Holland Tom. Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

Holland Tom
Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

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Table of Contents

Title

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Preface

Part One: War

I. The Sad and Infernal Gods

II. Four Emperors

III. A World at War

Part Two: Peace

IV. Sleeping Giants

V. The Universal Spider

VI. The Best of Emperors

VII. I Build this Garden for us

Timeline

Dramatis Personae

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Picuture Section

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Also by Tom Holland

RUBICON:

The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

PERSIAN FIRE:

The First World Empire and the Battle for the West

MILLENNIUM:

The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD:

The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World

DYNASTY:

The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

DOMINION:

The Making of the Western Mind

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ABACUS

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Abacus

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Maps by John Gilkes

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise

circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a

similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-4087-0699-2

Abacus

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

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To Bill Heald: without whom the writing of this book

would have been very much more of a challenge.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Preface

PART ONE: WAR

THE SAD AND INFERNAL GODS

II.

FOUR EMPERORS

III.

A WORLD AT WAR

PART TWO: PEACE

IV.

SLEEPING GIANTS

THE UNIVERSAL SPIDER

VI.

THE BEST OF EMPERORS

VII.

I BUILD THIS GARDEN FOR US

Timeline

Dramatis Personae

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My chiefest thanks are to my brother, James Holland, who introduced me to

Bill Heald. Bill, one of the world’s great cancer surgeons, came to my

rescue midway through the writing of the book, and pretty much personally

ensured that I was able to finish it. I would also like to thank Amyn Haji,

Andrew Emmanuel, Margaret Burt and all their teams at King’s College

Hospital for the meticulous care they have given me over the past year. As

ever, I owe more than I can say to Richard Beswick and everyone at Little,

Brown; to Lara Heimert and everyone at Basic Books; and to Patrick

Walsh, the best of agents, and everyone at PEW Literary. My devotion to

the staff of the British Library, the London Library and the Hellenic and

Roman Library knows no bounds. Jamie Muir not only read the book in

manuscript, but took the most wonderful photographs of my coins for me.

Llewelyn Morgan, the kindest and most generous of scholars, assisted me

with eunuchs and elephants alike. Sophie Hay, that tutelary guardian of

Pompeii, allowed me to use some of her beautiful photographs. Matei Blaj

not only invited me to Romania, but drove me all the way to Sarmizegetusa.

Dominic Sandbrook and everyone at Goalhanger did all they could to stop

me finishing this book – but to such enjoyable effect that I cannot begrudge

them their many, many, many demands on my time. My beloved family –

Sadie, Katy and Eliza – were, as they have ever been, the rock on which I

build everything.

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MAPS

The Roman World in AD 68

Nero’s Rome

Central Rome in AD 65

The German Frontier

Judaea

Italy

The Siege of Jerusalem

Campania

Pompeii

Britain

Bithynia and Pontus

Parthian Empire

Greece

Hadrian’s Rome

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PREFACE

In AD 122, the world’s most powerful man arrived on the banks of the Tyne.

The river – which flows through what today is the city of Newcastle – was

the most northerly point that had ever been visited by a Roman emperor.

Below it stretched lowland Britain, the fertile southern half of the island,

which over the course of the previous eighty years had been conquered,

pacified and tamed by the legions. Beyond it lay the wilds of the north,

lands too savage and poverty-stricken to merit conquest. Such, at any rate,

was the judgement of the visiting Caesar. Publius Aelius Hadrianus –

Hadrian – was a man well qualified to distinguish between civilisation and

barbarism. He had studied with philosophers, and ridden to war against

headhunters; lived both in Athens and on an island in the Danube. Prior to

his arrival in Britain he had been on a tour of military bases along the

Rhine, and given orders for a great palisade to be built beyond the river’s

eastern bank. Now, standing beside the grey waters of the Tyne, Hadrian

had plans for an even more formidable marvel of engineering.

The boldness of the project was evident from the very presence of

Caesar in Britain. It was not only his legions who needed squaring. So too

did the gods. Sacrifices had to be made both to the Ocean, that immense

and fearsome expanse of water in which Britain was set, and to the Tyne

itself. Hadrian, a man punctilious in his dealings with the supernatural,

knew better than to commission a bridge without assuaging the spirit of the

divine that was manifest in every river. Pons Aelius, the structure was

named: Hadrian’s Bridge. This, for an obscure spot on the margins of the

world, was a signal honour. Only bridges in Rome were normally named

after emperors. In due course, a decade later, when Hadrian came to

commission a huge mausoleum for himself on the far bank of the Tiber, and

wished to provide ready access to it from the capital, Pons Aelius was the

obvious, the only name for the resulting structure. There were now, with its

completion, two very different bridges bearing the imprimatur of Hadrian’s

favour. The result, upon the distant outpost in Britain, was the bestowal of

an even more solemn dignity.

It was not just the bridge over the Tyne that was called Pons Aelius, but

the fort that had been constructed on the river’s northern bank. This fort, in

turn, was only one of a number of military encampments stretching in a

direct line from one shore of the Ocean to the other. Joining them, and

running for eighty miles, was a wall fashioned largely out of stone. Behind

the wall ran a metalled road. Behind the road ran a ditch, dug so deep that it

could only be scaled with ladders. Infrastructure of such an order, built on

such a scale, was as awesome a memorial to Hadrian as anything he had

sponsored in Rome. It proclaimed a degree of martial effort and a capacity

for intimidation that had no rival anywhere. The emperor’s visit to the Tyne

had been fleeting, the merest way-stop – but he had left behind him the

unmistakeable stamp of a superpower.

Not that many Romans ever saw the Wall. So distant was it from all that

made for civilization – ‘trade, seafaring, agriculture, metallurgy, all the

crafts that exist or have ever existed, everything that is manufactured or

grows from the earth’1 – that it tended to serve them as, at best, a rumour. In

time, they would come to forget that it was Hadrian who had built it at all.

For a millennium and more after the collapse of Roman rule in Britain, its

construction was attributed to another, later Caesar; and only in the mid-

nineteenth century was the Wall conclusively proven to have been the work

of Hadrian. Since then, thanks to the labours of generations of

archaeologists, epigraphers and historians, our knowledge of how and by

whom it was built has improved immeasurably. The study of Hadrian’s Wall

is now ‘littered with the bones of discarded hypotheses’. 2 Meanwhile, along

its spectacular central stretch – a section which in 1600 had been so infested

by bandits that the antiquarian William Camden was forced to omit it

altogether from his tour – visitors today are greeted by interpretative signs,

gift shops and toilet facilities.

Even so, a sense of the mysterious has not been banished entirely from

Hadrian’s Wall. In the early winter of 1981, when an American tourist by

the name of George R. R. Martin visited it, dusk was closing in. As the sun

set and the wind gusted over the crags, he had the site to himself. What

would it have been like, Martin began wondering, to stand there in

Hadrian’s time, to be a soldier from Africa or the Near East posted to the

very limits of civilisation, to gaze into the darkness and dread what might

be lurking there? The memory stayed with him. A decade later, when he

embarked on a fantasy novel called A Game of Thrones, his visit to

Hadrian’s Wall was to prove a particularly vivid influence: a wall, as he

would later describe it, ‘defending civilisation against unknown threats

beyond’. 3

In Martin’s fictional world of Westeros, the ‘unknown threats’ prove to

be the Others, pale demons formed of snow and cold who make slaves of

the dead. The Roman frontier system is recalibrated in his novels as a

seven-hundred-foot-high wall of ice, eight thousand years old and three

hundred miles long. It has ancient spells carved into it. Every so often it

gets attacked by mammoths. Martin’s version of Hadrian’s Wall, thanks to

the blockbusting success both of his novels and of the TV shows adapted

from them, has come to put the original somewhat in the shade. Yet it also

demonstrates, perhaps, just how firm the hold of a particular understanding

of Rome’s empire remains on our collective imagination. There is never any

question in A Game of Thrones that our sympathies lie with the Night’s

Watch, the soldiers who garrison the Wall, rather than with the Others.

Martin, after all, when he stood on the northernmost limit of Rome’s

empire, and gazed out into the dusk, had been imagining himself a Roman,

not a Briton. People visiting Hadrian’s Wall rarely identify with the natives.

Novels and films that feature it invariably adopt the occupier’s perspective.

To venture beyond the limits of Roman civilisation, whether with a doomed

legion or in search of a lost eagle, is to venture into a heart of darkness.

Rudyard Kipling, the great laureate of the British Empire, cast the Wall

itself as a monument to civilisation. ‘Just when you think you are at the

world’s end, you see a smoke from East to West as far as the eye can turn,

and then, under it, also as far as the eye can stretch, houses and temples,

shops and theatres, barracks and granaries, trickling along like dice behind

– always behind – one long, low, rising and falling, and hiding and showing

line of towers. And that is the Wall!’4 Even today, in an age infinitely less

keen on imperialism than it was in 1906, when Kipling published his stories

about Roman Britain, it is possible to cast the presence of soldiers on

Hadrian’s Wall from Morocco or Syria as a cause for celebration. It was to

emphasise this aspect of the Wall that the BBC, in a recent film made for

children about Hadrian’s arrival in Britain, amended chronology so as to

portray the governor of the province at the time as African. * The same

Roman Empire that built a wall across its most barbarous frontier, and ruled

perhaps 30 per cent of the world’s population, remains today what it has

been since the late eighteenth century: a mirror in which we feel flattered to

catch our own reflection. †

It was Edward Gibbon, in 1776, who originally cast the second century

AD as the most golden of golden ages. Famously, in the first volume of The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he defined the reigns of Hadrian

and of his immediate predecessors and successors as ‘the period in the

history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was

most happy and prosperous’. Everywhere from the Tyne to the Sahara, and

from the Atlantic to Arabia, lay at peace. Lands that once, prior to the

establishment of Roman rule, had been convulsed by internecine conflict –

kingdom against kingdom, city against city, tribe against tribe – had come

to lie ‘under the guidance of virtue and wisdom’. 5 True, this commendation

came with various caveats. Subtle and mordant, Gibbon was far too

knowing to imagine that any period of history had truly been paradise. He

was alert to the autocratic character of the Caesars’ rule – and he knew, of

course, none better, what was to come. Even so, to a man of his

temperament – refined, tolerant, respectful of learning and commerce – the

world ruled by Hadrian appeared immeasurably preferable to the barbarism

and superstition that he identified with the Middle Ages. ‘The frontiers of

that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined

valour, The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had

gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants

enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.’6 The tone of

gentle irony with which Gibbon framed this account of the empire’s

prosperity implied no scorn for the Romans’ achievement. Order was better

than chaos, and the order brought by the Caesars to ‘the fairest part of the

earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind’, was indeed a thing of

wonder. Gibbon knew this because it had been a thing of wonder to the

Romans themselves. They had marvelled at the spectacle of one-time

enemies laying down their weapons and devoting themselves instead to the

arts, so that cities everywhere were radiant with beauty, and the countryside

like a garden. They had revelled in the scale of the shipping that crowded

the seas, bearing treasures from as far afield as India. They had felt moved

that the flames of sacrifice, previously dots of isolated fire, were now

something inextinguishable, passing ceaselessly from people to people,

always ablaze somewhere across the face of the world. Such, it might seem

to a provincial raised in Hadrian’s empire, were the fruits of the Roman

peace: the Pax Romana.

Since the time of Gibbon, knowledge of how this peace functioned and

was maintained has improved by quantum leaps. Archaeological sites have

been excavated, inscriptions tabulated and evaluated, papyri and writing

tablets dug up from rubbish tips painstakingly transcribed, and the immense

mass of evidence synthesised to a degree that would have stupefied and

delighted Gibbon. Confidence on the part of Western scholars that the

empire ruled by Hadrian did indeed comprehend the fairest part of the earth

was long ago qualified by an awareness that it was not the only superpower

on the face of the Eurasian landmass. Today, comparative studies of Roman

and Chinese imperialism are as cutting-edge a field of scholarship as any in

ancient history. Nevertheless, the sheer scale and duration of the peace that

was imposed on the western edge of Eurasia during the first and second

centuries AD, a period when for the first time much of it constituted a single

political unit, remains unparalleled. As in the 1770s, so today: no one can

claim, as the Caesars proudly did, that the Mediterranean is exclusively

theirs.

Even the prosperity of the Roman world – which is liable to seem, to

twenty-first-century consumers, a good deal less dazzling than it did to

Gibbon – is still perfectly capable of impressing economists. ‘Living

conditions’, so the Gray Professor Emeritus of Economics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has calculated, ‘were better in the

earlier Roman Empire than anywhere else and anytime else before the

Industrial Revolution.’7 Inevitably – the lack of precise data being what it is

– the size and efficiency of the Roman economy in the first two centuries

AD remain topics of furious debate; and yet the resources that were available

to cities across the empire are familiar not just to scholars of the period but

to countless numbers of tourists. It is hard even for the most casual visitor

to Ephesus or Pompeii not to feel impressed by the sights. Temples and

theatres, baths and libraries, paving stones and central heating: all constitute

ready markers of the Pax Romana. To this day, whether in films, cartoons or

computer games, they serve as shorthand, not just for the heyday of the

Roman Empire, but for civilisation itself.

But what did the Romans ever do for us? The answer: sanitation,

medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water

systems and public health. Such a list, even as it flatters the Pax Romana,

hardly sums it up, of course. If there was light, there was also darkness. The

most famous of all Roman monuments, beloved alike of the Italian tourist

industry and Hollywood, was a stage for the spilling of blood. The cross

that once stood in the centre of the Colosseum may be long gone, removed

by archaeologists in the 1870s, but the murderous entertainments staged in

the amphitheatre – even if there is no hard evidence that Christians were

ever fed to lions there – remain as much a focus for moral disapproval

today as they did back when the site hosted a chapel and the Stations of the

Cross. No one watching Gladiator sides with the emperor. In our instinctive

sympathy for the victims of Roman blood sports, we show ourselves the

heirs not of the Caesars but of the early church.

‘I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of

the martyrs of Jesus.’8 So wrote Saint John in Revelation, the last book of

the New Testament, some time during the late first century AD. John’s

vision ranks as an apocalypse, a parting of the curtain that veiled from

mortal gaze events that were yet to come; but it is also the most vivid, the

most coruscating, the most influential attack on imperialism ever written.

The woman beheld by John was a whore, dressed in purple, bedecked with

extravagant jewellery and sitting on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten

horns. Babylon was her name, and she ranked as the mother of all the

world’s depravities and abominations. An angel, speaking to the narrator,

revealed the true identity of this monstrous prostitute: ‘the great city which

has dominion over the kings of the earth’. 9

In Revelation, the power and the wealth of the world’s capital serve only

to heighten the relish John feels at the spectacle of her ruin. A voice from

heaven informs him that in a time to come the kings of the earth will weep

and wail when they watch her burn and merchants will mourn:

Alas, alas, for the great city

that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet,

bedecked with gold, with jewels, and with pearls!

In one hour all this wealth has been laid waste. 10

Here, incubated by Rome’s empire, was a prophecy of her downfall that

was fated always to be the shadow of the memories of her greatness. Just as

it was the age of Hadrian and of his successor Antoninus Pius that Gibbon

hailed for having offered the world its fairest prospect of universal peace, so

it was the spectacle of barefooted friars singing vespers in a pagan temple,

in the very heart of Rome, that first prompted him to muse on her decline

and fall. The ancient gods were not alone in having been humbled by

Christ. Also brought low were the Caesars who had ruled the empire at its

greatest extent. Today, in Rome, neither Hadrian’s mausoleum nor the Pons

Aelius commemorate the man who built them. They bear witness instead,

on the summit of the mausoleum, to the appearance of the archangel

Michael, who in Revelation is described as throwing down Satan to the

earth. Meanwhile, on the triumphal column raised by Trajan, Hadrian’s

predecessor and the most fêted of all Rome’s emperors, it is not Trajan

himself who stands there, but Saint Peter, a humble fisherman. Christ had

foretold all of it: ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’11

The notion that this was to be viewed as a positive, as a consummation

devoutly to be wished, would have appeared incomprehensible to Trajan.

To the Roman elite in this period, the beliefs and teachings of Christians

were only dimly a matter of concern. They were a faint and only

occasionally noted presence in the empire’s urban fabric, like Mesozoic

mammals in an ecosystem dominated by dinosaurs. Yet just as mammals

were destined, in the long run, to inherit the earth, so, too, were the

Christians. Indeed, so total was the revolution in values brought about by

their triumph, and so utterly have we in the West come to take them for

granted, that it can be hard for us today to appreciate just how profoundly

influenced by them many of our assumptions remain. If Europeans and

Americans have always looked back to Rome with admiration, then so also

has that admiration – even during the heyday of Western imperialism – been

clouded by suspicion. Christians, when they annexed the lands of other

peoples, did so as the followers of a provincial who had been tortured to

death on the orders of an imperial administrator. To take on the role of

Pontius Pilate, then, might not sit readily or easily with their consciences.

Enthusiasm for decolonisation is a very Western phenomenon.

The Romans, in their own displays of colonial violence, were more

innocent. To them, a cross served not – as it did for Christians – as an

emblem of the triumph of the tortured over the torturer, but rather the

opposite: of the right they claimed for themselves to suppress insurrection

as brutally and uncompromisingly as they pleased. No feelings of guilt

shadowed their callousness. It was Christianity that first instilled those.

Today, although church attendance in the West may not be what it used to

be, our society remains as stamped as it ever was by the legacy of the early

Christians’ hostility to the Whore of Babylon. Historians of classical

antiquity bear its imprint no less than everybody else. Certainly, enthusiasm

for empire tends not to be a feature of contemporary classics departments.

The martial qualities the Romans valued, which enabled them both to

conquer and to uphold their immense imperium, to reap vast harvests of

slaves, and to celebrate blood sports as entertainment, are rarely the toast of

scholars in universities today.

It is one of the great paradoxes of ancient history, then, that the most

influential legacy of the Pax Romana should have been a movement so

revolutionary in its ultimate effects that today it requires a huge effort for us

even to begin to comprehend the world as the Romans comprehended it.

For now we see through a glass, darkly. Christianity, however, is not alone

in having endured from the first and second centuries AD as a living

tradition, nor is it the most radical in its hostility to the memory of Roman

imperialism. In due course, after all, Caesars came to power who were

themselves Christian, and the empire that previously had been drunk on the

blood of the saints and the martyrs was reconsecrated to Christ. Even

though Trajan, in the long run, did come to fall, the replacement of his

statue on the summit of his triumphal column in Rome with one of Saint

Peter signalled no condemnation of the emperor’s memory. Just as the

Romans themselves had hailed him as Optimus Princeps, the Best of

Emperors, so did medieval Christians admire him almost as one of their

own. Indeed, prompted by anxieties as to the fate of his soul, a remarkable

story about him came to be told. It was claimed that a particularly saintly

pope, impressed by the details of Trajan’s life, distraught that such a

paragon of virtue should have failed to gain entry to heaven, and moved to

plead for his salvation, ‘went to Saint Peter’s Church and wept floods of

tears, as was his custom, until he gained at last by divine revelation the

assurance that his prayers were answered, seeing that he had never

presumed to ask this for any other pagan’. 12 This was why Dante, in his

great poem The Divine Comedy, felt able to place Trajan in Paradise. It was

not only Christians, however, who speculated about the fate after death of

Caesars who had ruled during the empire’s pomp. So too did Jews. Not for

them any fretting over the fate of emperors’ souls. If rabbis could barely

utter the name of Hadrian without cursing him – ‘May his bones rot!’ – then

it was an earlier Caesar who attracted the most unsettling traditions. Titus,

who had ruled briefly between AD 79 and 81, and was the second of a

dynasty called the Flavians, had merited terrible punishment. A gnat, the

smallest of God’s creatures, had flown into his nose and entered his brain.

There, for seven years, it had buzzed incessantly. When at last Titus died,

and physicians opened his skull, they found that the gnat had grown to

become a creature like a sparrow, with a beak of brass and claws of iron.

The emperor’s sufferings, meanwhile, were not at an end – nor would they

ever be: for in hell, his reconstituted body was fated every day to be burned

to ashes.

What had been Titus’ crime? In AD 70, four years after the Jews had

risen in revolt against Rome, an army under his command had captured the

holiest building in the Jewish world, the Temple of Jerusalem, and put it to

the torch. Six decades later, Hadrian rubbed salt into Jewish wounds by

ordering a pagan temple built on the site. Once again, the Jews rose in

revolt. Once again, the Romans crushed them. This time, the work of

pacification was to prove decisive. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city.

The name of the Jewish homeland, Judaea, was changed to Palestine. The

Jews, so a Christian scholar gloated, ‘are the only people in the world to

have been banished from their own metropolis’.13 They had become a

nation in Exile.

The impact of these fateful developments still reverberates today. The

great rock where the Temple once stood is now a site sacred to Muslims as

well as to Jews, surmounted as it is by the first masterpiece of Islamic

architecture, the Dome of the Rock, and Islam’s third-holiest mosque. It

ranks, in consequence, as a flashpoint as dangerous as any in the world.

Meanwhile, Israel – a Jewish state established in what was once Judaea –

has always drawn on the memory of the wars against Rome to consolidate

its sense of national identity. Masada, a mountain south of Jerusalem where

some time in the early 70s AD almost a thousand Jewish men, women and

children were reported to have taken their own lives rather than surrender to

the Romans, has become an emblem for Israelis of the courage and resolve

that they, too, as a people surrounded by enemies, feel summoned to show.

Such a sense of self-identification is founded upon a key principle: that

Israel does indeed stand in a line of descent from the Judaean state that was

first conquered and then obliterated by Rome. When, in 1960, recently

discovered letters from the leader of the Jewish revolt against Hadrian were

shown to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the president of Israel, they were described to

him as ‘dispatches written or dictated by the last President’. 14

A joke – but not entirely a joke. The risk of anachronism in assuming

that the inhabitants of the Roman province of Judaea were Jews in the sense

that we use the word today is very great. So great, in fact, that I have opted

not to take it. Just as the inheritance of Christian tradition can operate as a

smokescreen, obscuring for us the contours of the Roman Empire in its

heyday, so, too, can the inheritance of Jewish tradition. Much that makes

what today we call ‘Judaism’ distinctive – the role played by rabbis,

synagogues, the Talmud – constitutes less a preservation of what had

existed before the wars against the Romans than an adaptation to its loss.

Prior to the final destruction of their homeland by Hadrian, the Ioudaioi –

as the Greeks called the inhabitants of Judaea – ranked as a people, an

ethnos, much like any other. Yes, they might appear eccentric; but so did

many other peoples. They were certainly not seen as belonging to a

‘religion’ called ‘Judaism’: for both words, which derive from specifically

Christian theological propositions, would have meant nothing to the

Romans, nor to the Greeks, nor to the Jews themselves. Just as the

inhabitants of Athens were Athenians, and of Egypt Egyptians, so is it most

accurate, perhaps, to term the inhabitants of Judaea Judaeans. The Roman

Empire in its heyday was a world very different from ours, and it is perilous

to write about it in a language such as English, one that has been shaped

and weathered by over a millennium of Christian assumptions, without

being alert to just how treacherous a medium it can potentially be. Just as I

have sought to be true to the spirit in which the Colosseum was built by

calling it in my narrative the Flavian Amphitheatre (this having been its

original name), so also have I sought to guard against more insidious

anachronisms: perspectives and assumptions that would have been

incomprehensible to the people who are the protagonists of this book.

Roman attitudes towards dimensions of experience that we might be

tempted to view as universal – dimensions of morality, or sexuality, or

identity – were, to our way of thinking, radically strange and unsettling. So

unsettling, indeed, that some have preferred not even to recognise them as

such. My goal in writing Pax has been at all times to show the inhabitants

of the Roman world the respect due to all ancient peoples: by attempting to

understand them not on our terms, but on their own, in all their

ambivalence, their complexity and their contradictions.

Anyone attempting to fulfil such an ambition confronts an obvious

challenge. When, in 1960, letters from the dying days of the revolt against

Hadrian were discovered in a cave in the Judaean desert, the excitement

they generated was not due solely to Israeli patriotism. The find was

stunning because it helped to fill – however incompletely – a yawning gap

in the historical record. The conflict, momentous though it may have been,

had left behind few written sources. While there are scraps of detail to be

garnered from inscriptions, or from coins, or from the much later – and

transparently tendentious – writings of rabbis and church fathers, the only

narratives to have survived are sketchy in the extreme. Historians and

archaeologists, over the past few decades, have sifted the rubble of the

evidence to heroic effect; and yet still, despite the recent publication of a

number of studies of the war, it has proven impossible to arrive at anything

more than the barest outline of its course. The myths told about the Judaean

death-struggle against Hadrian remain far more vivid than any narrative of

it that a historian can hope to write.

True, there are other conflicts that we know even less about. There was

an uprising in Britain during Hadrian’s reign, for instance, that one Roman

writer explicitly compared to the war in Judaea, and which presumably

contributed to the emperor’s decision to build his famous wall; but we know

little more about it than that.* Conversely, the narrative that can be told of

the revolt of the Judaeans against Hadrian is made to seem all the more

ghostly by the fact that the original Judaean uprising – the one that

culminated in the destruction of the Temple and the siege of Masada – left

behind what ranks, by the standards of ancient history, as quite prodigious

quantities of evidence. We have biographies of the two Flavians – Titus and

his father, Vespasian – who commanded the legions in the conflict. We have

a scabrous survey by Tacitus, the greatest of all Roman historians, of

everything that made the Judaeans appear peculiar to their neighbours. We

have coins, and inscriptions, and friezes. Above all, we have a detailed

narrative account of the revolt and its causes, written not by a Roman but by

a Judaean – and a Judaean, what is more, who played a significant role in

the conflict. Josephus’ Judaean War is one of the supreme works of history

to have survived from antiquity; and yet, remarkably, it is not the only

narrative account of those fateful years that we have. Tacitus wrote one as

well – albeit focused not on the Judaean revolt, but on the civil war that was

simultaneously convulsing the Roman world, and which saw, in the year AD

69, no fewer than four Caesars rule in succession.

To tell the story of the period, then, is always to be alert to how the

evidence for Roman history, sometimes blazing bright, sometimes non-

existent, is a variable thing. The world portrayed in this book is illuminated

much as a coastline at night might be illuminated by an immense battery of

lighthouses. This way and that their beams sweep in irregular and

untrustworthy patterns. Sometimes a stretch of rocks may be flooded by

brilliant light. Sometimes the scene may be abruptly cast into darkness.

Entire reaches of the shoreline may never be illuminated at all. So it is with

the decades between the first Judaean revolt and the second, between the

year of the four emperors and the accession of Antoninus Pius.

I emphasise this not to alarm the reader, but rather to explain the balance

and the rhythms of the book. The range and focus of my narrative, the

degree to which it moves from setting to setting and zooms in and out, is

determined above all by the nature of the available source material and

archaeological evidence. We may lack records for entire years at a time; but

we can reconstruct the events of one particular year, the fateful one of AD

69, month by month, and often day by day. We may lack histories that focus

on the doings of town councillors, or women, or businessmen, or slaves; but

we have been left the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which the

ghosts of many such people still haunt the streets. We may lack a biography

of Trajan, that most admired of all the Caesars; but we do have detailed

accounts of what was happening under his rule in a very particular

province. This is a story that begins and ends in Rome; but is about very

much more than Rome. It is a story that embraces the entire Roman world,

and beyond.

Although it has very much been written to stand alone, Pax is the third

in a series of histories. The first, Rubicon, tells the story of Julius Caesar

and his age; the second, Dynasty, that of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor,

and the line of rulers who claimed descent from him. Pax opens at a key

moment in history: the suicide in AD 68 of Nero, Augustus’ last male

descendant. With his death, Rome’s first dynasty of autocrats became

extinct. What was to replace it? The attempt to answer this question brought

a long century of civil peace to an end. In AD 69, four men in succession

ruled as emperor. Soldiers slaughtered one another in the streets of Rome,

and the capital’s greatest temple was consumed by fire. The year of the four

emperors served as a brutal reminder to the Roman people that all their

greatness, all their prosperity, might be threatened by the very quality that

had originally won them their empire and enabled them to ensure its

security: their aptitude for killing. The capacity of the legions to exercise

extreme violence was the necessary precondition of the Pax Romana. This

is why, in a book about the longest sustained period of peace that the

Mediterranean has ever enjoyed, the context should be provided by war.

A child alive when Nero committed suicide might well have attended

the obsequies of Hadrian, the rites surrounding his death. The decades

separating the two emperors witnessed a succession of episodes so dramatic

that their fame endures to this day: the siege and destruction of Jerusalem;

the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; the inauguration of the Colosseum.

Conflicts, even once the mass of the Roman world had been restored to

order following the year of the four emperors, still flared: in Britain, along

the Danube, in Judaea. The legions carried their arms to the Persian Gulf.

The Romans remained who they had always been: the heroes of a great

drama marked by incomparable feats and ordeals. Yet most momentous of

all was a process of change that, over the course of the period covered by

this book, served forever to transform what was meant by the name

‘Roman’. By the time Hadrian died, it had come to signify, in the words of

one contemporary – a man close enough to the emperor to have swapped

poetic witticisms with him – ‘less a single people than the entirety of the

human race’.15 The empire was the wealthiest, the most formidable, the

most terrifying state that had ever existed: a state that repeatedly, over the

course of the decades described in Pax, made a show of its invincibility, so

that even its enemies came to believe it could never be defeated. I have

sought to portray the Romans in their imperial heyday, not as our

contemporaries, not as straw men either to be emulated or condemned, but

as a people who command our fascination, above all, by virtue of being

different – unnervingly, compellingly different.

* Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who served as governor of Britain in the years immediately following

Hadrian’s death, was a Berber. Quintus Pompeius Falco, the governor who welcomed Hadrian to

Britain, was the son of Sicilians.

† An estimated 20 to 40 per cent of the world’s population was ruled by Rome in the time of Hadrian.

Certainty, of course, is impossible.

* The Roman writer was Fronto, in a letter to Marcus Aurelius, who was his student at the time. A

popular theory – and one that inspired a famous children’s novel, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of

the Ninth – is that the Ninth Legion, Legio IX Hispana, was annihilated during the course of this war;

but this has always been speculation.

OceanofPDF.com

Truly, it is as though the Romans and the boundless majesty

of their peace have been bestowed by the gods upon

humanity to serve them as a second sun.

PLINY THE ELDER

Where they make a desert they call it peace.

TACITUS

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PART ONE

WAR

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THE SAD AND INFERNAL GODS

A Golden Age

Sixty-five years after the birth of Christ, the most celebrated woman in

Rome became a god. On earth, a sumptuous funeral was staged to mark her

ascension to the heavens. Her corpse, stuffed with the most expensive

spices that money could buy, was borne in solemn procession down the side

of the Palatine, grandest and most exclusive of the city’s famous seven hills.

Choruses singing funerary hymns preceded it, and officials masked and

costumed to look like the dead woman’s ancestors; soldiers provided her

with her escort. Down into the valley that ran between the Palatine and a

second, smaller hill, the Capitol, the procession went. This valley – the

Forum, as it was known – was a location splendidly appropriate to the

occasion. Paved with gleaming marble, hemmed in by luxury shopping

centres, and adorned with a veritable confusion of statues, temples and

arches, it stood at the heart of the greatest city on earth.

‘Rome, seat of empire, abode of the gods, surveys from her seven hills

the circuit of the globe.’1 So a poet, some fifty years earlier, had hailed the

city. Rome’s sway, in the intervening decades, had only expanded. Even

Britain, a boggy land of milk-drinking barbarians beyond the Ocean, had

been brought to acknowledge its rule. From Spain to Syria, all the

Mediterranean was Rome’s. There was no city on the shores of that ancient

sea so wealthy, so beautiful, so renowned that it did not yield place to

Rome. This greatness, as the dead woman was borne in sombre procession

towards the cluster of structures in front of the Capitol, was manifest all

around. To the right of the mourners, for instance, as they advanced along

the Forum, lay a particularly spectacular sweep of temples and open spaces.

The complex was barely a century old. It stood as a monument to conquest.

The first stretch of it to be completed, a forum raised by a great statesman

and warlord named Julius Caesar – a man of such transcendent achievement

that he had ended up a god – had been built with the loot of Gaul. The

second stretch, another forum, had likewise been funded by victories won

across the sweep of the world. The man responsible for it had done more

than any other Roman to expand his city’s power. Augustus – ‘a name

signifying that he was something more than human’2 – had been Caesar’s

great-nephew and adoptive son, and such was his glory that it had come to

put even his father’s in the shade. Augustus had made himself the ruler of

Egypt, a land incomparably wealthy and fertile; completed the pacification

of Spain; trampled down beneath his imperious tread the savages who

lurked beyond the Rhine. He had won plunder on a scale fit to stupefy

previous conquerors. Much of it he had spent on beautifying Rome. ‘He

boasted of having found it made of brick and leaving it made of marble.’3

Fittingly, the most splendid of all the many buildings he had sponsored, a

great temple in his forum adorned with statues and a gilded roof, was

dedicated to Mars, the god of war. Behind distant frontiers, garrisoned by

the most formidable fighting force that history had ever known, the peoples

of the civilised world lived in peace. Augustus himself, his work once done,

had duly ascended to join his father in heaven.

A city that reigned as the capital of the world was more than just a city.

A century previously, a maze of narrow streets had stretched where the

great marble complexes now stood. Apartment blocks, workshops, taverns:

all had been swept away. Calm had replaced chaos; symmetry confusion.

The dignity of the location had demanded nothing less. Not just the heart of

Rome, it was the heart of all that lay beyond. The mourners, as they laid the

dead woman on a marble-fronted rostra in the shadow of the Capitol, could

see looming behind it a monument which rendered this particularly

manifest. For eighty-five years it had been standing there: a giant milestone

sheathed in gold. Augustus, the man responsible for its erection, had

commissioned it to mark the spot from which distances across the empire

were to be measured. Whether on the margins of the Sahara, or on the banks

of the Rhine, or on the shoreline of the Ocean, a Roman could know with

confidence where he stood. He was defined by his distance from the Forum.

All roads led to Rome.

Yet the distant past, when wolves had stalked the Palatine and the Forum

had been a marsh, was not forgotten. Poets delighted in picturing a time

when cattle had roamed the future capital of the world, and when boats

sailing up the Tiber had done so shaded by forests. It was not just in poetry,

however, that the Roman people could find reminders of their city’s

beginnings. Immediately in front of the rostra where the pall-bearers had

laid their burden there was to be seen a distinctive stretch of paving. This,

black against the white of the low marble wall that surrounded it, was the

Lapis Niger: the ‘Black Stone’. Scholars disagreed as to what precisely it

signified – but no one doubted that it was very ancient. Some claimed that it

marked the final resting place of Romulus, a son of Mars who, 817 years

previously, had founded Rome and given the infant city his name. Others

insisted that Romulus, far from mouldering in a grave, had been taken up to

the heavens in a thunderstorm, and that it was this – the moment when a

Roman had first become a god – that the Lapis Niger commemorated.

Either way, it served as a memorial to the first two centuries and more of

the city’s history: a time when the Roman people had lived not as citizens

but as the subjects of a rex – a king.

Seven men in all, from Romulus through to a haughty tyrant by the

name of Tarquin, had sat on the throne of Rome. Fabulously remote in time

though these kings were, the Lapis Niger was not the only trace of them

preserved in the fabric of the megalopolis that Rome had since become. On

the Palatine, for instance, where Romulus, pondering whether to found a

city, had looked up and seen twelve vultures flying overhead – an infallible

sign that he should – visitors could admire his hut. Then, by taking the road

that led south of the Palatine to the city walls, they could arrive at another

sight. Next to a gateway called the Porta Capena, beside a dripping

aqueduct, there stood a grove; and in this grove there bubbled a spring

sacred to the memory of Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius. It was

beside its waters that Numa, a learned philosopher, had been instructed in

the ways of the gods by Egeria, a nymph. ‘Egeria loved him, you see, and

had communion with him, and this it was that endowed him with

superhuman wisdom, and a life rich in numerous blessings.’4

Not every memorial to the kings was on public show. Some had been

buried away – literally so. Beneath the Lapis Niger there lay an

underground shrine; and within it stood a block of stone inscribed with

enigmatic Latin. Barely decipherable, with clumsy lettering that looked

almost Greek, it bore witness to a time when kings had stood guard over

sacred groves and driven oxen to sacrifice. Conservators, nervous of its

potency as an emblem of the ancient past, had stowed it with various other

artefacts beneath the black paving stones: for they had known better than to

destroy it. Writings from the beginnings of Rome’s history might well carry

a charge of the supernatural. The most dramatic evidence for this was to be

found in a temple on the summit of the Palatine, where three rolls of

prophecy, inscribed in antique Greek, were stored. Tarquin had bought them

from the Sibyl, an aged priestess who stood guard over an entrance to the

underworld outside Naples. Contained within the scrolls were remedies for

every calamity, every fearsome warning from the heavens that was fated

over the course of the centuries to afflict the Roman people. Access to this

sensitive material was tightly regulated. Death was visited on anyone found

copying them. They remained in Nero’s time what they had always been:

the ultimate secrets of state.

Unlike the Sibylline Books, the age of the kings had long since been

consigned to the dung heap. In 509 BC, 244 years after the foundation of

Rome, Tarquin had been expelled from the city. The monarchy had been

abolished. No longer had its powers – what the Romans termed its

imperium – been held by a single man. Instead, they had been divided up

among a range of elected magistrates. The most eminent of these – two in

number so that each one could keep a watchful eye on the other – were

named consuls. Annual elections to the consulship ensured that no man

could hold the office for more than a year at a time. The intention had been

very deliberate: to rein in the ambitions of anyone who might otherwise be

tempted to aspire to monarchy. No longer the subjects of a single man, the

Roman people had come to rank as cives: citizens. The word ‘king’ had

become the dirtiest word in their language.

This did not mean, however, that the Romans disapproved of a citizen’s

longing to win glory for himself. Quite the opposite. Honour was regarded

as the ultimate, the only test of worth. The limits set on a consul’s term of

office, even as they prevented the magistracy from serving as a stepping-

stone to monarchy, had inspired in every high-reaching citizen the dream

that he too might win a consulship. It was a dream that had never faded.

This was why, almost six centuries after the expulsion of Tarquin, consuls

still held office in Rome. Awaiting the funerary procession, they sat in the

open air beside the rostra, before the full gaze of everyone. Alongside them,

dressed in sober mourning attire, were ranked other members of Rome’s

elite: men from distinguished families, of certified wealth, or of worth

decisively proven in a whole range of magistracies and commands. These

were the optimates: the best class. Their authority reached back to the very

beginnings of Rome. Romulus himself, it was said, had convened the

hundred leading men of the infant city to serve him as a council of elders –

a ‘senate’ – and formally acknowledged them as the fathers of the state. The

fall of the monarchy had only confirmed them in their authority. It was the

senate, in the wake of Tarquin’s expulsion, that had led the Roman people

in their struggle for independence; it was the senate, in the centuries that

followed, that had guided them in their conquest of the world. Granted, the

city’s public affairs – its res publica – were the business of the people as

well as of the senate of Rome; but no one had ever doubted who was the

body and who the head. Senatus Populusque Romanus: SPQR, the Senate

and People of Rome. Such was the Roman republic.

And it had all begun with the spectacle of a woman’s body laid out in

the Forum. No senator, as he gazed at the rostra that summer day 573 years

after the downfall of the monarchy, would have been ignorant of the story.

Lucretia, nobly bred, nobly married, and a woman of impeccable virtue, had

been raped by Tarquin’s son. Summoning her father and her husband, she

had told them of the outrage done her, and then she had stabbed herself to

death. Her kinsmen, ‘to whom the reason for Lucretia’s suicide was a

greater cause of shame and distress than the suicide itself’,5 had shouldered

her corpse and borne it down to the Forum. There, drawn by the shocking

spectacle, a crowd had begun to amass. Fury that a free-born woman had

been treated as though she were a slave had swept the city. The Roman

people, outraged and insulted, had risen in defence of their liberty. A stern

precedent had thereby been set. A Roman, faced by servitude, had only two

real options: either to take his own life or to kill the man who had made him

a slave.

And now, in the very place where Lucretia’s body had been exposed to

public view nearly six hundred years earlier, the corpse of another woman

lay before the gaze of the assembled people. What lesson did this second

funeral teach? Certainly, the name of the dead woman – Poppaea Sabina –

conveyed more than a hint of antique virtue. The Sabines, a rustic people

inhabiting the fields and foothills which stretched north-east of Rome, had

been early partners in the rise of the Roman people to greatness. Numa

Pompilius, for instance, had been a Sabine. It was the dream of every jaded

urbanite to retreat to a Sabine farm. Sabinus still served as shorthand for

honest, peasant values. Poppaea’s forebears, however, had long since left

the barnyard behind. Her grandfather had held a consulship in the same year

as his own brother. Her stepfather and half-brother had both likewise served

as consuls. Poppaea herself – although ineligible, naturally, as a woman, to

hold a magistracy – had ended up more famous than any of them. No less

than her husband, she relished being talked about.

She was certainly a woman of many parts. ‘From her mother, the most

celebrated beauty of the day, she had inherited both looks and renown.’6

She was formidably smart. Rich and well-bred, Poppaea had comported

herself in public with the dignity appropriate to a Roman matron. This,

however, had done nothing to stop her from becoming the object of feverish

fantasy. Her habit of half-veiling herself in public was interpreted not as a

display of modesty, but as a tease. The Romans were a people addicted to

gossip, and Poppaea had given them a field day. She shod her mules with

gold. She bathed in asses’ milk. She was as promiscuous as she was proud.

True or not, these rumours would never have taken fire as they did without

the blaze of her charisma and sex appeal. Women wanted to be her; men

wanted to bed her. And now she was dead. Brought in state to the Forum

Poppaea may have been; but a new Lucretia she was not.

What, then, was she doing there, this woman who had been proclaimed a

god, eternally beautiful, Venus Sabina? The senators in their togas of

mourning had assembled in the Forum that summer day not of their own

volition, but in obedience to the wishes of her husband. For almost eleven

years now, Imperator Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus had been

acknowledged by the Roman people as Princeps: First Citizen. The title had

ancient roots. Crabbed and suspicious though the great men of the republic

had invariably been, even so it was possible, when there could be absolutely

no denying it, for a citizen of particularly formidable achievement to be

acknowledged as princeps. This rank was never an official one, and would

unfailingly generate bitter resentment. A citizen had to have saved the

Roman people from some terrible foreign enemy, or secured them

spectacular conquests, or served as a particular model of rectitude, to be

given the title. Nero, however, had done none of these things. Deep-rooted

though the assumption was among the Roman elites that responsibilities

were properly the due of age, and that youth was not to be trusted, he had

first been hailed as princeps at the tender age of seventeen. Senators, far

from wrinkling their noses at this extravagant praise, had instead scrambled

to vote him a whole raft of legal powers. Honours, prerogatives,

priesthoods: Nero had been granted them all. The result had been to give

him, in effect, the rule of the Roman world. ‘Caesar is the republic.’7 So it

was said. When Nero decided to stage a public funeral in the Forum, it was

a brave soul who turned down the invitation to it.

If all this sounded very like a monarchy, then so it was. Much had

changed in Rome over the course of the preceding century. Senators in the

Forum that day had only to look up at the hill above them to appreciate this

fact. The Palatine, once crowded with the mansions of the republic’s power

brokers, was now the property of a single man: Nero himself. The ability of

Rome’s aristocratic clans to stamp their presence on the city’s prime real

estate had been systematically degraded to nothing. Even the senate house,

a complex of chambers directly behind the Lapis Niger, bore the name of

Julius Caesar. So, too, did the gleaming forum that stretched beyond it. The

same Gallic loot that had funded Caesar’s taste for grands projets had

enabled him to put the whole republic in his shadow. Backed by legions

steeled amid the killing fields of Gaul, he had brought the traditional

structures of Roman government crashing down in ruin. Victorious in a

bloody civil war, Caesar had ended up the master of Rome.

Inevitably, many of his erstwhile peers had found this unendurable.

Conscious of themselves as the heirs of the antique heroes who had

expelled Tarquin and his rapist son, they had felled Caesar beneath a hail of

daggers. This desperate act, however, had done nothing to restore the

republic. Instead, the Roman world had once again been plunged into civil

war. For a decade and more it had raged. Warlord had fought against

warlord. By the end of this murderous cycle of violence, only two had been

left standing. One of them was Caesar’s most formidable lieutenant, a

seasoned veteran of great charisma and even greater appetites: Mark

Antony. The other was Caesar’s adoptive son and heir: the young man who

would come to be known as Augustus. In 31 BC the two warlords had met in

a great naval battle at Actium, a bay on the western coast of Greece. Antony

had been defeated, and the following year he had committed suicide. It was

Caesar’s son, not his deputy, who had emerged triumphant in the great

struggle for the world. The mass of the Roman people, rather than resenting

his mastery, had welcomed it. They were weary of chaos and bloodshed.

They craved peace. Better a monarchy than anarchy. The republic, to all

intents and purposes, was dead.

Augustus, however, knew better than to rub the noses of his countrymen

in that reality. As subtle as he was self-disciplined, he had no wish to end

up, as his deified father had done, murdered by his fellow senators.

Accordingly, he had done all that he could to veil his supremacy. He

insisted that he had restored the republic. ‘He always loathed “Master” as

an accursed and dishonourable title.’8 Certainly – for all that he had briefly

contemplated naming himself Romulus – Augustus had no intention of

ruling as a king. It was simply not worth the risk. He was interested in the

reality, not the show, of power. Behind the façade of republican government

– the debates in the senate house, the stately succession of consul by consul,

the insistence on the sovereignty of the Roman people – he methodically

gathered the reins of state into his own hands. The imperium that previously

had been shared out among a whole multitude of magistrates was

monopolised, to all intents and purposes, by a single man. It was to this

regal scope of power that Nero, by becoming princeps, had succeeded. Not

just Rome, but the entire world subordinated to Rome, was subject to his

authority. Unsurprisingly, over the course of the decades that followed the

lifetime of Augustus, the word imperium had gradually come to take on a

subtle new shade of meaning. No longer just the powers wielded by a

princeps, it signified as well the vast expanse of territory that was subject to

these same powers. To rule as Nero did was to rule over an imperium

Romanum: a ‘Roman empire’. It was to rank as an imperator: an ‘emperor’.

‘Your destiny it is to live as in a theatre where your audience is the entire

world’: so an advisor was said to have warned Augustus.9 It was not

enough, however, for an emperor to be an actor. Unlike a king, unlike a

consul, he did not have a script to follow. To make a success of his role, he

had to write his own. No one, of course, had understood this more

completely than Augustus; and no one had made a more resounding success

of it. The emperors who followed him had swung to extremes. Augustus’

immediate successor, a war hero and man of formidable accomplishment

named Tiberius, might well, had he lived in a free republic, have been

hailed as princeps by virtue of his own achievements; but those days were

for ever gone. Heir to an autocracy that he secretly despised, Tiberius had

proven himself a terrible actor, so contemptuous both of his own role and of

the flatterers who surrounded him that he had ended up retiring for good to

the island of Capri. Nero, by contrast, adored acting. He loved the big stage.

The first princeps since Augustus to have adopted the title Imperator as his

first name, he relished the thought that, as emperor, he could command the

audience of the entire world. Already, he had adopted many roles. He had

posed as Apollo, the radiant god of music. He had posed as Sol, the celestial

charioteer of the sun. Not only had he played a lyre and driven a chariot, but

he had done so before the public gaze. This, by the standards of

conservative opinion in Rome, was a shocking betrayal of the dignity

expected of any citizen, let alone a princeps; but many among the Roman

people, members of the elite among them, had thrilled to it. Now, mustering

all his taste for flamboyance, all his relish for grandiloquence, all his eye for

spectacle, Nero was set to play a further role: that of bereaved husband.

Poppaea’s corpse, stuffed with spices, had been mummified. Next to it,

piled in unprecedented profusion, was incense from across the East: ‘the

spring produce of Cilicia, the flowers of Sabaea, the flame-feeding harvests

of India’. 10 So much perfume had been imported from Arabia that the

region’s entire annual supply was said to have been exhausted. Poppaea

richly deserved such tribute. Not merely a goddess, she had been pregnant

with Nero’s child. The loss of the boy – if indeed boy she had been carrying

– was a tragedy not just for Nero, but for all the Roman people. The family

of Augustus was a sacred thing, touched by the supernatural, numinous with

the potency of the man who, by saving Rome from ruin, had proven himself

worthy to reign eternally as a god. Augustus’ heirs, who had ruled the world

neither as kings nor as elected magistrates, had done so instead as members

of his house: as Caesars. This was true even of those who had not shared in

his bloodline. Tiberius, for instance, had succeeded to the rule of the world

as the August One’s adoptive son. Nero, by contrast, was the genuine

article. Commending his dead wife to the senate and people of Rome, he

did so as the great-great-grandson of Augustus. When they mourned

Poppaea, they were mourning someone else as well: the stillborn infant

Caesar.

The loss, as everyone knew, was a grievous one. Rome was fast running

out of people who could boast the sacred blood of Augustus in their veins.

The various branches of the August family, in the half-century since his

death, had been relentlessly pruned. Tiberius, suspicious and resentful of

anyone with a claim on the rule of the empire, had proven particularly

murderous. Only a very few of Augustus’ descendants had survived his

reign. Of these, only one – a young man named Gaius, who ever since his

childhood had been nicknamed Caligula, or ‘Bootikins’ – was qualified by

gender to succeed to the rule of the world. His reign had not, for the

optimates, been a pleasant experience. Indeed, they remembered it as a

terrifying demonstration of ‘just how far, when combined with supreme

power, supreme vice might go’.11 When, after four scandalous and

sanguinary years, Caligula made the mistake of insulting one of his own

guards, and ended up hacked to death on the Palatine, there were many in

the senate who talked openly of restoring the republic. It was not just the

trauma of all they had suffered at Caligula’s hands that prompted them to

push for this. It was also the fact that, in the wake of their tormentor’s

assassination, there was no man of the bloodline of Augustus available to

succeed him. How could anyone who was not a Caesar possibly rule as

emperor? The problem appeared insuperable.

Except that, in the event, it proved entirely superable. Too many

powerful people had too much at stake in the system of monarchy founded

by Augustus not to see it endure. Claudius, a nephew of Tiberius who,

despite a nervous twitch and an unjustified reputation as an idiot, had at

least been brought up in Augustus’ household. The Praetorians, the military

garrison stationed in Rome, hailed him as imperator, and the senators,

impotent in the face of this démarche, duly bowed to the inevitable, voting

to give Claudius the name of Caesar. The new emperor, much to everyone’s

surprise, proved a great success. He built aqueducts, sponsored the

construction of a new port at the mouth of the Tiber, and embarked on the

conquest of Britain. Even so, Claudius could never quite suppress a sense of

imposter syndrome. Looking around for ways to fortify his regime, his gaze

fell on a princess of the bloodline of Augustus: a sister of Caligula,

formidable and imperious, by the name of Agrippina. That she was also his

own niece gave him only momentary pause. Despite the disgust felt by his

fellow citizens for incest, which they viewed as a repellent custom,

appropriate perhaps to foreign despots but certainly not to a Roman, he did

not hesitate to take her as his wife. The move promised him much

advantage. It was not only his own legitimacy that was shored up by the

marriage, but that of his two children by a previous wife: a girl named

Octavia and a boy named Britannicus. Nor was that all. Agrippina was able

to contribute even more to the prospects of the dynasty. She had a son of

her own: older than Britannicus, of an age to inherit the rule of the empire,

and with the blood of Augustus in his veins. That son was Nero.

It might have seemed, then, that Claudius had pulled off a masterstroke.

In AD 53, when he married his new stepson off to Octavia, the redemption

of the August family from extinction appeared complete. With Britannicus,

his own son, soon to come of age, and every prospect that Octavia would

shortly be giving him grandchildren, Claudius could look to the future with

confidence. Yet his hopes were to be grievously disappointed. No sooner

had Nero married his stepsister than death returned to stalk the August

family. In ad 54, Claudius died while at supper. So, too, the following year,

did Britannicus. Rumour laid the blame for both deaths on Nero. Four years

later, when Agrippina was cut down by a Praetorian hit-squad – stabbed, it

was said, through her womb – the young emperor’s responsibility was clear:

for he openly acknowledged it. People claimed and believed that it was

Poppaea who had urged him to matricide; and certainly, there could be no

doubting her role in his next crime. In 62, impatient to marry the woman

with whom he had become infatuated, and who was already pregnant by

him, Nero divorced Octavia. Then, shortly after exiling his ex-wife to a tiny

island off the Italian coast, he had her executed. The charge: adultery.

Octavia’s severed head was presented to Poppaea. Once again, the August

family had been brought almost to extinction. Once again, its future was left

hanging by a thread.

That it was Nero himself who bore the chief responsibility for this

precarious situation helped to explain, perhaps, the titanic scale of his grief

now that Poppaea too, and her unborn child with her, were dead. Who could

say just how deeply his guilt ran? Gossip had it that his wife had nagged

him for staying out late at the races, and that he had momentarily lost his

temper, that he had kicked her in the stomach, and that she had died of the

resulting miscarriage. Was the story true? Certainly, there was no crime so

dark or terrible that Nero might not be thought by his enemies capable of it.

Equally, however, it was possible to cast his bereavement in a very different

light. Many found in it a theme fit to rival the tales of gods and heroes. It

was Venus herself, so one poet wrote, who had arrived on the Palatine to

claim Poppaea; the goddess would bear her away on a chariot, up into the

heavens past shooting stars and planets, to a place of honour high above the

northern pole. ‘Downcast she was, and felt no joy in the favour done her.

For she was leaving behind her husband, a man equal to the gods. Loudly,

then, in her longing she moaned for him.’12

Just as he moaned for her. Heavy and stupefyingly expensive, the cloud

of incense hung over the ranks of mourners. Even as Nero delivered his

eulogy, it had begun to drift across the forum of Julius Caesar, across the

city walls, and across the expanse of monuments and parkland beyond the

Capitol. This was the Campus Martius – the Field of Mars. In earlier times,

it was where Rome’s citizens, summoned to war, had gathered to take the

oath that transformed them from civilians into soldiers. Now the Campus

was a showcase for the arts of peace. It was where people came to exercise,

or to picnic beside an artificial lake, or to indulge in some luxury shopping.

There were bath-houses, and theatres, and temples. It was typical of the

Campus that the most splendid of these, built back in the early days of

Augustus’ supremacy, should have been dedicated not just to one god, not

just to a few, but to all the gods: the Pantheon.

No one touring the Campus could possibly forget that Augustus himself

had come to be listed in their ranks. Everywhere stood monuments to his

glory. Most sombre was a great circular mausoleum, adorned with

cypresses and topped by a funerary temple, at the far end of the Campus.

This, the tomb Augustus built for himself, was also where the ashes of

Nero’s predecessors had been laid: Tiberius, and Caligula, and Claudius. So

too the ashes of the great women of the August family: from matriarchs to

princesses. Augustus was not the only god whose mortal remains had been

laid to rest in the mausoleum. Both his wife and Claudius had similarly

been deified. Now, with Nero’s speech ended, and pall-bearers shouldering

the byre, all that remained on earth of another god was being brought to join

them. Leaving the Forum, passing through a gate in the city walls, entering

the Campus Martius, the funerary procession headed for the mausoleum.

There, deep in the bowels of the complex, a chamber awaited them. A

chamber fitted for the mummy of Poppaea.

To some, this came as a disappointment. ‘The Roman way is to dispose

of a body by burning it.’13 Ever since the cremation of Augustus, when

flame-edged theatricals had kept the assembled crowds entertained for

hours, the funeral of a member of the August family had served the people

as a guarantee of spectacle. Yet Nero, showman though he was, knew that

the enthusiasm of many in the city for fiery extravaganzas had recently

taken a knock. The previous year, a devastating conflagration had swept

Rome. Nothing on its scale had ever been witnessed before. For days the

firestorm had raged. Between a quarter and a third of the world’s capital

had been left as blackened rubble. One year on, and the terrible scarring of

it continued to disfigure the city. Buildings along the eastward summit of

the Palatine had been destroyed, and ancient, much-loved trees. So too had

a stretch of the Forum. Of other districts, where the streets had been

cramped and the buildings made of wood, nothing was left at all. Vast

numbers of people, left homeless by the inferno, had been reduced to

squatting out on the Campus. The shanty town stretched for miles. Leaving

behind the city walls, the funerary procession had no option but to pass the

destitute masses huddled in their tents. Ahead of the mourners lay the paved

area outside the mausoleum where cremations were conducted. Here, under

normal circumstances, on a day when the funeral of a member of the

August family was being celebrated, a pyre would have been erected. No

pyre, however, awaited Poppaea. The pall-bearers continued into the cool of

the tomb. The mummy vanished from public view. It was neither the time

nor the place for pyrotechnics.

To rule as Caesar was indeed to drive the chariot of the sun. The horses

had to be guided with the utmost care. Veer too far one way, and humanity

would burn. Veer too far in the opposite direction, and all would be lost to

ice. The Roman peace – the Pax Romana – did not sustain itself. Only a

leader of divine quality could hope to preserve it. Nero, when he compared

himself to Sol, was not indulging in vainglory. He was reminding the

Roman people of what it took to rule the world. A touch of the reins here, a

flick of the whip there, and all would be kept steady. Amid the infinite

calamities to which mortals were heir, whether bereavement or the burning

of a city, Nero could be trusted to keep the Roman people on a steady

course. To keep them from ruin. To bring them, as though they were a

phoenix rising from ashes, to a golden age.

The Rape of Proserpina

There were certain times, certain places, when the human and the divine,

the earthly and the supernatural, would meet and become interfused. This

was the assurance that Nero offered the Roman people. From the very

beginning he had been bathed in gold. Born in December, the dead of

winter, he had been greeted as he came into the world by the first rays of the

dawning sun. Light from an invisible source had haloed him. As emperor, it

had been his ambition to bring a similar radiance into the heart of the city.

The great fire of AD 64 had provided him with his perfect opportunity. Four

years on from the conflagration that had inflicted such devastation on

Rome, the bodies and blackened rubble had all been cleared away. The

emperor had appropriated entire swaths of the world’s most valuable real

estate, an area once crowded with mansions and apartment blocks. Beyond

the Forum, in a valley stretching between two hills, the Caelian and the

Oppian, Nero had commissioned an immense and improbable estate. Much

of it was parkland. There was a lake, vineyards, woods, wild animals, even

models of famous cities. Most spectacular of all, extending up the slope of

the Oppian Hill, was a sprawling villa decorated with gems and pearls. It

was adorned as well with great works of art, had some forty lavatories, and

was sheathed all over with gold. The sun had only to rise in the sky for the

blaze of this complex – the ‘Golden House’, as Nero called it – to dazzle

the Romans who gazed upon its beauty. The emperor, taking possession of

it, had joked that at last he could begin ‘to live like a human being’. 14 In

truth, what it offered was a god’s-eye view of the world; or, to be more

precise, a view of the world such as Sol, looking down from his golden

chariot, might enjoy: for the Mediterranean, seen from such a distance,

might indeed look like a lake, and the lands all around it like the stretches

of a park. Nero, just to ram home the point, had even commissioned a giant

bronze statue of himself, 120 feet high, crowned with the rays of the sun.

When completed, it was to stand guard over the entrance to the Golden

House. Those who had seen it spoke of it in stupefied tones. They called it

the ‘Colossus’.

Not everyone was impressed. Surveyors mapping out Nero’s new estate

had done so over what, until recently, had been people’s homes. ‘An

overweening stretch of parkland has robbed the poor of their dwellings.’15

No wonder that there was resentment. Mutterings could be heard at every

level of society. Senators, too, had lost homes to the Golden House. Nero’s

contempt for the optimates as a class had become, over the course of his

reign, increasingly evident. He had mocked their sensibilities; offended

their proprieties; rubbed their noses in the brute fact of their impotence.

Unlike the mass of the Roman people, whom he had wooed with spectacle

and entertainment, the traditional elites of the city had come to loathe him.

An emperor who scorned to show the senate the respect that was its ancient

due was, in the opinion of those who belonged to it, a bad emperor by

definition. Even as the masses cheered Nero’s name, the heirs of Rome’s

most distinguished families had begun, in whispered tones, to call him a

tyrant. The Golden House had only confirmed them in this opinion. To the

poor, at least – the plebs, as they were called – the spreading expanse of

parkland in the very heart of the city offered relief from their cramped and

noxious living conditions; but to senators it had become merely a reminder

of just how very little they counted. ‘All the city now has become a single

house.’16

Naturally, there had been conspiracies. Nero, whose spies were

everywhere, had crushed them all. Large numbers of senators had been

variously executed, forced to commit suicide, or dispatched into exile. Even

so, in the dying days of the year AD 67, some particularly unsettling reports

had begun to reach the emperor. A major plot had been foiled in the capital

itself. In Gaul, so his agents informed him, one of the governors was

plotting revolt. Gaius Julius Vindex was a senator of formidable

capabilities. ‘Physically fit and mentally alert, seasoned in war and bold

enough not to shrink from a perilous enterprise, he combined a deep love of

liberty with immense ambition.’17 Not only that, but he was descended from

a line of Gallic kings. Even so, Nero, who – unlike his predecessors – had

never led an army in battle, was not sufficiently alarmed to start mustering

troops now: for there was a more effective way to combat incipient

rebellions. Death squads, which he had employed to great effect against

conspirators in Rome, could also be sent out into the provinces. Informed

that Vindex had been in touch with the governor of Spain, a grizzled

martinet by the name of Servius Sulpicius Galba, who had failed to report

the treason, Nero duly gave orders for the governor’s assassination. He had

no reason to doubt that such measures would work. Apollo, the god of

prophecy as well as of music, had personally sent him a message: ‘Beware

the seventy-third year.’18 Nero, who was still only thirty, drew great comfort

from this oracle. Clearly, he assured his friends, he still had decades of life

and good fortune ahead of him. There was nothing remotely to worry about.

Nevertheless, with the passing of the old year and the beginning of the

new, even Nero could not help indulging a certain mood of introspection.

Solemn ritual marked 1 January. For two hundred years, it had been the day

on which the two new consuls embarked on their term of office. It was not

just for the Roman people to endorse their election; the heavens, too, had to

give their approval. This was why, on the first day of the 820th year since

the founding of Rome – the year that we commemorate as AD 68 – the

consuls made sure to seek the backing of the king of the gods, the deity

hailed by the Romans as Optimus, the ‘Best’: Jupiter. Senators in blindingly

white togas accompanied them. Nero’s own robe, embroidered with gold,

was the most blinding of all. Other citizens in holiday finery swelled the

lengthy train. Perfume hung in the air. Saffron crackled on lighted braziers.

Attendants led two white bullocks, unbroken to the yoke, along the route of

the procession. The path was a steep one, and so the animals, their hooves

skittering on the flagstones, had to be urged up the slope. Ahead of them

loomed a great crowd of temples. The Capitol, where in ancient times a

giant and mysteriously well-preserved head, a caput, had been found,

portending Rome’s destiny as the head of the world, ranked as the most

sacred of the city’s seven hills; and on 1 January it was especially so.

Jupiter’s temple, which stood on the very summit of the Capitol, was the

most imperious in the city. Its roof, like that of Nero’s new palace, was

sheathed in gold. It boasted columns plundered from Athens. It dominated

the Forum, which Jupiter shared with two other deities: Juno, his queen, and

Minerva, his daughter. The view from the central chamber of the massive

edifice, where the god had his throne, commanded all of Rome. Jupiter, the

Romans knew, would never abandon such a seat: ‘the finest and most

splendid monument in the world’.19 His temple was as close to an image of

eternity as the city provided. It was impossible to imagine a time when it

would no longer stand there, and when priests would no longer climb the

Capitol to reach it. No wonder that bronze tablets from Rome’s archives,

detailing laws and decrees of the senate reaching back to the very

beginnings of the city, were stored there: for where was more imperishable?

The consuls who on 1 January made the first public sacrifice of the year to

Jupiter knew themselves to be part of a tradition that reached both

backwards and forwards through time.

So, too, did Nero. The consulship, once bestowed by the votes of the

people, was now bestowed by the favour of Caesar. ‘The majesty of the

giver shines in the gift.’20 Nero, as the man who had graced the new consuls

with their magistracies, was no less anxious than the consuls themselves to

know what signs of approval or disapproval – ‘auspices’ as they were

known – might be given by the gods. It was the responsibility of the

emperor himself to take them. The rituals that traditionally marked the new

year had swelled since the time of Augustus by additional, more recent

observances: oaths of loyalty sworn to Caesar; promises to uphold his

legislation; the gifting to him of strenae, New Year presents. Such

ceremonies were conducted across the immense span of the empire, in

provincial cities and in legionary camps; but it was what happened on the

Capitol that had the greatest heft. Nero, with magistrates and senators

gathered round him in a great crowd, and priests, and citizens representing

all the various classes of society, knew that he had the perfect opportunity

to broadcast a message, not just to Rome, but to the world. Conspiracies

were wasted effort. His rule was planted on solid foundations. The auspices

were good.

Later, people would remember two things. The first was that no one had

unlocked the doors to the temple of Jupiter, prompting a frantic search for

the keys. The second was the strena presented to Nero by Poppaea Sabina.

Two and a half years had passed since the death of Rome’s most famous

beauty. In his bereavement, Nero had sought such comfort as he could. A

naturally uxorious man, he had turned for companionship to Acte, a

freedwoman from Syria with whom he had conducted a passionate affair

early in his reign, and still held fast in his affections. He had also married

again. Statilia Messalina, although she might lack the glamour of Poppaea,

was very much Nero’s kind of woman: smart, witty, well-bred. Indeed, so

devoted was he to her that he had forced her husband, a serving consul with

a fatal talent for banter, to commit suicide. Yet Messalina, devoted to her

though her new husband was, had one debilitating drawback: she did not

look like Poppaea. So Nero – rather than live with the ache of his frustration

– had sought to find someone who did. The search had been long but

ultimately successful. A new Poppaea had been brought to the emperor’s

bed. Soft-skinned, auburn-haired, she seemed to all who saw her to be the

ultimate manifestation of Nero’s genius for transmuting fantasy into reality.

Dressed in the dead empress’s robes, arrayed in the dead empress’s jewels,

borne in the dead empress’s litter, she was treated exactly as though she

were the dead empress herself. Nero had even married her. First, though,

prior to the wedding, the bride-to-be had been readied for her future as

Caesar’s wife. A surgeon had been summoned. Poppaea’s doppelgänger,

strapped onto the operating table, had been obliged to endure the loss of his

genitals: testicles, penis and all.

Nero, making a joke of it, had nicknamed the mutilated boy Sporus:

‘Spunk’, in Greek. Yet the presence in his bed of a partner who not only

looked like Poppaea, but answered to her name, and had legally become his

wife, was no laughing matter. To Nero, and to all who saw her with him, it

seemed that a great miracle had been achieved: that Poppaea had been

brought back to life. So besotted was the emperor that he dreamed of

moulding Sporus completely into a woman. An immense reward was

offered to anyone capable of implanting a uterus within the eunuch. This, of

course, even for a man of Nero’s genius for bending reality to his will, was

an ambition too far; but the sterility of the Poppaea he had fashioned for

himself did not prevent her presence on the Capitol that January morning

from carrying an unsettling charge. What Nero offered to the Roman people

was the assurance that the mundane could be rendered fantastical, the

predictable spiced up with the unexpected, and the world of the everyday

fused with that of myth. This was why, when ‘Poppaea’ stepped forward to

present Nero with his strena, she seemed to the assembled crowd a creature

both more and less than human. It was also why, in the months and years

that were to follow, the ring which she presented to her husband that

morning on the Capitol as he was taking the auspices would itself come to

seem a portent.

On the ring was a gemstone, and carved onto the gemstone was the

image of a goddess. Libera did not have a shrine on the Capitol. If the great

temple of Jupiter provided the king of the gods with a seat from which he

could survey not just the limits of Rome, but the entire world beyond, then

the setting of Libera’s temple was altogether less grand. Beyond the

Capitol, there stretched a flat and low expanse of land, bordered by the

Tiber and, on the far side of the various apartment blocks and warehouses

that crowded it, a second hill. The Aventine, unlike the Palatine or the

Capitol, had never been home to winners. Instead, from the very beginnings

of Rome, it had provided a refuge to those who had failed in the great race

of life: to the poor, the immigrant, the down-at-heel. The temple of Libera,

founded in the tenth year of the republic’s existence, and rebuilt by

Augustus after its destruction in a fire, stood on the northernmost slope of

the Aventine, directly above the banks of the Tiber. There, it served the

plebs as the great temple on the Capitol served the elites: as a focus of their

supplications, their devotions, their hopes.

Just as Jupiter shared his sanctuary in Rome with Juno and Minerva, so

did Libera share hers with her mother, Ceres, and her brother, Liber. The

worship of Ceres reached all the way back to the time of Numa Pompilius –

as well it might have, for she was the goddess who blessed the fields with

harvest and put bread on the table, without which everyone would starve.

Though the rustic days of Numa were long gone, her great festival, the

Cerealia, was still celebrated every spring, at the start of the agricultural

year. Its stage was the Circus Maximus, the largest stadium in the world,

built by Romulus in the valley between the Aventine and the Palatine;

incinerated during the first hours of the Great Fire; and already, thanks to

Nero’s patronage and energy, restored to its former glory. Whether, that

coming spring, the festival would be celebrated in the traditional way, by

releasing foxes with lighted torches on their backs into the arena, was

obviously a sensitive question; but certainly, now that the renovation of the

Circus was complete, there would be chariot races and all kinds of

spectacles. Nero, a natural showman, would make sure of that. He perfectly

understood how to keep the plebs entertained. Extravaganzas would also be

staged a month earlier, to mark the Liberalia, the festival that honoured both

Liber and Libera, and which, despite the enduring disapproval of moralists,

had long been celebrated on the Aventine as a licence to cast off every kind

of inhibition. Liber, after all, meant ‘free’. Wine, sex, rampages through the

streets: the Liberalia was literally a riot.

The ring, then, had been thoughtfully chosen. The reminder it gave to

Nero as he stood before the temple of Jupiter surrounded by senators was a

welcome one. The foundations of his power lay not just in the Capitol but in

the Aventine. Rome was the largest city the world had ever seen. It

contained a million mouths. Only one man could possibly keep such an

immense population from starvation: Caesar. The message was one that

Nero had made sure to stamp on his coins. On one of them Ceres was

shown sitting in front of a woman holding a horn overflowing with the

fruits of the harvest. This woman was Annona: the embodiment of the grain

supply. It had long been the privilege of every citizen in Rome to receive

from Caesar a monthly corn dole. The annexation of Egypt, which had

enabled Augustus to fund the beautification of Rome, had enabled him as

well to banish the spectre of famine from the city: for the wealth of the

country had consisted of more than gold. The fields that bordered the Nile

were the great breadbasket of the world.

Every year, hulking freighters loaded with corn would set sail from

Alexandria. Meanwhile, others would depart Carthage, the capital of

Africa: for this province too was famed for the fertility of its soil. These

transport ships, for a long time, had been unable to head directly to Rome.

Instead, because the waters at Ostia, the port which stood at the mouth of

the Tiber, had been too shallow to receive them, they had been obliged

instead to dock at Puteoli, a port on the Bay of Naples. Recently, however,

Ostia had been given an upgrade. The Roman people, whose sway extended

across sea as well as land, were not to be defied by mere reeds and silt. In a

great engineering project begun under Claudius and completed under Nero,

a deep-water port was constructed a mile or so north of the existing

facilities at Ostia. The corn transported from Egypt and Africa still had to

be unloaded at Puteoli; but it could now be transported onwards to the

mouth of the Tiber in something approximating to bulk. From there, it could

then be moved into the giant warehouses that, fortress-like, lined the river

for sixteen miles, all the way to the Aventine. The plebs, long habituated as

they were to receiving bread from Caesar, did not view this as charity.

‘Every man gets his dole by virtue of being a citizen.’21 Such, at any rate,

was the maxim. The fire, however, had placed the imperial budget under

terrible strain. Nero, even as he struggled to ensure the continued supply of

corn to the city, had been obliged to suspend the dole itself. Poppaea, by

giving her husband a ring stamped with the image of Libera, was reminding

him of his responsibility to restore it. Headquarters for the distribution of

corn was Libera’s temple: the temple that she shared with Liber, and Ceres,

her mother.

Libera, however, was not merely Libera. Just as the temple of Jupiter,

following its incineration by a thunderbolt in 83 BC, had been rebuilt using

material plundered from Athens, so had Libera, as the centuries had passed,

become ever more Greek. Initially, she had been a shadowy figure – so

shadowy, indeed, that it was debated by antiquarians whether she might not

have been Liber’s daughter rather than his sister. Increasingly, however, as

Roman power expanded first across Italy and then into the eastern half of

the Mediterranean, this had changed: for the more that the conquerors put

the Greek world in their shadow, so the more had their gods come to be

painted in the colours of the conquered. The Greeks, too, worshipped a

goddess of the harvest. Demeter, they called her: the mother of a daughter

named Persephone. The story told of this girl – Proserpina, as she was

known in Latin – was a haunting one. That once, back in the early days of

the world, when all had been eternal summer, she had been walking with

her handmaidens across a meadow in Sicily; that Pluto, the god of the dead,

had appeared suddenly in his chariot and abducted her; that her mother,

plunged into grief and despair, had left the corn in the fields and the fruit on

the trees to perish, and the earth to turn to ice; that finally, under the terms

of a truce brokered by Jupiter, it had been agreed that, for six months every

year, Proserpina should return to her mother, but that for the other six

months, enthroned in the underworld as the queen of the dead, she should

stay with Pluto; and that ever since there had been winters as well as

summers. The story had become a familiar one to the Romans almost half a

millennium before the time of Nero. Proserpina had long since been elided

with Libera. Deeply embedded in the soil of the Aventine though her temple

was, this goddess whose origins reached back to the very beginnings of the

city hinted at mysteries – haunting, tantalising mysteries – that were not to

be fathomed in Rome. Those who wished to learn them had to travel

elsewhere: to Greece.

And it was to Greece, as it so happened, that the boy transformed into

Poppaea, only a few months after the operation that had made him into a

woman, had been taken by Nero. Borne in a litter appropriate to an

empress, the new Poppaea had toured a succession of the festivals for which

Greek cities were famed. Her husband had been in heaven. In the country

that ranked as the home of the performing arts, Nero had felt himself

appreciated at last. His singing had been greeted with rapturous applause.

So, too, his performances as an actor. He had even raced in the Olympic

Games. Risking unspeakable danger by yoking his chariot to ten horses

rather than, as was customary, two or four, he had not only lived to tell the

tale, but taken first prize. His delight had been off the scale. Imperious in

his gratitude, he had remitted the taxes of the entire province. Even as he

did so, however, he proclaimed that his true debt was not to the Greeks

themselves, but rather to their gods. ‘For both by land and sea they have

ever looked out for me.’22

Many were the hills, the groves, and the shrines in Greece that, over the

course of the centuries, had been hallowed by their presence. Well-educated

Romans, schooled in the Greek classics as they were, tended to be no less

aware of this than the Greeks were themselves. One sanctuary in particular

haunted their imaginings. Ten miles outside Athens there stood a town

named Eleusis. Here it was that Ceres had sat in mourning for her lost

daughter; and here it was that the pair of them had been reunited. The

mystery of what had happened in this holy place, the restoration of the earth

to fertility and the triumph of life over death, was one that mortals, if they

purified themselves sufficiently and swore a binding vow of secrecy, might

have revealed to them. It was not only Greeks who were seduced by this

promise. Rome’s most learned men were intrigued as well. The mysteries

taught at Eleusis were, in their opinion, Athens’ greatest gift to the world.

‘Thrice blessed’, a tragedian had written back in the city’s golden age, ‘are

those mortals who, having seen these rites, then descend into the

underworld: for while everyone else passes into wretchedness, they alone

have life.’23 Here was a promise that anyone might welcome – even a

Caesar. The image on the ring given to Nero while he was taking the

auguries on the Capitol was a nod to this, for it portrayed the rape of

Proserpina. Poppaea, who had only just returned from Greece with her

husband, knew just how haunted by the story of Proserpina’s abduction he

had been – and just how haunted by his longing to visit Eleusis.

