III

ROMA

Ancient Rome, 753 BC–AD 337

THERE is a quality of cohesiveness about the Roman world which applied neither to Greece nor perhaps to any other civilization, ancient or modern. Like the stones of a Roman wall, which were held together both by the regularity of the design and by that peculiarly powerful Roman cement, so the various parts of the Roman realm were bonded into a massive, monolithic entity by physical, organizational, and psychological controls. The physical bonds included the network of military garrisons which were stationed in every province, and the network of stone-built roads which linked the provinces with Rome. The organizational bonds were based on the common principles of law and administration, and on the universal army of officials who enforced common standards of conduct. The psychological controls were built on fear and punishment—on the absolute certainty that anyone or anything that threatened the authority of Rome would be utterly destroyed.

The source of the Roman obsession with unity and cohesion may well have lain in the pattern of Rome’s early development. Whereas Greece had grown from scores of scattered cities, Rome grew from one single organism. Whilst the Greek world had expanded along the Mediterranean sea lanes, the Roman world was assembled by territorial conquest. Of course, the contrast is not quite so stark: in Alexander the Great the Greeks had found the greatest territorial conqueror of all time; and the Romans, once they moved outside Italy, did not fail to learn the lessons of sea power. Yet the essential difference is undeniable. The key to the Greek world lay in its high-prowed ships; the key to Roman power lay in its marching legions. The Greeks were wedded to the sea, the Romans to the land. The Greek was a sailor at heart, the Roman a landsman.

Certainly, in trying to explain the Roman phenomenon, one would have to place great emphasis on this almost animal instinct for the ‘territorial imperative’. Roman priorities lay in the organization, exploitation, and defence of their territory. In all probability it was the fertile plain of Latium that created the habits and skills of landed settlement, landed property, landed economy, landed administration, and a land-based society. From this arose the Roman genius for military organization and orderly government. In turn, a deep attachment to the land, and to the stability which rural life engenders, fostered the Roman virtues: gravitas, a sense of responsibility, pietas, a sense of devotion to family and country, and iusti-tia, a sense of the natural order. ‘Tillers of the soil make the strongest men and the bravest soldiers,’ wrote the Elder Cato.1

Modern attitudes to Roman civilization range from the infinitely impressed to the thoroughly disgusted. As always, there are the power-worshippers, especially among historians, who are predisposed to admire whatever is strong, who feel more attracted to the might of Rome than to the subtlety of Greece. They admire the size and strength of the Colosseum with never a thought for the purposes to which it was put. The Colosseum, in fact, became the symbol of Roman civilization. It became a commonplace: ‘When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; and when Rome falls—the World.’At the same time there is a solid body of opinion which dislikes Rome. For many, Rome is at best the imitator and the continuator of Greece on a larger scale. Greek civilization had quality, Rome mere quantity. Greece was original, Rome derivative. Greece had style, Rome had money. Greece was the inventor, Rome the Research and Development division. Such indeed was the opinion of some of the more intellectual Romans. ‘Had the Greeks held novelty in such disdain as we,’ asked Horace in his Epistles, ‘what work of ancient date would now exist?’ What is more, the Romans vulgarized many of the things which they copied. In architecture, for example, they borrowed the heavy and luxurious late Corinthian order, but not the Doric or the Ionian. ‘The whole fabric of Greek art goes to pieces’, writes one critic, ‘when it is brought into contact with a purely utilitarian nation like Rome.’

Rome’s debt to Greece, however, was enormous. In religion, the Romans adopted the Olympians wholesale—turning Zeus into Jupiter, Hera into Juno, Ares into Mars, Aphrodite into Venus. They adopted Greek moral philosophy to the point where Stoicism was more typical of Rome than of Athens. In literature, Greek writers were consciously used as models by their Latin successors. It was absolutely accepted that an educated Roman should be fluent in Greek. In speculative philosophy and the sciences, the Romans made virtually no advance on earlier achievements.

Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Rome was somehow a junior partner in Graeco-Roman civilization. The Roman genius was projected into new spheres— especially into those of law, military organization, administration, and engineering. Moreover, the tensions which arose within the Roman state produced literary and artistic sensibilities of the highest order. It was no accident that many leading Roman soldiers and statesmen were writers of high calibre. Equally, the long list of Roman vices cannot be forgotten. Critics have pointed to a specially repulsive brand of slavery, to cruelty beyond measure, and, in time, to a degree of decadence that made hellenism look puritanical.

In its widest definition, from the founding of the ‘Eternal City’ in 753 BC to the final destruction of the Roman Empire in AD 1453, the political history of ancient Rome lasted for 2,206 years. In its more usual definition, from the founding of the city to the collapse of that western segment of the Roman Empire of which Rome was the capital, it lasted for barely half that time. It is customarily divided into three distinct periods: the Kingdom, the Republic, and the Empire. [AUC]

The semi-legendary Roman Kingdom corresponds in many ways to the earlier ‘Heroic Age’ of Greece. It begins with the tale of Romulus and Remus, the orphaned twins, reputedly descendants of Aeneas, who were suckled by a she-wolf, and it ends with the expulsion of the last of the seven kings, Tarquin the Proud, in 510 BC. Those two-and-a-half centuries lie long before the era of recorded history. Romulus, the founder of Rome, supposedly organized the Rape of the Sabine Women, who helped to populate the new city. Numa Pompilius, a Sabine, introduced the calendar and the official religious practices. He founded the Temple of Janus in the Forum, whose doors were opened in time of war and closed in times of peace. Tullius Hostilius, the third king, a Latin, razed the neighbouring city of Alba Longa and deported its population. Ancus Marcius created the order ofplebs or ‘common people’ from imported captives. Servius Tullius, the sixth king, granted Rome its first constitution, giving the plebs independence from the patricians or ‘elders’, and created the Latin League. The fifth and seventh kings, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, were of Etruscan descent. The former undertook the first public works in Rome, including the vast sewer named after him. The latter was expelled, following the Rape of Lucretia organized by his son. [ETRUSCHERIA]

Rome, with its seven hills commanding the strategic crossing-point of the River Tiber, was but one of several cities of Latium that spoke the ‘Latin’ tongue. In those early years it was dominated by more powerful neighbours, especially by the Etruscans to the north, whose fortified city of Veii lay only 16 km from the Forum. The remains of the ‘Etruscan Places’ at Vulci, Tarquinia, and Perugia attest to an advanced but mysterious civilization. Rome borrowed much from them. According to Livy, the city only survived the Etruscan attempt to storm it and to reinstate the Tarquins after the one-eyed Horatius Codes had held the Sublician Bridge:

Then out spake brave Horatius

The Captain of the Gate:

‘To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late;

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his Gods?

Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,

With all the speed ye may:

AUC

ROMAN chronology was based on the conventional date for the founding of the city. Zero year was long taken to be equivalent to 750 BC. All subsequent dates were calculated AUC, ab urbe condita, ‘from the founding of the city’. A modified scheme came into being in the first century BC, when the computations of M. Terentius Varro (636–725 AUC), ‘the most learned of the Romans’, made the city’s foundation equivalent to 753 BC.

By Varro’s time, however, most Romans had also become accustomed to an alternative system, which referred not to the date of the year but to the names of the annual consuls. Both in official records and in everyday conversations, they talked of ‘the year of C. Terentius Varro and L. Aemilius Paulus’ (216 BC), or of ‘the seven consulships of C. Marius’ (107, 104,103,102,101, 100, and 86 BC). One needed a detailed grasp of Roman history to follow the references. Few educated people would not have known that the elder Varro and Aemilius Paulus had commanded the Roman army at the disaster of Cannae.

Fortunately, the two systems were compatible. Each of them could be invoked to support the other. For example, the rise and fall of G. lulius Caesar could be calculated with reference to the following:

AUC	Consulship	BC
695	M. Calpurnius Bibulus and C. lulius Caesar (I)	59
705	C. Claudius Marcellus and L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus	49
706	C. lulius Caesar (II) and P. Servilius Vatia Isauricus	48
707	Q. Rufius Calenus and P. Vatinius	47
708	C. lulius Caesar (III) and M. Aemilius Lepidus	46
709	C. lulius Caesar (IV) Sole Consul	45
710	C. lulius Caesar (V) and M. Antonius	44
711	C. Vibius Pansa and A. Hirtius, both killed; replaced by the Triumvirate of M. Antonius, G. Octavianus, and M. Aemilius Lepidus.	43

It was Caesar who realized that the existing calendar was becoming inoperable. The old Roman year contained only 304 days divided into 10 months, beginning on xi Kal. Maius or 21 April. The extra months of lanuarius and Februarius had been invented as stop-gaps. In 708AUC,therefore, during Caesar’s third consulship, drastic reforms were introduced. The current year was prolonged by 151 days so that the New Year could begin on 1 January 707 AUC/45 BC and run over twelve months of 365 days until 31 December. Further adjustments were made under Augustus in 737 AUC/AD 4, when the old fifth and sixth months, Quintilis and Sextilis, were renamed Julius (after Caesar) and Augustus, and the four-yearly bissextile or ‘leap-day’ was introduced. The resultant Julian Year of 365 1/4 days was misaligned with the earth only by the tiny margin of 11 minutes 12 seconds, and remained in universal use until AD 1582.

None the less, consuls continued to be appointed throughout the Principate; and the custom of counting years by consulships was preserved with them. The regnal years of the emperors were not usually invoked. In the later Empire, when consulships were abolished, the AUC system was supported by references to the fifteen-year tax cycle of ‘Indictions’. When the Christian era finally came into use in the mid-sixth century AD, the Roman era had been in operation for thirteen centuries.1 [ANNO DOMINI]

I, with two more to help me,

Will hold the foe in play.

In yon straight path a thousand

May well be stopped by three.

Now who will stand on either hand

And keep the bridge with me?’

‘Horatius’, quoth the Consul,

‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’

And straight against that great array

Forth went the dauntless Three.

For Romans in Rome’s quarrel

Spared neither land nor gold,

Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,

In the brave days of old.

The Roman Republic presided over the city’s growth from provincial obscurity to mastery of the whole Mediterranean. The process began in 509 BC with the first election of the ruling consuls, and ended 478 years later, when Octavian established the first imperial dynasty. It was an epoch of incessant conquest. In the fifth century, Rome gained a hold over its immediate neighbours and a territory of 822 km2 (314 square miles). In one famous episode, in 491 BC, the Roman exile G. Marcius Coriolanus, who had led an all-conquering Volscian army to the gates of Rome, was persuaded to desist by the tearful entreaties of his mother. In the fourth century Rome recovered from its sack by the Gauls in 390 BC, and in the three fierce Samnite Wars established its supremacy over central Italy. In the third century Rome undertook the conquest of the Greek south, first in the war against Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (282–272 BC), who came to the aid of his compatriots, and later in successive campaigns ending with the annexation of Sicily (see pp. 138–47, above). These campaigns provoked extended conflict with Carthage, and the three Punic Wars.

Of all Rome’s wars it was the hundred years’ conflict with Carthage that best demonstrated that famous Roman combination of stamina and ruthlessness. Older than Rome, African Carthage had been founded by migrants from Phoenicia, in Latin Punka (see pp. 104–6). Relations between them had traditionally been pacific, protected by a treaty contained in the oldest known document of Roman history. Dated in the first year of Republic, the treaty enjoined each side to respect the other’s sphere of influence. The peace was kept for nearly three centuries before Roman forces crossed the Straits of Messina.

ETRUSCHERIA

AT Santa Severa, ancient Pyrgi, near Rome, archaeologists have uncovered two Etruscan temples overlooking the sea. The find, made in 1957–64, was exceptional. It was the first Etruscan site that offered something other than tombs. Dated c.500 BC, it yielded three wafer-thin gold tablets, with inscriptions in Punic and Etruscan:

To the lady Astarte. This is the sacred place made and given by Thefarie Velianas, king of Cisra, in the month of the Sacrifice of the Sun … in the third year of his reign, in the month of Kir, of the Day of the Burial of the Divinity. And the years of the statue of the goddess [are as many] as these stars.1

Pyrgi served as harbour to the nearby town of Cisra (modern Cerveteri); and King Thefarie or ‘Tiberius’ had chosen to worship a Carthaginian Goddess, [TAMMUZ] The temples must have been dedicated some time after the abortive Etruscan raid on Greek Cumae on the Bay of Naples, perhaps within a decade of the revolt of Rome against Etruscan overlordship.

The Etruscans flourished in Tuscany and Umbria from 700 to 100 BC. They claimed to be immigrants from Asia Minor. Their alphabet, derived from the Greek, is easily read, but their language has not been fully deciphered. After the initial era of princes, they passed in the sixth century into the era of mercantile city-states on the Greek model. Their grave-chambers are covered in fine, stylized, pictorial murals often depicting banquets of the dead (see Plate 5). The little that is known about them derives either from archaeology or from hostile Roman accounts of a later age, when they are painted as gluttons, lechers, and religious devotees. From the first Etruscan exhibition in London in 1837 to its most recent successor in Paris in 1992,2 many attempts have been made to interest the European public in Etruscology. The greatest stimulus came in 1828–36, from the opening of tombs at Vulci, Caere, and Tarquinia, then in the Papal States.

But the dominant mode has been one of Romantic speculation. The Medici, who organized the first investigations, claimed to be of Etruscan descent. In the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood named his pottery ‘Etruria’ unaware that the fashionable ‘Etruscan Style’ was of Greek, not Etruscan, origin. Prosper Mérimée was beguiled by the mystery of the Etruscans, as was the Victorian pioneer George Dennis. And so was D. H. Lawrence:

The things [the Etruscans] did in their easy centuries were as natural as breathing. And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life … And death was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life.3

This is not Etruscology; it is Etruscheria, or, as the French would say, étruscomanie.

In the First Punic War (264–241) Carthage itself remained relatively immune from Roman landpower, although its hold on Sicily was lost. Rome learned the arts of naval warfare. In the Second Punic War (218–201), which followed Hannibal’s spectacular expedition across the Alps from Spain to Italy, Rome recovered by sheer persistence from the brink of annihilation. The Celts of northern Italy were in revolt, as was much of Sicily; and the road to Rome was left almost undefended. The two battles of Lake Trasimeno (217) and Cannae (216) belong to Rome’s most crushing defeats. Only the tactics of Q. Fabius Maximus ‘Cunctator’, ‘The Delayer’, the dogged nursing of resources, and the capture of Syracuse (see pp. 142–4) enabled Rome to survive. Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal was thwarted in a second attempt to invade Italy from Spain, and in 203 Hannibal himself was forced to withdraw. He was followed to Africa by the young Publius Cornelius Scipio ‘Africanus’, survivor of Cannae, conqueror of Cartagena. At Zama in 202, Hannibal met his match. Taking refuge with the enemies of Rome in Greece, he was eventually harried to suicide.

Carthage, deprived of its fleet and paying heavy tribute, survived for sixty years more. But in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC) the elder Cato raised the call for the enemy’s complete destruction. Carthago delenda est. The deed was carried out in 146. The city was razed, the population sold into slavery, the site ploughed, and salt poured into the furrow. In Tacitus’ words on another occasion, the Romans ‘created a desert and called it peace’. Scipio Aemilianus, watching the scene in the company of the historian Polybius, was moved to quote the words of Hector in the Iliad:‘The day shall come when sacred Troy shall fall.’ When asked what he meant he replied: ‘This is a glorious moment, Polybius, yet I am seized with foreboding that some day the same fate will befall my own country’.5

As the challenge of Carthage was neutralized, and then removed, the triumphant legions of the Republic began to pick off the remaining countries of the Mediterranean. Cisalpine Gaul was conquered between 241 and 190. Iberia and much of northern Africa came as a prize in 201. Illyria was conquered between 229 and 168. Macedonia, together with mainland Greece, was taken over by 146. Transalpine Gaul was invaded in 125 BC, and finally subdued by Caesar in 58–50 BC. The independent kingdoms of Asia Minor were annexed in 67–61 BC, Syria and Palestine by 64 BC. [EGNATIA]

In the last hundred years of the Republic’s existence the foreign campaigns became entangled in a series of civil wars. Successful generals sought to control the central government in Rome, whilst would-be reformers sought to satisfy the demands of the lower orders. The resultant strife led to intermittent periods of chaos and of dictatorial rule. In 133–121 BC the popular tribunes Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his brother, G. Sempronius Gracchus, attempted to allocate public lands to displaced peasants who had served in the Republic’s conquests. Both were opposed by the ruling oligarchy, and both were slain. In 82–79 L. Sulla Felix declared himself Dictator after defeating the partisans of G. Marius (157–86), the greatest soldier of his age. In 60 BC three rival soldier-politicians, M. Licinius Crassus, Pompeius Magnus, and C. Iulius Caesar, formed the first ruling triumvirate. But in 48 BC Caesar claimed the title of Imperator after crushing the faction of the remaining triumvir, Pompey. Finally, in 31 BC, after the fall of the second triumvirate, Octavian brought the civil wars to a close. His victory at Actium brought about the surrender of Egypt, the death of Antony and Cleopatra, the end of opposition, and his assumption of the title of ‘Augustus’. In this way the last gasp of the Roman Republic coincided with the capture of the last piece of the Mediterranean coast which had remained at least nominally independent. In almost 500 years the gates of the Temple of Janus had been closed on only three occasions, [AQUILA]

EGNATIA

OF all the Roman roads, the Via Egnatia proved to be one of the most vital. Built in the second century BC, it linked Rome with Byzantium and hence, in a later age, the Western with the Eastern Empire. It took its name from the city of Egnatia in Apulia, the site of a miraculous fiery altar and a main stage between Rome and the Adriatic port of Brindisium. In Italy it provided an alternative route to the older Via Appia, which reached the same destination through Beneventum and Tarentum. On the eastern Adriatic shore, its starting-point was at Dyracchion (Durres), with a feeder road from Apollonia. It crossed the province of Macedonia, passing Lychnidos (Ochrid) and Pella to reach Thessalonika. It skirted the Chalkidike peninsula at Amphipolis and Philippi, before terminating at Dypsela on the Hebros (Maritsa) in Thrace.1

The final section into Byzantium did not originally carry the name of Egnatia, and made a long inland detour to avoid the coastal lagoons. The direct route between Rhegion and Hebdomon was only paved by Justinian I, bringing the traveller to the Golden Gate of Constantinople after twenty days and over 500 miles. It was proverbial that ‘all roads lead to Rome’. But all roads led away from Rome as well.

