
son of his own. He also endeavored to strengthen his position by disbanding
Otho's praetorian guard in favor of a larger body composed of his own
legionaries. However, on arrival in the capital, he learned that the eastern
legions had transferred their allegiance to Vespasian, the governor of rebel-
lious Judaea; and the Danube armies did the same, thus for the first time
assuming their historic emperor-making role of the future. So another phase
^
of this prolonged and complex civil war inevitably lay ahead.
The plan Vespasian adopted was that he himself should remain in Mpx-
andria, where he could cut off the supply of grain to Rome, while hi§„,
principal supporter Mucianus, governor of Syria, was to set out on ih^^
long march to the west. But meanwhile a Danubian legionary commander
named Primus, who had joined Vespasian's cause, made a sudden dash
for Italy, apparently without awaiting orders from his new chief. Vitellius
planned to hold the line of the River Po against him, but his former
generals, Valens and Caecina, were both unavailable to command his
troops since Valens was ill and Caecina had deserted. In late October,
therefore, the almost leaderless ViteUian army, superior in numbers but
tired after a forced march of thirty miles, was overwhelmed by Primus in
the Second Battle of Bedriacum; and as the victors advanced on the capi-
tal, ViteUius's remaining forces melted away. Yet he still had active sup-

porters inside Rome itself, and Vespasian's brother Sabinus, who hap-
pened to be prefect of the city, had to barricade himself against them on
the Capitoline Hill. But this proved of no avail, since as Primus's troops
forced their way within the walls, the position of Sabinus was stormed by
the Vitellians, and he was captured, killed, and thrown into the Tiber.
And Vitellius himself, who had gone into hiding, was discovered by the
invading army and lynched.

Vespasian and His Sons

The Senate promptly declared Vespasian and a week or two
his successor,
afterwards his main force arrived in the city under the command of Mucia-
nus, who put an end to the ambitions of Primus by superseding him.
Reducing the praetorian guard to its earlier and smaller dimensions, Mucia-
nus directed the government in the name of Vespasian until the new em-
peror himself reached the city some ten months later.

Soon afterwards, his relative Cerialis put down Gallo-German

a serious
nationalist revolt against Roman rule that had broken out on either side of
the Rhine, under Civilis, a Batavian, and Classicus of the tribe of the
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / iSg

Treviri. Further to the south, Vespasian annexed the Upper Rhine-Upper

Danube reentrant, in order to make the empire's defense hne better and
shorter. And meanwhile, the new emperor's elder son Titus had almost
completed the suppression of the First Jewish Revolt by capturing the
rebels' capital, Jerusalem (70). In the following year Vespasian and Titus
celebrated a magnificent joint triumph.
With the help of MuciagLUS-.Cuntil his death some five years later), Vespa-
sian now addresse'H' nimself to the reconstruction of the empire and its

defenses, gravely damaged by the civil wars. He was a man of less distin-
guished origins than his predecessors, being the son of a Sabine tax collector
of knightly rank. Moreover, he himself had correspondingly plain tastes and
was proud of them. He was a man who, although in basic matters autocratic
enough, was easy to get on with and accessible. Yet he worked without
stopping; and he decided things by prosaic common-sense methods that
made him one of the most effective of all the emperors. It was no mere
coincidence that his three immediate forerunners had survived for only a
few months each, after which they all perished violently, whereas his own
reign lasted for ten years, at the end of which he died a natural death.
Although none of the three others had been lacking in ability, he was a far
better ruler than any of them.
Of necessity, his financial poHcy, after the vast expenditures of the civil
wars, had to be stringent: tax rates were drastically increased and new
sources of revenue invented. Yet Vespasian succeeded in raising funds to
strengthen the eastern frontier which was now, after the wars of the previ-
ous decade, more heavily garrisoned than before —and he also showed
himself a pioneer in the educational field by endowing new professorships.
His provincial policy, too, was liberal since he furthered the Romanization
of Spain as Claudius had Romanized Gaul; Vespasian wanted to avail
himself of administrative capacity wherever it could be found. And, with
this once more in mind, once again following in the footsteps of Claudius,
he revived the ancient censorship (73-74), utilizing the office not only to
purge the Senate of men who had sided against him but also to augment
itby many new members, provincials as well as Italians.
His fellow censor was his son Titus, whom, although no one had ever
made such use of a member of his family before, he also employed as his
praetorian prefect. Vespasian rightly disregarded rumors that the young
man cherished designs against him, and when, like all rulers as they grew
older, he deteriorated in energy and health, he was able with Titus's help
to carry on effectively. Moreover, as the first emperor to have a son of his
own blood whose maturity and distinction already fitted him to succeed to
the throne, he openly declared his intention of founding a new dynasty with
Titus as his heir.
2go / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Painting by Ducros (1748-1810) of the Arch of Titus, erected by his brother

Domitian to commemorate his suppression of the Jewish Revolt.
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 2gi

^x^<^-'^^^

Brass sestertius of Vespasian (a.d. 76) showing the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva on the Capitol, restored after its destruction in the Civil Wars of 69.

Yet there now followed a period in which his political opponents, mainly
old-fashioned aristocratic republicans who justified from Greek
their ideas
philosophy, expressed a good deal of hostility to the new dynastic program;
and Titus rigorously put down a conspiracy in which Vitellius's former
general Caecina was involved. This was early in a.d. 79, which proved to
be the last year of Vespasion's life. During the summer, near his Sabine
birthplace, he succumbed to a stomach chill and died.

Titus's tenure on the throne (79-81) was so short that it is impossible to

say whether his charm, for which he was famous, would have carried him
through a longer period of rule or not. For the second time, he sent away
his mistress, the Jewish princess Berenice, whose liaison with him cannot
have been popular in senatorial circles. In the provinces, attention was
principally concentrated on Britain, where Agricola, governor from 77,
consolidated the Forth-Clyde line and advanced tentatively as far as the
River Tay. At the capital, Titus made himself popular by lavish expendi-
ture. Yet at the very outset of his reign, Italy had been struck by disaster
when an eruption of Vesuvius, dormant since before the beginning of his-
tory,had buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae (Castellamare di Stabia),
Oplontis (Torre Annunziata), and other centers, thus providing excavators
from the eighteenth century onwards with the richest of all collections of
evidence about the ancient world.
Titus died prematurely, at the age of only forty-two. Yet rumors that he
was poisoned by his younger brother and successor Domitian were probably
unjustified; though it is true that Domitian harbored a strong grudge against
him, since he himself, despite stirring adventures at the end of the civil wars.
2^2 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Muleteer who succumbed to fumes at Pompeii during the eruption of Vesuvius

in A.D. 79. Liquid plaster was pumped into the cavity left by the decomposition
of the body.

had been given far fewer opportunities of distinguishing himself in subse-

quent years.
When Domitian now became emperor in his turn, he showed little sym-
pathy with the old republican forms in which most earlier rulers had
clothed their autocracy, but instead followed a meticulously thought-out
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 2g^

policy of systematic absolutism. As time went on, and particularly after his
adoption of the unprecedented title "perpetual censor" (84-85), this tend-
ency caused consternation among the senators. As a counterblast, the em-
peror realized he must achieve popularity —
with the army for which he was
eager in any case, since he was ambitious to become a conqueror of foreign
lands.
Conquest in Britain, however, did not appeal to him, and Agricola's plans
to annex part of the Scottish highlands were dropped. But success was
achieved in southwestern Germany, where the frontier line, pushed forward
by his father, was advanced once again (83). Domitian's principal objective,
however, was the kingdom of Dacia (Rumania), whose king Decebalus had
almost restored it power its monarchs had boasted more than a
to the
century earlier. Sent to bring him to order, Domitian's generals suffered a
couple of severe defeats. Then, finally, the military situation was restored.
—
Yet Decebalus survived because of what happened next.
In 89, within the borders of the empire, the seditious pattern of the
previous dynasty now began to repeat itself, and the Roman commander
in Upper Germany rose in rebellion. Domitian swooped down and merci-
lessly crushed the revolt. But his suspicions of the senators, already consid-
erable, were greatly increased by this traumatic event. Under treason proce-
dures revived for the purpose, a substantial number of leading Romans were
executed. They included, as on earlier occasions, men of republican philo-
sophical inclinations; but as Domitian, always a nervously irritable man,
became increasingly afraid of retaliation, terror began to spread among the
rest of the senatorial class. The legionaries, it is true, continued to support
him strongly. But among those alienated and frightened were the com-
manders of the praetorian guard. And they, without the knowledge of their
own soldiers, joined his wife Domitia, daughter of the eminent general
Corbulo, in a conspiracy that struck the emperor down in a.d. 96.

Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus

The sixty-six-year-old lawyerand former consul, Nerva, who was de-

clared his successor on the very same day, must have been privy to the plot.
But it caused such great anger in the army, and especially among the rank
and file of the praetorian guard, that after a short interlude he was humiliat-
ingly compelled, in the following year, to hand over Domitian's assassins
and allow them to be executed. Immediately afterwards, to save his throne
and his life, he adopted a son and heir from outside his own family. Nerva
was acting like Galba before him, but his choice was a great deal more
successful. It fell on Trajan, aged forty-four, the governor of Upper Ger-
many; his adoption inaugurated a period of over sixty years in which
294 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE
successions to the throne were determined by adoption rather than by birth.
In subsequent cases, however, was usually reinforced by matrimonial ties
it

— and would never have happened at all if the rulers had had sons of their
own.
Trajan's father was descended from Roman settlers in Further Spain and
his mother was a Spaniard; he was the first of the emperors to come from
a province, and his origin was symptomatic of the rise of the provincial
element within the ruling class. The way to the highest office was now
becoming open to all educated men, regardless of race and nationality; at
present, westerners such as Gauls and Spaniards were still advancing much
—
more rapidly than north Africans and easterners though their turn would
come later.

Attractive and affable, Trajan possessed the rare qualification of popular-

ity among Senate and army alike. His governmental policies were progres-

Trajan (a.d. 98-117).

 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 2()S

Brass sestertius of Trajan, "the best ruler" (OPTIMO PRINCIPI),

celebrating his endowment for poor children {A.hVS\enta YXAl^iae).

sive. In Italy, one of his achievements was the foundation of the alimenta,
a system of financial provision for poor children. He also lightened the
burden of taxation in the provinces; and a series of letters preserved by Pliny
the Younger, his governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, displays his humane
care for the welfare of the provincials —combined with a suspicious preoc-
cupation with internal security and a paternalistic tendency to interfere in
the affairs of the ostensibly self-governing cities when their finances, as
frequently happened, were unsound.
An ever-increasingprogram of impressive public works was also carried
out on Trajan's orders. The spiral rehefs on his column at Rome indicate
the source of the vast expenditure on such projects: they were paid for by
the wealth of conquered Dacia. Domitian had been obliged to leave the
country unsubdued. The forces with which Trajan invaded it were even
more formidable. He enlarged the Roman army to thirty legions, each of
which, moreover, was increased in size; and the auxiliaries who fought
alongside them were supplemented by new kinds of native troops (numeri),
which comprised national units from un-Romanized tribes, equipped with
their own arms and cuirassed horsemen. With this great army, the emperor
overran Dacia in two large-scale wars (101-106). Its capital Sarmizegethusa
(Gradistea Muncelului) was captured and destroyed, and Decebalus was
driven to suicide. His kingdom became a Roman province, and gigantic
sums of gold and silver were seized and brought to Rome, the last really
large profits its treasury ever derived from a war. But the end of the Dacian
campaign meant that there was a new, long frontier to protect; and from
now on the numerical superiority of frontier troops shifted permanently
from the Rhine to the Danube and Dacian garrisons.
But there were also the eastern borders of the empire to be consid-
ered; and Trajan had decided that the peace concluded half a century
earlier with Parthia must be brought to an end because it had not pro-
2g6 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Reliefs from Column of Trajan, Rome: heads of Dacian and Roman soldiers
(above and right).

vided a satisfactory imperial boundary. But when Armenia, the tradi-

tional bone of contention between the two states, fell to him with ease
(114), he decided to go onwards and annex the whole of Mesopotamia as

well, with infinite prospects of conquests ahead that might make him
the first authentic successor of Alexander the Great. Parallel Roman
forces simultaneously descended the Tigris and Euphrates, the Parthian
winter capital Ctesiphon was taken, and the end of the following year
saw Trajan at the Persian Gulf. Never before had a Roman commander
marched so far, and it would never happen again.
However, it was a transient success. Far behind the advancing Roman
army, in one eastern province after another, the Jews of the Dispersion
broke into savage revolts, encouraged by their numerous coreligionists in
Parthian territory temporarily occupied by the Romans. And meanwhile,
the Parthians themselves rallied their forces and attacked Trajan's extended
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / igj

lines of communication. He suppressed the rebellions where he could and

even uniquely proclaimed the conversion of the kingdom of Parthia into a
Roman client state.But this was little more than an empty gesture; and
almost immediately he turned back towards home. Either he decided that
it had all been in vain —
in which case it must have been the hardest decision
of his life —or he hopefully believed that he could leave the scene because
the arrangements he had recently made would endure, though he can
scarcely have been laboring under such a massive delusion. But there is a
third possibility also, for perhaps, whatever the military forecasts, his weak-
ened health had made him unable to carry on. He was ill, suffering from
high blood pressure, followed, it would appear, by a paralytic stroke in a.d.
ii6 — though it may be that his illness was in part the psychological outcome
of failure. At all events, in the following year, in the southeastern corner
of Asia Minor, he died.
298 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Brass sestertius of Trajan (ca. a.d. Ill) depicting his bridge

over the Danube built by Apollodorus of Damascus.

Gold death-mask of a client-king of the Cimmerian Bosphorus,

which supplied grain for Roman armies
on the Danube and in the east.
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 2gg

One of the brass sestertii of Hadrian celebrating his restoration

of provinces: here his native country Spain.

PALESTINE IN
THE TIME OF CHRIST

Sea of Galilee

Caesarea Mariti

ARABIA
(NABATAEA)

50 mjles
JOO / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Hadrian, found at Tel Shalem^near Beth-Shean.

THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 301

k-"

Gem-portrait of Antoninus Pius (a.d. 138-61).

J02 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
Trajan's talent for civil government, the popular aggressiveness of his
military policies, and his agreeable, accessible personaUty had earned him
the title of the Best Ruler (Optimus Princeps) Yet whereas his Dacian
campaigns had brought in a great deal of money, the vastly ambitious
Parthian campaigns that followed cost enormous sums with little or no
compensating political or military advantages. True, these displays of might
may have helped his successors to keep the peace. Yet, by and large, Trajan
remains a classic example of a good man carried away by the exciting
Roman tradition that conquest was glorious.

His successor Hadrian, a distant relative from the same part of Spain, had
accompanied him to Rome at the outset of his reign and then served him
in many important posts, enjoying his special favor. On Trajan's deathbed,
itwas given out that the emperor had adopted him as his heir, but this,
though possible, remains uncertain.
In any event, Hadrian now assumed the imperial powers. Without delay,
he decided —
as his predecessor may well have decided already that the —
newly occupied eastern territories were untenable, and so, unwilling for
adventures when he needed to consolidate his own power, he abandoned all
that was left of Trajan's temporary conquests and withdrew the Roman
frontiers to the Euphrates again, much to the dissatisfaction of militarist
senators.Then he set out for Rome and subsequently for the lower Danube
frontierwhere there was trouble. While he was away from the capital,
however, four of the most eminent senators, all former consuls, found
themselves accused —with how much justification is uncertain —of plotting
against his life and were put to death, probably by the independent initiative
of his praetorian prefect (ii8). This treatment of the four ex-consuls perma-
nently damaged his relations with the Senate. Moreover, although he was
assiduous in his attentions to that body, it became clear that he did not
estimate class and rank very highly.
The remarkable feature of Hadrian's twenty-one-year-long principate
was the fact that he spent more than half of it outside Italy, traveling widely
throughout the provinces of the empire. His motives for all these journeys
were varied. One was pure curiosity; he was the most fanatical of all the
many Roman But in addition, as the designs selected for his
sightseers.
coinage confirm, he had formed a novel conception of what the imperial
territories meant. He saw them no longer as a collection of conquered
provinces, but as a commonwealth in which each individual province and
nation possessed its own proud identity. Yet probably the foremost aim of
his travels was to keep the army, which he maintained an expert interest,
in
in a state of skilled readiness; and he made efforts to improve the living
conditions of the soldiers, deprecating the harshness of previous rulers. One
 THE INHERITORS OF EMPIRE / 303

of the first fruits of this active mihtary poUcy, following upon a minor
was the best preserved of all the fortifications
reverse on the British frontier,
of the empire, Hadrian's Wall from Tyne to Solway, manned byfiftccri
thousand auxiliaries watching over the bare brown hills that rolled away to

Fighting in the empire was infrequent. But there was one serious war
towards the end of his life, a Jewish rising —not of the Dispersion this time,
as in the previous reign, but in the homeland of Palestine itself. Hadrian's
establishment of a Roman co lnnv and^ temple at Jerusalem, now renamed
Aelia Capitolina after the emperor's family name Aelius, caused great anger
among the Jews, and under a talented leader. Bar Kosiba, they launched
the ferocious and bloodily suppressed Second Jewish Revolt (132-35). Ha-
drian, a keen Hellenist —and himself a talented writer and musician — felt

no sympathy with a race that could not, like every other people in the
empire, be content with the dominant Greco-Roman civilization and its
ideas.

Reconstructed section of Hadrian's Wall at Vindolanda (Chesterholm).

j04 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
Following up the governmental policies of Trajan, Hadrian aime^Jikfi*.
—
him, at enlightened centralization and he pursued it with particular skill.
His was a remarkably many-sided personality, full of bold ideas yet at the
same time devoted to administrative efficiency and deeply concerned with
justice and the law. Yet he continued to be dogged by the unhappy relations
with the senators which had marred his early years. Then, in 136, a danger-
~
ous plot, perhaps genuine, resulted in further executions, whereupon Ha-
drian, who had no son and was sick, decided that he must proceed rapidly
with the adoption of an heir. His first choice, who took the name of Aelius -
after him, died almost at once and was replaced by the fifty-one-year-old
Antoninus who soon afterwards, on Hadrian's death, succeeded peacefullyj^
to the throne (138).
Antoninus, like his two predecessors, was of western provincial origin,
his father being a man of consular descent from Nemausus (Nimes) in
southern Gaul. His reign was aptly summed up by the conferment of the
title Pius, indicating devotion to his duty, the gods, his country, and his

adoptive father. He also achieved a careful balance in his relations with the
Senate, showing deference to its prestige while quietly continuing to central-
ize the administrative machinery and taking steps to cut down unnecessary
public expenditure. In Britain, he advanced the frontier and constructecLa
new Antonine wall from the Forth to the Clyde (141), though subsequently
there were outbreaks of raiding within the province. The southern frontiers,
too, suffered from occasional unrest and rebellion. Nevertheless, the greater
part of the empire enjoyed peace during the twenty-three years of his reign.
 15
Imperial Society

Imperial Art and Architecture

^ ^ he sculptural portraiture of private persons, men, women, and chil- J
dren, flourished throughout the imperial period.*
But above all it is the emperors of the age and their relations who
are depicted in a series of extraordinarily skillful portrait busts, designed to
acquaint the peoples of the empire with the personahties their rulers wished
to present to them. Augustus had been shown in many guises, but under
Claudius a new problem arose, for his knobbly countenance seemed to defy
accurate representation. Some sculptors compromised, other idealized.
When his stepson Nero succeeded to the throne, they had to think once
again how to depict the rapidly increasing grossness of the imperial features;
and they achieved remarkable success. Far from minimizing or evading the
idiosyncracy of Nero's appearance, they cleverly cherished his peculiarities,
and even endowed them with a certain impressiveness, by infusing just that
touch of elevation that made the emperor seem, if still a fat lout, at least
a lout of slightly superhuman dimensions.
The men who designed the heads on the coins, too, performed triumphs
that earned the admiration of the Renaissance, their contrasted interpreta-
tions ofNero and the bleak Galba proving particularly noteworthy. Under
Vespasian, portrait sculptors and coin engravers had to rise to a new chal-
lenge —
an emperor who belonged to an unpretentious social class and
wanted to show it. Some artists, it is true, tried to iron out his rugged,
whimsical features into something more orthodox. But others depicted
them exactly as they were, or even added a touch of amusing caricature.
Trajan is shown as an impressive soldier or as a responsible and thoughtful
administrator. But the most interesting of the male portraits of the epoch

*And Egypt maintained a superb tradition of portrait painting on the panels inserted in
mummy cases.

305
3o6 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Ceiling of villa at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata) near Pompeii.

comes from the principate of Hadrian. He was partly homosexual (as Trajan
also had been), and the posthumous heads of the boy Antinous, who was
loved by Hadrian and died young, show a dreamy gaze suggesting the
tragedy of that early doom.
Sad, meditative little children of the imperial house are likewise por-
trayed with keen psychological sympathy, and the women of successive
dynasties, too, were made known to the public through the same sculptural
medium. The ladies of Vespasian's house evidently did not share their
emperor's desire to reflect his middle-class origins, for they are elegant and
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / soj

frequently change their elaborate hairstyles. The portraits of this age aim
at a new, smooth, fluent surface texture, enhanced by the subtle use of flesh
and hair tints, of which only traces survive today. The sculptors are fond
of deep incisions, appropriate to the strong sun and shadow in which their
busts and statues originally stood.
The same vigorous interplay of light and shade appears on a relief upon
the inner face of the Arch of Titus of Rome, depicting soldiers carrying the
spoils taken from the Jerusalem Temple in a.d. 70; the artist creates the
illusion that the procession is viewed through an open frame, silhouetted
against the sky. But the outstanding example of this relief sculpture is the
continuous series of spiral designs on the Column of Trajan. Towering over
the massive new Forum designed by his great architect Apollodorus of
Damascus, the reliefs, more than a hundred in number, offer a bird's-eye
view of numerous events in the emperor's Dacian wars. This panorama
includes no fewer than twenty-five hundred human figures, and a wide
variety of incidents is selected for illustration —
battles and sieges, the cap-
ture of prisoners of war, visits by envoys, marches and journeys, buildings

Relief from Column of Trajan, Rome: Dacians attack Roman camp.

S08 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE
and and above all, events relating to the emperor himself, the
fortifications,
addresses he delivered and the sacrifices he made to the gods, and the deeds
he performed that illuminated his solicitude and clemency.
Among other great arts of the early empire was the painting of walls; and
as a recently discovered example has reminded us, of ceilings as well. The
bulk of the pictures that have come down to us are of an earlier date than
the great reliefs that have just been mentioned. They appeared (together
with elegant stucco decoration) in town houses at Pompeii and Her-
culaneum and in country villas that adjoined those cities at Stabiae (Castel-
lamare di Stabia), Oplontis (Torre Annunziata), and elsewhere. The erup-
tion of Vesuvius that overwhelmed the region in a.d. 79 preserved a great
many of these paintings; most of those that survive belong to the period
immediately preceding the eruption, since much redecoration, displaying a
new brilliance and richness in color, had taken place as a result of earth-
quake damage in 62. Figure paintings, often derived from lost Greek origi-
nals, were greatly in favor; very often they were devoted to the mythological
and theatrical themes dear to Nero. Moreover, as in his own Golden House
at Rome, an earlier taste for architectural vistas was now revived, displaying

a new baroque, scenic illusionism that experimented with effects of spatial

recession drawing their inspiration from stage designs.
There are also paintings of romantic landscapes, and fantastic Nile
scenes, studies of still life, and portraits. On some walls the overall pic-
torial design includes painted panels as center points, but it would have

seemed wrong to the architects and artists who planned these houses to
spoil their organic structure and decor by affixing detachable panel pic-
tures like modern canvases to the walls. Similarly, the floors were meant
to be seen without carpets or mats and instead were covered with vivid
mosaics, in large patterns or small, sometimes, like the paintings, repro-
ducing Greek masterpieces of the past. This was one of the most enjoy-
able and picturesque of Roman arts; when transferred to walls, vaults,
niches, apses, and ceilings, a process that had already tentatively begun,
it led the way to the mosaic decoration that was to line the interiors of
Byzantine churches.

These paintings and mosaics adorned large terraced villas opening out
upon the sea and town houses which still retained their traditional grouping
around the atrium, though by this time the architectural designs showed
increasing variety and elaboration. Sometimes, however, these houses of the
rich, for example at Herculaneum, had begun to be divided up by partitions

in order to serve a somewhat less prosperous social class. There were also

other forms of housing for the middle class and poor, and on this subject
recent researches at Pompeii have yielded a good deal of information.
Stucco relief of athlete from Villa di San Marco,
Stabiae (Castellamare di Stabia).
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / 3^^

Mosaic showing the first wine drinkers,

from New Paphos, Cyprus, fourth century a.d. (above).

Mosaic at Emporiae (Ampurias) in Spain (opposite).

312 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Inlaid polychrome marble of Venus doing up her sandal: from Pompeii.

revealing domestic arrangements of considerable variety and a general stand-

ard of living (not only for the richest elite) never achieved again until the
nineteenth century. Quite a lot can also be learned about the humble accom-
modation of slaves in both the town houses and the rural dwellings (villae
rusticae), which often combined private suites for the use of their rich and
mainly absentee proprietors with elaborate farms worked by their agents,
tenants, and servants.
In another respect, too, Pompeii is a uniquely informative source of
evidence for the lives of its ordinary citizens. At the moment when the
eruption buried the town (as, no doubt, at all other times as well), the walls
of buildings were covered by many thousands of graffiti that have survived
and display extraordinary variety. Very often, there are references to the
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / 3^3

—which were hotly contested

annual civic elections still in these smaller
towns, unlike Rome — and one such election was imminent at the time when
the eruption took place. The graffiti also have much to say about current
theatrical and gladiatorial events. Moreover, like their counterparts today,
they recorded many curious aspects of the loves and erotic fantasies of a
greatnumber of individuals.
The lives of the inhabitants of Pompeii are also illustrated by the surviv-
ing remains of about twenty inns and one hundred and twenty bars. At the
ancient colony of Ostia, on the other hand, which was the port of Rome,
only two inns and fourteen bars have come to light, since the people of this
place apparently preferred to drink in the social clubs of their trade corpora-
tions (collegia). The community was rapidly expanding to keep pace with
a massive development of port facilities. Claudius, who was eager to direct
and engineers away from showpieces to practical
the skills of his architects
projects, gave the town a new harbor connected by canals with the Tiber;
and temples, baths, warehouses, and granaries were constructed. Then,
subsequently, Trajan added a landlocked hexagonal inner basin, and Ostia
came to handle the largest volume of goods of any ancient Mediterranean
city apart from Alexandria.
In these prosperous years, the population of this great business center
grew rapidly to a total of approximately one hundred thousand. This expan-
sion dictated a revolution in housing for the not particularly wealthy, in the

Warehouses (horrea) at Ostia beside the Tiber.

^14 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
course of which the Pompeii-type dwelling of earlier days was largely
replaced by tall apartment blocks that accommodated greater numbers of
people. Made of brick, which was no longer concealed as in the past by stone
or stucco facings, these large buildings were strongly constructed and relied
for their architectural effecton the spacing and scale of their windows,
which had panes of selenite, mica, or glass and were framed by small
external balconies. The interiors of the apartments, adorned with good
mosaics and wall paintings, often contained seven rooms or more and
sometimes as many as twelve. These blocks did not normally possess a
private water supply of their own, but, as at Pompeii, public cisterns fed
from the aqueduct were liberally distributed around the public places of the
town.
In very few other cities of the empire has substantial housing been
excavated, but the Ostian type was no doubt more characteristic than
the Pompeian; itwas the empire's most important contribution to urban
living. And at Rome itself, too, increasing signs of the same sort of
apartment blocks have lately come to light, in addition to many other
types of residential accommodation. It is true that, up to the second
century A.D., we still have complaints of rickety, ill-constructed, high-
rise tenements in the capital. Some of the worst abuses, however, had
been eliminated by Nero, who made efforts to impose a more spacious
plan and scale.

He was given opportunity by the Great Fire of Rome (a.d. 64) which
this
he was unfairly accused of having started himself to make room for his
Golden House (Domus Aurea), for this and its parklands took over nearly
four hundred acres of what had formerly been the most thickly inhabited
—
zone of the city the largest piece of land that any European monarch has
ever carved out of his capital to make a residence for himself. The Golden
House, like palaces erected by Greek monarchs of earlier days, was not a
single unified structure but consisted of a number of separate pavilions set
among elegantly designed formal landscapes. The central porticoed build-
ing contained an octagonal hall that can still be seen today, though it is now
beneath the ground. It was lit from a round hole in the center of the cupola
and made unprecedentedly enterprising use of the brick-faced concrete that
had been Rome's greatest architectural discovery.
Nero's successors abandoned the Golden House; but Domitian ordered
the construction of a new imperial residence on the Palatine. In addition
to the private quarters of the emperor, it included state apartments, consist-
ing of two groups of imposing halls separated from one another by a
colonnade. Domitian also built a magnificent villa looking down onto the
Alban Lake, complete with theater and amphitheater. It has not survived;
 IMPERIALSOCIETY / 3^5

but much can still be seen of a later and considerably more elaborate
country palace erected by Hadrian near Tibur (Tivoli). Extending for a mile
across the slopes beneath the city, this complex virtually forms a whole
town in itself. The architect exploits the gently undulating site by ringing
every change on the theme of curve and countercurve; and his impressive
mastery of concrete achieves all manner of ingenious, romantic effects, with
nostalgic reminiscences of the Greece the emperor loved. This Villa of
Hadrian, wrote Mortimer Wheeler, "stripped and shattered though it be,
remains the most fantastic material creation of the Roman genius: of a
particular Roman genius, which had travelled far and experienced much,
and had learnt to temper affairs with sentiment, sentiment with reason."
And another building that owes its design to Hadrian was Rome's Pan-
theon. His reconstruction of Agrippa's original temple is the best preserved
today of all the edifices that the ancient Romans ever built; it is among the
most admirable of all their achievements. The huge colonnaded portico
leads into a rotunda one hundred and forty-two feet high and wide. Its
concrete interior wall contains vaulted niches and recesses which show that
by now the Romans had pretty full trust in their mastery of this material
so that they could boldly lighten it and the dome
by inserting such cavities;
that they superimposed on these walls, surpassing Nero's Golden House,
proved durable enough even to survive the removal of its gilded bronze tiles
in the seventh century a.d.
From its smoothly and regularly diffused
circular central opening, a
stream of light descends into the rotunda. The great space is tranquil and
sublime. But unlike an earth-bound Greek temple, it dwarfs men and
women by its hugeness. This cavernous grandeur warns humans that they
are in the presence of all the gods —
for that is what "Pantheon" means, and
its niches were probably intended for statues of the old planetary divinities.

And in this astrologically minded age, the central opening of the dome
represented the sun, while the starlike rosettes on its curved internal surface
reflected the majestic rhythm of the heavenly bodies.

Such was one of the greatest among the innumerable shrines devoted to
the religious needs of the Roman population. But ample provision was also
made for their pleasures. There were enormous bathing establishments, of
which something will be said in describing a later epoch, when the construc-
tions of such buildings reached its climax. And there were also theaters
everywhere. But there was also another sort of entertainment altogether,
provided by the Flavian Amphitheater. Begun by Vespasian and completed
by Titus, it was designed for gladiatorial combats and the slaughter of wild
animals, and it could also be flooded to stage imitation sea fights. Known
much later as the Colosseum, after the colossal statue of Nero that had
3i6 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

The interior of Hadrian's Pantheon after G. P. Panini (1691-1765).

 IMPERIALSOCIETY / J//

Stood nearby, this amphitheater, the eadiest in the city to be built com-
pletely of stone, remains, for all its horrific purpose, one of the most marvel-
ous buildings in the world.

These amphitheaters were like two semicircular theaters

elliptical

placed back to back. The curving exteriors of Greek theaters had nor-
mally displayed two stories of arcades, and Rome had a theater with
three. But in its final form the Colosseum was extended up to four of
these stories, of which the topmost was walled and windowed, but the
three lowest consisted of open arches in continuous arcades. Classical
columns are to be seen, engaged in these great rows of arches, but they
are there only to provide ornamentation and scale. The essential con-
structional units are the massive concrete-covered piers that support the
arches. The Colosseum displayed, with unique majesty, the genius of
Roman architects for dramatic effects and exerted a vast influence upon
the buildings of later Europe.
It provided seats for about forty-five thousand spectators and standing
room for five thousand more. The emperor's platform was at the center of
one of the long sides, facing the sections reserved for state officials and the
holders of the games. There were also places for foreign envoys, imperial
ladies. Vestal Virgins, and priests. The entertainments provided in these
arenas remained extraordinarily popular, and rulers found it advisable to
arrange and finance such displays on a munificent scale and to listen pa-
tiently to the popular demonstrations and protests and demands that the
audiences of pampered Rome, by tradition, seized the opportunity to stage
on these occasions. As for the gladiators, their legal and moral was
status
utterly degraded, but many graffiti bear witness to the admiration and
excitement that they nonetheless provoked in the hearts of the public,
especially women.
The pattern of the Colosseum was reduplicated throughout the Roman
world in other amphitheaters of widely varying dimensions. And indeed, it
was these first and second centuries a.d., when the Pax Romana gained
such remarkable strength, that provided by far the greater part of the
immense material remains not only of amphitheaters but also of very many
other kinds of buildings that are still to be seen in Rome and its provinces.

Economic and Social Imbalance

The cities of these regions, abounding in prosperous, public-spirited bene-
factors competing with one another in their lavish contributions to munici-
pal amenities, were entering upon the climactic period of their development,
destined in some areas never to be equaled again in later times. The conse-
quent orgy of urban construction produced many spectacular achievements,
 3iS / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

The Temple of Bacchus-Dionysus (?) at HehopoHs

(Baalbek in Lebanon), ca. a.d. 150.
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / 3^9

among which Thamugadi (Timgad) and other cities in north Africa may
perhaps be singled out because they have never been built over in later ages
and therefore survived on a monumental scale.
Such cities often originated from military camps but rapidly outstripped
these origins and displayed striking advances in industry and commerce. In
these fields of activity, the provinces had truly come into their own and had
begun to eclipse Rome itself. For example, the glass and bronze wares of
Italian Capua were superseded by products made in Gaul; and the most
important pottery industry was similarly displaced, first to Condatomagus
(La Graufesenque) in the south of Gaul (ca. a.d. 20) and then to Ledosus
(Lezoux in the Auvergne). Next, in the second century a.d., the main
output of pottery was from the Rhineland, which became before long the
principal industrial area of Europe. For the first time in history, this region
had caught up with the industrial production of the eastern Mediterranean;
while the Danube area, too, along the whole of its length, was developing
an east-west commercial axis of great importance for the future. Nor was
this kind of expansion a European phenomenon only, since in Asia as well,
and in Syria where the towns stretched almost uninterruptedly throughout

Mosaic of two gladiators from Curium, Cyprus. Fourth century a.d.

t ^/?^.

* ' * J
320 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

.V ?

Relief of gladiator from Ephesus (Selguk).

a single vast urbanized zone, the export trades in textiles and other materials
continued to flourish and multiply.
Yet the fundamental facts of Roman trading remained the same as before
and were subject to the same limitations; it was still, on the whole, a
hand-to-mouth affair with no solid capitalistic infrastructure or foundation.
And, above all, the basis of the imperial economy was still not commerce
but agriculture. In this sphere, at first sight, there were certain encouraging
signs. For example, many fruit trees were brought as far as the shores of
the Rhine, Danube, and Atlantic, and planted; and olives were introduced
into the steppe lands of southern Tunisia and southeast Spain, which be-
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / i^/

came the principal centers of the empire's production of oil. Spain also
produced and sent abroad a great deal of wine: the Monte Testaccio on the
outskirts of Rome is a mound consisting of fragments of forty million jars
that had once been full of cheap wine imported from Spanish vineyards.

The rich farmer-landowners possessed and hved in huge residential and

agricultural complexes. Among many hundreds of such "rustic villas" may
be named Cheragan (on the Garonne, in Gaul), covering forty acres and
housing four or five hundred dependents; and Anthee (near Philippeville in
Belgium), which included a large residence and twenty other buildings
within a thirty-acre walled enclosure; and Chedworth in Britain, which was
another luxurious administrative center for a substantial group of farms.
The owners of such palaces were very wealthy men, although on the whole
this was an age not so much of a few millionaires as of a great many affluent
bourgeois.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this development, the basic facts of the
agricultural economy were still much as they had been in earlier years. For
one thing, the placid rhythm of the Antonine world still depended, though
perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, upon slaves; and they were still wholly

The amphitheatre at Capua (S. Maria Capua Vetere).

Mid-first century a.d., remodeled by Hadrian.

:4^ %
S22 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Large bronze coin of Tiberius (a.d. 14-37) ^^ ^ veteran colony (Carthage?) in

north Africa. Altar-precinct, inscribed PACE ANGusta PERPerwj, "in the
perpetual Augustan peace."

excluded from the area of political and social privilege. But excluded also
—and this too was no novelty —were the "free" agricultural workers who
formed an even larger proportion of the population. It was not the depressed
rural poor of the countryside but the prosperous people of the cities who
felt loyalty to the imperial regime in gratitude for services rendered.
In the eighteenth century, the historian Edward Gibbon believed that the

Public lavatory at the Hadrianic Baths at Lepcis Magna.

 IMPERIALSOCIETY / ^2^

Antonine age witnessed greater happiness and prosperity than the world
had seen before. And he may even have been right, because prosperity had
never been very widespread, any more than it is now. True, it was not very
widespread in the time Gibbon was writing about either, for it did not
extend to the poor cuhivators of the land who comprised most of the
Roman world's inhabitants. Nevertheless, the limited circle of those enjoy-
ing favorable conditions had been considerably enlarged. And to that ex-
tent, there was some justification in the praises that the second century
Asian orator Aelius Aristides, anticipating Gibbon, lavished on the imperial
system of the day, eulogizing the lush amenities and secure, universal
communications that were owed to the Antonine peace.

Even if the poor did not secure many of these material blessings, at least
Roman law as it upon the first and
entered, under the initiative of Hadrian,
most creative and philosophical period of its Golden Age, was now doing
a good deal to protect them from the worst illegalities of exploitation. For
example, the treatment of slaves (despite their exclusion from privilege) was
—
controlled by an increasing number of legal safeguards devised out of a
combination of humaneness with a self-interest that saw advantages in their
well-being. And the free poor, too, unprosperous though they remained,
likewise benefited from current legal reforms.
These tendencies were apparent in the activity of Hadrian's north African
jurist Salvius Julianus. Famous for his concise formulations, Salvius col-
lected and revised the successive edicts that praetors had for centuries been
accustomed to pronounce at the outset of their year of office. This meant
that, from now on, the edicts could be recognized as permanently valid; and
his publication of them diffused among the subject populations of the em-
pire a far clearer understanding of the legal safeguards to which they were
entitled than had hitherto existed.
The same trend was manifest in the work of one of Salvius's pupils and
employees, Gaius. His renowned Institutes, the only classical legal work to
have come down to us in substantially its original form, includes suggestions
that their author was especially interested in provincial legislation and had
discussed it previously in writings that have not survived. That is to say,
the study of the law was now displaying a new and much more attentive
interest in people who were not Roman citizens; the legal barriers between
privileged citizens and all the rest, for centuries a fundamental feature of
Roman life, were becoming eroded.
And yet, despite all these measures, equality had come no nearer than
it had been before. All that had happened was that these old civic differences

between Roman citizens and the rest were being replaced by another dis-
tinction altogether. This perpetuated the division of the community (other
Above: Thamugadi (Timgadj
innorth Africa, founded by
Trajan in a.d. ioo for
legionary veterans.

Left: Temple at Sufetula

(Sbeitia in Tunisia).
Mid-second century a.d.
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / 3^5

than slaves) into two main groups to which the law gave entirely separate
treatment. The superior class (honestiores) included senators, knights, land-
owners, soldiers, civil servants, and town counsellors. Everyone else be-
longed to the lower category (humiliores), who possessed inferior legal
rights and incurred heavier penalties in the courts, including many punish-
ments that only noncitizens had suffered before. Roman law, despite all its
concern for equity, had always favored the upper echelon of society, from
which its own practitioners originated; and now, from the time of Trajan
or Hadrian onwards, such preferential treatment became crystallized in
legal forms. This greater explicitness was ominous, for beneath the tranquil
surface of second-century life, it confirmed the depressed status of the
underprivileged and thus deepened the basic rift that in the following centu-
ries would help bring the empire down.

So inequalities were perpetuated; and this seems paradoxical, seeing that

the Roman lawyers were at the same time producing measures displaying
a new considerate solicitude. But the inequalities derived from a social
system that unchangeably presupposed them, whereas the solicitude
stemmed to a considerable extent from that Stoic philosophy to which
Cicero had owed much of his moral inspiration in an earlier epoch.
J26 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE
From Seneca to Apuleius

In the imperial age the most eloquent exponent of this system was Nero's
minister Seneca (b. ca. 4 B.c.-d. a.d. 65), son of a rhetorician from Corduba
(Cordoba) in Further Spain. In contrast to earlier Roman tragic drama, of
which almost all is lost, we have nine tragedies attributed to Seneca. These
plays, to which Shakespeare and other European dramatists owe a very
great debt, breathe the enlightened tolerance and humanity of Stoicism,
including its sympathy for slaves. And more exphcitly still, this same spirit
pervades Seneca's literary letters and ethical treatises, which the Renais-
sance came to value for the moral guidance they provided.
He also set the tone for a new phase of Roman literature by his use of
and vivid pointed epigrams to which the lapidary
scintillating verbal tricks
Latin language so readily lends itself. This same sparkling, oratorical, "Sil-
ver Latin" style, combined with a similar Stoic viewpoint, was adopted by
Seneca's nephew Lucan in his poem the Civil War or Pharsalia. Its subject
was the struggle between Pompey and Caesar*; but it displayed a philosoph-
ical viewpoint, gradually veering towards antimonarchism, that increas-
ingly broke up his friendship with the reigning emperor Nero. Despite its

many purple patches and digressions, this mordant, powerful poem won
great fame in the Middle Ages and earned its author a place as one of
Dante's four Lords of Highest Song.
Nero's fatal displeasure eventually fell on both Seneca and Lucan; and
it descended also on his "arbiter" of court fashions, Petronius, who wrote
a lively, scandalous picaresque novel known to us as the Satyricon, that is

to say, saturikon libri, tales of lascivious behavior —for here Senecan moral-
izing takes a rest. The preceding centuries had produced many sorts of
Greek fiction, including fake biographies, fantastic travel stories, romantic
novelettes, satirical efforts in mixed prose and verse, and pornographic
sketches. Petronius gathers all these threads together in a highly entertain-
ing Latin narrative of three disreputable but elaborately educated young
homosexuals on the move around the Greek towns of south and their Italy;

journey is also intended as a mocking comment on the contemporary

Roman social scene.
This work, of which a large portion, but by no means all, survives,
includes poems and prose discussions that give the author his opportunity
to offer criticism of currently fashionable writings. And, in addition, Pe-
tronius includes oblique, humorous echoes of earlier literary works. Thus
the antihero's renunciation of women for boys is intended as a burlesque
of middle-brow, heterosexual, Greek love romances, and descriptions of the

*For the battle of Pharsalus, see p. 231.

Painted shop sign of cloth merchant and felt maker Marcus Vecilius
Verecundus, Pompeii.

Relief of men towing boatload of wine on the River Durance. From Cabrieres
d'Aygues; second century a.d.
328 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Graffito of iron works from Catacomb of Domitilla, Rome.

wrath of the phalhc god Priapus are a parody of the wraths of the Homeric
gods. The Satyricon also contains set pieces or short stories, of which the
longest and most famous is the Dinner of Trimalchio, a self-made vulgar
industrialist of slave origin living inCampania, who emerges as the most
entertaining comic figure of all ancient literature. His banquet and reminis-
cences, as well as the coarse, colloquial remarks of his friends, guests, and
hangers-on, reflect needle-sharp observation and keen sensual gusto and —
incidentally, they provide unique historical material. Although fiction did
not qualify as a separate branch of literature in ancient classifications of the
subject, was the most vigorous and creative hterary form of the time; and
it

many centuries later, too, in the mixed beginnings of the modem European
novel, admiring recollections of Petronius were still to play a great and
varied part.

In the generation that followed him, the most original talent was that of
Martial (b. ca. a.d. 40-d. ca. 104), the outstanding epigrammatist of the
ancient world. Although Spanish, Martial caught the authentic Italian note
of riotous, mordant satire and has imprinted his definition of this term on
subsequent European letters. His witty, humane, obscene little poems cast
a vivid light upon the social picture of his day.
Juvenal, born in about a.d. 50 at Aquinum (Aquino) in southern Latium,
strikes a grander and also harsher note; and his sixteen long poems reveal
him to be one of the supreme masters of the Latin tongue and the foremost
 IMPERIAL SOCIETY / 329

of all Roman satirists, who did more even than Martial to establish satire
as a tradition of the Western world. Juvenal had started life as a rather
unsuccessful rhetorician; and neither forgetting nor forgiving the relative
—
poverty from which he partially emerged only partially, for he never
—
obtained adequate recognition he flays the evils of the contemporary
Roman scene with ironical, savagely pessimistic invective. This is ostensibly
directed against personages belonging to the past; yet its ferocity is really
aimed Although Juvenal wrote during the time of
at the present as well.
Trajan, in a Rome much more relaxed than it had been under the hated
Domitian, the empire still seemed to him a sick, maladjusted organism,
overflowing with deplorable men and vicious women.

Letter on papyrus from Theon to his father complaining that he had not taken
him with him to Alexandria, ca. a.d. 200.

J
JJO / THEIMPERIALPEACE
An equally damaging view of Roman society, once again despite the
current Trajanic improvements, was implicit in the work of Tacitus (b. ca.

A.D. 55- d. ca. 116?), the greatest of Roman historians. Perhaps the son of
a tax collector in one of the provinces of Gaul, he became a well-known
advocate; though, as he explained in his Dialogue on Orators, times of
imperial peace do not encourage forensic pleading to flourish as had under it

the republic, and in consequence he moved over to a political and adminis-

trative career. But the hazards he and other Romans had undergone under
Domitian continued, even after that emperor's death, to prey on many
minds; for example, Tacitus criticized him posthumously in a biographical
essay in praise of his own father-in-law Agricola, who, according to the
historian, had received insufficient imperial appreciation for his governor-
ship of Britain. Germany, too, was the subject of a special moralizing study
of great ethnological interest, the German ia, providing a reminder that
Tacitus never commits the error of regarding Rome, or even its empire, as
the only existing world.
Then he turned supreme achievement, the narration of Rome's
to his
history from the death of Augustus to the death of Domitian (a.d. 14-96).
This survey is divided into the Histories and the Annals. Of the former
work, dealing with the last twenty-eight of those years, only the first part,
describing the convulsed Year of the Four Emperors, is still extant. But the
greater part of the subsequently published Annals, dealing with the earlier
period from Tiberius to Nero, has survived. Tacitus draws upon studies by
earlier historians, now lost, but transforms them by the massive power of
his own personality; and these haunting, penetrating, moralistic analyses of
the men holding such monstrous power in their hands comprise our earliest
and only extensive account of the imperial phenomenon. Tacitus was
unique for the meticulous care with which he collected and sought to verify
and evaluate his facts, far exceeding in this respect the fascinating biogra-
phers who were his contemporaries, Suetonius and Plutarch, writing in
Latin and Greek respectively. His claim to impartiality, however, cannot
be accepted, since his hatred of Domitian, for example, overflows into unfair
bias against anemperor he saw as Domitian's forerunner, Tiberius. Incisive,
abrupt, tortured, and unfailingly stimulating, Tacitus's literary style is also
frequently poetical in its vocabulary and construction, echoing tragic drama
(which he had at one time attempted to write) in its awareness of the
implacability or malevolence of destiny and in its stress upon the more
sinister aspects of the imperial regime.
Nevertheless, thesegloomy implications sometimes clash strangely with
the more favorable facts that Tacitus was far too good a historian to
suppress. Thus he was able, for example, to weigh up objectively the credit
and debit side of Roman rule as it appeared to the peoples of the empire.
 IMPERIALSOCIETY / 55/

And the relative advantages of absolute monarchy and the old republican
system are presented with equal objectivity —so that, in later Europe, not
only revolutionaries felt able to claim his support for their cause, but
autocrats as well. If Tacitus felt in his romantically republican heart that
one-man rule was wrong, his powerful intellect also told him that Rome
could not avoid it.

In consequence, his heroes are often men like Agricola, who quietly got
on with under even the most deplorable of emperors and this,
their jobs —
indeed, was what Tacitus had done himself, and so also, before his accession
to the throne, had Trajan,whose reign the historian was writing. Yet,
in
in spite of this conclusion reached on rational grounds, Tacitus's spirit was
moved by observing how men and women, even in times of tyranny and
terror, still find themselves able to rise to remarkable heights of heroism;
people like the ex-slavewoman Epicharis, who, when cruelly tortured, still

refused to betray her fellow conspirators against Nero.

Under the Antonines, a very different sort of commentary on the life of

the empire was provided by the Greek author Lucian of Samosata (Samsat
in southeast Turkey), who wrote a series of adroit and sometimes amusing
essays ridiculing such targets as religious charlatans, overpretentious
philosophers, and travelers who told exaggerated tales.
His capacity for story telling was shared in full measure by a contempo-
rary Latin writer of unique gifts, Apuleius. Born in about 123 at Madaurus
(Mdaourouch in Algeria), he became one of the leading lecturers in popular
philosophy (sophists) who were peculiarly characteristic of this century,
gaining such renown that they could address even emperors with confidence
and arrogance. Apuleius was the archmanipulator of an unfamiliar sort of
Latin prose; artfully combining the florid with the archaic, for which there
was a current vogue, it creates a sort of language that is on the way to the
Middle Ages. Moreover, he was also a lawyer, and his Apologia one of the —
few Latin speeches, other than Cicero's, that have come down to us is a —
startlingly extravagant defense against charges that he was a magician,
which in Saint Augustine's view was precisely the right name for him.
The same fantastic, luscious style, incorporating a wealth of Roman and
Greek literary echoes, reappears in Apuleius's Metamorphoses or Golden
Ass, the only Latin novel that has survived in its entirety. Adapting, per-
haps, a simpler Greek work but creating something entirely original in the
process, the writer tells of a certain Lucius, who is accidentally turned into
a donkey and undergoes many other fantastic experiences. The numerous
stories this long narrative incorporates include the worldwide Cinderella
folk tale of the fairy bridegroom, which Apuleius combines with the Greek
myth of Cupid and Psyche; and his account of their weird, romantic adven-
552 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
tures attracted endless admiration and allegorical interpretation in the liter-
atures of later antiquity and of medieval and Renaissance Europe as well.

The Mystery Religions

When Apuleius describes, with all the wealth of his exuberant imagina-
tion, how his hero is initiated into the mysteries of the Egyptian goddess
whose merciful hand raises up and saves the fallen souls (psychai) of human
beings, he seems to be recording a profoundly felt experience of his own.
And thisbased on an ecstatic empathy with the Mystery faiths and Savior
is

cults that marked, in a sense, the transition between decaying state pagan-
ism and rising Christianity. It was true that the gods and goddesses of the
old national religion of Rome still provided a great stimulus to patriotism
and for this purpose were exported to the provinces, where they were
deliberately identified with the local, native divinities of each region. Yet
they were too sterile to fillvacuum during these first centuries
the spiritual
of our era when men and women became increasingly preoccupied with the
urgent needs of their own souls for something that would satisfy them; and
the enormously widespread acceptance of astrological doctrines, maintain-
ing that everything was irremediably fixed was another factor
by the stars,

that caused many to turn their panic-stricken attention to other and more
comforting sorts of faith instead.
What they turned to, above all, was a passionate belief in certain saviors
who would endow their chosen devotees with a life of blessedness after they
were dead. There was a new, rather hopeless humility abroad, a sinking of
the heart, and instinct of isolation and defeat; since no reliance could be
—
placed in this world and this was an age when scientific studies were in
total retreat —
ever-increasing numbers of peoples throughout the Roman
empire pinned their hopes on the next world instead, longing for an individ-
ual victory over evil and death in a happy hereafter. It was to these yearn-
ings that the pagan Savior cults responded with their thrilling, dramatic,
sometimes orgiastic ceremonials, their solemn rituals of progressive initia-
tion (mysterion), and books claiming unique revelation and
their holy
knowledge. The strength of these religions was that they were all things to
all people; and they were among the most vigorously lively features of

contemporary Roman society and thought.

These Mystery Savior faiths went back to the elaborate secret rituals of
Demeter in early Greece and to the disturbing, frenzied worship of
Dionysus, the liberator of mankind, which was celebrated in the Bacchants
of Euripides. Among
kingdoms of Alexander the Great's heirs this
the
Dionysiac cult, as a setting for Mysteries, became particularly widespread,
and its subsequent arrival in Italy, where the god was known as Bacchus,
 IMPERIALSOCIETY / JJJ

had alarmed the Senate into a repressive reaction (i86 B.C.)- But then this
rehgion became accepted among the Romans and attained enormous popu-
larity. The ecstatic element tended to be toned down into mere hedonism,

the afterlife being often depicted as just a jolly party with facilities for
alcoholic and sexual gratification.
More profound excitement, however, was inspired by the Mystery cult
of Cybele, the ancient, divine earth-mother of Asia Minor. Admitted to
Roman cult in 204 B.C. and an extraordinary poem of
later celebrated in
Catullus, the worship of Cybele, accompanied by stirring ritual dramas,
raised hopes of immortality to a fever heat of excitement, as the resurrection
of her youthful consort Attis, god of all that annually grows and dies, was
enacted amid scenes of resplendent pageantry.
Innumerable people throughout the Roman Empire believed passionately
in Cybele. But even more, like Apuleius, beheved in the Egyptian Isis.
Accompanying her in the liturgical drama was the god of the underworld,
Osiris, who stood like Attis for the birth and death of the year; and the
annual Finding of Osiris was the occasion for unrestrained jubilation and
excitement. As the worship of Isis turned into a cosmopolitan Mystery
religion, her major festivals provided ceremonies equaling or even exceeding
those of Cybele in their theatrical, emotional appeals to ear and eye. Her
penitents roamed the streets of the cities intoning hymns, or competed with
one another in acts of piety and self-mortification, or contemplated the
magnificent images of the goddess and meditated upon her countenance. All
barriers of caste and race were thrown down and distinctions of sex as well,
for among these worshippers were great numbers of women. To them the
worship of Isis, like many of the successful beliefs of the world, made a
—
and specific and powerful appeal this Goddess of Ten Thousand
direct
Names was their own glory and gave them equal power with men.
From the first century B.C., when senators' suspicions of Egyptian ideas
failed to keep the cult of Isis out of Rome, right on until the final decline
of paganism many hundreds of years later, her faith remained the most
widespread of all the religions of the Roman empire, the only Savior cult
that had a real chance of becoming universal.
 16
The Jews, Jesus, and Paul

The Jews
^he religion, however, that in the end turned out to defeat all the
others originated not in Egypt or Asia Minor, the homeland of the
cults of Isis and Cybele, but in that other historic center of religious
movements, Palestine.
Nearly a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, this little country had
controlled a great empire under King David and his son Solomon. After
them, however, it had split into two kingdoms, a northern (Israel) and a
southern state (Judah), which later fell to successive imperial powers, As-
syria (721 B.C.) and Babylonia (597-586 B.C.) respectively. Subsequently the
Persians had taken over the whole territory, and then it came under the
Ptolemaic and Seleucid monarchies in turn. Finally, in the second century
B.C. the Jewish nationalist movement of the Hasmonaeans (Maccabees) had
broken away from the Seleucids and succeeded in reestablishing national
independence.
In total contrast to the Greeks and Romans, the Jews adhered to a strict
monotheism, venerating their ancient holy books with an all-engrossing,
literal-minded reverence that declared that every past and present and
future happening was a fulfillment of divine prophecy. They believed that
their Laws had been handed to Moses on Mount Sinai by God himself, who
"gave him the two tablets of the Tokens, tablets of stone written with the
finger of God." These tablets, forming a Covenant that was the supreme
cornerstone of the Jewish conception of history, were held to have been
inscribed with the first five books of the scriptures, the Torah (Pentateuch
in Greek), which is often translated "Law" but originally meant instruction

by divine revelation. Next in importance to the Torah, in what Christians

later named the Old Testament, came the prophets. These glorious figures
were credited with deeds and utterances inspired by the Torah and forecast
and prefigured by what had been said in it. The Psalms, too, traditionally

334
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / 335

^vv^tl

Bronze coin of Augustus (posthumous) at Nicopolis in Epirus (Sebastou Ktisma,

i.e., his foundation to celebrate Actium) with figure of Isis described as

Myrionymos, Lady of Ten Thousand Names.

though erroneously attributed to King David, were invested with similar

authority.
And then in the second century B.C., under the Hasmonaean dynasty,
arose the most determined, serious, and progressive element in the Jew-
ish spiritual leadership of the day, the Pharisees or "Separated." They
opposed the Hasmonaean monarchs because the latter, in their view,
were wrong to combine kingship with the antique high priesthood in
their own persons. Yet the Pharisees were not political activists but fa-
vored submission to the divine will even meant endurance of
if this

worldly oppression. Although they held that individuals would eventu-

ally rise bodily from the dead, they discounted the possibility, which
some other Jews were now envisaging, of a violent, simultaneous, uni-
versal resurrection that would bring all life on earth to an apocalyptic
end. Nor were the Pharisaic thinkers fundamentalist or fanatical, but on
the contrary, while duly stressing the applicability of the Law to all
human problems and insisting as much as anybody on the distinctively
religious character of Jewish life, they were also eager to adapt their
faith to modern needs, for example, by accepting oral interpretations as
an integral part of the written canon.
Though the Pharisees' movement remained lay and unofficial, it served
as a focus for national Jewish hopes and aspirations. And, in poverty-
stricken Palestine, the leading members of the movement, though they
themselves mostly were of middle-class origin, often championed the cause
of ordinary people and the oppressed; though other Pharisees displayed a
tendency to puritanical formalism that earned them charges of compla-
cency. Their strength lay in the synagogues, which existed in every Jewish
town. At these focal points of spiritual Hfe, the popular reHgious universities
33^/ THE IMPERIAL PEACE
of the day, the Torah was carefully studied and expounded, and fervent
prayers were offered for the revival of the nation.
The Pharisees' agents and assistants were the doctors of the Law or
"scribes" (Sopherim). Qualified jurists with pupils, it was they who decided
what details of conduct were required to give practical effect to the Torah.
Unpaid laymen, and not men of wealth, they gradually became the coun-
try's most influential section, in place of the old landed aristocracy. But that

aristocracy, too, was still strong. It consisted mainly of a group known as

the Sadducees; they followed an unspiritual policy directed towards the
survival of the established order and the avoidance of rebellion; and it was
they who controlled the ancient, revered Temple at Jerusalem, which after
desecration by the Seleucid occupying power had been rededicated by the
Hasmonaeans. Moreover, it was from the Sadducee ranks that the high
priest was periodically appointed and the hereditary priests under him who
organized the Temple's manifold activities.

