Read Ancient Rome: An Introductory History Online

Authors: Paul A. Zoch

Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Rome, #test

Ancient Rome: An Introductory History (54 page)

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journal of inspirational thoughts, which shows a noble and humanitarian spirit grappling with life's problems and the purpose of existence. It is easy to understand why his
Meditations
became popular among Christians and was read by rulers of many countries over the centuries for its high principles and ennobling ideals.

Latin Literature of the Flavian and Antonine Eras

The literature of the time from the death of Nero to that of Marcus Aurelius shows some great talent at work, worthy of any age.

Quintilian (?30-?100) is said to have been the first rhetorician to receive a salary from the empire's treasury, in accordance with Vespasian's program of funding public education. Quintilian's
Institutio oratoria
, a treatise on the education of an orator, is the first book to discuss in detail the education of young people. The tenth book of the
Institutio
contains a critique of Greek and Roman writers.

Martial (40-104) wrote epigrams and short poems on a variety of subjects, usually concerning his own friends and enemies, and the foibles and vices of individuals in Roman society.

Of Juvenal's (?50-?128) work, sixteen satires survive. He attacked the vices of his agepursuit of wealth, decadence, immorality, love of luxuryin bitter invective. He is the author of the phrase "bread and circuses": "The citizens who once gave their leaders empire, fasces, legions, and all that, now keep to themselves and fervently and nervously wish for just two things, bread and circuses" (
Satires
X. 80).

Tacitus (b. ?56) is arguably ancient Rome's greatest historian, and one of the most distinctive stylists in Latin. His first work,
Dialogus de oratoribus
, written in a Ciceronian style, concerned the decline of oratory in Rome. His
Agricola
, which shows him developing his distinctive style, is a biography of his father-in-law, Gn. Julius Agricola, a general of the empire's army squashing a revolt in
Britain
. The
Getmania
is a description of the German peoples, in which Tacitus contrasts their savage nobility and honor with Rome's decadence and immorality. Tacitus' fame rests, however, on

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his
Annals
and
Histories
, of which large fragments survive. In the
Annals
we read the brilliant descriptions of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero (some of which have been quoted in earlier chapters of this book); unfortunately, the section on Caligula is lost, along with part of the section on Claudius and Nero's last year. What survives of the
Histories
covers the period of the civil wars following Nero's death through 71. Tacitus hated the principate and especially the despotic Domitian, and his distinctive stylejarring and abruptreveals his hatred.

Tacitus' friend Pliny the Younger (61-112) wrote hundreds of letters on various topics. They are not private letters, for he fully intended for them to be published. Among them one finds letters describing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the treatment of Christians (as governor of the province Bithynia, Pliny had asked Trajan for official instructions on what to do about them), a cruel father, cruel masters, Roman society, and the tragic death of a friend's twelve-year-old daughter.

Suetonius (b. 69) is a historian, but of a very different stamp from Tacitus. Suetonius was a secretary of sorts in the palace during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, and undoubtedly used his access to the palace to search out juicy gossip and dirt about the emperors for his book
De vita Caesarum
. He also wrote
De viris illustribus
, which includes some information on the lives of some Latin writers. (Suetonius, too, has been quoted in this book.)

Apuleius (b. 123) wrote the only Latin novel that has survived intact,
Metamorphoses
(generally translated as
The Golden Ass
). The main character is turned into an ass and goes through many adventures before being restored to human form by the goddess Isis. The novel contains the famous love story of Cupid and Psyche.

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Afterword
The Disintegration of the Empire

Commodus (ruled
A.D.
180-192), Aurelius's son, failed to complete the annexation of Germany. In a way, Commodus out-Neroed Nero: He had three hundred concubines, one of whom he named after his mother, and he killed his sister. Upon his murder in 192, M. Helvidius Pertinax became emperor (192-193), but was quickly assassinated; how the next emperor gained the position is particularly noteworthy. The practice of buying the support of the Praetorian Guard reached a new level when the soldiers offered the position of emperor to the highest bidder; the buyer was M. Didius Julianus, who was assassinated two months later, on June 1, 193. Septimius Severus (193-211), who was born in Lepcis Magna in Africa, next became emperor and restored order to the empire; his arch still stands in Rome as a monument to his victories over the Parthians. Upon his death in 211, he was succeeded by his sons, M. Aurelius Antoninus (better known by his nickname, Caracalla) and L. Septimius Geta, who hated each other; Caracalla killed his brother in 212 and became sole ruler. That same year he gave citizenship to all free men in the empire. He was murdered in 217.

The empire suffered much during the third century as one man, after becoming emperor, would have to fend off numerous other contenders for the royal power. Hence, there were many emperors during the course of the century. On April 21, 247, during the reign of Philip the Arab (so called because he came from the Saudi peninsula), Rome celebrated its one-thousandth birthday. The failure to solve the problem of the Germans and the Parthians caused a major crisis in the 250s, when the Germans swarmed

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Arch of Septimius Severus. (Author photograph)

over the Danube and Rhine Rivers. The Goths also made raids in the Aegean Sea. In the East the Parthians took over Syria. Emperor Valerian attacked Parthia, but was conquered and captured in 260; he died in captivity. In 268 the Germanic tribe the Alamanni ravaged Italy. Emperor Claudius II Gothicus freed northern Italy from the Germans, and the provinces were regained.

