SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

As he walked down a passage between two of the properties that were part of the growing ‘palace complex’ (already far more extensive than Augustus’ relatively modest accommodation), the three praetorians, NCOs in our terms, attacked him. A personal grudge reputedly drove the leader, Cassius Chaerea. He had often acted as the emperor’s agent, torturer and enforcer, but Gaius in return is supposed to have repeatedly and publicly mocked his effeminacy (‘girlie’ was one of the favourite taunts). This was Chaerea’s revenge.

His incest with his sisters and his mad plans to make his horse a consul have become notorious. His vanity building projects have been placed somewhere on the spectrum between an affront to the laws of nature and ludicrous display. (Imagine him, as more than one ancient writer pictures the scene, prancing on horseback along a roadway constructed on top of a bridge of boats across the Bay of Naples, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great …)

His valiant soldiers were disgracefully humiliated by being made to hunt for seashells on a French beach. And his gleeful menace directed at the long-suffering Roman aristocracy became legendary. On one famous occasion he was caught bursting into laughter at a palace dinner party when he was reclining next to the two consuls. ‘What’s the joke?’ one asked politely. ‘Just the thought that I would only have to nod and your throats would be cut on the spot,’ came the reply. Someone else would have wielded the knife if Chaerea had not.

In 41 CE it was not just that a group of disaffected praetorians killed one emperor; the Praetorian Guard immediately installed his successor.

Meanwhile, the senate met in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the great symbolic monument of the Republic, and exchanged fine words about the end of political slavery and the return of liberty. It was a hundred years, they calculated, since freedom had been lost – presumably thinking that the deal arranged in 60 BCE by Pompey, Caesar and Crassus, as the Gang of Three, was the turning point – and so it was a particularly auspicious moment to reclaim it.

The Praetorian Guard, who had a low view of the capabilities of the senate and no desire to return to the Republic, had already picked a new emperor. The story was that, terrified by the violence and commotion, Gaius’ uncle the fifty-year-old Claudius had hidden himself down another dark alley. But he was quickly discovered by the praetorians and, though fearing he too was about to be killed, was hailed as emperor instead.

These events are a vivid snapshot of the politics of Roman autocracy almost thirty years after the death of Augustus. The senate’s ineffective posturing over the restoration of the Republic serves only to prove that the old system of government was gone for good, little more than a nostalgic fantasy conjured up by those who had never experienced it.

the killing of Gaius had no significant impact on the long history of imperial rule at all. That was one thing the assassins of 41 CE had in common with the assassins of 44 BCE, who killed one autocrat (Julius Caesar) only to end up with another (Augustus).

A number of modern historians have presented Nero in particular more as a victim of the propaganda of the Flavian dynasty, starting with Vespasian, which succeeded him, than as a self-obsessed, mother-killing pyromaniac who reputedly started the great fire of 64 CE not just to enjoy the spectacle but also to clear land for building his vast new palace, the Golden House. Even Tacitus admits, the rehabilitators point out, that Nero was the sponsor of effective relief measures for the homeless after the fire; and the reputed extravagance of his new residence, with all its luxuries (including a revolving dining room), did not prevent the parsimonious Vespasian and his sons from taking over part of it as their home.

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the views of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

The first Augustus had made a great show (and it was partly a show) of living more or less on a par with traditional Roman aristocrats. Within decades, though, the emperors were living in a style of luxury and extravagance that was unmatched in the Western world.

Most Roman rulers spent longer at their desks than at the dinner table. They were expected to work at the job, to be seen to exercise practical power, to respond to petitions, to adjudicate disputes throughout the empire and to give verdicts in tricky legal cases, right down to those that from the outside (though not to the parties involved, no doubt) appear relatively trivial.

With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.

Between Nerva and Marcus Aurelius heirs to the throne were selected and adopted without obvious concern for family relationships. Some had no link to the existing emperor by blood or marriage at all, or only a remote one, and they came from further afield. Trajan, the first such adoptee, was originally from Spain; the families of others came from either there or Gaul. They were the descendants of early Roman settlers abroad, who had probably married into the local communities, rather than from the indigenous population. But, in a way that dramatically fulfilled the Roman project of incorporation, they made the point that the emperor could come from the provinces of the empire.

