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We Have No King But Caesar
Roman Imperial Ideology and the Imperial Cult
David Nystrom
Beginning in 327 BC, the Roman state went to war eighty of the next eighty-five years.[1] Incessant bellicosity, observed Cicero, was the expected norm. Glory and an empire could thereby be won.[2] Following the Roman victory at Pydna in 168 BC, Polybius, forcibly transplanted to Rome, became an ardent admirer of his conquerors.
There can surely be no one so petty or so apathetic in his outlook that he has no desire to discover by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement unparalleled in human history.[3]
The Athenian empire survived thirty years. Alexander’s began to unravel within minutes of his death. The Romans forged an empire that lasted centuries.
The Roman Achievement
This achievement required a complex and vibrant ideological matrix that was already decades old when Augustus came to power. He did not fundamentally alter it by assuming the trappings of personal supremacy, but rather magnified it by directing Roman tradition through the prism of his own story. Like his republican forebears, Augustus was able to anneal the vanquished to the Roman cause by blending power with service and reward. What were the salient features of this ideology? How did Augustus shape it? What did it mean to worship Augustus or to call an emperor “king”?
Ordained by the gods. The Romans claimed a divine commission to conquer and to civilize.
Rome is a land nourished by all, and yet parent of all lands, chosen by the power of the gods to make even heaven more splendid, to gather together the scattered realms and to soften their customs and unite the discordant wild tongues of so many people into a common speech so they might understand each other, and to give civilization to mankind (humanitatem homini), in short to become the homeland of every people in the entire world.[4]
Pliny asserts the divine commission was not so crass as mere conquest, but through conquest to proffer humanitas to all peoples and thereby fashion a type of new humanity.
Just. The Romans bore the conviction that their rule was just. The epic poem Virgil crafted to laud Augustus pressed into service this theme. The Roman project was to “submit the whole world to the rule of law”: totum sub leges mitteret orbem.[5]
Fundamental to the education of Roman elites was the belief that rule over others demanded self-mastery.[6] Roman law was a codified expression of this belief. To bring sober and restrained government to others was the Roman idea. “You, Roman, be certain to rule the world (be these your arts), to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and crush the proud.”[7]
Roman militarism was defended on the basis of justice. The Romans wished to believe they stood for order and sobriety in public life, that they were quick to display clemency to the supine but resolved to confront the obstinate.[8] Undergirding this was a belief that Romanitas was superior to other forms of human culture.[9] Cicero records the view that Rome is greater than Greece because Rome stands alone as the home of virtue, imperial power and dignity (domus est virtutis, imperii, dignitatis!).[10] Rome is marked, he avers, by the wisdom of its laws and the vastness of its empire. These make Rome glorious beyond all others.
Vast. Cicero once lauded Pompey and Caesar for so expanding the arena of Roman domination that its borders “are fixed not by limits of the earth but by limits of the sky.”[11] Two centuries after Cicero, Aelius Aristides wrote, “You have caused the word ‘Roman’ to belong not to a city but to be the name of a sort of common race, and this not one out of all the races, but a balance to the remaining ones.”[12]
Of course the Romans could also display xenophobic passions. Juvenal wrote he hated a Rome full of Greeks and lamented that “the Syrian Orontes has long since flowed into the Tiber.”[13] Cicero could be equally caustic. He disparaged Mysians and Phrygians and opined that the Jews were among several peoples born for slavery (nationibus natis servituti).[14] In a delightfully pregnant passage Juvenal writes: “Leave that sort of lie to the equites from Asia, Bithynia and Cappadocia too, and the powerful that were imported with bare feet from New Gaul.”[15]
Access to power in the capital was extended slowly, offered first to Latin speakers in the west.[16] By the early second century several emperors were of non-Italian origin (e.g., Hadrian was born in Spain), and citizenship, once rarely enjoyed by non-Italians, was in ad 212 extended to all free persons within the bounds of the empire.
