Towards a new history – of emperors

Tiro long outlived his master. Cicero, as we shall see, came to a gory end in December 43 BCE, as did his brother, Quintus. Tiro lived on, so it was said, until 4 BCE, when he died at the age of ninety-nine. He had spent the intervening years fostering and controlling Cicero’s memory, helping to edit the correspondence and speeches and writing his biography, which – although it has not survived – became a standard source of information for later Roman historians. He even issued a large collection of his jokes. One of Cicero’s later admirers suggested that his reputation for wit might have been better had Tiro only been a little more selective.

Tiro also lived to see a new permanent regime of one-man rule, emperors firmly installed on the throne of Rome and the old Republic an increasingly distant memory. This new regime is the theme of the last four chapters of SPQR, which explore the period of just over 250 years from the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE to the early third century CE – more specifically, to the particular turning point in 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. It is a very different story from that of the first 700 or so years we have explored so far.

Roman history in this later period is in some ways much more familiar than anything earlier. It was during these centuries that most of those famous ancient landmarks still standing in the city of Rome were constructed: from the Colosseum, erected as a place of popular entertainment in the 70s CE, to the Pantheon (‘Temple of All Gods’), built fifty years later, under the emperor Hadrian, and the only ancient temple that we can still walk into in more or less its original state – it was saved by its conversion into a Christian church without wholesale rebuilding. Even in the Roman Forum, the centre of the old city, where the big political battles of the Roman Republic took place, most of what we now see above ground was built under the emperors, not in the age of the Gracchi, or Sulla, or Cicero.

Overall there is much more evidence for the world of the first two centuries CE, even if no other individual ever stands out in quite such vivid detail as Cicero. That is not to do with the survival of vast new quantities of literature, poetry or history, though there are certainly volumes of that, and of increasingly varied types. We still have gossipy biographies of individual emperors; cynical satires, from the pens of Juvenal and others, pouring scorn on Roman prejudices; and extravagantly inventive novels, including the notorious Satyricon, written by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a one-time friend and later victim of the emperor Nero and filmed 2,000 years later by Federico Fellini. This is a bawdy story of a group of rogues travelling round southern Italy, featuring orgies, cheap lodging houses with beds crawling with bugs, and a memorable portrait – and parody – of a rich and vulgar ex-slave, Trimalchio, who almost gave his name to a much later classic novel; the working title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio at West Egg.

The dramatic change is rather in documents inscribed on stone. We have already analysed a few of these from centuries earlier, whether the tombstone of Scipio Barbatus or the semi-comprehensible inscription mentioning the ‘king’ (rex) dug up in the Forum. But in those early periods they were relatively few in number. From the first century CE, for reasons that no one has ever really fathomed, there was an explosion of writing on stone and bronze. In particular, thousands and thousands of epitaphs survive from right across the empire, commemorating relatively ordinary people or at least those with enough spare cash to commission some permanent memorial for themselves, however humble. They sometimes refer to little more than the occupation of the dead (‘pearl seller’, ‘fishmonger’, ‘midwife’ or ‘baker’), sometimes to a whole life story. One peculiarly loquacious stone commemorates a woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the centre of a ménage à trois that split up after her death. There are also thousands of short biographies of leading citizens carved into the plinths of their statues all over the Roman world, and letters from emperors or decrees of the senate proudly displayed in far-flung communities of the empire. If the job of the historian of early Rome is to squeeze every single piece of surviving evidence for all it can tell us, by the first century CE the question is how to select the pieces of evidence that tell us the most.

An even bigger difference, however, in reconstructing this part of the story of Rome is that we must now largely do without the luxury, or constraint, of chronology. That is partly because of the geographical spread of the Roman world. There is no single narrative that links, in any useful or revealing way, the story of Roman Britain with the story of Roman Africa. There are numerous microstories and different histories of different regions which do not necessarily fit together and which, retold one by one, would make a decidedly unilluminating book. But it is also because, after the establishment of one-man rule at the end of the first century BCE, for more than two hundred years there is no significant history of change at Rome. Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history. Of course there were all kind of events, battles, assassinations, political stand-offs, new initiatives and inventions; and the participants would have had all kinds of exciting stories to tell and disputes to argue. But unlike the story of the development of the Republic and the growth of imperial power, which revolutionised almost every aspect of the world of Rome, there was no fundamental change in the structure of Roman politics, empire or society between the end of the first century BCE and the end of the second century CE.

So we shall start by looking in the next chapter at how, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the emperor Augustus managed to establish one-man rule as a permanent fixture – perhaps the most important revolution in the story of Rome – and then explore the structures, problems and tensions that both underpinned and undermined that system for the next two centuries. The varied cast of characters will include dissident senators, the drunken clients of Roman bars and persecuted (and, for the Romans, troublesome) Christians. The big question is: how can we best understand the world of the Roman Empire under an emperor?