The Emperors for the Job

[English page]

An account of the Roman Empire at its height amounts to a marvellous vademecum.

Llewelyn Morgan | Published in History Today Volume 73 Issue 8 August 2023

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/emperors-job

The Colossi of Memnon, illustration from Wonders of the Past, 1910. © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images

Halfway up the inside of a church tower in central Italy, upside-down, is an epitaph of a ‘T. Flavius Clymenus’. A freedman of the imperial household, a former slave, his middle name indicates who had owned and freed him: one of the ‘Flavian Emperors’, Vespasian, Titus or Domitian, who ruled Rome at the end of the first century. Not far from Antrodoco, where the church of Santa Maria Extra Moenia stands, stood a villa at Cutiliae where Vespasian was in the habit of spending the summer months, and indeed both Vespasian and his elder son Titus died there. This is no doubt where T. Flavius Clymenus had been employed.

Cutiliae was situated in the rural territory east of Rome known as the Sabina. Vespasian himself, with his rustic accent and manners, was considered a bit of a country bumpkin, and might seem an improbable emperor from an improbable source. But in the Roman imaginary the Sabina evoked tough and thrifty peasants and solid, old-fashioned values. Tom Holland’s Pax, the third instalment of his Roman trilogy, describes the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with the assassination of Nero, the civil conflict that followed, the Flavians who emerged from it, and the ‘Spanish Emperors’, Trajan and Hadrian, to whom has been attributed the settled heyday of the Roman Empire, the Pax, ‘peace’, of Holland’s title. A persistent theme is how the various contenders for power presented their credentials to the Romans. In Vespasian’s case, his origins in a part of Italy that might appear a few hundred years behind Rome, appealing in itself, also complemented the blunt, no-nonsense military manner he cultivated. ‘Woe is me, I think I’m becoming a god!’, he joked on his deathbed, while a response to his son Titus when he questioned the propriety of a new tax on toilets has resulted in the French word for a public urinal, vespasienne.

But authenticity could take many forms in Rome. When Vespasian’s second son Domitian succeeded to the throne after Titus’ premature death, having hitherto acted, arguably, like the archetypal spare, his approach was to style himself as censor. This was a time-honoured role in Rome that encompassed not only morals (though he did bury alive a Vestal Virgin convicted of adultery) but also enhancement of the physical city (‘a lunatic desire to build’, as one author described it), and increasing the silver content of the coinage. As well as being an impeccably traditional office, the censorship was an ideal vehicle for an emperor whose talent was micromanagement. Domitian was also an emperor, it is fair to say, who had little time for the polite fiction, maintained since the first emperor Augustus, that any institution other than the army (the Praetorian Guard in Rome and the legions scattered around the Empire) was necessary for establishing and maintaining imperial authority.

It follows that Pax packs in a lot of war, and that in this account of an imperial system in its mature phase an absolute prerequisite for an acceptable head of state was military competence, clear in the cases of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. But Domitian’s campaigns, despite the assessment of our generally hostile sources, were effective enough in restricting barbarian incursions, and it was his immediate successor Nerva who exposed the reality of things most starkly. An emperor without any military experience, it took just a year before the Praetorian Guard mutinied and took him hostage, mollified only when Nerva adopted, and thus identified as his successor, the leading general of the day, Trajan.

Holland communicates the irreducibly Roman character of all this with the panache we have come to expect: his trick of ironically occupying the headspace of Romans as they think objectively deplorable thoughts (‘Just as marshes bred sickness, so did the wild places of Gaul breed superstition, savagery and insurrection’) is an effective way of communicating how ‘unnervingly, compellingly different’ from us the Romans were. But what he draws out alongside the historical timeline is the fascinating complexity of the Roman Empire at its height: for instance, the creeds, Judaism and Christianity, that proved more resilient than the Romans could possibly anticipate to their violent repression, sometimes even penetrating into the royal family; the astonishing resources applied to supplying the population of Rome with grain and water; the vast Flavian Amphitheatre (or, Colosseum) which, like Hadrian’s architectural masterpiece the Pantheon, would have been unthinkable without the magic ingredient of volcanic ‘Puteola powder’ from the Bay of Naples. An author named Holland can be forgiven also for expatiating on the Batavians, a provincial people who exerted remarkable influence at certain critical junctures.

The sheer diversity of their empire had always exercised Roman writers, the greatest fear of many moralists and satirists being that Rome might find itself conquered by the conquered, that Romans would turn into Greeks, or that Roman values could disappear from Rome and become visible only among barbari, like Germans or Scots. The emperor Hadrian had no such qualms. He travelled all around the empire, pursuing a particular enthusiasm for Greek culture. When he sailed up the Nile in AD 130 there was a poet in his party called Julia Balbilla, the descendant of royalty from across the Greek and Persian east. Balbilla left poems commemorating their visit inscribed on the left shin of one of the ‘Colossi of Memnon’ at Thebes, two images of Amenhotep III that had become identified with a classical hero, and which emitted an unearthly sound when the sun came up. 

All in all, a glimpse of Rome’s future. A rich and fascinating period of history requires a companionable guide. Holland’s erudite and irresistibly readable account amounts to a marvellous vademecum.

Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age
Tom Holland
Abacus, 448pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Llewelyn Morgan is Professor of Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford.