Rome: An Empire's Story (5 page)

The foundation of the city of Rome itself was left to one of Aeneas’ descendants, Romulus, who with his brother Remus was the son of a princess of Aeneas’ line and also of the god Mars, conveniently giving the Romans a second divine ancestor. When Augustus built his own forum and temple he dedicated the latter to Mars and set images of Venus, Mars, and Julius Caesar (now a god as well) on the pediment.
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Livy, who wrote not long after Virgil, opened his history
From the Foundation of the City
with the declaration that if any nation had the right to claim descent from Mars, the god of war, that nation was Rome.
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Romans found in the myths of early Rome more than
simply a justification for their current greatness. The story of how Romulus killed his brother because he dared step over the wall he had just built for the new city was understood as a sign that civil war too was written into the Roman psyche. The Rome of Augustus was, after all, in recovery from nearly a century of civil wars. When Virgil describes the Africans rising against Dido after she chose a foreign prince, the Italians attacking the Trojans when Aeneas won the hand of the local princess, or when Livy tells how Romulus supplied his followers with women by kidnapping the wives and daughters of the neighbouring Sabines, we can see how Romans sought an explanation for their own apparently ingrained traditions of violence.
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That darker investigation runs alongside the repeated retellings of how much it had cost to found the Roman state and fulfil the city’s divine destiny. The atrocities of the end of the Republic—with its riots, lynchings, and cold-blooded political murders—must have made it impossible to tell a convincing story of Rome only in terms of successive acts of heroism and piety.

Becoming Imperial

Myths of the deep past accumulated over time. Of course they were rewritten as Rome’s empire grew. If we compare stories like these to the foundation myths of other cities in the ancient Mediterranean, it becomes immediately clear that many of Rome’s traditions were not very unusual. A startling number of cities claimed descent from Trojan or Greek refugees.
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This was presumably because Homer’s epics had such great prestige, and because so little else was known about the early first millennium
BC
. Others claimed to be descended from wandering heroes, Hercules especially, but also Odysseus, Perseus, Antenor, and others. Most Greek colonies claimed divine sanction for their possession of the land, and the dispossession of the previous inhabitants. That sanction might take the form of signs, oracles, or miraculous events. Many paid cult to their founders, as the Romans in fact worshipped Romulus under the name Quirinus. Violent beginnings, battles with indigenous peoples, and marriages between incomers and native women, are also standard elements.
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Even the foundling turned founder has many parallels. Presumably these were the central elements of the first versions of Rome’s tales of origin. Only at a later stage can the prophecies have begun to include world dominion, and the legends started to explore the darker side of Roman nature.