In the century
first Hasmonaeans were maintained on the throne
B.C. the
by Pompey as his clients; but later they succumbed to Antony, who replaced
them by a monarch from Idumaea in the south of the country, a man
bearing the name of Herod (37 B.C.). As a protege of Antony and thereafter
for a quarter of a century a dependent of Augustus, Herod expanded Judaea
and made it one of the most prosperous of Rome's client kingdoms. To
distinguish him from later Herods, he became known as the Elder or the
Great. He was a deeply suspicious man and struck down a number of
individuals, including his closest relatives, for fear of possible sedition. Yet
under his rule the rest of his subjects were able to flourish —including the
greatest of all Pharisee thinkers, Hillel and Shammai.

Jesus

Herod died in 4 B.C., and Jesus had probably been born slightly earlier;
the date a.d.i to which his birth came to be attributed was based on a
miscalculation by a sixth-century monk.
Almost all our information about Jesus is contained in the four Gospels
(to which the other, noncanonical. Gospels do not add very much). Their
writers are known as the evangelists, from the Greek word euangelion,
"Good News"; and they were identified from the earliest times as his
apostles Matthew and John, and Saint Paul's companions, Mark and Luke.
Yet these, despite recent efforts to argue to the contrary, can scarcely have
been the real authors of these writings. Who those authors were cannot now
be determined. Nor do we know where the Gospels were written, or when;
probably they reached their form between thirty-five and sixty years
final

after Jesus's death. But the main difficulty these works present, from the
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / 337

historian's point of view, arises from their intention to edify, to spread behef
in the divinity of Jesus; that is to say, they were not designed primarily as
historical evidence. In attempting, therefore, to extract historical informa-
tion from what they record, a distinction must be made between those
passages that bear the stamp of the early Christian church and those that
seem to go back to Jesus himself. And, contrary to pessimistic estimates,
the main lines of his career and thinking and teaching can to some consider-
able extent be reconstructed.
When Jesus was still a boy, the core of Palestine was directly annexed
by the Romans as the province of Judaea (a.d. 6), governed not by a senator
but by a knight, who was known as its prefect. Under his
in this territory
general supervision Rome allowed the Jews a measure of internal self-
government under a Council (Sanhedrin) directed by the high priest. Ad-
joining this Judaean province, to its north and east respectively, were the

BRITAIN
 a

Jj8 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
territories of Galilee and Peraea. These continued to form the princedom
of one of Herod the Great's sons, Herod Antipas (4 B.C.-A.D.39), who ruled,
as his father had ruled before him, by the grace of Rome.
On the desert fringes of Judaea and Peraea, in about A. D. 28-29, a mysteri-
ous Jewish preacher, John the Baptist, attracted widespread attention by
proclaiming to his coreligionists (not to Gentiles) the imminence of the
Kingdom, or rather "kingship," of God. This was not a new idea; despite
the scepticism of Pharisees, many Jews had long believed that their earthly
miseries would one day end when the divine rule would be achieved upon
earth and the Lord would usher in universal perfection. They had also
emphasized the need for repentance, and so did John, stressing that it must
be a total change of heart. When this came to pass, he declared, the sins
of Jewish men and women would be forgiven. And he set a seal on the
process by performing baptisms in the River Jordan —
a new development
of the periodical ritual ablutions familiar in ancient Palestine, converted by
the Baptist into a once-and-for-all event that radically and permanently
transfigured the spiritual nature of its recipients.
One of those who received John's baptism was Jesus —an unquestionably
historical happening since the early church would have dearly liked to omit
it (seeing that Jesus was supposedly sinless) but could not because of its
authenticity. He had probably been born not at Bethlehem in Judaea —
fiction inserted to fulfill an old Testament prophecy —but at Nazareth (or
possibly some other small place) in the northern land of Galilee. This was
a country of fairly recent conversion to Judaism that produced numerous
devout sages, though was looked down on by Jerusalem as bucolic in its
it

way of life and incorrect in matters of religion. Jesus's mother was Mary,
who was married to Joseph.
Soon after John had baptized Jesus, Herod Antipas placed him under
arrest as a potential revolutionary, for sedition was rife, especially in these
border areas. Thereupon Jesus returned to Galilee and began his mission.
It contained, at least initially, the same ingredients as the Baptist's, but with
one remarkable amendment. Jesus, while continuing to proclaim the King-
dom of God, no longer preached, like the Baptist and other Jews before him,
that this was imminent, but that it had already begun to arrive by his own —
agency, on the direct order of God. This conviction was the key to Jesus's
entire career. It dominated all his thoughts and actions and every item of
his ethical and social teaching. For example, his many parables brilliant —
narratives of imaginary happenings in daily life, endowed with an underly-
ing spiritual significance —
derived from and depended upon this single-
minded idea.
—
The same is true of his alleged miracles. These healings or exorcisms
on the one hand and conquests of nature (such as walking upon water) on
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / JJp

the other — were "signs" in the traditional Jewish sense that they not only
prefigured salvation but also at the same time actually helped to bring about
what they prefigured. And in certain passages of the Gospels it is implied
not so much that these miracles "actually happened" as that their primary
significance was symbolic; they were descriptive gestures or enacted para-
bles, once again relating to the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. His

healings in particular (some of which must surely have been authentic) were
directlyand explicitly linked by Jesus to the forgiveness of sins conferred —
—
by himself and the product of repentance that was the accompaniment of
this dawning Kingdom.
The Jews, however, regarded the forgiveness of sins as belonging to the
One God alone. What they had thought when the Baptist proclaimed this
doctrine in connection with his own baptisms is scarcely known. But when
Jesus proclaimed it, once again, as his own personal prerogative, they were
shocked because he seemed to be usurping the divine authority and thus
infringing upon their cherished monotheism.
Yet Jesus continued to admit that the completion, the full realization, of
the Kingdom of God upon earth had not yet taken place; like many other
Jewish thinkers he believed that would take place almost immediately.
it

His entire program of teachings and preachings was based on these two
assumptions: the familiar belief that the Kingdom would be brought into
full and final effect on the earth almost at once, and the more startling

conviction that he himself, by God's will, was beginning to bring it into

effect already, there and then. This second assertion placed everything in

a new light. Repentance now meant not only a complete change of heart
but a change of heart that specifically accepted Jesus's message about
himself.
Later on, the evangelists, and especially Luke, laid special stress on
Jesus's compassion. And no doubt he had a deeply compassionate charac-
ter. But the actions and gestures reveahng this quality were, once more,
motivated by his total concentration on the Kingdom of God as a haven
into which every Jew had the possibihty of entering. As for Gentiles, the
Kingdom of God was not a concept that would have had any meaning for
them, and it does not appear from the Gospels that Jesus, any more than
the Baptist, directed his preaching towards them at all, apart from a few
isolated individuals who happened to come his way. But owing to his belief
that all Jews, indiscriminately, could be admitted to this Kingdom, he paid
particular attention to the Jewish poor because they were "poor in spirit";
that is to say, lacking material strengths of their own, they depended on
God's help and were therefore especially accessible to his invitation to enroll
in the Kingdom. Sinners, too, received a welcome from him because they
too, once they repented, would obtain admission —
all the more readily since
S40 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
they lacked the complacency of the consciously virtuous. And forgive your
enemy, he amazingly said, and turn the other cheek, because what can
possibly be the point of petty worldly enmities in the face of this great,
overriding opportunity for all Jews to enroll in the Kingdom together? He
said the words, "Suffer little children to come unto me," not for any
compassionate or sentimental reason, but because their simple, unspoiled
directness provided just the approach needed for the ready acceptance of
Jesus's message. And he welcomed women around him, too, because it was
absurd to suppose that the Kingdom was open only to one of the two sexes.
In this respect he differed from the Jewish teachers of the time, the scribes,
who were not surrounded by women in this way. Nor did the scribes go
outside the synagogues in each town, as he did, in order to preach to a much
wider Jewish public.
As a teacher, Jesus was brilliant but unorthodox. He was also, like John
the Baptist before him, seen by many of his listeners as heir to the ancient,
extinct succession of prophets. And some hailed him as the Messiah or
anointed one (Greek Christos). This was, according to Jewish tradition, the
personage who would eventually come and who,
to rescue oppressed Israel,
according to more recent theories, would receive the aid of superhuman
hosts in performing this task. To harmonise with this warlike view of his
function as the liberator of Israel, he was credited with descent (variously
described) from the royal house of David. And Jesus was also ascribed a
mysterious and variously applied designation, "The Man" or Son of Man.
At certain times in the past, in keeping with a Jewish tendency towards
corporate and communal concepts, this term had been used to denote all
Israel, or the remnant of Israel that would be saved, though it may latterly

have acquired a more specific reference to a future single individual who

would perform this salvation. Some also regarded Jesus as Son of God. All
Israelites were Sons of God, though the term had tended to be
in a sense
applied to great secular and spiritual leaders. But Jesus, whose mother was
Mary the wife of Joseph, was believed to have no father but God himself.
But how, in the light of these contemporary ways of thinking, did Jesus
see himself? This has been greatly disputed. But it seems probable that he
felt that none of these designations —
except perhaps the suitably ambiguous
—
"Son of Man" sufficed to describe his mission, which he believed to be
unique. In holding this belief, he followed other Galilean sages before him
who had likewise claimed an exceptional, personal intimacy with God. And
so did the devotees of Qumran, a semimonastic settlement near the Dead
Sea, whose scrolls, discovered in nearby caves during the past thirty years,
have thrown much light on the contemporary, varied Jewish scene: they
reveal, for example, the veneration of a Teacher of Righteousness, who had
once lived on the earth and would, it was believed, come to live on it again.
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / ^41

We have no evidence that Jesus saw himself in just this Ught, but, Hke the
Teacher of Righteousness whom the dedicated inmates of Qumran revered,
he beheved that he enjoyed an ahogether pecuhar relationship with God.
This, like his claim to forgive sins, brought him into collision with the
most active Jewish religious group, the Pharisees, and with their associates
the scribes. In the face of this opposition, his mission in Galilee, in which
he was assisted by his twelve principal disciples (apostles), ended in failure
— as he himself openly admitted. And as his support dwindled, the local
prince, Herod Antipas, saw a chance to get rid of this preacher, who was
not only inconvenient, but also potentially subversive because his insistence
on the dawning actuality of direct rule by God himself implied a disloyal
attitude to earthly monarchies. Antipas, had executed the
by this time,
Baptist. And at this juncture, now was manifestly
that Jesus's mission
unsuccessful, it was probably Antipas once again who compelled him to
leave Galilee.
At all events that is what Jesus did; and in about a.d. 30, or perhaps 33,
he proceeded by gradual stages to Jerusalem. He was making his way
deliberately to the center of the Jewish establishment. Yet he knew these
leaders would not accept him; and he must, therefore, have foreseen his
death —a prospect he seems (though this is not universally agreed) to have
clothed in the thoughts of the Suffering Servant eloquently depicted by the
prophet Isaiah, while likewise recalling the stories of the martyrs who at
different times had died for Israel. Jesus, like other Jews, believed many of
his experiences fulfilled the predictions and prefigurations of the Torah,
prophets, and psalms, and purposefully directed every action to this end;
thus his entry into Jerusalem was carefully arranged, in keeping with a
prophetic text, to show that his kingship was not of this world. And next,
once again in deliberate fulfillment of a scriptural passage, he directly
challenged the most politically powerful Jewish group, the Sadducees, by
entering their domain, the precincts of the Temple, and driving out the
traders who did their business there.
In consequence, with the connivance of one of his twelve apostles, Judas
— who was probably,
Iscariot disappointed by Jesus's
like others, of refusal
an earthly — the Sadducees placed him under
role He was charged arrest.
with threatening to destroy the Temple (an unlikely accusation) and was
also accused of claiming to be the Messiah and Son of God and King of the
Jews — which he gave no clear answer, since neither an affirmative nor
to
a negative reply would have offered an adequate explanation to such an
unsympathetic audience. He was then handed over to the provincial prefect
Pilate (Pontius Pilatus). Pilate was reluctant to judge the case since he had
experienced great trouble with Jewish disputes on earlier occasions. But
finally he agreed to give judgment and convicted Jesus of sedition against
^42 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
the Roman imperial throne on the grounds that he refused to deny that he
was King of the Jews. And so Pilate gave orders for his crucifixion.
Three days after Jesus's death on the cross, his followers believed that
they saw him resurrected upon the earth and that he then ascended to
heaven. And thus had begun the process by which the failure of his lifetime
—
was converted into triumph after his death one of the few revolutions in
the world's history that has lasted.

Paul
But Jesus's posthumous triumph took a long time to become manifest.
That it took place at all was due to the extraordinary accident, or act of
providence, that made a man of towering gifts into one of the disciples of
the crucified Jesus. He was Jew of quite different origins from his
Paul, a
new master, for whereas Jesus came from Galilee, an appendage of the
homeland, Paul belonged to the Dispersion (Diaspora), comprising the
communities of Jews in countries other than Palestine. The first Dispersion
had taken place in the early sixth century B.C. after Jerusalem and its
Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians, who took many thousands
of Jews away into foreign captivity. Some, later, were repatriated by the
Persians who succeeded to the Babylonian Empire, but the Dispersion
continued to increase in numbers, particularly when the Ptolemies intro-
duced many Jews into their new city of Alexandria and then again when
the Seleucids, who took their place as rulers of Palestine, settled many
families in Asia Minor and subsequently drove many more out of Judaea
by persecution. By the time of Paul, the Jews of the Dispersion were to be
numbered in millions, comprising a sizable minority in many or most of the
principal cities of the eastern Roman provinces.
Paul himself came from the self-governing Greek city of Tarsus in Cilicia
(southeastern Asia Minor). He claimed descent from the Jewish tribe of
Benjamin and belonged to a family of strict Pharisees. It seems probable
that he spent his youth at his native town, learning his father's craft of
weaving goat's hair into tents, carpets, and shoes. Tarsus was a center of
advanced Hellenic culture, so that Paul was familiar with Greek and wrote
in that language. The Jews in Greek cities like Tarsus were accorded a

quasi-autonomous community status by the Roman authorities. But Paul's

family enjoyed a more unusual They were among that
distinction as well.
section of the local population, never numerous in such towns, that had
been granted Roman citizenship. Perhaps it was Paul's father who had
acquired this franchise, either as a reward for services to Rome or because
he had been a slave and was subsequently freed. At all events, although he
gave his son the Jewish name of Saul, this was replaced, on occasion, by
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / S43

a Latin equivalent, Paulus —probably chosen because of its resemblance to

his original name. Thus the young man possessed the remarkable triple
qualification of belonging to the Jewish, Greek, and Roman civilizations all
at the same time; no one else in ancient history spans, as he does, all those
three different worlds.
But above all, he was a Jew, and a very active one; indeed he may well
have been a member of an ultrapious group active in the Dispersion. At all
events, soon after the crucifixion, he began to object strongly to Jesus's
disciples and the Messianic claims they were putting forward on his behalf.
In accordance with the coercive powers that the Romans delegated to their
Councils at Jerusalem and elsewhere, the Jewish authorities were pursuing
fierce sanctions against these dissidents. And in enforcing these sanctions,
Paul tells us that he, himself, played an active part; perhaps he received his
instructions from the local Council at Tarsus or Antioch and set out from
one of these cities on his punitive missions.
In any case it was on one such disciplinary journey, perhaps in about
A.D.36, that he made for Damascus, an important "free" city of Syria that
contained a Jewish community of considerable size. It was the devotees of
Jesus among their number whom Paul had been commissioned by his
—
Jewish chiefs to bring to order. But instead he later declared while he —
was on his way to Damascus, a mighty light flashed upon him and blinded
him and felled him to the ground; and at the same time he heard a voice.
Psychologists describe such experiences under the name of photism, a
sensation of light or color accompanying some other species of sensation
and especially a sound. The sound Paul believed that he heard was the voice
of Jesus ordering him to enter Damascus where he would learn of a new
task to perform. When he recovered, therefore, from his blindness, he went
on into the city, where Jewish converts to Jesus's doctrines told him to go
and preach to the Jews the glorious message (Gospel) that Jesus himself had
been preaching to them a short while ago. And he gladly accepted this
message since his experience outside the gates of Damascus had utterly
changed his attitude to the followers of Jesus, so that, instead of being their
remorseless persecutor, he now believed, no less fanatically, that they were
right after all.

For what followed we have a remarkable source, the letters of Paul

himself, written in Greek. The earliest of these documents perhaps dates
back to about A.D.50, only twenty years at most after the crucifixion of
Jesus; so it antedates the first of the Gospels by at least sixteen and probably
twenty years and constitutes by far the earliest Christian literature. Paul's
vigorous, violent personality emerges from these epistles with stunning
force; he was a strange addition indeed to the humble and uneducated
adherents of the infant church. Despite his powerful intellect, he often
^44 / THEIMPERIALPEACE
wrote paradoxically and ambiguously —
were dashed off to meet
his letters

the current needs of the moment, so that even the one with the greatest
claims to a measure of comprehensiveness, the Epistle to the Romans, was
not by any means intended as a systematic corpus of his views.
Furthermore, the letters were not primarily written with historical aims
in mind. And yet they convey a great deal of invaluable information. Facts
can also be derived from the Acts of the Apostles. But this work, from the
historian's point of view, is considerably less reliable. It was written much
later,under a strong shadow cast by the events of the intervening period,
and the first half of its contents consists largely of miracles of which the
historian can take no cognizance. Nevertheless, the rest of the book contains
a good deal of by no means unreliable historical material.
The letters and the Acts, therefore, taken together, make it possible to
give a fairly accurate idea of Paul's career and teaching. It becomes clear
that, during the period immediately subsequent to his conversion, the em-
bryonic Jewish movement that had accepted the Messiahship of Jesus was
still based upon Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish faith and the place

where Jesus had died. At first it was Peter, Jesus's close personal associate,
who headed this Jewish Christian community and the fairly extensive mis-
sionary movement that it began to direct towards its fellow Jews in Judaea
and neighboring lands. due course James the Just, the brother of
But in
Jesus, took Peter's place. After Paul had been converted, there was, for a
time, no split between himself and this group, and he worked as its mission-
ary to its fellow Jews, first in Arabia (southern Jordan) and later for ten
years in Syria and Cilicia.
Then in about 45, with his friend Barnabas, he set out on the first of those
far more widespread journeys of his, which so notably exploited the im-
proved communications of the Pax Romana for the benefit of Christianity.
This first great journey, lasting several years, took him not only to Syria but
also to Cyprus and Asia Minor as well. The intention of Paul and Barnabas
was to speak in synagogues to their fellow Jews. Yet matters did not turn
out that way. For one thing the Jews were against Paul, since they objected
towhat they regarded as his deification of Jesus and the rejection of mono-
theism that this seemed to imply; and they carried their hatred of his
teaching even to the lengths of physical violence. Furthermore, a strong
disagreement arose between Paul and his own Jewish Christian mother
church —a disagreement that before long caused the division of the Chris-
tian community two
into separate parts —one Jewish, and the
virtually
other consisting of Gentiles, to whom Paul, rejected by the Jews, increas-
ingly addressed his teaching. In particular, the Gentiles who accepted the
new faith proved unwilling to undergo circumcision and the dietary restric-

tions required of Jews; and whereas Paul saw no possibility of enforcing

 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / J^J

such practices upon them, the Jewish Christians deplored this permissive

attitude. Nevertheless, he set out with a series of different companions on

two further huge journeys during which he addressed himself once again
ever increasingly to the Gentiles, who did not make such injurious objec-
tions. These travels covered a period of about eight years, including one and
a half years spent at Corinth, in Greece, and three at Ephesus (Selguk) on
the west coast of Asia Minor.
On returning to Jerusalem in about A.D.58, Paul was subjected to accusa-
tions of blasphemy by the angry Jews, and the Roman authorities arrested
him life. While still detaining him at their provincial capital
to save his
Caesarea Maritima (Sdot Yam), two successive Roman governors deferred
a decision on these charges, anxious to evade the obscure but inflammable
questions at issue. However, when Paul, as a Roman citizen, requested that
his case should be transferred to the court of the emperor Nero at Rome,
his appeal was granted; and after an eventful journey, including shipwreck
at Melita (Malta), he spent two years in the city, first under informal house
arrest and then in prison. Finally, following a trial or trials, instigated this
time not by the Jews but apparently by his other enemies the Jewish Chris-
tians, he was condemned to death and executed, either in 64 when the

Christian community at Rome was persecuted as scapegoats for the city's

Great Fire, which had destroyed the city, or possibly a year or two later.
There was something wrong with Paul, what he called his "thorn in the
flesh" — either a physical ailment or more probably a sexual problem, since
although, like Jesus, he adopted the un-Jewish practice of enlisting women
to help him in his ministry, he wrote somewhat sourly about sex. But the
characteristic of Paul that most greatly struck the imagination of those who
came after him was his fabulous perseverance and endurance. Wherever he
went, he urgently argued, remonstrated, appealed in support of the new sort
of Judaism that he believed to have been made necessary and inevitable by
Jesus's crucifixion. Oscillating strangely between modesty and self-confi-
dence, he was unimpressive in presence and manner; but he hectoringly
repeated over and over again his demands for utter obedience.
It was obedience to a novel cause. The reason why Paul became converted
was that he found he could no longer accept the normal Jewish view that
the Torah was the answer to all the problems of life. Criticizing this whole
—
code far more sharply than Jesus who had merely stated that he came not
to destroy the Law but to complete it —
Paul denounced its provisions as
over burdened with legalism and unrealistic in its demands for perfection.
Like other Jews, Paul held that the Fall of Adam had plunged the whole
world into evil ways. But unlike them, as he looked around at its ills and
above all at the miseries of the Jewish people in their homeland, he felt that
the Torah had, for centuries, failed to end these tribulations and was still
346 / THE IMPERIAL PEACE

failing to end them now; so it could not possibly be the answer he was
looking for.

That being so, mere oral explications to its doctrines, such as the Phari-
sees were prepared to offer, did not seem enough; instead, a total change
was needed, something that would turn the whole of this abominable his-
tory into complete and abrupt reverse. And in his desperate perplexity,
although he had never known Jesus himself, Paul seized on the astonishing,
moving tales of his Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension and de-
cided that these reported events possessed exactly the saving power of
reversal that he was looking for. That was not, obviously, the same as Jesus
had preached, since when Jesus was preaching these events had not yet
happened. Moreover, in strange contrast to the later Gospels, Paul is almost
totally uninterested in any and every supposed occurrence in Jesus's life
before the Last Supper. It was his death only, and what followed after his
death, that Paul declared to be redemptive (by God's Grace, besides which
he held all human initiatives to be negligible). He was very well aware that
Jews and Greeks alike would find it singularly hard to understand that these
happenings have anything to do with us. Yet that is what he believed, and
what he devoted his life and eloquence to explaining to the outside world.
In comparison with the central, overwhelming significance of the redemp-
 THE JEWS, JESUS, AND PAUL / J^/

tive power of Jesus's death and what followed it, the whole Jewish code, in
fact all knowledge in any ordinary sense of the word, seemed to him useless

and pointless.
Yet many Jews and Jewish Christians alike considered that this rejection
of the Law was nothing better than an open invitation to license, and they
therefore refused to join him in throwing the Torah overboard. In conse-
quence, both communities turned against him; and his career seemed to
have ended in total failure. His churches for Gentile converts did not
prosper, or even in many cases continue to exist. Instead, such Christian
communities as survived in the Dispersion preferred to follow the Jewish
Christian church, based on the very code he had spurned. His reputation
at the time of his death was at its lowest ebb.
But then the course of events was remarkably changed by the First Jewish
Revolt (a. D. 66-73). The province of Judaea had never been a credit to
Rome. Elsewhere in the empire, Roman government, if sometimes un-
imaginative, had generally been relatively successful, or at least peaceable.
In Judaea, on the other hand, successive provincial governors, men lacking
senatorial rank and supported only by a small garrison of non-Jewish
auxiliaries, had been obliged to grapple with an almost continuous and
ever-worsening series of internal crises, embittered by mutual incomprehen-
sion of each other's religious attitudes. As a result, an underground terrorist
movement developed, or rather several distinct movements; and finally the
imprudent actions of one of the governors triggered off open revolt. With
all the resources of the Roman Empire against them, the rebels had no

chance of success. Besides, they chose the worst possible moment for them-
selves, when Rome had just made a durable peace with its eastern enemy
Parthia. For a time, it is true, the Jewish insurgents were given a lucky
reprieve by the prolonged Roman civil wars after Nero's death. But the end
was bound to come, and the obliteration of Jerusalem and its Temple by
Vespasian's son Titus in 70 marked the end of the nation's Hfe in Israel for
more than two thousand years.
When the Jews, because of this rebelHon, fell into total disgrace with the
Roman occupying power, the Christians in their midst urgently needed to
convince the Romans that they themselves lackedany taint of Judaism. But
in this respect the split in their ranks proved damaging. The Jewish Chris-
tians, despite all their efforts to prevent this, became discredited in Roman
eyes along with the Jews; and so they dwindled gradually into a scattering
of insignificant sects, which failed to survive into the modern world. The
Gentile Christians, on the other hand, escaped this Roman stigma and lived
on to become the dominant force and theme of the Christianity of the
future. Within the firsttwo decades following the revolt, it was they who
produced all four Gospels: books that preach a sharp dissociation from the
^4^ / THEIMPERIALPEACE
Jews and present the Jewish Christians, too, as exemphfied by Jesus's apos-
tles, in a very unfavourable light.
And so, because of this strange reversal of circumstances, Paul's Gentile
mission had prevailed after all. True, much of his own teaching still seemed
too daring and provocative, and the Acts of the Apostles which deals with
his career says remarkably little, indeed virtually nothing, about the content
of his message. Yet because his ministry had been directed to the Gentiles
he had to be rehabilitated. The Acts, therefore, chooses to praise him, not
for his embarrassing views, but on the safer grounds that he was an indefati-
gable missionary; and "the greatest example of endurance" was what he
remained.
Moreover, later on, at a time when to talk of Jesus Christ and simultane-
ously practice Judaism had been declared wholly impossible, feelings moved
still further in Paul's favor. Indeed, there was an attempt by Marcion, in
the second century A.D., to raise him to a startling, overriding eminence.
But this proved unacceptable, and it was the cautious, sober interpretation
of his career that prevailed; he could be praised as an intrepid missionary,
but his awkward radical thoughtsmust be damped down. Yet often, in later
years, the reverberations of the true Paul have been heard through this
deliberate softening and muffling, and they have sometimes been explosively
loud. By extending Christianity to the Gentiles, it was he who had made
it into a world religion. And since then he has been the greatest single source

of all its successive spiritual revivals. Whenever the faith has been in danger
of flagging, the memory of the man who first spread it far and wide has been
revived time after time to give it new life.
 THE JEWS, JESUS AND PAUL / 349

The Redeemer on the Throne. Mosaic from BasiHca di S. Apolhnare Nuovo,

Ravenna. Sixth Century A.D.
'A ^^A
Preceding page:
Relief of Beheading of German prisoners on Column of Marcus Aurelius, ca.
A.D. 180-93.
 17
Collapse and Recovery

Marcus Aurelius and His Son

hen Antoninus Pius died in i6i, he bequeathed the empire
to Marcus Aurehus, his adopted son and the husband of his
daughter. But Marcus Aurehus promptly appointed a co-
emperor, Verus, who had hkewise been an adoptive son of Antoninus but
had not hitherto enjoyed the same degree of preferment. This regime of an
imperial pair, which lasted until Verus's death in 169, was an important
innovation that would be seen again during the centuries to come. However,
the two emperors were unequal in stature. Marcus Aurelius, whose inmost
thoughts have come down to us in his Meditations, was both phenomenally
hard-working and a man of the highest ideals. Verus, on the other hand,
though attractive, was a lightweight. Nevertheless, when a crisis arose in
the East because of Parthian encroachments on Armenia, it was he who was
sent to deal with the situation, and in 163-66 his generals reoccupied Ar-
menia and annexed Mesopotamia.
But at about the time when these campaigns were coming to an end, an
event in another part of the imperial frontier lands heralded the permanent
transformation of the world scene. German and other tribesmen, "barbari-
ans" as the Romans called them, began to pour across the upper and middle
and lower reaches of the Danube in a wide series of formidable, collusive
thrusts. In the preceding years, during a long period of relative stability,
many of the Germans had outgrown their relatively simple agricultural
techniques and became determined, if they could, to abandon their marshy
forest clearings for the richer territories that lay within the Roman borders.
The fighting that now resulted was more serious than anything of the kind
that had been seen before, and it continued to engage the personal attention
of Marcus Aurelius for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Breaking
through into the provinces of central and eastern Europe, the land-hungry
Germans even crossed the Alps into Italy itself, where they destroyed cities

353
354 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

and laid siege to the Adriatic port of Aquileia. Almost simultaneously,

another German tribe penetrated most of the Balkan peninsula^ plundering
Eleusis very close to Athens.
""
The Roman armies, though incapacitated by an epidemic brought back
from the East —perhaps the novel scourge of smallpox —gradually and
painfully regained control of the military situation. It faced Marc us
Aurelius with a financial emergency of almost desperate dimensions. Yet,
while pressing ahead with border defense, he also formed Iwp further ideas
for dealing with this unprecedented German pressure. One was to admit
large numbers of tribesmen into the empire as settlers and potential auxil-
iary soldiers. This had been done before, for example by Augustus and
Nero; and Marcus Aurelius now adopted the policy on a much more
systematic scale. In various parts of Italy and the northern frontier prov-
inces, these German settlers were assigned to Roman proprietors or the
leaseholders of imperial domains and legally tied to their new plots of land.
The emperors who organized such arrangements have often been accused
of barbarizing the provinces. But these settlements can also be regarded as
a counterblast to racial prejudices, though not a sufficiently decisive one;
and at least they supplied the Roman \yorld with cultivators and^soldiefs..
whose services it needed.
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 355

Marcus Aurelius's second solution involved the annexation of Mar-

comannia (Bohemia) and a further province of Sarmatia to its east, provid-
ing the empire with frontier defenses that were shorter in length and de-
pended on mountains instead of the Danube. But like Augustus before him,
who had first formed this intention of annexing Bohemia, Marcus Aurelius
never succeeded in carrying out his plan. It was put off, first because of a
serious rebellion by his principal eastern general (175), and then because he
himself died. After his death, the proposed annexations were abandoned.
It is would have been a success, for the easier frontier
unlikely that they
would scarcely have compensated for the difficulty and expense of recruit-
ing enough troops to garrison such huge and warlike territories. Probably
the empire had already expanded to the farthest limits that were practically
possible.
Because Marcus Aurelius had a son of his own, Commodus, he elevated
him abandoning the principle of adoption from outside
to be his heir, thus
the family that had been pursued by his four immediate predecessors. Since,
however, Commodus's excessive addiction to emotional religions and
gladiatorial sports made him one of the most eccentric of Rome's emperors,
his father has been blamed for this reversion to the hereditary doctrine. Yet,
unlike the four rulers before him, Marx^us Aurelius could not have found
a generally acceptable candidate outside his own house, so that any adop-
tion would have provoked rival candidatures and civil wars. And they at
least were avoided since, when he died, the transition to Commodus's rule
was managed peacefully.
Thereafter, however, the first batch of authentic or rumored conspiracies
against the new emperor came almost at once. They made him extremely
hostile towards the Senate. But since, while eagerly developing his own
personality cult, he showed no desire to govern the empire himself, the
effectivepower remained in the hands of successive praetorian prefects.
Finally one of them, Laetus, the first north African to hold this post, became

Brass sestertius of the young Commodus distributing largess, a.d. 172-73.

356 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Bust of African. Later second century a.d.

convinced that Commodus's growing megalomania and antisenatorial feel-

ing had become too hazardous and decided that he must die, and gom mis-
sioned a professional athlete to murder him.

The Dynasty of Severus

The was elevated to the throne, but when his marti-
city prefect Pertinax
net xliscipline and meanness quickly angered the guardsmen, Lae-
financial
tus withdrew his support and allowed him to be killed after a three-month
reign. The situation recalled what had happened after the termination of
Rome's first imperial dynasty, when Galba had likewise acquired a reputa-
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 357

tion for stringency and failed to establish himself. And from now on the
analogy developed further, during the long period of civil war that ensued.
The chaotic events of these months served to emphasize, once again, the
insuperable flaw in the arrangements governing Rome's imperial succes-
sions, a flaw that was to become increasingly disastrous in the years to come.
The successor to Pertinax, a rich senator Didius Julianus, set an unedify-
ing precedent by purchasing the throne at an auction held by the praetori-
ans; soon afterwards, however, he terminated the emperor-making career
of their prefect, Laetus, by putting him to death. But from the provinces
news came, almost immediately, that two governors had been declared
emperor by They were Severus, a forty-eight-year-old north
their legions.
African, proclaimed atCarnuntum (Petronell) on the Danube in Upper
Pannonia, and Niger whose troops saluted him in Syria. Obeying a com-
mand from Severus, the Senate put Didius Julianus to death after a reign
of nine weeks. Then Severus marched south and entered Rome. But before
dealing with his eastern rival Niger, he felt it necessary to conciliate the
most influential of the western provincial governors, his fellow African
Albinus in Britain. So he gave Albinus the title of Caesar, which was the
equivalent of pronouncing him heir to the throne, although Severus had two
4 sons of his own, Caracalla and Geta, aged five and four respectively. Then
he set out for the east and overwhelmed Niger at Issus, at the point where
A Asia Minor and Syria meet Encouraged by that success, jie felt strong
(194).
\ enough to declare his own elder son_ Caracalla his heir after al l, thus
Jjrgaking openly with Albinus, whom he defeated and killed in 1Q7 in a fierce.
battle at Xugdunum (Lyon).
Although the civil wars were so reminiscent of the strife of 68-69, ^^ey
had lasted much longer and proved far more damaging to the empire. The
numerous casualties included twenty-nine members of the Senate; and Seve-
rus still remained suspicious of the senators who survived and excluded
them from his administrative posts, which he filled with knights of purely
military training.

Since the Parthians had given aid to his enemy Niger and had made
inroads into Roman territory, it was against them that Severus next turned
(197-99). He captured their winter capital Ctesiphon and reasserted Rome's
claim to Mesopotamia, but he did not attempt to repeat Trajan's short-lived
advance to the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless, Parthia was dealt an unprece-
dentedly severe blow, which proved to have weakened it permanently as —
Rome would later have reason to regret.
On his accession, Severus had replaced the praetorian guard by his own
Danubian soldiers and doubled its size. And same time he had
at the
substantially increased the city police as well. Now, moreover, on returning
35^/ TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Bronze head of Septimius Severus.

from the East, he stationed a new legion just outside the capital, at Albanum
(Albano Laziale). This set a novel precedent, for hitherto no legions at all
had been stationed in Italy by any previous emperor; and Severus's move
has sometimes been interpreted as an African's deliberate indication that
Italian supremacy over the provinces was coming to an end. And this was,
indeed, gradually happening. However Severus's primary motive in station-
ing this unit in Italy was probably not political but military. It was based
on his recognition that the imperial army needed a central reserve capable
—
of being sent wherever it was needed a reserve that Augustus had neg-
lected to provide for.
He had fixed the number of Roman legions at twenty-eight, later reduced
by losses to twenty-five. Trajan had maintained thirty legions, and Severus
now raised this total to thirty-three, including a larger proportion of provin-
cials than hitherto. Severus also increased the native soldiery that had been
employed since the previous century, relying especially on mounted archers
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / S59

from Osrhoene (Mesopotamia) and Palmyra (Syria), who were available for
dispatch around the empire wherever the need arose. Severus elevated the
army to these unprecedented dimensions because he knew that a big and
permanent change had taken place; ever since the frontier crisis of Marcus
Aurelius, imperial defense had become a far graver problem than ever
before.
Besides, another purpose of the enlarged army, in Italy as elsewhere, was
tominimize the ever-present possibility of sedition. And with this purpose
once again in mind, he took a number of steps to make the officers of the
legions a privileged class and them firmly to his own person. In due
tie

course, many former soldiers of his new guard were promoted to officer
status, which in consequence assumed a more democratic appearance. And
the other ranks of the army, too, were considerably better paid and re-
warded than hitherto. This was a development that, as we shall see, caused
lasting hardship to the taxpayers and in the end, throughout many areas of
the Roman world, virtually wiped out the middle class of society. Yet it was
both logical and inevitable if the empire was to face up to its new military
problems.
Three years later, Severus took his new army into action, setting out
with his wife and two sons for Britain, where tribal attacks had caused
the Antonine Wall to be abandoned, and had breached Hadrian's Wall.
The large-scale invasions of Caledonia (Scotland) that he now proceeded
to undertake yielded, as usual in this area, no permanent results, but
Hadrian's Wall was rebuilt and restored as an effective frontier. Soon
afterwards, however, at Eboracum (York), the emperor died (211). He
was reported to have given a last piece of advice to his sons: "Be on
good terms with one another, be generous to the soldiers, and don't
care about anyone else!" Whether that is authentic or not, he had
launched the empire on a new path by giving overall priority to the re-
quirements of a greatly expanded army.
Severus was an extremely purposeful man, determined to exercise rigor-
ous control of all that went on. It is therefore surprising to find that he
became as thoroughly dependent on his praetorian prefect as any ruler
before him; no doubt the personal burden of empire was so enormous that
even the most strong-minded ruler found he needed a confidant. And so the
prefect Plautianus, a fellow townsman of Severus, gained an extraordinary
and almost autocratic authority But as he did so, the emperor's Syrian
(197).
wife Julia Domna, an able woman surrounded by a personal court of
learned scholars and writers, became his enemy. And.Caracalla, too, unhap-
pily married to Plautianus's daughter, came to hate his father-in-law and
in the end brought about his downfall and death (208).
jdo / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus.

Severus left the empire jointly to his two sons. It was a mistaken arrange-
ment since they hated one another; and Caracalla, a temperamental and
violent young man, almost at once had Geta murdered. Then, in 213, he set
out for Germany, where he defeated some of its tribes and bought off others
with a subsidy, winning considerable popularity among his troops. Next he
set off for the East, identifying himself with Alexander the Great whose

conquests he was eager to rival. Although an attack on Armenia failed, he

pushed forward the frontier of Mesopotamia and invaded Media, to its
north. But near Carrhae (Haran) he succumbed to an assassin (217). This
was his Mauretanian praetorian prefect Macrinus, who was alarmed that
Caracalla might be intending to put him to death.
Macrinus's principal claim to fame is that he was the first Roman em-
peror who had not been a member of the Senate, but was only a knight. His
reign was brief and undistinguished. His conclusion of the Parthian w^ on
not very favorable terms, followed by retrenchments in military pay, made
the army look back longingly to the reign of his predecessor; and Severus's
Syrian sister-in-law, Julia Maesa, was able to organize a rebeUion in which
COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 361
j62 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
Macrinus was defeated and lost his life. The new emperor was her fourteen-
known as Elagabalus after El-Gabal, the sun god of th^r
year-old grandson,
home town Emesa (Homs), of whom he was the hereditary priest.
When he and grandmother and mother reached Rome, the young
his
monarch, a promiscuous sexual invert, devoted himself entirely to the
worship of his oriental divinity; and his neglect to adapt its cult to the
religious institutions of Rome deeply alienated the senatorial class. Alarmed
for her own and her family's future, Maesa switched her allegiance to
another of her grandchildren, Severus Alexander, the fourteen-year-old son
of her daughter Julia Mamaea; and the two women, by an opportune bribe,
induced the praetorians to murder Elagabalus and his mother. Maesa died
shortly afterwards, but this unprecedented phase of personal feminine rule
went on, since throughout the reign of her son that was now to follow, it
was Mamaea who ruled the empire. The later tradition that Alexander's
reign witnessed a revival of senatorial influence was largely fictitious.
In its Mamaea's government became preoccupied by simulta-
later years,
neous threats on both major frontiers. In 231 she and her son left Rome for
the East to repel an invasion of Mesopotamia by the Persians (Sassanians),
who had overthrown the Parthian kingdom and replaced it by their own
much superior power.* After heavy losses on both sides, the Romans tem-
Mesopotamian province. But then Alexander and
porarily recovered their
Mamaea had to return to the west to deal with a perilous German menace
on the Rhine. They attempted to buy off the German aggressors, but this
proved unpopular with their own officers and cost them their lives (235).

The Disintegration of the Empire

The officer who emerged from the mutiny as emperor, the giant
Danubian peasant Maximinus I, might have dealt effectively with Rome's
external foes, but the severity with which he treated his own subjects led
to his death_ia-2.38-.J.n that single year, the empire saw the coinage qfjio
fewer than seven Caesars. The survivor among them, Gordianus III, was
a youth of thirteen whose praetorian prefect governed the empire effectively
until the deaths of both of them on an eastern expedition. Then came a
renewal of the series of soldier emperors. Their first batch, however, seemed
unable to measure up to the formidable accumulation of threats within and
outside the imperial borders alike. Philip the Arabian (244-49) sought to
distract attentionby celebrating the thousandth anniversary of Rome. But
Decius (249-51), who came from the same region as Maximinus, overthrew
him and then himself fell to German (Gothic) invaders. His successor

*See below, p. 367.

 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 3^3

Gallus (251-53) had to deal not only with similar onslaughts but also with
an unfamiliar and prolonged pestilence, perhaps bubonic plague. Finally, as
economic disasters proliferated. Valerian (253-60) was captured by the
Persians. His son, co-ruler, and successor Gallienus (253-68) found himself
confronted with internal and external problems of every kind. (

The main whole of this period, was the

internal difficulty, throughout the
proliferation of military usurpers. Between a.d. 218 and 268 about fifty
usurpers assumed the imperial title, either at the capital or in some other
part of the empire; and out of the twenty-seven "regular" emperors of the
third century (insofar as they can be distinguished from usurpers), seven-
teen were killed at the hands of their own people —
all but one of them by

the troops — and two of the others were forced to commit suicide. Therein
lay one of Rome's most grievous and costly problems. The old custom by
which its rulers were appointed by the Senate had become a threadbare
farce. In reality, with a few unimportant exceptions, they were placed on
the throne by one or other of the armies, after which the Senate was
ostensibly asked for its approval — but, in reality, merely received the infor-
mation. Since local recruitment was now prevalent, the armies on many
occasions were stronger in parochial esprit de corps than in patriotism. But
above all their motive for changing emperors was greed; they felt eager for
the lavish gifts that their proteges were always compelled to distribute. In
consequence, the soldiers acclaimed new imperators with ludicrous or
tragic frequency; and the previous incumbent was nearly always killed.

This totally unstable situation at the top created paralysis in the empire's
defenses, not to speak of its finances. There were constant, costly civil wars.
Time after time, a frontier operation against a foreign foe had to be called

Base denarius of Decius (a.d. 249-51)

silver
depicting the two Danubian provinces of Pannonia.
3^4 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

^e'd^^'

Man and two women in Pannonian costume.

From Intercisa (Dunapentele) on the Danube.

off because the monarch of the time was obUged to turn back to face a rival
Roman army. Sometimes the commanders who found themselves, succes-
sively elevated to the throne would have lost their lives to their own^ropps
if they had not consented. But much more often, they were willing; the lure

of the purple was too great —

however briefly it was likely to be worn.
After asserting his claims, a new emperor almost always tried to have a
successor available, to give the illusion of dynastic stability. There were two
traditional ways in which he could attempt this. One way was to bring
forward and promote his own son or another close relation, so that when
he himself died there might be a smooth takeover inside the family. The
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY
armies, in theory, liked a dynastic succession of this kind because it insured
the continuity of their pay, ahhough their attachment to any proposed
dynasty wore off rapidly if the ruler proved parsimonious or ineffective in
thefield. The senators, on the other hand, generally preferred a second

method of securing the succession, according to which the ruler, after

consulting with themselves, adopted a suitable heir from outside his own
house. This procedure had worked well in the second century a.d. But
dv.ring the anarchic years that ensued, there was scarcely an opportunity
to give it a try. The fact was that any and every doctrine about how to
arrange for a peaceful succession, whether by heredity or adoption, re-

mained theoretical and irrelevant, since all such efforts almost invariably
failed.

The Danubian armies were by far the largest in the empire, and dur-
ing the recurrent civil wars of this epoch it was their candidate, more
often than not, who gained the throne. Maximinus I, though stationed
elsewhere at the time of his succession, was a Danubian ex-ranker put

Gravestone of Yorkhai, son of Ogga, and his daughter Balja,

from Palmyra. Later second century a.d.
j66 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
forward by a unit from his homeland. Decius, too, was born in the
same country, of an Itahan family. Neither maintained his power for
long; the more from the Danube region were still to
successful emperors
come. But already it ^as producing most of the best officers in the
army and the best soldiers as well. And when not engaged in promoting
the imperial claims of one of their countrymen, they were more patri-
otic than troops from elsewhere. Their hearts were filled with the fron-
tiersman's proud and emotional confidence that their protectionjpf their
own homes was protecting Italy and Rome as well.
In reversal of the situation of early imperial times, the Rhine armies had
now become smaller than those of the Danube. That meant that they felt

neglected by Rome in favor of the Danubian legions; and this official

attitude, they felt, unfairly impeded them in carrying out their defensive
tasks, which were terribly severe in the face of German invasions. That was
why, in a time of grave crisis, they put forward Postumus (259-68) as an
emperor of their own. He set up independent consuls and Senate at Augusta
Trevirorum (Trier) on the Moselle; not only Gaul, but Britain and Spain
ralUed to his cause, and for fourteen years, under himself and his successors,
western Europe was a large separatist state, confronting Rome in a cold war
that broke at intervals into open hostilities.
The eastern garrisons, too, second only to those of the Danube in size and
strength, were equally ready to put forward rulers of their own choice.
Elagabalus (218-22), the grandnephew of a Syrian empress, was a nominee
of that country's soldiery. And thereafter a number of emperors and would-
be emperors continued to be proclaimed by these eastern armies, including
Philip (244-49), ^^^ son of an Arabian chief.
But the most vigorous, durable, and menacing of the oriental dissidents
came from the oasis city of Palmyra (Tadmor), upon the borders between
'Syria and Mesopotamia. Annexed by Rome in the early first century a.d.,
Palmyra possessed a good water supply and was located at an important
desert crossroads; and from the time of Severus onwards, its excellent
mounted archers played a strong part in frontier defense. Moreover, when
Parthia succumbed to the more dangerous Persians, Palmyra became even
more important, indeed indispensable, as a bastion of the empire. Indeed,
in the reign of Gallienus, its chieftain Odenathus was made the semi-
independent commander of Rome's entire defensive system in the East. But
when he fell to assassins (266-67), his gifted and learned widow Zenobia
declared her total independence and expanded the dominions she already
held in Syria and Mesopotamia by annexing Egypt and the greater part of
Asia Minor as well. Then she declared herself Augusta, empress of Rome,
and her son was hailed as Augustus (ca. 270).
The dismemberment of the empire, from which both Zenobia and Post-
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 367

Fort at Qasr-al-Her, near Palmyra. Second century a.d.

umus had torn enormous territories, could scarcely go further. Moreover,

itcame at a time when Rome's external enemies had never been stronger
and more menacing.

The from beyond both the eastern and northern frontiers, already
threats
productive of anxiety, had begun to increase with appalling sharpness some
forty and fifty years earlier and were still getting graver and graver.
The massive changes in the East have already been briefly mentioned.
Way back in the previous century, the situation had first begun to look
easier, since Rome's enemies, the Parthians, were gradually declining in
strength. This was partly because of their recurring warfare against the
Romans; and the invasion of Severus, in particular, weakened their hold
over their feudal dependencies. One of these was Persis (Fars) in the deep
south of Iranian chauvinism; and in 223-26 its princ^^rdashir (Artax-
erxes) of the Sassanian dynasty, ruler of a large area extending from the
Persian Gulf to Isfahan, invaded Parthia and overthrew the last of its
monarchs. His own Sassanian dynasty that replaced it ruled from Ctesiphon
i n Babylonia, but the religious capital was now at a holy city near Persepolis
368 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Bronze coin of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra

(a.d. 269-71), issued at Alexandria in
Egypt
which she conquered before her defeat by
Aurelian.

Gold Ardashir (Artaxerxes) I (d. a.d. 241),

stater of
who founded the Sassanian dynasty of Persia.

on Persian territory, the residence of the glorious monarchs of his race eight
centuries earlier.
The Sassanians combined pride in this ancient tradition with a willing-
ness to take over Parthian institutions. But the new state was far more
formidable and centralized than Parthia. It was also intensely nationalistic,
claiming the right to all the Roman Empire's eastern territories in the name
of its own ancestral inheritance. This aggressiveness, backed by an effi-

ciently centralized administration, enormously worsened the strategic situa-

tion of Rome, confronting it with a military threat that equaled the gravest
German menaces from the north. The Persian army, reinforcing the tradi-
tional mail-clad Parthian horsemen by recruitment from newly created
nobles, was the most up-to-date attacking force of the age. And the Romans
failed to reduce this new foe to manageable proportions or bring it to a
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 369

workable agreement. Their eastern military operations, hitherto something

now became a direly urgent and hugely expensive
of an imperialistic luxury,
necessity.
After initial fierce but indecisive fighting in the frontier regions, ShapujT
(Sapor) I (Ca. 234-70) adopted, at his coronation, the provocative title of
"King of Kings of Iran and non-Iran." He was the most dangerous single
enemy the Roman emperors had ever had to confront. Every year, he raided
deep into their provinces; and during the first two decades of his reign he
launched three major invasions. Mesopotamia and Armenia were overrun,
and Antioch, the capital of Syria, was temporarily lost to Rome as well.
Then, in the last of these campaigns in 260, the Roman emperor Valerian
himself fell into Shapur's hands near the Mesopotamian town of Edessa
(now Urfa in southeast Turkey). This event, the most inglorious in all
Roman history, continued to be emphasized over and over again in Persian
propaganda; and Valerian remained a captive for the rest of his life. His son
Gallienus did not succeed in rescuing him, or did not try. The only consola-
tion for Rome was that when its eastern commander Odenathus, the prince
of Palmyra, made overtures to Shapur I, the Persian decided to reject them.
This decision and Shapur's savage treatment of the Roman provinces he
overran were imprudences that, by a narrow margin, eventually saved these
territories for Rome.

During these same disastrous years the Romans' position on the Rhine
and Danube boundaries, too, deteriorated gravely. For years, it is true, there
had been fighting on either side of the two rivers. But new German peoples
appeared, who were far more dangerous than any that had ever been seen
there before. They were the Goths. Leaving their Scandinavian homes
before the beginning of our era, they had come to the lower Vistula, and

Silver drachm of the Persian (Sassanian) King Sapor (Shapur) I

(a.d. 241-72), who captured the Roman emperor Valerian.

 —

S70 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

then during the second century a.d. various pressures forced them onwards
in a southwesterly direction, until finally they established themselves near
the mouth of the Danube. During had acquired some
their migrations they
culture and political cohesion, and although remaining weak in army tactics
and siegecraft, they absorbed a number of Roman military techniques.
In the 230S — at the very time when the eastern frontier, too, was the scene
of perilous new threats —these
Goths began to surge across the lower
Danube, and the Romans tried to appease them with a subsidy. In the
following decade, however, this ceased to be paid any longer; perhaps no
money could be found to pay it with. But the cessation infuriated the Goths
who, encouraged by rebellions within the empire, crossed the river again
and penetrated far into the Balkans (248). The commander of the Danubian
armies, Decius, defeated this invasion with such success that his troops
declaredhim emperor in the following year. But his attempt to reinforce
the Danube defenses proved inadequate, for in their monarch Kniva the
Goths had a leader capable of grandiose strategies, threatening Rome al-
most as perilously as Shapur at the opposite extremity of the empire; and
Kniva's supreme triumph came in the marshes at Abrittus (near Razgrad,
west of Varna), where he defeated and slew the emperor Decius himself.
These two menacing foes at either end of the empire, thejjermans and
Persians, took collusive advantage of each other's attacks on the forces of
Rome, which were consequently faced with prolonged, gigantically costly
warfare on two fronts that made all previous border operations look trivial
in comparison. While Persians overran the Orient, and rebellions and epi-
demics (perhaps bubonic plague) paralyzed Roman defense, the Goths,
joined by other peoples, ravaged the Balkans and even drove deep into the
central plateau of Asia Minor, as far as the central plateau (253). Moreover,
they took to the sea as well, obtaining ships from the Greek coastal cities

and swooping on major Black Sea ports, with disastrous effects on the
empire's grain supplies. And meanwhile other German tribes, too, joined
the onslaught along the entire length of the European river frontiers.
Among them was the powerful confederacy of the Franks, who broke right
through the Rhine defenses, overran Gaul and Spain, and extended their
raids as far as north Africa.
Since one man could not face both ways at once, the imperial armies, in
such regions as remained to them, were now divided between two com-
mands, anticipating the between the eastern and western
later division
empires. Valerian took the East and Gallienus the West, and after
Valerian's capture by the Persians Gallienus fought on. In the last year of
his life (268), utilizing the Heruli — recent arrivals in the Black Sea area
as their sailors, the Goths mustered unparalleled numbers of warriors and
ships at the mouth of the River Dniester; and Greece and Asia Minor were
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 37J

Bronze head of Claudius II Gothicus

(a.d. 268-70) from Aquileia.

ravaged yet again. The invaders, laden with plunder, began to return north-
wards by the Balkan land route; and the Roman Empire had reached the
lowest depths of disarray.

The Military Recovery

But an extraordinary recovery was about to begin. It was preceded
in fact
by Gallienus's reorganization of the army. He had completed the separation
of the officer corps from the senatorial career —thus making the military
system more professional. And, above all, he had set up a new, mobile
strategic force, based on cavalry, that had now for the first time become an
372 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
element of primary importance in the previously infantry-dominated impe-
rial army. The headquarters of the new formation was at Mediolanum
(Milan), which was now virtually the advance capital of the empire. This
troop concentration in Italy was an important extension of the ideas of
Severus, who had located a legion on Italian soil. It was also a step that was
to have far-reaching effects in later times, both militarily since it at last
created a powerful reserve, and politically because encouraged a growing
it

tendency to stop seeing Rome as the world center. Yet such a force, for all
its strategic benefits, was at the same time a grave security risk, as was
confirmed when its very first commander tried to make himself emperor,
and then its second, the future emperor Aurelian, led a successful plot that
put Gallienus to death.
Yet Gallienus's new army, at the very end of hislife, had won a major

military triumph against his foreign foes. As the Goths returned northwards
through the Balkans, he succeeded in cutting them off, winning the bloodi-
est battle of the century at Naissus (Nis in Yugoslavia), in which fifty

thousand enemy soldiers met their deaths (268). Pfnd soon afterwards, when
a group of west German tribes, the Alamanni, struck into Italy itself, his
Danubian successor Claudius II (268-70) crushed them beside Lake Bena-
cus (Garda) and then defeated the Goths in further battles, which rightly
earned him the title of Gothicus. Then he was struck down by the continu-
ing epidemic and died; but the expulsion of the Goths was completed by
an emperor who was an even more brilliant commander, Aurelian, known
as "hand.on hilt" (manu dd ferrum). Meanwhile otheT <ijermansrTOo, were
continuing to pour through the Brenner Pass; but Aurelian engaged these
as welland overwhelmed them in two battles in northern Italy, at Fanum
Fortunae (Fano) and near the fortress of Ticinum (Pavia).

Gold coin(aureus) of Aurelian (a.d. 270-75) at Siscia

(Sisak in Yugoslavia) commemorating the reestablishment
of imperial unity (CONCORDIA ANGusti)
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 373

Then Aurelian turned on Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. Asia Minor and

Egypt were recaptured and brought back under Roman rule; and he twice
defeated her principal general in Syria (271). Palmyra itself fell to him, and
then revolted, and then fell again, and the queen walked in golden chains
at Aurelian's triumph. And with her walked Tetricus, the last monarch of
Postumus's splinter state in the West. Following upon the suppression of
Zenobia, Aurelian had immediately moved right across the empire to Gaul
and defeated the rebel army on the Catalaunian Plains (near Chalons-sur-
Marne), after Tetricus himself had deserted his own soldiers and joined him
(224)-_.
Vet ,^ ^JLirelian was still conscious that many and he built a
perils existed;
i\ew defensive wall around Rome, enclosing all the regions that had been
added to tTie city since the last wall had been built six hundred years earlier.
Moreover, he decided that the defenses beyond the lower Danube, heavily
infiltrated by barbarians, were no longer tenable, and in consequence Dacia
a province since the time of Trajan, was abandoned, and the frontier
brought back to the river, which provided a shorter and stronger boundary.
And then another Danubian warrior Probus (276-82) repelled a massive
three-pronged German attack on Gaul and drove other Germans (Vandals)
out of the Balkans. Next, his former praetorian prefect Carus (282-83), who
succeeded him as emperor, struck north against further hordes of Germans
and then moved east against the Persians, and even temporarily occupied
their capital Ctesiphon.
The entire military picture, inside and outside the empire alike, had been
transformed out of all recognition within the space of only fifteen years. It

was the most extraordinary warlike achievement, or cumulation of varied,

simultaneous achievements, in the whole of Roman history. Rome had
seemed in a state of such advanced disintegration that recovery could
scarcely be imagined. Yet by the exceptional talents of successive Danubian
generals, commanding troops as good as any that Rome ever produced, the
seemingly impossible had come to pass, and the empire was restored.