Yet he had never gone. The mysteries were not lightly penetrated, and

Nero had good reason to fear them. During his tour of Greece, putting on

the mask of a tragic actor, he had repeatedly played matricides: murderers

who, commanded by oracles to commit the most terrible of crimes, had then

been hounded by the Furies, fearsome goddesses armed with whips and

blazing torches. Nero, by bringing to life ancient myth on the stage, had

been performing the most audacious of manoeuvres: the presentation of

himself as a hero of legend. Yet this had come with costs. Every year at

Eleusis, before the rites of initiation began, a herald would warn away all

criminals; and Nero, who confessed to being haunted in his dreams by the

ghost of his mother, had particular reason to dread the admonition. True, he

was notorious as a man contemptuous of the gods. Only one of them, a fish-

tailed goddess from Syria, had ever truly commanded his devotion; and

even her he had come to despise. So badly had he fallen out with her,

indeed, that he had taken to relieving himself on her statue. Or so people

claimed. Nero’s relish for mocking convention, and the glee he took in

making the eyes of prudes pop, made such rumours all too believable.

Nevertheless, there were limits. Even Nero knew better than to desecrate

certain mysteries. The gates that led to the realm of Pluto and Proserpina

were not lightly opened. Nero, dreading to visit Eleusis, had never doubted

it. This was because, only three years previously, he had opened the same

gates himself.

The great fire had left Rome a city of the dead. Such had been its

ferocity that untold numbers had been turned to ashes. There had been no

prospect of recovering their bodies, or of giving them proper burial. The

horror of this had lain like a shadow over the entire city. Naturally, then,

Nero had turned for advice to the Sibylline Books. The instructions he

found there were clear. Various gods required propitiation. Chief among

them were Ceres and Proserpina. There were rites to be performed at their

temple on the Aventine and in the heart of the Forum, rites that reached

back to the very origins of Rome. It was Romulus who had first instituted

them. Next to where the senate house would one day stand, and where

Nero, the year after the great fire, would deliver his funeral oration over the

mummified body of the first Poppaea, he had dug a circular trench. In it he

had placed the fruits of the harvest: everything that, ‘sanctioned by tradition

as good and by nature as necessary’,24 was sacred to Ceres. Yet this trench –

which the Romans called the mundus, the ‘world’ – was a place of death as

well as life. The black stone of the Lapis Niger, which lay within the

mundus, had been carefully chosen. Great pains had gone into its sourcing.

Brought to Rome from Cape Matapan, the southernmost tip of Greece, it

had been quarried from beside a cave that led to the underworld: a place

much haunted by the flickering and gibbering of ghosts. 25

The Lapis Niger, however, was not the only emblem of death that stood

within the mundus. There was also an ancient cypress, with roots so fibrous

and grasping that they reached all the way to the forum built by Julius

Caesar. No wonder, then, that the mundus, like Eleusis, and like the cave on

Cape Matapan, should have ranked as a portal to the underworld. For most

of the year it was shut; but there were times, shadow-haunted times, when it

was made to stand open. On such days no business could be done, no

battles offered, no marriages celebrated: ‘For when the mundus is open, it is

as if the gates of the sad and infernal gods are open.’26 There was nothing,

on such occasions, to stop the dead from visiting the realm of the living –

nothing to stop those who had perished in the great fire from returning to

the scene of their incineration. Nero, by acting in obedience to the Sibylline

Books, and opening the mundus, had sought to give rest to their shades, to

make up for their lack of a burial, to draw a line under the calamity of the

inferno that had consumed them and reduced them to ashes.

But no line had been drawn. The gates of the underworld remained open.

The shades of the dead still roamed the city unavenged. Such, at any rate,

behind closed doors and in nervous huddles, was what Nero’s enemies

whispered. It was said, and believed, that the emperor had started the fire

himself; that he had employed his agents to ensure its spread; that he had

sung, as the city blazed, of the ruin of Troy. Nero, in the immediate wake of

the disaster, had vowed to raise altars across the city to Vulcan, the god of

fire; but these altars, three years on, were still nowhere to be seen. Small

surprise, then, in the weeks and months that followed the new year, that the

ring given to Nero at the New Year should have come to seem more and

more ominous a sign. The emperor had many enemies, and events, it turned

out, were slipping from his control. Out in the provinces, his attempt to nip

rebellion in the bud had failed. The shadow war was over. In March, Vindex

openly raised the banner of revolt. In April, Galba did the same. Nero,

shocked into a sudden realisation of the peril of his situation, sought to rally

such legions as he had with him in Italy. Simultaneously, he mustered

reinforcements. Legions in the Balkans were commanded to rally to their

emperor’s cause. He also enrolled a legion from scratch, by recruiting

marines from Misenum, a port on the Bay of Naples that constituted

Rome’s largest naval base. Nero’s flurry of activity, however, had its limits:

despite the fact that he was the first Caesar since Augustus to have had

himself portrayed on coins in military dress, he remained reluctant to ride

out at the head of his troops. Instead, he trusted them to a proven loyalist, a

former consul and governor of Britain by the name of Petronius

Turpilianus. Petronius headed north to rendezvous in northern Italy with the

legions coming from the Balkans. Nero, meanwhile, waited in Rome. His

mood, despite the sudden blaze of rebellion, remained positive.

But then, at the beginning of June, came ominous news. Vindex,

defeated in battle by an army drawn from the German frontier, had

committed suicide; but the triumphant legions, far from dedicating this

victory to Nero, had promptly hailed their commander as emperor. The

commander himself, a man of subtle and cautious temperament named

Verginius Rufus, had refused the title; but Nero, shaken by the disloyalty of

troops whose love he had until that moment taken for granted, was plunged

abruptly into despair. It was less force of arms that made him fear for his

throne than rumours and exaggerations. Even Petronius was reported –

erroneously – to have defected. Nero, increasingly frantic, began to

contemplate flight to Alexandria. Yet still he lingered in Rome. Only once

he had finally convinced himself that all was lost did he abandon the

capital; but not for Egypt. Instead, taking horse, he made for a villa on the

outskirts of the city. With him went the boy transformed into Poppaea and

his most trusted secretary, a freedman named Epaphroditus. It was to prove

a fateful mistake. Brought news that the senate had formally condemned

him as a public enemy and sentenced him to death, he prepared to commit

suicide. For an hour he hesitated; but then, when he heard hoofbeats on the

road outside, and realised that guards were coming to apprehend him, he

summoned the assistance of the loyal Epaphroditus and slit his own throat.

A centurion, hurrying into the villa, sought to staunch the wound with his

cloak; but it was too late. ‘So fixedly did his eyeballs bulge from their

sockets that onlookers were filled with horror and fear.’27 Nero was dead.

And Poppaea Sabina, that maimed and sterile parody of the woman he

had loved and raised to the heavens, beating her breast, pulling at her hair,

tearing her clothes, mourned the husband who, like Pluto, had raped her and

borne her into a realm of shadow.

Back to the Future

The women who tended the tomb in the garden had no doubt that their lord

was dead. They had personally arrayed his body in shining white vestments;

and then, when all was ready, laid his physical remains to rest. Rejected as

he had been by his own people, legally condemned as an enemy of Rome,

brought to a squalid and ignominious end, his defeat seemed total. What

victory, then, could there possibly be in the wake of such a death?

Acte, Nero’s first great love, and his two childhood nurses, leaving the

tomb where they had reverently deposited the emperor’s ashes in a

porphyry sarcophagus, were not alone in feeling stunned. Everything

seemed to have happened so quickly. Few people in the capital had been

aware of the distant rumblings of insurrection. ‘Nero had been toppled more

by dispatches and by rumours than by force of arms.’28 The news of his

suicide, then, had come as a general shock. Rome had been at peace for

more than a century. The prospect of civil war returning to the city’s streets

seemed grotesque, a nightmare conjured up from the dark days of the

republic’s collapse. Yet the portents which followed Nero’s death were too

ominous to be ignored. Rivers had been seen flowing backwards. On the

east coast of Italy, an entire olive grove had uprooted itself and crossed a

road. In Rome itself, lightning had struck the temple built by Julius Caesar

in his forum, decapitating all the statues of the emperors placed there. Now,

in the Forum itself, the cypress which for centuries had stood within the

limits of the mundus abruptly died. The gates of the underworld, it seemed,

were open yet. The people who, in the wake of Nero’s funeral, bore flowers

to his tomb, and lamented his passing, were not merely mourning Nero

himself. They were also mourning the family of Augustus, that dynasty shot

through with a sense of its founder’s immortality, and yet which now, with

the death of its last surviving member, had perished for ever. The vast mass

of the Roman people, looking to the future, felt a sense less of relief than of

trepidation. ‘In their despondency, they were desperate for news.’29 Who

was to rule in Nero’s place? To maintain the peace that, for a century now,

had been general across the empire? To keep the city supplied with bread?

In the senate house, they already had an answer to these questions. The

same decree that had proclaimed Nero’s condemnation as a public enemy

had proclaimed as well the award of all his prerogatives, all his titles, to

Servius Sulpicius Galba. To most senators, the governor of Spain seemed

the obvious choice. No living Roman was more distinguished. Forebears of

his had won the consulship long before Augustus’ rise to power. This fact,

however, had not prevented Galba from serving a succession of emperors

loyally and well. Unlike most senators who came from ancient families, he

had scorned to spend his days sulking on his estates, snobbishly resentful of

the Caesars’ supremacy. Instead, just as any ambitious nobleman would

have done back in the heyday of the republic, he had sought to make a

name for himself: as a magistrate, as a soldier, as a governor of major

provinces. Breeding and public service: the combination was a rare one.

Certainly, to senators weary of Nero’s relentless mockery, the craggy and

unbending Galba appeared the perfect candidate to serve as princeps: an

antique hero sprung from the pages of a history book. Accordingly, taking

ship, a delegation of optimates headed for Spain, there to press on him the

name of Caesar.

Yet they were, of course, deluding themselves. Any notion that a would-

be emperor with an army at his back might be dependent for his elevation to

supreme power on the decrees of the senate was fantasy. That Galba

himself, a confirmed conservative, paid lip-service to them as the source of

his legitimacy did not render him any the less a usurper. ‘A secret of state

had been revealed: that a man might be made a princeps elsewhere than in

Rome.’30 Even in the capital, the ability of senators to influence events was

limited. This was a lesson that Claudius’ seizure of power had already

taught them. Now they found themselves having to learn it all over again.

The senate was not alone in sending an embassy to Galba. Also sailing for

Spain were a squad of Praetorians. Far more than the senate house, it was

their camp, a vast, brooding fortress on the north-eastern edge of Rome, that

constituted the true foundation of an emperor’s authority in the city. To

command the Praetorians was to command a force that could make or break

a Caesar.

This was why, ever since the original construction of their base back in

the time of Tiberius, no senator had ever been appointed as their prefect.

Only a private citizen of sufficient wealth and ability to qualify as an eques

– a cavalryman – could aspire to that. The rank harked back to the distant

days when membership of Rome’s elite had been signalled by possession of

a horse; but the equestrian order, over the course of the centuries, had

evolved to become a very different beast. While it might never hope to rival

the prestige of the senate, it did mark those enrolled in it as high achievers,

talents worth watching, men on the make. Under Augustus, the equestrian

order had provided aristocrats from obscure Italian towns, officers who had

picked the winning side in the civil wars, and even, on occasion, the

wealthy sons of former slaves, with a status that demanded respect.

Senators might sneer at such upstarts; but not too openly. Increasingly,

equestrians had come to provide what every Caesar needed: a reservoir of

able and hard-nosed men capable of serving in a whole variety of

administrative posts. Some of these posts were more important than others;

and of them all, none was more important than the prefectship of the

Praetorians. The Praetorians, after all, were not just any body of men to be

commanded. They were soldiers with responsibility for the security of

Caesar; which meant, in turn, that they were soldiers capable of swaying the

very fate of Rome.

Nero, perfectly aware of what had happened to Caligula when he forgot

this, had gone to great lengths to keep them sweet. He had lavished pay rise

after pay rise on them, bonus after bonus. He had also made sure to split the

command. Both the men he had installed as prefects had evil reputations.

This was hardly surprising, for the pair of them had served as his enforcers.

Both were notorious for their thuggishness; both were despised by their

peers as blots on the equestrian order. One, Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, had

worked variously as a gigolo and a racehorse trainer before Nero,

appreciative of the talents suggested by this curriculum vitae, had raised

him to the command of the Praetorians; the other, Gaius Nymphidius

Sabinus, was the son of a freedwoman rumoured to have sold herself for

sex in the slave quarters on the Palatine. Tigellinus, although for long the

senior partner, had recently been elbowed aside. His colleague, determined

not to let a crisis go to waste, had moved with ruthless speed to capitalise

upon the swell of insurrections in Gaul and Spain. Nymphidius it was who

had convinced the Praetorians to abandon Nero; Nymphidius it was who,

capitalising on Galba’s reputation for fabulous wealth, had succeeded in

winning their backing for him by promising them a bonus massive even by

the standards of Nero’s prodigality. The prefect, having staked everything

on this throw, could be well pleased with how the dice had come to fall.

Nero eliminated; Tigellinus put decisively in the shade; Galba’s favour

secured. Nymphidius was effectively the master of the capital.

Nevertheless, his situation remained precarious. Accordingly, even as

the capital waited with trepidation for its new master to arrive from Spain,

Nymphidius set to shoring up his position. He continued to court Galba.

Simultaneously, he sought to bring Rome ever more under his thumb.

Senators were alternately wooed and menaced. Sometimes Nymphidius

would invite them to dinner; sometimes he would berate them for

presuming to go behind his back. Naturally, as a man who would have been

nothing without Nero’s patronage, he made sure as well to harry agents of

the toppled regime. When lynch mobs turned on them, crushing informers

beneath fallen statues of the emperor or the wheels of heavily laden

wagons, he did nothing to save his former colleagues. His pose throughout

was one of high-minded patriotism. He had no wish, after all, to be thought

a vulgar opportunist.

Yet even Nymphidius, the man whose treachery had served to doom his

master, could not help but remain in thrall to Nero’s charisma. In his house

he kept the most outrageous of all the many souvenirs left behind by the

dead emperor. To sleep with Sporus, the wretched boy transformed into the

image of Rome’s most beautiful empress, was to sleep with Poppaea

Sabina. This was why, rather than allow her to accompany the other women

to the garden when Nero’s ashes were laid to rest, Nymphidius had seized

her, and kept her as his own. A man taking such a trophy to bed with him

might well dare to dream. The upstart prefect began to have it put about that

he was the offspring, not – as people had previously believed – of servile

parents, but of Caligula. If true, this would have meant that he had the blood

of Augustus flowing in his veins. Already, Nymphidius had made himself

the master of Rome. Why, then, amid all the confusions of the age, should

he not aspire to the mastery of the world?

To own Poppaea was, perhaps, to be driven a little mad. She was, after

all, a living, breathing embodiment of the great conviction to which Nero

had dedicated his life: that there was no fantasy so impossible, no dream so

implausible, no desire so shocking, that it might not be rendered real.

Certainly, to transform a male into a female was a project better suited to a

god than to a mortal. Only the boldest, the most self-assured were likely to

attempt it. Nero might be dead; but the example of what he had achieved

with Poppaea, the fashioning of a young boy into not merely a dead

empress, but the most famous beauty in the world, still served as a

memorial to his ambitions. Nymphidius, abducting her even as Nero’s

corpse lay on its pyre, had known what he was stealing. She was a symbol

not just of imperial power, but of the daring required to reach after imperial

power. Well might those who had moulded her, fashioning an empress out

of a boy, think nothing beyond them.

Even women. Nero, wishing his creation adorned in a manner

appropriate to her rank, had appointed as Poppaea’s wardrobe-mistress a

noblewoman notorious equally for her rapacity and for her role as ‘his tutor

in sexual depravity’.31 Now, with her patron dead, Calvia Crispinilla had

taken refuge in her native Africa. 32 There, with a startling display of

initiative, she had persuaded the commander of the legion stationed in the

province, a man named Lucius Clodius Macer, to raise the banner of revolt.

First Macer seized Carthage, the provincial capital; then he halted the corn

supply. He began to mint coins that signalled his intention to take Sicily –

and to do so, what was more, as an agent of the senate. The aim, self-

evidently, was to cripple Nymphidius’ authority in Rome. Calvia, a woman

with a track record in bending reality to her wishes, had shown that her

talents were not confined merely to the dressing room. Just as she had

transformed a mutilated boy into a shimmering vision of female glamour, so

had she now wrought an even more startling metamorphosis: that of Rome’s

African breadbasket into a source of grievous danger, not just to

Nymphidius, but to Galba as well.

Except that Galba, far from answering Nymphidius’ increasingly frantic

calls for assistance, showed himself flintily unperturbed by them. Rather

than advance on Rome at speed, he spent a month after his elevation

making sure of his rear. Only in July did he finally set out from Spain.

Climbing the Pyrenees, he marked with contempt how the Praetorians sent

to him from Rome were forever grumbling about the exertions of the

march, the paucity of the rations, the strictness of the discipline. Sent

furniture by Nymphidius from the Golden House, he scorned to use it.

Crossing Gaul, he neglected to take the shortest route to Rome, but instead,

striking inland, removed Verginius Rufus from his command; received the

acclamation of various Gallic tribes; and then, taking a road that led not

along the coast, but over the Alps, flogged the Praetorians over yet another

mountain range. All this, from Nymphidius’ point of view, was bad enough.

But it was not the worst. Galba, although a perfectly well-meaning old man,

was also a fond and foolish one. So Nymphidius’ agent reported back. For

all his breeding, for all his record of public service, for all his commitment

to discipline, the new emperor was the creature of a gang of worthless

favourites. Some were freedmen; some were senators on the make. Laziest

and most venal of the lot was an officer named Cornelius Laco.

Nymphidius’ agent, in describing the new emperor’s associates, had

particular reason to dwell on Laco. Galba, after all, had just appointed him

Praetorian prefect.

This was, to put it mildly, a bold piece of management. Rome was

effectively in Nymphidius’ hands, and the prefect – unsurprisingly – did not

take the news of his replacement well. Deciding to gamble everything once

again on a throw of the dice, he sought to strike against Galba as only a few

weeks previously he had struck against Nero. His backers in the senate were

squared. One of them – a consul designate by the name of Cingonius Varro

– even wrote him a speech. Armed with this oration, Nymphidius headed at

midnight to the Praetorian camp. His aim was to deliver it to the soldiers

and then employ them to secure the city. When he arrived at the camp,

however, it was to find the gates barred against him. The Praetorians –

persuaded by one of their officers that Galba, as a man innocent of

murdering his mother and performing as an actor, should be given a chance

– refused to hear their prefect out. Even when the gates were finally opened

to Nymphidius, it was only so that he might the more easily be cornered and

slain. His corpse, dragged out from the camp, was put on public show, there

to be gawped at by the masses.

Galba, brought news of this, could be well pleased. He had long

experience in smacking down uppity officers. His fame as a martinet was

richly deserved. The senatorial elite, in turning to him, had been turning as

well to an image of Rome long nurtured by traditionalists: as a city made

great by the iron-forged discipline of its people. Everyone knew the stories.

Once, for instance, back in the heroic early days of the republic, a consul by

the name of Manlius Torquatus, riding at the head of an army, had ordered

that no one was to break ranks, no one to fight except in a line of battle.

Shortly afterwards, his own son went out on patrol. Provoked by the taunts

of the enemy, the young man engaged one of them in single combat, slew

him, and then, bearing the corpse of his adversary, returned in triumph to

the camp. Manlius, rather than praising his son, gave orders that he be

executed on the spot. And so it was done. While Galba, who was childless,

had never quite matched this edifying standard of severity, his reputation

was very much that of a man who, only given the chance, would surely

have taken it. Whipping flabby soldiers into shape was his particular forte.

Once, sent by Caligula to improve standards of discipline along the Rhine,

he had set the legions there a personal example by running alongside the

emperor’s chariot for twenty miles, all the while holding a shield. Now,

summoned to the rule of a city long indulged and corrupted by Nero, he

faced a similar challenge. It was not one that he intended to shirk.

The Roman people had grown soft. They needed toughening up. This

was why, in Galba’s opinion, the threat to the corn supply was nothing

much to worry about. Certainly, he had no intention of restoring the corn

dole: for what was a handout if not a menace to Rome’s moral fibre?

Likewise, just as Manlius Torquatus, in his commitment to discipline, had

shown himself implacable, a man forged out of iron, so now did Galba, in

his determination to return his fellow citizens to their traditional values,

scorn to show either fear or favour. Entering Rome as its emperor, he aimed

to make an example of worthless senators no less than of delinquent

soldiers. Cingonius Varro, the consul designate who had written a speech

for Nymphidius, was duly executed without trial. So, too, as a confirmed

partisan of Nero, was Petronius Turpilianus. Even royalty was not spared

Galba’s grim resolve to punish insubordination: Mithridates, a king visiting

Rome from the shores of the Black Sea, was put to death on a charge of

having laughed at the emperor’s baldness. Meanwhile, far from granting the

Praetorians the bonus that Nymphidius, on Galba’s behalf, had promised

them, the new emperor left them empty-handed. Playing the antique hero to

the hilt, he explained his reasoning in lapidary terms: ‘I choose my soldiers,

I do not buy them.’33

Most salutary of all, perhaps, was his treatment of the marines who, a

few months earlier, had been promoted by Nero to serve as legionaries. As

Galba, nearing the end of his long journey from Spain, was advancing

through the outskirts of Rome, a large crowd of them had met him on the

banks of the Tiber, beside the Milvian Bridge. There they demanded that the

emperor confirm them in their new status and award them an eagle: for it

was an image of this bird, ‘the king and most fearless of all birds’,34 that

served every legion as its standard. When Galba, impatient with these

importunities, sought to brush them aside, the former marines began to riot.

Some even drew their swords. Galba promptly gave orders to his cavalry to

cut them down. Entering the capital, he did so along streets that were

slippery with blood and echoing to the moans of the dying. Meanwhile, the

survivors of the massacre were being rounded up and put under guard.

Galba was not done with them yet. Back in ancient times, it had been the

practice to inflict on mutinous legionaries a punishment known as

decimation: the selection by lot of one man in every ten, who would then be

put to death by his peers. No one had imposed this penalty for many

decades – and certainly not in Rome itself. This, however, was hardly a

consideration to perturb Galba. The punishment went ahead. The lesson it

taught was a very public one. The Roman people, redeemed from the

squalid indignities that had marked the rule of Nero, were being returned to

their best, their noblest traditions.

Or were they? Nero, preparing to leave Rome on campaign against

Vindex, had commissioned a wagon train to transport his various props to

the front, and dolled his concubines up as Amazons. This, in its subversive

theatricality, was everything that Galba most despised; and yet the truth was

that, by inflicting a punishment so shocking, so self-consciously antique, he

was staging a spectacle no less idiosyncratic than Nero’s had been. Galba’s

enemies, rather than taking him at his own worth, might legitimately have

pointed out that his actions, far from evoking the noble traditions of Rome’s

ancient past, were reminiscent instead of the very tyrant whose rule he had

usurped. To execute distinguished senators without trial smacked all too

uncomfortably of Nero’s recent purges. So did the manner in which Galba

dealt with Clodius Macer. Rather than set sail for Africa and confront him

in open battle, as a hero from Rome’s ancient past would surely have done,

he had him murdered by an assassin.

Nero, posing as the charioteer of the sun, had not merely been gratifying

a taste for fancy dress. He had also been making a serious point. To rule as

emperor was to drive a chariot that threatened the world with danger even

as it bestowed on humanity the blaze of its light. Galba, taking up the reins

left hanging by Nero, had no choice but to yank on them hard, to jerk them

this way and that, to struggle with horses that were, in their headstrong way,

forever threatening to career off-track. No matter how sternly he might seek

to define himself against his predecessor, he could not avoid the occasional

compromise with Nero’s legacy. Even the most sinister of the dead

emperor’s creatures, if they had something to offer, might flourish under

Galba’s rule. It was noted, for instance, that Calvia Crispinilla, far from

sharing in Macer’s ruin, had gone from strength to strength. Not only was

she richer than ever, but she had succeeded in marrying a former consul.

Why, people wondered, had the vengeful Galba spared her? Presumably

because, behind the scenes, she had struck a deal. As to what the deal might

have been, there was a possible clue in the fact of Macer’s murder. That an

assassin had ever come close enough to strike him down was a remarkable

thing. Only someone he trusted, someone intimate in all his counsels, could

have finessed it. Only someone, perhaps, who had encouraged him to

become a rebel in the first place.35

Nero was gone, but there were still players in the great game of Roman

politics who had known him, served him, and drawn inspiration from his

style. Some, such as Calvia, operated in the shadows; others were public

figures. Galba knew this perfectly well. Back in the formative days of his

insurgency, before openly declaring his defiance of Nero, he had succeeded

in winning the support of two key Iberian officials. One of them, a young

man named Aulus Caecina Alienus, managed the finances of Baetica, the

lush and mineral-rich region of southern Spain named after the river Baetis

– the Guadalquivir, as it is called today – and governed from the wealthy

city of Corduba. Of ancient family, as keen witted as he was towering, and

ferociously ambitious to boot, Caecina yearned to cut a dash on the stage of

the world. Unsurprisingly, he had leapt at the chance to elbow aside his

elders and secure a promotion; otherwise, he might have had to wait for

years. Sure enough, as reward for delivering the treasury of Baetica into the

new emperor’s hands, he was appointed to the command of a legion on the

Rhine: evidence of the opportunities that might arise in a time of civil war.

Caecina, however, was not the most significant magistrate in the Iberian

Peninsula to have swung behind Galba. Marcus Salvius Otho, like Galba

himself, was a governor. For a decade, he had administered the province of

Lusitania – modern-day Portugal – and done so responsibly and well. This,

to the sniffier among his contemporaries in the senate, had come as a

surprise. Nothing good had been expected by his elders of Otho. Back in

Rome, he had become a byword for both effeminacy and hooliganism. His

beauty regime was a matter of scandal: for as well as depilating himself on

a daily basis, he was darkly rumoured to wear a toupee. Simultaneously, he

was notorious as the man who had served Nero as guide to the seamier

reaches of the city. The pair of them, roaming the darkest back-alleys, were

said to have amused themselves by beating up passers-by, and tossing them

up and down in military cloaks. Whatever the truth of these stories, it is

certain that Otho and the young emperor had grown inseparable. Or so it

had seemed. Abruptly, it had all gone wrong. Otho, fallen out of favour, had

been packed off by Nero to Iberia. Although officially it had ranked as a

promotion, everyone – Otho included – knew the truth. He had been sent

into exile. And so, for a decade, he had twiddled his thumbs in Lusitania.

Homesick for Rome and embittered by Nero’s treatment of him, Otho

enthusiastically backed Galba. First he donated all his gold and silver

tableware to help fund the revolt; then, joining the new emperor on the road

to Rome, he provided such excellent analysis and advice that the pair of

them would often ride together for days at a time. Yet Otho, for all the

grudging respect he had won from Galba, had not entirely changed his

spots. He remained recognisably the man who had once roistered with

Nero. As well as tableware, he had furnished the new emperor with slaves

sufficiently educated in metropolitan etiquette to wait on a Caesar’s table;

soliciting the company of the Praetorians, he had made sure to distinguish

himself from the crabbed and stern-faced Galba by expressing sympathy for

their privations, and discreetly offering bribes. Even the scandal that had led

to his exile, and rendered him a figure of notoriety among the respectable,

lent him – among men inclined to be entertained by such matters – a certain

raffish allure. So often had the story been retold that no one could be quite

sure of the precise details; but everyone knew that it had revolved around

Poppaea. Rome’s most beautiful woman, before she married Nero, had been

married to Otho. Some said that he had seduced her so as to facilitate

Nero’s cheating on Octavia, and then fallen in love with her himself; some

that he had bragged about his wife’s sex appeal once too often, and paid the

price; some that there had been the souring of a ménage à trois. Whatever

the truth, the fact remained that Otho, no matter how vital a role in Galba’s

revolt he might have played, offered to those bored of discipline and

severity an authentic touch of Neronian style. He had, after all, slept with

the dead emperor’s wife.

Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the moment he arrived in Rome,

Otho moved quickly to claim a prize left ownerless by the murder of

Nymphidius: the one-time freedboy who had been transformed into

Poppaea Sabina.

Head-Hunters

Galba, on his return to Rome, found it a strange and unfamiliar place. He

had been absent from the city for almost a decade, and in that time the

combination of fire and Nero’s taste for grands projets had served to

transform the cityscape. The horizon was dotted with cranes. For four years,

Rome had been the world’s largest construction site. Stupefied by the sheer

scale of Nero’s ambitions, people claimed that he had been planning to

rename it ‘Neropolis’. True or not, Nero had certainly sought to transform

the fabric of the city. Rome had long been a deathtrap. Away from the

Campus, its streets were narrow, twisting, irregular, its various quarters

lacking in even the most rudimentary firebreaks, its rickety apartment

blocks raised up on timber lintels. Ugly and shabby Nero had found it. This,

people claimed, was what had prompted him to burn it to the ground.

Certainly, whether he was responsible for the fire or not, he had seized the

opportunity to set the city on new foundations. Rome had been given an

airier, more regular street-plan, complete with open spaces and broad

boulevards. Porticoes were added to the fronts of both townhouses and

apartment blocks, ‘so that fires might more readily be fought from their

terraces’.36 Vaults replaced timber beams. The result was the emergence

from the ashes of a city unlike anything that had existed before: a city in

which even the humblest structures were fashioned out of concrete and

stone.

Not everyone appreciated it. People complained at the loss of familiar

streets; at the lack of shelter from the sun; at the clamour and chaos which

filled the entire city with dust. Galba, who rarely backed an initiative unless

it had been superannuated for several centuries, was not a natural patron of

innovative urban design. Yet he had nothing to offer in its place. Although

there were entire quarters of Rome that had survived the fire, snarls of

ancient streets, courtyards where pigs still rooted about in the dirt, garrets

that seemed to teeter beneath the weight of the families crowded inside

them, he was not the man to roam a slum. He lacked the easy familiarity

with the more squalid reaches of the city that both Nero and Otho had come

by. The shows of patronage with which he graced the Roman people were

felt by the plebs to be grudging, niggardly, slight. Even though he might

remind them on his coinage of the role he had played in upholding the

supply of corn, he did not restore the dole. The treasury, after all the

extravagances of Nero’s reign, was exhausted. There was no alternative,

Galba sternly insisted, to austerity.

Yet it was noted that the new emperor, even as he cut donatives and

screwed money out of whomever he could, was not wholly lacking in

funds. He certainly had enough to invest in the vast complex of warehouses

that had long been owned by his family south of the Aventine, and which

now, it seemed, needed enlargement. Few imagined it a coincidence that the

warehouses, in addition to corn, were used to store oil and wine:

commodities that were famously the specialities of Galba’s erstwhile

province of Spain. 37 Certainly, it did not take the Roman people long to

deliver their verdict on the emperor. That November, shortly after his arrival

in the capital, games were staged at which actors performed a farce. The

play featured a character called Onesimus: a stingy, wrinkled, finger-

wagging misanthrope. Gusts of laughter swept the theatre. When one of the

actors embarked on a song about Onesimus, the entire audience not only

joined in but sang it over and again. ‘Even Galba’s age, to a people

accustomed to the youth of Nero, seemed something ludicrous and

grotesque.’38

Once, before the rise to greatness of Augustus – who had first made

himself consul at the point of a sword when only nineteen – the Roman

people had set a premium on crows’ feet and sagging jowls. The literal

meaning of senator was ‘elder’. Galba’s age, in the first flush of his coming

to power, had seemed a marker of his legitimacy. Not only had he met

Augustus as a young boy, but the Princeps, pinching his cheek, had foretold

that one day he would rule the world himself. Apollo, it was now apparent,

had delivered a similar prophecy: for had he not warned Nero to beware

‘the seventy-third year’, and was not Galba seventy-three? * Yet even the

new emperor’s most devoted henchmen knew that he ranked as, at best, a

stopgap. Not only was he elderly, but he had no surviving children. All the

more essential, then, that he adopt an heir. For six months Galba had put off

making a decision. He had lived long enough to appreciate that it was ever

the way of men to abandon the setting for the rising sun. Yet he was also a

patriot. He knew his duty: to look to the future, and think of the welfare of

Rome. As the days shortened, and the turning of the year drew near, so

Galba began to sift the candidates. On 1 January, he entered into his second

consulship. As Nero had done the previous year, he went in stately

procession to the Capitol, where he offered in sacrifice two white bulls. Ten

days later, he summoned his closest advisors to a meeting. He had come to

his decision.

A year had passed since Poppaea, the empress who had once been a boy,

had given her husband the ring with its engraving of the rape of Proserpina.

This, people had come to see, had been an ominous portent. Much had

happened since. One emperor had fallen; another had risen to take his place.

Otho, by seizing the maimed parody of his former wife, had known full

well what he was doing. Poppaea served as a totem. To own her was to

signal a readiness to play the role not merely of a Caesar, but of a Nero. The

six months of Galba’s rule had demonstrated that there was no mileage for

an emperor in attempting to rule the world as an antique hero might have

done. The demands on a Caesar were too gruelling, too complex, too

contradictory for that. The plebs had to be kept fed, the masses amused, the

Praetorians sweet. Otho, by cutting a Neronian dash in the streets of Rome,

did not intend to undermine Galba. Quite the opposite: he was looking to

cement the emperor’s rule. As the first provincial governor to have come

out openly in the usurper’s favour, he had no need to prove his loyalty. His

only ambition was to demonstrate to Galba the full range of his talents. All

were at Caesar’s service. And then, in due course, once Galba was dead,

Otho, his duly appointed heir, would become Caesar in turn, at the service

of the Roman people.

His hopes, however, were to be cruelly dashed. Galba, informing his

most trusted confidants of his decision, did not name Otho as his heir. ‘The

worst kind of people’, he declared, ‘will always miss Nero.’39 There was to

be no pandering to such base nostalgia. Rome had suffered enough already

from playboys. It was not even as though Otho had a distinguished ancestry.

His father had been the first of his family to become consul, his grandfather

the first to become a senator, and his mother was darkly rumoured to have

been a slave. Clearly, it was out of the question for such an upstart to be

adopted by an emperor. Instead, pondering how to set the Roman people

back on the straight and narrow, Galba did what he invariably did: he

looked to the past. The great families who, back in the heroic days of the

republic, had furnished Rome with magistrates for generation after

generation, and led their city to the rule of the world, were not entirely

extinct. Much diminished as a result of the murderous suspicions of the

Caesars though they were, a few of them, a century on from the collapse of

the republic, endured, like exotic beasts kept in a zoo. Galba, who was

himself just such a beast, had never doubted that his city’s interests would

best be served by setting these legacies of a vanished age to roam free and

proud once again. ‘For here,’ he declared, ‘it is not as it is for people who

are ruled by kings, where one family enjoys perpetual rule and everyone

else is a slave.’40 Such were the considerations which determined his choice

of heir.

Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus, a nobleman barely thirty years

old, was pretty much as well-bred as it was possible for any Roman to be.

He was linked variously by blood and by adoption to some of the most

famous names in Rome’s history. These included the only two men whom

Julius Caesar had ever acknowledged as his peers. One of them, Gnaeus

Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great – had swept the seas clear of pirates,

conquered a vast swath of the eastern Mediterranean, and built Rome’s first

permanent theatre; the other, Marcus Licinius Crassus, had combined

stupefying wealth with a reputation as the most formidable fixer in the

history of the republic. Ancestral connections such as these, under the

Caesars, had proven highly dangerous. Piso had lived his entire life beneath

their shadow. Claudius had executed both of his parents and his eldest

brother; Nero had put another brother to death; and Piso himself had spent

much of his adult life in exile. Unlike Otho, he had no experience

negotiating the political rapids. He had never gone drinking with an

emperor; governed a province; held any magistracy at all. Nevertheless, as

well as his descent from Pompey and Crassus, he could boast an upright

character, old-school attitudes, and a manner seen by his admirers as

dignified and by his enemies as stiff and sour. These attributes, in Galba’s

opinion, were more than sufficient to qualify him as a Caesar. So it was that

the emperor introduced the young man to his closest confidants as his heir.

Who next to inform of the good news? Galba – after a brief moment of

hesitation – decided to bestow the honour not upon the senate, nor upon the

people, but upon the Praetorians. As thunder rumbled overhead, and drizzle

shrouded the city, the emperor travelled with his new son to their camp.

There, delivering a speech that was as curt as it was lacking in any mention

of donatives, he introduced Piso to the assembled ranks. Various officers

responded approvingly. The rank and file said nothing. Galba, not pausing

to wonder what might explain this surliness, then headed to the senate

house. Again, he gave a short speech. Piso also delivered an oration. It was

well received. Those senators who admired Piso were effusive in their

congratulations; those who cared nothing for him even more so. The session

went on late. Then, when it was finally over, the emperor and his son retired

to the Palatine. An important step had been taken. Rome had a new Caesar.

Everything had gone very well.

Or had it? Otho – to whom Galba’s adoption of Piso had come as a

complete shock – certainly did not think so. Neither did the power brokers

who, seduced by his seemingly great expectations, had lent him vast sums

of money; nor the Praetorians, to whom he had repeatedly promised lavish

bonuses. When Otho, in the immediate aftermath of Piso’s adoption, joked

‘that it made no difference to him now whether he fell in battle at the hands

of an enemy or in the Forum at the hands of his creditors’, 41 he was not

signalling the ruin of his hopes, but the opposite: his resolve to fight for

them to the death. Too many people, he suspected, had too much invested in

him to give up on his prospects now. And so it proved. Agents were

recruited, bribes judiciously deployed, and large numbers of Praetorians

recruited to his cause. Otho, his delight in the swelling scale of the

conspiracy matched by his dread of leaks, waited impatiently for favourable

omens to arrive. He did not have long to wait. The gods indicated their

approval of his venture on 15 January. Otho promptly gave the signal for

the coup to begin. Piso had been a Caesar for a mere five days.

That morning, Galba, too, was taking soundings from the gods. Otho

joined him on the Palatine, where sacrifice was being made to Apollo. The

seer consulted the entrails. The omens, he warned the emperor, were

threatening. A conspiracy was gathering pace. There was an enemy within

the gates. Otho, listening to these words, kept a perfectly straight face.

Then, a few moments later, one of his freedmen brought him a message.

‘The architects are waiting,’ he said. 42 Otho, making his apologies,

explained that he was in the midst of a complicated property deal, and

slipped away. Leaving the Palatine by a back route, he stole down the side

of the hill. At its foot, met by his accomplices, he climbed into a woman’s

litter. He was then borne away at top speed to the Praetorian camp. After a

while, noticing that the porters were flagging, he climbed out and began to

run – but as he paused to re-tie his sandal, his companions lifted him onto

their shoulders and hailed him as Caesar. Cheering soldiers surrounded him.

The officer in charge, taken aback, failed to close the gates, nor made any

attempt to disperse the swelling crowd of men. Since Laco, the prefect, was

with his master on the Palatine, Otho and his accomplices found it a simple

matter to secure the camp. To raucous cheers, a gilded statue of Galba was

brought crashing down. Otho, saluting the soldiers and blowing them

kisses, delivered a rabble-rousing speech. He then gave orders for the

arsenal to be opened. By now, with both the Praetorians and I Adiutrix – the

legion of former marines that had been decimated on Galba’s orders –

giving him their full and enthusiastic backing, he could afford to breathe a

sigh of relief. His gamble had paid off. Rome was effectively his.

Meanwhile, on the Palatine, rumours of the coup were starting to

percolate. The reports, however, were confused. Neither the emperor nor his

advisors remotely grasped the scale of the crisis facing them. Piso delivered

a worthy speech. Messengers were dispatched to rally troops that had

already defected to Otho. A large crowd, senators among them, gathered to

demonstrate their support and to demand vengeance on the rebels. Galba,

ignoring advice from one of his closest confidants to lock himself up inside

the palace, decided to send Piso to check on the Praetorian camp. But no

sooner had the young Caesar gone than a fresh rumour eddied across the

Palatine. Otho was dead, his followers slaughtered, the rebellion over

before it had begun. A Praetorian displayed a sword dripping with blood

and claimed personally to have cut down the usurper. The emperor, by now

sufficiently mistrustful of these reports to have strapped on a breastplate,

nevertheless allowed himself to be swept up by his supporters. Sitting in a

chair, he was borne this way and that, swaying on their floodtide. All were

cheering and chanting. And then, as Galba was carried into the Forum, he

suddenly looked round and saw Piso.

The young Caesar was wild-eyed and out of breath. The news he

brought, that Otho was very much alive and in command of the Praetorian

camp, could not have come to Galba as more of a blow. As his closest

advisors debated frantically among themselves whether to return to the

Palatine, or barricade themselves on the Capitol, or take shelter behind the

rostra, the emperor himself appeared befuddled by the shock of it all.

Rather than attempting to take back control, he allowed himself to be borne

still on the ebb and flow of the crowd. Then, abruptly, from the far edge of

the crowd, he heard screams. Looking round, he saw a squad of horsemen.

Their swords were drawn. Onwards they came. Across the Forum they

galloped. All those in their path, even senators, were trampled down. Galba

called out to the Praetorians who had been attending him to take up

position. None of them did as they were told. Instead, one of the guards

reached for the image of the emperor on their standard, tore it off and flung

it onto the ground. Everyone now understood that Galba was doomed. His

supporters sought to flee. Among those joining the stampede were the men

who had been carrying the emperor in his chair. Galba was sent sprawling

onto the flagstones as Otho’s men surrounded him.

Differing accounts were given of the emperor’s end. Some, those who

hated him, claimed that he had grovelled before the Praetorians and

promised them a pay rise. Most, however, were agreed that he perished

bravely. His murderers, once he was dead, continued to stab and hack at his

body. Others, fanning out across the Forum and beyond, hunted down his

accomplices. Among the leading figures in Galba’s regime to be butchered

by the Praetorians was their own prefect – fit punishment, it might have

been thought, for Laco’s disastrous failure to maintain their loyalty. 43 Piso,

who had taken shelter in one of the temples in the Forum, was cut down on

the very threshold of the sanctuary.

The heads of all three men were delivered to the new emperor. The

soldier who had decapitated Galba, prevented by the emperor’s baldness

from taking it by the hair, stuck his thumb into the dead man’s mouth and

carried it that way to Otho. Head-hunting was regarded by the Romans as a

horrific and barbarous practice, beneath the dignity of a civilised people.

Yet heads were now being harvested. The events of a day which had seen an

emperor publicly murdered in the very shadow of the Capitol, beneath the

looming and sacred immensity of its temples, had introduced into the city a

strange fever of savagery. The world seemed turned upside down. Romans

indulged in displays of barbarism that would have shamed a German or a

Briton. Otho gloated over the head of Piso; Galba’s head, stuck on a spear,

was paraded by camp-followers around the Praetorian barracks. Only as the

sun began to set was it finally handed over to the dead emperor’s steward.

Galba’s burial that same night in his private gardens was the burial as well

of an entire tradition in Roman public life. A scion of the ancient nobility

had been given his chance to restore the city to its ancient ways – and he

had failed spectacularly. The chance would never come again. ‘Everyone

had agreed how suited Galba was to rule – except that then he had ruled.’44

* Probably. The sources for the date of Galba’s birth are contradictory. But he was certainly in his

early seventies.

OceanofPDF.com

FOUR EMPERORS

Mutiny on the Rhine

Part of the bewilderment felt in Rome at the spectacle of Galba’s downfall

was that mighty convulsions in the affairs of the world rarely took place in

January. The death of Nero, Galba’s march from Spain, the establishment of

his regime in the capital: these upheavals, seismic though they were, had at

least happened during the time of year when great events were supposed to

happen. Winter, by contrast, was a season for drawing breath. Soldiers kept

to their barracks, ships to their harbours, and those who could afford to do

so to their homes. Snow mantled the mountain peaks that fringed the

capital, and trees strained beneath its weight. It was a time to stoke up the

fire, bring out a jar of vintage wine, and leave the screaming of gales to the

gods.

Such, at any rate, was the idea. In AD 69, however, things were to prove

different. Otho, compassing the downfall of a Caesar, may have been the

first in that fateful year to grasp after the rule of the world; but others would

soon be doing the same. Not for a century had Rome been troubled by the

tread of rival warlords. The Roman people had grown accustomed to peace.

The blood spilled in the wars that had brought Augustus to power had long

since dried, and the wounds had been bound up and healed. Senators in the

capital, groaning under the rule of a Caligula or a Nero, may have learned

to dread the hammering of Praetorians on their gates; but this had only ever

been a tax paid on their rank. The vast mass of people, whether in Rome, or

in Italy, or in the provinces beyond, had never had any cause to imagine that

the days of civil war might return. The Pax Romana had held.

No wonder, then, barely two weeks after the turning of the year, that the

murder of an emperor on the streets of Rome should have come as such a

shock. Even in the farthest reaches of the empire, where barbarians might

still endure as a lurking presence, swords were rarely drawn from their

sheaths in the icy dead of the year. Chill though the streets of the capital

might be in January, they could not compare for cold with more northerly

climes. Winter was notoriously harsh on the banks of ‘the icy Rhine’. 1 The

barbarians themselves, of course, knew no better. ‘The climate has

habituated them to the cold.’2 To anyone raised in Italy, however, the snow

and sleet of a northern winter were bound to seem grimly appropriate to the

wilds that stretched beyond the Rhine. There was nothing in Germany that

anyone from a civilised land might envy or desire: only bristling forests and

stinking swamps. Savage lands bred savage men.

Sixty years previously, in AD 9, a general named Quinctilius Varus had

suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in Rome’s history when he and

some twenty thousand men, stumbling along the margins of a great bog, had

been ambushed by German warbands and wiped out almost to the last

legionary. The ‘Varian disaster’, as it was commemorated by the Roman

people, had prompted an iron-forged response. This was a matter of course.

The occasional reverse in battle might be forgiven; but defeat in a war

never. No Roman could ever concede that. Vengeance on the tribes

responsible for the Varian disaster had been murderous. Summer after

summer, the legions had marched across the Rhine. Summer after summer,

they had visited fire and slaughter on everyone in their path. Summer after

summer, they had sent echoing into even the remotest reaches of Germany,

into its most impenetrable depths, a rumour of the wrath and terror of

Rome.

Eventually, however – once the point had been decisively made – a halt

had been called to such operations. It was never a matter of policy for the

Roman people to exterminate their adversaries. Augustus himself, in his last

testament, had rendered this explicit. ‘When it was safe to pardon foreign

peoples,’ he noted graciously, ‘my preference was to spare rather than to

wipe them out.’3 His own hope had always been to tame the Germans, to

plant cities in their midst, to break them to the civilisation that came from

being the cives – the citizens – of a settled community. The Varian disaster

had put paid to that. By refusing to accept Roman rule, the Germans had

shown themselves undeserving of its fruits. Better, a succession of emperors

had concluded, to leave them to wallow in the sump of their own savagery.

Yet this policy too had imposed demands on Roman arms. Barbarians, by

their very nature, were shiftless, treacherous, migratory. The risk was

always that, left to their own devices, they might attempt to force the Rhine,

to spill into lands brought the benefits of Roman peace, to strip them bare.

‘Always, whenever Germans cross into the provinces of Gaul, it is in

pursuit of the same things: rape, riches, and a change of scene.’4

This was why, even though the bulk of Germany might not be worth the

effort of conquest, there remained an obligation to stand sentry upon its

flank. The mobility and aggression that traditionally were the hallmarks of

Roman military power had come to be tempered. Twin military zones were

established along the Rhine’s western bank. The first of these, Lower

Germany, ran from the North Sea to the confluence with the Moselle; * the

second, Upper Germany, along the middle reaches of the great river. Here,

in this narrow strip of land, had been invested a massive effort of

engineering. No barbarian could miss it. Watchtowers loomed above the

Rhine. Signal-stations dotted its length. Ships patrolled its waters. Lacking

in cities the western flank of Germany may have been; but not in military

infrastructure. Nowhere in the Roman world was the army so omnipresent.

The aim was to render Gaul and the vitals of the empire impenetrable.

This buttressing of the Rhine did not, of course, imply any acceptance

on the part of the Roman high command that there might be limits to their

own reach. There was no word for ‘frontier’ in Latin. Valuable as the Rhine

might be as a physical delineation of Roman power, the river did not mark

its limits. Bridges spanned the swirling currents. Pastureland on the eastern

bank was designated prata legionis: ‘meadows of the legion’. No Germans

were permitted to settle close to it. Those who made the attempt were

unfailingly driven back. The Roman military authorities reserved the right

to destroy their settlements, burn their crops, and enforce the transfer of

entire peoples should the situation so require. To gaze from a watchtower

on the Rhine to the far bank was to know that civilisation, rather than

coming to an abrupt halt, faded gradually. The great charge of Roman arms

was to keep the barbarism festering in the very darkest reaches of Germany,

where men lived like animals, and possessed the limbs and bodies of wild

beasts, forever at bay.

By definition, to serve on the banks of Rhine was to stand at a remove

from the centre of things. To Aulus Caecina, the ambitious young man

promoted to the command of a legion there after delivering the treasury of

Baetica into Galba’s hands, his reward had proven a form of torture. While

Otho, over the second half of AD 68, had been able to stalk the corridors of

power in Rome, to wine and dine senators, to take out loans and lavish

bribes where they would most count, Caecina had been obliged to twiddle

his thumbs in Upper Germany. What was a bog compared to the Forum, a

dripping forest to the Palatine? The frustration of it all, at a time when the

convulsions of the age were offering unprecedented opportunity to men on

the make, was intense. When Caecina, looking to feather his nest,

embezzled some public funds, it betrayed his impatience as much as his

greed. Not that this had cut any ice with Galba. The emperor had always

looked askance at peculation. He had duly ordered the young man brought

to trial. Caecina’s prospects seemed to have taken a terminal plunge.

Or had they? To command a legion, even one stationed on the outer

limits of civilisation, was not, perhaps, to be as entirely removed from the

heartbeat of power as it might seem. The army stood at the very centre of

what it meant to be a Roman. So it had always done. Once, back in the early

days of the republic, a legion – a legio – had meant simply a levy of the

Roman people. Only in times of war had the city possessed an army at all.

The Campus Martius, rich in monuments and pleasure gardens though it

had come to be, preserved in its name a reminder of those ancient days. To

assemble on the Field of Mars, to be sorted into a legion, had been for the

Roman people to pass from one dimension of citizenship into another: to

become a different order of man. The oath that every recruit was obliged to

swear – the sacramentum – fashioned him anew as a thing of iron, for it

bound him ‘never to flee, never to desert out of cowardice, never to

abandon the battle line’.5 Discipline was all. This was the tradition that had

inspired the story told of Manlius Torquatus and his son, along with a host

of similar edifying tales. They reflected a time when the army had been a

unitary entity: the Roman people in arms.

A time long gone, of course. Inevitably, as Rome’s power grew, so it had

become impossible to maintain the army as a single levy. Rather than one

legion, there might be ten, or fifteen, or twenty, at any one time in the field.

These, operating in various theatres of war, often for years at a time, had

become, by the final century of the republic’s existence, not levies but

professional armies. Legionaries had come to owe their loyalty not to

Rome, but to the commander at their head. Warlords, during the civil wars,

had presumed to impose their own version of the sacramentum. Last and

greatest of these warlords had been Augustus. The legions that were posted

to various parts of the Roman world – to the Rhine, to the Danube, to Syria,

to Egypt – were his legions. The men sent to command them were his

deputies: his legati, his ‘legates’. The sacramentum the legionaries swore

every year at the beginning of January, fearsome as it was and hedged about

by blood-curdling sanctions, signified their allegiance to him personally.

Each Caesar who succeeded Augustus inherited this command. Such it was

to be an emperor. To lose the armies – as Nero had discovered – was to lose

the rule of Rome.

No less than the capital itself, the forces camped out along the distant

Rhine were indelibly stamped by the great revolution in the affairs of the

city that had shattered the republic for ever and brought the Caesars to

power. Caecina, arriving in Upper Germany, had been taking command not

just of a legion, but of a living link to the age of Augustus. Originally

recruited by Julius Caesar during the civil war that had brought him the

mastery of Rome, IV Macedonica had never failed, following Caesar’s

assassination, in its loyalty to his adoptive son. Again and again, it had

proved its devotion. Bloodiest and most heroic of its battle-honours had

been a titanic engagement fought in Macedonia, in northern Greece, which

had seen Caesar’s murderers defeated once and for all, and provided the

legion with its name. Augustus, rather than disbanding it once the civil wars

had been brought to an end, and his own supremacy securely established,

had opted instead to keep it in service. For a decade, completing a conquest

of the peninsula that had dragged on for two centuries, it had fought in

Spain. There, for another sixty years, it had remained as a garrison. Then,

replacing a legion transferred by Claudius to take part in the conquest of

Britain, it had been posted to Upper Germany. Its base was a camp named

Mogontiacum: modern-day Mainz. By the early autumn of 68, when

Caecina took up his legateship, IV Macedonica had been stationed on the

Rhine for almost three decades. An entire generation recruited to the legion

had known no other home.

Never before in history had there been a standing army of this order: IV

Macedonica had over five thousand legionaries, and yet it was just one of

thirty such armies. Some of these gloried in a record of campaigning that

reached all the way back to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul; others – such as I

Adiutrix, the legion which Nero had raised in the last, desperate weeks of

his life, and which Galba had decimated on his way to Rome – had been in

existence for barely a few months. To serve as a legionary was not just to

feel a ferocious esprit de corps, but to view other armies with a certain

contempt. Resentments that in certain cases reached all the way back to the

civil wars might be nurtured down the generations. IV Macedonica, for

instance, was not the only fourth legion in service. A second one, IV

Scythica, had been recruited by Antony, and even after its founder’s death

had refused to give up its number. Rather than risk stoking the legion’s

resentment, Augustus had ceded the point. It was in a similar spirit of

compromise that he had permitted no fewer than three third legions to

coexist. This was why an army required a name as well as a number to be

properly distinctive: III Gallica had been recruited by Caesar in Gaul; III

Cyrenaica had originally been stationed in Cyrene, a city in Libya; III

Augusta commemorated Augustus. Of the two sixth legions, one was

named Ferrata – ‘Ironside’ – and the other Victrix, ‘Victorious’. In the name

awarded to I Adiutrix – ‘Helper’ – there was to be found an assurance that,

despite their bruising introduction to life as legionaries, the erstwhile

marines might yet do good service.

There was, then, no one Roman army – just a range of armies. Even

when legions shared a base, they would jealously guard their

distinctiveness. On the Rhine, which had the heaviest concentration of

troops anywhere in the empire, seven legions in all, there were two such

headquarters. One, Vetera, stood in Lower Germany; the second was

Mogontiacum. Both had been founded some eighty years previously; both,

over the course of the decades, had been repeatedly expanded, strengthened,

rebuilt. Together, they played a key role in maintaining Rome’s offensive

capabilities: for both commanded access to navigable rivers which, joining

the Rhine on its eastern bank, reached like dagger thrusts deep into the

bowels of Germany. It was along the line of one of these rivers, the Lippe,

that Varus had marched on the fateful expedition that culminated in the

annihilation of his three legions; and it was in the wake of the Varian

disaster that Vetera, the fortress to which the three legions had been

returning when the ambush took place, had been massively upgraded. Sixty

years on, it bristled with freshly constructed stone fortifications. It also

boasted barracks sufficient to accommodate not one but a pair of legions.

The senior of these, V Alaudae, had perhaps the most distinctive name

of any legion: for alaudae, ‘larks’, was not a Latin word, but a Gaulish one.

Julius Caesar had paid for the legion out of his own funds as the conquest of

Gaul was nearing its climax, and its soldiers – like those of III Gallica – had

been recruited entirely from Gallic warriors. They had made a point of

wearing feathers on the sides of their helmets, giving them, so the joke had

it, a resemblance to the crested lark.6 This, more than a century on, was

precisely the kind of detail that any legionary serving with the Alaudae was

bound to treasure. Bragging rights were of particular importance to soldiers

obliged to share their base with another legion – and at Vetera there could

be no doubt which of the two armies outranked the other. The other legion

stationed there, XV Primigenia, named after the goddess of fortune, had

been in existence a mere thirty years, and its creator, the notorious Caligula,

could hardly compare in the annals of fame with Julius Caesar. So it was

that the Larks occupied the right-hand, more prestigious side of the base:

for pedigree, on the limits of civilisation just as in Rome, was never to be

disrespected.

A point insisted upon by IV Macedonica as well. Just like the Larks,

they shared their base with a legion created by Caligula and named

Primigenia: in this case, XXII Primigenia. Here at least, for a man as

desperate to climb the slippery pole of advancement as Caecina, was

something to cling to. As commander of the legion that occupied the

position of honour in Mogontiacum, he ranked as the most senior officer in

the entire camp. To be sure, there was no getting away from the brute facts

of his situation: that he was stuck in a German winter. To stand on the

ramparts of the military base, to gaze down towards the Rhine, to watch

sentries on the great bridge that spanned its currents stamping their feet and

blowing on their hands to keep warm, was to have that rubbed brutally

home. But it was also to appreciate something else. The settlement that had

grown up at the base of the fort, and which reached all the way down to the

river, was not an entirely barbarous place. It had monuments to dead Roman

heroes; a bath-house; a gilded statue of Jupiter mounted to imperious effect

on a column, so that whenever the winter sun broke through the clouds the

god would blaze, and seem fashioned out of golden fire. Though it was raw

and muddy, and to anyone familiar with Rome irredeemably provincial, yet

it served too as a reminder of a time when Rome itself had been provincial.

Back in the heroic early years of its existence, after all, the city that now

ruled as the mistress of the world had been obliged to stand constant sentry

against its foes. As Mogontiacum was now, so had Rome herself once been.

Such a reflection, perhaps, came naturally to a man with the command

of an army. Professional though the legions were, and drawn though they

tended to be from recruits who were most unlikely ever to have visited

Rome, they aspired to be as hard and martial as soldiers in the early days of

the city had been. ‘The virile progeny of rustic warriors, youths taught to

turn the soil with Sabine spades’:7 this was how poets celebrated the

ancestors of the Roman people. Sadly, however, the days when men of such

quality might be found in Rome itself, and summoned to serve with the

legions, were long gone. The fruits of peace had proven too enervating.

What did the plebs know about turning the soil with Sabine spades? Men

softened by the pleasures and perks of urban living could hardly be

expected to display the backbone required of previous generations. Galba

was not the first emperor to have fretted about this deterioration. ‘Quite

without the traditional courage and steel.’8 Such had been the damning

verdict of Tiberius on recruits drawn from towns across Italy. The result

was a paradox. Where, moralists might well ask themselves, was one

likeliest to meet men possessed of the spirit that had first, back in the early

centuries of Rome’s existence, enabled the city to embark on its rise to

greatness? Not in the Forum, not in the Campus Martius, that was for sure.

Rather, in places so distant from Rome that antique heroes such as Manlius

Torquatus most likely had never even heard of them. In places, it might be,

like the Rhine.

‘Military discipline – that is what underpins the Roman state.’9 Four

hundred years and more had passed since Manlius, arraigning his son on a

charge of disobedience, had delivered himself of this ringing maxim. What

in the metropolis might seem rebarbative and almost comically out of

fashion did not seem so in Germany. There, everyone knew what was owed

to the habit of obedience. The Gauls might have been more numerous, the

Germans taller, the Spaniards physically stronger, the Africans more

practised in the arts of treachery and bribery, the Greeks more cunning and

intelligent; but only the legions had the disciplina Romana.10 This it was

that had enabled them to conquer the world. Four centuries on from the age

of Manlius Torquatus, and the steel shown by legionaries in battle was of a

kind that might have startled even the stern old consul. No longer, as their

ancestors had done, did they advance in loose formation, chanting and

pounding their weapons on their shields. Such wild behaviour was now left

to barbarians. Instead, slowly and steadily, maintaining tightly serried ranks,

a Roman army walked in silence towards its foe; and only at the very last

moment, once the enemy was within range, would the legionaries break

their silence with a great battle cry, hurl their spears, and break into a run.

Self-control of this order was impossible without years of rigorous training

– which was why only a Roman army could master it.

Nevertheless, a legion was not some mere killing machine. A Roman

officer wanted more than blind obedience from his men. To be sure,

punishments for the rank and file might often be brutal, and no one

sentenced to them had any right of appeal. Nevertheless, the scarring that

many soldiers bore on their backs, entire fretworks of welts, did not mean

that they were ever to be compared with slaves. Quite the opposite. Only

citizens were allowed to serve with the legions. Slaves, if they were found

to have volunteered, would invariably be sent to the mines. This was

because a legionary, even as he had to be broken to discipline like a horse or

a hunting dog, also had to exercise the virtus, the manly quality that was

properly that of a citizen. He had to show initiative as well as obedience;

ardour for glory as well as self-restraint. If this risked paradox, then so had

it always done, right from the earliest days of the republic. The genius of

the Roman people had long lain in their ability to square two seemingly

contradictory instincts: a yearning to excel, and a deep suspicion of

vainglory. The republic might be long gone; but there still remained, in a

base like Mogontiacum, just a ghostly hint of its paradoxes.

‘What is a camp to a soldier? Why, it is like a second Rome.’11 This

conviction, that no legion, not even when it was on the march, should ever

submit to spending a night in the open, but rather should fashion a camp for

itself, one commensurate with its dignity as an army of citizens, had been a

constant for many centuries. Indeed, it was what had first brought home to

the Greeks that the Romans were not merely barbarians. Foreign observers,

even those familiar with the workings of the legions, could never entirely

shake their sense of wonder at the ability of a Roman army to construct a

camp complete with ramparts, neatly spaced blocks of tents and a forum in

a matter of hours. ‘It is as though a town has sprung up from nowhere.’12

Between a marching camp and the great military bases that studded the

length of the Rhine there were differences of degree rather than of kind: for

all the German legionary camps had originated as makeshift winter

quarters. The Romans themselves compared them to beehives: geometric,

perfectly ordered, a dimension in which everyone knew his place and the

collective was all.

Not just a second Rome, then, but a model of what, in an ideal world,

Rome might have been. The Roman people had always been great

enthusiasts for evaluating and calibrating where they stood on the social

scale. Back in the early days of the city, when citizens would gather on the

Campus Martius in preparation for military service, each man would be

ranked according to his wealth and status, and then, based on this ranking,

receive assignment to a ‘century’. So satisfying had everyone in the city

found this system to be that it had provided the basis not just for the

structure of the army, but for elections too. Throughout the entire existence

of the republic, the Roman people had voted in centuries. Only with the

coming to power of Augustus had this constitutional arrangement finally

ended: for would-be magistrates, no longer dependent on the votes of their

fellow-citizens, had come to compete instead for Caesar’s favour. Even so,

old habits died hard. A sense persisted that Rome could only properly be

Rome if detailed records were maintained of precisely who held citizenship.

This is what had prompted Claudius, in the year 47, to conduct a census.

Evidence had been taken from one end of the empire to the other. The total

number of citizens had been recorded with an impressive degree of

exactitude: 5,984,072. Claudius himself had publicly acknowledged just

how gruelling the effort of arriving at this figure had been. The truth was

that Rome had become too vast, and the reach of the empire too immense,

for a ready track of her citizens to be maintained. Only in military bases

was it different. Only there could the traditional enthusiasm for calibration

still be given free rein.

As a result, there were few institutions in the world quite as bureaucratic

as a legion. Every recruit had his own personal dossier. Details of his

character, his distinguishing features and his military record were kept

permanently on file. ‘To rank as soldiers men must first be entered on the

records.’13 This was simple common sense. Without records, after all, how

could any legionaries know their proper place? Every soldier served in a

century. Every century was commanded by an officer – a ‘centurion’ –

whose responsibility it was to keep his men in order, and who had himself,

most likely, been promoted from the ranks. Six centuries formed a cohort;

ten cohorts formed a legion. The first century in every cohort, and the first

cohort in every legion, ranked as the most senior. All of which, in a manner

true to the most venerable and noble traditions of the Roman people,

instilled in every soldier a hunger, a passion for honour. There was no

legionary so humble that he might not dream of becoming a centurion, just

as there was no centurion who did not dream of promotion to the command

of a more senior century. The pinnacle of every soldier’s ambition was to

lead the first century in the first cohort, the most distinguished century of

all: for then he would rank as primus pilus, the legion’s chief centurion.

Those who despaired of Rome’s moral character had only to look to the

Rhine for reassurance that an ancient maxim still packed a punch. ‘Its

venerable customs, and the quality of its men: these are what enable the

Roman state to endure.’14

Obedience was the first duty of every soldier; but loyalty to the

traditions and best interests of Rome was just as important. The

sacramentum was sworn to the emperor; but so, too, was it sworn to the

Roman state. What if these two obligations should come into conflict? This,

in the opinion of many in the legions stationed along the Rhine, was not a

merely abstract question. Galba’s rise to power had brought it sharply into

focus. The new emperor did not have the blood of Augustus in his veins. He

could claim no line of descent from a god. Nor was he remembered fondly

on the Rhine. His term of command there had been a savage one. It was not

enough for a general to be a disciplinarian; he also had to win his soldiers’

love. This Galba had signally failed to do. The events of the past year had

only confirmed the German legions in their suspicion of the upstart Caesar.

He had failed to reward them for suppressing Vindex’s revolt. He had

dismissed Verginius Rufus, their much-respected commander, from office.

He had persistently treated them with disdain. So it was, on 1 January, that

many along the Rhine hesitated to swear the sacramentum to him. In

Vetera, it was true, this mood of resentment did not blaze into open mutiny:

the legionaries in Lower Germany were persuaded by their officers to

swallow their doubts and swear the oath. In Mogontiacum, however, it was

a different story. There, it was not the rank and file who took the lead in

repudiating Galba. It was their legate.

Caecina’s stage as a mutineer was the Principia. This great complex of

courtyards and buildings standing at the very heart of the base served as his

legion’s headquarters. The most impressive building of all was an immense

hall lined with columns, one half of which had been built by IV

Macedonica, and the other half by XXII Primigenia.15 Each half contained a

shrine, and each shrine a gilded eagle. Every legion had one. To lose it – as

the three armies wiped out in the Varian disaster had done – was the worst

disgrace imaginable. This was why Galba, by refusing to grant an eagle to I

Adiutrix when he first entered Rome, had precipitated a full-blown riot. It

was also why the statues of the emperor that stood next to an eagle in its

shrine possessed, for the soldiers of a legion, a rare and awful potency; and

it was why, for any legionary who had sworn the sacramentum, the thought

of smashing them was a blasphemy too shocking to contemplate. Equally,

the refusal of the soldiers stationed in Mogontiacum to pledge their loyalty

to Galba was a signal, that first day of the year, to send them toppling onto

the floor. Incited by Caecina, IV Macedonica took the lead; after some

initial hesitation, XXII Primigenia followed. Four centurions who tried to

stop the mutiny were arrested. The fateful step had been taken. The die had

been cast.

The oath the legionaries swore that day was not to any individual, but to

the Senate and People of Rome. This did not, however, imply any ambition

to restore a republican form of government. Rather, it reflected the awkward

fact that the mutinous legions had not yet settled on their own candidate as

Caesar. Caecina, for all his ambition and restlessness, was not so headstrong

as to imagine that he might take Galba’s place. Only a man with sufficient

rank and pedigree could hope to do that. The obvious choice for Caecina

and his fellow conspirators was the governor of Upper Germany, a former

consul by the name of Hordeonius Flaccus; but he was widely despised, and

not even the most optimistic mutineer could seriously imagine him as

emperor. Fortunately, Flaccus was not the only high-ranking official

stationed on the Rhine. The neighbouring region, too, was a military zone.

Its commander stood at the head of formidable resources of manpower.

Accordingly, even as Caecina was rousing his own soldiers to mutiny, he

had already factored in the need to win over the legions of Lower Germany

to his side, and to persuade their commander to take a fearful step: claim the

rule of the world.

The headquarters of Lower Germany lay some ninety miles downriver

from Mogontiacum, in a settlement that over the course of the preceding

century had emerged to become the single most impressive Roman

foundation anywhere on the Rhine. Originally it had been called Altar of

the Ubians, after a German tribe that had transferred from the eastern bank

back in the time of Augustus and settled in the region. The Ubians,

however, in honour of Nero’s mother, had renamed themselves the

Agrippinians, while Claudius, in a gracious show of patronage, had raised

the settlement’s status to that of a colonia: the highest honour to which any

city could aspire. To rank as a colony was to stand in a tradition that

reached back to the distant days of the monarchy: to plant such settlements

in pacified territory had always been a favoured method of the Roman

people for ensuring that a territory stayed pacified. The inhabitants of a

colony – whether retired legionaries or favoured natives – enjoyed

privileges beyond the dreams of those in the surrounding countryside: for

exclusivity was precisely the point. The Colonia of Claudius and the Altar

of the Agrippinians – Colonia, as it came to be known, or Cologne – served

as the true capital of the north. From here the governor of Lower Germany

commanded no fewer than four legions: the two based at Vetera and two

others, I Germanica and XVI Gallica. Colonia itself had no need of legions

to endow it with a martial air. As well as a formidable fleet, it boasted as its

most precious relic the sword of Julius Caesar. It was, in short, a seat not

inappropriate to a would-be emperor. Caecina certainly trusted that this was

so. No sooner had the statues of Galba been sent toppling at Mogontiacum

than he was dispatching a trusted officer to Lower Germany. The officer left

at top speed. So hard did he ride that he arrived in Colonia that same

evening. He went straight to the commander’s headquarters. There, without

waiting for the morning, he hurried through halls of sumptuous

magnificence. His ambition: not just to report news of the mutiny, but to

summon the commander of Lower Germany to the rule of the empire.

Aulus Vitellius was at supper. 16 This, to gossips back in Rome, would

have come as no surprise. Vitellius was notorious as a glutton. Like Otho,

he trailed a reputation for viciousness and depravity that reached all the way

back to his youth. A favourite of both Caligula and Nero, he had shared the

passion of both men for racing chariots at furious speed, until a spectacular

crash had left him with a permanent limp. He had also gambled

prodigiously, and – so it was darkly rumoured – prostituted himself. There

was no need, however, to assume that he had slept his way to advancement.

Vitellius’ record was more impressive than the slanders of his enemies

might suggest. His father, although a latecomer to the senate, had ended up

reaching heights dizzying even by the standards of the very grandest

senator. Not only had he held the consulship three times and served as

Claudius’ colleague in the conduct of the census, but upon his death he had

been granted a public funeral and awarded a statue on the rostra. Dignities

such as these counted for much. Vitellius’ pedigree, even if it could hardly

compare with Galba’s, let alone Nero’s, was not entirely worthless. Nor was

his record of public service. As governor of Africa he had been highly

praised for his integrity; as Galba’s appointee to the command of Lower

Germany, he had shown himself, in the space of only a few months, to be

both competent and personable. He had rescinded injustices, introduced

reforms, and displayed a common touch that, although dismissed by his

fellow senators as vulgar, delighted the rank and file. Louche he may have

been – but there were worse qualities, in the opinion of those who had

experienced Galba’s term of command, for a Caesar to possess.

Still, Vitellius hesitated. His doubts about the course of action being

urged on him by the mutineers ran deep. He had no wish to embroil the

Roman people in a civil war, nor any certainty that he had what it took to

rule the world. Yet to refuse equally threatened disaster. It would leave

Vitellius with little choice but to suppress the mutiny – and how confident

could he be that the soldiers under his own command would consent to

that? The answer was not long in coming. On 2 January, the elderly legate

of I Germanica, Fabius Valens, came galloping into Cologne. He had ridden

from Bonna – Bonn – where his legion had its base. Notorious for his

mastery of the darker political arts, he was, much like Caecina, a man in a

hurry, impatient for promotion. The two legates, perhaps unsurprisingly,

detested one another. Just as Caecina had done, Valens urged rebellion. The

following day, all the armies along the Rhine, in Lower and Upper

Germany alike, hailed Vitellius as emperor. Rather than show their respect

for the constitutional proprieties by informing the senate, they prepared

instead to march on Rome. That the traditional start of the campaigning

season was still several months away worried Caecina not a jot. Ever

impatient, he had no intention of waiting for spring before seizing the

initiative. Nor did Valens want to be left in the starting blocks. Both men

were set on bringing war to Italy as fast as they possibly could.

So all along the Rhine, amid the snow and sleet of a German January,

the legionary bases echoed to the preparations for war. Meanwhile, as

though to escape dwelling on the crisis that had overwhelmed him so

abruptly, and out of dread at what the next months might bring, the would-

be ruler of the world was sinking into a sozzled torpor. ‘Wallowing in

luxury and hosting lavish banquets, so that by midday, bloated with food, he

would slump into a drunken slumber: such were the preparations of

Vitellius for becoming emperor.’17

A Very Peculiar People

News of the mutiny on the Rhine was greeted with horror in Rome. Otho

was not the only one to be appalled. So, too, were the city’s elite. Vitellius’

failure to inform them of his change of circumstances was noted with

indignation. This slight, however, was not the worst. Civil war now

threatened. The flooding by the Tiber of the corn market, and its destruction

of Rome’s oldest bridge, were ominous portents of the ruin that was plainly

to come. As Otho and Vitellius, despite the winter season, both readied

themselves for the looming death struggle, many in the senate expressed a

longing, albeit under their breath, to see both men lose. It seemed to them a

cruel twist of fate that Nero should have been toppled only for the empire to

be fought over by a pair of his cronies: ‘the two men in the world most

notorious for shamelessness, indolence and extravagance’.18

Not that Otho agreed, of course. The sneering of his critics only steeled

him to prove them wrong. For all the murderous circumstances of his

accession, he had no relish for bloodshed. He behaved with a notable

leniency towards Galba’s followers, and did his best, in the opening weeks

of the conflict, to arrive at terms with Vitellius. He also made sure to tickle

the tummy of the senate. Prominent senators exiled by Nero were recalled;

appointments to the consulship respected; a concern for constitutional

proprieties flaunted. Even so, it was a treacherous tightrope that Otho had to

walk. Galba’s brief term as emperor had left many in Rome nostalgic for his

predecessor; and Otho, anxious to portray himself as heir to the house of

Augustus, knew that his youthful friendship with Nero might well, among

certain constituencies, be played for advantage. Funds were duly made

available to complete the Golden House; statues of Poppaea restored to

their plinths; Sporus maintained in his finery. Otho had a talent for the nod

and the wink. When the plebs and the Praetorians hailed him as ‘Nero

Otho’, the new emperor made sure not to acknowledge the title; but neither

did he repudiate it.

Meanwhile, Nero himself had come back from the dead. Such, at any

rate, was the news that began to sweep Greece. The appearance on Cythnus,

a small island in the Aegean, of a man who not only looked like Nero but

could sing and play the harp provoked wild excitement. The emperor’s

name still exerted a potent magic. ‘Many, eager for change and hating the

state of the world as it was, felt its pull. 19 Only the fortuitous stop-off on the

island of a provincial governor en route to take up his command enabled the

uprising to be nipped in the bud. The imposter, apprehended by the

governor’s escort, was put to death, and his corpse sent on a tour around the

Aegean. Its bulging eyes and the ferocity of its expression provoked general

astonishment. Then, once it had been made clear to everyone in Greece that

Nero was well and truly dead, and that he had not, after all, cheated the sad

and infernal gods, the body was sent on to Rome.

Yet the incident was more ominous than many in the capital cared to

acknowledge. The enthusiasm of the Greeks for Nero’s memory was hardly

surprising. He had, after all, remitted their taxes. Anxiety that this policy

might soon be reversed was widespread – and justifiably so. Yet any

nostalgia the Greeks felt for Nero was double-edged. Just as he was the

emperor who had lifted their tax burden, so it was he who had originally

crushed them beneath its weight. Golden houses, after all, did not come

cheap. There was an entire capital to rebuild. Tax-collectors, in provinces

untouched by Nero’s generosity, swarmed like flies over joints of meat.

Misery in the face of ceaseless exactions fused with yearning for a brighter

day. Across the eastern half of the empire and beyond, assorted prophecies

of a new and impending age of justice swirled, shimmered and coalesced.

Nero, in these, often had a starring role. In some he was a figure more than

human, who had escaped his persecutors, and would soon come again to

reign in majesty. In others he was a monster, who had fled Italy ‘like a

runaway slave unseen and unheard’.20 Invariably, in all these fantasies there

glimmered the same vision: of a world torn to pieces, and Rome’s empire

drowned in blood.

Otho, however, had other priorities. Focused as he was on the threat

from the Rhine, he had no time to worry about the seething mood of

discontent in the eastern provinces. It had been a long time since the Greek

world had presented any military threat. The age of Alexander the Great,

whose conquests had reached as far afield as India, was four centuries past.

