Chapter 6: The Roman Empire

Augustus’s Reign

The Principate

Augustus fit his own position into the republican constitution not by creating a new office for himself but by gradually taking over many of the offices that traditionally had been held by separate people.
The Senate named him often as both consul and tribune.
He was also named imperator, a title with which the Senate customarily honored a general after a major victory.
He held control of the army, which he made a permanent standing organization.
He had himself named pontifex maximus, or chief priest.
An additional title that Augustus had the Senate bestow on him was princeps civitatis, “first citizen of the state.”
Only later would princeps civitatis become the basis of the word prince, meaning “sovereign ruler.”
Augustus wisely wielded all his power in the background, and the government he created is called the principate.
Augustus curtailed the power of the Senate, but it continued to exist as the chief deliberative body of the state, and it continued to act as a court of law.
Augustus created the office of emperor.
Augustus professionalized the military even more than it had been in the late republic, and made the army a recognized institution of government.
Augustus ordered a tax on inheritance and on certain types of sales.
Grants of land to veterans had originally been in Italy, but by Augustus’s time there was not enough land for this.
Instead he gave veterans land in the frontier provinces that had been taken from the people the Romans conquered, usually near camps with active army units.
The army that Augustus developed was loyal to him as a person, not as the head of the Roman state.
This would lead to trouble later, but the basics of the political and military system that Augustus created lasted fairly well for almost three centuries.

Roman Expansion

One of the most significant aspects of Augustus’s reign was Roman expansion into northern and Western Europe
In Gaul he founded twelve new towns, and the Roman road system linked new settlements with one another and with Italy.
Augustus ordered a major invasion of Germany beyond the Rhine.
Meanwhile Roman troops penetrated the area of modern Austria, southern Bavaria, and western Hungary.
The regions of modern Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania in the Balkans fell, and the Romans created a land-based link between the eastern and western Mediterranean.
Within the area along the empire’s northern border the legionaries and auxiliaries built fortified camps.
Traders began to frequent the frontier and to do business with the people who lived there.
Thus Roman culture gradually spread into the north.
As a result, for the first time central and northern Europe came into direct and continuous contact with Mediterranean culture.
As a political and religious bond between the provinces and Rome, Augustus encouraged the cult of Roma et Augustus (Rome and Augustus) as the guardians of the state and the source of all benefits to society.
Worshipping Roma et Augustus became a symbol of Roman unity, and Roman officials could often judge the degree of loyalty of a province by noting the extent of public temple activities.
Augustus had himself portrayed on coins and he had temples, stadiums, marketplaces, and public buildings constructed in Rome and other cities.
Augustus created the pax Romana, the “Roman peace,” which he saw as lasting about two hundred years, until the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius in 180 c.e.
The pax Romana was enforced by troops who remained on active duty or as reserves in the provinces and on the frontier, ready to respond to any resistance to Roman dominance.
Roman governors applied Roman law to Romans living in their territories, but they let local people retain their own laws.
While Romans did not force their culture on local people in Roman territories, local elites with aspirations knew that the best way to rise in stature and power was to adopt aspects of Roman culture.
Especially in cities, Roman culture blended with local traditions.
The Roman city of Lugdunum, modern Lyons in southern France, provides an example of this process.
The site was originally the capital of a state that had existed before the Roman conquest of Gaul, named for the Gallic god Lug.
Julius Caesar made it a Roman military settlement. In 12 b.c.e.
Augustus made it a political and religious center, with responsibilities for administering the area and for honoring the gods of both the Romans and Gauls.
Many such towns were eventually granted Roman citizenship due to their embrace of Roman culture and government and their importance to the Roman economy.
Ambitious young men flocked to provincial capitals such as Lugdunum, for it was here, and not in the countryside, that one could make one’s mark.

