A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (10 page)

Mobility within the Empire was one of its greatest achievements. The Roman roads were so good that Harold was able to march (down Ermine Street) from Yorkshire to Hastings in three days. British
roads, on the other hand, were so bad that George III, having once been overturned, never in his long reign ventured further north than York.

Long distances therefore were no bother to the Roman army, so cohorts – they were never called legions – of auxiliaries, often using their own tribal weapons and sometimes with
special skills, like the slingers from the Balearics, the horsemen from Numidia (Algeria) and the archers from Crete, could be moved readily around the Roman world. They were always commanded by
Roman tribunes or prefects, were supposed to understand orders in Latin and could eventually benefit from the perks of the Roman legionary. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmen,
steeped at Eton and Winchester in Roman history – did not one cable the Foreign Office from India,
peccavi
(‘I have Sind’)?
– copied the
‘artful’ system of Augustus. William Pitt, in inventing the Highland regiments, was following a Roman precedent.

The discipline of the Roman army was legendary, retailed with relish and approval by nineteenth-century historians echoing their Roman predecessors Livy and Polybius. Most famous, or infamous,
was the punishment of decimation, whereby one in every ten soldiers in an offending cohort was chosen by lot to be clubbed or stoned to death by soldiers from another cohort. In fact it
didn’t happen very often and hardly at all in the Empire, though Octavian had employed it in the Dalmatian War of 34
BC
. (He was not, as we shall see, a very nice
man.) Caligula, of course, tried to inflict decimation but his orders were ignored. Flogging was a more usual punishment and, for larger bodies of men, the substitution of barley for wheat in the
diet; this latter, with a reduction of share of booty, was the favoured punishment of Julius Caesar. A modern German historian propounds the view ‘that mutiny and insubordination were
surprisingly prevalent in the Roman army . . . that the Roman legionary arrogated to himself an independence of thought and action which was far beyond that with which the Roman soldier is
generally credited’.
¹⁵

Here is an account
¹⁶
of a mutiny worth retailing. The Emperor Claudius, who was not stupid as Gibbon would have us believe, nor amiable as portrayed by
Charles Laughton, had decided to invade Britain. Julius Caesar had pointed the way in 55 and 54
BC
, but he had not known about the lead mines which, together with wheat and
slaves, could
make the operation ‘wipe its face’, as they say in the City. Besides, his predecessor, Caligula, made a fool of himself by pretending to invade the
island – the fleet never sailed – and to restore imperial pride, teach the barbarians a lesson, employ some under-extended legions and get himself a Triumph, Claudius assembled a force
of 40,000 men consisting of the legions from the Rhine and one from Pannonia (roughly where Austria is now). But as the historian Dio recounts, the army flatly refused to face an ocean voyage
‘outside the world’. When he heard of the mutiny, Claudius sent his top freedman, Narcissus, who was in charge of the new secretariat he had instituted (a sort of Army Council), to sort
it out. The soldiers were not impressed. They were used to a pep talk from their
imperator
at the outset of a campaign; to be addressed by an ex-slave, one can hear the centurions grumbling,
was too much – or too little. They shouted him down with the sort of jeering reserved for the Saturnalia, when slaves dressed up as masters and vice versa, like the Roman soldiers at the
Antonia in Jerusalem, crowning Jesus King of the Jews with twigs from kindling. Nevertheless, Narcissus must have turned them round because the mutiny evaporated and the legions went on board.

The crucial battle was a two-day affair, unusual in ancient warfare, at the Medway (whose existence the Roman General did not expect), and the first day went badly for him. But the second went
well, especially when the Emperor turned up with a contingent of his Praetorian Guard and a detachment of elephants. The inscription cut on the triumphal arch celebrating his victory states
Claudius suffered no losses; at Colchester eleven kings had submitted to him. Not finding any existing town grand enough to constitute the capital of this new and peaceful province, the Emperor
founded Verulamium (St Albans). After three weeks, having
left complicated instructions for the administration of Britain, he returned to Rome, where he added to his names that
of ‘Britannicus’. He also had his Triumph.

A Roman Triumph was a terrible thing. It was the ultimate beano for the legionaries, who paraded through the city with sticks instead of swords and gorged themselves afterwards on oysters from
Baiae (Naples), freshwater eels, capons, ducks, piglets and kids and had their fill too of gilded prostitutes. They also received a
donativum
, a present of money. The procession followed a
prescribed route: assembling in the west of the city on the Campus Martius (cf. Champ de Mars in Paris), it went through a special gate called the Porta Triumphalis, through the Circus Maximus,
where it was cheered by a crowd of 150,000 people and ended at the temple of Jupiter Optimus, which the triumphant
imperator
entered to offer the god the laurels of victory.

Floats were drawn through the streets depicting highlights from the campaign and the vanquished were paraded in their finery and with their captured treasures displayed. Jugurtha, King of
Numidia, cut a splendid figure at the Triumph of Marius, in his purple robes, his golden jewelled necklaces and bracelets flashing in the sun, his head encircled with a white diadem. He was led in
his chains to the Tullianum, Rome’s only execution cell, divested of all his finery (which was handed piece by piece to a clerk of the treasury) and, clad only in a loincloth, jumped into the
pit beneath. Rather than face such a humiliating end, the defeated Mithridates, hero of Mozart’s first opera, had himself killed.

