Rome: An Empire's Story (4 page)

Writing the history of the late empire has always proved difficult. At first the problem was the rival viewpoints of pagans and Christians, after
Constantine I (306 to 337) replaced persecution with toleration and then began to patronize the Church on a grand scale. All his successors were Christians except for one, Julian, who tried to reverse Constantine’s reform in his brief reign (361–3). By the end of the century, general toleration had been replaced by attacks on the temples of polytheists, and emperors devoted more and more of their energy to the fight against heresy. Enough influential polytheists survived to blame the new religion for the disasters of the fifth century. Our historical sources are bitterly divided. Then there is the problem of hindsight. How can we ignore the fact that the loss of Trajan’s Dacian provinces was just the first of many losses of territory that saw Britain and northern Gaul slip out of Roman control in the mid-fifth century and the replacement of the last western emperor by a series of barbarian kings before 500?

Nevertheless the fourth century was in some senses an optimistic era, one that saw a partial recovery of intellectual life, much building (if now of churches and palaces rather than the traditional monuments of the classical city), and in the east some real prosperity. Even when a great group of Ostrogoths was allowed to cross the Danube in 376, Romans could reasonably remember other peoples settled inside the empire as allies. But the defeat of the eastern army by the Goths in 378 at the battle of Adrianople set in motion a set of migrations and diplomatic manoeuvres that led within a century to the total loss of the west. From the early fifth century new groups entered the empire, seeking their own share of territory, settlement as ‘guests’ of Rome, and perhaps sometimes safety from their own enemies, like the ferocious Huns. Rome itself was sacked twice, first by the Goths in 410 and then again by the Vandals in 455. The last emperor in the west was deposed in 476, although perhaps it did not seem a watershed at the time. By
AD
500 the Vandals ruled a kingdom based on Carthage, the Visigoths and Sueves controlled Spain and Gaul, Burgundians and Franks the rest of what is now France, and an Ostrogothic King ruled in the former imperial capital of Milan. The eastern emperors—bankrupt, without an army and preoccupied with Persia—had to acquiesce. So too did Roman elites stranded, as it were, behind enemy lines. For a few generations, Roman bishops and intellectuals served the new kings of the west, helping to create societies in which Romans and barbarians divided up roles and their wealth. Archaeological evidence shows quite clearly that trade across the Mediterranean was not severely disrupted, and in some areas urban life and even Latin literature thrived. The rulers of these kingdoms were Christians
(if mostly Arian heretics in the eyes of eastern Roman bishops). Most attempted to preserve elements of Roman civilization, even rebuilding Roman monuments and intermarrying with Roman aristocratic families. Most relied on Roman bureaucrats to manage the complex fiscal systems they had inherited, preserving their warbands as an army to defend their acquisitions. Their kings lived in Roman palaces in the major cities of their realms, they issued coinage with Latin legends, devised law codes, and some even watched gladiatorial games.

Then, in the early sixth century, the eastern empire struck back. During Justinian’s reign (527–65) his generals snatched Africa from the Vandals, and fought a long and damaging war up and down Italy culminating in the end of the Ostrogothic kingdom. Visigothic Spain was invaded. At Constantinople, great building projects were undertaken, a huge codification of Roman civil law was carried out, and administrative reforms put into place. (The complaints of one senior bureaucrat, John the Lydian, show how the ‘new’ bureaucracy created by Diocletian and Constantine was now regarded by its members as a set of ancient and venerable institutions!) For a generation, a Mediterranean Roman Empire seemed reborn. Then it folded up again. The Lombards invaded Italy, the Franks expanded their power, and, except for a foothold around Ravenna, Roman territory was confined to North Africa and Sicily. Meanwhile, the emperors were once again locked into war with Persia. The Persian Emperor Khusrau II swept back over the Syrian frontier once again and this time captured Jerusalem. Persian forces raided north into Anatolia and south-west into Egypt, where Alexandria fell in 619. The emperors could do little to help because the invasion coincided with an invasion from the north-west by the Avars. Constantinople, under siege from both sides, could well have fallen in 626. A new emperor, Heraclius, managed to pay off the Avars, defeat the Persians, and carry war to their own capitals in southern Mesopotamia. Humiliated by defeat, Khusrau was assassinated in 628. Heraclius triumphed in Jerusalem and Constantinople.

