The Roman World 44 BC-AD 180

Martin Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136509339
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Roman World 44 BC – AD 180 deals with the transformation of the Mediterranean regions, northern Europe and the Near East by the military autocrats who ruled Rome during this period. The book traces the impact of imperial politics on life in the city of Rome itself and in the rest of the empire, arguing that, despite long periods of apparent peace, this was a society controlled as much by fear of state violence as by consent.

Martin Goodman examines the reliance of Roman emperors on a huge military establishment and the threat of force. He analyses the extent to which the empire functioned as a single political, economic and cultural unit and discusses, region by region, how much the various indigenous cultures and societies were affected by Roman rule. The book has a long section devoted to the momentous religious changes in this period, which witnessed the popularity and spread of a series of elective cults and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity from the complex world of first-century Judaea. This book provides a critical assessment of the significance of Roman rule for inhabitants of the empire, and introduces readers to many of the main issues currently faced by historians of the early empire.

This new edition, incorporating the finds of recent scholarship, includes a fuller narrative history, expanded sections on the history of women and slaves and on cultural life in the city of Rome, many new illustrations, an updated section of bibliographical notes, and other improvements designed to make the volume as useful as possible to students as well as the general reader.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

1

SOURCES AND PROBLEMS

The Roman world from the middle of the first century BC to the end of the second century AD witnessed, after traumatic upheavals, the establishment of a stable society over one of the widest geographical areas to know political unity at any time in human history. From the achievements, ethos and writings of the Roman Empire at its height stemmed the values – moral, religious, artistic, legal, political – which have shaped European culture down to the twenty-first century. In some respects, such influence has been continuous over the last 2,000 years. Christianity, which sprang from Judaism in the early first century, and Rabbinic Judaism, which emerged from the traumas of the end of that century, evolved in an unbroken tradition through the Middle Ages. So too did the medical achievements of the High Empire, to the extent that the speculations of Galen (AD 129–c. 199) about the workings of the body remained standard theory until the eighteenth century. So also did the astronomy and astrology of Claudius Ptolemaeus (AD c. 100–c. 178) and the work of the Classical Roman jurists, whose textbooks, written in the mid-to late second century AD, provided the foundation of Late Roman and then medieval law codes. German law is based on their categories to this day.

Other achievements were forgotten until the Renaissance, when the rediscovery of Plutarch (AD c. 46–c. 120), and the philosophical discussions of the elder Seneca (c. 55 BC–c. AD 40) and others, set standards and tone for civilized morality, while a burgeoning awareness of the architecture of the grand buildings erected in the High Empire stimulated the neo-classicism of Renaissance architecture. The industriousness of Greek scholars of the second century AD ensured that the works through which the Early Modern world came to know about and love Classical Greece were themselves products of the Roman world (Plutarch, Appian, Arrian above all).¹

To understand the evolution of the Early Roman Empire is thus to comprehend the foundations of our own society. It is not, as will be seen, an entirely easy task to achieve. For Edward Gibbon in the late eighteenth century, the consolidation of the Roman Empire saw the establishment, after violent conflict, of a balanced constitution, which under enlightened emperors led inevitably to the peace and security of the second century ad:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.²

This judgement directly reflects the views of the narrative sources of political history on which Gibbon based his account. For the Roman senator Pliny (AD 61–c. 112), writing in the early second century AD, the despotic tendencies of early emperors had given way to the just and beneficent rule of Trajan. A similarly kindly filter has coloured posterity's view of subsequent emperors down to, but not including, the monster Commodus (sole ruler AD 180–92). But a history of the Roman world must be more than an account of the finer feelings of its governing élite and literati. The mass of humanity of all classes, ethnic backgrounds and cultural affiliations, and of both sexes, cannot be assumed to have concurred with the view of a Roman senator. Was the second century AD for them, too, an age in which it was good to be alive? And if not, why not?

THE EVIDENCE³

The problem in answering such a question lies, as always in the study of ancient history, in the selective nature of the evidence. The narrative histories of the political events of the period were composed by Roman senators – Velleius Paterculus (c. 20 BC–after AD 30), Tacitus (AD c. 56–c. 120), Cassius Dio (AD c. 163/4–c. 230) – whose stance close to, but not quite in, the centre of state power engendered an idiosyncratic, often jaundiced view – which was compounded by the requirement of the historiographical genre to concentrate on the military efforts of the state, and overt political action by the ruling class, rather than on economic or social developments or the hidden, unspoken wielding of power by emperors.

