Aspects of Roman History 31 BC-AD 117

Richard Alston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415611206
• eBook ISBN: 9781317976424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This new edition of Aspects of Roman History 31 BC- AD 117 provides an easily accessible guide to the history of the early Roman Empire. Taking the reader through the major political events of the crucial first 150 years of Roman imperial history, from the Empire's foundation under Augustus to the height of its power under Trajan, the book examines the emperors and key events that shaped Rome's institutions and political form. Blending social and economic history with political history, Richard Alston's revised edition leads students through important issues, introducing sources, exploring techniques by which those sources might be read, and encouraging students to develop their historical judgement.

The book includes:

• chapters on each of the emperors in this period, exploring the successes and failures of each reign, and how these shaped the empire,
• sections on social and economic history, including the core issues of slavery, social mobility, economic development and change, gender relations, the rise of new religions, and cultural change in the Empire,
• an expanded timeframe, providing more information on the foundation of the imperial system under Augustus and the issues relating to Augustan Rome,
• a glossary and further reading section, broken down by chapter.

This expanded and revised edition of Aspects of Roman History, covering an additional 45 years of history from Actium to the death of Augustus, provides an invaluable introduction to Roman Imperial history, surveying the way in which the Roman Empire changed the world and offering critical perspectives on how we might understand that transformation. It is an important resource for any student of this crucial and formative period in Roman history.

Chapter 1

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Rome before Augustus

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Introduction and issues

On 2nd September, 31 bc, the fate of the world was decided. Two fleets sailed into battle on a constricted stretch of sea between the Greek island of Lefkas and the straits of Actium in what is now Northern Greece. One fleet was led by Mark Antony and his wife and ally Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. The other fleet was commanded by C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, heir to his uncle Julius Caesar. Octavian was supported by his experienced admiral Vipsanius Agrippa.

Neither side appear to have been ready for war when it broke out in 32 bc. Antony and Cleopatra had gathered an impressive legionary and naval force to resist Octavian. They had assembled that force at Actium in Western Greece partly to oppose any attempt by Octavian to invade the East and partly as a launch pad for an invasion of Southern Italy. Yet, Antony and Cleopatra faced considerable logistical problems in gathering their forces from across the region while Agrippa and Octavian made use of their relative proximity to Greece to strike first. They created a beachhead in the North of Greece, at Paxos, and launched naval raids across the west coast of Greece. This military activity gave Agrippa and Octavian the advantage. They took control of the sea lanes and Agrippa was able to establish a naval base at Lefkas, modern Lefkada. Octavian meanwhile advanced to make camp north of the straits of Actium.

Antony and Cleopatra were encamped to the south of the straits. Actium had looked like a sensible base. It was a good harbour, safe from summer storms. But the land route to Actium was difficult, running over mountain ranges, and there were no major centres nearby to help organise supplies for the large number of troops that Antony had assembled. Cut off from the sea, Antony could not easily feed his troops. As spring turned to summer and the temperatures rose, hunger and disease gripped the troops. Antony's army started to die. Antony offered battle, but Octavian's troops were safe behind their defences and were well-provisioned. They were almost certainly informed about what was happening in Antony's camp. Strategically, they could wait for Antony's army to weaken.

Antony and Cleopatra needed to move. Potentially, they had two choices: they could burn their fleet and retreat over the difficult land route or they could attempt a naval breakout. In reality, however, they had no choice. The fleet was their major strategic asset. Fleets were expensive and time-consuming to equip and train. If they were to continue the war, Antony and Cleopatra would need to assemble reinforcements from across their territories and that would require a fleet. A naval battle was their best chance of escaping Actium and preserving their fleet was their only chance of winning the war. And so, they sailed out to battle with the strategic objective of escaping with as many of their ships intact as possible.

