Download Imperial Rome: 14-180 CE

Imperial Rome: 14-180 CE
From: Hooker, Richard. “Imperial Rome.” World Civilizations. 1996. Web. August 1, 2004.
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ROME/IMPROME.HTM
After the death of Augustus in 14 CE, Rome underwent a series of profound changes. The Empire itself grew
dramatically; from Augustus to the time of Trajan (98-117 CE), Rome acquired more of northern Africa,
most of Great Britain, parts of Germany, eastern Europe around the Black Sea, as well as Mesopotamia and
the northern part of the Arabian peninsula. At home, Rome struggled with its new institution of semimonarchical rule. Augustus had fudged the issue by declaring himself "first among equals," or simply,
princeps, but his successors stopped pretending and simply called themselves either Caesar, to indicate
descent from the royal house, or imperator, since they derived their power from the imperium [literally,
“commander-in-chief”] over Rome and the military. The institution became more like a monarchy after
Augustus's death; Augustus had been elected by the Senate, and this practice remained—in truth, the early
emperors were simply hand-picked by the current emperor.
The first emperors of Rome were all from the Julian line. Augustus was immediately succeeded by Tiberius
(emperor 14-37 CE), who was followed by Gaius, nicknamed Caligula ("little boot") (37-41 CE), Claudius
("cripple, lame") (41-54 CE), and Nero (54-68 CE). Tiberius and then Caligula demonstrated how arbitrarily
power could be wielded by the emperor; Caligula, in particular, probably had a nervous breakdown on the
death of his sister and was famous throughout Roman history for his cruelty and delusive behavior. The
imperiate of Caligula, however, demonstrated how the emperor's rule was based on sheer military power;
after the assassination of Caligula in 41 CE, the Praetorian Guard found Claudius cowering in the palace and
declared him emperor. All remnants of Republican rule had been removed.
This was a frightening discovery in the administration of the government; now that it was apparent that
military force alone produced and legitimated the emperor's rule, there was nothing to stop ambitious
generals from using their armies to advance their political careers dramatically. The final Julian emperor to
sit on the throne was Nero, who had begun as a brilliantly talented and highly moral youth. It was in the time
of Nero that the Romans began to actively persecute, and execute, Roman members of a new eastern,
mystical religion: Christianity. Among those executed was one of the founders of Christianity, Paul of
Tarsus. Nero soon, however, proved himself unconcerned and incompetent, and the frontier armies began to
grow restless. In 68 CE, the armies revolted in Gaul and Nero was overthrown. The next year, 69 CE, no
fewer than four emperors mounted the throne, each backed by a powerful army.
Rome was spinning into chaos, but a Roman general, Vespasian (69-79 CE), managed to hold onto the
imperiate long enough to found his own dynasty: the Flavian dynasty. Neither Vespasian nor his successors
were from a noble or aristocratic Roman family. In many ways, this was Vespasian's strength. He was a
hard-headed and practical soldier and administrator who ridiculed most of the trappings of the office he held.
This hard-headed practicality translated into a highly effective imperiate. He was succeeded by his son, Titus
(79-81 CE) and then Domitian (81-96 CE), who began the second wave of persecutions of Christians.
Domitian was assassinated in 96 CE (it was hard to die a natural death as emperor of Rome; very few seemed
to have achieved it), and since he had no successor, the Senate elected the senator Nerva (96-98 CE). The
Flavian dynasty was at an end, but Nerva began a period that later Roman historians would call the five good
emperors: Nerva, Trajan (98-117 CE), Hadrian (117-138 CE), Antoninus Pius (138-161 CE), and Marcus
Aurelius (161-180 CE). All of these emperors died without passing the succession on (except Marcus
Aurelius), so each of these emperors were elected by the Senate from within its own ranks. This period was
the period of the greatest political stability in Imperial Rome after the age of Augustus; when Marcus
Aurelius broke the pattern and was succeeded by his son, Commodus (180-192 CE), all hell broke loose
again.
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Despite such political instability, this period saw the widespread exporting of Roman culture, government,
and law. The Romans actively built up large urban centers throughout the Empire and granted these cities all
the rights and privileges granted to Romans. These cities were ruled by the upper classes who, as a result,
grew increasingly loyal to the emperor. At the same time, Rome began to exercise more control over these
municipalities; unlike earlier empires which were more or less loose confederacies, the Roman Empire was
converted into what amounted to a single state under the centralized control of a Roman bureaucracy.
Culturally, this period is regarded as less creative and less interesting, but this is probably not the case. The
first century may, in fact, rival the Golden Age during the Augustan principate1 in creativity, especially in
literature and philosophy. Perhaps the most significant philosopher in Roman history was Seneca (4 BC-65
CE), who served for a time as the tutor and advisor to Nero in his youth. Seneca adopted Stoic2 principles in
a peculiarly Roman fashion, theorizing about the relationship of "duty" (officium) and human passions to the
larger pattern of the universe, the logos. His central philosophical principle is that one should calm one's
passions with the knowledge that all human experience, particularly suffering, has a meaning in the larger
pattern of history and the order of the universe. This pattern, however, cannot be apprehended by human
beings, so any effort to understand suffering is bound to produce more suffering…
Literary activity, in particular, seems to have evolved into a dramatically creative phase around the time of
Seneca; this period is called the "Silver Age" of Latin literature. Writers such as Juvenal (60-140 CE) and
Persius continued to write satires about the moral decay of Roman culture while exulting in the day to day
problems and depravity of their city and its bursting population. Juvenal in particular used Stoic principles to
show how far Roman life had strayed from its original values…Epic poetry was wildly popular in the Silver
Age as Virgilian imitators sprang up all over the place. The theme, however, was not the moral virtue of
Romans, but the moral degeneracy of their own times set in relief against the old virtues.
