A Criminal History of Mankind (36 page)

If he noticed that his son was a vicious ruffian, it was too late to prevent his becoming emperor. The moment his father died, Commodus abandoned the war against the northern tribesmen and rushed back to Rome to enjoy himself. He changed the name of Rome to Commodiana, voted himself the name ‘Hercules’ and behaved exactly like every bad emperor in Rome’s violent history. Nero had been an aesthete; Commodus liked to think of himself as an athlete. His greatest pleasure was to fight in the arena against carefully chosen opponents - whom he despatched with his sword - and to take part in the chariot races. He boasted that he had killed thousands of opponents with his left hand only. This homicidal maniac was probably insane. He would dress up as Hercules and then walk about hitting people with his club. An attempt on his life made him paranoid, and he proceeded to execute senators by the dozen. Finally, when it became clear that no one’s life was safe, his own mistress poisoned him, then a wrestler throttled him. In a mere twelve years, he undid all the good work of the previous four emperors and left Rome bankrupt.

Commodus was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to Rome. It was not that he was worse than Caligula or Nero; only that the empire was bleeding to death and could not afford another madman. It had once been a privilege to be a citizen of Rome; now it only meant paying heavy taxes to a series of generals who managed to fight their way into power. When Commodus died, four would-be emperors scrambled for power. The winner was, ironically, a Carthaginian named Septimius Severus, a coarse, brutal but efficient soldier who re-established Rome’s military supremacy, murdered the regulation number of senators, and died a natural death after ruling for eighteen years. He advised his two sons to stick together, pay the soldiers, and forget the rest. They ignored his advice and set about trying to murder each other; Caracalla, the elder, proved to have a better grasp of the science of treachery; he invited his brother to a conference in their mother’s boudoir and had him hacked to death in his mother’s arms. Caracalla then murdered twenty thousand men he suspected of supporting his brother and instituted a reign of terror reminiscent of Marius. He surpassed most previous emperors in sheer malignancy when he went to Alexandria - against whose citizens he held a grudge - and invited most of its youths to some celebration on the parade grounds; then his soldiers surrounded them and cut them down. The one act for which he deserves credit was granting Roman citizenship to all the freedmen of the empire; but even this was probably a measure to increase the number of taxpayers. When Caracalla was murdered by his own officers, the senate was bullied into proclaiming him a god.

After that, ‘barrack emperors’ came and went with vertiginous speed, most of them assassinated. One of the few whose name is recalled by posterity was Heliogabalus (218-22 A.D.), whose name has become a synonym for peculiar vices. In fact, he was merely what we would now call a transsexual - a woman born in a man’s body. Soon after he became emperor - at the age of fifteen - he advertised for a doctor who could perform the sex-change operation, but finally settled for castration. He then married a beefy slave called Zoticus, and the ceremony was followed by a ritual defloration and honeymoon. The ‘empress’ (as he insisted on being called) then decided to become the patroness of the city’s prostitutes; he called them all together and made a speech in which he showed an exhaustive knowledge of every perversion that they might be called upon to satisfy. This interest in prostitutes soon revealed itself as a desire to take up their calling; he began to tour the city at night, offering sodomy or fellatio to the males he accosted. On one occasion he even went into a brothel, threw out all the prostitutes and settled down to satisfying all the customers himself.

After four years of this, his soldiers decided they would prefer a real emperor; Heliogabalus was murdered in the lavatory in 222 A.D. and his body tossed into the Tiber.

