A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (8 page)

Roman Law bound Rome like Roman cement. Its genius was its complexity and its fairness, which gained it acceptance for thirteen centuries by millions of people. It lasted from
Romulus in 753
BC
to Justinian in
AD
535, when 3 million judgements were finally consolidated into sixteen volumes by sixteen commissioners. In the
realm of jurisprudence, Roman Law is rivalled only by the English and the First World still responds to one or other of these systems.

The power of Rome grew through conquest, followed by treaties, and a process by which local gods and local laws were subsumed by Rome. The British, when collecting their Empire through
annexation and the spoils of war, were not so respectful of ‘native’ rights; for instance, after a career such as his in Africa, Cecil Rhodes would have been prosecuted for
extortion
¹²
had he been a Roman. Indeed it was with this
charge that Cicero, champion of the Republic in its dying days, leapt into
Roman history to prosecute Verres, a governor of Sicily.

Cicero, darling of Classics masters, is most eloquent in his analysis of Roman Law – whose twelve tables schoolchildren had to learn by heart – and in the preaching and practice of
the Republican virtues of dignity, probity, industry, virtue, respect (for authority) and prudence, which are all Latin words and Roman concepts. He could also be a thumping bore and wrote the
worst hexameter extant:

which has been neatly translated as, ‘How fortunate of Rome to date/her birthday from my consulate’, and his penchant for self-congratulation and his long letters
of advice must have contributed to his being purged, after the
coup
which brought Octavian (later Augustus), Antony and Lepidus into power as dictators.

The establishment of that triumvirate was, in typical Roman fashion, enacted by the Senate with 400 centurions and soldiers hovering around to help them make up their minds; for the seizure of
power in Rome was always cloaked with legality, and the Senate, which finally disposed of Nero, remained an institution respected by tyrants, until the arrival of the ‘African’ Emperor
Severus.

Roman Law, in the beginning, was based on the authority of the
paterfamilias,
the head of the family, who had the right, until the end of the Empire, to sell his children. It was he who
insisted on
boni mores
– dutiful service, chastity and
respect for superiors. He could and did punish adultery in his children with death. The Romans were always
monogamous, though later divorce was easy. Strangely, there is no trace of primogeniture, although a Roman must ensure his posterity, otherwise enjoy no happiness in the grave. Hence the frequency
of adoption, because the upper classes were far from philoprogenitive – which led Augustus, as part of his campaign to restore ‘old-fashioned values’, to give tax concessions to
citizens who produced three or more children, rather like the almost free rail travel and state benefits for large families in present-day France.

The original Roman
paterfamilias
was the incarnation of the law. There was one law for the patricians and none for anybody else. Between these patricians – who belonged to a
gens
(like the
gens Julia
of our first five Emperors), of which there were 300, which was in turn one of the thirty
curiae
making up the three tribes of Ancient Rome –
there was at first no need for complicated laws of contact, because a Roman’s word – to another Roman – was his bond.

Each was a legal personality with a lot of land in the centre of Rome – his
heredium
– to which the family clung throughout the generations; and as they grew with Rome, so
they attracted a
clientela,
a group of dependents – poorer citizens and freedmen – whom they protected in return for votes or willingness to participate in a claque in court.

Freedmen and ‘foreigners’, which were soon the majority in Rome, could only sue in the courts via a Roman
paterfamilias,
so it was essential to belong to a
clientela
right up until Caracalla – he of the Baths – enfranchised all free men in the Empire. Roman lawmakers moved in great strides to deal with the problems, and the benefits, of increasing
population and prosperity. At first one of the magistrates, called a
praetor,
interpreted the tables of the law in Rome; after the
conquest of Sicily there were four,
with Spain six; Sulla the Dictator made eight and Caesar, sixteen; they began to create case law with their decisions, which were posted on a white board
(album)
displayed in the Forum.

More through the influence of Seneca than of Christianity, Roman Law softened with time, until even slaves gained certain rights. A creditor could no longer seize the son of a debtor and put him
in irons. Debt, and the means of its recovery, often by a patrician from a small farmer, had been the cause of the greatest riots in early Rome. At that time it was not only legal, but a religious
duty to revenge murder of a kinsman with another death. This law is now only observed by the Mafia. However, a citizen could still kill a thief if he came by night or, in the daylight, carried
arms.

Laws like this, which came from the original twelve tables, could be chanted by schoolboys, but later legislation regulating, say, repossession of mortgaged property or restitution for damage
done by a slave to another citizen’s mule or alienation by a trustee of a minor’s fortune had to be studied, together with the art of rhetoric, in law schools throughout the Roman
world. Cicero studied under Scaevola, who was an
augur
(one of twelve interpreters of Roman religion) and was, more to the point,
the
expert on Civil Law. He went on to take
instruction under Philo the Academician, then attended the lectures on rhetoric of Apollonius Molon in Rhodes, and finally he toured Greece, improving his lung power. His subsequent successes in
political trials gave him (a
novus homo,
without family connections) enough support among the electorate – the knights, the country grandees, the smart young men about town – to
become a consul. So success at the bar, like success on a military campaign, was the first step in the
cursus honorum,
which led to the top of the Roman state.

Our five Emperors all, in their fashion, respected the laws of Rome. Augustus, who had, as Octavian, proscribed 2,000 knights and 300 senators in 43
BC
, became the benign father of the state, whose mission it was to restore the institutions of the Republic, so battered by the civil wars in which he was the only winner. He followed
the forms of the Republic and in being elected consul thirteen times demonstrated that his authority came from the Senate and People of Rome.