The civil strife was the outward expression, above all, of a shift in political attitudes, which is well illustrated from the careers of the two Catos, both of whom supported the losing side. Marcus Porcius Cato, ‘The Censor’ (234–149 BC), became a byword for the old Roman virtues of austerity and puritanism. After twenty-seven years of soldiering he retired to his farm to write books on history and agriculture. He railed against the wave of hellenistic luxury and sophistication, and in particular against the unprincipled careerism, as he saw it, of the Scipios. In his last years he called unrelentingly for the annihilation of Carthage. His great-grandson M. Porcius Cato Uticensis (95–46 BC) showed the same rectitude and obstinacy of character. A Stoic by training, he joined Pompey in the campaign to check the dictatorial ambitions of Caesar. When Pompey’s cause was lost, he killed himself rather than submit, after a heroic journey across the Libyan desert which led only to encirclement in the town of Utica. He had spent his last night reading Plato’s Phaedo, on the immortality of the soul. In this way he became a symbol of republican opposition to tyranny, of principled opposition. Cicero praised him. Caesar, in his Anticato, tried meanly to discredit him. The poet Lucan (AD 39–65), who also committed suicide rather than submit to a despot, makes him the champion of political freedom. Dante, after Lucan, makes him the guardian of Mount Purgatory, and hence of the path to spiritual liberty.

AQUILA

THE eagle’s ranking as ‘king of the birds’ is as ancient as the lion’s as ‘king of the beasts’. In Roman lore, it was Jupiter’s ‘storm-bird’, carrier of the thunderbolt. Eagles figured as emblems of power and majesty in Babylon and Persia, and were adopted by the Roman general, Marius, after his oriental conquests. The legions of the Roman Empire marched behind eagle ensigns; and Roman consuls carried eagle-tipped sceptres.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1228.)

In Slavonic folklore, the three brothers, Lekh, Chekh, and Rus, set out to find their fortune. Rus went to the east, Chekh to the south to Bohemia, whilst Lekh crossed the plain to the west. Lekh stopped beside a lake under a great tree where a white eagle had built its nest. He was the father of the Poles; and Gniezno, the ‘eagle’s nest’, was their first home.

In Wales, too, the peak of Mount Snowdon, the heart of the national homeland, is called Eryri, ‘the place of eagles’.

In Christian symbolism the eagle is associated with St John the Evangelist (alongside the Angel and Axe of St Matthew, the Bull of St Luke, and the Lion of St Mark). It appears on the lecterns of churches, upholding the Bible on its outspread wings to repel the serpent of falsehood. According to St Jerome, it was the emblem of the Ascension.

Throughout European history, the imperial eagle has been co-opted by rulers who claimed superiority over their fellow princes. Charlemagne wore an eagle-embossed cloak; and Canute the Great was buried in one.2 Both Napoleon I and Napoleon III used eagle symbolism with relish. Napoleon’s heir, the-King of Rome, received the sobriquet of aiglon or ‘eaglet’. Only the British, to be different, betrayed no aquiline interests.

Eagles recur throughout European heraldry, having been present at an earlier date in Islamic insignia.3 Both Serbia and Poland boast a white eagle, the Polish one crowned (and temporarily uncrowned by the Communist regime). Both Tyrol and Brandenburg-Prussia sported a red eagle, the Swedish province of Varmland a blue one. The Federal Republic of Germany took a single stylized black eagle from the city arms of Aachen. Under the dynasty of the Palaeologues, the Byzantine Empire took on the emblem of a black, double-headed spread eagle, symbol of the Roman succession in East and West. In due course this passed to the Tsars of Moscow, ‘the Third Rome’, to the Holy Roman Emperors in Germany, and to the Habsburgs of Austria.

Ein Adler fängt kerne Mücken, runs the German proverb: ‘an eagle catches no midges’.

C. Iulius Caesar (100–44 BC) led the decisive attack on the established procedures of the Republic. A successful general and administrator, he shared the first triumvirate from 60 BC with Pompey and Crassus, served as Consul and, from 59, Proconsul of the two Gauls. Caesar’s enemies were disgusted by his shameless bribing of the Roman populace, by his manipulation of politicians, by the ‘smash-and-grab’ policy of his military campaigns. Cicero’s protest—’O tempora! O mores!’—is still with us. On 10 January 49 BC, when Caesar crossed the frontier of the province of Italia on the River Rubicon, he declared war on Rome. He shunned the outward trappings of monarchy, but his dictatorship was a reality, his name became synonymous with absolute power. He even succeeded in changing the calendar. He was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC, by a group of republican conspirators headed by M. Brutus and C. Cassius Longinus, whom admirers have called the ‘Liberators’. Brutus was a descendant of Rome’s first Consul, who overthrew the Tarquins. Shakespeare called him ‘the noblest Roman of them all’. Dante put him in the lowest circle of Hell for his betrayal of Caesar’s friendship.

After Caesar’s death, the leadership of the Caesarian party was assumed by his nephew, Octavian. C. Octavius (b. 63 BC), whose name had been changed to C. Iulius Caesar Octavianus, when he was adopted as Caesar’s official heir, was to change it again when all the battles were won. He served for twelve years in a second, shaky triumvirate with M. Aemilius Lepidus and M. Antonius (c.82–30 BC), who together at Philippi suppressed the republican faction of Brutus and Cassius. But then he turned on his partners, and attacked the dominant Mark Antony. Octavian was master of the west, Mark Antony of the east; and the naval battle of Actium was a rather tame conclusion to a confrontation in which the combined forces of almost all the Roman world were ranged. But Actium was decisive: it ended the civil wars, finished off the Republic, and gave Octavian the supreme title of Augustus.

The Empire, whose early years are widely referred to as ‘the Principate’, begins with the triumph of Augustus in 31 BC. It saw the marvellous Pax Romana, the ‘Roman Peace’, established from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. Although turbulent politics and murderous intrigues continued, especially in Rome, the provinces were firmly controlled, and wars were largely confined to the distant frontiers. A few new territories were acquired—Britannia in AD 43, Armenia in 63, Dacia in 105. But in the main the Empire was content to protect itself in Europe behind the limes or ‘frontier line’ from Hadrian’s Wall to the Danube delta, and to fight in Asia against Rome’s most formidable enemies—the Parthians and Persians, [AQUINCUM]

AQUINCUM

LIKE neighbouring Carnuntum, Aquincum started life as a legionary camp on the Danube in the reign of Tiberius. It soon attracted a cluster of canabae or ‘informal settlements’, and in the second century AD was given the formal status of municipium. As a gateway to the Empire from the plains of Pannonia, it thrived mightily, both as a legionary base and as a commercial centre. Its prosperity is reflected in its twin amphitheatres, military and civilian, and the mural paintings which adorned its more opulent houses.1

The ruins of Aquincum lie in the suburbs of modem Budapest [BUDA] Like the English, the Hungarians had no direct experience of the Roman world, having migrated to their present homeland after the Empire’s fall. But they cherish their ‘Roman heritage’ all the more.2 [BARBAROS]

Eventually, the imperial retreat had to begin. And retreat led to crumbling at the edges and demoralization at the centre. Already in the third century AD a rash of short-lived emperors signalled the weakening of the monolith. A partial recovery was staged by ordering the division of the Empire into East and West. But in the fourth century a marked shift of resources in favour of the East was accompanied by the decision to transfer the capital from Rome to Byzantium. That was in AD 330. Rome had reached its term as a political centre. The ‘eternity’ of its rule over Kingdom, Republic, and Empire lasted exactly 1,083 years.

The motor of Roman expansion was far more powerful than that which had fuelled the growth of the Greek city-states or of Macedonia. Although the overall dimensions of Alexander’s empire may briefly have exceeded those of the later Roman world, the area of land which Rome systematically settled and mobilized was undoubtedly the larger. From the outset Rome applied a variety of legal, demographic, and agrarian instruments which ensured that an incorporated territory contribute to the overall resources of the Roman war-machine. According to circumstance, the inhabitants of conquered districts would be granted the status either of full Roman citizenship, or of half-citizenship (civitas sine suffragio) or of Roman allies. In each case their duty to contribute money and soldiers was carefully assessed. Loyal soldiers were rewarded with generous grants of land, which would be surveyed and divided into regular plots. The result was a growing territory that needed ever more troops to defend it, and a growing army that needed ever more land to support it. A militarized society, where citizenship was synonymous with military service, developed an insatiable agrarian appetite. A fund of state land, the ager publicus, was held back to reward the state’s most devoted servants, especially senators.

Within this overall strategy, political arrangements could be extremely flexible. The introduction of uniform administration was not an immediate priority. Peninsular Italy, which was united under Roman rule at the end of the third century BC, had to wait 200 years for its reorganization into regular provinces. Local rulers were frequently left in place. Those who resisted, or rebelled, risked annihilation. In Greece, for example, resistance was undermined when in 146 BC the Roman general appeared at the Isthmian Games and announced that the city-states would be allowed to retain their autonomy. Corinth, which declined the offer, suffered the same fate as Carthage (and in the same year).

Roman religious life was amazingly eclectic. Over the centuries the Romans came into contact with virtually all the gods of the Mediterranean, each of whose cults they added to their collection. In the early days, the devotion of a Roman family was centred on the household deities of hearth and barn. Civic life centred on a series of guardian cults, such as that of the Vestal Virgins, who tended the eternal flame, and on a complicated calendar of festivals presided over by the Pontifex Maximus. Later, the proximity of Magna Graecia led to the wholesale adoption of the Olympian pantheon. The first temple of Apollo was consecrated in Rome in 431 BC. The Epicureans, and especially the Stoics, also found many adherents. In late republican times, oriental mystery cults were popularized—among them that of Atargatis from Syria, of Cybele, the ‘Magna Mater’ of Asia Minor, and of Egyptian Isis. In imperial times, official religion shifted to the obligatory cult of recent or reigning emperors. Christianity took hold at a time when the Persian sun-god Mithras was increasingly cultivated, especially in the army. The gospel of love had to contend with the dualist doctrine of light and darkness, whose initiates bathed in bull’s blood and celebrated the birth of their god on 25 December. Their subterranean oblations are imagined in the ‘Hymn of the XXX Legion’:

Mithras, God of the Morning, our trumpets waken the Wall!
Rome is above the nations, but Thou art over all!
Now as the names are answered, and the guards are marched away,
Mithras, also a soldier, give us strength for this day!
Mithras, God of the Sunset, low on the western main—
Thou descending immortal, immortal to rise again!
Now when the watch is ended, now when the wine is drawn,
Mithras, also a soldier, keep us pure till the dawn!
Mithras, God of the Midnight, here where the great Bull dies,
Look on Thy children in darkness. O take our sacrifice!
Many roads Thou hast fashioned—all of them lead to the Light!
Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright! [ARICIA]

The Roman economy combined a large measure of self-sufficiency in the inland areas with extensive trade and commerce in the Mediterranean. Overland transport costs were high, despite the main roads, so provincial cities did not look beyond the surrounding districts for most commodities. But the seaborne traffic, first developed by Greeks and Phoenicians, was increased still further. Wine, oil, furs, pottery, metals, slaves, and corn were the standard cargoes, [CEDROS]

ARICIA

ADOZEN miles to the south of Rome, in a crater amidst the Alban hills, lies Lake Nemi, the ‘lake of the grove’. In imperial times, the nearby village of Nemi was called Aricia; and throughout the Roman era the woods beside the lake sheltered the sacred Arician Grove, home of Diana nemorensis, ‘The Diana of the Grove’.

The Arician cult is known both from the writings of Strabo and from modern archaeology. In many ways, it was unremarkable. It involved the worship of a sacred oak, whose boughs were not to be broken, and a sanctuary of perpetual fire. Apart from Diana, it addressed two minor deities— Egeria, a water nymph, and Virbius, a fugitive from the wrath of Zeus. As shown by the surviving mounds of votive offerings, its main devotees were women who hoped to conceive. On the day of the annual summer festival, the grove was lit up by myriad torches, and women all over Italy burned fires in gratitude.

In one respect, however, the cult was exceptional. The Chief Priest of Aricia, who bore the title of Rex Nemorensis or ‘King of the Grove’, was obliged to win his position by slaying his predecessor. At one and the same time he was priest, murderer, and prospective murder victim. Stalking the grove with drawn sword, even at dead of night, he awaited the hour when the next contestant would appear, break off a twig of the Oak, and challenge him to mortal combat.

In recent times, the Arician Grove is notable as the starting-point of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), one of the founding works of modern anthropology. Frazer ranks alongside Marx, Freud, and Einstein as a pioneer who changed the thinking of the world. Frazer posed himself two simple questions: ‘Why had the priest to slay his predecessor?’ and ‘Why, before he slew him, had he first to pluck the Golden Bough?’

In search of possible answers, he set off on an investigation of supernatural beliefs in every conceivable culture, ancient or modern. He examines rain-making in China; priest-kings from the Pharaohs to Dalai Lama; tree-spirits from New Guinea to the Cedar of Gilgit, corn-spirits from the Isle of Skye to the Gardens of Adonis; May-Day festivals, summer Fire Festivals, and harvest Festivals. He describes belief in the internal Soul among the Hawaiians and in the external Soul among the Samoyeds of Siberia: in the transference of evil and the expulsion of spirits. He outlines a great range of sacrificial ceremonies from sacrifices among the Khonds of Bengal, to ‘eating the God’ in Lithuania and ‘crying the neck’ by the reapers of Devon.

Frazer was making two assumptions, which in his own day were revolutionary. On one hand, he insisted that so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ practices were based on serious ideas, and hence, despite their grotesque appearances, were worthy of respect. At the same time, he showed that the supposedly advanced religions of the civilized world, including Christianity, owed much to their pagan predecessors. ‘The life of the old kings and priests teems with instruction’ he wrote. ‘In it, was summed up all that passed for wisdom when the world was young’.2 Or again:

Our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences…. We are like heirs to a fortune which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who built it up has been lost… . Their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity…. We shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth and to give them the benefit for that indulgence which we may one day stand in need of ourselves: cum exclusione itaque veteres audiendi sunt.3

Frazer’s universal tolerance was one of the principal means whereby the European humanities were able to escape from their narrow Christian strait-jacket, and open themselves up to all times and all peoples. His demonstration that many of the customs of Christian peoples had their roots in pagan practices was particularly shocking:

At the approach of Easter, Sicilian women sow wheat, lentils and canary-seed in plates which are kept in the dark and watered… The plants soon shoot up: the stalks are tied together with red ribbons and the plates containing them are placed on the sepulchres which with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in … churches on Good Friday…. The whole custom—sepulchres as well as plates of sprouting grain—is probably nothing but a continuation, under another name, of Adonis worship.4

Returning to the Arician Grove, Frazer concluded that the King of the Grove personified the tree with the Golden Bough, and that the rite of his death had parallels among many European peoples from Gaul to Norway. The Golden Bough, he claimed, was none other than the mistletoe, whose name he derived from the Welsh, meaning ‘tree of pure gold’. ‘The King of the Wood lived and died as an incarnation of the supreme Aryan God, whose life was in the mistletoe or Golden Bough.’

To be safe, he added a final paragraph saying that nowadays the visitor to Nemi’s woods can hear the church bells of Rome ‘which chime out from the distant city, and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes…. le Roi est mort, vive le roí!’ In other words, the pagan King of the Grove has gone; the Christian ‘King of Heaven’ reigns supreme. He didn’t care to mention that the Christian King, too, was born to be slain.

The growing population of Rome was fed on state-supplied corn, the frumen-tum publicum, which was imported initially from Latium and later from Sicily and North Africa. But the Romans were also wedded to luxuries, and were able to pay for them. The ‘silk route’ was opened to China, and the ‘spice lanes’ to India. Roman traders, the notorious negotiators, moved freely round the Empire after the armies, taking valuables, styles, and expectations with them, [SAMOS]

A common currency was introduced in Italy in 269 BC and in Roman territories as a whole in 49 BC. In the imperial period there were gold, silver, brass, and copper coins. The brass sestertius became the basic unit of currency. The gold aureus was worth 100s., the silver denarius 4, the copperasone quarter. Local currencies continued alongside, however, and the right to mint was an important mark of status, [NOMISMA]

CEDROS

THE fact that the Greeks and Romans had only one word—either kedros or cedros—to describe the two different species of juniper and cedar merits a nine-page appendix. On the scale of scholarship demanded by a genuine specialist, a subject such as Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World needs a volume as large as the one you are reading.

And it is worth every page. It shows what a dedicated scholar can do by applying a very narrow instrument to a very broad front—in other words, if one is permitted the only appropriate metaphor, to saw a cross-section through the trunk of the classical world. Like other such works, it starts with a meticulous examination of the different sources of evidence: archaeology, literary references, inscriptions, temple commissioners’ accounts and reports, dendrochronology. It then surveys the subject-matter—from the cedar floorbeams at Cnossos to the ash spear of Achilles, from the 220 Roman ships built in 45 days for the First Punic War to the bridge over the Rhine built in ten days for Julius Caesar.

Greece and Rome were not timber-based civilizations, like those of the far north. [NOVGOROD] But their knowledge of timber was renowned, and the timber trade well developed. After reading up on the subject, one can never see a fir tree without thinking of the Athenian fleet at Salamis, nor pass a larch without imagining the 100-foot mast of a Roman trireme. Every bare hillside is a reminder of the Romans’ deforestation of southern Italy and of northern Africa, [ECO]

History demands sympathetic historians. There has never been a finer dovetail than that which joined classical trees and timber to the son of a timber merchant from New York State.

SAMOS

S AMIAN ware, the everyday ‘red-gloss pottery’ of the Roman Empire, probably originated on the island of Samos, but the great mass of it was not manufactured there. From an important factory at Arretium (Arezzo), which was most active AD 30–40, its production was moved to a number of large-scale potteries in Gaul. Forty-five main centres are known; but the major ones from the first century were located at sites at La Graufesenque (Aveyron) and Banassac (Lozére), from the second century at Les Martres de Veyre and Lezoux (Puy-de-Dôme), and from the third century at Trier and at Tabernae Rhenanae (Rheinzabern) in Germany. The full geographical range stretches from Spain and North Africa to Colchester and Upchurch in England and Westerndorff on the River Inn in Austria.1

Ceramology seeks the triumph of ingenuity and pedantry over the remains of millions of archaeologists’ pots and shards; and Samian ware has offered the most extensive challenge. Since studies began in 1879, over 160 kilns have been identified, together with over 3,000 individual potters’ marks. Hans Dragendorff (1895) classified 55 standard forms of vessel (D1-D55). Others have catalogued standard decorative motifs, analysed technical aspects such as the gloss, the clay, and the texture of the terra sigillata, or established the colour spectrum from the characteristic orange-pink of Banassac to the deep orange-brown of Les Martres de Veyre. Pioneer collections at the British Museum and the , Musée Carnavalet led the way for numerous studies from Toronto to Ljubljana.2

Potters’ marks are specially revealing. Often preceded by the letter f(= fecit, made by), m (= manu, by the hand of), or of {-officina, by the factory of), they bring to life the craftsmen who fed the most widespread commodity of imperial trade. The working lives of 51 central Gaulish potters have been exactly charted. Cocatus Idenalis and Ranto worked throughout the reign of Trajan (98–117); Cinnamus of Lezoux was active c.150–90; Banuus, Casurius, and Divixtus spanned the five reigns from Antoninus Pius (138–61) to Albinus (193–7).3

The net result is a corpus of information that is so sophisticated that the date and provenance of the smallest fragment of Samian ware can be precisely established. For archaeologists, it is a research aid of inestimable value. A crate of Samian ware from Gaul was found, unopened, at Pompeii. Similar consignments were sent to every town and settlement of the Empire.