The Collapse of the Economy

Yet the restoration had taken place against a background of fierce eco-
nomic dislocation; this made it even more remarkable, but it also meant that
an enormous human price was paid. At the beginning of the century,
Severus and Caracalla had decided that the civihan population must sac-
rifice every comfort and amenity to insure the loyalty of the army. And this
policy had not been changed.
Moreover, the prevailing hardships were intensified by a collapse of the
imperial currency. The ancients expected currency in the precious metals
374 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

1113V JfTWlgl^
15

AhS

Gold medallion of Gallienus (a.d. 253-68) presented to a senior officer

"because he had remained loyal" (OB FIDEM RESERVATAM).

to contain the quantities of fine metal that corresponded to the values

attached officially to each denomination; the public refused to tolerate gold
and silver coins of token weight. But the Roman government, pressed for
funds, could not refrain from lightening the weights of these pieces, and,
above all, they adulterated the silver. This had been done for a long time,
but in the third century a.d. the process became so blatant that people
would no longer accept the base money with which the market was flooded.
In consequence, inflation reached, even by modern standards, preposterous
heights: between the years 258 and 275, despite an attempt by Aurelian to
stabilize the coinage, prices in many or most parts of the empire rose by
nearly one thousand percent. The result, for a population also tormented
by unprecedented wars and epidemics, was misery.
But what was most serious for the imperial government was that this
inflation, which they themselves had inadvertently caused, meant that the
wages of soldiers, as of other state employees, were practically wiped out.
So successive emperors, in order to protect their very existence, had to
employ special methods to augment these perilously diminished pay pack-
ets. Among these methods was the distribution of donatives —
special money
gifts (originally war spoils), either handed out by emperors at the beginnings

of their reigns or on other joyful occasions, or left (and known to be left)

in their wills. It had long been customary to supplement army pay by such
bonuses; and after the transient predecessors of Severus had been killed
because they failed to hand over the donatives they had promised, the third
century a.d. witnessed sharp increases in the size and frequency of these
awards. Moreover, they consisted, at least on imperial accessions, not of the
contemporary coins of debased silver, but of pieces of pure gold. To quell
 COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY / 375

a mutiny after the death of Galhenus, we learn that the soldiers were given
twenty of these gold coins each; larger pieces, the imposing gold medallions
of the time, were presented to senior officers.
But the huge sums required pay these donatives had to be obtained
to
by increases in taxation. The land tax and poll tax, the direct contribu-
tions that provincials normally had to pay, were not the best ways of
obtaining such revenue. These taxes fell unfairly, because nonprogres-
stvely,upon an agricultural economy like Rome's, and in bad times
there was a strict limit to what could be raised by such means. So in-
stead, the emperors, starting apparently with Caracalla, demanded an
extraordinary income tax known as crown money (aurum coronarium),
originating from a republican custom of levying gold crowns for tri-

umphs, although now the crowns were commuted into cash. Yet the
raising of all this money, from whatever source, was of little avail be-
cause the rapid rise in prices meant that the sums needed for the army
were far beyond what any monetary taxes could provide. Accordingly,
the Roman government, from the Severan period onwards, also pro-
ceeded to raise revenue by other means. First of all they confiscated
personal property whenever they had a chance. And, secondly, they
raised supplementary taxes not in cash but in kind, that is to say, by
levying supplies of foodstuffs and other goods (annona militaris). This
had been done before, in national emergencies, but now the practice was
organized on a far more systematic scale. And, once collected, the pro-
ceeds of these levies in kind were recycled to the troops in the form of
free distributions of rations, clothing, and the materials needed to make

Relief from funeral monument at Noviomagus (Neumagen), showing four Gauls

or Germans paying taxes or rents. Early third century a.d.
J7^ / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
arms and equipment. As the quality of money deteriorated, these distri-
butions rapidly became the principal means of remunerating the troops.
During the previous century, rations and uniforms and arms had been
issued to soldiers against deductions from pay, but as the system of pay-
ments in kind gained in momentum, it became customary to exempt them
from such deductions. As for the civilian populations, who were compelled
to hand over these supplies, at first they were paid for what they provided,
and as late as the 230s such cash transactions are still recorded. But by that
time the money the authorities offered in compensation fell far below the
inflated prices the suppliers could have secured for themselves on the free
market. Moreover, it was now becoming increasingly rare for the govern-
ment to offer contributors any payment at all; and by the middle of the third
century forced deliveries for the army, without recompense, had become
prevalent and normal.
—
Moreover, for some time before that apparently from the days of Seve-
rus— each province had also been required to hand over food directlyjtp the
troops stationed within its borders. Landowners extracted the required
products from their tenants, and the leading officials of the cities were
ordered to see that their citizens contributed what was demanded. Worst
of all perhaps was the unforeseeable irregularity of such claims, which fell
like thunderbolts upon the population. We have inscriptions recording
grievous local discontents and desperate appeals for relief.
It may seem strange, at first sight, that so vast an empire could not

maintain an army of between a quarter and half a million strong without

resorting to these assessments reminiscent of a prehistoric nonmonetary
economy. But now that money had become so much less useful, the army
could only be supplied at all by these more primitive methods. In the
technologically backward Roman world, food, clothing, weapons, and
armor were expensive to produce and transport. Yet the soldiers had to have
them in huge quantities, and they could have them only if the subjects of
the empire contributed the materials. Besides, not only the army but the
imperial civil service, too, had to be paid for, and the inhabitants of Rome
as well, who, even if the city had lost some of its poHtical power, were
allowed to retain a subsidized status as privileged parasites.
It was in against this grim economic background that the great Danubian
soldier-emperors succeeded so amazingly in restoring Rome's military equi-
librium on both sides of the frontiers. But the strain on the civihan popula-
tion, outside the capital at least, was appalling and seemed almost impossi-
ble to endure.
 18
The Climax of
the Pagan Empire

The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius

et would be a complete mistake to regard this tumultuous epoch
it

merely as a time of military and economic vicissitudes. On the

contrary, it was also an age of extraordinary intellectual and
spiritual —
achievement in several respects the culmination of the pagan
world.
The keynote had been set at the outset of the period by the emperor
Marcus Aurelius. He was one of those rulers, rare in human history, whose
practical achievements have been eclipsed and outlived by what he wrote.
His dramatically intimate disclosures of his deepest thoughts, entitled by
editors "his writings to himself and later known as the Meditations, are
the most famous book ever written by a monarch. Their language is Greek,
and they are framed in literary form, but they were meant to be private notes
and intentions, and their author did not intend this highly personal master-
piece of self-scrutiny and self-admonition to be pubhshed.
Marcus Aurelius's doctrine was an austere one and provided no comfort
— except that of putting its tenets into practice. Men and women must just
strive onwards, he declares, and continue their laborious efforts as best they
can, with patient, long-suffering endurance; they must turn inwards and be
strong, and draw on their own inner lives and resources, and thus renew
themselves and find the courage to get on with their daily existences; and
his was almost unendurably burdensome. Life is desperately short and
transient, says Marcus Aurelius, a temporary visit to an alien land. And all
we have the power to do, as long as it lasts, is to act as responsibly and
unselfishly and kindly as we can to those who are our fellow travelers on
this transitory enterprise. Much of this is the old Stoicism, but none of its

previous devotees, even Seneca or a more recent exponent, the eloquent,

lame, ex-slave Epictetus (b. ca. 55-d. 135) from Asia Minor, had ever
communicated the urgency and hardness of self-reliant moral and social

377
S7^ / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
effort in phrases that strike home so poignantly. True, Marcus Aurelius is

a fatahst; much, he beheves, is predestined and cannot be altered. Yet, all

the same, much else can be altered and improved by the efforts of our own
will —
which we must summon up the discipHne to use as it should be used.
As the Stoics had always said, we have a share of the divine spark so that
it is only natural and right for us to see each other as kinsfolk —as brothers
and sisters who should treat each other decently, members of a single
cosmopolis of which the Roman Empire, for all its imperfections, seemed
to its ruler the most complete earthly expression.
Marcus Aurelius sought to reinforce these ideals with a rigorously ascetic
attitude typical of the age that was now beginning. Nowhere can one find
more on the "twitchings of appetite" that were all that the
relentless attacks
pleasures of eye, ear, food, and sex appeared to him to amount to. Moreover,
as one hard year succeeded another, his spirit was tortured by ever more
serious doubts about his own personal adequacy. All he could do was
struggle on, fighting off moods of depression and battling against a sensitive
distaste for disagreeable people and sights that made him more human than
any other antique Stoic. Left far behind are the bright classical incentives
to material achievement, the sunny sense of unlimited power. But in terms
of humanly decent principles, translated scrupulously into a consistent way
of living, Marcus Aurelius's creed was the culmination of ancient paganism
and of Rome.

A Great Age of Lawyers

He had also done much onwards the Golden Age of Roman Law
to carry
ushered in earlier in the century by Hadrian. Marcus Aurelius's legal ad-
viser, Quintus Cervidius Scaevola, was a popular consultant jurist who left

extensive written works behind him. This practice of writing everything

down was a fairly new practice among jurists, based on Greek rather than
Roman custom. A high proportion of the lawyers of the day were eastern-
ers, and although Cervidius himself probably was not, many of the cases

he describes come from provinces of the eastern empire.

Cervidius was also the teacher of the emperor Severus. In his reign this
legal Golden Age developed a second phase that, although perhaps less
abundantly creative than its predecessor, produced one of the most far-
reaching of Rome's contributions to posterity, comprising the working out
and writing down of existing principles over the entire field. The products
of this vast enterprise offer extraordinary insights into the secrets of how
the imperial machine worked. Moreover, Severus, following occasional
earlier precedents, chose the greatest jurists of the day —some of the greatest
of all time —as his praetorian prefects who were also entrusted with vital
 -7 --ajO

i>*u LX^.i-"t<7^^»-t TO^-trTMQ^^^ c Lo; >TftoT^cp d>^;, j^lj^^

(///-/^ »^^»^J

,'f?^ T/ j V> r>^-^vv^

-^

Papyrus recording the purchase of the seven-year old slave boy

Abba or
Eutyches by Gaius Fabullius Macer of the navy, a.d. i66.
38o / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
judicial functions, including both direct and appeal jurisdiction; and, in
addition, they exercised a general control over the imperial finances.
One of them, Papinian, who was perhaps from Syria or north Africa,
became praetorian prefect from a.d. 203 until 212, is the most famous name
in all Roman jurisprudence. He never wrote a comprehensive treatise but
compiled extensive collections and summaries of legal decisions. Indepen-
dent, not averse to changing his mind, master of terse and exact Latin, he
produced solutions which are original and closely reasoned and which give
the fullest weight to considerations of equity and humaneness. And then
Ulpian, who came from Tyre in Phoenicia, was joint prefect from 222 to
223. His massive works, destined to cover the whole range of the law, are
businesslike and unaifected and superlatively clear; he displays an easy,
reliable mastery of all this gigantic, complicated material. And another
praetorian prefect of the time was Paulus. His writings, the most volumi-
nous of all, include the Opinions (Sententiae). The work that has come down
to us under this name may be an anthology taken from a number of his
books; and it also contains later interpolations. But Paulus, as far as we can
judge, while falhng short of Ulpian's lucid precision, excelled him in
breadth, independence, and powers of penetrating argument.

Reconstruction of Baths of Caracalla (in foreground).

 THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / 381

\f' -^

'^^,ff

Reconstruction of Baths of Caracalla (interior).

 —

j82 / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
When, three centuries later, Justinian's jurists summed up the achieve-
ments of Roman law, more than half the contents of this Digest came,
directly or indirectly, from these three writers — Papinian, Ulpian, and
Paulus.
The distinction between the legal treatment of one and an-
social class
other, the honestiores and humiliores, still continued and may even have
been intensified. Yet in many other respects, paradoxically enough, these
jurists displayed enlightened attitudes. Thus, while striving to maintain the
fundamental institutions of Roman law —the family, private property, and
sanctity of contracts — they also modified these concepts in a philanthropic
and democratic direction, corresponding with a new sensitiveness for suffer-
ing, of which this age saw so much. Thus Ulpian proclaimed that all human

—
beings are born free so that slavery is unnatural. And there was an acceler-
ation of already existing tendencies to protect the poor, weak, and defense-
less.

However, this trend was not exclusively, or even primarily, humanitar-

ian, but was directed towards the ehmination of all possible causes of

discontent or disloyalty that might prevent the maximum exploitation of all

classes to serve the state and pay its enormous taxes. Indeed, this fiscal aim
was expressly claimed by Caracalla when he published the most famous^
legal measure of antiquity, known as the Constitutio Antoniniana (212-13).
With the exception (despite Ulpian) of slaves, it bestowed upon virtually the
entire population of the empire the status of Roman citizens, which had
hitherto been restricted to Italians and an elite minority of provincials. But
the purpose of this measure was, in fact, to increase the numbers of those
who had to pay the indirect dues on inheritance and slave emancipation
these being taxes that fell upon citizens of Rome. And the elevation of
almost every free person to citizen rank was not, in fact, a very sensational
development. The differentiation between citizens and noncitizens had be-
come increasingly blurred for a century past, as the lawyers had recognized
by their substitution of the altogether different distinction between the two
main social classes. So the enactment of Caracalla, although dramatic in its
finality, was not so much an epoch-making event in itself as a step in a

gradual and already well-advanced process of standardization.

Standardization, once again, and a more concrete approach to genuine

equality were apparent in a great spread of secondary education during this
same third century a.d.
 THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / 383

New Buildings and Portraits

And the same approach is illustrated by the amenities provided for the
people of Rome, notably the stupendous baths that were inaugurated by
Severus but bear the name of his son Caracalla who completed them. There
were finally eleven such public baths in the pampered capital and smaller
replicas and variants in almost every town of the empire. They
displayed

much ingenious multiplicity of function, being designed not only for luxuri-
ous bathing at various temperatures, but also for all the diverse social
activities of an elaborate community center in which many people,
belong-

ing to a wide spectrum of social and economic classes, spent a substantial

part of each day.
All the features that had appeared in thermal establishments of the earlier
empire were to be seen on a massive scale in the Baths of Caracalla, enriched
by every sort of novel elaboration. Surrounded by an enclosure containing
gardens, open-air gymnasiums, and art collections, the main building was
provided with vast unseen services of heating, water supply, and drainage,
designed to deal with the needs of sixteen hundred bathers. The bathing
accommodation included a circular domed hot room; and the central fea-
ture of the whole complex was a great cross-vaulted central hall or
con-

course containing a swimming pool. This hall, measuring one hundred and
eighty-five by seventy-nine feet, is so large that men and women almost
vanish inside its immensity; for all its services to human comfort, this is the

architecture not of humanism but of a new age in which the individual is

one of a mass. A new age, too, is heralded by the architectural style, since
and assurance,
the load of the intersecting vaults, with their increased span
is carried not on a row of independent columns but on
only four enormous
piers dividing the hall into three bays— vaults and piers alike being
con-

structed of the concrete that made these enormous, lightly soaring buildings
possible.
Nor was third-century architecture the only art to display a strong move
away from the traditional classicism;marked changes were apparent in
portrait sculpture as well. This had long been one of Rome's outstanding
achievements, and in these difficult times its practitioners rose to heights of

originality and psychological skill they had never attained before.

Contrary to what is often believed, these developments started as early
as the reign of Marcus Aurehus. His best-known busts, it is true, are
as

emptily classicizing as any of the products of the immediately

less inspired

preceding age of Antoninus. But a few of Marcus Aurelius's surviving heads

are startlingly different and give us an almost violent impression of what
the author of the harrowing Meditations was And, by the same
really like.

token, the reliefs on the Column of Aurelius at Rome show a different world
S84 / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
from the Column of Trajan: a world in which wars are no longer military
parades and triumphs, but, as Virgil had known long ago, scenes of horror
and tragedy.
Under Commodus and Caracalla the portrait sculptors of the emperors
take a rest from the seriousness of Marcus Aurelius's philosophy, instead
providing richly baroque interpretations of these outrageous autocrats. But
then, in the years of turbulence and desolation that followed, the artists
returned to their search for the inner man and woman, with astonishing
results. The clue to these triumphs is their departure from faithfulness to
nature. Now that the classical world is on its way out, strict adherence to
physical accuracy is subordinated to more intangible, nonnaturalistic pro-
cesses of introspection. As was the portraiture of the
in earlier times, it

emperors themselves that directed the most original trends and attracted
the finest talent, since the propaganda of these rulers demanded that their
features, after suitable interpretation, should be made known to the world.
But in the mid-third century the emperors were of a new type, tough
soldiers, rugged and careworn. And it is evident that each successive ruler
was very willing for his subjects to see him laden and afflicted with these
cares and anxieties, which were endured on their behalf and enhanced by
his artists almost to the point of dramatic caricature.
So these men provide a startling series of portraits, particularly during
the ruinous years a.d. 235-68. Their faces are made to reflect, quite deliber-
ately, the almost unbearable strain to which their vigilance to stave off
disaster was subjecting them. The Danubian giant Maximinus I, for exam-
ple, hated by the senators but a victorious commander of armies, is pre-

sented by his sculptor with imposing vividness; his close-cropped hair and
beard, sketched with light, rapid, pointillist chisel strokes, reflect the illusion-
istic techniques of painting. The personality of Philip the Arabian, too, is

revealed in a highly charged impressionistic study of his mobile, suspicious

features and flickering brows. There is also a violently asymmetrical, nerv-
ously glaring Decius —the subject also of distinguished coin portraits —and
the forehead of his successor Gallus is grotesquely furrowed.
A slight stiff'ening of features, a certain hardening of anatomy, and the
simplifying of volume have begun to remodel and distort these faces into
inorganic forms that correspond not to the human shape but to deeper
movements within the and the universe.
soul Some portraits emit an aura
of intense feeling, almost as though they are representing the tormented
visage of a medieval mystic. And tremendous play was made with the eyes,
their irises and upward rolling pupils deeply incised with the sculptor's drill:
they were seen as the mirrors of the soul, reflecting its inmost light the —
doors by which the viewer could pass straight into the mind of the man or
woman who is portrayed. This was an age in which the torments of practical
 THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / 38^

Gold bust of Marcus Aurelius from the

veteran colony of Aventicum (Avenches).
386 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
lifewere counterbalanced by an intense concentration on spirituality.
We are reminded of the greatest of these pagan spiritual revivals when
we see the portrait busts of Gallienus, for they display a temporary regres-
sion from the military austerity of his predecessors, displaying him in the
guise of a Hellenic philosopher. He was the friend and patron of Plotinus,
the greatest philosopher the Roman Empire ever produced.

Plotinus, Mithras, and Mani

Born in a.d. 205, perhaps at Lycopolis Upper Egypt, Plotinus studied
in

philosophy for eleven years at Alexandria, and after joining an imperial

expedition against the Persians settled in Rome as a teacher, remaining
there, in touch with the cultivated court of Gallienus, until he eventually
retired to Campania, where soon afterwards he died (ca. 269-70). His
instruction took the form of seminars and discussions that he recorded in
a series of essays written in Greek. They were primarily intended for the

Relief of beheading of German prisoners on Column of

Marcus Aurelius, ca. a.d. 180-93.
 —

THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / ^8"/

guidance of his students, one of whom, Porphyry of Tyre, collected and

published them in six books known as the Enneads, from ennea, "nine,"
because was the number of treatises in each book.
this

Plotinus saw the living universe as a complex, ordered structure that

continuously and perpetually descends in an unbroken succession of stages
from its transcendent First Principle. This principle, the single immaterial
source of all existence and all values, pours itself out in an eternal downward
rush of generation that brings into being all the different levels of the world
as we know it, in a majestic, spontaneous surge of Hving forms. Yet this
downward radiation has a reverse counterpart as well, for in the eternal
dance of the universe there is always an upward impetus also, an upsurging
towards identification and unification with the First Principle, the One.
The One, as Plotinus conceived beyond thought or definition or
it, is

slanguage — the negation of number and movement and space and time. And
yet in another sense, it is the very opposite of negation, for it is superabun-
dant reahty and goodness, absolute and pure. Plotinus's One has been said
to be nearer than any other Greco-Roman philosopher's concept to the God
of the Christians. Yet there is no great resemblance, all the same. This One
is not, like the Christian God, a power that intervenes in earthly things

since, although their creator, it remains wholly external to them and outside
all the orders of being, "light above light." And its creative activity leaves
it unchanged, just as the sun, too, engenders its own encircling illumination
while staying undiminished itself.

Yet, remote though the One is, this incessant generation of which it is

the agent insures that every level of the cosmos is intimately linked with
every other. Above all, the structure of the One is repeated in the structure
of human and they all contain within themselves the potentiality of
beings,

^ union with the One: their life, like the life of all the universe, is an upward
yearning urge, an impulse to climb back to the summit and reunite them-
selves with the One. The whole philosophy of Plotinus seeks to animate our
dulled sense of the supernatural and bring us back to our true nature and
source.
The intermediaries in this contact between the One and the human body
are Mind and, below it. Soul. Universal Mind is the timeless thought force
and Soul the direction that emanates from it, but once again they are not
only the divine working organisms of the universe as a whole but also
present within each and every individual person. Lowly and degraded
—
though our mortal bodies are since Plotinus shared the increasingly wide-
spread distaste for the corporeal that we have seen in Marcus Aurelius
the souls and minds of every man and woman provide steps by which they
can rise to the heights.

Indeed, by so doing they can, though only on the rarest occasions, catch
Philip the Arabian (a.d. 244-49).
Egyptian mummy-portrait, later second century a.d. Mummy portraits
of this sort were common in Egypt during this period.
390 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Head of a Roman, ca. a.d. 240-50.

a supreme glimpse of the One itself and even reunite with it. They can
achieve this by looking within themselves. Many earlier philosophers had
spoken in praise of such contemplation. Butwas Plotinus above all who
it

saw it as the dynamic device for thinking away the hmitations of body and
space and time into nothingness, until we merge with the supreme reality
itself. And he was confident that he himself had more than once, by harsh

discipline, experienced this mystic union in which his personality became

trulyawakened to what it was.
He is the Western world's pioneer of those who have believed they can
achieve such ineffable joyous reunion by intellectual disciphne alone, with-
out the need for religion or drugs. Many maintain today that such experi-
ences do not, as he believed, genuinely apprehend something that lies out-
 THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / jp/

side^ but are entire ly inward happenings. Yet in any event Plotinus pos-
sessed the urgent, troubled need and power to communicate to others this
"blessed fullness" and to endow it with a luminous, enchanting splendor
that made all the political and economic disturbances of the day fade away
into irrelevance.
Such, then, was one answer to the widespread, painful crisis of human
identity throughout the vast and increasingly regimented and tormented
Roman world. In this successful search for intimacy in a bottomless uni-
verse Plotinus presents paganism, during this final century of its prolonged
supremacy, at its noblest. But he offers no likelihood that it could maintain
itself, was about to do, as a faith for
as Christianity all classes since his
words were manifestly directed to an intellectual and spiritual elite.

Yet there was also another pagan belief, during this same epoch, that
much more nearly competed with Christ for the control of the Western
world. This was the cult of the Sun, which was revered by millions of the
inhabitants of the Roman Empire; and its religion for a time even became
the state worship. From the remotest periods of antiquity onwards, people
had concluded from their observation of nature that they must greet the
Sun's orb as a beneficent divinity; and their conviction was confirmed afresh
each day as the god rose again. In due course, he played a part in many
writings of the Greeks. He was identified with Apollo; Plato hailed him as
the author of all light and from the time of Alexander the Great
and life;

and his successors the faith in his potency had spread throughout the
Mediterranean world. Moreover, there was an ever-increasing tendency to
explain the other traditional deities in terms of the Sun, in all but monothe-
istic fashion.
To Rome, the divinity of the Sun came very early on; and then, centuries
afterwards, in the superb dome of Hadrian's Pantheon, the central opening,
surrounded by starlike rosettes, represented the solar orb. Moreover, the
cult of this deity offered flattering analogies to the imperial regime and its

resplendent, sunlike leaders. Under Severus, whose wife Julia Domna came
from Syria where reverence for the Sun was especially strong, its worship
almost took command
of the whole state religion. There was a brief inter-
lude when grandnephew Elagabalus (a.d. 218-22), to the alarm of
their
conventional Romans, tried to bestow supremacy upon his own local Syrian
version of Sun worship, which was accompanied by bizarre, outlandish
trappings. But his failure did not delay the continued rise of solar beliefs
in more acceptable forms, and the light-filled imagery of Plotinus reveals
how deeply such ideas pervaded current thought. Before long, the emperor
Aurelian established a massive temple of the Unconquerable Sun as the
central and focal point of the entire religous system of the state (274). The
jgi / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
birthday of the god was to be on December 25, and this, transformed into
Christmas Day, was one of the heritages that Christianity owed to his cult.

For a time, at a critical juncture, the symbiosis of the two faiths was very
close. Constantine the Great, in the years preceding his Christianization of
the empire, and even later while this process was actually under way,
concentrated all the resources of a vast bronze coinage upon the single
design of the Sun god, accompanied by the inscription To the Sun, the
Unconquerable Companion (SOLI INVICTO COMITI) (ca. 309). At this
juncture, the Sun cult could well have become the reUgion of the Mediterra-
nean area for an indefinite period ahead. But it did not do so, in the end,
because such a divinity was too impersonal, too lacking in urgent human
appeal. Devotees of the Sun themselves felt that this excessive remoteness
failed to satisfy their needs, and a branch of the cult came into being in order
to respond to such yearnings. It was the worship of an ancient Iranian deity,
Mithras, who was god of the Morning Light, and from the first century a.d.
onwards he was identified with the Sun himself. But unlike solar cult the
ritual of Mithras always retained its private character. State approbation,
it is true, was not lacking, but in marked contrast to the Sun's innumerable

appearances on the official coinage, Mithras never appeared on the coins at

all. Mithraism was not a court religion and had no public ceremonies or

professional priestly class, itwas persona l —

supplying the intimate element
that the Sun faith lacked.
And its popularity increased at great speed, especially at the great cosmo-
politan ports and trading centers of the West, where the worshippers at
such shrines included numerous merchants. But it was above all the army,
and particularly its officers, who accepted and diffused these beliefs. The
Mithras of legend was a hero figure, unconquerable like the Sun himself,
a superman for critical times —
and he was also an ethical, austere model
of conduct and the patron of truthful dealings and obligations, excellently
suited to an age of rising asceticism, whose good faith, purity, and conti-
nence his worshipers must seek to emulate. Moreover, all the excitement
inherent in initiations of an elect, which played such a prominent part in
contemporary religion, was offered by the melodramatic form and staging
of his rites.

The worship of Mithras, then, possessed ideas, moral urgency, and inti-

mate emotional force. And its baptisms and sacrifices and communal meals
offered resemblances to the rituals and sacraments of the Christians. Yet it
was Christianity, instead, that won the day. The "biography" that was
Mithras's holy book was unconvincing. Above all, it failed to persuade its

readers that he had ever really appeared on this earth to provide help for
human beings. Sculptors, it is true, displayed him as compassionate, yet his
religion still was lacking in the tenderness and sympathy that alone could
 THE CLIMAX OF THE PAGAN EMPIRE / JpJ

solace the poor for their misfortunes. Besides, Mithraism had no place for
women; and it is they, as the cults of Isis and Cybele and Jesus made clear,

who provided the largest numerical support for successful faiths.

Mithras, attending the Iranian Sun god in eternal opposition to his evil
enemy, linked solar theology with the other outstanding pagan movement
of the time, that of the Dualists, who believed in the conflict between good
and evil powers contending with each other for the control of the universe.
This belief goes back to very ancient times; to millions of people it has
appeared the only possible explanation of what they see in the world with
their own eyes. Evil manifestly exists. But how can this be so, if a benevolent
and all-powerful God or gods created and controls the world? It seems a
glaring contradiction; and many have therefore felt convinced that there
must be two opposing forces, a good and an evil power, locked in a struggle
that has so far, very manifestly, by no means come to an end.
The Athenian dramatists had been racked by the problem, and so were
their philosophical compatriots. Then Persian ideas seeped into Greek and
Roman lands, explaining the origin of evil in terms of the dualistic struggle.
An enormous, fantastic variety of dualistic beliefs gradually arose, but
through them all ran the conviction that the world, created by the evil
power, has to be condemned and thrown off", and that men and women
escape the imprisoning vileness of the body by purging what is nonspiritual
within themselves. Since human souls are fragments of the vast luminous
divine light beyond the sky, every person contains a spiritual element, too.
But the spirit is incarcerated in the body, awaiting its freedom. And to teach
how such liberation was to be achieved was the business of the Dualists,
known as Gnostics from gnosis, "knowledge." This was the secret enlight-
enment they were able to impart to their initiates, who thus gained special
privileges in this world but above all won that salvation in the world to
come, which was the aim of all the leading religions of the day.
The culminating period of this Dualist movement started in about a.d.
240 when a young Persian named Mani began to preach, addressing great
crowds at the national capital Ctesiphon and the large Greek city of Se-
leucia which lay on the opposite bank of the contemporary of
Tigris. A
Plotinus, Mani taught for thirty years, displaying lofty spiritual and artistic
gifts and wide learning. His fundamental principle was this clash between

good and evil, Light and Darkness. In the remote past of the universe, he
declared, the Dark had encroached on the Light, and we are still suffering
from that invasion, since Primal Man failed to repel it, and his failure and
fall were what created our flawed world. Yet as life still pursues its dirty

path, pronounced Mani, there is hope, for the dirt and Darkness is slowly
being blotted out by Light; and once this process is completed a Savior will
 —

J9^ / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

return (whom he though this was not a Chris-
identified with Jesus Christ,
tian rehgion), and all will be Light once again. But meanwhile the human
body, as other philosophers had reiterated, remains an encumbrance. The
cosmic conflict could only be won by ascetic self-denial on the part of every
human being, in hope of sloughing off this loathsome world.
Mani was an organizer of genius, and his aim was to found a religious
community of his Manichaeans would embrace the entire earth. In the
that
end, he proved too radical for the Persians, whose kings, bowing to vigorous
exponents of the traditional national religion, put him to death (ca. 274-77).
Yet by then their empire was filled with his doctrine; and before another
century was gone, it had permeated huge regions of the Roman world as
well.
But the Roman government hated these Manichaeans for political rea-
sons because it regarded their Persian origin as deeply suspect and poten-
tially seditious; and so they suffered repression. And when the
later, too,

Christians made become the national religion of

their bid to Rome, Mani-
chaeanism found itself unable to stand up to them either. It was too passive
and pacifist to offer really effective rivalry, and too ascetic and antisocial to
form a powerful, cohesive church. Besides, the theological solution of the
Manichaeans, for all its attractive features, ultimately failed to carry the
day. Their story was epitomized in the career of Saint Augustine. As a
young man he became one of them, because he was unable to accept the
idea that God, who must be good, could ever have created evil. But after
nine years he abandoned this Manichaean allegiance because he concluded
that their division of the deity into two halves was hateful and shocking
and, in consequence, impossible to believe after all.
 19
The Supreme State and
Church

The New State of Diocletian

hile these last manifestations of paganism were reaching

their chmax, the Roman Empire had become a very different
place.
The first of the two great agents of change was a Dalma-
tian of humble origin, Diocletian. After rising to become commander of the
imperial bodyguard, he successfully asserted his claim to the throne (284)
and two years later appointed an old Danubian comrade Maximian as joint
Augustus. Then, after some years of urgent frontier fighting, he converted
this dual regime into a system based on four rulers instead, the tetrarchy.
This he did by nominating two further Danubians as secondary emperors
or Caesars: Galerius from Serdica (Sofia), who was to preside over parts of
the East under his own ultimate control; and Constantius I from Naissus
(Nis), who was to rule over western areas under Maximian. The tetrarchs
had four separate capitals, all endowed with magnificent buildings. For
himself, Diocletian selected Nicomedia (Izmit) on the Sea of Marmara, a
choice reflecting the increasing strategic importance of the Bosphorus
Strait, while Galerius resided at Thessalonica (Salonica) in Macedonia. In

the West, although the Senate remained at Rome, Maximian's court was
at Mediolanum (Milan), and Constantius had his headquarters at Treviri

— the former Augusta Trevirorum, now Trier, located at a crossing of the

Moselle commanding the natural lines of communication between northern
Gaul and the Rhineland. The great basilica and baths and city gate (Porta
Nigra) of Treviri are still to be seen.
There had been partitions of the empire before, but this arrangement was
more elaborate and thoroughgoing and was intended to be permanent. It
was designed to fulfill military needs and to insure, in due course, an orderly
series of collegiate imperial successions. Nevertheless, although the te-

trarchy multiplied authority, it did not officially split it; the empire was still

395
39^ / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
an undivided unit. Legislation was in the name of all four men; the law of
one Augustus was the law of the other, and both Caesars were obliged to
obey them both.
Constantius and Diocletian put down rebellions in Britain (ca. 287-96)
and Egypt (293-94 and 297-98) respectively, and from 302 they campaigned
successfully across the Rhine and the Danube. And Diocletian and Galerius
also fought the Persians; they were defeated at first, but then Galerius
eventually won a victory of a completeness granted to few others in Roman
history, which he celebrated by the erection of an arch at Thessalonica. In

Silver head of Persian (Sassanian) king at about

the time of the war with Diocletian and Galerius.

j^^''> li^'^?^^
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 397

305 Diocletian, whose health had become precanous, took the unprece-
dented step of abdicating from the throne and induced the reluctant Max-
imian to do the same. They retired into private life at Salonae (Split, in

Yugoslavia) and in Lucania (southwest Italy) respectively, and Constantius

I and Galerius became Augusti in their places.
Diocletian had left a remarkable heritage, for he was the greatest imperial
organizer since Augustus. One of his reforms was to raise the number of
provinces from fifty to a hundred; since their areas were now relatively
small, it was hoped that provincial governors would have little opportunity
to revolt— especially as their posts were now completely separated from
military commands. A further innovation was the grouping of the provinces
into thirteen major units or dioceses. These dioceses, which in some cases
pointed the way to national groupings of the future, were administered by
governors general, and they in turn depended on the four praetorian pre-
fects (one attached to each ruler), who had now shed their military duties
and concentrated exclusively on the civil administration.
Another of Diocletian's tasks, undertaken with the help of his fellow
tetrarchs, was to overhaul the entire structure of the Roman army. Pursuing
his predecessors' interest in mobile formations, he created a new mounted
guard that consisted mainly of Germans. This guard, known as the scholae
S9^ / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
palatinae after a portico in the palace where they awaited the imperial
orders, was incorporated into one of the two major branches into which the
entire army was now divided. This was the mobile field force; divided into
four formations, one for each ruler, these comitatenses ("soldiers of the
retinue") included a certain proportion of infantry, but cavalry was their
particular strength. The second major division of Diocletian's army was the
frontier force, stationed along the much strengthened border fortifications;
in consequence these troops were later known as limitanei or riparienses,
("men of the frontier" or "men of the river banks"). This frontier army was
recruited by systematic annual conscription among Roman citizens. But
extensive use was also made of the warlike tastes and various speciahst skills

of barbarian tribesmen. These recruits included numerous Germans, as well

as men from the highlands of Asia Minor. Diocletian also expanded the
hitherto somewhat insignificant fleet.
The total military strength of the empire was now half a million or more,
a good deal larger even than the expanded army of Severus a century earUer.
These massive dimensions made it all the more necessary that the taxes
needed to pay the soldiers should be duly gathered in. Throughout the
previous half century, these exactions had caused the peoples of the empire
immeasurable hardship. Diocletian did not, could not, lessen the burden.
On the contrary, he increased it to the very utmost that manpower and food
production and transport could bear. But at least he tried to insure that the
levies were distributed fairly.
In particular, he issued an edict fixing maximum prices for all goods and
transport costs, and maximum wages for all workers throughout the empire
(301). It seemed to Diocletian that in order to bring in the taxes, and in order
to fulfill another aim too, the reduction of the dishonesty of army contrac-
tors, a degree of confidence and stability had to be restored; and this could
be done only by estabUshing stationary price levels. His edict on this subject,
the most valuable of all ancient economic documents, was something quite
new to the Roman Empire, though similar measures had occasionally been
attempted in Greece. However, the tetrarchs neither owned nor controlled
the means of production and consumption, and consequently they proved
unable to enforce their orders. The result was that goods disappeared from
the market; and so inflation resumed its inexorable course. In order to
combat it, Diocletian and his colleagues had already made a determined
attempt to issue a reformed, stable coinage (ca. 294), and it was in terms
of this currency that the edict was framed. But he lacked the silver and gold
needed to issue sufficient coins in these metals, so that the artificial relation
he established between these and the token base metal issues proved untena-
ble,and the price of commodities in terms of the latter continued to shoot
up at an appalling rate.
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / ^gg

But the emperors also made another attempt to Hghten the miseries of
the harassed taxpayers. What had them particularly gravely was
afflicted

the irregularity and suddenness of the demands that had descended upon
them. To eliminate this unpredictable element, Diocletian and his col-
leagues placed the whole tax-collecting process on a novel, systematic, and
regular basis. Henceforward, the sums and supplies required were no longer
announced at varying, arbitrary intervals, but instead, a new and revised
announcement was published every year. So although people might not be
any better off, at least they knew where they stood. Individual Greek
communities in the past had experimented with annual budgets; but this
was the first time the idea had been applied on this massive empire-wide
scale. The preparations of the budget were placed in the hands of the four
praetorian prefects, who thus, in addition to their duties as supervisors of
the governors general of the dioceses, retained the position of the principal
finance ministers of the empire which their predecessors had occupied
during the previous century.
The taxation system for which they now became responsible was still
based overwhelmingly on agriculture, as in the past. But an effort was made
to mitigate the unfairness of the old system in which variations between
harvests and quahties of soilhad been ignored. A new method of assessment
was now worked out, according to which agricultural land was divided into
units of measurement deliberately calculated to take varying crops and
quahties and regions into account; and it was on this basis that the periodic
censuses of empire were henceforward to be conducted.
However, this new arrangement was not as effective as it might have been,
because of the many imponderables and complexities involved; and it also
had a scheme greatly advanced a process of which
sinister side effect, for the
there had already been signs earlier, the compulsion of the populace to stay
at work, on a hereditary basis, in the places where they were registered.

Under Diocletian and his successors this principle was broadened to insure
that the tenants of large estates did not escape such compulsions; and
besides, it was also extended outside the agricultural field to include mem-
bers of guilds or corporations, and government employees of every kind.
In order, then, to maintain the imperial defenses, a totalitarian state had
been devised — theoretically almost as thoroughgoing as the police system
advocated by Plato, though there was no practical likehhood that every
coercion and prohibition thought out by the emperors and their jurists
could ever be brought into effect.

All these measures of coercion were directed towards a more efficient

mobilization of resources against internal rivals and foreign foes. Imperial
publicity does not refer to the former peril directly since there was a tacit
propaganda assumption that the Roman army could not be anything but
400 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
loyal. But there was continual, increasing emphasis on the tetrarchs' role
as triumphant defenders against their numerous external enemies. From
now on, imperial coin propaganda concentrates remorselessly on this first
and most imperative demand that the Roman people had to make of its
rulers —
victorious leadership and prowess. These personages, who alone
stood between themselves and catastrophes even worse than those they were
already undergoing, understandably seemed larger than other human be-
ings. And this aggrandizement was reflected in imperial ceremonial that

developed into a formidable pattern far removed from the early principate
and closer in spirit to the contemporary Persian rival and foe.
Thus the mighty palace-fortress at Salonae (Split), to which Diocletian
withdrew after his abdication, centered upon a grandiose Hall of Audience.
Beneath the arch that surmounted its facade the retired, revered emperor
made his public appearances as if framed by the vault of heaven; and as he
paused, bejeweled and haloed, before entering and taking his throne in the
shrinelike hall, and momentarily stopped again as he left, the assembled
multitude accorded him homage as if he were the image of divinity itself.

Such, it was now must be the treatment accorded to the men who
felt,

represented the ancient, renowned, and now revived Roman state; and
through them it was the state itself that was glorified. The most Roman and
patriotic of all cults was the worship of Roma herself; and Diocletian, son

Etching by E. du Perac (1575) showing Diocletian's restoration of the Roman

Senate house (right).
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 401

Gold medallion of Diocletian at his capital Nicomedia (ca. a.d. 294).

"To Jupiter the Preserver" (lOVI CONSERVATORI).

of the loyal Balkan provinces, gave even more massive and widespread
publicity to this concept than any other ruler before him. When he reorgan-
ized the imperial coinage, he and his fellow rulers expressed this idea on the
token pieces, made of bronze with a light coating of silver, that circulated
throughout the empire. The slogan they chose for reduplication on all these
millions of coins celebrated the Genius of the Roman People (GENIVS
—
POPVLI ROMANI) an antique idea personifying that particular princi-
ple, virile yet coming from a source beyond human eyes, which enabled the

hfe of Rome and Romans to continue from generation to generation.

This principle seemed, above all, to be embodied in the emperors them-
selves. To describe them officially as gods, in these spiritually minded times,
did not always seem suitable and decorous — and, besides, the multitude of
past deified princes had downgraded symbohsm. But there was
this sort of
also long precedent for describing the rulers instead as companions of a god;
and it was in pursuance of this formula that EUocletian and Maximian
pronounced Jupiter and Hercules to be their special personal companions
and the patrons of their respective houses. The divinities they thus selected
were above all else patriotic in their appeal; and in this monotheistic epoch
that allowed most of the Olympians to fade into an amorphous amalgam,
national propaganda concentrated its efforts upon deities, such as Jupiter
and Hercules, who fulfilled the time-honored roles of protectors of the
Roman leaders and their people.

P^\,.o\\i'^--
^>^''*' w
402 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
The Growth of Christianity
This revival of paganism, on an even more emphatically national basis
than before, was accompanied by violent persecutions of the faith that had
become its principal competitor — Christianity. Moreover, as earlier, these
official attacks corresponded with the wishes of a considerable section of the
public. As the pagan cults were increasingly identified with patriotism,
popular hatred of the supposedly unpatriotic Christians attained new and
formidable dimensions.
Since the composition of the Gospels two hundred years earlier, the
Christian community, though still only a small minority of the total popula-
tion, had grown steadily. By a.d. 200, it had gained a sense of permanent
identity by establishing the components of the New Testament, a canonical
scripture that had eliminated a host of deviant writings and was refreshingly
more manageable than the multitudinous, confusing holy books of other
religions. Efforts had also been made to harmonize Christian doctrines with
those of the ancient pagan philosophers, first by Justin of Neapohs in
Samaria (d. 165/67), who represented the faith as summing up all that was
best in antiquity, and subsequently at the Christian school of Clement of
Alexandria (ca. 150-215). And then, in his compatriot and pupil Origen (d.
254-55) the church for the first time found a theologian who had thoroughly
mastered Plato and other Greek thought and had received personal instruc-
tion from the head of a philosophical school —
a teacher, incidentally, whom
he shared with the pagan Plotinus. But at the same time, among more
uncompromising Christians, there was also vigorous hostility to this whole
classicizing, philosophical approach, for example, from the fierce north
African Tertullian (ca. 160-228).
But while these and many other controversies flourished within the ranks
of Christianity, its membership and structure were quietly expanding all the
time. Origen saw the church as parallel to the empire, and it was indeed
almost a state within a state. It was still, basically, an urban institution, for
while its extension to rural areas in Africa and the East produced fanatical
nonconformists such as Tertullian, the main strength of the Christian com-
munity lay in the lower and middle classes of the cities. And
was in the it

ancient city-states of Asia Minor, in particular, that the church most rapidly
established vigorous nuclei, from which it could expand to other eastern
territories. But Christian missionary activities had also, at a very early date,

extended to the West as well, and in the third century the process ac-
celerated. At Rome itself, for example, the numbers of Christians probably
rose from about ten thousand in a.d. 200 to three or four times that total
a century later.
As time went on, the local communities of the church had come under
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 40^

the autocratic control of bishops. This growing importance of the episco-

pacy took power away from the local elders and, in the West, from the mass
of lay members as well. But it also made for much more efficient organiza-
tion. The first of the important bishops in north Africa, Cyprian (d. 258),
whose see was Carthage, felt emboldened by this impressive system to boast
of the united, dynamic solidarity of Christians of every status and grade.
And despite all the doctrinal disputes within their ranks, his praise was
justified; for the church possessed a solidarity and a tightness of organiza-
tion that were unrivaledany contemporary religion. These qualities were
in

apparent in welfare measures that knew no social distinctions and displayed

a scope and range that left Jewish and Greco-Roman precedents charities —
—
and mutual assistance clubs far behind. These beneficent arrangements,
with their financial basis solidly established in a bank, earned the reluctant
admiration even of pagans; and, later on, the emperor Julian the Apostate,
who hated Christianity, attributed its success to the effectiveness of its

philanthropic activities.

Yet the Christians, from an early date, had encountered opposition. The
Greek population of the East never liked them, any more than it liked the
Jews, because of their deliberate self-separation from the rest of the commu-
nity, in which the followers of Jesus declared themselves to be mere stran-

gersand sojourners. As a result of this attitude, the Greeks remained largely

ignorant of their customs and in consequence made them the targets of
extraordinary accusations, including charges of obscenity and even of can-
nibalism.
Moreover, in the West, too, as Christianity gradually became better
known, the same sort of hostility towards its followers began to develop
among the inhabitants of the cities. And, before long, the same unfriendly
Roman imperial administration as well. Indeed, when
attitude spread to the
the Roman government became able to distinguish the Christians from the
Jews, it liked the Jews rather better, for their religion at least was an
ancestral heritage, whereas no such excuse was available for the Christians.
Already in a.d. 64, under Nero, they were blamed for the Great Fire of
Rome. But that was a feeble charge, and in reality what was being held
against them, as Tacitus points out, was that they seemed to "hate the
human race." Nevertheless, that remained an exceptional occasion, for the
emperors were normally concerned to cool the temperature rather than heat
it; and for another century to come, they remained on the whole more

inclined to protect the Christians from the hostile public than to take the
initiative in convicting them of any crime. Trajan wrote instructions on the
subject to Pliny the Younger, governer of Bithynia. "They are not to be
hunted out," he ordered; "any who are accused and convicted should be
404 / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
punished, with the proviso that if a man says he is not a Christian and makes
it obvious by his actual conduct —namely by worshiping our gods— then,
however suspect he may have been with regard to the past, he should gain
pardon from his repentance."
Under Marcus Aurelius, however, the inhabitants of both Gaul and Asia
Minor objected violently to the Christian communities in their midst, blam-
ing the military, economic, and natural disasters of the time on their unpa-
triotic detachment from the common cause. Not long afterwards, Severus

subjected them to the first coordinated, empire-wide sanctions, forbidding

them to conduct missionary activities and imposing stringent penalties on
converts. Tertullian, in retaliation, uttered open defiance against the govern-
ment, declaring that no official position in the state ought to be held by any
true Christian. Then there was a lull. But, before long, anti-Christian
animosities began to intensify once again. In 235 Maximinus I, desiring to
find scapegoats for crises and earthquakes, exiled rival Christian popes
(bishops of Rome) to Sardinia and employed a new rigorousness in enforc-
ing regulations against the sect, and particularly against its clergy. Then,
as the imperial authorities became more and more desperately harassed by
all their problems, the competent organization of the Christians, relatively

few though they were, seemed more and more provoking, and Decius,
hailed in a recently discovered inscription as "Restorer of the Cults,"
declared himself unable to countenance their refusal to join in communal
corporate pagan observances. He therefore demanded of every Christian a
single performance of the traditional religious rites; once that had been
made, the local Sacrificial Commission handed out a Certificate of Sacrifice
(Libellus), of which specimens have been found in Egypt.
The members of the church, being mainly city people, found it hard to
escape notice and were dangerously vulnerable. Many, it is true, succeeded
in evading the But a considerable number of others, when subjected
tests.

to this pressure, lapsed from their faith, at least for the time being. Others,
however, who were called upon to sacrifice refused to do so and were put
to death. Martyrdom had glorious Jewish precedents; and besides. Chris-
tians who underwent the ordeal felt they were imitating the sufferings of
Christ himself and of Peter and Paul. Shrines of martyrs were established
and revered, on the analogy of pagan heroes, and provided great encourage-
ment to the faithful; in the words of Tertullian, "the blood of Christians is
seed." And then the emperor Valerian, engulfed in an even graver military
and financial situation than his predecessors, revived his anti-Christian plan
and extended it to include large-scale confiscations of church property.
But his son Gallienus called a halt to this persecution, launching a policy
of tolerance that lasted for forty years, during which the church established
itself on an increasingly firm basis. This caused alarm to pagans such as
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 40^

Plotinus's pupil Porphyry, whose work Against the Christians attacked

them with unprecedented ferocity. And Porphyry's friends were among the
instigators of the Great Persecution that now followed in a.d. 303. It was
launched by Diocletian and, above all, by his Caesar Galerius, whose views
on conformity were those of a mihtary martinet. The motive of the persecu-
tors was passionate enthusiasm for the old Roman religion and tradition
and discipline, in the interests of imperial, patriotic unity. In consequence,
as never before, the aim of these archregimenters was the total extirpation
of Christianity. It was a struggle to the death between the one faith and the
other, the old order and the new.
The first of Diocletian's edicts forbade all assemblies of Christians for
purj)Oses of worship and ordered the destruction of their churches and
sacred books. Then two further edicts in the eastern provinces commanded
that the clergy, unless they sacrificed to the gods of the state, should be
placed under arrest. Next, a fourth proclamation extended this requirement
to every member of the Christian church (304). And when, shortly after-
wards, Diocletian abdicated his eastern throne in favor of Galerius, the
suppression of recalcitrants was intensified still further. Bureaucracy and
army joined forces to maintain these anti-Christian measures over a period
of ten years, not so much in western Europe, where few casualties occurred,
but throughout the eastern provinces and in Africa. And although there
were apostasies once again, resistance was on the whole resolute and defiant;
and perhaps three thousand martyrs died.

Constantine the Great

As soon as Diocletian had abdicated in 305, the regular, planned succes-

sion to the tetrarchy broke down in hopeless confusion, revealing that the
system had no power to survive at all when no longer supported by his
exceptional personality. Amid a welter of joint, competing occupants of the
various palaces, Constantine I, son of the Danubian Constantius I, emerged
Maxentius (the son of Maximian) in 312 at Rome's Milvian Bridge,
to defeat
thereby becoming sole emperor of the West; and in the following year
Licinius gained unchallenged control of the East. Then in 323-24 Constan-
tine won three great battles against Licinius and became the only ruler of
the Roman world until his death in 337.
Constantine the Great was a man of impetuous and wide-ranging energy
who felt and change the world.
utterly convinced of his duty to govern
Against a continuing background of exaction and inflation, he carried on
the reforming activity of Diocletian over a very wide field, enlarging taxa-
tion and bureaucracy, tying more and more people to their jobs on a
hereditary basis, and generally advancing the formidable process of regi-
4o6 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Reconstruction of Milvian Bridge, Rome.

mentation in every way. Indeed, whereas Diocletian's plans had been con-
ceived to meet a series of emergencies, Constantine's were intended for a
stable monarchy that would last for all time.

In particular, he continued to reorganize the army, which received ever-

increasing commemoration on his coins and medallions. Like Diocletian
before him, he greatly enlarged the proportion of Germans among the
troops since, after fighting successfully in their country himself, he ap-
preciated their peculiar qualifications for tackling their own hostile compa-
triots across the borders. High favor, therefore, went to German generals
and other ranks as well.For example, the praetorian guard, which had
fought against Constantine on Maxentius's side, found itself abolished alto-
gether, after an existence of nearly 350 years, and was replaced by the
largely German mounted guard (scholae palatinae) created by Diocletian.
Furthermore, many other Germans and Sarmatians, admitted inside the
empire as settlers, were drafted into elite cavalry and infantry units of the
new field army established by Diocletian. Thus the effectiveness of the field
corps as a central striking force and strategic reserve was substantially
increased; and it was placed under the command of a pair of newly created
officers, the Master of Horse and the Master of Foot. The frontier garrisons,

too, were rearranged and enlarged, and recruitment was enforced by severe
penalties that caused widespread terror.
With the same military needs in mind, Constantine confirmed his pre-
decessors' conclusion that Rome was
no longer a suitable capital for the
empire. An emperor who hved there was poorly placed to maintain con-
trol, at one and the same time, over the two vital imperial boundaries,

the Rhine-Danube line in the North and the Euphrates in the East.
Earlier rulers, feeling the same, had already from time to time estab-
lished their residences at places more accessible to the frontier zones.
Mediolanum (Milan) was a favorite choice, and Constantine himself had
dwelt in a number of other centers, including Treviri (Trier), Arelate
THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 4^7
4o8 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
(Aries), and Ticininum, (Pavia), as well as Sirmium (Sremska Mi-
trovica) and Serdica (Sofia) in his own native Balkans. But now he de-
cided that the ideal site for simultaneous supervision of the Danube and
Euphrates defenses was the city of Byzantium on the strategic Bos-
phorus Strait; and there he founded Constantinople, on the site where
Istanbul is today (324-30).
Like Rome which formed its model, the new city was given a Forum and
a Senate of its own, and its people received free distributions from the grain
fleet that had served the ancient capital. It was true that Rome lost none
of its privileges, and at first Constantinople and its senators ranked only
second. Nevertheless, Constantine intended to make his new foundation the
future metropolis of the empire; and this revolutionary decision set the f^

The Arch of Constantine.

w-:

->j-» ^^
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / ^Op

Silvered bronze coin of Constantine the Great at

his new city Constantinopohs (CONST.), formerly Byzantium.
XP (Christos) on standard: "the National Hope" (SPES PVBLICA).

scene for the Middle Ages —and for the eventual supersession of Latin by
Greek as the official language of the state.

Constantine also carried through a second and even more far-reaching

and fateful revolution. This was the conversion of the empire from pagan-
ism to Christianity. The persecutions initiated by Diocletian and Galerius
had not achieved their aim; and as they ran their course, it became clear
that the pagan community regarded the whole campaign as exaggerated,
disliking the Christians rather less than they disliked the tyrannical govern-
ment. And so Galerius, during his terminal illness, had issued, in conjunc-
tion with Constantine and Licinius, the Edict of Serdica granting freedom
of worship to all members of the Christian faith (311). In other words, this
was the first time that they were granted a measure of legal recognition,
although was delayed in the East for two years because Galerius's succes-
it

sor Maximus II Daia (defeated by Licinius) refused to concur.

Meanwhile, in the West, Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge (312)
was won, as he later asserted, under the auspices of the Cross, and in the
following year he and Licinius, who had meanwhile defeated Maximinus,
echoed Galerius's pronouncement of tolerance towards the Christians in the
Edict of Mediolanum (Milan). Constantine always felt a strong, impulsive
need for a divine companion and sponsor. For a time the Sun god, whose
worship was ancestral in his family, had been his choice. But although this
deity continued to be depicted on the coins until 318-19, Constantine had
already disclosed, at the time of the Edict of Mediolanum, his own personal
adherence to Christianity; and the One Supreme Power, to whom the
literature and inscriptions of the time made numerous vague
allusions, was
identified, more and more explicitly, with Jesus.
And so Constantine, speaking of "the most lawful and most holy" reli-
4IO / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
gion of Christ, initiated over a period of years a series of measures openly
favoring its adherents. Christian priests, other than those of dissident sects,
were exempted from municipal obligations, and imperial funds were sent
to subsidize churches in the provinces. At Rome, the bishop, or pope, was
lodged in the Lateran palace, and the church borrowed imposing features
from the court ceremonial and was granted its own jurisdiction. Church and
state were to be run in double harness. However, as the emperor became
increasingly conscious of his own sacred mission, the successive councils of
Arelate (Aries) (314) and Nicaea (Iznik) (325) showed that it was he who
was the master. At Nicaea, he attended the council meetings himself, and
between the sessions he went down among the bishops and
in the intervals
joked with them in bad Greek.
And yet, at the time when Constantine raised the Christian community
to these lofty heights, its position throughout the empire had been relatively
insignificant; the church had lacked and social and economic
political
power become the ruling section of the
alike. Its elevation, therefore, to

empire was one of the most surprising phenomena in Roman history. The
emperor's motives have been endlessly analyzed and discussed. But it ap-
pears that he and his advisers experienced a growing conviction that, how-
ever uninfluential the Christians might be at present, the course of events
was working, or could be made to work, in their favor —since they alone
possessed the universal aims and efficient, coherent organization that, in the
long run, could unite the various conflicting peoples and classes of the
empire in a single, all-embracing harmony which was "Catholic," that is to
say, universal. It was in this belief that he launched his ecumenical mission-
ary drive and, as time went on, became increasingly intolerant of other
faiths.

So Constantine's Christianization of the empire, though it still bears the

appearance of a strangely bold and unexpected step, was based on far-
reaching statesmanlike calculations. Nevertheless would be mistaken to
it

regard Constantine's personal conversion as coldly calculating and nothing

else. On the contrary, he was a profoundly religious and emotional man.