The eastern Mediterranean, once ruled by various dynasties descended from

Alexander’s henchmen, was now a Roman lake. Famous cities – Antioch in

Syria, Alexandria in Egypt – no longer served as royal capitals, but as the

headquarters of provincial governors. Their wealth, their scale, their

splendour, far from serving to intimidate the Roman elite, tended instead to

inspire in them a mild contempt. The peoples of Asia, for all the dazzle of

their many achievements, were naturally fitted to be slaves. This was no

idle prejudice. Greek philosophers, wise in the ways in which the climate

affected the human constitution, had long ago proven it to everyone’s

satisfaction. Just as the cold weather of northern Europe bred men who

were spirited but stupid, so did the enervating heat of Syria or Egypt breed

men who were brilliant but soft. The happy medium, those who were

simultaneously spirited and brilliant, were the people who occupied ‘the

mid-position geographically’.21 The Greeks, with their customary conceit,

had identified this with their own cities. A comical error. History did not lie.

The ‘mid-position geographically’ was patently, self-evidently Rome.

Fitted by nature, then, for rule, the Romans had found it a far more

profitable business to subdue the peoples of the Orient than the barbarians

of the North. Whereas in Germany or Britain the infrastructure required to

extort taxes from a subject population needed to be created from scratch, in

Egypt or Syria it had been in existence for centuries. Governors sent from

Rome to the great capitals of the East ruled as the heirs of toppled royal

dynasties. Whether in Alexandria or Antioch, they lived in palaces, relied

on bureaucracies, and commanded structures of patronage inherited from

Macedonian kings. There were, however, many ways to shear a sheep.

Direct rule was not the only way to fleece subject peoples, and the Roman

authorities had no objection in principle to sponsoring monarchies. What

mattered was to be pragmatic.

Certainly, a king petty enough never to present a military threat, but

armed with sufficient tax-collectors to raise appropriate tribute, might prove

a valuable servant. As a result, the fabric of Roman rule in the Near East

had always been a patchwork. Provinces alternated with kingdoms; legates

with dutifully subservient monarchs. All were dependent on Caesar. Just as

a governor who overstepped the mark or failed in his responsibilities might

expect a recall, so did the threat of deposition hang over every king who

ruled as a Roman client. Augustus, redrawing the lines of provinces or

kingdoms as circumstance demanded, had set an example followed by

every subsequent emperor. What mattered was not consistency but whether

the coffers were full. That Nero had emptied them only made the task of

replenishing them the more urgent. Everything hung upon it. Without taxes,

after all, how were the soldiers to be paid? And without pay, how were the

legions to be maintained? And without legions, what prospect of

maintaining peace in the world?

Yet there was always, shadowing Rome’s voracious appetite for revenue,

a parallel danger. If the tax-collectors pushed their extortions too far, they

might well end up undermining rather than buttressing Roman power.

Nero’s reign had provided dramatic evidence of this. In Britain, a recently

invaded and precariously stabilised province, the natives had been pushed

into open rebellion. Led by a warrior queen named Boudicca, they had gone

on a murderous rampage. Three Roman settlements had been left as

smoking rubble. Only in the very nick of time, courtesy of a crushing

victory won against overwhelming odds, had the provincial authorities

managed to claw the situation back from the brink. Perhaps, bearing in

mind the character of the Britons, the rebellion should not have come as a

surprise. Barbarians that they were, and only recently conquered, they were

not accustomed to tax-collectors. The same could hardly be said, however,

of a second people who had erupted into revolt during Nero’s reign. These

were the inhabitants of a small but strategically vital region midway

between the ancient lands of Egypt and Syria, whose experience of

conquest by foreign powers was a venerable one, reaching back many

centuries: the Judaeans.

For a hundred years and more – ever since the storming of Jerusalem,

their ancient capital, by Pompey – they had been under the thumb of Rome.

Like most other peoples of the Near East, they were habituated to the use of

money, to tax-collectors, to the demands of mighty empires. Indeed, prior to

Pompey’s arrival, the Judaeans themselves had behaved as an imperial

power, assimilating their southern neighbours to their way of life, and

waging a brutal war of extermination against their neighbours to the north, a

people called the Samaritans. So successfully had they prosecuted this that

in 112 BC, half a century before Pompey’s arrival in the region, they had

captured both the holiest shrine in Samaria and its capital city, ‘destroying it

utterly, and enslaving its inhabitants’.22 Despite these twin calamities, the

Samaritans had succeeded in preserving their identity against the Judaeans’

resolute attempt to destroy it; and the coming of the Romans had obliged

the rival peoples, however reluctantly, to cease their hostilities.

Nevertheless, the mutual hatred between them was undiminished – and

certainly much greater than the resentment either felt towards their new

overlords. The Romans, old hands at dividing and ruling, had naturally

made sure to take full advantage.

The Judaean elites in particular had proven ready collaborators: for the

Roman authorities, far from undermining the local primacy of Jerusalem,

had consistently sought to buttress it. This was why, far from anticipating

trouble, they had felt able to govern Judaea with a notably light hand. No

legion was stationed there. Such garrisons as did exist were small. Even

when the peculiar customs of the Judaeans required them to assemble in

Jerusalem in vast and teeming numbers, the Roman authorities – habitually

nervous of large provincial congregations – made no attempt to ban them.

There seemed no need for such measures. Certainly, nothing in the century

and more of Rome’s engagement with Judaea suggested trouble. Rather, it

seemed that the Judaeans could be relied upon to play by the rules: to pay

their taxes, and avoid doing anything foolish. But then, abruptly, this

conventional wisdom had been turned on its head. In AD 66, while Nero was

in Greece, touring the country’s festivals and soaking up the applause of the

crowds, startling news had reached him. The Judaeans were in revolt.

The blaze, it seemed, had been sparked by a distant fire. In 64, Rome

had gone up in flames. That same year, Nero had sent out a new official to

administer Judaea. Gossips claimed that Gessius Florus had secured his

appointment thanks to his wife’s friendship with Poppaea; but it was not

long before he had begun to demonstrate a qualification that might have

recommended him to Nero even more. ‘He stripped bare whole cities; he

ruined entire communities.’23 Wherever there were funds to be extorted,

Florus would extort them. Depredations on this scale were something new.

Barely a year into Florus’ term of office, a vast demonstration was staged

against him in Jerusalem. The occasion was the visit to the city of Cestius

Gallus, the governor of Syria, and Florus’ immediate superior. Cestius,

listening to the protestors, had given them solemn assurances. Florus would

be reined in. His exactions would be eased. Yet Cestius was in no position

to meet these promises. Florus was answerable not to him, but to Nero.

What Nero wanted Nero got – and what Nero wanted in the wake of the

great fire was large amounts of money. So it was that Florus had continued

with his depredations; and so it was, a mere two years after his appointment

to the province, that Judaea had exploded.

Yet this, perhaps, was not the entire story. Even analysts who could

recognise how badly the Judaeans had been treated, and ‘how patiently they

had endured their oppression’,24 could recognise as well that they were a

most unusual people. If, like the Egyptians or the Syrians, they had been

shaped by their experience as the subjects of a long succession of

monarchies, then so also, in many of their customs, did they more closely

resemble the barbarians of the north. Like the Germans, they counted it a

crime to expose unwanted babies; like the Germans, they were renowned

for their suspicion of foreigners; like the Germans, they refused to put up

statues to the gods. Even these comparisons, however, only hinted at the

behaviour that rendered the Judaeans most truly distinctive. ‘Everything we

hold sacred they scorn as superstition, and practices which we abominate

they uphold.’25 That the origins of the Judaean way of life went very far

back in time – and were certainly more ancient than Rome itself – even the

most hostile witnesses agreed. Broadly understood as well were some of the

more curious details of the Judaeans’ history: that their distant ancestors

had lived in Egypt; that they had been led to what became their homeland

by a man named Moses; and that this same Moses had instructed them in a

most novel form of worship. The precise details were too obscure to merit

close study; but the outline was clear enough. The Judaeans believed that

there was only one god, ‘almighty and eternal, inimitable and without

end’.26 Various laws had been given by this god to Moses. The Judaeans

were obliged to circumcise themselves; to sit around every seventh day –

the ‘Sabbath’, as they termed it – in indolence and idleness; never to eat

pork. No matter where they might live – whether in Judaea itself, or in

Alexandria, or in Rome – they were all required to follow these

prescriptions. Outlandish, of course; but obedience to the law given by

Moses had at least enabled the Judaeans, in a world where they were vastly

outnumbered by other, more powerful peoples, to preserve their identity.

‘Whether at table or in bed, they exist as a people apart.’27

Even so, despite their many peculiarities, the Judaeans were not notably

more alien or sinister than numerous other peoples who, over the course of

the centuries, had likewise been brought under Roman rule. They did not,

for instance, as the Britons did, practise human sacrifice. They did not, as

the Egyptians did, worship gods in the form of animals. They did not, as the

Syrians did, castrate themselves. A few Romans, indeed, far from scorning

the worship of the Judaean god as folly and superstition, rather admired it.

Learned scholars might identify him with Jupiter. Philosophers might praise

Moses for his wisdom, and salute the Judaeans as ‘philosophers by race’. 28

Men about town, somewhat improbably, might recommend the house of

prayer built in Rome by the Judaeans of the city – the ‘synagogue’, as it

was known – as a place to pick up girls. Even Poppaea, that very epitome of

fashion, was known by the Judaeans to be a theosebes: a woman who

respected their god. It was not necessary actually to attend a synagogue, or

to give up pork, or to keep the Sabbath, for Roman trendsetters to recognise

in Judaean customs and beliefs something daringly countercultural,

something edgy and chic.

‘So far have the practices of this detestable people spread that they have

been adopted across almost the entire world.’29 This – a complaint that

conservatives in Rome were prone to levelling against any foreign cult they

might find in the city – was a wild exaggeration. Judaea was far too distant,

far too insignificant, to have much of a public profile. Its people

nevertheless did have a certain talent for punching above their weight.

Synagogues were to be found in all the great cities of the empire: not only

Rome, but Alexandria, and Antioch, and many others besides. The Judaeans

were an ancient people; and antiquity, so the Romans had always believed,

merited honour. Claudius – citing Augustus as his witness – had pointedly

issued a warning to anyone who might think otherwise. ‘The customs used

by the Judaeans in the ritual of their god demand respect.’30

Such a declaration – coming as it did from Caesar – brooked no

argument. Mobs in Alexandria tempted to turn on the Judaean community

in the city were to remember that its presence there was almost as old as the

city itself. Soldiers in Judaea who insulted the writings of Moses by ripping

them up or tossing them on a fire might expect to be beheaded. Officials

tempted to curry favour with an emperor by erecting statues of him in

Jerusalem or minting coins with his head on them had only to recall the

reverse suffered by a governor named Pontius Pilate. ‘A vindictive man

with a monstrous temper’,31 Pilate had permitted legionary standards to be

brought into the city; but when the Judaeans, falling to the ground and

baring their throats, had cried out that they would rather die than break their

law, he had been left with little choice but to order the eagles removed. The

lesson was one that the Roman authorities had made sure to absorb: there

was no point in offending Judaean sensibilities just for the sake of it. Pilate,

indeed, rather than bearing a grudge against the provincials who had forced

him into retreat, had shown himself, over the course of his lengthy term of

office, to be a consistent patron of their interests. He had worked closely

with the Judaean priests. He had graced Jerusalem with an aqueduct. He

had harassed and bullied the Samaritans – so much so that, in the end, it had

led the governor of Syria to send him home.

The Roman people had won the rule of the world not only by force of

arms, but also by mastering the arts of peace. Jerusalem, the ancient capital

that was, in the opinion of the Judaeans, the very holiest place in the world,

had flourished under the rule of the Caesars. It was, so Roman gazetteers

freely acknowledged, ‘the most famous city of the East’. 32 The Temple

itself, once shabby and nondescript, had been spectacularly renovated.

Immense blocks of gleaming white stone; fittings of a sumptuous

splendour; courtyards vast enough to host the thousands of sacrifices

offered up day by day: here were spectacles that even visitors who were not

Judaean freely acknowledged to be one of the great sights of the empire.

The Temple, that great monument to the devotion of the Judaeans to their

god, was a monument as well to Roman order. Without pilgrims travelling

from every corner of the world to Jerusalem, bringing with them rich

offerings of tribute, the city would have been a miserable shadow of itself;

but equally, without the peace maintained by Roman arms, the roads kept

free of bandits, the shipping lanes kept free of pirates, the flood of pilgrims

would have diminished to a trickle. Most Judaeans – and especially those

who lived beyond Judaea – perfectly appreciated this. ‘An empire so vast in

scale could never have come into being except with the help of God.’33

This, to the Judaeans of Rome or Alexandria, appeared self-evident. It was

why, in their synagogues, they did not hesitate to make offerings to the

emperor. In the Temple, too, among the hereditary priests who constituted

the Judaean ruling class, there was no quibbling over the regular sacrifices

made on Caesar’s behalf. Certainly, to the provincial authorities, these had

appeared a perfectly acceptable expression of loyalty: a demonstration that

there need be no contradiction between rendering unto Caesar and

rendering unto the Judaean god.

But then had come Florus’ term of office. In 66, looking to make up a

financial shortfall, he had confiscated a large sum of money from the

Temple. An incendiary move. This was not least because the garrison at his

back had been recruited from the Judaeans’ bitterest, most inveterate rivals:

the Samaritans. Outrage had blazed across the city. Rioters had taken to the

streets. Florus had responded with savage reprisals. Given licence to make

the streets of the city flow with blood, the Samaritan garrison had needed

no second invitation. Over three thousand people – women and children as

well as men – had been cut down. Eminent Judaeans had been arrested,

scourged, tortured to death. Every level of society had been left scarred.

How, though, were the Judaeans to be rid of their tormentor? As crowds of

the poor bayed for action, there had been many among the priests who

urged the traditional course of circumspection: appeals to Cestius, appeals

to Caesar. Others, however, had scorned such equanimity as feebleness and

cowardice. A faction of militants, keen to ride the mood of insurrection in

the city, had seized control of the Temple. From there a young priest named

Eleazar, bold, charismatic and impetuous, had announced a fateful measure:

the banning of all gifts from foreigners. The implications had hardly needed

spelling out. No more sacrifices on behalf of Caesar. No more gestures of

loyalty to Rome. A declaration of war.

To defy the world’s greatest power was a fearsome step. There were

plenty of Judaeans who thought it suicidal. ‘Do you imagine you are taking

on Egyptians and Arabs here? Only contemplate the immensity of Rome’s

empire, and then how feeble by comparison you are.’34 What, though, the

insurgents demanded, if their god were on their side? Certainly, their initial

actions had met with miraculous success. Efficiently if brutally, Eleazar and

his men had eliminated the two major sources of opposition to their rule of

the city: the garrison of soldiers recruited by the Romans from Samaria, and

the Judaean peace party. The Samaritans had been lured out of their fortress

by a promise of safe passage and promptly massacred; the leaders of the

peace party were burned to death in their own opulent homes, or else

hunted down, dragged out from where they had been hiding, and murdered.

Among the victims had been Eleazar’s own father. A few weeks later, when

Cestius arrived from Antioch at the head of the inevitable reprisal force, a

series of seemingly miraculous events had only confirmed the rebels in their

conviction that their god was on their side. First, just as he seemed on the

point of capturing the Temple, Cestius had abandoned his siege; then,

attempting an orderly withdrawal, he had suffered a series of ambushes in

the narrow defiles that led from Jerusalem. The withdrawal had fast become

a rout. The corpses of over five thousand Romans had ended up littering the

road. Catapults, battering rams, artillery: all had been lost. So too an eagle. 35

The disgrace of it could hardly have been any worse.

The legion that had lost its eagle – XII Fulminata, ‘Thunderbolt’ – was a

famous one: originally levied by Caesar, and with many battle-honours to

its name. How, then, could it possibly have been defeated by a ragtag posse

of Judaean rebels? Moralists were in no doubt. For decades, ever since the

time of Augustus, XII Fulminata had been stationed in Syria. Anxiety about

the debilitating effect of service in the East ran deep among the Roman high

command. The same climate that rendered the peoples of Asia effeminate

was bound, so disciplinarians fretted, to soften legionaries as well. Unlike

on the Rhine, where the legions served at a safe distance from the

distractions of civilisation, those in the eastern provinces were stationed in

close proximity to teeming cities. In Egypt, two legions shared a base just

outside Alexandria; in Syria, the province’s legions were billeted in towns

around Antioch. Small wonder, then, that seasoned generals, arriving to

take over postings in the East, should often have despaired of the men under

their command. For a decade prior to the outbreak of the Judaean revolt, the

most celebrated of all Rome’s soldiers – a stern, charismatic and formidably

able man named Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo – had been busy whipping the

flabby garrisons of the eastern frontier into shape. Legionaries rousted out

of the fleshpots of Antioch had been marched up into the mountainous

wilds of Armenia, and there obliged to spend an entire winter under canvas.

Sentries had frozen to death at their posts. ‘One soldier, indeed, was seen

carrying a bundle of firewood, and so frostbitten were his hands that they

actually dropped off, still attached to their load.’36 Such it was to be a

Roman, and a man. Corbulo’s methods had proven resoundingly effective.

Nothing had better illustrated their success than the record under his

command of X Fretensis.* This legion, like XII Fulminata, had been

stationed for many decades in Syria, but unlike XII Fulminata it had been

honed by Corbulo to a formidable degree of proficiency. Battles had been

won, cities stormed, uppity foreigners brought to sue for terms. The ferocity

of the legion had proven more than worthy of its standard: a wild boar. The

Tenth had deserved well of Caesar. So, too, had Corbulo.

Except that in 67 Nero had summoned the great general to Greece,

charged him with treason, and instructed him to kill himself. Corbulo, ever

obedient to orders, had briskly fallen on his sword. His downfall had served

as a warning to ambitious men everywhere: the reward for high

achievement, in an autocracy such as Rome had become, might very well

be death. It is unlikely, however, that a man such as Cestius Gallus –

appointed as he had been to the command of various legions by a suspicious

and vengeful emperor – had needed such a lesson. Why, with Jerusalem at

his mercy, had he embarked on his disastrous retreat? The capture of the

Temple would certainly have nipped the insurgency in the bud; but it might

also have secured for Cestius a fatal nimbus of glory. Rather than risk that,

it may be that he had aimed simply to demonstrate Roman prowess to the

insurgents, and then, his mission accomplished, discreetly withdraw. If such

had indeed been his plan, then it had signally failed. The loss of an eagle

had set the seal on a disgrace that there was no option but to avenge. As in

Germany after the Varian disaster, so now in Judaea: honour demanded an

unstinting, an annihilative vengeance.

This, as Nero’s regime imploded, as Galba rose to the rule of the world

and then fell, as Otho and Vitellius prepared for civil war, remained a sacred

obligation laid upon the Roman people. Three years on from the outbreak of

the Judaean revolt, the back of the insurgency appeared broken. Jerusalem

remained in arms, as did a few other scattered fortresses; but otherwise

Judaea had been pacified. The campaign bore witness to Nero’s eye for

talent: for just as he had not hesitated to eliminate able commanders if he

felt menaced by them, so also had he been perfectly ready to promote them

if they presented him with no threat. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was a man

ideally suited to the Judaean command. A veteran of both the Rhine frontier

and the conquest of Britain, he was a soldier of great ability: brave,

strategically astute, and popular with the men he had commanded. He was

also – no less germanely to Nero’s purposes – quite without pedigree.

Raised in a small Sabine hamlet some fifty miles from Rome, he came from

a family, the Flavians, who, in the opinion of high society, ‘lacked even the

slightest distinction’.37

Even so, they were definitely on the make. Vespasian’s elder brother,

Sabinus, was a man of notable ambition who had succeeded in serving as a

consul, a provincial governor, and finally as the magistrate charged with

keeping order in Rome: the prefect of the city. Vespasian, bobbing along in

his brother’s wake, had likewise managed to secure a consulship, likewise

managed to secure a governorship; but he remained, even so, to his high-

achieving brother, something of an embarrassment. His accent was rustic;

his sense of humour coarse; his expression – ‘like a man straining to have a

shit’,38 as one wag put it – that of a peasant who had spent too long in the

sun. Perennially short of money, he had been reduced, prior to the Judaean

command, to mortgaging all his property to Sabinus, and investing in the

mule-trading business: a humiliation that had led him to be nicknamed,

inevitably, ‘the muleteer’. War, however, was a lucrative business – and

Vespasian, as the conqueror of the Judaeans, could look forward to a rosy

future. At his back now, after all, he had three battle-hardened legions. One

of them, under the command of a stern and able senator from Baetica

named Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, was none other than X Fretensis. The other

two legions as well could boast a formidable fighting record. It was a fine

thing at any time to enjoy the command of such an army; but especially so

when civil war threatened, and the world itself seemed in play.

Not that Vespasian, throughout his term of office, had behaved with

anything other than exemplary propriety. Conscious that with Nero’s death

his command stood in abeyance, he had paused military operations against

the Judaeans. He had sent his eldest son, Titus – a dashing young heart-

throb who was with him in Judaea as a legate – to serve as his ambassador

to Galba; and then, when the news of Galba’s murder came through, and

Titus, uncertain what to do, turned back mid-journey, thrown in his lot with

Otho. Vespasian had certainly dropped no public hint that he might be

‘brooding on private hopes’.39 Yet in the dimension of the supernatural,

where the patterns of the future might be read by those skilful enough to

trace them, Vespasian had found good reason to nurture high ambition.

Despite his provincial upbringing, portents of good fortune had long

shadowed him. An ox had once knelt before him and bowed its neck; a

stray dog had brought in a human hand and dropped it at his feet. Evidence

enough, it might have been thought, that he was destined for very great

things indeed.

There was more, however, to come. Vespasian’s appointment to the

Judaean command had brought him to a land celebrated across the world as

one of the great homes of prophecy. Poppaea’s fascination with Judaean

lore had been due in large part to this reputation – just as it might be

reported, in the stories told of Nero’s second coming, that he was fated to

appear in Jerusalem, where he would sit in the Temple, ‘proclaiming

himself to be God’.40 Vespasian knew better than to heed such ravings; even

so, he could not help but ponder a couple of prophecies that he personally

had received. The more the world seemed to totter on its foundations, so the

more he found himself haunted by them; and the more he found himself

haunted by them, so the more he dared to dream.

Back in the early summer of 68, as Nero’s doom was becoming

apparent, Vespasian had travelled to the border of Judaea with Syria. Here

there rose a mountain named Carmel; and on its summit, in an ancient

shrine ‘without image or temple, but only an altar’, 41 there was a priest

named Basilides. Skilled as he was in the art of deciphering the future, this

priest had inspected the sacrifice offered by his visitor and read in it

startling news. All Vespasian’s dreams, no matter how soaring they might

be, were destined to come true. So Basilides had revealed. The news had

spread like wildfire among the legions billeted in Judaea. Entrails, however,

were not the only place where Vespasian’s destiny might be read. There was

Judaean scripture as well. Visions of the future, recorded by ancient

prophets, now seemed transparently on the verge of fulfilment. ‘The time

had arrived, according to a belief as venerable as it was well-established,

and which had become general across the East, when men were fated to

come from Judaea to rule the world.’42

The Judaean insurgents, rising in revolt against Rome, had assumed that

this prophecy referred to them; but at least one of the rebels, captured by the

Romans and brought in chains before Vespasian, had acknowledged the

error of his ways. Yosef ben Mattityahu was a man of distinguished family:

a priest from Jerusalem, learned in the scriptures of his own people, but

familiar as well with Rome, a city to which he had travelled as a young

man, and where – as he proudly let everyone know – he had ‘become

known to Poppaea, the wife of Caesar’. 43 Following the defeat of Cestius,

he had been appointed by the insurgents to the command of Galilee, a

region north of Samaria long racked by tensions: between Judaeans and

their neighbours, between rich and poor, between towns and countryside.

Since Vespasian’s base lay in Syria, it was Galilee that he had first invaded,

and Yosef’s command that he had first sought to crush. Yosef himself,

cornered in a fortress named Jotapata, had managed to hold out for two long

months; but the walls, as they were bound to be, had eventually been

stormed. A large band of Judaeans, Yosef among them, had hidden in a

cistern. There they had agreed to a suicide pact; but Yosef – ‘whether by

good fortune or divine providence, who can say?’ – had managed to survive

the mass slaughter. Taken prisoner, he had been hauled in front of

Vespasian, Titus and the rest of the Roman high command. Painfully aware

that he risked either execution or being sent as a prisoner to Rome, he had

requested a word in Vespasian’s ear. Then, when granted it, he had

announced that he spoke as a prophet, a messenger of God. ‘You, Vespasian

are Caesar and emperor – you and your son. So load me with your heaviest

chains, and keep me as a prisoner here. My master though you may be, you

are the master as well of much more: of the land, and the sea, and all

humankind.’44

Almost two years had passed since this dramatic revelation; and if

Vespasian, in that time, had kept the self-proclaimed Judaean prophet close

beside him, and granted him certain favours – the company of a woman,

gifts of clothes – then so also had he made sure to keep Yosef in chains.

Private hopes were private hopes, after all; and Vespasian, having pledged

his loyalty to Otho, was resolved to keep his word. Yet with Vitellius

preparing to advance on Italy, and all the world hanging in the balance, who

could say for certain what might happen?

So it was that Vespasian, mulling his prospects, kept his counsel, and

waited to see what the news might be from Rome.

The Sweetest Smell

Meanwhile, far from Judaea, Valens and Caecina were waiting for nobody.

Their strategy was a simple one: to seize Rome as early in the year as they

possibly could. It was this that had determined the date of their departure:

for the passes into Italy generally became useable in April, and it was a long

march from the Rhine to the foothills of the Alps. Two separate columns

had embarked on the winter offensive. The first, under the command of

Valens, had been drawn from the armies of Lower Germany: principally V

Alaudae, but also the two legions stationed at Vetera. Much excitement, on

the day of their departure from Colonia, had greeted the sight of an eagle

flying ahead of them along the road: a certain portent of success. Caecina,

meanwhile, was busy recruiting his own force from the bases of Upper

Germany. Heading down the Rhine from Mogontiacum, he arrived at the

most southerly of the German legionary headquarters: a stone-clad

settlement near the headwaters of the great river named Vindonissa. Home

to the menacingly named XXI Rapax – ‘Predator’ – the base constituted a

key strategic crossroads, for it controlled access to the Danube as well as

the Rhine. More to Caecina’s purposes, however, it also served as a gateway

to Rome: for beyond it loomed the two highest mountains in the Alps, and

between the two mountains a road that, soon enough, would enable him to

make the crossing into Italy.

In the meantime, however, rather than kicking his heels as he waited for

the snows to melt, Caecina decided to pick a fight with the local Gauls.

Helvetia was a land celebrated in the annals of Roman martial achievement.

Natives of the Alpine valleys, the Helvetians had once been a restless and

aggressive people. Back in the time of Julius Caesar, it was their attempt to

burst out from their mountainous homeland, and seize more fertile lands to

the west, that had provided the conqueror of Gaul with his first taste of

military glory. The tendency of barbarians to go crashing into lands where

they were not wanted had long been the stuff of Roman nightmares. Ever

since a horde of Gauls, back in the early days of the republic, had erupted

across the Alps, swept southwards, and briefly occupied Rome, the city had

been steeled by a grim resolve never again to endure such a humiliation.

This was why Caesar had been able to cast his conquest of Gaul as a

campaign conducted in self-defence. The natives had needed to be brought

the fruits of Roman dominance. The days when entire tribes might load up

their wagons, and embark on mass migrations, had been brought to a

decisive end. Redounding to the benefit of the Roman people, it had all

been for the good of the Gauls as well.

‘Wars were rife, and your country fractured into a multitude of petty

kingdoms, until you accepted Roman rule.’45 What Gaul could possibly

dispute this? Brutal though the original conquest might have been, its fruits

had been those of peace. The blood of the million natives said to have been

slaughtered by Caesar’s legions had served to fertilise an entire new

civilisation. Once, the great men of Gaul had worn trousers and checked

cloaks, held court on hills behind palisades topped with severed heads, and

dripped gravy from their long moustaches. No longer. The descendants of

Gallic kings now draped themselves in the stately robes appropriate to the

senate house. They lived in great stone palaces complete with mosaic floors

and central heating. They enjoyed luxuries sourced from across the Roman

world, scorned head-hunting as repellent barbarism, and were never less

than impeccably clean-shaven. Not everyone, of course, ranked as an

aristocrat; but even in the most backward reaches of Gaul, be it in the

depths of the countryside or along the margins of the Ocean, markers of

Rome’s rule were never far away. They might be found in the agricultural

labours of those whose ancestors had been ‘forced to lay down their

weapons and take up farming’;46 in a style of cheap pottery familiar across

Italy; or in altars raised to gods with Roman names, and inscribed in

rudimentary Latin. Roads, great gashes of stone scored across the landscape

where previously there had been only muddy tracks, ensured that nowhere

in Gaul lay beyond the reach of provincial officials and tax-collectors. Even

on the very edge of the world, in Armorica, as Brittany was known, there

were settlements laid out on neat grid patterns, and buildings with red tiles

for roofs, and monuments that aped those of distant Rome. People in these

towns might jingle coins stamped with the head of Caesar, cook with olive

oil, and wash themselves in baths. It was hardly sophistication; but neither

was it barbarism.

Even so, the venerable Roman dread of the Gauls had never entirely

been exorcised. Back in the time of Tiberius, a tribe named the Aedui, the

inhabitants of what today is Burgundy, had risen in open revolt, in the

conviction that their ancient glory and independence were destined to be

restored. Only with difficulty had the rebellion been suppressed. The

Roman authorities, impatient with any hint of subversion, had cracked

down hard on anyone predicting that their rule might not be eternal. As in

Judaea, so in Gaul: the traditions of prophecy were both venerable and

distinctive. Yet unlike the priests of the Judaeans, whom Roman governors

had customarily treated with punctilious respect, those of the Gauls had met

with escalating persecution. ‘Druids’, they were called: magicians who in

the depths of dark forests were reported to harvest mistletoe, burn their

victims alive in great wicker cages, and feast on human flesh. Both

Augustus and Tiberius had sought to rein them in. Then, under Claudius,

had come outright repression. ‘It is impossible to overestimate the debt that

is owed the Roman people for their having put an end to these monstrous

rites.’47 Such was the consensus of all civilised people. Just as marshes bred

sickness, so did the wild places of Gaul breed superstition, savagery and

insurrection. The peace brought to them by Rome could never entirely be

taken for granted. The legions of the Rhine, even as they stood sentry over

the barbarians beyond the river, were always conscious of a certain need to

guard their backs.

Caecina, by embarking on a brisk but bloody campaign against the

Helvetians, was making play with what remained, among the soldiers under

his command, a deeply held conviction: that the Gauls, no matter how

civilised they might seem, and no matter how loyal to Rome they might

pretend to be, were never entirely to be trusted. The Helvetians, rather than

acknowledging Vitellius as emperor, had gone so far as to detain one of his

centurions: insult enough to the legions from the Rhine. Even without this

justification, however, they would still have been primed to embark on an

Alpine war. Their defeat the previous summer of Julius Vindex, the

governor who had first raised the banner of revolt against Nero, had been,

they felt, insultingly rewarded. Far from seeing Vindex as he had seen

himself, as a Roman patriot, they had viewed him with contempt as merely

the latest in a long line of Gallic trouble-makers. That he had been joined in

his revolt by the Aedui, those perennial malcontents, had merely confirmed

the legions of the Rhine in their conviction that they had preserved Gaul

from a full-blown insurgency. Galba’s refusal to acknowledge this, let alone

permit the legions to plunder the homelands of the rebels, had been a key

factor in their mutiny. Unsurprisingly, as Valens led his column past Aeduan

territory, the tribesmen went out of their way to avoid giving him even the

slightest pretext for attacking them. Every demand for money or arms was

met with cringing promptitude; supplies of food were handed over

unprompted. The fate of the Helvetians demonstrated just how sensible

these precautions had been. Brief though the war in the Alpine valleys was,

thousands were slaughtered, thousands more taken as slaves. As Caesar had

once dealt with the Helvetians, so now had Caecina. The Romans, it

seemed, were the Romans still; the Gauls were still the Gauls.

Or were they? In truth, the devastation visited on Helvetia, far from

affirming how distinctive the two peoples remained, demonstrated

something very different: just how blurred the boundary between them had

become. Identity in Roman Gaul was a shifting, deceptive, and treacherous

thing. Just as Julius Vindex might seem, depending on perspective, either a

senator or an insurgent, so it was not immediately clear, as Caecina’s

legions slaughtered and enslaved the Helvetians, who should rank as the

barbarians. Long gone were the days when the tribesmen of the Alps had

been among the most obdurate enemies of Rome. Their failure to put up

even the most token resistance to the armies of Upper Germany

demonstrated that Gauls, no less than Italians, might be softened by long

years of peace. It was not arms they relied upon to defend themselves, but

rather a mastery of Latin. Sent by Caecina to Vitellius for judgement, a

leading Helvetian succeeded in reducing even hardened legionaries to tears

with his oratory, thereby securing a triumphant acquittal. Meanwhile, it was

a Roman officer of ancient family who had led an army of warriors down

from the Rhine; who had stripped a defenceless and sedentary people bare;

and who was now poised to cross the Alps and descend into Italy, just as

barbarian invaders had done long centuries before. Spring that year arrived

early. Caecina, rather than delaying, decided to steal a march on both Otho

and Valens by taking the mountain road in early March. Though the snows

were still deep, up and over the pass he went. Down into the rich plain of

the Po Valley he swept. Riding at the head of his column, he was dressed in

the trousers and patterned cloak of a Gallic chieftain. By his side, mounted

on a war-horse, rode his wife. The dash he cut was less that of a Roman

magistrate and more – so it seemed to his enemies, at any rate – that of

some barbarian warlord.

Unsurprisingly, then, the news of his Alpine descent reverberated across

Italy like the echo of a very ancient story. Otho, alerted that war had come

to the Po, was steeled in his resolve to play the part of a traditional Roman

hero. Just as in the early days of the republic a barbarian incursion would

prompt consuls to muster an urgent levy, so did Otho, scorning a multitude

of baneful omens, move with impressive speed. No time now for his beauty

regime. Instead, leaving Rome, he did so unshaven, marching on foot,

wearing the iron armour of a common legionary. Ahead of him he had

already sent his main force, led by figures redolent of antique virtue: a

former consul, an erstwhile legate, the general who had defeated Boudicca.

In a council of war, this officer openly dismissed the elite forces arrayed

against them as ‘Germans’. Adopt a holding strategy, he urged Otho: for the

legionaries from the Rhine, he argued, would find the heat of an Italian

summer unendurable. ‘Should we manage to protract the war, they will

prove physically incapable of coping with the climate. The sun will be too

much for them.’48

Otho, however, knew better than to clutch at such straws. No less than

Vitellius, he was dependent on the support of legions from the barbarous

reaches of the empire: even though, advancing from Rome, he had the

Praetorians and I Adiutrix at his back, the bulk of his manpower consisted

of armies summoned from the Balkans. Legionary was doomed to fight

with legionary; citizen with citizen. Like some flesh-hungry corpse risen

from the dead, the spectre of civil war, long banished to the history books,

had returned to put Italy in its shadow. There was no prospect now of

confining the conflict to the provinces. Although Caecina had met with

rebuffs since crossing the Alps, he had succeeded in his primary goal: to

seize and fortify a formidable bridgehead. Cremona, a colony founded three

centuries previously beside the waters of the Po, had served Rome

originally as a bulwark against invasions from beyond the Alps; then as a

base for the conquest for Gaul; then as one of the largest and most

prosperous cities in northern Italy. Now, with Otho gathering his strength

some twenty-five miles along the line of the Po to the east, and Valens fast

approaching from the west, it had been restored to its role as a military

stronghold. Whoever held it held the key to Italy.

Otho understood this as well as Caecina did; and when, on 10 April,

Valens and his column finally arrived in the city, all three men knew that the

moment of reckoning had arrived. Certainly – no matter what his generals

might advise – Otho could not afford to sit on his hands. Vitellius, he knew,

was already on his way from the Rhine with a mass of reinforcements. Soon

Otho and his men would be decisively outnumbered. A flying column

would find it a simple matter to bypass him and capture a defenceless

Rome. He had no choice but to force a battle. Sure enough, four days after

Valens had rendezvoused with Caecina, Otho ordered his legions to march

on Cremona. Two days later, after an agonisingly slow advance through

vineyards and over irrigation channels, they blundered into the enemy. Both

sides scrabbled desperately to take up position. Raggedly, then increasingly

murderously, battle was joined.

That evening, news of the result was brought to Otho. Rather than

joining the fighting, he had opted to remain in his base to the rear. This

decision had been dictated by common sense, not cowardice, for any

victory his legions won would have been wasted if it came at the cost of his

life. As it was, however, the victory had not gone to Otho’s men. Long and

hard though they had fought, in the end they had proven no match for the

steel and greater numbers of the legions from the Rhine. The slaughter had

been terrible. Thousands upon thousands of corpses lay heaped in tangled

piles across the fields of Cremona. Those of Otho’s men who had succeeded

in extricating themselves from the battle were weary and demoralised. Even

so, the emperor’s cause was not wholly lost. Reserves and survivors

remained to him, and there was the prospect of further reinforcements

arriving from the Balkans. The Praetorians, who had remained by Otho’s

side in his camp, urged the man they had raised to the rank of Caesar to

keep fighting. ‘Certainly, no one can doubt that it would have been possible

to continue with the war, brutal though it was, and the cause of terrible

misery, for still the victory had not gone decisively to either side.’49

Yet Otho, ignoring the appeals of the Praetorians, had no intention of

continuing. It was now, in defeat, that he prepared to demonstrate to the

world that all his role-playing as an antique hero, which ever since his

usurpation had constituted the keynote of his behaviour, had not been

merely role-playing. Even as a private citizen, the civil wars that destroyed

the republic had always filled him with a particular horror; nor, with

thousands of his fellow citizens already littering the soil of Italy, was he

willing to be the cause of further bloodshed. ‘Am I the man to allow the

flower of Rome again to be winnowed, all these famous armies again to be

mown down and lost to the service of the state?’50 That night, answering his

own question, Otho retired to his tent. He wrote a pair of letters: one to his

sister, one to Statilia Messalina, Nero’s widow. Rather than gorging on a

final meal or drowning his sorrows in wine, he contented himself with a

single glass of water. Then he went to sleep. When he awoke, he picked up

a dagger from under his pillow, placed its point over his heart, and ran it

through with a single thrust. And so he perished, that the Roman people

might not.

Nothing in Otho’s life became him like the leaving of it. His men

greeted the news of his suicide with extravagant displays of grief: they

rained kisses on his corpse, and several of them gathered around the blaze

of his pyre and immolated themselves. Most of the defeated legions, it was

true, consented to swear the sacramentum to Vitellius: yet this, for the

victorious emperor, was not entirely the triumph it might have seemed.

Everyone knew that Otho had killed himself in the hope that the wounds of

civil war might be bound up: and so the spectacle of his soldiers laying

down their arms redounded to the glory of the dead emperor quite as much

as it did to that of Vitellius. The truth was that Otho had laid a lethal trap for

his successor. In death, a man who in life had been viewed as effeminate,

selfish and dissipated had shown himself manly, patriotic and sober. Even

the great crime that had brought him to power came to be seen, in the wake

of his suicide, in a better light. ‘It was widely asserted that he had toppled

Galba, not to win power for himself, but in order to give back Rome her

freedom, and to restore the republic.’51 Otho, with the gaze of his fellow

citizens fixed upon him, had passed his last and greatest test. How – now

that he seemed to have the stage of the world to himself – would Vitellius

perform?

News of the victory his legions had won reached the new emperor only

shortly after his departure from Colonia. Out on the open road as he was,

there was no platform immediately available to him appropriate to his new

standing. Fortunately, it did not take him long to reach one. Lugdunum –

modern-day Lyon – was the metropolis of Gaul. No administrative capital

north of the Alps boasted a larger population or more impressive

monuments. Roads led out from it in every direction like the spokes of a

wheel. An altar raised to Rome and Augustus had been a focus of loyalty

for all the various tribes of Gaul for eighty years. Taking up residence in the

city, Vitellius could be confident that he was among friends. The people of

Lugdunum, vehement in their loyalty to the house of Caesar, had barred

their gates to Vindex, and suffered for it under Galba. The welcome they

gave to the commander of the German legions was a joyous one. Vitellius,

much buoyed as a result, felt confident enough to signal the founding of a

new dynasty. Already, back in Colonia, he had declined the title of ‘Caesar’.

Now, before an assembly of his legions, and with Caecina and Valens

flanking him on either side, he proclaimed his six-year-old son his heir. The

name he bestowed on the child: ‘Germanicus’.

Yet if the new emperor’s dynasty was to be raised on firm foundations, it

could not rely solely on the legions of the Rhine. His support base was

perilously narrow. How best to buttress it? Vitellius, torn between the rival

options of clemency and severity, veered between the two. The Praetorians

who had backed Otho in his coup were pensioned off, the centurions who

had constituted the backbone of his army executed. The generals who had

opposed Caecina and Valens at Cremona were pardoned, but Galba’s closest

relative, a man whom Otho had banished from Rome but otherwise left

alone, had his throat slit in a roadside tavern. The effect of these mixed

messages – which contributed to an already widespread sense of the new

emperor as a man too indolent and lacking in self-discipline to hold to

consistent policies – was further compounded by a series of public relations

disasters. Vitellius’ journey from Lyon to Rome might almost have been

designed to burnish Otho’s posthumous fame. No simple glass of water for

him. Perhaps only a very ostentatious sobriety might have redeemed him

from his reputation as a glutton; but Vitellius was in no mood to make such

a display. As a result, there were prodigious stories told of his greed: that

the imperial gullet was insatiable; that entire cities had been ruined by the

need to keep it filled; that wagons bearing delicacies and titbits for the

emperor were making the whole of Italy shake. Vitellius, intimate of Nero

though he was, had never mastered the art of reading a crowd. Unlike Otho,

he had failed to learn how to craft his image. His every attempt to strike a

pose proved maladroit. Arriving in Cremona, where the fields beyond the

city were still strewn with corpses, rotting in the summer sun, he scorned to

retch. ‘A dead enemy smells sweet,’ he declared, ‘but an enemy slain in a

civil war sweeter still.’ A memorable aphorism – but one which prompted

widespread revulsion. Visiting Otho’s tomb, Vitellius mocked it for its

meanness; presented with the dagger with which his rival had committed

suicide, he sent it to Colonia, there to be dedicated to Mars. Such behaviour,

simultaneously petty and vindictive, did not help to win him golden

opinions.

Not that anyone in Rome cared much either way. With Nero dead, and

his two successors toppled in quick succession, there were few in the city

who felt a strong sense of identification with the new dynasty proclaimed

by Vitellius. The recent dizzying round of murders and battles had become,

for the Roman people, merely a fresh form of entertainment. Fittingly, news

of Otho’s defeat at Cremona had reached them as they were celebrating the

Cerealia in the Circus Maximus. When Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s elder

brother, stood up to proclaim Vitellius the new emperor, his words were

applauded rather as a victory in the races might have been. That Vitellius

had, in his youth, been a celebrated charioteer only enhanced the sense of

him as a man whose ascent was a wild and startling sports result. Certainly,

his entry into the capital seemed – in its fusion of artifice and jeopardy, of

novelty and dazzle – precisely the kind of pageant that might have graced

the Circus. The eagles of the legions, the decorations worn by the

centurions, the serried ranks formed by the soldiers: it was, everyone

agreed, ‘a splendid show’.52

It was also, so people whispered, not entirely what it seemed. Vitellius,

parading through the streets of the capital, was robed appropriately in the

toga of a Roman magistrate; but only because his friends, seeing him cross

the Milvian Bridge dressed in armour and with a sword at his side, had

frantically advised him not to look as though he had conquered the city. It

was noted as well that Vitellius’ vanguard, which had entered Rome before

the emperor, had worn not their parade armour but cloaks made of animal

skins. They might as well have been a pack of wolves. Meanwhile, even as

soldiers like these roamed the city, Vitellius was lavishing money he did not

have on the exhibition of wild beasts. Between the criminal savaged by a

bear or a lion and the spectator in his seat, cheering on the bloodshed, the

boundary was normally absolute. That summer, it seemed very different: as

though all of Rome had been given over to predators.

Vitellius, in his awkward, clumsy way, knew perfectly well whose

example he was following. On the Campus Martius, he made public

sacrifice to the shade of Nero; at banquets, he would demand that musicians

play compositions by the man he termed simply ‘the Master’. 53 Yet even

Vitellius might hesitate, on occasion, to follow where other admirers of

Nero had led. Otho’s death had left him as a spoil of war the wretched boy

who had been transformed into the likeness of Poppaea Sabina. Rather than

using his prize as Nymphidius and Otho had done, as a private perk, he

proposed a different, more beneficent course: one that would enable him to

pose as a crowd-pleasing friend of the people. Let Poppaea, who had given

Nero a ring engraved with the image of Proserpina, now play the role of

Proserpina herself. Let her be brought onto a public stage for the

entertainment of the masses, ‘and be raped just as Proserpina had been

raped’. 54 Here at last, Vitellius might have thought, was a gesture that could

not fail to redound to his credit: a public relations triumph. But it was not to

be. Poppaea, unable to endure the shame of what was being proposed,

committed suicide. The spectacle had to be cancelled. The sad and infernal

gods had mocked the hopes of yet another emperor.

The Fourth Beast

That July, as Vitellius was nearing Rome, and rumours were swirling that

yet another convulsion in the affairs of the world was imminent, an officer

came to find Yosef ben Mattityahu. Still weighed down by chains, as he had

been ever since his capture at Jotapata two years before, the Judaean was

led before Vespasian and his staff. The general greeted his prisoner warmly.

He issued a command, and a man stepped forward with an axe. Then, with a

single blow, he severed the chain. Vespasian had already made clear to his

companions that he had good reason for setting Yosef free: ‘For it is

unacceptable to see treated as a prisoner a man who is a mouthpiece of God,

and has prophesied my rise to greatness.’55

For months Vespasian had been mulling over what fate might have in

store for him, and what he should be doing to embrace it. Cautious and

canny, he hesitated to take a step that he knew, were he to stumble, would

prove fatal, not just to himself, but to all his family. Still, behind the scenes,

he had been making plans. Even as he publicly pledged his loyalty to a

succession of emperors – Galba, Otho, Vitellius – he had been in secret

negotiations with a pair of other key players in the Roman East. One, a

former consul by the name of Gaius Licinius Mucianus, was the new

governor of Syria: replacement for the hapless Cestius. A man of feline

character, snobbish and elegant, he was as celebrated for his literary talents

as he was notorious for his private proclivities, but seasoned as well both as

a magistrate and as a commander. Initially, his relationship with Vespasian

had been a scratchy one, for Mucianus, who had served with Corbulo in

Armenia, rated his own military capabilities highly, and had not cared to

cede the limelight to a Sabine bumpkin. The governor of Syria, however,

was nothing if not a shrewd judge of character, and he had soon come to

recognise Vespasian’s qualities. The two men, alert to the opportunities

opened up to them by the gathering convulsions of the age, had buried the

hatchet. Charmed by Titus’ youthful charisma, impressed by Vespasian’s

potential as a Caesar, Mucianus had privately committed both his three

legions and his own prestige to the Flavian cause. This was an alliance such

as senators in the dying days of the republic might have recognised: a

compact made between warlords in the hope of deciding the fate of the

world.

Yet it was the measure of how distant the age of Caesar, Pompey and

Crassus had become that the other key figure in Vespasian’s calculations,

the man without whom he could never hope to challenge Vitellius, was not

even a senator, not even from Italy. Tiberius Julius Alexander, the prefect of

Egypt, was a native of Alexandria – and a Judaean. His family was a

distinguished one, with a notable record of service to their people.

Alexander’s father, a fabulously wealthy businessman, had paid for the

gates of the Temple in Jerusalem to be overlaid with gold and silver; his

uncle, a philosopher admired even by Greek intellectuals, had written

pioneering studies of Judaean law. Alexander himself, however, had opted

for a career that was altogether more Roman. Drive and ability had

combined to demonstrate just how high, a mere century after the conquest

of Egypt, a provincial might climb the rungs of advancement. Alexander

had served as governor of Judaea; as an officer under Corbulo; as an

ambassador to the court of a barbarian king. Entry into the senate, it was

true, had proven a step too far; but it was precisely this lack of senatorial

status that had enabled Alexander, even as the bushfires of revolt were

starting to blaze in Judaea, to set the crown on a brilliant career:

appointment to the rule of neighbouring Egypt.

Some posts, after all, were simply too sensitive to be granted to senators.

Indeed, so wealthy was Egypt that they had been banned, ever since the

days of Augustus, from so much as setting foot in the province. Alexander’s

only rival as the highest-ranking equestrian in the empire was the

commander of the Praetorians. With his two legions and his ability to

throttle Rome’s corn supply, the prefect of Egypt was a key player in the

great game that Vespasian aspired to play. No one could hope to become

Caesar without Alexander’s backing. But which way would he jump? On 1

July he announced his decision. Travelling to the great legionary base

outside Alexandria, he instructed the two legions stationed there to

repudiate their oath of loyalty to Vitellius. Alexander himself, the

legionaries under his command, the crowds in Alexandria: all committed

themselves with full-throated enthusiasm to a new emperor. The same name

was heard on everybody’s lips: Vespasian.

Two days later, when news of what had happened in Egypt reached

Judaea, and the legions stationed there began to join in the acclamation,

there was no longer any need for Yosef ben Mattityahu to remain in chains.

The prophecy that he had discerned in the scriptures of his people, and

which Vespasian had for two years been brooding over, could be broadcast

at last to the world. The one-time rebel against Rome was now the servant

of a Caesar. Yosef, a man skilled at tracing the patterns of God’s plans in the

rhythms of history, knew full well in whose footsteps he was following.

Once, in the great city of Babylon, there had been a Judaean by the name of

Daniel; and such had been Daniel’s talent for reading the future that it had

won him his freedom from captivity and the ear of a king. The record of his

visions had been preserved in Judaean scripture. In a dream, he had seen a

horned beast rise up out of a storm-tossed sea; and this beast was ‘terrible

and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured

and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet’. Ten in number

were its horns; but then, as Daniel gazed at them, ‘there came up among

them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were

plucked up by the roots’.56 Haunting indeed: for what could the vision

possibly signify but the very crisis even then convulsing Rome’s empire,

that great beast, which had devoured and broken all the other kingdoms of

the world into pieces? Since the time of Pompey, ten men had claimed its

rule; and of these, in the course of only a year, three had followed in quick

succession. Who, then, could doubt that Vespasian was destined to triumph

over all his foes, that his victory was written in the book of the future, that

he was none other than the eleventh horn, ‘before which three of the first

horns were plucked up by the roots’?

All that summer, the sense of a great reckoning in the dimensions of

both the mortal and the divine was palpable. In mid-July, Vespasian met

with Mucianus for a council of war. The venue for their meeting, the

colonia of Berytus – modern-day Beirut – was the most Roman city in the

entire East. Settled by generations of retired legionaries, it boasted

everything that might make a visitor from Rome feel at home: baths,

amphitheatres, a population speaking Latin. Where better for a would-be

Caesar to plot a march on the capital? The planning at Berytus that July was

for a titanic military effort: a summoning to war of legions from across the

Roman world. Mucianus, it was agreed, would lead a task force from Syria

and make the provinces he passed through ‘ring from end to end with the

preparation of ships, troops, and arms’. 57 He would also soak the provincials

for cash. Simultaneously, the Balkan legions were to be roused to mutiny.

All was to be readied for an invasion of Italy the following year. Vespasian,

meanwhile, would remain in the East. Specifically, he intended to winter in

Egypt. Here he would prepare for what he trusted would be his final

reckoning with Vitellius in the spring. A cool and measured strategist, he

saw no point in snatching too rashly after the rule of the world.

Alexandria, the largest city in the empire after Rome itself, was a seat

not unworthy of Vespasian’s ambitions. Wealthy, sophisticated and touched

by the enduring glamour of its founder, Alexander the Great, it ranked as

the undisputed capital of the East. From his base in the city, Vespasian

could ensure that no corn ships sailed for Rome; that no barbarians

menaced Syria; and that no rebels caused undue trouble in Judaea. But he

could also benefit from something else. In Alexandria, he could burnish his

stature as a man who was more than human. Crude and earthy though

Vespasian might be in private, he did not disdain the nimbus of the divine

that had begun to attach itself to him. When he went alone into the greatest

of all the city’s temples, the gods granted him a vision of the prosperity that

was to be his. The natives hailed him as a man marked out by destiny as the

heir of Alexander. Yosef, brought in his train to Egypt, continued to preach

the good news: that the scriptures of his people were being fulfilled, and

that a man had emerged from Judaea to claim the rule of the world.

Not that Vespasian was alone in identifying his cause with supernatural

purposes. The more that crisis roiled Rome’s dominions, so the more did

prophecies of a new order threaten to slip his grasp. Everywhere it was

being whispered that the gods, who for so long had bestowed their blessings

upon the Roman people, had withdrawn their favour. If to the Roman

people themselves the prospect of their downfall was naturally a dreadful

one, then so it inspired many others, both in the provinces and beyond, to

dream wild and fantastical dreams. Back in April, for instance, outside

Lugdunum, a Gaul of humble background by the name of Mariccus had

won thousands of followers by claiming to be a god. The presence of

Vitellius in the city, far from giving him pause, had only encouraged him to

preach that the age of Roman rule was at an end. When the Aeduan

authorities, alarmed by the spread of this message among their people, had

him arrested and handed over to the imperial authorities, he was condemned

to be eaten by wild beasts; but the animals would not touch him. True,

Vitellius had then had the self-proclaimed king of the Gauls executed in his

own presence; but the readiness of large numbers of provincials to believe

that Mariccus had indeed been a god, and had conquered death itself, was

an ominous straw in the wind.

Meanwhile, beyond the immediate reach of Roman power, the winds

were blowing even stronger. In Germany, for instance, there was no

controlling the swirl of prophecies. Many of these were borne specifically

on the gusts of the civil war. Rome’s agonies had not gone unnoticed on the

far side of the Rhine; nor had the withdrawal of large numbers of

legionaries from the various bases along the river. On the banks of the

Lippe, in the valley that stretched eastwards from Vetera, there stood a

tower; and in this tower there lived a seeress. So formidable was her

reputation that many of the natives viewed her as divine; and even Romans,

who referred to her as Veleda, might well be in awe of her powers. Perched

as she was high above the world, she was practised at hearing the future

whispered on both gales and breezes. The long years of humiliation suffered

by her people were at an end. War was coming to the Rhine. The great

bases of the legions were fated to be wiped out from the face of the earth.

Such were Veleda’s prophecies. Few were permitted to approach her, but

this only added to her mystique. Far and wide her words were reported.

They were heard deep in the eastern forests of Germany, by peoples who

prided themselves on having cast off the Roman yoke; but they were heard

as well along the Rhine, in regions where the natives had long since been

habituated to Roman ways, where the goods they produced all went to

Roman markets, and where young men enlisted as a matter of course in the

Roman military.

Auxilia, these soldiers were called: auxiliaries. Even the legions,

incomparable as heavy infantry though they were, could not function

without the support of cavalry, archers, and lightly armed skirmishers: and

so it had long been the practice of Roman commanders to recruit such

additional troops as might be needed from among native allies. Augustus,

impatient with this ad hoc process, had brought his customary genius for

organisation to the task of regularising them. His achievement had been

typically subtle. The auxiliaries had been fashioned into a fighting force

that complemented the legions without ever rivalling them. Like

legionaries, they were professional; but at a third of the rate of pay. Like

legionaries, they were arranged into units; but these were each a tenth of a

legion’s size. Like legionaries, they were well-trained; but not so

formidably that they might not, should the state of a campaign require it, be

sacrificed to the cause of preserving the legions from danger. To serve as an

auxiliary was always to be conscious of a certain inferiority; and this, to be

sure, might easily provoke resentment. Certainly, it had never been

forgotten by the Roman authorities that the greatest disaster to befall their

arms in Germany – the annihilation of Varus’ three legions – had been

masterminded by a one-time auxiliary commander. Nevertheless, the

shadow of this precedent did not fall as darkly as it might have done.

Mutinies among auxiliary units were few and far between. The Roman

authorities were alert to the hatreds that might exist among their various

subjects, and did not hesitate to capitalise on them: this was why the cohorts

Florus had commanded during his time in Jerusalem had consisted of

Samaritans. Nor was the opportunity for weight-throwing the only perk of

service an auxiliary enjoyed. The reward for completing a term of duty was

a precious one: Roman citizenship. Its benefits were such that they

extended down the generations. Any sons of a barbarian broken to

civilisation by service with the auxiliaries would be eligible to serve in the

legions. They might gain promotion, become centurions, and retire as

people of great eminence. Their sons, in turn, might aspire to even higher

status. The perks of rank, the pleasures of wealth: all might very well be

theirs. Why, then, should anyone think to jeopardise such a prospect?

In times of peace, there were many incentives for provincials brought

under Roman rule to identify with their conquerors. The horizons of a

global empire were broad. Peasants might toil in the fields to satisfy the

demands of tax-collectors; farmers might dread the confiscation of their

pack-animals by passing soldiers; prophets might preach visions of Rome’s

downfall, and of how the last were destined to be first, and the first last. But

these, by the classes who, in provinces across the empire, flourished under

Roman rule, and whose prosperity was dependent on its continuance, might

easily be ignored. Now, though, in a time of chaos and upheaval, matters

were different. Obedience to Caesar was all very well – but what if there

were numerous Caesars? Everything then became a gamble. One man’s

loyalist, after all, was another man’s rebel. The welter of assassinations and

suicides that, in barely a year, had claimed emperor after emperor, the

spectacle of legion slaughtering legion, the sense that the entire fabric of

Rome’s dominion might be groaning and buckling, threatened to scramble

everything. A disorienting possibility had opened up. What if the empire

was not, after all, eternal? ‘It is the doom of the legions to be wiped out.’58

Such was the message delivered by Veleda from her tower. She was not

alone, of course, in issuing such a forecast. Variations on the theme had

been circulating in the eastern provinces of the empire for decades. Never

before, though, had they seemed quite so urgent. The more that people were

tempted to believe in such prophecies, the greater the likelihood of open

rebellion; and the greater the likelihood of open rebellion, the more the

local elites were obliged to wrestle with split loyalties. Should they stick

with a Roman order that had long buttressed their own fortunes, or throw

caution to the winds, and seek to carve out a new status for themselves? The

stakes could hardly be higher. It was, for everyone, a fearsome choice.

Any who doubted this had only to look to Judaea. There, three years on

from the onset of the great revolt, there were still men and women who

hoped to square their identity as Judaeans with their loyalty to Rome.

Vespasian, heading to Berytus for his council of war with Mucianus, had

summoned the highest-ranking of them all to join him. Marcus Julius

Agrippa was – despite his Roman name – the great-grandson of Judaea’s

most celebrated king. Herod the Great, a brutal but slippery survivor much

admired by both Antony and Augustus, had richly deserved his renown.

Seventy years after his death, Judaea remained stamped by his relish for

showy building projects. Herod it was who had rebuilt the Temple in

Jerusalem, a decades-long programme of construction designed to showcase

his piety, rally Judaean support for his regime, and immortalise his name.

Simultaneously, he had displayed a rare talent for collaboration. He had

raised temples to Augustus; graced Jerusalem with a theatre, a hippodrome,

and various other monuments fit to impress any visiting Roman; and

commissioned a stupefying harbour which he had named – with typical

smoothness – Caesarea. No reach of Judaea was so lonely that it might not

bear the mark of his genius for reconciling the Judaean with the Roman.

Deep in the badlands south of Jerusalem, for instance, on the summit of a

sheer mountain, there stood a fortress named Masada; and inside this

fortress Herod had built two palaces. The interior decoration of these twin

complexes was a pointed fusion: mosaics adorned with fruits and flowers,

symbols of the divine favour that had graced the Judaeans with their

homeland, paired with wall-paintings that would not have disgraced the

Palatine. Certainly, no one could have doubted, visiting Masada, that it was

possible for a Judaean ruler to serve both his god and Caesar.

Yet it was the measure, perhaps, of just how skilfully Herod had walked

a tightrope that no one, in the wake of his death, had been found to replace

him. The Roman authorities, slicing and dicing his kingdom, had never

quite been able to decide how it should best be administered. Even as its

central core had been reconstituted as a province, ruled directly from Rome,

so had various other portions been divided up between Herod’s heirs. The

authority of Agrippa – who ruled a patchwork of lands to the north and east

of Judaea – was, compared to that of his great-grandfather, a spectral thing.

Although he had been vested by Claudius with responsibility for ensuring

the proper management of the Temple, he had never had any troops

stationed in Jerusalem, nor had the city been a part of his sovereign

kingdom. Chains of command, as a result, had become hopelessly

entangled. Nothing quite like the confusion of it existed anywhere else in

the empire. It had long seemed, in Jerusalem, that the city had not one but

two masters: the Roman governor and Agrippa.

It was the king, in the febrile, fatal months before Judaea exploded into

open revolt, who had taken the lead in attempting to broker a compromise

between Florus and the radicals pushing for insurrection. Or rather, it had

been his sister, Berenice: a much-married princess darkly rumoured to be

the mistress of Agrippa himself, but whose presence in Jerusalem had been

due reflection of her piety and devotion to the god of her people. Barefoot

and at risk of her own life she had stood before Florus, begging him to

show restraint, but in vain. Agrippa, joining his sister in Jerusalem shortly

afterwards, had also sought to reconcile his countrymen to the continuance

of Roman rule; but they had only stoned him and proclaimed his

banishment. Leaving the city for the last time, Agrippa had done so in tears.

‘Only with the help of God can you possibly hope to win – and that will

never come, since it is evident, from the sheer scale of their empire, that He

is already on the side of the Romans.’59

This prophecy, uttered a year after Nero’s suicide, was one that many

Judaeans could legitimately doubt. To people praying for a miracle, the

spectacle of the rulers of the world tearing themselves to pieces had a

particular resonance. Vespasian, whose repression of the revolt had initially

been so remorseless, had not only halted his campaigning, but actually left

Judaea for Egypt. In Jerusalem, in Masada – where refugees had fled in the

earliest days of the uprising – and in a couple of other fortresses still in

rebel hands, people raised their prayers and dared to hope. In the sky,

ghostly armies dazzled onlookers with the blaze of their weapons; in

Jerusalem, the Temple periodically seemed lit by heavenly fire. No one

doubted that these wonders portended a mighty reckoning. The prophecies

that Yosef ben Mattityahu had interpreted as applying to Vespasian were

understood very differently by the rebels. Repeatedly in their scriptures,

Judaeans could read of an age when a kingdom of righteousness was

destined to emerge, and when the foreign rulers, in all their arrogance,

would be smashed like a potter’s vessel. God’s Anointed, a prince, was

destined to come: his ‘Messiah’. This Christos (so Greek-speaking

Judaeans translated the title) would be no Caesar. Rather, he would restore

Jerusalem to the status it had enjoyed back in ancient times, when the

Temple had first been built and the city had ranked as the capital of a

mighty kingdom: Israel. ‘With justice he will give decisions for the poor of

the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath

of his lips he will slay the wicked.’60

Assurances like these had long furnished Judaeans with hope. Many,

unsurprisingly, yearned to believe that their fulfilment was at hand. As in

Gaul, so in Judaea: self-proclaimed prophets had arisen and won themselves

many disciples. One, ‘a charlatan named Theudas’, had told his followers to

follow him to a river named the Jordan, on the promise that he would part

its waters and lead them to the far side; another, a man known as ‘the

Egyptian’, had emerged from out of the desert at the head of several

thousand supporters, and sought to bring down the walls of Jerusalem with

a single word of command. Neither had caused the provincial authorities

undue alarm. Both had been easily routed; both had been briskly put to

death. Not that it was only the Romans who despised such men as frauds.

So too did many Judaeans. Priests in particular were deeply suspicious of

men from beneath their own class who modelled themselves on ancient

prophets, set themselves in opposition to Roman rule, and claimed a

particular closeness to God. They were charlatans, magicians, frauds. Yet

what, in the final reckoning, had the revolt against Rome been, the uprising

against the terrible and dreadful beast with its great iron teeth, if not the

expression of a belief very similar to that held by Theudas or the Egyptian?

Agrippa, warning the people of Jerusalem that without divine assistance

their rebellion was doomed, had been speaking from the heart. Unless,

indeed, the appointed time was at hand, when all the peoples of the world

were destined to be brought under the yoke of the God of Israel, and the

new wine to dry up, and the leopard to lie down with the goat, then nothing

would be sufficient to spare their city from annihilation.

This was why Yosef, even as his former comrades reviled him as a

traitor, never doubted that by serving the cause of the Romans he was

serving the cause of his own people as well. During his term of command in

Galilee, he had experienced for himself just how bitterly divided the

region’s inhabitants were. There were many, out in the wilds of the

countryside, who profoundly resented foreign rule, who feared the spread of

alien customs, who might go so far as to boycott Roman plates, or

cookware, or lamps; but there were others, particularly in Sepphoris,

Galilee’s largest city, who had offered their surrender to Vespasian even

before his army had taken the field. Local landowners, eager to exploit the

chaos of the times, had raised private armies, showing themselves quite as

ready to turn on one another as on the Romans. The boundary between

freedom-fighter and bandit repeatedly seemed to blur.

Even before the arrival of Vespasian’s legions in Galilee, the fields had

been littered with corpses. Smoke had drifted above burning farms. Then

the Romans had come. The horror of it still lived with Yosef. Although his

time in the countryside had been miserable, he had not been oblivious to its

beauties, and had marvelled at how, along the banks of the lake in the heart

of Galilee, ‘the soil is so wonderfully fertile that not a plant there fails to

flourish’:61 walnuts and palms, figs and olives, grapes and wildflowers.

Even the Sea of Galilee, however, had ended up a butcher’s shambles.

Fugitives from the legions, taking to fishing boats and rafts, had been

hunted by the Romans; and such was the slaughter that the blood and

viscera of the slain had come to dye the entire lake red. The beaches had

been strewn with swollen carcasses, clammy and rotten in the sun. The

stench of it had reached to the heavens.

That such a fate might be visited on the Temple was a prospect not to be

borne. Vespasian, for all that his gaze was fixed on Italy, had not forgotten

Judaea. The prosecution of the war against the Judaeans had been entrusted

to Titus, his able, ambitious and smoulderingly charismatic son. The force

at his back was a formidable one, for in addition to the army his father had

previously commanded, Titus had been given XII Fulminata, ‘a legion

which hungered to avenge the defeat it had previously suffered at the hands

of the Judaeans’62 – and a host of other forces besides. There was little

reason to doubt that the Romans would treat the rebels in Jerusalem, should

they fail to surrender, just as they had treated the rebels in Galilee.

Yet this did not mean that the Temple was doomed to burn. Yosef

himself, devout in the worship of his god even as he followed in Titus’

train, could offer himself as living evidence that there was no necessary

contradiction between being a Judaean and submitting to Caesar. He could

point as well to the intimate links between the Roman high command and

Agrippa. Julius Alexander, who had been appointed to serve Titus as his

deputy, had once been Berenice’s brother-in-law. Berenice herself had

embarked on a passionate affair with Titus. Intimacy between Judaeans and

Romans was certainly possible. Yosef, clinging to this assurance, felt no

shame at his role as a collaborator with the Romans. It was the devout, the

patriotic, the properly Judaean thing to do. Only the rebels’ submission,

after all, would enable the Temple, and Jerusalem with it, to be spared. The

empire might indeed seem to be tottering; but Yosef, that battle-scarred

veteran of the war for Galilee, still had no doubt that the Judaean revolt was

doomed. The fundamental law which for so long had governed relations

between the peoples of the world still held. No peace was ever on offer

except a peace on Roman terms.

* Or perhaps the river Aar. The identity of the Obringa, the river that marked the southern border of

Lower Germany, has not been definitively settled.

* During the civil wars that brought Augustus to power, the legion had served the future emperor by

guarding the straits – the fretum – of Messina: hence its name, fretensis, the legion of the straits.

OceanofPDF.com

III

A WORLD AT WAR

We Who Are About to Die

Autumn in Italy was a time of ease. The fields were harvested, the apples

picked from the orchards, the vats filled and foaming with the juice of sun-

warmed grapes. ‘Ripe and mellow, the season no longer blazes with the

passions of youth: for now that autumn has come, the year is poised

midway between youth and old age, and its hair is streaked with grey.’1

Farmers could spend their time singing, dancing, enjoying the fruit of their

labours. Oxen could rest in their stalls. Soldiers, as the evenings drew in

and the south wind brought squalls of rain gusting across fields and hills,

could afford to relax: for the campaigning season was over.

Or was it? Ever since the first proclamation of Vitellius as emperor, the

times had been in disorder. The rhythms of the year were out of kilter.

Caecina, who had raised the banner of mutiny on the very first day of

January, who had led his troops to war in the depths of winter, who had

crossed the Alps while the passes were still covered with snow, had blazed

a particularly notable trail. In the Balkans, where the legions seethed with

loathing for Vitellius, most of the officers had been content to follow the

recommendation of Vespasian: that they should await the arrival of

Mucianus and his task force, and prepare to invade Italy in the spring. One

legate, however, impatient with this advice, had been eager to emulate

Caecina and risk a winter campaign. Marcus Antonius Primus had been

appointed by Galba to the command of VII Galbiana: a legion recruited

only the previous year by Galba himself. Fiercely devoted to their imperial

patron, the soldiers of VII Galbiana had accompanied him from Spain, done

much of the killing that had accompanied his entry into Rome, and then,

one month later, been posted to a station of honour on the Danube.

Unsurprisingly, their loyalty to Galba’s successor was shaky in the extreme.

In their legate they had a commander more than ready to take advantage of

their resentment and urge on them the course of insurrection.

Antonius, a beak-nosed aristocrat of commanding presence and

imposing physique, was ideally suited by his talents to a time of crisis.

Peace had seen him sent into exile as a convicted fraudster; war had seen

Galba award him his Danubian command in the province known by the

Romans as Pannonia. Like Caecina, he was ferociously ambitious; like

Caecina, he had a fondness for cutting corners; like Caecina, he yearned to

cut a dash on the great stage of the world, and not to moulder for ever on

the banks of some distant and barbarous river. A natural demagogue, he had

found it a simple matter to override the reservations of his fellow legates.

By late August, he had come to stand at the head of a host of legions drawn

from across the Balkans; by September, he had launched a full-scale

invasion of Italy; and by early October, he had seized control of Verona, a

city which – no less than Cremona – constituted a key strategic hub.

Caecina, dispatched northwards by a frantic Vitellius to oppose this

onslaught, could hardly help but be impressed. As he advanced from Rome,

all the reports reaching him cast Antonius as a commander cut from his own

cloth.

Certainly, the contrast with Vitellius seemed a marked one. Caecina,

after months spent in the company of the man he had done so much to raise

to greatness, had come to share in the emperor’s own self-estimation: that

he was simply too torpid, too indecisive for the job. His entire regime was

rotten with a lack of purpose. Assorted favourites pandered shamelessly to

their master’s appetites, squandering fortunes that the treasury could ill

afford. Valens, Caecina’s partner in the great venture that had brought

Vitellius to the throne, and his bitterest rival, lay sick. Even the legionaries,

as they marched northwards to confront Antonius, lacked the steel-forged

discipline that had been their hallmark on the Rhine: a summer spent

scattered across the capital had badly impaired their cohesion and morale.

To Caecina, as he advanced on Verona, met the enemy south of the city, and

clashed with them indecisively, it seemed that he was facing the man he

himself had been, and the army he had led, only a few months before. The

reflection plunged him into despair. It also decided him on a fateful course.

Twice already he had betrayed a Caesar. Now, ever ready as he was to cast

off his loyalties, and contemptuous of the emperor he had left behind in

Rome, he prepared to do so once again.

On 18 October, Caecina sent the various legions under his command out

of the camp on manoeuvres. Only the senior centurions, and certain hand-

picked legionaries, were ordered to stay behind. Summoned to Caecina’s

headquarters, these men listened in astonishment as their commander urged

them to abandon their oath of loyalty to Vitellius, jump ship, and side with

the Flavians. No matter that their camp was well protected by marshes on

its flanks and a river in its rear, that they had eight legions in the field, that

they were yet to lose so much as a skirmish, Caecina succeeded in winning

his audience round. The portraits of Vitellius were sent toppling. The name

of Vespasian was inscribed on the standards. Then, towards evening, V

Alaudae returned. Contemptuous as the Larks were of the forces ranged

against them, and proud of their own long and distinguished record of

service, they reacted with fury to any suggestion that they should merely go

over to the enemy. An eclipse that stained the moon the colour of blood

seemed a fitting image of their commander’s treachery. Still sufficiently

respectful of Caecina not to put him to death, they nevertheless loaded him

down with chains. Then, with the backing of the other legions, the Larks

picked their own legate as his temporary replacement and prepared to

evacuate the camp. The plan was to withdraw to Cremona: that mighty

stronghold of their cause, and a city to which Caecina had already sent two

legions as an advance guard. There they would be able to await the arrival

of Valens: for Caecina’s great rival, alerted to his erstwhile colleague’s

treachery, was reported to have roused himself from his sickbed and left

Rome with reinforcements. So it was, breaking the bridges behind them as

they went, that the Vitellians made for a destination calculated to stiffen

their morale: the site of the crushing victory they had won only six months

before.

Meanwhile, in Antonius’ camp, there were soldiers who could also find

inspiration in their memories of the battle. The men of XIII Gemina

nurtured a particular grudge. The emblem of their legion’s record of service

– one that reached all the way back to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul – was the

lion: that fiercest and most kingly of beasts. Yet their punishment, in the

wake of Otho’s defeat, had been a humiliating one. Lions had been treated

as donkeys. Caecina, rather than cashiering them or sending them back to

Pannonia, had set them to work as builders. True, there was, for a legion,

nothing inherently degrading about this. Soldiers were supposed to be

handy with tools. ‘Picks win wars’ – so Corbulo had put it.2 Camps and

roads did not just materialise by magic, after all. The men of XIII Gemina,

however, had not been put to building a camp or a road. Instead – as the

citizens of Cremona, jeering the soldiers as they laboured at their task, had

taken great pleasure in pointing out – they had been put to improving the

civic amenities of the city. Specifically, they had been put to building an

amphitheatre.

Any Roman city with pretensions to greatness had to have one. The

word – ‘a space that can be viewed from both sides’, it literally meant –

derived from Greek, but the design was all Italian. No other style of

monument was more distinctively Roman. To have one was to boast a stage

fit for a Caesar. Vitellius, travelling through Gaul from the Rhine, would

never have used Lugdunum to proclaim his dynastic ambitions had it been

the kind of city to lack an amphitheatre. Spectacula, the Romans had

originally called such a structure: a place for putting on a spectacle. The

spectacle itself was twofold. There was the show staged in the arena; and

there was the show provided by the sponsor of the entertainments, a

demonstration of splendour and munificence calculated to stupefy all who

beheld it. Spectaculars, of course, were expensive, just as the infrastructure

necessary to host them was expensive: which was why, across most of

Gaul, amphitheatres were few and far between. Equally, it was why in

Lugdunum, a city that cast itself as the capital of all the Gallic provinces,

tribal leaders had been desperate to build one. The man who had paid for it,

an aristocrat from Aquitaine, had been a priest of the altar to Rome and

Augustus; and in AD 19, when the amphitheatre was inaugurated, he had

made sure to let everyone know it. No structure in the whole of Gaul was

less provincial; no structure in the whole of Gaul more truly Roman.

Vitellius, though still many days distant from the capital when he arrived in

Lugdunum, had been able to stage shows in the city’s arena and feel that, by

doing so, he was introducing himself to the world. A spectacular indeed.

True, it was the nature of live entertainment that it might sometimes go

wrong. The refusal of wild beasts to touch Mariccus, the Gallic rebel

sentenced to the arena, had been a particular embarrassment. Jeopardy,

however, was precisely what made the experience of attending an

amphitheatre so thrilling. The less a show was scripted, the more exciting

spectators were likely to find it. Executions – for all the civic lesson that

they taught – were the least popular of the attractions staged in an

amphitheatre precisely because they so rarely served up surprises.

Entertaining though it might be to watch lions or bears devour a criminal

loaded down with chains, how much more so was it to watch them pitched

against huntsmen. Even this, however, tended not to be the biggest draw.

Top of the bill was invariably the pairing of warriors, the one against the

other. Nothing provided more drama, nothing generated more excitement,

than spectacles of armed combat. When fans flocked to an amphitheatre, it

was above all to watch contests between well-trained and proficient

fighters, stars at the very top of their game, men sworn by their own

ferocious version of the sacramentum to endure fire, chains, the whip and

the sword: gladiators.