The Flowering of Latin Literature

Many poets and prose writers were active in the late republic and the principate, and scholars of literature later judged their work to be of such high quality that they called the period from about 50 b.c.e. to 20 c.e. the “golden age” of Latin literature.
Their works were highly polished, elegant in style, and intellectual in conception.
Roman poets referred to the gods often and treated mythological themes, but the core subject matter of their work was human, not divine.
Rome’s greatest poet was Virgil (70–19 b.c.e.), who drew on earlier traditions, but gave them new twists.
Virgil’s masterpiece is the Aeneid, an epic poem that is the Latin equivalent of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey.
The parallels between this story and the very recent real events involving Antony and Cleopatra were not lost on Virgil’s audience.
Therefore, Augustus encouraged Virgil to write the Aeneid and made sure it was circulated widely immediately after Virgil died.
The poet Horace (65–8 b.c.e.) rose from humble beginnings to friendship with Augustus.
His most important works are a series of odes, short lyric poems often focusing on a single individual or event.
The historian Livy (59 b.c.e.–17 c.e.) was a friend of Augustus and a supporter of the principate.
He especially approved of Augustus’s efforts to restore what he saw as republican virtues.
Livy’s history of Rome, titled simply Ab Urbe Condita (From the founding of the city), began with the legend of Aeneas and ended with the reign of Augustus.
The poet Ovid (43 b.c.e.–17 c.e.) wrote erotic poetry about absent lovers and the joys of seduction, as well as other works about religious festivals and mythology.
His best known work is The Art of Love, a satire of the serious instructional poetry that was common in Rome at the time.
The Art of Love provides advice to men about how to get and keep women, and for women about how to get and keep men.
This work was so popular, Ovid relates, that shortly afterward he felt compelled to write The Cure for Love, advising people how to fall out of love and forget their former lovers.
In 8 b.c.e. Augustus banished Ovid to a city on the Black Sea far from Rome.
Some scholars argue that Augustus banished Ovid because his poetry celebrated adultery at a time when Augustus was promoting marriage and child bearing.

Marriage and Morality

Augustus promoted marriage and childbearing through legal changes that released free women and freedwomen (female slaves who had been freed) from male guardianship if they had given birth to a certain number of children.
In imperial propaganda, Augustus had his own family depicted as a model of traditional morality.
He had his wife Livia at his side dressed in conservative and somewhat old fashioned clothing rather than the more daring Greek styles that wealthy women were actually wearing in Rome at the time.
Augustus had his daughter Julia arrested and exiled for adultery and treason.
Samesex relationships among men in Rome fol lowed a variety of patterns: some were between social equals and others between men and their slaves.

Augustus’s Successors

The Julio-Claudians and the Flavians

Augustus adopted his stepson Tiberius (who was also his son-in-law) as his son.
Adoption of an heir was a com- mon practice among members of the elite in Rome, who used this method to pass on property to a chosen younger man — often a relative — if they had no sons.
Long before Augustus’s death he shared his consular and tribunician powers with Tiberius, thus grooming him for the principate.
In his will Augustus left most of his vast fortune to Tiberius, and the Senate formally requested Tiberius to assume the burdens of the principate.
For fifty years after Augustus’s death the dynasty that he established — known as the Julio-Claudians because all were members of the Julian and Claudian clans—provided the emperors of Rome.
Two of the Julio-Claudians who followed Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius, were sound rulers and able administrators.
The other two, Caligula and Nero, were weak and frivolous men who exercised their power poorly and to the detriment of the empire.
Augustus’s creation of an imperial bodyguard known as the Praetorians had repercussions for his successors. In 41c.e. the Praetorians murdered Caligula and forced the Senate to ratify their choice of Claudius as emperor.
In his early years Nero ruled fairly well, but he became increasingly paranoid about the power of those around him.
In 68 c.e. his erratic actions and his policies led to a revolt by several generals, which was supported by the Praetorian Guard and members of the Senate.
He was declared an enemy of the people and committed suicide.
In 69 c.e., the “year of the four emperors,” four men claimed the position of emperor in quick succession.
The man who emerged triumphant was Vespasian, commander of the eastern armies.
Vespasian restored the discipline of the armies.
To prevent others from claiming the throne, Vespasian designated his sons Titus and Domitian as his successors, thus establishing the Flavian dynasty.
The military conquest of Judaea represented a failure of official Roman policy, but it is a good example of the way in which the Romans maintained clear control over their subjects.
The Flavians carried on Augustus’s work in Italy and on the frontiers.
During the brief reign of Vespasian’s son Titus, Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy erupted, destroying Pompeii and other cities and killing thousands of people.
His younger brother Domitian was killed in 96 c.e. in a plot that involved his own wife, ending the Flavian dynasty.