One of the territories his successor Aurelian (270-275) regained is particularly noteworthy: the city of Palmyra (today, Tadmur in Syria). Odaenathus, a nobleman of Palmyra, became king of the city when Valerian was captured, and he successfully waged war against the Parthians. He and his son were murdered in 267, perhaps by his wife, Zenobia, who with her other son Vaballathus assumed power and expanded Palymra's rule to include Egypt and much of Asia Minor. Not until she proclaimed Vaballathus Augustusthat is, emperordid Aurelian move against her, and he conquered her in 273.

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The reign of Diocletian (284-305) marks a new stage in the government of the empire. Recognizing that the empire and its military demands (created by fronts along the Rhine, Danube, and Tigris and Euphrates) presented too great a task for one man, Diocletian in 293 instituted his famous tetrarchy (rule of four). Bearing the title Augustus, he ruled the eastern part of the empire with the help of his assistant Galerius, who had the title Caesar; the Augustus in the western part of the empire was Maximian, and his Caesar was Constantius Chlorus. To reduce the danger of assassination and usurpations of imperial power, Diocletian also greatly increased the mystique of the emperor and made the principate's power and pomp more like that associated with Persian despots: People addressing the emperor first had to perform
proskynesis
, that is, lie down on the ground before the emperor and kiss the comer of his robe. Even members of the emperor's council and family had to stand in his presence.
Dominus
(lord) became the regular word of address to the emperor, who now wore a diadem and purple gown. The tetrarchy reestablished peace and stability, but the unity of the system suffered when Diocletian retired.

Constantine (324-337), the son of Constantius Chlorus, became sole emperor in 324 and moved the capital of the empire to the Greek city Byzantium, which he later named after himself (Constantinople). His reason for moving the capital was strategic and only sensible, as Italy had for long been declining in the importance of the empire: The constant warfare shifted attention to the Rhine, Danube, and Tigris and Euphrates, far away from central Italy. Constantine, in fact, had been emperor for ten years before he visited Rome for the first time. In the Edict of Milan (313) he granted the Christians full religious freedom, and in 325, at the Council of Nicaea (from which came also Christianity's Nicene Creed), he made Christianity the official religion of the empire. His decision to have the empire embrace Christianity was based on a personal experience: Before the battle at the Milvian bridge (one of the battles that secured his position as emperor), he had seen a cross in the sky with the words, "In hoc signo vinces" (With this as your standard, you will conquer). Officially, Christianity faced no competition from other religions after 391, when the emperor Theodosius (379-395) banned all

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pagan religions; worship of the pagan gods continued, however, in the villages (
pagus
, hence the English word
pagan
).

Social and political conditions in the empire were changing. As the emperor's power grew increasingly autocratic, the Senate's power decreased; all the provinces, for example, were now imperial, and the Senate exerted no control over them. The Praetorian Guard, however, gained much power at the Senate's expense, including the power to legislate, pass judgment in court, and hear appeals. Citizens were now grouped into two classes,
honestiores
(more honorable) and
humiliores
(more lowly born), and there was separate legal treatment for each: A crime that would cause a member of the
humiliores
to be punished with death, for example, earned one of the
honestiores
only banishment. To support the royal court and constant military expenditure, taxes were so high that many peasants fled to the barbarian lands, rather than be slaves to the empire. To prevent further flight from the empire and the consequent loss of income from taxes, the emperor created a law binding peasants to the soil and allowing the landlords to chain those whom they suspected would flee; this was the legal basis of serfdom in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, people were bound by law to follow in the occupation of their father.

In 364 the Roman Empire was permanently divided between East and West by the co-emperors Valentinian (364-375) and Valens (364-378). The empire in the East developed into what is now called the Byzantine Empire; it flourished and preserved the Roman Empire in the East until it was sacked in 1453 by Muhammed II, the Ottoman sultan.

The Roman Empire in the West did not fare so happily, for it suffered from more Germanic invasions. Britain was abandoned by the empire after 410, cutting short the Romanization of the island. Most of Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa was taken over by the Germans. In 410 the Visigothic chieftain Alaric sacked the city of Rome. In 475 the general Orestes proclaimed his son, Romulus Augustulus, to be emperor; the death of the empire occurred the next year when Orestes was murdered and his son was deposed by the German Odoacer, the first of the German kings of Italy.

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Bibliography

The bibliography includes those works that had a significant influence on the scholarship in this book. Included are the editions of the original Latin and Greek texts that I used for my translations, as well as the English translations of other works to which I also referred.

Primary Sources

Aurelius, Marcus.
The Communings with Himself
. Translated by C. R. Haines. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930.

Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, ed.
Cicero's Letters to Atticus
, vols. 2 and 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965 and 1968.

Birley, Anthony, trans.
Lives of the Later Caesars
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1976.

Brunt, P. A., and J. M. Moore, eds.
Res gestae divi Augusti
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Caesar, Julius.
The Gallic War
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Caesar, Julius.
Libri III de bello civili
. Edited by Renatus de Pontet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Cicero, M. Tullius.
Epistulae ad familiares, vol. 1
. Edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Cicero, M. Tullius.
Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem et M. Brutum
. Edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cicero, M. Tullius.
Philippics
. Translated and edited by Walter C.A. Ker. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.

Dio Cassius.
Dio's Roman History
, vols. 1-9. Translated by Earnest Cary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

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