SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

the ‘House of the Griffins’

On several occasions in his letters, Cicero can be found worrying about how to decorate his properties appropriately, how to project an image of himself as a man of taste, learning and Greek culture, and how to source the artworks that he needed in order to do that, not always successfully. A tricky problem he faced in 46 BCE reveals some of his slightly fussy concerns. One of his unofficial agents had acquired for him in Greece a small collection of statues that was both too expensive (he could have bought a new lodge, he explains, for the price) and quite unfit for the purposes he had in mind. For a start, there was a statue of the god of war Mars, when Cicero was supposed to be presenting himself as the great advocate of peace. Worse, there was a group of Bacchantes, the uninhibited, ecstatic, drunken followers of the god Bacchus, which could not possibly be used to decorate a library as he wanted: you needed Muses for a library, he explained, not Bacchantes.

60s BCE, to judge from the coins it was carrying, sank between Crete and the southern tip of the Peloponnese, near the island of Antikythera – hence its modern name, ‘the Antikythera wreck’. It was carrying bronze and marble sculptures, including one exquisite miniature bronze figure on a wind-up revolving base; luxury

Spurius Maelius in the mid fifth century BCE was executed and his house pulled down when – in a classic conservative Roman inference – his generosity to the poor raised suspicions that he was aiming at tyranny.

Yet in another way, the connection between family and house was surprisingly loose. Quite unlike, for example, the British aristocracy, whose traditions put great store by the continuity of ownership of their country houses, the Roman elite were always buying, selling and moving. It is true that Cicero hung on to some family property in Arpinum, but he bought his Palatine house only in 62 BCE, from Crassus, who may have owned it as an investment opportunity rather than as a residence; and before that the house of Livius Drusus, where he was assassinated in 91 BCE, had stood on the site.

Quintus Lutatius Catulus,

In one of Cicero’s later attacks on Mark Antony, he complains

that Antony was living and drunkenly carousing in a house that had once belonged to Pompey, with rams from captured ships, probably seized in the campaign against the pirates, still adorning the entranceway.

This pattern of property transfer raises several basic questions. The sums involved were very large. In 62 BCE Cicero had to hand over 3.5 million sesterces for his new house on the Palatine, and there is almost no information about how this kind of payment was organised in practice. It is unlikely that Cicero’s slaves simply wheeled truckloads of cash through the streets under armed guard. The whole transaction points instead either to the use of gold bullion, which would at least have required fewer trucks, or more likely to some system of paper finance or bo...

Cicero was, for example, keen to pay off a large loan of almost a million sesterces to Julius Caesar before the outbreak of civil war made it embarrassing.

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They shared the single defining characteristic of being human property in someone else’s ownership. But that apart, they were just as varied in background and style of life as free citizens.

Satyricon, written by Gaius Petronius Arbiter,

Trimalchio, who almost gave his name to a much later classic novel; the working title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio at West Egg.

woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the centre of a ménage à trois that split up after her death.

What is more, in the Roman imagination the battle was almost instantly turned into a clash between solid, disciplined Roman troops and wild hordes of orientals. Despite the fact that Antony had the staunch support of several hundred senators, all the emphasis was on the exotic rabble, with – as Virgil put it – ‘their barbarian wealth and weird weapons’, and Cleopatra issuing commands by shaking an Egyptian rattle. Cleopatra was a crucial element in this whole picture. Whether or not she, like Fulvia, really played the leading part in the military command, as ancient writers claimed, is debatable. But she was a useful target. By focusing on her rather than on Antony, Octavian could present the war as one fought against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy – and led by a commander not only dangerous, regal and seductive but also unnatural, in Roman terms, in undertaking the male responsibilities of warfare and command.

One fragment of the newly discovered victory monument at the site of the Battle of Actium shows Octavian’s triumphal chariot at his procession of 29 BCE. Two children, seen beneath Octavian’s arm, share the ride. They are most likely his own daughter Julia and Drusus, the son of his wife, Livia, by an earlier marriage, or possibly the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

The tombstone of Marcus Billienus who served in the eleventh legion (‘legione X I ’) in the Battle of Actium and took the name Actiacus (‘Actiumman’) to celebrate his own part in the victory. Although the bottom of the stone is missing, what does survive, combined with the find-spot, suggests that he ended up a local councillor (decurio) in a settlement of veterans in North Italy.