The genre of emperors’ biographies effectively invented by Suetonius (AD c. 69–after 122), who had the advantage of working in the imperial household, provides something of a corrective in the latter field. But Suetonius’ reliance on unchecked anecdotes, and his concern for the personal characteristics of emperors more than for their relations with their subjects, somewhat limit the usefulness of his work.

The Augustan History (Scriptores Historiae Augustae), a collection of the biographies of emperors stretching from Hadrian to the late third century AD, is even less reliable. Similar in style and organization to Suetonius’ lives, these biographies descend into obvious fantasy and forgery in some of the third-century lives. The most likely explanation of the origins of the work is that, despite the pretence of multiple authorship, it was produced in the late fourth century by a single individual with a strong (if peculiar) sense of humour, which developed as he proceeded chronologically with the composition of the biographies. In that case, the biographies of Hadrian and of the Antonines can be considered among the most reliable in the collection, since the author could rely on plentiful data, and had not yet developed the tendencies which make the later lives unusable; but no uncorroborated statement found in any of the biographies can be used without caution.

For the most part, information must be culled from less direct sources than historical or biographical narratives. From the governing class in Rome there survives a mass of evidence which was preserved for its literary merit. For the beginning of the period, the last letters of Cicero (106–43 BC) and his passionate speeches against Antonius (the Philippics) provide an unparalleled insight into the attitudes and assumptions of one, rather idiosyncratic, politician. The other collections of letters which survive, the Moral Letters of Seneca, the letters of the younger Pliny, and the pedantic correspondence with his imperial pupils of the rhetorician Fronto (AD c. 100–166/7), offer many insights into the social and ethical assumptions of élite Roman society but, since they were mostly composed for publication, they lack the immediacy of Cicero. A cultural efflorescence under Augustus produced much poetry in Latin, the so-called ‘Golden Age’, while the steady stream of poets in the first century AD welled up into a second flood at the end of the first century and early second century AD, the ‘Silver Age’. The origins of most Latin poetry in imitation and adaptation of Greek genres preclude use of such writings as if they described their own society directly, but frequent hints can nonetheless be culled about contemporary affairs; in this respect, the Latin genre of satire, in which contemporary morals are mocked, is particularly illuminating (thus Horace (65–8 BC) and especially Juvenal (AD c. 60–after 127)). Much, too, can be learnt from the compendious scholarship of gentlemen academics, which had become fashionable in the Late Republic: the antiquarian musings of Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) and the massive compilation of the elder Pliny (AD 23/4–79), his Natural History, contain numerous nuggets of information among the verbose speculations of the learned.

It would then be possible to compose a history simply of the upper class in the city of Rome. But it would be quite wrong to view developments among this privileged group as normal for the rest of the emperors’ subjects. Little literary evidence survives from the western (Latin-speaking) part of the empire outside Rome in this period. Latin writers gravitated to the capital in search of patronage. An honourable exception was Apuleius (AD c. 125–after 160s), a citizen of Madaura in North Africa, whose novel, The Golden Ass, gives an instructive insight into provincial life as viewed by a man on the fringes of the urban élite. But from the Greek-speaking East survives a mass of literary evidence which rivals the Latin compositions in Rome in quantity, if not always in quality. Some of these authors also wrote in Rome, from the composers of Greek epigrams for Augustus, to Plutarch (in c. AD 92–93) and the rather greater numbers attracted by the philhellenic policy of Hadrian in the 120s AD (see Chapters 7 and 23). But many, like Pausanias (AD c. 115–c. 180), were content to stay in Greece itself, or Asia Minor, reflecting the cultural self-absorption of those areas. Only one such author composed a history of his own region in his own time: the Jewish writer Josephus (AD c. 37/8–after AD 93), whose accounts of the Jewish war of AD 66–70 and the history of the Jews to AD 66, in his Antiquities of the Jews, provide a unique insight into the nature of Roman rule as viewed from below. Much of the rest of the Greek literature of the imperial period was concerned with the remote Classical past before Alexander the Great. This fact is, in itself, an important cultural phenomenon, but it restricts the usefulness of these writings in reconstructing the history of their own times. The exceptions are few: Dio Chrysostom, rhetorician and philosopher (AD c. 40–after 112), whose moral discourses sometimes referred to contemporary events, or the rather more rigorous Stoic-Cynic Epictetus (AD c. 55–c. 135).