Unfortunately, we know very little of how Romans thought about themselves before they became an imperial power. The first Latin literature was created at the end of the third century
BC
.
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By that time Rome was without question the major power in the western Mediterranean basin, and it had for generations dominated the Italian peninsula. The first Roman historians, Fabius Pictor writing in Greek and Cato the Elder in Latin, were already setting out to explain how Rome had overtaken Carthage. Fabius Pictor had taken part in the wars against the Gauls of north Italy in the late third century, and was one of a delegation of senior senators who visited the oracle at Delphi in Greece seeking advice after Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae in 216
BC
. Cato (234–149
BC
) saw the defeat of Hannibal, and also took part in the first wars against the great kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. His book of
Origins
was the product of combing Greek scholarship for information about the prehistory of the peoples of Italy. Most of what he gathered must have been foundation legends similar to that of Rome. Earlier Greek historians of the classical period knew a little about Rome; but not much of what they had to say has survived. Rome seems to spring into history fully formed as an imperial power, spectacularly aggressive, with institutions well developed for surviving occasional defeats and converting military victories into lasting political dominion.
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The Romans of this period already had a sense of their history as a rise to greatness. A contemporary of Cato, Quintus Ennius (239–169
BC
), wrote an epic poem that was in effect a history of Rome from the beginning until his own day. It was called the
Annales
, and was the basis of education in the late Republic in the same way the
Aeneid
was under the empire. Cicero adored it, but only fragments now survive. All the same we have a good sense of Ennius’ ‘plot’. The first three books told the story of Rome from the fall of Troy through the foundation of the city and the rule of its seven kings until the Republic was created. Then followed twelve books relating Rome’s wars against other Italian communities; against the Macedonian king Pyrrhus; against Carthage, culminating in the conquest of Greek cities in Italy and Sicily; and then the first wars in Spain; and those fought in the Balkans during the early second century
BC
against the great kingdoms of the east. Ennius then added three more books describing the victories of his patron, the general Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, whom he had accompanied on campaign in the northern Balkans in 189–188
BC
. On their return Nobilior built a great temple on the Field of Mars, one dedicated to Hercules and the Muses. A prototype of Augustus’
Fasti
was also displayed in it. From the
beginning, then, war and poetry went hand in hand. And Roman history
was
the history of Roman imperialism. Roman power was extended, just war by just war, until the entire sequence came to seem to have been sanctioned by the gods of Rome.
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Their favour could never be taken for granted, but through repeated acts of piety the Roman people retained the divine mandate. Triumph after triumph proclaimed the support of the gods.
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And while these epics and histories (and dramas too, although few have survived) were composed, the city itself became filled with victory temples, many vowed in battle and funded by the spoils donated by individual generals. The same generals decorated their own homes with trophies.

This then gives us a Roman sense of empire. The rule of one people, the people of the toga, over those whom they had defeated in war; a rule sanctioned by the gods of Rome as a mark of their favour for a people who were uniquely pious. Only in the last century of the Republic did Romans develop means of describing the great political entity they had created.
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Our term ‘empire’ derives from the Latin
imperium
. Its fundamental meaning was ‘command’, and right up until the end of the Republic, this remained its primary sense. As late as Julius Caesar’s day the word
imperator
(the origin of our ‘emperor’) simply meant a general, someone invested with command. Soldiers on a battlefield might chant out the title after a battle as a way to honour their commander.
Imperium
was a temporary power and a personal one, granted him with solemn rituals for the duration of one campaign. Stepping back inside the city, which he had to do if he wanted to celebrate a triumph, meant relinquishing this power. Augustus was the first who never relinquished it. One sense that
imperium
acquired only very late in the process was the total territory controlled by Rome. Augustus’ account of his own life, inscribed on pillars before his tomb and disseminated as copies throughout the empire, proclaimed world hegemony and made clear that allied states and defeated enemies were all subject to Rome’s command.

The Archetypal Empire

The modern idea of empire has its own history. Yet Rome has a key place in the history of this idea. The Romans created a set of ideas and symbols that exercised a fascination over many subsequent generations. Other empires had touched the Mediterranean world before Rome, most recently those of the Persians and of Alexander. But their repertoire of ceremonials,
titles, and images has had less of an afterlife, in part because Romans refused to acknowledge them as their equals, and invented their own language of world domination, in part because the Latin vocabulary of empire was the one adopted by later powers. The history of the idea of empire in the west is very largely the history of successive imitations of Rome. Each time Rome was copied, directly or indirectly, the idea of empire was modified. Yet Latin titles and imperial eagles lasted well into the twentieth century. ‘Empire’ plunges through European and finally world history, like a snowball rolling downhill.
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The Roman Empire had many imitators and would-be successors. The rulers of the medieval west lived among the ruins of Roman monuments. Roman coins were still to be found in the fields. Roman walls embraced the tiny towns of Europe, and the best roads remained for centuries those the Romans had built, roads that still crossed rivers on stone bridges that early medieval monarchs could not rival. Latin remained the main language of literature, and classical texts were widely read and treated with exaggerated awe. And knowing Rome was inseparable from knowing about its empire. When Frankish kings began to extend their power over other peoples, Rome was the only possible model. At the end of the twelfth century, the French king was nicknamed Philip Augustus, and his main rivals were the German emperor and the Angevin kings of England, who included lesser kings among their vassals. Emperor meant, for much of the Middle Ages, the supreme secular position of leadership. Ordinary kings ranked below him, popes on a par.