The origins of the obsession were venerable. Bouts between armed men

had first been staged in Rome as munera: offerings to the shades of the

departed. Over the course of the centuries, the funerals of distinguished men

had come to be marked by fights between ever greater numbers of pairs of

gladiators. The makeshift amphitheatres erected in the Forum to host these

munera had grown in size and extravagance. Caesar, staging games to

propitiate the ghost of his father, had set 320 pairs of gladiators to fight one

another, all of them arrayed in silver armour. His enemies, painfully aware

how likely this was to boost his appeal, had sought to regulate such displays

of extravagance as tightly as they could; but the effort had been hopeless.

The collapse of the republic had made sure of that. Once Augustus was

secure in his supremacy, he had been free to stage extravaganzas beyond the

dreams of previous generations. No expense had been spared ‘to fill the

hearts and eyes of the Roman people with unforgettable spectacles’. 3 One in

particular, jaw-dropping in its scale, had featured ten thousand gladiators.

Munera, once staged to keep the dead at bay, had come to serve as an

essential prop of the new regime. The Roman people, greedy for ever more

eye-popping entertainments, had looked to the emperor to provide them;

and the emperor, in his role as benefactor to his fellow citizens, had made

sure to oblige. Nero, unsurprisingly, had raised the bar to particularly

stupefying heights. Even men ‘doddery with age, hoary-headed, grown old

in the city’,4 had confessed themselves amazed by his games. This was why,

for Vitellius, the staging of munera at Lugdunum had been quite as

important a demonstration of his new rank as the parading of his victorious

legions or the proclamation of his dynasty. No one could lay claim to the

rule of Rome and fail to serve up gladiators.

Even so, an emperor had to tread carefully. To stage games before the

gaze of the world was potentially a perilous business. Pitfalls lurked

everywhere. This was especially so in a time of civil war. Vitellius,

travelling from Lugdunum to Cremona, had arrived there to find its

amphitheatre freshly completed. Naturally, he had made sure to inaugurate

it: a mark of gratitude both to the people of Cremona and to Caecina, who

had furnished the gladiators. Yet the setting had been as haunted by the

spirits of the dead as the very first munera had been all those centuries

before. Games were not normally staged next to a battlefield littered with

the corpses of legionaries. Indeed, moralists approved of gladiatorial

combat precisely because it reminded citizens softened by peace, unfamiliar

with arms, far distant from scenes of war, of what it took for Rome to rule

the world. Unlike theatrical entertainments, which were self-evidently

corrupting and enfeebling, munera served to harden those who watched

them. Yet Vitellius, listening to the roar of the crowds, sharing in their sense

of excitement, had drawn the wrong conclusion. It was presiding in the

amphitheatre that had inspired him to visit the scene of carnage beyond the

city; and there, rather than reflecting with sorrow on the vast numbers of his

fellow citizens who lay rotting in the summer heat, he had behaved as a fan

might have done at the games, giddy with delight at the slaughter. Vitellius

had signally failed to propitiate the shades of the dead. Instead, he had

offered them only insult.

And now, six months after their dispatch to the realm of the sad and

infernal gods, the time was nearing, perhaps, for them to claim vengeance.

Unbeknown to the Vitellians, the Flavians were heading for Cremona too.

Antonius, informed that the enemy force camped south of Verona had

abandoned its base, and was nowhere to be found, had decided – rather than

go blundering around northern Italy in search of it – to target a different

adversary. The two legions Caecina had sent to garrison Cremona had

seemed too tempting a quarry not to hunt down, isolate and eliminate.

Accordingly, riding at the head of four thousand cavalry, five legions and

assorted cohorts of auxiliaries, Antonius had left Verona. Like Caecina, he

was a man forever in a hurry. The pace he set was a furious one. After two

days of hard marching, he and his men arrived at a village called

Bedriacum, some twenty miles east of Cremona. This, six months

previously, was where Otho’s legions had made their base; and it was where

the Flavians now set up camp. The legionaries dug ditches, threw up

ramparts, and raised palisades; then caught their breath. Not Antonius,

however. At the head of his horsemen, he went for an exploratory canter

down the road that led to Cremona. Here it was – to the mutual surprise of

both forces – that he blundered into the Vitellians. Like the Flavians, they

had made remarkable speed. Like the Flavians, they were startled to

discover that all along they had been in a race. Now, at last, the two

adversaries were face to face. The contest, long brewing, had come to a

head.

It was the morning of 24 October. As the sun climbed in the sky, so the

rival vanguards clashed. The fortunes of battle swung this way and that.

First, Antonius and his horsemen were stampeded back towards Bedriacum;

then, making a stand beside a river, they succeeded in blocking the enemy

advance and forced the Flavian cavalry in turn to retreat. Meanwhile, both

sides had been summoning reinforcements. By late afternoon, all the

Vitellian legions – the two originally stationed in Cremona included – had

taken up position in the fields outside the city. Opposite them, the Flavian

legions, marching up the road from Bedriacum, were also massing. Among

them was XIII Gemina. The same legionaries who had toiled at building the

amphitheatre for the people of Cremona now stood before the city of their

tormentors, spears and swords at the ready, braced for combat. The

Cremonans had wanted to stage great spectacles of slaughter. Now they

were to get their wish: a spectacle of slaughter that threatened not just the

rival combatants, but the audience as well.

Already, to astute observers, it was becoming clear that soldiers and

gladiators, in a time of civil war, might easily seem indistinguishable. Back

in the spring, during the first round of fighting at Cremona, one of Otho’s

partisans had employed a force of two thousand gladiators against Caecina;

Vitellius, approaching Rome with his victorious legions, had sought ‘to

bulk them up as though they were fighters in the arena’. 5 Never before,

however, had the elision between the gladiator and the legionary, between

the arena and the battlefield, between entertainment and the terrifyingly

serious business of warfare, appeared quite so unsettling as it did that

October evening to the people of Cremona. All of them understood the

stakes. Standing on the walls of their city, they could see the watch fires of

the rival armies. It was as though the entire world had become an

amphitheatre – and they, like the soldiers preparing for battle, were trapped

in the arena.

The sun set. A couple of hours passed. Clumsily at first, falteringly, but

then with escalating savagery, the rival legions engaged. Gladiators were

not permitted to refuse combat; nor, in similar manner, had the Vitellians

taken the sensible option of retreating into Cremona for the night, and

leaving the Flavians to shiver out in the open. Instead, swept with confused

alarms of struggle and flight, the fields beyond the city became a hellish

scene of slaughter. There was no one battle, just a succession of ragged but

murderous engagements. The Vitellians had various advantages: numbers

that were more than a match for the Flavians; lethal artillery; supplies that

could be brought to them throughout the night by the women of Cremona.

Yet the Flavians refused to yield. The moon blazed in their rear, magnifying

their shadows and disconcerting their opponents; a suicide mission took out

the Vitellian artillery; Antonius, making his way from legion to legion and

tirelessly urging them on, proved far more effective a commander than the

makeshift generals on the other side. The hours passed. The sky to the east

began to lighten. Antonius, alert to the mood of his adversaries, sensed that

their morale was fraying. Then, as the sun rose, so too did a rumour: that

Mucianus and his legions were approaching. Antonius seized his chance.

Hurling his last reserves into the fray, he hit the enemy with everything he

had; and at last the Vitellians broke.

Even now, however, the rout was not total. Although many of the

fugitives fell on the road that led back to Cremona, many did not. Some

reached the legionary base on the eastern flank of the city; others took

shelter within the city itself. Like a gladiator brought to his knees, but

resolved not to bare his throat to his adversary, the legionaries who had

sworn the sacramentum to Vitellius, and fought so hard to win him the rule

of the world, now refused to abandon him. The officers felt less

commitment to their oath. Once the legionary base had finally been

stormed, after a desperate and pulverising struggle, and the Flavian artillery

began to target the city walls, they knew the game was up. Their opponents,

if they did not surrender, would be given licence by the rules of war to

storm the city, level it to the ground, and slaughter all its defenders – and

where was the profit in that? The men on both sides of the terrible conflict

were, after all, fellow citizens. The ideals of peacetime still counted for

something. That this was so had been evident even amid the confusion of

battle: there were some among the Vitellians, brought food by the women of

Cremona, who had shared it with friends of theirs in the Flavian ranks,

crying out in distress, as they did so, ‘What are we doing here, why are we

fighting?’6

Once the members of the high command had resolved to lay down arms,

their first port of call was Caecina. Releasing him from his chains, they

begged for his help in negotiating with the Flavians; but Caecina, smug as

only a man proven to have made the right call could be, turned them down.

Left with no choice but to offer an unconditional surrender, the Vitellian

commanders duly hung olive branches from the battlements; then, once the

artillery fire had ceased, they marched out disconsolately through the city

gates. At first they were jostled and jeered by the Flavians, but it did not

take long for emotions of fellow-feeling to assert themselves. Terrible

dispatches had been received from the front. Worst was the story of a

legionary from VII Galbiana who had cut down a man from XXI Rapax

during the rout that followed the battle, but who then, gazing at the dying

soldier, had realised, to his horror, that it was his own father. The news of

this, for all the lamentations and curses it provoked among the Flavian

ranks, had done nothing to check the violence of the fighting. Now,

however, with the surrender formalised, a great yearning to see the wounds

of civil war bound up swept both sides. Even Caecina, whose role in the

recent cycles of slaughter had been such a prominent one, helped contribute

to the healing process – for when he emerged from Cremona, resplendent in

the finery of his office, surrounded by guards, and confident in the service

he had done the Flavians, he was roundly booed by both sides. Antonius,

stepping in to keep him from being manhandled, sent him onwards to

Alexandria, there to report the news of the battle to Vespasian and claim his

reward for jumping ship. Caecina, with his gambler’s instinct, had made

another winning bet.

That the horrors of fratricidal strife might work to the advantage of those

bold and ruthless enough to profit from them had never been forgotten.

Although Augustus’ regime had ended an age of civil war, it had been bred

of it as well. Over all the convulsions of the past year, all the upheavals that

had seen emperor succeed emperor, and the fields of Cremona fertilised by

blood, an ominous question had hung: what if a new Augustus were never

to emerge? Fires once started might not easily be put out. Dread of this

possibility, that Rome might be turned to ashes, and horsemen strike the

city with clattering hooves, had long been stamped on the Forum itself. At

the base of the Capitol, there rose a flight of steps known as the Stairs of

Mourning; and next to these steps there stood a temple to the goddess

Concordia. She it was who had enabled the Roman people to live in

harmony with one another during their rise to greatness and to win

themselves the rule of the world. Always, though, they had understood that

she had her shadow. Discordia had no temple, for she existed only to

destroy. Given the chance, she would shatter the iron-covered doors that

kept strife otherwise immured; let violence rule the streets; unleash civil

war. Once already, in the terrible decades that had preceded Augustus’

reign, she had done this; and only by a titanic effort had the doors been

barred again. Now, with Discordia loose a second time, there was a

desperate need for one of the warlords competing to rule as Caesar not just

to triumph, but to triumph by stamping out all the flames of war. For

otherwise the whole world might burn.

After Antonius received the Vitellian surrender, he went to the bath-

house, as though to wash away the filth and blood of war. Stepping into the

water, he complained that it was tepid. ‘Not to worry,’ he added, ‘it will

soon be hot enough.’7 And so it would be. Soldiers in his train, hearing

Antonius’ comment, took it to mean what they wanted it to mean: that

Cremona should be put to the torch. Word spread, and the legions began to

force their way into the city. Neither Antonius nor any other officer was

able to restrain them. The hunger for gold, sex and vengeance was too

great. Only after four days of plundering, rape and slaughter had the

legionaries finally had their fill. By that time, nothing remained of Cremona

save a single temple. A city that had stood for 286 years, and long served

the Roman people as a bulwark against their foes, had been wiped from the

face of the earth. Its very soil was left so polluted that the legions had to

abandon the site. The shame felt by Antonius and the rest of the Flavian

high command did nothing to bring the city back. Rather, it highlighted the

mortal danger in which Rome and its empire now stood: that a commander

might urge his men to sheathe their swords, and still the swords would

flash.

Batavian Foam

There was no reach of the Roman world so remote that it might not be

touched by the shocks of the age. Even on the shores of the northern sea,

where everything was mud, their impact could be felt: a great sucking pull,

like the brown and icy tides that daily retreated from the mouths of the

Rhine delta. Just as the line of the river marked where civilisation and

barbarism met and mingled, so were the plains that bordered its lowest

reaches neither truly land nor water, but an indeterminate dimension

comprising both. Cattle cropped grass amid estuaries so broad that they

might as well have been the sea. Lakes were dotted with oaks torn up from

the shore during floods, ‘sailing upright through the water, with huge

islands of soil trapped between their roots’. 8 Here was a glimpse of the

chaos that had once existed before the separation of the elements: a

reminder of the confusion that awaited humanity were civilisation to

collapse.

Roman efforts to order this watery and barbarous realm had been

strenuous. Corbulo had led them. Prior to his appointment to the command

in Armenia he had served as governor of Lower Germany. Predictably, he

had set his men to digging. A canal was excavated, joining the Rhine to the

river Meuse some twenty miles to the south, ‘thereby sparing people the

risks of making the journey by sea’. 9 New roads were constructed, new

forts. Just as the drear flatlands required taming, so too did the barbarians

who lurked among them. North of the Rhine, settled around a great inland

lake, were a people called the Chaukians, who seemed, to a degree startling

even to seasoned observers, closer to creatures of the sea than to men. They

lived on stilts or artificial mounds perched above the high-water mark, ‘so

that when the tide sweeps over the surrounding land, they look like

seafarers, and when the tide withdraws, like ship-wrecks’. 10 They dug mud

with their bare hands, drank nothing but rainwater, and subsisted on seals

and the eggs of seabirds. Periodically, setting sail in ships made from dug-

out tree trunks, they would launch raids on the coast of Gaul, until Corbulo,

employing a mixture of armed force and targeted assassinations, succeeded

in pacifying the whole area. The lesson once taught, he had pulled his

forces back to the Rhine. Where was the value to Rome, after all, in ruling a

wasteland of mud?

Nevertheless, the peoples of the northern sea were not without their

uses. Settled on a great island in the Rhine delta were the Batavians: a

Germanic people who, since their transplantation there back in the early

days of Roman rule, had come to enjoy a special renown. In part this was

due to the popularity of their hair products: for ‘Batavian foam’, a soap

compounded of ashes and fat, not only cleaned hair but – to the delight of

fashion-setters back in Rome – lightened it. Chiefly, however, the fame of

Batavia was due to a quite different export: its young men. Subject to

Roman rule though the Batavians might be, they were spared the

humiliation of paying taxes. Instead, to a degree unique among the various

Germanic peoples who lived on the western banks of the Rhine, they had

been encouraged to maintain their fondness for battle, and to serve the

Romans just as weapons or armour served them: ‘as tools of war, and

nothing else’. 11 The Batavians, unlike other auxiliaries, were commanded

by their own chieftains; and these, for all that they ranked as Roman

citizens and sported Roman names, maintained a pride in their native

traditions that had long since faded among the aristocracies of Gaul. Like

bulls bred for the arena, the Batavians exhibited a strain of wildness that, in

the opinion of their Roman patrons, was precisely what rendered them so

distinctive and valuable.

Fit, in fact, to protect a Caesar. There had been no more striking measure

of the reputation the Batavians enjoyed than their employment as

bodyguards by Augustus and his successors. Only with Nero’s death had

this tradition finally ended – for Galba, suspicious of the Batavians’ loyalty

to the extinguished imperial dynasty, had disbanded them and sent them

packing. Service in the capital, however, was not the only opportunity they

had to demonstrate their worth. Their record on campaign was viewed even

by seasoned legionaries with awe. There was no one quite like a Batavian

for crossing a swollen river with his horse and in full armour. A recent

battle, during the invasion of Britain, had won them the particular

admiration of Vespasian, for their prowess as swimmers had enabled them

to ambush an army of natives on the far bank, establish a bridgehead, and

assist the legate in securing a decisive victory. Nor was even this the limit

of their talents. A favourite trick was to shoot an arrow, and then, ‘while it

hung in the air, hit and split it with another’.12 Martial ferocity, an ability to

swim like frogs, and expertise with firearms: here were capabilities rarely

combined. The Batavians were the auxiliaries that every Roman

commander wanted in his ranks.

All of which, in the early months of the civil war, had been good news

for Vitellius. The Batavians, already alienated by Galba, had rallied to his

cause. That spring, eight cohorts of them had played a key role in the defeat

of Otho’s legions at Cremona, holding the right wing and outflanking I

Adiutrix. This contribution notwithstanding, however, they were not

popular with their comrades. Ever since the beginning of the campaign to

make Vitellius emperor, they had been rubbing the legions the wrong way.

The chains of command that under normal circumstances served to

maintain the military pecking order, and in particular the subordination of

auxiliaries to legionaries, had started to fray. Naturally prone to bragging,

the Batavian cohorts had become increasingly bumptious. Vitellius, who

originally had been planning to take them to Rome, was appalled to

discover the full scale of their unruliness. Concerned as well to replenish

troop numbers on the Rhine, he had duly ordered them home. The wisdom

of this decision was made clear during an incident in Turin, when the

Batavians had got into a brawl with the fourteenth legion, and the entire city

had only narrowly avoided being burnt to the ground. Deep were the sighs

of relief among the members of the Vitellian high command when the

Batavian cohorts were reported to have arrived in Mogontiacum. There, at

least, on the margins of the world, they could do little harm.

But then the Flavian onslaught had begun, and Vitellius, in a panic, had

sent a frantic message to the Batavian cohorts, ordering them back to Italy.

They had set out, but they were destined never to arrive. Messengers from

the Rhine brought news to the capital that, devastating though it was, would

not, perhaps, have come as a total surprise to fashionistas and their

hairdressers. Every woman who used Batavian foam knew the score. There

was always the risk – an exceedingly slight one, but a real one, nevertheless

– that the soap, rather than dyeing the hair a fetching shade of blonde, might

singe it, and destroy it, and leave the user bald. Now, to the consternation of

Vitellius and his command, it seemed that the military authorities on the

Rhine were facing an analogous disaster. The Batavians, it was reported,

had risen in revolt. Forts along the Rhine estuary had been put to the torch.

An entire fleet, manned by Batavian rowers, had deserted to the rebels. The

remnants of V Alaudae and XV Primigenia, all the legionaries stationed at

Vetera who had not marched earlier in the year to Italy, had been defeated in

open battle. Vetera itself lay under siege. And how had the rebels come by

sufficient manpower to bottle up an entire legionary base? The answer to

that particular question hit Vitellius like a punch to his ample stomach.

Prominent among the forces camped out around Vetera were none other

than the reinforcements he had been banking on to come to his rescue: the

eight cohorts of Batavian auxiliaries.

Here, for anyone nervous that civilisation might sink, its great battle lost,

was yet another lurching development. The fortresses, the watchtowers, the

naval stations, everything that had adorned the otherwise featureless skyline

of Batavia: all had been swept away. The Batavians themselves, who for

decades had benefited from the rare favour of Caesar, and the discipline that

only service alongside the legions could instil, appeared to have reverted to

the savagery that was the natural condition of barbarians. Their commander,

a nobleman with the impeccably Roman name of Julius Civilis, had vowed,

so reports had it, to dye his hair the colour of blood, and never to cut it until

he had destroyed the Larks and XV Primigenia once and for all. Just as a

dyke, if it failed to be maintained, might start to crumble before the surging

of the sea, so had stripping the legions from the Rhine and the Danube left

the provinces adjoining them alarmingly exposed. In the Balkans, bands of

menacing tribesmen named Dacians had begun to cross the lower reaches of

the Danube and flood into Moesia, the province that bordered the Black

Sea; and only the fortuitous arrival of Mucianus at the head of his task force

had enabled their tide-surge to be blocked. Meanwhile, along the Rhine,

German warbands in their canoes had taken to its waters in growing

numbers. Plunder was their immediate object; but the prophecies of Veleda,

who had pronounced the doom of the great legionary bases, were much on

their minds as well. A desultory attempt to storm Mogontiacum was easily

repulsed; but at Vetera, where the Batavians had already settled down for a

lengthy siege, the growing number of forces under Civilis’ command were

not so easily dispersed. The legionaries too had heard Veleda’s

pronouncements. Huddled behind their ramparts, shivering through the

lengthening nights, listening to the drunken chants of German tribesmen

from around the watch fires, they dreaded that the prophetess was right, and

that all Rome’s efforts to redeem the world from savagery, all the

legionaries’ efforts to hold the line against it, were fated to melt into ruin.

The perspective was one that came naturally to soldiers who might well

have spent their entire careers serving among the garrisons along the Rhine.

There was, however, another way, a very different one, of understanding

Civilis’ purposes. The Batavian commander, prior to leading his cohorts

against Vetera, had not pledged them to the overthrow of Rome. Quite the

opposite. The Batavian cohorts, marching to war against the Larks and XV

Primigenia, had done so as soldiers of Caesar. Not of Vitellius, it was true –

but of Vespasian. In early autumn, even as Antonius was leading the Balkan

legions into Italy, the Flavian commander had written to Civilis reminding

him of his shared service with Vespasian in Britain, and urging him to

prevent any reinforcements from reaching Vitellius from the Rhine. Civilis,

restless and ambitious, had needed no further persuasion. That he had

betrayed the man to whom he had sworn the sacramentum was true enough;

but his truest oath of loyalty was not to a usurper, but to Rome.

This, in a time of civil war, was an argument that provided many officers

with a justification for treachery. Civilis was certainly not the only officer to

have stabbed Vitellius in the back. If Caecina’s had been the most

flamboyant example of treachery, there was another as well, altogether

more underhanded, and for that reason perhaps more effective. Hordeonius

Flaccus, the commander of Lower Germany, had not departed with Vitellius

for Rome. Elderly and unwell, he was as notorious for lethargy as Caecina

was for dash. This reputation, in the early weeks of the Batavian

insurgency, had provided him with the perfect screen for collaborating with

Civilis: for all along he had been in correspondence with Vespasian. As the

weeks went by, Flaccus’ failure to combat the rebellion came to seem to the

troops under his command ever more obstructive. No less than the vast

mass of the legions in the Rhine who had marched on Italy under Caecina

and Valens, the legionaries left behind in Germany were solid in their

loyalty to Vitellius. Demands by Civilis, prior to his march on Vetera, that

they abandon it, and swear allegiance to Vespasian, had been rebuffed with

indignant contempt. The longer the siege of Vetera dragged on, the more the

suspicions of Flaccus festered. Caught red-handed with a letter from

Vespasian, he was only able to stave off a mutiny by having the messengers

who had brought it arrested and sent to Vitellius. Meanwhile, back in

Vetera, the defenders gazed out at the totems that bristled along the enemy

positions, the carvings of beasts the Germans had carried from their forests,

and the standards the Batavian cohorts, those seasoned veterans of service

to Rome, had brought, and wondered what kind of siege they were engaged

in: a struggle against barbarians, or a civil war? ‘And they could not make

up their minds.’13

The garrisons on the Rhine were not alone in their sense of confusion.

As the days shortened, and autumn turned to winter, so shadow seemed to

be lengthening over the world. From the shores of the northern sea to the

fields of the Po Valley, chaos threatened everywhere. Charred stumps

marked where Roman forts had once stood; rubble was all that remained of

a famous Italian city. Who could say where it would end? Discordia was the

most terrible of goddesses. To a people long grown accustomed to peace,

the speed with which she had staked her claim to the rule of their empire

was bewildering. ‘The centre cannot hold. Good sense is banished. Force

rules the day.’14 The legionaries trapped inside Vetera were not alone in

their perplexity at how rapidly the boundaries between civilisation and

barbarism had come to blur. If the dramatic events on the Rhine barely

registered in the capital, then it was because its people, wrapping their

cloaks around them against the gathering chill of winter, faced threats much

closer to home. By demonstrating just how uncontrollably the passions of

civil war might blaze, the news from Cremona had taught them to dread the

worst. They were facing the very real prospect of fire and slaughter in the

heart of Rome.

Rather than risk that eventuality, Otho had chosen to commit suicide.

Vitellius, however, was cut from different cloth. Brought the news from

northern Italy and the Rhine, he had scorned to fall on his sword. His

instinct had always been to block his ears to bad news; and he still had

reason enough for optimism. Valens, who had left Rome too late to join the

hostilities at Cremona, was still at liberty, and presumed to be heading to

Germany, there to bring the Batavians to heel, and to raise reinforcements.

Fresh cohorts of Praetorians had been recruited, loyal to their emperor as

only soldiers whose throats were stuffed with gold could be. So, too, a

legion raised, as I Adiutrix had been, from marines. Accordingly, rather

than acknowledging the bad news from Cremona, Vitellius sought to hush it

up. First he would interrogate spies who brought him news from the Flavian

camp; then he would have them executed. Finally, in a spectacular gesture,

a Praetorian officer who had been given a personal tour of the battlefield at

Cremona by Antonius himself, and then, on his return to Rome, found his

report doubted, committed suicide: ‘in order’, as he put it before running

himself through, ‘to demonstrate that I am to be believed’. 15

By mid-November, with Antonius advancing steadily southwards, it had

become clear even to Vitellius that simply sitting tight in Rome and hoping

for Valens to turn up with reinforcements was no longer a viable policy.

Accordingly, the emperor sought to put on a show of martial vigour. As

large a force as he could muster was sent to block the Flaminian Way, the

road that led from the Adriatic coast to Rome, and which Antonius was

bound to take. The emperor even ventured out to their camp himself. His

presence there did not greatly boost morale. Twitchy and indecisive,

Vitellius responded to every piece of alarming news by getting drunk.

When he addressed his troops, he found himself menaced by a flock of

sinister-looking birds. When he sought to make sacrifice, the bull

stampeded and impaled itself on a spike. Shortly afterwards, when news

reached Vitellius of a mutiny at Misenum, the great naval base in the Bay of

Naples, he was thrown into panic, and hurried back to Rome. Here,

conscious that it was unlikely to be his for long, he finally accepted the

name of ‘Caesar’. Meanwhile, support for his regime continued to ebb

away. Senators began to show him open disrespect. Across Italy, ever more

cities declared for Vespasian. Finally came the cruellest, most fatal cut of

all. In Narni, the hill-town overlooking the Flaminian Way, to which the

Vitellian forces had retreated following their emperor’s own withdrawal to

Rome, sentries saw a detachment of Flavians crossing the plain below them.

They were carrying an object on a spike. It did not take the Vitellian forces

long to recognise it, and to realise that their last hope was gone, that

reinforcements would not be coming, that the war was effectively over: for

the object was Valens’ head. The Vitellians, acknowledging that the game

was up, sued for terms. Soon afterwards, arrayed in full battle order, they

marched down from Narni. It was Antonius who accepted their surrender.

He spoke to them kindly, then dismissed them from service. The road to

Rome lay open at last.

But not Rome itself. Vitellius still had troops in the city. This, even amid

the collapse of all his fortunes, was sufficient to provide him with leverage.

Each side, anxious to avoid visiting the fate of Cremona upon the capital of

the world, had already been sounding out the other’s terms. Vitellius, a

reluctant emperor from the outset, had not the slightest wish to make a

heroic last stand. ‘So plunged into despondency was he that, had others not

kept in mind he was an emperor, he would himself quite have forgotten it.’16

Such criticism, however, was harsh. Torpid and indecisive though Vitellius

may have been, he prosecuted his negotiations with all the vigour he could

muster. The sudden death of his mother, to whom he had been deeply

attached, only confirmed him in his resolve to keep the lines of

communication to the Flavians open: for his hopes were vested above all in

keeping his wife and children alive. * Granted, these lines of communication

risked becoming confused. Antonius was not the only Flavian in the game.

Even as he closed in on Rome, so Mucianus was closing in on him.

Vespasian’s plenipotentiary, deprived by Antonius of glory that he felt

should rightfully have been his, had not the slightest intention of allowing

any further impairment of his authority. The victor of the battle of Cremona

could not be permitted to claim Vitellius’ surrender as well. Accordingly,

when Antonius wrote promising the hapless emperor a dignified retirement

in exchange for his abdication, Mucianus made sure to do the same.

Vitellius himself, besieged by friends who scorned the very idea that the

Flavians might permit him to live, was left all the more paralysed by

indecision. His dilemma was very real. Who, at this terrible moment of

crisis, with his own life, and the fate both of his family and of Rome itself

hanging in the balance, could he trust to speak for Vespasian?

Fortunately, there was an obvious person to hand: none other than

Vespasian’s elder brother. Despite the guards Vitellius had appointed to

keep watch over him, Flavius Sabinus was still the city’s prefect. The fact

that he had not been removed from the post stemmed in part from the

emperor’s high regard for him; but it was also partly due to the emperor’s

desire to veil his status as a hostage. Vespasian’s younger son, an eighteen-

year-old by the name of Domitian, was also in Rome; and he, like his uncle,

had opted to trust to the forbearance of his captor rather than risk an escape.

Accordingly, as all Vitellius’ hopes crumbled and the limits of his dominion

tightened in around him, he could look to a Flavian faction within the city

itself. Already, in the early weeks of December, he and Sabinus had come

together for a number of private meetings. At the last of these, held in the

awesome setting of a temple that Augustus had raised on the Palatine, terms

had finally been agreed. Only two witnesses were present to hear them; but

onlookers reported that Vitellius seemed cowed and depressed, while

Sabinus looked less triumphant than full of pity. On 17 December, the news

from Narni reached Rome. That evening, addressing the Praetorians who

stood guard over him on the Palatine, Vitellius informed them of his

intention to lay down the rule of the world. It seemed that the civil war was

over at last.

Yet the emperor, in his negotiations with Sabinus, had failed to take into

account the interests of his most militant backers. The Praetorians, appalled

by the prospect of losing their patron, and dreading that it would result in

their own extermination, were outraged by Vitellius’ plans. Indeed, so

voluble were their protests that the emperor did briefly waver – but not for

long. The next morning, he had himself dressed in dark robes and

proceeded to the Forum. With him came the members of his household and

his little boy, carried in a tiny litter, ‘as though to a funeral’. 17 The crowd

greeted him with cheers, the Praetorians with an ominous silence. Vitellius,

determined not to be blown off course by either, proclaimed to the Roman

people that the civil war had ended. The city was to be handed over to

Sabinus. No opposition was to be offered the Flavian legions advancing

along the Flaminian Way. Vespasian was to rule as emperor: ‘I abdicate for

the sake of peace, for the sake of our country.’18

But Discordia, fell and bloodthirsty, was not to be baulked so easily of

her prey. Beyond the senate house, at the foot of the Capitol, stood

Concordia’s temple, Rome’s greatest monument to civic harmony; and here

it was that Vitellius, after first hugging his children, commending them to

the Roman people, and bursting into tears, sought to head. His intention was

to present the goddess with his sword, which he had already unstrapped as a

symbol of his abdication, and thereby signal to the Roman people that civic

peace had been restored at last; but Discordia had no intention of letting

him reach her rival’s shrine. Already the consul, offered the sword by

Vitellius, had refused to accept it; and now, rather than allow the emperor to

proceed with his abdication, the crowds blocked his passage, so that he

found himself with no option but to return to the Palatine. Meanwhile, as

Vitellius was retreating from the Forum, Sabinus was trying to reach it.

Infuriated by the reports of what had happened, he was determined to seize

back control of the situation, and spell out to the crowds exactly what had

been agreed. He had not reckoned, however, on the gathering mood of

violence. As he and his supporters headed down to the Forum, they were

surprised by a posse of Praetorians. The attack was beaten off; but Sabinus,

thinking better of his original plan, decided that the safest course of action

would be to retreat to the nearest fortifiable position. And so this is what he

did. He and his companions climbed the Capitol.

No place, of course, was more redolent of patriotism. If Rome was the

head of the world, then the Capitol was the head of Rome. The great temple

on its summit, its roof sheathed in gold, its profile sharp against the sky,

was what joined the rule of Jupiter in the heavens to the rule of the Roman

people on the earth. It proclaimed the blessings of the gods on Rome’s

dominion to the entire world. By seizing control of the Capitol, Sabinus was

making a defiant and very public statement about the legitimacy of his

cause. That night, as gusts of icy rain blew across the city, he sent for his

children and his nephew, Domitian. The Praetorians, lax in their sentry duty

around the hill, failed to keep them from slipping through. Sabinus also

managed to smuggle out a messenger to Antonius, alerting him to what had

happened, and a centurion to the Palatine, there to upbraid Vitellius and

demand that he rein in his supporters. All to no end. As the sky began to

lighten, so it became apparent to Sabinus that he was trapped. Antonius was

still a day’s march away; and Vitellius proved powerless to help. ‘No longer

an emperor, he served his men merely as a justification for continuing the

war.’19 The Praetorians, all too bitterly conscious of what a new emperor

was likely to mean for them, certainly had no intention of surrendering to

the forces of a rival emperor. Discordia had triumphed over her sister.

Almost a year had passed since the murder of Galba; now, once again,

the heart of Rome became a scene of conflict. As determinedly as though

they were assaulting some barbarian stronghold, some distant capital held

by inveterate rebels, the Praetorians advanced up Rome’s most sacred hill.

Sabinus and his followers, pelting their opponents with tiles and blocking

their advance with toppled statues, frantically sought to keep them at bay,

but in vain. The defenders were too few; the assailants too resolute; both

sides too careless of the sacred ground they were treading. Who first

torched the Capitol would subsequently be much disputed – but not the

consequence. Flames were soon licking Rome’s holiest building, flickering

up its colonnades, then blazing through its gables, bringing its roof crashing

down. ‘And so the temple of Jupiter, undefended, unplundered, its doors

locked shut, was burned to the ground.’20

Back in April, when proclaiming Vitellius emperor, Sabinus had done so

in the Circus Maximus, the largest and most famous stadium in the world.

Now, eight months on, he found himself the chief actor in a spectacle more

awful, more heart-stopping, more stupefying than anything staged in the

Circus. Shocking though the slaughter of the past months had been, it could

not compare for sheer horror with the incineration of Jupiter’s temple.

Confusion had made his masterpiece. Yet this masterpiece – unlike the

destruction of Cremona – was not one that threatened to engulf its audience.

The crowds in the Forum, gathering to watch the Capitol burn, might as

well have been sitting in the stands, gawping at splintered chariot wheels

and mangled limbs. The din of battle mingled with the blazing of the fire.

Then the slaughter began. Although some of the defenders – Domitian

included – managed to slip away and escape the inferno, large numbers

were cut down. Sabinus himself, scorning to offer resistance, was taken

prisoner, loaded with chains, and dragged to the foot of the Palatine. There

he was greeted by Vitellius, who sought to spare his life, but in vain: for the

emperor had badly misjudged the mood. The crowd wanted blood. Boos

and catcalls began to ring out. Then a host of daggers flashed. Sabinus

crumpled to the ground. His body was slashed and hacked about, his head

brandished as a trophy. Finally, when the mutilators of his body were done,

what remained of his corpse was dragged across the Forum and dumped on

the Stairs of Mourning. Above it, on the crown of the Capitol, the fire

continued to blaze, while below it, at the foot of the steps, the temple of

Concordia stood in the sombre and heavy shadows cast by the billowing

smoke.

The murder of Sabinus was merely an appetiser for the entertainment

that was to follow. That evening Rome seemed at peace, but the calm was

deceptive, and everyone knew it. The city lay midway between dread and

expectation. Sure enough, well before dawn, Antonius and his legions

arrived on the outskirts of Rome. Alerted to the siege of the Capitol by

Sabinus’ frantic message, they had been hurrying all day and night to the

rescue; now, learning that they were too late, Antonius called a pause.

Curtly he dismissed the envoys sent by Vitellius to negotiate terms,

informing them that there was no longer any deal to be made; then,

summoning his troops to an assembly, he proposed making camp beside the

Milvian Bridge and waiting for daybreak. But his men refused to halt. First

in the cramped streets that lined the city walls, and then on the Campus

Martius, the people of Rome woke to the din of combat. ‘Like spectators

watching gladiators clash for their enjoyment, they flocked to watch the

fighting, cheering and applauding now one side, and now the other.’21 This

relish for the fury and bloodshed of battle was less a reflection of

irresponsibility than a shrewd estimation that the result had already been

decided. And so it proved. Only from behind the walls of the Praetorian

camp did the Vitellians manage to offer sustained resistance; and even they,

once Antonius had succeeded in bringing his overwhelming force of

numbers to bear, were soon overwhelmed. The massacre, as the Praetorians

had always feared it would be, was total. The camp was left a butcher’s

shambles. The din of battle ceased. Rome returned to calm.

A calm, it seemed to Vitellius, like that of the grave. The emperor, rather

than joining with his troops in their last stand, had been fretting and

vacillating, and scurrying this way and that. First he had headed for his

wife’s house on the Aventine; then, hearing a rumour that terms were

agreed with Antonius, he had returned to the Palatine. The complex lay

abandoned. Everyone – officials, soldiers, slaves – had fled. How long

Vitellius paced the empty corridors, trying locked doors, starting at every

sound, there was no one present to witness; but in the end, so it would later

be reported, he had hidden himself in a porter’s lodge, barricaded himself

inside the room with a bed and a mattress, and chained up a dog next to the

entranceway.* There he had waited: Vitellius Caesar, the heir of Augustus,

the man who had laid claim to the rule of the world. And there, in due

course, once the soldiers of his victorious opponent had climbed the

Palatine, occupied it, and begun fanning out through its corridors, he was

found.

Some would later report that the soldiers who dragged him out from his

bolthole failed to recognise him. If so, his identity did not remain a secret

for long. His clothes were ripped from his body, his hands tied behind his

back, a rope tethered around his neck. Out from the palace he was dragged

into the Forum. There, where only two days previously a great crowd had

gathered to cheer him and prevent his abdication, he was mobbed by

hissing, spitting people. Some tugged on his stubble; others prodded his

protuberant belly and mocked him for his gluttony; still others pelted him

with filth. When he lowered his eyes out of shame, a soldier held the tip of

a sword to his chin, so that he had no choice but to meet the gaze of his

persecutors and watch his statues being toppled from their plinths. Up the

Stairs of Mourning he was hauled. There, fleetingly, he attempted to assert

his dignity, suddenly retorting, to an officer who had been abusing him,

‘And yet I was your emperor.’22 His last words. As Sabinus had done the

day before, he fell beneath a rain of blows. Then, as though his body were a

joint of meat presented on a silver platter to the imperial table, his flesh was

sliced with delicate precision from his bones. Finally, a hook was jammed

into the roof of his mouth, and what remained of his body dragged away

and dumped into the Tiber.

By now it was evening. As the crowds dispersed, so Domitian emerged

from hiding. He presented himself to Antonius and the rest of the Flavian

high command. The legions cheered him, hailing him as Caesar. Then,

leading him through the darkening streets, they escorted him to his father’s

house: the house of Vespasian, emperor of Rome.

Not One Stone Shall Be Left

In Alexandria, the arrival of the news from Italy detailing the downfall of

Vitellius was accompanied by great wonder. It happened one day that

Vespasian, as he sat in public, dispensing justice to the people of the city,

was approached by two men. One was blind; the other a cripple.23 Both men

claimed to have been visited in a dream by a god. ‘Ask the emperor to spit

on your eyes,’ the god had instructed the blind man. ‘Ask the emperor to

touch your leg with his heel,’ he had instructed the cripple. And so it was

that both men, obedient to the god’s commands, had come to stand before

Vespasian. The emperor, torn between the scepticism that came naturally to

a bluff Roman military man confronted by Egyptians telling tall stories, and

a yearning to believe that they might just conceivably be true, hesitated.

Only when his friends assured him that no one would blame him for making

the attempt did he do as the god had commanded. At once the blind man

could see. At once the cripple could walk. News of the feat swept the city.

Never before in Alexandria, city of wonders though it was, had anyone

witnessed quite such a miracle of healing.

Yet an infinitely greater one was needed from the new emperor. The

world, from the northern seas to the eastern deserts, was bleeding. Rome’s

dominion, grievously wounded as it had been by revolts and civil wars, was

still in a critical condition. Jerusalem remained in rebel hands. Provinces

from Britain to the Black Sea were wracked by insurgencies and barbarian

incursions. Most ominous of all was the continuing chaos along the length

of the Rhine. There, far from conceding that the civil war was over, the

legions had refused to accept the new emperor. 24 When Flaccus sought to

impose the sacramentum in Vespasian’s name, he was dragged out of his

bed and murdered. The mutineers were not alone in their continued loyalty

to Vitellius’ memory. Some of Gaul’s most distinguished senators, men who

had been serving him in a range of senior posts, also refused to accept the

new regime. This, of course, presented them with an obvious problem.

Who, if not Vespasian, were they to acknowledge as Caesar? One of the

Vitellians, a Gallic senator by the name of Julius Sabinus, proposed a

radical solution. His grandfather, so he revealed, had been the illegitimate

son of none other than Julius Caesar: meaning that he had a better claim to

the imperial office than any upstart muleteer. Even though nobody in Gaul

was naïve enough to imagine that this would play well south of the Alps, it

was sufficient, among the Vitellian diehards, to consolidate support for what

they termed an Imperium Galliarum: a ‘Gallic Empire’. This was no

declaration of independence from Rome, but something altogether more

paradoxical: a claim to embody the legitimacy of its rule more authentically

than Rome did itself.

Grotesque though this conceit inevitably appeared to the Flavian high

command, the assumption underlying it was one that they could not entirely

dismiss. The temple that since the distant days of the monarchy had stood at

the heart of the city was gone. Its eternity had been taken widely for

granted, and the shock of its destruction was felt far beyond Rome. What

else could the disaster possibly have signalled if not the anger of the gods?

This conviction, which had steeled the Gallic senators in their defiance of

Vespasian, was one that nagged as well at many in the capital itself. To gaze

up at the charred summit of the Capitol was to dread that perhaps the death

of Vitellius had marked only a brief pause in the murderous cycles of civil

war, and that the empire of the Roman people was doomed to be shattered

beyond all hope of repair, reduced to blackened ruin just as their most

sacred temple had been. Certainly, the news from the north seemed to

suggest this. The Gallic senators, viewed from Rome, appeared to be rebels,

plain and simple. The legions on the Rhine, by rallying behind Julius

Sabinus and his cronies, had disgraced themselves ‘by preferring

submission to foreign masters to the rule of Vespasian’.25 Then, still lurking

in predatory fashion on the margins of Vetera, there were the Batavians.

Ever more Germans from beyond the Rhine were reported to have swelled

their numbers. The boundaries constructed with such effort by generations

of legates and provincial administrators, between order and chaos, between

civilisation and barbarism, seemed to be on the verge of total collapse.

Treachery had come to be cast as loyalty, and rebellion as a defence of

Roman values. It was, in short, a mess.

Yet in Rome itself – the head from which the rest of the world had for a

year and more now been rotting – there were signs of hope. Swords had

been sheathed; soldiers ordered off the streets; all traces of blood scoured

from the Stairs of Mourning. Nothing about this had been inevitable. The

scope for continued violence in the wake of Vitellius’ murder had been

considerable. The Flavian legions had already, after all, put the people of

Cremona to the sword, and Antonius, their commander, was a man

notorious for snatching after his own ambitions. Yet he, and all the other

jackals around him, had proven no match for Mucianus. One day after the

murder of Vitellius, with Rome still full of marauding soldiers and the

streets piled high with corpses, senators had cautiously re-emerged from

their hiding places. Convening in the senate house, they had listened as

letters from Vespasian and Mucianus were read to them. They had then

voted to grant Vespasian a great package of powers and titles: everything

that had come to constitute, over the course of the previous century, the

rank of emperor. One clause, however, was a novelty. With Vespasian

absent, so it was decreed, the senate should be guided ‘according to his will

or authority’. 26 The hand of Mucianus – Vespasian’s great partner and

plenipotentiary – was unmistakeable. Sure enough, no sooner had he

arrived in the capital at the head of his legions than he was taking full

advantage of the licence granted him by the senate. Armed as he was with

the imperial seal, ‘so that he was able to transact any business that he

wished without the emperor’s specific approval’, and settled on the

Palatine, he ruled as the master of Rome. 27

Yet Mucianus, imperious though he might be, was possessed of a certain

selflessness as well. A man of deep subtlety and sophistication, he was

perfectly content for Vespasian to serve as the public face of the new

regime. He had recognised in the no-nonsense Sabine an instinctive and

rugged conservatism of a kind that the Roman people, bruised by the

upheavals of the past year as they were, had come to crave. Respect for

tradition; obedience to proprieties; an unembarrassed commitment to

Rome’s primordial virtues: these were what the times demanded. Other

qualities as well, however, were required by the circumstances of the age –

and here Mucianus himself was content to step in. No dynasty could hope

to establish itself without a certain measure of ruthlessness. What option

was there, for the victors in a civil war, but to ride roughshod over the

occasional civic norm, to betray the occasional deserving ally, to sponsor

the occasional crime? Sure enough, senators who objected to Mucianus’

high-handed behaviour were obliged to swallow their resentment, and

flatter him as assiduously as they had once flattered Nero. Antonius,

garlanded with empty honours, could only watch impotently as VII

Galbiana, the legion he had personally commanded, was packed off back to

the Danube. Various relatives of Piso, the blue-blooded unfortunate adopted

by Galba, were discreetly eliminated. So, too, was Vitellius’ brother, and

Germanicus, that little boy who had been the great object of all the dead

emperor’s fondest ambitions. Mucianus, adept as he was at weighing up

costs and benefits, was also content to shrug off the resulting blots on his

reputation: for setting the new order on foundations as firm as he could

make them was his one priority. And meanwhile, far from the capital,

Vespasian maintained his own reputation for honesty and bided his time.

Not until the entire world had been set in order did he intend to set sail

for Rome. Confident though he was in Titus’ ability to bring the Judaeans to

heel, he did not wish to depart from Egypt until their reduction was at least

imminent. Jerusalem, after all, was the city that he had originally been

mandated to capture; and only with its fall would he be able to return home

trailing the requisite clouds of glory. Equally, but for diametrically opposed

reasons, he was anxious not to head for Rome until operations north of the

Alps had been satisfactorily concluded. There was nothing to be had there

for Vespasian but embarrassment. The refusal of the legions in Germany to

swear the sacramentum to him made a mockery of his claim to enjoy the

universal approbation of the Roman people. Clearly, there was no option

but to launch a campaign of pacification along the Rhine. Clearly, too, it

would require the most careful framing. Otherwise, it risked rubbing home

a most awkward fact: that the civil war, no matter the claims of Flavian

propagandists, was in reality far from over.

In the event – by a paradox worthy of the confusion of the times – it was

the Germans who came to Vespasian’s rescue. In early spring, Veleda’s

prophecy that the legionary bases along the Rhine were destined to fall had

appeared fulfilled when the starving garrison of Vetera finally opened its

gates to the Batavians. The siege had lasted, on and off, for many months,

and the soldiers of V Alaudae and XV Primigenia had been reduced to

eating grass. By the terms of the agreement negotiated with Civilis, the

Batavians took possession of the base and all its contents; the legionaries

were granted safe passage, despoiled of everything but their lives. Even

these, however, were soon to prove forfeit. Eight miles from Vetera, the

German warbands that had flocked to Civilis’ banner ambushed the Roman

column. One of the two legionary commanders was taken captive and sent

as a human trophy to Veleda.* Some of the other officers were kept as

hostages. Everyone else was left as food for crows. Civilis, indignant that

the Germans had contravened the oath he had personally sworn, condemned

them as criminals; but he did not choose to forgo their support. Instead, in

acknowledgement of the vow he had made the previous summer, that he

would exterminate the legionaries who had held Vetera as their base, he

very publicly cut the hair he had let grow long. The remaining Vitellian

forces in Lower Germany, granted their lives by Civilis on similar terms to

those granted the troops at Vetera, did succeed in completing their

evacuation, but at the cost of deep and public humiliation. Each base, once

its garrison had departed, was stripped bare and set on fire. Only two –

Mogontiacum and Vindonissa – were left in Roman hands. Otherwise, of

the great chain of strongholds built with such effort and implacability along

the length of the Rhine, not a single one remained.

All of which, for the Flavian high command, came as a godsend. The

annihilation of a legionary column by Germans, the torching of military

infrastructure: here were horrors risen from the very depths of Roman

nightmares. When the news from Vetera reached the capital, it cast the war

zone north of the Alps in a stark and glaring light. Any acknowledgement

that Civilis had originally attacked the base in the name of Vespasian, or

that Sabinus had laid claim to the empire as a Caesar, or that Gallic

senators, when they rode out on campaign, did so at the head of legions,

arrayed as legates, in the cause of a Roman empire, was utterly banished.

Mucianus, plotting the final defeat of the Vitellian cause, could represent

the crisis on the Rhine as merely another round in a timeless struggle:

between order and anarchy, between civilisation and savagery, between

Roman and barbarian. Only with a titanic effort, such as had been displayed

in the wake of the Varian disaster, could the situation hope to be resolved.

And now, with the termination of hostilities in Italy, such an effort was

indeed made possible. Vast and overwhelming force could be brought to

bear hard on the problem.

As the months passed, so ever more legions were committed to the great

labour of pacification. By the summer, no fewer than nine were operating

along the Rhine. So, too, were vast numbers of auxiliaries – among them a

unit of Batavian cavalry commanded by Civilis’ own nephew, a veteran of

numerous campaigns in Britain by the name of Julius Briganticus. By

August, when Briganticus fell in battle, bravely defending a fortress on the

banks of the Rhine against a surprise attack by his uncle, the war was

effectively over. Sabinus, the would-be Caesar, had already vanished from

the scene: brought to defeat, he had retired to his villa, which his slaves,

following his suicide, had then incinerated to serve him as a pyre. Civilis,

altogether more obdurate, managed to continue the fight into early autumn,

breaching dykes in an attempt to halt the advance of his opponents,

pursuing guerilla tactics against their garrisons, capturing their flagship and

towing it up the Lippe to provide Veleda with yet another trophy. All this,

however, had been by way of shoring up his negotiating position. Sure

enough, with winter closing in, and a vast invasion force poised to bring

ruin to his homeland, Civilis sued for peace. He and his adversaries met on

the banks of a Batavian river. Prior to their arrival, workmen had

demolished the central stretch of a bridge; and now, stepping onto what

remained of it, the two negotiating teams communicated with one another

by yelling across the gap: ‘I have always shown Vespasian the utmost

respect,’ declared Civilis, ‘and been known as his friend.’ His conquerors,

in implicit acknowledgement of this, were content to spare his life, and to

grant his people the same terms of service they had previously enjoyed.* A

telling offer. No matter how assiduously Flavian propagandists might cast

the Batavians as rebels against Rome, the leniency shown them hinted at

just how complex, and ambiguous, their role in the conflict had actually

been.

Certainly, Vespasian owed his plenipotentiary a great deal. Mucianus

had played a difficult hand cunningly and well. The glory of it redounded

not only to Rome, but to the new imperial house. Quintus Petillius Cerialis,

the man Mucianus had entrusted with command of the great campaign of

pacification, had married into Vespasian’s family, and as such could be

reckoned a Flavian. Like Sabinus and Domitian, he had been held as an

effective hostage by Vitellius; unlike Sabinus and Domitian, he had made a

dramatic escape from Rome, disguised as a peasant. His enthusiasm for

adventure was unquenchable. On occasion – as during Boudicca’s revolt,

when he had advanced impatiently against the rebels at the head of a single

legion – this might result in disaster; but in general it enabled him to

provide excellent copy. Certainly, his dispatches from the front were vivid

with colour and excitement, contributing to a sense in Rome that the

Flavians might be something more than mere usurpers: that they could be

trusted to provide the city with glory as well as peace.

This was why Mucianus, far from resenting Cerialis’ successes, was

content to wait until the war was almost won before himself arriving in

Gaul with reinforcements. With him he brought Domitian, moody, testy,

ambitious to ride at the head of troops as a Caesar – and therefore not

remotely what the situation required. Mucianus, rather than slapping the

young prince down, opted instead to hug him close. The campaigning, he

assured Domitian, was not worthy of his efforts: ‘He should abstain from

trifling risks, so that he would then be ready to take on greater ones.’28

Rather than to the front, Mucianus sent him instead to Lugdunum. There,

appearing before the people who only a year previously had been cheering

Vitellius so rapturously, Domitian played a valuable role in reconciling the

Gauls to his house. Vespasian, informed of his younger son’s performance,

was sufficiently impressed to make a joke of it: ‘Thank you, my boy,’ the

emperor wrote, ‘for allowing me to remain in power, and for granting me

some time yet on the throne.’29

The joke was all the more pointed, of course, for the fact that Domitian

did not even rank as his father’s heir. Vespasian’s younger son had never

been left in any doubt as to his place in the pecking order. That summer,

especially, there was no forgetting it. Impressive though the feats of arms

performed north of the Alps might be, they could not compare for sheer

drama with the great war of vengeance that at last, four years after the

eruption of Judaea into revolt, had reached the walls of Jerusalem. The true

measure of manhood, so the Romans believed, was the capacity to endure

grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood; and Titus, by that reckoning, was

proving himself a hero equal to any from their city’s past. The Judaeans

were not, like the Batavians, mere creatures of bog and marsh. They were

an ancient people, inveterate in the pride they felt in their ancestry, and

resolute in their conviction that they were the favoured ones of a jealous

and demanding god. Rebels in Judaea, unlike those in more barbarous

lands, might aspire not just to throw off Roman rule, but to purge

themselves thoroughly of every last hint of Rome itself.

In looking to the future, the leaders of the Judaean revolt looked as well

to the past. Coins now proclaimed the revival of the ancient realm

celebrated in their scriptures and their prophecies: Israel. The script used by

the moneyers was an archaic one, redolent of the distant age when the

Temple had first been built. The calendar employed by scribes dated years

not from the accession of a Caesar, but from what they termed the

redemption of Jerusalem. No insurgents had ever before attempted such a

thoroughgoing repudiation of Rome’s claim to rule the world; and although

Vespasian, town by town, village by village, had succeeded in stamping out

resistance across most of the province, so impregnable to the revels did

their capital appear that the majority of them continued to trust in the future

of Israel. Certainly, the pause in the Roman offensive had not been wasted.

The walls, already bristling, had been made to bristle even more. The city

heaved with rival factions, all of them armed to the teeth. Titus, arriving

before Jerusalem’s gates in the spring of AD 70, had found himself

confronted by a task such as no general had faced in over two centuries: a

siege fit to challenge the legions to the very limits of their capability.

‘The will of the immortal gods it is that the Roman people should rule

over every nation.’30 Faith in this venerable maxim, which had steeled

generations of legionaries never to surrender, never to leave a defeat

unavenged, had recently, of course, come to be badly shaken. First the

collapse of the empire into civil war, and then the destruction of Jupiter’s

temple on the Capitol, had caused many to wonder if the will of the

immortal gods was quite all that it had been. As in Gaul, so in Judaea: it

was the responsibility of the Flavian house to repair the damage done to the

self-confidence of the Roman people. So it was that Titus, right from the

beginning, made sure to prosecute the siege with a ferocious energy. Rather

than content himself with starving Jerusalem into surrender, he looked to

storm it. The object of his initial assault was a wall which protected the

northern suburbs of the city, and which, unlike the defences along its

craggier reaches, could be approached across level ground. Like termites,

the legionaries spread through the neighbouring woods. Three great towers

were built from the harvested timber. Sheathed in iron, topped with

battlements, these monstrous structures enabled the Romans to rain down

death on the defenders. Meanwhile, from platforms ranged along the base

of the wall, the legions deployed their killing-machines. The very sound of

the artillery, hour after hour, day after day, was a kind of trauma: the

screaming of the missiles; the crashing as they hit stone or human flesh;

‘the constant thudding of dead bodies as they dropped one after the other

from the rampart’.31 Such was the velocity with which a bolt travelled that it

might pass in through one defender and out through another. Heads, hit by

boulders, might be sent flying like sling-shot. The baby of a pregnant

woman, hit in the stomach by a missile, might be borne by it several

hundred feet.32 Relentless, pulverising, nightmarish, the bombardment never

stopped. To the defenders, the assault on the city seemed to be the work less

of men than of demons.

Then, on the fifteenth day of the siege, a Roman battering ram finally

succeeded in forcing a breach. It did not take the legions long to come

flooding through the wall. Yet even as his men occupied the suburb that lay

beyond it, Titus knew the siege still had a long way to go. Beyond the outer

wall lay two inner walls; and beyond them, in the ancient heart of

Jerusalem, a brilliant cityscape of palaces, mansions and towers. Most

stupefying of all – an image, so the Judaeans believed, of the universe itself,

the place chosen personally by their god for his seat, the one building in the

world that ranked legitimately as his sanctuary – there loomed the Temple.

Its wonders were celebrated far beyond Judaea. A place of mystery, in

which rituals quite unlike those of other lands were strictly veiled from all

outsiders, it was also a place of incomparable beauty. ‘To strangers

approaching from a distance, it appeared like a mountain covered in snow:

for all those stretches of it that were not plated with gold were a dazzling

white.’33 Such a prize was one worthy of a Caesar.

Self-regard, however, was not the only motive Titus had for wishing to

take possession of the famous building. Already, he was looking to the

future. Once the rebels among them had been eliminated, the Judaeans

would have to be reconciled to his father’s rule. The Temple could serve

them as an emblem of Roman order, just as it had in times past. Agrippa,

who had loyally accompanied him to war, was its patron, after all. A

priesthood restored to the king’s supervision would be a priesthood willing

to offer sacrifice once again on behalf of Caesar. With Jerusalem taken, and

the necessary reprisals completed, everything could return to normal. Yet

this would only be possible if the city submitted quickly. The risks

otherwise were very great. Five months had passed since the burning of the

Capitol; and who was to say, should the rebels continue their fruitless

resistance, what calamity might not come to engulf another famous temple?

Accordingly, once the legions had breached the second wall, and occupied

the stretch of the city that lay between it and the third wall, Titus called a

temporary halt to the siege. The artillery fell silent. The rebels were granted

a chance to surrender.

‘To impose the works and ways of peace, to spare the vanquished and to

overthrow the haughty by means of war’:34 such was the peculiar genius of

the Roman people. Titus knew that many Judaeans were still keen to play

their part in Rome’s global mission. Some of them – Agrippa, Julius

Alexander, Yosef ben Mattityahu – were in his train. One of them, Berenice,

was in his bed. Others, however, were trapped in Jerusalem. Not everyone

in the city was a rebel. Many – men as well as women and children –

yearned desperately to submit. Even the rebels themselves, split as they

were into various factions, offered nothing like a unified front. There was

opportunity, so it seemed to Titus, to work on their divisions and doubts. It

was time to put on a parade.

The fusion of magnificence with menace came naturally to the Romans.

Titus, a natural showman, knew how to make it pack a punch. As defenders

on the unbreached city wall massed to gawp at the spectacle, he marshalled

the four legions under his command, the twenty cohorts of auxiliaries, and

the eight cavalry units in a display of dazzling intimidation. Dressed in

mail, arrayed in formation, the world’s most lethal fighting force stood on

full parade; ‘and such was the brilliance of the armour, such the perfect

discipline of every man, that even the boldest rebel was filled with dread’. 35

Still, however, the gates remained bolted. The days passed. The city seethed

with mingled despair and defiance. By night, slipping past the sentries,

deserters began to flee the city; and when they had made it into the hills

beyond the city they would squat, empty their bowels, and scoop out from

their excrement the gold coins they had swallowed before making their

escape.

These fugitives, however, were men who had always dreaded that

rebellion against Rome would lead to disaster; and those who thought

otherwise, putting their trust in their god, scorned to change their minds. So,

too, did other rebels in the city: warlords who knew themselves to be

beyond any hope of forgiveness, and who preferred to go down fighting

rather than to submit to the vengeance of the Romans. These were the men

who had seized the commanding heights of the city, and they had no

intention of ceding them. When Titus, anxious to undermine their morale

any way that he could, sent Yosef to address them from a safe distance – to

paint in lurid colours the full scale of Roman might, to assure the rebels that

they were fighting not only the legions but their own god as well, who had

condemned them for their crimes and taken the side of Caesar – the resolve

of the defenders was only stiffened. One of them, catching Yosef by

surprise, knocked him out with a brick. His claim to be a prophet,

acknowledged by the emperor himself, and self-evidently proven by events,

was answered by howls of execration.

To abuse a friend of Caesar was, of course, to abuse Caesar himself.

Titus, ordering his men to resume the siege, had no need to urge them to the

fight. The insults done Rome by the Judaeans were manifold and grievous.

Clearly, they demanded payment. One legion more than any other felt this

with a raw and anguished intensity. The soldiers of XII Fulminata, men who

had lost their eagle during Cestius’ retreat from Jerusalem, had now, under

Titus, been given the chance to redeem themselves. That the shame of

defeat might be purged by iron-forged courage, by superhuman effort, and

by a commitment to displays of pitiless terror was an enduring theme in

Rome’s annals. The legionaries of the Twelfth, summoned to storm

Jerusalem, could feel themselves participants in a dimension of legend.

Massive were their labours, heroic their resolve. Ever more trees were

felled, until for ten miles all around there was nothing to be seen of the

beautiful woods and parks that had once framed the city but a great desert

of stumps. Vast platforms, vast ramps, vast towers were built; and when the

Judaeans, who had mined them, set the tunnels on fire and brought

everything crashing down, the men of the Twelfth doggedly set to work

again. First, with the other legions, they constructed a wall around

Jerusalem, nearly five miles long, and completed – to the astonishment and

horror of the watching defenders – in only three days; then they returned to

the city, and to the scene of their recent disaster. The object of their efforts

was a great fortress named the Antonia: built by Herod, and named after

Mark Antony, Titus had no choice but to storm it, for it served as the key to

the Temple. And so, stinking in the summer heat, drained by the demands of

their labours, resolute in their determination to prove themselves worthy as

soldiers of Rome, the men of XII Fulminata toiled on; and week by week

the platforms rose.

With all four legions labouring on the siege-works, the din of war

around the Antonia was especially deafening. As well as the hammering

and sawing, there was also the ceaseless crump of artillery fire, louder now

than at any point since Titus’ arrival before Jerusalem. The Judaeans, when

they routed Cestius’ expeditionary force, had captured large quantities of

siege equipment; but they had found it a challenge to master the unfamiliar

machines. Two months had passed, however, since the start of the siege:

time enough for the defenders to become proficient. As the Romans raked

the walls of the Antonia, so the Judaeans fired at the legionaries toiling

away below them. The thud of the rival batteries of artillery, angry and

desperate, pounded as though it were the heartbeat of the city. Yet away

from the beleaguered fortress, in the streets, the courtyards, the

marketplaces of Jerusalem, there was a stillness deep and deathlike enough

to muffle everything; and this, too, was the sound of the siege. Famine had

come to stalk the city. Such supplies as remained were commandeered by

the various bands of fighters. The rest of the population, out of options,

began to starve. ‘No one wept, no one mourned, for hunger had exhausted

all their passions. With dry eyes and rictus grins those who lingered on alive

gazed at those who had already perished.’36 The starving, their bellies

grotesquely extended, haunted open spaces like shadows, and when they

fell lay untended, piling up in the streets. The rebel commanders, revolted

by the stench, first sought to have them buried, and then, when all the

available space in the city had been exhausted, flung from the city walls.

Yet the corpses still piled up; and increasingly, rather than continue with the

fruitless effort of clearing them, the fighters simply trod them underfoot.

The sacrilege of it shocked Titus. Coming across a great pile of bodies

dropped into a ravine, he groaned and raised his hands, assuring the gods of

his horror at what he was seeing. Likewise, when it was reported to him that

various auxiliaries were slitting open the stomachs of refugees, in the hope

of discovering gold inside them, he indignantly condemned it as a crime.

Rome’s greatness was not to be compromised by trampling on the laws of

gods and men. Yet these scruples, it went without saying, implied no

sympathy for the rebels. Slaves who rose against their masters merited

nothing but the most brutal repression. It was not enough to punish them;

their punishment had to serve the entire world as a lesson. This was why, in

the arena, criminals were thrown to beasts, or put to death in a whole range

of humiliating ways: to provide a public entertainment. Cheaper, however,

and easier, was just to hang an infractory slave from a cross. This, in the

early weeks of the siege, when bands of rebels were still sallying out from

the walls to launch raids or forage supplies, was precisely what the

legionaries had done with all those they took captive. A great forest of

crosses had sprung up before the city walls. ‘The soldiers, giving vent to the

anger and hatred they felt for the Judaeans, made a mockery of their victims

by nailing them up in a variety of poses.’37 Not just the rebels but Jerusalem

itself had been made into a spectacle.

And soon it was to be made even more of one. The hopes originally

entertained by Titus of bringing the siege to a speedy resolution were

exhausted. The refusal of the Judaean rebels to surrender left him with no

choice but to pulverise their every last holdout. Ten weeks had passed since

the start of the siege – and now, at last, the Judaean defences were starting

to crumble. On 3 July, the facing wall of the Antonia abruptly collapsed. An

initial assault on the breach was beaten back; but two days later, under

cover of darkness, a small band of legionaries crept up through the rubble,

slit the throats of the Judaean sentries, and sounded a trumpet from the

ramparts. The Judaeans, panicking, withdrew through the entrances that

joined the fortress to the Temple; the Romans, storming up the toppled wall

to take possession of the Antonia, sought to follow their retreating

adversaries. They were repulsed, however, after a savage struggle; and the

Judaeans, sealing the entrances off, were able to secure the entire perimeter

wall of the Temple. So massive were its outer walls, so colossal the building

blocks used for its construction, that it constituted, in effect, another

fortress: a citadel ‘on which more care and effort had been lavished than all

the rest’. 38

Not that Titus was daunted. Great feats, after all, required great effort.

Again, he summoned his men to a draining display of labour. Broiling

though the heat was, and terrible the stench and the dust, they succeeded in

levelling the Antonia in the space of only a week. Then they set once again

to the building of ramps, this time against the walls of the Temple. Four

were raised from the foundations of the Antonia; four, most exhaustingly of

all, from the base of the Temple itself. The resistance, meanwhile, was as

ferocious as it was desperate. Traps were set in which large numbers of

legionaries were burned to death. An attempt to climb the walls was

repulsed with a massive loss of Roman life. The walls proved impervious to

even the mightiest of battering rams. Yet Titus, grim and implacable,

refused to pause. He knew that the Temple, for all his setbacks, was almost

in his grasp. And so it proved.

Over three months had passed since the start of the siege, and Titus’

plans for Jerusalem were no longer what they had been. Even now, his

preference was to spare the Temple destruction if he possibly could – but

not at the cost of further Roman casualties. Shortly after the failure of his

frontal assault on the Temple’s outer wall, he gave orders for its gates to be

torched. The gold and silver plates donated by Julius Alexander’s father

began to melt, and drip, and hiss; the wood underneath them caught fire; the

colonnades that framed the outer courtyard of the Temple burst into flames.

The Judaean defenders, surrounded by a great wall of fire, retreated to the

inner courtyard, within which stood the massive edifice of the sanctuary

itself. Beyond that stood the last surviving stretch of the colonnade; and

here many thousands of people from the city below, men, women and

children, had sought refuge on the assurance of a prophet that they would

receive there from their god ‘miraculous signs of their deliverance’. 39 But

the prophet had deceived them. They, and everyone on the heights where

the Temple stood, were beyond deliverance. And now the reckoning was at

hand.

It was 10 August. Two days had passed since the torching of the gates.

Huge numbers of legionaries were camped out before the walls of the inner

court. The day before, the Judaean fighters had sought to clear the enemy

from the outer court; but in vain. Now, as the sun rose above the eastern

hills, they returned to the attack. Again they were beaten back. A legionary,

pursuing them to the walls of the inner court, picked up a blazing piece of

wood, climbed onto the shoulders of one of his comrades, and hurled it

through an aperture in the wall. Beyond the window lay one of the rooms

that framed the inner courtyard. Its timber beams and tapestries were bone

dry. The fire caught. The Judaean fighters, when they saw it, raised a

terrible animal howl of anguish. They had no thought now of holding their

positions. Their only concern was to extinguish the fire. But it was too late.

The flames were out of control. Black smoke, billowing up from the blaze,

was already pluming high above the Temple, drifting over Jerusalem,

proclaiming to Judaeans across the starving city the news of a horror almost

too great for them to compute: the ruin of the sanctuary they held to be the

holiest place on earth.

And the news of it, soon enough, would spread across the known world.

The burning of the Temple set the seal on a conclusion that had surely

already, over the course of that long and terrible summer, come to stare

Titus in the face. There could be no returning to the order that had existed

prior to the revolt. The primacy of Jerusalem in the region, long upheld by

Roman favour though it had been, was finished for good. Instead, the city

was to serve the world as a symbol of the might, of the terror, of the

invincibility of Rome. Not for two centuries and more had the legions

inflicted such a fate upon a famous city. Perhaps, as the flames began to lick

the Temple, Titus did regret that the option of returning it to the

guardianship of Agrippa had once and for all been closed off; but certainly

he shed no tears over its fate.40 Terror visited on a recalcitrant foe was

nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the opposite. Ruin and slaughter were what

the legions had been trained to inflict. Surging into the inner court of the

Temple, the legionaries fought not as wild beasts, but as soldiers joined by a

common citizenship, men forged by unyielding discipline to feel no pity, no

revulsion at the spectacle of blood. Thousands fell. Viscera, slipping out

from stomachs slit open by Roman swords, slithered around the altar and

spilled down the sanctuary steps. ‘The heights on which the Temple stood,

enveloped in one great blaze of fire as they were, appeared to be boiling up

from their very foundations. And yet the sea of flame was nothing to the

ocean of blood, nor the death-squads of legionaries to the legions of the

dead.’41 And when the slaughter was done, and the Temple complex had

been stripped bare of all its treasures, and the Temple itself was crashing

down in ruin, the legions brought their standards into the court opposite the

eastern gate, and there they set the eagles up and offered sacrifice to them;

and then, with a thunderous acclamation, they hailed Titus as imperator.

The Judaeans, notorious though they might be for their customs and

their powers of prophecy, had never been taken seriously by the Romans as

a military threat. Back in the days of its independence, their kingdom had

always ranked as a second-class power, and their revolt, when it broke out,

as a provincial uprising of a thoroughly familiar kind. Now, four years on,

the capture of their capital served the emperor and his son as a battle-

honour glorious beyond anything that Galba, Otho or Vitellius had remotely

been able to boast. When, a month after the incineration of the Temple,

Titus succeeded in capturing the very last redoubt of the rebels in

Jerusalem, the great palace built by Herod, and there was no one left in the

city for his men to plunder, rape, enslave or kill, he gave orders that it

should be razed to the ground. Only a single stretch of wall and three towers

were spared: ‘the wall to provide protection to the garrison left on the site,

and the towers to demonstrate to posterity just how proud and mighty a city

had once stood there, until vanquished by Roman courage’.42 No longer a

contemptible people, the Judaeans had been transfigured into adversaries

worthy of a Caesar, and their capital into a city fit to stand comparison with

any in the annals of warfare. Thanks to its annihilation, Jerusalem now

mattered to an emperor in Rome as it had never done while it stood.

Vespasian, leaving Egypt shortly before the final completion of combat

operations in the Judaean capital, could return home knowing that his

family’s otherwise undistinguished reputation was now burnished to

glorious effect.

The infant imperial dynasty owed a great deal to the Judaean rebels.

The Prince of Peace

No one knew how to celebrate a victory quite like the Romans. It was

Romulus who had shown the way. Returning home after slaying a Sabine

king with his own hands, he had paraded his booty through the streets of

Rome. His troops, ranged in their various units and singing rude songs as

they went, had marched alongside it. Romulus himself, ‘dressed in a purple

robe and wearing a crown of laurel on his head’,43 had ridden in a splendid

chariot drawn by four horses. All through the city the procession had

wound. Then, at the end of it, Romulus had climbed the Capitol and made

sacrifice to the gods. The trail that he had thereby blazed was one that many

subsequent generations of warlords had followed. Pompey, Caesar,

Augustus: all of them had celebrated what the Romans termed a triumphus:

a triumph.

Increasingly, however, since the time of Augustus, the custom had fallen

into abeyance. Emperors, suspicious of the glory that triumphs bestowed on

those awarded them, had come to reserve the honour for themselves. The

most recent, staged by Claudius to celebrate his conquest of Britain, had

been rendered considerably less glorious than it might otherwise have been

by the fact that, as everyone knew, Claudius himself had spent barely two

weeks on the island. No one, however, could accuse the new emperor and

his son of any lack of heroism. Both had sustained injuries on the field of

battle: Titus had actually had a horse killed under him, and sustained

permanent damage to his shoulder. The senate – whose responsibility it was

to adjudicate on such matters – duly decreed that both men should celebrate

a triumph; Vespasian and Titus, breaking with tradition, but in a manner

calculated to warm traditionalist hearts, opted to share the honour. The

result was a spectacle such as the Roman people had not witnessed for a

long while: one that transported them back to an age when every year, it

seemed, had brought them news of fresh victories, fresh conquests, fresh

triumphs. Time-honoured elements of the ritual, familiar to younger

spectators only from history books, were thrillingly and flamboyantly

resurrected. It was as though ancient history had come alive.

Vespasian and Titus rode as Romulus had once ridden, in splendid

chariots, and Domitian on an equally splendid horse. Great quantities of

loot – gold, silver and ivory; carpets dyed the rarest purple or else

embroidered with vividly lifelike scenes; pearls and topazes set in dazzling

crowns; exotic animals of every kind – were paraded past the cheering

crowds. So too were prisoners: seven hundred in all, ‘the tallest and most

handsome’44 of those taken captive after the fall of Jerusalem, together with

their two most prominent generals. When the procession reached the

Forum, guards trussed one of the commanders up, knocked him to the

ground, and then lashed the flesh off his bones as he was hauled across the

flagstones to an underground cell. Meanwhile, Vespasian and Titus had

climbed the Capitol. There they waited on its summit. The news they had

been expecting soon arrived: the Judaean commander was dead. A great din

of joy erupted across the Forum. It was time to complete the day’s

celebrations, to offer sacrifice, to make dues to Jupiter. Axes swung over

kneeling oxen, and blood spattered the rock of the Capitol. Entrails were

inspected. The omens proved good. Smoke rose to the heavens, and the

perfume of roasting meat drifted across the city, where sumptuous banquets

had been prepared for the Roman people. The triumph was done.

From war had come peace. The victory won by Vespasian had not been

solely over the Judaeans, of course. Everyone knew this; no one mentioned

it. The notion that a Roman might celebrate a triumph over a fellow citizen

was a repellent one, and Vespasian certainly had no wish to draw attention

to the means by which he had emerged as emperor. Yet his triumph,

although over barbarians, could not help but make play with the civil war as

well. It reminded spectators of the conflict that had so recently engulfed the

capital – and reassured them that such violence was now banished for good.

The evening before their triumph, the emperor and Titus had met beyond

the traditional limits of Rome, on the Campus Martius, and passed the night

there: for it was an ancient law of the Roman people that only on the very

day of a triumph might a general and his army be permitted to enter the city.

Nowhere was it proclaimed, as the legionaries swaggered along the

processional route, that the days of soldiers running amok in the streets

were over; but every formalised detail of the triumph proclaimed it even so.

In a similar manner, when Vespasian made sacrifice at the climax of the

procession, no one watching could forget the inferno that had so recently

engulfed the Capitol: for Rome’s most sacred hill still bore the scars of the

flames.

Already, however, the emperor had set to healing them. He had

personally begun the clearance work, picking up a blackened lump of stone

and carrying away a load of rubble on a hod. He had ordered a search for

documents that might replace the three thousand bronze tablets, many of

them dating back to the very beginnings of Rome, destroyed when the

public record office on the Capitol had burnt down. He had already

commissioned the construction of a new temple of Jupiter, as splendid and

imposing as the old one, on the foundations of the vanished structure. Roma

resurgens: such was the slogan stamped on his coins. ‘Rome is back.’

Nero, of course, in the wake of the great fire, had proclaimed the same

message. The comparison was not one to which Vespasian cared to draw

attention. Unlike Otho or Vitellius, he had nothing to gain from affecting a

Neronian pose. Quite the opposite. Vespasian’s image – rough-hewn, no-

nonsense, leery of extravagance and showboating – had already done much

for the Flavian cause. Rather than apologise for his lack of pedigree, he

made a show of it. ‘A warrior line, nourished on Sabine berries’:45 so one

poet, stuck for anything better to say, celebrated Vespasian’s ancestry.

Ostentatious in his modesty, he spurned the echoing halls of the Palatine for

life in the suburbs or – during the heat of summer – on his Sabine farm.

Certainly, he had no intention of settling down in the Golden House.