These disparate and disjointed literary sources for life outside Rome are amplified and corrected by an extraordinary mass of physical evidence, from the strictly archaeological to inscriptions on stone, metals and wood and the written records of papyri, and coins. The accumulated effect of such evidence may give the impression of a society which can be known in detail, particularly in contrast to the preceding and following periods, but the peculiar nature of this evidence and the biases inherent in it also need to be acknowledged.⁴

The frequency with which evidence for the early imperial period is reported from archaeological sites is, to a large extent, a function of the ease with which it can be recognized. That, in turn, means that only certain kinds of evidence will usually be spotted. Thus Roman villas, town plans, public buildings and roads of this period may be recovered with comparative ease because of the regularity of their construction over much of the empire and the durability of buildings constructed in stone rather than wood or other perishable materials. The wide circulation of the artefact least subject to decay, that is, pottery, enables archaeologists to correlate different areas with comparative ease; but again, only fine wares travelled far, so that the relations of poorer people are less easy to fathom. The reconstruction of settlement patterns and lifestyles of peasants can indeed be recovered from archaeological evidence, but only with great and painstaking care.

A similar bias towards the better-off prejudices use of the million or so inscriptions on stone which are currently known to survive from the Roman period.⁵ Most of these can be dated to Roman imperial times, and together they provide multifarious details of the careers and family relations of individuals, the deployment of military units, and the relations between cities and between subject and emperor. The ‘epigraphic habit’ is a rather strange one. Cutting letters on stone requires a mason skilled in the traditional craft. The custom did not catch on in all areas of the empire and, for reasons of expense, never became common among those whose wealth fell below that of the better-off artisans (although many ex-slaves were prepared to pay to commemorate their freedom). It was thus an urban phenomenon. In the countryside, peasants could rarely afford the luxury, and only soldiers who were eager to perpetuate their memory, and were quite well paid, erected permanent monuments. In our society, the fashion survives primarily in the commissioning of grave markers.⁶

Writing on more perishable materials has survived in the last 2,000 years only through exceptional climatic conditions or by unusual chance. Papyri survive in great numbers from Roman Egypt, and reveal much about small town life and the state's bureaucracy. The peculiar society and administration of Egypt (see Chapter 27) enable this evidence to be applied to the rest of the empire only with caution. Similar care is needed in assessing the significance of evidence of social strains. Many of the papyri survived because the land in which they were buried has not been inundated since antiquity. By definition, then, they derive from caches outside or on the fringes of the land cultivable from irrigation from the River Nile. The communities who lived on such marginal land may have been more susceptible to fluctuation in climate, or in state demands, than others in the empire. Some, but fewer, papyri survive from the Near East, especially from the Judaean desert, throwing some light on the history of Judaea and Arabia. Inscriptions on wooden slats have been discovered in the excavations of the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall; it can confidently be assumed that more will appear in excavations elsewhere in the western provinces, now that archaeologists know what they are looking for.⁷

Evidence of coins can be used in a variety of ways to reconstruct history.⁸ On the one hand, the inscriptions and types can be presumed to reflect a propaganda message intended by the state to influence its subjects. Whether such propaganda was very successful is unclear, but that is another matter. On the other hand, economic historians can learn much about the circulation of coinage by analysing the distribution of the places where coins of a particular issue are found; such information is especially useful when the coins are discovered as spot finds, since such individual coins will have survived in the archaeological record only because they were dropped by accident, and that in turn reveals that such coins must have been generally carried for purposes of exchange. In contrast, the discovery of deliberate hoards may be evidence of political turmoil; at the least it can be assumed that some factor prevented the hoarder from recovering his or her treasure.

In all this mass of evidence a crucial question, and a source of continuing conflicting interpretations, is how much to take at face value. What is involved must be not just the collection and collation of evidence, but an attempt, with sympathy but without uncritical acceptance of ancient evaluations, to interpret that evidence in a framework of a plausible model of how the Roman Empire might have worked.

It cannot be stressed too emphatically that the only certain fact about the ancient world is that most information about it has been lost. What survives does so mostly through the preferences and prejudices of those – mostly Christian monks – who in Late Antiquity, and through the Middle Ages, copied the manuscripts on which our texts are based. Imagination and empathy are essential to achieve even a glimpse of the lives of people long dead. Thus, all historians accept that attempte...