Besides, there were still live Roman emperors to admire and rival. They ruled in Constantinople on the Bosporus, the city we know as Istanbul and which had been Byzantium before. These emperors justifiably regarded themselves as Romans, the heirs of Justinian and Constantine at least as well as of their pagan predecessors. The language of their empire might now be Greek, and its domains had shrunk to the lands around the Aegean Sea, but the palace, the hippodrome, and the libraries of Byzantium, as well as the ceremonial and titulature of the court, proclaimed its authentic Roman imperial style. North and west of Byzantium a great penumbra of peoples were drawn into its cultural sphere. Viking adventurers travelled across the European rivers to Novgorod and then on to the city they called Miklagard, the Great City. One of them carved some runes, still visible today, into the balcony of the great imperial church of Haghia Sophia, built by the sixth-century emperor Justinian. Its dome provided the model for Islamic mosques,
themselves often built on the site of Roman temples or churches and often employing Roman columns in their construction. After the Fourth Crusade (1202–4) there were Frankish emperors in Byzantium for a while, briefly drawing the western and eastern traditions together. Even when the restored Greek emperors finally lost the city to the Turks in the fifteenth century there was no total rupture. Various princes took the opportunity to declare their own states a ‘Third Rome’: Moscow is the most famous. For a while there had in any case been a sultanate of Rûm ruling former Byzantine possessions in Asia Minor, and the Ottomans staged grand ceremonies in the hippodrome and worshipped in Haghia Sophia, now a mosque, just like their Christian predecessors. Roman political models had been less influential elsewhere in the Islamic world. Other aspects of Roman civilization periodically fascinated. The cities of Byzantine Syria had a brief period of prosperity after the Arab conquest. During the ninth century the Abbasid caliphs employed some of their Christian subjects to trawl Greek literature and translate whatever was valuable. Many medical texts and some works of philosophy have survived only in Arabic translation.
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Empire had lasting resonance, then, as a set of symbols. From our distant vantage point we can watch the baton being passed down, generation to generation. The predominant dynamic seems to have been competition. Charlemagne employed the language of empire to consolidate Frankish hegemony: he and the papacy also found it a helpful tool in keeping the Byzantine emperor at bay. Four centuries later the author of the
Chanson de Roland
imagined Charlemagne as a great proto-crusader, who at God’s command would defend Christendom against the
paien
(the pagan). A few of the medieval German emperors took up this challenge. But mostly they employed the title of emperor to express their sense of being at the pinnacle of a worldly hierarchy, overlords of prince-electors, petty kings, and free cities from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. During the three centuries in which the Hapsburg family provided Holy Roman Emperors, the imperial style was further elaborated in Spain, Austria, and Germany. The enduring power vested in these symbols is demonstrated by the decision of Napoleon to abolish the Holy Roman Empire, and to proclaim the first French empire in 1804. Austria responded by declaring the Austrian Empire the same year. Nineteenth-century France experienced an alternation of republics and empires. The second French Empire perished after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870: the German Empire was born the next year. The British Queen Victoria took the title Empress of India in 1876. The
nineteenth century saw brief New World empires established in Brazil, Haiti, and in Mexico. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted until 1918. The Russian tsars lost their empire just a year earlier: their title tsar (derived naturally from Caesar) can be tracked back in Slav languages as far as the rulers of tenth-century Bulgaria, some of Byzantium’s most formidable opponents. British monarchs retained the imperial title until 1948. The latest emperor in this tradition was Bokassa, who ruled the Central African Empire between 1976 and 1979.