After this light relief, Rome returned to the serious business of conspiracy and assassination. In seventy years there were more than seventy emperors or would-be emperors. This high turnover was due to the fact that the army was now the only real power, and if the soldiers took a dislike to an emperor, they killed him. Meanwhile, the threat from the barbarians was growing. A great Persian king, Artaxerxes, overthrew the reigning Parthian dynasty and founded a new line of kings, the Sassanids. While Artaxerxes threatened Rome’s eastern frontier, the Germans and Goths poured in from the north. The beautiful queen Zenobia of Palmyra in Syria led a revolt that took three years to suppress - she was finally led off to Rome in golden chains, where she married a senator and died a Roman citizen. In Britain, invaders demolished huge sections of Hadrian’s Wall. The roads of the empire became infested with bandits again. Fields lay uncultivated. Plagues swept across the empire for fifteen years. Rome was unable to feed her peoples, for - unlike the Chinese, who had made their land fertile with canals - Italy’s food production was always low; she depended heavily on imports. Finally, from a welter of would-be emperors there emerged one remarkable man, Diocletian, who seized the throne in 284 A.D. and held on to it for twenty-one years. He set out ruthlessly to patch up the leaks in the sinking empire. He did it by sheer brute force, and most Romans would undoubtedly have preferred it to disintegrate, for Diocletian squeezed them as they had never been squeezed before. His armies flung bands of steel around the empire; but the towns and villages in which they were garrisoned had to feed them for nothing. Shipowners had to provide free passage for the army. Taxes were so high that businessmen gave up their businesses and farmers left their land untilled - until Diocletian passed laws forbidding them to retire.

Recognising that the empire was now too big and too chaotic for one man to govern, Diocletian appointed three other ‘Caesars’ to help him. The main partner was his most trusted officer Maximian, who governed the west from Milan. Diocletian governed the east from Nicomedia, in Asia Minor, which he turned into a miniature Rome. His son-in-law Galerius ruled what are now called the Balkans, while Maximian’s son-in-law, Constantius Chlorus, ruled Gaul. And finally, when he was convinced that the empire had been stuck together again, Diocletian retired and persuaded Maximian to do the same. The empire promptly began to fall apart.

The complicated struggle for succession went on for the next seven years, the main contenders being Galerius, Maxentius (who was the son of Maximian) and Constantine, the son of Constantius Chlorus (apparently so-called because his face was a bilious green). When Chlorus died in Britain, Constantine was hailed as emperor by his father’s troops. Finally, Constantine invaded Italy, fought a battle against Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, and threw his rival’s body into the Tiber. After another dozen years of civil war, he became Constantine the Great, sole ruler of the Roman Empire.

And here we come to one of the major unsolved puzzles of history. Constantine was as unpleasant a character as we have encountered so far in the story of Rome, not merely ruthless but gratuitously cruel. One example will suffice. When he decided to get rid of his wife Fausta - daughter of Maximian and sister of Maxentius, both of whom Constantine had killed - he had her locked in her bathroom and the heating turned up until she literally steamed to death. Yet this is the man who claimed he had been converted to Christianity in rather the same manner as St Paul. He alleged that, on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, he had seen a cross in the sky and the words ‘By this sign shall ye conquer.’ Constantine went into battle with a spear turned into a cross as his standard, and conquered. From then on, Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity has naturally been grateful to Constantine ever since, and his biographer Eusebius explains how Constantine had prayed earnestly for a sign from God, which was given in the form of the cross. The fact remains that Constantine did not become a Christian until he was on his death bed. And a life of betrayals, perjuries and murders - including his own son - indicate that he remained untouched by the spirit of Christianity.

So why did Constantine decide to make Christianity the official religion of the empire? There are several possible explanations. One is that he did indeed see a cross in some natural cloud formation which he superstitiously took to be a ‘sign’ - we have seen that the Romans were obsessed by omens. Another possibility is that he was influenced by his mother Helena, a British princess (or, according to Gibbon, an innkeeper’s daughter), who at some point became a Christian and later made a famous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and located the cross on which Jesus was crucified. This is just possible, except that Constantine saw very little of his mother during his early manhood - he was too busy struggling for power - and in any case, does not seem to have been the sort of person who would be influenced by his mother’s ideas. Another possible explanation is that he was influenced by the death - by disease - of the ‘Caesar’ Galerius, who had persuaded Diocletian to persecute the Christians and who died believing that his illness was sent by God to punish him. Finally - and most likely - seems the explanation that Constantine thought it would be appropriately dramatic for the all-powerful conqueror to raise up the minority religion (only about one-tenth of his subjects were Christians) to a position of supreme importance.

