Rome: An Empire's Story (31 page)

Yet the emperors survived. Emperors remained central through successive crises and fragmentations, through periods when there were multiple courts, beyond the fall of the west, and also the great losses of territory in the seventh century to Persia and then to the Arabs, and on, beyond the scope of this book, into the Middle Ages. Byzantine emperors preserved many of the court ceremonials of their predecessors, and so did the Frankish emperors who briefly supplanted them in the thirteenth century, the final Greek dynasties, and the first Turkish sultans.
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Great spectacles took place in the hippodrome of Constantinople before the new Muslim rulers of the city, just as they had before Justinian and Constantine, and in Rome before the Severi, Commodus, Vespasian, and all the other emperors back to Augustus. What made monarchy such a successful component of empire?

It helps to recognize that Rome was not unusual. If we consider other ancient empires, very few lasted for long without monarchy at their centre. The Chinese first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221–206
BC
) did not replace a republic, but a series of rival kingdoms that occupied the basins of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers during the Warring States Period. One of the many things that united their populations was a notion of ritual kingship.
The kings of the preceding Zhou period played a vital part in managing the ceremonial through which the favour of the gods was maintained. Ancestor cult and lineages were drawn into state worship of heaven. Chinese historiography starts with the annals of Sima Qian, written in the last century
BC
, more or less at the same time as Varro, Atticus, and Nepos were trying to construct a definitive chronology for Roman history. For Sima Qian, Chinese history began with the legendary yellow emperor, and various other dynasties were identified before the Zhou who ruled for much of the last millennium
BC
. The Zhou kings, and then the emperors from the Qin dynasty onward, set monarchy at the cosmological centre of the Chinese universe. Empire without the sons of heaven was unthinkable.
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The Achaemenid Persian emperor too ruled over an empire created from an amalgam of kingdoms, among them those of the Medes and the Persians, the Babylonians and Egyptians and Lydians. The title shahanshah, used in one variant or another by various imperial Persian dynasties until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, means king of kings. Persian monarchs increasingly elaborated a sense of their cosmic role, drawing on a wide variety of religious traditions.
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The earliest empire in south Asia was that of the Mauryan dynasty (322–185
BC
), which in some senses resembled Achaemenid Persia. It was created in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest of Persia, and in north-west India competed with the Seleucids for control of former Persian satrapies. This empire too was created by the conquest of a series of earlier kingdoms. Much less is known of the early empires of the Americas, but most of these seem to have had monarchies at their centre. The Inkas claimed a cosmological centrality similar to that of the Chinese sons of heaven.

A few general observations occur. First, monarchy was very common not only in early empires, but also in the earlier states out of which many were composed. When kingdoms are united to form an empire it would be bizarre to expect anything other than a grander kind of monarchy to emerge. The idea that an emperor is to a king, what a king is to a subject— the Persian notion of king of kings—is perhaps a fairly obvious one. Hierarchical societies grow by multiplying levels. Second, the emperors very often became the focus of rituals that set them at the cosmological centre of the universe. The details varied. Many ancient emperors were considered gods, or the children of gods, or (like the Roman emperors) gods in waiting. Others enjoyed special favour, or like Chinese emperors were privileged mediators between heaven and earth. Depending on how the local religion was organized, emperors might be priests or might be
anointed by them. This personalized aspect of imperial universalism was often presented as traditional, the product of ancient ritual systems being modified to accommodate emperors, but some accommodations were extreme. Cyrus the Persian, Alexander the Great, Asoka the Buddhist monarch of the Mauryan dynasty, the Qin first emperor, and Augustus each has some claim to be a religious innovator. Rome was only unusual in not having been a monarchy from an earlier period, and in dispersing religious authority among a broader elite.

But it is not enough to show that most empires ended up with monarchs. The key question is What advantages did monarchy have for an ancient empire relative to other forms of government? One common answer— common since antiquity in fact
¹²
—is that monarchy is phenomenally powerful as an organizing force. Accounts of the origins of civilization, from that of Lucretius to the theory of hydraulic despotism pioneered by Karl Wittfogel to explain why the earliest cities and states were so often based on irrigation agriculture, have stressed the importance of monarchs as the chief animators of society.
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Only monarchy, this theory goes, had the capacity to plan, coordinate, manage, and discipline societies into the collective projects on which they depended. Anthropologists have often seen chiefdoms as necessary precursors to states for similar reasons. State formation is associated with the emergence of legally based authorities, including magistracies; but they often owed their creation to charismatic individuals who had supplanted the traditional authority of elders and lineages. Students of ancient Greece are familiar with the idea that tyranny was in some sense a necessary midwife of political institutions. Cicero argued in favour of Pompey’s great commands on the grounds that only under the leadership of such a man could the Roman people solve the formidable problems of empire. This sort of thinking was not confined to the elite. The price of grain collapsed when Pompey took responsibility for it in 57
BC
, and in a similar crisis in 22
BC
the Roman people tried to get Augustus to take on the role of dictator or consul for life. Romans of all ranks believed in the power of individuals much more than they did in the power of institutions.

