Rome: An Empire's Story (38 page)

War on Two Fronts

The task of restoring normal relations with the northern peoples was conducted in deadly counterpart with a deterioration of relations on the eastern front. It is common to blame this on the appearance of a new Persian dynasty, the Sassanians, in 226
AD
and the aggression of the Emperor Shapur (241–72), who fought several wars against Rome, defeated the Emperor Philip in 240, seized the city of Antioch in 256, and captured and executed the Emperor Valerian in 260. But the Romans bore some responsibility for all this. Again the story can be traced back to the 160s. After Trajan’s conquest and Hadrian’s withdrawal from his new province of Mesopotamia there had been peace with the Parthians until the joint reign of Marcus and Lucius, when Roman armies once again invaded Persia, without much provocation.
²³
Severus did the same a couple of decades later. Roman aggression did a good deal to destabilize the Parthian dynasty, creating an opportunity for the Sassanian takeover. It is difficult to tell now whether Persia exploited Rome’s difficulties in the north or vice versa or whether the security system of the early Roman Empire was simply incapable of dealing with threats on so many fronts.

What is clear is that the inability of the emperors to defend the great cities and unarmed provinces of the interior of the empire led to a crisis in their legitimacy. One index of failure was that in the period 235–84 more than twenty emperors reigned. The exact number depends on how many rebels are considered as short-lived rulers. A second index of failure was geographical fragmentation. Local rulers, client kings, and army commanders took over responsibility for protecting their immediate localities. When Aurelian came to power in 270, most of Gaul, Spain, and Germany had been ruled from the Rhineland for over a decade, and the monarchs of the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria controlled much of the Near East, even including Alexandria. Usurpations had been attempted in Africa, on the Danube, in Egypt, and in Asia Minor. Successful and unsuccessful usurpers alike were drawn from the military classes, their links to their armies personal and contingent on their continued success. Civil war and failure at the frontiers fed off each other. Only military success could restore legitimacy and reverse the fragmentation of authority. Valerian’s son Gallienus (253–68) achieved some external successes. Aurelian (270–5), who had expelled the Iuthungi from Italy, went on regain control of Egypt (272), to suppress the secessions led by Palmyra (273) and the emperors of Trier (274). His successors inflicted more defeats on the Germans. Carus finally carried the Persian war into Mesopotamia and captured the Persian capital Ctesiphon. He died on campaign in 283 and his successor Numerian withdrew, but within a year he had been replaced by Diocletian, who ruled until his abdication in 305. During his long reign he too fought on the Danube and against Persia, and had to assert his power in Egypt and against rebels in the west. He left behind a completely reorganized Roman Empire. The period from the end of the Severan dynasty in 235 to the accession of Diocletian in 284 is sometimes known as the Anarchy. Any ‘crisis’ that lasts for half a century would inflict a huge cost on institutions. Diocletian’s empire did indeed need a new coinage, a new taxation system, and a new administration as well as a new military system. Under Constantine it acquired a new capital and a new religion too. But the late Roman Empire was not created in a revolution. Well before Diocletian’s reign a new ideal of the emperor had emerged, crowding out the productions of senatorial historians and Greek panegyrists. This emperor was a soldier rather than a fellow citizen, and he was surrounded by spectacular ceremonial and ferocious justice.

