Aspects of Roman History 82BC-AD14

A Source-based Approach

Mark Everson Davies, Hilary Swain, Mark Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135151591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Aspects of Roman History 82BC–AD14 examines the political and military history of Rome and its empire in the Ciceronian and Augustan ages. It is an indispensable introduction to this central period of Roman History for all students of Roman history, from pre-university to undergraduate level.

This is the first book since H.H. Scullard's From the Gracchi to Nero, published two generations ago, to offer a full introductory account of one of the most compelling and vital periods in the history of Europe. Aspects of Roman History 82BC–AD14:

• brings to life the great figures of Pompey, Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus, and explores how power was gained, used and abused
• covers the lives of women and slaves, the running of the empire and the lives of provincials, and religion, culture and propaganda
• offers both a survey of the main topics and a detailed narrative through the close examination of sources
• introduces students to the problems of interpreting evidence, and helps develop the knowledge and skills needed to further the study of ancient history.

1
INTRODUCTION

Aims

Terry Buckley’s Aspects of Greek History, 750–323 BC: a Source-based Approach was published in 1996, followed by Richard Alston’s Aspects of Roman History, AD 14–117 in 1998. Both books were intended for an international readership and for students at school, college or university. However, they took as their starting point the specification for the UK examining board OCR’s Advanced Level in Ancient History. Our book continues this series.

It is based on the new, post-2008, OCR specification but, like its predecessors, is intended not only for those taking the A level but for the many students in Britain who begin Ancient History at university and for students in other countries who are coming across this period for the first time. The book is not a text book in the narrow sense, in that it does not contain questions or exercises or suggestions to the teacher for lesson plans. It is an account of the period designed to be useful to those at the end of secondary or the beginning of higher education. We aim to provide an introduction that goes beyond an account of the main topics (a job done with brilliant success by David Shotter in his Lancaster Pamphlets The Fall of the Roman Republic and Augustus Caesar) and provides a narrative with some close examination of the sources, but without going into the level of specialist detail of, say, the Cambridge Ancient History.

The titles in this series reflect the fact that, in books of this scale, the range of issues and events included must be restricted if those that are dealt with are not to be treated too superficially. So the coverage of foreign and military affairs is selective: there is little on Caesar in Gaul or Antony in Parthia.¹ Social, economic and religious issues are all raised in this book, but we have followed the emphasis of the specification and focused primarily on politics, specifically the question of how power was gained and used. This approach might be criticized as old-fashioned. However, we would strongly defend it from a pedagogical viewpoint. The most important thing for a student at this stage to learn is the intelligent and critical use of sources. This is a challenging enough task when dealing with narrative history and well known individuals. When dealing with wider topics – class issues, the role of women, law and society – which are rightly prominent in later undergraduate and postgraduate study, there is a need to collect a very wide range of material and use archaeological and inscriptional evidence that needs expert and sophisticated interpretation. A student who starts with this kind of study will get a wide and balanced view of Roman society, but will have to take a great deal on trust and will not easily learn to become a historian. It also has to be acknowledged that, for many people, the initial attraction of ancient history is the famous individuals such as Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus and the stories that are told about them.

We are secondary school teachers and our experience is of helping students coming across the study of ancient history for the first time to an understanding of the period. Our hope is that this book will help students to acquire the knowledge and skills to take their study of ancient history further and to engage with more specialist material. We regularly make reference to modern historians, sometimes because we feel that a historian has summarized a point particularly well, sometimes in order to indicate that there are different opinions on an issue rather than a single view among experts. There is not enough space in a book of this kind to include each historian’s supporting argument, and students should not take a reference to an author’s judgement as an indication that his judgement is beyond criticism. Where there is significant dispute among historians, we have not hesitated to express our own opinion, in the belief that this acts as a prompt to students to form their own views.

We start, as in both previous Aspects books, with a survey of the sources. After that we do not always give source references for factual information, although equally we have not restricted references to sources to points where there is particular controversy over the evidence: we feel that it is helpful to give students frequent reminders of where our information comes from. As with modern historians, a citation of an ancient author’s words should not be taken as an invitation to students to accept those words uncritically. We have, however, selected for detailed comment certain passages where interpretation is difficult or which illustrate issues of evidence and source-criticism.

Like Alston, we end the book with some short thematic chapters. These are designed not to be full surveys, still less systematic introductions to particular theoretical approaches, but to provide summary and context to some issues that have emerged in the narrative section. There is an emphasis on the Augustan age in these chapters, reflecting the greater emphasis in the specification on issues of religion, propaganda, public buildings and provincials for that period than for the Republic, which in turn reflects the emphases in recent scholarship. However, the Republic is not ignored, and each chapter does contain an overview of the whole period.