—
But why did he choose the Christian religion and not, for example, the
Sun worship to which he had been earlier devoted? The reason was that he
felt a powerful need for a personal savior; and in this the cult of the Sun

was deficient. Mithraism, it is true, attempted to fill the gap. But its key
figure lacked one indispensable feature. Mithras, like other pagan saviors,
was never thought to have actually appeared on earth and taken part in the
history of humankind. But Jesus was believed to have done just this and to
have intervened to save all men and women, in the most dramatic an3^
moving way possible. That made him by far the most satisfying savior of
all; and it explains why Christianity won the struggle over the minds and
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 411

hearts of Constantine and his subjects. The paintings in the catacombs, and
reliefs and other works of art of the period, demonstrate the point clearly
— for it is in his role as Savior and as worker of the miracles that brought
and symbolized salvation that they chose to portray him.

Bronze coin of Philip the Arabian (a.d. 244-49) of Apamea (Dinar) in Phrygia,
depicting Noah's Ark, which some believed to have come to land nearby.

Jewish sarcophagus from Vigna Rondanini Catacomb with Menorah

(seven-branched candlestick).
412 / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
But it may still, perhaps, be wondered why the religion that succeeded
paganism as the dominant faith of the Western world was Christianity and
not Judaism. Judaism, too, had such a great deal to offer, and it had
recovered very effectively from the consequences of the Second Revolt (a.d.
132-53), attaining great solidity once again in the third century a.d. And
besides, the two faiths, parent and offspring, possessed so much in common.
They both, unlike the pagan cults, offered a philosophy as well as a cult;
and more than ninety percent of Christian ethics had already appeared in
the Jewish scriptures. Moreover, the social and philanthropic services of the
two religions were once again comparable, though the centralized arrange-
ments of Christian bishoprics were more efficient than the local efforts of
individual Jewish communities and presbyteries. The Christians also ex-
celled in their presentation of a truly universal charity, compassion, and
consolation, embracing even the sinners and the destitute. True, all these
features are also found in certain areas of Jewish theology and social think-
ing. But they are presented more vividly in the books of the New Testament.

Yet above all, it was for another reason, with which we are now familiar,
that they prevailed over Constantine, and then the Roman world: because
of the Christians' Savior, and his personal intervention upon the earth. This
was a feature that the Jews, like the Sun worshippers and Mithraists, could
not offer.

Constantine himself did not treat the Jews too badly, but the Christian
rulers of the next generation regarded them with noticeably less tolerance.
The Jews must be allowed to exist because Jesus had been one of them; yet
their lives should be made miserable because they had killed him. And
nonconformist Christians, belonging to sects that would not follow the
official line, ran into trouble as well. In the words of Constantine's spokes-

man Eusebius, the first ecclesiastic historian, nothing was so infuriating to

—
God as divisions in the church they were like cutting the body of Christ
into pieces.
Constantine himself was baptized at the very end of his life, after postpon-
ing this step, like many of his co-religionists, until his deathbed when he
could sin no more. By that time, the Christian revolution throughout the
empire was well advanced. His conversion, which had prompted was seen it,

by Petrarch in the fourteenth century as the great dividing line between

antiquity and the ages that lay ahead; and, indeed, he had brought a whole
new world into being. Constantine himself was profoundly aware of the
vastness and holiness of this task: he saw himself as the thirteenth apostle
of Jesus and God's Messianic regent upon earth.

It is in this guise that he is displayed in a colossal marble head that stands

in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on Rome's Capitoline Hill.
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 4^3

Constantine the Great.

Here is the man at whose court, resplendent and hieratic, men spoke in
hushed tones of his "Divine Face" and "Sacred Countenance." The sculp-
tor has conceived this countenance as a holy mask, a cult object foreshad-
^ owing the icons of the coming Byzantine Empire: an overpowering image
animated with the presence of God and empowered to repel the demons
lurking in every pagan idol. The head is nine feet high and weighs nine tons.
It formed part of a huge seated statue, of which the wooden body and

glittering robe of gilded bronze have not survived.

This vast figure, reducing ordinary individuals to nothingness beside its

hugeness, stood in one of the apses of the Basilica Nova. This was a secular
building, the heir to the old market basilicas — social, judicial, and commer-
cial meeting places beside the Forum. Yet it was a basilica with a difference.
Constructed mainly by Maxentius, after whom it is often named, it was
414 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

The Basilica Nova at Rome constructed by Maxentius and

Constantine the Great.

altered by Constantine who changed the principal orientation from the long
to the short axis. The Nova was based on the bold idea of isolating
Basilica
the central cross-vaulted hall familiar in Roman baths and converting it into
an independent structure. It consisted of only three bays, separated by huge
internal piers, after the fashion of the bath halls of Caracalla and Diocletian.
The lofty nave and aisles, lit by huge half-circular windows anticipating the
Romanesque cathedrals of the future, were no longer roofed by flat ceilings
hke the old market basilicas, but surmounted, like the halls of the baths,
by great curving, intersecting barrel vaults. The Basilica Nova, of which
three lofty spans remain today, represented the climax of Rome's greatest
architectural achievement: its discovery how to exploit the significance of
interior space.
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 4^5

But the future lay with another sort of basiUca, not secular but ecclesiasti-

cal. Constantine's religious transformation stimulated the greatest ar-

chitects of theday to serve the requirements of the new national faith; and
these magnificent successors of the humble house-churches of the past were
their major creations. Like the Basilica Nova, they were rectangular and
longitudinal. But, in contrast to that building, they contained side aisles
separated from the loftier nave, not by a few massive piers carrying rounded
arches, but by long rows of columns supporting flat architraves. And flat,
too, was the surmounted this central nave, since cross vaults like
ceiling that
those of the Basilica Nova would have distracted the essential concentration
of Christian churches on drawing the eye towards the East. The great

Bronze medallion with heads of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Later third century (?) a.d.
 4l6 / TOWARDSANEWWORLD
colonnades created a single irresistible tide of nave and aisles flowing on- ,^

wards towards the cross on the canopied altar, and to the apse that rose
skywards beyond, enshrining the throne of the bishop, the representative of
God. This culminating point of the Christian basilica was glimpsed from
afar by those who entered the building from the west and saw the rays of
the rising sun pouring through the windows of the apse upon the celebrant
who stood facing his congregation. In the rest of the building there was holy
penumbra, in which gilt mosaics and bejeweled objects lavishly glistened.
Little can be seen of Constantine's basilica churches today, since they
were demolished by later generations in favor of the monuments they
themselves were eager to erect upon the same sacred sites. Yet his grandiose f

basilicas, in their day, added up to the greatest architectural accomplish-^

ment of any single man in Roman At his new foundation of Con-
history.

f stantinople, he founded the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Santa Sophia),

later replaced by Justinian's even mightier building. At Rome too, which

retained enormous spiritual importance as the burial place of the martyred *

Peter and Paul, there was the Basilica of St. Peter (ca. 333-37), lit by sixteen
great windows and flanked by massive transepts. And, before St. Peter's,
Constantine had already built, alongside the Lateran palace which was the
residence of the popes, the church that was called after himself, the Basilica #
Constantiniana, which later bore the name of St. John Lateran instead and
became the cathedral of the city.
Beside it was erected a centralized octagonal baptistery, which became
the prototype of many others and has survived today. And Constantine*
built much larger centralized churches as well, which, like his basilicas,
represented a major architectural revolution —and, like them again, have
suff'ered the fate of total disappearance. They included the cross-shaped
Holy Apostles at Constantinople and the palace church of the Golden
—
Octagon at Antioch, dedicated to Harmony the divine power that creates
unity within the empire, the Christian community, and the universe. In
Palestine, too, there were great Constantinian buildings. The Holy Se-
pulchre at Jerusalem combined both the longitudinal and centralized for-
mulas, since it was a rectangular basilica built to enclose a circular martyr's
shrine.

The Successors of Constantine

Constantine was determined to achieve hereditary succession to his
throne, but his endeavors to arrange this were less successful than anything
else he attempted. In 326, on reports of a plot, he ordered the execution of
his wife and his eldest son by an earlier marriage. Then he groomed for the
succession the three boys who remained to him, together with the two sons
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 4n

of a half brother. Within thirteen years after his death, however, all these
fivehad been eliminated, except one, who was Constantius II.
While prodigious monetary inflation and taxation continued within the
empire, Constantius fought against Persia and then turned to the West to
put down usurpers. Meanwhile he was converting Constantine's establish-
ment of Christianity into a lasting reahty. He himself, however, belonged
to the Arian sect, regarding Christ, being the Son, as younger than God and
inferior. Under Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, five times exiled, this sect
was overtaken by Catholicism and Constantius's attempts to grapple with
the theological disputes that were splitting the state apart bore no fruit. He
appointed his cousin Constantius Gallus to be his Caesar and presumptive
heir, residing at Antioch; but in 354, on suspicions of disloyahy, he recalled

Gallus and put him to death. Then he appointed a new Caesar, the dead
main's half brother Julian, who won an important series of campaigns
4i8 / TOWARDS A NEW WORLD
Germans and restored the Rhine frontier. Thereupon his troops
against the
proclaimed him emperor, and conflict with Constantius II was inevitable;
but before the clash came, the emperor died (361), and Juhan succeeded in
his place.
He had reacted strongly against his Christian background and is known
as the Apostate because he abandoned the faith altogether. He noted that
his Constantinian relatives, steeped in crime, had failed to practice what
they preached, and he spoke for the financially depressed gentry of the
ancient Greek towns of Asia Minor, who felt a distaste for the glaring
affluence of the court and despised its intellectual confusions as uncultured.
Instead, Julian in his youth had derived from men of learning, including his
tutor and a well-known philosopher of the day, a passion for classical
literature and the deities of the pagans; and these admirations emerge
strongly from his surviving speeches, essays, and letters, in which he
manipulates the Greek language of his day with confidence and skill.
When he came to the throne, he openly professed adherence to the beliefs
of the pagans and reinstituted their cults, endowing them with substantial
grants in aid and an organization intended to compete with the Christians.
He also proclaimed general toleration of all religions. However, not only
was the Christian church deprived of its financial privileges, but in the
religious disorders that followed its members were penalized more severely
than the pagans. A measure forbade them to
particularly controversial
teach in the schools. To blow
strike a further against their faith, Julian
offered encouragement to the Jews, whose lot had become worse under the
Christian regime; and he even planned to allow the reconstruction of the
Temple at Jerusalem, destroyed nearly three centuries earlier. Another

Silvered bronze coin of Julian the Apostate (a.d. 361-63) at Sirmium (Sremska
Mitrovica in Yugoslavia). The bull symbolizes leadership: "The Safety of the
State" (SECVRITAS REIPVBLICAE).
 THE SUPREME STATE AND CHURCH / 4ig

reason for this move may have been a desire to protect the rear of his army
from Palestinian revohs during forthcoming eastern campaigns. But owing
to the absence of any real enthusiasm on the part of either Julian or the
rabbis, who were content with their teaching centers in the synagogues, this
plan to elevate the Jews at the expense of Christianity came to nothing.
And the same, indeed, was true of the whole of his angry anti-Christian
campaign. He believed he possessed a divine mission to heal a sick society.
But his character, a curious blend of opportunism and preciosity, was alien
from any diplomatic compromise; and he was too deeply imbued with
classical traditions to reach out and understand the common man of his day.
His Canute-like attempt to roll back the Christian tide was too anachronis-
tic to prevail.

In other directions he succeeded better, for he was a hard-working and

conscientious administrator. He did what he could to revive the declining
fortunes of the city-states in the eastern part of the empire —the communi-
ties from which much of his political support was derived. He temporarily
cured the raging monetary inflation by placing an extensive gold coinage in
circulation. And above all, he made a courageous attempt to cut down the
ever-growing and all-encroaching imperial bureaucracy.
But major ambition was to deal drastically with the Persians, who had
his
become menacing once again during his predecessor's reign. After elaborate
preparations, Julian marched eastwards, in one of the most determined
invasions of Persian territory for centuries, and won a victory (365). But his
column was constantly harassed by the enemy, and in one of these skir-
mishes in the Zagros foothills, he received a wound from which he died. His
successor, a Danubian officer named Jovian (363-64), reversed both his
principal policies, negotiating an unpopular peace with the Persians and
restoring Christianity —
of which he was a pious adherent —
as the religion
of the empire.
 :^

^V

/•rl^-

'^^^.

L^- ^ .^iCH^v
-d
.>.

^vf.

'r#

f <
 THE IX.
TRANSFORMATION
OF EUROPE

.%^^^s

o *.

y? '^ ^ ^W%
$9'^

^l-o^S.-
Preceding page:
View of Ancient Rome by Samuel Palmer.
 20
The Fall of

the Western Empire

Valentinian I and Theodosius I

n A.D. 364 the army acclaimed Valentinian I, another Danubian, as
emperor; and he was the last impressive ruler the western empire had.
Valentinian was tall and vigorous, with fair hair and gray blue eyes, and
ahhough his opponents sneered at him as a man of barbarous origins, he
had received a thorough education. Although jealous, cruel, and easily
angered and frightened, and often at sea in his judgment of civilian officials,
he was a and an energetic organizer. He disliked the Roman
fine soldier
aristocracy and felt an unusually strong sense of duty towards the poor.
More unusual still, he tolerated differences of religious opinion.
Concluding that in the interests of national defense there should be a
second emperor beside himself, Valentinian gave the East to his brother
Valens, who took up his residence at Constantinople. He himself kept the
West, ruling at Mediolanum though the Senate still remained at Rome. His
treasury was impoverished by the division since revenue from the richer
eastern provinces ceased to flow in. Nevertheless, at his death eleven years
later he left the western empire stronger than ever; no one could have
believed that it would shortly be entering upon the final phase of its long
life.

Valentinian achieved this excellent result by dealing vigilantly with a host

of successive emergencies. First, the Germans had burst across the Rhine,
seizing the fortress of Moguntiacum (Mainz). But the emperor defeated
them three times and then marched up the Neckar valley and won a major
victory in the Black Forest. Remaining in the north for seven years, he
constructed a complex new system of defenses and weakened his enemies
by deliberately up dissensions between one tribal group and an-
stirring
other Meanwhile, numerous Germans continued to be admitted as settlers
within the western frontiers. In 374-75 Valentinian repelled and avenged
another great incursion of Germans across the middle and upper Danube.

423
424 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
 THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 425

Silver dish (missorium) showing Valentinian I with his army.

Not long afterwards, however, while listening to the insolent words of

German envoys, he burst a blood vessel and died, leaving his throne to his
sixteen-year-old son Gratian.
Three years later the other, eastern, Roman empire suffered a setback of
unprecedented gravity. Beyond its two great German states had
borders,
taken shape, the Ostrogoths ("bright Goths") in the Ukraine, and the
Visigoths ("wise Goths") based upon what is now Rumanian territory. But
a non-German people living further away, the Huns, had burst through into
the lands of these two peoples in about a.d. 370. The Ostrogothic state
crumbled before the onslaught of their formidable cavalry, and two hun-
dred thousand Visigoths, too, were driven by the Hunnish invaders across
the Danube into the eastern Roman empire, where its authorities permitted
426 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

them to settle. Incensed, however, by their unjust treatment at the hands

of these functionaries, the Visigothic chieftain Fritigern broke into revolt
and ravaged the Balkans, while other northerners forced their way across
the Danube in their wake (376). Valens marched rapidly from Asia to deal
with the crisis and passed to the attack at Hadrianopolis (Edirne, Adriario^
pie) in Thrace. But the Visigothic cavalry drove off the horsemen of the
Romans, and the imperial infantry fell almost to a man. Valens himself
perished; and his corpse disappeared without a trace.

His nephew Gratian, emperor in the West, had failed to reach the scene
in time to help him. And now he appointed, to succeed Valens at Constan-
tinople, a new colleague Theodosius I, the thirty-two-year-old son of a
Spanish landowner and general. For the next decade Theodosius ruled the
eastern empire and added to by inducing his western counterparts to cede
it

the greater part of the Balkan peninsula. Then, putting down two usurpers
in the West, he momentarily reunited the two imperial thrones before his
death in 395. Theodosius was blond and elegant and eager to please, but
greedy, extravagant, and unreliable, veering from brutal judicial sentences
to quick pardons, and from frenzied activity to idleness. He became known
as "the Great" because of his insistence on rigorous Christian orthodoxy.
 '

THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 42J

This was one of the main features of his reign; the other was the acceptance,
despite the disaster at Hadrianopohs, of a mass of Visigoth settlers within
the imperial borders (382). There they could live under their own rulers but
must supply soldiers —
and agricultural workers for the Romans the first of
a series of German nations on which this allied, "federate" status was
conferred.

The Frontiers Broken

After Theodosius's death the empire was once again divided, and this
time the division became permanent. The East went to his eighteen-year-
old-son Arcadius (395-408), and the western throne at Mediolanum to his
younger son, Honorius, aged eleven (395-423). Both boys, as they grew
older, turned out to be unintelligent and incompetent, and the task of ruling
the two empires fell to their regents. The effective ruler of the West was \/
Stilicho, half Roman and half German, who was married to Honorius's
cousin. Although he was a general of unusual brilliance and vigor, Stilicho's
career, which might have saved the West for a time, was darkened by two
clouds. The first was his hostility to the eastern empire, where he arranged
that his counterpart as the guardian of its young emperor, Rufinus, should
be assassinated. The second flaw in Stilicho's reputation was his unwilling-
ness to deal firmly enough with the Visigoths' new ruler Alaric, a chieftain
whose ability won him special and quasi-royal prestige. Alaric had shown
his aggressive intentions by a series of invasions deep into Italy itself (401-3)
— events that induced the timid Honorius to move his capital from Medi-
olanum to the Adriatic coastal town of Ravenna, which was protected by
marshes from the land side and provided an escape route by sea. Yet
Stilicho, instead of resolutely proceeding against Alaric, preferred to keep
him sound and strong as a counterpoise to the eastern Roman state. And
indeed in 405, after destroying an Ostrogothic invasion under Radagaisus
at Faesulae (Fiesole), Stilicho developed plans for military action against

the eastern government.

But on December 31 of the following year his designs were inter-
rupted by the gravest and most fateful of all the German invasions of
the West. On that day a mixed army of men from a number of different
tribal groups — —
Vandals, Suevi, Alans, Burgundians crossed the ice on
the frozen Rhine and, sweeping aside half-hearted resistance, plundered
Moguntiacum (Mainz) and Treviri and many other border
(Trier)
towns. Next the invaders fanned out into Gaul beyond, continuing to
ravage wherever they went and marching on throughout the entire
country as far as the Pyrenees. With only a few exceptions, of which
Tolosa (Toulouse) was one, the Gallic cities did not put up a fight. It
^jfcb^Mk^^

Stilicho (d. A.D. 408) on ivory diptych.

 THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 429

proved a decisive breakthrough because the Rhine barrier could never

again be repaired.
StiHcho did nothing effective to block the invaders, at first because he was
still preoccupied with his plans for invading the East, and then because the
shock waves of the German onslaught threw up several usurpers in the
Roman armies that were supposed to repel them. One of these men crossed
over to the continent from Britain, which henceforward, denuded of troops,
passed gradually into the hands of Saxon immigrants who had been allowed
to settle in the country. Stilicho was under heavy pressure from the Visi-
goths,whose leader Alaric insisted that he should be given four thousand
pounds of gold from the western imperial treasury. Stilicho compelled his
reluctant Senate to agree, but soon afterwards found himself accused of
plotting in collusion with Alaric to place his own son on the throne. Al-
though this may not have been true, a mutiny was fomented against him
at Ticinum and his supporters were massacred. He himself went to the
emperor at Ravenna; but Honorius had him put to death (408). For half a
century to come, no German was to follow in his footsteps as commander
in chief in the West. But, meanwhile, as the immediate sequel of his death,
the Roman troops began to slaughter the families of their federate German
fellow soldiers, who, in consequence, went over to the Visigoths.

THE BARBARIAN' INVASIONS OF THE 5TH CENTURY AD

IN
• lUTES

ALANS
430 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

Gold medallion of Priscus Attalus (a.d. 409-10, 414-16), puppet of Alaric and
Ataulf, at Rome which is "unconquerable and eternal" (INVICTA ROMA
AETERNA).

Their leader Alaric, cut off from the helpful contacts that Stilicho had
maintained with him, went on demanding money and land and, when his
demands were rejected, he marched in three successive years right up to the
outskirts of Rome. On the first occasion he was appeased by large payments;
on the second he set up a puppet emperor, Priscus Attalus, within the walls;
and when he arrived for the third time, the gates were treacherously opened
to admit him. Thereupon his army moved in and occupied the city, which
had not been taken by a foreign foe for nearly eight hundred years. Its
capture by Alaric horrified the entire Roman world; yet although much
wealth was plundered and fires were started in various areas, the number
of buildings that were burned down was not very great. The Visigoths
stayed in Rome for only three days.
After that, taking the emperor's half sister Placidia with him, Alaric
departed and moved on towards the south of Italy, planning an invasion of
north Africa. But he turned back and died, and was buried deep in the bed
of an Italian river so that his body should never be found and subjected to
impious treatment.

The dominant Roman military leader of the next decadewas Con-

stantius III, a long-necked, broad-headed general from Naissus. In the
year after Alaric's sack of Rome, Constantius courageously took the ini-

tiative. First, he put down no fewer than three rival claimants to the
throne and established himself at the capital of one of them, Arelate,
which now replaced devastated Treviri as the principal city of the west-
ern provinces. Next, in 413, Constantius granted one of the invading
 THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 4^1

German tribes, the Burgundians, the status of alhes and federates and
allowed them to live on the west bank of the middle reaches of the
Rhine.
Meanwhile, however, the Visigoth Ataulf, brother-in-law and successor
of Alaric, had moved his people out of Italy and settled them in the fertile
lands of southwest Gaul. To prove
good intentions towards the empire,
his
he married Honorius's half sister Placidia whom his predecessor had ab-
ducted from the city. But Honorius withheld his agreement to the marriage,
and Constantius forced Ataulf to withdraw into Spain, where he was killed
at Barcino (Barcelona) (415). Then his brother Wallia, after he returned
Placidia to the Romans, was permitted to take his Visigoths back to south-
western Gaul, where they were granted federate status, with Tolosa as their
capital (418). Honorius also proclaimed the delegation of his authority in
Gaul to a regional administration at Arelate in which Romans and Visi-
goths were intended to collaborate. But the scheme never really got off the
ground.
Constantius had married Placidia in the previous year —against her will,

though she provided him with a son. His position was now very powerful;
and early in 421, Honorius proclaimed him joint emperor of the West.
However, the eastern rulers refused to recognize this unilateral appoint-
ment. This greatly angered Constantius III; but he had no opportunity to
challenge them since, after a reign of only seven months, he died. Had he
lived, he would have continued to provide vigorous administration. But he

could never have been on good terms with Constantinople, so that it is

doubtful whether his survival would have reversed the gathering process of
western decline.

A quarrel now broke out between Honorius and Placidia, who sought
refuge at the eastern capital, accompanied by her four-year-old son Valen-
tinian III. But when Honorius died of dropsy in 423, an eastern army helped
her to return to Italy and defeat a usurper, and the child became emperor
in the West (425-55). During the first years of his titular rule, Placidia
exercised autocratic control. But there was also another striking figure to
be reckoned with, Aetius, a Danubian from Durostorum (Derster or Si-
listria in Bulgaria). As a young man he had been a hostage in the hands first

of the Visigoths and then of the Huns, experiences that had given him
valuable insight into these two leading foreign peoples of his time. Then,
after Honorius's death, he had led a large force of Huns to try to block the
return of Placidia. Subsequently, he made his peace with her government;
but before long she began to find his power excessive. He took an army to
north Africa, on which the Romans depended completely for their grain.
At this time the country was under the semi-independent control of Boni-
432 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
face, a strange blend of saint and medieval knightly adventurer. Like Aetius,
Boniface had at first been opposed to Placidia but had then made his peace
with her, whereupon she deliberately set the two men at odds with each

other.She offered her own support to Boniface. But in the ensuing hostilities
he was wounded and died (432). Aetius now became the unchallenged
commander in chief; and before long he began to be stronger than Placidia.
His most urgent task was to check the Vandals, a German people who
had moved from Gaul into Spain and then across the strait into the vital

north Africa (429). Their king Gaiseric was a leader whose

territories of
single-minded, far-sighted diplomacy and willpower faced the Romans with
the most intractable German problem they had ever experienced. A joint
army of the western and eastern empires sent against him failed dismally,
and since the northern frontiers of Gaul were now breached and peasant
revolts, too, had broken out within that country, the western government
felt obHged to offer him peace. A treaty was drawn up, according to which

the Vandals were granted federate status in Mauretania and Numidia (Mo-
rocco and western Algeria).
But this time it was a federate status that was not far removed from
complete independence. And four years later, Gaiseric revealed this situa-
tion in unmistakable terms when he invaded the historic nucleus of Roman
north Africa, comprising the grain lands of Tunisia and northeastern Alg-
eria; and the ancient capital Carthage itself fell into his hands (439). It was
the second city of the western Roman World; and its loss was a blow that
made the dissolution of the empire lamentably apparent. At this point, the
government of Ravenna felt compelled to make a revised treaty with Gais-
eric. Under its terms, he retained the regions he had lately seized, while
ostensibly giving Mauretania and Numidia back to the western empire. But
instead he broke his word and kept everything. Furthermore, he now aban-
doned even the pretense of federate status and instead began to rule openly
over his own sovereign state, which was torn away from Roman suzerainty
altogether. This was an unprecedented phenomenon; and Gaiseric was also
unique among the Germans in possessing a fleet of his own, which struck
terror far beyond north Africa's shores and menaced Italy itself, severing
the unity of the Mediterranean for the first time in over six hundred years.
Gaiseric contributed more to the collapse of the western Roman Empire
than any other single man. And Aetius, although successful elsewhere in
transplanting and resettling the Burgundians, was powerless to stop him.
This was also the time when the Huns, who had hitherto supplied Aetius
with many of his soldiers, began to be the enemies of the Romans instead,
fighting first against the eastern empire and then against the West. The
Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus saw them as deceitful, violent,
greedy savages, abnormally competent as horsemen. By the early fifth
 —

THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 4j^

century they had built up an empire of enormous dimensions, stretching all

the way from the Baltic to the Danube. In 434 this entire territory was
inherited by Attila and his elder brother Bleda, whom Attila soon put to
death. Evil-tempered, arrogant, and tireless, this square, flat-nosed little

man earned the name of "the Scourge of God," for during his nineteen-year
reign he came to play almost as large a part as Gaiseric in the downfall of
the Roman World.
At first, however, during the 440s, he remained on friendly terms with
Aetius, concentrating his attacks on the eastern empire, which he compelled
to conclude two on increasingly unfavorable terms. Then, however,
treaties
a new ruler at Constantinople, Marcian (450-57), refused to subsidize him
any longer, and Attila finally turned against the West in order to make up
this financial deficiency by looting. He was given a pretext to intervene when
Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III appealed to him to rescue her from
a wedding with another man whom she did not like. The Hun chose to
interpret this as a proposal that he himself should become her husband, and
when his demand for a dowry consisting of half the western empire was
turned down, he marched on Gaul. There, on the Catalaunian Plains near
Chalons-sur-Marne, he was confronted by a combined army of Aetius's
Roman troops and federated Germans. The German units were partly
provided by the Visigoths, and their king was one of the many who fell in
the mutual slaughter that followed. Yet he fell in the moment of victory
the greatest victory of Aetius's career. It was the only battle Attila ever lost
in his life; and it forced him to evacuate Gaul.
But Gaul's gain meant terror for Italy, since he and his Huns crossed the
Alps in the following year, sacking Mediolanum and other leading cities.
This time Aetius had no imperial army to send against him. Yet as Attila
was preparing to cross one of the Po tributaries, Pope Leo I arrived on the
scene from Rome; now that the city no longer contained an imperial court,
its bishops, the popes, were political potentates. Pope Leo made effective use

of this authority, holding a meeting with Attila beside the River Mincius
(Mincio, a Po tributary) and persuading him to withdraw from Italian soil.
Presumably he convinced the king that owing to famine and pestilence the
Huns would not be able to feed off" the land. In any case, they turned back,
and Italy was free of them.
Two years later, Attila died. His empire fell apart between his quarreling
sons; and before long their army faced a rebellion from their German
subjects south of the Danube and suff"ered an overwhelming defeat. The
surviving Huns retreated far to the east (455) and were never a great power
again.
But by that time Aetius was dead, for Valentinian III, falsely persuaded
that he was treasonable, had murdered him with his own hand (454).
4S4 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
Throughout two decades and more Aetius had labored to keep the destroy-
ers of the western world in check. For a time he was almost successful, but
with his assassination its terminal crisis had begun.

The Last Emperors of the West

Only six months later, two of Aetius's barbarian retainers struck down
Valentinian in revenge. In spite of his personal insignificance, his death was,
in its way, as decisive as the killing of Aetius. The emperor had no heir, so

that his dynasty, which had exceptionally lasted for nearly a century, ex-
pired with him.
The year of his death brought immediate catastrophe. Gaiseric the
Vandal, whose navy dominated the seas, landed in person at Ostia and
captured the city of Rome itself. He remained
two weeks, extracting
for
loot far beyond Alaric's briefer plundering; and on his departure he
removed thousands of captives including Valentinian's widow and two
daughters.
The western empire had just twenty-one more years to Hve. During that
period, as many as nine more or less legitimate rulers could be counted.
Belonging to a variety of different famihes, most of them could claim only
the barest minimum of power; and six came to violent ends. Within the
rapidly dissolving government of Ravenna, the predominant personage was
now the supreme commander Ricimer. For the first time since Stilicho, a
German had become the commander in chief again. Yet Ricimer's German
origin was still felt to disqualify him from wearing the imperial purple itself
— so instead, for he was the power behind the throne, for the next fifteen
years, he set up emperor after emperor and then repeatedly unmade them
as well, thus intensifying the general instability. Hismost able protege was
Majorian (457-61), who fought well against the Germans in Gaul and Spain
but then suffered a serious naval reverse at Gaiseric's hands off Carthago
Nova (Cartagena), which caused Ricimer to put him to death. The Ger-
man's next candidate, Anthemius (467-72), who was supported by Con-
stantinople as well, suffered a similar fate, followed shortly afterwards by
the death of Ricimer himself.
After three more transient reigns, which witnessed the loss of a loyal
remnant of Gaul to the now independent Visigoths, a new military com-
mander, Orestes, who had been Attila's secretary, gave the Ravenna throne
to his own son. The youth bore the historic names of Romulus Augustus
but was generally known by the diminutive version Augustulus. But Romu-
lus remained emperor only for the briefest of periods because a German
general, Odoacer, who commanded a force of his Danubian compatriots in
Italy, now proceeded to intervene. Odoacer now decided to request, within
 THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE / 435

that peninsula, the federate status and land grants that other Germans had
succeeded in acquiring in other territories of the West. When his claim was
rejected, his soldiers saluted him as their independent ruler —not as Roman
emperor, however, but as their king.
Seizing Ravenna, Odoacer declared Romulus to be deposed and dis-
missed him into pensioned retirement. This time, however, no attempt was
made to appoint a new Augustus in the West. Instead, at Odoacer's bidding,
the Roman Senate transferred the imperial insignia to Zeno, who occupied
the throne at Constantinople (474-91). Zeno demurred because the penulti-
mate, transient emperor of the West, Julius Nepos, who had been his
nominee, was still alive in Dalmatia But since the eastern empire
until 480.
at this time was troubled by internal dissensions, Zeno took no action
against Odoacer, who, while politely placing the heads of Zeno (and Nepos)
on his coins, continued to rule Italy as an independent monarch, like the
kings of the Vandals and Visigoths.
In consequence, later historians fastened on this year 476 as the date at
which the long declining western empire finally fell. In recent times, there
has been a tendency to minimize the significance of this particular event
since, after all, it was only one more landmark in a long series of destructive
developments and not a very spectacular landmark at that; and, besides, the

AFTER THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE IN AD476

500 miles
43^ / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
system created by Odoacer was not unlike the arrangements that
in Italy
other German tribes had already made in Gaul and Spain. Nevertheless,
this forced abdication of the last man to occupy the throne at Ravenna did
have a meaning, for it signified that the last remaining country of the West,
and its metropolitan territory at that, had become just another German
kingdom. The western Roman empire had fallen; or it had become some-
thing else. At any rate it was no more.
 21
The Fatal Disunities

The Failure of the Army

'
^he western empire was no more because it had succumbed to its

external enemies. Yet thesewould not have been too formidable to

overcome if it had still possessed sufficient internal strength. But
when the murderous blows were struck, the government could no longer
muster the force to ward them off. This was because Italy and the whole
Western world were hopelessly disunited within. The disunities assumed
various shapes and forms. Each one of them, in itself, was damaging. In
combination they made resistance to the external onslaughts impossible.
One prime cause of disunity was the failure of the rulers to control their
generals. This, of course, was nothing new. It had been a defect inherent
in the imperial system from the very beginning, since the Romans, for all

their political skill, had never devised a workable system for insuring a
peaceful transition from one ruler to the next. This defect was a standing
temptation to many of their own commanders, beckoning them to make a
violent bid for the immense stakes of autocratic power. Under the dynasty
of Valentinian I, at least ten and possibly thirteen men from outside his
house made lunges at the throne. They were all unsuccessful in the end, but
all had enjoyed a considerable measure of acceptance for a time; and the

struggles to put them down severely weakened the already strained re-
sources of imperial manpower and revenue. In the words of an acute con-
temporary historian, Ammianus, "What fury of foreign peoples, what bar-
barian cruelty, can be compared with the harm done by civil wars?"
And yet, despite these troubles, Valentinian I and his kinsmen had pre-
sided over a period of comparative internal calm. At first sight, it is surpris-
ing that this should have been so, since not one of these emperors, after
himself, was of sufficient caliber to carry such an enormous burden with
personal distinction, and the later incumbents were almost unrelievedly
dim. Yet the family remained on the throne for the record period of ninety-

437
4SS / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
one years. And the measure of stability that this unbroken continuation had
provided could readily be appreciated after the dynasty had gone, for chaos
at once descended. However, assumed the form, no longer of usurpa-
this
tions, but of a regime in which even the most ostensibly legitimate emperors
were mere figureheads depending on powerful German generals. The throne
passed with ludicrous rapidity from one puppet to another, and the old
Roman failure to secure peaceful successions had become a major factor in
the dissolution of the western empire that followed so soon afterwards in
476.

While the armies of the empire were seeking to assert themselves against
one another, they were failing to perform the tasks of imperial defense that
were required of them. They collapsed before foreign invaders who were,
theoretically, much inferior in numbers and equipment —
the sort of enemies
that Rome had often encountered before and defeated. Alaric and Gaiseric
may have commanded no more than a mere forty thousand and twenty
thousand warriors respectively; whereas, according to the Notitia Dig-
nitatum, which lists the senior officers of state and army, with their staff's,
in A.D. 395, the two Roman empires between them possessed no fewer than
five hundred thousand soldiers. And half of these belonged to the West,

being stationed, for the most part, on or near the Rhine and Danube
borders.
However, such statistics are deceptive. For one thing, as much as two-
thirds of the western empire's total army consisted, not of the high-grade
field force, but of the less mobile and less respected frontier troops —and it

was from their ranks, moreover, that the heavy casualties in the field force
had to be replenished as best they could. The result was that in terms of
active, eff'ective strength, the western Romans could scarcely mobilize big-
ger numbers than their foes. Stilicho, in 405, led a force of not many more
than twenty thousand and even fifteen thousand was considered a substan-
tial total for a Roman army of the time.
field

This numerical weakness was largely due to the increasing failure of the
imperial authorities to enforce conscription. During the earlier part of the
fourth century a.d. this had been the principal source of recruitment, and
Valentinian I, for example, conscripted strenuously every year. But the
exempted categories were cripplingly numerous; not only slaves, as always,
but also senators, bureaucrats, clergymen, and many others were entitled
to opt out. Eff'orts to recruit the remainder of the population, therefore, had
to be intensive. Even the men who worked on the emperor's vast estates
found themselves called up. Yet other landlords, though required to provide
recruits in proportion to the size of their estates, firmly resisted such de-
mands, or sent only the men they were content to lose. And they had some
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 4^g

excuse for resentment at being singled out in this way, because little attempt
was made to conscript the inhabitants of the cities, who, especially if they
came from Rome, were deemed useless as soldiers; so that the burden fell
on the rural population, with the inevitable result that agricultural produc-
tion suffered and would have suffered more still had there not been wide-
spread evasion of the draft.
Becoming convinced, for such reasons, that ordinary measures of con-
scription would no longer avail, the government introduced new and strin-
gent rules —
including the insistence that if a man's father had been a soldier,
he himself must become one too. This doctrine of hereditary obligation had
already been put into practice earlier, with application to a wide variety of
professions;and now it was directed towards the military career, insofar as
the authorities had the power to assert their will, with ever-increasing
sternness. As Saint Ambrose remarked, military service was no longer
considered a patriotic duty, but a servitude — to be shunned. By the 440s it

had become impossible to attempt any call-ups whatever except in the

gravest emergencies. And a decade later we hear of no more western citizens
being drafted at all.

And most strenuous efforts to make

yet this failure occurred despite the
army life attractive. There had been endeavors on these lines in a number
of earlier reigns. Such reforms had been sharply censured by conservatives,
and Valentinian I and Theodosius I, too, were charged with treating the
soldiers much too indulgently —
for example, when they allowed them to
earn extra pay as workers on the farms. However, these inducements were
varied by heavy threats, including instructions that those who sought to
escape military service by amputating their thumbs should be burned alive.

Yet neither the stick nor the carrot tempted men to seek the life of a soldier
in such a perilous and dislocated world.
The law of 409 reveals, that the hereditary defenders of
result was, as a
the frontier posts just melted away. The cities were left unguarded even
when invaders were almost in sight; and the encouragement of local defense
groups proved effective only rarely. True, a fine general like Stilicho or
Aetius could still win But on many other occasions the imperial
his battles.
troops were doomed to defeat before they had even caught a glimpse of a
German or Hun soldier. Besides, in the frontier garrisons in particular, they
were exploited by theirofficers, who grabbed much of their pay, and this
leftthem unenthusiastic for battle. But this was only one small aspect of
a wider phenomenon: the empire no longer inspired its soldiers to fight
vigorously for its survival.
Failing, therefore, to mobilize enough satisfactory recruits, the govern-
ment decided that if it could not get men, it would get money. And so, from
the fourth century onwards, it accepted cash sums in lieu of manpower from
440 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
those who wanted to avoid serving and from their landlords as well. It took
these sums in order to pay for German soldiers to supplement and replace
the elusive provincials. This in itself was not new. There had long been
Germans in the Roman army; and their enrollment had been considerably
increased by Diocletian and Constantine. At that time they were mostly
recruited under personal contract, on an individual basis, to serve under
Roman officers; and for the most part they fought well, seeing the empire
not as an enemy but as an employer.
But then in 382 Theodosius I extended the process decisively and trans-
formed it into something more novel. The German "allies" or federates
whom he now enlisted were not merely individual soldiers any longer, but
whole tribes, each recruited under its own chieftains, who paid their men
in cash and goods received annually for the purpose from the emperor. Once

introduced, this new federate participation in the army grew apace. It was
widely criticized as an undermining influence, and yet, since other forms of
recruitment had failed, it was probably the best remedy available. And yet
it proved a failure, and its failure helped to bring the western empire down.

Social Catastrophe

One reason why it failed was the total lack of sympathy between the army
and civilians. Rather than fight, the soldiers preferred to terrorize the rest
of the population, who consequently loathed them.
Besides, the people resented the military for other reasons as well. Above
all else, the burden of taxation they had to bear in order to keep this army
in existence was appallingly heavy, so heavy that its impositions alienated

Relief of imperial official traveling with his staff.

 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 44I

the poor from the state forever. The laws of Theodosius I, for example, show
a passionate desire to increase the extortion of revenue by every possible
means. "No man," he pronounced in 383, "shall possess any property that
is exempt from taxes." Harsh regimentation, for this same purpose of
paying the army, had been a fact of Roman life for nearly two hundred
years. But now each successive emperor continued to turn the screw a little
tighter still.

payment of these huge taxes was only one part of the contri-
Besides, the
bution a citizen had to make to the state. There was also widespread
requisitioning of his personal services. For example, he was compelled to
supply coal and wood, and to boil lime, and to help keep public works and
buildings in repair. This mobilization of compulsory labor became more
stringent all the time; and violence and torture were employed to prevent
evasions. Yet, at the same time, as in the military draft, there were far too
many exemptions, which privileged social groups found excessively easy to
obtain; and there was also a great deal of corruption, as the large number
of ineffective attempts to cure this state of affairs makes glaringly clear.
It was unquestionable that, in some form or other —
cash or kind or
personal services or all three —
huge contributions had to be raised, since
otherwise the army and empire were not going to be able to survive. But
does the historical fact that this purpose was not, in the end, achieved prove
that the required amounts were too great to be raised —
that their collection
was a practical impossibility?
No. Probably the taxes could have been brought in, if only the system
for levying them had been less inefficient. It was inefficient because it was
so intolerably oppressive, leaving tax dodging as the only alternative to
destitution. And it was not only oppressive but unfair, since the worst
sufferers were, as always, the agricultural poor. The unfairness of the land
tax, from which the state drew nine-tenths of its income, had always meant
that they were hit much harder than the rich, and despite Diocletian's
attempts to introduce sliding scales of crops and harvests, this situation was
still substantially unchanged. Indeed, it had become worse. By 350 the sums

exacted from this principal source of revenue had multiplied threefold

within living memory, and after that the situation deteriorated still further.
Moreover, the most important tax in kind, utihzed for many years to pay
government employees, had to be paid in the form of grain, so that once
more it was the agricultural population that suffered. True, subsequently
there was a change of method, as a result of which levies in kind were
increasingly commuted to gold once again. But that was of no assistance
to laborers in the fields who had no gold and were once again suffering from
a galloping inflation. Moreover, they were still crippled by the general
adverse conditions that had always restricted the economy of the ancient
442 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

Dog-tag fastened round the neck of a slave, promising

a reward if he ran away. Later fourth century a.d.

—
world costly transportation and stagnant technology, supplemented now
by a shrinkage of cultivable land owing to encroachments by the invasions.
Slavery was not the major problem of the age. It is true that in certain
territories, such as the Middle Danube regions and Mauretania, slaves were
numerous enough to make a substantial contribution to the labor force.
still

However, this did not so much increase the total number of workers availa-
ble as depress the "free" poor still further, since they could not compete
with this unpaid labor and dropped out of the market altogether. Besides,
such areas with abundant slaves were somewhat exceptional. In most other
parts of the empire, at this epoch, there was no longer enough slave labor
to make any appreciable difference to the economic picture one way or the
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 443

other. Such slaves as there were sometimes helped the empire's various
enemies and sometimes went around looting. But their role in the history
of the period was relatively unimportant. It was on the impoverished "free"
men and women of the rural countryside that the full horrors of the situa-
tion descended. They and the government were oppressed and oppressor,
face to face in destructive and suicidal hostility. It was largely because of
this rift that the taxes needed to support the army were not, could not be,
paid in. And since that could not be done, the western empire failed to find
defenders and collapsed. This was perhaps the gravest and most disastrous
of all the disunities that afflicted the Roman World.

It also brought about radical changes in the structure of society. When

the small farmers and agricultural laborers could no longer make both ends
meet, they sought protection where they could find Thus whole villages
it.

formally placed themselves under the patronage of individual army officers,

who, in return for the services of the villagers, were prepared to parley on

Mosaic of wounded huntsman at villa near Piazza Armerina, Sicily. Fourth

century a.d.
444 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
their behalf with the imperial tax collectors. More numerous, however, were
the communities that chose not officers but local landowners as their pa-
trons. And many same on their own personal
individual civilians did the
—
account small farmers who abandoned their homes and land in despera-
tion and fled within the walls of the nearest great estate. This had happened
before, during the troubles of the third century, but now the process re-
peated itself on a vast scale.
Since agricultural labor was so scarce, the landowners were content to
receive these people, who defrayed their keep either by paying a cash rent,
or by handing over a proportion of the crop they were allowed to grow, or
by contributing the labor of their hands. Although their surrender was
unconditional, at first, like the clients of the army officers, they could often
rely on their new patrons to chase the tax authorities away. But later the
landowners did an unholy deal with the western government, and the
refugees found themselves on the tax lists once again. The emperors, that
is, were glad to endeavor to prevent these tenants from moving away

without their landlord's consent, so that they were wholly subjected to his
control —and so were their children after them. Such men were not exactly
slaves, but foreshadowed the serfs of the Middle Ages.
One of the emperors who published such restrictions was Valentinian I.
He, for his part, was not prompted by any desire to grind the faces of the
poor but was acting from motives of plain realism, since if there was one
thing worse than being frozen into one's occupation, it was being frozen out
of any job or food at all —
and from that fate at least the landowners saved
their refugee tenants. Moreover, in other respects, Valentinian displayed

notable concern for the welfare of the poorer classes, to which he himself
had belonged. In particular, he appointed functionaries described as De-
fenders of the People (368-70). Somewhat resembling the ombudsmen of
modern countries, these officials were designed to protect the under-
privileged "against the iniquities of the powerful." The praetorian prefects
were ordered to nominate such a defender in every town of the western
empire, and the emperor himself required to know the name of every man
who received such an appointment. Unfortunately, however, his successors
watered the project down, transferring the selection first to city councillors
(Theodosius I) —the very men responsible for collecting the taxes —and
then to committees on which the landowners were heavily represented
(Honorius).
The scheme had But there were still writers prepared to speak up
failed.

for the oppressed. John Chrysostom, bishop (patriarch) of Constantinople

(ca. 354-407), was painfully aware of the gulf between rich and poor. And

above all Salvian, presbyter at Massilia (Marseille) (ca. 400-after 470),

described in his work On the Governance of God (De Gubernatione Dei) how
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 44§

God was chastising the world for its sins —a chastisement which he equated
with the material oppression he saw everywhere around him. The age he
lived in, like the later i8oos, which poverty was regarded as
was one in

blameworthy and disgraceful. Salvian fiercely rejected that stigma; and

indeed he was so determinedly radical that no social class gained his favor
except the destitute, whose abominable treatment by the government and
the rich alike he deplored with intense forcefulness and unrelieved gloom.
The consequence of the conditions he so eloquently describes was that
thousands of people despaired of making an honest living at all, and went
underground to form traveling gangs of robbers and bandits. Gaul, in
particular, experienced a succession of large-scale disturbances of such a
kind. Indeed, such bands operated almost on the scale of a nationwide
rising, in which tenants and slaves alike revolted in unison against the
landlords and authorities; we learn that these Bagaudae an old name by —
—
which they called themselves held their own People's Courts, "where
capital sentences are posted up on an oak branch or marked on a man's
bones." And can you wonder that there were such terrorist gangs? asked
Salvian, blaming these widespread disorders unreservedly upon the ruth-
lessness of the governing class.
Far back in the distant past, whole aeons away it seemed, was that not
totally imaginary golden age when the various classes of the Roman state,
even if never truly united because of the yawning economic differences, had
at least been able to live together without seeking each other's annihilation.
Now, instead, the empire had come to a time like the nineteenth century,
when Disraeli made a character in his novel Sibyl remark: "I was told that
the privileged and the people formed two nations." But in the nineteenth
century the social structure managed to avoid disintegration; whereas in the
fifth century it had crumbled, opening a breach through which the external
enemy could batter his way in.

Yet the western empire might still have held together, brushing aside the
claims of the poor, if only the rich and the government had more frequently
seen eye to eye with one another. They colluded, it is true, in insuring that
the tenants on the large estates should be allowed no freedom or rights. But
in other respects there was very little sympathy between the imperial au-
thorities and the upper class. In the declining Roman world this class, the
topmost layer of the population, consisted of men entitled to describe
themselves as senators. And even if the Senate, as such, did not count for
a great deal more than it had in the earlier empire, its individual members
were now more powerful than they had ever been before. Those who at-
tended the Senate house at Rome did not see much of the emperor, whose
residence was at Mediolanum and later in Ravenna. But this gave them (as
44^ / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
it gave the popes same city) a certain independence of action. Con-
in the

stantine the Great knew the value of these senatorial dignitaries, mainly
pagan though they still were; and so, while excluding them from his army,
he courted their acquiescence in his policies by offering them lucrative
civilian posts, and preserving and even enhancing the pompous dignity of
their consulships and other sinecures.
Class consciousness and snobbery were enormous. Yet the senatorial
order was not altogether closed to newcomers. Moreover, the term "sena-
tor" had come to be extended beyond those who actually sat in the Senate
at Rome to several
thousand additional aristocrats living outside the capital
and, in many cases, outside Italy. Such men, the owners of enormous
properties, may have been five times wealthier, on an average, than their
forerunners of earlier imperial epochs. Their estates, to which so many
displaced persons fled for shelter, were like small kingdoms in themselves,
self-contained economic and social units packed with farm workers, slaves,
artisans, guards, bailiffs, and hangers-on. In Gaul there was a particularly
massive concentration of about a hundred powerful landowners who, with
Honorius's concurrence, virtually assumed control of the country and later,
with the support of the Visigoths, briefly proclaimed one of their own
number as emperor (455).
The noblemen and noblewomen of the later empire were magnificent
personages. But they were not particularly addicted to vicious high hving
—a good deal less so than their forerunners three and four centuries earlier.

So the idea that the Western world collapsed because of orgies, a theory
beloved by modem moralists and makers of spectacular films, must be
abandoned. There had been many more orgies earlier, when the empire was
had been doing well, than later when it was faring badly. More serious is
the accusation that the senators of the fourth and fifth centuries stood aloof
from public life. Many of them held no office of state, preferring instead to
remain at home and enjoy their properties at leisure. In Rome and the
provinces ahke, they failed to pull their weight in state affairs. True, towards
the very end of the western empire there was a change, because by then the
landowners had become more powerful than the emperor himself, and some
of them successfully invaded his councils. But even then many others still
remained apart, living idly on their own estates and oblivious of any wider
claims upon their time.
Salvian, among others, felt this profoundly and declared that the higher
a man's status might be, the greater were his obligations, and the greater
his guiltwhen, as so often, he fell short of them. By this sin of omission such
a man was betraying the empire and contributing to its fall. And indeed,
in spite of lip service to the romantic concept of Eternal Rome, many
noblemen were not prepared to lift a finger to save the reality. On the
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 44-/

contrary, they often actively undermined its welfare by rebuffing imperial

officials, harboring deserters and brigands, and taking the law into their own
hands to such an extent that they even maintained their own private prisons.
Valentinian I objected to this practice with some determination; but his
successors— the emperors who made an arrangement with the landowners
about the tenants — had give
virtually And even
to these upper-
in. yet, so,

class personages still frequently remained hostile to the government,

scoffing at the Augusti as uncultured and detesting their ministers.

In the vain hope, then, of keeping their armies in the field, the impe-
rial and alienated the rich. They also alien-
authorities ruined the poor
ated and then very largely destroyed the solid segment of the population
that came in between —
the middle class. This had once been the back-
bone of the Greek city-states, and later on it had fulfilled the same role
in the Roman Empire as well, which had likewise been a network of

city-state communities. But the external invasions and internal rebellions

of the third century a.d. had dealt this middle class terrible physical
blows, while the accompanying monetary inflation caused their endow-
ments to vanish altogether. And then, from the next batch of third-cen-
tury emperors, who grimly pursued the enormous tasks of reconstruc-
tion, the old-fashioned ideals of this bourgeois section of the community
received little sympathy. The cities of the empire, their public work pro-
grams cut to nothing or severely restricted, began assume a
to
thoroughly dilapidated appearance; and then in the fourth and fifth cen-
turies, despite contrary efforts by Julian and others, their position still

continued to worsen, and the old urban civilization, especially in the

West, plunged into a sharp decline.
The nucleus of the middle class had been provided by the curiales, who
comprised the members of the city councils (curiae) and their sons and
descendants. Once, they had been munificent benefactors of their cities; but
those days were gone forever. Nowadays
most important function by
their
far was to carry out the orders they received from the central government,
and above all to collect its revenues. It was the duty of the councillors, and
of their offspring when their turn came, to extract from their fellow citizens
the taxes in cash and kind demanded by the state and to compel them to
join the army.
In other words, they had virtually become imperial agents. This meant
that they had and
to participate in acts of oppression, social critics such as
Salvian of Massilia deeply blamed them for doing so. Yet the councillors'
own personal situation, too, had become acutely difficult since they had to
make up any shortfall themselves. This meant that from the third century
onwards wealthy men became increasingly reluctant to serve on the city
44S / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
councils. It meant that, since few new families were willing to be
also
enlisted in such a burdensome cause, these memberships more and more
often assumed a hereditary character —
a situation encouraged by the impe-
rial government, which insisted, as in so many other sections of the commu-

nity, that the sons of councillors should follow in the footsteps of their
fathers.
But such insistence, although reiterated with almost neurotic regularity,
did not prevent these curiales from deserting wholesale from their posts;
and indeed the entire middle class of the western empire, of which they
formed such an essential part, was almost wiped out of existence. In a
society that had always so largely depended on this class, its destruction left
a vacuum that nothing could fill, and signified that from now onwards the
population of these territories for the most part consisted of very rich and
very poor. No doubt, the traditional urban civilization had always exhibited
a disequilibrium since the towns were parasites upon an agrarian economy.
Nevertheless, that was the system on which the ancient world had been
founded, and its virtual erasure contributed substantially to the destruction
and transformation of that world.
So throughout the last two centuries of the Roman West there was an
ever-deepening loss of personal freedom and well-being for all except the
very prosperous and powerful. The western empire had become a military
camp in a perpetual state of siege, where each man was assigned a place he
and his descendants must never desert. The authorities sought to impose
maximum regimentation, to pay for the army and prop up the imperial
structure. And yet all that they thereby achieved was to hasten the ruin of
what they wanted to preserve, by destroying all the individual loyalty and
initiative that alone could have achieved its preservation.

Moreover, this suicidal process was accelerated by the vast size and
deteriorating quality of the civil service employed to regiment the remainder
of the population. It was a self-perpetuating body because, like the town
councils and so many other institutions, it became hereditary. Since the
beginning of the fourth century there had been a new imperial aristocracy
of service, enabling the rulers to make use of a body of helpers loyal to
themselves. Before long, however, the civil servants of this new brand, who
knew how greatly they were needed in order to collect the required revenue,
gained confidence and betrayed an unobtrusive, but nonetheless persistent,
defiance of their rulers.
Valentinian I, and some of his successors, tried to halt this trend, declar-
ing that the civil servants owed obedience as much as any soldiers. Yet the
emperors failed to prevent this rampant bureaucracy from gradually en-
croaching on their own imperial power and finally reducing it to almost
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 449

total paralysis. It is true that some of the provincial governors and gover-
nors general, as well as some of the praetorian prefects who supervised their
activities, were conscientious enough. But others, more numerous than in
earlier days, were callously inhumane and corrupt — partly because the
western empire was too poor to give them decent pay. The laws of the time
made unmanageable officialdom to order;
feverish attempts to reduce this
but the very repetitiousness of such measures shows how ineffective they
must have been.
These regulations are known to us because they were collected in a.d. 438
in the code of the eastern ruler Theodosius II, accepted also by his western
colleague Valentinian III. This Theodosian Code contains enactments of
both empires dating back a century and more. And they prove remarkably
revealing. Although some are humane and enlightened, many others display
an almost hysterical, repressive violence that augured badly for the survival
of the weaker of the two states, the empire of the West. And, once again,
these laws are monotonously repetitive —
proof that they were circum-
vented, disobeyed, and ignored. The government was overwhelmed by the
situation and powerless to improve it. And the lawyers of the period who
composed such strident documents were evidently a great deal less impres-
sive than their counterparts of earlier times. Moreover, the administration
of justice, like the other operations of bureaucracy, was undermined by
bribery.An anonymous fourth-century writer of On Matters of Warfare (De
Rebus Bellicis) explaining plans for the administration and army, concludes
his essay with an appeal to Valentinian I and Valens: "Put a stop to
dishonest litigation!"
The rulers whose orders produced all these unproductive edicts often

Gold medallion of the eastern emperor Valens (a.d. 364-78) at Treviri (Trier):
he is "triumphant over the barbarian peoples" (TRIVMFATOR GENT/wm
BAKBarum).
4jO / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
lived extremely cloistered lives themselves, disastrouslyremoved from con-
tact with their subjects in the outside world. At the two courts of Ravenna
and Constantinople, ceremonial and adulation were elaborate, and the eu-
nuch-chamberlains who controlled admission to the imperial presence were
regarded with implacable hostility, not only by the ruhng class but by all

others, too, who encountered their arrogance. In vain the official coinage
poured out streams of rousing patriotic slogans that sank to extraordinary
depths of unrealism and unpersuasiveness. There is unceasing stress on
Glory, and emperors ferociously declare themselves "triumphant over the
barbarian nations," when the very reverse was the case. Between the heads
of the two Roman states and their subjects, there was a lamentable failure
of communication.

Uncooperative Attitudes

Even so, however, the downfall of the western empire would have been
delayed if had cooperated better with its more successful eastern
only it

counterpart. But cooperation was often poor, or nonexistent. There was an

ancient, endemic, mutual dislike between the Latin-based and Greek-based
halves of the Roman World, and the rulers of the two sections often seemed
reluctant to come to each other's assistance and much readier to offer a stab
in the back instead.
This situation was at its worst just after the death of Theodosius I had
left the two regimes divided once again, and this time divided sharply and

finally. The commander in chief of his son Honorius in the West, Stilicho,

felt obsessive hostility towards the eastern empire, where he even had his

counterpart Rufinus assassinated. Nor, as we have seen, did he act strongly

enough against the Visigoth Alaric, since he always regarded the govern-
ment at Constantinople as a much more dangerous enemy. When, long after
his death, the West proved willing to accept an eastern nominee for its
throne (Anthemius, a.d. 467-71), it was already too late. Decades of mutual
ill will had sapped the strength of the western empire beyond repair, and

soon afterwards it ceased to exist.

