SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

Roman estimates of casualties at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, up to 70,000 deaths in a single afternoon, make it as great a bloodbath as Gettysburg or the first day of the Somme, maybe even greater.

‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’ is an Italian favourite: ‘These Romans are mad’.

It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read textbooks to research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome.

If Caesar really did advocate life imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success.

‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’); and it was closely followed, a few lines later in the written text, by the snappy, and still much repeated, slogan ‘O tempora, o mores’ (‘O what a world we live in!’, or, literally, ‘O the times, O the customs!’).

The scale was so great that some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of

the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions. Nor was ancient Roman religion particularly concerned with personal salvation or morality.

In general, it was a religion of doing, not believing.

There was so much bronzework in the Etruscan cities that even in 1546 enough was discovered at the site of Tarquinii alone to produce almost 3,000 kilos, once melted down, for decorating the church of St John Lateran in Rome.

One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property – whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles).

The Latin word for ‘rams’, rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word ‘rostrum’.

The ambivalence of the Latin word hostis nicely captures the blurring of the boundary between ‘the outsider’ and ‘the enemy’. So too does the standard Latin phrase for ‘at home and abroad’ – domi militiaeque – in which ‘abroad’ (militiae) is indistinguishable from ‘on military campaign’.

Throughout this period, somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year, a greater proportion than in any other pre-industrial state and, on the higher estimate, comparable to the call-up rate in World War I.

An army of the size the Romans and their allies fielded at Cannae would, for example, have needed around 100 tonnes of wheat alone, every day.

By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth.

And it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.

There was never a written Roman constitution, but Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes) – represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people represented the democratic element.

They imposed vast cash indemnities on some states, a total of more than 600 tonnes of silver bullion in the first half of the second century BCE alone.

The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap.

But it is a fair estimate that in the early second century BCE the numbers of new slaves arriving in the peninsula as a direct result of victories overseas averaged out at more than 8,000 per year, at a time when the total number of adult male Roman citizens, inside and outside the city, was in the order of 300,000. In due course, a significant proportion of these would have been freed and become new Roman citizens.

Now buried underground near the modern Campo de’ Fiori, it once covered an area significantly larger than the later Colosseum.

The ‘75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin’ carried in the procession was the equivalent of the entire annual tax revenue of the empire. It would have been enough to feed two million people for a year, and a good part of it went towards building that first, ostentatious, theatre.

In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses).

Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is one of Rome’s most corrosive legacies.

Almost certainly the rebel forces were stiffened with the discontented and the dispossessed among the free, citizen population of Italy, including some of Sulla’s ex-soldiers, who may well have felt more at home on military campaign, even against the legions in which they had once served, than on the farm.

These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers.

In Jugurtha’s case, previous service with the army of Scipio Aemilianus in Spain, as the commander of an allied detachment of Numidian archers, gave him useful experience of Roman military tactics and useful connections on the Roman side.

It was as if military victory allowed the general literally to step into a god’s shoes, just for the day – which explains why the slave standing behind him in the chariot was supposed to have whispered in his ear, over and over again, ‘Remember you’re (just) a man.’

whose women and children he had put to death. Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping.

To put this in a wider perspective, statistics available from more recent historical periods suggest that at least one in fifty women were likely to die in childbirth, with a higher chance if they were very young.

Hadrian’s Pantheon was another. Finished in the 120s CE, the concrete span of its dome remained the widest in the world until 1958 (when it was beaten by the Centre of New Industries and Technologies building in Paris), and twelve

of the original columns in its portico were each 12 metres high, carved from a single block of grey granite and specially transported 2,500 miles from the Egyptian desert.

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.

Augustus fully nationalised the Roman legions and removed them from politics.

Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age.

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’.

The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.

In the second century BCE the biggest house in Pompeii (which we now know as the House of the Faun, after the bronze statue of a dancing faun or satyr found there) roughly equalled the size of the palaces of some

of the kings in the eastern Mediterranean who had grabbed, or been given, parts of the territory conquered by Alexander the Great. In the second century CE, the ‘villa’ (as it is now euphemistically known) that Hadrian built at Tivoli, a few miles from Rome, was bigger than the town of Pompeii itself. And there he re-created for himself a miniature Roman Empire, with replicas of the greatest imperial monuments and treasures – from Egyptian waterways to the famous temple of Aphrodite in the town of Cnidos, with its even more famous nude statue of the goddess.

Vespasian in 79 CE was the only emperor in the first two dynasties to die without any rumours of foul play surfacing.

Whatever carefully manipulated display lay behind these reports (and whatever the uncanny similarity with a far better known miracle worker of the

first century CE), eyewitnesses are said to have vouched for the miraculous cures years later, long after Vespasian’s death.

It is largely the legacy of the two main monotheisms of the ancient world – Judaism and its offshoot Christianity – that has encouraged us to see the invention of new gods, the adjustment and the extension of the pantheon and the fluidity of the boundary between humans and gods as faintly ludicrous.

Disapprovers always need something to disapprove of; and, in any case, the distinction between exquisite good taste (mine) and vulgar ostentation (yours) is necessarily a subjective one.

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’).

Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years

later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.

The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.