Antony had won at Actium: a sadistic young thug with a dangerous tendency to self-aggrandisement. In

Some people at the time were fatalistic, or realistic, enough to think that it would not make much difference whichever of them won. A curious anecdote about some talking ravens amusingly sums up that idea. Octavian, so the story goes, was returning to Rome after the Battle of Actium when he was met by an ordinary working man who had trained a pet raven to say, ‘Greetings, Caesar, our victorious commander’. He was so impressed with the trick that he gave the man a substantial cash reward. But it turned out that the trainer had a partner, who was not given his share of the money and to make his point went to Octavian and suggested that the man should be asked to produce his other raven. The pair of chancers had been sensibly hedging their bets. When this second bird was brought out, it squeaked, ‘Greetings, Antony, our victorious commander’. Happily, Octavian saw the funny side and simply insisted that the first man share the reward with his partner.

Some of his innovations are still taken for granted as part and parcel of our mechanisms of political power. For the founding father of all Roman emperors, however, it has always proved difficult to pin him down. In fact, the new name

‘I have given them empire without limit’ (imperium sine fine), Jupiter prophesies for the Romans in Virgil’s Aeneid, national epic, instant classic and a book which landed straight on the school curriculum in Augustan Rome. It still remains (just) on the modern Western curriculum 2,000 years later.

was a standing joke that the pair of consuls who proposed one of ‘his’ laws promoting marriage were both bachelors. 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’.

They all adopt an idealising, youthful style that echoes the classical art of fifth-century BCE Athens and makes a glaring

and loaded contrast with the craggy, elderly, wrinkled, exaggerated ‘realism’ that is characteristic of the portraits of the Roman elite in the earlier part of the first century BCE (Fig. 33).

Not only do they fail to match up with the one surviving written description of his features, which – trustworthy or not – prefers to stress his unkempt hair, his bad teeth and the platform shoes which, like many autocrats since, he used to disguise his short stature; they also look almost exactly the same throughout his life, so that at the age of seventy-plus he was still being portrayed as a perfect young man.

They troop in, matching what had by then become their caricatures. Julius Caesar is so power crazy that he seems likely to unseat the king of the gods and party host; Tiberius looks terribly moody; Nero cannot bear to be parted from his lyre. Augustus enters like a chameleon who is impossible to sum

It is almost impossible to see behind the scenes of the Augustan regime, despite all the evidence we appear to have. This is one of the best-documented periods of Roman history. There are volumes of contemporary poetry, mostly singing the emperor’s praises, though not always. Ovid’s hilarious spoof on how to pick up a partner, which still survives under the title Ars Amatoria (Love Lessons), was sufficiently at odds with Augustus’ moral programme that it was one reason for the poet ending up in exile on the Black Sea; his relationship with Julia may have been another. And any number of later historians and antiquarians found Augustus an interesting subject, whether they were reflecting on his imperial style or collecting his jokes and bons mots. The repartee with the raven trainers is only one example from a mini-anthology of his banter, which also includes some nice fatherly ribaldry on his daughter’s habit of pulling out her grey hairs (‘Tell me, would you rather be grey or bald … ?’). Another memorable survival is the chatty, episodic biography written by Suetonius about 100 years after the emperor’s death: it is the source of remarks about his teeth and hair, as well as many more reliable and unreliable snapshots and snippets, right down to his occasional poor spelling, his terror of thunderstorms and his habit of wearing four tunics and a vest under his toga in the winter.

What does survive, however, is the text of Augustus’ curriculum vitae, a document that he wrote at the end of his life, summing up his achievements (Res Gestae, as the surviving version is usually titled in Latin – or ‘What I Did’). It is a self-serving, partisan and often rose-tinted piece of work, which carefully glosses or entirely ignores the murderous illegalities of his early career. It is also a unique account, in roughly ten pages of modern text, of what the old reptile wanted posterity to know about his many years as princeps, how he defined the role and how he claimed to have changed Rome. It is worth attending to his sometimes surprising words before trying to look behind them.

Roman army reaching the city of Meroe south of the Sahara and a fleet entering the North Sea; delegations arriving from as far afield as India, not to mention a mixed bag of renegade kings begging for mercy, with names gratifyingly exotic to a Latin ear – ‘Artavasdes king of the Medes, Artaxares of the Adiabenians, Dumnobellaunus and Tincomarus of the Britons’. And that is only a small slice of it.

No trace of this survives, and the best guess is that it was something closer to an annotated plan of Roman roads than a realistic geography in our terms (see plate 21).

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.

Suetonius even claims that his father was held up by the birth and so was late for one of Cicero’s big performances in the senate on the subject.

No senatorial meeting was held on 23 September, so far as is known. But whether the story was an invention or not, the point was to present the same day as both the end of Republican politics, demonstrated in the corruption of Catiline, and the beginning of the life of the emperor.

classic ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’, Augustus set out to make sure that no one could easily follow the example of his own youth: that is, raise a private army and take over the state.

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,

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.