The Age of the “Five Good Emperors”

The Flavians were succeeded by a line of relatively competent emperors, whom the political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in the sixteenth century termed the “five good emperors” — Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius.
The last four “good emperors” were, in fact, related members of the Antonine family.
Augustus had claimed that his influence arose from the collection of offices the Senate had bestowed on him and that he was merely the first citizen.
Hadrian is typical of the emperors of the second century.
He received a solid education in Rome and became an ardent admirer of Greek culture.
When Trajan became emperor in 98 c.e., Hadrian was given important positions in which he learned how to defend and run the empire.
Although Trajan did not officially declare Hadrian his successor, at Trajan’s death in 117 Hadrian assumed power.
Hadrian built a number of buildings, including the circular Pantheon in Rome and new temples in Athens.
Under Trajan the boundaries of the Roman Empire were expanded to their farthest extent.
Roman soldiers also built walls, of which the most famous was one across northern England built primarily during Hadrian’s reign.
Hadrian’s Wall, as it became known, protected Romans from attacks from the north, and also allowed them to regulate immigration and trade through the many gates along the wall.
The later emperor Antoninus Pius built a second wall one hundred miles north, but this was quickly abandoned.
As the empire expanded, the army grew larger, and more and more troops were auxiliary forces of non citizens.
The army evolved into a garrison force, with troops guarding specific areas for long periods.
Soldiers on active duty had originally been prohibited from marrying, but this restriction was increasingly ignored, and some troops brought their wives and families along on their assignments.

Rome and the Provinces

Life in Imperial Rome

Many residents of the city of Rome were slaves, who ranged from highly educated household tutors or government officials and widely sought sculptors to workers who engaged in hard physical tasks.
Romans used the possibility of manumission as a means of controlling the behavior of their slaves, and individual Romans did sometimes free their slaves.
Manumission was limited by law, however, in part because freeing slaves made them citizens, allowing them to receive public grain and gifts of money, which some Romans thought debased pure Roman citizenship.
A typical day for the Roman family began with a modest breakfast, as in the days of the republic.
Seafood was a favorite item, as the Romans normally ate meat only at festivals.
While poor people ate salt fish, the more prosperous dined on rare fish, oysters, squid, and eels.
Wine was the common drink, and the rich often enjoyed rare vintages imported from abroad.
Rich or poor, Romans mixed their wine with water, because drinking wine straight was seen as vulgar.
As in the republic, children began their education at home, where parents emphasized moral conduct, especially reverence for the gods and the law and respect for elders.
Daughters learned how to manage the house, and sons learned the basics of their future calling from their fathers, who also taught them the use of weapons for military service.
Wealthy boys gained formal education from tutors or schools, generally favoring rhetoric and law for a political career.
Others entered the army, usually as cadets on the staffs of prominent officers.

Approaches to Urban Problems

Fire and crime were serious problems in the city, even after Augustus created urban fire and police forces.
Streets were narrow, drainage was inadequate, and sanitation was poor.
In the second century urban planning and new construction improved the situation.
For example, engineers built an elaborate system that collected sewage from public baths, the ground floors of buildings, and public latrines.
They also built hundreds of miles of aqueducts, sophisticated systems of canals, channels, and pipes, most of them underground, that brought freshwater into the city from the surrounding hills.
Better disposal of sewage was one way that people living in Rome tried to maintain their health, and they also used a range of treatments to stay healthy and cure illness.
The most important medical researcher and physician working in imperial Rome was Galen (ca. 129–ca. 200 c.e.), a Greek born in modern day Turkey.
Galen wrote a huge number of treatises on anatomy and physiology, and became the personal physician of many prominent Romans, including several emperors.
Neither Galen nor any other Roman physician could do much for infectious diseases, and in 165 troops returning from campaigns in the East brought a new disease with them, which spread quickly in the city and then beyond into other parts of the empire.
Modern epidemiologists think this was most likely smallpox, but in the ancient world it became known simply as the Antonine plague.
Along with fire and disease, food was an issue in the ever more crowded city.
Because of the danger of starvation, the emperor, following republican practice, provided the citizen population with free grain for bread and, later, oil and wine.
By maintaining the grain supply, the emperor kept the favor of the people and ensured that Rome’s poor did not starve.