Another reason why it fell was because of a disastrous failure to assimi-

late the Germans in its midst or achieve a workable arrangement with their
leaders. These German immigrants had constantly increased in numbers.
A decisive moment came in 382 when Theodosius I allowed entire tribes to
reside on imperial Thrace as autonomous federate units, com-
territory in
mitted to serving in the Roman army under their own chiefs. And then
again early in the fifth century, when the Visigoths and Burgundians settled
in Gaul, there were once more formal partitions of land in which the local
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 45^

Gold coin (solidus) of western emperor Anthemius (a.d. 467-72) shown with his
eastern colleague Leo I who sponsored him. "The Welfare of the State"
(SALVS REIPVBLICAE).

Roman proprietors handed over a third of their arable ground to the set-
tlers; and later this proportion was doubled.
In these developments one can detect the origins of the independent
European nations of the future. Yet when these Germans had first begun
to establish themselves on imperial territory, they felt no ambition to be-
come independent of Rome or spurn its institutions, desiring only to obtain
a share of its benefits and, above all, Even the Visigoth
cultivable soil.

Alaric, who went down to history as the captor of Rome, had at first,
according to the Gothic historian Jordanes, aimed at a new form of coexis-
tence, and a single German-Roman people. And his son Ataulf (410-15)
formulated the same ideal with great explicitness, stating that he had for-
merly wanted to establish a Gothic empire in place of the Roman state,
whereas now, instead, he "aspired to the glory of restoring the fame of
Rome in all its integrity and of increasing it by means of the Gothic
strength."
But the Roman response to this unprecedented offer of partnership was
inadequate. True, there were a few writers, inspired by pagan or Christian
universalism, who paid lip service to hp service was
multiracial unity. But
all that it was, because even they could not restrain themselves from ex-

pressing, like so many other authors of the time, a deep repugnance for the
personal characters and habits of the barbarians. Even Salvian, who bravely
supported coexistence on the grounds that these noble savages were better
than corrupt Roman society, commented on the nauseous smell of the
Germans' bodies and clothing, and described the Goths as perfidious, the
Alamanni as drunkards, the Saxons, Franks, and Heruli as wantonly brutal,
and the Alans as rapacious lechers. Similarly Sidonius Apollinaris, the
4j2 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
highly Hterate bishop of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), while lavishly flatter-
ing successive Visigothic monarchs and observing that he and they had a
common interest in saving the empire, nevertheless objected fastidiously to
the noisy skin-clad Goths, and tattooed Herulians, and Burgundians who
stank of the rancid butter they smeared on their tow-haired skulls.
Valens's governors and military commanders subjected the immigrant
Visigoths to unconcealed, rapacious exploitation. But what was almost
worse was that the Romans generally imposed on these new, unwelcome,
and disconcerting neighbors a kind of spiritual and social apartheid. The
German immigrants seemed to them an unabsorbable lump of branded,
subhuman outcasts; and so they set them apart, beyond a wall of contempt
and distaste. For instance, a law of 370 set a total veto on intermarriage;
and even the wearing of barbarian clothes by Romans was stringently
forbidden. This deliberate detachment, moreover, was greatly accentuated
by religious divergences, since the Arian form of Christianity, which was
adopted by the Germans, appeared to the churches of Rome and Constan-
tinople* to deny the divinity of Jesus and was condemned as heretical.
Only Aetius, if he had lived, might have reversed the general trend, for
he knew the Germans well and handled them with tact. But he came too
late, and he was struck down, whereupon hostility to the Germans became

the rule. Some of them, in response to this treatment, behaved with apolo-
getic humility. But many more reacted by refusing to become Romanized
after all. Thus the scheme of enlisting units of Germans in the army proved
a failure and foundered; disliked and despised, they retaliated by hating the
people whose glories they had once hoped to share. True, the individual
German soldiers in Roman units generally remained loyal. But the federate
troops, despite good service on occasion, came to be in a condition of almost
perpetual turbulence and revolt. In 409 and 422 they acted with treasonable
disloyalty. And thereafter they got increasingly out of hand and presented
a perilous hazard.
Instead of a new unity between Romans and Germans, a deadly dishar-
mony prevailed. In recent times, a —
few generations ago when racial expla-
nations were fashionable — it was maintained that Rome fell because its

ethnic purity suffered pollution. The opposite is rather the case. Despite
intermixtures with many peoples over the course of the centuries, the tough
character of the Romans had not changed as — their continuing achieve-
ments testify. Indeed, the trouble was rather that, psychologically, they had
not changed enough; if only they had been able to adapt themselves to
getting on with the Germans, the western empire might have been pre-
served.

*For the distinction between western Catholic and eastern Orthodox, see pp. 461, 470 fF.
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / ^55

What happened was painfully displayed by the rise of Gaiseric

instead
the Vandal. Far from talking of coexistence and partnership within the
empire, he raised his north African state to an uncompromising, virulently
hostile independence, fiercely including both the great Roman landowners
and the non-Arian clergy And at the same time King Euric
in his attacks.
making his people in Gaul and Spain into
of the Visigoths (466-484/5) was
another wholly independent nation and once again subjecting the official
church to vigorous oppression. His code (475) rejected any kind of
legal
amalgamation between the German and Roman peoples in his kingdom,
declaring them utterly separate and distinct from one another. So now
segregation was the policy on both sides. The opportunity for a constructive
union had been lost, and it was dramatically appropriate that the last
emperor of the West was forced to abdicate in the year immediately follow-
ing the publication of Euric's code.

Christians and Pagans

There were also various other causes of the downfall of the western
empire, secondary and peripheral, though not altogether unimportant. One
of these was the proliferation of dropouts who refused to participate in
communal and public life. There were many people who found the social
and economic situation intolerable and in consequence went underground
and became the enemies of society. A large number of them became hermits
and monks and nuns, who abandoned the company of their fellow human
beings and, in the manner of modern Jesus-people or followers of gurus,
divorced themselves from society, shaking the dust of the imperial system
off their feet as completely as if they had never been part of it all.

The monastic movement had its beginnings in Egypt, but it was intro-
duced to the western empire by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who
arrived in Rome in aboutaccompanied by two Egyptian monks. Then
341,
the popularization of the ascetic ideal in the West was carried further by
St. Martin of Tours (b. ca. 330-d. 397), a Danubian who founded monaste-

ries in Gaul. And St. Jerome, from Stridon in Dalmatia (b. ca. 348-d. 420),

in addition to his immense services to Christian scholarship, wrote an

account of the sort of lives led by hermits and monks, based on his own
experience as creator of a monastic society at Aquileia in northeast Italy
(370-73), and later at Bethlehem in Palestine. Then, early in the following
century, John Cassian, founder of a monastery at Massilia (ca. 415), wrote
works that induced many a nobleman to make the transition from senator
to monk. By this time, however, the monastic life was no longer the end
of a career but often led to a bishopric; monasticism had become respectable
and was on its way to the prestige conferred upon it by St. Benedict (ca.
434 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
480-547). But in its earlier days it had attracted those who wanted to escape
from the community; and at all times, granted its steadfast attempts to
maintain Christianity's spiritual commitment in face of an insidious society,
it manpower and revenue.
deprived the state of greatly needed
On what proved particularly disadvantageous was the
a long-term view,
celibacy the monastic career entailed, since it, by lowering the birth rate,
still further diminished the numbers of potential soldiers and taxpayers.

Moreover, this urge to the celibate life, already noticeable during the previ-
ous two centuries, extended far outside the circle of monks and nuns; and
preachers of the caliber of Augustine and Jerome defended it eloquently as
an ideal to be aimed at by ordinary people. But it was an ideal that imposed
yet another division upon a society that was profoundly divided already.
The government knew what was happening and assailed the men and
women who had embraced this profession of withdrawal. However, it took
no forcible steps to bring them back.
Against those, on the other hand, who did not adhere to the same religion
as themselves —
and even to the same branch of the same religion the —
authorities practiced violent coercion. This was possible because church and
state were bound in a close alliance, established by Constantine the Great.
The state was, at first, the controlling partner; as one of Valentinian I's
bishops admitted, '*the state is not in the church, but the church is in the
state." Nevertheless, the imperial court having moved elsewhere, the bish-
ops of Rome, the popes, were left free to become great men on their own
account. And another bishop, not of Rome but of Mediolanum, raised the
power of the hierarchy to a new peak. This was Ambrose, who occupied
the see from 374 until his death in 397. Ambrose presided over a grandiose
program of ecclesiastical building and rediscovery of martyrs; and he had
—
two famous clashes with Theodosius I from both it was the bishop who
emerged victorious. After his death, the ecclesiastical initiative returned
from Mediolanum to Rome, whose Popes Innocent I (401-17) and Leo I
(440-61) treated with Alaric and Attila respectively, the latter with trium-
phant success. And in the same period mighty Roman churches were under
construction.
was Pope Leo's view that collaboration between state and Catholic
It

church was a bargain beneficial to both, uniquely capable of binding the

disunited Western world together. But not everyone agreed; and in fact the
alliance turned out to have the opposite eflfect. This was because of the
excessive, violent zeal with which the civil leaders, acting upon the requests
of their spiritual partners, pressed conformity upon the pagans. By such
means they transformed diff'erences of opinion into irremediable hostilities.
Valentinian I was very unusual since he stood against this policy, preferring
universal toleration. But shortly after his death there was a great symbolic
Mosaic depicting St. Ambrose (d. a.d. 397).
45^/ THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
moment war against paganism when his son Gratian expelled the
in the
pagan statue of Victory from the Senate house (382). After his death, there
was once again keen debate on the subject; but the Christian view prevailed.
And then Theodosius I passed a whole series of laws endeavoring to obliter-
ate paganism altogether. In north Africa, however, religious riots broke out
among the pagans because their temples had been closed; but this only
spurred the bishops of the region to demand further and even more hostile
legislation in order to "extirpate the last remnants of idolatry."
One of the ecclesiastics who took the lead on the
in exerting this pressure
secular power was Augustine, the outstanding churchman, intellectual, and
writer of his age. Augustine was born at Thagaste (Souk-Ahras in Algeria)
in 354 of a Christian mother, who converted his father. The young man
received a careful education in north Africa and became professor of rheto-
ric at Mediolanum. After passing through a variety of religious convictions,

recaptured in his passionately introspective and self-critical Confessions, he

was ordained a priest at Hippo Regius (Annaba), where he became bishop
four years later, in 395. And now he came out in favor of coercing pagans
—and backsliders from Christianity to paganism as well; for Christ, he
declared, like a general, must use military methods to recall deserters to his
army.
The pagans were being worn down. But an attempt by one of their
western sympathizers, Eugenius, to seize the throne in 392-94 gave the

The church of S. Sabina at Rome,

originally founded ca. a.d. 422-32.
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 457

authorities a serious shock, and then Alaric's capture of Rome in 410

invested paganism with a new was widely

lease of hfe since the disaster
attributed to the empire's Christian regime. That was the argument that
Augustine's City of God sought to refute; the immediate stimulus of the
work was an urgent need to stem this new pagan revival. Thereafter, acts
of imperial repression against the supposed peril continued well on into the
440S. These coercive measures did in the end almost succeed in their aim
of extirpating paganism. Yet at first, during the crucial years of the earlier
fifth century, this persecution had intensified the very disunities it was

designed to eliminate; and it had thus played its part in the destruction of
the western Roman Empire.
Equally divisive and destructive were the conflicts within Christianity
had been Constantine's conviction that unity among all Christians
itself. It

was urgently necessary, not only because God and Jesus were indivisible,
but also because church unity was the best way of uniting the whole empire.
Yet disputes within the church continued to abound, relating to clerical
celibacy, the Fall of Man, and the nature of the Holy Spirit; and the East,
as always, stressed the singleness of the supreme deity, while the West
emphasized the divinity of Jesus, which the Arians seemed to be decrying.
It seemed, therefore, to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, that "No wild
beasts are such enemies to mankind as aremost of the Christians in the
deadly hatred they feel for one another." Valentinian I, it is true, remained

Basilica Liberiana (S. Maria Maggiore) at Rome, built by Pope Sixtus III (a.d.
432-40) (the apse was added in 1290 and the ceiling in 1500).
4^8 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
as tolerant to "heretics" within the Christian ranks as to pagans outside
them. But his successors displayed a very different attitude, especially
Theodosius I, who issued repeated laws and edicts against nonconformist

Christians. And Augustine, brooding on his own earlier spiritual deviations,

concluded that Christian heretics as well as pagans must be brought into
the fold by force. He quoted the scriptural text: "give opportunity to a wise
man and he become wiser." But "opportunity" was only a euphemism
will

for violent suppression; and it was in the same spirit that Pope Leo I later
declared that "truth, which is simple and one, does not admit of variety."
Manichaeans and Jews, too, continued to fare much worse under the Chris-
tian emperors than under their pagan predecessors. But persecution, as
always, deepened rather than closed the rifts and made the united loyalty,
which the empire so desperately needed, even more of a will-o'-the-wisp
than ever.

Moreover, the psychological attitudes of pagans and Christians alike

were equally unhelpful to the government in its unsuccessful struggle to
insure national survival. The pagans, on the whole, relied too complacently
on the glories of the past; and the Christian theologians preached doctrines
that deprecated the importance of serving the state.
To take the pagans first, their ancient educational habits were very far
from dead. Indeed, their purveyance of the classical tradition still held the
field virtually unopposed. The Christians had no rival educational theory
or practice to offer; even Constantine himself fervently assumed the patron-
age of the old system without showing any desire to broaden its scope. And
so in the great universities of Rome and Mediolanum and Carthage, and
in the famous municipal schools of Gaul, the professors adhered to the
classical pattern of the Seven Liberal Arts; or rather, since four of them were
no longer much taught (Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music), they
concentrated on the remaining three, Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic.
Indeed, throughout the entire fourth century, there was a significant resur-
—
gence of these traditional subjects though, as the middle class decayed, the
pursuit of such studies became increasingly limited to the aristocracy,
whose cultural and literary attitudes, as revealed in their refined and cli-
quish poems and letters, remained fixed in an almost uniform sterility.
These works display a romantic, nostalgic feeling for Eternal Rome the —
"Invicta Roma Aeterna" of coins and medallions. Though no longer the
governmental center of the world that had taken its name, the ancient city
was now symbolic of that world in a novel and significant manner. This was
denoted by the term "Romania," which came to signify the whole heritage
of Roman culture in the Latin West, in distinction from Gothia, Francia,
Alamannia. Emperors and officers and humbler people alike who had origi-
nated in far distant provinces and had scarcely, if ever, set foot in the city
 THE FATAL DISUNITIES / 45g

were now thinking of themselves as "Romans" with passionate emphasis.

Less than a decade after the city had fallen to Alaric, the Gallo-Roman poet
Rutihus Namatianus still felt able to discern a Rome of higher reality that
could never falter or fail:

No man will he forgets you;

ever be safe if

May I praise you when

the sun is dark.
still

To count up the glories of Rome is like counting

The stars in the sky.

Rutilius was a pagan, but contemporary Christians, too, felt the impact
of the classical past very strongly. It is true that they also engaged in
incessant debate about the extent to which they should draw upon this
pagan heritage. Augustine, for example, in spite of his immense admiration
of the Aeneid, contrasted your Virgil with our Scriptures. Yet he also, like
others, recalled that even the ancient Israelites had been permitted to "spoil
the Egyptians" and take their women as concubines; and therefore, accord-
ing to the same reasoning, he and his fellow Christians were entitled to
abstract what they could from the pagan writers.
But the trouble about this deeply ingrained veneration of the past was
that it tempted people to see every contemporary event in terms o{ previous

Roman happenings. In order to ram these comparisons home, the writers

call continually upon a wide range of precedents taken from the entire range

of their country's glorious history. Thus when the pagan, classicizing

Claudian of Alexandria, the leading poet of the age, wants to write flatter-

ingly about his own contemporaries, he can never stop comparing them to
the Scipios and Catos and Brutuses. "If we have any discernment at all,"
advised Macrobius in his learned symposium the Saturnalia, "we must
always revere antiquity." And indeed, the very last western emperor of all

was named both Romulus and Augustus.

Yet this propensity for looking backwards with such single-minded pas-
sion led directly to catastrophes. When, for instance, the pagan historian
Ammianus writes of the recent defeat of the Romans by the Visigoths at
Hadrianopolis (376), he at once compares the disaster to German invasions
half a millennium earlier; his point is that such tribulations had occurred
—
before and had been overcome so that there is no reason why they should
not be overcome once again. And later on, Rutilius Namatianus made
exactly the same point. Yet the analogy was fallacious, since the German
invasions five centuries previously had never off'ered even the slightest
threat to the empire's actual survival, whereas now the degree of magnitude
had altogether changed; the blow suffered by Valens at Hadrianopolis in 378
indicated a plight far more desperate than had ever existed before. But the
complacent nostalgia of Roman education made it impossible to face up to
460 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
such novel situations with any adequate or constructive response. "Your
power is felt wherever the sun's hght shines," declared Rutilius about
Rome. But he was wrong, since the Roman West was approaching final
collapse; countermeasures of the most determined kind were urgently re-
quired, and attitudes such as his distracted attention from this necessity.

The great Christian theologians, on the other hand, men of superior brains
and character who in earlier times would have joined the public service
instead of the church, were often guilty of a different but equally serious
disservice to the state, namely, the active discouragement of Christians from
working on its behalf, either in a peaceful or a warlike capacity. This attitude,
from the New Testament, had been natural enough in the old
easily justifiable
days when the civil authorities were engaged in persecuting Christianity. But
it is remarkable that, even after the empire had become Christian, the leaders

of the church should still persist in their old conviction that Christianity was
incompatible with state service. And yet that is what happened: a series of
popes continued to pronounce that to work for the government was perilous
to a man's soul; and St. Martin of Tours, founder of monasteries in Gaul,
asked to be released from the Roman army because he was Christ's soldier
and could not fight for his country. When such views took hold of the
population, the power of the empire to resist its foes was weakened.
It was sapped further by Augustine. He was not, it is true, a pacifist;

indeed he conceded that a literal interpretation of Christ's saying "turn the

other cheek" would ruin the state. But the massive twenty-two books of his
City of God undermined patriotism by more insidious means. In this su-
preme hterary masterpiece of the later Roman empire, from which medieval
thinkers derived a large proportion of all they knew about the ancient
world, he called up all the resources of pagan philosophy and Christian
doctrine alike to make a sharp distinction between the earthly city and its

counterpart in heaven. Plato and Paul had told of such ideal cities before,

but Augustine, writing soon after Alaric's sack of Rome, described the
concept with a vividness that was altogether new. And he infused it with
a distinct unhopefulness about the future of any and every terrestrial state.
He had felt this and now it seemed to him more than ever that
before,
Christianity was the crop coming just before the icy frosts of winter frosts —
that would freeze the nations of the world to death.
True, his "earthly city," which contains not only the sinners of this world
but unrighteous men and women anywhere in the universe, is a wider
concept than the Roman Empire. All the same, Augustine's pessimism
carries gloomy implications for the future of Rome's civilization —
or rather,
of the human endeavor that was needed to maintain it. His doctrine of
grace, adapted from Saint Paul, maintained that by our own unaided will,
without God-given aid, human beings are incapable of achieving anything
 / 4^1

Disc showing two young men. Fourth century a.d

at all. It was a decisive break with the optimistic, humanistic attitudes of

the classical world. And it was deeply resented by men such as Pelagius,
a British or Irish theologian who, in the spirit of Cicero, laid strong coun-
teremphasis on individual effort. Violent controversies ensued —and the
Pelagians were suppressed.
Augustine had cut Rome firmly down to size. Its interests could no longer
be held paramount: "Please pardon us '\{ our country, up above, has to cause
trouble to yours. . . . You would
still greater merit if you served a
acquire
higher fatherland." And indeed,
grew older, Augustine came more
as he
than ever to reject any identification between Christianity and empire. In
terms of world politics, he did not prevail because the identification had
come to stay. But his influence was widespread, and his refusal to believe
in a Christian empire was a part and parcel of the West's failure to defend

itself against its enemies and stave off its own collapse.
 22
The Aftermath

The Successor States in the West

hen Rome's rule crumbled in the west, it left the Visigoths
ruling the southwest of Gaul as well as Spain, and the Bur-
gundians in control of southeastern Gaul, while another
group of German communities, the Franks, had established themselves in
the north of the country. The Visigoths and Burgundians, however, whose
Arian "heresy" was alien to the local Catholic populations and their bish-
ops, were overcome in 507 by the Franks, whose pagan chief and founder
of the Merovingian dynasty Clovis of Turnacum (Toumai), (ca. 482-511),

had embraced the Catholic brand of Christianity with three thousand of his
warriors. He was emblems of a Roman consul by the eastern
sent the
Roman emperor Anastasius I; yet his kingdom was not a dependency of
Constantinople, but the independent nucleus of a future nation-state.
Clovius and his successors extended this Frankish dominion both to the east
and to the south, where Mediterranean Gaul gave them strength and cul-
ture.
Later Merovingian monarchs, however, gradually became puppets of
their successive mayors of the palace, of whom one, Pepin the Short, finally
deposed his overlord and founded the Carolingian dynasty (751), named
after his father Charles Martel. Then a ruler of that house, Charlemagne

(772-814) broke with his family's previous policy of peaceful missionary

penetration, by undertaking repeated military campaigns and forcible con-
versions throughout the northern regions of Europe. Permanent inspectors
were dispatched to the three hundred counties of his realm; and a legislative
assembly was summoned twice a year. Finally, Charlemagne declared him-
self Roman emperor and had himself crowned at Rome by Pope Leo III

(800).
In Spain Euric (466-85) and Alaric II (485-507) had fully established the
power of the Visigoths; and after the collapse of the Gallic portion of their

462
 THE AFTERMATH / 463

Seal of Alaric II, King of the Visigoths (a.d. 484-507)-

464 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
empire to Clovis, this Visigothic kingdom assumed a more national, Spanish
character. Nevertheless, there remained a division between the Cathohc
south of Spain — with Roman law and Roman, Byzantinized
its such cities

as Hispalis (Seville) — and the new who were governed from

settlers, their
capital at Toletum (Toledo) and retained their own Arian religion and legal
codes. However, the Visigothic regime prospered, especially under Leovi-
gild (568-86), who annexed additional regions of the peninsula and became
the first monarch in a former Roman province to strike an independent
national coinage of his own. Then his successor Reccared (586-601) turned
from his Arian faith to the church of Rome, thus founding Iberian Catholi-
cism.
But Islamic power, spreading in a gigantic explosion across north Africa
after the death of the prophet Mohammed (632), soon impinged forcibly on
Spain. In 711 the country was invaded by the Mohammedan prince Tarik,
whose successors asserted Moslem control throughout the southern part of
the peninsula, relegating the Christian Spanish monarchy to its northern
regions for centuries to come.
Meanwhile in Italy, after Odoacer had asserted virtual independence of
Constantinople, his Ostrogothic successor Theodoric (493-526) brought
unaccustomed peace and prosperity to the land. He solicitously retained the
Roman civil administration, and Latin literature greatly flourished, produc-
ing such writers as Boethius and then Cassiodorus who served as bridges
between the culture of the past and the medieval civilization that was
dawning. Moreover, although the Ostrogothic regime was not Catholic but
Arian, the Roman church continued to gain in power; and its Pope Gelasius
I wrote to the eastern emperor, Anastasius I, "the world is ruled by two

things, the sacred authority of the priesthood and the kingly power."
In north Africa, however, the relations of the independent Arian king-
dom of the Vandals both with Catholicism and with Constantinople were
subject to violent vicissitudes. But this state did not maintain itself for long,
for by the middle of the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I's
general Belisarius blotted it out of existence; and then Belisarius and his
successor Narses destroyed its Ostrogothic counterpart in Italy as well.

The Survival of Byzantium

The eastern empire, named Byzantine after the original name of Constan-
tinople, remained, unlike the western, very much in existence. When the
two realms had been finally separated between the off'spring of Theodosius
I, Arcadius and Honorius, the advisers of the former in the east had with

difficulty warded off an Ostrogothic threat. During the long reign of Ar-

cadius's son Theodosius II (408-450) that followed, power at Constantino-

I|3tv4r i^ti "^^ -vi^T -CXJC|?iH'l'l^rm^<'-^- ^f|^ y»«'t?^*'i^f, Vrf

Page from manuscript (eighth century) showing Cassiodorus's monastery

of Vivarium (ca. a.d. 550).
466 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

Gold medallion of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, King of Italy(A.D. 493-518),

''conqueror of the peoples" (VICTOR GENTIVM).

pie was by his mother Pulcheria. Noting the sack of Rome

chiefly exercised
by Alaric, the eastern government erected new walls around its capital, and
the Huns were bought off* with increasingly large sums. But Pulcheria's
Thracian husband Marcian, when he subsequently became emperor (450-
57), refused topay Attila's subsidy, thus launching him against the West
instead. After Marcian's death, a German general gave the Byzantine
throne to another Thracian, Leo I (457-74), who saved his empire from the
German soldiery by calling in troops from Asia Minor; and their comman-
der, his son inlaw Zeno, became his successor (474-91).
It was in Zeno's reign that the western empire became extinct. But the

eastern empire did not; and it nominally assumed control of the West,
though in practice Zeno refrained from interfering. But one of the chief
 THE AFTERMATH / 467

events of his time was a quarrel between the ecclesiastical authorities in

Rome and Constantinople, reflecting a dispute that was to rack Christen-
dom for centuries to come and would eventually result in the permanent
division between Catholic and Orthodox. On Zeno's death his widow gave
the throne to a rich nobleman Anastasius I (491-518), who shored up a
difficult financial situation.

Then Justin I (518-27), in whose time the Slavs appeared as a major threat
in the Balkans, became the founder of a new dynasty and elevated his
nephew Justinian I to the regency and the throne (527-65). The guiding
spirit of one of the most creative epochs in human history, Justinian also

built some of the world's greatest buildings; at Constantinople his Church

of the Holy Wisdom (Santa Sophia), which replaced Constantine's basilica
of the same name, still stands, a fitting symbol of the profoundly religious
Byzantine ethos. The last emperor to speak Latin better than Greek, Jus-
tinian instigated the compilation of a Latin Corpus of Civil Law in which
a committee of sixteen men summed up and adapted the whole legal experi-
ence of Rome, condensing three million lines of earlier law books into one
hundred and fifty thousand. The reign had its fair share of troubles, includ-
ing riots in the capital and one of the severest outbreaks of bubonic plague
in recorded history. Yet all the time Justinian's indefatigable administra-
tion, controllingand consulting the church, continued to adjust the imperial
system to the tasks of the future with impersonal and ruthless benevolence.
Moreover, he held his own against Persia, now reaching the height of its
power shortly before it fell to the Arabs. And Justinian also, as we have
seen, recovered Italy and north Africa, thanks to the genius of his generals
Belisarius and Narses.
These western reconquests proved impossible to maintain. Yet the east-
ern Roman or Byzantine empire continued to exist for an extraordinary —

Bronze coin of Justinian I (a.d. 539). On reverse, M (40) is denomination mark

(follis): NIK is mintmark (Nicomedia, Izmit).
Gold medallion of Justinian I celebrating his reconquest of North Africa from
the Vandals (a.d. 535).
 THE AFTERMATH / 469

duration of time. With only a brief interval from 1204 to 1261, when its

central region came under the domination of Western crusaders, it still

survived until its capital fell to the Ottoman Turkish sultan Mohammed II

in 1453. Many times throughout this millennial career it served as the

bulwark of Western civihzation against the East; and throughout almost the
entire period Constantinople was by far the largest and most splendid and
most learned city in Europe. Although its culture was Greek, and its superb
artwas a highly original blend of Roman, Greek, and oriental elements, the
Byzantine emperors saw themselves as the heirs of ancient Rome and called
themselves "Kings of the Romans."

But why did this eastern, Byzantine monarchy outlast its western coun-
terpart by nearly a thousand years? Why did these two halves of the origi-
nally united empire experience such totally separate and distinct destinies?
For one thing, the western realm was far more vulnerable to external attack
owing to its geographical location. In Europe, it had to guard the long
frontiers of the Upper and Middle Danube and the Rhine, whereas the
Byzantine Empire had only the Lower Danube to cover thus remaining —
relatively free to deal with menaces arising from the Asian east. Besides, if
the western emperor failed to hold his river barriers, he had no second line

/THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AT THE DEATH OF JUSTINIAN (AD 565) I

500 miles
470 / THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE
of defense to back upon, and Italy and Gaul and Spain lay wide open
fall

to the invaders; whereas to force the Bosphorus, guarded by the impregna-

ble defenses of Constantinople, was beyond the capacity of any hostile
power.
Furthermore, the eastern empire possessed a sounder social and eco-
nomic structure than the western, embodying fewer glaring disunities. It did
,not, for example, suffer in the same way from enormously wealthy noble-

men, who grudged both men and money to the government and the army.
Moreover, in contrast to the West, the middle class, the traditional nucleus
of ancient society, survived its vicissitudes throughout many of the domin-
ions of Constantinople in tolerable economic conditions; and employing this

class to man more effective than its

a professional civil service that was
western counterpart, the Byzantine authorities managed to gather in a
much higher proportion of the national income than the court of Ravenna
was ever able to collect. Besides, in contrast to the position today, the East
was both more populous and better cultivated than the West; and its prov-
inces had survived the ravages of the third-century invasions with greater
resilience.
Furthermore, the internal empire was far
political stability of the eastern
more impressive. During a whole century and a half from a.d. 365, its
internal peace was broken by only five usurpers (three of them in the same
remarkable contrast to the proliferation of such rebels in the west.
reign), a
True, Constantinople had its troubles, notably savage ecclesiastical divi-
sions. But it could weather them, owing to its inherently superior situation
in other respects. That was why it was the West that fell, or had to assume
new political forms, whereas the East was able to survive for another
thousand years.
 EPILOGUE

As far as
happened
our sources, multiple but elusive, allow us to find out what
in the ancient Roman
nothing to long ages of diverse and
Empire, we have seen a
from
and
rise

splendid efflorescence,
then to a massive fall or radical change. It is a story that has extended from
the establishment of diminutive Tiber villages to the creation and mainte-
nance of an enormous multiracial society, followed by its fragmentation into
units foreshadowing the nations of the modern world.
With modifications, much of Rome continued to live on within these
successor states; its language, government, law, church, literature, art, and
habits of thinking and living were all far from dead. And of these persisting
Roman elements Western civilization has remained very conscious ever
since, recalling and cherishing them in one revival and renaissance after
another. Yet in politics, as in art, the repetitions have never been exact, since
the backgrounds can never be repeated; and that again is why, although the
Roman experience unmistakably still carries lessons and warnings for
today, their exact form and significance are sometimes problematical.
One thing that is clear is that we do not always want to relive the
experience of the Romans; although sometimes what they did is entirely to
be admired and envied, in other respects they were detestable. Most of what
they achieved was based upon the use of force. The culture that has given
us their unequaled masterpieces was created and maintained, in the last
resort, by violent means that modern societies could not, or should not,
tolerate today. We are still left, therefore, with the unanswered question of
how the acute ethnic problems that still bedevil the equally large, or larger,
political units of own day can be solved without the use of such unac-
our
ceptable methods. Here we should look at the second stage of the Roman
process, for its forcible stages were habitually followed by phases of political
settlement. At such times this people and its rulers displayed a sagacity to
which no study of our own times, or for that matter any other times either,
reveals an effective parallel. In other words, after conquering or absorbing

47^
Print of the Roman Forum by Piranesi (1720-78).
 EPILOGUE / 4JS

a territory, the Romans generally then proceeded to administer it, if not

with a great deal of social justice (as the term is understood today), at least

in a remarkably pacific fashion that conferred a degree of prosperity such

countries had never known before.
Another aspect of society which the Roman experience raises thought-
in

provoking questions — once again, it does not always supply the

even if,

—
answers concerns the relationships between the individual and the com-
munity. In the heroic days of the Roman Republic, community spirit was
enormous, and its whole tradition prevented the rise of any individuals to
extraordinary importance; it was not entirely eccentric of Cato the Elder,
when he was writing military history, to prefer to omit the names of Roman
generals altogether. In the last days of the republic things were changing,
as the rise of an admirable portrait sculpture clearly hinted. Under the
imperial regime that followed, however, the opposite extreme to the repub-
lic was reached, as personality cult ran riot, focusing on the larger-than-life
figures of the rulers themselves.
The modern historian demurs here, protesting that although this glaring
spotlight was evidently directed upon the emperors, they did not, as in-
dividuals, exert all the effects ancient writers supposed upon the historical
process, which went its own way more or less regardless of them under the
influence of ineluctable social and economic factors. And there is certainly
some measure of truth in that, since Suetonius's highly personal Twelve
Caesars alone would give us a ludicrously inadequate picture of what was
going on. But, equally, we must not exaggerate our reaction in the other
direction, as we are inclined to do under the pressure of modem sociological
thinking, not to speak of our distaste for the dictators we have seen in our
own time. Indeed, it is these modern dictators themselves who warn us that
itwould be a mistake to react too forcibly against Suetonius and the others.
Granted that Stalin, for example, in a sense reflected the current trends and
tendencies around him, it would clearly be wrong to argue that those
tendencies would have impelled world history along precisely the same
course if he had never existed. Roman history offers the same warning in
no uncertain terms. Without, for example, the very peculiar personalities
and individual gifts of Augustus and Constantine, it would not have gone
the same way at all.
The story of Rome, in other words, shows that individuals do count. And
that does not apply only at the most exalted level either. The historian
Tacitus, bemoaning the imperial autocracy, admits freely that it left room
for superb courage and achievement among ordinary citizens. And Roman
poetry, in spite of all the powerful ties that bound its writers to their state
and society, emerges as something far more private and personal than the
community-minded poetry of classical Greece.
474 / EPILOGUE
Even though Roman history needs no updating to make it valuable and
exciting, nevertheless, in our own late 1970s it is perhaps this aspect of it

that most forcibly strikes the mind in the end. We in the Western world are
living in times when official assessments of the desirable and practicable
extent of individual freedom are sometimes being reduced and eroded with
unprecedented speed and thoroughness. How do the Romans stand on this?
It is true that, although their unique legal capacity contributed greatly to
the democracies of the future, they scarcely even began to achieve what is

regarded as democracy today, in any of the current interpretations of the

term. Indeed, the lower and by far the greater part of the social pyramid
comprised a vast, inarticulate majority, living scarcely above the level of

bare survival, as such unfortunates had lived in all other societies ever since
the beginning of time. If we are disposed to make moral judgments and —
the historian should not always to refuse to do this —
we may regret that this
was a barrier Rome did not break. Nor, of course, has any other nation until
the modern age —and even now only partially.

But, having duly taken note of that, let us consider what they did accom-
plish. Their whole immense story shows us not only what a tightly knit
community can achieve by mutual cooperation, but what possibilities
also
for individual self-expression exist within that community. Even if the large
suppressed majority still failed to benefit, Rome did attain an unprecedent-
edly massive measure of personal self-realization and achievement, at least
among all the other and formative elements in its society: politicians, writ-
ers, artists, thinkers, architects, engineers, lawyers,and men of affairs. And
it is that tradition that wins our respectful admiration and causes us to be
proud that we are among its inheritors.
 NOTES

PART I ETRUSCAN ROME

Chapter i. Rome and Etruria

Italy and Rome, italy: the name is probably a Hellenized form of the Itahan
Vitelia (calf land), a name originally restricted to the southern half of the peninsula's
toe. SALT ROUTE: extended inland by Via Salaria (from sal, "salt") from Rome to
Reate (Rieti) in the Sabine country, hills of ROME: originally raised by action of
Ciminian and Alban volcanoes, middle and late bronze age: used to be named
after Terramara {terra marna, "rich black soil") settlements south of the Po.
latium: the name "Latini" was first applied to a tribal group on the Tiber north
of Rome, iron age: includes "Villanovans" named after a small town near Bologna.
INHUMERS of Latium formed part of widespread Fossa Culture that reached its
climax in seventh century B.C. palatine: {Roma quadrata, "square Rome"): two
archaic cisterns and rock-cut postholes of remains on Alban Hills. Rome's origins:
it was believed that after the sack of Troy in the Trojan War (ca. iioo B.C.), one of

the Trojan leaders, Aeneas, had made his way to Italy, where he founded Alba
Longa, of which Rome was a much later offshoot. Probably the Etruscans devised
the Aeneas link between the Trojan saga and their own Asian origins, foundation
OF ROME: 814 B.C. (Timaeus); 753 B.C. (Varro); 751 B.C. (Cato the Elder); 748-747
B.C. (Fabius Pictor); 729 B.C. (Cincius Ahmentus).

The Etruscan City States, etruscans' origins: Herodotus placed their com-
ing more than three centuries too early, perhaps telescoping early Iron Age and
Etruscan immigrants. The suddenness of the finest orientalizing tombs from ca. 700
suggests a new historical situation. (At least some influences crossed the Apennines
from the north, notably to Vetulonia). etruscan link with carthage: two gold
plates from Pyrgi (S. Severa) inscribed in Etruscan (ca. 500) are matched by one in
Punic (Carthaginian) — or possibly Phoenician —Cypriot. greek and south Ital-
ian LINKS: Not only lonians from Cumae (mid-sixth
at Gravisca, but pottery
century) at Tarquinii and Caere, metals at populonia: the copper came from
Campiglia. Later, after ca. 400 B.C., huge quantities of iron, mined on the island of
Ilva (Elba), were smelted at Populonia. volaterrae (Volterra) was the capital of
a metal-rich zone, voltumna: the sex of the deity is uncertain.

475
476 / NOTES TO PP. 15-25
Earliest septimontium: Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Germalus, Caelius,
Rome,
Oppius, Cispius, the last two being spurs of the Esquiline; eight including the
low-lying Suburba, between Esquiline and Viminal. city boundary: pomoerium,
a term understood to mean the strips inside and outside the wall. The Capitoline
Hill was not inside Xht pomoerium. etruscan trade with rome: seventh-century
graffiti from Forum Boarium (Cattle Market) reflect this. By 650 Rome had close
relations with Etruscanized Falerii (Civita Castellana), another frontier town 28
miles north, center of a diversified group of Faliscan towns.

Chapter 2. The Etruscan Monarchy

Etruscan Rome, greeks in-campania: first on island of Pithecusa (Latin Ae-

naria, now Ischia; Euboeans, ca. 775), then Neapolis (Naples, ca. 650) and Dica-
earchia (Latin Puteoli, now etruscan-campanian league of twelve
Pozzuoli).
cities led by Capua: perhaps legendary, etruscans in latium: probably (though
this is disputed) not conquered until after Campania, because it was so swampy. A
Tarquinii inscription (elogium) seems to boast of the conquest of nine Latin cities;

Tusculum means "Etruscan city," and Praeneste (Palestrina) tombs show a domi-
nant Etruscan class 50 years before the Tarquins at Rome.

Early Roman Religion, anthropomorphism: Varro said that making statues

in Greek fashion undermined people's fear of the gods.
Structure of the Earliest Roman State, legendary king-list: Romulus,
Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius
Tullius, Tarquinius Superbus. rex: also inscribed on cup now found near the Regia
which may be ca. 530-510 B.C. Words related to rex are found in other Indo-
European languages as well, three earliest tribes: Tities, Ramnes, Luceres.
SENATE: the meaning of pat res conscripti is disputed. According to tradition there
had been in earlier days still a Senate of only 100 members, politorium: 117 tombs
now found, including Etruscan remains, latin language: craftsman's inscription
on gold fibula from Praeneste (Palestrina) late seventh century; cippus from Roman
Forum (Black Stone) late sixth century, tarquins: the diviner (haruspex) Tar-
nuitius Priscus is mentioned on an inscription (elogium) of Tarquinii. Five other
Etruscan cities, including Clusium (Chiusi), were believed to have fought against
Tarquinius Priscus as allies of the Latins. "Tarpeian" cliff on Capitoline Hill =
"Tarquinian." Iron model of axes 2ind fasces of ca. 600 found at Vetulonia. Etruscan
pottery of ca. 530-520 at Rome (S.Omobono) comes from Vulci. calendar of
NUMA: probably of time of Tarquins. The names Aprilis (April) and Idus (day of
month) are Etruscan.
"Servius Tullius." Servian tribes: the urban tribes (and Four Regions) are:
Suburana (Sucusana), Esquilina, Collina, Palatina. The Capitoline Hill was not
included in the Four Regions, comitia centuriata: its establishment is sometimes
attributed to after 450 or ca. 366 B.C. Servian infantry classes: first three
infantry of line, last two light-armed. Then came five classes of unarmed, early
HOPLITE SHIELD: Fabriano (near Gubbio). senate of 300 members: based on
three tribes and 30 curiae, alba longa: from tenth century controlled line of future
Via Appia. Its existence may not antedate Rome's, but its importance does. Its
 NOTES TO PP. 25-39 / 477

destruction (doubted by some) was attributed to King Tullus Hostilius. Its leading
families in Rome: Julii, Tullii. OSTIA AND pons sublicius: (from sublicae, "piles")
legendary attributions to King Ancus Marcius. massilia: founded from Ionian
Phonaea (Phocaea). greek influence in Latium: shown by some of the early
bronze statuettes now discovered at Gabii (Castiglione). greek altar of Her-
cules (Ara Maxima): presided over commerce; imports in the sixth century were
paid for by Rome in salt, timber, and slaves, capitoline temple: platform of
cappellaccio without mortar. The temple had flanking colonnades, unlike the "nor-
—
mal," smaller Etruscan temple described by Vitruvius Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva
(identified with the Greek Zeus, Hera, and Athena) had already been grouped on
the Capitolium Vetus on the Quirinal (whose god Quirinus was identified with
Romulus), expansion of tarquinius superbus: Antium (Anzio), Ardea, and
probably Lavinium seem to have accepted Roman military leadership (temporarily).
Gabii guarded the eastern flank of Latium against the Sabines: treaty celebrated on
a coin of Augustus. Garrisons (of allies) at Pometia (Pomezia), Circeii (S. Felice
Circeo), Signia (Segni).
The Fall of the Monarchy, downfall of superbus: ascribed to love affair
(with woman), cf. downfall of Athenian Hippias (510 B.C.) (with boy), aricia
became leader of the league of Ferentina. destruction of etruscan town: late
sixth century, S. Giovenale, near Viterbo. porsenna: perhaps an Etruscan title
(purthna). clusium: at the southern end of the Val di Chiana. (A modem theory
identified Porsena's city instead with Marsigliana d'Albegna or Orbetello, on the
coast). ETRUSCAN RAIDER-SETTLERS IN ROME: Mastama (from magister, "gen-
eral"?) and Caeles Vibenna. cumae battle: the Syracusan victor was Hiero I.
MARZABOTTO: on flood plain of River Renus (Reno); gridiron street plan, adria:
gave its name to the Adriatic Sea. spina: built on piles amid a network of canals.
ETRUSCAN writing IN EUROPE: Scandinavian runes in the Middle Ages were still
based on Etruscan letters.

PART II THE UNITY OF ITALY AND ROME

Chapter ^. The Unification of Italy

Rome's Hostile Neighbors, latins: By 500 B.C. the original 50 or more com-
munities were reduced to 10 or 12. lavinium: at least 13 altars of 500 B.C. or a little
earlier, recently discovered large-scale statuary from sixth, but mainly of fifth and
fourth centuries; and archaic Latin inscription to Castor and Pollux. Lavinium first

developed parallel to the Alban communities, then rose as they declined. TUS-
CULUM: its leader Octavius Mamilius was believed to have been Tarquinius Super-
bus's son-in-law. treaty with latins: (Cassian Treaty, 493 B.C.); made by
Spurius Cassius Vecellinus. ardea: home of legendary Italian (Rutulian) leader
Tumus in Virgil's Aeneid. Perhaps Ardea, like Lavinium, had for a time been in
Roman hands at an earlier date, oscan: alphabet derived through Etruscan alpha-
bet from Chalcidic (Euboean) Greek. VOLSCI: originated in upper Liris (Garigliano)
valley west of the Fucine Lake, and moved across Lepini Mountains towards Rome.
47^ / NOTESTOPP.43-61
They were the tribe of the legendary heroine Camilla in Virgil's Aeneid. antium:
captured 338; the beaks of its ships were the first war prizes to embellish Rome,
placed on the speaker's platform {rostra, "beaks") in the Forum by Gaius Maenius.
LATIN COLONIES: the earliest were Cora (Cori, dated to 501), Signia (Segni, 495),
Velitrae (Velletri, ca. 494), Norba 492. There were about 14 of these "old" colonies
(priscae Latinae coloniae) by 338. The term colonus, from colere, "to cultivate,"
reveals an agricultural motive, sabines: had probably begun to descend the Tiber
valley in eighth century. Their towns included Reate (Rieti), Cures (near Via Sa-
laria), Amiternum (S. Vittorino). fetiales: presided over international relations;
no war was acceptable to the gods unless in defense of Rome or its allies.

Victory over Veii. etruscans in fifth century rome: there are Etruscan
names of consuls in Fasti 492 grain had been imported from
509-490 and 461-448; in

Etruria. Archaeological evidence shows waning of Etruscan contacts ca. 475-450.

FIDENAE: the tradition of a very early Latin colony (of regal date) here is uncertain.
VEIL Rome had arranged for a flag to be flown on the Janiculum Hill in case of
attack. Veii had a tunnel piercing a ridge leading to the Tiber valley 17 miles north
of Rome, also another shortcut to the river halfway to Ostia. fabii: continuous
consulships ca. 485-479/7, then ten-year gap. They shared their leading position
with the family of the Licinii. cremera battle: legendary details suspiciously
similar to those of the battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks and Persians (480
B.C.). CENSORS: period of office ended with lustrum ("cleansing"). Censors were
appointed at intervals of five years from 209 B.C. onwards. They took over the
selection of senators from the consuls, camillus: reputedly dictator five times,
military tribune with consular power five times, four Triumphs, expansion after
VEIL Capena and Falerii annexed; four new rustic Roman tribes.

The Gallic Invasion and its Aftermath, celts: La Tene style (from Swiss-type
site) succeeds Hallstatt ca. 500 B.C. The La Tene Celts invented horse-drawn carts.
GAULS: sack of Rome mentioned by Theopompus (ca. 350) and Aristotle. Further
raids in 360s, 350s and 340s, which caused the Italian peoples to turn to Rome.
Subsequently the Gauls of north Italy became caere: ports:
skillful agriculturalists,

Pyrgi (Santa Severa), Alsium (Palo), Punicum (Santa Marinella). Raid by Dionysius
I of Syracuse ca. 384. hostility to veil Greek imports to Caere had increased

from ca. 630, and those to Veii had decreased, perhaps because of Roman territorial
gains from the latter, hospitium with caere: ca. 390/86 (?) (some ascribe this to
ca. 300 instead). Rome probably joined Caere in sending colonists to Sardinia and

Corsica, wall of servius: (fourth century) of Grotta Oscura tufa, circus max-
IMUS: believed to have dated from regal times.
The Romans in Latium and Campania, latin colonies after gallic inva-
sion: Nepet (Nepi) and Sutrium (Sutri) ca. 383-382, formally dependencies of Fale-
rii. TUSCULUM: its Rome: Mamilii, Fulvii, Fonteii, Juventii, Porcii.
consuls at
praeneste: the Via Praenestina led to Rome; Praeneste was an Etruscanized
Latian town, like Satricum (Conca), Lanuvium (Lanuvio), Velitrae (Velletri). For-
tuna: the "bringer" {ivom ferre), later identified with the Greek Tyche (Chance).
CAPUA: its bronze work was praised by Cato the censor in second century B.C.
TIBUR: on River Anio (Aniene); dominated Via Valeria.
 NOTES TO PP. 62-71 / 479

The Samnite Wars, samnites: belonged to Sabellian group of peoples; they

were believed to have originated from Sabine Amiternum (S. Vittorino). right to
EXCHANGE CITIZENSHIP: private rights included the right to exchange citizenship
on moving from the one city to the other (ius migrandi or mutandae civitatis),

limited in third century B.C. (to prevent too much immigration to Rome) and
abolished in second century. Latin colonies privileged in 338: Ardea, Circeii, Nepet,
Norba, Setia, Sigma, Sutrium — half of the priscae Latinae coloniae. sabines: after
revolt of 290, some were enslaved, and the rest given civitas sine suffragio. Cales was
one of a small number of Latin colonies allowed to coin silver in the third century.

Others were Suessa Aurunca (Sessa), Paestum (formerly Posidonia), Signia, and
Alba Fucens (Albe). latin colonies: cosa: polygonal walls, with corbelled gate-
way such as also survive at Signia. ostia: Town wall of Fidenae tufa, t.arr.acina:
calledAnxur by the Volsci. samnite tribes: Caraceni, Pentri, Caudini, Hirpini.
NEAPOLIS: issued coins on behalf of Rome in the later fourth century, inscribed "of
the Romans" m Greek, vi.a appia: by 244 extended to Brundisium. By the end of
the third century, seven major roads led to and from Rome, third samnite war:
The Lucanians had appealed to Rome. The Samnites won a victory near Luceria
(Lucera) (294), and the Romans near Aquilonia (Lacedogna) (293). maniple:
manipulus, "handful," from a bundle of straw tied to a pole to act as a flag. A
maniple contained two centuries of 80 men, each divided into ten mess units sharing
a tent and a mule, gl.adiators: first called "Samnites"; later they also included
Thracians and Gauls, treaties: with peoples of Etruria, Umbria, Picenum, and N.
Apulia and the Marsi. In the later third century B.C. the Romans also made truces
of varying duration (instead of permanent treaties) with other Etruscan cities.

50,000 square miles controlled BY ROME: included 10,000 square miles of

Roman and 5,000 0^ Latin territory. The system included partial, though not
necessarily always conscious, borrowings from Sparta, the Panhellenic, Thessalian,
Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, and the Athenian Empire, coinage: aes grave, true
coins of defined face value, developed from aes signatum of central Italy (of later
fourth century), consisting of flat bars of varying size with a design on one side. This
in turnhad evolved from shapeless, unstamped aes rude, valued purely by weight,
which had partially replaced cattle as a medium of exchange in fifth century B.C.

Chapter 4. The Class Struggle

The Early Republic, consuls: perhaps at first, for a time, there was only one,
possibly known maximus. dict.ators: may have developed from
as the praetor
praetor maximus. Nominated by a consul on the Senate's proposal with subsequent
ratifying law. Only a few of the recorded early dictatorships seem to be genuine.
LEGISLATION: remarkable in that it could be initiated by all three branches (magis-
trates. Senate, and assemblies), patrons: the evidence of a patron or client could
not be enforced against the other.
Patricians and Plebeians, plebeians: allegedly plebeian consuls ca. 502-500
may not have been plebeians at all but patricians, p.atricians: out of 53 fifth-
century gentes, only 29 still appear in fourth century; by 300 B.C. they formed less
than one twentieth of the population, agitations for land: go back to ca. 486.
480 / NOTESTOPP. 71-83

Livy records seven between 441 and 410. Until the Apennines were conquered, there
was a lack of summer pastures, ceres: temple probably on site of S. Maria Cosme-
din. The cult was looked after by two plebian aediles, assistants of the tribunes of
the people (two patrician curule aedileships were created in 367 B.C.). tyrants:
allegedly tried to seize power at Rome in 478, 431, 376 B.C. greek trade: Athenian
commerce with Rome fell off sharply 450-400. apollo: temple of ca. 431 in
Flaminian Fields, on site of previous shrine (ApoUinar). epidemics: anthrax? food:
five shortages of grain reported 508-411. In about fourth century coarse emmer wheat

was partly superseded by more highly evolved bread wheat; and vine- and olive-
—
growing had been learned from the Greeks though the need for heavy initial
outlays slowed down development, debt: cf. problems of fourth century Greece.
SECESSIONS: allegedly 494, 449, 448, 342, 287 B.C. Menenius Agrippa reputedly
appeased the plebeians in 494. oath of plebeians: lex sacrata, hence probably
erroneous tradition of secession to Mons Sacer (just beyond R. Anio). tribuni
PLEBIS: originally 2, or 4, or 5; 10 by 449 B.C. concilium plebis: generally known
as Comitia plebis tributa after ca. 287. The Comitia populi tributa was founded in

imitation of this (it elected quaestors, curule aediles, etc.) plebiscita: in ca. 449 B.C.
(?) all such future measures that received the prior sanction of the patrician senators
(patrum auctoritas) were recognized as universally binding. Unconditional validity
from 339 (?) and/or 287.
The Twelve Tables, decemviri: names of first team (execpt one) seem authen-
tic, but not second team (including some plebeians), twelve tables: traditionally

ten published by the first team of decemvirs, plus two "unjust" ones by the second.
A formal procedure of appeal (provocatio) carrying no guarantee of admission may
have existed by the time of the tables.

Social Appeasement, laws of 449: Leges Valeriae Horatiae. measure of 447:

the two quaestors (junior financial officials), previously appointed by the consuls,
were to be elected by the Concilium plebis. Two were added in 421 when the
plebeians were admitted. It is often uncertain whether specific "measures" reported
in the tradition were conceded by the patricians as having force of law or merely
asserted by the plebeians as a right, restoration of consulship: Leges Liciniae
Sextiae. One of the tribunes, Lucius Sextius Lateranus, may have become the first

plebeian consul in 366. These two tribunes supposedly limited land ownership to 300
acres (500 iugera), but this tradition may be a reflection of later political disputes.
CENSORS: Lex PubUUa of 339 laid it down that one must be a plebeian. It was not
adhered to until 131 that both members of a pair of censors be plebeians, nobles:
also included those descended from a tribunus militum consulari potestate. debt
MEASURES: allegedly 352, 351, 342, 326 (?). The Lex Genucia (342) had tried to veto
usury, at least temporarily, concord: Camillus's temple was at the foot of the
Capitol, near theForum, lex poetelia: 326 or possibly 313 B.C. It also permitted
mortgages on land, aqua appia: followed by Anio Vetus (272) from Sabine hills,
tunneled with short bridges and an inverted siphon, cnaeus flavius: curule aedile
304 B.C. NEW NOBILITY: its hegemony was upheld by the Fabii Maximi who
controlled the Senate in the early third century B.C.
 NOTESTOPP. 87-94 / 4^1

PART III ROME AGAINST CARTHAGE

Chapter 5. First Wars against Foreign Powers

The Invasion of Pyrrhus. tarentum: at its zenith under the philosopher-

scientist Archytas, early fourth century. Its attempt to mediate in the Second

Samnite War (ca. 314) had been rebuffed by Rome, venusia: on upper Aufidus (R.
Ofanto); probably 6000 settlers. Latin colony at Hadria or Hatria (Atri) at the same
time, and Roman colony at Sena Gallica (Senigallia) a few years later, thurii
former Sybaris. greek helpers of tarentum in later fourth century
Archidamus II of Sparta, Alexander I of Epirus, Cleonymus of Sparta, pyrrhus
capital at Ambracia (Arta); completed Hellenization of Epirus. His army included
3000 Thessalian cavalry and 2000 archers, heraclea: detached from Tarentum by
Rome by favorable treaty (ca. 278). ausculum: Pyrrhus was threatening the Latin
colonies of Venusia and Luceria. beneventum: called Malventum until made a
Latin colony in 268, at same time as Ariminum (Rimini); they were the two farthest
colonies from Rome ever to be founded; they split Samnium in half, egypt: Roman
treaty with Ptolemy II in 273; Rome had made an agreement with Rhodes in ca.
306. silver COINAGE: didrachms inscribed romano, issued at south Italian mint
after 280. Coins of ca. 269 issued at Rome have type of wolf and twins, carthage:
Population of city (fourth century): 400,000-500,000, compared to 100,000-150,000
at Rome, 200,000 at Tarentum. Carthaginian sicily: Panormus founded early

seventh century; principal port Motya near Lilybaeum (Marsala). Carthaginian

SARDINIA: recent discoveries (e.g., Monte Sirae) show importance ca. 600. Chief
port Nora was much older. Corsica: Greeks defeated off Alalia (Aleria) ca. 535 B.C.
Corsica went to the Etruscans and later to the Carthaginians. Caere: Carthaginian
presence at its ports Pyrgi and Punicum. Tunisia: fertile valley of R. Bagradas
(Medjerda), beside which was the second Carthaginian city Utica (Henchir bou
Chateur), traditionally older, west africa: e.g., exploration of Hanno before 480
B.C. agricultural STUDIES: 32-book work of Mago, translated by order of
Roman Senate in later second century B.C. Carthaginians at rome: Perhaps the
Altar of Hercules (Ara Maxima) beside the Tiber was founded with a view not only
to Greek but to Carthaginian associations (Hercules being identified with the Sem-
itic treaties with rome: according to one theory the first treaty
deity Melkart).
was with the Etruscans, not the Romans, messana: dominated since 283 by Mamer-
tini ("men of Mars"), companion mercenaries of Syracusan Agathocles. roman

FLEETS: by 311 a flotilla; 267, 4 quaestores Italici (at Ostia, etc.) responsible for it.
The First Punic War. the war: In 262 Rome took Segesta and Agrigentum
(Agrigento); their capture was a turning point, quinqueremes: better than obsolete
triremes in which, although there were fewer rowers, every one of them had to be
a skilled oarsman. Two Carthaginian warships have now been found under the sea
off Lilybaeum (Marsala), including one that apparently dates from the First Punic
War. REGULUS: according to legend, rather than urge the Roman Senate to make
peace, he went back voluntarily to be tortured and killed by the Carthaginians, last
PHASE: Carthaginian successes by young Hamilcar Barca (248-242), badly supplied
from home, prow: on bronze as from ca. 240-235 B.C. peace treaty: veto on
482 / NOTESTOPP. 94-115
Carthaginian presence in Italian waters was for benefit of Greek cities in south Italy.
SICILIAN PROVINCE: quaestors set up at Syracuse and Lilybaeum. indirect taxes:
levied by the on imports and exports. They also derived income
cities expecially

from monopolies, war of the mercenaries (truceless war): started at Sicca

Veneria (El Kef), Liby-Phoenicians and Numidians joined; promises had been bro-
ken by Hanno the Great and landlords.