Whatever the answer, it seems unlikely that Christianity finally conquered because Constantine became convinced of its truth. The historian Eusebius was being either naive or dishonest when he wrote: ‘When I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed soul, united with God, free of all mortal dross, in robes gleaming like lightning and in ever-radiant diadem, speech and reason stand mute.’ For it seems likely that the empress Helena made her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in an attempt to atone for the crimes committed by her son, while Constantine himself felt no such misgivings.

When, in 326 A.D., Constantine decided to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium, on the Hellespont, he was, in effect, handing over Rome to the Christians. The city whose name had become identified with materialism and violence became the city of love and salvation; Caesar surrendered his crown to the pope. Subsequent history, as we shall see, raised the intriguing question of which actually conquered the other.

THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Within a year of achieving respectability, in 313 A.D., the Christians were squabbling like children. The cause of the quarrel was that one party found it impossible to forgive the other for compromising with the Roman authorities during Diocletian’s persecutions. The Christians had been ordered to hand over their sacred books. Some had refused and been martyred. Some had handed over books that they claimed to be scriptures, secure in the knowledge that the police were illiterate - one bishop handed over medical textbooks. A few had actually handed over their sacred books for the duration of the persecution. Now these compromises became the object of rage and contempt, and the non-compromisers wanted to see them punished and ejected from the church. The non-compromisers called themselves Donatists (after a Bishop Donatus who held their views). To Constantine’s mild astonishment, these advocates of love and forgiveness began to assail one another in public. He was dragged into the quarrel himself when he ordered that confiscated church buildings should be handed back to the Christians; now he had two lots of Christians each claiming they were the rightful owners. The Bishop of Rome sided against the non-compromisers; so did a council of bishops who met in Aries in 314 A.D. The indignant Donatists rejected their decision and proceeded to kill their opponents. Belatedly, it must have dawned on Constantine that these Christians were just as quarrelsome and difficult as the Jews, and that he had made a grave mistake in substituting their religion for the easygoing paganism of the Romans. It may well have been the sight of his Christian subjects snarling at one another that decided him to flee to Byzantium. But his hope of peace was again disappointed. The Greek Church was just as bitterly divided. And the cause, it seemed, was that a priest named Arius was unable to swallow the notion that Jesus was actually the God who had created the universe, and that this commonsense notion scandalised the Bishop of Alexandria. Arius appealed to the historian Eusebius - the one who thought Constantine was free of all mortal dross - and Eusebius agreed with him. The struggle soon became so fierce that Constantine was forced to call a special council of bishops at Nicaea, near Nicomedia (just across the Hellespont from Byzantium). This council came down against Arius and in favour of the proposition that Jesus
was
God the Father - a notion that would have shocked the founder of Christianity, or possibly, since he seems to have had a sense of humour, made him smile. The decision made, of course, no difference whatever to Arius and his supporters, who remained convinced - rightly - that commonsense was on their side, whatever the Nicene Creed said to the contrary. Arius’s opponents declared him a heretic - taken from a Greek word meaning to think for oneself (which Christians found increasingly reprehensible), and he was refused communion. When Arius died, his chief opponent, Athanasius, circulated a story that he had been struck down by direct heavenly intervention, presumably by a thunderbolt.

And while the Christians squabbled and killed one another, the Roman emperors continued to do the same. Constantine died in 337 A.D., just after being baptised. The fact that his heirs were Christians did not prevent them from adopting traditional Roman methods of settling the succession; two nephews whom Constantine had included among his heirs were executed, and his three sons then ruled the empire jointly, the one called Constantius taking over the throne in Byzantium (now called Constantinople). His first act was to allay the fears of various uncles and aunts by personally guaranteeing their safety. His next was to plot against them. The bishop of Nicomedia entered into the plot and provided a forged document, supposed to be written by the emperor Constantine, declaring that he had been poisoned by his brothers. The soldiers were shown this document, and they went off and massacred two uncles, seven cousins and numerous other kinsmen. The only members of the family who were spared were two children named Gallus and Julian. Meanwhile, the other two brothers of Constantius quarrelled and went to war; one killed the other; then the killer was in turn killed by a rebel officer who wanted to seize the throne. Constantius killed the rebel and so became sole emperor. In due course, perhaps out of guilt, he appointed Gallus as joint Caesar, but soon regretted the decision and had him arrested and beheaded like a criminal.