SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

There was no such thing as a typical slave. Some in Cicero’s possession would have been enslaved abroad after defeat in war. Some would have been the product of a ruthless trade that made its profit by trafficking people from the margins of the empire. Others would have been ‘rescued’ from a rubbish tip or born as slaves, in-house, to slave women.

their standards, the slave aides of wealthy men in luxurious mansions, their private doctors or literary advisors, usually educated slaves of Greek origin, lived cosseted lives.

the Latin word familia always included the non-free and the free members of the household (see plates 16, 17).

As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide. The famous Latin phrase ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (‘You too, Brutus?’) is an invention of Shakespeare’s.

The majority still preferred the reforms of Caesar – the support for the poor, the overseas settlements and the occasional cash handouts – to fine-sounding ideas of liberty, which might amount to not much more than an alibi for elite self-interest and the continued exploitation of the underclass,

Whatever the rumours and allegations, and whatever the status of the little boy whom Cleopatra had pointedly named Caesarion, Caesar had recognised no legitimate children. So he had taken the unusual step of adopting his great-nephew in his will, making him his son and the main beneficiary of his fortune. Gaius Octavius was then only eighteen years old and soon started capitalising on the famous name that came with his adoption by calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar – though to his enemies, as to most modern writers wanting to avoid confusion, he was known as Octavianus, or Octavian (that is, the ‘ex-Octavius’).

Octavian – or Augustus, as he was officially known after 27 BCE (a made-up title meaning something close to ‘Revered One’) – dominated Roman political life for more than fifty years, until his death in 14 CE.

As Augustus, he transformed the structures of Roman politics and the army, the government of the empire, the appearance of the city of Rome and the underlying sense of what Roman power, culture and identity were all about.

Augustus also transformed himself, in a staggering shift from brutal warlord and insurgent to responsible elder statesman, signalled by his astute change of name.

In October 42 BCE, the united forces of the triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius near the town of Philippi in the far north of Greece (the focus of much of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), and the victorious allies then began even more systematically to turn on one another.

In 40 BCE Octavian and Antony had effectively carved up the Mediterranean world between themselves, leaving just a small patch for Lepidus. So for much of the 30s BCE, Octavian operated in the West, dealing with any of his Roman enemies who remained at large – including the son of Pompey the Great, the main surviving link to the civil wars of the early 40s BCE – and conquering new territories across the Adriatic. Meanwhile, in the East, Antony mounted rather more high-profile campaigns, against Parthia and Armenia, but with very mixed success, despite the resources of Cleopatra.

At the start of the conflict in 31 BCE, the good money would probably have been on a victory for Antony: he had considerably more troops and more cash at his disposal. But Antony and Cleopatra lost the first battle at sea, near Actium (the name just means ‘promontory’) in northern Greece, and they never regained the initiative.

The next year, Octavian sailed to Alexandria to finish the job. In what has often been written up as a kind of tragic farce, Antony stabbed himself when he thought that Cleopatra was already dead, though he lived just long enough to discover that she was not. A week or so later she too is said to have killed herself, with the bite from a snake smuggled into her quarters in a basket of fruit.

One of the sources of Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony, written 150 years after Antony’s death and full of some of the most lurid anecdotes of his life of luxury, was a descendant of a man who worked in Cleopatra’s kitchens – and may well have preserved a view of the culinary style of her court from below stairs. But it is absolutely clear that, both at the time and even more so in retrospect, Augustus (as he was soon known) exploited the idea of a clash between his own deep-rooted, Roman, Western traditions and the ‘oriental’ excess that Antony and Cleopatra represented. In the war of words, and in later justifications of Augustus’ rise to power, it became a struggle between the virtues of Rome and the dangers and decadence of the East.

It is not difficult to see what the image of Octavian would have been if Antony had won at Actium: a sadistic young thug with a dangerous tendency to self-aggrandisement.

Some people at the time were fatalistic, or realistic, enough to think that it would not make much difference whichever of them won.

Even at the time of his funeral, people were debating exactly what Augustus’ regime had been based on. Was it a moderate version of autocracy, founded on respect for the citizen, the rule of law and patronage of the arts? Or was it not far short of a blood-stained tyranny, under a ruthless leader who had not changed much since the years of civil war and with a series of high-profile victims executed either for plotting against him or for getting into bed with Julia, his daughter?

Whether people liked or loathed him, he was in many ways a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary.

He was one of the most radical innovators Rome ever saw. He exercised such influence over elections that the popular democratic process withered: the large new building completed in 26 BCE to house the assemblies was soon more often used for gladiatorial shows than voting, and one of the first acts of his successor was to t...

He controlled the Roman army by directly hiring and firing the legionary commanders and by making himself the overall governor of all the province...

He attempted to micromanage the behaviour of citizens in an entirely new and intrusive way, from regulating the sex life of the upper classes, who were to suffer political penalties if they did not produce enough children, to stipulating what people should wea...

And, unlike anyone before, he directed the traditional mechanisms of Roman literary patronage towards a concerte...

Augustus to all intents and purposes had writers such as Virgil and Horace on his payroll, and the work they produced offers a memorable and eloquent image of a new golden age for Rome and its empire, with Augustus centre stage. ...

Yet Augustus appears to have abolished nothing. The governing class remained the same (this was no revolution in the strict sense of the word), the privileges of the senate were in many ways enhanced, not removed, and the old offices of state, consulships and praetorships and so on, continued to be coveted and filled.

Most of his formal powers were officially voted to him by the senate and cast almost entirely in a traditional Republican format, his continued use of the title ‘son of a god’ being the only important exception. And he lived in no grand palace but in the sort of house on the Palatine Hill where you would expect to find a senator, and where his wife Livia could occasionally be spotted working her wool.