Roman society was built on fundamental legal distinctions between the citizen and the non-citizen and, among the non-citizens, between the free and the unfree. It was a strict system of hereditary social ‘orders’ or estates. Practices which began in ancient Latium were modified over the centuries until they encompassed the vast and variegated populations of all the Empire’s provinces. In early republican Rome, the patres or city fathers were set apart from the plebs or common people, with whom they were forbidden to intermarry. The patrician clans dominated both the political life of the city in the Senate and economic life through their hold on the distribution of land; and they fought a long rearguard action against the plebeian challenge. But eventually their privileges were undermined. In 296 BC, by the Lex Ogulnia, the plebs were to be admitted to the sacred colleges of pontífices and augurs. In 287 BC, by the Lex Hortensia, the laws of the plebeian assembly became binding on all citizens. The plebs had become part of the Establishment. In the so-called ‘Social War’ of 90–89 BC, Rome’s Italian allies successfully claimed the rights of full citizenship. But it was not until AD 212 that the Constitutio Antoniniana gave citizenship to all free-born male subjects of the Empire.

Important distinctions developed within the patrician oligarchy of the later Republic. A handful of the most ancient and senior clans, the gentes maiores, formed an aristocracy among the patricians—the Valerii, Fabii, Cornelii, Claudii, and others. The nobiles were a wider but still senatorial group, consisting of all who could claim descent from a consul. They possessed the highly valued right of displaying in public the waxen portraits of their ancestors. The equites or ‘knights’ formed a sub-senatorial propertied class which possessed the means to belong to the cavalry. They had the right to wear a toga edged with two thin purple stripes, the angusticlavia, as opposed to the senator’s toga with broad purple stripes, the latidavia. In the theatre, they sat in the first fourteen rows, immediately behind the orchestra, reserved for senators. They were the chief beneficiaries of promotions under Augustus, when they largely displaced the nobiles as the backbone of the ruling class.

The strong contrast between city and countryside persisted. Like Rome itself, the provincial cities developed into major urban centres, characterized by imposing public works—paved streets, aqueducts, baths, theatres, temples, monuments—and by the growth of merchant, artisan, and proletarian classes. The city mob—constantly pacified, in Juvenal’s words, ‘through bread and circuses’, panem et circenses, became a vital social factor. In the countryside, the villas of local dignitaries stood out above the toiling mass of slaves who worked the great latifundia. An intermediate and, in the nature of things, enterprising group of lib-ertini or ‘freed slaves’ grew in importance, as the import of fresh slave populations tailed off with the end of the Republic’s conquests, [SPARTACUS]

Despite the extreme contrasts of Roman society—between the vast power and wealth of the patricians and the lot of their slaves, between the opulence of many city-dwellers and the backwardness of the desert tribes and barbarian settlers on the periphery—it is a tribute to the flexible paternalism of the Roman social tradition that the outbreaks of class conflict were relatively few and far between. Blood relations carried great weight in Rome, where elaborate kinship groups proliferated. The patriciate presided over society at large just as the paterfamilias presided over every extended family. The patricians were originally divided into three tribes; the tribes into thirty curiae or parishes; and the parishes into gentes or clans and families. In later times the gens was composed of persons boasting the same remote male ancestor, whilst the familia was narrowed to mean ‘household group’. The absolute rights of fathers over all members of their family, the patria potestas was one of the corner-stones of family law. [NOMEN]

SPARTACUS

SPARTACUS (d. 71 BC) was a gladiator, and the leader of the ancient world’s most extensive slave uprising. A Thracian by birth, he had served in the Roman army before deserting and being sold into slavery to the gladiatorial school in Capua. In 73 BC, he broke out, and with a band of fellow fugitives set up camp on Mount Vesuvius. For the next two years he defied all attempts to catch him. His army swelled to almost 100,000 desperate men, who marched the length and breadth of Italy, to the Alps and the straits of Messina. In 72 BC he defeated each of the reigning consuls in turn in pitched battles. He was finally cornered at Petelia in Lucania, separated from his Gallic and German allies, and annihilated by the forces of the praetor, M. Licinius Crassus. Spartacus died sword in hand, having first killed his horse to render further flight impossible.1

Appropriately enough, Crassus was one of the wealthiest slave-owners in Rome. He had benefited from the estates sequestered from the faction of Marius, and grew vastly rich by training his slaves in lucrative trades and by mining silver. Known as ‘Dives’, he was Consul in 70 with Pompey, and triumvir with Pompey and Caesar in 60. He celebrated his victory over Spartacus by lining 120 miles of the road from Capua to Rome with crucified prisoners, and by treating the Roman populace to a banquet of ten thousand tables. He enriched himself further as Governor of Syria, only to be killed in 53 BC by the Parthians. His head was cut off, the mouth stuffed with molten gold. The accompanying notice from the Parthian king read: ‘Gorge yourself in death with the metal you so craved in life.’

Slavery was omnipresent in Roman society, and in some estimations the key institution of the economy. It provided the manpower for agriculture and industry, and underpinned the luxury of the cities. It involved the total physical, economic, and sexual exploitation of the slaves and their children. It was supported by the wars of the Republic, which brought in millions of captives, and in later centuries by systematic slave-raiding and slave-trading. Julius Caesar sold off 53,000 Gallic prisoners after one battle alone, at Atuatia (Namur). The island of Delos served as the principal entrepôt for barbarians brought from the East, and from beyond the Danube.

Slavery continued to be a feature of European life long after Roman times—as it was in most other cultures. It persisted throughout medieval Christendom, though it was gradually overtaken by the institution of serfdom. It was generally permitted among Christians so long as the slaves themselves were not Christian. It was still common enough in Renaissance Italy, where Muslim slaves were treated much as in their countries of origin. In more modern times, the European powers only tolerated it in their overseas colonies, where it survived the conversion of the slaves to Christianity.

The abolition of slavery was one of the chief social products of the European Enlightenment. It progressed through three main stages. The outlawry of slave-owning in the home countries was followed by the suppression of the international slave trade and then of slave-owning in the overseas colonies. In Britain’s case, these stages were reached in 1772, 1807, and 1833. Abolition did not occur, however, through revolts such as that of Spartacus. It occurred, as Emerson remarked, ‘through the repentance of the tyrant’.2

In modern times, Spartacus was adopted as a historical hero by the communist movement. His name was borrowed by the forerunner of the KPD, the Spartakusbund of 1916–19; and it was used by Arthur Koestler for the protagonist of his novel The Gladiators (1939). Slave revolts, in the Marxist view, were a necessary feature of ancient society, and were given suitable prominence in communist textbooks. A partner for Spartacus was found in Saumacus, leader of an earlier revolt among the Scythian slaves of Crimea, i.e. on ‘Soviet territory’. Soviet historians did not care to emphasize the parallels between the world of Spartacus and Crassus and that of the Gulag, forced collectivization, and the nomenklatura.3 [CHERSONESOS]

There was a profusion of popular assemblies in Rome, which had both social and political functions. The patricians met on their own in the comitia curiata, their ‘parish meetings’, where, among other things, they ratified the appointment of the consuls. The plebeians, too, met regularly in thecomitia tributa or ‘tribal meetings’, where they discussed their communal affairs and elected their officials—the tribunes, or ‘spokesmen of the tribes’, the quaestores and the aediles the plebeian magistrates. After 449 BC they could be summoned by the consuls as well as by the tribunes. They met in the Forum; and in the plebiscita, or ‘voting of the plebs’, they gave their opinion on any matter put to them.

For military purposes, patricians and plebeians met together in the comitia cen-turiata or the ‘meetings of the centuries’. They assembled outside the city, on the vast Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, where they were drawn up in their thirty-five tribes. Each tribe was divided according to wealth into five classes, with the equites or ‘knights of the cavalry’ at the top and the poorest of the pedites or ‘infantry’ at the bottom. In time, there was also an unpropertied class of proletarii or ‘proles’. Each of the classes was organized in turn into centuriae or ‘centuries’, and each century into ‘seniors’ (men aged between 45–60, on the reserve list) and ‘juniors’ (men aged between 17–45, liable for active service). The census of 241 BC showed a total of 260,000 citizens in 373 centuries, which works out at almost 700 men per century. Here was the whole of Roman (male) society in full view. These comitia centuriata gradually assumed the functions once reserved for the patricians, including the elections of the chief magistrates, the conferment of the imperium or ‘right of command’ on military leaders, the ratification of laws, and decisions of war and peace. They voted by dropping clay tablets into one of two baskets as they filed out of their century enclosures. Their proceedings were required to be completed within one day.

NOMEN

CLAN and family provided the basis for the Roman system of personal names. All patrician males had three names. The praenomen or forename was generally chosen from a shortlist of twelve, usually written in abbreviated form:

C(G) = Gaius, Gn = Gnaeus, D = Decimus, Fl = Flavius, L = Lucius, M = Marcus, N = Numerius, P = Publius, Q = Ouintus, R = Rufus, S = Sextus, T = Titus

The nomen indicated a man’s clan, the cognomen his family. Hence ‘C. Julius Caesar’ stood for Gaius, from the gens or clan of the Julii, and the domus or family of Caesar.

All men belonging to the same patrician clan shared the same nomen, whilst all their paternal male kin shared both nomen and cognomen. At any one time, therefore, there were several ‘Julius Caesars’ in circulation, each distinguished by his praenomen. The famous general’s father was L. lulius Caesar. When several members of the same family had all three names in common, they were differentiated by additional epithets:

P. Cornelius Scipio, tribune 396–395 BC

P. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (‘the Beard’), dictator 306

P. Cornelius Scipio Asina (‘the She-Ass’), consul 221

P. Cornelius Scipio, consul 218; father of Africanus

P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior (‘the Elder African’ 236–184), general, consul 205,194, victor over Hannibal

L. Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus (‘the Asian’); brother of Africanus

P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Minor (‘the Younger African’); son of Africanus Maior

P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor Numantinus (‘the Numantian’, 184–129 BC); adopted son of Africanus Minor, destroyer of Carthage

P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica (‘the Nose’), consul 191

P. Cornelius Scipio Corculum (‘Little Heart’), pontifex maximus 150

Plebeians, like G. Marius or M. Antonius, possessed no nomen.

Women, in contrast, were given only one name—either the feminine nomen of the clan for patricians or the feminine cognomen of the family for plebeians. Hence all the daughters of the Julii were called ‘Julia’, or of the Livii ‘Livia’. Sisters were not differentiated. The two daughters of Mark Antony were both called ‘Antonia’. One became the mother of German-icus, the other the grandmother of Nero. All the daughters of Marius were called ‘Maria’. It is a sign of Roman women’slowly standing that they were denied a full individual identity.1

As Roman practice shows, multiple names were only required by citizens with independent legal status. For much of European history, therefore, most people made do with much less. All they had was a forename, or ‘Christian name’, together with a patronymic or adjectival description. All the languages of Europe had their counterparts for ‘Little John, son of Big Tom’. In addition to a personal name, women often used a term denoting whose wife or daughter they were. In the Slavonic world, this took the form of the suffixes -ova or -ovna. ‘Maria Stefanowa’ (Polish) stood for ‘Stephen’s wife, Mary’; ‘Elena Borisovna’ (Russian) for ‘Helen, daughter of Boris’. Well-known people and foreigners often acquired names indicating their place of origin.

In the Middle Ages, the feudal nobility needed to associate themselves with the fief or landed property which justified their rank. As a result, they adopted place-based surnames using either a prefix, such as von, or di, or suffix, such as -ski. Hence, the French prince Charles de Lorraine would be known in German as ‘Karl von Lotharingen’ or in Polish as ‘Karol Lotarinski’. Members of guilds adopted names denoting their craft or trade. The ubiquitous Bakers, Carters, Millers, and Smiths belonged to the largest group to fix on the custom of family surnames. More recently, state governments have turned custom into a legal requirement, bringing individuals into the net of censuses, tax-collecting, and conscription.2

The Gaels of Scotland and the Jews of Poland were two ancient communities who long escaped surnames. Both had enjoyed communal autonomy, surviving for centuries with traditional name forms using either patronymics (such as the Jewish ‘Abraham Ben Isaac’, i.e. Abraham, son of Isaac) or personal epithets. The famous Highland outlaw, whom the English-speaking Lowlanders called Rob Roy MacGregor, c.1660–1732, was known to his own as Rob Ruadh (Red Robert) of Inversnaid. Both the Gaelic and the Jewish nomenclatures fell victim to state bureaucracies in the late eighteenth century. After the Jacobite defeat, the Scottish Highlanders were registered according to clan names which they had previously rarely used, thereby giving rise to thousands upon thousands of MacGregors, MacDonalds, and MacLeods. After the Partitions of Poland, Polish Jews in Russia usually took the names of their home towns or of their noble employers. In Prussia and Austria they were allotted German surnames by state officials. From 1795 to 1806, the Jewish community of Warsaw found itself at the mercy of E. T. A. Hoffmann, then chief Prussian administrator of the city, who handed out surnames according to his fancy. The lucky ones came away with Apfelbaum, Himmelfarb, or Vogelsang: the less fortunate with Fischbein, Hosenduft, or Katzenellenbogen.3

Within these assemblies, patronage groups played a vital role. In a hierarchical and highly compartmentalized society it was natural, indeed essential, for wealthy patricians to manipulate the activities of the lower orders and thereby to influence the decisions of popular institutions. To this end each patronus retained a following of dependent clientes. The patron expected his followers to support his policies and his preferred candidates. The clients expected a reward of money, office, or property. Serving a wealthy patron was the best road to social advancement. It was patronage that gave Roman government its characteristic blend of democratic forms and oligarchic control.

The network of assemblies, the rotation of offices, and the need for frequent meetings created a strong sense of belonging. Every Roman citizen knew exactly where he stood with regard to his tribe, his clan, his family, his century, and his patron. Participation and service were part of the accepted ethos. In formal terms, it was the popular assemblies which appointed the chief officials, and the officials who appointed the Senate. In reality, it was the senators who made all other institutions function to their advantage. Whoever dominated the Senate ruled the Republic.

The Senate, which held centre stage under both Republic and Empire, had a membership which fluctuated between 300 and 600 men. Its members were appointed by the consuls, whom it was called on to advise. But since the consuls were required to give preference to ‘experienced men’, and since senatorial patrons controlled all the major offices of state, the Senate could blithely perpetuate its hold on government. It was the core of a self-perpetuating élite. The dominant element within the Senate at any particular moment depended on the delicate balance of power between competing individuals, clans, and clientelae or ‘client groups’. But the same patrician names are repeated over and over through the centuries, until a tidal wave of upstarts finally swept them away.

With time, the efficiency of senatorial control declined in proportion to the growth of factionalism. When the Senate was paralysed through civil strife, the only ways to keep the system running were either for a dictator to be installed by common consent or for one faction to impose its will through force of arms. This was the source of the string of dictators in the first century BC. In the end, the faction led by Octavian Caesar, the future ‘Augustus’, imposed its will on all the others. Octavian became the patron of patrons, holding the fate of all the senators in his hands.

The two consuls, the joint chief executives of Rome, held office for one year from 1 January. In its origins, their office was essentially a military one. They were proposed by the Senate and appointed by the comitia centuriata, which gave them the imperium or ‘army command’ for specific tasks. But they gradually assumed additional functions. They presided over the Senate, and, in conjunction with the Senate, held responsibility for foreign affairs. They supervised the management of the city’s internal affairs under the praetores, the ‘chief judges’ who ran the judicial system, thecensores, who controlled taxation and the registration of citizens, the quaestores, who ran public finance, the aediles, who policed the city and ran the Games, and the pontifex, the high priest. In conjunction with the tribunes, they were expected to keep the peace between the Senate and the people. It is a measure of the consuls’ importance that Romans kept the historical record of the city, not in terms of numbered years, but in terms of the consulships. [AUC]

Thanks to the reforms of Marius and Sulla, the profile of the consulship changed. The practice of administering the provinces through proconsules, or consular deputies, extended its range of powers. On the other hand, direct control of the army was lost.

Roman government seems to be the subject of many misconceptions. It was in constant flux over a very long period of time, and did not attain any great measure of homogeneity, except, perhaps, briefly in the age of the Antonines. Its undoubted success was due to the limited but clearly defined goals that were set. It provided magistrates to settle disputes and to exact tribute. It provided an army for external defence, law enforcement, and internal security. And it supported the authority of approved local or regional élites, often through their participation in religious rites and civic ceremonies. The magic combination involved both great circumspection, in the degree of the state’s encroachment on established rights and privileges, and utter mercilessness, in defending lawful authority. In Virgil’s words:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

(Make it your task, Roman, to rule the peoples by your command; and these are your skills: to impose the habit of peace, to spare those who submit, and to conquer the proud.)

Yet Roman institutions seen through modern concepts can be deceptive. Under the Roman kingdom the monarchy was not hereditary, and it was limited by the Senate of the patricians which eventually overthrew it. Under the early Republic the two consuls, elected annually by the patrician Senate, received the full ‘power to command’. But they were closely constrained both by the dual nature of the office and by the right of veto established in 494 by the tribunes of the plebs. Hence the famous formula of SPQR—Senatus Populusque Romanusy ‘the Senate and People of Rome’—in whose name all authority was exercised. Under the late Republic and early Empire, most of the traditional magistracies and legislative bodies survived; but they were subordinated to the increasingly dictatorial pretensions of the executive.

Roman political culture determined how changing institutions actually worked. Political and religious life were always closely interwoven. The reading of the auguries accompanied all decision-making. Strong emphasis was placed on family or local authority. As a result, civic responsibility, the demands of military service, and respect for the law were deeply ingrained. Rotating offices demanded a high degree of lobbying and initiative. Under the Republic consensus was always sought through the taking of consilium (advice). Under the Principate (or early Empire), it was obedience that counted.

Roman law has been described as the Romans’ ‘most enduring contribution to world history’.8 Its career began with the Twelve Tables of 451–50 BC, which were thenceforth regarded as the fount of ‘equal law’, the ideas that were equally binding on all citizens. It distinguished two main components, the ius civile (state law) regulating the relations between citizens, and the ius gentium (international law). It developed through the agglomeration of accepted custom and practice, as determined by prudentia or ‘legal method’. Over the years every point of law was tested, amended, or expanded. The praetors were the main source of this type of law-making until the ‘Perpetual Edict’ of the Emperor Hadrian put a stop to further amendments. Laws initiated by magistrates, the leges rogatae, were differentiated from the plebiscita or ‘popular judgements’ initiated by one or other of the assemblies.