Popular Entertainment

The most popular forms of public entertainment were gladiatorial contests and chariot racing.
Gladiatorial combat had begun as a private event during the republic, sponsored by men seeking new ways to honor their ancestors.
Games were advertised on billboards, and spectators were given a program with the names and sometimes the fighting statistics of the pairs, so that they could bet more easily.
Men came to be gladiators through a variety of ways. Many were soldiers captured in war, sent to Rome or other large cities to be gladiators instead of being killed.
Some were criminals, especially slaves found guilty of various crimes.
Some Romans protested gladiatorial fighting, but the emperor's recognized the political value of such spectacles, and most Romans enjoyed them.
The Romans were even more addicted to chariot racing than to gladiatorial shows.
Under the empire four permanent teams competed against one another.
Each had its own color—red, white, green, or blue.
Two-horse and four-horse chariots ran a course of seven laps, about five miles.
One charioteer, Gaius Appuleius Diocles, raced for twenty-four years, with over 4,000 starts and nearly 1,500 wins.
His admirers honored him with an inscription that proclaimed him champion of all charioteers.
Roman spectacles such as gladiator fights and chariot racing were not everyday activities for Romans.

Prosperity in the Roman Provinces

As the empire grew and stabilized, many Roman provinces grew prosperous.
Peace and security opened Britain, Gaul, and the lands of the Danube to settlers from other parts of the Roman Empire.
Veterans were given small parcels of land in the provinces, becoming tenant farmers.
People used Latin for legal and state religious purposes, but gradually Latin blended with the original language of an area and with languages spoken by those who came into the area later.
Gradually hybrid deities and rituals developed.
The process of cultural exchange was at first more urban than rural, but the importance of cities and towns to the life of the wider countryside ensured that its effects spread far afield.
The garrison towns that grew up around provincial military camps became the centers of organized political life, and some grew into major cities, including Eburacum (modern day York), Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris), and Londinium (London).
In order to supply these administrative centers with food, land around them was cultivated more intensively.
During the first and second centuries, Roman Gaul became more prosperous than ever before, and prosperity attracted Roman settlers.
In Britain, Roman influence was strongest in the south, where more towns developed.
Across eastern Europe, Roman influence was weaker than it was in Gaul or southern Britain, and there appears to have been less intermarriage.
The Romans were the first to build cities in northern Europe, but in the eastern Mediterranean they ruled cities that had existed before Rome itself was even a village.
The well preserved ruins of the ancient city of Aspendos, at the mouth of the Eurymedon (now Kopru) River on the south coast of modern Turkey give a picture of life in one of these older Eastern cities.
Built sometime before 500 b.c.e., the city was an important economic center in the Persian Empire and the site of a major battle in the wars between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states.
More than just places to live, cities like Aspendos were centers of intellectual and cultural life.

Trade and Commerce

The expansion of trade during the pax Romana made the Roman Empire an economic as well as a political force in the provinces.
Britain and Belgium became prime grain producers, with much of their harvests going to the armies of the Rhine.
Italy and southern Gaul produced huge quantities of wine, which was shipped in large pottery jugs wherever merchant vessels could carry it.
The growth of industry in the provinces was another striking development of this period.
Cities in Gaul and Germany eclipsed the old Mediterranean manufacturing centers.
Lyons in Gaul and later Cologne in Germany became the new centers of the glass making industry, and the cities of Gaul were nearly unrivaled in the manufacture of bronze and brass.
The Romans took the manufacture of pottery to an advanced stage by introducing a wider range of vessels and making some of these on an industrial scale in kilns that were large enough to fire tens of thousands of pots at once.
The most prized pottery was terra sigillata, reddish decorated tableware with a glossy surface.
Terra sigillata often portrayed GrecoRoman gods and heroes, so this pottery spread Mediterranean myths and stories.
As the Romans drove farther eastward, they encountered the Parthians, who had established a kingdom in what is now Afghanistan and Iran in the Hellenistic period.
Silk was a major commodity traded from the East to the West, along with other luxury goods.
In return the Romans traded glassware, precious gems, and slaves.
The pax Romana was also an era of maritime trade, and Roman ships sailed from Egyptian ports to the mouth of the Indus River, where they traded local merchandise and wares imported by the Parthians.
Educated Romans did not have a corre- sponding interest in China.
For them, China remained more of a mythical than a real place, and they never bothered to learn more about it.