Chapter 6. The Changing Roman World

An Age of Innovations, gladiators: in 358 B.C., 307 Roman prisoners had
been slaughtered as human Capua (S. Maria
sacrifices at Tarquinii (Tarquinia).
Capua Vetere), and Puteoli (Pozzuoli, the former Dicaearchia) in Campania had the
largest amphitheatres known until the Colosseum, greek works of art: first seen
in Triumph of Lucius Papirius Cursor, captor of Tarentum in 272. Manius Valerius

Messalla showed paintings of his Sicilian victories in 264. Livius andronicus:

when freed, he took on his former owner's name, as was the custom. Ulysses
(Odysseus) had long been regarded as an Italic hero. Livius may have become
Rome's first schoolmaster. Ludi Scaenici were now added to Ludi Romani (240)
[religious Ludi Tarentini, later known as Ludi Saeculares, were believed to have
been introduced in 348 (or 249?)]; they purified the city at intervals of time (often,
the passage of a century), by propitiatory ceremonies to the underworld deities.
JURISTIC LITERATURE: its founder at Rome was Sextus Aehus Paetus Catus (consul,
198 B.C.)
The Challenge of Flaminius. plebeian council (concilium plebis, comitia
PLEBis tributa): based dn 35 tribes by 241 B.C. gauls: ager Gallicus annexed in
ca. 283, after Roman defeat at Arrentium (Arezzo) in 284. Invasion by Boii, Lin-

gones, Insubres, Taurini, Gaesati in 225.

Chapter 7. The Invasion by Hannibal

The Carthaginians in Spain, hamilcar barca: had seized hilltop Ercte or

Heirkte behind Panormus [(Palermo) M. Pellegrino or M. Castellacio] as base for
raids in First Punic War, and had joined with his political enemy Hanno the Great
in War of the Mercenaries (Truceless War). Drowned in R. Helice
terminating the
in Spain. Carthago nova: originally Mastia. saguntum: may have been recog-

nized as a Roman ally before 226. ebro treaty: Romans were prepared to agree
because of Gallic threat at home.
The Victories of Hannibal, roman manpower 218 B.C.: perhaps out of a total
population of Italy of three million, with two million slaves [(?) plus population of
1,400,000 in Cisalpine Gaul], there were 270,000-300,000 adult Roman and 640,000
allied males, alps: crossed by Hannibal somewhere between Little S. Bernard and
M. Genevre passes (probably a pass of M. Cenis M. Genevre
group). All his 37
or
elephants seem to have survived the crossing, although they then did not last long.
placentia: where R. Trebia (Trebbia), flowing down from
just east of the point
Apennines, joins the Po. 217 B.C.: 11 legions were put into the field, including four
to block road to Rome. Hannibal penetrated through Collina Pass, and then on
 NOTESTOPP. II5-I3I / 4^3

fabius maximus: had held an

between Pistoria (Pistoia) and Faesulae (Fiesole).
into letting Hannibal move from
earher dictatorship in 221. In 217 he was duped
Ofanto). The consuls
Campania to Apulia, cannae: near south bank of Aufidus (R.
Varro, 215 B.C. Twenty-five
were Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius
together with its dependencies Atella
legions were raised, capua: the rebellious city,
issued coins of its own, inscribed
(Aversa) and Calatia (S. Giacomo alle Gallazze),
in the Italic Oscan language. Syracuse:
betrayed by Spanish officer to Marcus
skill of the great mathemati-
Claudius Marcellus, the "Sword of Rome," despite the
cian Archimedes in devising engines of war.
tarentum: taken by Hannibal by
treachery (citadel remaining in Roman hands),
plundered by Romans on recapture.

COINAGE: subdivisions of the denarius were also issued.

Spain, the two Cornelius scipios (father and uncle of
The Scipios in
departure for Spain, then was
Africanus): Publius, who failed to stop Hannibal's
defeated at Ticinus and Trebia, and returned to
Spain in 217; and Cnaeus, sent to

Spain in 218, where he won a naval victory off the

Ebro in the following year. The
brothers defeated Hasdrubal Barca near Ibera on the
Ebro in 215, but in 211 Publius
at Ilorci (Lorqui) behind
was killed on the upper Baetis (Guadalquivir) and Cnaeus
Carthago Nova, publius scipio junior (publius's son,
later africanus): the
private citizen to be invested with proconsular
imperium. ilipa (206): Hasdru-
first

bal (son of Gisgo) and Mago (brother of Hannibal)

were the defeated Carthaginian
Osca (Huesca), etc.
commanders, tax on Spain mints for siver coinage opened at
:

islands.
SPANISH auxilia: included cavalry slingers from Baleares (Balearic)
miles up to there, then
italica: R. Baetis was navigable by sea-going vessels for 140
by smaller boats up to Corduba (Cordova) plain,
rebellious latin colonies:
included Ardea, Cales, Alba Fucens; they were punished
by a double draft in 204.
imported from Egypt
The farms of Italy were so exhausted that wheat had to be
(208-207). .

at Great Plains
The Triumph of Scipio Africanus. scipio in Africa: first victory
(Medjerda)]. zama
[Campi Magni; near Souk el Kremis, on upper Bagradas
(southwest of Sicca Veneria).
(REGIA): battle probably in plain of Draa-el-Metnan
Ihpa, Campi Magni.
lines of maniple operating independently: Baecula,
PORTRAITURE: Etruscan portrait busts at Clusium and Caere. From
third century,

Hellenistic Greek portraits also gradually exerted

an influence.

PART IV THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

Chapters. 'Vur Sea''

The Eclipse of the Greek Kingdoms. Alexander the great:

son of Philip II
Alexander's Hellenistic successors were
(359-336 B.C.) The principal states of
I Soter
named after their monarchs Antigonus I, Seleucus I Nicator, and Ptolemy
(Skhoder) and Lissus (Les,
(founder of the Lagid house), illyrians: took Scodra
(ancient, rich,
ca. 260),Corcyra (Corfu, 229). ROMAN protectorate: Apollonia
and Bay of Valona) and Dyrrhachium; (formerly Epidamnus;
strategic port in
Durazzo, Durres; 229). The Romans reheved Apollonia in 214.
Macedonia: had
484 / NOTESTOPP.I3I-I39
united almost Greece by alliance with Achaean League and conquest of Sparta
all

(222). PEACE WITH PHILIP V (205): Pcace of Phocnicc. aetolian LEAGUE: protec-
torate over Delphi in third century. They made peace with Philip V in 206 because
Rome had not helped them sufficiently, antiochus iii: acquired Armenia and
regained Parthia and Bactria as vassal kingdoms, crossed Persian Gulf, and entered
Kabul valley (212-206). Rhodes and pergamum: defeated Philip V by sea off
Chios FORTRESSES OF PHILIP V: Demetrias (near Volos), Chalcis, Corinth.
(201).

CYNOSCEPHALAE: 3,000 Macedonians killed, 5,000 captured. Philip, weak in cav-

alry, gave his infantry no flank guard, flamininus: had been at Tarentum (205-

204) where he won the goodwill of the Greeks, hannibal: leading official (suffete)
of Carthage ca. 196. At Antiochus's court he was rumored to be planning a fresh
invasion of Italy, magnesia: the Roman commander was Lucius Cornelius Scipio
(who took the name Asiaticus). Antiochus had 75,000 men to face 30,000 Romans.
The Roman victory was preceded by another at sea at Myonnesus (^ifitkale). The
peace of Apamea in Phrygia (Dinar, 188) was concluded by Cnaeus Manlius Vulso
after he had subdued the Galatians (descendants of Gaulish immigrants) in the
center of Asia Minor. Subsequent Seleucid decline caused the independent develop-
ment of Pontus, Armenia, Parthia, Judaea, perseus: Third Macedonian War.
Romans failed to dislodge him from Tempe in 171 and 170 but succeeded in 169. Two
years after Pydna he died at Alba Fucens. epirus: was raided for slaves by the
Romans because it had not helped them eff'ectively. republics of Macedonia:
land tax reduced by half; iron and copper worked by contractors, gold and silver
mines reopened after ten years. Illyria, too, was subdivided into three republics.
antiochus IV EPIPHANES: Ordered to leave Ptolemy VI's Egypt by Gaius Popillius
Laenas (168).

Imperialistic Policies. Rhodes after pydna: Eumenes IPs brother was At-
talus II Philadelphus (160-138 B.C.). delos: was also to gain greatly from the
destruction of Corinth in 146. achaean league: had gone over to Rome in 198 but
had often been strained since then, spain: land communications with Italy
relations
were secured by development of Po valley, 200-150 B.C. celtiberians: a major
group of peoples formed by fusion of Iberian population with Celtic invaders.
father of GRACCHI: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus; founded native town Grac-
churis near Ebro (179). carteia (el rocadillo): for sons of soldiers, was the first

Latin colony outside Italy (171). viriathus: final base was among the Carpetani,
northwest of Toletum (Toledo). His soldiers were settled at Valentia (Valencia, 138).
numantia: surrounded by Scipio Aemilianus (consul for the second time in 134
after special legislation) with seven camps and a five-mile long, double-ring wall. A
red layer of burned material shows the town was burnt to the ground, pacified
SPAIN: a major strategic road was built from ca. 120 B.C. from the Pyrenees to
Gibraltar (in Spain the road system did not radiate but followed the periphery of
the peninsula), andriscus: Fourth Macedonian War; he overran Thessaly and was
caught in Thrace. Macedonian province:
included Epirus and Thessaly; alliances
were made with Thracian chiefs, via egnatia: from Apollonia to Thessalonica
(Salonika); by 130 it was continued in Asia Minor, corinth: the local autocrat,
Critolaus, was its commander, carthage: in 191 offered immediate payment of 40
 NOTESTOPP.139-149 / 4^5

further installments of its indemnity and gave much free grain for Roman forces in
the east, masinissa: his empire extended from Mauretania to Cyrenaica. Rome
offered adjudications in the i6os and 150s, which did not hamper him. But he was
ignored in the Third Punic War and died in 148. cato and carthage: opposed
by Publius Scipio Nasica Corculum, who regarded it as morally salutary to have an
enemy to fear, third funic war: Carthage initially surrendered and handed over
hostages and war material, but on hearing that the city must be destroyed decided
AFRICAN PROVINCE: 5,000 Square miles with capital at Utica (Henchir bou
to fight.
Chateur), which had joined the Romans. Seven cities were left "free." Governors
went there by an extension of their year of urban office (prorogatio) first in 326 B.C.;

by this time general practice). If the wind was right, Ostia was only a 48-hour sail.

Chapter g. The New Society

Senate and Nobles in Charge, new men as consuls: i6 out of 262 from 264
from 200 to 146 B.C. The 200 consuls between 233 and 133
to 134 B.C., 8 out of 108
B.C. included 99 from 10 famihes, 159 from 15 families, age limits (minimum) of
MAGISTRACIES: Lex Villia Annalis (180 B.C.). Possibly the same law required an
interval of two years between senior magistracies. NEW CULTS: Aesculapius (As-
clepius) from Epidaurus after plague in 292, Venus Erycina from Eryx (Erice) in
Sicily 215, Cybele from Asia Minor in 205-204. In 139 Jews were banished by the
praetor peregrinus.
The Rise of Latin Culture, tragedies: about Roman history and legend:
fabula praetextata. comedy: owed something to rudimentary Italian song-and-
dance and dramatic sketches of the past. Naevius's comedies were mainly palliatae
(adaptions of Greek New Comedy) but also togatae (about Roman themes). Mime
(fabula riciniata) was staged at Rome before 200 B.C. slaves: in 217 the Saturnalia
was turned into a Hellenized festival in which slaves temporarily changed places
with their masters, ennius: Rudiae was subjected to Greek and Latin influences
from Tarentum and Brundisium (Brindisi) respectively. Ennius was brought home
from Sardinia by Cato the Elder (204) and was with Marcus Fulvius Nobilior in
Aetolia (189). The Annals are in quantitative dactylic hexameters. Thirty-one lines
of his four or six books of Satires have survived. He was the uncle of Pacuvius of
Brundisium (died ca. 130), who disputed the title of the greatest Roman tragedian
with Accius of Pisaurum [(Pesaro) died after 90 B.C.]. SCIPIO africanus: after the
obscure "Trials of the Scipios" (137, 184?) relating to misuse of public funds,
Africanus withdrew, ill, to his farm at Liternum (north of Cumae) in Campania,
where he died soon afterwards, personality cult: from second century state
officials were permitted to erect statues of themselves in public places. Delos became
an important center of Greek sculpture which influenced Rome, cato the elder:
was made by the
his career clan of the Valerii, enemies of the Scipios. against
women's LIBERATION: Lex Voconia (164). In 195 Cato had opposed the repeal of
the wartime Lex Oppia (215) restricting female dress and jewelry. In 102 B.C. there

was the first public funeral ceremony for a woman, roman histories in greek:
Quintus Fabius Pictor, Lucius Cincius Alimentus (both took part in the Second
Punic War), education: secondary schools taught by grammatici were opened
4S6 / NOTESTOPP. I49-161

after the Second Punic War. sciPio aemilianus: associates included Panaetius of
Rhodes (ca. 185-109), who placed a new emphasis on human individuality and

(incidentally) helped to adapt Stoicism to Roman public life, and Polybius of

Megalopolis (ca. 200-after 118), Greek historian of Rome, comedy: Caecihus
Statius [d. 168 B.C., a Gaulish (Insubrian) ex-slave], rated in the following century
as the greatest of Latin comic dramatists.
Roman Wealth and New Buildings, luxury: the taste for it spread after the
public had seen the loot in the ovatio (minor triumph) of Marcus Claudius Marcellus
(211) and the triumphs of Cnaeus Manhus Vulso (187) and Lucius Aemihus Paullus
Macedonicus, victor of Pydna. Mass imports of Greek works of art (as well as the
voting of divine honors to Romans in the east) had started in the later third century
B.C., and much statuary came in after the sack of Corinth (146). taxes: there may
have been irregular levies of direct taxation (tributum) in the i8os. Italians also had
to pay indirect taxes (vectigala) including rents on public land, mines, and salt-

works, a five percent tax on freeing slaves, and customs dues (portoria). Puteoli,
formerly Dicaearchia (now Pozzuoli), which grew in the Second Punic War and
became a Roman colony in 194, was a leading customs station and port), basilicas:
often with galleries, exedrae, and clerestories; early Roman examples 184, 179, 170.
Are now believed to have evolved from the porticoes of the Hellenistic Greeks
[directly imitated in Rome 196 (?), 167, 146 B.C.]. There were two types: (i) with long
side facing an open area (e.g.. Alba Fucens, Ardea, Cosa); (2) longitudinal, with
entrance at short side (e.g., Pompeii), arches in rome: the earliest were erected
by Lucius Stertinius (196 B.C.), in Circus Maximus and Forum Boarium (Cattle
Market); then 190, 120. The oldest surviving arch in Italy is at Cosa (Ansedonia, ca.

150), with a triple opening. Imperial triumphal arches at Rome: of Titus, Septimius
Severus, Constantine. concrete in temples: Concord (121), Castor and Pollux
(117). AQUA marcia: built from head of Anio valley by praetor Quintus Marcius Rex
who also repaired older aqueducts, roads: Via Aemilia (187 B.C.) continued the Via
Flaminia from Ariminum (Rimini) to Placentia (Piacenza). bridges: after the Pons
Aemilius, the Pons Mulvius (Ponte Milvio) was built to carry the Via Flaminia (109).
stone FACINGS: marble apparently first used for Temple of Jupiter Stator (149 B.C.).

POMPEII HOUSES: Italian (Samnite) phase fourth century (e.g., House of Surgeon)
replaced by Hellenistic Greek phase mid-third century, incrustation style of
WALL PAINTING: from crusta, slab of marble, which this imitates; earliest surviving
examples at Pompeii and Cosa from ca. 100 B.C.
Agriculture and Slavery, small holders: generally found south Italy (except
Greek south coast) unattractive, though small grid units (c. 120) have been detected
in Apulia. But small holdings were still extensive in the mountains and Campania
and the Po valley, malaria: expecially prevalent in Maremma and Pomptine
(Pontine) Marshes; had perhaps been introduced by Carthaginian soldiers in the
Second Punic War. soldier's pay: ca. 170-122 B.C., five asses a day with deductions
for food, clothes, and arms, limitation on landownership: Leges Liciniae
Sextiae (366 B.C.), though recorded details are anachronistic, grain: poorer people
ate either coarse bread (ground husks and all) or porridge of meal (often millet) and
water, campania: e.g., Francolise near Capua possessed Villae rusticae (residence
 NOTESTOPP. 161-169 / 4S7

with farms) at Posta (end second century) and S. Rocco (mid-first century), recently
excavated, etruria: e.g., farmhouse at Villa Sambuco (near S. Giovenale, end
second century), now being excavated, grain competition: from Sicily and north

Africa, mainly felt in Roman area and some coastal towns, wine: probably already
exported ca. 230 B.C. (red Latian), later spread widely; the first known vintage dated
from the consulship of Gains Opimius (121 B.C.) vegetables: turnips, beans, also
fruit (especially figs), cattle: Italians rarely ate meat and it was mainly pork —
when they did. slaves: there is a fourth-century-B.c. painting of a woman with a
slave from Neapolis (Naples). The First Slave War provoked unrest in Delos,
Laurium in Attica (silver mines), Macedonia, Pergamum. colonies after 200:
Cisalpine Gauls forced to give up half their territory. Mutina (Modena) and Parma
became Roman colonies in 183, Bononia (former Felsina, now Bologna) and
Aquileia Latin colonies in 189 and i8l But Latin colonies then lapsed because of
unwillingness of settlers to accept the limited Latin franchise. But Roman colonies,
too, ceased to be founded for many years. Roman citizens were reluctant to sacrifice
rentals of ager publicus to go to either sort of colony. DEBTORS: if they possessed
land, it could be sold up, and they forfeited many citizen rights. But there were also
many poor and discontented in the towns.

PART V THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

Chapter 10. Reform and War in Italy

The Gracchi, reassertion by tribunes: successful clashes with consuls and

Senate 151, The Lex Aelia and Lex Fufia (ca. 150?) in retaliation gave
149, 138.
officials the right to obstruct plebeian assemblies by the announcement of unfavora-

ble auspices (obnuntiatio). land problems: the amount oi ager publicus m illegal
possession was considerable, but much inflated by rumor, tiberius gracchus: to
increase free labor, made slave labor a target for criticism, grudge against scipio
AEMILIANUS: because Scipio had advised the Senate to reject a treaty that Tiberius,
as quaestor in Spain in 137, had made to save the army of Gains Hostihus Mancinus.
TiBERius's FACTION: included his father-in-law the princeps senatus, Appius
Claudius Pulcher. Some senators supported Tiberius because they were displeased
by the appointment of Scipio Aemilianus to Spain. Tiberius was also supported by
a Stoic philosopher. Gains Blossius, of a prominent anti-Roman family from Cumae.
PERGAMUM: Attalus III Philometor was its last king; after his death Eudemus
visited Tiberius Gracchus of whose father Pergamenes had been clients, murder
OF TIBERIUS GRACCHUS: the physical attack was led by Publius Cornelius Scipio
Nasica Serapio. land commission: 76,000 allotments made 132-125; number of
citizens rose eventually from 319,000 to 395,000. By in B.C. all public land in Italy
was allotted except rich Compania. reelection to tribunate: Gains Papirius
Carbo, tribune 131, had sought to pass bill authorizing this (though it had never been
legally impermissible), but Scipio Aemilianus frustrated him; possibly a subsequent
law in the early 120s carried out Carbo's intention. A further measure of Carbo,
extending the secret ballot to legislative assemblies, was passed and played a part
488 / NOTESTOPP. 169-187
breakup of oligarchic power, colonies of gaius gracchus: Neptunia
in the later

(Tarentum) and Scolacium (Squillace), under the toe of Italy, look like commercial
sites. ALLIED GRIEVANCES: shared by Latins who since ca. 128 had lost right to move
from one city to another (ius migrandi) in favor of a new "Latin right" by which
only local officials became Roman citizens, law courts: the quaestio
(magistrates)
de repetundis was established by a Lex Calpurnia of 149 B.C. senators debarred
FROM FINANCE: Lex Claudia de nave senatorum (218 B.C.). This was one reason why
they instead seized money in the provinces. sciPio aemilianus's wife: Sempronia,
sister of Gracchi, fulvius flaccus's land bill: according to one view Tiberius

Gracchus, too, had intended to distribute land to Italians, though many of them had
not approved of his measures.
Marius. massilia: given security by Rome's occupation of Po valley 200-150
B.C. AVERNi: under Bituitus, defeated by Quintus Fabius Maximus, who also be-
came patron of the AUobroges and took their name "Allobrogicus." The Aedui, who
were the rivals of the Arverni, had taken the side of Rome, via domitia: an ancient
route, already improved before 124. masinissa's successor: Micipsa, succeeded by
Adherbal and Jugurtha. jugurtha betrayed: by King Bocchus of Mauretania.
arausio: the consuls were Cnaeus Mallius Maximus and Quintus Servilius Caepio.
AQUAE SEXTIAE: Roman colony since 124 B.C. For many years after the battle, there
was a bumper crop on the blood-soaked, corpse-filled soil, campi raudii: Marius
was joint commander with Catulus. 120,000 Germans were killed, armies of
marius: standing and short-term Roman armies were now distinguishable from
each other. Marius's soldiers ("mules") each carried 100 pounds of weapon rations,
cooking pots, stakes for palisades, etc. candidate murdered: Gaius Memmius,
standing for consulship of 99 against Glaucia, who supported Satuminus (and died
with him).
The War with the Italians (Social, Marsian War). Italian claims: Lex Licinia
Mucia of 95 B.C., setting up inquiry into aliens illegally claiming to be citizens, was
construed by the Italians as a snub, rebel capital: moved from Corfinium to
Bovianum (Boiano) and then Aesernia (Isernia). cisalpine gaul: a province in 91
or 89 B.C., or possibly under Sulla. LEX julia: followed up by other laws (Calpurnia,
Plautia Papiria, Pompeia).
Sulla in the East, mithridates vi: had gained most of the seacoast from
Danube to Caucasus but was resisted by King Nicomedes IV Philopator of Bithynia
(ca. 94-75 B.C.). SULLA: defeated Mithridates's general Archelaus at Chaeronea and
Orchomenus, and after the peace caused the Marian general Fimbria to commit
suicide, murdered praetor: Sempronius Asellio (89 B.C.). debt law: cancelling
three-fourths of all debts, passed by Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who was then mur-
dered in Asia in a mutiny caused by Fimbria.

Chapter 11. Reaction and Breakdown

The Dictatorship of Sulla, the early sulla: he had already began to legislate
against the Senate and tribunes in 88. Roman colonies whose creation had been
resumed since ca. 128, after a long intermission, were now much larger; one of Sulla's
veteran colonies was Pompeii, settled to punish it for siding against him in the civil
 NOTESTOPP. 187-192 / 4Sg

war, but relations between the old and new populations were tense, as they also were
at the Sullan colony of Praeneste (Palestrina), formerly strongly anti-Sullan. Quaes-
tors were now increased to 20, praetors from 6 to 8. Sulla encouraged and regula-
rized the current practice of sending (proroguing) men who had just held office to
provincial governorships as promagistrates (proconsuls, propraetors). Consuls now
ceased to be basically military officials, tribunes: prohibitions of their veto in
special circumstanceswere multiphed. Their judicial powers were also curtailed.
The Rise of Pompey. lepidus (78-77 B.C.): his supporter in Cisalpine Gaul was
Marcus Junius Brutus. Lepidus was defeated at the Milvian Bridge by Catulus and
died shortly afterwards from grief owing to his divorce, sertorius: Metellus Pius
was initially sent against him. Sertorius was murdered by Perperna. pompey: son
of Pompeius Strabo. After bringing three legions from Picenum to help Sulla, he had
killed Cnaeus Papirius Carbo in Sicily and defeated Cinna's son-in-law Cnaeus
Domitius Ahenobarbus in north Africa. Pompey married Sulla's stepdaughter
Aemilia (d. 80), and then later a close connection of the Metelli, Mucia, whom he
divorced in 62. slave revolt: the joint leader with Spartacus until 72 was Crixus,
a Thracian. verres case: Cicero defeated the leading orator of the day, Quintus
Hortensius Hortalus. jury law: the Lex Aurelia (70 B.C.) divided panels equally
among senators, knights, and tribuni aerarii, the next class below the knights in
property qualification, pirate wars: Marcus Antonius (102 B.C.), Pompey under
Lex Gabinia (67). A Cilician command (later province; Southeast Asia Minor) had
been created to deal with pirates in 102; enlarged in 64. Crete was added to the
province of Cyrenaica in 67. mithridatic wars: second conducted by Murena
(81), third by Lucullus (74) and Pompey {Lex Manilla, 66). Lucullus had reduced
accumulated interest on debts of Asian cities and forbade creditors to seize more
than a fixed proportion of the sums due. Pompey cancelled many tax immunities
of eastern states. Armenia: Tigranes I the Great (after loo-ca. 56 B.C.). judaea:
Pompey reappointed Hyrcanus II (high priest 76-67, high priest and ethnarch
[(secular prince) 63-40]. new men: the last certain novus homo to win the consul-
ship had been in 94 B.C. cicero's fellow consul: Gaius Antonius Hybrida.
BANKRUPT NOBLES: competition for office was intense (and canvassing expensive)
because only two out of the 20 annual quaestors could later become consuls, gallic
ENVOYS: 63; from the tribe of the Allobroges. executed catilinarians: included
ex-consul Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, pistoria: won by Petreius (62), Gaius
Antonius Hybrida remained Caesar's marian links:
in his tent, allegedly ill.

Caesar married Cinna's daughter Cornelia, and his father's sister had been Marius's
wife. EMERGENCY DECREE CASE: trial of Gaius Rabirius (63). houses of first
CENTURY B.C.: the characteristic form of wall paintings of the time ("Second Style")
displayed illusionistic architectural vistas (e.g., Boscoreale bedroom in Metropolitan
Museum, New York, and newly discovered villa at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata).
CICERO'S EDUCATION: Studied philosophy and rhetoric at Rome, Athens, and
Rhodes. Schools of rhetoric (higher education) had begun at Rome early in first

century B.C. LAW: Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex (d. 82) published the first

systematic treatise on civil law. philosophy: Zeno came from Citium in Cyprus.
Cicero followed the belief of a later Stoic, Posidonius [of Apamea in Syria (Kalat-el-
490 / NOTESTOPP. 192-215
Mudik); b.ca. 135-d.ca. 50 B.C.] that philosophy had been the inventor of the civihzed
arts, and supported the view of the contemporary New Academy at Athens (de-
scended from Plato's Academy) that dogma must be avoided, concord of the
ORDERS: slogan used by the historian Macer, who agitated for popular rights as
tribune in 73; Cicero broadened it into a general concept involving moral responsi-
bility and embracing moderates in the country towns (consensus Italiae).

Toward the First Triumvirate, land intrigues: (63 B.C.); Cicero opposed
major agrarian bill of Rullus, which may or may not have been directed against
Pompey. The veterans asked for a renewal of the Lex Valeria of 86 scaling down
debts by three-quarters, cato's grain dole: 62; cf. occasional measures in Helle-
nistic Greece, tax gatherers (publicani): had strengthened their position after
the First Mithridatic War by lending money to the Asian cities to pay tax arrears
and indemnities.

PART VI CAESAR AND AUGUSTUS

Chapter 12. Caesar

The First Consulship of Caesar, land law:

59 B.C.; extended to rich Compania
by hotly contested Lex Campana. Bibulus attempted to obstruct legislation by
obnuntiatio (proclamation that the auspices were ill omened), under the Leges Aelia
and Fufia (ca. 150). But refuse was emptied over Forum, and his
his head in the
official bundle of rods (fasces) were broken. Egyptian king helped by caesar:

Ptolemy XII Auletes (80-51 B.C.) Caesar's command: Lex Vatinia. Dalmatia was
later known as Upper Illyricum.
The Gallic War. gaul: "three parts" (according to Caesar): Belgae, Celts,
Aquitani. ariovistus: of a Suebian tribe, perhaps the Triboci. He had defeated the
Aedui in 61 at Magetobriga (Moigte de Broie?), and it was they who led the appeal
to Caesar against him. clodius: guilds or corporations (collegia), often composed
of men practicing the same trade, were normally permitted to exist subject to
senatorial sanction; they had, however, been suppressed in 64 B.C. for political
action, but were revived by Clodius. He financed his grain dole out of the annexation
of Cyprus organized by his political enemy Cato the Younger (58). There were
320,000 recipients by ca. 46 B.C. cicero exiled: in 58 by the agency of Clodius
[who bore him a grudge for destroying his alibi in a lawsuit concerning Clodius's
desecration of the cult of the Good Goddess (Bona Dea) in 61]; he was brought back
in57 by Pompey. parthia: centered on Media (northern Iran); Ecbatana (Hama-
dan) was the capital of the Arsacid royal house, Ctesiphon (in Babylonia), their
winter residence. The Parthians ruled from the Euphrates to the Indus and con-
trolled the caravan routes son of crassus: Publius Licinius
from the Far East,
Crassus. quiberon bay: the victor was Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus. German
tribes suppressed in 56: Usipetes and Tencteri. belgic revolts (54): by Treviri;
and Ambiorix of Eburones (Ardennes) massacred garrison at Aduatuca. confer-
ences (53): Samarobriva (Amiens), Lutetia (Paris), Durocortorum (Reims), ver-
CINGETORIX: pan-Gallic command conferred at Bibracte, capital of Aedui (52).
 NOTESTOPP. 215-232 / 4gi

FINAL OPERATION (51): Uxellodunum (Pay conquered

d'Issolu in Dordogne).
GAUL: Gallia Comata (later divided into three provinces plus two German com-
mands); road system based on Lugdunum (Lyon), founded in 43. army pay:
became 225 denarii per annum, carrhae (53): the victor was Surenas, ruler of
Seistan (eastern Iran and southwestern Afghanistan) as Parthian vassal. In the
battle, his horse archers were kept supplied by swift Arabian camels carrying
reserves of arrows. The Parthians also employed cataphracts (heavily mailed horse-
men with large spears), clodius murdered (52): by the gangster Milo, originally
pro-Pompeian but now convicted on Pompey's initiative (in spite of Cicero's defense

speech) and exiled to Massilia. pompey's command (49): proposed by the consul
Gaius Claudius Marcellus with the support of the two consuls-designate. Rubicon:
R. Pisciatello (?).

Catullus and Lucretius. Alexandrians: Greek, third century B.C.; Callima-

chus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, Euphorion. Their Roman followers were
called the Neoterics. atomists (Greek): Leucippus, Democritus (fifth century B.C.).

LUCRETIUS ON POLITICS: II, 10-13 (trans. R. Humphries).

The Civil War. Caesar's invasion: second column moved on to Arretium
(Arezzo). reserve treasury: in Temple of Saturn, ilerda: the Pompeian com-
manders were Afranius and Petreius. Adriatic flotilla eluded by caesar:
commanded by Bibulus, who died soon afterwards, pompey murdered: by
Ptolemaic general Achillas and two Roman ofhcers. cleopatra: a remarkable
linguist, but did not trouble to learn Latin; no doubt she spoke to her Roman lovers
in Greek, army relieving caesar: Mithridates of Pergamum, and Jewish contin-
gent. VICTORY IN ASIA MINOR: at Zela (Zile) against Pharnaces II. This was the
occasion of Caesar's saying 'T came, I saw, I conquered" (veni, vidi, vici). second
THREAT OF MUTINY (47): the legionaries followed Caesar from Campania to Rome
where he pacified them.
The Dictatorship of Caesar. Caesar's settlements: a veteran with three
children usually received rather more than six acres. Colonies in provinces remained
provincial soil and paid land tax. His civihan colonies included Corinth, Carthage,
Urso (Osuna in Spain). Gades (Cadiz) was the first provincial city to receive the
franchise without a settlement, as a municipium. Some colonies, notably in Nar-
bonese Gaul and Further Spain, were given the intermediate Latin right; i.e., their
magistrates became citizens. In Cisalpine Gaul the regions south and north of the
Po received Roman citizenship and "Latin right" respectively, medicine: the first
regular school at Rome was founded by Asclepiades of Bithynia, ca. 40 B.C. DEBT:
the praetor, Caelius (a correspondent of Cicero), also proposed the abolition of
house rents for one year (48), and the tribune, Dolabella, urged their total abolition.
Caelius started a rising with Milo and was executed at Thurii (Sybaris). Dolabella
survived (until 43). caesar's wealth: his gold coinage, issued by Aulus Hirtius,
was probably the largest in Roman history. After the Gallic War the price of gold
had fallen by one-quarter. Cleopatra's half brother with her at rome in
46: Ptolemy XIV. She murdered him in 44. caesar's libraries: organized by the
learned writer Marcus Terentius Varro (b.ii6-d.27 B.C.); by the fourth century a.d.
there were 29 libraries in Rome, nine of which are known to us. calendar:
492 / NOTESTOPP. 232-247
reorganized by Sosigenes; adjusted by Augustus and Pope Gregory XIII (1582).
PORTRAITURE: coins of the early first century B.C. had displayed idealized portraits
of early Romans; the first coin portraits of the recently dead were of Sulla and his
fellow consul of 88 B.C., Quintus Pompeius Rufus, on a coin of their grandson named
after the latter (54 B.C.) Caesar's busts (of his lifetime): e.g., at Castello d'Aglie
(Turin), magistrates: Caesar increased praetors from 8 to 16, aediles from 4 to 6,
quaestors from 20 to 40. eastern expedition: 44 B.C.; 16 legions, 10,000 cavalry
and archers. In anticipation of Caesar's absence all major appointments were fixed
two years ahead. Caesar's secretaries (knights): Gaius Oppius, biographer,
and wealthy Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades (Cadiz), brutus: praetor urbanus
in 44, Cassius praetor peregrinus (less important). On a coin of ca. 54 B.C. issued
when he was a young moneyer, Marcus Brutus had boasted of his descent from the
legendary liberators Lucius Brutus (believed to have expelled Tarquinius Superbus)
and Ahala (alleged to have put down the tyrant Maelius, 440-439 B.C.). caesar's
MURDER: only two senators claimed to have moved to his defense: Gaius Calvisius
Sabinus and Lucius Marcius Censorinus.

Chapter ij. Augustus

The Second Triumvirate, name: Gaius Octavius, then Gaius Julius Caesar
Octavianus. lepidus: at first retained Narbonese Gaul and Further Spain (assigned

to him by Caesar), lost them after Philippi, was given Africa in 40. sextus pom-
peius: set up independent rule based on Sicily (43). Antony's brother: Lucius
Antonius, captured after siege of Perusia [(Perugia), 41]. alliance: between An-
tony, Octavian, and Lepidus (40); Treaty of Brundisium. brutus's mother: Ser-
vilia (mistress of Caesar, presided over political salon) held conference at Antium

[(Anzio), 44]; Brutus's wife was Porcia, daughter of Cato and widow of Bibulus.
FULVIA: formerly married to Clodius and Curio, reconciliation: between Antony
and Octavian (37); Treaty of Tarentum. Cleopatra's empire: established 37,
amplified at Donations of Alexandra (34). Its titular rulers included her son, al-

legedly by Caesar, Ptolemy XV Caesar (Caesarion) and her children by Antony.

ANTONY'S CLIENTS: Asander (Cimmerian Bosphorus, 41-17 B.C.), Herod the Great
(Judaea), Amyntas (Galatia), Polemoo (Pontus), Archelaus (Cappadocia). Par-
thian WARS: Parthian invasion of Syria 41-40 B.C.; successful expedition by Ven-
tidius, 38; disastrous Roman retreat, 36; Armenia occupied by the Romans 34.

SEXTUS POMPEius's END: fled to Asia Minor; killed, 35. actium: preceded by
Agrippa's seizure of Methone.
The Principate of Augustus, veterans' rewards: paid by Octavian (Augus-
tus) himself for nearly 30 years, mainly from civil war spoils, colonies of oc-
tavian (AUGUSTUS): mainly in west (those in Spain issued numerous local coin-
ages), but also a few in east, e.g., in newly annexed province of Galatia (Lycaonia,
Pisidia). His colonies, unlike Caesar's, were almost exclusively military, man-
power: by the time of Augustus's death the free adult male population of Italy,

including Cisalpine Gaul (part of Italy since 42 B.C.), was perhaps one and a half
million (no more than in 218 B.C.). But the total number of slaves in Italy, including
women and children, may have been as high as four million, augustan nobles:
 NOTESTOPP. 247-261 / 4g^

the princeps had married Livia (38 B.C.), of a noble clan and formerly married to
the member of another, Tiberius Claudius Nero, by whom she had two sons,
Tiberius and Nero Drusus (Drusus Senior), augustan 'new men': tended to
become army commanders and suflfect consuls, i.e., those replacing, during the
course of each year, the more important "ordinary" consuls, who were still generally
noble (though many upper-class families were dying out). The Lex Valeria Cornelia
of A.D. 5 on election procedure enhanced the dignity (not power) of the upper class.
SENATORS: excused attendance at age of 60. worship of Augustus with the
GODDESS ROME: first at Pergamum (Bergama) in Asia and Nicomedia (Izmit) in
Bithynia; provincial councils {konia, concilia) presided. In Rome, an altar was
erected to the numen ("divine power") of Augustus (a.d. 13) and his genius was
worshipped with the lares publici, protective deities of Rome. His image was carried
with military standards and received the homage of the troops, spain: Lusitania
(Portugal and western Spain) became a separate province during the reign of Augus-
tus, and Tarraco (Tarragona) became the capital of Nearer Spain (Hispania Tar-

raconensis). travels: Agrippa in east, Gaul, Spain (23-21, 20-19), Augustus in

Sicily, Greece, Asia (22-19). ^^ 20 Armenia was reduced to client status, amid great

applause, though the arrangement did not last, marriage laws: Lex de maritandis
ordinibus and Lex de adulteriis coercendis (18 B.C.) reinforced by Lex Papia Poppaea
(a.d. 9) which introduced still stronger incentives to marriage, knights: Caesar had
increased their employment as chief advisers and officers, death of agrippa: a
fragment of Augustus's funeral oration has now come to light. Bohemia: center of
empire of Maroboduus [Marcomanni, (who supplanted Boii ca. 8 B.C.)]. pra-
etorian GUARD: included inner group of mounted speculatores (messengers and
intelligence agents), and supplemented by a separate bodyguard of Germans, pre-
fect OF THE CITY: temporary appointments during the reign were followed by
creation of permanent post (? ca. a.d. 13). fire brigade: vigiles; eventually of 7,000
freedmen (a.d. 6). military pensions: because of financial shortgage, fixed-term
enlistments (20 years legionary, 25 auxiliary) often had to be prolonged, monar-
chy: easterners thought of Augustus as monarch (basileus), though that title does
not appear on coins, exiled by Augustus: his daughter Julia (2 B.C.) and grand-
daughter Julia (a.d. 8) and his grandson Agrippa Postumus (a.d. 7) whose death
in A.D. 14 was ordered either by Augustus or Tiberius, prima porta paintings:

Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome; cf. a branch of what is traditionally known
as the Pompeian Second Style (though these designations now need recasting). Soon
afterwards the Third Style (ca. 20 b.c.-a.d. 20) showed more illusionistic land-
scapes, and panel paintings amid fantastic architecture, taxes: Caesar had abol-
ished tax farming and titles in Asia and probably Sicily, substituting fixed tributum
soli. Tributum was paid in some provinces by all adults and in others by adult males.

BRIDGES: e.g., Alcantara Bridge over Tagus, with 18 arches of which 6 remain.
TUNNELS: e.g., of Occeius at Cumae (three-quarter-mile), and Neapolis-Puteoli
(one-half mile), wool: Pompeii (building for Guild of Fullers dedicated by its

woman patron the priestess Eumachia), Parma, Mediolanum (Milan), Patavium

(Padua).
The Economic Basis, glass blowing: recently invented in Sidon (Saida) in
494 / NOTESTOPP. 261-277
Phoenicia, earthenware: of coarser variety at Mutina (Modena) and Aquileia.
FOREIGN TRADE: by Latin and Greek words surviving in German, Semitic,
reflected
Pahlevi, Iranian, Irish,and even a few in Indian and Mongohan. lepcis magna:
founded by Carthage in sixth century B.C. to oppose the Greeks, coinage: brass
{orichalcum: zinc alloy) and copper replaced discredited bronze (lead and tin alloy,
terminated in 80s B.C. except for special issues) in official coinages. Local city
currencies of bronze were supplemented, for a time a very few of silver. Client
kingdoms had coinages of their own, in silver and bronze and gold in the Cim- —
merian Bosphorus (Crimea), land transport: Diocletian's Edict of Prices shows
that a 1200-pound wagon load of wheat would double in price in 300 miles, freed-
MEN: priests (Augustales) of the cult in which Augustus was associated with the
Lares.
Augustan Literature. Maecenas: probably from aristocracy of Arretium
(Arezzo); had played a major political part up to the battle of Actium, and therefore
acted more than once as the absent Augustus's representative at Rome. He was
sloppy and soft according to Seneca, but Horace described him as an active man
and a keen critic, eclogues of virgil: most were
loosely modeled on Theocritus
of Syracuse (b. ca. 300-d. georgics: poetical and patriotic, but
ca. 260 B.C.).

contained information based on agricultural handbook of Marcus Terentius Varro

{Res Rusticae, 37 B.C.). aeneid: romantic element cf. Apollonius Rhodius of Alex-
andria, Argonautica (third century B.C.). Latin bride of Aeneas — Lavinia. HORACE:
b. 65-d. 8 B.C.; Epodes and Odes (including Carmen Saeculare) in lyrical meters
[latter claimed Alcaeus (b. ca. 620 B.C.) as model]: Satires and Epistles (including
Ars Poetica) in hexameters. His Sabine farm perhaps identifiable near Digentia
(Licenza), 22 miles northeast of Rome, properties: (59-47 B.C.); claimed Callima-
chus of Cyrene (b. ca. 305-d. ca. 240) as model. A contemporary elegist was Tibullus
55 or 48; d. ca. 19 B.C.), whose patron was the soldier, statesman, and orator
(b. ca.

Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (b. 64 B.c.-d. a.d. 8). livy: alternatively his
dates could be 64 b.c.-a.d. 12. His history ended in 9 B.C. ovid: his tragedy the
Medea is lost.

PART VII THE IMPERIAL PEACE

Chapter 14. The Inheritors of Empire

The Successors of Augustus, the east: Cappadocia (eastern Asia Minor) and
Commagene (northwestern Syria) annexed (a.d. 17). death of germanicus: Cna-
eus Calpurnius Piso, imperial governor of Syria, was accused of his murder in the
Senate and although innocent of this charge (but guilty of sedition) killed himself.
TREASON CHARGES: under the Lex Julia maiestatis, probably passed by Julius
Caesar, sejanus: son of Lucius Aelius Strabo of Volsinii (Orvieto): for a time father
and son were joint praetorian prefects. Before Sejanus become consul in a.d. 31 he
had been granted the rank of praetor, sons of germanicus and agrippina the
ELDER: Nero Caesar (d. a.d. 31), Drusus Caesar (d. 33), and Gaius (Caligula, later
emperor), grandson of tiberius: Tiberius Gemellus, killed by Caligula in 38.
 NOTESTOPP. 277-288 / 4g§

REVOLT IN UPPER GERMANY (39): under Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus.

Also executed was Caligula's brother-in-law and heir apparent Marcus Lepidus;
Caligula's sisters Agrippina junior and Julia Livilla were banished. Caligula's
WIFE (fourth and LAST): Caesonia. claudius: son of Nero Drusus (Drusus, the
Elder, brother of Tiberius) and Antonia. revolt in dalmatia (upper il-
lyricum): One of the two provinces into which Illyricum was divided in ca. a.d.
9: Lucius Furius Camellus Scribonianus (42). Britain: the invasion was prompted
by the death of Cunobelinus (ca. a.d. 9-40/43; Shakespeare's Cymbeline) of the
Catuvellauni, overlord of southeastern England. By 47 the frontier was the Fosse
Way [Lindum (Lincoln) — South Devon]. The revolt of Cunobelinus's son Caratacus
ended in 51 and veterans were settled at Colonia Camulodunum (Colchester) in 50
(also at Colonia Agrippinensis, now Koln). But the capital of Britain was later
moved from Camulodunum to the much larger Londinium (330 acres). Perhaps
6,000 miles of roads were built in the first four decades of the British province.
mauretania: gradually pacified after murder of its client king Ptolemy at Rome
THRACE: made a province after the murder of its last client prince in 46. Lycia
in 40.

(southern Asia Minor) was also annexed as part of province Lycia-Pamphylia (43).
GAULS: nobles were brought into the Senate (by adlectio), and all Roman citizens
in Gaul were permitted to stand for office in the capital, following a speech by

Claudius, largely preserved on a bronze tablet at Lugdunum (Lyon), messalina:

great-neice of Augustus. Her lover executed in 48 was Gaius Silius. nero's name:
originally Lucius (his father was Cnaeus) Domitius Ahenobarbus. nero's amuse-
ments: early in his reign he associated with pantomimi (male ballet dancers). He
was also interested not only in music but in chariot racing (of which there were four
main factions), boudicca: her revolt was suppressed by Gaius Suetonius Pauhnus
(60). tigellinus's fellow PREFECT: Faenius Rufus, executed in 65 with Seneca,
after a plot to place Gaius Calpurnius Piso on the throne, philosophical republi-
cans: Thrasea Paetus, forced to commit suicide in 66. corbulo's peace: Tiridates
I of Armenia was jointly sponsored by Rome and Parthia. After these wars the

Euphrates garrison was permanently increased at the expense of the Rhine and
Danube, vindex: defeated by the eminent Verginius Rufus, commander in Upper
Germany, who refused the throne for himself (as again in the following year, 69).
The Year of the Four Emperors, galba's advisers: Vinius, Laco, Icelus.
Galba's HEIR: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus. otho: of princely family from
Ferentium (Ferento) in Etruria.
Vespasian and His Sons, gallo-german revolt: captured major Rhine base
of Vetera (near Birten) in 70; the whole river line to Argentorate (Strasbourg) or
beyond was lost, Cerialis recovered Classicus's capital Augusta Trevironum (Trier),
destroyed the Gallic Empire, and drove the Batavians back home, upper rhine-
UPPER DANUBE REENTRANT: Agri Decumates. FIRST JEWISH REVOLT: Masada
resisted until 73. Vespasian's origin: from Sabine town of Reate (Rieti). spain:
southern province of Baetica received Latin rights, and between a.d. 74 and 84, 350
Spanish towns received municipal charters, taxes: in provinces were in some cases
doubled by Vespasian, and Greek immunities revoked, education: Quintilian of
Calagurris (Calahorra in Spain) was the first salaried professor of rhetoric. Teachers
496 / NOTESTOPP. 288-293
to vespasian: supported by Stoic and
received tax rebates like doctors, opposition
Cynic ideas. Helvidius Priscus executed, plot of caecina (79): allied with Eprius
Marcellus, leading orator and Vespasian's adviser. Vespasian's death: at Aquae
Cutiliae (Bagni de Patemo). Berenice: daughter of Agrippa I and sister of Agrippa
II (northern Palestine and southern Syria): had supported Rome in the First Jewish
Revolt. BRITAIN: Fishbourne Villa had probably been built for the old age of
Cogidubnus of the Atrebates (ca. 43-75), forth-
a chent king within the frontiers,
CLYDE LINE: forts at Camelon and near Cadder and Mumrills. Vesuvius eruption
(79): Pliny the Elder, admiral and historian and scientist, died of suffocation on the
beach (described in a letter of his nephew Pliny the Younger to the historian
Tacitus). AGRICOLA under domitian: advance beyond Firth of Forth (fortress at
Inchtuthil) in 83, "mons graupius": site of Roman victory (84); probably not far
short of the Moray Firth. Signal stations on road east from Ardoch may mark the
frontier after withdrawal following Agricola's recall. Vindolanda (Chesterholm) is

also a Domitianic fort (recent discoveries of limewood tablets), southwestern

GERMANY UNDER DOMITIAN: by the end of his reign the frontier {limes) road ran
from near Bonna (Bonn) down R. Neckar to meet the Danube in Raetia. dacian
BATTLES: Oppius Sabinus, governor of Moesia, was killed in 85, and Cornelius
Fuscus, praetorian prefect, in 86 or 87; then Roman victory at Tapae (Iron Gates)
in 88. REVOLT UPPER GERMANY (89): by Lucius Antonius Saturninus. After-
IN
wards Domitian converted the Upper and Lower German commands into formal
provinces.
Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, trajan's origins: born at Italica (Santiponce) in
Baetica (southern Spain) in 53. provincial origins: in 90 the first known eastern
consul was elected, and in 94 the first pair of consuls both to possess provincial
backgrounds, alimenta: at Veleia (Velleia in northern Italy) Trajan supported 245
boys and 34 girls born in wedlock and 2 illegitimate children, administration:
curatores of one or several cities, perhaps already under Domitian, then at Caere
(Cerveteri, 113). Achaea (Greece) in the same reign, had
Pliny, like a governor of
special powers as There was a new distinction between civilian and
corrector.
military careers in the equestrian ranks of the government service, trajan's army:
400,000 strong. The first cohort of each legion was doubled in size. There was also
a new intelligence organization (frumentarii), and a mounted bodyguard of equites
singulares (500, later 1,000), mainly German and Danubian (from Pannonia). tra-
jan's dacian WARS: new Roman colony adjacent to old site of Sarmizegethusa,
near Totesti, ca. no. On the frontier fortifications (Limes Dacicus), castelli (e.g.,

Buciumi, near Cluj) have unusually elaborate gates. The Danube bridge designed
by ApoUodorus, over 1,000 yards long, was built of stone piers and segmental timber
arches, eastern frontier: Arabia Petraea (Nabataea: western Jordan and Sinai)
annexed 105-6; Bostra (Bosra) replaced Petra as capital. Later in the century Gerasa
(Jerash)became an increasingly important town. Jewish dispersion revolts:
Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt; the aim in thefirst two was the extermination of the Greeks.

Henceforward Jews were forbidden in Cyprus, Revolts were also fomented by the
Parthian King Osroes in the Jewish communities of Bablonia. parthian attacks
in ROMAN REAR: Mesopotamia, Armenia, Adiabene (Assyria). Was Trajan obliged
 NOTESTOPP. 293~305 / 497

toabandon his conquests even before the Jewish revolts? Parthian client king
AT ctesiphon: Parthamaspates. Hadrian's origin: born at Gades (Cadiz) in
Baetica (southern Spain) in 76; his paternal grandfather had married Trajan's aunt.
PLOT OF THE FOUR CONSULARS (118): including Mauretanian Lusius Quietus, who
had suppressed the Babylonian Jews and governed Judaea. They were executed by
the praetorian prefect Attianus. provinces: a great series of coins honored individ-
ual provinces and Hadrian as their visitor (adventui Augusti) and restorer (re-
stitutori). The Temple of Divus Hadrianus (Hadrianeum) erected in the Campus

Martius after his death displayed sculptural representations of the provinces, de-
feat in BRITAIN: a legion was lost some time between 117 and 122. Hadrian's
ARMY: Hadrian introduced, or increased, heavy armored cavalry (cataphracts)
borrowed from the Sarmatians (nomads related to the Scythians); and he extended
the use of irregular "national" numeri. fortifications: Hadrian built a stone wall
on the Numidian as well as the British frontier and constructed a continuous
wooden palisade in Raetia and Upper Germany. Hadrian's western wars:
minor risings in Britain and Mauretania. aelius caesar: his original name was
Lucius Ceionius Commodus. antoninus "pius": insisted on the deification of
Hadrian, though the Senate was not enthusiastic, antoninus's wall: in Britain
(a.d. 142); but the frontier was retracted more than once, and definitively before the
end of the century, antoninus's wars: disturbances in 139-42 among Brigantes
(Yorkshire; some Britons were transplanted to the Agri Decumates) and organized
in numeri there, and in Numidia, Mauretania, Syria, Palaestina (Judaea), Egypt,
Dacia (partitioned into three provinces).

Chapter /j. Imperial Society

Imperial Art and Architecture, arch of tituS: the spoils from the Jerusalem
temple include the Menorah (seven-branched candlestick), silver trumpet, and
golden table of the Shewbread. column of trajan: in colonnaded court flanked
by Greek and Latin libraries behind the basilica which occupied the north side of
Trajan's Forum; completed in a.d. 113 according to the plan of Apollodorus. pom-
PEii: a so-called "fourth" style from ca. 50 a.d. comprised a great many varied
themes, including more imaginative versions of the architectural vistas of the "sec-
ond" style. Wall decorations also include stucco, mosaics: the favorite mosaic
pavements in Italy (first-third century) were black and white. Figured overall
designs are conspicuous, e.g., in Africa. Wall mosaics already appear on Pompeii
fountains, slave accommodation: socalled House of Menander (Pompeii), and
Villa ofAgrippa Postumus (outside Pompeii), cf. Pliny the Younger's villa at
Laurentum. ostia: most of the apartment houses (of which more than 200 have
been identified) incorporated shops. Ostia replaced Puteoli (Pozzuoli) as Italy's
principal west coast port, other housing: Bulla Regia (Hammon Daradji) in north
Africa (a Roman colony for veterans under Hadrian) shows an experiment in
underground housing, to resist summer and winter climatic extremes, nero's
golden HOUSE: architects Severus and cf. Prytaneum of
Celer. Separate pavilions,
Antigonus II Gonatas at Pella (Palatitsa) in Macedonia and Hadrian's Villa at Tibur
(and Sultans' Seraglio at Istanbul), domitian's palace: architect Rabirius. ha-
4^8 / NOTESTOPP. 305-326
drian's VILLA: adorned with masterpieces of Greek sculpture and of the Hadrianic
school which it influenced, pantheon: made little impression in antiquity but
exercised great influence on the Renaissance, temples: the buildings at Heliopolis
(Baalbek) in Syria were exceptionally magnificent, roman baths: Agrippa, Titus,
Trajan (later Caracalla, Diocletian); cf. four so far discovered at Pompeii, two at
Herculaneum. Vespasian's buildings: Forum and Temple of Peace; he recon-
structed the Capitoline temple and started work on the Colosseum. Colosseum :

fourth story is of blind arcading broken by windows, earlier amphitheaters:

the building of Titus Statihus Taurus at Rome in 29 B.C. had been partly of wood
and partly of stone, but there were earlier stone amphitheaters at Pompeii, etc.
Pompey had built Rome's first stone theater (53 B.C.) and Augustus built the
three-story Theater of Marcellus (13 B.C.). There were three imperial training
schools for gladiators at Rome, also at Capua (S. Maria Capua Vetere), Ravenna,
and Praeneste (Palestrina), unless this was still privately owned. Even Petuaria
(Brough-on-Humber) had its amphitheater.
Economic and Social Imbalance, thamugadi: founded in a.d. 100 by Trajan
as a Roman colony for veterans and originally designed on camp lines, later greatly
expanded; the most complete African remains, next to Lepcis Magna (which was
likewise colonized by Trajan), trade: Greeks and Syrians supplemented their
virtual monopoly of the Mediterranean carrying trade by taking over a large share
of the outlying routes, rhineland: e.g., Tres Tabernae (Rheinzabern) and Augusta
Trevirorum (Trier), with Colonia Agrippinensis (Koln) as glassblowing center.
SLAVES: by second century, it was ceasing to be profitable to employ slave gangs
in agriculture and mining. Emperors received petitions from slaves as from every
other category of the population, aelius aristides of mysia (a.d. 117 or 129-181
or later): To Rome: Eis Romen. cf. Pliny the Elder, "the immense majesty of the
Roman peace." salvius julianus: of Pupput (?) near Hadrumetum (Sousse) b. ca.
a.d. loo-d. ca. 69; also wrote Digesta, in 90 books, gaius (lawyer): born under
Trajan (?), perhaps from a Greek province, hadrian: salaried jurisconsuls were
members of his Consilium, legal reforms: there were also improvements in the
legal status of women, humiliores: liable to flogging, torture, summary execution;
lacked right of appeal to emperor which all honestiores, not only citizens, possessed.
The dichotomy was already to some extent recognized by the time of the leading
jurists Labeo (d. a.d. io/ii) and Ateius Capito (d. 22).
From Seneca to Apuleius. seneca: his father was Seneca the Elder (b. ca. 55
B.c.-d. ca. A.D. 37/41). The younger Seneca was the author of a scientific work, the
Natural Questions. His alleged correspondence with St. Paul is a fourth century
forgery, petronius: plausibly identified with Titus Petronius Niger, consul ca. a.d.
61. His poems seem, in part at least, to be derisive parodies of Lucan and Seneca,

on whose retirement Petronius became prominent. Set pieces: also "The Widow of
Ephesus." His writing is ignored by Tacitus (who describes him as arbiter elegantiae),
and fiction is not included in Quintilian's survey of Latin Hterature. martial: from
Bilbilis (Calatayud). Other Domitianic poets were Statius (Thebaid, Silvae), Silius
Italicus (Punicia), and Valerius Flaccus (Argonautica). tacitus: his name appears
to have been Publius Cornelius Tacitus. It is disputed whether the Annals were
 NOTESTOPP. 326-342 / 499

published late in Trajan's reign (as is usually believed) or early in Hadrian's, lucian
OF SAMOSATA (Samsat in southern Turkey, ca. a.d. 120): his works, in Greek,
developed a special variety of the dialogue, based on Cynic and other antecedents.
SOPHISTS OF SECOND CENTURY A.D.: the Second Sophistic" (the First was in the

fifth century B.C.). archaic revival: the New Speech (Elocutio Novella), spon-
sored by Fronto (b. ca. a.d. loo-d. ca. 166), the tutor of Marcus Aurelius and leading
Roman orator of his day. astrology: in vogue in eastern Mediterranean since
second century B.C.; spread to Italy late in the following century, science: virtually
its last figure was Galen of Pergamum (b. a.d. 129-d. ca. 199) who summarized the
ancient knowledge of medicine.
The Mystery Religions, demeter: her Mysteries were centered on Eleusis in
Greece, dionysus (bacchus): wall paintings in Villa of Mysteries outside Pompeii,
first century B.C. cybele: poem on myth of Attis by Catullus. Bloodbaths of animals

(taurobolium, criobolium) originated in Asia Minor and first appeared in the west
in second century a.d. Before Cybele, the Mystery cult of Asclepius (Aesculapius)
had been imported to Rome after a plague (293 B.C., from Epidaurus). isis: the
Egyptian gods gained the imperial cachet under Hadrian.