The complexity and antiquity of legal practice inevitably gave rise to the science of jurisprudence, and to the long line of Roman jurists from Q. Mucius Scaevola (Consul in 95 BC) onwards. It was a sign of deteriorating times that two of the greatest jurists, Aemilius Papinianus (Papinian, d. 213), a Greek, and Domitius Ulpianus (Ulpian, d. 223), were both put to death, [LEX]

The Roman army was the product of a society nurtured in perpetual warfare. Its logistical support system was as remarkable as its technical skills and its corporate ethos. For half a millennium, from the Second Punic War to the disasters of the third century, it was virtually invincible. Its victories were endless, each marked by the pomp of a Triumph and by a vast collection of monuments on the model of Titus’ Arch or Trajan’s Column. Its defeats were all the more shocking for being exceptional. The annihilation of three Roman legions in the German backwoods in AD 9 was a sensation unparalleled until the death of the Emperor Decius in battle against the Goths in 251, or the capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians in 260. The Latin proverb si vis pacem, para bellum, ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’, summarized a way of life. [HERMANN]

LEX

IT is often said that Roman law is one of the pillars of European civilization. And so, indeed, it is. Latin lex means ‘the bond’, ‘that which binds’. The same idea underlies that other keystone of Roman legality, the pactum or ‘contract’. Once freely agreed by two parties, whether for commercial, matrimonial, or political purposes, the conditions of the contract bind the parties to observe it. As the Romans knew, the rule of law ensures sound government, commercial confidence, and orderly society.

Yet it must not be imagined that the legal traditions of Rome were bequeathed to modern Europe by any simple line of direct inheritance. Most of the Empire’s law codes fell into disuse with the disintegration of the Empire, and had to be rediscovered in the Middle Ages (see Chapter V). They survived longest in Byzantium, but did not by that route strongly influence modern law-making. Indeed, in terms of direct example, they probably most immediately affected the formulation of Catholic canon law.

What is more, even in the secular sphere the revival of Roman traditions had to compete with other non-Roman, and often contradictory, legal practices. Rome was only one of several sources of European jurisprudence. Customary law, in all its diversity, was equally important. In some countries, such as France, a balance was achieved between Roman and customary traditions. In most of Germany, the Roman law arrived in the fifteenth century, at a very late date. In England, exceptionally, the common law, modified by the principles of equity, was to gain a virtual monopoly.

Even so, the Roman distinction between the public and the private domains was to suit the purposes of Europe’s growing polities; and civil law in most European countries was to be based on codified principles in the Roman fashion (as opposed to the Anglo-American concept of legal precedent). In this regard, the single most influential institution came to be the French Code Napoléon (1804).

Whatever their connections, all educated European lawyers acknowledge their debt to Cicero and to Cicero’s successors. It was Cicero, in De legibus, who wrote: Salus populi suprema lex, ‘the safety of the people is the highest law’.1 One could equally say that the rule of law provides the people with the highest degree of safety.

During the Pox Romana, the Empire’s fortresses and frontiers were maintained by a standing force of some thirty legions. Many legions became closely associated with the provinces in which they were permanently stationed for generations, or even for centuries—the ‘II Augusta’ and the ‘XX Valeria Victrix’ in Britain, the ‘XV Apollinaris’ in Pannonia, or the ‘V Macedónica’ in Moesia.

Each legion counted c.5–6,000 men, and was commanded by a senator. It consisted of three lines of infantry—the hastati, principes, andtriarii, each made up of ten maniples commanded by a ‘prior’ and a ‘posterior’ centurion; a body of velites or ‘skirmishers’; the iustus equitatus or ‘complement of cavalry’, consisting of ten turmae or ‘squadrons’; and a train of engineers. In addition, there were a large number of auxiliary regiments made up of allies and mercenaries, each organized in a separate cohort under its own prefect.

With time, the percentage of citizen-soldiers declined disastrously; but the backbone of the system continued to rest on the middle-ranking Roman officer caste, who served as centurions. Distinguished service was rewarded with medals, or with crowns for the generals; and loyal veterans could expect a grant of land in one of the military colonies. Discipline was maintained by fierce punishments, including flogging and (for turncoats) crucifixion. In later times, the decline of civilian institutions gave the military their chance to dominate imperial politics. The gladius or ‘thrusting sword’, first adopted from the Iberians during the Second Punic War, became, in the hands of the gladiators, the symbol of Rome’s pleasures as well as her invincibility.

Roman architecture had a strong proclivity for the utilitarian. Its achievements belong more to the realm of engineering than to design. Although the Greek tradition of temple-building was continued, the most innovative features were concerned with roads and bridges, with urban planning and with secular, functional buildings. The Romans, unlike the Greeks, mastered the problem of the arch and the vault, using them as the basis for bridges and for roofs. The triumphal arch, therefore, which adorned almost all Roman cities combined both the technical mastery and the ethos of Roman building. The Pantheon, first built by Agrippa in 27 BC in honour of’all the gods’ and the Battle of Actium, carries a vaulted dome that is 4 ft 6 in (1.5 m) wider than St Peter’s. (It is now the Church of Santa Maria Rotunda ad Martyres.) The Colosseum (80 AD), more correctly the Flavian Amphitheatre, is a marvellous amalgam of Greek and Roman features, and has four tiers of arches interspersed with columns. It seated 87,000 spectators. The vast brick-built Baths of Caracalla or Thermae Antoninianae (AD 217)—where Shelley composed his Prometheus Unbound—are a monument to the Roman lifestyle, 360 yards (330 m) square. They contained the usual sections graded by temperature —the frigidarium, tepidarium, and caldarium, a piscina or pool for 1,600 bathers, a stadium, Greek and Latin libraries, a picture gallery, and assembly rooms. The Baths of Diocletian (AD 306) were even more sumptuous. The grandiose Circus Maximus was devoted to chariot-racing; it was enlarged until it could accommodate 385,000 spectators, [EPIGRAPH]

Roman literature is all the more attractive for challenging the prevailing ethos of a military and, to a large extent, a philistine society. The Roman literati obviously had their clientele, especially among the leisured aristocracy of late Republican and early imperial Rome. But somehow they did not blend into the landscape so naturally as their Greek counterparts. There was always tension between the sophisticated world of letters and the stern Roman world at large. This tension may well explain why Latin literature developed so late, and why it received such a hostile reception from those who, like Cato, saw it as a mere aping of decadent Greek habits. It may also explain why dramatic comedy was the first genre to be imported, and why satire was the only medium which the Romans could honestly call their own. Of the thirty or so masters of the Latin repertoire, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Cicero have gained universal recognition. But anyone who recoils from the luxury, gluttony, and cruelty of Roman living must surely feel an affinity for the sensitive souls who reacted most strongly against their milieu— for the exquisite lyrics of Catullus, the biting wit of Juvenal, the epigrams of Martial.

EPIGRAPH

EPIGRAPHY, the study of inscriptions, is one of the important auxiliary sciences in exploring the classical world. Since so much material and cultural evidence has perished, the inscriptions which have survived on stone or on metal provide an invaluable source of information. The careful study of tombstones, dedicatory tablets, statues, public monuments, and the like yields a rich harvest of intimate details about the people whom the inscriptions commemorate—their family life, their names and titles, their writing, their careers, their regiments, their laws, their gods, their morality. The great epigraphic collections, such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) and the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (CIG), both produced in nineteenth-century Berlin, are as solid and as durable as the monuments which they record.

The most famous of Roman epigraphs—the Twelve Tables of the Law, which stood for centuries in the Forum—did not survive; but the variety of the extant material is extraordinary.

Roman tombstones frequently bore a poetic description of the dead person’s life and career. A stone from Moguntium (Mainz) carried a protest over the manner of the dedicatee’s death:

Jucundus M Terenti l(ibertus) pecuarius
Praeteriens quicumque legis consiste viator
Et vide quam indigne raptus inane queror.
Vivere non potui plures XXX per annos
Nam erupuit servus mihi vitam et ipse
Praecipitem sese dejecit in amnem:
Apstulit huic Moenus quod domino eripuit.
Patronus de suo posuit.

(Jucundus, shepherd, a free slave of Marcus Terentius. Traveller, whoever you are, stop and peruse these lines. Learn how my life was wrongly taken from me, and listen to my vain laments. I was not able to live for more than 30 years. A slave took my life, then threw himself in the river. The Man took his life, of which his master was deprived. (My) patron has raised (this stone) at his own expense.)

Dedications to the gods were a usual feature of public monuments. An inscription discovered in the Circus Maximus, and now placed on an obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, was originally erected in 10–9 BC by the Emperor Augustus in honour of the conquest of Egypt:

IMP . CAESAR . DIVI. F
AUGUSTUS
PONTIFEX . MAXIMUS
IMP XII. COS XI. TRIB POT XIV 
AEGYPTO. IN POTESTATEM
POPULI ROMANI REDACTA
SOLI . DONUM . DEDIT.2

(The Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of the divine (Julius), Supreme Priest, twelve times Commander, eleven times Consul, fourteen times Tribune, Egypt having passed to the control of the Roman people, has offered this gift to the Sun.)

Objects of a much more humble nature often bear interesting inscriptions. Vases and pottery carried marks of manufacture. Metal stamps, for imprinting a name or advertisement onto clay, were in common use. A whole series of such stamps, from the bottles of an optician, were found at Reims:

D CALLISEST FRAGIS ADASPRITVDI

D(ecimi) Gall Sest(i) [s] frag(is) ad aspritudi(nem)
(Decimus Gallius Sestus’ Eye-Wash for Granulous Pupils)

The first Roman writers wrote in Greek. Livius Andronicus (c.284–204), who translated Homer into Latin verse, was an educated Greek slave brought to Rome after the sack of Tarentum in 272 BC. Serious Latin literature appeared in the second half of the third century BC, with the plays of Cn. Naevius (d. c.200 BC), T. Maccius Plautus (c.254–184 BC), and P. Terentius Afer, ‘Terence’ (b. 185 BC). All three made brilliant adaptations of the Greek comedies; with them, the theatre became a central institution of Roman culture. Native Latin poetry begins with Q. Ennius (239–169 BC),a prime literary innovator. He introduced tragedy, launched the art of satire, and fashioned the Latin hexameter which provided the basic metre of many later poets.

Oratory held a prominent place in Roman life, as it did in Greece. Its greatest practitioner, M. Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), spoke and wrote in a polished style which has been taken ever since as the model for Latin prose. A ‘new man’, Cicero rose to the highest office of consul in 63, only to be banished and, after a second spell of political activity, to be proscribed and beheaded. His writings, which included moral philosophy and political theory as well as the orations, had an immense influence both on Christian and on rationalist thinking. He was a champion of the rule of law, and of republican government. His successor, the elder Seneca (c.55 BC–CAD 37), a rhetorician from Cordoba, compiled a great anthology of oratory.

History writing had much to feed on. Titus Livius, ‘Livy’ (59 BC-AD 17), wrote a history of Rome in 142 books, 35 of which are extant. He idealized the Roman Republic, and impresses more by style than by analysis. ‘I shall find satisfaction, not I trust ignobly,’ Livy began, ‘by labouring to record the story of the greatest nation in the world.’ C. Iulius Caesar (100–44 BC) was both the supreme maker and recorder of Roman history. His accounts of the Gallic War and of the civil war against Pompey are masterpieces of simplicity, once known to every European schoolboy. C. Sallustius Crispus or ‘Sallust’ (86–34 BC) followed Caesar both in his political and his literary interests. Cornelius Tacitus (AD 55–120) continued the annals of Livy through the first century of the Empire, and not with any great enthusiasm for the emperors. His inimitably astringent style can also be seen in monographs such as the Germania. ‘The revolution of the ages may bring round the same calamities,’ wrote Gibbon in a footnote, ‘but the ages may revolve without a Tacitus to describe them.’

The art of biography also flourished. The supreme exponent was C. Suetonius Tranquillus (AD c.69–140), sometime secretary of the Emperor Hadrian. His racy Lives of the Twelve Caesars is a mine of information and entertainment, outshone only by Tacitus’ study of his father-in-law Agricola, Governor of Britain.

Latin literature undoubtedly reached its heights with the poets of the Augustan Age—Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, the lyricist C. Valerius Catullus (c.84–54), the elegiac poet Albius Tibullus (c.55–19 BC), and the aptly named Sextus Propertius (c.50–15 BC), whose love poems to the exasperating Cynthia match those of Catullus to his Lesbia. ‘Cupid is naked’, wrote Propertius, ‘and does not like artifice contrived by beauty.’

P. Vergilius Maro, ‘Virgil’ (70–19 BC), created language that rarely palls, even with the most mundane of subject-matter. His Eclogues or ‘Selections’ are pastoral poems; his Georgics eulogize farming. The Aeneid, or ‘Voyage of Aeneas’, is an extended allegorical epic which celebrates the Roman debt to Homer and to Greece. Recounting the adventures of Aeneas, a survivor of Troy and ancestor both of Romulus and of the gens Iulia, Virgil provided the mythical pedigree with which educated Romans wished to identify. His infinitely precise hexameters are not really translatable. They were written at the rate of one line a day for ten years, and sing in inimitable tone—serene, sustained, subtle, sad:

FELIX QUI POTUIT RERUM COGNOSCERE CAUSAS,

(Happy is he who could learn the causes of things.)

SED FUGIT INTEREA, FUGIT IRREPARABILE TEMPUS.

(But meanwhile time is flying, flying beyond recall.)

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR; ET NOS CEDAMUS AMORI.

(Love conquers all, so let us yield to Love.)

ET PENITUS TOTO DIVISOS ORBE BRITANNOS

(And Britons wholly separated from all the world.)

SUNT LACRIMAB RERUM ET MENTEM MORTALIA TANGUNT.

(There are tears shed for things, and mortality touches the mind.)

For Dante, Virgil was il maestro di lor che sanno (the master of those who know), and ‘the fount which spilt such a broad river of words’. For the early Christians he was the pagan poet who, in the fourth Eclogue, was thought to have forecast the birth of Christ. For the moderns he was ‘lord of language… poet of the poet-satyr … wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man’. He probably composed his own epitaph, seen at Pozzuoli by Petrarch:

MANTUA ME GENUIT CALABRI RAPUERE: TENET NUNC

PARTHENOPE. CECINI PASCUA, RURA, DUCES.

(Mantua bore me; Calabria carried me away; Naples now holds me. I sang of pastures, fields, and lords.)

Q. Horatius Flaccus, ‘Horace’ (65–8 BC), Virgil’s friend and contemporary, was the author of Odes and Satires, Epodes and Epistles. He had studied in Athens, commanded a legion, and fought at Philippi before retiring to his Sabine farm under the protection of his patron Maecenas. He was a gentle, tolerant soul. His Epistle to the Pisos, otherwise the Ars Poetica, was much admired by later poets. His Satires were directed at human folly, not evil. His Odes shine with translucent clarity, and with curiosa felicitas, a ‘marvellous felicity of expression’:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI.

(It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.)

PARTURIENT MONTES, NASCETUR RIDICULUS MUS.

(The mountains will give birth, and a silly mouse will be born.)

ATQUE INTER SILVAS ACADEMI QUAERERE VERUM.

(And seek for truth even in the groves of Academe.)

EXEGI MONUMBNTUM AERE PERENNIUS … NON OMNIS MORIAR.

(I have created a monument more lasting than bronze… I shall not die completely.)

Horace is the most imitated, and the most translated of poets.

P. Ovidius Naso, ‘Ovid’ (43 BC–17 AD), was a leading figure of Roman society until banished to the Black Sea coast by the Emperor Augustus. The causes of his exile, he says, were ‘a poem and an error’. The poem was undoubtedly his Ars amatoria, ‘The Art of Love’; the error probably involved the Emperor’s daughter Julia, who was also banished. Ovid’s Metamorphoses or ‘Transformations’, which rework over two hundred Greek and Roman myths and legends, has been rated the most influential book of the ancient world. It has provided the favourite reading not only of the Romans but of people as different as Chaucer, Montaigne, and Goethe. It has inspired a torrent of creative works from Petrarch to Picasso. Si vis amari, wrote Ovid, ama (If you wish to be loved, you, too, must love).13

The Silver Age of Latin literature, which lasted from the death of Augustus to perhaps the middle of the second century, contained fewer giants. Apart from Tacitus and Suetonius, there gleamed the talent of the Stoic philosopher Seneca II, of the two Plinys, of the poet Lucan, the rhetorician Quintilian, the novelist Petronius, and, above all, of the satirist D. Iunius Iuvenalis, ‘Juvenal’ (c.47–130). Difficile est saturam non scribere, wrote Juvenal (it is difficult not to write satire).

The calculated violence of Roman life was proverbial. The butcheries of the foreign wars were repeated in the civil strife of the city. Livy’s catch-phrase, Vae vic-tis! (Woe to the vanquished) was no empty slogan. In 88 BC, when the so-called ‘Vespers of Ephesus’ saw perhaps 100,000 Romans massacred in one day on the orders of King Mithridates, Sulla, leader of the aristocratic ‘Optimates’, marched on Rome and proscribed the rival followers of Marius. The head of the Tribune, P. Sulpicius Rufus, was exhibited in the Forum. The urban Praetor, preparing to conduct a sacrifice before the Temple of Concord, was sacrificed himself. In 87 BC, when Rome opened its gates to Marius, it was the turn of the Optimates to be slaughtered. Marius’ legions of slaves and his Dalmatian Guard struck down every senator whom the general did not salute. Among his victims were names of later importance—Gn. Octavius, the reigning consul, M. Crassus, M. Antonius, L. Caesar, all ex-consuls. In 86, after the sudden death of Marius, the general’s associate, Q. Sertorius, summoned the executioners on the pretext of distributing their pay, then cut them down en masse to the number of some 4,000. In 82, when the Optimates finally triumphed, they too massacred their prisoners: ‘the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the Temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the Senate’.14

Thereafter, to avoid such scenes, the procedure of proscription was formalized. Victorious factions would post a list of names in the Forum to summon the leaders of the defeated faction to stand trial or risk confiscation. Men on the list who killed themselves in time, usually by opening their veins in a warm bath, could save their families from ruin. Those who failed to do so found their names on a new list, carved in marble, declaring their lives and the property of their kin to be forfeit. In 43, for example, the proscription of the second triumvirate caused the deaths of at least 300 senators and 2,000 knights. Among them was Cicero, whose head and hands, severed from the corpse, were exhibited on the rostra of the Forum. Where the ruling class of Rome set an example, the populace followed. [LUDI]

‘The Roman Revolution’ is not a term that was used in ancient times. But it has been widely accepted by historians who see the transition from Republic to Principate as the product of profound social transformations. In other words, it is not an established historical event so much as the subject of modern sociological theorizing. ‘The period witnessed the violent transfer of power and property,’ wrote its chief interpreter, ‘and the Principate of Augustus should be regarded as the consolidation of the revolutionary process.’ In this scenario the chief victim was the old Roman aristocracy. The chief revolutionary was Caesar’s heir, the young Octavius—a ‘chill and mature terrorist’, a gangster, a ‘chameleon’ who presented himself in turns as bloodthirsty avenger or moderate peacemaker. The resultant changes included the ruin of the established governing class, the promotion of new social elements, the domination of Rome by ambitious Italian outsiders, and, with their support, the emergence of a de facto monarchy. The key to Roman politics lay in the patronage of the rival dynasts—especially Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, and Octavius. The key to understanding the essential mechanisms lies in the art of prosopography—which analyses the detailed careers of a class in order to uncover the inducements which animate them. (Syme, relying heavily on the work of Münzer, did for Roman history what Lewis Namier did for Georgian England.) ‘Political life’, he wrote, ‘was stamped and swayed not by the parties and programmes of a modern parliamentary character, not by the ostensible opposition of Senate and People … but by the struggle for power, wealth, and glory.’ Particularly important in an age of civil war was a politician’s ability to control the army and to satisfy the soldiers with lands, money, and respect. Fighting, it would seem, was only a secondary preoccupation for successful generals.