There is a peculiar feature of the summer weather on that part of the Greek coast. Although the day often dawns still, the wind tends to blow every afternoon before falling as the day nears its end. The fleet could not row to freedom, it needed to sail. But raising sail required the fleet to break formation and battle lines and make a dash for the open sea. The battle was, therefore, time limited. If Antony and Cleopatra could neither destroy their opponents nor fight their way through Octavian's and Agrippa's lines before mid-afternoon, the battle would be lost. At some point in the afternoon, Cleopatra and Antony thought they saw their opportunity. They raised sail and made their escape. The fleet dispersed to catch the wind and sailed for their appointed rendezvous. When they assembled again, the terrible truth became obvious. The majority of the fleet had not escaped. The battle was lost. Without a powerful fleet, Antony and Cleopatra could not contest the sea lanes and could not assemble reinforcements. It would be near impossible to resist Octavian. Octavian was in position to make a steady and victorious progress around the Eastern Mediterranean, persuading the various cities and states and the Roman provincial governors that their only future lay with him. As the full magnitude of the disaster became apparent, everyone made the same calculation: the war might not have been over, but it had been lost. Antony and Cleopatra sailed to Alexandria for a last winter, waiting for the arrival of their conqueror and the death that was an inevitable consequence of their defeat. Their allies defected and began the process of making peace with Caesar's heir. Octavian could now contemplate his unrivalled mastery of the Roman world.

Rome had suffered civil war before and those wars had led to periods in which a single individual had held quasi-monarchic powers. After a period of civil wars that been fought intermittently from 88 bc–83 bc, Sulla had emerged victorious, appointed himself dictator and either killed or exiled all his remaining enemies. He was in absolute control and used that control to reform the Roman constitution, reinforcing the control of the senate, the traditional governing council of Rome. Sulla was to lay down his powers in 80 bc and Republican government resumed in a relatively normal form. In 49 bc, Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, the river that separated his province from Italy and launched another civil war. He, too, had become dictator and effectively wielded monarchic power. His assassination on 15th March, 44 bc had brought an end to that period of government. Like Sulla's dictatorship, Caesar's rule could also be seen as an interlude (and there had been several others in remote Roman history) in a long period of Republican government.

It is conventional to divide Rome's history into these three periods: the regal period, the Republic, and the Empire. Rome was traditionally thought to have been founded in 753 bc by Romulus. The date in itself has little value and Romulus, like many of the early kings of Rome, belongs to the realm of myth. In a similarly unreliable and mythic history, the Roman Republic was said to have been founded after the expulsion of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, in 509 bc. After that point, Rome was seen as a Republic. Whatever political system was developed in the late sixth century, it is unlikely to have been very like the Roman Republic as we know it from the first century bc. Nevertheless, and in spite of various experiments, the main components of Republican government (rule by a collective of Roman citizens and a number of magistrates whose tenure of the position was time-limited) were in place for the majority of the next five centuries. During that period, Rome was transformed from perhaps a reasonably large city-state in the heart of Italy to the central city of a vast Mediterranean empire. After 430 years of remarkably successful Republican government, the battle of Actium was to usher in a new period of imperial rule that was to last until ad475, when the Gothic King decided that the nominal emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, was more trouble than he was worth and sent him into a comfortable internal exile. Actium, then, marks the beginning of this new age, an age which we, somewhat confusingly, refer to as the Empire.

The transition from Republic to Empire is one of the most controversial events in world history. It has been the subject of considerable and forceful debate from antiquity to the present. The transition is important because it makes us think about the nature of government, what government is for and what the best possible government is.

Although we live in an age in which liberal democracy is almost universally regarded as the best form of government, this is an unusual feature of contemporary political culture. In previous generations, many have argued that democracy risks corruption and that some form of monarchic rule or aristocratic rule (rule by the best men) would be more efficient and therefore better. Even today, questions are asked as to whether democratic governments can ever be relied upon to take the necessary difficult decisions, whether politicians are sufficiently expert to identify the right course, or whether the necessity of re-election is to the detriment of their management of the state since politicians will always seek to bribe their electorates or need to court alliances with business leaders and financiers who will fund their campaigns. Many of these questions have been and can still be discussed using Roman history. The focus of that discussion is frequently on the transition between Republic and Empire. The fall of the Republic appears to represent a rejection or failure of aristocratic governance. The spectre of the fall of the Roman Republic suggests that any republican system may have certain flaws integral to its workings and that if political circumstances are unfavourable, a republic might just degenerate into corruption and violence.

The transition between Republic and Empire poses certain key questions:

• Is republican government necessarily corrupt?

• Is the development of monarchic imperialism necessary to ensure the survival and good governance of states?