For us, looking back with hindsight, the most amazing aspect of this story is not that the crisis occurred, but that the empire survived it at all. The energy of the soldier emperors was clearly one factor, but there were other
sources of strength not appreciated at the time. Consider, for example, the commitment of the empire’s elite to its continued existence. The ‘Gallic emperors’ who controlled Gaul, and at times the Spanish and British provinces, between 260 and 274 are a case in point. The main figures, Postumus, Victorinus, and Tetricus I, were all soldiers and all apparently descended from rich local families. Their support was drawn from both local nobles and the army of the Rhine. Their ‘empire’ originated in a revolt against Gallienus, but its main efforts were directed at survival and the preservation of vested interests. Following the successes of first Claudius II and then Aurelian, provinces, cities, and then even the last of the emperors rejoined the central empire. Throughout the secession the political propaganda, known mainly through coinages, was utterly Roman. At the other end of the empire the fierce resistance put up by Greek cities drew on even older allegiances. Publius Herennius Dexippus, a historian who organized resistance at Athens, presented his efforts as just the latest episode in a long history of Athenian resistance to the barbarian. The survival of these allegiances is impressive testimony to the durability of the identities created in the early empire. The empire survived because, when it seemed about to come apart, the ruling classes and many of its subjects
chose
to participate in its rescue.

Further Reading

The evolution of the Roman military machine is surveyed in a number of essays in the second volume of the
Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare
(Cambridge, 2007) edited by Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby. Adrian Goldsworthy’s
Roman Army at War
(Oxford, 1996) is a lively account of how it worked in practice. The evolution of a stable frontier, and its social and economic consequences, is the subject of C. R. Whittaker’s
Frontiers of the Roman Empire
(Baltimore, 1994). Debate still largely responds to Edward Luttwak’s controversial but stimulating
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire
(Baltimore, 1976). A good selection of these responses is included in John Rich and Graham Shipley’s collection
War and Society in the Roman World
(London, 1993). Benjamin Isaac’s
Limits of Empire
(Oxford, 1990) discusses the role of Roman armies in controlling the provincial populations they claimed to protect.

The complex history of the third-century crisis is covered in the usual reference works, but there is a particular good account in David Potter’s
The Roman Empire at Bay
(London, 2004). A good sense of what historians are arguing about at the moment is given by the collection
Crises and the Roman Empire
(Leiden, 2007) edited by Olivier Hekster, Gerda de Kleijn, and Danielle Slootjes.

XIV
IMPERIAL IDENTITIES

Once upon a time Kings ruled this City, but they were not fated to have home-grown successors. Outsiders took over their rule, foreigners in fact, for when Numa succeeded Romulus he came from the Sabine lands—not far away to be sure, but it made him a foreigner in those days. When Tarquin the Elder succeeded Ancus Marcius, well he was of mixed race, for his father was Demaratus the Corinthian, while his mother was born in Etruscan Tarquinii. She was not a wealthy women, as you might imagine given she had agreed to such an inferior marriage, and for that reason he was unable to hold office at home. But he migrated to Rome, and here was made king.

(From a speech of Claudius inscribed on bronze,
ILS
212)

Desperately Seeking the Romans

The Emperor Claudius’ speech to the Senate in
AD
48 proposed opening up membership of the Senate to the wealthiest and most noble citizens of the provinces of Gaul. Part of his words are preserved on a bronze tablet at Lyon, and Tacitus records the resentment the proposal aroused among senators.
¹
Fear that admitting new blood might dilute national identity is all too familiar today. Claudius’ appeal to an ancient tradition of inclusiveness maybe did not convince, but then he was an emperor and did not need to. But he was correct that Roman identity was in flux right from the very beginning.

It is impossible to write an account of the Roman Empire without lapsing into writing about the ‘Romans’, as if it is obvious who should be included in that term. But it is surprisingly difficult to answer the simple question ‘Who were the Romans?’

Formal answers exist, of course. If we were to apply strict legal criteria we would have to focus on Roman citizens.
²
But the nature and composition of that group was repeatedly transformed, as Rome grew from a conventional city-state, with its assemblies, taxation, and armies all based on citizenship, into a Mediterranean power composed of different kinds of imperial subjects. En route we would need to consider the citizens of the middle Republic, concentrated in Rome, but with a penumbra of citizen colonies up and down the peninsula; then Italy after the Social War in which almost all free people were citizens; then the situation in the early empire when citizenship was acquired by various privileged groups, including provincial aristocrats and auxiliary veterans; and finally the Roman world after Caracalla’s Edict by which citizenship was generalized, a world in which most people were citizens and yet the status was strangely still valued.
³