Stratified. Roman society was hierarchical and featured a dizzyingly steep social pyramid. Wealth, class, ancestry and location were only the most salient factors that together conveyed status. Seneca observed, “how vast is the majority of the poor.”[17] Aggressively class conscious, the Romans took active steps to reinforce social stratification in even the smallest of cities.[18] Roman attitudes regarding class were vividly expressed. Martial claimed that sexual relations with a free woman were preferable to sexual relations with a freedwoman.[19] Augustus closed the ranks of the senatorial order and restricted intermarriage between classes.[20] Tacitus complained of the marriage of a woman of senatorial standing to an equestrian whose grandfather was from a town other than Rome.[21] Varro considered rural slaves equipment and classified them with farm tools.[22] In a passage that reveals cascading levels of honor among cities, Cicero relates Anthony’s barb directed at Octavian: “He charges that Caesar’s mother is from Aricia, as if it were the same as Tralles or Ephesus!”[23] For Cicero even a magnificent provincial city like Ephesus was beneath comparison to an Italian city.
The distinction between the “best sort” of people and the “lesser sort” is commonly represented in Latin literature,[24] and appears casually in this bit of Tacitus concerning the year of chaos following the death of Nero:
The worst element were delighted but the best citizens scandalized (bonos invidiae) by the act of Vitellius in erecting altars on the Campus Martius and sacrificing to the shades of Nero (inferias Neroni fecisset). The victims were killed and burned in the name of the state. The torch was applied to the sacrifices by the Augustales, a sacred college which Tiberius Caesar had dedicated to the Julian gens.[25]
In the fourth century the Roman diplomat Symmachus described the senate as pars melior humani generis, “the better part of humankind.”[26] The distinction was a key element in the Roman strategy of imperial stability. Aelius Aristides remarked approvingly,
You have divided all of the men in your empire, and by this I mean of course the entire inhabited world, into two parts, and everywhere you have made citizens of all who are the more accomplished, and noble, and powerful of people, even if they maintain their own cultural proclivities, while those who are left you have made the subjects.[27]
True civilization, apparently, could only be realized by elites.
Urban and material. The Roman Empire was an urban phenomenon. Supreme among all cities was Rome. Italian cities typically enjoyed a privileged status relative to cities outside Italy. Many cities were colonia or colonies, technically extensions of the city of Rome itself. These were often populated with retired soldiers. Other cities were municipia. Some municipia outside of Italy possessed Italian rights (ius Italicum), a favored status that conveyed exemption from certain taxes. The East was already highly urbanized by the time the Romans arrived, and where possible the Romans blended in Latin forms.[28] In the nonurbanized West the Romans founded cities in order to spread Romanitas.[29]
Trier on the banks of the Moselle River, originally a military camp, became a Roman city replete with circus, palace, basilica, hot and cold baths, and a gymnasium. Similar cities could be found from Britain to Africa and Asia Minor. The political life of cities was pressed to conform to the Roman pattern. The Lex Irnitana (constitution of Irni) discovered in 1981 outside of Seville suggests that by the late first century a basic constitution crafted in Rome was available for adoption by towns throughout the empire.[30] It stipulated qualifications for election to the town council, the responsibilities of council members and what sorts of legal cases could be handled locally. The conquered had lost political rights and perhaps material wealth. The route open to restore their fortunes was to learn to play by Roman rules. The Romans could not, of course, force the conquered to accept Romanitas, but they could render acceptance of Roman ideology attractive. Savvy provincials quickly realized that adopting a Roman constitution was a first step to securing Latin rights and eventually citizenship.
Informal with power centered at the top. The letters of Cicero and Pliny indicate that informal personal ties characterized the Roman ruling elite. It was by use of these ties of patronage that the Romans held sway over a vast empire of some forty provinces with an administration that was both numerically meager and essentially amateur.[31] Among the Romans a patron or benefactor was a person who provided protection, financial assistance or political influence. The recipient of this largesse was the client. The client was expected to honor and at times serve the patron. “To fail to repay a favor is not permitted to a good man,” wrote Cicero.[32] “Homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, robbers, sacrilegious men, and traitors there will always be; but worse than all these is the crime of ingratitude,” wrote Seneca.[33] This system, he opined, is the glue holding society together.[34] Effective use of these relationships depended on not only fame (what was said about one) but also gloria (the notoriety that results from effective self-promotion).
The Romans expected and practiced self-promotion. Tacitus once wrote, nam contemptu famae contemni virtutes (to fail to cultivate one’s reputation is to lose respect for one’s virtues).[35] Only by boasting of their own exploits could there be a record for the moral instruction of future generations. Gloria was necessary to advance a career during which great deeds could be attempted and placed before the arbitriment of history. So Cicero wrote, optimus quisque maxime gloria ducitur (the better the man the more committed to glory).[36] There were limits of course. Cicero in a letter begged Lucceius to make his name “illustriou...