LUDI

THE people who have conquered the world’, wrote Juvenal, ‘now have only two interests—bread and circuses.’ ‘The art of conversation is dead!’ exclaimed Seneca. ‘Can no one today talk of anything else than charioteers?’ The Ludi or ‘Games’ had become a central feature of Roman life. Originally staged on four set weeks during the year in April, July, September, and November, they grew to the point where the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum were in almost permanent session. At the first recorded Games in 264 BC, three pairs of slaves had fought to the death. Four centuries later, the Emperor Trajan laid on a festival where 10,000 persons and 11,000 animals perished.1

Professional gladiators provided shows of mortal combat. Marching in procession through the Gate of Life, they entered the arena and addressed the imperial podium with the traditional shout: AVE, CAESARI MORITURI SALU-TAMUS (Hail Caesarl We, who are about to die, greet thee). Nimbleretiarii with net and trident faced heavily armed secutores with sword and shield. Sometimes they would join forces against teams of captives or exotic barbarians. The corpses of the losers were dragged out on meat hooks through the Gate of Death. If a gladiator fell wounded, the emperor or other president of the Games would signal by ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ whether he should be reprieved or killed. Promoters exploited the rivalry of gladiatorial schools, and advertised the feats of famous performers.

One programme which has survived listed a fight between . T v Pugnax Ner III and M. p Murranus Ner III, i.e. two fighters from the Neronian school in Capua, each with three wins, one fighting with (T)hracian arms—small shield and curved sword—and the other in Gallic (M)yrmillo style. Pugnax came out v(ictor), whilst Murranus ended up p(eritus), dead.2

The thirst for grand spectacles gradually led to the practice where gladiatorial shows were interspersed with venationes or ‘wild-beast hunts’, by full-scale military battles, and even by naval contests in a flooded arena. In time, acts of gross obscenity, bestiality, and mass cruelty were demanded. Popular stories elaborated scenes of spreadeagled girls smeared with the vaginal fluid of cows and raped by wild bulls, of Christian captives roasted alive, crucified, set alight or thrown to the lions, or of wretches forced to paddle in sinking boats across water filled with crocodiles. These were only passing variations in an endless variety of victims and torments. They continued until the Christian Emperor Honorius overruled the Senate and put an end to the Games in AD 404.

Nothing, however, roused such passions as chariot-racing, which began in Rome and continued in Byzantium. Traditionally, six teams of four horses careered seven times round the spine of the circus, competing for vast prizes. Sensational spills and fatal crashes were routine. Huge bets were placed. Successful charioteers became idols of the mob, and as wealthy as senators. Successful horses were commemorated by stone statues: ‘Tuscus, driven by Fortunatus of the Blues, 386 wins.’

Racing was in the hands of the four corporations—Whites, Reds, Greens, and Blues, who supplied the competing stables, teams, and drivers. The ‘factions’ of circus supporters were responsible for many a riot. In Byzantine times they were institutionalized, and were once thought to have formed the basis for incipient political parties. This theory is now largely abandoned; but faction-like associations were still performing in late Byzantine ceremonies. The Christian Church always frowned. ‘Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses; but we will remember the Name of the Lord Our God.’

Overall, it is a cynical picture. Shifting alliances of convenience predominate over parties of principle. Political concepts—Cicero’s libertas populi, auctoritas Senatus, concordia ordinum, consensus Italiae—are presented as mere slogans and catchwords. The Roman constitution was ‘a screen and a sham, a mere façade for men’s baser instincts’. The old aristocracy could be bought. The new men were driven by greed and vanity. They were the ‘trousered Senators’, the ‘ghastly and disgusting rabble’ of Caesar’s provincial dependants; the ‘thousand creatures’ installed in the Senate by the second triumvirate; the servile apologists and propagandists whom Octavius hired to win public opinion and to distort history. Behind the scenes lurked the bankers, the millionaire paymasters, the adventurers—C. Maecenas, L. Cornelius Balbus from Gades, C. Rabirius Posthumus, treasurer of Alexandria.

In this scenario, therefore, the turning-point occurred already in 43 BC, during the proscriptions of the second triumvirate which followed Caesar’s death and in which, to his discredit, Octavian took the lead:

The Republic had been abolished … Despotism ruled, supported by violence and confiscation. The best men were dead or proscribed. The Senate was packed with ruffians. The Consulate, once the reward of civic virtue, now became the recompense of craft or crime. Non mos, non ius… The Caesarians claimed the right and duty of avenging Caesar… Out of the blood of Caesar the monarchy was born.17

The rest was an epilogue. All cried ‘Liberty’, and all longed for peace. ‘When peace came, it was the peace of despotism.’

None the less, it is not possible to dismiss all the works of Augustus (r. 31 BC–AD 14) as the fruits of propaganda. He undoubtedly had a seamier side but, importantly for the Romans, the omens were with him. Suetonius tells the story how the future Emperor’s mother had been entered by a serpent during a midnight service in the Temple of Apollo nine months before his birth. But then a comet had appeared in the sky when he first celebrated the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris. And on the eve of Actium, where he left the battle to subordinates like Agrippa, he met a Greek peasant driving an ass along the shore. ‘I am Eutyches [Prosper],’ said the peasant, ‘and this is my ass Nikon [Victory].’ [CONDOM]

The nature of the early Empire, or Principate, is particularly deceptive. The Emperor Augustus achieved lasting power for himself and his successors, not by the abolition of republican institutions, but by collecting all the offices that controlled them. He made himself Imperator or ‘Supreme Commander’, Consul, Tribune, Censor, Pontifex Maximus, and Proconsul of Spain, Gaul, Syria and Cilicia, etc. As a result, he possessed powers as extensive as many an autocrat; but he did not exercise them through centralized autocratic channels. He replaced the pseudo-republic of the senatorial oligarchy with a quasi-empire, whose old institutions were obliged to work in a new way. As Princeps senatus, a new office, he acted as chairman of the Senate, whose membership was drawn either from ex-magistrates, whom he would have appointed, or from imperial nominees. He left the Senate in charge of roughly half the provinces, into which all the Empire was now divided; but he subjected their deliberations to an imperial veto. Dictatorial powers were delegated to former municipal offices such as those of the Praefectus Urbi in charge of criminal jurisdiction, or of thePraefectus Annonae, in charge of trade, markets, and the corn dole. Similarly, numerous boards of Curatores or Commissioners, overseeing everything from roads and rivers to the repair of public buildings, now answered solely to the Emperor. The growth of a more formal autocracy was a development of Christian times, especially in the Eastern Empire, where Persian influences were strong. (See Appendix III, p. 1223.)

The main law-making procedures of the Republic were gradually abandoned. But many of its statutes remained. The comitia tributa was occasionally summoned to confirm laws passed by other bodies; and the senatus consulta or ‘decisions of the Senate’ were still issued. From the second century AD, however, the Emperor became the sole source of new law—through his edicts, or ordinances, his rescripts or ‘written judgements’ on petitions, his decreta or rulings on judicial appeals, and his mandates or administrative instructions. By that time the Senate had been replaced as the supreme court of appeal by the Emperor’s praetorian prefect.

CONDOM

IN 18 BC, and again in AD 9, Emperor Augustus attempted to increase the fertility of the Empire’s population through decrees curbing abortion and infanticide. From this and other sources it is clear that the Romans were familiar with many methods of contraception, including herbs: spermicidal douches containing cedar gum, vinegar or olive oil, vaginal pessaries soaked in honey, and condoms fashioned from goats’ bladders. One Roman writer advised: ‘Wear the liver of a cat in a tube on the left foot… or part of the womb of a lioness in a tube of ivory.’

Research into medieval practices once suggested that the necessary mentality for ‘diverting nature’ was simply not present.2 But this view has been revised. Examination of church penitentials shows that the subject was much discussed, especially since the ‘sins of Onan’ can reasonably be taken to include coitus interruptus.3 Dante’s hints in Paradiso xv (106–9) about Florence’s ‘empty family houses’ and about ‘what was possible in the bedchamber’ leave little to the modern imagination. The increase of urban prostitution increased an interest in avoiding pregnancy. The Cathars, too, were notoriously non-pro-life. In the 1320s, the inquisitors succeeded in persuading a Cathar priest’s lover to reveal their techniques:

When [the priest] wanted to know me carnally, he used to wear this herb wrapped up in a piece of linen …about the size of the first joint of my little finger. And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck when we made love; and this thing or herb at the end of the cord used to hang down as far as the opening of my stomach … It might happen that he might want to know me carnally twice or more in a single night. In that case, the priest would ask me before uniting his body with mine: Where is the herb? … I would put the herb in his hand and then he himself would place it at the opening of my stomach, still with the cord between my breasts.

The only detail missing was the name of the herb.

Historical demographers studying Italian merchant families and English villages have concluded that births must have been kept artificially low in both the medieval and modern periods.5 In the eighteenth century, lechers like James Boswell made no secret of using ‘armour’. Their Continental counterparts talked of ‘English overcoats’ or ‘umbrellas’. Their hero was the mysterious Captain Condom, said to have been either physician or commander of the guard at the Court of Charles II.6 The first pope to have condemned contraceptive practices was supposedly Clement XII in 1731.

Modern campaigners for birth control did not advocate contraception in the cause of permissiveness. Marie Stopes, though packed with nymphomaniac drive, was also an old-fashioned romantic. In Married Love and Wise Parenthood, she was arguing to give women the chance of relief from child-bearing and of enjoyable love-making within marriage.7 Military authorities who distributed ‘French letters’ to troops on the Western Front were concerned both for the soldiers’ health and for civilian relations. Abortion remained the principal technique in the Communist world, as in the Roman Empire. In the West, contraception was not linked to changing sexual mores until the availability of ‘the Pill’ and of free clinical advice for unmarried adolescents in the 1960s. Yet, as a jingle of the 1920s recalls, success was nowhere guaranteed:

Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes
Read a book by Marie Stopes.
But, to judge from her condition,
She must have read the wrong edition.8

With the passage of time, the vast corpus of Roman law had to be repeatedly codified. There were three such partial attempts in the Codex Gregorianus (AD c.295), the Codex Hermogenianus (c.324), and the Codex Theodosianus (438). Similarly, in the Edict of Theodoric (before 515), the so-called Breviary of Alaric (506), and the Burgundian Code (516), barbarian rulers attempted to summarize the law which they found in provinces captured from Rome. Yet the main work of systematization was undertaken under the Emperor Justinian. Between them, the fifty Decisions (531), the Institutes (533), the Digest of the Jurists (534), the Revised Code (534), and the Novels (565) covered every aspect of public and private, criminal and civil, secular and ecclesiastical law. It was through the Justinian law-books that this huge heritage was transmitted to the modern world,[LEX]

The term provincia, ‘sphere of action’, originally referred to the jurisdiction of magistrates sent to govern conquered lands. Under the Empire, it came to refer to the lands themselves. Each province was given a charter, the lex provincialis, which determined its limits, its subdivisions, and its privileges. Each was entrusted to a governor, either a proconsul or a propraetor, who raised troops, collected tribute, and through ‘edicts’ spoke with the force of law. Each governor was accompanied by a staff of legates appointed by the Senate, by a military guard, and by an army of clerks. A distinction was made between imperial provinces, which the Emperor retained under his direct control, and senatorial provinces, which were left to the Senate. The creation of provinces had far-reaching consequences both for Rome and for the fate of the Empire. In the short run, Rome thrived mightily from the vast influx of tribute and from the constant traffic in people and goods. In the long run, through the steady internal consolidation of the provinces, the capital city was squeezed from the sources of wealth and power. Over four centuries, ‘Mother Rome’ was gradually rendered redundant by her own children.

As Rome waned, the provinces waxed. In the first stage, provincial élites supplied the droves of newcomer knights and senators who swamped the traditional oligarchy and ran the Empire. In the second stage, when the military forces were concentrated on an increasingly self-sufficient periphery, provincial cities such as Lugdunum (Lyons) or Mediolanum (Milan) flourished in competition with Rome. Political life was plagued by the rivalries of provincial generals, many of whom became emperors. In the third stage, the links between the periphery and Rome were weakened to the point where the provinces began to claim autonomous status. Especially in the West, the fruit was ready to fall from the tree. The centrifugal shift of power and resources was one of the underlying causes of the Empire’s later distress, [ILLYRICUM] [LUGDUNUM]

The Empire’s finances, like its provinces, were split into two sectors. The Aerarium of the Senate was the successor to the Republican Treasury in the Temple of Saturn and Ops. The imperial Fiscus was an innovation of Augustus. In theory, it was separate from the Emperor’s private property, the patrimonium Caesaris; in practice, the boundaries were not respected. The main items of income included rent from the state lands in Italy, tribute from the provinces, portaría or ‘gate dues’, the state monopoly in salt, the mint, direct taxes on slaves, manumissions and inheritance, and extraordinary loans. Apart from the army, the main items of expenditure included religious ceremonies, public works, administration, poor relief and the corn dole, and the imperial court. In time, imperial agents took over all tax-collecting outside Rome.

The army was gradually increased in size and strength, reaching a maximum in 31 BC of almost sixty legions. After Actium, the Empire’s permanent defence force consisted of 28 legions of c.6,000 professionals apiece. The Navy maintained squadrons on the Rhine and the Danube, as well as in the Mediterranean. From 2 BC Augustus initiated the nine cohorts of the élite praetorian lifeguard, based in Rome. The soldiers were paid 720 d. per annum for a praetorian, 300 d. for a cavalryman, 225 d. for a legionary, and they served for twenty years.

The legions were known by number and by name. Augustus retained the sequential numbering used both by his own and by Mark Antony’s army, awarding distinctive names to legions with the same number. Hence there was a Legio III Augusta and a Legio III Cyrenaica, a Legio VI Victrix and a Legio VI Ferrata. Several legions possessed the number I, since emperors liked to give seniority to units raised by themselves. Legions which were destroyed in battle, such as the XVII, XVIII, and XIX lost in Germany, or the Legio IX Hispana wiped out in Britain in AD 120, were never restored.

The limes, the ‘frontier line’, was a vital feature of the Empire’s defence. It was not, as is sometimes supposed, an impenetrable barrier. From the military point of view it was more of a cordon, or series of parallel cordons, which, whilst deterring casual incursions, would trigger active counter-measures as soon as it was seriously breached. It was a line which normally could only be crossed by paying portaría and by accepting the Empire’s authority. It was, above all, a marker which left no one in doubt as to which lands were subject to Roman jurisdiction and which were not. Its most important characteristic was its continuity. It ran up hill and down dale without a break, and along all frontier rivers and coasts. In places, as in Britain, it took the form of a Great Wall on the Chinese model. Elsewhere it might carry a wooden stockade atop earthworks, or a string of linked coastal forts, or, as in Africa, blocks of fortified farmhouses facing the desert interior. Its guarded crossing-points were clearly marked with gates and roadways. They naturally became the focus for towns and cities which grew round the military camps and markets which the upkeep of the frontier required.

ILLYRICUM

THE Roman province of Illyricum occupied the eastern shore of the Adriatic between the Italian district of Istria and the Greek province of Epirus. It was bounded to the north by Pannonia beyond the river Dravus and to the east by Moesia and Macedonia. It was known to the Greeks asIllyris Barbara, being the part of ancient Illyria which had remained free from the conquests of Philip of Macedon. In imperial times it was divided into three prefectures—Liburnia and Dalmatia on the coast and lapydia in the interior. Apart from Siscia (modern Zagreb) and Narona (Mostar), its principal cities were all seaports—Tartatica, Ader (Zadar), Salonae (Split), Epidaurum. The southernmost fortress city of Lissus had been founded by Syracusan colonists in 385 BC. (See Appendix III, p. 1231.)

Illyricum was subdued in stages. It first paid tribute to Rome in 229 BC, and was twice overrun during the Macedonian Wars of the second century. It was fully incorporated under Augustus in 23 BC. Having participated in the great Pannonian revolt of AD 6–9, it remained in the Empire until Byzantine times.

Little is known of the ancient Illyrians. Their language was Indo-European, and probably supplied an underlying stratum to modern Albanian. Their material culture was renowned for its sophisticated metal-work. From the sixth century their ‘Situla art’ was distinguished by fine repoussé figures set on bronze wine-buckets amidst scenes of feasting, racing, and riding. A silver coinage was minted in the third century. Illyrian warriors fought in chain-mail like the Scythians, but not in chariots like the Celts.1

Illyricum gave birth to two Roman emperors and to St Jerome. The Emperor Diocletian retired to a grandiose palace built on the seafront of his native Salonae. His octagonal mausoleum survived as a Christian church—an ironic fate for the resting-place of the Christians’ last great persecutor. St Jerome was born at nearby Strido in AD 347, more than 200 years before the first appearance of the Slavs who were to lay the foundations of the future Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro.

Illyricum, like Britannia, belongs to a group of Roman provinces whose ethnic and cultural connections were totally transformed by the great migrations (see Chapter IV). But the memory of the Illyrians was cherished by their successors. Their legacy is very different from that bequeathed to those parts of Europe which never knew Rome at all. [ILLYRIA]

LUGDUNUM

IN 43 BC the Proconsul- Muniatus Plancus drew the centre-line of a new city overlooking the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Lugdunum was to be the principal city of Roman Gaul, the meeting-point of a star-like network of paved roads. Its amphitheatres can still be seen on the hill of Fourvières. It commanded not only the Rhone-Rhine corridor but the route leading north-west from Italy to the Channel.1

The Rhône, though navigable, was a swift and turbulent river. Downstream, ships risked being wrecked on numerous reefs and islands; upstream, they could only make headway against the current with the help of horses. In the decades before the arrival of steamboats in 1821, 6,000 horses worked the towpath, hauling cargoes up to Lyons before floating back down on rafts.

From 1271 to 1483, the lower Rhône constituted an international frontier. The left bank, known as I’Empi, lay in the Holy Roman Empire. The right bank, le Riaume, and all the islands, belonged to the Kingdom of France. Fifteen stone bridges were built between Geneva and Aries; and several sets of twin towns, such as Valence and Beaucaire, grew up on opposing banks.

In that same era, Lyons recovered the economic pre-eminence which it had once commanded in ancient Gaul. It was annexed to France by Philippe le Bel, who entered the city on 3 March 1311, after which it headed ‘the French isthmus’ linking France’s northern and southern possessions. From 1420 it hosted four international fairs annually; from 1464 it received privileges aimed at subverting the commerce of Geneva; and from 1494 to 1559 it supplied the logistical base for France’s Italian wars. Its merchant élite was distinguished by many Italian families, including the Medici, the Guadagni (Gadagne), and numerous Genoese. This ‘lively, determined and secretive city’, ‘caught up in whirlpools and rhythms of a very particular kind’, made itself ‘the leading centre of the European economy.’