The most striking thing about Pliny’s career is its success, across different reigns and dynasties, from the assassinated Domitian, who first noticed and promoted him, through the elderly Nerva, to the adopted military man Trajan.

Most Roman senators chose a mixture of collaboration and dissidence, which the first Augustus’ awkward compromise between senatorial power and senatorial service made almost inevitable.

for the most part ancient cities were not zoned as modern cities are. Rich and poor lived side by side, large houses with many tiles sharing the same streets and districts with tiny hovels.

Yet for the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-nots: between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between very comfortable and extravagantly luxurious, and the vast majority of even the non-slave population, who at best had a modest amount of spare cash (for more food, for an extra room, for cheap jewellery, for simple tombstones), and at worst were destitute, jobless and homeless.

the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).

The majority of the 50 million would have been peasant farmers, not the fantasy creations of Roman writers but smallholders across the empire, struggling to grow enough to feed themselves in some years, doing better, with a small surplus to sell, in others.

The huge multistorey apartment blocks (insulae, or ‘islands) common in Rome and its port of Ostia symbolise this hierarchy among the more ordinary Romans and capture the spectrum from the reasonably comfortable to those only barely hanging on. Insulae provided rented accommodation at a high density, which is how such a large population managed to cram into a relatively small area in the city of Rome.

The basic logic was always that the lower down in the building you lived, the more spacious and expensive your accommodation was, and the higher up in the building, the cheaper, pokier and more dangerous, with no facilities for cooking or washing and no means of escape in the (frequent) event of a fire.

Most people who needed a regular income to survive (and that was most people) worked, if they could, until they died; the army was an exception in having any kind of retirement package, and even that usually involved working a small farm.

As with the arrangement of apartment blocks, the Roman pattern is precisely the reverse of our own: the Roman rich, with their kitchens and multiple dining rooms, ate at home; the poor, if they wanted much more than the ancient equivalent of a sandwich, had to eat out.

Roman towns were full of cheap bars and cafés, and it was here that a large number of ordinary Romans spent many hours of their non-working lives.

Pompeii is again one of the best examples. Taking account of the still unexcavated parts of the town and resisting the temptation (as some archaeologists have not) to call any building with a serving counter a bar, we can reckon that there were well over a hundred such places there, f...

But in general the law was out of the reach of most of the population, who, as we shall soon see, often looked on trials and legal processes more as a threat to be feared than as a possible protection.

Across the Roman world as a whole, country and town, the number may have been very low, well under 20 per cent of adult men. But it must have been much higher than that in urban communities, where many small traders, craftsmen and slaves would have needed some level of basic literacy and numeracy to function successfully in their jobs (taking the orders, counting the cash, organising deliveries and so on). There are indications too that ‘functional literacy’ of that sort gave even the ‘middling’ people some stake in what we would think of as high classical culture.

Apart from a very few philosophical extremists, no one in the Roman world seriously believed that poverty was honourable – until the growth of Christianity,

It would probably have surprised both Pliny and Trajan to discover that 2,000 years later the most famous of their exchanges is to do with an apparently insignificant, but awkward and time-consuming, new religious group: the Christians.

For the next 200 years, until the end of the second century CE, those two incompatible visions of empire – consolidation versus expansion – coexisted surprisingly easily. There were a few additions to Roman territory.

Only Trajan’s campaigns led to any significant expansion of the empire: through 101 and 102 CE he conquered Dacia, part of what is now Romania, in the operations that are depicted in detail on his column; between 114 and 117 CE he invaded Mesopotamia and went beyond, as far as modern Iran. This was the furthest east that Roman power was ever formally to extend, but not for long. Within days of coming to the throne in 117 CE, Hadrian abandoned most of the territory.