Chapter 16. The Jews, Jesus, and Paul

The Jews. Israel (kingdom): fell to Assyria 721 B.C. judah: fell to Babylonia
597-586 PROPHETS: the "major" prophetic books are those of Isaiah (multiple
B.C.

authorship), Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (and Daniel in the English Bible), temple:
Antiochus IV Epiphanes set up a statue of Olympian Zeus in the Holy of Holies
(168 B.C.). The temple was reconsecrated by Judas Maccabaeus (165-164 B.C.) and
rebuilt in 22-18 B.C. by Herod the Great (37-34 whom Antony
had placed on
B.C.)
the Judaean throne to succeed the Hasmonaean Mattathias Antigonus (40-37), a
client of Parthia. jesus's birth: misattributed to a.d. by Dionysius Exiguus [from
i

Scythia (southern Russia), ca. a.d. 500-60). non-canonical gospels: e.g. of

Thomas, Eve, Mary, James, John, Judas, Matthias, Peter, Philip, judaea: ruled by
prince (ethnarch) Archelaus B.C. 4-A.D. 6 by Roman prefects (knights) from a.d.
6-41; then (after interlude under King Agrippa I, a.d. 41-44) by Roman procurators
(knights) from a.d. 44 until First Jewish Revolt; thereafter by senior (senatorial)
governors, son of man: bar nasha. qumran: Dead Sea Scrolls of various dates up
to dispersal of sect in First Jewish Revolt, apostles: Peter, James and John the sons
of Zebedee, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of
Alphaeus, Thaddaeus (or Judas), Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot (meaning "of
Kerioth"). fulfillment of old testament: Typology, pontius pilatus: pre-
fect of Judaea a.d. 26-36.

Paul. DISPERSION: Ptolemy I Soter had introduced many Jews and Samaritans
(dissident Jews from northern Palestine) into Alexandria, and Antiochus III the
Great settled 2,000 Jewish families in Asia Minor, earliest letters (epistles)
OF PAUL: probably / and // Thessalonians (ca. a.d. 50), though some place Gala-
tians in ca. 49. acts of the apostles: perhaps written towards a.d. 90. peter:
supposedly martyred in Rome under Nero, though his career after the first years
following Jesus's death is uncertain, james the just: put to death by the Jewish
^OO / NOTESTOPP. 342-362
high priest Ananus II in a.d. 62. paul and pax romana: cf. rabbinical story that
God had created the Roman peace simply so that Jews might study the law undis-
tracted. procurators of judaea who detained paul: Antonius Felix (52-ca.
60) and Porcius Festus (ca. 60-62). Jewish christians: their decline was ac-
celerated after the Second Jewish Revolt under Hadrian. The smaller sects into
which they split included the Ebionites. gospels: written for Gentile Christians,
though Matthew possibly envisaged a Jewish readership as well, marcion: of
Sinope (Sinop) in northern Asia Minor, came to Rome ca. a.d. 137.

PART VIII TOWARDS A NEW WORLD

Chapter //. Collapse and Recovery

Marcus Aurelius and his Son. aurelius and verus: originally Marcus An-
nius Verus and Lucius Ceionius Commodus respectively. Antoninus Pius had
adopted them at Hadrian's wish in 138 (Verus was the son of Aelius Caesar).
EPIDEMIC: exanthematous typhus or bubonic plague? northern enemies of
AURELIUS: Marcomanni (German) and Sarmatians (or Jazyges, non-German) to
their southeast. The Germans burned Opitergium (Oderzo in northern Italy) in 170.
REVOLT IN EAST (175): AvidiuS CassiuS. DEATH OF MARCUS AURELIUS: at Vin-
donissa (Windisch) or Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica). heir of marcus aurelius:
he passed over Pompeianus married to his daughter Lucilla. She conspired against
Commodus in ca. 182 and was exiled and killed, commodus's praetorian pre-
fects: Perennis 182-85, Cleander 186-89, Laetus 191.

The Dynasty of Severus. didius julianus: won throne at auction against

Sulpicianus, city prefect, severus: from Lepcis Magna, which he splendidly rebuilt.
Just over half the senators were now provincials, and about one-third of these
provincials were north African, city troops increased: Severus also trebled the
watch (vigiles). "caracalla": a Celtic or German tunic; his original name was
Bassianus; later officially called Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, parthian war: but
Severus twice failed to take the desert fortress of Hatra. British war: Severus built
a new Carpow on the r. Tay (above Abernethy). caracalla's
legionary fortress at
WIFE: Plautilla. northern wars: Alamanni (mentioned for first time) defeated,
and Chatti (?) bought off in 213. elagabalus: his original name was Varius Avitus
Bassianus (after his father Varius Marcellus); later officially called Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus, like Caracalla. elagabalus's mother: Julia Soaemias. severus
ALEXANDER: his original name was Alexianus. His father was Gessius Marcianus.
northern FRONTIER: garrison weakened by Severus Alexander's eastern wars.
The Disintegration of the Empire, maximinum i: elevated by a Danubian unit
at Moguntiacum (Mainz), seven Caesars in 238: Maximinus I, Maximus Caesar

(his son), and II Africanus (in Carthage), Balbinus and Pupienus

Gordianus I

(known as Maximus)Rome), Gordianus III Pius (238-44, prefect Timesitheus

(in

d. 243/4). Gordianus III fought in the east but was murdered at Zaitha near the
Euphrates, probably at the instigation of his successor Philip, millennium: Secular
Games (Ludi Saeculares) a.d. 248. decius: from southern Pannonia; he assumed
 NOTESTOPP. 3^2-377 / 50^

the name of Trajanus. epidemic: continued until at least 270. SONS: promoted by
Severus, Maximinus, Philip, Decius, Valerian, Carus. Philip's father: Marinus in

Trachonitis (southeast of Damascus), valerian: followed brief reign of Aemilianus

(253). ZENOBIA: her son Vaballathus Athenodorus was made Augustus. Her chief
minister was the Syrian philosopher Longinus. last parthian king: Artabanus
V. sassanians: after Sasan, grandfather of Ardashir. Their holy city was Istakhr,

ancient residence of the Achaemenids. shapur i's invasions of roman empire:

242/4, between 250 and 256, 259-60. Gothic invasions: as far as Marcianopolis
(Provadiya, west of Varna, 248) and as far as Ephesus (Sel^uk) and Pessinus (Balhi-
sar, 253). FRANKS: plundered Tarraco (Tarragona), capital of Nearer Spain (His-
pania Tarraconensis). heruli: originally from Scandinavia. Some had migrated to
Rhine area, most to Black Sea.
The Military Recovery, mobile force: the first commander Aureolus, a Da-
cian, revolted against Gallienus but surrendered to the next emperor Claudius II
Gothicus, who killed him. naissus: probably the victory was won by Gallienus
rather than after his death by Claudius II Gothicus, to whom it was also attributed
by later historians, alamanni: had been
defeated by Gallienus in ca. 258-60 but
settled in the which the Romans permanently evacuated.
Agri Decumates,
CLAUDIUS ii's BROTHER: Quintillus (270). zenobia's DEFEATS: Zabdas defeated at
Antioch and Emesa (Homs) in 271. aurelian's wall at rome: 12 miles long, with
16 gates and 381 rectangular towers; originally 20 feet high. Built by civilian labor.
aurelian's SUCCESSOR: Tacitus (275-76), an elderly senator; defeated the Goths
in Pontus but was killed by his troops or committed suicide, carus: defeated
Germans (Quadi) and Sarmatians on Danube and captured Ctesiphon. He was the
first emperor to omit to request senatorial approval of his accession.

The Collapse of the Economy, aurum coronarium: gold crowns had been
offered to eastern and Hellenistic conquerors and Roman generals of second century
B.C. COMPLAINTS: e.g., from Burunum (South-el-Khmis, Tunisia) to Commodus,

from Lydian tenants probably to Severus (both these were from imperial estates),
Scaptopare (Kyustendil in Bulgaria) in 238, Aragueni (Phrygia) to Philip; and many
protests on Egyptian papyri. Probably the later practice of taking refuge on the great
country estates had already begun; e.g., Kaua (Mauretania), cf. a great third century
peristyle house near Colonia Agrippinensis (Koln), with grain warehouse. But
private munificence towards cities largely ceased in the later third century.

Chapter 18. The Climax of the Pagan Empire

The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. epictetus (b.ca. 55-d.ca. 135): from

Hierapolis (Pamukkale) in Phrygia. marcus aurelius: recognized occasional
heavenly guidance. His view of the cosmopolis was partly derived from the Stoic
Posidonius who held that inner tensions preserve it as a composite whole, severus's
praetorian PREFECTS: under Antoninus Pius, too, they had regularly been promi-
nent jurists. PAPINIAN: joint prefect with Plautianus 203-05. Executed by Caracalla
ULPIAN: had been Papinian's assessor. Killed by mutinous praetorians in 223.
in 212.

PAULUS: pupil of Cervidius Scaevola; Papinian's assessor, and may have been briefly
joint prefect with Ulpian. Wrote 320 books, constitutio antoniniana: our ver-
j02 / NOTESTOPP. 377-395
sion (a Greek papyrus) may be a policy statement, not the original constitutio itself.
A class known as dediticii ("capitulants") was excluded along with slaves; perhaps
it principally comprised people recently and forcibly settled within the empire

(known as laeti), though there was also a category of freed slaves described as
dediticii. Ostensible aim of the constitutio: "so that the Gods, with more worship-

pers, would favor the pious Roman people more." Nevertheless, the national law
of the Greek past continued to assert itself against imperial law, at least until
Diocletian systematically enforced the latter.

New Buildings and Portraits, baths of caracalla. the reservoir could hold
2,688,000 cubic feet of water, marcus aurelius's portraits: some show blank,
Antonine classicism, but a few are in a novel, tense style: e.g., from Arch of C. 178
(vanished) celebrating Marcomannic triumph, and gold head from Aventicum
(Avenches in Switzerland) at Lausanne, marcus aurelius's column: style origi-
nally foreshadowed, in part, by reliefs from lost column of Antoninus, portraits:
Commodus as Hercules in Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome; Caracalla in Museo
Archeologico Nazionale, Naples; Maximinus I in Ny Carlsberg Glypothek, Copen-
hagen (his coin portraits carry realism almost to the point of caricature); Philip in
Museum, Rome; Trebonianus Gallus in Metropol-
the Vatican; Decius in Capitoline
itan Museum, New York; Gallienus in Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome.
Plotinus, Mithras, and Mani. plotinus: studied in Alexandria under the Plato-
nistAmmonius Saccas who also taught Origen and Longinus. porphyry (ca. a.d.
232-305) FROM TYRE (sur): pupil first of Longinus then of Poltinus. sun cult:
traditionally went back in Rome to King Numa Pompilius. Identified with Apollo
as in Greece since about fifth century B.C. mithras: supported the god Ahura-
mazda, against Ahriman. mani: arrested by Persian king Bahram I and died at
Gundeshapur (ca. 274/7). Kartir, chief Magus and architect of the state religion,
prevailed.

Chapter ig. The Supreme State and Church

The New State of Diocletian. Diocletian succeeded the sons of Carus,

Numerian (probably killed by his praetorian prefect Aper) and Carinus (killed after
a battle with Diocletian near R. Margus (Morava). revolt in Britain: Carausius
(ca. 287-93; he apparently controlled northeastern Gaul), Allectus (ca. 293-96;
defeated by Constantius I's praetorian prefect Asclepiodotus). Some forts of Brit-
ain's Saxon shore may date from this period, other northern successes: Con-
stantius I Germany (302-04) and five victories of Diocletian on Danube (from
in

302). revolts in EGYPT: the second proclaimed the usurper Domitiius Domitianus
(297-98). PERSIAN WAR (296-98): Diocletian and Galerius were defeated by Narses
I near Carrhae (Haran), but Galerius seized Armenia, and then Ctesiphon, and
annexed five small provinces, maximian's retirement: the palace at Piazza Ar-
merina in Sicily may possibly have belonged to him, or to his son Maxentius.
dioceses (dioeceseis): each under a vicarius, i.e., officially a deputy of the praetorian
whose favor the power of the vicarii subsequently declined), price
prefects, (in
EDICT (Edictum de Pretiis): the most complete copy is from Aezani (Emet) in
Phrygia (Asia Minor), currency reform of diocletian: underestimated the
 NOTESTOPP. 395~405 / 5^3

value of the precious metal coinage in relation to the base metal issues, so that the
price of commodities in terms of the latter rose sharply, ceremonial: the name of
Diocletian's imperial council was changed from consilium to consistorium, because
its members no longer sat but stood in his presence, salonae: the palace covered
nine acres. Its plan was based on a blend of Roman camps, city walls, and civil
architecture, companions of the gods: Commodus had displayed Hercules as his
companion (comes) on coins and medallions.
The Growth of Christianity, clement of Alexandria: "how may a rich man
be saved"? origen: taught by Leonides (his father), Pantaenus, Clement, and
Ammonius Saccas (also the teacher of Plotinus). His numerous works included a
refutation of the pagan Celsus. tertullian: born in or near Carthage. He joined
the extreme, ascetic, Montanist movement, cyprian: executed in 258 during
Valerian's persecution, jews: began to be outnumbered by Christians in second
century a.d. Although Severus forbade proselytism by Jews (as by Christians), their
good relations with Rome were cemented in Syria Palaestina (the former Judaea)
by the recognized national leader (patriarch) Judah I ha-Nasi, "the prince" (a.d.
135-219). There was extensive synagogue building in Galilee (Chorazin, Capernaum,
Kefr Bir'im): cf. at Dura Europus on the Euphrates. Exilarchs, the counterpart of
the Palestinian patriarchs, presided over flourishing communities of Babylonian
Jews in third century (Nehardea, Sura, Pumbeditha, Machuza near Ctesiphon).
decius's PERSECUTION: Pope (bishop of Rome) Fabian was executed. Diocle-
tian's PERSECUTION: neo-Platonist Hierocles, governor of Bithynia and Egypt, was
one of its leaders and SUCCESSORS of Diocle-
also wrote against the Christians.
tian Constantius I (305-36), Galerius (305-11), Severus II (306-7). Maximian
:

(second reign 306-8, third attempt 310), Maximinus II Daia (308-13; nephew of
Galerius), Constantine I (the Great) (312-37), Licinius (312-24; from the new Dacia,
south of the Danube); but Constantine and Licinius had first been declared Augusti
in 306 and 308 respectively.

Constantine the Great, his mother: St. Helena, a barmaid from Bithynia; she
became a pious Christian (at an uncertain date) and died in ca. 328. German wars
of CONSTANTINE: against Franks, Alamanni, etc. (306-13). Constantinople: did
not have a large population until ca. 360. By the end of the century it had 4,388
private residences. For church buildings, see below, christianization: in the latest
edition of the "Edict of Serdica," the name of Licinius was omitted. The "Edict of
Milan" consisted of regulations of Constantine and Licinius that were issued when
the latter visited Mediolanum (Milan) to marry Constantine's half sister Constantia,
and subsequently repeated by Licinius in a proclamation at Nicomedia (Izmit),
(though Licinius, quarreling with Constantine, later reverted to persecution). Afri-
can milestones with the Christian Chi-Rho symbol date from 317-19. A vault mosaic
in the Mausoleum of the JuHi under St. Peter's at Rome
and the
identifies Christ
Sun. King Tiridates III of Armenia had joined the Christian faith and imposed it
on his country soon after his restoration to its throne in 298. supreme deity
(SUMMUS SANCTUS DEUS): revered by Hierocles and invoked by troops of Licinius
before his victory over Maximinus II Daia at Tzirallum (near Edime) in Thrace in
313. church FUNDS: an extension of the private wealth of the emperor rather than
^04 / NOTESTOPP. 405~4i9
of state funds, christian communities: the best organized and biggest were at
Antioch and Alexandria, dissident christians: e.g., the Donatists of northern
Africa condemned all who had sacrificed to pagan deities in Diocletian's persecution

and were eventually persecuted by Constantine (316-21). He built an important

church at Cirta, renamed Constantina (now Constantine). christian catacombs
AT ROME: St. Callixtus, Sebastian, Domitilla, etc. jews: catacombs at Rome (some
to be opened before long to the public); Via Appia Pignatelli, Villa Torlonia, Vigna
Rondanini. Roman treatment of the Jews deteriorated under Constantius II (337-
61), expecially after the rebellion of Patricius in Palestine, house-churches:
church at Dura-Europus on Euphrates (232) was built to succeed a place of worship
in a private house. But purpose-built churches preceded Diocletian's persecution.
BASILICAS: Trajan's timber-roofed Basihca Ulpia was widely imitated; cf. fine Basil-
ica of Severus at Lepcis Magna, lateran: from family of Plautii Laterani. It may
not have become the papal cathedral immediately. ST. peter's: built over shrine of
St. Peter which the surviving structure dates from ca. a.d. 160-70. Constantine also
transformed the cella memoriae of St. Paul into the Basilica Ostiensis (St. Paul
outside the Walls). His great Roman churches were all located outside the walls so
as not to offend the pagans, holy apostles, Constantinople: under its conical
roof, the remains of Constantine the Great, the "thirteenth apostle" lay for a time.
GOLDEN OCTAGON, ANTIOCH: forerunner of palace-church of Aquisgrana (Aa-
chen), etc. PALESTINE (SYRIA palaestina): in addition to the Holy Sepulcher there
were further great churches of Constantine at Jerusalem (on the sites of the Nativity
and the Ascension, initiated by his mother Helena, as well as at Bethlehem and
Hebron). Such combinations of centralized and longitudinal designs reached their
climax in Justinian I's Santa Sophia (Aya Sofya) at Constantinople, alleged plot
OF 326: by Constantine's wife Fausta and eldest son Crispus (by his previous wife
Minervina; Caesar since 316): both executed.
The Successors of Constantine. his heirs: sons: Constantine II (337-40), Con-
stantius II (337-61) and Constans (337-50), and nephews (both killed immediately
after his death). Delmatius and Hannibalianus (made King of Kings in Armenia).
constantius ii's PERSIAN WARS: Shapur II (309-79) thrice attacked the fortress
of Nisibis in Mesopotamia (Niisaybin, southeastern Turkey) without success but
was then diverted by a nomad threat on his eastern frontier, revolts against
CONSTANTIUS II: Magnentius, Vetranio, Nepotianus (all in 350; Magnentius reigned
until 353); Silvanus, 355; Julian, 360. callus (constantius): put down revolts in
Syria Palaestina (Patricius) and Isauria (southern Asia Minor) but was recalled and
put to death at Pola in Istria (Pula in northwestern Yugoslavia). Julian's German
VICTORIES (356-59): over Alamanni, whom he defeated at Argentorate (Strasbourg)
in 356, and over Franks, rebellion of julian (360): at Lutetia (Paris). Julian's
EDUCATION: by eunuch Mardonius and pagan philosopher Maximus (at Ephesus);
also at Athens, restoration of Jerusalem temple: ostensibly abandoned be-
cause of inflammable gases. Julian's administration: bureaucracy and body-
guard and secret policy (agentes were greatly reduced, and he attempted
in rebus)

to revive the cities and their councils. Persian war: Julian was killed while march-
ing to meet a reserve army. jovianuS: originated from Singidunum (Belgrade). He
surrendered Nisibis and Singara (on Jebel Sinjar) and Galerius's gains in the east.
 NOTESTOPP. 423-440 / 505

PART IX THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

Chapter 20. The Fall of the Western Empire

Valentinian I and Theodosius valentinian i's origin: from Cibalae (Vin-

I.

kovci in Yugoslavia), his northern campaigns (365-73): successive headquarters

at Lutetia (Paris), Ambianum (Amiens, formerly Samarobriva): to deal with attacks
by Saxons, Picts, and Scots on British provinces), Treviri, and Sirmium (Sremska
Mitrovica) (with interlude to crush revolt of Firmus in Africa, 373-75; there was
also a later African revolt under Gildo, 398). gratian: and Valens had to give Italy,
Illyricum, and north Africa to Gratian's brother Valentinian II, hailed emperor at
Aquincum [(Budapest) 375-92]. theodosius i's origins: from Cauca (Coca) in
Spain. REVOLTS against theodosius I: Magnus Maximus (383-88), a Spaniard,
in Britain, Gaul, and Spain (he overthrew Gratian); Eugenius (392-94), a protege
of Arbogast who had Valentinian II murdered but was killed in battle of Frigidus
(R. Vipacco or Wippach, tributary of Isonzo).
The Frontiers Broken, stilicho's wife: Serena, alans: nomadic pastoralists
from between R. Volga and R. Don. usurpers after invasion: e.g., Constantine
III (407-11), elevated in Britain, established capital at Arelate (Aries). Honorius had

probably settled Saxons in Britain as foederati, in exchange for military service. Its

communities were still economically linked to the continent in ca. 420-30. alaric's
DEATH: at Consentia (Cosenza), buried in R. Busento. burgundians: kingdom
based on Borbetomagus (Worms) (ca. 406); transplanted to Sabaudia (Savoy) in 443.
WESTERN usurper (423-25): Johannes. catalaunian plains: Theodoric I, the
first Visigothic leader to be truly regarded as a king, was killed, hun defeat by
GERMANS: on R. Medao (unidentified). Germans pressed forward near Lake Con-
stance.
The Last Emperors of the West, brief final reigns: Olybrius (472), Glycerius
(473-74), Julius Nepos [(474-75); d. 480 in Dalmatia], Romulus Augustus ("Agus-
tulus," 475-76). LOYAL REMNANT OF CENTRAL GAUL: Auvergne, with its Capital
at Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand; formerly Augustonemetum), lost by Julius Nepos

to Visigothic king Euric (474). Arelate fell in 476. father of romulus: Orestes,
a Roman who had been Attila's secretary, "fall": the term "Middle Ages" (from

476 or 395, 406, 610, 800, 842?) was first used by Professor C. Kellner of Halle in
1688. Abbe Ferdinando Galiani (1744): "The Fall of empires: what can that mean?

Empires, being neither up nor down, do not fall." German approval of "fall":
Beatus Rhenanus (fifteenth-sixteenth century); cf. the Dutch jurist and historian
Hugo Grotius (sixteenth-seventeenth century).

Chapter 21. The Fatal Disunities

Social Catastrophe, great estates: e.g., Burgus Julius near Carthage (on
mosaic in Bardo Museum, Tunis); cf. Burgus of Leontius at confluence of Dordogne
and Garonne; and earlier three-storied fortress at Pfalzel (fourth century), defend-
ers of PEOPLE: Letter of Valentinian I to his praetorian prefect Petronius Probus.
bagaudae: Tibatto (435, raised slaves), physician Eudoxius (440s, fled to Huns);
also in Spain, where they were crushed by Aetius in 454. their people's courts:
^06 / NOTES TO PP. 440-462
Mentioned in verse drama Querolus ("the Protester"). Gaulish landowner as
EMPEROR: Avitus (455) at Arelate; coronation attended by Visigothic king Theo-
doric II (453-66).
Uncooperative Attitudes, ataulf: on German-Roman cooperation, reported
by a citizen of Narbo (Narbonne) to the chronicler Orosius. sidonius apollinaris:
(b. ca. 430-d. ca. 488) of Lugdunum (Lyon); praised the Visigothic monarchs
Theodoric and Euric (having fought against the latter in 471-75). disloyalty
II

OF FEDERATES: in 409 they failed to prevent other Germans from crossing into
Spain, and in 422 they deserted to the Vandals there.
Christians and Pagans, monasticism: first made famous by St. Antony (bom
in Upper Egypt ca. 251), who organized his followers into groups during the persecu-

tion of Galerius (305-6). monasteries of St. Martin of Tours: Liguge near Pictavi
(Poitiers; formerly Limonum) ca. 360, and then Marmoutier near Civitas Turonum

(Tours; formerly Caesarodunum). Martin who came from Savaria in Pannonia

(Szombathely in Hungary), followed St. Antony's ideal of partly eremitical and
partly communal life. After 400 Honoratus established a monastery at Lerin near
Cannes, jerome: numerous works include translation of Bible into Latin (the
Vulgate). JOHN CASSIAN: writer oi Institutes and Conferences which exercised great
Monte Cassino (died ca. 547).
influence on St. Benedict of Nursia (Norcia), abbot of
CHURCH IS IN THE STATE: Bishop Optatus of Milev (Mila in Algeria), medi-
OLANUM (MILAN) IN LATER FOURTH CENTURY: five huge churches: SS Nazaro,
Simpliciano, Giovanni in Conca, Tecla, Lorenzo. Ambrose, bishop of Mediolanum,
unearthed two pairs of saints there and one at Bononia (Bologna), forcible con-
formity: based on interpretations of texts of Luke's Gospel and Paul's Epistles.

victory debate (384): between Ambrose and the pagan aristocratic Roman orator
and writer Symmachus (b. ca. 340-d. ca. 402). augustine's background: his
parents were Patricius and Monica, and he was educated at Thagaste, Madaurus,
and Carthage. He was then Rome
one year as a teacher before going to
in for
Mediolanum in 386. survival of paganism: gladiatorial combats may have con-
tinued until 439-40, duels of men against wild animals until 498, and contests
between wild animals augustine on "opportunity": to Vincentius,
until 681.

Donatist bishop of Cartennae (Tenes). "your" virgil: letter to Nectarius of

Calama. "invicta roma aeterna": e.g., on gold medallion of client Priscus
Attalus. RUTiLius NAMATIANUS: poem, De Reditu Suo ("On his Return"), popes
AGAINST GOVERNMENT SERVICE: Siricius (385-99), Innocent I (401-17). PELADIUS:
died after 419. He wrote commentary on Pauline epistles. Seventy tracts supporting
his viewpoint are the work of his followers, augustine dissociates church
from STATE: under influence of lay Donatist theologian Tyconius, author of Rules
and interpreter of St. Paul.

Chapter 22. The Aftermath

The Successor States in the West, clovis: son of Childeric I, ruler of a

tribe of Salian Franks. He had remained loyal to his treaties with the Romans,
but won the battle of Vouille against the Visigoths, whose king Alaric II, son of
Euric, was killed. Clovis had defeated a last west Roman outpost at Suessiona
 462-470 / 5^7

(Soissons in northern France) in 486. Charles martel: threw back a Moslem

invasion from Spain (732). Charlemagne: the Holy Roman Empire disap-
peared only in 1806. hispalis (Seville): its bishop Isidore (b. ca. 560-d. ca.
was one of the principal links between the ancient world
636), a prolific writer,
and the Middle Ages, north africa: the Islamic armies started their advance
westwards from Egypt in 640 and had conquered the whole of north Africa by
71L OSTROGOTHS: took one-third of Italian land for their own use. The popula-
tions were kept apart. Theodoric the Ostrogoth, like the Burgundians and Visi-

goths, placed the head of the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I on his coins, boe-

THius (b. ca. 480-d. 524): held high office but was then imprisoned and
executed by Theodoric. He wrote On the Consolation of Philosophy in prison.

CASSIODORUS (b. ca. 490-d. 583): senator, consul, encyclopaedist, theologian,

founded religious community at Vivarium (Coscia di Staletti) in his native Ca-
labria.BELiSARius: occupied Carthage and captured Vandal king Gelimer (533);
then in Italy 533-40 and 546-49. narses: Pers-Armenian eunuch; completed
conquest of Italy 550-54, then administered it from Ravenna to 567. Justinian's
generals also recaptured parts of southern Spain.
The Survival of Byzantium, arcadius's advisers: Rufinus Eutropius, An-
themius. theodosius ii: bought off Huns, 422; sum increased 434, 443. eastern
EMPEROR LEO I: given the throne by Aspar the Alan, zeno: from Isauria in Asia
Minor; his original name was Tarasicodissa. At first for a few months co-emperor
with his son Leo II (474). anastasius I: from Dyrrhachium (Durres in Albania).
His major reform of the coinage marked the beginning of the Byzantine system.
JUSTIN I: from a village near Naissus (Nis in Yugoslavia), balkans: Bulgars crossed
the Danube and menaced Constantinople in 679. corpus of justinian i: Digest
(50 books with 432 titles from 2,000 works); Codex (imperial statutes, 8 edi-
tions); Institutes (elementary); Novellae (new laws). Undertaken by a commis-

sion of 16 members, mostly presided over by Tribonian of Side [(Eski Antalya,

southern Asia Minor), d. 542/5]. Persia: large areas of the Byzantine empire
were lost to the Persian king Chosroes II Parvez (590-628). loss of jus-
tinian I's WESTERN CONQUESTS:
northern Italy settled by Lombards (568) for
two Pope Gregory the Great [(590-604), the last intellectual to com-
centuries;
bine western and Greek culture] negotiated directly with them. Hopes of a
united empire were further shattered by movement of Slavs into the Balkans
(seventh century) separating Italy from the east, and by the loss of northern
Africa to the Arabs (eighth century), crusaders at Constantinople: 1204-
61; the "Latin Empire." turks: the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at
Manzikert in 1071. The Ottoman Turks began to encroach on the empire under
the founder of their dynasty Osman I (1288-1326). fall of Constantinople
(1453): the end of the "Middle Ages" (or this has been dated to 1440, 1492,
1515, 1548). USURPERS IN EASTERN EMPIRE: Procopius (365-66, distant relation
of Julian the Apostate); Basiliscus (475-76), Marcian (479), Leontius I (484-88)
(all in Zeno's reign); and Vitalian (513-15).
ANCIENT SOURCES

I. LATIN HISTORICAL WRITERS

AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, ca. A.D. 330-95, bom at Antioch in Syria (Antakya
in SE Turkey). History (Rerum Gestarum libri) of years a.d. 96-378 (Books 14-31

about A.D. 353-78 survive).

CAESAR, Gaius Julius, 100-44 B.C. Dictator, Seven books of "Commentaries" on

Gallic War (eighth is by Aulus Hirtius), three on Civil War (the concluding books
on African, Alexandrian, and Spanish wars are by other authors).
CASSIODORUS, ca. A.D. 490-583; born at Scylacium (Squillace) in S Italy, Extant
examples of his numerous works include the Chronica, a brief summary of Roman
history to a.d. 519. See also Jordanes.
EUTROPius, Fourth century a.d. Survey (Breviarium) of Roman history from
beginning to a.d. 364.
FLORUS, ANNAEUS (?), second century a.d.; born in North Africa. Epitome of
Roman history to wars of Augustus.
HISTORIA AUGUSTA, ostensibly the work of six authors (probably pseudonyms);
apparently of the later fourth century a.d. Partly fictitious "biographies" of Roman
emperors, Caesars, and usurpers from a.d. 117 to 284 (gap for 244-59).

ISIDORE, bishop of Hispalis (Seville), a.d. 602-36; numerous works included

own times (Chronica Majora) and History of the Goths.
history to his
JEROME, SAINT (Eusebius Hieronymus), ca. a.d. 348-420; bom at Stridon in
Dalmatia. His historical works include a Chronicle of ancient events and short
biographies of Christian writers (De Viris Illustribus).
JORDANES, mid-sixth century a.d.; probably a Goth from the Lower Danube.
Summaries of Gothic and Roman history, former summarizing the Gothic Histories
of Cassiodorus (q.v.)
LIVY (Titus Livius), 59 b.c.-a.d. 17 or 64 b.c.-a.d. 12; bom
Patavium (Padua
at

in N Italy). History of Rome {Ab Urbe Condita; to 9 B.C.) in 142 books, of which

35 are extant, covering the periods 753-243 and 219-167 B.C. From the lost books
we have fragments and excerpts, and there are two sets of abridgments.
NEPOS, Cornelius, ca. 99-24 B.C.; bom in North Italy. Out of various works 24
short biographies survive.
OROSius, Paulus, early fifth century, a.d.; probably born at Bracara Augusta

508
 ANCIENTSOURCES / ^Og

(Braga in Portugal). Christian Chronicle (Historiae adversum Paganos) in seven

books from the Creation to a.d. 417.
SALLUST (Gains Sallustius Crispus), ca. 86-35 B.C.; b. Amitemum (San Vittorino
in central Italy). Monographs on Catilinarian conspiracy (Bellum Catilinae) and
Jugurthine War (Bellum lugurthinum) in addition to lost Histories.

SUETONIUS (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus), ca. a.d. 69-104 (?); probably from
Hippo Regius (Annaba in Algeria). Writings include biographies: De Vita Caesarum
(The Twelve Caesars), De Viris Illustribus (including De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus),
De Poetis (at least three survive), De Oratoribus (15, summary of one survives), De

Historicis (one of six survives).

TACITUS, Publius Cornelius, ca. a.d. 56-before or after 117; probably of Gallic or
North Italian origin. Histories of the years a.d. 69-96 (?): out of 12or 14 books, 4
and part of the fifth survive (on the Civil Wars, a.d. 69-70). Then Annals covering
the years a.d. 14-68; out of 18 or 16 books, 10 (minus parts of 3) survive (on Tiberius,
part of Claudius's reign, and most of Nero's). Previous works included a biography
of his father-in-law, Agricola, and the Germania and Dialogue on Orators (Dialogus
de Oratoribus).
VALERIUS MAXIMUS, wrote in 30s A.D. Moral and rhetorical history (Facta ac
dicta memorabilia) in 9 books.
VELLEius PATERCULUS, ca. 19 B.c.-after A.D. 30; of Campanian origin. Compen-
dium of Roman history (Historiae Romanae) to a.d. 30.

2. GREEK HISTORICAL WRITERS

APPIAN, 2nd cent, a.d.; probably born at Alexandria in Egypt. History of Roman
conquests to Trajan, in 24 books of which nos. 6-9 (mostly) and 11-17 are complete.
Dio CASSius (Cassius Dio Cocceianus), from Nicaea (Iznik in
ca. a.d. 155-235;

NW Turkey). Roman history to a.d. 229, in 80 books of which nos. 36-54 (68-10
B.C.) are preserved; 55-60 (91 b.c.-a.d. 46) exist in abbreviated form; 17 and 79-80
in part. Xiphilinus (eleventh century) epitomized from book 36 onwards, and Zona-

ras (twelfth century) gives the gist of 1-21 and 44-80.

DiODORUS SICULUS, lived under Caesar and Augustus; from Agyrium (Agira) in
Sicily. World history (Bibliotheke) in 40 books to Caesar's Gallic War, of which 1-8

and 11-20 are fully preserved and the remaining books fragmentary.
DiONYSius, worked under Augustus; from Halicarnassus (Bodrum in SW Tur-
key). His writings included Roman Antiquities to outbreak of First Punic War, in
20 books of which the first 10 survive.
EUSEBius, ca. A.D. 260-340; of Caesarea Maritima (near Sdot Yam in Israel). His
writings included Church History, extended in latest edition to a.d. 324, and eulogis-
tic hfe of Constantine the Great.
HERODIAN, early third century a.d.; from Syria. Roman History from a.d.
180-238 in 8 books.
JOSEPHUS, FLAVius, A.D. 37-38-after 94; of Jewish, Pharisaic origin. Jewish War
(about the First Jewish Revolt), Greek translation in 7 books of lost Aramaic
original; Jewish Antiquities in 20 books, a history of the Jews from the Creation to
J/0 / ANCIENTSOURCES
just before the First Revolt; His Life, an autobiographical defense; and Against
Apion, a two-book work attacking anti-Semitic writers from the third century B.C.
NICOLAUS, later first century B.C.; from Damascus in Syria. Court historian of
Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.); his works included a Universal History to Herod's
death of which portions are preserved.
PLUTARCH (Lucius (?) Mestrius Plutarchus), before a.d. 50-after 120; of Chae-
ronea in Greece. Numerous writings include 23 pairs of "parallel lives" of Greeks
and Romans, and lives of the Caesars, of which only Galba and Otho survive.
POLYBius, ca. 200-118 B.C.; of Megalopolis in Greece. Universal History of the
years 220-144 BC- in 40 books, of which we have the first 5, a large part of book
6, and smaller extracts from most of the others, com-
substantial portions of 7-16,
prising altogether nearly a third of the whole work.
PROCOPius, ca. A.D. 5oa-after 562; born at Caesarea Maritima (near Sdot Yam
in Israel). History of the Wars of Justinian in 8 books and censorious Secret History.
THEODORETUS, ca. A.D. 393-466; bishop of Cyrrhus (Kurus in SE Turkey).
Writings included Church History from Constantine the Great to A.D. 428, and
Religious History containing biographies of ascetics.
ZONARAS, Johannes, twelth century a.d.; monk at Hagia Glyceria in the Princes'
Islands (Kizil Adalar). Universal Epitome of Histories to a.d. 1118, now in 18 books,
excerpting Dio Cassius, Plutarch, etc.

zosiMUS, ca. A.D. 500; a pagan, possibly from Ascalon (Ashkelon) or Gaza in SW
Palestine. Historia Nova from Augustus to a.d. 410.

OTHER SOURCES
(i) Other historians and biographers, whose works in this field are now lost or
mainly lost but detectable through intermediaries. Of particular importance
(among very many) are the Latin writers Cato the Elder (234-149 B.C.), Licinius
Macer (d. 68 B.C.), Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23-79), Pollio (76 B.C. -a.d. 4), Valerius
Antias (ist cent. B.C.), and Varro (116-27 B.C.), and, in Greek, Cincius Alimentus
(late second century B.C.), the emperor Claudius (10 b.c.-a.d. 54), Fabius Pictor

(late second century B.C.), and Posidonius (ca. 135-50 B.C.).

(2) Other Greek and Latin authors of a primarily nonhistorical character whose
works nevertheless contain historical information, notably Augustine, Cicero,
Lucan, Salvian, Seneca the Younger, Sidonius ApoUinaris, Virgil, etc.

(^) Inscriptions.

(4) Papyri, mainly from Egypt.

(^) Graffiti, especially at Pompeii.
(6) Coins, of the Roman state and local communities and client kingdoms, and of
the neighbors and enemies of the Roman Empire.
(j) Commemorative medallions of the Roman state and local communities of the
empire.
(8) Works of art and architecture and engineering.
(g) Remains of agricultural and commercial and industrial activities.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

AFRICA, T. w. The Immense Majesty: A History of Rome and the Roman Empire,
New York, 1974.
alfOldi, a. Early Rome and the Latins, Ann Arbor, 1965.
ANDRfe, J. M. Le siecle d'Auguste, Paris, 1974.
ARNOTT, p. D. An Introduction to the Roman World, London, 1976.
BADIAN, E. Roman Imperialism Late Republic, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1968.
in the

BAILEY, c, ed. The Legacy of Rome, Oxford, 1924.

BALSDON, J. p. V. D. Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome, London, 1969.
.
Roman Women, London, 1962.
, ed. The Romans, London, 1965.
BANTi, L. // mondo degli etruschi, 2nd ed., Rome, 1969 {Etruscan Cities and their
Culture, London and Berkeley, 1973).
BENGTSON, H. Einfiihrung in die alte Geschichte. 6th ed., Munich, 1974 {Introduc-
tion toAncient History, London and Berkeley, 1975).
BiANCHi BANDINELLI, R. Rome: le centre du pouvoir, Paris, 1969 {Rome the Center
of Power: Roman Art to ad. 200, London, 1970).
Rome: la fin de Vart antique, Paris, 1970 {The Late Empire: Roman Art
.

AD. 200-400, London, 1971).

BLOCH, R. Les origines de Rome, Paris, 1959 {The Origins of Rome, London, i960).
BOAK, A. E. R., and SINNIGEN, w. G. History of Rome to ad. §6^, 5th ed., New
York, 1965.
BOETHius, A. AND WARD-PERKINS, J. B. Etruscan and Roman Architecture, Har-
mondsworth, 1970.
BONNER, Education in Ancient Rome, London, 1977.
s. F.

BRAUER, G. C. The Age of the Soldier Emperors, Park Ridge, 1975.

BRILLIANT, R. Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine, London, 1974.
BRISSON, J. p. Carthage ou Rome, Paris, 1973.
BOREN, H. c. Roman Society: A Social, Economic and Cultural History, Lexington
(Mass.), 1977.
BRUNT, P. A. Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic, London, 1971.
CALABI, I. L'uso storiografico delle iscrizioni latine. Milan, 1953.
CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY. Vols VII-XII, Cambridge, 1928-39.
CARCOPINO, H. La vie quotidienne a Rome a Vapogee de Tempire, Paris, 1939 {Daily
Life in Ancient Rome, Harmondsworth, 1956).
CARSON, R. A. G. Coins of Greece and Rome, 2nd ed., London, 1970.

5"
J/2 / BIBLIOGRAPHY
GARY, M., AND SCULLARD, H. H. A History of Rome, 3rd ed. (of Gary's History),
London, 1975.
CASSON, L. Travel in the Ancient World, London, 1974.
CHARLESWORTH, M. P. The Roman Empire, Oxford, 1951.
CHEVALLIER, R. Les voies romaines, Paris, 1972 {Roman Roads, London and Berke-
ley, 1976).
CHRIST, K., ed. Hannibal, Darmstadt, 1974.
CHRIST, K. Romische Geschichte: Einfiihrung, Quellenkunde, Bibliographie, Darm-
stadt, 1973.
CLARKE, M. L. The Roman Mind, London, 1956.
COARELLi, p., etc. Le cittd etrusche, Milan, 1973 {Etruscan Cities, London, 1975).
COWELL, F. R. Everyday Life in Ancient Rome, London, 1961.
CROOK, J. A., Law and Life of Rome, London, 1967.
CUNLIFFE, B. Rome and the Barbarians, London, 1975.
DILKE, o. A. w. The Ancient Romans: How they Lived and Worked, Newton Abbot,
1975-
DOREY, and DUDLEY, D. R. Rome against Carthage, London, 1971.
T. A.,
DOWNEY, The Late Roman Empire, New York, 1969.
G.
DUDLEY, D. R. The Romans, London, 1970 {Roman Society, 1975).
EARL, D. The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome, London, 1967.
ERRINGTON, R. M. The Dawn of Empire: Rome's Rise to World Power, London, 1972.
FERGUSON, J. The Religions of the Roman Empire, London, 1970.
FINLEY, M. I. The Ancient Economy, London, 1973.
ed. Slavery in Classical Antiquity, London, i960.
,

FOWLER, w. w. Rome, 3rd ed., Oxford, 1967.

friedlAnder, l. Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms, loth ed., Leipzig,
1922 {Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, London, 1965 ed.).
GABBA, E. Esercito e societd nella tarda republica romana, Bologna, 1973 {Republi-
can Rome: the Army and the Allies, Oxford, 1977).
GAGE, J., Enquetes sur les structures sociales et religieuses de la Rome primitive,
Brussels, 1977.
Les classes sociales
.
dans Tempire romain, Paris, 1969.
GARZETTi, A. L'impero da Tiberio agli Antonini, Rome, i960 {From Tiberius to the
Antonines, London, 1974).
Rome, 1976.
GENTILI, B., etc. Storia della letteratura latina,
GIBBON, E. and Fall of the Roman Empire, London,
History of the Decline 1776-1788.
GRANT, M. The Climax of Rome, 3rd ed., London, 1974.
The Fall of the Roman Empire, Radnor (Pennsylvania), 1976.
.

.
The Jews in the Roman World, London, 1973.*
.
Roman History 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1968.
from Coins,
. Roman Harmondsworth, 1964.
Literature, 3rd ed.,
The World of Rome, 3rd ed., London, 1974.
.

GRIMAL, p. La civilisation romaine, Paris, i960 {The Civilization of Rome, London,

1963)
etc. Der Hellenismus und der Aufstieg Roms, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1965
,

{Hellenism and the Rise of Rome, London, 1968).

GRUEN, E. s., ed. The Image of Rome, Englewood Cliffs, 1969.
HADAS, M. A History of Rome, New York, 1956.

*See also Jesus (1977) and Saint Paul (1976) for short bibliographies.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY /j^i

HAMMOND, M. The Antonine Monarchy. Oxford, 1959.

HAYWOOD, R. M. Ancient Rome, New York, 1967.

HEICHELHEIM, F. M., and Yeo, C.A. History of the Roman People, Englewood Cliffs,

1962.
HEURGON, J. Rome et la mediterranee occidentalejusqu'auxguerrespuniques, Paris,
1969 {The Rise of Rome, London, 1973).
HEUSS, A. Romische Geschichte. Braunschweig, 2nd ed., 1964.
HIGHET, G. The Classical Tradition, Oxford, 2nd ed., 1967.
HOMO, L. Le haut-empire, Paris, 1941.
JOLOWicz, H. F. Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law, 2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1972.
JONES, A. H. M. The Decline of the Ancient World, London, 1966.
A History of Rome through the Fifth Century, London, 1968.
.

The Roman Economy, Oxford, 1974.

.

The Later Roman Empire, Oxford, 1964.

.

KAEHLER, H. Rom und sein Welt, 2nd ed., Munich, 1968-70 {Rome and her Empire,
London, 1963).
KELLY, J. M. Roman Litigation, Oxford, 1966.
KENT, J. P. F. Roman Coins, London and New York, 1978.
KIENAST, D. Augustus, Darmstadt, 1977.
KJELLBERG, E., AND SAFLLND, G. Grekisk och Romersk Konst, Stockholm, 1958
{Greek and Roman Art, London, 1968).
KRAFT, H., ed. Konstantin der Grosse, Darmstadt, 1974.
KUNKEL, w. Romische Rechtsgeschichte, 6th ed., Koln, 1971 {An Introduction to
Roman Legal and Constitutional History, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1973).
LE GALL, J. La religion romaine de Vepoque de Caton Tancien au regne de Vempereur
Commode, Paris, 1975.
LEY!, M. .A., and MELONL P. Storia romana dagli etruschi a Teodosio, 4th ed., Milan,
1968.
LEWIS, N., and reinhold, m., Roman Civilization: A Sourcebook, New York,
1955-
LOT, F. La fin du monde antique et le debut du moyen age, Paris, 1927 {The End

of the Ancient World, 2nd ed., London, 1966).

LUTTWAK, E. N. The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Baltimore, 1977.
MCDONALD, A. H. Republican Rome, London, 1966.
macdonald, w. l. The Architecture of the Roman Empire, New Haven, 1965.
M.ACMLLLEN, R. The Roman Government's Response to Crisis a.d. 2jj-jjy, New
Haven, 1976.
Roman Social Relations jO B.C. -ad. 289, New Haven, 1974.
.

MANSUELLI, G. Etrurien und die Anfdnge Roms, Milan, 1963 {Etruria and Early
Rome, London, 1966).
MARKLS, R. A. Christianity in the Roman World, London, 1974.
MAROTTi, I. Letteratura latina, Bologna, 1976.
MARROU, h. I. Histoire de Teducation dans Tantiquite, 2nd ed., 1948 {History of
Education in Antiquity,London, reprint 1977).
MARSH, F. B. A History of the Roman World from 146 B.C. to 30 B.C., 3rd ed.,
London, 1963.
MARTIN, J. p. La Rome ancienne: 75J avant JC.-jgj apres J.C, Paris, 1973.
MASSON, G. A. A Concise History of Republican Rome, London, 1973.
MATTINGLY, H. Roman Coins, 2nd ed., London, i960.
$14 / BIBLIOGRAPHY
. Roman Imperial Civilization, London, 1957.
MAZZARINO, s. La fine del mondo antico, Milan, 1959 (The End of the Ancient
World, London, 1966).
MILLAR, The Emperor in the Roman World, London, 1977.
F.

, Das Romische Reich und seine Sachbarn, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966

etc.
{The Roman Empire and its Xeighbors, London, 1967).
MOMMSEN, T. Romische Geschichte, 1854-56, 1886, ed. K. Christ, Darmstadt, 1976
{History of Rome, London, 1913, abridged ed. i960).
NASH, E. Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, 2nd ed., New York, 1968.
NICOLET, c. Le metier de citoyen dans la Rome republicaine, Paris, 1976.
Rome et la conquete du monde Mediterranee 264-2 j B.C., Vol. I, Les
.

Structures de TItalic romaine, Paris, 1977.

OGILVIE, R. M. Early Rome and the Etruscans, London, 1976.
The Romans and their Gods, London, 1969.
.

OXFORD CLASSICAL DICTIONARY, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1970.

PALANQUE, J-R. Le bas-cmpire, Paris, 1971.
PALLOTTINO, M. Etruscologia, 7th ed., Milan, 1972 {The Etruscans, Harmonds-
worth, 1975, from 6th ed.).
, etc., eds. Popoli e civilta dell Italia antica, Rome, 1974.
PALMER, The Archaic Community of the Romans, Cambridge, 1970.
R. E. A.,
PAOLi, u. E. Vita Romana, loth ed., Florence, 1967 {Rome: Its People, Life and
Customs, London, 1963).
PARKER, H. M. D. A History of the Roman World from a.d. ij8 to 557, 2nd ed.,
London, 1958.
PASSERINI, A. Linee di storia romana in eta imperiale, 2nd ed., Milan, 1972.
PAYNE, R. Ancient Rome, New York, 1970.
PEROWNE, s. The End of the Roman World, London, 1966.
PETIT, p. Histoire generale de Vempire romain, Paris, 1974.
PICARD, G. Empire romain (Architecture universelle), Fribourg, 1965.
PIGANIOL, A. L'empire chretien, 2nd ed., Paris, 1972.
Histoire de Rome, 5th ed., Paris, 1962.
RADICE, B. Who's Who in the Ancient World, 2nd ed., London, 1973.
RAFFALT, R. Grosse Kaiscr Roms, Munich, 1977.
REMONDON, R. La crise de Vempire romain, Paris, 1964.
ROSTOVTZEFF, M. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. (P.
M. Fraser), Oxford, 1957.
ROULAND, N. CUentela: Essai sur Tinfluence des rapports de clientele sur la vie
politique romaine, Aix-Marseille (diss.), 1977.
SALMON, E. T., A History of the Roman World from jO B.C. to a.d. ij8, 6th ed.,
London, 1968.
SCHMIDT, J. Vie mort des esclaves dans la Rome antique, Paris, 1973.
et
SCULLARD, H. The Etruscan Cities and Rome, London, 1967.
H.,
Erom the Gracchi to Xero, 4th ed., London, 1976.
A History of the Roman World from j^j to 146 B.C., 3rd ed., London, 1961.
SHERWiN-WHiTE, A. N. The Roman Citizenship, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1973.
SIMON, M., AND BENOIT, A. Le Judaisme et le Christianisme antique, Paris, 1968.
SMALLWOOD, E. M. The Jews under Roman Rule from Pompey to Diocletian,
Leiden, 1976.
STARR, c. G. Civilization and the Caesars, Ithaca (N.Y.), 1954.
The Emergence of Rome, 2nd ed., Ithaca (N.Y.), 1965.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY / 5^5

STRONG, D. Roman Art, Harmondsworth, 1976.

SUTHERLAND, c. H. V. Roman Coins. London, 1974.
SYME, R. Roman Papers, Oxford, 1977.
The Roman Revolution, Oxford, 1939.
TEMPORINI, H., ed. Aufstieg und Niedergang der antiken Welt, Berlin, 1972 (many
parts).
THOMAS, J. A. c. Textbook of Roman Law, Amsterdam, 1977.
TOYNBEE, J. M. c. The Art of the Romans, London, 1965.
Roman Historical Portraits, London and New York, 1978.
TURNER, E. G. The Papyrologist at Work, Durham (N. Carolina), 1976.
VOGT, J. Die rbmische Republik, 6th ed., Freiburg, 1973.
Der Niedergang Roms, Zurich, 1965 {The Decline of Rome, London, 1967).
WALBANK, F. w. The Awful Revolution, Liverpool, 1969.
WATSON, A. Rome of the Twelve Tables, Princeton, 1975.
WATSON, G. R. The Roman Soldier, London, 1969.
WHEELER, R. E. M. Roman Art and Architecture, Rome, 1964.
WHITE, L., ed. The Transformation of the Roman World, Berkeley, 1966.
WILKINSON, L. p. The Roman Experience, New York, 1975.
ZANKER, P., ed. Hellenismus in Mittelitalien, Gottingen, 1976.
TABLE OF DATES*

B.C.

625-600 Arrival of Etruscans at Rome.

[586 Jerusalem captured by the Babylonians (Nebuchadnezzar).]
578-534(7) Reign of Servius TuUius.
[ca. 563-483 Life of Gautama Buddha.]
[ca. 551-479 Life of Confucius.]

535 Etruscans and Carthaginians defeat Phocaean Greeks off Alalia.

524 Etruscans defeated off Cumae.
[510 Tyrant Hippias expelled from Athens.]
507(7) Tarquins expelled; republic begins.
506(7) Etruscans defeated by Latins and Cumaeans at Aricia.
496 Romans defeat Latins at L. Regillus.

494(7) First Secession of the plebians. Establishment of tribunes of the

people.

493 Cassian Treaty with Latins.

479 Veii defeats Romans at R. Cremera.
471 Creation of tribal assembly (Concilium plebis).
451-50 The decemvirates and Twelve Tables.

449 Valerian-Horatian laws.

444 Institution of military tribunes with consular powers.

443 Institution of censorship.

431 Aequi defeated on Mt. Algidus.

[431-404 Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.]
425 Fidenae taken from Veii.

396 Fall of Veii.

[ca. 388 Plato founds Academy at Athens.]
387 Gauls defeat Romans at R. AUia and capture the city.

378 "Servian Wall."

367-366 Licinian-Sextian laws; first plebeian consul.
343-341 First Samnite War.

*Until the 4th cent. B.C., Italian dates are only approximate.

516
 TABLEOFDATES / ^IJ

B.C.

34^^338 Latin and Campanian War.

339 Publilian laws.

[334-323 Conquests of Alexander the Great.]

328-302 Second Samnite War.
321 Defeat by Samnites at the Caudine Forks.
312 Censorship of Appius Claudius. Via Appia and Aqua Appia.
298-290 Third Samnite War.
297 Hortensian Law.
295 Samnites defeated at Sentinum.
280-275 War with Pyrrhus.
[ca. 274-232(7) Rule of Asoka in India.]
264-241 First Punic War.
241 Victory off Aegates Islands. Annexation of Sicily.

241-238 War of Mercenaries (Truceless War) against Carthage.

238 Annexation of Sardinia and Corsica.
237 Hamilcar Barca goes to Spain.

232 Flaminian land law.

226 Ebro treaty with Hasdrubal Barca.
225 Gauls defeated at Telamon.
218-201 Second Punic War.
218-216 Defeats at R. Ticinus, R. Trebia, L. Trasimene, and Cannae.
215-209 Revolts of Capua, Tarentum, Syracuse.
207 Hasdrubal defeated at R. Metaurus.
206 Victory of Scipio Africanus at Ilipa.

[206 B.C.-
A.D. 220 Han Dynasty in China.]

202 B.C. Victory of Scipio Africanus at Zama.

200-196 Second Macedonian War.
197 Philip V defeated at Cynoscephalae.
192-189 War against Antiochus III.
190 Antiochus III defeated at Magnesia.
171-68 Third Macedonian War.
168 Perseus defeated at Pydna.
149-46 Third Punic War.
146 Destruction of Carthage and Corinth.
'39~i32 First Slave Revolt in Sicily.

133 Scipio Aemilianus captures Numantia.

133-129 Pergamum left to Rome and annexed as province of Asia.
133 & 123-
122 Tribunates of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
121 Defeat of Arvemi and Allobroges in Gaul.
112-105 Jugurthine War.
104-100 Second Slave Revolt in Sicily.
102-101 Marius defeats Teutones and Cimbri.
^l8 / TABLEOFDATES
B.C.

91 Tribunate and murder of Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger.

91-87 Social (Marsian) War.
90 Julian Law conferring rights upon Italians.
88 Sullamarches on Rome.
88-84 First MithridaticWar.
81 Second Mithridatic War .

81 Dictatorship of Sulla. 1
81-72 Revolt of Sertorius in Spain.
74-63 Third Mithridatic War.
j
"
73-71 Slave revolt of Spartacus.
70 Consulships of Pompey and Crassus.
67 Gabinian Law gives Pompey pirate command. i
66-63 Manilian Law gives Pompey Mithridatic command. Eastern settle-

ment.
63 Consulship of Cicero. Conspiracy of Catiline.
60 "First Triumvirate" of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar.
59 First consulship of Caesar.
58-51 Caesar's Gallic War.

53 Crassus defeated and killed by Parthians at Carrhae.

49-45 Civil War. Caesar's victories at Pharsalus (followed by death of
Pompey), Thapsus, Munda.
44 Perpetual dictatorship and assassination of Caesar.
43 Second Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. Death of
Cicero.
42 Deaths of Brutus and Cassius, defeated at Philippi.