The word that Romans most often used to describe his position was princeps, meaning ‘first citizen’ rather than ‘emperor’, as we choose to call him, and one of his most famous watchwords was civilitas – ‘we’re all citizens together’.

Even where he seems most visible, Augustus turns out to be elusive; and that was presumably part of his secret. One of his most significant and lasting innovations was to flood the Roman world with his portrait: heads stamped on the small change in people’s pockets, life-size or larger statues in marble and bronze standing in public square...

Even for Julius Caesar, apart from coins, there are only a couple of very doubtful candidates for a portrait that was made during his lifetime. By contrast, about 250 statues, not to mention images on jewels and gems, found right across Roman territories and beyond, from Spain to Turkey and Sudan, show Augustus in many different guises, from heroic conqueror to pious priest.

For some modern historians the most important sentences are the couple that report the results of his censuses of Roman citizens, recording a total head count of 4,063,000 in 28 BCE, rising to 4,937,000 in 14 CE. These are the most reliable data we have for the size of the ancient Roman citizen body at any time, largely because, inscribed on stone, they are prone to none of the errors that careless manuscript copiers can easily introduce.

He was wealthy on a new scale. The combination of his inheritance from Caesar, the riches of Egypt that he seized after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the occasional blurring of the boundary between state funds and his own meant that he could outbid anyone as a popular benefactor.

It was an axiom of the Augustan regime that the emperor paraded his generosity to the ordinary people of the city of Rome and that they in turn were to look to him as their patron, protector and benefactor.

The final theme is his building. One part of this was a massive programme of restorations, of everything from roads and aqueducts to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, the founding monument of the Republic.

The Res Gestae itemises a wholesale redevelopment of the city centre, which exploited for the first time the marble quarries of northern Italy and the most lustrous, colourful and expensive stones that the empire had to offer. It turned the ramshackle old town into something that looked like an imperial capital. There was a huge new Forum to rival, if not overshadow, the old one, a new senate house, a theatre (still standing as the Theatre of Marcellus), porticoes, public halls (or basilicas) and walkways, as well as more than a dozen new temples, including one in honour of his father Julius Caesar.

For obvious Roman reasons, he did not call himself king.

To begin with, that meant being repeatedly elected consul, eleven times in all between 43 and 23 BCE, and on two isolated occasions later. Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.

The point was that Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics, justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring an old language. His rule was also presented as inevitable, as part of the natural and historical order: in short, as part of how things were.

He took a monopoly on military force, but his regime was nothing like a modern military dictatorship. In our terms, Rome and Italy at this period were remarkably soldier free. Almost all the 300,000 Roman troops were stationed a safe distance away, near the boundaries of the Roman world and in areas of active campaigning, with only a very few troops, including the famous security forces known as the Praetorian Guard, based in Rome, which was otherwise a demilitarised zone.

But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

He established uniform terms and conditions of army employment, fixing a standard term of service of sixteen years (soon raised to twenty) for legionaries and guaranteeing them on retirement a cash settlement at public expense amounting to about twelve times their annual pay or an equivalent in land. That ended once and for all the soldiers’ reliance on their generals to provide for their retirement, which over the last century of the Republic had repeatedly led to the soldiers’ private loyalty to their commander trumping their loyalty to Rome.

Although the Praetorian Guard continued to be a problematic political force, simply because of its proximity to the centre of power in Rome, only during two brief periods of civil war over the next two centuries, in the years 68 to 69 CE and again in 193 CE, were legions stationed outside the city instrumental in putting their candidates on the Roman throne.

On a rough reckoning using the known military salary figures, the annual bill for regular pay combined with retirement packages for the whole army would now have come to about 450 million sesterces. That was, on an even rougher reckoning, the equivalent of more than half the total annual tax revenue of the empire.

As soon as ambitious individuals came to rely on the nod of the emperor rather than on the popular vote for public office and other sorts of preferment, they no longer had to attract the support of the people en masse, they were no longer compelled to build up a popular following and they had no institutional framework within which to do so.

Yet for all his autocratic power, Augustus still needed the senate. No sole ruler ever really rules alone. The Roman Empire had a light administrative footprint compared with the bureaucracy of all modern states and some ancient ones too. Even so, someone had to command the legions, govern the provinces, run the corn and water supplies and generally act as the deputy for an emperor who could not do everything.

Senatorial status was also made hereditary over three generations. That meant a senator’s son and grandson could keep all the perks of being a senator without ever taking public office.

In return, the senate became something much closer to an arm of administration in the service of the emperor.

In 9 CE, five years before his death, there was a terrible military disaster in Germany at the hands of local rebels and freedom fighters, which destroyed most of three legions.

Julia, as his natural daughter, was the favourite instrument in his plans. She was married off first to her cousin Marcellus, who died when she was only sixteen; then to her father’s friend and colleague Marcus Agrippa, more than twenty years her senior; then, in what must have looked the perfect arrangement, to Livia’s son Tiberius.

The marriage of Tiberius and Julia produced only one child, who did not survive childhood. Augustus adopted two sons of her marriage to Agrippa as a way of marking them out as heirs (while further confusing the family tree).

In the end, despite all his efforts, Augustus was back where he could have started all along, with Livia’s son Tiberius, who became the next emperor in 14 CE. Pliny the Elder could not resist pointing out one other irony of this. Tiberius Claudius Nero, the new emperor’s father, had been on Antony’s side in the civil war, and his family had been among those besieged at Perusia. Augustus died, Pliny quipped, ‘with the son of his enemy as his heir’.

Caligula (‘Bootikins’), by which he is now better known. They had taken him as a young child on military campaigns and dressed him up in a miniature soldier’s uniform, including some trademark miniature army boots (caligae in Latin).