• What is the nature of imperial government and is imperial government in itself necessarily corrupt?

• Who is government for?

These are general political issues, which deserve endless debate. I leave it for the reader to think through these issues.

Before we can use Rome to answer these questions, we need to understand what happened in Rome in the transition from Republic to Empire. We must ask different, more precise questions. This chapter will guide us through the following historical issues:

• What was the nature of Republican government?

• How did Augustus change Rome's political system?

• Did Augustus make Roman government better?

The Roman Republic as a political system

We can analyse the Republican system in three sections, which will look at the following themes:

• constitution and law;

• Roman political culture;

• the historical operation of politics in Rome.

These three themes overlap and they need to be understood together. The first section is ‘formal’: it illustrates the rule book by which Roman politics was played. The second section looks at the regularities and expectations of the Roman political system. These were, arguably, more important in generating the political class in Rome than the constitution. These regularities governed political relationships, and it is relationships that make political power. The final section looks at the historical operation of the system since the experience of Roman politics in the first century influenced how individuals acted (whatever the precise balance of institutional relationships).

The Roman Republican constitution and Roman political institutions

Rome did not have a written constitution. The operation of Roman politics was governed by custom modified by occasional legislative acts (rather in the manner of the British system). The Romans valued tradition. Tradition guaranteed the rightness of actions and the ‘custom of the ancestors’ could be used to justify political actions. Furthermore, Roman political gatherings were also religious gatherings in which empowered magistrates would ascertain the will of the gods and seek the blessing of the gods for the decisions to be made. The emphasis placed on tradition meant that the Romans were reluctant to rationalise their political system (for that would interfere with tradition). The constitution developed a plethora of different assemblies, councils, boards and magistrates, many of which had overlapping functions or powers which were not clearly defined. For our purposes, it is not necessary to cover the finer detail of the development of Roman constitutional practices, merely to recognise that such practices were not fixed by law.

The fundamental principle of the Roman constitutional system was the sovereignty of the people. The people elected magistrates and passed laws. The power of the magistrates, which included the right to punish and the ability to lead armies, depended on the sovereignty delegated by the people to the magistrates. The ‘people’ (populus) was the collective body of Roman citizens. For the purposes of Roman political life, the political community was constituted of Roman adult males, though Roman children and Roman women were citizens and were covered by the right and protections of Roman citizens. Foreigners and slaves were not given any political rights, though foreigners had some legal protections that they could exercise in Rome (through application to magistrates) and slaves were protected, as property, from abuses by those who were not their masters. Citizens were registered in a census. The census established the property holdings of the individual citizens (which allowed the citizenry to be located in particular bands of wealth) and by tribe. Tribes were associated with particular localities within Roman territory and tribal membership was passed down the family line from father to son. The tribes were effectively hereditary constituencies of the Roman people, convenient ways of organising the population, and were not communities.

The Roman male citizenry met in two main assemblies: the comitia tributa and the comitia centuriata. These assemblies were responsible for the election of magistrates and the passing of laws. The comitia tributa appears to have been the main law-making assembly. It was this assembly that seems to have elected the more junior magistrates and most notably the tribunes, the people's representatives. The senior magistrates were elected by the comitia centuriata. The comitia tributa was organised by the 35 tribes of Rome and would vote by tribe. In the passing of laws and elections, the voting would proceed by members of a particular tribe leaving an enclosure and crossing specially erected bridges. Once all members of the tribe had voted, their votes would be counted and their vote declared. Once sufficient tribes had been declared, for a decision to be made (the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Aspects of Classical Civilisation
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• 1 Rome before Augustus
• 2 Augustus (31 BC–AD 14)
• 3 Tiberius (AD 14–37)
• 4 Gaius Caligula (AD 37–41)
• 5 Claudius (AD 41–54)
• 6 Nero (AD 54–68)
• 7 Civil wars (AD 69–70)
• 8 Vespasian and Titus (AD 70–81)
• 9 Domitian (AD 81–96)
• 10 Nerva and Trajan (AD 96–117)
• 11 Society
• 12 The economy
• 13 Administration and government
• 14 The Roman army and military policy
• 15 Family and gender
• 16 Religion
• 17 Romanisation
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index