There was always a fuzzy zone where Roman control faded gradually into non-Roman territory, and there were always peoples who were not formally part of the provinces of the empire but nevertheless did what the Romans told them to, on the old model of obedience.

Hadrian’s Wall, as we call it, stretched for more than 70 miles, right across the island from one coast to the other. Its construction was an enormous investment of military man-hours – but it is surprisingly hard to know what exactly it was for. The old idea that it was a defensive structure to keep the ‘barbarians’ out is unconvincing.

But it could hardly have deterred any reasonably spirited and well-organised enemies who were keen to scale it, especially as much of it was built only of turf, unlike the solid stone sections that star in most photographs. Without a walkway along the top, it was not even well designed for surveillance and patrol purposes. But as a customs barrier, which is one recent suggestion, or as an attempt to control the movement of people more generally it seems a more hefty construction than was necessary.

practice, if not in the Roman imagination, the empire of the first two centuries CE became less a field of conquest and pacification and more a territory to be managed, policed and taxed.

Although major construction projects such as Hadrian’s Wall must have been the result of some decision at a high level, for the most part the emperor’s involvement was on the pattern of Trajan’s in Bithynia, dealing with issues as and when they came up.

What is certain is that the Romans made hardly any attempts, even during this more leisurely phase of imperial control, to impose their cultural norms or to eradicate local traditions.

Travelling around the empire meant not just crossing time zones in our sense but moving between entirely different ways of calculating dates or hours of the day (how anyone managed their diary is a mystery). Local traditions flourished in everything from clothing (trousers and Greek cloaks) to religion.

A reasonable estimate is that across the empire at any one time there were fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators, plus maybe a few thousand slaves of the emperor, who had been sent out from the imperial centre to govern an empire of more than 50 million people.

The army was one answer. Over the first few decades of the rule of the emperors, soldiers were recruited increasingly from outside Italy (the provincials were in practice guarding the empire), were more and more stationed towards the edges of the Roman world (safely away from Rome, on the Augustan model) and became heavily involved in administrative as well as front-line jobs.

And many of the towns of modern Britain, including London, owe their sites to Roman choices and planning. Some were more successful than others. There must be a sad story behind the Mediterranean-style, outdoor swimming pool in the Roman baths at Viriconium (modern Wroxeter, near the English–Welsh border), which did not survive many frosty winters and soon became the town’s rubbish dump.

And the habits of urban life would have meant little or nothing to the majority of the population, who continued to live, as they always had done, in the country.

The provincial – or ‘native’ – elites living in these towns acted as the crucial middlemen between the Roman governor, with his tiny staff, and the provincial population at large.

The signs of these range from the images of Roman emperors in the province of Egypt, all presented as if they were traditional Egyptian pharaohs, to the flamboyant sculpture on the façade of the Temple of Sulis Minerva in the Roman town of Bath in southern England.

It is, however, the prolific Plutarch who made the most systematic attempt to define the relationship between Greece and Rome, to dissect their differences and similarities and to wonder what a Greco-Roman culture might be.

The picture often conjured up of a miserable bunch of soldiers from sunny Italy being forced to endure the fog, frost and rain of northern Britain is very misleading. The garrison was largely made up of forces recruited in equally foggy places across the English Channel, in what are now Holland, Belgium and Germany. But at all levels of the Wall community, individuals came from much further afield, even from the opposite ends of the empire.

Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the governor of Britain between 139 and 142 CE. Thanks to some lucky survivals we can still identify both the building work he sponsored in northern Britain and the family tomb he commissioned at the other end of the Roman world, in his home town (of Tiddis, as it is now called) in northern Algeria.

The rebellions that we know about were not the work of high-principled, or narrow-minded, nationalists. Getting rid of the Romans was never the same as an independence movement in the modern sense. Nor were they driven by an excluded underclass or religious zealotry.

They were usually led by the provincial aristocracy and were a sign that the relationship of collusion between the local elites and the Roman authorities had broken down. To put it another way, they were the price the Romans paid for their dependence on collaboration.