The Roman term
imperator
was given to a general by the acclaim of his troops, whereas the superior king figures of modern history derive their status from the Judaeo-Christian ritual of
being anointed with oil by a priest, in early days under instruction from the Almighty. Emperors in Rome never claimed divine right and had to wait for death to be deified. They believed in
vox
populi – vox dei,
that the voice of the people expresses the will of God (and not, as revolutionaries would have it, the other way round); they insisted that the people, that is to say
the legislators, had to approve their most outrageous actions.

This explains the amount of time the successors of Augustus spent terrorizing the Senate. Nero, having failed to arrange a fatal accident for her, had his mother killed but legalized matricide
by inventing a conspiracy which she was supposed to have mistress-minded. As we shall see, he even managed to convert the event into a Triumph. And consider Caligula, always billed as the monster
of the classical world; feckless, whimsical and cruel, he would have approved the dictum of his latest (American) biographer, that while power corrupts, absolute power is more exciting. In fact,
making his horse into a consul never happened, and was his joke anyway. His thirty-nine named victims were carefully chosen and were fewer than those of the Emperor Claudius (who couldn’t be
kept out of the courtroom).

Caligula despised the Roman people which is why he was wished on them by his predecessor, Tiberius, equally contemptuous, but less amusing and amused; but he respected their
laws. By modern standards – Hitler executed 10,000 Germans after the July plot – Roman Emperors were restrained in their treatment of conspirators, having no secret police and only
rarely holding trials in camera. In fact, Caligula practised ‘open government’, in that when reintroducing the
Lex Maiestatis
(discouraging
lèse-majesté
– offences against his sacrosanct person) he had the terms set out on a bronze tablet. He published his accounts, lifted censorship and even published the names of the clients at his brothel
on the Palatine. (Another of his terrible practical jokes.)

The Roman Empire could not have lasted so long had its subjects not believed in the efficacy and eventual justice of Roman Law. One of its most famous citizens, Saul of Tarsus, knew exactly what
he was doing when he appealed unto Caesar.

THE ROMAN ARMY

Colonel de Gaulle, in his revealing book – like Hitler and Franco
¹³
he stuck to his principles –
Le Fil de
l’épée (The Way of the Sword),
published in 1932, praises the army as the embodiment of a nation’s will. He wrote. ‘France was created by the sword. Our fathers
entered history via the sword of Brennus [he of the Brenner Pass,
ed.
]. Roman armies brought them civilization. The fleur-de-lys, symbol of the nation’s unity, is but a javelin framed
by lances.’ De Gaulle and his admirer (but not his friend) Churchill were the last statesmen to believe in blood. Both had experienced the First World War at its most disagreeable, Churchill
with his battalion – he had asked for a brigade – and de Gaulle who had been present at Verdun where the mutiny had been put down by another future head of state, Pétain; but if
the experience had dismayed them it had not discouraged them. The Roman Army – and still less the Japanese – would not have tolerated trench warfare. The Roman soldier respected his
life and would not have obeyed a commander who did not share that view. Both would have regarded the grumpy deference of the British tommy and the sentimental sacrifice of the French
poilu
– in their hundreds of thousands – as unprofessional.

In equating a nation with its army, de Gaulle is thinking like a Roman; indeed to contemporaries the Roman army
was the religion of Rome, and Rome the religion of the army.
With good reason, since the vulnerable city of Rome had achieved hegemony in Italy through force of arms (and some cunning) wielded by its volunteer citizen foot soldiers assisted by knights,
riding, without stirrups, small horses paid for out of the public purse. The Republic conquered most of the world with a professional army essentially of heavy infantrymen, and the Empire
maintained, consolidated, monitored and only slightly aggrandized those possessions which stretched from Mauretania (Morocco) to Armenia, and Thebes in Lower Egypt to Luguvallium (Carlisle). The
addition of Britain by the Emperor Claudius was expensive and would not have been approved by Augustus. In his day the Roman world contained a population of about 45 million controlled by an army
totalling, with auxiliaries, 400,000 men, who (with weapons less sophisticated than the 500,000 Americans recently in the Gulf) kept the world at peace. When the Roman soldier was not fighting
– most of the time – he was building. Nowhere is this military activity of peaceful construction better illustrated than in North Africa where Legio III Augusta (originally 100 men) was
stationed for more than a century, and where, as Sir Mortimer Wheeler once observed, the remarkable thing was that nothing remarkable happened.

When de Gaulle wrote of the civilizing mission of the Roman army in France he cannot have meant its original and at times genocidal subjugation of Gaul under the command of Julius Caesar, who
gained a lot of his money and much of his reputation (
pace
his unchivalrous treatment of the brilliant young Vercingetorix) there. De Gaulle must have been thinking of the Roman roads, the
aqueducts (like the Pont du Gard), the temples (like the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, perhaps the most perfect building in the Western world,
erected at the beginning
of the millennium in honour of Augustus’ two young grandchildren and heirs) and the almost intact amphitheatre in the same city, where I saw the Davis Cup in 1991. All these were constructed
by engineers, architects and surveyors attached to the Roman army, using Roman cement and blocks of building stone cut and joined by Roman soldiers. De Gaulle was thinking too of that system of law
and order, inspired by and imposed on their world by the Romans, so fair that it justified, in the fullest sense, their regime, whose rarely invoked sanction was the Roman army. For though the
Empire was gained by force, consensus secured it. In our period – from the accession to power of Octavian to the death of Nero – and so on for centuries, the Roman army never had to
face an equal enemy.