Changes at the top
That is not to say that everything remained the same between 14 and 192 CE. There was an enormous expansion over that period in the palatial headquarters of imperial power; the staff of imperial administration grew out of all recognition; and the infrastructure became far more complicated. And, by the early second century CE, the emperor began to look very different to his subjects.
The first Augustus had made a great show (and it was partly a show) of living more or less on a par with traditional Roman aristocrats. Within decades, though, the emperors were living in a style of luxury and extravagance that was unmatched in the Western world. The Roman town of Pompeii gives a clear sense of the scale of this change. In the second century BCE the biggest house in Pompeii (which we now know as the House of the Faun, after the bronze statue of a dancing faun or satyr found there) roughly equalled the size of the palaces of some of the kings in the eastern Mediterranean who had grabbed, or been given, parts of the territory conquered by Alexander the Great. In the second century CE, the ‘villa’ (as it is now euphemistically known) that Hadrian built at Tivoli, a few miles from Rome, was bigger than the town of Pompeii itself. And there he re-created for himself a miniature Roman Empire, with replicas of the greatest imperial monuments and treasures – from Egyptian waterways to the famous temple of Aphrodite in the town of Cnidos, with its even more famous nude statue of the goddess.
In between, the couple of houses that Augustus had occupied on the Palatine Hill had grown to be a full blown palace. Nero was the most notorious of the first emperors for extravagant domestic building. His Golden House incorporated state-of-the-art luxury and engineering, but the size was just as striking. The residential quarters and parkland together stretched, so it was said, across half the city, almost as if centuries later the Palace of Versailles had taken over the centre of Paris. It prompted some clever graffiti from its critics. ‘All Rome is becoming a single house. Flee to Veii, citizens,’ one wag scrawled. He was looking back to the proposal made centuries before, after the invasion of the Gauls in 390 BCE, that the Romans should abandon their city and set up home in what had been an enemy Etruscan town. But controversial as Nero’s ‘invasion’ of Rome was, his grand construction projects set the pattern for the future.
72. A sculpture of a crocodile, giving an Egyptian flavour, set beside an ornamental pool in Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. This villa was even more extravagant than Nero’s Golden House. Hadrian got away with it, when Nero did not, largely because his development was relatively hidden in the countryside, and did not appear to take over the city of Rome itself.
By the late first century CE, the emperors were enjoying newly acquired luxurious suburban estates around the edge of most of the city (combinations of palace and pleasure parks know as horti, or ‘gardens’), and they had more or less taken over the whole of the Palatine Hill for their central headquarters, or ‘palace’ (from ‘Palatine’). This now included audience chambers, official dining rooms, reception suites, offices, baths, and accommodation for family, staff and slaves – and right at its back door, symbolically close, was the bogus ‘Hut of Romulus’, where Rome had once begun. The palace was not only widely visible, on many storeys, towering over the city. It had completely taken over land on the Palatine that for centuries had been the favourite place for senators to live. It was here that Cicero had his main city house, as did Clodius and many other of the leading players in the politics of the Roman Republic. There could hardly be a clearer symbol of the change in the balance of power in Rome than that the best remains of those old Palatine houses are now found buried in the foundations of the later palace, or that the elite families, finding themselves pushed out of their district of choice, tended to migrate to the Aventine Hill, which in Rome’s early days had been the stronghold of radical plebeians.
Hand in hand with the expansion of the imperial palace went an expansion of the imperial administration at the central hub of the empire. Little is known in any detail about how the first Augustus’ staff was organised, but it was probably an expanded version of the household of any leading senator of the previous century: large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves, acting in every capacity from cleaners to secretaries, with family and friends as advisors, confidants and sounding boards. That is certainly the impression given by the occupants of a large communal tomb (a so-called columbarium, or ‘dovecote’), discovered in 1726 on the Appian Way. This originally contained the ashes of more than a thousand of the slaves and ex-slaves of Livia, with small plaques recording their names and jobs. Those that survive give a snapshot of her staff: they included five doctors and a medical supervisor, two midwives (presumably for the rest of the household), a painter, seven seamstresses (or menders), a bedroom attendant (capsarius, possibly the ancient equivalent of ‘handbag carrier’), a caterer and a eunuch (function unspecified). This looks like the slave staff that any aristocratic lady might have had, but on a vastly expanded scale. Where they all lived is something of a mystery. They can hardly have fitted into the imperial couple’s Palatine houses and presumably must have been lodged elsewhere.