The Coming of Christianity

Factors Behind the Rise of Christianity

Many Jews came to believe that a final struggle was near, and that it would lead to the coming of a savior, or Messiah, a descendant of King David who would destroy the Roman legions and inaugurate a period of peace, happiness, and prosperity for Jews.
The pagan world also played its part in the story of early Christianity.
The term pagan, derived from a Latin word meaning “rural dweller,” came to refer to those who practiced religions other than Judaism or Christianity.
Many people in the Roman Empire practiced many religions, combining them in whatever way seemed most beneficial or satisfying to them.

The Life and Teachings of Jesus

Into this climate of Messianic hope and Roman religious blending came Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 3 b.c.e.–ca. 29 c.e.)
Like Socrates, Jesus left no writings.
Accounts of his sayings and teachings first circulated orally among his followers and were later written down.
The principal evidence for his life and deeds are the four Gospels of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), books that are part of what Christians later termed the New Testament.
The four Gospels included in the Bible are called canonical, from the Greek word that means “the rule” or “the standard.”
The Gospels include certain details of Jesus’s life, but they were not meant to be biographies.
He preached of a heavenly kingdom of eternal happiness in a life after death, and of the importance of devotion to God and love of others.
His teachings were based on Hebrew scripture and reflected a conception of God and morality that came from Jewish tradition.
The Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah is Christos, the origin of the English word Christ.
The Roman official Pontius Pilate, who had authority over much of Judaea, knew little about Jesus’s teachings.
Like all Roman officials, he was concerned with maintaining peace and order, which was a difficult task in restive Judaea.
Some Jews believed that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah.
Others hated and feared him because they thought him religiously dangerous.
The four Gospels differ somewhat on exactly what actions Jesus took in the city and what Jesus and Pilate said to each other after Jesus was arrested.
On the third day after Jesus’s crucifixion, some of his followers claimed that he had risen from the dead.
For his earliest followers and for generations to come, the resurrection of Jesus became a central element of faith.

The Spread of Christianity

The catalyst in the spread of Jesus’s teachings and the formation of the Christian Church was Paul of Tarsus, a well educated Hellenized Jew who was comfortable in both the Roman and the Jewish worlds.
The New Testament reports that at first he persecuted members of the new sect, but when on the road to the city of Damascus in Syria he was struck blind by a vision of light and heard Jesus’s voice.
He recognized that Christianity would not grow if it remained within Judaism, and connected it with the non-Jewish world.
The breadth of the Roman Empire was another factor behind the spread of Christianity.
If all roads led to Rome, they also led outward to the provinces.
This enabled early Christians to spread their faith easily throughout the known world, as Jesus had told his followers to do in the Gospels, thus making his teachings universal.
Though most of the earliest converts seem to have been Jews, or Greeks and Romans who were already interested in Jewish moral teachings, Paul urged that Gentiles, or nonJews, be accepted on an equal basis.
People were attracted to Christian teachings for a variety of reasons.
It was in many ways a mystery religion, offering its adherents special teachings that would give them immortality.
But in contrast to traditional mystery religions, Christianity promised this immortality widely, not only to a select few.
Most early Christians believed that they would rise in body, not simply in spirit, after a final day of judgment, so they favored burial of the dead rather than the more common Roman practice of cremation.
Along with the possibility of life after death, Christianity also offered rewards in this world to adherents.
One of these was the possibility of forgiveness, for believers accepted that human nature is weak and that even the best Christians could fall into sin.
Christians stressed the ideal of striving for a goal. By spreading the word of Christ, Christians played their part in God’s plan for the triumph of Christianity on earth.