There is a legend that Mark, the youngest of the Gospel writers, witnessed Titus’ Triumph to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem and was so affected by the sight of the high priest in
chains on a Roman cart, surrounded by the treasures of the Temple, that he resolved never to incur the wrath
of Rome. The triumphant generals laid trophies taken from the enemy
in temples, where Roman soldiers could honour them, in ceremonies of which the regimental services, victory parades and state – or as they used to say ‘public’ funerals of great
warriors like Wellington and Churchill, which take place at St Pauls in the City of London, are reminiscent. In Rome the temple of Jupiter was not far from the temple of Juno Moneta, where the mint
was housed. It is interesting that while poets lie with kings in the Royal Peculiar of Westminster Abbey, the monuments to the victories which made the British Empire are in the church built in the
City of London, where the money is, to celebrate England’s status as a great power.

Rome peaked at a Triumph. While voices were raised, occasionally, at the excesses of the Games or the institution of slavery, no one criticized the expense, the grandeur, the arrogance, the
triumphalism of a Triumph, not even Cicero. Rome, which kept a copy, on a bronze tablet, of each individual soldier’s record of service, never forgot that Triumphs were achieved on his back.
Nero forgot and it cost him his life.

THE BLOODY GAMES

The Roman Games descended from the Greek, whose inspiration had been religious, international and pacific. They had begun at Olympia in 776
BC
and
lasted unchanged for 1,000 years until banned by the spoilsport Christian Emperor Theodosius. The winning athletes won only token awards but, sneered Cicero, were more celebrated in Greece than
were victorious generals. Roman Games, though attended by a whiff of religion and originally featuring athletic events like the foot-race, javelin throwing and the pentathlon, developed along quite
different lines, becoming bloody, political and expensive. In our period, they included fights to the death between every kind of wild beast, between men (criminals and, later, Christians) and
beasts, and, of course, between men and men – gladiators, professional killers.

The passionate entertainment of Romans was the chariot race where, although accidents did occasionally happen – to a too-successful jockey just before a big race – death had no part.
The chariot race was essentially Roman. Romulus and Co. raped the Sabine women in a hippodrome at races in honour of an ancient rural deity, Consus, and throughout the history of the Roman Empire
there were annual games called the Consualia. In the end there were at least fifty circuses in the Empire and they are still being unearthed. The largest was the Circus Maximus, where the Great
Fire started,
in a boutique, in
AD
64; it was rebuilt by the Emperors Domitian and Trajan to seat 150,000 spectators, becoming the model (with
dimensions of 640 by 190 metres) for circuses throughout Europe. They can be seen, or bits of them, at Arles, Vienne, Trier, Antioch (which held 80,000 and where the film
Ben Hur
was shot)
and Carthage. Private circuses were built by the rich, like nine-hole golf courses, for their friends. The younger Pliny had one on his Tuscany estate.

The centre of the Circus Maximus was used for the exhibition of trophies and prisoners-of-war, works of art and spectacular loot, like artefacts from Karnak (cf. Cleopatra’s Needle in
London or the lions in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice). Nothing was too grand for the greatest display of power, speed and danger in Rome, relished and anticipated with excitement by all ranks
– slaves, freedmen, citizens, knights, senators and the Emperor and his friends. Everyone could sit and free seats were allocated for the poor. Caligula complained about being kept awake by
the noise of the common people claiming their places in the middle of the night before the Games next morning – so much more fun than Wimbledon.

The charioteers were beloved and imitated. Children played with chariot toys, like they play with the models of cars sold all over the world today. Later they rode in carts drawn by sheep or
donkeys, pretending to be charioteers, like Caligula and Nero, a contemporary of the dreaded Boadicea, ‘married’ one at a famous orgy. They were of modest origin, sometimes slaves, but
were admired like Nigel Mansell and Sir Lester Piggott rolled into one, and they made, relatively, much more money (tax free). One called Diolus, with 1,462 wins, made 36 million
sesterces
,
say £15m in today’s money; another, Scorpus, subject of an epigram by
Martial,
¹⁷
was given fifteen sacks of gold in an
hour. The chariots were divided into teams, White and Red, then subdivided into Green and Blue. Romans and their Emperors were intensely partisan for their favourite teams: Caligula lunched with
the Greens, Caracalla had the jockey of a rival team murdered.

The horses – two, rarely three and, in a
quadriga
like the bronze on top of the arch by Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner, four – bred, and trained until they were five years
old, in studs in Cappadocia, Sicily, Spain and North Africa, were also famous, and the judgement of the animal on the inside left of a
quadriga
was crucial when it came to cutting corners.
There was no time for pit stops, so slaves threw buckets of cold water on the overheated axles of the chariots when they turned. By the time of Caligula, when spectators could watch and bet on
twenty-four heats in a day, the four chariots circulated fourteen times, covering about five miles, so the axles must have got quite hot.

No statistic could be produced to show the number of Spaniards who go home after a bullfight and do not beat up their wives, but we do not have to be psychologists to understand the catharsis,
the soothing of the savage breast, induced after hours of witnessing the bloody deaths of animals or human beings,
a fortiori
the crueller, the more protracted, the more ritualized. Julius
Caesar invented the bullfight as another course in the sadistic banquet of the Roman Games. Oddly, he exhibited indifference, at the height of his power, when he attended the Games, publicly
looking through his papers instead of down at the gore below, attracting the kind of comment which a prime minister might if he were to be
seen glued to his despatch box at a
Cup Final at Wembley. However he did understand, as a young man on the political make, the brownie points to be scored by paying for gladiators. As an aedile, the first office on the political
ladder, he showed off (borrowing the money from Crassus) by fielding 300 pairs. Gladiators also doubled as bodyguards and were used by Caesar’s buddy and fixer, Clodius, for the political and
gang warfare which marked the last years of the Republic and made Romans more easily accept the discipline imposed by Augustus.