36 Octavian eliminates Sextus Pompeius and Lepidus.

31 Octavian and Agrippa defeat Antony and Cleopatra at Actium.
30 Deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. Egypt annexed.
27 B.c-
A.D. 14 Augustus (Octavian)
25 Annexation of Galatia.
19 Death of Virgil.

16-9 Annexations to Danube and Elbe.

8 Death of Horace.
[6-4(?) Birth of Jesus.]
A.D. 6-9 Revolts in Pannonia and Illyricum.
9 Arminius defeats and kills Varus at Teutoburg Forest.
14-37 Tiberius.

19 Death of Germanicus.
[ca. 30 or 33 Crucifixion of Jesus.]
31 Execution of Sejanus.
37-41 Caligula (Gaius).
41-54 Claudius.
41-46 Annexation of Mauretania, SE England (Britannia), and Thrace.
 TABLEOFDATES / J/p

AD.
[ca. 45-58 Missionary journeys of Paul.]
54-68 Nero.
61 Revolt of Boudicca (Boadicea) in Britain.

63-66 Settlement of Armenian question with Parthia.

65 Pisonian conspiracy and deaths of Seneca and Petronius.

66-70 First Jewish Revolt (First Roman War).
68-69 Galba, Otho, Vitellius. Civil Wars.
69-79 Vespasian.
79-81 Titus.

79 Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by eruption of Vesuvius.

80 Inauguration of Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum) at Rome.
81-96 Domidan.
96-98 Nerva.
98-117 Trajan.
106 Annexation of Dacia.
113-17 Trajan's eastern campaigns.
115-ca. 118 Revolts of Jewish Dispersion in Cyrene, Cyprus, and Egypt.
117-38 Hadrian.
122 Hadrian's Wall in Britain.

132-35 Second Jewish Revolt (Second Roman War).

138-61 Antoninus Pius.
142 Antonine Wall in Britain.
161-80 Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (d. 169).

162-66 Parthian War.

166-72,
177-80 Marcomannic and Sarmatian wars.
180-92 Commodus.
193 Pertinax, Didius Julianus.
193-211 Septimius Severus.
194 Defeat of Pescennius Niger at Issus.
197 Defeat of Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum.
197-99 Parthian War.
208-11 British wars.
211-17 Caracalla and Geta (d. 211 or 212)
212 The Constitutio Antoniniana conferring general citizenship.
212 Death of jurist Papinian.
217-18 Macrinus.
218-22 Elagabalus.
222-35 Severus Alexander. Rule of Julia Mamaea.
223 Deaths of Julia Maesa and jurist Ulpian.
ca. 226 Persians (Sassanians) overthrow Parthians.
235~38 Maximinus I. Thrax.
238 Gordianus I and // Africanus proclaimed in Africa; Balbinus and
Pupienus.
J20 / TABLEOFDATES
A.D.
238-44 Gordianus III; rule of Timesitheus (d. 243).

241-72 Sapor I. Sassanian King of Persia. I

244-49 Philip the Arabian.
248 Millenary Games in Rome.
249-51 Trajanus Decius. Persecution of Christians.
251 Decius defeated and killed by Goths at Abrittus.

25^~53 Trebonianus Gallus. Epidemic begins.

253 Aemilian.
253-60 Valerian and Gallienus. German and Persian invasions.
257 Renewed persecution of Christians.

259-73 Usurpation of Postumus and successors in western provinces.

260 Valerian captured by Persians. Sole reign of Gallienus.
261-67 Odenathus viceroy of the east.
267 Zenobia independent ruler in the east.
268 Goths defeated at Naissus.
268-70 Claudius Gothicus.
269 Decisive victories over Goths,
ca. 270 Death of Plotinus.
270~75 Aurelian.
270 Dacia abandoned.
271 Wall of Aurelian started at Rome.
273 Zenobia defeated. Capture of Palmyra.
274 Tetricus, emperor in Gaul, defeated at Catalaunian Plains. Temple of
Sun god at Rome.
275-76 Tacitus.
276-82 Probus.
^71~19 Victories on Rhine and Danube.
277 Death of Mani.
282-83 Carus.
283-84 Carinus and Numerian.
284-305 Diocletian and Maximian (286).
286-96 Usurpations of Carausius (d. 293) and Allectus in Britain.
293 Constantius I (d. 306) and Galerius (d. 311) appointed Caesars.
297-98 Persian War.
301 Edict on Prices.
303-11 Great Persecution of Christians.
311 Edict of Serdica (Sofia).
312 Constantine I the Great defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.
312-37 Constantine I the Great and Licinius (d. 324)
313 Edict of Mediolanum (Milan) in favor of Christians.

324-30 Foundation of Constantinople.

325 Council of Nicaea.
326 Execution of Fausta and Crispus.
337 Accessions of Constantine II (d. 340), Constantius II (d. ^61), and Con-
stans (d. 350)
 TABLE OF DATES / 521

A.D.
350-53 Usurpation of Magnentius in the west.

357 Julian defeats Germans near Argentorate.

360-63 Julian the Apostate. Restoration of paganism.
363-64 Jovian.

364-75 Valentinian I. Valens emperor in the east.

373-97 Ambrose bishop of Mediolanum (Milan).

375 Gratian (d. 383) and Valentinian II (d. 392) emperors in the west.
378 Valens defeated and killed by Visigoths at Edirne (Adrianople).
378-95 Theodosius I.

382 Altar of Victory removed from Senate house.

383-88 Usurpation of Magnus Maximus in the west.

389 Jerome's foundation of a religious house at Bethlehem.

392-94 Usurpation of Eugenius in the west.

395 Arcadius (d. 408) emperor in the east and Honorius (d. 423) in the
west.
395-408 Stilicho commander in chief in the west.

395-430 Augustine bishop of Hippo Regius.

404 Ravenna becomes the capital of the western empire.

405 Stilicho defeats the Ostrogoth Radagaisus at Faesulae.

406 German invaders cross the Rhine.

408-50 Theodosius II emperor in the east.

410 Capture of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth, and his death.

413 Burgundians settled by Constantius III on west bank of Rhine.
418 Visigoths granted federate status with Tolosa as capital.
425-55 Valentinian III emperor in the west, rule of Placidia (to ca. 432).
428-77 Gaiseric, king of the Vandals.
432-54 Aetius commander in chief in the west.

434-53 and then (445)

Attila joint sole king of the Huns.
438 The Theodosian Code.
439 Capture of Carthage by Gaiseric, who declares his Vandal king-
dom independent.
450-57 Marcian emperor in the east.
451 Aetius and the Visigoths defeat Attila at the Catalaunian Plains.
452 Attila's invasion of Italy halted by Pope Leo I.

455 Sack of Rome by Gaiseric.

45^72 Ricimer commander in chief in west, makes and unmakes emper-
ors.

457-61 Majorian emperor in west, wins victories but is defeated by Van-

dals.

467-72 Anthemius emperor in the west.

457-74 Leo I emperor in the east.
474-91 Zeno emperor in the east.
474-5 (d- 480) Julius Nepos emperor in the west.

475 Code of Euric, king of Visigoths, who declares himself indepen-

dent.
522 / TABLE OF DATES
A.D.
475-76 Romulus Augustulus, last western emperor at Ravenna.
47^~93 Odoacer (Herulian) king of Italy.

481-511 Clovis king of the Franks.

491-518 Anastasius I emperor in the east (Byzantine Empire).
507-711 Visigothic kingdom in Spain.

518-27 Justin I Byzantine emperor.

524 Death of Boethius.

527-65 Justinian I Byzantine emperor.
528-39 Justinian's Digest.

533 Belisarius reconquers N Africa from the Vandals.

535~53 Belisarius and Narses reconquer Italy from the Ostrogoths.
547 Death of St. Benedict.
568 Lombards invade north Italy.
ca. 583 Death of Cassiodorus.
590-604 Pope Gregory I the Great.
[632 Death of the Prophet Mohammed.]
636 Death of Isidore of Seville.
637-711 Arabs take Sassanian Persia, N Africa, and most of Spain.
678-717 Arabs repelled from Constantinople.
732 Charles Martel defeats Arabs in France.
751 Lombards capture Ravenna.
800 Charlemagne crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.
962 Otto I crowned emperor by Pope John XII.
1204-61 Crusaders occupy Constantinople (Latin Empire).
1453 Fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Turks (Mohammed II).
1806 Abolition of Holy Roman Empire.
 INDEX

About Reality, 228 society, 321-22; and slavery, 161-65

Abrittus, 370 Agrigentum (Agrigento), 163
Abruzzi, 273 Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius, 244, 245,
Academy of Athens, 205, 270 247, 252, 253, 260, 268, 278, 315
Achaean League, 143 Agrippina (the Elder), 278, 283
Acra Leuce, 112 Agrippina (the Younger), 283
Act of Liberation, 136 Ahenobarbus, Cnaeus Domitius, 177,
Actium, 245, 246, 247, 272 230, 231
Acts of the Apostles, 344, 348 Alamanni, 372, 451
Adria (Atria), 39 Alans, 451
Adriatic Sea, 5, 11, 88, 107, 109, 123, 132, Alaric 427, 429-30. 434, 43^, 45°' 45^
I,

230, 242, 269, 354, 427 454, 456-57. 459, 460, 466
Aedui, 215, 217, 222 Alaric II, 462-63
Aegates Islands (Egadi), 97 Alba Longa (Castel Gandolfo), 30, 37
Aegean Sea, 8, 13, 131, 143, 183 Alban Lake, 314
AeHa Capitohna, 303 Alban Mount (Monte Cavo), 8, 29, 30,
Aehus Caesar, 303, 304 32, 44, 45, 159
AemiHi, 71, 114 Albania, 131
Aeneas, 24, 235, 268-69 Albans, 30-31
Aeneid, 268-70, 459 Albanum (Albano Laziale), 358
Aequi, 44, 45 Albinus, Clodius, 357
Aequian, 46 Alesia fortress, 222
aerarium, 261 Alexander, Severus, 362
aerarium militare, 256 Alexander the Great, 88, 90, 131, 133, 140,
Aetius, 431-32, 434, 45^ 196, 239, 296, 332-33, 360, 391
AetoHan League, 133, 136, 141 Alexandria, 140, 227, 232, 234, 236, 245,
Africa, see names of countries; names of 267, 268, 288, 313, 342, 386, 417
people Alexandria, library of, 236
African cavalry (Numidian), 116 Algeria, 94, in, 252, 432, 456
African League, 43 Algidus, 45
Against the Christians, 405 alimenta, 294-95
Ager Gallicus, 107, 108, 109; see also Allia (Fossa della Regina), 52
Gaul and Gauls allies (socii),
65
Agricola, Cnaeus Julius, 291, 331 Allobroges, 177
agriculture, 152, 226, 399, 444; imperial alphabet, 14, 24

523
524 / INDEX
Alps, 5, 52, 116, 177, 178, 193, 253, 353 Arians, 417, 452, 453, 457, 464
Alsace, 217 Aricia, 32, 37, 44, 57
Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis), 261 Ariminum (Rimini), 229
Ambrose, St., 439 Ariovistus, 217
Ammianus, Marcellinus, 437, 459 Aristides, Aelius, 323
Anastasius I, 462, 464, 467 Aristodemus, 36
Ancyra (Ankara), 256 Aristonicus, 164
Annals (Ennius), 150 Armecy, 217
Annals (Tacitus), 330 Armenia, 195, 196, 244, 252, 285, 295-96,
Anthee, 321 353» 369
Anthemius, 434, 450 Arminius, 255
Antigonids, 131, 133, 134 Arno River, 11
Antinous, 306 Arpinum (Arpino), 197
Antioch, 133, 196, 343, 369, 416, 417 Arraux River, 217
Antiochus III (the Great), 134-35, 136- Arretium (Arezzo), 264
37, 140, 163, 164 art and architecture, 305-17, 383-86, 411,
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 140 415-16
Antium (Anzio), 45, 61 Art of Love, The, 273
Antonine wall, 304 Artemis, 32
Antonius, 304, 353, 383 Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), 451-52
Antonius Pius, 353 Arverni, 177, 215, 221-22
Antony (Marcus Antonius), 227, 229, Assembly, 69-71, 82, 95, 148, 153, 170,
231, 232, 234, 242, 243, 244, 246, 259, 171, 176, 187, 195, 203, 231; see also
268, 336; Cleopatra and, 244, 245; ri- Comitia centuriata; Populus Roma-
valry with Octavian, 245 nus
Apennine Mountains, 5, 11, 38, 45-46, Assyria, 11, 26
56, 62, 63, no, 116, 203 Ataulf, 431, 451
Apollo, 51, 72-73' 391 Athanasius, 417, 453
Apollo of Veii, 13 Athens, 15, 36, 55, 149, 183
Apollodorus of Damascus, 307 atrium, 159-60
Apologia, 331 Attalids, 134
Apuleius, 331-32, 333 Attains, Priscus, 430
Apulia, 89, 118, 193, 270 Attains I Soter, 134

Aqua Appia, 81 Atticus, Titus Pomponius, 203

Aqua Marcia, 159 Attila, 432-33. 454, 466
Aquae Sextiae (Aix en Provence), 178 Attis, 333
aqueducts, 81 Attus Clausus, see Clausus, Attus
Aquileia, 354, 453 auctoritas,69
Aquinum (Aquino), 328 Augusta, 366
Aquitania, 218 Augusta Trevirorum (Trier), 395
Ara Maxima, 33 Augustine, St., 394, 454, 456, 457, 458,
Arabia, 344 459, 460, 461
Arabs, 467 Augustus, 242-73, 277, 279, 286, 305,
Arausio (Orange), 178 330, 336, 354» 366, 396, 459» 473;
Arcadius, 427, 464 adoption of term "Augustus," 249;
Arch of Titus, 306-8 Augustan literature, 268-73; econ-
Ardashir (Artaxerxes), 367 omy and, 260-67; principate of, 247-
Ardea, 44 61,280
Arelate (Aries), 406, 410, 431 Augustus, Romulus, 434-35
Ares, 21 Aurelian, 372, 373, 374, 391
Argos, 89 Aurelius, Marcus, 353-56, 359, 383, 384,
 INDEX / 525

387, 404; Stoicism of, ^iJ-jS Bronze Age, 7, 8

Ausculum (Ascoli Satriano), 89 Brundisium (Brindisi), 131, 269
auspicia, 71 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 240, 242-43,
Aventine Hill, 32, 33, 37, 51, 54, 72, 73- 244, 259
74, 78, 158 Brutus Albinus, Decimus Junius, 240,
459
bubonic plague, 370
Babylonia, 334 buildings, construction of, 156-60
Bacchanalia rites, 149, 150 Bulgaria, 431
Bacchants, 332 Burgundians, 430, 432, 450, 452, 462
Bacchus (Dionysus), 148, 332-33 Burrus, Sextus Afranius, 283, 284
Baecula, (Bailen), 120-21 Byzantine Empire, 246, 308, 413, 464-
Baetica, 121 70; see also Constantinople
Baetis River (Guadalquivir), 120-21
Bagaudae, 445
Bagradas Valley (Medjerda), 97 Caecilii Metelli, see Metelli, Caecilii
Balbus, Lucius Cornelius, 240 Caecina, 286, 288, 291
Bar Kosiba, 303 Caelian Hill, 8, 15, 30, 37, 54
Barcino (Barcelona), 431 Caere (Cerveteri), 15, 17, 23, 51, 54, 55,
Barnabas, 344 59, 93. 94
Basilica Julia, 235 Caere, city of, 17

Basilica Nova, 413-15 Caesar, Julius, 201-3, 211-41, 242, 243,

Basilica Porcia, 157 244, 247, 249, 258, 259, 260, 272, 281;
Basilica of St. Peter, 416 appointed dictator for life, 237-39; as-
Baths of Caracalla, 383 sassinated, 240-41; in Britain, 219-21,
Bavaria, 253 281; civil war, 229-32; crossing the
Bedriacum, 286 Rubicon, 227; dictatorship of, 232-41;
Belgae, 217, 221 in Egypt, 231-32; First Consulship,
Belisarius, 464 213-15; First Triumvirate, 206-9; Gal-
Benedict, St.,453-54 lic War, 215-27; as Imperator, 232;
Beneventum (Benevento), 89 personality cult, 236; Pompey and,
Berenice, 291 213, 217, 218, 219, 225-27, 228, 229-31,
Bethlehem, 338, 453 240
Bibracte (Mont Beuvray), 215 Caesar, Lucius Julius, 182
Bibulus, Marcus Calpurnius, 213 Caesarea Maritima (Sdot Yam), 345
Bithynia, 136, 183-84, 195, 196, 295, Caesarion (son of Caesar), 236
403-4 Caledonia (Scotland), 293, 359
Black Forest, 423 Cales (Calvi, near Capua), 59, 61, 62, 63
Black Sea, 183-84, 370 Caligula, 278, 280
Bleda, 433 Camillus, 51, 55, 78, 80, 81
Boethius, 464 Camp Raudii, 178
Bohemia, 255 Campania, 6, 7, 18-19, 24, 36, 37, 38, 62,
Boniface, 431-32 loi, 118, 156, 162, 189, 267, 386; Romans
Bononia (Bologna), 242 in, 55-61
Bosphorus Strait, 395, 408 Camulodunum (Colchester), 282
Boudicca (Boadicea), 284 Cannae, 118, 119, 133
Brenner Pass, 372 Cape Ecnomus, 96
Brennus, 52, 54 Cape Ifach, 112
Britain, 45, 51, 219-21, 281-82, 284, 291, Cape Nao, 112
293. 303' 304, 330, 359. 366, 429 Cape Naulochus (Venetico), 244
Britannicus, 282, 283 capitalism, 266
526 / INDEX
Capitol, Capitoline Hill, 8, i6, 24, 33, 34, Christianity, 258, 284, 332, 334, 387, 392,
51, 52, 412 394, 409, 410, 419, 451, 452, 462, 464;
Capreae (Capri), 278, 280 Constantine the Great and, 410-12;
Capua (Santa Maria Capua Vetere), 18, growth of, 402-5; ministry of Jesus,

56, 57, 63, loi, 119, 120, 124, 163, 172, 336-42; and pagans, 453-61; and Paul,
193. 319 342-48
Caracalla, 357, 360, 373, 375, 382, 383, Christmas Day, 392
384, 414 Chrysostom, John, 444-45
Carmen Saeculare, 271 Church of the Holy Wisdom (Santa
Carnuntum (Petronell), 357 Sophia), 416
Carnutes, 221 Cicero, 19, 34, 148, 150, 154, 194, 197-205,
Carolingian dynasty, 462 208, 217-18, 221, 225, 230, 234, 242,
Carrhae (Harran), 225, 360 325, 461
Carthage and Carthaginians, 10, 38, 132, Cimbri, 178
133. i35» 137. 163, 172, 175, 233, 403, Cimmerian Bosphorus (Crimea), 183-
432, 458; against Rome, 85-128; de- 84, 195
struction of, 143-45; population, 92; Cinna, 185, 201
see also Punic Wars Circus Maximus, 54-55
Carthago Nova (Cartagena), 113, 120, Cisalpine Gaul, 5, 38, 52, 107, 181-82,
122, 126, 434 192, 215, 217, 218, 221, 227, 231, 242; see
Cassian, John, 453 also Gaul and Gauls
Cassiodorus, 464 citizenship, 55-56, 57, 59, 103, 150, 175,
Cassius, 240, 242-43 181, 182, 233, 247, 342, 382; without

Cassivellaunus, 221 franchise (civitas sine sujfragio), 58

Castor and Pollux, 43 City of God, 460
Catalaunian Plains, 373, 433 cives Romani, 75
Catilinarian Orations, 199 Civil War, 216, 231
Catilinarians, 201, 205 Civil War or Pharsalia (Lucan), 326
Catiline, 197-201, 203, 205 Civilis, 288-89
Cato, 141, 144, 150-54, 157, 163-64, 201, clan (gens), 20
206, 208, 213, 218, 219, 232, 459, 473 class struggle, 67-83; early Republic,
Catullus, 227-28, 333 67-71; patricians and plebeians, 71-74;
Catuvellauni (Hertfordshire), 221 social appeasement, 77-83; Twelve
Caucasus Mountains, 196 Tables, 75-77
Caucus, see Claudius, Appius Classicus, Julius, 288-89
Caudine Forks, 63 Claudian of Alexandria, 459
Celtiberians, 141-42, 177 Claudian clan, 46, 253, 277, 280, 285
Cenabum (Orleans), 221 Claudii, 71
census, 247 Claudius, 280-83, 286, 289, 305, 313
Ceres, 72 Claudius, Appius, 75, 80, 89
Cerialis Caesius Rufus, Quintus Petil- Claudius H, 372
lius, 288-89 Clausus, Attus, 46
Certificate of Sacrifice (Libellus), 404 Clement of Alexandria, 402
Cevenne Mountains, 177 Cleopatra, 232, 236, 243, 259; Antony
Chalons-sur-Marne, 433 and, 244, 245
Charlemagne, 462 clientela, 70-71, 83, 196
Charles Martel, 462 Clodia, 228, 244
Chedworth, 321 Clodius, 215, 218, 225, 228, 244
Cheragan, 321 Clovis, 462, 464
Cherusci, 255 Clusium (Chiusi), 37, 38, 52
China, 265 Clyde River, 291, 304
 INDEX / 527

Cnaeus (son of Pompey), 232 Cornelii family, 71

cohortes urbanae, 256 Corsica, 93, 100, 103, iii

Coimbatore, see India Coruncanius, Titus, 102

coins and coinage, 89-90, 97, 119, 126, corvi (boarding bridges or gangways),
181, 234, 260, 265-66, 398, 419; adul- 96, 97
terated, 374; of Caesar, 237; "good Cos, 265
money" (denarius) policy, 186 Cosa (Ansedonia), 60
college of priests (pontifices), 75, 81 Covenant, 334
Colline Gate of Rome, 187 co-viria, 22-23
colonies, 60-61, 187, 233; see also names Crassus, 193, 194, 197, 199, 201, 208, 213,
of colonies 218, 225, 239, 252
Colosseum, 315-16 Cremera River (Valchetta), 47
Column of Aurelius, 383 Cremona, 286
Column of Trajan, 307, 383 crown money (aurum coronarium), 375
comitatenses, 398 crucifixion, 342
Comitia centuriata, 26, 28, 69-71, 74, 77, Ctesiphon, 296, 357, 367, 373, 393
82, 107, 1 17-19; see also Assembly cult of Diana, 37
Comitia curiata, 23, 26, 74 Cumae, 18, 24, 36, 38, 56, 72

commercium, 58-59 curiae (or wards), 22-23, 26, 447-48

Commodus, 355, 356, 384 Curii clan, 78-79
concilium plebis, 74, 82 Curio, Gaius Scribonius, 226-27, 229,
Concord, 205, 208 231
Condatomagus (La Graufesenque), 319 Cybele, 333, 393
Confessions, 456 Cynoscephalae (Dog's Head), 135-36
coniuratio Italiae oath, 245 Cyprian, St., 403
Consilium (of the Senate), 253 Cyprus, 344
Constantine I (the Great), 392, 405-16, Cyrenaica, 194-95
417, 445-46, 454, 458, 473
Constantinople, 246, 408, 416, 431, 433,
435, 444, 450, 452, 464-70; ^^^ ^1^0 Dacia (Rumania), 239, 293, 295, 302,
Byzantine Empire 307, 425
Constantius I, 395, 396, 397, 405, 440 Dalmatia, see Illyricum
Constantius II, 416-18 Damascus, 343
Constantius 430-31
III, Dante, 326
Constitutio Antoniniana, 382 Danube River, 178, 253, 286, 288, 295,
consular power (tribuni militum con- 302, 319, 320, 353, 355, 357, 366, 369,
sulari potestate), 49 370, 373. 406, 408, 423, 425, 426, 432,
consuls and consulships, 56, 67-68, 69, 433, 438, 469
72, no, 218, 237-38, 288; of Caesar, Dardanus, 185
213-15 Dark Age, 11
conubium, 58-59 David, 334, 335
Corbulo, Cnaeus Domitius, 285, 293 De Agricultura, 163
Corduba (Cordoba), 326 De Rerum Natura, 228
Corfinium (Corfinio), 181 Dead Sea, 340-41
Corinth, 11, 12, 15, 55, 136, 143, 144, 233, Decebalus, 293, 295
236, 345 decemuin, 49
Cornelia (daughter of Metellus Scipio), decemviri, 75
226 decemvirs, 76, 77-78
Cornelia (daughter of Scipio Africanus), Decii clan, 78-79
151-52 Decius, Trajanus, 362, 365-66, 370, 384,
Cornelii (bodyguard), 187 404
528 / INDEX
Declaration of Freedom, 136 Emesa (Homs), 362
Defenders of the People, 444 English Channel, 219
Delos, 140, 163 Enneads, 387
Delphi, 51, 54 Ennius, 150, 153, 156, 269
Demeter, 72, 332 Ephesus (Selguk), 32, 345
Demetrius of Pharos, 132-33 Epicharis, 331
Detmold, 255 Epictetus, 377
Dialogue on Orators, 330 Epicurus, Epicureans, 228, 229
Diana, cult of, 32, 37 Epirus, 131, 163
Dido, 268-69 Epistle to the Romans, 344
Digest, 382 Epistles, 271
Dinner of Trimalchio, 328 Epodes, 271
Diocletian, 395-401, 405, 406, 409, 414, equites, rise of, 173-74
440, 441 Esquiline Hill, 8, 15, 29, 54
Dionysiac cult, 332 "Etruscan Street" (Vicus Tuscus), 24
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 20 Etrusco-Corinthian pottery, 12
Dionysus, see Bacchus Etruria and Etruscans, 5-39, 56, 65, 67,
Dispersion (diaspora), 342, 343 72, 75, 77, 93, 94, 97, loi, no, 123, 157,
Disraeli, Benjamin, 445 160, 162, 192, 199, 237, 286; city-states,
Dius Fidius, 46 11-15; earliest Rome, 15-17; early
"divide and rule," policy of, 66 Roman religion, 19-21; Etruscan
Dniester River, 370 Rome, 18-19; fall of the monarchy,
Domitia, 293 35-39; monarchy, 18-39; Roman
Domitian, 291-93, 295, 314, 329, 330 state, 21-25; ^"<^ Rome, 5-17; Servius
Douro River, 114, 142 Tullius and, 25-35
drainage (cuniculi), 19 Eumenes II, 137-39, 140
Drave (Drava) River, 215 Eunus (Antiochus), 164
Druids, 221 Euphrates River, 218, 286, 296, 302, 408
Drusus, Marcus Livius (the Elder), 175, Euric, 453, 462-63
253. 255 Euric's Code, 453
Drusus, Marcus Livius (the Younger), Euripides, 332
180-81, 183, 277 Eusebius, 412
movement, 393-94
dualist
Durostorum (Derster or Silistria), 431
Dyrrhachium (Durres), 231
Fabii, 47-49» 7i
Faesulae (Fiesole), 427
Eboracum (York), 359 family funerals, 147-48
Eclogues, 268 Fanum Fortunae (Fano), 372
economic and social imbalance (impe- farming, see agriculture
rial society), 317-32 Felsina (Bologna), 38
Edessa, 369 Ferrara, 178
Edict of Mediolanum (Milan), 409 Fidenae (Castel Giubileo), 49, 50
Edict of Serdica, 409 fire brigade (vigiles), 256
Egypt, II, 90, 94, 131, 134, 140, 196, 213, First Jewish Revolt, 289, 347
231-32, 245, 248, 249, 260, 266, 305, First Principle, 387
366, 404 First Punic War, 94-100, loi, 102, 103,
Elagabalus, 362, 366, 391 107, III, 115, 131, 163
Elbe River, 178, 255, 277 First Triumvirate, 206-9
Eleusis, 354 Flaccus, Marcus Fulvius, 175, 176
El-Gabal, 362 Flaminius, Titus Quinctius, 135-36
 INDEX / 5^9

Flaminius, Gaius, 107-10 Geta, 357, 360

Flavian Amphitheater, 315 Gibbon, Edward, 322-23
Flavius, Cnaeus, 81 gladiators, loi, 193, 284, 313, 317
Fors Fortuna, 56 Gnostics, 393
Forth River, 291, 304 Golden House (Domus Aurea), 284,
Fortuna, 189 308, 314, 315
Forum, 8, 15, 20, 21, 75, 235, 261, 272, Golden Octagon, Church of, 416
307' 413 Gordianus III, 362
Forum Boarium (cattle market), 7, 15, Gospels, 336-37, 339, 402; Paul and,
lOI 342-48
Four Regions of Rome, 25, 28, 32 Goths, 369-70, 371, 372, 451, 452
France, see Gaul and Gauls Gracchus, Gaius, 169-76, 180, 181, 188
Franks, 370, 451, 462 Gracchus, Tiberius, 169-76
Fregellae (Opri), 62, 63 Gratian, 425, 426, 454-55
Fritigern, 426 Gratidianus, Marcus Marius, 186
Fullers, 264 Gravisca (Porto Clementino), 12
Fulvia, 244 Great Drain (Cloaca Maxima), 15
Great Fire of Rome, 284, 314, 403
Greece, 5, 11-12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 24,
Gabii (Castiglione), 35-36, 46 26-27, 28, 33, 39, 49' 60, 72, 75, 89,
Gades (Cadiz), 93, iii 105' 133. 137' 157' 179' 183, 185, 233,
Gaiseric, 432, 433' 434, 43^, 452-53 236, 246, 267, 269, 315, 345' 37O' 473;
Gaius, Marius, 176-80, 253, 323 eclipse of Greek kingdoms, 131-39
Galatia, 251-52, 256 Greek language, 14, 409, 418
Galba, 285-86, 293, 305, 35^57 guilds (collegia), 215
Galenus, 395, 396, 405, 409 Gulf of Ambracia (Arta), 245
Galilee, 337, 338, 341 Gulf of Cumae (Bay of Naples), 6, 18

Gallia Lugdunensis, 285 Gulf of Tunis, 92

Gallia Narbonensis, 177, 178 gymnasiums, 383
Gallic War, 215-27
Gallic War (Caesar), 216
Gallienus, 363, 366, 369, 370, 371-73, Hadrian, 302-4, 306, 3^4' 323' 325' 37^,
374, 386, 404-5 391
Gallus, 362-63, 384 Hadrianopolis, 426, 427, 459
Gallus, Constantius, 417 Hadrian's Wall, 303, 359
Garonne River, 321 Hall of Audience, 400
Gaul and Gauls, 5, 51-55, 65, 107, 109, Hamilcar Barca, 111-12, 126
116, 177, 179, 248, 252, 282, 283, 289, Hannibal, 111-27, 132, 133, 137, 143, 146,
294, 319, 366, 370, 373, 395, 427, 431, 161, 272; crossing of the Alps, 116; vic-

432, 433' 434' 435' 445. 446, 450, 453, tories of, 115-19; see also Punic Wars
458, 460, 462, 469 Hasdrubal, 112-13, 115, 123
Gelasius I, 464 Hasdrubal Barca, 119-21
Georgics, 268 Hasmonaeans (Maccabees), 196, 334,
Gergovia, 215, 222 335' 336
Germania, 330 head of the family (pater familias), 20,
Germanic tribes, see names of tribes 259
Germanicus, 277, 280 Hellenism, 151, 154, 183
Germany and Germans, 248, 255, 277, Helvetii, 215-16, 217
280, 285, 286, 293, 330, 360, 366, 373, Heraclea (Policoro), 88-90
397-98, 406, 423-25' 427-29' 433. 434; Herculaneum, 291, 308
see also names of tribes Hercules, 33, 401
530 / INDEX
Herod Antipas, 338, 341 and church, 395-419; wealth and con-
Herod the Great, 336, 338 struction, 156-60; see also names of
Herodotus, 13 emperors
Heruli, 451 imperium maius power, 252
Herulians, 452 India, 266
Hestia, 21 Innocent 454
I,

Hiero H, 95-96, 98 Institutes,323

Hillel, 336 Ionian Sea, 245
Hindu Kush, 131 Iron Age, 8-10, 17, 47
Hippo Regius (Annaba), 456 Isaiah (prophet), 341
Hispalis (Seville), 464 Isfahan, 367
Histories, 330 Isis, 333, 393
History of Rome, 272-73 Israel, 334
Holy Apostles, Church of, 416 Issus, 357
Holy Sepulchre, Church of, 416 Italian language, 7
Homer, 102, 268, 269 Italica, 122
Homonoia, 80 Italy, and Rome,
5-11; unification of, 43-
honestiores and humiliores, 323-25, 66; See also Etruria and Etruscans;
382 Rome; names of places
Honoria, 433 iudicia publica (law courts), 106-7
Honorius, 427, 429, 431, 444, 446, 450, iurisprudentes, 102-3
464 ius civile, 104
hoplite infantry, 28 ius gentium, concept of, 104-6, 205
Horace, 253, 270-71, 272 ius naturale, 105, 205
Hortensius, Quintus, 82
hospitium publicum, 54
House of the Vestals, 256 Janiculum Hill, 49
Huns, 425, 431, 432, 439, 466 Jerome, St., 453, 454
Jerusalem, 196, 289, 344, 345
Jerusalem Temple, 196, 303, 306, 336,
Iberus River (Ebro), 113, 120 341, 347, 418
Iceni (East Anglia), 284 Jesus, 258, 334, 336, 343, 344, 345, 346-
Idumaea, 336 47. 393. 4.03, 409, 412, 457
Ilerda (Lerida), 231 Jews, 296, 303, 334-46, 403, 404, 418, 419
Ilipa, 121 John the Baptist, 338, 339, 340, 341
lUyrians, 131, 135 Jordan River, 338
Illyricum (Dalmatia), 131, 215, 255, 280, Jordanes, 451
435. 453 Joseph, 338, 340
imperialism, 98, 129-65, 275-348; agri- Jovian, 419
culture and slavery, 161-65; art and Judaea, 196, 249, 284, 288, 336, 337, 347
architecture, 305-17; climax of Pagan Judah, 334
Empire, 377-94; collapse and recov- Judaism, 412
Greek king-
ery, 353-76; eclipse of the Jugurtha, 177, 178
doms, economic and social im-
131-39; Jugurthine War, 178
balance, 317-32; and Jews, Jesus, and Julia (daughter of Augustus), 252, 253,
Paul, 334-48; mystery religions, 332- 255, 260
33; policies, 139-45; results of (trans- Julia (granddaughter), 273
formation of Europe), 421-70; rise of Julia Domna (wife of Severus), 359, 391
Latin culture, 149-56; Senate and, Julia Maesa (sister-in-law of Severus),
146-49; from Seneca to Apuleius, 360-61, 362
326-32; society, 146-65; supreme state Julia Mamaea, 362
 INDEX / 53^

Julian the Apostate, 403, 417, 418-19 Lepidus, Marcus Aemilius, 192, 193, 242,
Julian clan, 280, 285 244-45, 251
Julian family, 235 Lesbia, 228
Julianus, Didius, 357 Libya, 195
Julianus, Salvius, 323 Licata, 96
Juno, 33, 34, 51 Licinius, 78, 79-80, 405, 409
Jupiter, 29, 32, 33, 34, 51, 150, 269, 401 Ligurians, 177
Jupiter Latiaris, 29, 37 limitanei (or riparienses), 398
Justin I, 467 Liris River (Garigliano), 44-45, ^^
Justin of Neapolis, 402 lists (fasti), 67
Justinian I, 382, 464 Livia, 253, 260, 261
Jutland, 178 Livius Andronicus, Lucius, 102
Juvenal, 328-29 Livy, 80, 272-73
Luca (Lucca), 218
Lucan, 326
knights (equites), 43, 173-74, 176, 185-86, Lucania, 397
188, 208, 230, 253, 259, 323 Lucian of Samosata, 331
Kniva, 370 Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca (Sessa), 156
Lucius, 253, 255
Lucretius, 228-29
Labienus, Titus, 222, 232 Lucullus, Lucius Licinius, 195
Laetus, Quintus Aemilius, 355-56, 357 Luke, 336
Lake Benacus (Garda), 372 Lusitania (Portugal), 141, 286
Lake Nemorensis (Nemi), 37 Lycopolis, 386
Lake Regillus (Pantono), 43 Lydia, 13
Lake Trasimene, 117
Lake Volsiniensis (Bolsena), 14
Lars Porsenna, 37 Macaulay, Thomas, 37
Lateran palace, 410 Macedonia and Macedonians, 131, 133,
latifundia, 162 134, 135. 136, 139-40, 141, 142-43. 144,
Latin culture, rise of, 149-56 154, 179, 196, 231, 242
Latin language, 7, 14, 44, 102, 149, 153, Macrinus, 360
228, 246, 268, 328, 380, 409 Macro, Naevius Sutorius, 278, 280
Latin League, 45, 56, 57, 61 Macrobius, 459
Latium, 6, 7, 8, 9, 18-19, 30, 32, 36, 37, Madaurus, 331
38, 43-46, 152, 328; Romans in, 55-61 Maecenas, Gaius, 268, 270, 271
law courts (quaestiones), 188 Maesa, see Julia Maesa
law of nations (ius gentium), 104-6, Magna Graecia, 12, 18, 87
205 Magnesia (Manisa), 137
Lay of Horatius, 37 maiestas, law of, 189
Lazio,7, II; see also Latium Majorian, 434
Lebanon, see Phoenicia and Phoeni- Malaca (Malaga), 93
cians "man in fetters" (nexus), 73
Ledosus (Lezoux in the Auvergne), 319 Mani, 393-94
legions and legionaires, 125-26, 139, 178- Manichaeanism, 393-94
79, 187, 217, 245, 247, 255, 286, 293; Mantua, 39, 268
see also Roman army man us, power of, 76-77
Lemnos, 13 Marcellinus, Ammianus, 432, 457
Leo I, 433, 454, 458, 466 Marcellus, 252, 253
Leo III, 462 Marcian, 433, 466
Lepcis Magna, 265 Marcii clan, 78-79
532 / INDEX
Marcion, 348 Mithridates VI, 183-86, 195-96, 232
Marcomannia (Bohemia), 355 Moesia, 255
Marius, Gaius, 178-80, 183, 185, 186, 187, Moguntiacum (Mainz), 423, 427
197, 201, 217 Mohammed, 464
Marius's Mules, 179 Mohammed II, 469
Mark, 336 Monte Cavo, see Alban Mount
Mars, 21, 32, 34 Monte Testaccio, 320-21
Marsian War, 181 Monumentum Ancyranum, 256
Martial, 328, 329 Morocco, 94, 252
III,

Martin of Tours, St., 453, 460 Moselle River, 220, 366, 395
Mary, 338, 340 Moses, 334
Marzabotto, 39 Moslems, 464
Masinissa, 124, 144, 177 Mount Sinai, 334
Massilia (Marseille), 32, in, 115, 116, 176- Mucianus, Gaius Licinius, 288, 289
77, 231, 444, 453 Mummius Achaicus, Lucius, 143
mater familias, "jj Munda, 232
Matthew, 336 Mutina (Modena), 242
Mauretania, 252, 282, 432, 442 mutual trustfulness (fides), 19, 70
Maxentius, 405, 406, 413 Mylae (Milazzo), 96
Maximian, 395, 397, 405 401, mystery religions, 332-33
Maximinus I, 362, 365, 384, 404
Maximius, 409
Maximus, Fabius (the Delayer), 118, Naevius, 98, 149, 269
119 Naissus (Nis), 372, 395
Maximus II Daia, 409 Narbo (Narbonne), 177
Media, 360 Narbonese Gaul, 215
Mediolanum (Milan), 371-72, 395, 406, Narcissus, 282, 283
427, 433, 445, 454, 458 Narses, 464
Meditations, 353, 377, 383 National Assembly (comitia centuriata),
Mediterranean, 5, 6, 11, 33, 89, 91, 93, 94, 107, 117, 118-19
117, 125, 131, 161, 164, 177, 182, 194, 195, natural law (ius naturale), 105, 205
313, 391, 432; fleet police, 263-64; Nazareth, 338
Mare Nostrum dominance, 145 Neanderthal man, 7
Melita (Malta), 345 Neapolis (Naples), 18, 62, 268
mercenaries, 98 Neckar Valley, 423
Merovingian dynasty, 462 Nemausus (Nimes), 304
Mesopotamia, 11, 13, 225, 296, 353, 357, Nepos, Julius, 435
359» 360, 362, 366, 369 Nero, 283-85, 286, 305, 308, 314, 315,
Mesopotamia (Harran), 225 326, 330, 33L 345, 347, 354, 403
Messalina, 282 Nero, Gaius Claudius, 123
Messana (Messina), 94-95 Nero Drusus, see Drusus, Marcus
Metamorphoses, i-j}, 331 Livius (the Elder)
Metaurus River (Metauro), 123 Nerva, 293
Metellus, Quintus, 177 New Testament, 402, 412, 460
Metelli, Caecilii, 149 Nicaea (Iznik), 410
Middle Ages, 326, 331, 408, 444 Nicomedia (Izmit), 395
Milvian Bridge, 192, 409 Niger, 357
Mincius River, 433 Noricum, 253
Minerva, 33, 34 Normandy, 218
Misenum, 264 Notitia Dignitatum, 438
Mithraism, 392-93, 412 Numidia, 124, 177, 178, 180, 432 <

i
 INDEX / 533

Nymphidius Sabinus, Gaius, 284, 285, Paullus, 139, 156

288 Paulus,38o, 382
Pax Romana (or Pax Augusta), 258,
267, 317, 344
Octavia, 244, 282, 284 peace of the gods (pax deorum), 19-20
Octavian, 241-249, 268 Pelagius, 461
Octavius, 170 Peloponnes, 141

Odenathus, 366, 369 Pepin the Short, 462

Odes. 271 Peraea, 337
Odoacer, 434, 435, 464 peregrin us, 103-4
Odyssey, 102 Pergamum (Bergama), 134, 135, 137, 138,
46
officials (fetiales), 140, 164, 171, 174
On the Governance of God (De Guberna- Persepolis, 367
tione Dei), 444-45 Perseus, 138-39, 142
On Matters of Warfare (De Rebus Belli- Persia and Persians, 196, 334, 362, 363,
cis).449 366, 367-68, 370, 373, 386, 393, 394,
Opimius, Gaius, 175-76 396, 417, 419, 467
Oplontis (Torre Annunziata), 291, 308 Persian Gulf, 296, 357
Oppius, 240 Persis (Fars), 367
Ops Consiva, 21 Pertinax, 356, 357
Orestes, 434 Peter, 344, 404, 416
Origen, 402 Petrarch, 412
Origins, 153 Petronius, 267, 326-28
Oscan language, 44, 181 Pharisees, 335-36, 338, 341
Osiris, 333 Pharsalus, 231
Osrhoene, see Mesopotamia Philip the Arabian, 362, 366, 384
Ostia, 31, 61, 282, 313, 434 Philip V, 132-38, 147
Ostrogoths, 425, 464 Philippi, 242, 270, 271
Otho, 284, 286 Philippics,242
Ovid of Sulmo, 273 Phoenicia and Phoenicians, 11, 91-92, 93,
163, 380
pietas, 70
Palatine Hill, 8, 15, 24, 54, 203, 314 Pilate (Pontius Pilatus), 341-42
Palazzo dei Conservatori, 412 pilum (spear), 178-79
Palestine, 303, 335, 336-42, 416, 418, 453 Piraeus, 185
Pallas, Antonius, 282, 283 pirates and piracy, 141, 163, 194, 195
Palmyra, see Syria Pistoria (Pistoia), 203
Pannonia, 255, 277, 357 Placentia (Piacenza), 116, 231
Panormus (Palermo), 93, 97 Placidia, 430-32
Pantheon, 315, 391 Plato, 391, 399, 402, 460
Papinian, 380, 382 Plautianus, Gaius Fulvius, 359
Parthia and Parthians, 196, 218, 225, Plautus, 149-50, 154, 156, 163
239, 244, 252, 284, 295-97, 302, 347, plebeian council (Concilium plebisj, 107
353. 357. 366, 368 plebiscita, 74
pater patriae, 259-60 Pliny the Younger, 295, 403-4
patres conscripti, 23 Plotinus, 386-91, 393, 402, 405
patres familias, 23, 71 Plutarch, 330
patrician clans (gentes), 71 Po (Padus), 5, 6, 7, 39, 52, 107, no, 116,

patricians and plebeians, 71-74, 78, 82, 123, 182, 286, 288,
433
107; see also class struggle Poetelius Libo Visolus, Gaius, 80
Paul, St., 336, 342-48, 404, 416, 460-61 Politorium (Castel di Decima), 24, 31
534 / INDEX
poll tax (tributum capitis), 260 invasion by Hannibal, 111-28; see also
Polybius, 65, 69-70, 97, 115, 125, 141 First Punic War; Second Punic War
Pompeii, 157, 159-60, 264, 291; art and Puteoli, 159, 267
architecture, 308-14 Pydna, 139, 140, 156, 157
Pompey (Cnaeus Pompeius), 189-97, Pyrenees Mountains, 113, 120, 121
199, 205, 208, 243, 272; assassinated, Pyrgi, 93
231; and Julius Caesar, 213, 217, 218, Pyrrhus, 87-90, 91, 94, 131
219,225-27, 228, 229-31, 240; rise of,
189-97
Pomptine (Pontine), 236 quaestio de repetundis, 173
Pons Sublicius, 31-32, 159 quaestiones, 188
pontifex maximus, 102 Quiberon Bay, 218
Pontus, 195, 196 Quirinal Hill, 8, 16, 29, 34, 54
Poppaea, 284, 286 Quirinus, 34
populares, 176 Qumran, 340-41
population, 58, 62, 159, 247, 267, 382
Populonia, 13
Populus Romanus, 176; see also Assem- Radagaisus, 427
bly Raetia, 253
Porphyry, 405 Rasenna, 11
Porphyry of Tyre, 386-87 Ravenna, 264, 427, 429, 432, 434-35,
Porta Nigra, 395 445, 449-5O' 470
Porticus Aemilia, 158 Reccared, 464
Portugal, see Lusitania Record Office (Tabularium), 189
Portus Itius (Boulogne or Wissant), 219 Regia, 24
Postumus, 366, 373 Regia-Sanctuary, 21
pozzolana, 159 Regulus, Marcus Atilius, 97
Praeneste (Palestrina), 56, 58, 189 religion, 19-21, 148-49, 251, 260, 271, 315,
praetor peregrinus, 103, 104 332-33» 386-99
praetorian guard, 256, 277, 279-80, 285, responsa prudentium, 103
357. 360 rex (title), 21
praetors, 56, 67, 122 rex sacrorum ("king of religious
praetorship, 79, 103-4 affairs"), 21
Prima Porta, 261 Rhine River, 219, 248, 255, 277, 280,
Primus, Marcus Antonius, 288 288-89, 295. 319. 320, 362, 369, 395,
Probus, 373 406, 423, 427-29. 431. 438, 469
proconsuls, 252 Rhodes, 134, 135, 138, 140, 153, 163, 255
proletarians, 125 Rhone River, 116
Propertius of Asisium (Assisi), 271-72 Ricimer, 434
Propontis (Gallipoli), 137 right to appeal (provocatio), 81
Prorogatio procedure, 146-47 roads, 63, 159, 264
provincia, 98-99 Roman army, 23, 63-65, 78, 265, 359,
Prusias II, 136 364-66, 371, 373, 392, 397, 400, 460;
Psalms, 334-35 failure of, 437-40; native troops
Ptolemy XIII, 231, 232 (numeri), 295; see also names of bat-
Ptolemy dynasty, 90, 131, 133, 134, 140, tles; names of emperors; legions and

236, 334, 342 legionaries

public land (ager publicus), 72, 74, 162 Roman calendar, 236
Pulcheria, 466 Roman law, 58, 73, 378-82, 464; ad-
Punic Wars, 94-100, 111-28, 148, 156-57; vances in, 102-7; inequalities, 323-25,
 INDEX / 535

382; Twelve Tables, 75-77, 79, 80, 81, Save (Save) River, 215
103 savior cults, 332-33
Roman Republic, 46, 129-209; fall of, Saxons, 451
167-209; imperialism, 129-65 Scaevola, Quintus Cervidius, 378
Rome: against Carthage, 85-128; age of Schlieffen, General von, 118
innovations, 101-2; burning of, 284, scholae palatinae, 397-98, 406
314, 403; under Caesar and Augustus, Scipio, Metellus, 226, 232
211-73; challenge of Flaminius, 107- Scipio, Publius Cornelius, 120
10; class struggle, 67-83; earliest pe- Scipio Aemilianus, 114, 142, 144, 154-56,
and Etruria, 5-17; Etrus-
riod, 15-17; 169, 170, 172, 174-75' 177' 180, 459
can monarchy, 18-39; imperial Scipio Africanus, 114, 120-22, 136, 137,
republic, 129-65; and Italy, 5-11; prin- 142, 146, 147, 151, 153, 154, 156; triumph
cipate government, 247-61; see also of, 122-27
names of places scribes (Sopherim), 336
Romulus, 21, 459 Scythia (south Russia), 52
Rubicon River, 227 Sea of Marmara, 395
Rudiae, 150 secessions (secessio), 73
Rufinus, 427, 450 Second Jewish Revolt, 303
Rufus, Publius Sulpicius, 183, 184 Second Punic War, 111-28, 132, 133, 135,
Rutilius, Namatianus, 459, 460 137, 144, 146, 150, 15I' 153. 157' 169, 174,
178; Spanish campaigns, 119-22; Tri-
umph of Scipio Africanus, 122-27;
Sabines, 45-46, 56, 59, 71, 192 victories of Hannibal, 115-19
Sacred Way, 15 Second Revolt, 412
Sadducees, 341 Second Samnite War, 62-63, 80, 81
Saguntum (Sagunto), 114, 115 Second Triumvirate, 242-73
St. Albans, 221 Secular Games, 10, 271
St. John Lateran, Basilica of, 416 Seine River, 215
Salonae (Split), 397, 400 Sejanus, 277-79, 280
salt road (via salaria), 49 Seleucia, 393
Salvian, 445, 446, 451 Seleucids, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 196, 218,
Salvian of Massilia, 447-48 334, 336
Samaria, 402 Senate, 68-69, 7^, 82, 109, 114, 116, 119,

Samarobriva (Amiens), 221 121, 124, 135, 153, 170, 174, 176, 177, 180,

Sambre River, 217 188, 195, 199, 201, 203, 213, 226, 227,
Samnite Wars, 62-66, 87, 125 231, 236, 240-41, 242, 249, 252, 279,
Samnites, 56-57, 89, loi, 181, 187 280, 286, 302, 333, 355, 357, 363, 435'
Sancus, 46 445, 446; and Nobles (imperial repub-
Sanhedrin, 337 lic) 146-49; rules governing member-
Santa Sophia, 467 ship, 188-89
Sardinia, 93, 99-100, 103, in, 150, 404 senatus consultum ultimum, 176
Sarmatians, 406 Seneca, 283, 284, 326, 377
Sarmizegethusa (Gradistea Muncelu- Sententiae, Opinions, 380
lui), 295 Sentinum (Sassoferrato), 63
Sarsina, 149 Sequani, 215, 217
Sassanians, see Persia and Persians Serdica (Sofia), 395, 408
Satires, 271 Sertorius, Quintus, 192-93
Saturnalia, 459 Servius Tullius, 25-35, 54, 69
Saturnius, 179, 180 Seven Hills of Rome, 15, 16, 54
Satyricon, 267, 326-28 Seven Liberal Arts, 458
536 / INDEX
Severus, 356-62, 366, 367, 373, 375, 376, Tacitus, 277. 330-31, 403, 473
378-80, 383, 391, 398, 404 Tagus River, 114
Sextius, 78, 79-80 Tarentum, 87, 88, 89, 102, 119, 172
Sextus, 232, 243, 244 Tarquinii (Tarquinia), 12, 15, 23, 54
Shakespeare, William, 326 Tarquinius Priscus (the Elder), 23,
Shammai, 336 33-34
Shapur (Sapor) I, 369 Tarquinius Superbus, 33-34, 35-37
Sibyl, 445 Tarquins, 43, 44, 67
Sicily, 18, 38, 60, 75, 87, 89, 93, 95, 96, Tarracina (Terracina), 61
97-99, 102, 103, III, 119, 122, 131, 144, Tarsus, 342, 343
164, 179, 194, 199, 231, 244, 266 taxes, 59, 156-57, 174, 208, 247, 260-63,

Sidon. II
266-67, 284, 285, 289, 295, 359, 375,
Sidonius Apollinaris, 451-52 399, 441, 443-44
Sierra Leone, 93 Tay River, 291
Sirmium, 408 Telamon (Talamone), no
slave wars, 193 Temple of Mars the Avenger, 261

slaves and slavery,

Terence, 154-55
81, 194, 266, 321, 326,
TertuUian, 402, 404
382, 438; and agriculture, 161-65
Tetricus, 373
smallpox, 354
Teuta, 132
social appeasement, 77-83
Teutoburg Forest, 255
SocialWar, 181, 182-83, 185, 187
Teutones, 178
Solomon, 334
Thagaste (Souk-Ahras), 456
sophists, 331
Thames River, 221
Spain, 5, 51, 93, 125, 127, 141-42, 156, 157'
Thamugadi (Timgad), 317
169-70, 178, 192, 194, 208, 213, 229,
Thapsus (Ras Dimas), 232
230, 232, 233, 248, 252, 265, 285, 289,
Theater of Marcellus, 261
294, 320, 366, 370, 431, 432, 434, 435'
Theoderic, 464
462-63, 469; Carthaginians in, 111-15;
Theodosian Code, 449
Second Punic War, 119-22
Theodosius I (the Great), 426-27, 439,
Sparta, 15, 55, 143
440-41, 442. 45O' 454' 456' 458' 464
Spartacus, 193
Theodosius II, 449, 464-65
Spina, 39
Thermopylae, 137
Stabiae (Castellamare di Stabia), 291,
Thessalonica (Salonica), 231, 395, 396
308 Third Punic War, 144, 154
Stalin, Joseph, 473 Third Samnite War, 63, 82
Stilicho, 427-3O' 434, 439. 45° Thrace, 282, 426
Stoicism, 205, 325, 326; of Marcus Thucidydes, 13
Aurelius, 377-78 Thurii (Terranova di Sibari), 88 1

Straits of Gibraltar, in Tiber River, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 19, 31, 32, 1
Stridon, 453
33, 46, 47, 49, 52, 61, 158, 159, 288, 313
Suetonius, 330, 473 Tiberius, 250, 253, 255, 256, 277-80, 330
Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, 178, 183-89, 192, Tibur (Tivoli), 32, 56, 58, 314
193. i95» 197' 227, 237; dictatorship of, Ticinum (Pavia), 372, 408, 429
187-89; in the East, 183-86 Ticinus River (Ticino). 116
sun cult, 391-92, 412 Tigellinus, Gaius Ofonius, 284
Surus (Carthaginian elephant), 153 Tigris River, 296, 393
Switzerland, 253 Titus, 289-9I' 315' 347
Syracuse, 38, 95, 119, 120 Toletum (Toledo). 464
Syria, 11, 133, 196, 248, 260, 265, 343, 344, Tolosa (Toulouse), 427
357' 359' 366, 369' 373' 380 Tomi (Constanta), 273
 INDEX / 537

Torah, 334, 335-36, 345 Vercingetorix, 221-22

trade corporations (collegia), 313 Verres, Gaius, 194, 199
Trajan, 293-302, 305, 306, 313, 329, 331, Verus, Lucius, 353
357- 358, 373. 403 Vesontio (Besancon), 215
Transalpine Gaul, 218, 222, 242 Vespasian, 285, 288-91, 305, 306, 315,
Transpadane Gaul, 107, 182 347
Transylvania (Rumania), 239 Vesta, 20-21
Trebia River (Trebbia), 116 Vestal Virgins, 20, 151, 317
Trevirorum (Trier), 366, 395, 406, 427 Vesuvius, 308
tribune of the people, 74 Via Appia (Appian Way), 63, 81, 193
tribunician power, 252 Via Egnatia, 143
tributum soli, 260 Via Latina, 45, 63
tributum tax, 156-57 Victory Games of 240 B.C., 102
Trifanum, 57 Villa of Hadrian, 315
Troy, 185 Viminal Hill, 16, 29, 54
Tunisia, 144, 266, 320, 432 Vindex, Gaius Julius, 285
Turnacum (Tournai), 462 Virgil, II, 24, 30, 39, 59, 246, 253, 259,
Tusculum, 43, 46, 55, 57, 78, 152 260, 268-70, 271, 272, 273, 384, 459
Twelve Caesars, 473 Viriathus, 141, 142
Twelve Tables, JS-Jf, 78, 80, 81, Visigoths, 425-26, 427, 429-30, 431, 433,
103 434, 435' 446, 45O' 451, 452, 453, 459,
Tyre, 11, 91-92, 380 462-63, 464
Vistula River, 369
Vitellius, 286-88, 291
Ukraine, 425 Vitellius, Lucius, 282
Ulpian, 380, 382 Volsci, 44-45, 46, 61
Umbria, 123, 149 Voltumna, 14
U.S. Constitution, 69 Vulca of Veii, 35
Urfa, 369
Utica, 232
Wall of Servius TuUius, 28, 54
Wallia, 431
Valens, 286, 288, 426, 449, 452, 459 Wheeler, Mortimer, 315
Valentinian I, 423-25, 437-38, 439, 444, White Promontory (Alicante), 112
447, 448, 449, 454, 457 women, 243-44, 317, 393
Valentinian III, 431, 433, 434, World War I, 118
449
Valerian, 363, 369, 370, 404
Vandals, 373, 432, 434, 435, 452-53. Xanthippus, 97
464
Varro, 10
Veii (Velo), 15, 17, 47-5O' 52, 54, 55- Zagros Mountains, 419
78 Zama, 124
Veneti, 218, 219 Zela (Zile), 232
Venus, 235, 236 Zeno, 435, 466-67
Venusia (Venosa), 87-88, 270-71 Zenobia, 366, 372-73