The Growing Acceptance and Evolution of Christianity

At first most Roman officials largely ignored the followers of Jesus, viewing them simply as one of the many splinter groups within Judaism.
Slowly some Roman officials and leaders came to oppose Christian practices and beliefs.
Some Romans thought that Christianity was one of the worst of the mystery religions, with immoral and indecent rituals.
Many in the Roman Empire also feared that the traditional gods would withdraw their favor from the Roman Empire because of the Christian insistence that these gods either did not exist or were evil spirits.
Persecutions of Christians, including torture and executions, were organized by governors of Roman provinces and sometimes by the emperor, beginning with Nero.
Responses to Christianity on the part of Roman emperors varied.
The emperor Trajan forbade his governors to hunt down Christians.
Later emperors, including Septimius Severus at the very end of the second century, Decius in the third century, and Diocletian in the fourth century, increased persecutions again.
By the second century c.e. Christianity was also changing.
The belief that Jesus was soon coming again gradually waned, and as the number of converts increased, permanent institutions were established instead of simple house churches.
Bishops, officials with jurisdiction over a certain area, became especially important.
They began to assert that they had the right to determine the correct interpretation of Christian teachings and to choose their successors.
Councils of bishops determined which writings would be considered canonical, and lines were increasingly drawn between what was considered correct teaching and what was considered incorrect, or heresy.
Christianity also began to attract more highly educated individuals, who developed complex theological interpretations of issues that were not clear in scripture.
Bishops and theologians often modified teachings that seemed upsetting to Romans, such as Jesus’s harsh words about wealth and family ties.
Given all these changes, Christianity became more formal in the second century, with power more centralized.

The Empire in Disarray

Civil Wars and Military Commanders

The reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 c.e.), the last of the “five good emperors,” was marked by problems.
The Tiber River flooded in 162, destroying crops and killing animals, which led to famine.
Soldiers returning from wars in the East brought the Antonine plague back to Rome and then carried it northward.
The Meditations are a good key to Marcus Aurelius’s character, but they appear not to have circulated very much during the centuries immediately after they were written.
Certainly very few later emperors took this advice to heart.
After the death of Marcus Aurelius, misrule by his successors led to a long and intense spasm of fighting.
Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus was strangled by a conspiracy that included his wife, and in 193 five men claimed the throne in quick succession.
Two of them were also assassinated, and Septimius Severus (r. 193– 211) emerged as the victor. He restored order, expanded the borders of the Roman Empire in Africa and western Asia, and invaded Scotland.
Changes in recruiting practices that emphasized local recruiting of non-Romans created a Roman army that became less acculturated to Roman values.
This army was no longer the vehicle for Romanization that it had been in earlier centuries.
More than twenty different emperors seized power in the fortynine years between 235 and 284, a period scholars call the “crisis of the third century.”
These emperors were generally military commanders from the border provinces, and there were so many that the middle of the third century has become known as the age of the barracks emperors.
Almost all were either assassinated or died in civil wars, and their concentration on overthrowing the ruling emperor left the borders unguarded.

Turmoil in Economic Life

This chaos also disrupted areas far away from the borders of the empire.
Renegade soldiers and corrupt imperial officials, together with many greedy local agents, preyed on local people.
In some places in the countryside, officials requisitioned villagers’ livestock and compelled them to do forced labor.
Farmers appealed to the government for protection so that they could cultivate the land.
Because the local officials were themselves so hard pressed, they squeezed what they needed from rural families.
Many farmers, unable to pay, were driven off their land, and those remaining faced ruin.
As a result, agricultural productivity declined.
In response to the economic crisis, the emperors reduced the amount of silver used in coins, replacing it with less valuable metals such as copper, so that they could continue to pay their troops.
The Romans still controlled the Mediterranean, which nurtured commerce.
The road system remained largely intact, though often roads were allowed to fall into disrepair. Trade still flowed, but with reduced efficiency and high costs.
By 284 c.e. the empire had reached a crisis that threatened its downfall.
The position of emperor was gained no longer by lawful succession but rather by victory in civil war.
The empire had failed at the top, and the repercussions of the disaster spread throughout the empire with dire effects.