SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

he sums up the Roman imperial project: ‘they create desolation and call it peace’, ‘solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’.

The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’.

Roman religion was not only polytheistic but treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation. As far back as the takeover of Veii in the early fourth century BCE, Rome had regularly welcomed the gods of the conquered. There were from time to time controversies and anxieties about this; the priests of the Egyptian goddess Isis found themselves expelled from the city of Rome on more than one occasion. But the basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities.

Christianity was, in theory, an exclusive monotheism, which rejected the gods who for centuries had guaranteed the success of Rome.

First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judaea. The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents.

What is more, some Christians were preaching values that threatened to overturn some of the most fundamental Greco-Roman assumptions about the nature of the world and of the people within it: that poverty, for example, was good; or that the body was to be tamed or rejected rather than cared for.

At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. From Pliny’s Bithynia to Perpetua’s Carthage, Christianity spread from its small-scale origins in Judaea largely because of the channels of communication across the Mediterranean world that the Roman Empire had opened up and because of the movement through those channels of people, goods, books and ideas.

For an increasingly large number of the inhabitants of the empire, becoming Roman meant becoming a Roman citizen. Throughout the provinces in the first two centuries CE, there were many ways in which this happened. Non-citizens who served in the Roman army were made citizens when they completed their terms of service; local officials in towns across the empire were more or less automatically granted Roman citizenship; whole communities or individuals (like Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus) were made citizens for special services they had rendered; and slaves of Roman citizens wherever they lived became Roman citizens if and when they were freed.

Citizenship was a gift, and by 200 CE, according to the best recent estimate, roughly 20 per cent of the free population had become citizens. To put it another way, there were probably at least 10 million provincial Roman citizens.

By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first ‘foreign’ emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather than ‘native’, but not all, or even most. In effect, the provincials were now ruling Rome.

IN 212 CE the emperor Caracalla decreed that all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, wherever they lived, from Scotland to Syria, were Roman citizens. It was a revolutionary decision, which removed at a stroke the legal difference between the rulers and the ruled, and the culmination of a process that had been going on for almost a millennium. More than 30 million provincials became legally Roman overnight. This was one of the biggest single grants of citizenship – if not the biggest – in the history of the world.

Guard at the time, Marcus Opellius Macrinus, followed him briefly on to the throne. Probably implicated in the assassination, Macrinus was the first Roman emperor who was not by birth a senator.

Citizenship, once granted to all, became irrelevant. Over the third century CE, it was the distinction between the honestiores (literally ‘the more honourable’, the rich elite, including veteran soldiers) and the humiliores (literally ‘the lower sort’) that came to matter and to divide Romans again into two groups, with unequal rights formally written into Roman law.

The second Roman millennium – which did not finally end until Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in the East by the sixth century CE, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE – was grounded on entirely new principles, on a new world order and, for most of the time, on a different religion.

But if the emperor Tiberius, who succeeded the first Augustus, could have slipped fairly comfortably into the imperial shoes of Commodus at the end of the second century CE, he would not have understood what it was to be an emperor a few decades further on. Rome in its second millennium was effectively a new state masquerading under an old name. Whether this millennium was one long, slow period of decline; a series of patchy cultural and political changes which eventually transformed the ancient world into the medieval; or an extraordinarily dynamic era of art, architecture and cultural reflection depends on your point of view.

after the assassination of Commodus in 192 CE, the Augustan template collapsed. The number of emperors is one obvious sign of that. In the nearly 180 years between 14 and 192 CE – apart from the single brief interlude of civil war after the death of Nero, when there were three unsuccessful claimants to the throne – there were just fourteen emperors. In the hundred years between 193 and 293 CE there were more than seventy (the list is elastic depending on how many unmemorable co-emperors, usurpers or ‘pretenders’ you decide to include).

At the same time, the city of Rome was eclipsed as the centre of power. Emperors were not often there but hundred of miles away with their armies. They did not have the time, incentive or cash to follow the Augustan model of leaving their mark on the city in brick and marble or of acting as popular benefactors. After the vast baths that Caracalla constructed in the 210s CE, there were hardly any major imperial building projects in the capital for eighty years, until the emperor Diocletian built his even bigger set of public baths in the 290s (large parts of which still stand outside Rome’s main railway station). The absence of emperors from Rome also hastened the decline of the senate.

The city of Rome irrevocably lost its place as the capital of the empire and fell to invaders on three occasions in the fifth century CE, for the first time since its sack by the Gauls 800 years earlier. The Roman world came to be controlled from regional capitals, such as Ravenna and Constantinople, modern Istanbul. The western and eastern parts of the empire were governed separately. And,

The emperor Constantine, the founder of the city of Constantinople in the early fourth century CE, was the first Roman emperor to formally convert to Christianity, baptised on his deathbed in 337 CE. Constantine did, in a way, follow the Augustan model of building himself into power, but what he built was churches.

As a gesture to tradition, Constantinople was given its own senate house, but it was a building for an institution that had become a fossil. When an admittedly rather muddled commentator tried to explain the name of this building in the eighth century CE, he decided that it must have been built by a man called ‘Senatus’.