The most powerful of the silver age epics is the Civil War or Pharsalia, by Lucan (40-65 CE). This epic
narrates the struggle between Caesar and Pompey leading up to Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus. In Lucan's
narrative, Caesar is bloodthirsty, cruel, and ambitious; Pompey, who is the only representative of traditional
Roman virtue, is ineffective and undecisive. No individual stands out as exceptional or virtuous; the cost of
this moral poverty are Roman lives and blood, gallons and gallons of Roman blood. In fact, Lucan and his
audience revel in melodramatic violence; in one scene, a soldier single-handedly fends off an entire army by
serving as a human shield, standing his ground in spite of the dozens of spears and missiles in his body.
Lucan's theme, however, is about the moral depravity that has taken away Roman freedom; this message was
not lost on Nero, and when Lucan took part in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero, the emperor forced him to
commit suicide at the age of 25.
In historical writing, Tacitus (55-117 CE) emerges as perhaps the greatest of the Roman historians. Among
his histories is a massive history of the imperiate, called the Annals; the central theme of his history is that
Rome had become morally degenerate and this moral degeneracy was responsible for all its ills. If there is a
single theme running throughout all of the literature and philosophy of the period, it is precisely this issue of
moral degeneracy. The Romans were, after all, straight-laced moralists, and nothing got their attention better
than a good, stern moral lecture. So, overall, the character of first century and second century Rome is a
moralistic character, in which either the psychology of immorality as both seductive and destructive is
explored by some writers, while other writers, such as Seneca and Tacitus, sternly condemn the degeneracy
of the age.
The “principate” refers to the first era of the Roman Empire, during which the Emperors attempted to preserve the
illusion of Republican rule. The term is derived from Augustus’ title princeps. The reality, of course, was that the
Emperors were nearly absolute monarchs.
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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The sense of the English adjective ‘stoical’ is not utterly
misleading with regard to its philosophical origins. The Stoics did, in fact, hold that emotions like fear or envy (or
impassioned sexual attachments, or passionate love of anything whatsoever) either were, or arose from, false
judgements and that the sage--a person who had attained moral and intellectual perfection--would not undergo them.”
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This period also saw the introduction of Christianity into Europe and the Roman Empire. Originally a Jewish
religion, it was spread to the Greek world by the early apostles. In particular, a late follower of Christianity,
Paul of Tarsus devoted his life to translating Christianity into a form that would be acceptable by Greeks and
Romans. On the whole, however, the Romans didn't pay much attention to the Christians, since they were
small in numbers which were largely confined to women and children. Both Nero and Domitian persecuted
Christians for political reasons, but on the whole, the Romans left them alone. It wasn't until the third and
fourth centuries that Christianity grew dramatically in the Roman Empire (along with other mystery
religions3), until it was finally declared the state religion by the emperor Constantine.
During this period, the Romans undertook their most massive building projects, which included the Pantheon
in Rome (built by Hadrian), which is the largest unsupported dome in the world, and the Colosseum, a
massive games complex that can seat well over sixty thousand people. All the great engineering projects date
from this time, including a massive system of aqueducts. Rome itself had eleven aqueducts carrying 300
million gallons of water a day into the city from the surrounding hills. Not only was this water used for
drinking and washing, it was also used for flushing the massive sewer system that had been built for Rome.
In science, however, historians regard the Romans as deficient—looking at their massive sewers and
aqueduct marvels, the joke about the Romans is that when God was handing out brains, the Romans thought
he said drains. This view, however, is not entirely accurate. The Romans did not pursue speculative natural
philosophy as the Greeks did, but were interested only in practical applications. While we say that the
Romans made no significant scientific discoveries, in reality they made a host of scientific discoveries in
engineering and medicine, the practical sciences. The "discoveries" of the Greeks were rarely empirical
[information gathered by observation and/or experiment] in nature and frequently wrong (or immediately
refuted). In medicine, the Romans advanced very far in the first and second centuries; perhaps one of the
greatest medical scientists of the ancient world was Galen, who lived in the last half of the second century;
his most important discovery was that blood circulated in the arteries. The full mechanism, however,
wouldn't be understood in the West until the seventeenth century.
This silver age came to an abrupt end in 180 CE, when Commodus succeeded his father, Marcus Aurelius, as
emperor. Within a few short years, this slightly cracked emperor managed to undo over a century of stable
political rule and cultural stability, and Rome steered into a storm of chaos: the calamitous third century.
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Any of various secret cults of the Greco-Roman world that offered to individuals religious experiences not provided
by the official public religions.
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