It would also be necessary to factor in peculiarities such as the Roman habit of extending citizenship to many former slaves, and also a range of ‘half citizens’, most of them termed ‘Latins’ of one kind or another. That title was extended from its original sense of citizens of other Latin states, first to members of the Latin colonies, founded by Rome in Italy in the middle Republican period, and filled with a mixture of settlers drawn from Romans and allies; then to citizens of certain provincial communities granted the Latin right in a series of regional grants beginning in Caesar’s day; and also to a different category of freedmen who were not fully citizens and were known as Junian Latins (after the
Lex Iunia
which created the status). Other Mediterranean citizenships were drawn into the system: within the astonishingly complex society of Roman Egypt, Alexandrine citizens meant not just citizens of the provincial capital but also a status group treated as halfway between other Egyptians and Romans. Multiple citizenships were absolutely normal too, not just in Cicero’s sense that he had two homelands—Arpinum and Rome—but also in the sense that many provincial communities had come to allow dual citizenship, and had also created half-citizenships of their own, giving resident aliens a range of rights and obligations. Some of these grants were privileges, others devices designed to make sure the ever more mobile propertied classes did not evade local obligations either where they lived or where they were born.
⁴

Nor were all citizens equal. There were experiments in the Republican period with creating citizens without the vote. The traditional assemblies were in any case organized in complex ways that gave more weight to the votes of those in higher census categories than to others. Freedmen could vote, but in many cities were not allowed to hold office or become members of the most senior councils. Women of all social statuses faced strict limits on how far they could exercise citizen rights. The wives and daughters of Roman citizens could confer citizenship on their male children, but their political participation was effectively zero, very few had financial autonomy or could make independent use of the law, and their roles in ritual—if often prominent—were always subordinated to the authority of male priests. Many of the things that defined the role of citizen in Republican Rome—including voting, fighting, sacrificing, being taxed, taking public contracts, and being counted in the census—never applied to women. The crucial point is that Romans did not use citizenship as a way of creating a hard boundary between themselves and aliens. Instead they used the language of citizenship to express a set of statuses and relationships through which individuals might be involved in the community in different ways, and also to various degrees.

Other ways existed to mark the boundaries. Romans were often contrasted to barbarians, especially in imperial propaganda. A common coin type of the second century depicted a mounted emperor trampling down a cowering barbarian. More elaborate developments of these motifs appear on monuments such as Trajan’s Column. Roman literature also displays a rich harvest of xenophobic and racist stereotyping, a legacy presumably of traditions of invective that were so central to Roman oratory.
⁵
Then again, scholars writing in Latin since Cicero’s day differentiated between the writings of the Greeks and those of
nostri
, which literally means ‘our people’. Tacitus does this describing writers who had dealt with Britain before he did, and Pliny the Elder added a list of sources for each book of his
Natural History
divided into Roman and foreign authorities. The arrangement was replicated in Roman libraries where Greek and Latin books seem, in theory at least, to have been shelved separately. Roman priests also traditionally distinguished a bundle of cults considered of alien origin as needing to be celebrated ‘with Greek rituals’: in fact, the rituals were nothing of the kind, but the idea of a difference evidently mattered.
⁶

The distinctions between Romans and others probably mattered most
inside
provincial societies. Metal detector users in southern Spain have found
a number of fragments of bronze tablets that record constitutions granted local communities by the emperors in the late first century
AD
.
⁷
These Latin
municipia
must have been strange worlds, in some ways miniatures of Rome with councils, collegiate magistracies, priesthoods, gladiatorial
munera
, courts, and so on. One clause of this basic law stipulates that any gaps in its coverage should be dealt with as if the parties were Roman citizens. In fact, almost the only true Roman citizens were the magistrates, those who had been magistrates, and the descendants of those who had been magistrates: plus their ex-slaves of course!