Workmen who under Nero had been employed to build the most fantastical

complex ever constructed in Rome were employed by Vespasian on an

equally showy project of demolition. The outer reaches of the estate were

returned to their original purposes. When the Colossus, finally completed a

decade after its original commission, was hauled up into position by the

side of the road that led into the Forum, it wore the face not of Nero, but of

the Sun. Most dramatic of all was the fate of the ornamental lake that had

stood at the very heart of the park. Drained and filled with concrete, it

might as well never have existed. Vespasian, however, was keen to build as

well as to erase. Shrewd as ever, he had spotted a glaring gap in the capital’s

infrastructure. While other, smaller cities might boast amphitheatres built of

stone, Rome did not. The only one that had ever existed in the city – a small

and antiquated structure on the Campus Martius – had been destroyed in the

great fire. * The solution, then, appeared obvious: devote a site notorious as

the pleasure-garden of a single man to the pleasure of the entire Roman

people. Build an amphitheatre on it. ‘Restore Rome to itself.’46

Such a project of construction enabled Vespasian to present himself

doubly as an imperator. No one in the city could doubt, watching as

surveyors mapped out the vast space that was to constitute the arena,

gawping at the sheer sweep of the seating area, marvelling at the sumptuous

beauty of the fittings, that the new emperor was sponsoring a structure

beyond the dreams of any previous Caesar. Even the memory of Nero, that

great entertainer, was put in its shade. As row after row of seating went up,

and storey after storey, so the full scale of Vespasian’s ambition became

evident: to provide a space in which the entirety of the Roman people might

assemble. Yet Vespasian was not building his amphitheatre solely to provide

the plebs with entertainment. His aim was to educate them as well: to

remind them of what the word imperator had originally meant. Over the

course of Rome’s history, many generals had been saluted with the title on

the field of battle. Titus, hailed by his legions amid the rubble of Jerusalem,

had been only the most recent. Until its appropriation by Augustus, the

word had been used primarily to describe a commander victorious in war. A

structure massive on the scale of the Flavian Amphitheatre could only ever

have been funded by a city victorious in many wars. Vespasian was not, as

Nero had been, a man without experience of combat. He knew what it was

to sleep on hard ground, to spill the guts of a barbarian, to watch flies

swarm around an open wound. It was as such a man that he had

commissioned his amphitheatre. It was as such a man that he aimed to raise

it as a monument to Rome’s rule of the world.

Yet Vespasian, too, was an actor. No less than Nero, he had a genius for

fashioning Rome into a stage-set. His amphitheatre, massive though it

might be, was simultaneously a thing of smoke and mirrors. Emperor and

son, by celebrating a triumph, had ensured that no one would be left in any

doubt, watching the Flavian refurbishment of the capital, as to precisely

how it was being funded. The Roman people, after all, had seen with their

own eyes the wealth of Judaea paraded through their streets. And not only

that. Also included in the triumph had been vast billboards illustrating

particularly dramatic moments from the war – the annihilation of Judaean

phalanxes, the storming of wealthy cities – together with ‘a large number of

ships’.47 Few in the crowd would have appreciated the truth: that the

Judaeans had been far too few in numbers to meet the legions anywhere

except from behind walls; that the only wealthy city stormed in the course

of the war had been Jerusalem; that there had never been any naval battles,

just the hunting after fugitives across a lake, and the odd skirmish with

pirates. The new emperor and his son, riding through the streets of Rome,

were not merely celebrating a triumph; they were also staging a fraud.

No one watching them, of course, would have presumed to point this

out. Yet it was evident to anyone with even the vaguest awareness of the

background to the Judaean revolt. Time-hallowed tradition decreed that

only the conquest of fresh territory merited a triumph. The suppression of a

rebellion did not suffice. Titus, it was true, while still in Judaea, had made a

point of treating it exactly as though it were recently annexed territory:

stationing his most formidable legion, X Fretensis, to garrison what

remained of its capital, and constituting the region formally as a province.

This was why the triumph had to take the form it did. Vespasian had no

choice but to pose as the conqueror of a previously unconquered land, rich

in pearls, ivory and embroidered carpets. Titus, veering even further into

fantasy, claimed to have stormed a capital that had never in its history been

stormed before. ‘The city of Jerusalem, either attacked in futility or left

entirely untried by all the leaders, kings, or nations before him, he

destroyed.’48 So it was proclaimed on a great arch erected in the Circus

Maximus. Similar messages, whether chiselled onto monuments across the

capital or composed by admiring poets, were everywhere. Year after year,

coins were minted with the image stamped on them of a woman bowed in

mourning, and the slogan IUDAEA CAPTA – ‘Judaea has been taken

captive.’ The message was clear: Vespasian and Titus had succeeded in

subduing a barbarous land previously beyond the limits of Roman rule.* No

such feat of conquest had been witnessed since the days of Augustus. The

glory of it bathed the Flavians – and the entire city of Rome with them – in

a nimbus of purest gold.

The greatest actors did not draw attention to the fact that they were

acting. Nero might never have understood this – but there was a Caesar who

had. Augustus, the founder of the autocracy to which the Flavians were now

heir, had also come to power after wading through Roman blood. Subtly

and seductively, he had sought to mask the circumstances of his rise to

dominance. Rather than focus on the civil wars that had left him unrivalled

as Rome’s master, he had dazzled his fellow citizens with the brilliance and

splendour of his victories over foreign foes; rather than draw attention to

the authentic basis of his supremacy, he had posted his legions to the outer

limits of the empire, where no one in the capital could see them. Vespasian

had studied the lessons of Augustus’ career well. The more he promoted

Judaea as a source of infinite treasure, the more he was able to disguise the

true source of his wealth; the more he vaunted the role played by Flavian

armies in the capture of Jerusalem, the more he was able to blur the

memory of the sacking of Cremona. The war fought by Vespasian and Titus

against the Judaeans, a campaign that originally had seemed merely a

routine police operation, the suppression of a rebellion much like any other,

now qualified as something very different: the foundation stone around

which the Flavians had constructed their entire claim to legitimacy. It was,

as a feat of image-building, one that even Augustus might have admired.

The wealth paraded by Vespasian in his triumph and lavished on his

amphitheatre did not – in the main – come from Jerusalem. Rather, he and

Mucianus, the two warlords who between them had triumphed in the civil

war, had extorted it from across the provinces of the East. Even once

Vitellius was dead, and the civil war brought to an end, the new emperor

had continued to turn the screws. Sailing home from Alexandria, he had

combined a leisurely tour of the Aegean with the imposition of swingeing

tax demands. Some peoples had their obligations doubled, while others,

previously exempt, were obliged to start paying tribute. Among the latter

were the Greeks, who – to their impotent fury – had Nero’s grant of

freedom to them rescinded: this on the grounds that, as Vespasian drily put

it, ‘they had forgotten how to be free’.49

Elsewhere, the new emperor was obliged to tread more carefully. In

Gaul and Germany, Vitellian sympathies still smouldered. Along the Rhine,

where much of the military infrastructure had been reduced to fire-

blackened stumps, the scarring was particularly visible. Vespasian,

however, was not a soldier’s soldier for nothing. He knew how to whip a

potentially mutinous army into shape. Various legions – IV Macedonica

among them – were cashiered; the Larks were dispatched to the furthest

reaches of the Danube; XXI Rapax and XXII Primigenia were transferred

from Upper Germany to stations farther along the Rhine. Two new legions

– both of them pointedly given the name ‘Flavia’ – were formed out of

discharged Vitellians. The various legionary bases destroyed by the

Batavians were rebuilt. Vetera was relocated altogether. Then, once the

restoration work had been completed, the legions stationed in Lower

Germany embarked on a series of punitive raids across the Rhine. Reprisals

on the barbarians who had presumed to massacre the garrison of Vetera

were predictably brutal. Just as the Judaeans had been punished for their

criminality by the destruction of their temple, so were the Germans obliged

to endure the loss of their great prophetess. The Romans, no less than their

adversaries, stood in awe of Veleda – ‘that tall maiden whom the Rhine-

dwellers worship, shuddering at the thunderings of her golden voice’50 –

and they knew better than to risk the anger of the gods she served by putting

her to death. Instead, once they had taken her captive, they dispatched her

to Italy. There, in a town some twenty miles south of Rome, she was

installed as a temple servant. The woman who from the summit of her

lonely tower had prophesied the doom of the legions now served the

interests of her conquerors: mediating between the gods and the Roman

people.

Meanwhile, in Upper Germany, military control had not merely been

restored, but advanced: the new emperor, keen to integrate the Rhine

defences with those of the Danube, ordered the annexation of the Black

Forest, the region known to the Romans as the Decumatian Fields, and

which linked the upper reaches of both rivers. Briskly, efficiently, and to

formidable effect, Vespasian had succeeded in reconstituting the entire

empire north of the Alps. Nevertheless, he remained wary of potential

trouble. When, to universal astonishment, Julius Sabinus, the self-

proclaimed Caesar of the ‘Gallic Empire’, turned out not to have been

cremated in his villa, but rather to have been kept in hiding by his wife, the

emperor refused to share in the general mood of admiration for this display

of marital devotion. Not even the revelation that Sabinus, on one occasion,

had accompanied his wife to Rome disguised as her slave, all in a vain

attempt to secure a pardon, was sufficient to spare them both execution.

Decades later, Vespasian’s insistence on putting such a self-evidently

devoted couple to death was still remembered as a disgrace. ‘Never in his

entire reign did he commit a more cruel and savage act.’51

A claim that was, in its way, a compliment. Vespasian – certainly by the

standards of previous Caesars – was not a man greatly given to cruel and

savage acts. By doing his dirty work for him, Mucianus had enabled him to

keep his hands clean. The elimination of Vitellius’ young son while

Vespasian was still absent in the East had left the stage clear for the

emperor, on his arrival back in Rome, to make an impressively generous

gesture: the arrangement of a splendid marriage for his dead rival’s

daughter. Not merely a display of beneficence, this had signalled to the

Roman people that he was not a man to bear a grudge. In Vespasian, so his

fellow citizens were delighted to discover, they had an emperor who rarely

took serious offence, no matter what abuse might be levelled at him. Jokes,

liberties, insults: all bounced off him like arrows off a shield wall.

Vespasian had been wounded enough in the course of battle not to fret over

a bit of mockery. He knew, as someone who had served both Caligula and

Nero, to what dark ends paranoia might lead. This was why, when friends

warned him that a senator was predicted by astrologers to become emperor,

he promptly made the man consul, assuring his friends, ‘He will not forget

the favour.’52 Even the practice of frisking visitors approaching the imperial

presence, routine since the time of Claudius, was abolished. Vespasian, a

man who all his life had shown himself as indomitable as he was

contemptuous of flummery, had not become emperor merely to start at

shadows.

Not that this rendered him any the less an autocrat. Supreme power was

supreme power, and Vespasian made no apologies for it. Pointedly and

deliberately, he rubbed the noses of senators tempted to look down on his

regime in the brute fact that the commanding heights of the Roman state

were now his to do with as he pleased. Ten years he ruled as emperor,

during which time he held eight consulships, Titus seven, and Mucianus

three. Nor was Vespasian any the less assiduous in monopolising control of

the security apparatus. Rather than entrusting command of the Praetorians

to an equestrian, he broke with all precedent by giving the command to

Titus. The appointment was as cynical as it was shrewd. The conqueror of

Jerusalem, who had already more than demonstrated his readiness to crush

opposition, could be trusted to maintain the new regime as a family

business. After all, he was due to inherit it.

Vespasian might scorn to display paranoia; but Titus, if he were to

succeed his father to the rule of the world, could not afford to be so relaxed.

His glamour, in the years that followed his triumph, was touched by more

than a hint of the sinister. His fingerprints were suspected on two particular

crimes: the execution of Helvidius Priscus, a senator celebrated for his stern

and republican cast of virtue; and the murder, after one of Titus’ own dinner

parties, of Caecina. In both cases, it was true, there were extenuating

circumstances. Helvidius, who had refused to grant Vespasian the titles that

were a Caesar’s due, had consistently been so rigid in his devotion to the

traditions of the republic that he might as well have been courting

execution; while Caecina, despite almost a decade of dutiful service to the

Flavian cause, remained notorious as someone who had only to pledge his

loyalty to betray it. Certainly, for all that Vespasian, as emperor, bore the

ultimate responsibility for the deaths of both men, the blame did not attach

to him. Even the severest moralists were inclined to give him the benefit of

the doubt. ‘He alone, out of all those who became emperor, was changed by

it for the better.’53

A decade after launching his bid for power, Vespasian could be well

pleased with all that he had achieved for the Roman people. Their empire

stood on renewed foundations; their city, to a degree unparalleled since the

age of Augustus, had been burnished and beautified. On the Capitol, the

familiar silhouette of the temple of Jupiter was well on its way to being

restored to the skyline; beyond the Forum, in what had once been the

grounds of the Golden House, the Flavian Amphitheatre already rose three

storeys high. Neither monument, however, served as the truest memorial to

Vespasian’s remarkable achievements. That was to be found instead just

beyond Caesar’s great marble forum, in what, until the great fire, had been

Rome’s central meat market, but was now, following its redevelopment, the

site of an enormous temple to Pax: Peace.

Many were the paradoxes to which this building gave form. Dedicated to

peace, it glittered with trophies to war. The centrepiece of its great

collection of treasures was the plunder taken from the Temple in Jerusalem,

and which, in the triumph celebrated by Vespasian and Titus, had been the

only objects paraded through the streets to have come unambiguously from

Judaea. Golden ornaments that once had pandered to the superstition and

conceit of the Judaeans, a great table and a peculiar-looking lampstand with

seven arms – a ‘menorah’ – now redounded to the glory of Caesar. Not that

the spoils of Jerusalem were the only treasures to do so. Statues and

paintings looted by Nero from across the Greek world, and originally

installed in the Golden House, might now be admired by any citizen who

cared to pay a visit to the Temple of Peace. The spectacle of masterpieces

garnered from across many provinces, and all assembled in a single place,

could not help but hint at a further paradox: that Rome, the mistress of the

world, was no longer solely a Roman city.

‘A building as beautiful as any in the world.’54 Such was the verdict of

Vespasian’s contemporaries on the Temple of Peace. It was an astonishing

legacy for the man once derided as the Muleteer to have fashioned for

himself. The blend of meanness and shrewdness that the Roman upper

classes commonly associated with Sabine peasants was certainly nothing of

which Vespasian ever felt ashamed. Even as the Temple of Peace served as

a monument to his supreme mastery of war, it bore witness to his unfailing

eye for the bottom line. When Titus, alerted to the fact that his father had

put a tax on urine, complained that the policy was a vulgar one, Vespasian

held up a coin, shoved it under Titus’ nose, and demanded to know if it

stank; then, when Titus shook his head, answered, ‘But it comes from piss,

all the same.’55 True or not, the anecdote bore witness to qualities that even

the haughtiest of Vespasian’s contemporaries, no matter how much they

might look down their noses at the upstart emperor, could not help but

privately admire: wit, lack of pretence, and an unflinching commitment to

the service of the Roman people.

Duty was a concept that Vespasian had always held dear. Unsurprisingly,

then, when he fell sick in the summer of 79, he continued to attend to his

responsibilities as emperor, even going so far as to receive embassies while

lying in bed. It was clear that he did not have long, for in the skies, an

infallible marker of change, a fiery-tailed comet, was seen. At the end,

Vespasian insisted on facing death like a soldier: on his feet. Propped up by

his servants, he breathed his last in their arms. ‘Poor me,’ he had murmured

at the onset of his illness. ‘I think I am becoming a god.’56 He had not been

wrong. Like Caesar, like Augustus, like Claudius, Vespasian was raised

after his death to the heavens. His achievements had been manifold, and his

legacy would prove an enduring one. The terrible year in which no fewer

than four Caesars had reigned, and civilisation itself seemed lost to chaos,

had not, after all, proved fatal to the empire of the Roman people.

Vespasian, just as the prophets of the East had predicted, had set the world

on new and strong foundations. He had shown himself a prince of peace

indeed.

* Suetonius reports two rumours: one – wholly unbelievable – that Vitellius starved his mother to death; the other, marginally more credible, ‘that she was so depressed at the state things had come to,

and so anxious about how matters might turn out, that she asked her son for poison: a request which

he readily granted her’ ( Galba: 14).

* The report is from Suetonius ( Vitellius: 16). According to Dio (64.20), Vitellius hid in a kennel, and was savaged by dogs as he cowered there.

* It was perhaps his good fortune to be murdered on the way.

* The ultimate fate of Civilis is unknown.

* Nero had built an amphitheatre out of wood, also on the Campus Martius, that may still have been

standing when work began on the Colosseum – although it, too, may have been consumed in the

great fire. The evidence is ambiguous.

* Intriguingly, a single coin has been found bearing the message IUDAEA RECEPTA, or ‘Judaea has

been recovered’ – evidently the product of a mint that had failed to receive the correct propaganda

briefing.

OceanofPDF.com

PART TWO

PEACE

OceanofPDF.com

SLEEPING GIANTS

Concrete Facts

In ancient times, so it was said, the greatest of all Greek heroes had visited

Italy. The story was a favourite among the Romans. Hercules was the son of

Jupiter – a paternity that had thrown Juno, the queen of the gods, into a

towering rage. So irate was she at her husband’s adultery that she had sent a

mist of madness down upon Hercules. His insanity had driven him to

commit a terrible crime: the murder of his wife and children. For this deed

the gods had sentenced him to a series of supposedly impossible labours –

which, being a hero, and the strongest man of all time, he had duly

completed. The first of the labours had provided him with his signature

look: the hide of a ferocious lion which he had throttled with his own hands,

and worn ever afterwards as a cloak. * Another labour, the tenth, had been

more demanding. It had required Hercules to travel to a distant island

beyond the setting of the sun, to kill a three-headed giant, and then to drive

the monster’s cattle back all the way to Greece. It was in the course of

completing this feat that he had arrived in Italy. Reaching what would one

day be Rome, he had built a bridge over the Tiber and slain the local giant.

Then, heading southwards, he had arrived in Campania, the rich and fertile

land stretching inland from the Bay of Naples. Here he had found himself

confronted not by one giant, but by an entire race of them. Never a man to

duck a challenge, he had fought the whole lot at once. The clash had made

the earth shake – but Hercules, aided by his divine father, had finally

emerged triumphant from the battle. The defeated giants, their wounds still

fiery from the impact of Jupiter’s thunderbolts, had been chained and

imprisoned by the victorious hero beneath the great mountain that rose

above the Campanian plain: Vesuvius.

Hercules’ feat had been much commemorated by poets and scholars. To

celebrate it, so they recorded, he had led a triumphal procession – a pompe,

in Greek – along the lower slopes of Vesuvius. Then he had founded a pair

of cities. One of these, Pompeii, stood at the very foot of the mountain, and

commemorated in its name the hero’s triumph. The other, Herculaneum,

was situated on a promontory jutting out into sea, and was famed for its

cooling breezes. Whether Hercules had truly founded these two cities

might, perhaps, be doubted by sceptics. Yet even if he had not, and even if

he had never been anywhere near Campania, the stories told of his battle

with the giants reflected something about Pompeii and Herculaneum that

was indisputably true: they were both very old.

This hint of the antique, along with its Greek patina, had always been a

part of the appeal of the Bay of Naples for Rome’s movers and shakers.

Campania – ‘that most blessed of plains’1 – was a landscape numinous with

myth. Nymphs had once swum in its waters and sirens sung from its

islands. The Sibyl, bearing her books of prophecy, had travelled to meet

Tarquin from its shores. Cumae, her home, contained what was widely

agreed to be a portal to the underworld. Like Naples, which lay a few miles

east from it along the coast, the city had been founded back in the mists of

time by Greek settlers; and it still, centuries on, provided tourists from

Rome with what they fondly liked to imagine was a touch of ancient

Greece. Fantasy, in a setting as desirable as Campania, with its perfumed

streets and its vine-clad slopes, its fields of wildflowers and its

incomparable oyster beds, had long proven irresistible to those with the

wealth to invest in it. Only in the more exclusive neighbourhoods of Rome

were properties more expensive. Otherwise, the Bay of Naples ranked as

the priciest real estate in the world.

A sea view was especially prized. The most spectacular locations, those

on rocky promontories or in other particularly beautiful spots, had

originally been developed back in the final century of the republic; and

already, by the time of Augustus, the sheer number of villas lining the coast

had come ‘to give the impression of forming a single city’.2 These estates

were not working farms, like those on the outskirts of Pompeii, an inland

city, but palaces, vast complexes of colonnaded porticoes and landscaped

gardens adorned with libraries, paintings and antique bronzes. Outside

Herculaneum, for instance, there stood a villa originally commissioned by

Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, filled with philosophical texts and statues

ransacked from the Greek world, that might as well have been transplanted

from Alexandria. When he had built the Golden House, Nero had

consciously been attempting to recreate the ambience of such an estate: its

artificiality had been precisely the point. Villas along the Bay of Naples had

long since ceased to draw sustenance from the towns and farms that existed

beyond their walls. Everything that had originally attracted the super-rich to

Campania – mythology, culture, beauty – had been privatised. Petronius, a

senator obliged to commit suicide by Nero, and famed both as an arbiter of

fashion and as a pathologist of decadence, had mocked the trend: ‘Once,

with my own eyes, I saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar; and when the

boys asked her, “Sibyl, what do you want?,” she answered, “I want to die.”

’3

The coastline, however, was not exclusively a playground for the super-

rich. It boasted quarries as well. Between Naples and Cumae the landscape

had a peculiar quality: for here the giants imprisoned by Hercules lay

sufficiently close to the surface that their fiery wounds scorched the earth

and made water boil and bubble. The vapours were often toxic; and yet so

fertile was the soil that in spring the perfume of the wild roses growing in

the Phlegraean Fields, as they were known, was sweeter by far than that of

roses in a garden. How to explain this? Scholars had arrived at what

appeared to be the conclusive answer: once, long ago, the whole region had

been on fire. This was evident from even the most cursory examination of

the fields – and of the slopes of Vesuvius too. In both regions, the rock –

‘although cold now for many long years’4 – was black and porous, as only

rock could be that had been burnt right through. ‘Pompeian pumice’, it was

called; and rain, percolating through the soil, was retained by it, ‘and kept

like a warm kind of juice’. 5 So life-giving was this juice that it sustained the

sweetest-smelling roses in the world, and the fairest orchards and vineyards,

and no fewer than three harvests every year. Campania was a land

perpetually in bloom.

Yet fertility was not the greatest gift the Phlegraean Fields and the slopes

of Vesuvius had bestowed upon the region. The flames which once, back in

ancient times, had scorched and blackened it had also turned the earth to ‘a

kind of sandy dust endowed with wonderful qualities’. 6 Mix this dust with

lime, so engineers had discovered, and the result was the world’s strongest

and most adaptable concrete. Remarkably, it even hardened under water.

Transported far and wide, it had been used in cities ranging from Spain to

Judaea. Unsurprisingly, however, it was in Campania itself that the frontiers

of town planning had been pushed back to most innovative effect. What

happened on the Bay of Naples served to shape the look of the world.

For a century, those who wanted a glimpse of the future had only to head

for the coastline south of the Phlegraean Fields. Here was to be found the

achingly chic spa town of Baiae, a place so celebrated for its delights that

even Vespasian, after a decade spent sternly boycotting the resort, had at

last, in the final year of his life, succumbed to temptation and paid it a visit.

Beach parties, yacht parties, seafood, courtesans, scandals: Baiae had it all.

In designing a townscape appropriate to this fabulous place of pleasure,

architects had exploited its ashy sands to the full. So many concrete piers

had been thrust out into the bay that, as one joke had it, the very fish were

cramped by them. Even more striking was a feature that had come to serve

as a particular emblem of Baiae: the dome. Perhaps such a bold novelty

could only have been developed in such a location, for nowhere else did

engineers have concrete of sufficient quality to render it practicable. Set

amid terraced gardens beyond the beach, the domes of Baiae, raised over

sulphur baths and swimming pools, presented a sight like nowhere else.

Well might poets hail the town as a princeps among seaside resorts. Nero, a

lifelong participant in its delights, had been inspired by it to break with all

convention, and commission a dome of his own for the Golden House. The

sincerest form of flattery – and due reflection of the fact that still, a full

century after their construction, Baiae’s domes remained thrillingly cutting

edge. ‘Golden shore of happy Venus’: so one visitor described the resort.7

The goddess, it was clear, had come to love a bit of concrete.

Not that domes were the limit of what might be achieved with

Campania’s miracle substance. Far from it. Even as the strains of music and

laughter filled the streets of Baiae, and waiters scurried along colonnades

bearing oysters on golden dishes, and billionaires swapped gossip in the

shade, there was constantly to be seen out at sea, beyond the glittering of

gilded piers, ship after ship, oars churning the waters, gliding to and fro.

Puteoli, a mile or so down the coast from Baiae, remained what it had been

long before the development of Ostia by Claudius and Nero: an

indispensable shrine to Annona, the goddess of the corn supply. Well might

the sandy ash used to make hydraulic concrete have come to be known as

‘Puteolian powder’: ‘for the harbours of Puteoli, by means of which the

port has become an emporium like no other, are entirely man-made’. 8 Every

summer, when the corn ships from Alexandria were first spotted on the

horizon, the people of the city would rush to the docks, and there, crowded

onto great artificial moles, celebrate that Rome had been spared starvation

for another year. The Bay of Naples, for all its show of pleasure, was

fundamental to the security of the capital. The events of the civil war had

served doubly as a reminder of this fact. Just as Vespasian’s occupation of

Egypt had demonstrated how easily the shipment of corn to Puteoli might

be throttled, so had the role played in the conflict by a second town visible

from Baiae, the great naval base of Misenum, proved a wake-up call.

Marines – whether recruited by Nero to serve as legionaries, or rising in

mutiny against Vitellius – had played a key role in the conflict. Rather than

disband I Adiutrix and post its men back to Misenum, Vespasian had sent

the legion to the Rhine; but he had no desire to see others from the base get

ideas above their station. Command of the fleet, then, was a crucial

appointment. A firm hand was needed on the tiller. A hand that could be

trusted not to jerk it this way and that wildly. A hand, in short, with grip.

Gaius Plinius Secundus – Pliny – was a man who had demonstrated grip

all his life. Amiable, stout and asthmatic, he was simultaneously the very

model of a go-getting equestrian. His promotion by Vespasian to the

command of the fleet at Misenum had set the seal on a career of exemplary

public service. Born in Comum, a beautiful lakeside town below the Alps,

Pliny had never been a man to stay in one place for long. As a young officer

he had held a range of posts along the Rhine, seeing active service, and

making some exceedingly useful contacts. In his first posting, he had served

under Corbulo; in his final posting, alongside the teenage Titus. It had taken

time, however, for these associations to bear full fruit. Under Nero, Pliny’s

career had stalled. Retiring to Comum, he had devoted himself to writing

books: on history, on oratory, on the vagaries of the Latin language. But

then, with Vespasian’s unexpected accession to power, his situation had

dramatically improved. His term of service under Corbulo, that friend and

patron of the great Mucianus; the time he had spent in a tent with Titus:

both had marked him out as a natural favourite of the Flavians. Sure

enough, Pliny had been entrusted by the new regime with a succession of

prestigious posts. From province to province he had gone, administering the

finances of each one with a display of competence and assiduity very much

after Vespasian’s heart. Duly appointed to the command of Misenum, Pliny

had continued to impress. The time he spent on the Bay of Naples did not

cut him off from the ultimate source of patronage: for he was frequently

required to travel to Rome. There, he had capitalised on the fact that both he

and Vespasian were early risers, regularly calling on the emperor before

dawn. A man who under Nero had seemed doomed to provincial obscurity

had emerged, thanks to the convulsions of civil war, an associate of Caesar

himself. Pliny, under Vespasian, had reached as high as any equestrian

could reasonably hope to go.

Even so, exhausting though his duties and responsibilities might be, they

were not, in Pliny’s own opinion, exhausting enough. Despite his return to

public service, he had scorned to lay down his pen. Even the hardest

working among his associates were stupefied by his stamina. ‘His

indefatigability was beyond belief, his powers of application exceptional.’9

Here were the same qualities that Corbulo, Pliny’s old commander, had

identified as the prerequisites for success: the essential requirements for the

projection of Roman power. Only by submitting to an iron-forged discipline

could the legions hope to maintain the rule of the world; only by

committing to a relentless programme of research could a scholar hope to

catalogue everything in the universe. Pliny was not just looking to continue

writing, but to write a book on a truly epic scale, one that might serve his

readers as an all-round education: an encyclopaedia. It was, as he proudly

acknowledged, an unprecedented ambition – ‘for not even a Greek has

attempted such a massive project single-handedly before’.10 Perhaps this

was because only a Roman could ever have conceived it: for it was only the

Romans who had the world in their hands.

To look out from Misenum across the Bay of Naples, to track the

freighters as they sailed past on their way to Puteoli, to marvel at the wealth

and beauty on display along the shore, was to comprehend just what it

meant for the whole world to be bound together in a single order. ‘For who

would deny,’ Pliny demanded, ‘now that the greatness of Rome’s empire

enables opposite ends of the globe to communicate with one another, that

life is improved by the interchange of commodities, by a partnership in the

blessings of peace, and by the general availability of things previously kept

concealed from us?’11 He was not alone in marvelling at how Roman rule

had served to shrink the world. The crowds in the capital who gathered to

gawp at Vespasian and Titus’ triumph had been doing the same. Whether it

was exotic blooms transplanted to adorn the gardens of senators, or dyes

harvested from shellfish in distant seas, or rare materials mined from the

very bowels of the earth, there was little that Roman consumers could not

obtain. Naturally, they had to be wealthy enough to afford them; but this, in

the opinion of even the sternest moralist, was precisely what rendered

luxuries such as purple or gold acceptable as markers of honour. The risk,

of course, was always that they might end up in the hands of people who

did not merit them – upstarts, parvenus, social climbers – or, perhaps worse,

that they might come to sap the character of those who did. Even as Pliny

hailed the fruits of the Roman peace, he was not oblivious to the risks they

might present to the Romans themselves: ‘of all the many peoples on the

face of the earth, the worthiest and the most upstanding’. 12

Nowhere was this danger more evident than in the kitchen. Back in the

early, heroic days of the republic, when even senators were to be found at

the plough, the Roman people had subsisted on a plain, manly diet, the

produce of their own fields, fertilised by their sweat. Greeks, meanwhile,

they had dismissed as effeminates, fussing over cookery books. The Roman

conquest of the world, however, had come to change all that. Exotic

foodstuffs, fantastical recipes, celebrity chefs: all had been imported to their

city. Now, in the age of the Caesars, it was the dinner parties of Italy,

‘luxurious and improvident’,13 that provoked the envy of the Greeks. Even

so, there remained deep within the Roman character a lurking suspicion of

cookery. Vitellius had been despised not merely as a glutton but as an

epicure. His most notorious accoutrement, a dish so wide as to resemble a

shield, was said to have been laden with delicacies sourced from the very

limits of east and west: ‘the livers of parrotfish, the brains of pheasants and

peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, the entrails of lampreys’. 14 Pliny, a man

who was certainly not oblivious to the pleasures of good food, viewed all

such extravagances with distaste. It repelled him that gourmands might eat

the skin of an elephant’s trunk, munching on it not because it was tasty, but

because it enabled them to feel that they were dining on ivory. The wonders

of the world merited respect. This was the conviction to which Pliny had

devoted a superhuman degree of effort. The true value of Rome’s empire

lay not in the opportunities it provided for profit, or for ransacking

previously inaccessible reaches of the world, or for stimulating jaded

palates, but in something altogether nobler: its success in pushing back, to a

degree never achieved before, the frontiers of knowledge.

To comprehend the world in its full richness and wonder it was

necessary to travel. Not everything could be transplanted to Rome. There

were plants that could only put down roots in certain soils; animals that

could only survive in certain environments; rivers, lakes, deserts and

mountains that had no equivalent in Italy. Most notable of all was the

astonishing diversity of human custom. ‘The sheer range of it is beyond

computation – being almost as broad as the range of human groupings

themselves.’15 Pliny, who had served in many provinces, and who as

admiral of the Misene fleet commanded men recruited from across the

Mediterranean, knew from first-hand experience just how various were the

peoples brought under Roman rule. He had seen for himself how, even as

Italy had imported the produce of the world, it had also, like a loving

mother gathering in her children, enabled distant lands to share in a

common home: ‘For she has joined together scattered empires, softened

barbarous customs, brought a quite astonishing number of nations (all of

them speaking inharmonious and savage languages) to converse in a

common tongue, endowed humanity with civilisation, and become, to sum

things up, the native land of peoples across the span of the entire world.’16

The implication was startling: that everyone in the empire was destined

to become, in the long run, a kind of Roman. Not only that: Rome’s

conquests rendered the barbarians who lived beyond the limits of Caesar’s

rule, who had failed to benefit from its ameliorating influence, only the

more barbarous. Pliny wrote as a man who, during his term of service on

the Rhine, had seen for himself how the Chaukians lived. Why, then, should

he doubt that on islands in the northern sea there were to be found people

born with horses’ hooves or giant ears, or that in Africa, beyond the Atlas

Mountains, there might be a tribe that lived in caves, subsisted on snakes,

and conversed entirely in squeaks? Even the farthest reaches of the world

were not wholly beyond his gaze. Studying travellers’ reports, he could

read, for instance, that it was possible to sail southwards from the Persian

Gulf and arrive in Spain, and that north of Britain, beyond a mysterious

island named Thule, all the ocean was ice. The more brilliantly the blaze of

Roman civilisation shone, the more it illuminated what had previously lain

in darkness. This it was that had made possible Pliny’s astonishing project:

‘to cover everything in the entire world’. 17

Knowledge was power. The mission to comprehend the world was not

some eccentric flight of fancy, some idle amusement, but one heroically

appropriate to the dignity of the Roman people. The Flavians, no less than

Pliny, were committed to this principle. When Vespasian and Titus, shortly

after coming to power, conducted a census, the resulting information had

naturally served the emperor as a basis for his fiscal reforms; but it had also

been something more, a public signal that the chaotic days of civil war were

over, that anarchy was banished, that everything was restored to order. To

fathom the rhythms and patterns of the natural world, too, was a duty that it

would have been irresponsible for an imperial people to shrug aside.

Mucianus, that subtle bulwark of the Flavian regime, had not hesitated,

while serving in distant lands, to record everything wonderful, everything

unexpected that he happened to see. Whether an immense plane tree

beneath which he and a dozen companions had enjoyed a picnic; or the

source of the river Euphrates; or monkeys playing chequers; or an old man,

aged 104, who had grown an entirely fresh set of teeth: all lay within a

Roman’s purview. Pliny, detailing the great man’s reminiscences, had made

sure to supplement them, whenever he could, with reminiscences of his

own. Just as Mucianus, visiting Greece, had met a man who originally,

before sprouting a beard and muscles, had been a woman, so had Pliny,

while in Africa, witnessed a bride on the very day of her wedding turn into

a man. Hints of a universal order might be found in even the most

incredible occurrences. Only in a global empire, however, was it possible to

trace them. Such was the supreme achievement of the Roman people: to

have fashioned a dominion that could reveal to humanity the fundamentals

of the cosmos.

These fundamentals were evident less in the convulsions that had

brought the Flavians to power than in the peace they had brought to the

world. This was not to say, of course, that unanticipated disasters might not

happen. Pliny, listing the vagaries of celestial phenomena, had recorded the

death over a century previously of a man from Pompeii: killed by lightning

from a clear blue sky. Fleetingly, throughout his encyclopaedia, he would

make reference to cities only recently destroyed: he noted that Jerusalem

was no more, and that in Cremona, just before its annihilation, a previously

unknown species of bird, looking much like a thrush, had appeared (the bird

itself, Pliny noted, was ‘delicious’18). Yet who could doubt, surveying the

glorious spectacle of the Bay of Naples – its harbours filled with shipping

from across the world; its hinterland rich in vineyards, orchards and olive

groves; its shoreline adorned with concrete – that the good times were here

to stay: that the arc of the universe did indeed bend towards prosperity?

Big Fish, Small Ponds

Once, before the coming of the Romans, the mountains that loomed to the

east of Campania had been home to a people despised and feared in equal

measure by all who lived along the Bay of Naples. The Samnites, hardy

warriors who wore collars of solid iron and shaved their pubic hair in

public, had proven themselves adversaries as flinty and unyielding as the

soil from which they scratched a living. Three grinding bouts of war it had

taken the Romans to subdue them; and still, almost four centuries on from

their final subjugation, they served the super-rich along the Bay of Naples

as the very epitome of peasants. Naturally, the days when the Samnites

would descend from their mountain fastnesses to bring fire and slaughter to

the soft lands below them were long gone, for they had come to rank as

Roman citizens more than a century and a half before. Even so, reminders

of the distant age when they had lived as a free and independent people

were not completely banished from Campania. Their language, Oscan –

once widely spoken along the Bay of Naples – was still to be heard on the

streets of Puteoli or Pompeii, or seen inscribed on faded monuments, or

glimpsed as scratched graffiti. More dramatic, however, was their enduring

influence on the theatrics of the arena. Fighters dressed as antique Samnite

warriors, complete with brimmed helmets, bobbing crests and short swords,

had long been fan favourites; and even though, now that the people of

Samnium ranked as Roman citizens, it was viewed as impolitic to refer to

such gladiators as ‘Samnites’, their style of fighting remained far too

popular to phase out. To attend munera, and to gawp at heavily armoured

warriors, was to be reminded not just of how ancient gladiatorial combat

was, but of another, no less striking fact: that its origins lay in Campania.

The Campanians did not begrudge Rome’s appropriation of their most

distinctive cultural export. It had worked to their benefit. Their gladiator

schools were internationally renowned, their facilities beyond the dreams of

other lands. Capua, an ancient city bordering Samnium, was home both to

the most elite gladiator school of them all and to an amphitheatre that for a

century had ranked as the world’s largest. In Puteoli, which already had a

perfectly serviceable stadium, Vespasian had commissioned the building of

a second, almost as large as the one in Capua. More provincial towns also

bore witness to Campania’s obsession with munera. The amphitheatre in

Pompeii, for instance, was the oldest to have been built of stone anywhere;

but equally telling was the fact that for much of Nero’s reign it had been

empty of gladiators. This had not reflected any lack of enthusiasm for blood

sports on the part of the Pompeians – quite the opposite. So fanatical were

they in their support that in AD 59 they had become embroiled in a fight

with fans from a neighbouring city. The senate, determined to crack down

on such hooliganism, had not only imposed exile on the more eminent

citizens involved in the brawl, but banned the city from staging gladiator

fights for an entire decade. This punishment, as well as denying the

Pompeians an entertainment to which they were addicted, had struck a

wounding blow to their sense of self-esteem. Twenty years on, the shame of

it was still felt as something raw.

Pompeii – like Colonia, like Cremona, like Berythus – ranked as a

colony. It was not the foundation of the city by Hercules that sustained the

conceit of its people, but its privileged relationship to Rome. True, the

process of becoming a colonia – involving as it had the planting in Pompeii

of two thousand retired legionaries, and the systematic erasure of Oscan

culture – had been a brutal one; but all that was now ancient history.

Pompeians did not just rank as Roman citizens, but as the citizens of a

version of Rome. To live in a colony was to be as susceptible to the

changing rhythms of life in the capital, to its fashions, its tensions, its

upheavals, as the Ocean was to the phases of the moon. This was why the

punishment slapped on the Pompeians by the senate had stung so painfully;

and it was why, rather than enduring it uncomplainingly, they had sought to

have it reversed. Several days’ travel from the capital though they might be,

Pompeians still had friends in high places. Poppaea Sabina, that most

glamorous of patrons, had both roots and property in the region; and sure

enough, a year before her death, she had persuaded Nero to relax the ban on

gladiators. The emperor himself, visiting Pompeii and bringing with him

from his wife lavish offerings of jewellery and pearls for Venus, the city’s

divine patron, had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. Factions defining

themselves as ‘fans of Nero’ and ‘fans of Poppaea’ had come to dominate

the city. Wherever there was chanting to be done, or space on the walls to

scrawl graffiti, they had made sure to let everyone know their devotion to

the imperial couple: a bandwagon which various local politicians, sniffing

opportunity, had been quick to jump upon. Every year in Pompeii elections

were held to determine who would have responsibility for the city; and

these elections, in the wake of the relaxation of the ban on gladiators, had

been won by candidates running on an obvious ticket. Collectively, they had

been known as the Neropoppaeenses: ‘the fans of Nero and Poppaea’. 19

In Pompeii, then, as in Rome, Nero’s downfall had come as an

earthquake. Although the aftershocks had not been as severe in their effects

on Campania as they were on northern Italy, they had not been negligible

either. The region – boasting as it did Rome’s largest naval base and its

greatest port – was a key prize. In the wake of Vitellius’ murder, the Flavian

high command had duly dispatched their fastest cavalry unit to secure it.

Capua, a hotbed of Vitellian sympathies, had been garrisoned all that winter

by a legion from Syria. Visiting Pompeii, Mucianus’ men had enjoyed the

theatre, forced themselves on the local women, and scratched their names

on various walls. While most had written in Latin, some had done so in a

peculiarly strange and indecipherable script: Arabic.* Here, for any

Pompeians who happened to observe the graffiti, was a striking measure of

just how convulsive the civil wars had been: that they had brought soldiers

from the outer limits of the world to the very heart of their town.

The mood of crisis, even once the period of direct military occupation

was over, had persisted. Regime change in Rome had precipitated regime

change in Campania. In Pompeii, the Neropoppaeenses had found

themselves frozen out of government. A legate personally mandated by

Vespasian to put the city’s affairs in order, Titus Suedius Clemens, had

made sure of that. Suedius was a man robustly and pointedly ignorant of

Pompeii. A centurion whose record on the Danube had been sufficiently

distinguished to win him appointment as primus pilus, he had served as one

of Otho’s leading officers and briefly commanded the Misene fleet. His

record in the civil wars, although not as glorious as it might have been, was

precisely what had recommended him to Vespasian: for it had won him a

reputation for pugnacity and intemperance. The new emperor had need of

such a legate in Pompeii: a man ready to ride roughshod over the subtleties

and snobberies that had always characterised the city’s politics, who could

ensure victory for candidates favourable to Flavian interests, who was

willing to put about a bit of stick. Grandees in Rome, distant from cities like

Pompeii, might sneer at them as provincial; but not Vespasian. The emperor

had been raised in the Sabine countryside, and he knew that one could not

rule effectively in the capital without securing the support of the whole of

Italy. Bruisers like Suedius could be relied upon to do the proper thing. To

sweep up the rubble of the toppled order. To clear away the debris. To patch

things up, so that in time no one would even know there had been an

earthquake.

In Pompeii, however, the task of setting the city back on proper

foundations was peculiarly challenging. It was not enough merely to secure

the election of reliable magistrates. Earthquakes in Campania were

something more than a metaphor. In AD 62, a tremor had shaken the region

so violently that large stretches of both Pompeii and Herculaneum were

reported in Rome to have collapsed altogether. This, perhaps, had been an

exaggeration; and yet the damage had been severe enough. In Pompeii, the

temple of Jupiter – which, as in Rome, loomed over the Forum – had been

brought crashing down in ruin. Bath complexes across the city had been put

permanently out of action. Great mounds of debris, swept up from the

streets, had come to loom beyond the northern wall of the city. The

plastering and the painting had never stopped. Suedius, arriving in Pompeii

a decade after the great earthquake, had found the city still in a frenzy of

reconstruction. Such a frenzy, in fact, that it had become a playground for

chancers. Vespasian, impatient with displays of greed unless they served the

public good, did not approve of such a free-for-all: for it had been reported

to him that communal areas in Pompeii, spaces that properly belonged to

the people, or to the emperor, or to the gods, were being encroached upon

by private speculators. The official charge laid on Suedius was to rectify

this: to deal with predatory developers as he had once dealt with

insubordinate legionaries. Such was the measure of the crisis in which

Pompeii found itself: that it had led to the imposition on the city of a form

of martial law.

But only a form. The very qualities that had recommended Suedius to

Vespasian – his military cast of mind, his relish for a fight, his status as an

outsider – had simultaneously set a limit on his usefulness. The emperor –

as he had shown by giving licence to Mucianus, in the early days of his

rule, to eliminate pretenders and browbeat the senate – had a talent for

commissioning agents to do his dirty work for him; but equally, he had no

wish to see them go too far. Suedius’ official mission, his role in ‘restoring

places appropriated by private citizens to the republic of the Pompeians’,20

might be proclaimed on stones erected around the city, but nothing more

than that. This was because – for all his success in strong-arming

Pompeians into voting for candidates approved by the new regime – the

truest responsibility for setting the city back on its feet lay not with Suedius,

but with the candidates themselves.

Politics in Pompeii was properly political. The notion that any Caesar,

even one as dutiful as Vespasian, might waste his time micromanaging local

elections was, of course, a ludicrous one. Quite aside from anything else, he

had no wish needlessly to insult those who were running for office.

Vespasian, more than any emperor since Augustus, was alert to the ideals,

the ambitions and the sensitivities of the Italian ruling classes. The

balancing act that he had set himself, as a man who had risen to power on

the back of a civil war, was a treacherous one: to whip civic elites across

Italy into line while at the same time co-opting them as partners in his

regime. Fortunately, the challenge was one to which Vespasian was well-

suited. He knew, as a countryman himself, the surest way to foist radical

change on the regions: by casting it as a return to tradition.

Pompeii was not merely a version of Rome, but a version of Rome as

the city had originally been. Just as legionary bases, in their own distinctive

way, bore witness to traditions and patterns of behaviour that derived

ultimately from the vanished republic, so too did coloniae. Established as a

colony more than half a century before Augustus’ rise to supremacy,

Pompeii preserved continuities with the past that had long since been

extinguished in Rome. In the capital, no one could attain the consulship

without Caesar’s approval; nor could any resolution of the senate be passed

without his say-so. In Pompeii, however, it was different. Suedius’

intervention had been very much the exception that proved the rule, for

even he had been obliged to get his way in the city by directly meddling in

elections.

To become a duumvir – one of the two magistrates who served every

year as the municipal equivalent of a consul – required votes. Securing

votes, in turn, required a candidate to canvass his fellow citizens, to marshal

heavyweight backers, to plaster walls with posters: everything that

originally, back in the days of the republic, had characterised elections to

the consulship. Admittedly, the duoviri – the ‘two men’ – did not, as the

consuls had done, lead armies or sway the fate of nations. Their

responsibilities were more circumscribed: decreeing the erection of statues,

supervising public funerals, appointing contractors to renovate temples.

Additionally, every five years, a particularly distinguished citizen would be

elected quinquennial duumvir: a magistracy that, much like the censorship

in Rome, required the man who held it to evaluate the moral and financial

standing of his fellow citizens, and to calibrate their status accordingly. He

it was who decided the eligibility of Pompeians to vote in the annual

elections; he it was who determined membership of the city council – the

Order of Decurions, as it was termed. To be enrolled as a decurion was to

rank as one of the hundred movers and shakers of the city: an official and

incontrovertible member of the urban elite. Such a status, viewed from

Rome, might not seem much to boast about; and yet it was amplified by a

hunger for honour no less intense for that. The duoviri could know, at the

very least, that they served as magistrates directly elected by the people. No

consul could any longer say as much. The prestige a duumvir enjoyed was,

within the walls of his city, no mean thing. A big fish in a small pond was,

after all, still a big fish.

‘More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and

been greedy for praise.’21 So Cicero, Rome’s most celebrated orator, had

declared back in the dying days of the republic. His own greed for praise

had seen him enshrined as Rome’s supreme exemplar of social mobility: for

he had risen from the obscurity of Arpinum, a one-horse town south of the

capital, to become the first man in his family ever to win the consulship.

His speeches in the law courts and to the senate had provided schoolboys

ever since with both their syllabus and a source of inspiration. ‘His fame,

his eloquence, that is what they pray for.’22 No wonder that Pliny, in his

encyclopaedia, should have lavished Cicero with particular praise: the

equestrian from Arpinum, to the equestrian from Comum, had provided an

obvious role model. Even though Pliny himself, despite his success in

climbing the rungs of advancement, had failed to reach the very top of the

ladder, he could always vest his hopes in his heir. He had no son; but he did

have a nephew whom he valued as a son. The younger Pliny, a student of

eighteen in the summer of Vespasian’s death, had already imbibed from

Cicero’s example dreams of scaling heights that his uncle would clearly

now never attain: fame as a wit and an orator, rank as a senator and a

consul. Fresh out of the schoolroom though he might be, his horizons were

already global in scale. He was no more content to spend his life in Comum

than he would have been to settle down in Pompeii. The limits of municipal

politics had already come to seem to him a kind of claustrophobia. A small

pond, to the younger Pliny, might as well have been a prison.

Yet if Cicero served as a model, so he also served as a warning. His

genius had brought him undying renown, but it had also doomed him.

Murdered in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination on the orders of Mark

Antony, an adversary whom he had relentlessly savaged in his speeches, he

had perished a martyr for liberties that were themselves on the verge of

vanishing. Under the heirs of Augustus, the greed for praise that Cicero had

hailed as the birthright of every Roman had become, for those at the very

summit of achievement, a perilous thing. To outshine a Caesar was to court

death as well as glory. The ancient families who, over the course of the

republic’s history, had provided Rome with consul after consul, and woven

their names into the very fabric of their city’s history, had been

remorselessly winnowed. Increasingly, they had seemed fabulous monsters,

living out of time. The convulsions of the civil wars had pushed them even

further towards extinction. Galba was not the only scion of a venerable

dynasty to have perished amid the bloodshed. By the time Vespasian came

to power, even the most distinguished of the nobles – men such as Marcus

Cocceius Nerva, a senator whose great-grandfather had served as consul,

whose grandfather had been a friend of Tiberius, and who himself had been

a literary mentor to Nero – could trace their inheritance of high office only

as far back as Augustus. Vespasian, respectful of tradition as he was, had

duly recruited Nerva into his inner circle, and in 71 the two men had shared

a consulship.23 But the senate, under the Flavians, no longer embodied the

full sweep of Roman history. That link to the deep past was gone for ever.

Many senators, indeed, were now not even from Italy. Typical was

Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, the high-achieving senator from Baetica in Spain,

who, after his term of service in Galilee, had been promoted by his former

commander to serve as governor of Syria: as distinguished a post as any in

the empire. Others, talent-spotted by Vespasian, had been fast-tracked into

the senate from the provinces, either directly or under cover of the census.

Most of these men hailed from the southern reaches of Spain or Gaul,

where the coloniae – cities such as Italica, the birthplace of Trajanus – were

centuries old; but there were senators too now from the eastern provinces.

Here, for diehard conservatives, was a most unsettling development. The

presence of men who spoke Greek as their first language in the great

cockpit of the ancient capital, where Cicero, and Caesar, and Augustus had

all held the floor, could hardly help but raise conservative hackles.

Certainly, for those who believed that Roman magistrates should properly

come from Rome, it was all most discombobulating. The city, to the more

disgruntled class of reactionary, seemed increasingly given over to

foreigners. Indeed, it seemed barely to be Roman at all.

How very different things were in Pompeii. There, no one had succeeded

in provoking the suspicious envy of a Caesar. The severest fate visited on

those Pompeians who had fomented trouble – whether by stirring up riots or

by parading their devotion to Nero – had been exile. The city’s leading

families were far too insignificant to have merited persecution. Some, as a

result, could trace their ancestry back generations. Marcus Epidius Sabinus,

a duumvir who swept to victory in 77 thanks in large part to the unsubtle

backing of Suedius, was heir to a particularly ancient dynasty. His house, a

spacious mansion next to the city’s original bath complex, was one of the

oldest in Pompeii and incorporated features dating all the way back to the

Oscan era. Simultaneously, however, Epidius had made sure to swim with

the times. A painting on the wall of his household shrine portrayed him and

his father, solemnly arrayed in togas, waiting to sacrifice a bull to

Vespasian. 24 Venerable ancestry, ostentatious loyalty: the combination was a

winning one. Epidius, not content with victory in the duumviral elections,

now had his gaze fixed on greater things. There was always the

quinquennial duumvirate, of course; but even that was not the ultimate

attainment. To rank as the most distinguished dignitary in Pompeii, the

father of his city, it was necessary to serve as flamen Vespasiani: the priest

of Vespasian. The person elected to this post mediated between his fellow

citizens, the emperor, and the dimension of the supernatural: a truly

awesome charge. Even as Vespasian, after returning from a trip to

Campania, lay dying in his Sabine villa, Epidius was preparing to take the

role on. He knew he had Suedius’ backing. He knew as well that the

priesthood would soon be vacant: for Vespasian, that summer of 79, was not

the only man on his deathbed.

‘In Rome, if you want high office, you can have it – but in Pompeii it is

more of a challenge.’25 Cicero, the man who had famously left the obscurity

of his own town to become a senator and a consul, had been joking when he

made the comment; but his tongue, even so, had not been entirely in his

cheek. There was, indeed, as conservatives in Rome often acknowledged, a

dignity to be had in local politics, an opportunity for service that might

bring its own form of glory. This, under the rule of Augustus and his heirs,

was even more the case than it had been back in Cicero’s time. In Rome,

there was no longer any opportunity for ambitious noblemen to do as their

forebears had done, and lavish their fortunes on beautifying the city, or

entertaining the people with games. Both activities were exclusively the

prerogative of Caesar. In Pompeii, however, it was different. There,

magistrates were not only permitted but expected to be models of

generosity. Election to office in Pompeii brought opportunities to spend

one’s own money for the public good. A citizen who served his duumvirate

by providing public benefactions was a citizen who had served his fellows

well. This it was, in Pompeii, truly to merit praise and commemoration.

The living proof of this, as he had been for many decades, was the city’s

most distinguished and influential figure: Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius Maius.

Of venerable ancestry, fabulously wealthy, the owner of a whole range of

high-end rental properties, Maius could look back with satisfaction, that

summer of 79, on a career of immense achievement. Every office that it was

possible for a Pompeian to win, he had won: duumvir, quinquennial

duumvir, priest of Caesar. His daughter, too, just for good measure, served

as the most eminent priestess in the city. Even Maius’ peers on Pompeii’s

council, a class of people not naturally immune to envy, were content to

acknowledge him as princeps coloniae: the princeps of the colony. 26 Such

admiration was due not only to his benefactions – lavish though these had

certainly been – but to something more: the subtlety and generosity of spirit

with which he had helped his fellow citizens navigate what had been, for

the entire city, an exceptionally turbulent time. In the wake of a famine,

Maius had subsidised the bread supply for four years. After the ban on

gladiators, he had kept up Pompeian spirits by staging such entertainments

as were still permitted: hunting displays, athletic shows, fights with wild

beasts. Following the earthquake, he had sponsored the refurbishment of

public buildings. In the wake of Nero’s downfall, he had stepped forward

from the shadows to which the Neropoppaeenses had temporarily confined

him to hail the Flavians, and to help smooth over any hint of lingering

sympathies in the city for the toppled regime. Inaugurated as the priest of

Vespasian, Maius had celebrated in the manner for which he had become

famous: by staging munera. The occasion had been enjoyed by one and all.

Awnings had kept the seats in shade; the water had been scented; gladiators

had thrilled the crowds. It had served as a masterclass in keeping the people

happy. No wonder Epidius had taken Maius as his model.

But now the grand old man of Pompeian politics was facing the final

curtain. It would hardly have been surprising if people in the city, brought

news of Vespasian’s death, had thought to compare the achievements of the

dead emperor with those of their own ailing princeps. Both had laboured to

heal a city shattered by disaster; both had invested heavily in the

entertainment of the masses. Although Maius, unlike Vespasian, was not

raised to the heavens when he finally breathed his last, his fellow citizens

honoured him as best they could. Immediately next to the city gates, beside

the road that led southwards from Pompeii to a seaside resort by the name

of Stabiae, his ashes were laid to rest in a particularly sumptuous tomb.

Encased in marble, topped by a vaulted roof, the monument was designed

to preserve the memory of Maius’ accomplishments for all eternity. Friezes

showed gladiators variously parading into the arena, engaging in combat

and kneeling in the sand; an inscription listing the dead man’s achievements

proclaimed that he had once staged a spectacle comparable to anything that

might be seen in Rome: ‘416 gladiators participated!’ the eulogy

breathlessly proclaimed. 27 Details such as this, garnishing the account of

Maius’ career, were designed to stay in the mind. Pompeii might not be

Rome – but it offered its own kind of fame. So long as the city continued to

flourish, and travellers took to the Stabian road, so the name of Gnaeus

Alleius Nigidius Maius would be preserved, and the record of his

benefactions recalled. It was, so the Pompeians might reflect, a kind of

immortality.

Snakes and Ladders

The Roman who at the end of his life could take pride in duties fulfilled,

ambitions met, the admiration of his fellows secured, was a Roman who

had proved his virtus: his worth as a vir, a man. Naturally, the world being

what it was, achievement was capable of inspiring jealousy as well as

admiration. Pliny, aware that his young nephew was ambitious to elevate

himself from equestrian status, to become a senator and attain the very

summit of rank, liked to illustrate the potential snares and pitfalls that might

await him with a particular story. The episode had taken place shortly

before Pliny’s appointment to the command of the Misene fleet, while he

had been on service in one of the Spanish provinces, administering its

finances. Even then, he had been well on his way to accumulating the

twenty thousand noteworthy facts, sourced from one hundred authors, that

were to provide him with the material for his encyclopaedia. The governor

of the province, a man by the name of Larcius Licinus, wished to purchase

his subordinate’s notebooks. Approaching Pliny, he had offered to pay a

vast sum. Pliny, deeply offended, had refused. His life’s work was not for

sale. Set on getting his own back, he had bided his time. Sure enough, once

his term of office in Spain was done, he had recorded in his encyclopaedia

an entertainingly embarrassing anecdote: how Licinus, while eating a

truffle, had bitten on a coin and bent a tooth. Then, just for good measure,

Pliny had recorded a second story: how, when Licinus went to inspect the

source of a river in northern Spain, the waters had promptly dried up. This,

so Pliny had noted with satisfaction, was ‘a terrible omen’. 28

The insult to his honour had been twofold. First, by offering as payment

a sum that was exactly equivalent to the minimum property qualification

required to rank as an equestrian, Licinus had pointedly been rubbing home

the much greater wealth that he, as a senator, by definition enjoyed. Second,

by insinuating that Pliny might have been conducting his researches for

mercenary reasons, the governor had sought to cast his subordinate not as a

scholar and a patriot, but rather as a grubbing drone, little better than a

tradesman. The shame of such an aspersion was not to be borne. ‘Any form

of commercial exchange, when done on a small scale, must be reckoned

vulgar,’29 Cicero had ruled. Only when business interests spanned the world

might they be reckoned a worthy source of income – and even then they

could never compare in dignity to land. Smoke drifting from the roofs of

tenant farms; vineyards and orchards laden down with succulent fruit; herds

of cattle lowing softly in the deepening twilight: these, because they were

timeless, were the most acceptable markers of Roman wealth. ‘No better

source of income than these, none more profitable, none more delightful,

none more appropriate to those who rank as free.’30

That standards like these were exclusionary was, of course, precisely the

point. Many millions of people lived within the Roman Empire; but no

more than a thousand, perhaps, could lay claim to estates sufficiently vast,

or businesses sufficiently international, to qualify for membership in the

senate. * Below them ranked another ten thousand or so of the super-rich,

men who were entitled by their wealth and standing to membership of the

equestrian order. These gradations of status, rooted in the distant past,

reassured Rome’s elite that, for all the chasm of difference that might

separate them from their forebears, they still maintained their traditional

genius for social calibration. Nevertheless, as the masters now of an empire

full of many cities, they had recognised a need to diversify their ranks. This

was why, in addition to senators and equestrians, a third order had come to

be accepted as belonging to the upper classes. It was not only in Pompeii

that men could become decurions. Equivalents of Maius or Epidius were to

be found in cities across the empire. In Gaul and Greece, in Spain and

Syria, magistrates conformed themselves to the exacting standards both of

their fellow citizens and of Roman snobbery. The blaze of a visiting senator

– a legate or a governor – did not necessarily dazzle such men. To be sure,

in the great firmament that was the world ruled by Caesar, decurions hardly

ranked among the most impressive of celestial bodies. No one would think

to compare them to the sun, or the moon, or the planets, or a comet. What

was the member of some provincial city council, in comparison to a senator,

but a tiny and delicate pinprick of silver? Better, however, to glimmer

faintly as a star than not to glimmer at all. Between the three ruling orders

and every other class the contrast was as profound as that between the

Milky Way and the darkness that framed it. Rich and poor, honourable and

contemptible, distinguished and invisible: these, in the final reckoning,

were the divisions in society that truly mattered.

Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the imperial elite. Not everyone

concurred: there were plenty of citizens who scorned any notion that their

superiors’ disdain for them might define their value. ‘Vulgar and sordid’:31

this had been Cicero’s withering opinion of, among many other classes of

tradesmen, fishmongers. Yet there were plenty of seafood retailers who, far

from feeling embarrassed by their trade, positively gloried in it. The fame

of Pompeii’s garum – a distinctively pungent condiment manufactured out

of fermented fish guts – was a source of great civic pride. In between noting

the value of the sauce as a salve for crocodile bites and the peculiar

insistence of Judaeans on only eating it when it was made from a particular

kind of fish, Pliny listed the city as one of the best in the world for the

delicacy. Those who had grown rich on the back of the trade were perfectly

happy to celebrate the source of their wealth. Showcase for this sense of

pride was the house of the city’s most successful dealer in fish-based

sauces. Selling them across Campania, and even as far afield as southern

Gaul, had brought Aulus Umbricius Scaurus considerable wealth. His

mansion, fashioned out of two separate properties, stood on one of the most

exclusive streets in the city and enjoyed splendid views out across the sea.

It also boasted some highly distinctive mosaics. The visitor who entered the

house was greeted in its hall by an unapologetic display of advertising: the

image, at each of the floor’s four corners, of a jar full of garum. ‘Top class’,

read the inscription on one; ‘the flower of garum’, read another.32 Scaurus’

own name appeared on three of the jars. Quite as much as any senator, he

knew his worth. He certainly scorned any notion that his business might be

either vulgar or sordid.

It helped, of course, when defying the snobbery of the elites, to be rich.

It was not, however, essential. Paid work, the very thought of which made

senatorial noses wrinkle uncontrollably, provided identity to people a long

way down the social scale. No one in either Rome or Pompeii needed any

reminders as to just how important a role craftsmen had to play in repairing

a cityscape devastated by fire or earthquake. Builders would advertise their

workshops with signs that lovingly illustrated the tools of their trade:

chisels, hammers, trowels. There was no profession so humble, perhaps,

that it might not serve as a source of dignity. In Pompeii, when a woman

named Clodia Nigella was commemorated, her career was emblazoned on

her tombstone as a badge of honour: ‘public pig-keeper’.33 The poor no less

than the rich had their pride. ‘There is no condition so humble that it cannot

be touched by the sweetness of glory.’34

This, in their very heart of hearts, was something that the elites were

prepared to acknowledge. Just as Pliny, humiliated by his superior, had

bided his time before exacting his vengeance, so might a carpenter or a

potter, if shamed by a nobleman, scrawl abuse about him on a temple wall,

or catcall him at the games, or defecate on his statue. In Rome, where

senators no longer depended upon votes for advancement, this was a truth

that mattered less than it did in a city like Pompeii, where the magistracies

and priesthoods won by a luminary such as Maius had owed much to his

popularity with the people. In the capital, there was only one member of the

elite who still needed to pay close attention to the vagaries of the plebs, to

court them, to flatter them, to parade for them his high regard – and that

man, of course, was Caesar. Vespasian, shouldering the rubble of the

Capitol onto a hod, had been demonstrating his respect not only for the

gods, but for the city’s workmen. That he valued their labour, and respected

the dignity it brought them, was illustrated by a story much repeated. An

engineer, so it was claimed, had invented a device that would enable

columns to be transported to the summit of the Capitol at minimal cost; but

Vespasian, although intrigued by the invention, refused to employ it. His

explanation was a telling one. ‘I have a duty to keep the masses fed.’35

Due tribute to Vespasian’s popularity with the Roman poor – but a most

improbable story, even so. Emperors were indeed committed to keeping the

masses in the capital fed (that, after all, was what the corn dole was for); but

none ever felt any obligation to maintain them in work. Even in Rome, the

supply of free bread might prove insufficient to preserve the unemployed

from starvation. The fate of those so wretched that they were reduced to

huddling by one of the city’s bridges, flapping their rags against carrion

birds and hungry dogs, was common enough that poets might wish it on

their rivals. Beyond the limits of the capital, where no one was given free

bread, unemployment was even more to be dreaded. Sometimes, it was true,

a grandee ambitious to win the affection of his fellow citizens would do as

Maius had done in Pompeii, and offer his fellow citizens some form of aid;

but never on a regular basis. The rhythms of the seasons, the demands for

labour, were too fluctuating for that. Even philosophers – for all that they

might feel ‘commanded by nature to do good to every human being’36 –

never thought to channel this sentiment into anything remotely approaching

poor-relief. Why should they have done? The poor, far from leading more

wretched lives than the rich, often seemed much happier than their betters:

they had less to worry about. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the wise.

‘No one finds poverty – inconvenient though it may be – a heavy burden,

unless one is minded to do so.’37 This, of course, was to cast the complaints

of those on the verge of starvation as simple malingering: a point of view

that it was hardly necessary to be a philosopher to hold. Citizens at the

bottom of the pile were generally held to have brought their misfortunes on

themselves. Poverty was due to moral failings. Here, in a society where

every Roman knew himself to be defined by an exacting and relentless

process of calibration, was a ready source of reassurance to everyone who

stood above the breadline. It was not enough to succeed; others had to fail.

Not only that: they had to be seen to fail. A message scratched

anonymously on a wall in Pompeii spoke for many: ‘I hate the poor.

Anybody who asks for something free is crazy; pay the price and get the

goods.’38

The judgement of fellow citizens was the only standard by which a man

could truly measure himself. In the competition for honour which always,

ever since the founding of Rome, had animated Roman society, there were

necessarily losers as well as winners. Not everyone could have prizes. The

destitute served their superiors, in effect, as a looking glass. Prosperity and

glory were nothing without the reflection provided them by poverty and

shame. Yet it was the glory of the Roman people that even the very poorest

among them – the day labourer rejected for work by a foreman, the peasant

scratching vainly at a patch of barren soil – could know themselves citizens

still. The spirit of liberty animated them, guaranteeing at least a shred of

dignity. There were fates, after all, worse than starvation: to be without a

family or a homeland; to have no legal recourse against beatings or sexual

abuse; to serve as a living embodiment of vileness and degradation; to rank

as the very lowest class of human being. It needed no great effort for the

Romans to imagine such an existence. This was because, serving as the

shadow of their city’s greatness, it was manifest everywhere they looked.

‘The primary distinction in the law of persons is this: that all men are

either free or slaves.’39 So it had always been. Just as day was unimaginable

without night, so was liberty without servitude. Freedom, in the opinion of

the Romans, was distinctively their birthright. It was this conviction, in the

days of their rise to greatness, that had steeled them to overcome every

obstacle, to shrug aside every setback, to pursue the course of victory at all

costs. The consequence was evident in the fulfilment of their city’s destiny,

divinely appointed as it was: to rule as the mistress of the world.

Conversely, by failing to fight to the death, and preferring submission to

annihilation, the peoples brought to acknowledge Roman dominance had

shown themselves fitted for servitude. Touring Syria in the wake of his

capture of Jerusalem, Titus had obliged his prisoners to act out their own

defeat for spectators: a dramatisation both of the invincible quality of

Rome’s greatness and of the reasons why the Judaeans, by contrast, had

forfeited every right to freedom. A moral lesson indeed.

Vast numbers of captives from Judaea had duly glutted the markets of

Italy. Their feet chalked white, as an indicator to would-be purchasers that

they were imports, they had stood on the castata, the platform on which

auctions were performed, where countless other prisoners, reaped by the

legions over the course of preceding generations, had similarly stood:

Britons and Gauls, Syrians and Greeks, Spaniards and Carthaginians. It was

a telling measure of the scale of Rome’s conquests that more slaves were to

be found in Italy than anywhere else in the world. They constituted perhaps

a quarter of the population.40 Quite as much as all the other fruits of empire

– exotic cooking ingredients, rare marble, fantastical flora – they illustrated

the sheer range and sweep of Rome’s dominion. More than that, however,

they served as living lessons in civic virtue: in the value of liberty.

That, of course, was not the only purpose of slaves. They existed to do

whatever their master might require of them, whenever he might require it.

For many this meant ceaseless toil. On farms and agricultural estates, where

a majority of the slaves in Italy lived, most were worked so hard that most

of them, after spending dawn to dusk out in the fields, could think only of

food and sleep. Others laboured in mines, ‘wearing out their bodies by day

and by night, deep below the earth’,41 others in quarries, others on the

building of harbours, or tunnels, or any number of infrastructure projects.

Vespasian, in the wake of his conquest of Galilee, had sent six thousand of

the strongest prisoners to Nero, who promptly set them to digging out a

canal. Yet work like this, suited to slaves though it might be, was not

exclusively the province of slaves. Free men as well toiled in fields and on

building sites. Miners and their apprentices enjoyed contracts which

specified their right to quit. These were the class of men, not slaves, who

were known by the elites as operae: labourers. Lack of work was such a

scourge precisely because there existed across Italy so many men desperate

to be hired, to bend their backs, to strain their muscles, to sweat in the sun.

Slavery was not a solution to any shortage of cheap labour. Quite the

opposite. Slaves were, as one philosopher put it, ‘hirelings for life’.42 Work,

however, was not necessarily what defined them in the eyes of their

masters. Rather, it was their status as commodities: human beings who, by

consenting to live as property rather than to perish as free men or women,

served to affirm the honour, the dignity and the superiority of those who

owned them.

Caveat emptor. Since slaves, by definition, constituted the lowest class

of humanity, the risk was always that this inferiority, rather than making

them the serviceable tools of their master, might actively serve to damage

his interests. A man content to submit to servitude, so it seemed to the

Romans, was a man all too likely to prove a liar, or a thief, or a layabout.

Conversely, a slave who accepted himself for what he was, acknowledging

that he was destined never to have any status save that derived from his

master, or be ascribed any virtue save loyalty, might well prove a treasure.

Investing well in a slave was often a matter of luck. Not exclusively,

however. Magistrates, well aware of the reputation of slave-dealers for

cheating, went to great lengths to regulate the market. Attempts to disguise

physical ailments were strictly forbidden. In a similar vein, merchants were

obliged to declare everything in a slave’s character that might have the

effect of lowering his price: a tendency to wet the bed, for instance, or to

run away, or to attempt suicide. Nor were these drawbacks the only ones to

bear in mind. As with horses, so with slaves: form counted for a great deal.

Only a fool would buy a Briton, for instance, to perform anything but the

most menial of tasks. Gauls made the best herdsmen. Doctors, teachers,

secretaries: here were jobs ideally suited to Greeks. People from Asia, so

connoisseurs tended to agree, were the best suited of all to slavery.

Naturally, these considerations affected price. Bargains were always to be

had; but at the very top end of the market, where potential buyers were

strictly limited to the ranks of the elite, quality was quality.

Nowhere was it more evident than in a rich man’s household that slaves

served not as necessities, but as status symbols. The more specialised a role

each domestic had, the better it reflected on the master. Expecting the

young man appointed to direct a drunken senator’s penis over a chamber

pot also to clean his teeth, or a masseuse to double as a hairdresser, was the

height of vulgarity. Inevitably, the competitive instincts of Rome’s greatest

men being what they were, one-upmanship was a relentless driver of

fashion. One market in the capital, alert to the demand for novelty, went so

far as to specialise in slaves with deformities: ‘the legless, the armless, the

three-eyed, the slave with a tiny head’. 43 Dealers were even rumoured to

confine children in cramped cages, with the aim of stunting their growth, so

as to satisfy the craze for dwarfs.44

These, however, were always recherché tastes. The surest premium was

set on beauty. By law, human chattels were as subject to their master’s

sexual needs as they were to any other demand that he might lay upon them.

The fashion among interior decorators for portraying scenes of rape on

frescoes served as a constant reminder to slaves of both sexes and of every

age that their bodies were not their own: their owners could use them

exactly as they pleased. Inevitably, then, an attractive attendant served as a

status symbol much as a racehorse or an antique statue might. The success

of a dinner party was quite as dependent upon the good looks of the waiters

as it was on the quality of the food. Guests assigned ugly slaves would

grumble about it. There was nothing like physical perfection in an attendant

to inspire what every man of taste, every snob, every trendsetter most

dreamed of inspiring: the jealousy of his peers.

The absolute cutting edge – as exemplified by the transformation of

Sporus into Poppaea Sabina – was a boy as beautiful as the most beautiful

of girls. Nero, of course, had pushed this particular fashion to a level that no

one could possibly hope to rival; but the basic principle of it was, for all

that, not novel. Indeed, it went with the grain of how every Roman viewed

slavery: as an institution bound, by its very nature, to feminise every male

subjected to it. When even an aged slave might be called ‘boy’ by his

master, it was hardly any great scandal to keep a genuine boy smooth, to

doll him up with make-up, to have his long hair crimped and teased into

feminine curls. Delicati – pretty boys, pets – were a common sight in the

palaces lining the Bay of Naples; but they were to be found as well in less

exclusive surroundings. A delicatus bought to impress dinner guests in

Pompeii was hardly likely to compare for beauty with boys owned by the

wealthier habitués of Baiae; but even so, he could serve his master as a

statement of aspiration. The lifestyles of the elite had always been grist to

the fantasies of the upwardly mobile. Only the craze for eunuchs – the

expense of which put them beyond the reach of any but the most fabulously

rich – tended to be viewed askance. This was due not to any particular

concern for the victims of the gelding knife, but rather to the opposite:

anxiety about the influence they might come to exercise over the mighty.

Pliny, whose eye for such details was unerring, noted that the most

expensive slave of all time had been a eunuch: a shameful waste of money.

It was noted as well by traditionalists afraid of Titus that he had a particular

taste for eunuchs. Nervousness about what this might portend for his rule as

emperor was hardly surprising. The fear was that Rome might end up like

some oriental monarch’s court: decadent, debased, the plaything of

twittering slaves who failed even to rank as male.

In truth, there was more to this dread of eunuchs than met the eye. It

spoke – for all that moralists liked to cast it as the manly repudiation of a

sinister foreign custom – of a much deeper anxiety. Slaves were mere

property, creatures who existed to affirm their owners’ superiority: but was

that all they were? Not necessarily. A delicatus, if he had wit, charm and

intelligence, might well inspire in his owner something more than simple

desire. A telling instance of such a possibility was provided by the career of

a slave once owned by Vitellius: not a eunuch, but a boy with whom the

future emperor had become hopelessly infatuated. The relationship had

proved as tempestuous as it was, on Vitellius’ side, passionate. Asiaticus –

named after the region of the world believed by the Romans to breed the

most naturally submissive slaves – had shown himself the very opposite of

submissive. As insolent as he was irresistible, he was forever thieving,

absconding, pushing his master’s devotion to the limit. When Vitellius,

resolved to end the relationship once and for all, sold Asiaticus to a

gladiator school, he only had to attend a show in which his favourite was

fighting to buy him back immediately. Who, then, was the master, who the

slave? In due course, after his appointment by Galba to the command of

Lower Germany, Vitellius had set his beloved free. Then, on the very day he

was hailed as emperor, he had raised Asiaticus to the rank of equestrian.

This promotion, a shocking illegality, had been viewed by Vitellius’

enemies as a blot on the honour, not just of the emperor, but of the Roman

people themselves. It had been compounded by his insistence on employing

Asiaticus as his closest advisor. In due course, following the implosion of

Vitellius’ regime, Mucianus had known precisely how to clear up the mess.

Asiaticus was sentenced not as a freedman, still less as an equestrian, but as

a slave. He perished on a cross.

Such, at any rate, was the account pushed by Flavian propagandists.

Vitellius, notorious for his gluttony, had been a monster of appetite. Yet

there was in this excoriation of the fallen emperor more than an element of

hypocrisy. Vespasian, too, had been devoted to a one-time slave. Antonia

Caenis, celebrated for her intelligence, prodigious memory, and familiarity

with the innermost workings of the house of Caesar, had served Claudius’

mother as a secretary. Even though, as a former slave, she was forbidden to

marry a Roman citizen, she had lived with Vespasian as his wife in all but

name: a relationship that, in the opinion of many, had redounded at least as

much to the benefit of Caesar as to that of Caenis herself. She was, after all,

a woman who knew where numerous bodies lay buried.

Emperors, no matter what they might say in public, had long recognised

the indispensability of slaves raised in the imperial household. Not only

were they blessed with a fuller understanding of how the empire functioned

than many senators; they were also likely to be fiercely intelligent. Granting

freedom to such slaves enabled them to serve Caesar openly as his agents.