The authors have each taken responsibility for specific sections of the book, and we have not attempted to guess each other’s thoughts or imitate each other’s writing style. Hilary Swain has written section 3 of this Introduction and Chapters 2–10. Mark Everson Davies has written sections 1 and 2 of this Introduction and Chapters 11 to 20. It is assumed that some readers will start at Chapter 11 or at Chapter 13, and so a little repetition is allowed at these points.

Dates are BC unless AD is specified. We use ‘AD’ because we live in the West; the abbreviations ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’, which claim universal validity for a specifically Christian and western dating system, are avoided.

Sums of money are given in sesterces: the sestertius was the accounting unit used by Romans even before the sestertius coin became common under Augustus. Some books use denarii; there were four sesterces to the denarius.

Sources

There is enormous variation in the quantity and quality of the sources available for the different parts of the period covered by this book. Much has been lost: only extremely short summaries of the books of Livy that covered 82–89 survive. Just a few fragments remain from Sallust’s full-scale history. There is very little source material indeed for the decade 80–70. From 70 onwards, we have Dio’s narrative account, and most of the writings of Cicero.

There are certain cultural assumptions that colour the views of almost all of the ancient written sources. One is the Roman attitude of tremendous respect for the mos maiorum, the ‘way of the ancestors’, which led people to attack what they disagreed with as dangerously radical innovations and to misrepresent changes that they proposed or agreed with as a return to traditional virtues. It led, on the one hand, to exaggeration of the continuities in Roman politics and life and, on the other hand, to a sometimes hysterical fear of the new, which has the effect of making writers overemphasise conflict and change in accounts of this period.

Almost all writers believed that Rome was in a moral decline that started as soon as it became a Mediterranean power. The point of no return was believed to have been 146, the year when Rome destroyed the rich trading cities of Carthage and Corinth, leading to great wealth flowing into the city. This view leads writers to condemn the excesses of the rich. However, because of their privileged backgrounds, they are not very sympathetic to the poor in Rome, who are usually portrayed as an unthinking, self-interested mob.

Historians and biographers

Dio

Cassius Dio Cocceianus was born around AD 150 in Bithynia, south of the Black Sea, in modern Turkey, and wrote in Greek. He was consul twice and an adviser to the emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla. His familiarity with senatorial and imperial power is both an advantage, in that he had an understanding of politics and access to the Senate’s records, and a disadvantage, because he can look at earlier periods through the eyes of a politician of the third century AD. In particular, Dio often fails to appreciate the difficulties that Augustus had in establishing monarchical power in Rome after the collapse of the Republic, and how sensitively he had to proceed.

He followed the Roman tradition of annalistic writing, that is, dealing with events on a year-by-year basis. However, comparison with other historians or inscriptional evidence can show that he has been careless with his dates; sometimes, pursuing a thematic connection, he has placed events of a similar kind in the same year when other evidence suggests that they happened at different times.

Some of Dio’s work survives intact and some of it survives only in summaries made in the eleventh century AD. We have, with a few gaps, complete books for the period from 69 onwards, making Dio’s by far the most complete narrative account of these times.

Dio has often been treated with something close to contempt. It is true that he suffers badly by comparison with his fellow Greeks, the great fifth-century BC historians Herodotus and Thucydides. All three writers offer the reader their thoughts, both in comments that they make and in speeches that they put into the mouths of historical characters, something that ancient readers of history found a perfectly acceptable thing for historians to do. Herodotus gives us reflections on freedom and tyranny. Thucydides analyses, carefully but with intense feeling, how society breaks down into civil war. The longest speech that Dio gives us is largely concerned with the exact administrative arrangements for making a monarchy most effective and efficient. Dio wrote under the rule of the emperors, and his work indicates how the loss of freedom and responsibility shrinks people’s minds; it is like turning from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to a town councillor’s proposal for reorganising the planning committee.

Not only Dio’s analyses but his statements of facts are often dismissed. For example, his assertion in Book 54 chapter 10 that Augustus was given consular power for life in 19 is rejected in Scullard 1982: 215 with ‘this must certainly be an exaggeration’; no reasons are given (compare and contrast Brunt and Moore 1967: 13–14; Levick 1976: 23). More recently, his statement (53.32) that in 23 ‘they gave [Augustus] in the subject territory authority superior to that of the governor in each instance’, that is, in Latin, proconsulare imperium maius, has been robustly challenged (Cooley 2009: 35, with references) on the ground that the phrase proconsulare imperium does not appear before the reign of Tiberius, although it seems clear that Augustus did overrule governors in the provinces. Although, as noted above, Dio can be careless with dates, even this has been exaggerated. For example, he writes about Egnatius Rufus’ activities when he was an aedile in chapter 24 of Book 53, in the middle of an account of the events of 26. However, he is not claiming that Egnatius Rufus was aedile in 26 rather than 22, which is the year attested elsewhere; he is making a comparison between the behaviour of two other men, Agrippa and Gallus, in 26 and Rufus’ behaviour at a slightly later date.