By the time of Claudius, thirty years later, there was an administrative organisation attached to the emperor on a completely different scale and level of complexity. A series of departments or bureaux had been established to deal with different aspects of administration: separate offices for Latin correspondence and Greek correspondence, another to handle petitions to the emperor, another accounts, another to prepare and organise the legal cases judged by the emperor. They were largely staffed by slaves, many hundreds of them, and headed by divisional managers, who were at first usually ex-slaves – reliable administrators, whose loyalty to the emperor could more or less be guaranteed. But when the immense power that these men wielded became something of a cause célèbre with the traditional elite, members of the equestrian class replaced them as managers. The senators never enjoyed being upstaged by a powerful servile underclass prancing around (as they would have seen it) above their station.
This looks very much like a modern civil service, but in one important sense it was not. There is no sign of the clearly defined hierarchies below the divisional managers or of the grading of posts, the qualifications and examinations that we now associate with the modern Western or ancient Chinese idea of the civil service. So far as we can tell, it was still based on the structure of the old-fashioned slave household, such as Cicero’s, even if vastly magnified. But it also points to another aspect of the emperor’s job that often gets forgotten among all the tales of luxury and excess: the paperwork.
Most Roman rulers spent longer at their desks than at the dinner table. They were expected to work at the job, to be seen to exercise practical power, to respond to petitions, to adjudicate disputes throughout the empire and to give verdicts in tricky legal cases, right down to those that from the outside (though not to the parties involved, no doubt) appear relatively trivial. On one occasion, so a long inscription explains, the first Augustus was asked to pass judgement on a brawl in Cnidos, where the famous Aphrodite came from, on the southwestern coast of modern Turkey. It was a nasty local fight that had ended with one thug being killed by a falling chamber pot accidentally dropped by a slave from the upper window of the house that the ‘victim’ was attacking. Who was guilty, Augustus had to decide, the assailant or the pot dropper or his owner?
It was the support of the emperor’s increasingly large staff that made it possible to deal with many cases like this, with the sacks of letters arriving in the palace post room and the streams of envoys that turned up, all expecting an imperial answer or audience. In that sense, it was rather like a modern civil service: for it must often have been a team of slaves and ex-slaves who read the documents, advised the emperor on the appropriate course of action and no doubt drafted many of the decisions and replies. Realistically, a good proportion of the letters ‘from the emperor’ received by local communities in the provinces and proudly put on display inscribed in permanent form in marble or bronze can hardly have been more than nodded through by him and stamped with his seal. But maybe that did not matter much to the recipients.
The majority of those who lived in the provinces, or even in Italy, had only the vaguest idea, if any, of what the imperial palace was like or how the emperor’s administration operated. Only a tiny number would ever have seen the living emperor. They would, however, have seen his image over and over again, on the coins in their purses and in his portraits that continued to flood the Roman world. The atmosphere was not so different from that of a modern dictatorship, with the ruler’s face peering out from every shopfront, street corner and government department. It even occasionally was converted into edible form, stamped into the biscuits distributed at religious sacrifices, as a few of the surviving biscuit moulds make clear. In fact, the second-century CE scholar, teacher and courtier Marcus Cornelius Fronto, in a letter to his grandest pupil, Marcus Aurelius, treated the spread of imperial images as a source of pride, even if he was sniffy about the artistic talents on display in the spontaneous initiatives of the ordinary people. ‘In all the banks, shops, bars, gables, colonnades, windows everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘portraits of you are on public display, even if they are badly painted and modelled and carved in crude, almost worthless style.’