Some, once set on the ladder of advancement, had gone on to reach startling

heights. A notorious example was Antonius Felix, who – like Caenis – had

originally been a slave of Claudius’ mother: sent out to govern Judaea, he

had pulled off the remarkable feat of marrying none other than a sister of

Herod Agrippa.* Claudius himself, as the emperor responsible for such

arrant social climbing, had been widely mocked as the dupe of his

freedmen; but Vespasian had known better. He had appreciated just how

efficiently Claudius’ sponsorship of former slaves had improved imperial

administration. Early in his career, he had benefited from their backing.

Now, as an upstart emperor, he depended on their advice and service.

Caenis was not the only one to have helped him shoulder the burden of rule.

There were many others, too. To a few of them – although, naturally, this

had done nothing to ease the condemnation of Vitellius for having done

precisely the same – Vespasian had even granted the rank of equestrian.

Here was something to infuriate every class of society. The plebs could

resent the spectacle of foreigners who had once ranked as their legal

inferiors enjoying wealth beyond their wildest dreams; the elites could

fulminate that the country was going to the dogs. Petronius, the senator

whom even Nero had acknowledged as the most stylish man in Rome, had

satirised the trend with spiteful brilliance. A writer of fiction as well as an

arbiter of fashion, he had conjured out of the great swirl of Roman

snobberies a memorably feline satire on the nouveaux riches. Trimalchio,

he had named his billionaire freedman. The backstory given to his creation

was a telling one. Like Asiaticus, Trimalchio had originally been a

delicatus, a sex toy for his master, and for his mistress as well; unlike

Asiaticus, however, he had made his fortune as a freedman by going into

business: ‘In one voyage I made a cool ten million. Immediately I bought

back all my master’s old estates. I build a mansion, I buy slaves and beasts

of burden; everything I touched, it turned to gold.’45

If these boasts evoked the spirit of anywhere, then it was that of Puteoli:

the port where Asiaticus, making his first escape, had headed to work in a

bar. Nowhere else – perhaps not even Rome – quite so embodied the flux

and churn of the age. Only in Puteoli were there fortunes to be made readily

from nothing; and only in Puteoli were there opportunities to spend them in

the vulgar manner of a Trimalchio, on luxuries freshly imported from across

the globe, all jumbled up together, without decorum or taste. Pliny, across

the bay, might labour at cataloguing the immense diversity of everything

beneath the sun, and ordering it into neat categories; but his efforts were

mocked by the wharves of the great port, where foodstuffs, and treasures,

and peoples all constituted one promiscuous mix. This was why, in an age

when slaves could end up as equestrians, and Syrians Romans, it was

Puteoli that seemed to offer elites a particularly terrifying glimpse of the

future: a world in which every accepted distinction of hierarchy had been

dissolved to nothing, and the only thing that truly mattered was money.

There was, however, another way of framing the rise to prominence of

freedmen: not as a menace to tradition, but as its perpetuation. The fact that

Romans were so willing to set their slaves free had always astonished

outsiders. Back in the days of Augustus, a Greek historian had noted in

astonishment that it was ‘one of their most sacred and unalterable

customs’. 46 A people who originally, according to legend, had been

recruited by Romulus from among shepherds, outlaws and fugitives, they

had never claimed to possess a distinctive bloodline, or to have sprung from

their city’s soil. ‘What idiocy it is, when you are willing to grant liberty to

such slaves of yours as merit it, then to envy them the rights of

citizenship.’47 So, back in ancient times, one of Rome’s kings – a man who

had himself begun life as a slave – was reported to have told his people. It

was a lesson the Romans had never forgotten. If slaves out in the fields or

the mines were unlikely ever to be freed, then those in close contact with

their owners – the accountant who handled his master’s business, the maid

who dressed her mistress’s hair – might indeed hope, as a reward for long

and loyal service, one day to receive their freedom. Naturally, the shame of

their term of servitude would never entirely fade. Chalk, once it had been

used to whiten feet, could never wholly be dusted off. A citizen whose body

had been used to satisfy the sexual needs of another man would always be

stained by the insoluble disgrace of it. Freedmen, for this reason, were

excluded by law from standing for office. No such restriction, however, was

imposed on their sons. No wonder, then, that senators, jealous of their

breeding, should have been so ready to wrinkle their noses at anything that

smacked of ‘the wealth and spirit of a freedman’.48 They knew all too well

where it might ultimately lead.

Already, in the towns of Campania, there were men serving as decurions

whose forebears in the time of Augustus had ranked as slaves. Most of

these forebears – like Petronius’ Trimalchio – had made a fortune in

business, then promptly invested it in land. A magistrate in Puteoli or

Pompeii from such a background might still suffer the whisperings of

colleagues from more established families; but service as a decurion was,

for all that, an accepted way for the upwardly mobile to wash reputations, to

push skeletons into closets. When the son of Umbricius Scaurus ran for

office as a duumvir, he did not draw attention to the fact that he was heir to

a fish-based condiments empire – and, sure enough, he won election. In a

similar manner, it was perfectly possible for the descendants of freedmen to

veil their ancestry: either by disguising anything in their names that might

smack remotely of servility, or by discarding them altogether. This was not,

however, the course adopted by most. A freedman, by law, belonged to the

family of his master; and this association, in the long run, might provide his

descendants with opportunity. Life, in a city like Pompeii, was precarious.

Death, even for the elites, was a constant risk. A dynasty like the Epidii

might be able to trace their origins back many centuries; but this was

unusual. A family that had furnished Pompeii with magistrates for two,

three, four generations might well, the vagaries of fortune being what they

were, find itself one day without an heir. Better, in such circumstances, for

the descendant of a freedman to inherit its name, its wealth, and its status

than to let it go extinct altogether. Everything must change, such a family

would reassure itself, so that everything could stay the same.

Emperors might come and go, earthquakes bring temples crashing down,

the descendants of slaves come to rank among the elite – but Pompeii, that

ancient city, founded centuries previously by Hercules, would always be

Pompeii.

The Giants Awaken

For several days the Bay of Naples had been troubled by earthquakes.

Pliny’s nephew, who was staying with his mother at Pliny’s villa in

Misenum, made sure to keep track of them. Although he was only eighteen,

the younger Pliny had already imbibed from his uncle both a fascination

with the wonders of the natural world and a commitment to taking notes.

An earnest and dutiful young man, he had once been told off by Pliny for

walking rather than taking a litter: for by taking a litter he would have had

the opportunity to read a book. ‘All time is wasted which is not devoted to

study.’49 Such was Pliny’s maxim.

His encyclopaedia served as a monument to a stirring principle: that

there was no occurrence so remarkable, no wonder so unsettling, that it

might not become for a Roman a legitimate object of enquiry. Earthquakes,

for all the terror they might generate, were as susceptible to methodical

enquiry as all the other objects of his prodigious research. Pliny, detailing

the many times they had convulsed the world, did not blame them on buried

giants, or – as some other scholars had done – on air trapped underground,

but on winds. ‘For the earth never shakes except when the sea is deathly

calm,’ he wrote, ‘and the sky so still that there is not a breeze on which a

bird can take wing, and all the breath of wind is exhausted; and this only

ever happens after it has been particularly gusty, doubtless because all the

winds end up enclosed in the veins and hidden caverns of the sky.’50 So

much for the theory. But Pliny had been attentive as well to the

practicalities. Many were the observations he had listed: that earthquakes

were most frequent in the spring and autumn; that they were often

accompanied by tidal waves, and by noises that sounded like shouting or

the clash of weapons; that the safest place to stand in a tottering building

was directly below an arch. To Pliny, the earthquakes that shook Campania

day after day were something more than an inconvenience: they were

phenomena that promised a better understanding of the world.

Elsewhere, not surprisingly, perspectives tended to be rather different. In

Pompeii, seventeen years after the great earthquake that had brought so

many of its buildings crashing to the ground, the recovery was still

incomplete. To arrive at the city by sea, and pass into it through the gate

that led from the harbour, was immediately to be struck by this. The temple

of Venus, raised on a vast artificial platform just across the main road from

Scaurus’ mansion, and visible from far out at sea, was the largest in the city.

Originally built to mark its inauguration as a colony, and dedicated to the

goddess who presided as its patron, it served as a monument to almost two

centuries of Pompeian history. Yet although parts of the complex had been

restored, most of it was still one enormous building site. Deep trenches

scored the courtyard; large building blocks were massed along its sides;

piles of debris and chippings lay scattered everywhere. No one working on

the temple needed Pliny to tell them how much damage an earthquake

could do. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the project, immense as it was,

did not bear witness solely to Pompeii’s vulnerability. It testified as well to

something more: a faith in its future. Venus, arrayed in the gold and

jewellery presented to her by Poppaea Sabina, had not abandoned her city;

nor had those labouring to restore her sanctuary to the goddess. All of them,

whether through their benefactions or their labour, were committed to

raising a temple bigger, richer, more resplendent than the one that had stood

there before. Its restoration would symbolise the rebirth of Pompeii itself.

Naturally, as tremor after tremor shook the city, day after day after day,

people worried what these convulsions might portend for the project. It was

noted with alarm that springs on the slopes above Pompeii had dried up,

and that men of an unnatural size – ‘such creatures, in fact, as the giants are

supposed to have been’51 – were to be glimpsed, sometimes on Vesuvius,

sometimes out in the countryside, sometimes even in Pompeii itself,

striding overland, or else pacing the sky. Yet life went on. Some, fearing the

worst, might have chosen to pack up and leave; but there were plenty who

had no intention of abandoning the city. It was, after all, their home. And so

most Pompeians stayed put.

Decorators in the city – skilled by now at filling in cracks, repairing

damaged details, touching up frescoes – certainly had no lack of work to

keep them busy. Others, too, from high to low, continued with their daily

routines. Decurions met with their clients, attended to their business

interests, consulted with their peers; slaves, obedient to the rhythms of their

owners’ demands and requirements, led such lives as they were forced to

lead. In the city itself, there were still plenty of springs to satisfy the

people’s needs. Near the Forum, on the city’s main commercial street, water

continued to splash from the mouth of Fortuna, the goddess of plenty.

Fittingly, the fountain stood not far from the mansion of Epidius Sabinus,

the man whose prospects – with the death of Maius – were now more

golden than anyone else’s in the city. Not that the blessings of Fortuna were

confined to Epidius. Beyond his house, the venerable bath complex that had

been so severely damaged in the great earthquake had been upgraded to

splendid effect, so that visitors could now enjoy state-of-the-art facilities:

heated floors, running fountains, a swimming pool. Elsewhere on the street,

people had work to do: deliveries to make, shops to staff, food to prepare

for inns and bars. In a bakery two blocks down from the baths, a pair of

donkeys turned a mill. Dogs barked. Lizards flickered over stones. Grapes

in the vineyard at the very far end of the street grew fat and sweet in the

sun.

And then, abruptly, everything changed, utterly and for ever. It was an

hour after midday. In Misenum, twenty miles across the bay from Pompeii,

Pliny was digesting his lunch. Lying on a couch, he was – inevitably –

reading a book. Even so, when his sister interrupted him with news of a

remarkable cloud that had appeared in the sky, he did not hesitate to call for

his sandals and hurry to a suitable vantage point. Gazing out over the Bay

of Naples, Pliny saw that his sister had not been exaggerating. The cloud

was like nothing he had ever seen before. His nephew would later recall it

in vivid terms: ‘In appearance and shape it most closely resembled a pine-

tree, for it had a column of great length and height, as though it were a

trunk, over-topped by a number of branches.’52 Others, perhaps, might have

described it as a mushroom cloud. Pliny, a man as well qualified as anyone

in the world to appreciate just what a fascinating opportunity for enquiry

into nature’s workings it promised, could not have been more excited.

Resolved to investigate the phenomenon more closely, he ordered a galley

to be readied for him. He ordered it to head towards the cloud.

From Misenum it was impossible to identify the mountain from which it

was rising. People across the bay, however, had no such problem. There, at

the base of Vesuvius, the violence of the eruption could be felt in tremors so

convulsive that walls, just as they had done seventeen years before, were

buckling and collapsing, and it seemed that the entire mountain ‘was

imploding into ruin’. 53 In Herculaneum, west of Vesuvius, people gazed up

in stupefaction at the column of ash and rock as it towered above them.

Only minutes after the eruption had been heralded by a deafening crash, the

cloud already reached miles into the sky, blotting out the sun. Then, after

about thirty minutes, a faint drizzle of pumice and ash began to fall. A

sound like trumpets was heard, and people began to cry that the giants, long

buried beneath the mass of the mountain, had risen in rebellion, and were to

be glimpsed amid the smoke. Those in the streets fled into their homes;

those in their homes out into the streets. Many, desperate to escape

Herculaneum altogether, hurried to the harbour, or else out along the road

that led towards Naples: for that way not only were they leaving Vesuvius

behind them, but they had the wind in their faces. The pumice and ash,

borne on the wind’s breath, was slowly drifting eastwards: away from

Naples, and towards Pompeii.

Here, although it was still early afternoon, it might as well have been

night. Only to the south and east, along the line of the horizon, did there

remain so much as a hint of the sun, like the faintest and feeblest of dawns.

Otherwise the darkness was total. Pompeians who wished to witness the

ruin that was being visited on their city had no choice but to rely on lamps

and torches. Holding them up as they waded through the pumice that was

already starting to clog the streets, they saw roofs straining under the weight

of their loads, and increasingly, as the hours passed, giving way. The more

this happened, so the more nervous people became about taking shelter in

their homes, and the likelier they were to attempt escape. A stream of

people and pack animals, loaded down with such belongings as could be

transported, left through the city gates and took to the open roads. Yet here

too there was peril. Intermixed amid the pumice were rock fragments,

‘charred and cracked by the heat of fire’.54 Ripped from the summit of

Vesuvius by the force of the eruption and blasted high into the air, these

were now, like irregular but deadly hailstones, crashing to the ground: a

hard rain indeed. The pumice as well, although too light to inflict bodily

harm, was falling in sufficient quantities to make the roads that led from

Pompeii challenging to negotiate – and certainly impossible for wagons.

Those looking to escape by boat found the harbour choked by debris: the

pumice, floating on the water, had formed a scum so thick that vessels were

unable to force a way through to the open depths. ‘Filled with the rubble of

the mountain, the waters along the coast had in no time at all become mere

shallows: impassable.’55

Similarly baffled by the challenge of this was the admiral of the Misene

fleet. Pliny, despite his original aim of taking ship to investigate the

mushroom cloud, had rapidly broadened the scope of his mission. He had

been prompted to do this by the arrival, just as he was about to set sail, of a

letter. It had been sent by a woman from a villa on the shore directly below

Vesuvius. Written a few hours before the eruption – and evidence, therefore,

of just how terrifying the portents of looming disaster, from the earthquakes

to the phantoms of giants, had been for those who experienced them – it had

opened Pliny’s eyes to a pressing responsibility: the need to organise a mass

evacuation. This was why, setting sail from Misenum, he had done so at the

head of a fleet. With the wind in his sails, he and his galleys had made good

time; but even so, when they reached the waters below Vesuvius they found

themselves no more able to pull into harbour than the people stranded on

the shore were to leave it. Briefly, Pliny wondered whether to turn back; but

the winds were against him, and he scorned to show what might be

misconstrued by his men as fear. Accordingly, he continued eastwards

along the coast, aiming for Stabiae. Here, where the rain of pumice was

much lighter than it had been directly in the shadow of Vesuvius, he and his

fleet were able at last to make land. In the harbour, Pliny found a friend of

his, a senator by the name of Pomponianus, who was frantically trying to

make his escape, and in despair that the winds were against him. Pliny,

taking his friend in his arms, comforted him, and then – partly to

demonstrate his own lack of concern at the situation, and partly because he

was streaked with ash – proposed taking a bath. Pomponianus, whose villa

stood above the harbour, ordered his slaves to carry the admiral to the bath-

house. Then, once Pliny had completed his ablutions, he joined his host for

dinner in perfect spirits – ‘or at least with a show of good spirits that was,

under the circumstances, no less remarkable than genuine good spirits

would have been’.56

Meanwhile, fifteen miles along the coastline from where Pliny was

enjoying Pomponianus’ hospitality, death was preparing to claim

Herculaneum. All afternoon and evening it had seemed to the people still in

the town that they might be spared the worst. The winds continued to blow

from the north-west, and such pumice as fell was very light. But then, some

three or four hours before midnight, the anger of the giants, freed from the

bonds that for so long had kept them imprisoned, reached a new pitch of

horror. A jet of red fire began to rise from the summit of Vesuvius. Not all

the billowing clouds obscuring it were enough to veil the ominous glow

from the view of those who had gathered at the foot of the mountain.

Lightning flared sheetwise through the ash, and jagged bolts of flame. ‘So

pitch was the night that their blaze seemed all the more brilliant for it.’57

Midnight came and went. Then, twelve hours after the initial eruption,

spectators in Herculaneum watching the lightning shimmer and stab above

them noticed something new. They did not have long to process the sight: a

glowing red cloud that, emerging from the column of ash, had begun to

flow down the side of Vesuvius directly towards them. In terror, people

broke and ran. Those who could threw themselves into the sea; those who

couldn’t – mothers with babies, young children, the elderly – huddled in the

vaults where they had already taken shelter. All perished equally. The

avalanche of ash, pumice and gas, moving at ferocious speed, overwhelmed

the entire city in a matter of minutes. No living creature could survive the

terrible heat. Skin was vaporised, intestines boiled. Brains, bursting through

skulls, dissolved on the passage of the fiery cloud. Heads were knocked off

statues. Beams, tiles, walls: all were sent flying. The entire city was left

buried. The entombment of Herculaneum had begun.

That something terrible had happened was evident to everyone along the

Bay of Naples. It was still night, and the mushroom cloud, which by now

had reached an almost impossible height, blotted out the moon and the

stars. The change in the mountain’s behaviour could be felt in the air. Pliny,

in Stabiae, had sought to downplay the lightning display over Vesuvius and

insisted on retiring to bed; but there were few who joined him in going to

sleep. Although, in Pomponianus’ villa, no one could make out the precise

details of what was happening fifteen miles away, it was evident enough

that the eruption, menacing though it had been from the very start, was

entering a new and ominous stage. The fall of pumice was now so thick that

if Pliny had not been woken up by anxious attendants, he would have been

trapped in his bedroom, while the tremors had become so violent that it

seemed the entire villa might come tumbling down around them. An

anxious consultation was held. Was it safer to take shelter in some

basement, or to head down to the harbour and trust to the sea? Eventually –

because the villa seemed on the verge of being shaken loose from its

foundations – Pliny and Pomponianus decided that the least worst option

was to make for the ships. First, to guard against the rocks that were raining

down now in increasing numbers, they and their attendants tied pillows

around their heads; then, lighting torches, they began to pick their way

down the slope. By now the sun was rising, but the dawn might as well

have been the dusk. The winds remained contrary, and so there was nothing

for it but to wait on the shore. An attendant spread out a sheet. Pliny,

wheezing heavily, lay down on it. He called for a cup of water. Then he

called for a second. The breezes still blew in his face. The ash and pumice

continued to fall.

It was not only downwind of the eruption, however, that people dreaded

they might be trapped. On the far side of the Bay of Naples, in Naples itself,

and in Puteoli and Baiae, panic was mounting. The devastating tremors that

accompanied the destruction of Herculaneum had, for the first time, brought

home to people living along the coastline west of Vesuvius that they, too,

might be in danger. Earthquakes, unlike clouds of pumice, did not depend

on winds to spread chaos and death. In Misenum, the convulsions that had

led Pliny to abandon Pomponianus’ villa had simultaneously jolted both his

sister and his nephew from their sleep. The pair of them, uncertain what to

do, went out into the courtyard of their house. There, at least there was no

roof to fall on their heads. They sat down. The younger Pliny, ever his

uncle’s nephew, unrolled a volume of history and started taking notes.

But then, with the coming of dawn, the violence of the earthquake grew

worse. Even the younger Pliny was obliged to accept that the time for study

had passed. He duly ordered carts to be loaded; then he and his mother left

their house and made their way to the heaving streets. Others began to

follow them, and soon everyone in the city seemed to be fleeing. The

younger Pliny, once he and his mother reached open ground, sought in vain

to stabilise his carts, which were rolling backwards and forwards ever more

violently; but even so, distracted by supervising his slaves as he was, he

could not help but keep glancing over his shoulder at the expanse of the bay

behind him. There lay a scene of awful wonder. Dry land stretched where

previously the sea had been. Marine creatures, left stranded by the

retreating waters, littered the sands. In the distance, the great mushroom

cloud, although still many miles tall, no longer reached the heights it had

before. Vesuvius itself, the source of this terrifying spectacle, was crowned

by flames. Pliny, in his encyclopaedia, had marvelled at how, across the

world, ‘in a vast range of locations, and in an immense number of ways, fire

will blaze up naturally from the earth’. 58 The younger Pliny, nervous as he

was for his uncle, and resolved not to flee the bay until his return, at least

had the consolation of knowing that the great encyclopaedist had been

proven right.

‘They swallow cities whole, burying them beneath earth so that not a

trace of them is left.’59 So Pliny, writing about earthquakes, had noted. Had

he been able, in the first light of dawn, to inspect the site of Herculaneum,

he would have glimpsed, through the faint drizzle of pumice, a sight

sufficiently terrifying to merit an entire new chapter. Earthquakes, it turned

out, were not the only natural phenomena capable of burying a city. Hour

after hour, high above Vesuvius, the column of ash and rock – which at one

point had seemed ready to brush the very heavens – had been collapsing.

Periodically, following in the wake of the first avalanche to descend on

Herculaneum, more avalanches of fire-edged dust had overwhelmed the

city. Ash, pumice and rock; trees uprooted from the side of the mountain;

rubble from toppled walls; tiles from demolished roofs: all had been borne

on the repeated surges, burying the city and spilling out into the sea, so that

by dawn every last trace of habitation had vanished beneath almost a

hundred feet of rubble. The shoreline lay transformed beyond all

recognition. Nothing remained of Herculaneum. In place of the famous city

founded long centuries before by a triumphant Hercules, there was only

desert. The giants had claimed their revenge.

In Pompeii, by contrast, sunrise seemed – however tentatively – to

promise an easing of the nightmare. For the first time since the initial

eruption, the downpour of debris had begun to ease. True, many of those

who had opted to shelter in their homes rather than fleeing had perished:

trapped beneath immense accumulations of pumice, and either asphyxiated

or crushed beneath fallen masonry. But many remained alive. Some, held

captive by rubble, sobbed and cried out for help. Others, afraid to risk the

open, cowered where they lay. Dogs howled, frantic with hunger and fear. It

seemed that the very city, like a crippled beast, was moaning in pain. Those

who dared to emerge from their hiding places, stepping out into the spectral

light and picking their way over the rubble, did so as quickly as they could.

Although all but the topmost storeys of buildings lay buried beneath

pumice, the fugitives still found pathways through what used to be streets to

make an escape. They headed for various city gates, men leading their

families, slaves lugging heavy sacks, children holding hands as they ran. A

doctor, clutching his box of medical instruments, prepared to venture out

from his refuge beside the amphitheatre; a temple servant carefully bundled

up the particular treasures of his shrine and struggled not to spill them as he

bore them away; a woman fleeing with some twenty other fugitives hugged

to herself a tiny statue of Fortuna.

But there was no help to be had from the gods. The giants, who had

already claimed one of the two cities founded by Hercules for their

vengeance, were not to be denied. When the black cloud of gas and molten

rock descended on Pompeii, it moved too fast to be escaped, killing every

living creature in its path. The woman who, falling to her knees, pressed in

vain a piece of cloth to her mouth. The slave shackled in a villa just outside

the city, whose fetters were fused to his bones. The dog, tethered by the

entrance of his master’s house, writhing in its death throes as its lungs filled

up with concrete. Ash fell on them, and on all the dead. Everyone, and

everything, was buried. Epidius would never now attain the honour that had

seemed, in the wake of Maius’ death, so tantalisingly within his reach. The

repairs to the temple of Venus would never be completed. The donkeys in

the bakery would forever be chained to the mill. ‘All lay sunk in flames and

dismal ash.’60

The surge that buried Pompeii was on a fittingly monstrous scale.

Terrible though the avalanches had been that descended on Herculaneum,

they could not compare for fury with the final flow, the black and fiery

cloud that completed the devastation visited on the sites where the two

ancient cities had stood. The great column of ash that ever since midnight

had been subsiding in fits and starts was now, after almost twenty hours, in

its terminal state of collapse. Like a great wave it burst over the Bay of

Naples. Pliny’s nephew, watching from Misenum as it spilled out across the

sea and swallowed up landmark after landmark, took his mother by her

hand and sought to outpace the cloud. But the cloud was moving too fast.

On the storm of ashes came ‘a dense blackness that swept ever onwards,

spilling over the earth in a great flood’. 61 The dark, when it descended, was

like that of a deep prison that has never known light. Small children sobbed;

parents screamed for lost sons and daughters; some wept for themselves,

some for the world. ‘For if there were many who raised their hands to the

gods, then there were many others who declared the gods to be no more,

and that the darkness would last for ever, and the world was at its end.’62

Hints of fire glimmered in the distance. Then blackness returned, and the

ashes fell more thickly. The younger Pliny and his mother, feeling

themselves in danger of suffocation, sought desperately to brush them off.

To both it seemed that an eternal night had claimed them, along with all of

Misenum and Campania, and everything beyond them. But then came the

faintest glimmering, a hint of light. The darkness began to dissipate. The

smoke became visible as smoke. The sun, blood-red, shone dully through

the veil of black cloud. Misenum still stood, and Baiae beyond it, and

Puteoli, and Naples. Shrouded in ash though they were, and though

thousands of their inhabitants had perished, they had been spared the fate of

the two cities founded by Hercules. The world, after all, had not been

brought to an end.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the bay, the same black cloud that

engulfed Misenum had reached Stabiae. Pliny and his party, sitting amid the

rain of pumice, had failed to see it coming. But they had glimpsed, coming

from the direction of Vesuvius, the faintest flickering of something: a glow

of fire. Then, borne on the wind, had come a stench like sulphur. Pliny’s

party had risen to their feet in panic. Most had turned tail. Two slaves,

rather than abandoning Pliny, who by now was gasping for breath, had

helped him to his feet. Immediately the old man had collapsed again. The

sulphur-like smell had worsened. The clouds of ash had grown thicker.

Thicker and thicker they had blown. The darkness soon was total.

Two days later, by which time the skies were clear again and the full

scale of the destruction visited on Campania had been made horrifyingly

clear, a search party returned to the spot where Pliny had last been seen. He

was found dressed just as he had been on the morning of his attempted

escape. No animal had disturbed him. No fragment of rock had hit him as

he lay. His body suggested not a corpse at all, but someone deeply,

dreamlessly asleep.

* Though some claimed that it was a different lion, which Hercules had killed as a teenager.

* Specifically in Safaitic, a script that records a dialect of Arabic spoken in the Harrah, a desert spanning what today is southern Syria and northern Saudi Arabia. See Helms.

* The senate numbered around six hundred. Perhaps another four hundred men who qualified by

income and status to become senators would have opted to remain equestrians.

* Even more remarkably, he had already been married to a princess: the daughter of the former king

of Mauretania.

OceanofPDF.com

THE UNIVERSAL SPIDER

The Greatest Show on Earth

One day, standing on the quays at Puteoli and watching freighters unload

their cargo, Mucianus had observed a most unusual sight: a troupe of

elephants walking backwards down a gangplank. It had not taken him long

to fathom the reason for this behaviour: the giant beasts, nervous about the

gap between the ship and the land, had turned round ‘so as to give

themselves a false estimate of the distance’. 1 Mucianus had always been a

great admirer of elephants. As a connoisseur of nature’s wonders, he was

bound to be. The largest animals to walk the face of the earth, they were

also renowned as the most intelligent. Mucianus himself had noted that one

particularly educated elephant could write in Greek; another one, more

backward than its companions, was reported by Pliny to have spent its

nights solemnly practising the tasks that its instructor had set for it during

the day. Size and brainpower: no other creature could boast such a winning

combination.

Unsurprisingly, then, elephants had become great favourites of the

Roman people. While enthusiasm for watching them write in Greek might

be limited, they could be taught as well a whole range of crowd-pleasing

skills: to walk tightropes, to perform as gladiators, to hurl weapons with

their trunks. When, a year after becoming emperor, Titus decided to

celebrate the completion of the Flavian Amphitheatre by staging munera of

unprecedented brilliance, the world’s largest and smartest quadrupeds were

naturally given centre stage. Coins minted in gold and silver to celebrate the

occasion were stamped with the image of a particularly martial-looking

elephant. Colossal, wondrous, awe-inspiring: it served as an emblem of the

Flavian Amphitheatre itself.

Elephants, like most of the beasts exhibited in the arena, tended to

flourish beyond the limits of Caesar’s rule. That wild beasts, no less than

barbarians, should be taught to respect Roman courage, and to dread

punishment for trespassing where they were not wanted, was a tried and

tested principle. This was why, when Rome embarked on its conquest of

Africa, lions that presumed to menace the cities of the new province had

been crucified. Centuries on, the presence of such ferocious beasts in the

Flavian Amphitheatre served as a public tribute paid by nature to the capital

of the world. Whether a rhinoceros from the depths of Africa, or ‘a padding

tiger, shipped in a golden cage’2 from India, or a bear from the

northernmost wilds of Britain, there was no creature so outlandish, so

fearsome, so exotic that it might not illustrate Rome’s global reach.

Yet wild beasts, for all the premium that was inevitably set on their

capacity to provide entertainment, were not used merely as exemplars of

ferocity. Lions, so Pliny had noted, were ‘alone among animals in showing

mercy to those who begged for it’. 3 In Mauretania, in the forests that

bordered the Atlas Mountains, elephants would descend to a river every full

moon, and there, sprinkling themselves with water, perform a ritual of

purification. Many other such examples of admirable behaviour might be

adduced from the animal kingdom: from the gazelles that, whenever they

saw the Dog Star, would stand facing it as though in worship, to the snake

that had once, so it was reported, rescued a small boy from bandits. Crowds

in the amphitheatre might cheer as wild beasts were speared for their

entertainment; but they might weep at the spectacle too. Just as the courage

and skill of gladiators served as a reminder to the Roman people of their

own ancestral prowess, so might a wild animal, even one brought to their

city from the very ends of the world, move them, and stir them, and prompt

them to a contemplation of their own noblest qualities. When, during one of

the beast shows staged to inaugurate the Flavian Amphitheatre, an elephant

knelt before Titus, offering him reverence, the episode assured everyone

who witnessed it that Caesar, Rome and the natural world were all joined in

a common harmony. ‘Trust me, that devout and suppliant elephant is moved

by the same breath of the divine as are we are.’4

It was a comfort to believe this. Only a few months had passed since the

eruption of Vesuvius, and only a few years since the very empire had

seemed on the verge of collapse. Dread as to whether these disasters were

the expression of some universal convulsion was only natural. The fear had

to be that the heavens were tugging on the affairs of the earth to malign

effect. Just as the waxing and the waning of the moon were known to

influence the motion of tides, the organs of shrews, the thickness of oyster

shells, the capacity for hard work in ants, and the behaviour of lunatics, so

perhaps, in the comet that had heralded Titus’ accession to the rule of the

empire, there had been the marker of some fateful slipstream that had the

world caught up in its wake. The annals of Roman history, which recorded

many natural disasters, many signs of cosmic anger, contained nothing

remotely comparable to the vomiting of fire from the bowels of Vesuvius.

The Bay of Naples was not some isolated region inhabited by peasants and

bandits, after all, but the playground of the world’s elite. The very admiral

of the fleet had perished in the eruption. So, too, had the son of Antonius

Felix: the nephew of Herod Agrippa, no less. Meanwhile, resorts along the

length of the Campanian coastline – Naples, Puteoli, Cumae – were

crowded with refugees. 5 Other fugitives from Pompeii and Herculaneum

had migrated to Ostia, bringing first-hand accounts of the disaster to the

very doorstep of the capital. Even before the arrival of eyewitnesses, people

across the Mediterranean had been looking to the skies, and shuddering at

what they saw there. Clouds of ash, drifting on the breezes, had cast Rome

into darkness, as well as lands much farther afield: Africa, and Egypt, and

Syria. ‘And the people in these places, ignorant of the cataclysm and unable

to imagine what might have happened, were no less ready than those who

had experienced it directly to believe that the whole world was being turned

upside down, the sun extinguished, the earth borne up to the sky.’6

Titus was grimly aware of how badly such portents might play. Ten

years before the eruption of Vesuvius, in the dying days of the year of four

emperors, the burning of the Capitol had provoked consternation across the

empire. In Rome, it had threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the

Flavians before their regime could even be established; in Gaul, it had fed

the flames of civil war. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the cataclysm

visited on Campania, Titus had done all he could to show himself a father to

his suffering people. While there was no helping Pompeii and

Herculaneum, both of which were left to their tombs of pumice and ash,

other cities in the region received substantial relief. Funds supervised by

former consuls were provided to help their citizens repair damaged

buildings, clear the detritus deposited on them by Vesuvius, and build

sufficient infrastructure to cope with the influx of refugees. No one would

say of Titus that he had fiddled while Campania choked.

Yet it was not enough merely to clean up after the disaster. The heavens

had to be appeased. The Romans, ever a practical people, took for granted

that any disturbance of the natural order, any incident out of the ordinary,

ranked as the equivalent of a bailiff’s dun. There was no alternative, when

debts were owed the gods, but to pay them. The call was to retrenchment: to

repair a fractured order, to renew abandoned customs, to return things to the

way they had been in ancient times. Titus, a man notorious as an enthusiast

for eunuchs, and viewed with deep suspicion by conservatives as potentially

a second Nero, might have seemed an unlikely standard-bearer for such a

programme. In the event, however, his talents proved well suited to the

mood of crisis. Presume not, he might have said, that I am the thing I was.

Certainly, as emperor, he knew what was required of him. Steely,

cynical, and possessed of a ready charm, he displayed a previously

unsuspected genius for posing as a model citizen. Ostentatiously, and to

widespread approbation, he presented himself as partner equally of the

senate and the people of Rome. Senators he wooed by relaxing the security

apparatus that he himself had only just stopped heading, and by refusing to

countenance any charges of treason; the plebs by making it clear that he

delighted in both their company and their pastimes. Titus, conscious of the

high seriousness demanded from him by the anger of the heavens, did all he

could to oblige. Accepting the office of pontifex maximus – the most

distinguished priesthood in the gift of the Roman state – he declared

himself motivated by one thing, and one thing only: a desire never to

pollute his hands with blood. Lying at dinner one evening, and realising that

he had done nothing all day to help anyone, he lamented his failure with

words redolent of an antique hero: ‘My friends, I have wasted a day.’7

Sentiments like these, even as they redounded splendidly to Titus’ credit,

were calculated to remind everyone in Rome of the ancient dues of civic

responsibility that had won the city its greatness. The Roman people, if they

were truly to flourish, and keep the gods on their side, had an obligation to

be true to their own best selves.

The Flavian Amphitheatre – vast on a scale appropriate to the vastness

of Rome’s empire, wondrous in a manner that eclipsed every other wonder

– loomed as a stupefying monument to this conviction. The crowds that

flocked to the inaugural staging of munera in its arena knew themselves to

be much more than spectators. Just as, in ancient times, the Roman people

had assembled in centuries to vote for their magistrates or to prepare for

military service, so now, climbing staircases and taking their seats, were

they moving to rhythms as venerable as Rome itself. That every citizen

should be ranked according to his wealth and status remained, in the age of

the Flavians, what it had been back in the earliest days of the republic: the

organising principle of the Roman state. Unlike the parkland of the Golden

House, which had permitted a promiscuous mixing of rich and poor, of

senator and plebs, the Flavian Amphitheatre stood as one great census

fashioned out of stone. Titus, who had served as censor only six years

before, knew that a people without order were merely a rabble. Taking his

place in the amphitheatre, he offered himself up to the gaze not of a mob,

but of his fellow citizens. Beside him were senators; above him, segregated

punctiliously according to wealth, and profession, and tribe, and dress, and

sex, everybody else. It was, for anyone anxious that the Roman people

might have forfeited their ancient dower of civic cohesion, a most satisfying

sight: a living, breathing, cheering demonstration that they remained a

community. ‘Rome is restored to herself.’8

The assurance of this gave, to the one-hundred-day extravaganza with

which Titus opened his great amphitheatre, an unprecedented resonance.

Certainly, the crowds were entertained; but they were not merely

entertained. Spectators had never before taken their seats in a building so

colossal that it seemed to scrape the very sky. To enter it was to enter a

dimension of myth. Dim though the origins of munera in the funerary

rituals of Campania were, it would have been hard for anyone, watching

gladiators stain the world’s largest arena with their blood, not to reflect on

just how many corpses, denied every ritual owed the dead, had lately come

to litter the Bay of Naples. It was not enough, however, to appease their

restless shades: there were the gods to appease as well. It was here that

Titus, as the son of a god himself, had a particular role to play. When he had

informers – men he personally had employed in his role as head of security

– hauled into the arena, and beaten with cudgels and whips, it was a more

effective declaration of policy than any number of speeches. Not only was

he publicly turning his back on his past misdemeanours, but he was also

summoning the spectators to reflect on their own obligations. A city united

was a city with no place for those who would set citizen against citizen.

Caesar, senate and people: all were joined in a common purpose.

Yet all this, in an age that appeared caught in the toils of a universal

disharmony, still threatened to prove inadequate. The elephant that knelt

before Titus, like the other beasts in the arena that similarly came to offer

the emperor obeisance, served as a reminder to the Roman people of an

order that existed beyond their daily lives: an order in which the anger of

the gods, and the rhythms of the natural world, and the demands of a

cosmic justice, had recently manifested themselves to terrifying effect.

Would they do so again? To feel the shadow of divine power was to

experience, amid the swirl and snarl of daily life, an intimation of ancient

legend. This, as Nero had brilliantly understood, provided scope for

excitement as well as dread. The toppled emperor himself, posing as a hero

of tragedy, had literally taken centre stage; but this was not the strategy

Titus chose to adopt. His aim was very different: not to defy the gods, but to

identify himself, and all the Roman people, with their celestial vantage

point. The opportunity in the arena to recreate the wonders and the terrors

of myth was infinitely greater than it was on a stage. Under Nero, it was the

emperor himself who had played the role of tragic hero; under Titus, it was

criminals. Stagecraft of an unparalleled sophistication and precision was

combined with a whole menagerie of beasts imported from around the

world. The result was spectacle of such an order that even the humblest

members of the crowd, as they watched, might well have felt divine. The

intestines of a man chained by his wrists were gnawed at by a bear; a

woman was mounted by a bull. Episodes such as these, the themes of Greek

mythology, had never before so vividly been brought alive. ‘Let decrepit

antiquity boast all it likes. Whatever has been rendered famous by song,

Caesar, has been reproduced in the arena for you.’9

Yet events, despite the emperor’s best efforts, continued to slip his grasp.

The terrors of myth, the manifestations of divine potency, the sense of a

cosmos governed by capricious forces beyond mere mortal comprehension:

these, in the final reckoning, were not to be contained within the limits of

an arena. The walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre, colossal though they

might be, vast beyond the wildest imaginings of previous generations,

proved inadequate to restrain them. A year after coming to power, while on

a visit to the scenes of destruction in Campania, Titus was brought

devastating news. For the second time in barely a decade, fire had laid

waste the Capitol. The temple to Jupiter, which he and his father had

restored with such effort and dutiful intent, had once again been reduced to

smoking rubble. Nor was it the only monument left in ruins. The fire had

swept across the Campus for three days and nights, destroying everything in

its path: temples, theatres, bath-houses. Even the Pantheon, that famous

shrine to all the gods built back in the early days of Augustus’ supremacy,

had gone up in flames. Then, in the wake of fire, came pestilence. Disease,

in crowded cities, was a constant hazard; but the plague that swept Rome in

Titus’ reign ‘was of a severity rarely witnessed before’. 10 The emperor

began to despair. Two years after coming to power, sitting in the Flavian

Amphitheatre, he wept so bitterly that everyone in the stands could witness

his tears. Then, heading for the Sabine estate where his father had died, he

was struck down by fever. Thunder, sounding from a clear blue sky, had

already warned the Roman people to expect the worst. Sure enough, a day

after falling ill, Titus breathed his last. Briefly though he had ruled – just

over two years – he had come to be viewed by his fellow citizens as a man

‘adored and doted upon by the whole of humanity’.11 And now this

favourite of the world was dead.

To many it seemed a body blow. A dynasty could not hope to perpetuate

itself without heirs, and Titus had no son. Two wives, back in his youth, had

come and gone. The second of these – a woman of commendable pedigree,

whose sister was married to Trajanus – he had divorced when her father fell

into disfavour with Nero: a separation that did not seem to have caused him

any particular regret. As dashing as he was cynical, Titus had made a

natural playboy. Indeed, prior to his elevation to the rule of the world, he

had been notorious for it. His affair with Berenice, begun in Judaea and

continued in Rome, had caused particular scandal, for it was widely felt that

a Caesar had no business consorting with a foreign queen. This was why, on

his father’s death, Titus had made a point of sending his mistress packing: a

signal to the Roman people of his intention to rule responsibly and well.

Doubtless, then, had he remained alive, he would have taken a wife,

fathered an heir, and secured his line. As it was, however, he had signally

failed to do as Vespasian had done and provide an heir presumptive. Now

that Titus had breathed his last, there was no one steeled for rule as Titus

himself had been: on the battlefield, in the Praetorian camp, in the senate

house. And so many in Rome, conscious of how perilous a moment the

death of a Caesar might be, hugged themselves against the future, and

dreaded the worst.

The Flavian dynasty was not entirely extinct, however. There was

always Domitian. Titus’ younger brother, although granted plenty of

honours by Vespasian, had never been given responsibility. His attempts to

secure military experience for himself had consistently been rebuffed, his

hopes of meaningful office blocked. Only in one field for advancement had

he been able to forge his own path: for early in his father’s reign, and

without Vespasian’s permission, he had succeeded in seducing the daughter

of Corbulo, Domitia Longina, and persuaded her to leave her husband.

Domitia had provided not just a marital link to a war hero, but a whole

circle of useful contacts: a better dynastic pairing, to be sure, than anything

that Titus had managed. Otherwise, however, it had seemed – certainly

while Titus was alive – that Domitian was doomed forever to be

supernumerary. His sense of resentment and frustration had festered. A

notorious loner, he lacked his brother’s easy charm. ‘Always,’ so it was said

of him, ‘he dwelt in the shadows and dealt in secrets.’12

Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility

was inevitably felt as something raw, Domitian had preferred to closet

himself away some twenty miles south of the capital, in a lakeside villa set

amid the beautiful Alban Hills. Here he had seduced Domitia, written

poetry, and practised archery by shooting arrows through the outstretched

fingers of a slave boy. Back in Rome, where a craving for solitude was

viewed at best as eccentricity, and at worst as evidence of secret deviancies,

gossips had enjoyed a field day. All kinds of dark rumours about his

unsociable nature were reported: that even the most innocent mention of

baldness was viewed by him as mockery of his own receding hairline, and

taken as a mortal insult. That rather than staying with his guests after a

meal, he preferred to head out for a solitary walk. That alone in his study he

would stab flies with a pen.

The malevolent quality of this last rumour – at once unforgettable and

unverifiable – spoke clearly of the dread that Domitian, even in his Alban

seclusion, was capable of inspiring. Nevertheless, he was the obvious, the

only choice to succeed Titus as emperor. No one, of course, appreciated this

more readily than Domitian himself. Even before the senate had confirmed

him in his dead brother’s titles and privileges, he had made sure to head to

the Praetorians’ camp, and there secure the soldiers’ backing with a lavish

donative. Although both Vespasian and Titus had denied him substantive

responsibility, Domitian had not spent twelve years at the heart of the

imperial court for nothing. He had penetrated to the very heart of its

functioning. His understanding of how power operated in Rome was pitiless

and without sentiment. Unlike Vespasian, who had emerged to greatness

from the ranks of the senate, or Titus, a man who all his life had found it

easy to be loved, Domitian was a natural outsider. It mattered nothing to

him what senators might think of him. He aimed to rule as an absolute

monarch, and had no intention of pretending otherwise. Augustus, founding

his rule amid the rubble of the republic, had picked his way carefully

through the ruins, nervous about what might give way beneath him, what

teetering buildings were still at risk of falling; but a century had passed

since his establishment of the monarchy, and the ruins were long since

stabilised. There was, in Domitian’s impatience with the pretensions of the

senate, his scorn for their specious slogans, a brute and abrasive honesty. He

did not object, as Augustus had done, when people addressed him as

‘master’, or even ‘god’. 13 Why should he? It might not have been

diplomatic; but it did, in Domitian’s opinion, suggest something precise

about his role.

When poets hailed him as Jupiter’s deputy, ‘commanded to rule the

happy earth in the god’s stead’, 14 they were not indulging in mere literary

flights of fancy. The new emperor, a man of stern and exacting piety, had no

doubt that he had indeed been entrusted with a divinely mandated charge.

No less than Titus, he felt himself in the shadow of a cosmic crisis. For two

years the heartlands of the empire had been afflicted by a relentless

sequence of disasters: first great clouds of ash, then fire, then pestilence.

Who was to say, were the gods to be left unappeased, what further

calamities might not be visited on the world? Domitian’s scorn for the

senate as a superannuated talking-shop implied no contempt for the

traditional values of the Roman people. Quite the contrary. It was precisely

because he experienced the obligation laid on him by the gods as a personal

burden, as his own exclusive responsibility, that it never crossed his mind to

share it. In his youth, twiddling his thumbs, Domitian had written poems on

the ruin of famous cities: the annihilation of Jerusalem, the burning of the

Capitol. Now, as emperor, it was his aim not to destroy, but to build. If he

was to succeed in the great task that had been laid upon him, and redeem

mankind from the threat of further calamity, then he had no choice but to

attend to every aspect of the Roman state. Not a detail of its functioning

could be overlooked. The need was for punctilious micromanagement. His

enemies might mock him as a bald Nero; but Domitian was no Nero. Not

since Augustus, indeed, had an emperor been possessed by such a sense of

moral mission. Domitian took his responsibilities, both to the gods and to

the Roman people, very seriously indeed.

Unsurprisingly, of course, the idea of him as an arbiter of morality was

greeted by many with snorts of derision. When, dusting down laws

originally brought in by Augustus, the emperor sought to toughen the

penalties for adultery, the spectacle of him presiding in solemn state with

Domitia Longina wrote its own satire. So, too, did his attempt to regulate a

particularly notorious marker of depravity. Domitian, like his older brother,

had a taste for top-end slaves. Attending the games, he would invariably be

accompanied by a small boy dressed in scarlet, ‘to whom he would chat

away, often in a tone of great seriousness’.15 This attendant was

distinguished by a feature that marked him out as unmistakeably a purchase

from one of Rome’s most exclusive slave markets: a tiny head. No less

close to Domitian’s heart was a second boy, a fabulously beautiful eunuch

named Earinus, who served the emperor as his cup-bearer: ‘a bright star of

incomparable beauty’.16 Inevitably, when Domitian passed a law banning

the castration of children – and even, with his characteristic eye for detail,

imposed price controls on the sale of slaves who had already been made

into eunuchs, so as to prevent dealers from capitalising on the contraction of

supply – the hypocrisy, to many, seemed glaring. Yet this was not altogether

fair. When Earinus came of age, the emperor freed him. Here was an

attempt by Domitian not only to make amends for the wrong done his cup-

bearer as an infant, but to signal his own obedience to the stern demands of

ancestral morality. Haters were going to hate; but Domitian, when he

expelled from the senate a man for dancing, or degraded an equestrian for

remarrying a woman he had already divorced as an adulteress, or banned

courtesans from using litters, he was not behaving like a tyrant. He was

behaving like a censor.

It was, in Domitian’s opinion, the honour – or the shame – of each

individual citizen that provided the surest measure of his record as ruler.

There was, however, a more public one as well: the face of Rome itself. No

more sobering evidence for the anger of the gods could be imagined than

the scarring that everywhere disfigured the capital. As ever, Domitian’s

concern with detail was remorseless. Order was all that mattered. Every last

obligation had to be satisfied. When Domitian sponsored the construction of

additional passageways beneath the Flavian Amphitheatre, facilitating yet

further prodigies of stagecraft, he also made sure to toughen up the

prescriptions on where each class of citizen might legally sit. Reminded that

Nero, in the wake of the great fire, had vowed to erect altars to Vulcan – a

promise ‘long-neglected and unfulfilled’17 – he painstakingly set about

fulfilling it. Conscious that without a full treasury no repairs could be

completed, no new projects embarked upon, he took his father’s concern for

sound money to predictably obsessional extremes. Unlike previous

emperors, Domitian did not even try to pretend that coinage might still rank

– as in ancient days – as the responsibility of the senate. Rather than leaving

the treasury to run itself, he dismissed from office the freedman who had

served both his father and his brother in the post of financial secretary.

When, anxious to reverse the debasement of the currency that had been a

feature of every emperor’s reign since the time of Tiberius, he restored the

amount of silver to the level that it had held under Augustus, no one had

any doubt whose policy it was. Even the appearance of the coins themselves

– the titles, the portraits, the choice of gods on the obverse – proclaimed the

startling truth: that there was no detail of policy so insignificant that

Domitian might not busy himself with it.

‘I beg my readers to remember that I am in a rush to cover everything in

the cosmos.’18 So Pliny, midway through his encyclopaedia, had apologised

to his readers. Domitian was hardly a man to issue apologies; but he, too,

neurotically conscious as he was of the vastness and complexity of the

empire he ruled, could not help but feel the pressure of serving as a

universal monarch. It was the burden of Caesar, as well as his glory, to have

global horizons. There was nothing he did so finicky that it might not

reverberate far and wide. Income left uncollected on a fountain in Rome

might diminish his ability to order the world. This was why Domitian,

rather than seeing the management of the capital’s water rentals as beneath

his dignity, attended to it with the same intensity that he brought to every

other aspect of policy. The more rent was collected, the fuller the treasury

became; the fuller the treasury, the better he could fulfil his awesome

responsibilities. To restore the temples lost to fire. To renew Rome, so that

its beauty and splendour might reflect back to the gods the blessings they

had bestowed on its people. To raise by a third the pay of the legionaries,

those valiant and steel-forged warriors who stood guard over civilisation

itself. And if, by emblazoning his name on inscriptions across Rome, and

by healing the capital of its scars, and by securing for himself the undying

loyalty of the legions, Domitian was able to render his own rule more stable

and secure, then that as well, of course, was nothing if not in the interests of

the Roman people. ‘Who is this I see as I recline?’ So a poet, invited to dine

with Domitian on the Palatine, exclaimed in wonder. His answer was the

only one possible. ‘Sovereign of every land, great parent of a world

subdued, humanity’s hope, favourite of the gods!’19

Thule Tide

Late summer, AD 83. A thousand miles and more from the imperial capital,

corpses littered the site of the northernmost victory ever won by Roman

arms. Pliny, writing in his encyclopaedia only a decade before, had noted

that the remotest reaches of Britain, shielded as they were by a mighty

forest, had never been penetrated by the legions. The Caledonians, as the

inhabitants of these distant lands were known, ranked as barbarous even by

the standards of other Britons. Large-boned and orange-haired, they

subsisted without any of the comforts afforded by civilisation: wine, central

heating, baths. On one side of their settlements stretched bleak mountains;

on the other, the heaving ocean. When, at the opening of the Flavian

Amphitheatre, a bear from Caledonia had been exhibited feasting on a

criminal, the spectacle of it had conveyed to the Roman people an important

and timely lesson: that the nursery of such a monster, its claws fearsome, its

jaws sticky with blood, was not easily subdued.

Which was precisely what made the challenge of attempting it so

deserving of Roman courage. Britain was a theatre of war in which the

Flavian dynasty had a personal stake. Vespasian, at the head of one of the

three legions assigned by Claudius to the conquest of the island, had played

a key role in the invasion, winning thirty engagements against the enemy

and storming twenty of their strongholds. Titus, after his initial tour of duty

in Germany, had served there as a junior officer. Then, after the civil war,

Vespasian had entrusted Britain to his son-in-law. Fresh from stabilising the

Rhine and pacifying the Batavians, Cerialis had arrived in the province with

a mandate to resume the northwards advance of Roman arms. As token of

this charge, he had brought with him an extra legion, raising the number

under his command to four: an intimidating concentration of power. Britain,

it had been made clear, was to serve the Flavians as a distinctively dynastic

trophy.

Cerialis’ initial target had been the Brigantes, a formidable people who

lived on either side of the Pennines, and who, under the leadership of their

queen, Cartimandua, had served the Romans as generally loyal allies.

Factions among them, however, had chafed against this subordination, and

periodically sought to reverse her policy. Batavian auxiliaries appointed to

garrison the frontier with Brigantia had repeatedly been drawn into

skirmishes with rogue warbands. Civilis’ nephew, that loyal servant of

Rome, had preserved the memory of battle-honours won against them in his

very name: Briganticus. Then, during the year of the four emperors,

Cartimandua had been toppled from her throne, and a mixed force of

legionaries and auxiliaries, sent to rescue her, had found themselves drawn

into a full-blown war. Cerialis, arriving in Britain, had prosecuted this

conflict with gusto. Remorselessly, he had hunted down warband after

warband. A new legionary base – Eboracum, the future city of York – had

been planted in the heart of Brigantia. Forts had come to dot the Pennines,

and roads, like the cords of a net, to stretch over moors and fells. Still,

however, there was more to conquer. First under Cerialis, and then under his

successors as governors, the legions had continued their advance towards

Caledonia. By the time of Domitian’s accession to power, they stood poised

on its very frontier: ‘the narrow neck of land’20 separating what today we

call the Firths of Clyde and Forth. Back in Rome, in the chambers of power

where Caesar, ‘gazing west and east, scanning the south wind and the

wintry north’, 21 kept watch on the limits of the world, a brilliant triumph

seemed close at hand: the conquest of the entire island of Britain. Alert to

the swelling mood of excitement, poets could recognise the prospect of the

fulfilment of a distinctively Flavian destiny. One of them, not content with

imagining the subjugation of Caledonia, went so far as to portray Vespasian

as offering to his sons an even more fabulous victory: ‘the conquest of

unknown Thule’.22

The opportunity to lead a Roman army on such an adventure was rare

and precious: conjured up from ancient annals, it might almost have

seemed. The man entrusted with the expedition could hardly have been

better qualified for the task. Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a senator from

southern Gaul, had studied in the ancient Greek city of Massilia: a port

from which, four centuries before, an explorer named Pytheas had set out

for the Ocean. Far beyond Britain he had gone, sailing for six days until he

had seen, mist-veiled and set in waters dotted with ice, the mysterious

island of Thule. Agricola, although he had hardly ventured as far as

Pytheas, had similarly made a name for himself beyond the Ocean. Time

after time he had been posted to Britain. He had served in the war against

Boudicca. He had commanded a legion under Cerialis. Finally – the climax

of his career in the island – he had been appointed by Vespasian as its

governor. By 82, the year in which he finally led an expedition across the

Firth of Forth, he had already been in office for five years: an impressively

long term. His men, battle-hardened by the campaigns that had seen them

fight their way up the length of Britain, enthusiastically shared in his sense

of mission. Marines from the fleet that Agricola had commissioned to

shadow the advance of his army, when they landed and spoke of their

experiences – the screaming of gales in their ears, the glistening of black

rocks before their gaze – would boast of having conquered the Ocean.

Legionaries ambushed by the enemy, rather than panicking, would steel

themselves, rout the barbarians, and scorn any talk of withdrawal. ‘Such

was their fortitude, they declared, that nothing could stop them. They would

plunge ever deeper into Caledonia, they would fight and fight again until

they had reached the outermost limits of Britain.’23

And they were as good as their word. Agricola’s great victory in the late

summer of 83, during the seventh year of his governorship, was a triumph

not just over the barbarians, but over Caledonia itself: its remoteness, its

savagery, its terrible weather. Repeatedly, confronted by Roman steel, the

Caledonians had melted away into bogs and woods, as insusbstantial, so it

seemed to the frustrated invaders, as the cloud that veiled the highland

peaks; but now at last they had been brought to battle. Agricola’s fleet,

raiding the length of the coastline, had successfully goaded the barbarians

into a determination to seek revenge; and his army, advancing to the foot of

a mountain named Graupius, had there found a great clamorous mass of

warbands, yelling, chanting and cheering their chieftains as they rattled up

and down in chariots. It was the Batavians, burnishing anew the reputation

for loyalty to Rome so recently tarnished by Civilis, who had taken the lead

against the enemy; and the cavalry that had finished them off. The next day

at dawn, Agricola sent horsemen out to reconnoitre the wilds that for so

long had been the haunt and the refuge of the barbarians; but he need not

have worried. ‘The silence of desolation reigned on all sides: the hills were

abandoned, distant homesteads put to the torch, and not a soul was to be

seen by our scouts.’24

Still, the great mission of Agricola’s term as governor remained

incomplete: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Summer was fading,

and Agricola himself, taking hostages as he went, was ready to head south;

but first, before he went, he commanded the bulk of his troops to overwinter

in Caledonia. There, he instructed them, they were to construct a great

network of forts, stretching all the way up the eastern flank of the

Highlands as far as the Moray Firth. It was to the fleet, however, that he

entrusted the most challenging and heroic task: to circumnavigate Britain.

No Roman had ever attempted this; and so it was, for Agricola’s sailors, a

journey into the unknown. The wildness of the sea, the savagery of the

coastline, the gathering violence of the autumn gales: all combined to

render it a fearsome voyage. Its successful completion ranked as a triumph

almost on a par with the victory at Mount Graupius.

Yet it was neither of these feats, when Agricola’s dispatch arrived in

Rome, bringing news of the year’s campaigning, that most vividly captured

the public’s imagination, but rather an even more epic achievement. The

Roman fleet, sailing past the northernmost point of Britain, had paused in

its voyage to subdue the islands that lay just north of the mainland: Orkney.

Beyond them in turn, intimidatingly far out to sea, lay a further

constellation of islands: the archipelago that today is known as Shetland,

and which Pliny, in his account of the world’s geography, had named the

Acmodae. The Roman fleet, obedient to orders they received from

Domitian himself, had sailed sufficiently far north to catch a glimpse of

them on the distant horizon; and then, because winter was approaching, and

the fleet had been instructed not to make land, turned and headed back

southwards. A remarkable accomplishment; and yet the Acmodae, as a

destination, were not nearly mysterious or haunting enough to resonate in

the imaginings of Rome. This was why, when Agricola reported the

sighting in his dispatches, he opted to call them by a very different name.

His inspiration was Pytheas, that ancient mariner who, sailing far beyond

the bounds of Britain, had reached an ocean of ice, and seen there a land

which ever since, in the imaginings of all civilised peoples, had served as a

byword for impossible distance. A fleet obedient to the orders of Caesar, so

Agricola insisted, had caught sight of a veritable wonder of wonders: the

island of Thule.

‘The furthest limits of the world have surrendered, around which the

ebbing floodtide roars.’25 The victories won by Roman arms against the

Caledonians and the Ocean ranked as victories won by Domitian, and were

hailed as such by exultant poets. The news from Britain set the seal on what

had been, for the new emperor, a year of brilliant achievement. Thirteen

years before, travelling to Gaul in the immediate wake of the Flavian

seizure of power, the young prince had found his hopes of winning martial

glory blocked by Mucianus; but now there was no one to stymie his

ambitions. Alerted that in the depths of Germany, beyond the immediate

reach of Roman arms, a particularly warlike people named the Chatti were

growing restless, Domitian had executed a model campaign. First, returning

to Gaul, he had lulled the barbarians into a false sense of security by

pretending to conduct a census; then, advancing across the Rhine from

Mogontiacum, he had taken them wholly by surprise. When the Chatti,

attempting to fight back, employed their customary hit-and-run tactics,

Domitian had ordered his cavalry to track them down, and then, rather than

allowing the barbarians to retreat into the woods, to dismount and follow

them on foot. Slaughter had resulted on a formidable scale.

This splendid victory, which had expanded the reach of Roman arms by

some fifty miles, enabled Domitian to tighten the infrastructure of

occupation his father had begun to develop on the eastern bank of the

Rhine. Beyond Mogontiacum there stretched a tract of particularly fertile

farmland; and beyond this farmland there loomed the Taunus, a range of

low but eminently fortifiable mountains. Domitian, demonstrating that he

was not Corbulo’s son-in-law for nothing, ordered his legionaries to get to

work with pick and shovel. Roads leading out from Mogontiacum began to

score the approaches to the Taunus; forts and watchtowers to line the crest

of the mountains themselves. Domitian, meanwhile, trailing clouds of glory,

had returned to Rome, there to celebrate a triumph and adopt a new name:

‘Germanicus’. When the dispatches reached him from Agricola, he was

able to receive them not as he had been when he first became emperor, as a

man without experience of warfare, let alone a record of victory, but as an

authentic imperator: a conqueror fit to be ranked alongside his father and

brother at last.

And perhaps even above them. In the early months of 84, Domitian

marked his defeat of the Chatti by issuing a new design of coin. On one side

was stamped a stylish portrait of the emperor himself, crowned with laurel

and lacking so much as a hint of baldness; on the other the image of a

woman seated on a long barbarian shield, her head bowed in mourning. The

slogan: GERMANIA CAPTA. The echo, of course – unmistakeable and

unavoidable – was of the slogan that Flavian moneyers were still, fourteen

long years after the sack of Jerusalem, busily recycling: IUDAEA CAPTA.

Glorious though the defeat of the Judaeans had been, Domitian had no

intention of basking forever in the reflected glory of his predecessors. The

Chatti, unlike the Judaeans, had authentically lain beyond the bounds of the

empire. Their defeat had enabled Domitian to tighten his grip on territory

that – in contrast to Judaea – had not previously been subject to the direct

rule of Rome. Fittingly, the coins that proclaimed the capture of Germany

were weightier than any minted by Vespasian or Titus. To hold one in the

palm of the hand was to feel just how solid it was, how reassuring its heft,

how pure its silver. Domitian, ever alert to detail, knew precisely the

message broadcast by such a coin to the Roman people. That the anger of

the gods was appeased. That prosperity was restored. That Germany had

been made captive for good.

As had Britain, too, of course. Domitian, assured by Agricola that the

entire island was now ‘peaceful and secure’, 26 certainly saw no reason to

doubt him. The governor, his job done, was recalled to Rome, there to be

welcomed with signal honours, including a statue in the forum of Augustus,

alongside those of the city’s greatest heroes. Yet Rome’s rule of the world

did not depend on victory in battle alone. The more barbarous a land, the

greater the long-term challenge of pacification. In Caledonia, as in the

Taunus mountains, soldiers busied themselves sawing wood, shovelling

earth, fitting stone. They cut roads through the heather. At the foot of a

glen, at a site now known as Inchtuthil, beside the river Tay, they built a

legionary base large enough to house five thousand men. Never before had

the markers of Roman order and discipline been stamped on such barbarous

terrain.

The investment of effort was immense; and so, too, the expense. Four

legions were required to hold the entirety of Britain; and legionaries did not

come cheap. Domitian’s willingness to fund the pacification of Caledonia

was an expression of faith – not just in Agricola’s record as governor, but in

his own as Caesar. Like a spider at the heart of a mighty web, one so

tirelessly and expertly woven that it spanned the world, he knew there was

no thread so distant but that it reached back ultimately to him. Everything

was interconnected. The soldier digging a ditch in Caledonian drizzle

needed to be paid in coin that he could trust. The mines, the roads, the

harbours, the vineyards, the estates, everything that sustained the Roman

peace, depended on the protection of the legions, and without it would be

lost. The success of the legions, and the prosperity of the empire, depended,

in turn, on the favour of the gods. Domitian, three years after coming to

power, could be well pleased with his achievements: he had set the empire,

previously tottering before repeated and indubitable manifestations of

divine anger, back on firm foundations. Yet the task had been a wearisome

one. It had required ceaseless attention to every last detail of the empire’s

functioning. Nor was there anywhere – from the marble-clad slopes of the

Capitol to the dankest reaches of Germany – that might not need his

presence. No wonder, then, to Domitian’s admirers, that the work demanded

of him and his ministers should have seemed crushing: ‘a weight almost

beyond endurance’.27 Others might sleep – but not the emperor. His gaze

was relentless, unblinking – for it had to be.

Yet even Domitian could not keep watch everywhere. Distracted as he

was by his reordering of the defences along the Rhine, he had failed to

attend to a menace that had long been building beyond a second mighty

river: the Danube. Sixteen years previously, during the year of the four

emperors, the embroilment of legions from across the empire in civil war

had served to expose, by weakening Rome’s defences, precisely where the

threat from would-be invaders was most pressing. Germans were not the

only barbarians to have taken advantage of Roman distraction. So, too, had

the Dacians. Mucianus, pausing in his march from Syria to Italy, had forced

the invaders back from Moesia; but the threat to Rome’s provinces in the

Balkans remained. Now, just when it seemed that the world had been

returned to peace and order, Dacian warbands once again began flooding

across the Danube. Two legions, marching out to meet them, were cut to

pieces. Among the dead was the governor of Moesia. This was humiliation

almost on a Varian scale.

Domitian, ever hands-on, headed at once for the scene of the debacle.

With him – due acknowledgement of just how alarming the situation was –

he took his most trusted military henchman. Cornelius Fuscus, a Flavian

loyalist appointed by Domitian to the command of the Praetorians, had

previously been a governor in the Balkans: a record of service ideally

suited, so it seemed to the twitchy emperor, to the task of taming the

Dacians. Sure enough, with Fuscus at his back, Domitian rapidly succeeded

in stabilising the situation. After only a few months’ campaigning, the

emperor felt sufficiently confident in the state of the Danubian defences to

head back to Rome, and there celebrate a second triumph. Fuscus,

meanwhile, rather than returning with his master to the capital, prepared to

invade Dacia. It had never been the Roman way to leave barbarian

impudence unpunished; and Domitian, ever sensitive to his own and the

empire’s dignity, felt duty bound to ensure that the Dacians were taught a

lesson. So over the Danube Fuscus went. In the event, however, it was not

the barbarians who were given the caning. No sooner had Fuscus and his

men crossed the Danube than the Dacians began to stalk them. The ambush,

when it came, was murderous. The entire expedition was wiped out. The

Praetorians lost their standard. ‘Dacian vultures fed on the guts of Fuscus.’28

Rip a hole in a spider’s web, and the wound will send tremors

reverberating through every last filament. When news of Fuscus’ defeat

reached Rome, the shockwaves were sufficient to alarm Domitian into

hurrying back to Moesia, there to resume the wearisome labour of patching

up the province’s defences. But they were felt as well far from the capital,

in the northernmost reaches of the empire, in distant Caledonia. There,

where the construction of military infrastructure had been proceeding with

great efficiency since the victory at Mount Graupius, orders arrived from

the emperor that Agricola’s conquests were to be abandoned. Brilliant

achievement though the annexation of Caledonia had been, its continued

occupation was a luxury that Rome could no longer afford. With its ability

to hold the line of the Danube now hanging perilously in the balance, the

very security of the empire was at stake. Domitian, desperate to plug the

gap left by the loss of two armies to the Dacians, had no choice but to

source manpower from Britain. He duly reduced the island’s garrison of

legions by a quarter. The great base raised up with such effort and care at

Inchtuthil was not merely abandoned, but disassembled. Buildings were

demolished; the flagstones of the bath-house dug up; an entire storehouse of

nails buried, to prevent the barbarians from melting them down and turning

them into swords and spearheads. Forts spanning the entire length of

Agricola’s northwards advance were levelled and burnt. The retreat from

Caledonia was total.

Agricola himself, a living reminder to everyone in Rome of conquests

won and squandered, knew better than to complain. The emperor was not a

man to take criticism lightly. Domitian’s jealousy of anyone who might dare

to infringe his prerogatives was a fearsome and potentially lethal thing.

Like his brother, he had initially made a show of banishing informers. ‘The

princeps who fails to punish them,’ he had ringingly declared, ‘is only

spurring them on.’29 Yet it did not take Domitian long to change his mind. A

strain of paranoia came naturally to him. Treason was treason, no matter the

rank of those who might talk it. As such, it needed sniffing out. Such came

to be Domitian’s settled opinion. Already, only a couple of years after

succeeding Titus to the rule of the world, he had shown himself perfectly

ready to execute senators convicted of conspiring against him. Well, then,

might Agricola have opted to hold his tongue.

Even so, to his admirers, it seemed a grievous affront that Rome’s

greatest general, at a time when news from the Balkans was all of military

disasters, should be lying low. Prominent among those who felt this was his

son-in-law, a brilliant orator and scholar who, although from an equestrian

background, had already entered the senate, and was ambitious to scale the

ladder of advancement: a young man named Publius Cornelius Tacitus. To

be sure, astute as he was, and reluctant himself to court the attention of

informers, he did not presume to blame Agricola. Any undue show of

independence, Tacitus knew, was likely to prove not merely fatal but futile.

Agricola was a citizen authentically worthy of the noblest traditions of his

city: living evidence that ‘men, even under an evil princeps, can be great’. 30

Yet the general who had defeated the savage Caledonians in open battle,

and sent a fleet to glimpse distant Thule, had found Rome an infinitely

more treacherous place to negotiate than the outer limits of the world. To

Tacitus, it appeared self-evident that Domitian’s reluctance to employ

Agricola in Moesia was prompted by dread of the great name that he had

won for himself. ‘Britain, no sooner conquered, was given up.’31 Such was

Tacitus’ damning verdict on the withdrawal from Caledonia. It was, as a

take on the situation in the province as a whole, as inaccurate as it was

unfair. Nevertheless, it did characterise, in its mordancy and bitterness, how

many in the senate viewed the abandonment of Agricola’s conquests: as an

unconscionable humiliation, a blot on the honour of Rome.

In truth, there was no senator who could feel the sting of it as painfully

as Domitian himself did. It went without saying that the emperor – who had

personally sanctioned the annexation of Caledonia – had no wish to see his

legions in retreat. Britain was not just a Roman trophy, but a Flavian one.

The crisis struck at the very basis of the emperor’s authority and prestige.

Every aspect of his reputation for competence stood in the balance.

Domitian had prided himself, for instance, on his strict control of Rome’s

mints: on his redemption of the gold and silver coinage from what, until his

coming to power, had seemed an inexorable process of debasement. Briefly,

he had restored its purity to the standard it had enjoyed under Augustus –

but then the disaster of the Dacian invasions had intervened. ‘The sinews of

war,’ as Cicero had once famously put it, ‘are limitless money.’ But what to

do when the supply of money ran out? The cost of levying fresh troops had

left the emperor with little choice but to license a debasement of his own.

True, it had not been a precipitous one. Domitian’s coins remained far more

solid than those of either his father or his brother. Even so, the financial

retreat forced on him by the debacle on the Danube was far more evident to

the Roman people than the withdrawal from a few forts and watchtowers in

distant Caledonia had ever been. They could feel it in their purses; they

could feel it in the palms of their hands. To shop with gold or silver was to

be alerted to the full scale of the emperor’s defeat.

Unsurprisingly, rather than risk the embarrassment of a further

debasement, Domitian set himself to defending the purity of his coinage as

resolutely as though it were the Danube or the Rhine. Since it was self-

evidently unthinkable either to cut the pay of his soldiers or to economise

on his renovation of Rome, he opted instead to tighten the screws on his tax

base. When a tribe in Africa named the Nasamonians, oppressed by

Domitian’s exactions, sought to rebel, and were massacred for their pains,

the emperor, addressing the senate, declared, with baleful satisfaction, ‘I

have forbidden the Nasamonians to exist.’32 The joke, grim as it was,

prompted only the wannest of smiles. It had not escaped the attention of

senators that the fate visited on the Nasamonians was not a million miles

from the ruin visited on several of their own number. The penalty for

treason, as they were all too painfully aware, was not only death but

confiscation of property. This, to an emperor in the toils of a financial crisis,

constituted an irresistible temptation. So, at any rate, it appeared to many

members of the super-rich. Since the eruption of war against the Dacians, a

growing number of senators – a nephew of Otho, a governor of Britain,

several former consuls – had been put to death. Spies, it seemed, might be

everywhere. The wealthier the citizen, the more he had to be on his guard.

Nor was treason the only crime that Domitian’s informers were

employed to sniff out. In the first year of the war against the Dacians, at

about the same time the currency was being devalued, the emperor had

declared himself Censor Perpetuus: Censor for Life. No longer, as had

previously been the case, was the census to be conducted at periodic

intervals. Instead, it was to be a continuous, never-ending process. The

Roman people were to imagine the eye of Caesar as fixed perpetually upon

them, penetrating the innermost recesses of their homes, keeping track of

their most private activities. Domitian, faced by irrefutable evidence that

the gods, despite all his previous efforts, remained in a state of anger with

the Roman people, had doubled down on his determination to appease

them. More intrusively than ever before, he aimed to regulate and punish

infractions of Rome’s time-hallowed morality. ‘It is the concern he has for

mankind that prompts him to exact such retribution: for without it the duty

we should properly show to the gods, that dread of every evil, will never

again be seen on earth.’33

Here, for members of the elite, was yet a further tightening of

Domitian’s stranglehold: now he had the right to dismiss them from the

senate whenever he pleased. Resentment of their ‘Censor and Master’34 was

intense, and the stories told in hushed tones about his hypocrisy

vituperative. It was claimed that he liked to depilate his concubines with his

own hand; that he had a taste for frolicking in swimming pools with the

cheapest street-whores; that he had conducted an adulterous affair with his

own niece, and then, having got her pregnant, caused her death by forcing

her to have a series of abortions. Yet such talk, by implying that Domitian’s

obsessive censoriousness was merely a cloak for his depravity, was a

woeful misreading of his character. Whatever his private failings – and who

could vouch for the truth of any of the gossip whispered about him? –

Domitian was not a man given to duplicity. He cared little what the elites

might think of him. His readiness to offend even the most eminent senators

in the cause of regulating the morals of the Roman people was as

unflinching as it was unapologetic. His duty was not to the senate, but to the

empire as a whole. His responsibility: nothing less than to keep the world at

peace.

And most people, even those who most bitterly hated him, appreciated

it. On 1 January 89, twenty years to the day since Caecina’s mutiny in

Mogontiacum, rebellion erupted again in the great legionary base. Its leader

was the governor of Upper Germany: a former consul by the name of

Antonius Saturninus. Domitian, for all the efficiency of his security

apparatus, was taken by surprise. For two and a half years, ever since

Fuscus’ defeat, he had been focusing on the need to put the Dacians back in

their box. The emperor had displayed commendable patience in working to

achieve this. Rather than launch a headlong attack and risk Fuscus’ fate, he

had opted to bide his time: mustering manpower, repairing destroyed

infrastructure, handing out bribes to the more biddable among the

barbarians. By the summer of 88, no fewer than six legions had come to be

stationed in Moesia. The governor of the province, licensed at last by

Domitian to cross the Danube, had inflicted a most promising defeat on the

Dacians. Domitian himself, keen to press home the advantage, felt ready to

renew the campaign in person.

But then the news of Saturninus’ mutiny reached him. No wonder that

he was thrown into panic. The only forces he had with him in Rome, the

Praetorians, were a shadow of their former selves: for they still bore the

scars from their mauling at the hands of the Dacians. The nearest available

legion, VII Gemina, was stationed in Spain. True, its commander was a

distant relative of the Flavians by marriage – the son and namesake of

Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, the man known by us as Trajan – and this, so

Domitian had to trust, was sufficient to ensure its reliability; but still, it was

a long way from the Rhine. Even as the emperor sent Trajan a desperate

summons, he knew he could not rely on VII Gemina joining him in time.

Heading northwards to confront Saturninus, he found himself fearing the

worst: the fate of Nero, the fate of Otho.

Yet in the event he need not have worried. Trajan, who marched as fast

as he could to join Domitian, was not the only man to demonstrate his

loyalty. So did Lappius Maximus, the governor of Lower Germany. Other

legates, too, including the commander of Vindonissa, refused to join

Saturninus’ mutiny. By the time the emperor reached Mogontiacum, the

rebellion had already been crushed. Oppressive though many in the Roman

elite found Domitian’s rule, they knew the alternative was worse.

Saturninus, making his pitch to become Caesar, had recruited the Chatti as

allies; and only the fortuitous thawing of the Rhine had prevented them

from crossing the river while it was still frozen, and spilling into Gaul. A

close shave – and a reminder to everyone that civil war was not the only

threat to the peace of the empire. Domineering and censorious Domitian

might be; but anyone with experience of the Rhine or the Danube, and of

the peoples who lurked beyond them, could appreciate his efforts to

strengthen their defences. Better an autocratic Caesar than provinces open

to the depredations of barbarians. Better the stability that the Flavians had

restored to the world than the chaos that had preceded their rule. Better, in

the final reckoning, tyranny than anarchy.