‘Vieux Lyons’, the old quarter nestling beside the Saône, recalls the city’s golden decades. A hillside warren of narrow streets connected by tunnel-like traboules or ‘transambulant passage-ways’, it is crowded with highly ornamented Gothic and Renaissance hotels, courtyards, squares, and churches. Its names, from the Manécanterie or ‘cathedral choir-school’ to the Hôtel de Gadagne on the Rue Juiverie or ‘Jewry Street’, ring with the memory of colourful bygone inhabitants. The Place Bellecour was laid out under Louis XIV on the interfluvial plain. Its statue of the Sun King, which had been shipped from Paris by sea, came to grief in transit and had to be fished from the river.

Given Lyons’s strategic location, and its industrial prowess based on silk [JACQUARD], geographers have wondered why it never ousted Paris as France’s capital. The prospect has remained an unrealized possibility. From 1311 Lyons has had to be content as France’s second city. For geography only determines what is possible; it does not determine which possibility will triumph. ‘A country is a storehouse of dormant energies’, wrote the master, ‘whose seeds have been planted by nature but whose use depends on man.’

Thanks to the limes, Rome could manage its relations with the barbarians in an orderly fashion. Throughout the Empire, barbarian officers and auxiliaries served with the Roman army, and barbarian tribes were settled by agreement in the imperial provinces. The romanization of barbarians, and the barbarization of Romans, were processes that had been operating since the earliest conquests of the Republic in Italy. After all, Caesar’s ‘trousered senators’ were Romans of Celtic origin who still liked to wear their native leggings under their togas.

Societies, it has been said, rot from the head down, like dead fish. Certainly, the list of early emperors contains more than its share of degenerates.

The Emperor Tiberius (r. AD 14–37), adopted son of Augustus, left Rome for Capri, to practise his cruelties and perversions. Under him, mass proscriptions returned to fashion, fuelled by the deadly work of the delatores or informers. Caligula (r. 37–41) ordered himself deified in his lifetime, and appointed his horse to a consulship. ‘It was his habit to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn,’ Suetonius wrote; ‘and, at large banquets when his wife reclined above him, he placed them all in turn below him.’ ‘Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced that it was a capital offence for anyone to mention goats in any context.’ He succumbed to an assassin who struck, appropriately, at his genitals. Claudius (r. 41–54), who married two murderous wives, Messalina and Agrippina, was poisoned by a toadstool sauce mixed with his mushrooms.20

The Emperor Nero (r. 54–68), an obsessive aesthete and sybarite, disposed of his mother by having her stabbed (after an attempted drowning miscarried). He murdered his aunt by administering a laxative of fatal strength, executed his first wife on a false charge of adultery, and kicked his pregnant second wife to death. ‘Not satisfied with seducing free-born boys and married women,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘he raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria.’ Then:

Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him—dowry, bridal veil and all—which the whole Court attended; then brought him home and treated him as a wife … The world would have been a happier place had Nero’s father Domitius married the same sort of a wife.21

In the end, he committed suicide with the words Qualis artifex pereo (what an artist perishes in me).

The Emperor Galba (r. 68–9), a military man, was killed by the mutinous military in ‘the year of the four emperors’, as were his successors Otho and Vitellius. Vespasian (r. 69–79), son of a provincial tax-gatherer, succeeded in his main aim—’to die on his feet’. His last words were ‘Dear me, I must be turning into a god.’ Titus (r. 79–81) was supposedly poisoned by his brother, after a reign of unusual felicity marred only by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius. The supposed poisoner, the Emperor Domitian (r. 81–96), was stabbed to death by his wife and her accomplices. Eight of the ten immediate successors of Augustus had died a nasty death, [PANTA]

Yet Rome’s Indian summer still lay ahead. ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.’ Under the emperors Nerva (r. 96–8), Trajan (r. 98–117), Hadrian (r. 117–38), Antoninus Pius (r. 138–61), and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80), the Empire not only reached its greatest geographical extent but enjoyed an unrivalled era of calm and stability. Nerva initiated the tradition of poor relief; Trajan was an honest, indefatigable soldier; Hadrian a builder and patron of the arts. Of Antoninus Pius, Gibbon wrote: ‘His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’

The minutiae of imperial administration during its heyday have survived in the voluminous correspondence of the Emperor Trajan with Pliny the Younger, administrator of Bithynia-Pontus:

PLINY. Nicaea has expended 10,000,000 sesterces on a theatre that was tottering and great sums on a gymnasium that was burned … At Claudiopolis, they are excavating a bathhouse at the foot of the mountain… What am I to do?

TRAJAN. You are on the spot, decide for yourself. As for architects, we at Rome send to Greece for them. You should find some where you are.

PLINY. The money due to the towns of the province has been called in, and no borrowers at 12 per cent are to be found. Ought I to reduce the rate of interest… or compel the decurions to borrow the money in equal shares? Trajan. Put the interest low enough to attract borrowers, but do not force anyone to borrow… Such a course would be inconsistent with the temper of our century.

PLINY. Byzantium has a legionary centurion sent by the Legatus of Lower Moesia… to watch over its privileges. Juliopolis… requests the same favour.

TRAJAN. Byzantium is a great city… But if I give such help to Juliopolis, all small towns will want the same thing.

PLINY. A great fire has devastated Nicomedia. Would it be in order to establish a society of 150 firemen?

TRAJAN. No. Corporations, whatever they’re called, are sure to become political associations …

PLINY. I have never been present at the resolutions concerning the Christians, therefore I know not for what causes… they may be objects of punishment… Are those who retract to be pardoned? Must they be punished for their profession alone?

TRAJAN. The Christians need not be sought out. If they are brought into your presence and convicted, they must be punished. But anonymous information against them should not carry any weight in the charges.25

PANTA

WHEN the city of Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeiana was buried under five metres of volcanic ash on 24 August AD 79, all forms of human life were extinguished—the elegant, the mundane, and the seamy. Yet when Pompeii was excavated, mainly from 1869 onwards, one aspect of its former life, its dedication to Venus, was officially concealed. A huge collection of objects which offended against the nineteenth century’s fear of obscenity were kept for decades in the stanze proibiti or ‘prohibited sections’ of the National Museum in Naples.1

The sexual commerce of Pompeii, in contrast, was plied without shame or hypocrisy. Brothels or lupinari were located in all parts of the town, and openly advertised their menus and their tariffs. The cheapest girls, such as Successa or Optata, charged 2 assi; Speranza charged 8, Attica 16. Outside brothels, there were notices to discourage eavesdroppers. One notice read: ‘No place for idlers … Clear off’. Inside, there were pictures to encourage the customers. Paintings and sculptures of sexual subjects were common, even in private houses. Murals portraying the ‘mysteries’ of the city’s cults had a semi-sacred character. Phalluses of gigantic proportions were on frequent display. They served as the flame-holders of oil-lamps, as the centrepiece of comic drawings, even as the spouts of drinking cups. Humorous trinkets showing male gods with divine equipment, or the god Pan plunging an upturned she-goat, were commonplace.

Many of the city’s whores are known by name or, like actresses, by their noms de scène: hence Panta (Everything), Culibonia (Lovely Bum), Kallitremia (Super Crotch), Laxa (Spacious), Landicosa (Big Clit), or Extaliosa (Back Channel). Their clients are also known by name or nickname. One was Enoclione (Valorous Toper), another Skordopordonikos (Garlic Farter). The chief ponce of Pompeii’s largest brothel died shortly before the volcano erupted. His servant had scratched an obituary on the gate: ‘For All Who Grieve. Africanus Is Dead. Rusticus Wrote This.’ The trade was both bisexual and bilingual: rent boys were available for both sexes, and the language of the game was either Greek or Latin. The essential vocabulary included futuere, Lngere, fellare; phallus, méntula, verpa; cunnus or connos (m.) and lupa.

Most expressive are the graffiti, ancient moments of triumph and disaster recorded for all time:

FILIUS SALAX QUOT MULIERUM DIFUTUISTI2
AMPLIATE, ICARUS TE PEDICAT3
RESTITUTA PONE TUNICAM ROGO REDES PILOSA CO4
DOLETE PUELLAE PEDI— … CUNNE SUPERBE VALE … AMPLIATUS TOTIES …
HOC QUOQUE FUTUTUI …5
IMPELLE LENTE6
MESSIUS HIC NIHIL FUTUIT7

With Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80) Rome received a true philosopher-king. A disciple of Epictetus, he trained himself to withstand the rigours of constant campaigning, the burdens of office, and the demands of a profligate family. His notes ‘To Myself’, known as his Meditations, exude all the higher sentiments:

What peculiar distinction remains for a wise and good man, but to be easy and contented under every event of human life…? Not to offend the divine Principle that resides in his soul, nor to disturb the tranquillity of his mind by a variety of fantastical pursuits … To observe a strict regard to truth in his words and justice in his actions; and though all mankind should conspire to question his integrity and modesty… he is not offended at their incredulity, nor yet deviates from the path which leads him to the true end of life, at which everyone should endeavour to arrive with a clear conscience, undaunted and prepared for his dissolution, resigned to his fate without murmuring or reluctance.26

Marcus Aurelius had a marvellous sense of who, and where, he was:

As the Emperor Antoninus, Rome is my city and my country, but as a man, I am a citizen of the world … Asia and Europe are mere corners of the globe, the Great Ocean a mere drop of water, Mount Athos is a grain of sand in the universe. The present instant of time is only a point compared to eternity. All things here are diminutive, subject to change and decay, yet all things proceed from … the one Intelligent Cause.27

By the mid-third century the Roman Empire was showing all the outward symptoms of an inner wasting disease. Political decadence was apparent in the lack of resolve at the centre, and in disorder on the periphery. In the ninety years from AD 180 no fewer than eighty short-lived emperors claimed the purple, by right or by usurpation. ‘The reign of Gallienus’, wrote Gibbon, ‘produced only nineteen pretenders to the throne … The rapid and perpetual transitions from the cottage to the throne, and from the throne to the grave, might have amused an indifferent philosopher.’ The army dictated to its civilian masters with impunity. The barbarians flooded over the limes, often unchecked. The raids of the Goths turned into permanent occupations. In 268 they sacked Athens. One breakaway ‘Empire’, under a certain Postumus, appeared in central Gaul, and another in Palmyra. The difficulty of enforcing the cult of worthless or transient emperors led to recurrent persecution of the growing Christian sect. From 250 to 265, plague raged in many regions: for a time, 5,000 people a day were dying in Rome alone. Famine followed the plague. Severe price inflation set in, accompanied by a seriously debased coinage. Marcus Aurelius had issued an imperial silver coin of 75 per cent purity. Under Gallienus (r. 260–8), a century later, it was 95 per cent impure. Tax revenues slumped; the imperial authorities concentrated resources in the frontier provinces; elsewhere, many provincial centres declined; amphitheatres were demolished to provide stone for defensive walls.

Even under Diocletian (r. 284–305), whose twenty-one years have been seen as the ‘founding of a new empire’, all was far from well. The tetrarchy, or ‘rule of four’, which divided the Empire into two halves, each with its own Augustus and its own deputy Caesar, facilitated administration and frontier defence. The army was greatly increased—but so was the bureaucracy. The rise in prices was controlled—but not the fall in population. The Christian persecutions continued. In 304 a great Triumph was organized in Rome; but it was the last. One year later, Diocletian abdicated, retiring to his native Dalmatia.

Flavius Valerius Constantinus (r. 306–37), later called ‘Constantine the Great’, was born at Naissus in Moesia Superior (i.e. Nis, in modern Serbia, not, as Gibbon says, in Dacia). His father, Constantius Chlorus, Diocletian’s Western Caesar, died at Eboracum (York) soon after succeeding to the purple. His mother, Helena, was a British Christian, revered in legend as the discoverer of the True Cross. Constantine reunited the two parts of the divided Empire and, in the Edict of Milan, proclaimed general religious toleration. At two crucial moments of his career he claimed to have had a vision. Initially, the vision was said to have been of Apollo, later of a Cross, together with the words ‘By this you will conquer’. He quarrelled with the citizens of Rome, and determined to move his capital to the shores of the Bosphorus. On his deathbed he was formally baptized into Christianity. In this way, at the moment of its Emperor’s Christian conversion, Rome ceased to be the centre of the Empire which it had created.

Christianity

In its origins, Christianity was not a European religion. Like Judaism and Islam, to which it is related, it came from Western Asia; and Europe did not become its main area of concentration for several centuries.

Jesus of Nazareth (C.5BC-33AD), Jewish nonconformist and itinerant preacher, was born in the Roman province of Judaea in the middle of the reign of Augustus. He was executed in Jerusalem, by crucifixion, during the reign of Tiberius (14–37AD) and the procuratorship of Pontius Pilatus, praenomen unknown, a Roman knight who may later have served at Vienna (Vienne) in Gaul. Reportedly,. though no fault was found in him, the procurator acquiesced in the demands of the Jewish Sanhedrin to put him to death, [CRUX]

Apart from four short gospels, whose evidence is partly repetitive and partly contradictory, few facts are known about the life of Jesus. There is no historical document which mentions him, and there is no trace of him in Roman literary sources. He did not even attract major notice from the Jewish writers of the period such as Josephus or Philo. His personal teaching is known only from a score of parables, from his sayings during the various incidents and miracles of his ministry, from his talks with the apostles, and from a handful of key pronouncements: his Sermon on the Mount, his answers in the Temple and at his trial, his discourse at the Last Supper, his words on the Cross. He claimed to be the ‘Messiah’, the long-foretold saviour of the Jewish scriptures; but he reduced the vast corpus of those scriptures to two simple commandments:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. (Matt. 22:37–9)

Jesus did not challenge the secular authorities, stressing on several occasions, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. When he died, he left no organization, no church or priesthood, no political testament, no Gospel, indeed; just the enigmatic instruction to his disciples:

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. (Matt. 16: 24–5)

That Christianity should have become the official religion of the Roman Empire could hardly have been foreseen. For generations of Christian believers in later times, the triumph of Christianity was simply the will of God. It was not seriously questioned or analysed. But for many Romans in the early centuries it must have presented a real puzzle. Jesus was long regarded as an obscure, local phenomenon. His followers, whose beliefs were confused by outsiders with Judaism, were unlikely candidates to found a religion of universal appeal. The faith of slaves and simple fishermen offered no advantage for class or sectional interest. Their gospel, which made such a clear distinction between the spiritual ‘Kingdom of God’ and the rule of Caesar, seemed to have resigned in advance from all secular ambitions. Even when they became more numerous, and were repressed for refusing to participate in the imperial cult, Christians could hardly be seen as a general menace, [APOCALYPSE]

Of course, one may see with hindsight that Christianity’s emphasis on the inner life was filling a spiritual void to which the Roman lifestyle gave no relief; also that the Christian doctrine of redemption, and the triumph over death, must have exerted great attractions. But one can also understand the bafflement of imperial officials, like Pliny the Younger in Bithynia (see p. 191 above). It is one thing to decide that the ancient world was ripe for a new ‘Salvationist’ religion; it is quite.

to explain why the void should have been filled by Christianity rather than by half a dozen other candidates. Of all the sceptics writing about the rise of the Christian Church, none was more sceptical than Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall contains on the one hand the most magnificent historical prose in the English language and on the other hand the most sustained polemic against the Church’s departure from Christian principles. He conducted what he called ‘a candid but rational enquiry into the progress and establishment of… a pure and humble religion [which] finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol’.29 (See Appendix III, p. 1236.)

CRUX

LIKE the square, the circle, the triangle, the arrow, and the notch, the cross is one of the irreducible, primary signs that recur throughout human history. Sometimes called ‘the sign of signs’, it is used in science to denote ‘add’, ‘plus’, and ‘positive’. Owing to the crucifixion of Christ, however, it was adopted at an early stage as the prime symbol of Christianity.

The Cross is omnipresent in the Christian World—in churches, on graves, on public monuments, in heraldry, on national flags. Christians are baptized with the sign of the Cross; they are blessed by their priests with the sign of the Cross; and they cross themselves—Catholics and Orthodox in opposite directions—when they implore divine assistance or when they listen to the Gospel. Medieval crusaders wore the Cross on their surcoats. The Christian Cross can be found in any number of variants, each with a specific symbolic or ornamental connotation.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1229.) [DANNEBROG]

Yet pre-Christian signs have long existed in Europe alongside their Christian counterparts. Best known is the age-old swastika or ‘crooked cross’, whose name derives from a Sanskrit phrase for ‘well-being’. In ancient Chinese lore, it signified ‘bad luck’ when the hooks were turned down to the left, and ‘good luck’ when they were turned up to the right. In its Scandinavian form, it was thought to represent two crossed strokes of lightning giving light or two crossed sticks making fire. In its rounded Celtic form, common in Ireland, it was made to represent the sun.2 It had several millennia behind it before the pagan Nazis chose a modern version of the hakenkreuz as their party emblem.

Another example of the transmission of oriental and non-Christian insignia concerns the tamgas or ‘pictorial charges’ of the ancient Sarmatians. The tamgas, which occasionally resemble some of the more simple Chinese ideographs, reappeared in the tribal signs of the Turkish tribes, who advanced into the Near East in early medieval times. By this route, they are thought to have contributed to the system of Islamic heraldry which western crusaders were to encounter in the Holy Land.3 At the same time, they bear a striking resemblance to signs which emerged at a somewhat later period in the unique heraldic system of Poland. As a result, scholars have been tempted to speculate that the familiar claim about the Polish nobility being descended from ancient Sarmatian ancestors may not be entirely fanciful. Their so-called ‘Sarmatian Ideology’, their heraldic clans, and their remarkable cavalry tradition have all been linked to the long-lost oriental horsemen of the steppes. One hypothesis holds that Poland’s Sarmatian connection may best be explained as a legacy of the Sarmatian Alans who disappeared into the backwoods of Eastern Europe in the 4th century AD.4

(Sarmatian tamgas)

(Polish heraldic clan signs)

Symbols can arouse the deepest emotions. When the International Red Cross was founded in 1863, few Europeans realized that its emblem could be other than a universal symbol of compassion. But in due course it had to be supplemented with the Red Crescent, the Red Lion, and the Red Star. Similarly, when a Christian cross was raised on the site of the former Nazi Concentration Camp at Auschwitz, it caused bitter controversy, especially among those who were not aware that the victims of the camp included large numbers of Christians as well as Jews. In 1993, nine years of accusations and broken agreements were ended with the creation of an ecumenical memorial centre.5 [AUSCHWITZ]

The spread of Christianity was greatly facilitated by the Pax Romano. Within three decades of Christ’s crucifixion, Christian communities were established in most of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean. St Paul, whose writings constitute the greater part of the New Testament, and whose journeys were the first pastoral visit of a Christian leader, was largely concerned with the Greek-speaking cities of the East. St Peter, Christ’s closest disciple, is said to have sailed to Rome and to have been martyred there c. AD 68. From Rome, the gospel travelled to every province of the Empire, from Iberia to Armenia.