The emperor’s face was ubiquitous, but it could be represented very differently. Only those with their eyes half shut could have failed to spot a dramatic change near the beginning of the second century CE in how the ruler looked. With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.
This change cannot have been merely a whim of fashion or, as one ancient writer predictably speculated, a device for Hadrian to cover his spots. But the reason for it remains puzzling. Was it an attempt to emulate the Greek philosophers of the past? Hadrian was a well-known admirer of Greek culture, as was the philosophical Marcus Aurelius. So was it part of an attempt to intellectualise Roman imperial power, to re-present it in Greek terms? Or did it point in the opposite direction, harking back to the tough military heroes of earliest Rome, even before the era of Scipio Barbatus in the early third century BCE, when to sport a beard seems already to have been something remarkable in a Roman? It is impossible to know, and no ancient writing that survives ever explains the new beards. But, at the very least, they hint that within the palace someone was thinking hard about the imperial image, right down to the facial hair, and, for whatever reason, was prepared to make a break from tradition.
73. The head of Hadrian in gilded bronze, with his characteristic facial hair. It was once on loyal display in a town in North Italy (Velleia, near modern Parma).
Important, and visible, as some of these developments were, the basic structures of imperial power, as the first Augustus had formulated them, remained in place throughout the rule of these fourteen emperors, no matter who was on the throne: Tiberius near the beginning of the first century CE would not have found it difficult to slip into the imperial shoes of Commodus near the end of the second. They all continued to blazon the title ‘Augustus’, amid a string of other often very similar names. It has always taken a sharp eye to distinguish Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus from the man who was emperor after him, Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius, the pair better known as Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. To their face they were all called Caesar. ‘Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you’, as gladiators occasionally shouted to the emperor before fights, would have been a form of address appropriate to each and every one of them.
They all continued to follow the Augustan precedent in building their way into power, in flaunting their generosity to the people and in displaying their military prowess – or they were much criticised if they did not. Vespasian’s most famous construction, the amphitheatre inaugurated under his son Titus in 80 CE, cleverly combined all three aims. Eventually known as the Colosseum, from a colossal statue of Nero that stood close by and lasted long after Nero’s end, this was simultaneously a massive building project (it took almost ten years to finish, using 100,000 cubic metres of stone), a commemoration of his victory over Jewish rebels (the booty from the war paid for it) and a conspicuous act of generosity to the Roman people (the most famous popular entertainment venue ever). It was also a criticism of his predecessor, pointedly built on the site that had once belonged to Nero’s private park.
But the fourteen emperors were also heirs to the problems and tensions that Augustus bequeathed. For the ‘Augustan template’, though enduringly solid in some respects, was in others a precarious balancing act. It had left some issues perilously unresolved. In particular, Augustus had never solved the problem of succession to imperial power. He had left the role of the senate and the relationship between the emperor and the rest of the elite highly contested. And, more generally, awkward questions remained about how the power of the ruler of the Roman world was to be defined and represented. How, for example, did the parade of civilitas or the idea that he was simply the ‘first among equals’ (‘primus inter pares’, in the Latin slogan) fit with vast imperial honours and the emperor’s nearly divine status? Exactly how close to a god was the Roman ruler?
All emperors and their advisors had to grapple with these dilemmas, which lie just below the surface of many of the lurid anecdotes. Several of the stories of the poisoning of imperial heirs, for example, point to the uncertainty of the rights of succession. The bantering insults of Gaius to his long-suffering consuls reflect the edgy relationship between senate and ruler. So it is to these defining conflicts of imperial power that we now turn: the succession, the senate and the status of the emperor, divine or not. They are as important to our understanding of how Roman imperial politics worked as the mammoth building schemes, military campaigns and generous benefactions; far more important than all the curious stories about crime, conspiracy or horses as consuls.