A second strand of argument paradoxically finds the utility of ancient monarchy in its weakness. What monarchies do best, it is argued, is act as ‘capstones’ in complex political structures.
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Kings balance all the other elements, just as a capstone prevents an arch from collapsing, but they had little active power or freedom of action. Kings might arbitrate conflicts, and take decisions about matters over which it was difficult to achieve consensus. But
their capacity to change things or take initiatives was weak. Economically and technologically ancient states were too feeble to give their chief executives much room for manoeuvre. Emperors were even worse off, since the size of their dominions meant it was very difficult to get reliable information on events happening far away, let alone to respond quickly. Emperors were forced to trust the generals, governors, and viceroys on the ground. Even at the centre of power the rituals of court and the intrigues of courtiers limited the emperors’ initiative. The idea of the impotent king at the centre of a vast palace, utterly dependent on his slaves, eunuchs, ministers, and courtiers, is a romantic one, but it is not completely misleading.

More recently a third way of looking at the role of emperors has become popular. Emperors and kings, in this idea, are important as symbolic centres, as embodied focuses of ideological power.
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The person of the emperor, sometimes even his body, represented the empire in a way that abstractions and institutions cannot. The religious dimensions are again obvious, but there are other elements too. As embodied symbols, emperors were more portable than ruling cities or monumental temples. Emperors could travel around their vast domains. Chinese emperors travelled constantly to participate in rituals at particular shrines.
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Macedonian monarchs often began their reign by visiting their armies and taking personal command of them.
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Even when the emperor was not physically present, his image and his name might be set up everywhere. Each pharaoh had his own cartouche, a hieroglyphic name enclosed in a lozenge-like shape, and it appeared on monuments all over the kingdom. Embodied authority offered other potentials for veneration. Imperial birthdays might be celebrated, and the rites of passage of other members of the imperial family. The notion of imperial families could easily be extended into imperial lineages and belief in the distinctiveness of royal blood. Ceremonial easily drifted into taboos on touching, addressing, looking at, or turning one’s back on the imperial presence. Some emperors were believed to have the capacity to heal certain illnesses. It was believed medieval Byzantine emperors had to be physically whole, with the result that deposing an emperor was often followed by blinding and castration. Underlying all this was the idea that the emperor’s body was something concrete and visible, unlike the empire as a whole.

All these ideas—the emperor as decision-maker, the capstone monarch, and the embodied presence—are helpful when it comes to thinking about the Roman emperor. Roman emperors did indeed resolve conflicts between
Senate and people, if only by giving the latter bread and circuses and taking away their power to vote. More significantly, promotion into the various orders, appointment to magistracies and military commands, governorships, and priesthoods were all decided, or at least heavily influenced, by the emperors. Emperors managed the economy of honours, and were the ultimate patrons. Emperors were judges, made decisions over diplomatic matters and over the finances of the empire as whole. Even in the first century
AD
, the Senate was involved in almost none of these decisions.
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Equally, there was a sense in which the emperor was often more reactive than proactive, rather as the notion of capstone monarch implies.
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How far this is true in the case of Rome is a matter of fierce debate. Some historians see emperors as forever on the back foot, responding to requests more than issuing orders, limited by the enormous time it took to communicate with distant provinces, and by an imperial budget in which army pay swallowed around three-quarters of the total tax revenue. Other historians point to figures like Trajan, who did initiate major new campaigns in central Europe and a great war with Persia, or Vespasian and his sons who remodelled the city of Rome after the dreadful fire of Nero’s reign. Romans themselves certainly thought it mattered who was on the throne, and a good deal of effort was expended in trying to remove tyrants. Why bother if they were too weak to matter? Some of this is a matter of perspective, of course. Tyranny was most acute at home: maybe from the provinces tyrants and good emperors looked much the same. No one doubts that early empires were slow-moving enterprises, oil tankers rather than speedboats. Perhaps the best answer is that the Roman Empire was never easy to steer, and it was all too easy for weak rulers to allow ritual and routine and their closest courtiers to run the empire. That has certainly been true in other monarchies.
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But some Roman emperors certainly ruled as well as reigned.

As for the emperor as an embodiment of empire, we find him everywhere. The names and images of the emperors were inserted into public ceremonies all over the Roman world.
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Annual festivals of the imperial cult, conducted by priests wearing images of the emperor on their crowns, were just the most prominent version of this. Gods shared their temples with the emperor, allowed his statues to join theirs on processions, and his name was incorporated into prayers and hymns.
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Emperors’ faces were present in many other buildings. The city of Sardis in western Turkey built a vast gymnasium and bathhouse in the centre of the city, a monument to civic culture and civilized values. One room was devoted to portrait busts of the emperors. Coins from all over the empire, both the gold and silver issued by imperial mints, and the bronze change occasionally produced in Greek cities, bore images of emperors. Some even referred to key events, like a visit (an
adventus
) paid to the city in question. Armies too paid cult on the birthday of the emperor, kept his image with their standards, and celebrated the anniversaries of imperial princes. Over time more and more ceremonial surrounded the imperial presence. By the fourth century it was a special privilege to be allowed to kiss the hem of his purple robe.

Fig 14.
The Roman ceremony of the Adventus depicted on a coin