The key figure was without doubt Saul of Tarsus (d. c.65), known as St Paul. Born a Jew and educated as a Pharisee, he took part in early Jewish persecutions of Christ’s followers. He was present at the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, in Jerusalem c.35. But then, after his sudden conversion on the road to Damascus, he received baptism and became the most energetic proselyte of the New Way. His three missionary journeys were the single most important stimulus to its growth. He met with varying success. In Athens, in 53, where he found an altar ‘To the Unknown God’, he was received with hostility by the Jews and with suspicion by the Greeks:

APOCALYPSE

PATMOS is Europe’s last island, hard by the Aegean’s Asian shore. In the first century AD it was used as a penal colony for the nearby Roman city of Ephesus. It was a fitting place to compose the last book of the canon of Christian scripture.

The author of the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, was called John. He never claimed what later tradition assumed, that he was St John the Apostle; and neither his style nor his outlook matches those of the Fourth Gospel. He had been exiled for religious offences, and was probably writing between AD 81 and 96.

The Apocalypse of St John the Divine records a series of mystical visions which, like Jewish apocalyptic literature of the same vintage, foretell the end of the existing order. The interpretation of its wondrous symbolism—of the Lamb, the Seven Seals, the Four Beasts and the Four Horsemen, the Great Whore of Babylon and the Red Dragon, and many more—has kept Christians puzzled and entranced ever since. The central chapters deal with the struggle with Anti-Christ, supplying a rich fund of demonology. [DIABOLOS] The concluding section, chapters 21–2, presents a view of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’:

‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.

And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things new. And He said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

And He said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ (Rev. 21:4–6)

Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other-some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange Gods: because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to Areopagus, saying May we know what this new doctrine… is?… For the Athenians… spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing. (Acts 17:18–21)

He sojourned twice in more congenial company at Corinth, where he probably wrote the Epistle to the Romans. On returning to Jerusalem he was accused of transgressing the Jewish Law, but as a Roman citizen appealed for trial in Rome. He is generally thought to have perished in Rome during the persecutions of Nero.

St Paul’s contribution was crucial on two separate counts. On the one hand, as the Apostle of the Gentiles, he established the principle that the New Way was not the tribal preserve of Jews, that it was open to all comers. ‘There shall be neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond nor free.’ On the other hand, he laid the foundations of all subsequent Christian theology. Sinful humanity is redeemed by Divine Grace through Christ, whose Resurrection abrogated the Old Law and ushered in the new era of the Spirit. Christ is more than the Messiah: He is the Son of God, identified with the Church in His mystical Body, which is shared by the faithful through Repentance and the Sacraments until the Second Coming. Jesus was uniquely the source of its inspiration; but it was St Paul who founded Christianity as a coherent religion, [CHASTITY]

The Jewish origins of Christianity have had lasting consequences, especially on relations between Christians and Jews. Following the Jewish Revolt of AD 70, the Jewish diaspora began to spread far and wide through the Empire. Judaism ceased to be concentrated in Judaea, and ‘the People of the Book’ became a religious minority in many parts of Europe and Asia. For them, Jesus Christ was a false messiah, a usurper, a renegade. For them, the Christians were a threat and a menace: dangerous rivals who had hijacked the scriptures and who broke the sacred taboos dividing Jew from Gentile. For the Christians, the Jews were also a threat and a challenge. They were Christ’s own people who had none the less denied his divinity, and whose leaders had handed him over for execution. In popular legend, and eventually for a time in official theology, they became the ‘Christ-killers’.

The schism within the Judaeo-Christian tradition has been generated on both sides by intense feelings of betrayal. It was inevitably more bitter than the conflicts of Christians with other religions. It is an unresolved, and unresolvable, quarrel within the family. From the hard-line Jewish perspective, Christianity is by nature antisemitic; and antisemitism is seen as a Christian phenomenon par excellence. From the hard-line Christian perspective, Judaism is by nature the seat of the antichrist, a bad loser, the perpetual source of smears, blasphemy, and insults. Notwithstanding the doctrine of forgiveness, it is the hardest thing in the world for Christians and Jews to see themselves as partners in the same tradition. Only the most Christian of Christians can contemplate calling the Jews ‘our elder brethren’.

Christianity, however, did not draw on Judaism alone. It was influenced by various oriental religions current in the Empire, and especially by Greek philosophy. The Gospel of St John, which begins ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, stands in marked contrast to the other three gospels, where this manifestly Greek doctrine of the Logos is not present. Modern scholars stress the hellenistic as well as the Judaic context. Philo of Alexandria, a hellenized Jew who sought to reconcile the Jewish scriptures with Platonism, holds a prominent place in this regard, [DIABOLOS]

CHASTITY

CHASTITY—in the sense of the permanent renunciation of sexual activity—was adopted by the early Christians as a central feature of their moral code. It was not unknown among the ancients, although Juvenal hinted that it had not been seen since ‘Saturn filled the throne’. It was practised by pagan priestesses, such as the vestal virgins of Rome, on pain of death, and in the Jewish world by some of the all-male sects. But it had never been upheld as a universal ideal.

Indeed, the wholesale pursuit of the virgin life had serious social implications. It threatened the family, the most respected institution of Roman life, and it undermined marriage. In a world where infant mortality was high, and average life expectancy did not exceed 25 years, the average household needed five pregnancies from each of its adult women to maintain numbers. Celibacy among adults seriously endangered the reproduction of the species.

Yet the Christians cherished chastity with unremitting ardour. From St Paul onwards, they increasingly condemned the ‘bondage of the flesh’. ‘For I delight in the law of God after the inward man,’ wrote St Paul. ‘But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.’

The appeal of these Pauline teachings can only be partly explained in terms of the life of the spirit demanding freedom from all worldly preoccupations. The belief in the imminence of the ‘Second Coming’ may also have played a part, since it was thought to have rendered procreation superfluous. Sexual orgasm was condemned because it involved the ultimate loss of free will. Many people believed that the character of a child was determined by the parents’ humour during intercourse. This created further inhibitions, since lovers would fear that impure sexual feelings might deform their offspring. Galen reports an erroneous medical notion to the effect that semen was produced from the froth of agitated blood. For men, sex was linked with physical as well as with spiritual disorder. For women, lifelong virginity was seen as the surest means of liberation from the tyranny of husbands and of traditional domestic duties. In general, therefore, sex was seen to be the mechanism whereby ‘the sins of the fathers’ were transmitted from generation to generation.

In August 386 there occurred in Milan one of the most famous conversions of a self-confessed fornicator. St Augustine’s Confessions provide a vital insight into the considerations involved in his acceptance of chastity. By that time, however, three hundred years had passed since St Paul. Established Christian communities were feeling the need to multiply.

Hence the secondary ideal of Christian marriage was revived alongside the primary ideal of Christian chastity. In this, marriage officially remained a stop-gap measure, a guard against lust and fornication for those too weak to abstain. ‘For it is better to marry’, St Paul had written to the Christians of Corinth, ‘than to burn.’

This ‘rout of the body’ continued to hold sway in the Middle Ages. The secular Latin clergy joined the monks in celibacy. The ‘Virgin Saints’ were universally revered. The cult of the Virgin Mary, immaculate notwithstanding both conception and childbirth, was given a status similar to that accorded to the creed of the Trinity. Christian ascetics practised every form of mental and physical restraint, self-castration not excepted.

The history of chastity is one of those topics in the study of Mentantés which best help modern readers to penetrate the mind of the ancients. It serves as a point of entry to what has been called ‘a long extinct and deeply reticent world’. The magisterial study, which traces the debates on chastity among the Church Fathers of both Greek and Latin traditions, does not comment on present-day sexual attitudes, which the early Christians must surely have seen as a form of tyranny. But it undertakes the task of every good historian—to signal the differences between the past and the present, where chastity, to borrow a phrase, is often seen as the most unnatural of sexual perversions. ‘To modern persons’, Peter Brown concludes, ‘… the early Christian themes of sexual renunciation, continence, celibacy and the virgin life have come to carry with them icy overtones… . Whether they say anything of help or comfort for our own times, the readers … must decide for themselves.’

The most recent research tends to suggest that Christianity and Judaism did not completely part company for perhaps two centuries. For many decades, the two overlapping communities may have shared the same messianic hopes. Judaic texts from the period 200 BC-AD 50, located in newly released sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls, bear a striking resemblance to the Christian gospels. One assessment maintains that the final break between Christians and Jews occurred in AD 131, when the leader of the second Jewish revolt against Rome, Simon Bar-Kokhba, proclaimed himself the Messiah, thereby severing the bond.30 [PASCHA]

Whatever the date of the final split, the Jewish presence alongside Christianity has never been extinguished. Every week for two millennia, the celebration of the Jewish Sabbath on Friday evening has always preceded the Christian Sabbath on Sundays. After the lighting of the candles and the prayers for peace, the service culminates in the opening of the Ark of the Covenant and a reading from the Book of the Law, the Torah:

The Ark is Opened

The Torah is a tree of life to those

who hold it fast, and those who
cling to it are blessed. Its ways
are ways of pleasantness, and all
its paths are peace.

The Ark is closed; Congregation is seated 31 

Early Christianity had many rivals. In the first two centuries of the Empire the mystery cults of Isis, Cybele, and the Persian sun-god Mithras were thriving. They shared several important traits with early Christianity, including the ecstatic union with the divinity, the concept of a personal Saviour or Lord, and initiation rites akin to baptism. The anthropological approach to religion would stress these similarities.

Gnosticism, too, had much in common with Christianity. In origin the Gnostics were philosophers, ‘seekers after knowledge’, but they attracted a following of a more religious character. They borrowed heavily from both Judaism and increasingly from Christianity, to the point where they were sometimes regarded as a Christian sect. They held to a distinction between the Creator or Demiurge, who was responsible for an evil world, and the Supreme Being; also, in the nature of Man, to a distinction between his vile, physical existence and the spark of divine essence which gives people the capacity to reach for the heavenly spheres. Simon Magus is mentioned in the New Testament. Valentinus was active in Rome, c.136–65, Basilides in Alexandria. Marcion (d. 160) founded a gnostic sect that lasted until the fifth century. He taught that Christ’s body was not real, and hence that the Resurrection could not have taken place in any physical sense; and he rejected the Old Testament, holding that the Jewish Jehovah was incomplete without the God of Love as revealed by Jesus. This ‘Docetism’ launched the long-running christological debate about the true nature of Christ.

The disputes between Christians and Gnostics revealed the need for a recognized canon of scripture. Which of the holy writings were God-given, and which were merely man-made? This question preoccupied Christians at the turn of the second and third centuries, though the definitive statement was not made until the Festal Letter of Athanasius in 367. The core of the New Testament—the four Gospels and the 13 letters of St Paul—was accepted c.130, and the Old Testament—that is, the Hebrew canon less the Apocrypha—c.220. Other books, especially the Apocalypse or Revelation, were disputed much longer. [APOCALYPSE]

PASCHA

EASTER is the prime festival of the Christian calendar. It celebrates Christ’s resurrection from the dead. It is preceded by the forty days of the Lenten fast, and culminates in the eight days of Holy Week, starting on Palm Sunday. It reaches its most sombre point during Passiontide, which begins at the hour of the Crucifixion at noon on Good Friday, only to erupt in an outburst of joy on the Third Day, on Easter Morning, when the Tomb was found empty.

In most European languages Easter is called by some variant of the late Latin word Pascha, which in turn derives from the Hebrew pesach, ‘passover’. In Spanish it is Pascua, in French Pâques, in Welsh Pasg, in Swedish Pask, in Russian and Greek Paskha. In German, however, it isOstern, which derives, like its English equivalent, from the ancient Germanic goddess of springtime Eostro (Ostara). From this it appears that the Christians adapted earlier spring festivals marking the renewal of life after winter. They also appropriated the Jewish symbolism of Passover, with the crucified Christ becoming the ‘Paschal Lamb’.

The difference in names also recalls ancient controversies over the date of Easter. Those early Christians who followed the practices of the Jewish Passover fixed Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon following the vernal equinox. In 325 the Council of Nicaea decided that Easter day should fall on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox.

But the matter could not rest there, since several rival astronomical cycles were in existence for calculating solar years and lunations. Originally the great observatory at Alexandria was charged with the mathematics; but soon important discrepancies crept in between the Greek and Latin Churches, and between different provinces within the Latin Church. In 387 Easter was held in Gaul on 21 March, in Italy on 18 April, and in Egypt on 25 April. Subsequent attempts at standardization succeeded only partially, though 21 March and 25 April have remained the extreme limits. The Orthodox and Catholic Easters were never harmonized. Since Easter is a movable feast, all other festivals in the annual Christian calendar which depend on it, from Whitsun (Pentecost) to Ascension Day must move with it.1 Easter finds no mention in the Bible, except for an isolated mistranslation in the English Authorized Version of 1613 where, in Acts 12: 4, ‘Easter’ appears in place of ‘Passover’.

For nearly two millennia Christendom has resounded at Easter-time to triumphal hymns about Christ’s ‘victory over Death’. For non-Christians these hymns can sound threatening. For the faithful, they express the deepest sense of their existence. The ancients sang the fourth-centuryAurora Lucis rutilat (‘The day draws on with golden light’), Finita iam sunt proelia (‘The strife is o’er, the battle done’ or Victimae Paschali Laudes). The best known Easter hymns, including Salve, festa dies (‘Welcome, happy including Salve, festa dies (‘Welcome, happy morning”),Vexilia regis(‘The royal banners forward go’), and Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis (‘Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle’) were composed by Venantius Fortunatus (c.530–610), sometime Bishop of Poitiers. The best Greek counterparts, such as Anastaseos Imera (‘The day of resurrection’), sometimes sung to the melody of ‘Lancashire’, were composed by St John of Damascus (c.675–749). Germans sing the Jesus lebt! of Christian Furchtegott Gellert; the French, À Toi la gloire, O résuscitél; the Poles, Chrystus zmartwychstan jest; the Greeks, Hristos Anestil The English-speaking world sings ‘Christ the Lord is risen today’ to words by Charles Wesley:

Vain the Stone, the watch, the seal;
Christ has burst the gates of hell.
Death in vain forbids his rise.
Christ has opened Paradise.
Lives again our Glorious King;

Where, O Death, is now thy sting?

Once he died, our souls to save;
Where thy victory, O grave?

                                                            Hallelujahl2

DIABOLOS

ALL the main traditions from which European civilization was fused were strongly conscious of the Evil One. In prehistoric religion, as in pagan folklore, he often took the form of a horned animal—the dragon, the serpent, the goat-man of the witches’ sabbath, the seductive Gentleman who could not quite conceal his horns, his tail, and his hooves. In classical mythology he was a lord of the underworld, with a pedigree that can be traced to the encounter of Gilgamesh with Huwawa. [EPIC] In the Manichean tradition [BOGUMIL], he was the Prince of Darkness. To Aristotle, he may have been no more than the absence of the Good. But to the Platonists, he was already the diabolos, the opponent, the Old Enemy. In the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job, he was the agent of sin and inexplicable suffering. In Christian lore, the tempter of Christ in the wilderness becomes the Satan and the Lucifer of the Fall. He finds a central place in medieval demonology and in St Augustine’s discussion of free will and of God’s licence for evil, as in the master-works of Milton and Goethe. In recent times Europeans have dropped their guard. But a history of Europe without the Devil would be as odd as an account of Christendom without Christ.1

Theological disputes foreshadowed the need for some form of ecclesiastical authority to resolve them. One solution was provided by Clement of Rome (d. c.90), who furthered the doctrine of the apostolic succession. Christian leaders had authority if they could trace their appointment to one of the twelve apostles, or to the apostles’ recognized successors. Clement himself, who was probably third in line to St Peter as ‘bishop’ at Rome, based his own claim on the text ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church’. The same point was made with greater force by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130–200), in his writings against the Gnostics:

The greatest and most ancient of churches, known to all, [is that] established at Rome by the apostles Peter and Paul… Every other church, that is, the faithful from all other parts, ought to be harmonized [with Rome], by virtue of the authority of its origins. And it is there that Tradition, derived from the apostles, has been preserved…32

Here already was the essence of the Roman Catholic tradition. (See Appendix III, p. 1224.)

For the time being, several competing authorities prevailed, and the apostolic succession, as interpreted in Rome, never gained universal acceptance. Direct contact with Christ’s apostles, however, obviously carried kudos. Apart from St Clement, the Apostolic Fathers included Ignatius of Antioch, Papias of Hierapolis, and St Polycarp of Smyrna (c.69–155), who was burned at the stake.

The persecution of early Christians is a matter of some controversy, and its true extent cannot be disentangled from the martyrology of the most interested party. ‘The ecclesiastical writers of the fourth and fifth centuries’, wrote Gibbon, ‘ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts.’ Still, fitful repressions did occur. Nero made Christians into scapegoats for the great fire of Rome in 64. This was contrary to the general toleration extended to national cults, such as Judaism, to which Christianity was judged to belong. Domitian, who demanded that he be worshipped as Dominus et Deus, executed Christian recalcitrants for ‘atheism’. Marcus Aurelius sanctioned a severe repression at Lyons in 177. But it was not until 250 that the Emperor Decius (249–51) ordered that all his subjects sacrifice to the state gods on pain of death. After another interval, Diocletian ordered in 303 that all Christian churches be destroyed and all bibles burnt. This Great Persecution lasted thirteen years, and was the prelude to the general toleration proclaimed in the following reign. Excessive repression had proved counterproductive. The Roman Empire’s surrender to Christianity was irrigated by the blood of martyrs, [CATACOMBI]

The growth of clergy—as a separate estate from the laity—seems to have been a gradual matter. The offices of Episcopos or ‘bishop’ as communal leader, and of diaconus or ‘deacon’, preceded that of the presbyter or ‘priest’ with exclusive sacerdotal functions. The title of Patriarch, the ‘Father’ of the bishops in any particular province or country, was long used very inconsistently. No special status was accorded to the bishop of Rome. The prestige which accrued from leading the Christian community in the capital of the Empire was diminished when the imperial government ceased to reside there. And it exposed the Christians of Rome to greater persecution. Throughout the early centuries there was a line of bishops on the ‘throne of St Peter’; but they did not emerge as a leading force in the Church until the fifth or, some might reckon, the seventh century.

CATACOMBI

BELIEF in the resurrection of the dead gave burial a special role in the early Christian community; and two miles beyond Rome’s Aurelian Walls, in the vicinity of the Appian Way, lay a district, Ad Catacumbas, where for safety early Christians buried their dead in underground galleries. Forty-two such catacombs have been identified since their rediscovery in the sixteenth century, each of them a warren of tunnels on five or six levels linking the maze of chambers and family loculi or ‘notches’. The earliest tombs, such as that of Flavia Domitilla, wife of the consul for AD 95, date from the end of the first century. But the greatest number date from the era of persecutions in the third century. The catacombs were never lived in; but later, under Christian rule, they became a favourite meeting-ground, where festivals were held and chapels built in honour of the popes and martyrs. Most of the inscriptions were cut at that time. For example, in the Catacomb of Praetextus, there is an inscription to one of Pope Sixtus’ martyred deacons, St lanuarius, arrested with him on 6 August 258: BEATISSIMO MARTYRI IANUARIO DAMASUS EPISCOP FECIT (Bishop Damasus made [this monument dedicated] to the Blessed Martyr lanuarius).