Certainly, Domitian did not lack for a sense of duty. No sooner had he

arrived in Mogontiacum, and made sure of the situation there, than he was

on his way back to the Danube. With him he took one of the two legions

that Saturninus had persuaded to mutiny: for he was resolved never again to

permit the existence of a double legionary base. The effect of this measure

was to diminish for good the potential for rebellion in both Upper and

Lower Germany; and this, combined with the punitive measures already

taken against the Chatti, served to bring a new and enduring stability to the

Rhine. The Danube, it was true, remained more unsettled; and Domitian

was obliged to work hard to endow the Balkans with anything like the sense

of security he had brought to Gaul. At one stage he was absent continuously

from Rome for almost a year. By 92, however, he had succeeded in his

primary goal: bringing peace to the limits of the Balkans. The Dacians laid

down their arms. They formally acknowledged Roman supremacy. A

Dacian prince received a crown from the emperor’s own hands.

Admittedly, Domitian’s victory was not as glorious as it might have

been: for he was obliged, as part of the peace treaty, to slip the Dacians

subsidies, and to help them improve their capital, the impregnable

stronghold of Sarmizegetusa, by supplying them with craftsmen. These

were details that the emperor opted not to trumpet in Rome. Nevertheless,

his achievement was considerable. His critics might sneer at him as a man

who had stooped to negotiate with barbarians; but Domitian had calculated

the costs of breaking the Dacians to Rome’s will, and decided that they

were simply too high. The expense of blood and treasure threatened to

bleed the empire white, and plunge it back into chaos. Compromise, to

Domitian, was not necessarily a dirty word. The prize he had won by

negotiating terms with the Dacians was very great. The entire length of the

empire’s northern reaches, from the Ocean to the Black Sea, stood at peace

at last.

Order, in a world darkened by the gods’ anger, was not easily kept.

Domitian knew this, none better. It took resolution, and sleeplessness,

unblinking and unsparing, and an attention to detail so implacable as to

verge on the merciless. If these were qualities such as the gods themselves

might be expected to display, then Domitian did not deny it. His task was of

a more than mortal order: the task indeed, as poets might put it, of a master

and god.

World City

It was no surprise that Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus should have been

present in court to witness the shocking scene. Young as he was, and

ambitious to make a name for himself as both an orator and a man of letters,

he knew that lectures on rhetoric would never provide him with the

complete education that he had come to Rome in the hope of obtaining.

Only the spectacle of its workings could do that: the pleading of rival

advocates, the cut and thrust of their repartee, the murmuring of

appreciative crowds as they listened to a particularly devastating

prosecution, a particularly dazzling defence. In Rome, the law still provided

audiences with what it had given them back in the days of Cicero: a ready

source of drama and excitement. The chance to take a rival to court lingered

on in the capital as one of the last civic freedoms to have survived from the

days of the republic. Suetonius, although born in Hippo Regius, a decidedly

provincial colonia on the north coast of Africa, came from a family that was

not without influence in Rome. 35 His grandfather, back in the days of

Caligula, had enjoyed contacts on the margins of the imperial household;

his father, an officer under Otho, had been with the emperor when the

fateful news arrived of the defeat outside Cremona. Suetonius himself,

although barely twenty, was familiar enough already with the workings of

power to keep an eye open for their more unexpected manifestations. And

so it was, in a crowded courtroom, that he found himself gawping at a most

unexpected sight: a financial officer inspecting the penis of a ninety-year-

old man to see if he had been circumcised.

This, even by the standards of Domitian’s attention to detail, struck

Suetonius as obsessional. Never before had an emperor sought to boost

revenue by licensing officials to inspect the genitals of suspected tax

evaders. The roots of this initiative lay, as the roots of Flavian initiatives so

often did, in the foundational achievement of the new regime: the defeat of

the Judaeans. Vespasian, alert to how soon after the incineration of the

Capitol that of the great temple in Jerusalem had been, had recognised in

this coincidence the unmistakeable hand of fate. A law had duly been

passed obliging Judaeans to pay to Jupiter the tribute they had previously

been paying to their own god. Domitian, as grasping as he was pious, had

found in this measure an exquisite licence for extortion. Splendidly though

Vespasian had restored the Capitol, the fire that swept it during Titus’ reign,

for the second time in barely a decade, had provided scope for an even more

extravagant refurbishment. So glittering was the new temple raised by

Domitian to Jupiter, so ornate, so grandiose, so vulgar, that critics compared

the emperor to Midas, the king whose touch, according to legend, had

turned everything to gold. The hill that had once served the Roman people

as the great shrine to their collective past was now, under Domitian,

transformed into something very different: a monument to Caesar. This was

why, behind his back, people might cast his building programme as the

expression not of duty to the gods, but a mortal sickness: ‘a lunatic desire to

build’.36 And it was why, when Suetonius came to witness a suspected

Judaean stripped naked before a crowded court, he felt sympathy for the old

man rather than contempt, and shock at just how far the emperor’s

exactions might be taken.

Naturally, fellow-feeling for Judaeans had its limits. Hostility towards

them, and suspicion of what Romans viewed as their atheistical practices,

had only been intensified by the events of the preceding thirty years: the

rebellion in Judaea, the destruction of Jerusalem, the relentless showboating

by the Flavians. After the ruin visited on their homeland, large numbers of

Judaeans had made their way to Rome to scrape a precarious living as best

they could, or else to join the ranks of beggars thronging the capital’s

streets. The sense of a city overrun by foreigners, which traditionalists had

been grumbling about ever since Rome had embarked on its rise to power,

had become, under the Flavians, a defining characteristic of the age. To

many, the influx of Judaeans that had followed the great victory won by

Vespasian and Titus was one side of a coin that had on its other the crashing

of wagons laden down with marble, the hammering and chiselling from

building sites across the capital, and all the various clamorous markers of

Domitian’s building programme. Nowhere, it seemed, was peaceful or

venerable enough to be spared. Even the spring beside the Porta Capena,

where in ancient times Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, had

consorted with a nymph, was no longer what it had been. Workmen

employed by Domitian to renovate the area had covered the grass with

stone, and Judaean squatters now filled the grove surrounding the fountain.

Both alike, the pomposity of the marble and the ugliness of the shanty town,

seemed to disgruntled conservatives a betrayal of the timeless holiness of

the place: a ‘desecration’. 37

Judaeans, however, were not the only objects of Roman disdain. The

more dyspeptic class of chauvinist loathed every kind of foreigner. A

satirist who urged his readers to defecate on statues of Julius Alexander

(‘pissing on them isn’t enough!’38), condemned the erstwhile prefect not as

a Judaean, but as an Egyptian. Syrians, a people notorious for their mingled

obsequiousness and avarice, not to mention their extravagant use of

pomade, were spoken of with particular vituperation. Most resented of all,

perhaps, because the most envied, were Greeks. A subject people they

might be, but they remained what they had been back in the age of Plato

and Aristotle: suspiciously, alarmingly clever. ‘Quick wit, shameless nerve,

a fluency readier than that of a trained orator’:39 such were the qualities that

seemed the markers of a Greek. How was the honest Roman to compete?

The question nagged at every social class, from top to bottom. Senators

proud of their deep roots in Rome’s past were obliged to watch as Domitian

raised magnates from notoriously epicene cities in Greek-speaking Asia –

Sardis, Pergamon and other such fleshpots – to the consulship, and gave

them the governorship of key provinces. Meanwhile, down among the

social dregs, where people employed in Rome’s most shameful professions

– prostitution, acting and the like – subsisted, Romans might find

themselves no less beset by competition. Greek whores were prettier,

wittier; Greek actors more convincing at playing women. ‘A pretty pass,

when someone who from childhood has breathed in the air of the Aventine,

been nourished by Sabine olives, should find himself put in the shade by

such people!’40

Such complaints, however, betrayed assumptions that were already

badly out of date. The definition of a Roman had long ceased to be someone

who, all his life, had breathed in the air of the Aventine, or snacked on the

homely produce of Sabine farms. Trajan, the legate Domitian summoned to

rescue him from the mutiny in Mogontiacum, had been born in Spain;

Agricola, the conqueror of Caledonia, on the southern coast of Gaul. Even

someone who might have been born on the Aventine was most unlikely to

be descended from a long line of forebears who could say the same. What

to other peoples seemed the prodigal generosity of the Romans with their

citizenship had always given the city a mongrel quality. Ever since the

founding of Rome, immigrants from beyond its walls – first from Italy, then

from the Mediterranean, and then from the whole world – had been adding

to the swirl of its crowds. Some had been granted citizenship as a gift or

reward; others, by far the majority, by virtue of winning their freedom from

servitude. Slavery had served for many as a pass to becoming Roman. It

was rare, generations on, for the descendant of a captive brought to Italy

during the course of Rome’s rise to global rule, whether from Syria, or

Greece, or Spain, to be distinguishable from native Italians. All alike ranked

as citizens; all alike belonged to the Roman people.

This process of change rarely occasioned much comment. For the most

part, the immigrants blended in, rendering the demographic changes almost

invisible. True, there were some who stood out: the exceptions who proved

the rule. Born in regions far to the south or north of Rome, their hair and

skin – rather than resembling that of people who lived on the shores of the

Mediterranean – bore unmistakeable witness to the climatological extremes

of their homelands. ‘For it is beyond question’, as Pliny had noted in his

encyclopaedia, ‘that Ethiopians, because they live so close to the sun, are

burnt by it, and so are born looking scorched, with curly beards and hair;

while the skin of peoples from the opposite end of the world is white like

frost, and their hair yellow and straight.’41 This was why, had Domitian

obliged, say, the Britons to fund the temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, they

would have found it impossible to disguise themselves: northern barbarians,

with their pale complexions and blond locks, looked nothing like Romans.

Judaeans, however – because in appearance they resembled all the other

peoples who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean – found it a simple

matter to deny their identity. There was only the one giveaway. Just as an

Arab might invariably be recognised by the holes bored in his ears, so no

Judaean could ever hope to grow back his foreskin. And this, for

Domitian’s tax inspectors, was giveaway enough.

Yet if there were Judaeans in Rome who, traumatised by the disasters

and humiliations visited on them, had despaired of their god, repudiated all

that rendered them distinctive, and sought to pass as Roman, then there

were others who refused to see the two identities – Judaean and Roman – as

incompatible. ‘The Romans, such is the astounding quality of their

generosity, have allowed almost everyone else a share in their name – entire

nations as well as individuals.’42 So wrote the one-time rebel commander

originally known as Yosef ben Mattityahu, but who, since sailing from

Judaea with Titus, and receiving a grant of citizenship from Vespasian, had

come to be called Flavius Josephus. In the capital he ranked as a significant

figure: the prophet who had foretold the rise of the Flavians to power.

Although he had not been invited to stay on the Palatine, Josephus had been

given rooms in one of the houses owned by Vespasian back when the

emperor had been a private citizen: licence enough, for a man as ready to

blow his own trumpet as Josephus, to boast of having met ‘with every

provision from Caesar’. 43 Further marks of Flavian favour had followed. A

history of the Judaean war, in which Josephus naturally made sure to give

himself a starring role, had been personally approved by Titus. Copies of it

had been placed in Rome’s public libraries. The author had even been

honoured with a statue. Josephus, more than anyone else in the capital,

provided living proof that a man might rank as a loyal citizen of Rome and

at the same time remain a devout and unapologetic Judaean.

Even so, for many of his compatriots Josephus was the epitome of a

traitor. Although Titus had granted him estates in his native land, he never

returned from Rome to claim them: the hostility towards him in Judaea was

too seething, too dangerous. To Judaeans mourning the sheer scale of the

ruin that had been visited on them, the notion that the Romans, who had

destroyed God’s sanctuary and paraded His treasures past cheering mobs in

their accursed capital, might in any way have been His agents, as Josephus

argued, was blasphemy. Yet there was a ready response to this criticism.

Josephus had only to point out the disasters that the rebels against Rome

had brought down upon their fellow Judaeans. There was no alternative to

interpreting the destruction of Jerusalem as God’s punishment on an errant

people, save to abandon trust in Him altogether. This – despite the fact that

in Rome Josephus was surrounded by compatriots who had indeed

abandoned trust in their god – he refused to do. More than that, he was

resolved to explain to his Roman audience that the Judaeans, far from

ranking as a contemptible people, were, in their piety, and their courage,

and their martial prowess, a people not dissimilar to the Romans

themselves. A people who fully merited respect.

The circle was not an easy one to square, and Josephus, struggling to

reconcile his awe for the divinely appointed supremacy of Rome with his

identity as a proud Judaean, was never less than conflicted. Nowhere,

perhaps, was this more evident than in his account of the climactic episode

of the Judaean war: an episode that had occurred a full two years and more

after his departure for Italy. X Fretensis, the legion left behind by Titus to

garrison the ruins of Jerusalem, had stirred itself at last from its base,

marching southwards into the desert. Its mission: to clear three fortresses of

bandits. This was, in its essentials, a routine police operation. The Judaeans

who had fled to the desert – women and children as well as men – were

refugees, not freedom fighters. 44 For seven or eight years, ever since the

start of the war, they had been hiding from the Romans in the wilderness.

They were no threat to the provincial authorities; but they were fugitives

from Roman rule, and therefore could not be permitted to remain in their

bolt-holes indefinitely. And so X Fretensis had set to work, scouring the

desert clean.

The last of the three fortresses to be stormed was Masada, the remote

palace built on a mountaintop by Herod. The operation had been briskly

executed. A siege; the construction of the inevitable earthworks; the

elimination of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, there was a hint in the

governor’s dispatches to Vespasian, just a hint, that not everything had gone

quite as smoothly as it might have done. Some of the bandits, shortly before

the Romans succeeded in storming the citadel and breaking through its

fortifications, were reported to have killed one another rather than face

death at the hands of their conquerors. The truth of the matter, admittedly,

was sketchy, for no Roman had actually witnessed the scene. Nor were

communications from the front necessarily to be taken at face value. After

all, had the siege ended amid more squalid circumstances – perhaps, say,

with the violation of a pledge of safety to the bandits, and a general

massacre – then the details were bound to have been discreetly veiled. 45

Whatever might have happened at Masada, however, the gist of the

governor’s dispatches provided Josephus with the perfect opportunity to

fashion a narrative of stirring drama. And so that, in the climactic section of

his great history of the Judaean revolt, was precisely what he did.

In Josephus’ version of the siege of Masada, the summit had been

occupied not by refugees, but by the same breed of armed rebel as had

already brought Jerusalem to ruin. Hours before the final Roman assault on

the summit, all of them – men, women and children – had perished in the

equivalent of a suicide pact. ‘Never will we be slaves – and so we choose

death.’46 These words, ascribed by Josephus to the rebel commander at

Masada, articulated a course of action that Josephus himself had very

notably not taken. A course of action that had proven ruinous, lunatic,

suicidal indeed; and yet which Josephus, despite his contempt for it, could

not help but endow with a certain patina of glory. The ambivalence was one

that others, too, might have recognised in themselves: the Batavian

auxiliaries who, loyal to their oath, had helped to suppress Civilis’ revolt;

the Brigantian noblemen who, obedient to the policy of their queen, had

refused to take up arms against the legions. Accommodation to the might of

Caesar was the only sane policy; and yet, for all that, deep within the hearts

of those who understood this, and scorned defiance of Rome as the policy

of madmen, there lay a shadow of awareness that the sanest policy was not

always the most heroic one.

Yet Josephus, certainly, was no coward. His insistence on the dignity of

his people and their customs, expressed in his voluminous writings and

aimed squarely at the imperial elites, took courage. Rome under Vespasian

and his sons was not, for any Judaean, a comfortable place to be. Never

before had a subject people been the objects of such systemic vituperation.

Flavian self-glorification had amplified, for two decades and more, a

message that could not have been more unsettling to Josephus. That the

customs of the Judaeans were barbarous. That the worship of their god was

mere superstition, discredited and overthrown. That to live as a pious

Judaean was incompatible with being a Roman. Josephus, by very publicly

denying all these propositions, was offering not merely a subtle defiance of

Flavian propaganda, but also a public reassurance to his compatriots that

such defiance was possible. In the capital, where the glittering temple to

Jupiter squatted monstrously over the city, funded by a tax without

precedent in Roman history, one deliberately calculated to rub the noses of

every Judaean in the brute fact of their god’s humiliation, Josephus’ bravery

could hardly help but serve as an inspiration.

And not only, perhaps, to Judaeans. ‘Our laws need no written defence,’

Josephus insisted, ‘for they manifest themselves through the behaviour of

those who live by them: a demonstration not of impiety, but of the truest

piety to be seen anywhere in the world.’47 The appeal of Judaean customs –

as Josephus himself, who had met Poppaea Sabina as a young man, well

knew – had reached to the very summit of Roman society; nor, even after

all the calamities that had overwhelmed the Judaeans under the Flavians,

had this appeal been entirely diminished. This became shockingly apparent

when, in the summer of 95, an accusation of atheism – ‘a charge on which

many who had drifted into Judaean ways were condemned’48 – was brought

against Caesar’s own two closest relatives. Titus Flavius Clemens was the

grandson of Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s elder brother, and had just served

four months with Domitian as consul when he was charged and convicted;

Flavia Domitilla, Clemens’ wife, was Domitian’s cousin. Their downfall

reverberated through the imperial court like a thunderclap. Clemens was put

to death, Domitilla exiled to a tiny island off the Italian coast. The

seriousness with which Domitian took his role as the guardian of Rome’s

traditional morality could not have been made more clear. Crimes against it

would be punished, no matter the rank of the perpetrator. Domitian’s

primary responsibility was neither to his family nor to the nobility but to the

gods. He was censor, pontifex maximus, the father of his country. What

hope for the Roman people if they could not depend on him to do his duty?

Josephus, defending the laws inherited by the Judaeans, never ceased to

make play with their antiquity: to insist that even the Greeks and the

Romans could accept them as just because they were ancient. Domitian,

similarly, scorning the whispered accusations levelled against him of

tyranny, cast the sternness with which he might deliver sentence as the

expression not of cruelty, but of the respect that was owed the past. In 91,

four years before the execution of Clemens, he had demonstrated this with a

display of justice redolent of the very severest days of the republic. In the

Forum there stood a temple to Vesta, the goddess of the hearth; and here,

ever since the days of Numa Pompilius, priestesses consecrated to virginity

had served as the guardians of an eternal flame. The privileges bestowed

upon these virgins were of a formidable order: they enjoyed the use of a

two-wheeled carriage; could free a slave or a condemned criminal simply

by gracing him with their touch; sat in the front row alongside senators at

the games. No women could rival them for sanctity: for the flame they

guarded was the hearthfire of Rome itself. This in turn, however, ensured

that the Vestals’ chastity was an issue of national security: for the hearthfire,

unless it were guarded by virgins, might be extinguished, and threaten the

ruin of the state. Such, at any rate, was what ancient custom decreed.

Increasingly, however, under the rule of the Caesars, it had come to be

moderated by displays of leniency. Under Vespasian and Titus, certainly, the

rules that protected the sanctity of Rome’s hearthfire had been more

honoured in the breach than in the observance; and even Domitian,

although he had imposed the death penalty on three errant Vestals, had been

gracious enough to permit them to choose their own method of execution.

No such mercy, however, had been shown Cornelia, the chief Vestal

convicted in 91 of sleeping with numerous lovers. Domitian, after trying her

in the privacy of his Alban villa, and dismissing her frantic protestations of

innocence, had sentenced her to the full horror of the penalty demanded by

tradition. Placed in a litter, gagged and bound with straps, she had been

carried in solemn procession through the Forum and onwards, to an

underground chamber beside the city walls, within which, as her friends and

family wept for her, she was walled up alive. Her lovers – all save one, who

had prudently confessed his crime before the inquisition began – were

caned to death beside the Lapis Niger. So shocking was the episode that it

would long endure in the collective memory of the city. The genius of the

Flavians for spectacle had reached, with Cornelia’s entombment, a macabre

apotheosis.

By the time Clemens, four years later, came to meet his fate, it was

evident that no one at court, no matter how close he might be to Caesar, or

how high his rank, or how devoted his record of service, could reckon

himself truly secure. Generally loathed in the senate though Domitian was,

the emperor had always kept about him a council of particularly valued

senators, men whom he cherished as his amici, his ‘friends’. Mutual trust

was the foundation of their relationship. A man such as Cocceius Nerva,

whose record of service to the Flavians reached back decades, well before

Vespasian’s rise to power, was typical of the breed of senatorial advisors on

whom Domitian, like his father and brother, had always depended. Yet even

Nerva, marking the mood of his master, might have been brought to feel a

certain degree of nervousness. The sense of a lapping tide was becoming

ever more difficult to ignore. Clemens was not the only eminent figure to be

executed in 95 on a charge of impiety. Also put to death that year was one

of the more distinctive of Domitian’s amici: a senator of distinguished

family and prodigious strength by the name of Acilius Glabrio. Summoned

by Domitian to participate in a festival in the Alban hills, he had

demonstrated his Herculean qualities by fighting a giant lion, and

dispatching it without sustaining so much as a scratch. Rumour had it that it

was this feat, by provoking Domitian’s envy, which had doomed him; but

Glabrio’s peers may well have had their doubts on that score. Certainly,

Nerva and his fellow amici were not alone in having reason to feel twitchy.

Four years before his death, Glabrio had been consul alongside a man

whose very marks of distinction – an impressive military record, a distant

relationship by marriage to the Flavians – had come to seem ever more

perilous. Trajan, no less than Nerva, had good cause to worry about the

limits of the emperor’s friendship.

‘How wretched is the lot of a princeps.’ So Domitian liked to observe.

‘For the only time that people believe him when he reports the uncovering

of a conspiracy is if he ends up actually murdered.’49 Domitian had always

been conscious of the shadow of death. Notoriously, he had once staged a

banquet in which the dining room, the pageboys and the food were all

coloured black; each guest had a slab laid next to him inscribed with his

name like a gravestone; and no one spoke but Domitian, whose talk was of

nothing but slaughter. As a result, ‘it seemed to all those in attendance that

they were already in the realm of the dead’;50 and so they dreaded that their

host was set on dispatching them to the underworld for good. In the event,

however, their lord and master proved to have been toying with them: for

after a night spent in a state of the utmost terror, they found themselves not

just spared execution, but lavished with gifts. The joke, however, had been

on Caesar as well as on his guests. Domitian, whose sense of humour was

never less than grim, understood himself well enough to make play, on

occasion, with his own darkest fears. The more Rome came to serve him as

a stage for the display of his power, his supremacy, his greatness, so the

more, away from the people’s gaze, did he seem haunted by a dread of how

insubstantial they might prove to be. In the Forum, dominating that most

historic of the city’s public spaces, there loomed an immense equestrian

bronze of the emperor, one predicted by his admirers ‘to endure as long as

the earth and the heavens shall last’. 51 Meanwhile, in his palaces, Domitian

had ordered the colonnades lined with reflective stone, ‘so that he would be

able to see reflected in its gleaming surface everything that might be

happening behind his back’. 52 A decade and a half after his coming to

power, the rhythms of his paranoia were quickening. Seamlessly, his fears

had fused with his censoriousness and his obsession with moral

grandstanding. The result: a ready licence for judicial murder.

Nor were Flavians the only members of his court who might be made to

serve the Roman people as a lesson. So, too, might freedmen. Domitian,

who had sacked his father’s treasurer early in his reign, had never hesitated

to put his secretaries in their place. Some, over the course of his reign, he

had removed from office altogether, replacing them with equestrians. Any

hint of inappropriate behaviour in their ranks was brutally punished. When

one freedman raised a funerary monument to his sons, and used stones

intended for the temple of Jupiter to build it, Domitian had ordered the

tomb demolished, and the bones and ashes flung into the sea. The most

pointed of all the warnings he delivered to his freedmen, however, came in

95. Even as Clemens was being convicted of atheism, so were charges

being brought against Epaphroditus, the secretary who, almost three

decades before, had assisted Nero in committing suicide. The message was

one that no freedman in the imperial court could possibly mistake. Even

though Epaphroditus had acted in obedience to Nero’s orders, the crime he

had committed in compassing a Caesar’s death was beyond the pale. And so

Domitian had ordered him put to death.

It was possible, however, to draw from his execution, and from the

executions as well of Clemens and Glabrio, lessons other than the one

intended. On 18 September 96, just before noon, Domitian was murdered in

his bedroom on the Palatine. His assassins were freedmen, court officials

who, as one post-mortem put it, ‘had lost all their affection for him, some

because they were facing trial on an assortment of charges, and others

because they anticipated being charged’. 53 That same day, Nerva was hailed

as emperor by the Praetorians.54 Once a loyal servant of Nero, then a

partisan of Vespasian and Titus, and for a decade and a half the most

distinguished among the amici of Domitian, there was no more seasoned

survivor in the entire ranks of the senate house. Smoothly, Nerva purchased

the loyalty of the Praetorians with the customary lavish bribe, and presented

himself – since he knew that the soldiers loved Domitian – as the heir and

avenger of the murdered Caesar. Then, just as smoothly, he proceeded to

address his fellow senators. Here, before a meagrely attended assembly, he

assured them of his loathing for the murdered tyrant. The following day,

presented with a fait accompli, the senators duly followed the Praetorians in

proclaiming their erstwhile colleague emperor. Nerva, to win their support,

signalled his approval for the erasure of the tyrant’s memory. The senate,

erupting in feverish jubilation, needed no second invitation. The giant

equestrian statue of Domitian in the Forum was promptly toppled to the

sound of exultant cheering; so, too, across the city, were all his many other

statues. Those made of gold and silver were melted down. Some senators,

in their excitement, even ordered ladders to be brought, so that temples

might be cleared of every last trace of the tyrant. ‘What a pleasure it was to

smash those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to hack at

them ferociously with our axes, as though our blows might inflict pain or

draw blood.’55

Yet all this, of course, even as it delighted Nerva’s colleagues in the

senate, risked infuriating the Praetorians; nor, despite the new emperor’s

best efforts, could he stop the guards’ resentment from continuing to bubble

away. No matter how many coins he might issue proclaiming his sense of

concord with them and the legions, he knew – as only a man who had lived

through Nero’s downfall and the year of the four emperors could know –

just how sharp a sword was hanging over his head. Finally, a year after his

coming to power, the moment of crisis came: the Praetorians marched on

the Palatine, laid it under siege, and took Nerva, who had been vomiting

with terror, hostage. The emperor, humiliated but unharmed, bought his

freedom by handing over to his captors the ringleader of Domitian’s

assassins: a freedman whom the Praetorians first castrated, then tore to

pieces. Not that the wretched object of the guards’ fury was their only

victim, of course. Nerva’s prestige too had suffered a grievous blow. His

entire regime appeared emasculated and eviscerated.

Yet Nerva, despite the devastating nature of the assault on his authority,

was resolved not to permit the empire to slip into anarchy because of it.

Doing as Galba had done almost three decades previously, but with

infinitely greater success, he adopted an heir. His new son was the

commander of Upper Germany, a man on whose fortieth birthday – by a

perhaps telling coincidence – Domitian had been assassinated: Trajan. As

token of this decision, Nerva sent his newly designated successor a

diamond ring. His choice, popular both with the military and the senate,

was the obvious one. Perhaps, indeed, Trajan’s elevation had been the plan

all along. If so, then it was not only Trajan himself who benefited from it.

When, a mere sixteen months after Domitian’s assassination, Nerva caught

a fever and died, there was no crisis, no collapse into civil war. The new

emperor, brought the news of his accession in Colonia, that great nerve

centre of Roman power, felt no need to hurry back to the capital. Stationed

as he was in Germany, he could see for himself how stably the empire

stood. The Rhine defences were formidable. The legions were battle-

trained. The treasury was full. The coinage was strong. The provinces were

prosperous. The Roman world lay at peace.

Although Trajan would never admit it, he owed much to Domitian.

OceanofPDF.com

THE BEST OF EMPERORS

Bread and Circuses

Early winter, AD 101. Rome had been desperate for news for months.

Everyone knew that far distant, in strange and barbarous lands, great deeds

were being performed; but all the Roman people had to go on was rumour.

Now at last, with the arrival of a young officer in the senate house, their

curiosity could be satisfied. Hadrian had ridden directly from the wilds of

the Balkans bearing dispatches from Caesar. In Dacia, a great war was

being fought. The emperor himself, who had left Rome on 25 March and

not returned to the city since, remained on the front. His plan was to winter

beside the Danube, so that come spring he would be ready to resume

campaigning the moment weather permitted. Superbly though the legions

had performed, there remained much to be done. The Dacians were a hardy,

obdurate and treacherous foe. This was why preparations for their defeat

required Caesar’s personal attention. Already, fresh legions had been

summoned from across the empire: the Rhine, Vindonissa, the eastern

provinces. Auxiliaries too – including even, from distant Britain, the

governor’s personal bodyguard. Never before had a Roman commander

mustered such an enormous and variegated force. Trajan, when he rode to

war, did so as the master of the world.

The senators themselves, men recruited from across the Mediterranean,

served as living witness to this. So too did Hadrian. Not just a messenger,

he was the son of Caesar’s cousin, and as a child had been his ward. When

snobs, behind Trajan’s back, sneered at the emperor as a ‘Spaniard’ and a

‘foreigner’,1 they were sneering at Hadrian too: for the young man, like

Trajan himself, came from Italica. It was a telling marker of the times. How

global the name of ‘Roman’ had become when it was possible for the

closest relative of a princeps to rank as the member not of a dynasty,

celebrated in ancient annals, or even of a line of Sabine farmers, but of a

family that had for generations lived in the sweltering plains of Baetica.

Hadrian, certainly, was alert to his good fortune. He knew the dazzling

prospects that his guardian’s rise to supreme power had opened up to him.

This was why, alerted to the news of Nerva’s death, he had made sure to

outpace the official emissary, and be the first to announce it to Trajan.

Already, he had put his relationship with Caesar to good use, shamelessly

capitalising on it to run up extravagant debts. At the same time, in his

attention to the workings of power, he had shown himself cool, clear-

sighted, proficient. To his audience, he served as a reminder of just how fast

the world was changing: of how, even as it became ever more Roman, so

Rome itself was becoming far removed from its own past. Standing before

the senate, Hadrian did so as the face of the city’s future.

To the Romans themselves, who viewed novelty and change with the

utmost suspicion, this might easily have seemed sinister. That it did not

owed much to the fact that Hadrian, a man born and raised in the capital,

and deeply steeped in its history, understood perfectly the part he had to

play. His role was to cast Trajan as an emblem not of innovation but of

renewal. It helped that, in attempting to meet this responsibility, Hadrian

was able to go with the grain of his audience’s hopes and expectations.

Trajan, to senators cowed by Domitian’s megalomania, appeared a

reassuringly old-fashioned figure. The qualities he put on public display –

plainness and self-discipline, affability and lack of pretension – were

pointedly not those of a monarch. In everything he did, he had been guided

by one overriding objective: to avoid any hint of behaviour that might

smack of his murdered predecessor. Three years into his reign, he could

reckon this policy an outstanding success. Whether in the effusions of

senators or in inscriptions chiselled by grateful plebs, Trajan was coming to

be saluted in terms less appropriate to a mortal than to Jupiter. The more he

affected the modesty and seemliness characteristic of an antique hero, so the

more – by a paradox calculated to torment Domitian’s embittered shade –

he was hailed by the people as Optimus: the ‘Best’.

‘He is neither a god nor divine, and it would be ludicrous to flatter him

by claiming that he is; no tyrant but a fellow citizen of ours; not our master

but our parent.’2 So Pliny’s nephew, a year before Hadrian’s arrival from

Dacia in the senate house, had told his colleagues. In the decades since his

uncle’s death, the younger Pliny had enjoyed a brilliant career. Like his

hero, Cicero, he had become the first man from his family to attain

senatorial rank. In 89, the year of Saturninus’ mutiny, he had served

Domitian as Hadrian was now serving Trajan: as the magistrate charged

with reading out Caesar’s communications to the senate. He had brought

and won various high-profile prosecutions. In 100, when he delivered his

commendation of Trajan to the senate, it had been to mark his elevation to

the consulship: an honour that he had attained, as he delighted in pointing

out to his friends, ‘at a much earlier age than Cicero did’. 3

Naturally, when the younger Pliny – or Pliny, as we shall call him from

now on – delivered his panegyric, it had been shadowed by a certain

awkward fact: that the new consul had not only begun his career as

Domitian’s spokesman, but consistently been promoted by him. Yet if

everyone knew this, no one cared to dwell on it: for the entire senate was

guilty of a similar hypocrisy. Six hours Pliny had spoken in praise of Trajan,

and every last breath of it had been heartfelt. Unlike Domitian, that

unapologetic autocrat, the new emperor offered senators the chance to

indulge in a welcome illusion: that Rome might simultaneously be ruled by

a monarch and yet be true to its most venerable traditions. To praise such a

man was to show patriotism, not to grovel like a slave. Hadrian, arriving in

the senate house to report on wars fought in the cause of the Roman people,

might have been a messenger sprung from the antique past. Pliny, only the

previous year, had put it well: ‘Our enemies see now that Rome has an

emperor fit to rank with her heroes of old.’4

This impression was enhanced by the fact that the Dacians, Trajan’s

recent adversaries, themselves seemed to have been conjured up from the

annals of the ancient republic. Much as the Samnites had done, back in the

days of Rome’s conquest of Italy, they combined peasant backwardness

with martial sophistication, bizarrely barbarous customs with a fascination

for Greek culture, a predatory restlessness with brooding, stone-built

strongholds. Of all the northern peoples who dwelt beyond the limits of

Roman power, they were the most fearsome. Back in ancient times, a Greek

historian had noted of the barbarians who inhabited the banks of the

Danube that, ‘were they only to share a single ruler or a common purpose,

they would be invincible, and put every other nation deep in their shadow’. 5

The Dacians, by coming together under the leadership of a formidably able

king named Decebalus, had demonstrated just how shrewd this judgement

had been. His capital, Sarmizegetusa, was no compound of savage huts, but

a citadel fashioned out of monstrous blocks of stone, sited on the heights of

a mountain, and guarded along the road that led to it by fortresses built on

precipitous crags. Barbarians the Dacians might be, but their aptitude for

warfare was of an almost Roman order.

The fearsome quality of their reputation did not derive, however, merely

from their mastery of arms. Raised on the plateau where Decebalus’

bristling capital stood were temples and a great circle fashioned out of

blocks of timber, constructed as an image of the heavens. The reputation of

the Dacians for occult wisdom was venerable and well merited: they

believed it was possible, thanks to rituals taught them in ancient times by a

peculiarly enigmatic god – a deified slave by the name of Zalmoxis – for

them all to become immortal. So it was that they marked birth with grief

and death with joy, and threw themselves onto the spears of an enemy

‘more readily than others might embark on a journey’. 6 They were, in short,

an adversary fully worthy of Roman arms, strange, menacing and terrible:

men who wielded scythes in battle as though they were cutting corn; who

bore standards shaped in the form of dragons that screamed as the wind

blew through their lupine jaws; who wrote messages on giant mushrooms.

If senators, listening to Hadrian report on these alarming foes, could feel

themselves transplanted to a more distant and heroic age, then so, too, once

the news of it had been more generally reported, could everyone else in the

capital. A mood of excitement such as the Roman people had not known for

a long while swept the city. ‘For under the rule of sluggish emperors, they

seemed to have grown old and enfeebled, but now, under the rule of Trajan,

they were stirring themselves afresh, and – contrary to every expectation –

renewing their vigour as though their youth had been restored to them.’7

Unlike Domitian, who had paid subsidies to keep the Dacians quiet, the

new emperor had marched directly into their homelands, defeated them in

open battle, and returned to winter quarters laden down with plunder. Out in

the field, he had readily shared in the hardships of his men, mingling his

sweat with theirs, comforting them when they were weary, tearing up his

cloak to bind their injuries when they were wounded. Yet his dispatches,

while conveying to the assembled senators a vivid sense of the heroism his

men had shown, also conveyed something more: the sheer excitement of it

all. The scenes of warfare in Dacia were ones that Trajan wanted brought

alive for his fellow citizens, so that they might be reminded of what it was

to be truly a Roman. The forts on the Danube filled with provisions and

provender; torches blazing from watchtowers; barges laden down with

supplies, straining against the currents of the mighty river. The legionaries,

led by Trajan, advancing into Dacia: crossing the Danube over twin

pontoon bridges; cutting paths through woods; fording rivers while carrying

their armour over their heads. The auxiliaries, making a gift to Trajan of

severed heads. Barbarian warriors, defeated in battle, fleeing Caesar’s

armies, suing for terms. Barbarian fortresses, surmounted by dragon

standards and the skulls of Domitian’s soldiers. Barbarian women, torturing

prisoners. War, to the Roman people, had always been a dimension of

wonder, of terror, of epic, of legend. And now it was so again.

Not that the narrative, if it were to have the appropriate ending, could be

hurried. Trajan’s audience back in Rome, hungry though they were for news

of victory, were familiar enough with the rhythms of their city’s wars back

in the days of the heroic past not to feel overly impatient. They knew, for

instance, that it had taken the legions half a century to subdue the Samnites;

and that the pacification of a land like Dacia, fierce as it was, and even

more savage than Samnium had been, would require all of Caesar’s martial

talents. They knew as well, however, that Trajan could be relied upon to

finish the job – and so it proved. In the end, not one war had to be fought

against Decebalus, but two. The story of how the Dacians were brought at

last to utter defeat was as full of thrilling episodes, heroic feats, and brilliant

accomplishments as any in Roman history: ‘a theme so rich in poetry’, as

Pliny enthused, ‘that it seems almost a thing of fable – although every detail

of it is true’. 8

Many had been the dispatches brought to the senate. As in the report

delivered by Hadrian on the first season of the war, so in the reports that

followed: Trajan had been anxious to make the details come alive. Scene

after scene had been painted in vivid colours. The emperor, crossing the

Danube in the spring of 102, and carrying all before him. The standards lost

by Fuscus recaptured. Decebalus, coming into Trajan’s presence and

humbly suing for terms, ceding territory, acknowledging himself Caesar’s

vassal. It seemed that the war was won: for Dacian envoys, much as

ambassadors back in the days of the Samnite wars would have done, had

come before the senate, laid down their arms, and ‘placed their hands

together, as though they were manacled prisoners’.9 The senate, exceedingly

gracious, had accepted their submission and returned to them their arms.

Trajan, set as he was on bringing order to the Danube, appeared to have

triumphed where Domitian had consistently failed. The Dacians had made

their surrender. The Pax Romana had been upheld.

Yet it was rarely the nature of barbarians to accept an enduring peace –

not unless they had first been brought to utter defeat. Decebalus proved no

exception. As treacherous as he was implacable in his hatred of Rome, the

Dacian king had refused to abide by the senate’s terms. Late in 105, Caesar

had duly found himself returning to the Dacian front. Back on the banks of

the Danube, he had commanded a great bridge to be built across the river,

one fashioned not of wood but of stone, to stand as a mighty witness to the

permanence of Roman power. Designed by Apollodorus, an engineer from

Syria renowned as the greatest architect of his day, it stunningly fulfilled

Trajan’s ambition for it: to intimidate and stupefy. All winter it had taken

the legions to complete it. Then, in the spring of 106 – having survived an

attempt sponsored by Decebalus to assassinate him – Trajan had closed in

for the kill. Over the great stone bridge he had gone. Slowly, painstakingly,

remorselessly, he had advanced into the savage depths of Dacia. He had

captured every last stronghold, stamped out every last bushfire of

resistance. Sarmizegetusa, that holy and impregnable fortress, had been

taken without so much as a fight. Then the coup de grâce: Decebalus, who

had fled into the remotest fastnesses of his kingdom, was cornered by a

squad of Roman cavalry. Rather than be taken prisoner to grace his

conqueror’s triumph, he killed himself. His severed head, delivered to

Trajan, was sent onwards to Rome, there – before the gaze of the assembled

people in the Forum – to be flung onto the Steps of Mourning. Meanwhile,

down in the senate house, Caesar’s dispatches had been delivered to the

conscript fathers. They were read out, as they had been five years

previously, by Hadrian.

Not since Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul had there been a feat of arms

quite so glorious, so gore-sodden, so lucrative. Hadrian, who had

commanded a legion during the final stages of the war, had witnessed for

himself the full scale of his cousin’s accomplishment. For the first time

since the retrenchment of Roman power in the wake of the Varian disaster,

an entire new province had been carved out of the wilds beyond the Danube

and the Rhine. The ruin Trajan brought to Dacia had been on an awesome, a

stupefying scale. Vast numbers of the natives had been either slaughtered or

enslaved; settlement after settlement put to the torch; the aristocracy

exterminated. The survivors, forcibly expelled from their homeland, had

been replaced by colonists from Moesia. Decebalus’ kingdom had been

wiped from the face of the earth. Not just its lands but its mineral wealth

were now Trajan’s to do with as he pleased. He had always banked on his

conquest of Dacia – brutally expensive though it had been – to pay for

itself: for deep in its mountains there lay extensive gold and silver mines.

More spectacularly, however, there was the fabulous treasure amassed by

generations of Dacian kings, and which Decebalus, in the dying days of the

war, had sought to put forever beyond Trajan’s reach. This he had done by

using Roman prisoners to divert the course of a river, burying the treasure

in the drying mud of the bed, and then, after covering the channel with

stones, bringing the river back so that it flowed again along its original

course. Inevitably, however, with Decebalus’ flight from Sarmizegetusa, the

secret had been betrayed. The gold, the silver, the goblets, the plate: all fell

into Trajan’s hands. No emperor since Augustus had won himself such a

hoard. It certainly put the Flavian bragging about Judaea into perspective.

There was no need, when Trajan returned to the capital in the summer of

107, for him to display anything in his triumph that had not authentically

been sourced from Dacia. The occasion was as dazzling as the triumph

celebrated by Vespasian and Titus had been gimcrack. Of the gold and

silver carted back from Sarmizegetusa, and the half a million or so prisoners

taken over the course of the wars, only a fraction could be displayed to the

cheering people. Rome, that great stage for the celebration, stood healed of

the wounds of fire and civil war. Never in its history had it looked more

sumptuously the capital of the world. There was, however, only the one

cynosure. This – it went without saying – was the returning hero himself:

Imperator Caesar Nerva Trajanus Augustus. Tall, broad-shouldered and

weather-beaten after the many months he had spent under canvas, he

exuded a quality of virtus, of manliness, such as a Roman from the most

primitive days of the city, one raised on turnips and acorns, might readily

have saluted. Even his receding hairline, rather than nagging at him in the

way that baldness had nagged at Domitian, seemed to his admirers yet

another marker of his greatness. It was surely, so Pliny suggested with his

customary suavity, a gift from the gods: bestowed on Caesar ‘so as to

enhance the majesty of his appearance’.10

Trajan’s hairstyle – straight, short, a soldier’s cut – marked him

unmistakeably as what he was: a vir militaris, a military man. It was a look

that could hardly help but seem to the plebs, no matter how much they

might cheer him, as a reproach. The Roman crowds liked their princes

stylish; but Trajan, by scorning to have his hair teased into an elaborate

mane of curls (as even the follicly challenged Domitian had sought to have

done), was making plain that he cared nothing for their taste. Everyone in

Rome knew that Trajan preferred military life to the metropolis. That much

was evident from how little time he had spent in the city. As emperor, he

had waited almost two years before returning from the northern limits of the

empire to the capital. He had spent over half his reign on the Danube.

Attention to the needs and desires of the Roman people had transparently

mattered less to him than the love of battle and the pursuit of fame. But

now, with Dacia conquered and peace universal, there was no call for him

to go and fight distant barbarians. Rome demanded his attention. At issue

was whether a Caesar who had shown himself peerless as a conqueror could

similarly, now that his sword was sheathed, demonstrate prowess as the

father of his people. The time had come for Rome to serve as the emperor’s

stage.

A comparison between a land infested with menacing savages and the

capital of the world was not entirely far-fetched. Such, at any rate, was the

opinion of those who – secure in their rank and privilege – literally looked

down on the teeming masses. To live in Rome as a member of the elite was,

by and large, to live on a hill. If Caesar had come to monopolise the

Palatine, that most exclusive of all residential neighbourhoods, then there

were plenty of other heights that might offer refuge from ‘the restless

rumble of great Rome’.11 Below the senator in his hilltop mansion, where

the breezes were cool and fresh, there stretched the most astonishing urban

landscape on the face of the planet. For miles it extended, an immense

agglomeration of marble and brick: clamorous, mephitic, wreathed in

smoke. No other city in history had ever been as vast as Rome was now.

Over a million people lived there, crammed into a few square miles –

more than the entire population of Dacia. Few of them passed their days as

senators did, surrounded by gardens, and fountains, and the very latest in

interior decoration. The demand for accommodation was too relentless, too

predatory for that. The property market in Rome was an exercise in

exploitation. ‘Nowhere does a squalid room cost more.’12 The rent charged

on the tenement blocks that furnished most of the plebs with their

accommodation was graded with a ruthlessly exacting precision. The higher

a floor, the likelier tenants were to find their rooms shaking as waggons

rumbled by below, or collapsing in the event of an earthquake, or cut off

from the street by fire. The crash of falling buildings was one of the most

distinctive sounds of the city. So, too, the sound of mourning: for many

were the neighbourhoods in which ‘the wailing for the departed is a

constant noise in the background’. 13 To live in Rome, that capital of a

peerless and peaceful empire, was to live in the shadow of death.

Even to walk the city was, for many Romans, to take their lives into

their hands. The streets were greasy and slippery, and many of them –

despite Nero’s attempt to improve the urban infrastructure – were as

crooked and narrow as they had ever been. The rich, borne in their litters

above the press of the crowds, resembled ships heaving in a storm; the poor,

elbowed here, knocked by crossbeams there, knew that any slip, amid the

general crush, might easily prove fatal. Even on the Capitol it was not

unknown for people to be trampled to death. Down in more insalubrious

quarters, where carts piled high with building material were forever

struggling to negotiate the winding streets, traffic jams brought particular

risks. ‘For suppose an axle were to snap under the weight it was carrying,

and an avalanche of marble to descend on top of the dense crowd, what then

would be left of the bodies? What limbs, what bones would be

distinguishable?’14

There was no legislating against such accidents. Even though heavy-

goods vehicles had long been banned from Rome during daylight hours, it

was impractical to ban the transport of building material: both the

renovation of the city and the employment of the plebs depended on it. Yet

even the legislation that did exist only created its own problems. The

crashing of waggons throughout the night ensured that Rome was a city that

never slept. This, in turn, brought its own perils. As night fell, and shops

were boarded up, and dogs fell quiet, so the rhythm of the streets became

darker in every sense. A great man, wrapped in his scarlet cloak, and

guarded by a long retinue of heavies, all bearing flaming torches, had

nothing to worry about; but not everyone could afford such protection. The

mood in Rome was often threatening, and after sunset especially so. Such

was the notoriety of the seamier reaches of the capital, where gambling and

prostitution flourished, that Nero and Otho, as young men, were said to

have haunted them, just for the fun to be had in beating up passers-by.

Muggers, however, might lurk anywhere; nor were street brawls confined to

taverns and brothels. Dawn would invariably bring to light corpses littering

the capital’s streets, lying in puddles of blood. Sometimes they would be

collected by those who had loved them, to be mourned and cremated; and

sometimes they would remain where they had fallen, to be swept up with

the rubbish.

Jupiter himself had decreed that corpses, like excrement, should be

deposited beyond the sacred limits of the city. Cleanliness was next to

godliness. This, ever since Numa’s meeting with Egeria, had been an

enduring maxim of the Roman people. Inevitably, the challenge of keeping

the streets swept, of furnishing sewers capable of serving the entire city, of

ensuring that water never stood stagnant, but instead flowed fresh and clear

wherever it might be needed, bubbling up from fountains, pouring out from

pipes, was a relentless one. Rome’s largest drain had been constructed back

in the days of the kings, and its most iconic aqueducts built under the

republic. The city’s most impressive infrastructure, however, was of more

recent origin. A succession of Caesars, ruling a city that seemed forever in

peril of buckling under the explosive growth of its population, had

sponsored engineering projects on a truly titanic scale. ‘Calculate accurately

just how much water flows to public buildings, baths, swimming pools,

canals, private residences, gardens and suburban estates; consider how far

the water has to flow before reaching its destination; contemplate the rows

of arches, the tunnels through mountains, the bridges running level over

deep valleys, and we are left with no choice but to acknowledge that there is

nothing in the entire world more remarkable.’15

When Pliny’s uncle, towards the end of his encyclopaedia, delivered this

opinion, he did so with the authority of a man who had drawn up lists of

every wonder in the cosmos. Yet the aqueducts – unexampled though they

certainly were – did not reach everyone in the city. The plebs in their

crowded tenements had to carry water up to their lofts, and then cart their

waste down to covered cisterns. No matter how carefully urine might be

decanted into jars, for use by fullers in the treatment of cloth, and no matter

how assiduously the gangs of public slaves might nightly transport

excrement out into the fields beyond the capital, for use by farmers as

fertiliser, the stench of it was never entirely banished from the city limits.

Mingling with dust, sweat, the incense offered to the gods, the brown

smoke from workshops, and the scents from countless multitudes of

cooking fires, it was so much a part of Rome that to live there was barely to

notice it. Only in times of plague and fever, when the city stood wreathed in

miasmas, would the stench become unbearable. The more diarrhoeas there

were, the more corpses; and the more corpses, the more miasmas. Then the

people would look to Caesar; and Caesar would look to the gods. Dread of

the responsibility laid upon his shoulders had driven Titus to an early grave,

and had been crucial in determining the entire tenor of Domitian’s rule.

Rome, vast and infinite and unfathomable, was rife with peril for any

emperor – even the very best of them. Trajan, returning to the capital, was

not oblivious to what it furnished him: no less worthy a setting for the

display of his greatness than Dacia had been.

And as on the Danube, so in Rome: he had profited greatly from the

labours of his murdered predecessor. ‘A terrible emperor, but one who had

excellent friends.’16 So, with gnomic wit, Trajan was said to have

acknowledged his debt. By raising temples to the gods and tending to the

morals of the Roman people, Domitian had readied the stage for his heir in

Rome no less surely than he had done in Dacia by fortifying the line of the

Danube. The threat of plague and fire had been banished. The capital was

stable. This did not mean, of course, that Trajan could afford to relax.

Danger still threatened. The greatest risk of all, as it had ever been, was of

famine. Trajan was alert to this on a more global scale than any of his

predecessors. His concern was for the people, not just of Rome, but of the

empire as a whole. Pliny, in his six-hour eulogy of the emperor, noted this

admiringly: how ready Trajan had been to ‘divert and direct the earth’s

abundance now here, now there, as the moment and necessity demanded,

supplying aid and sustenance to peoples across the sea. Indeed, it is almost

as though they were to be ranked among the plebs of Rome!’17

Pliny’s tone of surprise was due reflection of just how heavily the

obligation to keep the capital fed had weighed on Caesar after Caesar.

Trajan, no less than Augustus, or Claudius, or Nero, was a devout

supplicant of Annona. His return from Dacia, laden with plunder, had

enabled him to demonstrate this in the most conclusive manner possible.

Shortly after Trajan’s triumph, Pliny wrote in wonder of the barges and

breakwaters that were to be seen some thirty miles north of Ostia, ‘where a

bay is being converted into a harbour’. 18 This, however, was only one of a

whole number of engineering projects along what had previously – with the

exception of Ostia itself, and Claudius’ upgrade of it – been a featureless

coast. Trajan’s goal was both simple and breathtaking in its ambition: to

ensure the absolute security of Rome’s corn supply. No longer was Puteoli

to serve the capital as the only harbour capable of furnishing anchorage to

the very largest corn ships. Berths were to be provided at last beside the

mouth of the Tiber. Centrepiece of this development was a vast mooring,

joined by a narrow channel to Claudius’ port, in the shape of a hexagon.

The labour, and the expense required to fund it, were immense; but so, too,

once it had been completed, was the glory that accrued to its sponsor. The

name of the complex, broadcast to all who visited it by an immense statue

of the emperor placed opposite its entrance: the Harbour of Trajan the

Fortunate.

It was not enough, however, for Caesar to keep the capital fed. Seasoned

analysts admired Trajan for penetrating to the heart of what the plebs

expected from him: not just bread but circuses.19 Entertainment, as it had

ever been in Rome, was a serious business. Trajan, emulating Titus, had

used the Flavian Amphitheatre during his first appearance in the capital as

emperor to issue a manifesto, to proclaim his bona fides, to win the hearts

and minds of the people. Informers had been paraded before the baying

crowd, then led down to the Tiber, forced onto ships, and set adrift. ‘The

sight was an unforgettable one: a whole fleet of the wretches thrown on the

mercy of the winds.’20 So Pliny had gloated. The real extravaganza,

however, had come eight years later, with the munera that were staged to

celebrate Trajan’s final victory in the Dacian wars. Every kind of spectacle,

every kind of expense, was served up to the Roman people. The great

conqueror’s ambition – one funded with the plunder from Dacia – was to

leave his predecessors trailing in the dust. Rather than stage sea-battles in

the arena purpose-built for them by Domitian, he built his own from

scratch. The previous arena, once it had been disassembled, furnished

material for his improvements to the Circus Maximus. Most sumptuous of

all was an enormous complex of baths – so vast that a new aqueduct had to

be inaugurated just to keep it supplied with water – built on peculiarly

symbolic foundations: a stretch of the Golden House that had been filled up

to its ceilings with rubble. This it was well and truly to bury Nero.

To parade disapproval of self-indulgence while simultaneously

sponsoring the largest bath-house in the world was quite the manoeuvre.

Trajan, model of discipline and modesty that he was, had no patience with

luxury. His only vices were those appropriate to an honest soldier: alcohol

and boys. Certainly, there was no place in his building programme for

palaces. Harbours, arenas, bath complexes: these were all projects that

served, not Caesar, but the Roman people. And yet Trajan, despite his show

of seriousness and frugality, was a builder in a long line of builders, a

showman in a long line of showmen. When, flush with his Dacian loot, he

commissioned Apollodorus to design him a forum appropriate to the full

massive scale of his victory, the complex ended up larger in area than those

built by Augustus, Vespasian and Nerva combined. Libraries were

counterpointed with statues; shopping centres with friezes, arches and

triumphal columns.

Indeed, so monumental was Trajan’s forum, so overwhelming in its

impact, that it set the seal on a programme of building begun more than a

century before: the transformation of the city centre from an expanse of

brick into one of marble. Augustus had embarked on the progamme, and

Domitian had refined it; but it was Trajan, that stern and rugged captain of

the legions, who brought it to its ultimate fruition. Surrounding his forum

there rose a wall as high as it was blank. Beyond it, amid smoke and

clamour, the contents of chamber pots continued to be flung from attic

windows, and gangs of public slaves to farm excrement from cisterns, and

the victims of muggers to lie bleeding in squalid side-alleys, and beggars to

sit in huddled clusters beside bridges, and miasmas to creep up from the

Tiber. But Rome, for all its horrors, was like nowhere in the world – or

indeed like anywhere that had ever been. Trajan, that best of emperors, had

met the challenge set him by the gods: of ensuring that the Roman people

had a capital at last that was truly worthy of their greatness.

Levelling Up

In Prusa, a city at the foot of Mount Olympus, very few people had been to

Rome. The journey, for those without the money or contacts to facilitate it,

was a challenging one. The roads were long, the seas dangerous, the inns

expensive. Even the governor’s messengers, practised riders who could rely

on fresh horses supplied to them at regular posting stations, took two

months to reach the capital. Vaguely, of course, the citizens of Prusa were

aware of Rome as the mistress of the world. They knew that she was the

seat of Caesar. That she was dressed in purple and scarlet, and glittered with

gems and pearls. That the columns lining her shopping centres were

fashioned out of purest gold. The world, however, was full of cities, and no

one could hope to see them all. Most people in Prusa were perfectly content

to be bounded by limited horizons: for they knew that those horizons

contained within them great wonders and resources of their own.

The best place to survey them was from the heights of Olympus. The

mountain, although not quite as towering as its namesake in Greece –

identified by tradition as the home of the gods – commanded spectacular

views. Looking northwards, the adventurous climber could see, at the foot

of the mountain, the city of Prusa, and then, some fifteen miles farther

north, beyond a plain rich in vineyards, orchards and olive groves, an

expanse of water called the Propontis. Its shipping lanes were as busy as

anywhere in the Roman world: for it joined Asia to Europe and linked the

Aegean to the Bosphorus, the narrow channel that led onwards to the Black

Sea. From Olympus, on a clear day, it was just about possible to make out

Byzantium: an ancient Greek city that commanded the entrance to the

straits. Not just Byzantium but the entire region was of immense strategic

significance: the hinge that joined Anatolia to the Balkans. The people who

lived there might feel themselves far distant from Caesar, but the eye of

Caesar was certainly fixed on them.

Bithynia, it was called: a land which bore the stamp of various peoples,

barbarian, and Greek, and Roman. The name of the region derived from a

tribe distantly related to the Dacians; but so enthusiastically had the

Bithynian elites come to adopt Greek culture that their native language –

rather like Oscan in Campania – had been put irreversibly into eclipse. By

74 BC, when their last king, alert to the way the wind was blowing, had left

Bithynia in his will to Rome, their four leading cities – Prusa, Nicomedia,

Apameia and Nicaea – were Greek in both character and appearance.

Although Prusa and Nicomedia had both been named after kings, and

Apameia and Nicaea after, respectively, a queen and the wife of an upstart

autocrat, all four cities boasted strong elements of self-government. The

wealthy served on a council, a boule, and provided the magistrates; the

masses constituted an assembly, an ecclesia, and made sure that not even

the snootiest dignitary could afford to close his ears to their opinions and

demands. It was all very reminiscent of Greece.

But then had come the Romans. Pompey, the plenipotentiary charged

with restructuring Bithynia to serve Rome’s ends, had no patience with

democracy. He viewed it as rackety, destabilising and a menace to Roman

order. What Prusa and the various other cities of Bithynia needed was, in

Pompey’s opinion, administration by the kind of institution that he himself

represented: a senate. And so that, to all intents and purposes, was what he

had forced on them. Almost two centuries on, the council of Prusa

preserved its Greek name of boule; but in other ways, rather as the Order of

Decurions in Pompeii had done, it bore a palpable resemblance to the senate

of Pompey’s day. Timetai – the equivalent of censors – sternly patrolled its

membership rolls. Only magistrates and men of the very best families were

permitted to belong to it. Meanwhile, the assembly, banned from initiating

legislation, ranked as an impotent talking shop. The Roman governor, if he

so chose, could suspend it altogether. As on the Bay of Naples, so in

Bithynia: responsibility for the administration of a city lay with its great and

good.

Some cities, it was true, had greater freedom of manoeuvre than others.

Apameia, some fifteen miles from Prusa on the coast, had been re-founded

by Julius Caesar as a colonia, and had never let anybody in Bithynia forget

it. Other cities, ones particularly honoured by the Romans, ranked as

civitates liberae: settlements spared the obligation to pay tax. This was the

freedom that Nero had granted the entire province of Greece, and that

Vespasian had then rescinded; and it was a status, of course, that was highly

prized. Byzantium had been graced with it; so, too, the people of

Chalcedon, a city on the Bithynian side of the Bosphorus, famous for its

jasper, and for a breed of tiny crocodile that lived in one of its springs.

Prusa, however, ranked neither as a colonia nor as a civitas libera; and so

the members of its council, like the members of councils across the vast

expanse of the Roman world, had no choice but to raise and pay imperial

taxes. Their resentment at this was directed not at Caesar himself, however,

but at their near neighbours in Apameia: a city which served them as their

port, was smaller and less wealthy than Prusa, and would have been nothing

without the timber and other raw materials exported from the slopes of

Mount Olympus – and yet which, thanks to its status as a colonia, enjoyed a

quite infuriating preponderance of bragging rights.

Jealousy, rivalry, ambition: these were emotions that, like the wildfires

that sometimes ripped through forests and fields during the hot summer

months, had long been at risk, wherever the Greeks had cities, of blazing

out of control. The Romans knew this as well as anyone: for it had been the

failure of the various Greek states to swallow their differences and fight as

one that had facilitated their subjugation. Centuries on from their absorption

into Rome’s empire, cities such as Prusa knew better than to push their

mutual rivalries too far. Just as the senate had come down hard on the

Pompeians for brawling with sports fans from a neighbouring city, so, out

in the provinces, were the imperial authorities brutally impatient with any

hint of civic disorder. The days when the citizens of a Greek city, embroiled

in a disagreement with a neighbour, could strap on their armour, pick up

their spears, and go marching off to war were long gone. The Roman peace

was maintained at the point of a sword. Every governor exercised a strict

monopoly of violence. Roman rule might have deprived the Greeks of their

liberty, but it had bestowed on them a condition that they had never enjoyed

while they were free: an enduring and universal peace. This it was, under

the rule of the Caesars, that had enabled them to flourish. Yet the Roman

authorities, with the cynical pragmatism that had always been characteristic

of their approach to Greek affairs, did not stamp out every show of

independence. Quite the opposite. The governor responsible for Bithynia

relied on the council in a city like Prusa to do the vast majority of his work

for him: not just to collect taxes, but to administer justice in cases that did

not merit his personal attention; to uphold security on the streets of the city;

to maintain roads; and to furnish horses for the imperial post. The balance

to be struck was a delicate one: permitting a city like Prusa the illusion of

autonomy, while making sure the illusion never shaded too far into reality.

The Pax Romana depended on its successful maintenance.

Ambition, then, in Prusa, was not only licensed by the provincial

authorities but positively encouraged: the ambition of the city itself to be

more celebrated, more beautiful, more esteemed than its neighbours; the

ambition of its leading men to put their rivals in the shade, and win a

renown that would echo down the ages. Prusa itself was not the only stage

on which the most able of its citizens might aspire to make names for

themselves. Roman chippiness towards Greek high-achievers bore witness

to the sheer range and scale of their success. Under Trajan, the most

celebrated dynasts of Anatolia – the grandson of a king deposed by

Vespasian, the leading noblemen of, respectively, Galatia and Cilicia – had

come to be awarded the greatest honour in Caesar’s gift: the consulship. No

one from Bithynia, it was true, could say as much; but an ambitious

nobleman coming of age in Nicomedia or Nicaea, plotting out the course of

his career, could know that the consulship was not an impossible aspiration.

The summit of Roman achievement lay within his reach. He could dare to

dream.

Service in the senate was, of course, only ever a prospect for the

absolute crème de la crème of Bithynian society. There were, however, for

those who did not belong to the nobility but were ambitious still to win

golden opinions in the broader world, other options. ‘Bithynia’, a scholar

from the neighbouring region of Pontus had noted back in the time of

Augustus, ‘has produced numerous men notable for their learning’:21

philosophers and physicians, orators and mathematicians. A century on, and

it was a man from Prusa who most famously exemplified this tradition. Dio

Chrysostom – ‘the Golden-Tongued’ – was an intellectual who embodied

every stereotype held by the Romans about the Greeks. A philosopher,

historian, political analyst and literary critic, equally at home offering

advice to emperors on the art of kingship and giving playful eulogies of

parrots or gnats, his powers of oratory were hypnotic – even when his

listeners were not entirely sure what he was talking about. ‘I don’t really

understand you,’ Trajan was said once to have told him, ‘but I love you as I

love myself.’22

Favour of this order, shown to a man of not particularly distinguished

pedigree, from a not particularly distinguished city, in a not particularly

distinguished corner of the world, was due reflection of the opportunities

that might, with fortune’s blessing, open up in Rome to the eloquent and the

brilliant. Bluff, no-nonsense soldier though Trajan was, he valued Dio as

the kind of advisor that an emperor with aspirations to rule wisely should

properly have at his side, and was even said to have offered the philosopher

a ride in his triumphal chariot. Yet Dio, a man who might readily have

secured for himself a comfortable retirement in Rome, and was a habitué of

the richest and most sophisticated urban centres in the Greek world, only

ever loved one place as home. ‘Yes,’ he acknowledged, ‘Prusa may not be

the largest of cities, and it may not be the oldest – but it is more highly rated

than many, as even outsiders will confirm, so that its citizens, when ranked

in competition against the men of other cities, come not last, nor third, nor

even second.’23 Cosmopolitan Dio might be – but he was nothing if not a

patriot.

Yet if his career demonstrated the opportunities open to men hoping to

better both themselves and their native cities, then so it also illustrated the

perils of ambition. Potential elephant traps lay everywhere. This was

especially the case for a man like Dio, whose status in Prusa was not as

stable as he would have liked it to be. For all that his mother was the

daughter of a Roman citizen, a woman from one of the leading families in

the city, his father was an altogether more disreputable figure: a

moneylender, a property speculator, an arriviste. Dio, painfully sensitive to

this, had done all he could to identify himself with the values and

aspirations of the municipal elite. He had run for civic office; he had shown

himself a public benefactor. When, however, he followed in his father’s

footsteps by buying a plot of land, and building a shopping centre on it, he

provoked a riot. Prusa at the time was in the grip of famine; and Dio’s

commercial speculation had alerted everyone to the fact that he was richer

than previously appreciated. A crowd of starving people, convinced that

Dio was hoarding corn, marched on his house. The city magistrates were

barely able to dissuade the mob from stoning him and burning his mansion

to the ground. Their concern was less for Dio himself than about what the

breakdown of public order might signal to the Roman authorities. The poor,

who had long since been deprived of any stake in running the city, had

nothing to lose by staging a riot; but the rich, whose administration of Prusa

was conducted entirely on Roman sufferance, were frantic not to give the

governor any excuse to impose direct rule. The young Dio, bundled into the

local theatre by the city fathers, and obliged to justify his behaviour over

raucous jeering and catcalls, had been given a brutal crash course in the

realities of civic politics. Only with difficulty had he managed to exculpate

himself, and wriggle out of his baying audience’s demands that he fund

Prusa’s entire corn supply. The boundary between self-betterment and ruin

might sometimes be very thin.

The ordeal had left permanent scars. A city, Dio would repeatedly argue,

was happiest when it was most like a hive of bees, a heap of ants, a flock of

birds: ordered, harmonious, hierarchical. Such a philosophy, which he

taught in cities across the Greek world, was one on which civic elites – cast

by Dio as leaders of the hive, the antheap, the flock – were unsurprisingly

keen; but it had appeal as well for a Roman audience. ‘On what does the

security of a household depend, if not harmony between the master and the

mistress, and on the obedience of their slaves? And yet just think how many

times a household has been brought to disaster by conflict between master

and mistress, and by the treachery of their slaves!’24 Here was a reflection

as relevant to a Caesar as to the members of a Bithynian council. Dio’s

popularity with emperors and governors was hardly surprising. A

philosopher who could provide high-minded sanction for his patrons’ self-

interest was invariably valued; and Dio could furnish the Roman elite with

justification for nothing less than the Pax Romana.

Yet Rome, like Prusa, was rife with peril. Just as Dio, in the theatre of

his native city, had narrowly avoided being torn to pieces, so in the capital

of the world his intimacy with leading figures at Domitian’s court had

proved almost fatal. The patronage of great men, for a provincial looking to

make a name for himself in Rome, might easily prove a double-edged

sword. Dio, over the course of his career, had formed associations with

some very great men indeed. So intimate had he been with Marcus

Cocceius Nerva, the future emperor, that he was known in Rome as

‘Cocceianus’. Not all his patrons, however, had been as careful how they

trod as Nerva. One of them, charged by Domitian with treason, had duly

been convicted and put to death.25 Dio, caught up in the wake of the

scandal, had been sentenced to exile. Years later, in a speech to the people

of Athens, he would joke that his fate had been like that of ‘the cup-bearers,

and cooks, and concubines of a barbarian king, who are buried alive with

their master when he dies’. 26 Banished both from Italy and Bithynia, he had

roamed from city to city, impoverished by the loss of his property,

physically broken by the demands of his peripatetic lifestyle. For years the

dread had haunted him that he might never see Prusa again.

Yet philosopher that he was, Dio had refused to succumb to despair. Just

as he had drawn valuable lessons from his youthful experience of bread

riots, so had he sought to benefit from the opportunity to see the world. ‘For

I came to appreciate that exile is not entirely bad news, nor entirely without

profit.’27 When, in due course, Domitian was murdered, and Nerva, coming

to power, restored to his client both his civic rights and his property, Dio did

not immediately abandon his wanderings. Instead, alert to the rumours of

war, he made repeated trips to Dacia, gathering material there for a history,

and witnessing with the detached gaze of a philosopher the full awesome

might of Trajan’s legions. ‘It was as a man unqualified to participate in

military matters, that I arrived among soldiers who, although no fools, did

not have the time for listening to speeches – for they were like racehorses at

the starting-barriers, highly strung and tense, impatient with delay, and in

their excitement and eagerness pawing at the ground with their hoofs. There

were swords everywhere, and armour, and spears, and the entire camp was

filled with horses, with weaponry, with armed warriors.’28 When Dio

returned from the Dacian wars, it was as a man who could offer

commentary on Trajan’s achievements that drew directly on personal

experience; and when he headed onwards to Prusa, like some hero of myth

returning in triumph from his wanderings, it was as a man who could boast

the personal friendship of Caesar.

Inevitably, now that he was a man of wealth and status, Dio did what

any Greek in his situation would have done: he commissioned lots of showy

buildings. This was done, of course, with the aim of promoting himself as a

civic benefactor; but also in a spirit of patriotism. Dio, over the course of

his wanderings, had visited many famous cities, and seen for himself just

how ferocious the competition between them to rank as the most beautiful,

the most impressive, the most cultured had become. Colonnades, temples,

libraries: these, in the richest and most famous centres of the Greek world,

were going up at a furious rate. Dio had been despondent, on his return

from exile to Prusa, to discover just how shabby his own city looked by

comparison. Its baths were old and dilapidated; once splendid mansions had

crumbled into ruin; it lacked even the most basic amenities. Dio, who had

made sure to obtain written backing from Trajan for his plans, aimed at a

full-scale programme of urban renewal. His ambition was not merely to

beautify Prusa, ‘by equipping it with colonnades and fountains’,29 but to

renovate its fortifications and boost its transport links. This programme,

originating as it did with Prusa’s most famous son, was greeted with

widespread enthusiasm. Many citizens offered financial contributions of

their own. Dio, earmarking a particularly squalid stretch of town for

renovation, aimed to clear its ruins and run-down workshops, and build a

gleaming new portico and library. He even climbed Mount Olympus to

source marble for the development. The sense of excitement in the city was

palpable.

But so, too, was a mood of resentment. The return of the exiled hero had

not been greeted with universal approbation. There were many prominent

figures in the city whose noses had been put badly out of joint by Dio’s

arrival, and who scoffed at his claim to be a favourite of Trajan. If he were

really such an intimate of Caesar, they sneered, then why had he not

obtained for Prusa the status that every Greek city most craved – that of a

civitas libera? A pointed question: for Dio had indeed sought to obtain

freedom from taxation for his native city, and been rebuffed. True, he had

secured other privileges – a boost to Prusa’s judicial status, an increase in

the number of councillors permitted to serve on the boule – but his failure

to win the city a status equivalent to that of Byzantium or Chalcedon was a

sore point with him, and his enemies knew it. They knew as well that

between Dio and Caesar, now that the philosopher had left Rome, there

extended many layers of provincial administration. It was far easier for

Dio’s enemies to bend the ear of the governor than it was for Dio to bend

the ear of Trajan. Various charges began to circulate. That Dio, in his

ambition to rebuild Prusa, was acting like a tyrant by ‘tearing down all its

shrines’.30 That he was fleecing the subscribers to his development, which

was nothing but a scam. That he had erected a statue of Trajan next to

where his wife and son were buried – a flagrant case of treason.

Cumulatively, these accusations added up to one single, damning smear:

that Dio had transformed Prusa into a sink of malfeasance and impiety.

Yet if this patently spelt trouble for Dio himself, so also did it spell

potential trouble for his accusers. They had adopted a dangerous tactic: an

upper-class equivalent of a riot. By inviting the governor to poke his nose

into the affairs of their city, they had knowingly put the entire basis of their

autonomy at risk. In truth, the danger was greater than they appreciated.

Prusa was not the only city that seemed to the Roman authorities to be in a

state of mounting chaos. Nicomedia and Nicaea were at daggers drawn.

Corruption and peculation were rife. Councils everywhere were riddled

with debt. There was barely a city in Bithynia that seemed on a stable

footing.

Perhaps, had the provincial authorities themselves displayed a record of

competence, the risk to stability in the region might have been manageable;

but a succession of governors, rather than working to ease the crisis, had

only contributed to it. For a century and more, Bithynia and Pontus – paired

by Pompey into a single provincial unit – had suffered from notoriously

incompetent administrations. Both of the governors appointed to the

province in the wake of Dio’s return to Prusa had indulged in blatant

displays of extortion. Both, brought to trial before the senate, had managed

to escape the full sanction of the law. Both, despite their obvious guilt, had

been able to rely for their defence on an orator who, as the self-appointed

heir of Cicero, cast himself as the spokesman for principle, propriety and

tradition. To Pliny, it seemed clear that, in the trial of a senator ‘possessed

of noble birth and official distinction’,31 the precise details of what he might

or might not have done in some distant province counted for little when

weighed in the balance against his breeding. In private, Pliny was perfectly

capable of acknowledging that the occasional peccadillo might perhaps

have been committed – but his responsibility was to wink at it. The health

of the provincial administration in Bithynia, the right of the natives not to

suffer oppression, the good name of Roman justice: all of these certainly

mattered. It was just that, in the final reckoning, they mattered less than the

prestige of the senate.

Pliny had particular reason to believe this. Two decades previously, in

93, he had won his first case in the senate by successfully prosecuting a

corrupt governor of Baetica. The victory, however, had proven a pyrrhic

one. The governor’s conviction had set in train an escalating sequence of

prosecutions and counter-prosecutions – one that, fatally, had ended up

embroiling Domitian himself. Some of the most distinguished members of

the senate had perished amid a blaze of book burnings. Pliny himself had

not been complicit in this bloodbath – but the memory of it haunted him,

even so. ‘When we first became senators, we found ourselves tainted by the

evils of the age, and then for many years afterwards were both spectators

and victims of those same evils.’32 Pliny, like Tacitus, and like many others

of his generation, was all too painfully conscious of the shame that such

collective passivity had brought on Rome’s most august and venerable

body. Sensitivity to the charge of collaboration made him only the more

determined, now that the tyrant was toppled, and a happier age inaugurated,

to see the dignity of the senate restored.

Meanwhile, however, Trajan had other priorities. The whiff of

corruption drifting across the sea from Bithynia was a much greater cause

of alarm to the emperor than it was to Pliny. That the interests of the senate

should take priority over the stability of a distant province was a

perspective dependent on a certain insularity. Pliny, to a degree unusual

among the leading men of his age, had little personal experience of the

empire’s outer reaches. Although, in his youth, he had served with a legion

in Syria, he had otherwise passed his entire career in Italy. The senate, the

law courts, the salons where the very latest works of literature were

discussed: these constituted his natural habitat. To speak in the ancient

cockpit of Roman affairs, to hone the arts of oratory that Cicero had honed,

to furnish a colleague like Tacitus with material for a history, or to serve as

patron to a promising young man of letters like Suetonius: such were the

activities, in Pliny’s opinion, appropriate to a man of eminence. He might

never have supervised the finances of Baetica, or ventured across the

Danube, or braved the midges of Caledonia; but that did not mean he was

parochial. Quite the opposite. Italy was the richest, the most prosperous, the

most cultivated of lands. To know it as Pliny knew it was a precious thing.

He was familiar with Rome, of course; but there was more to Italy than

Rome. Pliny understood this as only someone with an immense portfolio of

properties could understand it. He had played host to famous writers in his

villa on the coast, welcoming them to his dining room with its spectacular

views of the sea, and to enjoy his heated swimming pool. He had tended to

his Umbrian estates, keeping track of the harvests, insisting that his slaves

not be chained as they laboured, helping out local dealers when the grape

harvest failed. He had travelled to his native Comum, revelling in how the

glories of its architecture complemented the natural beauty of its setting,

and endowing it with a quite fabulously expensive library. He was, in short,

a man of taste and learning, with a concern for the propriety of things that

did not necessarily preclude him from occasional displays to his inferiors of

graciousness and clemency. And this, perhaps, was why, when Trajan was

deliberating about who should be sent to Bithynia and Pontus, to attend to

the chaos brewing there, and set the province back on a stable footing, he

should have settled on Pliny.