In our opinion, Dio’s value as evidence should not be underestimated. The same speech, on the administration of a monarchy, which shows the narrowness of his historical analysis also indicates one of his strengths as a source. He had a great interest in the minute details of politics: what powers were given to particular people, what duties were expected of them. Changes in the constitution, and the ways in which power changed hands, sometimes openly and sometimes secretly, are central to the history of these times, and these are the things in which Dio was most interested and which he documents in some detail.

Appian

Appian was born around AD 95. He was a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt, and belonged to the wealthy equestrian class. He was a successful lawyer, and pleaded cases in Rome before the emperors. He wrote the Roman History around the middle of the second century AD. His focus was on war, and among the surviving parts of his history are five books on the civil wars from the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 to the defeat of Sextus Pompey in 36.

Appian is quite perceptive about the realities of power in this period, and he is much better at writing about military matters than Dio; however, he can be very casual about dates. While all ancient historians felt free to give historical characters speeches that may have been more exciting than those that were actually made, Appian sometimes even allows himself to rearrange events to create more drama. This is especially noticeable in his account of the days that followed Caesar’s murder: in almost every case where his order of events is different from that in Dio, Plutarch or Suetonius, the effect is to create more dramatic suspense or contrast. Appian has to be used with caution.

In this book, all references to Appian are to the Civil Wars unless specified.

Velleius

Velleius Paterculus was born in 20 or 19. He served as an officer under the future emperor Tiberius. He became a senator in AD 7 and praetor in AD 15. He wrote a short history of Rome, from the legendary beginnings to AD 30, in just two books. He writes in more detail as he gets to Augustus, but never as fully as Dio or Appian, although he is the only surviving historian whose work covers our whole period.

Velleius is a representative of those people who did best under Augustus and later emperors, the upper classes in the towns of Italy and southern Gaul. His family came from south of Rome and became citizens only after the Social War of the early 80s. His account is completely supportive of Augustus and Tiberius. At first, readers may feel that there is something refreshing about a man who owes his opportunities to a new political system openly supporting that system. Later writers from a similar background to Velleius who had enjoyed similar success – especially the second century AD historian Tacitus, who wrote about the period after Augustus’ death but who is referred to a number of times in this book – are extremely hostile to the emperors and show nostalgia for the days of the Republic, when the senators would have despised them as small-town upstarts and they would have had little hope of any kind of political career in Rome. However, Velleius quickly tries the reader’s patience. He supplies us with some valuable information, but he always gives the ‘party line’, and we know that his judgements are often not sincere. His comments on Varus, who was defeated and lost three legions in Germany in AD 9, illustrate this clearly. Velleius is consistently critical of him, but before the disaster Varus was close to Augustus and Tiberius and had enjoyed a glittering career, so it is obvious that if Velleius had written his history before AD 9 he would have praised him enthusiastically.

Plutarch

Plutarch was born around AD 45 and died around AD 120. He came from Boeotia in Greece, north of Athens. He did travel to Rome and received honours from the emperors, but h...

Table of contents

• ASPECTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILISATION
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 SULLA AND POMPEY, 82–79
• 3 POMPEY AND CRASSUS, 78–70
• 4 THE KEY PLAYERS, 69–64
• 5 CICERO, ‘THE PEOPLE’S CONSUL’,63
• 6 FRIENDS AGAINST THE WORLD, 62–59
• 7 THE ROAD TO LUCA, 58–56
• 8 DISINTEGRATION, 55–52
• 9 THE DIE IS CAST, 51–48
• 10 THEIDESOFMARCH,44
• 11 ANTONY AND OCTAVIAN, 44–42
• 12 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, 42–30
• 13 FROM SON OF CAESAR TO AUGUSTUS, 30–18
• 14 THE FIRST FAMILY, 18–2
• 15 FATHER OF THE FATHERLAND, 2–AD 14
• 16 SOCIETY
• 17 RELIGION
• 18 PROPAGANDA
• 19 URBI
• 20 ORBI
• TIMELINE
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
• INDEX