The largest complex, the Catacomb of St Callistus, was built by the ex-slave who became pope in 217–22. It includes the papal chamber, containing burials up to Pope Miltiades (d. 314), the crypt of St Cecilia, and in the Crypt of the Sacraments an extraordinary collection of mural paintings. Catacomb art was highly symbolic of the spiritual life and the world to come. Its favourite motifs included the dove, the anchor, the dolphin, the fisherman, the Good Shepherd, and Jonah, precursor of the Resurrection.

Pillaging by Goths and Vandals in the fifth century caused many relics to be withdrawn to churches within the city; and the postponement of the Second Coming caused the gradual abandonment of underground burial. St Sebastian’s crypt was one of the few sites to remain frequented. It was sought out by medieval pilgrims seeking protection from the plague.

Beside the Catacomb of Basileo stands a church which marks Rome’s most famous Christian legend. Fleeing from persecution along the Appian Way, St Peter met Christ on the road and asked him Domine, quo vadis? (Lord, where are you going?) Christ answered, ‘To Rome, for a second crucifixion.’ Peter turned back, and was martyred.

Three of the forty-two catacombs—at Villa Torlonia, at Vigna Randatini, and at Monte Verde—are Jewish.1

The ‘Fathers of the Church’ is a collective label which was used from the fourth century onwards for the Christian leaders of the preceding period. The Apologists, from Aristides of Athens to Tertullian (155–255), clarified what ultimately became orthodox beliefs. Others, including Hippolytus (165–236), Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215), Origen (185–250), and Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), were revered for their defence of the faith against pagans and heretics. The body of Patristics or ‘writings of the Fathers’ is not judged to end before those of St John Chrysostom (347–407).

Heresy, of course, is a tendentious concept. It is an accusation levelled by one group of believers against another; and it can only exist if the accusers believe in their own dogmatic monopoly of the truth. In Christian history, it only emerges in the second and third centuries as the general consensus solidified. Most of the Church’s Fathers were heretical in varying degrees. The chief heresies, as defined by later orthodoxy, included Docetism, Montanism, Novatianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Donatism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism. Of these, Arianism was specially important because it won the adherence of many communities both inside and outside the Empire. Founded by Arius (c.250–336), a priest of Alexandria, it held that Christ, as Son of God, could not share the full divinity of God the Father. It provoked the first ecumenical Council of the Church, where it was condemned. But it re-emerged through the support of the Emperor Constantius II, and its acceptance by several barbarian peoples, notably the Goths. It even split into three main sub-heresies: the Anomoeans, the Homoeans, and the Semi-Arians. It did not die out until the sixth century, [BRITO]

Christian monasticism was entirely oriental in its beginnings. St Antony of the Desert (c.251–356), an opponent of Arius and founder of the first anchorite community, was yet another Alexandrian.

The Christian concepts and practices, therefore, which in due course were pronounced Catholic (universal) and orthodox (correct) were the fruit of many years of debate and dispute. Their final definition awaited the work of four Doctors of the Church, who were active in the late fourth century—SS Martin, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Apart from the debate on the Logos, which soon gave precedence to the christological issue, they centred on the doctrines of Grace, Atonement, and the Church; on the Sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist; and above all on the Trinity. In 325, when the Emperor Constantine convened the first General Council of the Church at Nicaea in Asia Minor, the 300 delegates were asked to summarize the articles of basic Christian belief. They were dominated by the party from Alexandria, especially by the anti-Arian or Trinitarian group led by Athanasius (c.296–373). There were only a handful of bishops from the West, including Cordoba and Lyons. The absent Bishop of Rome, Sylvester I, was represented by two legates. What they produced was a combination of a baptismal formula used in Jerusalem with the famous idea ofhomoousios or ‘consubstan-tiality’. The Nicene Creed has been binding on all Christians ever since:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of all things both visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
Begotten of the Father, Only-begotten,
That is, of one substance with the Father;
By whom all things both in heaven and earth were made;
Who for us men and our salvation
Came down and was incarnate, became man,
Suffered and rose again the third day;
Ascended into the heavens;
Cometh to judge the quick and the dead;
And in the Holy Spirit.34

It was three hundred years since Christ had walked in Galilee.

The Bosporus, 4 November 1079 AUC. Shortly after ordering the execution of his heir apparent, the Emperor Constantine conducted a ceremony to mark the foundation of his new capital city. He laid the first stone of the western wall, at the point where it meets the sea. He was attended by the neoplatonist philosopher Sopater, who was acting as telestes or ‘magician’ and who cast the spells to secure the city’s good fortune. Also present was Praetestatus, a pontifex from Rome, who was said to have brought the most sacred of Roman talismans, the Palladium, to be buried at the base of the founder’s statue in the new forum. ‘The sun was in the sign of Sagittarius, but the Crab ruled the hour.’

Four years later, on 11 May 1083 (AD 330), fresh ceremonies inaugurated the life of the new foundation. Shortly after the execution of Sopater, and of another pagan philosopher, Canonaris, who had shouted out: ‘Do not raise yourself against our ancestors’, Constantine presided at a grand inaugural festival. The city was officially named ‘Constantinopolis’ and ‘Roma Nova’. Prayers to the goddess Tyche, or ‘Fortune’, the city’s tutelary genius, mingled with the Christian chant of kyrie eleison. In the Circus, by the Temple of Castor and Pollux, sumptuous games were held, but no gladiatorial contests. In the Forum, the oversize statue of the Emperor was unveiled. It had been made by mounting Constantine’s head on an ancient Colossus of Apollo, and it stood on a huge porphyry column. In all probability, a smaller gilded statue of Constantine, carrying a tiny Tyche on its outstretched hand, was paraded in torchlight procession. Certainly a procession of that sort soon became an annual tradition in Constantinople on Founder’s Day. The Tyche carried a Cross welded to her forehead. All subsequent emperors were expected to rise and to prostrate themselves before it. New coins and medals were struck: they carried the bust of Constantine, and the inscription TOTIUS ORBIS IMPERATOR.

Map 9. Constantinople

The choice of the city’s site had not been easily decided. The Emperor needed a capital that would benefit from the sea routes through the Bosporus and Hellespont. He had first looked at ancient Chalcedon on the Asian shore. Then he went for ancient Ilium (Troy), whose legendary connections with the founding of Rome offered important symbolic advantages. He visited the Trojan Fields, and marked out the outlines of a future city at a place revered as Hector’s Grave. The gates had already been erected (they can still be seen), before he changed his mind once again, crossing the water to the small town of Byzantium on the European shore, where he had recently conducted a victorious siege. At last, both the practicalities and the auguries were right. Later legend held that Constantine traced the line of the walls in person. Striding out in front of the surveyors, spear in hand, he left his companions far behind. When one of them called out, ‘How much further, Sire?’, he is said to have replied mysteriously, ‘Until He who walks before me stops walking.’

The transformation of little Byzantium into Constantinople the Great required works of immense size and speed. Constantine’s Wall ran across the peninsula from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmora, some two miles to the west of the ancient acropolis. Constantine’s Forum was built immediately outside Byzantium’s older wall. The separate suburbs of Sycae (Galata) and of Blachernae, on opposing sides of the Golden Horn, received separate fortifications; whilst much of the old city was stripped or demolished. The graceful granite column of Claudius Gothicus, erected inAD269 after a famous victory, was left on the point of the promontory, looking out over the sea to Asia. Constantinople, like Rome, contained seven hills, which were soon to be covered with public and private buildings. Eighty years later, a description mentions a Capitol or school of learning, a Circus, two theatres, eight public and 153 private baths, 52 porticoes, five granaries, eight aqueducts, four meeting-halls, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and 4,388 listed residences of outstanding architectural merit. To adorn this megalopolis, vast numbers of art treasures were brought from Greece—the Pythian Apollo, the Samian Hera, the Olympian [ZEUS], the Pallas of Rhodian Lindos. Four hundred and twenty-seven statues were assembled to stand in front of Saint Sophia alone. Colonists were forcibly imported from all the neighbouring settlements. In order to feed them, and to supply the annual dole, the grain fleets of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor were redirected. Constantinople had to be launched in record time; its neighbours were vandalized, emptied, and starved.

The character of Constantine has attracted much speculation. As the first Christian emperor, he became the subject of shameless hagiography. ‘Speech and reason stand mute’, wrote Eusebius of Caesarea, the first biographer, ‘when I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed soul, united with God, free of all mortal dross, in robes gleaming like lightning, and in ever radiant diadem.’ Yet to his detractors he was an odious hypocrite, a tyrant and murderer, whose reputation was only burnished by a deathbed conversion and by the forgeries of the subsequent era. Gibbon, who was allergic to Christian legends, none the less preferred a generous interpretation, stressing talents marred only by the extravagances of his old age. Constantine was ‘tall and majestic, dexterous … intrepid in war, affable in peace … and tempered by habitual prudence … He deserved the appellation of the first Emperor who publicly professed the Christian religion.’

Despite his mother’s example, it is a moot point how far Constantine was a practising Christian. He publicly confessed his debt to the One God; but most of his actions, including the Edict of Toleration, could equally be explained by the policy of a tolerant pagan. During the festivities at Constantinople, he was most interested in promoting the worship of himself. At the same time, he was a devoted patron of church-building, not least in Rome, where both St Peter’s and the Basilica Constantiniana (St John Lateran) were his foundations. In 321 he enforced the general observance of Sunday as a day of rest. As was common, he long deferred his formal baptism, being christened by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian, on his deathbed. He gave no special favours to the Bishop of Rome. Constantine basked in the deepening theatricality of the late imperial cult. As the Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), he inherited Diocletian’s practice of the adoratio purpurae, the adoration of the purple, and he surrounded himself with the obsequious language of oriental despotism. Public art, as illustrated on the friezes of the Arch of Constantine in Rome, was growing more stiff and formal. Intellectual life at Constantine’s court was dominated by the drive to reconcile the rising tide of Christianity with traditional culture. Constantine relied on the convert rhetorician Lactantius, whom he had known at Trier, both to teach his son Crispus and, in the Divinae Institutiones, to set out a systematic account of the Christian world view.

The state of the Christian religion in Constantine’s reign must be nicely gauged. After the Edict of Milan (313) the Church benefited from official toleration and a stable revenue and, with the Nicene Creed, from a coherent doctrine. Yet it was still little more than a minority sect in the early stages of institutional growth. There was no supreme ecclesiastical authority. The scriptural canon was not fully agreed. None of the greatest of the Church Fathers, from John Chrysostom to Augustine, had yet been born. The greatest of the heresiarchs, Arius, enjoyed considerable influence at the imperial court, being recalled from exile in 334. Indeed, Arianism was destined to become dominant in the succeeding reign. The Donatists in Africa had recently been suppressed. The only countries where Christianity was growing beyond the Empire were Armenia and Abyssinia. The age of sporadic persecutions was past; but ‘the divisions of Christendom suspended the ruin of Paganism’.

In 330 the Empire was in healthier shape than for many decades. East and West had been reunited. The general peace held. Constantine’s reforms have been dismissed as ‘a timid policy, of dividing whatever is united, of reducing whatever is eminent, of dreading every active power, of expecting that the most feeble will prove the most obedient’. At least they gave the Empire a breathing space. The army was brought under control by dividing the jurisdiction of the praetorian prefects into rival masterships of cavalry and infantry; by distinguishing the élite palatine troops from the second-rate forces on the frontier; and by the widespread introduction of barbarian officers and auxiliaries. The Emperor’s lavish building projects, and his repair of the road and postal system, was paid for by an oppressive land tax. A far-flung network of imperial messengers, who acted as official spies, kept potential opponents in fear.

Constantine had no plan for avoiding the perennial problems of succession. He had killed his eldest son, Crispus, on rumours of a Roman plot. But this still left him with three more sons—Constantine, Constantius, and Constans—a favoured nephew, and three brothers. Two years before his death he divided the Empire between them, raising his sons to the rank of Caesar. They ill repaid his generosity. Constantine II was killed whilst invading the territory of Constans. Constans was killed by the usurper, Maxentius. Constantius II, having initiated a massacre of his remaining relatives, was left to win the Empire from Maxentius.

Following the chaos of the previous century, the economy of the Empire was restored to a modicum of prosperity and stability. Civic munificence was diminished from earlier levels; but provincial cities, especially on the frontier zones of central Europe, retained a solid measure of pride in their public works. Diocletian’s tax reforms, based on assessments of agricultural labour, had provided the basis for regular budgetary planning. They also swelled the imperial bureaucracy. Complaints were heard about tax-collectors outnumbering tax-payers. The gold coinage, struck at the rate of 60 coins per pound of bullion, offset the debasement of copper coins and laid the foundations of Byzantium’s stable currency.

The Empire’s frontiers were holding firm; in fact, for a time they were slightly expanded. The valuable province of Armenia had been wrested from Persia in 297, and through romanization and christianization was laying the basis of a permanent and distinctive culture. To facilitate administration, the Empire was divided into the four prefectures of Oriens (Constantinople), Illyricum (Sirmium), Italia et Africa (Milan), and Gaul (Trier). In the West, in Britain, the depredations of the Picts and Scots had been held at bay by the expedition of Constantine’s father. The separatist ‘emperors of Britain’, Carausius and Alectus, had been brought to heel. In the East, Sassanid Persia threatened, but did not overrun. In the south, Moorish tribes were pressing on Roman Africa.

The most important changes to Europe’s political and ethnic map were proceeding beyond the Empire’s limits and beyond the reach of documentary history. The huge region of Celtic supremacy was dwindling fast. The Celts’ western strongholds in Britain and Gaul were heavily romanized. Their homelands in the centre were being overrun, absorbed, or destroyed by the movement of Germanic and Slavonic tribes (see Chapter IV). The Franks were already settled on either side of the Rhine frontier. The Goths had completed their Long March from the Vistula to the Dnieper. The Slavs were drifting westwards towards the centre, where Celtic Bohemia was heading for slavicization. The Baits already lived on the Baltic. The Finno-Ugrians, long since divided, were well on their way to their future territories. The Finns were on station on the Volga-Baltic bridge; the Magyars were settled at one of their many halts along the southern steppes. The nomads and the sea-raiders remained for the time being along the outer periphery. The Scythians were no. more than a distant memory. The Huns were still in Central Asia. The Norsemen were already in Norway, as shown by the oldest of their runic inscriptions.

Constantine’s view of the outside world would have been governed by the state of Roman communications. China, which was still disunited by the chaos of the recent ‘Three Kingdom Period’, was known through the fragile contacts of the silk route. It had been visited in AD 284 by the ambassadors of Diocletian. It was nominally subject to the Chin dynasty, whose influence was slowly spreading from north to south. It had largely abandoned the philosophy of Confucius and, through the flowering of Buddhism, was building strong cultural ties with India. India, whose northern region had just come under the rule of the Gupta emperors, the greatest patrons of Hindu art and culture, was much closer to Rome and was much better known. News of the crowning of Chandragupta I at Magadha in 320 would almost certainly have reached Constantinople via Egypt. Egypt was also the source of news from Abyssinia, which was the target of Christian missions from Syria and Alexandria. The Sassanid Empire of Persia, which shared a long and fragile frontier with Rome, was the object of intense interest. It had rejected the hellenism of the previous era and passed into a phase of militant Zoroastrianism. Mani, the prophet of dualist Manichaeanism, who had sought to marry Zoroaster’s principles with those of Christianity, had been executed some sixty years before. The boy-king Shapur II (310–79) was still in the power of his priests and magnatial guardians, who, apart from completing the compilation of the holy scriptures, the Avesta were conducting a thorough persecution of all dissenters. The Roman-Persian peace, which had not been broken for thirty-three years, was due to hold until Constantine’s death.

The founding of Constantinople in 330, which was a clear-cut event, seems to support the widespread practice of taking the reign of Constantine as the dividing line between the ancient and the medieval periods. In this, it has to vie with a number of competing dates: with 392 and the accession of Theodosius I, the first emperor whose empire was exclusively Christian; with 476 and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (see p. 240); with 622 and the rise of Islam, which divided the former Roman world into Muslim and Christian spheres (see pp. 251–8); and with 800 and Charlemagne’s restoration of a Christian empire in the West (see pp. 298–306). If this sort of dividing line were to be taken seriously, there is a danger that the young Constantine might be judged an ancient and the older Constantine a medieval.

Much more important is the overall balance at any given time between the legacy of the past and the sum total of innovations—what professional historians sometimes call the ‘continuities’ and the ‘discontinuities’. On this basis, one can state with some confidence that no such tipping of an important balance occurred in Constantinople in AD 330.

The city of Rome was inevitably diminished, not least when Constantine abolished the praetorian guard and razed their Roman headquarters. But Rome’s practical importance had declined long since. In the long run it actually benefited: by losing control of an empire which was set to crumble, it ensured that it would not be linked to the Empire’s fate. It was to find a new and lasting role as the home of Christianity’s most powerful hierarch. The current Bishop of Rome, however, was far from assertive. Sylvester I (314–35) attended neither the Council of Aries, which Constantine convened in 314 to end the Donatist quarrel, nor the General Council of Nicaea.

Most historians would agree that the core of Graeco-Roman civilization, as solidified in the later phases of the ancient world, lay first and foremost in the Empire and secondly in the complex cultural pluralism which it patronized and tolerated. The core of medieval civilization, in contrast, lay in the community of Christendom and its exclusively Christian culture. It developed through the mingling of ex-Roman and non-Roman peoples on a territorial base that coincided with that of the former Empire only in part. In 330, very few of the processes which led from the one to the other had even begun. Constantine himself was no European.

One must not forget the sequence of events. The span of time which separated Constantine from Charlemagne was greater than that which separated Constantine from Caesar and Augustus. It was equal to the span which encompasses the whole of modern history, from the Renaissance and Reformation to the present.

Yet Constantine did plant the seed of one historic notion—that the Christian religion was compatible with politics. Christ himself had categorically rejected political involvement; and prior to Constantine, Christians had not sought to assume power as a means of furthering their cause. After Constantine, Christianity and high politics went hand in hand. This, in the eyes of the purists, was the moment of corruption.

Appropriately enough, therefore, Constantinople soon became the founding seat of Christian power. It was made the official capital of the Roman Empire in 331, on the first anniversary of its inauguration, and it retained the distinction for more than a thousand years. Within one or two generations it assumed a predominantly Christian character, with the churches outnumbering the temples, until the temples were eventually banned. It was the source, and later the heart, of the ‘Byzantine’ state—the senior branch of medieval Christendom, and, despite the devotees of ‘Western Civilization’, an essential constituent of European history.