And then the world changed. Among the many peoples drawn into the long Romano-Persian conflicts were the tribes of the Arabian peninsula. In the process they had developed considerable military experience and knowledge of both sides, but it was the religious movement started by the Prophet Muhammad that galvanized them into concerted action. At the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, the Roman forces suffered a devastating defeat. By 642 Egypt, Syria, and Palestine were all under Arab rule and would never be
recovered. The empire had shrunk to a third of its size, a Balkan state with territory in western Anatolia and some distant western provinces, most of which it would lose as the Arab armies moved westward across North Africa and up into Spain, and as they mastered the sea. Cut off from the grain of Egypt, the urban population of Constantinople plummeted. The Persians were not so lucky. They too suffered a devastating defeat in 636, at Qadisyya. Their capital, Ctesiphon, was occupied the next year. The last remnant of the army was destroyed in 642 at the battle of Nihavand, and their last emperor perished, on the run, in 651.

Fixing the end of the Roman Empire is not easy. Certainly those emperors who defended Constantinople when the Arabs besieged it in 717 considered themselves Romans. So too did their successors right up until Constantinople finally did succumb, not to Arabs but to Turks, in the fifteenth century. We do not have to agree with them, but any other date we pick is arbitrary. Much of Roman and of Persian civilization did survive the Arab conquest. The cities of Syria flourished under the caliphate, and the tax systems of Khusrau II had an afterlife in Iran, just as Roman ones did in the barbarian kingdoms of the west. Charlemagne the Frank dreamt of becoming Roman emperor, and in 800 his dream came true in a ceremony conducted in Rome by Pope Leo III. Does Byzantium have a special claim to be more of an heir to Rome than either western Christendom or medieval Islam? I am not sure that it does, and so for me, the story of the Roman Empire ends here.

Further Reading

Many excellent narrative accounts of Roman history exist. My short list of favourites is the following. Two very good and recent ones are Simon Price and Peter Thonemann’s
The Birth of Classical Europe
(London, 2010) and Chris Wickham’s
The Inheritance of Rome
(London, 2009), respectively the first and second volumes of the Penguin History of Europe. Two excellent guides to social and economic history for at least part of the period are Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller,
The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, Culture
(London, 1987) and Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress,
The Evolution of the Late Antique World
(Cambridge, 2001). Michael Crawford’s
The Roman Republic
(London, rev. edn. 1992) is a model of how Roman history can and should be written, argumentatively and based on every available kind of evidence from archaeology, coins, and inscriptions to contemporary documents and later literature.

II
EMPIRES OF THE MIND

Then Romulus, proudly clad in the tawny pelt of the she-wolf who nursed him, will ensure the future of the race, will found the martial walls and from his own name call them
ROMANS
. I have fixed no boundaries to their dominions, no fixed term to their rule, I have given them
EMPIRE WITHOUT END
. Even harsh Juno, who at present fills land and sea and sky with fear, will in the end think better of them, and at my side will show her favour to the Romans, masters of the world, the people of the toga. This has been decreed.

(Virgil,
Aeneid
1.275–83)

Empire came to bewitch the Roman imagination. Ours too. Every study of ancient Rome, whether of its love poetry or festivals, its monumental art or the routines of the family, now invokes empire as one—sometimes as
the
— crucial context. But what they understood and we understand by ‘empire’ is not always the same thing. This chapter explores some of different senses of empire that are entwined at the heart of our stories of Rome.

An Imperial People

Sometimes it feels as if empire was written into Roman DNA. The Romans of the classical period definitely believed something like this. When epic
poets or historians imagined the very earliest days of the city’s history, they pictured it as already fixed on a course for greatness. The coming of empire was the central theme of the
Aeneid
, a great epic poem composed by Virgil in the court of Augustus.
¹
The epigraph of this chapter is taken from Jupiter’s prophecy of Rome’s future greatness that stands near the start of that epic. If at first it was designed to serve the immediate political needs of the poet and his patron, it had a much more influential afterlife. The
Aeneid
was the starting point of education in Italy and the western provinces for centuries to come. It occupied a place in Roman culture much like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution do in America, or Shakespeare does in Britain. Constantly quoted and instantly recognizable, lines of the
Aeneid
are even ubiquitous as graffiti across the empire. Most come from the first book of the epic, suggesting most pupils did not get very far. But the children of provincial notables will have read Jupiter’s famous lines as they struggled to learn Latin, and in the process learnt what it was to be Roman too.

The
Aeneid
does not tell the story of Augustus’ rise to power, nor even of Rome’s conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean. Instead, the story is set in the heroic age, the period immediately following that of Homer’s two great Greek epics, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. It tells how Prince Aeneas led a band of refugees away from the blazing ruin of Troy, after it had been sacked by the Greeks. The first six books follow their wanderings further and further west, driven first by fear, then drawn on by destiny into a strange and strangely modern new world. Monsters, hostile natives, and angry gods try to frustrate their journey. Then there are temptations along the way. No berth is more alluring than Carthage, which the Trojans find under construction, and ruled by Dido, the beautiful Phoenician queen and another refugee from the eastern Mediterranean. Of course Dido and Aeneas fall in love, and of course their love is doomed: this is, after all, epic not romance, although it takes Aeneas a while to realize it. For the gods have a plan, and the plan is Rome. Aeneas leads his men, his father and his son, and the sacred cult objects of Troy to the coast of Latium in central Italy. There war, prophecy, and marriage will eventually allow them to settle in the town of Alba Longa. From there, Aeneas’ distant descendant—Romulus—will set out to found the city.

Aeneas was the son of a goddess, Venus, worshipped in Rome as Venus Genetrix, Venus our Ancestor. Julius Caesar built a temple to her at the heart of the new forum he paid for from the spoils of the Gallic War. After his assassination, his heir, the future Emperor Augustus, completed the project. The temple was finished not long before the composition of the
Aeneid
. Both of these monumental works mark stages in the process by which a single authorized version of Roman history was created out of a mass of contradictory traditions. One reason for this was the shift from a Republican form of government to a monarchy. Many traditions were linked to particular families, but now one family dominated the city. Julius Caesar, and so Augustus too, claimed to be direct descendants of Aeneas and Venus. Another reason was that Roman historians had only just begun to construct a reliable chronology of their own past. Scholars of the last generation of the free Republic, including Cicero’s friends Varro, Nepos, and Atticus, had worked hard to correlate events in Roman tradition and the datelines established by Greek historians. Their conclusions—although often based on what to us seem like very shaky arguments—were never seriously challenged in antiquity. It was more important that Rome had a genuine and agreed history, than that it was the right one. Augustus was equally concerned to fix the past. The historian Livy dryly records how Augustus himself engaged in research in ancient history to establish that no subordinate officer could be awarded the exceptional honour of the
spolia opima
awarded only to a general who killed his opponent in single combat.
²
Less controversially, great bronze tablets were set up recording the
fasti
, the exact sequence of consuls from the start of the Republic to the present day. The consuls were the pair of annual magistrates after which each year was traditionally named. Caesar and Augustus promoted research into the calendar, and published it.
³

Fig 1.
The Prima Porta Augustus displayed in the Braccio Nuovo new wing of Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy

Fixed by Homer’s epic at the end of the heroic age, Aeneas lived far too early to found the city of Rome himself. Greek scholars had calculated that Troy had fallen in 1183
BC
while the date of the foundation of Rome was calculated as 753
BC
. That left quite a gap. But Virgil’s epic allowed Aeneas several visions of the future—Virgil’s present that is—as an imperial age in which, under Augustus’ rule, the Romans would rule the world according to the decrees of Jupiter. Most impressive was a descent into the Underworld where Aeneas’ dead father showed him the great Romans of history, waiting to be born, and gave him hints of their fates. Aeneas also took a trip up the Tiber to visit the future site of the city of Rome, still a pastoral idyll and settled by yet other refugees from the east, Greeks from Arcadia this time, who told him the story of how Hercules had passed by that very spot and defeated the terrifying monster Cacus there. Virgil wove together the many legends of ancient Rome, making out of them a narrative that could only culminate in Augustus.