‘These Greeks in their little towns – how they do love a gymnasium!’33

The emperor’s joke, written in a letter sent by express courier to Bithynia,

was one that he knew would bring a wry smile to the lips of the man

appointed there as his personal legate. Pliny, while travelling to his

province, had not been immune to a sense of excitement. Rounding the

southernmost cape in Greece, he had broken rhapsodically into Greek;

visiting the ancient city of Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Asia, he had

seen monuments there so fresh and splendid that they would not have

disgraced a town in Italy. Bithynia and Pontus, by contrast, offered nothing

but disappointment. Pliny found his province the very definition of

provincial. Even cities blessed by their natural setting or graced with

impressive architecture inclined towards the squalid. In Claudiopolis, a

small town on the main military road, famous for its cheese, the locals had

made such a hash of a development sponsored by Trajan that Pliny wrote in

despair to the emperor, warning him that the entire complex might need to

be levelled, and a new one begun from scratch. In Amestris, one of the

more handsome cities of Pontus, the central street was disfigured along its

entire length by an open sewer, ‘a disgusting eyesore which gives off an

appalling stench’.34 Pliny, wrinkling his nose, made sure that sufficient

funds were provided to have the drain covered; but this was a gesture of

benignity that was simultaneously, and very obviously, a mark of reproach.

Dio, even as he petitioned Trajan to bestow favours upon Prusa, and sought

to reshape his native city in accordance with the most sophisticated

fashions, had lived in dread of precisely such Roman contempt. ‘The marks

of distinction on which you set such store’, he had once warned the people

of Nicomedia, ‘provoke the scorn of every person of discernment, and in

Rome especially, where people laugh at them, they are known –

humiliatingly – as “Greek failings”!’35 The arrival in Prusa of a

plenipotentiary like Pliny, a man of exemplary and intimidating taste,

personally appointed to his commission by Caesar, and unafraid to make a

show of his metropolitan airs and graces, was for Dio a nightmare.

But the joke was on Pliny as well. Had Trajan, when he appointed his

legate to Bithynia, smiled at the thought of a man so habituated to the

glories and splendours of Italy travelling from provincial backwater to

provincial backwater, demanding accounts from recalcitrant councils,

investigating drains? Pliny had been given the commission in the

expectation that he would do a good job – and so he did. Where there was

maladministration to be found, he sought to find it. ‘How on earth have they

managed to waste so much money screwing this up?’ Trajan erupted, when

informed by Pliny that the people of Nicomedia had managed to build two

expensive aqueducts in succession, neither of which worked, and were

gearing up to build a third. Yet even as the governor pored over fraudulent

accounts, sniffed out bogus expense claims, and chased after stolen

furniture, he was painfully aware of just how much more remained to be

done. No one in either Bithynia or Pontus thought to offer armed resistance

to Pliny; but neither was everyone dutifully submissive to him. As

governor, he had the authority to intrude into the murkiest crannies of any

city he might choose to investigate; but he lacked the resources to do this on

a comprehensive scale. He knew, and the various councils in his province

knew he knew, that the exercise of Roman power could never be dependent

on Roman power alone. Without the backing of leading provincials, its

entire functioning would fall to pieces. When Dio warned the people of

Nicaea or Nicomedia not to squabble or riot, in case they should attract the

attention of the governor, he was acknowledging Roman impotence as well

as might: for it implied just how simple a matter it was for a city to keep the

imperial authorities in the dark. The might of Rome was dazzling,

intimidating, terrifying; but it was simultaneously a thing of smoke and

mirrors.

When Pliny arrived in Prusa, he showed neither the city nor its most

famous son any special favour. ‘I am examining the public expenditure,

revenue and outstanding debts owed the state,’ he wrote to Trajan. ‘The

more I look into the accounts, the more necessary such an investigation

comes to seem.’36 It was tribute to Dio’s international prominence that Prusa

should have been Pliny’s first stop on his tour of duty; and testimony to just

how complex the legal wrangling there had become that even the new

governor, for all his experience of legal matters, struggled to make sense of

it. First he sat in judgement on the case in Prusa; then in Nicaea; then he

wrote to Trajan for advice. The reply was brisk and to the point. The notion

that Dio might have committed treason was dismissed out of hand; so, too,

the prospect that he might have concealed or fabricated his accounts. The

eye of Caesar, which like a mighty beam of light was forever sweeping and

scanning the vastness of the globe, had penetrated to the heart of a case that

for years had baffled Greek and Roman alike. It was no cause of shame for

Dio to acknowledge this; nor for Pliny either. The profound differences

between the two men – that one was being judged and the other was the

judge, that one had thoughts only of Prusa and the other cherished Italy, that

one identified with the glories and traditions of Greek culture and the other

with the dignity of the Roman senate – had, thanks to Caesar, been

successfully reconciled. In Bithynia, as elsewhere across the Greek world,

the governor might despise the provincial, and the provincial might despise

the governor; but both could find in the empire’s helmsman an assurance

that it was being held to a steady course. ‘To do the greatest good to the

greatest number of people’:37 so Dio, addressing Trajan, had defined the

task of a properly godlike ruler. Distant though Caesar was from Bithynia, it

was possible for Greek and Roman elites alike to bathe in the warmth of his

gaze, and be grateful for it. Here was the measure of his greatness: that ruler

and ruled alike could acknowledge him as Optimus Princeps, the Best of

Emperors, and feel that the world was one.

A Passage to India

Dio, despite the favour shown him by both Nerva and Trajan, had never

been much interested in the city of his patrons. Such indifference was not

necessarily characteristic of Greek scholars. There were plenty, over the

years following Rome’s rise to greatness, who had written extensively about

their new mistress. They had analysed her constitution; traced the course of

her history; written biographies of her leading men. Dio viewed attention to

such ephemera as beneath his dignity. Philosopher that he was, he aimed to

trace patterns and articulate verities that transcended such mundane details

as how the Roman state might actually function. Addressing Trajan,

advising him on how best to govern, Dio made no mention of senators, or

equestrians, or freedmen. ‘What enables a king best to maintain the

prosperity of his lands is less his wealth, or his armies, or any other

manifestation of his strength, but rather the loyalty of his friends.’38 This

was a maxim which philosophers, back in the days when the Greeks still

had their own kings, had tended to take for granted. Rather than analysing

whether such a prescription might be applicable to the very different

functioning of Roman monarchy, Dio simply assumed that it was. A ruler,

he solemnly instructed Trajan, was only as wise as the wisest man who had

his ear.

As to who the wisest man among Caesar’s circle of acquaintances might

be, Dio was too modest to say. His audience, even so, would have found it

hard to miss his drift. Repeatedly in his addresses to Trajan, Dio compared

the emperor to the most famous conqueror in history. Almost half a

millennium after blazing a comet-trail from Greece to India, Alexander the

Great remained the archetype of military genius. ‘As everyone knows,’ Dio

told Trajan, ‘he was the most ambitious of men, possessed of the most

inexhaustible love of glory.’39 There was no one, not in Persia, not in India,

not anywhere in the world, whom Alexander had feared. His fame had

come to sound not only among Greeks and barbarians, but among the birds

of the air and the beasts of the mountains. In Rome, some of the most

celebrated men in the city’s history had been fired by his example. Pompey,

whose very quiff was inspired by the great conqueror’s hairstyle, had never

ceased to ape him; Julius Caesar, prior to embarking on his own career of

conquest, had stood before a statue of Alexander and wept hot tears of envy.

It was hardly to be wondered at, then, that Trajan, who keenly admired

Caesar’s achievement in pacifying Gaul, should also have betrayed a certain

fascination with the man who had inspired him to weep. Dio, by name-

checking Alexander in his speeches, was making knowing play with this.

But he was also doing something more. As a boy, Alexander had been

taught by Aristotle, no less. Repeatedly, over the course of his career of

conquest, he had sought out the company of philosophers. Philosophers, in

turn, had repeatedly guided, cajoled and upbraided him. Here was an

example from which any great ruler might learn. Even as Dio offered

guidance to Trajan on how best to rule the world, he also presumed to

remind the emperor that ambition for ambition’s sake was undeserving of

the wise ruler. The true conquest that any king was obliged to make was not

over barbarians, but over himself. Otherwise, as one notoriously acerbic

philosopher, quoted by Dio, had put it to Alexander, there could be no true

glory. ‘No, not even were you to swim across the ocean, and vanquish a

continent vaster than Asia.’40

Trajan, listening to this, had not remotely taken offence. In part, this

reflected the delicacy with which Dio had made sure to frame his argument.

Alexander had been headstrong, and selfish, and young – whereas Trajan,

of course, was none of these things. So obvious, indeed, was this point that

Dio had not even bothered to make it. There was, however, another reason

why Romans would be unlikely to raise an eyebrow at criticism of

Alexander: they were predisposed to agree with it. That Pompey and

Caesar, the two great warlords of the dying republic, should have admired a

king notorious for his vanity and ambition had only confirmed, for many

Romans, a suspicion of the great conqueror that was deeply rooted in their

past. The story was told in Rome that Alexander, sitting in judgement on a

captured pirate, had demanded to know what drove the man to sail the seas,

robbing and terrorising the innocent. ‘The same’, the pirate answered, ‘as

drives you to rob the whole world.’41

It was important to Trajan – for all that Dio might address him as ‘king’

– that he fought wars not as some royal conqueror, but as an imperator, a

general who stood in a long line of generals reaching back to the early and

virtuous days of the republic. In 107, when even the loot of Dacia proved

inadequate to the full titanic scale of his plans for renovating Rome, and he

was obliged to debase the currency that Domitian, with such care and effort,

had sought to keep stable, he veiled the embarrassment of it by making his

distinctively Roman pedigree explicit. Some of his coins were stamped with

the portraits of Caesars who deserved honour: Julius Caesar himself and

Augustus; Tiberius and Claudius; Galba, Vespasian, Titus and Nerva.

Others, however, bore witness to more distant reaches of time. Gold and

silver won from the Dacians, turned into coin, were adorned with the

images of heroes from the heyday of the republic, and of Rome’s oldest

buildings, and of the gods who, ever since the foundation of the city, had

watched with a special care over the fortunes of the Roman people. Trajan

might have won conquests fit to compare with those of Alexander, and he

might stand at the head of an empire as vast as any in history; but he was

certainly no king. He ruled as the father of his people: as the heir of all the

men and women who, over the centuries, had made Rome great.

‘Now at last our spirit revives.’42 Tacitus, writing a memorial to his

father-in-law early in Trajan’s reign, had hailed the banishment of shadow

from the senate house. By 112, when he travelled to the province of Asia to

serve as its governor, the entire empire seemed radiant with the brilliance of

a golden age. It was evident, almost half a century on from the death of

Nero, that the collapse of Rome into civil war during the fateful year of the

four emperors had been only a temporary spasm. The peace brought by

Augustus to the world had not been seriously damaged. The sinews that

joined market to market, city to city, province to province still held.

Everywhere, whether in the Bay of Naples, or on the Propontis, or across

the entire vast span of the Mediterranean – named by the Romans,

proprietorially but accurately, ‘our own’ – the sea lanes teemed with

shipping. Never before had the world been so connected. Trajan’s new port

beside Ostia, a vast concrete complex where previously there had been only

mud and reeds, fuelled the appetites of the capital, already voracious, by

ensuring that there was no demand, no fantasy, that might not be satisfied.

To those who contemplated Rome’s greatness it appeared a wonder and a

miracle: that ‘all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth’.43

The capital was not alone in benefiting from the unprecedentedly vast

market established by Roman power. The transport of food stuffs, raw

materials and luxury goods, conducted across vast distances on a scale

never witnessed before, had enabled cities everywhere in the empire to

flourish. Some – Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch – had grown immense on a

scale that would have seemed inconceivable to previous generations; but

even the most flyblown settlement might boast a library. What had been

notable about the famine that gripped Prusa during Dio’s youth was less its

severity than that it had happened at all. Corn, however, was not the only

product to be transported, traded, consumed. The sophisticated framework

of laws, the network of agents, the shipping, the harbours, the warehouses –

everything that over the course of the previous century had enabled Annona

to bestow her blessings on the Roman people – served the interests as well

of countless merchants. The Scauri of Pompeii, purveyors of the finest

garum not just to Campania but to markets as far afield as Gaul, had not

been alone in treating the great sea as their lake. Merchants, cities, entire

regions: all could afford to specialise. There seemed no limit to what might

be shipped: ‘gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and

scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly

wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh,

frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and

chariots, and slaves’.44

This list of the commodities transported to Rome, compiled by a

Judaean resident in the province of Asia, was not intended to flatter. The

city, to those who hated Rome and yearned for its downfall, seemed like a

monstrous parasite swollen with blood and gold. Such a perspective, among

those who scorned the claim of Caesar to the rule of the world, was hardly

surprising. It was not only Judaeans, however, who were capable of looking

askance at the wealth of the age. Tacitus, appointed by Trajan to the

governorship of Asia, had been given responsibility for the province that,

ever since its annexation more than two centuries previously, had been a

byword among the Romans for spectacular extravaganzas: its chefs, its sex

manuals, its statues made out of gold. ‘It was the conquest of Asia’, Pliny’s

uncle had recorded in his encyclopaedia, ‘that first introduced luxury into

Italy.’45 Ever since, the baneful effects of this development had been a

running theme of Roman moralists. Tacitus, an orator of great distinction, a

former consul, a man who had devoted much of his career to the service of

Rome, was no less a patriot for dreading that the very prosperity of the

empire might portend its downfall. When, shortly after Domitian’s murder,

he wrote a laudatory biography of Agricola, he could not help but wonder

whether his father-in-law, exemplary governor though he had been, might

not have done the provincials under his stewardship more harm than good.

Perhaps, by introducing to the savage Britons all the various refinements of

Roman life – baths, fine dining, swanky architecture – he had only debased

them, exactly as the Romans themselves had been debased. ‘For what in

their naivety the Britons termed “civilisation” was in reality a mark of their

enslavement.’46

The fruits of conquest for the Roman people had been manifold: glory,

power, wealth. But what if the fruits of these in turn had been servitude and

decadence? The question was one that Tacitus, over the course of his

illustrious career, had never ceased to brood upon. Like Pliny, he had owed

his early advancement to Domitian; like Pliny, he had felt tainted and

compromised as a result. How was it that the senate had lost its ancient

dower of liberty? Tacitus, in his attempt to make sense of this question, had

never ceased to cast his gaze backwards, to contemplate the rise of the

Caesars from the beginning. He did not, as Pliny did, imagine that the

senate could ever have its dignity restored. The shadow of autocracy lay too

dark. Liberty was nothing but a slogan. Augustus, who claimed to have

restored freedom, libertas, to the republic, had been motivated in all he did

by a spirit of subtle tyranny. Vespasian, who had stamped libertas on his

coins after securing the monarchy, had soon erased it. Tacitus had studied

the history of Augustus’ dynasty and the Flavians with close attention, and

he never doubted what they had constituted: a revolution. Trajan, stamping

his coins as Vespasian had done with the slogan libertas, could not alter

that. ‘The ancient, untouched character of the Roman people was gone.’47

Or was it? In the early years of Trajan’s rule, Tacitus had looked to the

vast expanses of Germany, where there were none of the luxuries that had

so corrupted and softened the Roman people, and dreaded the worst. For

two centuries and more the Germans had preserved their freedom against

the full might of the legions. The Caesars, who initially had sought to

subdue them, had abandoned the attempt. Limits had been set on the

advance of Roman arms. The victories claimed by Domitian, so Tacitus had

noted sourly, ‘were little more than excuses for celebrating triumphs’. 48 But

that, under Trajan, had changed. The conquest of Dacia had demonstrated

that Rome’s ancient quality of martial valour might not, after all, be

completely dead. Was it possible that at last, under a bold and puissant

imperator, Rome might be ready to resume its career of conquest, and fulfil

the destiny ordained it by the gods? Tacitus, in his province, was alert to

tremors that might have been imperceptible to him had he still been in

Rome. He knew that Hadrian, Trajan’s cousin, had been sent east. He was

alert to a brewing succession crisis in Armenia, the mountainous kingdom

that Rome had been content to tolerate as an independent state, but which

periodically – as in the time of Corbulo – had demanded intervention. He

could sense, very faint but unmistakeable, the shaking of the earth, as

legions from across the eastern provinces were subjected to ferocious drills,

forced marches and new bases. It did not require a man of Tacitus’

shrewdness to fathom what this portended. War was brewing. Trajan, who

for five years had been devoting himself to the needs of the capital, was

growing restless. When he next left Rome, however, it would not be for the

Danube or the Rhine. The example of Alexander blazed before him. Where

to look for fresh conquests, fresh glory, if not the East?

‘The liberty of the Germans is a greater menace than the despotism of

the Arsacids.’49 So Tacitus, comparing the two most dangerous peoples on

the borders of Roman power, dismissed the dynasty that ruled the Parthians.

Only a man more familiar with the Rhine than with Syria could ever have

expressed such a sentiment. The Arsacids did not, like German chieftains,

stand at the head of a mere tribe; nor did they lurk amid forests and bogs.

The lands subject to Parthian rule were wealthy, fabled and extensive.

Beyond Syria, flanked on either side by two great rivers, the Tigris and the

Euphrates, lay Assyria and Babylonia, lands studded with famous cities

already ancient when Romulus was born. Mesopotamia, these kingdoms

were called by the Greeks: ‘the lands between the rivers’. Here, amid dreary

mudflats, stood the great seat of Arsacid power, Ctesiphon; but the

homeland of the Parthians lay even farther east, beyond a mighty wall of

mountains on the upland plateau of Iran. These were lands, rich in palaces

and stores of glittering treasure, that Alexander had conquered: a feat that

ever since had served to brand the peoples of Mesopotamia and Iran as

inveterately womanish. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the Greeks.

For many centuries they had clung to it. Even as the subjects of Caesar they

had continued to look down on the Parthians as slavish and effeminate.

This prejudice was one that the Romans had readily come to share. The

Arsacids wore eyeliner, platform heels, and ringlets in their hair. Their

subjects, approaching the royal presence, would kneel like slaves and press

their foreheads to the floor. Their warriors, rather than standing and fighting

as legionaries did, like men, would instead wheel and wheel again on fast-

galloping horses, firing arrows over their shoulders as they sped away. All

the more disgraceful, then, that twice the Parthians should have routed a

Roman invasion force. The first, launched in the final decade of the free

republic, had been annihilated outside a city named Carrhae. Crassus, its

commander, had lost thirty thousand men, seven eagles, and his own head.

Two decades later, when Mark Antony led a second attempt to subdue the

Parthians, he had managed to survive the ensuing debacle with his head still

on his shoulders – but again lost thirty thousand men. Augustus, preferring

diplomacy to war, had negotiated the return of Crassus’ lost eagles and an

enduring peace, a treaty that a long succession of Caesars had been content

to uphold. Nevertheless, the stain of Carrhae had never entirely been wiped

away. The Arsacids remained awkward and untrustworthy neighbours. In

the decades following Nero’s suicide, they had played host to a number of

imposters claiming to be the dead emperor. They persisted in meddling in

Armenia. The very existence of their empire, a dominion barely less

immense than that ruled by Caesar himself, was a standing reproach to the

claim of the Romans to be the masters of the world. All these factors, to a

man of Trajan’s stern and fearless cast of mind, were bound to furnish

matter for thought.

Glory, vengeance, the elimination of Rome’s only true geopolitical rival:

here, it might have been thought, were reasons enough for him to

contemplate war with Parthia. Yet there was, perhaps, glimmering on the

margin of his reflections, a more fantastical motivation. To follow in the

footsteps of Alexander was inevitably to dream of reaching, as Alexander

had done, the ends of the earth. Beyond the limits of Parthian power lay the

land that by common consent was the farthest from Rome and the closest to

the rising of the sun. India, for the Romans, was the very epitome of the

exotic. ‘No land anywhere can rival it for wonders.’50 So Pliny’s uncle, a

man whose fascination with distant marvels was limitless, had written. His

opinion was not, however, original to him. Greek scholars who, in the wake

of Alexander’s expedition to India, had been able to report on it first-hand,

and provide a detailed portrait of that fantastical land, had left no one in any

doubt that it was indeed a realm of superlatives. There were eels that grew

to twice the length of a warship, locusts the size of dogs, snakes that

dropped out of trees and swallowed oxen whole. There were forests taller

than any mortal could shoot an arrow. There were war elephants in the

stable of every king. Pliny’s uncle, despite his ambition to describe the

entire globe, had confessed himself defeated by the sheer teeming

immensity of India. ‘It contains peoples and cities beyond number.’51 Even

so, he had persisted in attempting to list its marvels. The magnetic mountain

beside the Indus. The philosophers who immolated themselves alive. The

people ruled exclusively by queens. So extraordinary were such reports that

they might have seemed, to those who heard them, the invention of a poet

rather than details appropriate to an encyclopaedia. Yet in the wake of

Trajan’s great victory over the Dacians, the Roman people had been able to

witness with their own eyes the appearance in the capital of ambassadors

from India. This embassy, sent to offer congratulations to the emperor on

his victories in Dacia, had created a sensation. Clearly, if the thunder of

Trajan’s greatness had reverberated as far away as India, there was nowhere

that lay beyond the reach of Roman arms. Who was to say, then, that

Alexander might not be surpassed?

In truth, there was no need for Trajan to surrender to wild fantasies of

venturing to the ends of the earth for him to take an interest in India. Cool,

hardheaded pragmatism demanded it as well. A land that from the

perspective of Rome might seem fantastically distant and exotic had a very

different look when viewed from Egypt. There, in Alexandria and in ports

along the Red Sea, there were plenty of mariners who were more than

familiar with its coastline. If India was a land of wonders, then so also was

it a land of quite spectacular luxury goods. The diamond set in the ring

presented by Nerva to Trajan had come from India. So, too, in the expert

opinion of Pliny’s uncle, did the world’s best pearls. Shipmasters from

Egypt, borne on the monsoons that blew eastwards across the Ocean every

spring, would brave reefs, storms and pirates to source them. In Muziris, a

port in southern India hailed by the elder Pliny as the greatest emporium in

the country, merchandise of every description was to be found piled high.

There seemed almost nothing that might not be bought there.

Some products, indeed – the most exotic ones – had been transported

there from the very limits of the world. Silk, a shimmering fabric woven

from a mysterious wool that grew on trees, and as popular with trendsetters

in Rome as it was shocking to moralists, derived either from a people called

the Seres, noted for their ‘golden hair and blue eyes’, 52 or else from a place

called China – a land in every other way unknown. Most of the

commodities on sale in Muziris, however, came from the port’s immediate

hinterland. There was ivory, and tortoise-shell, and malobrathrum, an

aromatic plant used in top-end hair products. Above all, there was pepper, a

black berry which grew on vines guarded by poisonous snakes, could only

be harvested by monkeys, and was ground up to provide a culinary

seasoning. In Rome, food snobs tended not to rate it highly. ‘The only thing

to recommend it is a certain pungency.’53 So sniffed the elder Pliny.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Augustus’ conquest of Egypt, enthusiasm for

pepper among every class of Roman had become a mania. Demand was

voracious. Every spring, vast ships would sail from Berenice, a port on the

Red Sea that had originally been built to enable the import of elephants, and

was the only harbour along Egypt’s Red Sea coast capable of providing

vessels of their gargantuan size with anchorage. The arrival of the

merchants from Egypt in these ships – ‘perfect and wonderful

constructions’, as one Indian poet hailed them, ‘churning the white surf’54 –

was celebrated in Muziris as a great spectacle. Thousands of tons of pepper,

gathered into sacks stamped with the image of a tiger, were exchanged for

chests loaded with Roman gold. It was, for all concerned, a most lucrative

venture.

It was not only the merchants who made a profit, however. So too did

Caesar. The customs duties levied on the trade with India provided the

treasury with a sizeable chunk of its annual income. Every item imported

into Egypt, and every item exported onwards to the rest of the empire, was

subject to tax. It was a measure of just how much income this might raise

that the private contractors appointed by the imperial government to

administer it – the arabarchs – were notorious even in Rome for their

wealth. This was the business that had enabled Julius Alexander’s father,

the Alexandrian who gilded the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem, to make

his fortune. Even after he had served as prefect of Egypt, Julius Alexander

himself continued to be mocked as ‘the Arabarch’. 55 It was not Judaean loot

that had kept the Flavian regime afloat, but duties imposed on the trade in

Indian commodities: Vespasian, simultaneously grasping and contemptuous

of conspicuous consumption, had not hesitated to raise them to eye-

wateringly high levels. Trajan, conscious of his responsibilities as the

Optimus Princeps, and anxious not to price pepper out of the reach of the

average citizen, had lowered the rates again, and done all he could to

expedite the flow of merchandise from India. Not every legion in the

eastern half of the empire was in training for war against Parthia. Even as

Hadrian was summoning an immense expeditionary force to join him in

Antioch, soldiers from the great base outside Alexandria were busy at work

digging a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. 56 It mattered to Trajan

that elites across the empire, and especially in Rome, should enjoy the fruits

of improved access to the treasures of the East. Pearls and diamonds were

not idle luxuries, but trophies appropriate to the dignity of the masters of

the globe. And soon, if all went to plan, and fortune continued to smile on

the best of emperors, there would be even more trophies from the eastern

limits of the world for the Roman people to enjoy.

Trajan arrived in Antioch early in 114. Hadrian had assembled three

legions in the city; but these only hinted at the full scale of the task force

with which his relative was intending to settle the Parthian question once

and for all. That spring, just as Corbulo had once done, Trajan headed

northwards from Antioch for Armenia. At Satala, a base on the frontier

garrisoned by a legion originally transferred by Vespasian from the Rhine,

he completed a rendezvous with two huge contingents drawn respectively

from Syria and the Danube. Then, at the head of some eighty thousand men,

he crossed the border. Briskly, he deposed the Armenian monarch, reduced

Armenia itself to the status of a Roman province, and summoned the

nobility to pay him homage. The local princes, knowing better than to

ignore this command, scurried to obey; one of them, alert to Trajan’s

ultimate ambitions, brought him a horse that had been trained to kneel on its

forelegs and lower its head to the ground, as though it were in the presence

of a Parthian king. The senate, more attuned to Roman tradition, opted to

confirm him in the name Optimus: the honour in which – ‘because it bore

witness to his character rather than to his military prowess’57 – the emperor

took the greatest pride of all.

Once already under Trajan’s leadership, the Roman people had thrilled

as their ancestors had done, to the news of great victories won by the

legions over barbarous peoples, and of the sweep of the eagles over distant

lands. Now they did so a second time. The portrait of Caesar’s exploits on

the eastern front was painted for them in brilliant, primary colours. As in

any epic worthy of the name, there were perils as well as triumphs. Late in

115, after two seasons of campaigning that had secured for Roman rule a

great arc of mountainous territory directly north of Mesopotamia, Trajan

arrived in Antioch. The winter months were marked by ominous portents.

Thunderstorms rolled over the Syrian capital. Winds howled through the

city’s streets. Then, abruptly, there came a great roar, like a bellow of pain

rising up from the earth, and everything began to shake. Trajan, trapped in

his room, was led to safety by a mysterious entity of giant stature; but few

in the city were as fortunate. Multitudes were killed, either crushed by

collapsing masonry, or else by starving to death beneath fallen stone and

timber. Among the casualties was a consul. Only a few of those caught in

the earthquake were rescued. There was one woman who had managed to

sustain both herself and her baby with her breast milk, and another infant

who was found suckling at her dead mother’s breast; otherwise Antioch was

left a city of corpses. And even the peaks of the mountains that lay beyond

it were toppled, and hills flattened, and rivers set on entirely new courses.

Yet Trajan, rather than seeing in the annihilation visited on Antioch a

warning from the gods, interpreted it as encouragement. Mesopotamia

awaited, and the great conqueror was not to be baulked of his prize. That

spring of 116, he embarked on his third season of campaigning. He invaded,

subdued and annexed Assyria, where Alexander had won his greatest

victory. Then, on a flagship with a sail embroidered in gold with his name

and titles, Trajan embarked on the conquest of Babylonia. Down the

Euphrates his great fleet sailed. He did not, however, continue all the way.

Some fifty miles north of Babylon, the fabulously ancient city where

Alexander had died, he ordered his ships transported on rollers across the

mudflats to the Tigris. Here, on the far bank, stood Ctesiphon. The city had

been abandoned. Chosroes, the Parthian king, had fled. Rather than

defending his capital, he had opted for the womanish option: retreat behind

the mountainous frontier of Iran. Trajan, entering Ctesiphon unopposed,

could feel at last that his great labour of conquest was done. The land of

two rivers was his. Chosroes’ humiliation seemed complete. His palace lay

in Roman hands. His daughter was a captive. His golden throne, before

which his subjects had so often prostrated themselves, was a trophy of the

victorious Caesar. Trajan, ready at last to celebrate the consummation of

three hard years of campaigning, accepted the title of ‘Parthicus’, awarded

him a year earlier by the senate, and ordered a coin minted to proclaim his

achievement. Its slogan: PARTHIA CAPTA.

Still, though, he had not reached the limits of Mesopotamia. Beyond him

lay the Persian Gulf, with its shipping lanes to India. Trajan, who had

already commissioned a canal to join the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, had

now, with his eastern conquests, taken an even more decisive step to

facilitate the flow of global commodities into the empire: pepper and

diamonds, pearls and tortoise-shell, malobrathrum and silk. Pliny’s uncle, in

his encyclopaedia, had noted the drain of Roman gold to the East with

alarm; but Trajan, tireless as he was in his service to his fellow citizens, had

not conquered Dacia and Mesopotamia merely to fret over that. Luxuries

were not mere luxuries, but tokens of Roman greatness. What were the

treasures of India if not due tribute paid to the mistress of the world?

So it happened that once Trajan had secured Ctesiphon, he was filled

with a longing to see what lay beyond it. Sailing onwards down the Tigris,

he arrived at the Persian Gulf. ‘And as he stood beside the ocean, and was

briefed about its nature, he saw a ship departing for India. “I should

certainly have crossed to India myself,” he commented, “if only I had been

younger.” Whereupon he fell to contemplation of the Indians, and expressed

curiosity as to how they conducted their affairs. And he reckoned Alexander

to have been a lucky man.’58

OceanofPDF.com

VII

I BUILD THIS GARDEN FOR US

Frontier Spirit

No sooner had Trajan achieved the unprecedented feat of capturing

Ctesiphon and carrying Roman arms to the very shores of the eastern ocean

than all his labours failed him. He had reached too far, too fiercely, after

greatness. Fortune, whose favourite he had been all his life, had abruptly

abandoned him. He learnt this in Babylon, a city that had once, many

centuries before, ruled as the capital of the world, but of which little now

remained save for mounds of crumbling mud-brick. The palace in which

Alexander had died, a complex still topped with Greek roof-tiles but

otherwise a ruin, was where Trajan made sacrifice to the great conqueror;

and it was also where he learned that Mesopotamia had risen in rebellion.

Immediately, he set himself to stamping out the bushfires. Already, his

legates had gone on the attack. Joining forces with them, the emperor

defeated a Parthian army on the outskirts of Ctesiphon, then for a second

time entered the capital in triumph. His situation, even so, remained

precarious. Recognising that his plan to administer Mesopotamia as a

province would temporarily have to wait, he opted to make the best of a bad

job by crowning a renegade son of Chosroes as king and installing him as a

puppet. A more damaging blow to the imperial prestige was soon to follow.

Withdrawing from Ctesiphon to Syria, Trajan paused en route to besiege

Hatra, a citadel that commanded the road between Assyria and Babylonia,

and was notorious for the impregnability of its walls, the aridity of its

setting, and the swarming of its flies. Confronted by these challenges, the

emperor found himself unable to take the city before the approach of

winter; and so, cutting his losses, he withdrew to Antioch. Here, exhausted

by the demands he had placed on his ageing body, he fell ill; but even so,

partially paralysed by a stroke though he was, he refused to rest. There was,

after all, a fourth campaigning season to plan.

The need for this was very pressing. More was at stake than the

maintenance of Roman rule in Armenia and Mesopotamia. The immense

force assembled for the destruction of the Parthian monarchy had left

Rome’s military apparatus with minimal spare capacity. Three years Trajan

and his army had been absent on the eastern front; and in that time the

monopoly of violence habitually exercised by the legions within the limits

of the empire had begun to fray. Whether in the wilds of northern Britain, or

along the Danube, or in Mauretania, the westernmost of Rome’s African

possessions, a lack of ready reinforcements threatened entire provinces with

a breakdown of civil order.

Nowhere, however, was the situation more perilous than in the region

that ranked as the jewel in the imperial crown: Egypt. Here, Alexandria had

always been a sectarian tinderbox. The Roman authorities, stripped of the

reserves that would normally have enabled them to police the city, had

found themselves impotent to suppress running battles in the streets

between Greeks and Judaeans. The rioting had blazed out of control. Entire

stretches of the city had gone up in flames. Meanwhile, farther along the

African coast, in Libya, the ancient Greek city of Cyrene had already been

devastated by a full-blown Judaean uprising. Temples had been attacked

and burnt; statues smashed; a menorah carved into the main road that led

out of the city. By 116, even as Trajan was advancing on the Persian Gulf,

Judaeans across much of the eastern Mediterranean – not just in Egypt and

Cyrenaica, but in Cyprus and Judaea as well – were in open revolt. Hair-

raising reports from the scenes of carnage, brought to the emperor, left him

in no doubt as to that. It was claimed that Roman captives – those who,

supposedly, had not been eaten by the rebels or skinned to provide their

captors with cloaks – were being thrown to wild beasts or forced to fight as

gladiators. The humbling by the insurgents of their erstwhile masters was

pointed and deliberate. The retribution visited decades previously by the

Flavians on the Judaeans was now being visited by the Judaeans on the

Romans themselves.

To the emperor – whose father had played such a key role in Vespasian’s

campaign – the insult was personal. Although Nerva had sought to ease the

burden of the exactions laid on the Judaeans, Trajan, like Domitian,

preferred to keep the sack of Jerusalem and the humiliation of the Judaean

god fully before the gaze of the Roman people. Yet this, now that he had

embarked on the conquest of Mesopotamia, stood revealed as an unwise

policy. Long before, back in the time of Caligula, a governor of Syria had

advised against needlessly insulting the Judaeans. ‘For unlike other

peoples,’ he had warned, ‘they are not confined within the limits of a single

region, but have spread across the entire face of the earth, so that they are to

be found in every continent, and resident on every island.’1 In every empire,

too, he might have added – for there had been Judaeans settled in

Babylonia, the subjects of the Parthian monarchy, for centuries. These, now

that Trajan had come to Mesopotamia, had joined their compatriots in rising

up against the legions. The emperor, during the course of his counter-

insurgency operations, had targeted them with particular savagery. His most

brutal general, a Mauretanian prince named Lusius Quietus, had been

instructed ‘to extirpate them from the province’. 2 Quietus, whose service in

Dacia had already seen him elevated from the rank of auxiliary commander

to senator, had needed no second invitation. The slaughter he inflicted on

the Judaeans of Babylon in the summer of 116 had been something terrible.

Trajan, certainly, had been thoroughly impressed. That winter, as he drew

up his plans for the campaigning season to come, he granted the barbarian

chieftain the status of a consul and bestowed a startling promotion on him.

Lusius Quietus was appointed governor of Judaea.

The coming of spring, however, did not see Caesar return to his own

saddle. Even as insurgency blazed across the Roman world, from Babylonia

to Brigantia, the empire found itself facing an additional crisis. Trajan,

semi-paralysed and convinced that he had been poisoned, decided he had no

choice but to convalesce in Rome. Only a few days after leaving Antioch,

however, his condition took a turn for the worse. His ship pulled into

Selinus, an obscure and shabby port on the southern coast of Anatolia.

Here, in early August, the Optimus Princeps breathed his last. Unlike

Nerva, he had not made it clear who was to succeed him. Meanwhile, back

in Syria, where Trajan had appointed Hadrian to the command of the

eastern front, a dramatic development had taken place. On 9 August, a letter

had been made public to the people of Antioch. It had been written – so

Hadrian claimed – by the Optimus Princeps himself, and proclaimed his

full adoption by the emperor. Two nights later, Trajan’s new son dreamed

that a bolt of fire had descended from the heavens and struck him twice in

his neck, but neither frightened nor harmed him. Then, the following

morning, came the news that the Optimus Princeps was dead. Hadrian at

once reported it to his legions. They enthusiastically hailed him as

imperator. The empire had a new Caesar. But there were many, both in

Rome and elsewhere, who narrowed their eyes at this hurried chain of

events. Hadrian, so his enemies whispered, had been playing dirty. He and

his partisans in Trajan’s entourage had put words into a dying man’s mouth,

bribed his freedmen, faked his correspondence. Hadrian was not the

legitimate emperor. He had staged a coup.

Talk like this, in the midst of an emergency such as Rome was facing,

was perilous in the extreme. A disputed succession, a Judaean insurgency,

trouble on the Danube: here were precisely the circumstances that had

contributed, almost half a century before, to the catastrophe of the year of

four emperors. Yet even as his rivals conspired against him, Hadrian could

cite manifold proofs of his legitimacy. He was Trajan’s closest living male

relative. His wife, Sabina, was the dead emperor’s great-niece. On his

finger he wore the very diamond ring that Nerva, shortly before his death,

had bestowed upon Trajan. Hadrian’s claim to the rule of the world did not

depend, however, solely on his family connections. His entire career had

been preparation for the role. Like Trajan, he had profited from an

unusually long apprenticeship with the legions. He had served on both the

Rhine and the Danube, distinguished himself in the conquest of Dacia, been

entrusted by the dying emperor with the command of the Parthian war. He

was physically tough, always went bare-headed, no matter the heat or the

cold, and never demanded anything of his men that he did not demand of

himself. A stickler for discipline, he was simultaneously adored by the

legions. Like Trajan himself, he was properly an imperator.

Yet Hadrian, steeled by years of military service though he was, had

never been simply a soldier. More than any Caesar since Tiberius, he ranked

as an intellectual. While still a boy, his devotion to philosophy had been

such that he was nicknamed Graeculus – the little Greek. The passion for it

had never left him. Indeed, to a degree that his peers found faintly

suspicious, Hadrian was interested in everything: from music to geometry,

from antiquities to architecture, from poetry to the functioning of the tax

system. Unsurprisingly, many of his contemporaries found it hard to make

sense of him. That he was a Caesar unlike any other was evident from his

chin. The new emperor, in contrast to his clean-shaven predecessors,

sported a beard. This gave him the look of a common soldier, a legionary

serving in some base far distant from elite circles in Rome – or was it,

perhaps, the look of a Greek? Ambiguity came naturally to the new

emperor. Hadrian, to those who studied him, appeared nothing but paradox.

‘By turns stern and affable, severe and playful, hesitant and headstrong,

mean and generous, deceptive and straightforward, merciless and merciful,

he was a man whose character was impossible to pin down.’3 Certainly, in

the early days of his rule, as he sought to master his perilous inheritance,

Hadrian’s capacity to do the unexpected stood him in excellent stead.

Swiftly, subtly, ruthlessly, the rumblings against him in the senate house

were silenced. There was no need for the emperor himself, who was still in

Syria, to leave any fingerprints at the scene. Trajan had recently promoted

Hadrian’s former guardian, a native of Italica by the name of Acilius

Attianus, to the command of the Praetorians; and once Attianus returned

from Selinus to Rome, he played Mucianus to Hadrian’s Vespasian. The

city prefect was dismissed from office; two particularly distinguished

senators were strong-armed into exile; and four men of consular rank were

put to death on charges of treason. A purge, in short, of which Domitian

might have been proud.

Notable among its victims was Lusius Quietus. His elimination served a

double purpose. First, it demonstrated to legates across the empire that

Hadrian would tolerate no rogue elements within his command structure.

Second, it signalled to Judaeans in Judaea itself that there might be the

possibility of a rapprochement with Rome. It was the carrot, not the stick,

that proved most effective in inducing them to lay down their arms. Some

went so far as to hail the new emperor as a deliverer. Perhaps, they dared to

hope, he might license the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Quietus, during his brief

term as governor, had installed a shrine to Proserpina on the blackened rock

where the Temple had once stood – but this he had done as a legate of

Trajan. Hadrian, unlike either his adoptive father or the Flavians, had no

personal stake in keeping Jerusalem a ruin. What, then, was to stop him

from granting permission for the Temple to be rebuilt? Why should the

perfumes of sacrifice not rise once again over Jerusalem? Who was the new

Caesar, some Judaeans dared to wonder, if not the favourite of the Holy

One Himself, and the redeemer of His Chosen People?

Hadrian, however, had other priorities. With Armenia and Mesopotamia

a quagmire, much of the eastern Mediterranean in flames, and the Balkans

menaced yet again by barbarians from beyond the Danube, the stakes could

hardly have been higher. The entire infrastructure of Roman rule appeared

in danger of collapse. Hadrian, applying the pitiless gaze of a pathologist to

the tissue and sinews of the empire, did not hesitate to arrive at his

diagnosis. Trajan, best of emperors though he might have been, had

advanced too far beyond the natural limits of Roman rule. The strain on the

empire’s resources had been too great. It was not only Trajan who had

suffered a stroke. So had Rome itself. The treatment, then – brutal though it

might be – prescribed itself. Days after coming to power, Hadrian ordered

all of Trajan’s conquests in Armenia and Mesopotamia evacuated. Forces

that had already been committed to the suppression of the Judaean uprising

were reinforced. Now at last the full murderous professionalism of the

legions could be brought to bear on the rebels. The slaughter was terrible.

By the time order was finally restored, the Judaean populations in

Cyrenaica and Cyprus had effectively been eradicated, and in Alexandria

reduced to a ghostly shadow.

Meanwhile, as autumn turned to winter, Hadrian himself was heading

for the shores of the Propontis. Here, midway between the eastern theatre of

war and the Balkans, he spent his first winter as Caesar. By spring he had

arrived on the Danube. The need for his presence was urgent. As had been

the case in Armenia and Mesopotamia, major surgery was required. Hadrian

had not hesitated to perform it. Large stretches of territory to the west of

Dacia, only recently secured by the Optimus Princeps, were abandoned.

The celebrated stone bridge designed by Apollodorus was demolished, to

impede potential incursions. So shocking a betrayal of Trajan’s legacy did

this seem to many observers that Hadrian was widely rumoured to have

planned the evacuation of Dacia itself, and only with difficulty been

dissuaded. The wide currency given to this story was due reflection of just

how unpopular the policy of retrenchment was. The abandonment of

Trajan’s conquests by his successor ensured that they blazed even more

brilliantly than they would otherwise have done in the memory of the

Roman people.

Hadrian himself, shrewd and alert to public opinion, perfectly

understood this. When at last, almost a year after the death of his adoptive

father, he entered Rome for the first time as Caesar, he made sure to tread

with a cat-like care. Tact and cynicism, seamlessly fused, characterised his

every policy. He counterpointed the high-handed lavishing of bribes on the

masses – donatives, a remittance of debts – with a manner ostentatiously

reminiscent of a private citizen. Appearing before the senate, he solemnly

denied all responsibility for the deaths of the four senators purged by

Attianus; then, having dismissed his old guardian from the Praetorians, he

coolly raised him to the rank of a consul. Perhaps the most impressive

display of Hadrian’s ability to face two ways at once came with the

celebration of his predecessor’s victories in Parthia. This, of course, had

always had the potential to cause him embarrassment; but Hadrian, rather

than attempting to draw a veil over the matter, insisted instead that the dead

Trajan be awarded a triumph. A statue of the by now deified Optimus

Princeps was loaded onto a chariot and drawn through the streets of Rome.

His ashes, which had been brought with mournful ceremony from Selinus,

were buried beneath the great column in his forum. Munera were staged to

celebrate his victories in Mesopotamia: the ‘Parthian Games’. As for the

role played by Hadrian in withdrawing from the provinces Trajan had won,

and bringing the supposedly triumphant war to an end, no mention was

made of it.

There were many among the Roman elite – the sceptical, the weary, the

disillusioned – who scorned to be fooled by this. Tacitus, who had dared to

hope that Trajan’s wars of conquest, reminiscent as they were of the heroic

days of the republic, might mark a return of health and vigour to Rome,

found no cause for optimism in the new Caesar’s character. The mirror that

the past held up to the present was a sombre one. It was no problem, for a

scholar of Tacitus’ learning and temperament, to identify an ominous

parallel to Hadrian in the line of his predecessors. Tiberius, Augustus’ heir,

had been rigorously schooled in war and possessed of immense intellectual

gifts, but moody, suspicious, impossible to fathom. His coming to power

had prompted a number of shadowy crimes. Four senators had been put to

death on a charge of treason. Meanwhile, for all the battle-honours Tiberius

had won as the legate of Augustus, he had refused, on becoming princeps

himself, to sanction the advance of Roman arms. To be sure, he had

presided over an age of peace – but a sterile, stagnant one, devoid of all

glory and polluted by blood. Rome, once the city of a free people, had

become a despotism. The empire had sunk into lethargy. The ancestral

virtues of its citizens, the very qualities which had served to win them the

world, had been lost to decay and corruption. This it was that had enabled

Tiberius to rule as a tyrant – and after him Caligula, Nero and Domitian.

Who, then, was to say that the new Caesar would prove any different?

Tacitus did not dare to pose the question openly; but he did, by embarking

on a history of Tiberius and his successors just as Hadrian came to power,

presume to float it. Certainly, the senate had good reason to regard its new

master with suspicion – and also to veil its suspicion. Tacitus, writing about

the mood in Rome during the early days of Tiberius’ rule, understood the

instinct well. ‘The higher the rank of a man, the more urgently he felt the

need to dissemble what he thought.’4

Hadrian himself, meanwhile, was no less scornful of his critics than they

were of him. As well read in history as in everything else, he had no need to

rely on sour and malevolent senators to interpret the past for him. It was not

Tiberius to whom he compared himself, but Augustus. This was why, when

he sealed his communications, he did so with a signet ring engraved with

the head of the first princeps. It was why, when his chief secretary, the man

responsible for managing his correspondence, came across a bronze of

Augustus as a boy, complete with antique lettering, the official made sure to

present this rare and precious find to the emperor himself. Suetonius had

risen far. His eye for a useful patron had proven unerring. Although Pliny

had died shortly before the invasion of Parthia, a friend of his, a man

‘reliable, frank and trustworthy’5 by the name of Gaius Septicius Clarus,

had taken Suetonius under his wing, adopting him as a protégé. In 119,

when Septicius was appointed to the command of the Praetorians, the post

Attianus had recently vacated, Suetonius’ position at the heart of the

imperial establishment appeared assured. Alert to Hadrian’s self-

identification with the first princeps, and taking full advantage of the ready

access he enjoyed to the imperial archives, he embarked on a lengthy life of

Augustus. Although, once he had finished it, he dedicated the biography to

Septicius, the patron he really aimed to please was the emperor himself.

Suetonius’ portrait of Augustus bore an unmistakeable resemblance to

Hadrian. ‘Never did he make war on a people without just and pressing

cause, nor was he a man to lust after any expansion of the empire, or his

own renown as a conqueror.’6 This, as a description of the warlord who had

annexed Egypt, completed the pacification of Spain, and repeatedly sought

to subdue the Germans, was not, perhaps, as accurate as it might have been;

but as a mission statement for Hadrian it served very well.

Certainly, to claim sanction for change from the example of Augustus

was no mere antiquarian eccentricity. Radicalism, in the opinion of the

Romans, was sinister by its very nature. The phrase novae res – novel

enterprises – was convenient shorthand for everything destructive of the

settled order. This was why Augustus himself, even as he was constructing

a monarchy, had insisted that he was restoring the republic. Hadrian,

confronted by the task of setting the empire back on a stable footing after

Trajan’s disastrous invasion of Mesopotamia, had little choice but to parade

his devotion to the first princeps. In reality, however, he was forging

policies that were distinctively his own. The challenge facing Hadrian was

twofold. First, he needed to project an image of himself as the heir to

Trajan’s martial prowess, as an imperator in deed as well as name, while

simultaneously undoing much of what his predecessor had attempted. This

in turn, however, served to commit him to a far more fundamental

programme of reform. If, as Hadrian had come to believe, expeditions

beyond the natural limits of Roman rule threatened the entire fabric of the

empire with collapse, then it followed that the venerable dream of a

dominion without limit, one that might authentically span the world, was a

fantasy. Such a conclusion, to moralists in the capital, was naturally

anathema; but Hadrian, who had spent much of his life on the limits of

Roman rule, was able to embrace it precisely because his horizons were so

expansive and broad. This, of course, inevitably imposed demands. Hadrian

had no hope of imposing a radical restructuring of Rome’s military

apparatus from the capital itself. Only by touring the rivers, the mountains

and the deserts that delineated the limits of the empire could he hope to

push through such a policy. Fortunately, Hadrian had a taste for travel.

‘Such was his wander-lust that he only had to read about some distant

region to be filled with a longing to learn more about it first-hand.’7 So it

was that three years after his arrival in the capital as emperor, he set off on a

tour of the Roman world.

Taking the road northwards from Rome to Gaul, the imperator was

accompanied by leading members of his court. Sabina, his wife, was with

him. So, too, representing the imperial secretariat, was Suetonius. The

administration of the world never took a holiday, after all. Correspondence

still needed to be handled, whether Caesar was in the Palatine or out on the

open road. Hadrian’s primary concern, however, was not with civilian

matters. The initial object of his journey was the Rhine. Arriving in

Mogontiacum, touring the Taunus, wintering ‘amid German snows’, 8 he

drilled the legions as though a great war with the barbarians might be

brewing. Bearded and bare-headed, he made a point of setting the

legionaries a personal example. If there were twenty-mile marches in full

armour to be done, he would do them. If there were basic rations to be

eaten, he would eat them. If there was rough wine to be drunk, he would

drink it.

Yet even as Hadrian scorned to fasten his cloak with jewelled clasps or

to carry a fussily decorated sword, he never let anyone forget that his rank

was that of a commander-in-chief, heir to the noblest traditions of Roman

arms. This was why, at his back, he had both a detachment of Praetorians,

led by Septicius, the prefect, and a thousand Batavian horsemen. It was why

as well, even as he made sure that he knew every soldier’s name, he was

implacable in correcting even the slightest hint of ill-discipline. No one was

to say, when he gave orders for the limits of Roman rule in Germany to be

marked by a continuous palisade, fashioned out of massive oak posts and

crossbeams, that he was permitting his men to go soft. Quite the opposite.

The excellence of the soldiers’ discipline, together with the stupefying scale

of the palisade they were engaged in building, signalled to Roman and

barbarian alike that the proficiency of the legions was as formidable as it

had ever been: lethal, irresistible, terrifying. The truest show of contempt

that Hadrian could display towards the Germans, however, was not to

launch punitive expeditions against them, but to fence them off altogether.

What concern was it to the lord of a spreading garden, after all, that outside

its walls, squatting in filth and scratching at their sores, there might lie

beggars, envious of the fountains, the fruit trees, the flower beds from

which they were barred?

‘If Hadrian trained his soldiers as though conflict were imminent, then it

was because he was eager not for war, but for peace.’9 There were few,

during his tour of the Rhine, who felt that this redounded to his discredit.

Germany, after all, had been in a settled condition for many decades.

Beyond the Ocean, by contrast, it was a different story. In the spring of 122,

Hadrian sailed for a province that seemed positively to demand the

attentions of a warlike and conquering Caesar. Britain, during the dying

days of Trajan’s rule, had been convulsed by uprisings. The legions

stationed in the province had suffered heavy casualties. Only with difficulty

had order been restored. Yet even after several years of campaigning,

Rome’s command of the Ocean remained circumscribed. The northern

reaches of Britain, conquered by Agricola, abandoned by Domitian, were

still lost to barbarism. Had Trajan travelled to the island as Hadrian was

now doing, he would never have tolerated such a situation. He would have

embarked on a campaign of reconquest, and brought the entire island back

under Roman rule. All his admirers believed this – and Hadrian knew they

believed it. The challenge of how best to order the limits of Roman power,

and ‘to separate the barbarians from the Romans’, 10 was, then, a much more

awkward one to meet in Britain than it had been in Germany. The risk for

Hadrian was that he might compromise his entire project of stabilising the

empire: that by spurning the chance to emulate Trajan, he might cast

himself in the eyes of the Roman people as a new Domitian.

Agrippa, camped beneath Mount Graupius, had dispatched a fleet to

glimpse distant Thule. Hadrian, touring the northernmost limits of Roman

power, surveyed the line that a great stone wall was to take, clinging to

crags, bristling with forts, running from coast to coast. The emperor’s

enterprise was quite as much an expression of assertiveness as the

governor’s had been. To explore the limits of the world was one thing; but

to dismiss them as unworthy of conquest ranked as an altogether more

imperious display of self-confidence. When Hadrian made sacrifice to the

Ocean beside the Tyne, he was not doing so as a hapless supplicant, frantic

to stabilise his position. Quite the opposite. The emperor had brought

substantial reinforcements with him to Britain: some fifty thousand men, a

tenth of his entire military force, were now stationed in the province. The

commitment to garrisoning the reaches of the island that had merited

subjugation, and to constructing a wall fashioned entirely out of stone to

mark its limits, only emphasised the worthlessness of those barren reaches

left unsubdued. To march into the lands of barbarians, to defeat them in

battle, to bring them the benefits of rule by the Roman people: here, it went

without saying, were actions worthy of a Caesar. But to pen them up, to

leave them to their own savagery, to make clear to them with walls and

palisades their irrelevance: this, too, was a course of action that might

redound to an emperor’s glory. Rome’s destiny was not, as had long been

claimed, to rule the limits of the world; rather, it was to rule the limits of

those lands that merited its rule.

Six years after Hadrian, standing on the banks of the Tyne, had mapped

out his plans for a great wall, he arrived in Africa. No emperor had ever set

foot there before – not even Augustus. Suetonius, diligent in his researches,

had noted that it ranked alongside Sardinia as one of only two provinces the

first princeps had not visited – although Suetonius himself, who had

travelled with Hadrian through Gaul, Germany and Britain, was no longer

in the imperial train. His term of office in the secretariat had been brought

to a scandalous end after he and Septicius, his patron, had been accused of

indecorous behaviour in the presence of Sabina. Hadrian, a man sensitive to

every slight, did not approve of improprieties. Discipline was all. As in

Germany and Britain, so in Africa: this was the message the emperor had

come to instil. There was just the one legion in the entire province; but this

only made its responsibilities the more important. Lambaesis, its base, was

not an appealing destination. Situated in a location barely more hospitable

than the northern wilds of Britain – ferociously hot in summer, freezing

cold in winter – it was only half complete. This did not put off Hadrian.

Arriving at Lambaesis, he did so, as ever, bareheaded. A mile and a half

west of the base there stood a parade ground; and here, after watching

manoeuvres, Hadrian delivered a series of addresses. Praise was given, and

advice, and the occasional admonishment. Units expert at building walls out

of stone, and cutting ditches through tough gravel, were singled out for

special commendation. The horseman proficient with a javelin, the

legionary proficient with a pick: such were the men who prevented the

world from falling apart. It was to show his respect for them and their

fortitude that Hadrian had travelled to Lambaesis. His aim was not to lead

them into battle, but to steel them in their responsibility as guardians of the

Roman peace. ‘Soldiers, I salute your spirit!’11

Meanwhile, beyond the olive groves that extended for a hundred miles

south of Lambaesis, beyond a range of mountains, and beyond the scrub

that marked the beginning of endless desert, there stretched a wall

fashioned out of mud-bricks, punctuated by watchtowers, and garrisoned by

auxiliaries. Along the southern reaches of the world, as along the northern

ones, the limits of civilisation were marked by the apparatus of Roman

power. Beyond them lay nothing, behind them everything that made life

worth living.

What, after all, was a garden without a wall?

The Glory That Was Greece

Once, during the term of exile Domitian had imposed on him, Dio of Prusa

was roaming the wilds of southern Greece. Above Olympia, the sanctuary

to Zeus where Nero had raced his chariot and won first prize, the

philosopher had found himself hopelessly lost. Stumbling through rugged

woodland, he saw, on the crest of a hill, ‘a clump of oaks that looked like a

sacred grove’.12 Sure enough, once he had clambered his way up to inspect

it, Dio found a shrine fashioned out of crude stone. The skins of various

animals were hanging from it, together with a number of clubs and staffs.

Sitting nearby was a peasant woman, grey-haired but still strong and

handsome despite her advanced years. The shrine, she informed Dio, was

sacred to Hercules. She herself, she revealed, had been blessed by the gods

with the gift of prophecy. She fixed Dio with her stare. His exile, she told

him, would not last for ever. He was destined once again to mix with the

high and mighty. ‘For the day will come when you meet with a man so

powerful that lands and peoples without number will be subject to his

sway.’13

Sure enough, in time, Dio did meet with such a man. Standing before

Trajan, he mentioned the anecdote. It might almost have been calculated to

appeal to a Roman audience. Rare was the senator so hard-headed that he

did not cherish the notion that somewhere, in groves of ancient trees or on

the slopes of mountains, the wondrous might still be stumbled upon. In

landscapes measured out by surveyors and divided up into immense estates,

even the most sophisticated plutocrat might cherish reminders of a more

primitive but god-haunted age. Pliny, staying outside Comum, had noted

how, during the harvest, huge crowds would descend on an ancient temple

to Ceres that stood on his estate. He had been much moved by this spectacle

of devotion to the goddess. It had perturbed him, however, that the temple

was crude and cramped, and the people who gathered there ‘lacked shelter

from the rain and the sun’. 14 Accordingly, in a spirit of mingled piety and

paternalism, he had commissioned a refurbishment. Let the temple be

supplied with marble for its columns and floors, he had instructed, the

wooden statue of the goddess replaced with one carved from stone, and a

portico built to provide shelter. It had been Pliny’s ambition that his tenants

should enjoy the best of both worlds: a site of worship still hallowed by its

antiquity and rural setting, but given a splendid upgrade, in accordance with

the very latest in architectural fashion.

Dio, giving his speech to Trajan, had aimed to pull a similar trick.

Redolent of a vanished age of myth though the old woman was, she had

soon revealed herself, in her conversation with the philosopher, to be

startlingly familiar with the currents of the age. When she talked of

Hercules, the divine hero to whom the rough-hewn shrine was dedicated,

she might almost have been describing Caesar. ‘Not merely the king of

Greece was he, but lord over every land from the rising to the setting of the

sun.’15 Yet Hercules, godlike and glorious though he was, could not rule the

world unguided. He first had to be shown the path to true wisdom. His

father, Zeus – the name by which the Greeks knew Jupiter – had duly

arranged for this to happen. Hercules, brought before a mountain with twin

peaks, had been instructed to climb each summit in turn. On one he found

enthroned a woman wearing a malignant scowl, surrounded by a train of

attendants: Cruelty, and Lawlessness, and Insolence. Tyranny she was

called – but few who heard Dio describe her would have failed to recognise

in her something of Domitian. Meanwhile, on the other peak, sat a woman

as radiant and lovely as her sister had been ugly and forbidding. Royalty,

this queen was called; and the names of her ladies-in-waiting were Civic

Order, and Law, and Peace. Of these three, it was Peace who was the

fairest: ‘for she was exceedingly beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and with the

very loveliest of smiles’.16 All this the old peasant woman had narrated to

Dio; and Dio, in turn, had narrated it to Caesar.

Trajan, of course – although flattered by the oration – had paid no

attention to its key recommendation. That a man as muscularly Roman as

the conqueror of Dacia would ever have allowed himself to be guided in his

policy by a philosopher was a notion so far-fetched that he had doubtless

failed even to realise he was being asked to entertain it. Dio, while perfectly

alert to what the Roman elites wanted from him, had never thought to make

sense of the brute reality of their power except in terms that were

determinedly, defiantly Greek. This approach was one that had long tended

to characterise the perspective of philosophers on their Roman masters.

Chauvinist and naïve in equal measure, it derived from an age when the

world had been ruled, not by Caesar, but by the heirs of Alexander.

Increasingly, however, to a new generation of the Greek upper classes, it

was coming to seem badly out of date. If wealth and status offered the

nobility of a province such as Bithynia the chance, as it had always done, to

study philosophy and play the intellectual, then so also, unexpectedly,

thrillingly, dazzlingly, had it begun to offer them the prospect of careers at

the very summit of the Roman state. The first senator from the province, an

equestrian promoted by Vespasian, had come from Apameia; but already, in

Dio’s own lifetime, Bithynians were starting to arrive in the senate as well

from cities that had never ranked as coloniae. Why, then, should an

ambitious young man from Nicomedia or Nicaea, of good family and

education, imagine that the only way to win influence with Caesar was to

play Aristotle to his Alexander? Why should he not aim to be a consul as

well as a philosopher, a commander of armies as well as a chronicler of

their deeds, a Roman as well as a Greek?

Such questions spoke of a new sense of identity among the Bithynian

elites. Dio, for all his Roman citizenship, had never had any wish to become

a Roman. Visiting the island of Rhodes, he had been appalled to discover

that when the locals wished to flatter a visiting dignitary, they would chisel

his name onto an ancient statue, thereby erasing the very identity of the

hero to whom it had originally been dedicated. This, it had seemed to the

philosopher, was the fate awaiting any city that betrayed its own heritage by

slavishly apeing Roman manners: the erasure of its past. Yet even as Dio

was making this argument, the ground was shifting beneath his feet.

Ambitious young noblemen from cities like Prusa saw no contradiction

between devotion to the glories of their native culture and commitment to

the demands of Roman public life. The distance between Bithynia and the

imperial capital was starting to shrink.

No one illustrated this better than a brilliant intellectual from

Nicomedia: Lucius Flavius Arrianus. Some forty years younger than Dio,

Arrian combined a resolute pride in his native land with horizons as broad

as the Roman empire itself. He had studied philosophy in Greece with

Epictetus, a former slave universally honoured as the most brilliant

philosopher of the age; composed poetry; written a life of Alexander the

Great. Simultaneously, he had been entrusted by Trajan with the command

of a particularly rugged corner of Armenia; gained promotion from Hadrian

into the senate; governed Baetica, the province which boasted the home

town of both of his imperial patrons. Over the course of his career, he

would chart the coast of the Black Sea and the tributaries of the Danube;

marvel at the Caucasus and the Alps; witness African nomads hunting on

horseback. He was a Greek, he was a Roman, he was a citizen of the

world.17

A man better qualified to strike a chord with Hadrian it would have been

hard to imagine – and so it had proved. The two men had met a few years

before Trajan’s great war against Parthia, when Hadrian, dispatched from

Rome to prepare the ground for the invasion, had paused a while in Greece,

and sat at the feet of Epictetus. The friendship forged by the two students of

the great philosopher was to prove an enduring one. It helped that they had

numerous interests in common: philosophy, yes, and literature and history,

but also – and perhaps especially – hunting. It helped as well that Hadrian,

with his beard, his preference for Greek over Roman poetry, and his

insatiable appetite for travel, displayed a readiness unprecedented among

his predecessors to meet a provincial like Arrian halfway. If the Bithynian,

in his ambition to attain a consulship, had little choice but to take on Roman

manners, then the emperor, devoted as he was to the legacy of Greece, had

few compunctions, while touring the eastern half of the empire, in adopting

the manners of a Greek.

Hadrian visited Arrian’s homeland in 123, on the second leg of the same

expedition that had already taken him to Germany and Britain. As in the

west, so in the east, his aim was to tend to the wounds recently inflicted on

the empire and make an attempt at healing them. In Cyrenaica, he had

ordered the restoration of monuments ‘destroyed and burned down in the

Jewish disturbances’;18 on the banks of the Euphrates, he had held a summit

with Chosroes; in Antioch, he had graced the still shattered city with a bath-

house and an aqueduct. Bithynia, although it had been spared war and

rebellion, had also demanded Hadrian’s attention: for, like the Syrian

capital, it had recently been devastated by an earthquake. Nicomedia,

Arrian’s home town, had suffered particular damage. Even though Hadrian

had been preparing to depart for the German frontier when the disaster

struck, he had responded with notable generosity. Unsurprisingly, then,

when he finally arrived from Syria in Nicomedia, he received an ecstatic

welcome. Crowds lined the streets to cheer. Civic dignitaries hailed him as

their saviour. Coins portrayed him raising the city from its knees.

Why had Hadrian been so ready with a helping hand? The funds

lavished on restoring Nicomedia could certainly be justified in cool,

strategic terms: the Propontis, as the imperator well knew, was key to the

command of both the Euphrates and the Danube. That, after all, was why he

had spent his first winter as Caesar on its shores. Yet when he sponsored the

beautifying of a city such as Nicomedia, he had more than the defences of

the empire on his mind. His friendship with Arrian reflected not just

personal compatibility, but admiration for much that the Greek upper

classes represented. Unlike Trajan, who had dismissed them as Graeculi,

‘little Greeks’, Hadrian himself had once been mocked as a Graeculus.

Now, though, he was Caesar, and the wealth of the empire was his to do

with as he pleased. By restoring the monuments of an ancient city, by

sponsoring its festivals, by gracing its leading men with the proofs and

marks of his favour, he aimed not just to revive its cultural glories, but to

appropriate them to the greater glory of Rome and its empire. The beauty

and the eeriness of myth, which had once hallowed every reach, every

corner of the Greek world, were to be redeemed from oblivion by Caesar’s

patronage. Past was to merge with present; the local with the cosmopolitan.

Such was the garden that Hadrian wished to tend: one that, like him, was

‘various, infinite, possessed of many forms’.19

Dio, addressing Trajan, had evoked a world in which the dimensions of

myth and the imperial court shed light on each other. To come from

Bithynia, perhaps, was to take for granted that Hercules might serve as a

point of reference for a Caesar. Gaze out from Prusa, and the view was not

just of the Propontis, that vitally strategic seaway, but of a mountainous

promontory named Arganthonius. Here it was, during a voyage bound for

the Black Sea, that Hercules had landed with his attendant: a boy of

exquisite beauty by the name of Hylas. Disaster had quickly followed.

Climbing the side of the mountain in search of water, Hylas had come

across a spring. Gazing into the waters that rose from it, he had found

himself staring into the face of a beautiful nymph. Seeing her arms rise up

to seize him, feeling her reach for him with her lips, he had cried out in

alarm – but it had been too late. Hylas had vanished, swallowed up by the

water. Hercules, although he had roamed the mountainside for days,

bellowing in anguish, had searched for the boy in vain. ‘And still to this day

the people of Prusa commemorate his bereavement, taking to the mountain

in a kind of festival, marching in procession, crying out for Hylas.’20

Trajan – whose passion for boys was such that an Assyrian king, looking

to win the emperor’s favour, had secured it by getting his son to perform

‘some barbaric dance or other’21 – might well have been intrigued by such a

custom, had Dio only thought to report it. Hadrian, touring Bithynia, was

certainly alert to the allure of the region’s myths: the way in which they

touched the landscape with their radiance, the mirror they held up to human

existence. A glimpse of the divine in a boy’s smooth cheek: here was

something which merited the attention of Caesar no less than roads and

docks. Why, after all, labour at keeping a garden secure, only to ignore its

blooms? Hadrian embraced every aspect of the empire that he ruled. ‘He

was an explorer after all things fascinating.’22

Which was why, much travelled though he might be, there was one

destination more than any other which he clasped to his heart. Bithynia had

its attractions, to be sure, and so too did many other reaches of the Greek

world. Nowhere, however, could begin to rival the legacy – mythological,

historical, poetical, architectural, philosophical – of one particular city:

Athens. Six hundred years had passed since the founding of its democracy

and the glories of its golden age, when it had ranked as both the bulwark

and the school of Greece; and two hundred years since a Roman task force,

breaching the city’s walls and pillaging it with brutal abandon, had brought

a definitive end to its independence. Since then Athens had subsisted as a

shadow of its former self: somnolent, provincial, impotent. The Athenians,

once the trendsetters for the entire world, now flocked to the foot of the

Acropolis to cheer on gladiators. There, in the very shadow of the

Parthenon, the Theatre of Dionysus – where Sophocles had staged his

tragedies and Aristophanes his comedies – was washed with blood. Yet

Roman tourists, for all the mild contempt they might feel for the Athenians

as a people reduced to parasitism on their own ancestors, could not help but

thrill to the sheer glorious immanence of the past in the city’s streets. Even

Cicero, a man of obdurate chauvinism when it came to foreign travel, had

acknowledged it. ‘Wherever we tread in the city, we tread on hallowed

ground.’23 To walk where Pericles had walked; to sit where Plato had sat; to

speak where Demosthenes had spoken: here, even for the most philistine

tourist, was a moving, stirring experience.

And for Hadrian, very heaven. He had first visited Athens in 112, shortly

after his spell of study with Epictetus. He had arrived in the city as a figure

of already menacing rank: Trajan’s relative and heir presumptive, charged

with laying the groundwork for war with Parthia. The Athenians, flattered

to find such a powerful man so obviously smitten by their city, had heaped

honours on him: citizenship, a senior magistracy, a statue in the Theatre of

Dionysus. But these were not the only benefits Hadrian had derived from

his visit to Athens. While in the city he had met with a living embodiment

of the future: Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus, a grandee

whose formidable array of names bore splendid witness to his status as a

one-man melting pot. Descended from one of Alexander the Great’s

generals, he was the grandson of the last king of Commagene, a small realm

in northern Syria that Vespasian had annexed in 72. Philopappus’ father, the

first of his line to become a Roman citizen, had fought for Otho at Cremona

and with Titus at Jerusalem. Philopappus himself was the grandson of a

king who had been raised to the consulship by Trajan. He had also – just for

good measure – served as the chief magistrate of Athens. Fabulously rich,

fabulously well-connected, fabulously civilised, he was hailed by the

philosophers and scholars who profited from his patronage as ‘a man of

immense generosity, magnificent in the rewards he handed out’. 24 His sister,

Julia Balbilla, who lived with him in Athens, was a celebrated poet. The

presence there of such a pair of siblings – dynasts simultaneously Greek,

Syrian and Roman – was tribute to the enduring hold of the city on the

world’s imagination. Hadrian was prompted by it, perhaps, to a momentous

reflection: that Athens might not, after all, be as irredeemably provincial as

the Roman elite had always tended to assume.

Certainly, by late 123, when he first visited Athens as emperor, Hadrian

had come to imagine a future for the city as something more than a tourist

trap. He based himself there for almost a year and a half – and in that time

he lavishly repaid the Athenians for the honours they had granted him a

decade previously. With sensitivity and grace he displayed respect for their

traditions. When he attended the Theatre of Dionysus, it was not to cheer on

gladiators, but to preside over one of the city’s most sacred festivals. Taking

his seat at the foot of the Acropolis, he did so in Athenian dress. It was not

his intention, however, to wallow in nostalgia. Profound though his respect

for the glories of the Athenian golden age might be, Hadrian wished to

renew the city, not preserve it in aspic. That he celebrated the legacy of

Athens’ past did not prevent him from commissioning a massive project of

urban renewal. Even as he left the Acropolis well alone, he lavished

infrastructure on the city appropriate to a modern capital: baths, aqueducts,

reservoirs. This, even by the standards of his generosity to Antioch or

Nicomedia, was largesse on a prodigious scale. It was almost as though the

city were being founded a second time.

Nothing, perhaps, better exemplified Hadrian’s plans for Athens, the

manner in which he was obsessed simultaneously by the antique and the

cutting-edge, than his single most spectacular grand projet. For almost six

and a half centuries, in a building site south-east of the Acropolis, a colossal

temple of Zeus had stood unfinished. Such was the scale of its design that

even an ancestor of Philopappus – a king of Syria, no less – had failed to

complete it. Now, under Hadrian, the builders returned to work. Vast

columns began to rise where previously there had been only foundations. A

wall half a mile long was built to enclose the site. A statue of Zeus

fashioned out of gold and ivory, surpassed in size only by the Colossus in

Rome, was readied in a nearby workshop. At once an ancient monument

and a masterpiece of modern design, the temple was an unmistakeable

statement of the emperor’s vision for the Greek world: one that prompted

Greeks themselves to hail him as ‘the benefactor of his subjects – and

especially of Athens’. 25

By late 128, when Hadrian returned to his favourite city, the temple of

Olympian Zeus – the Olympeion – was nearing completion. Also taking

shape were his plans not just for Athens, but for the entire Greek world.

Earlier that year, standing on the dusty parade ground at Lambaesis,

Hadrian had been inspecting the defences of the empire, and testing the

mettle of those who stood guard over them. Now, arriving in Athens, he

was labouring still to keep the world in order. Those who knew him well

had long appreciated this. ‘Observe the profound peace that Caesar has

procured for us.’ So Epictetus had marvelled. ‘There are no wars or battles,

no bandits or pirates, with the result that we may travel as we please, and

sail from east to west.’26 The philosopher had a long memory. He was old

enough to remember the year of the four emperors, and to be grateful that

the world was no longer being trampled beneath the tread of rival warlords.

Born a slave, and disabled from an early age, Epictetus had no illusions as

to how brutal life might be. The value he placed on the Pax Romana was

neither wishful thinking nor sycophancy. It was the considered judgement

of a man widely viewed as the wisest in the world.

Yet Epictetus had spoken not only as the world’s most distinguished

intellectual but as a Greek. He knew – just as Arrian, who recorded his

words, knew – that the history of Greece before the coming of Rome had

been ceaseless conflict. Cities that now profited from the Pax Romana had

once, back in the days of their liberty, forever been tearing chunks out of

each other. Did this mean, then, that conquest by Rome had been for the

Greeks’ own good? There were many, unsurprisingly, who shrank from

acknowledging this. Even as Dio lamented the inability of Greek cities to

live in harmony with one another, he had seen the attentions of Roman

governors as something to be feared. Addressing the people of Nicomedia,

whose rivalry with the Nicaeans was notorious, he had urged them to

recognise just how damaging their squabbling was, and how demeaning. To

appreciate this, they had only to look to history. The Athenians, back in

their golden heyday, had flaunted their predominance, thrown their weight

around, put other cities in their shadow. By doing so, they had roused the

envy of the one power in Greece that could compare with Athens for

greatness: the fearsome warrior state of Sparta. The two cities had ended up

going to war. The consequences had been ruinous for both – and for all the

Greeks. It was what had led, in the long run, to their conquest by Rome. ‘At

least, however, when Athens and Sparta fought, a genuine empire was at

stake, not just some vain conceit.’27 Dio, urging Nicomedia and Nicaea to

bury the hatchet, had done so on the assumption that it was the surest way

for them to uphold their mutual dignity. Only by living in harmony would

they be able to avoid the more intrusive manifestations of Roman rule. Such

a message, coming from a powerless intellectual, was one that the people of

Nicomedia had felt no particular obligation to heed. Now, a generation on,

the most famous cities in Greece were waking up to a similar exhortation.

The idea that they might all be joined in a single confederation – a

Panhellenion – was no longer the fantasy of philosophers. It was the policy

of Caesar himself.

Although Athens was the particular focus of Hadrian’s attentions, the

city was not the only one for which he had plans. In 128, just as he had

done four years previously, he headed into southern Greece. His

destination: Sparta. The city, which in ancient times had been the dominant

power in southern Greece, existed, like Athens, as the ghost of its own

greatness. To the Romans, the Spartans served as the epitome of virtus:

manliness. Back in its heyday, when Sparta had challenged Athens for the

rule of Greece, education in the city had been famously exacting. Boys had

been kept in barracks, regularly flogged, and trained never to show any

pain; girls had been taught to wrestle. Sparta’s commitment to military

excellence was viewed by Roman moralists as a tradition quite as admirable

as anything to be found in Athens. It was true, of course, that the Spartans, a

people who had not been to war for three centuries, no longer had cause to

breed a race of heroes – but this had cut no ice with their Roman admirers.

Pressure on the city’s inhabitants to live up to the example of their ancestors

had become ever more irresistible. So it was that the ancient ways of doing

things had come to be dusted down. ‘Wrestling grounds and displays of

exertion renewed their popularity with the young; the barracks were

restored; Sparta was herself again.’28 Nero, ever the showman, had imported

girls from Sparta to put on displays of wrestling for the entertainment of the

Roman people. Tourists who could afford to travel to the city itself would

thrill to the spectacle of boys being lashed to a bloodied pulp, and never

once letting out a whimper. Those with a particular relish for history might

join the Spartans in their barracks and nibble at their notoriously revolting

food.

To Hadrian, these displays of ‘Spartan self-discipline and training’29

appeared wholly as authentic as if they derived from unbroken tradition.

The marks of favour with which he graced the city were signal, and

appropriate to the city’s past as a military hegemon. He made various gifts

of land, including two islands, to Sparta, and granted it the right – hitherto

exclusive to Rome – to source wheat from Egypt. Its most distinguished

citizen, a cousin of Philopappus, was awarded the command of a legion.

Just as the Athenians, under Hadrian’s patronage, had been restored to their

ancient dignity, so were the Spartans restored to theirs. The two most

famous cities in Greece, whose rivalry had once been so calamitous, were

now, under the benignant rule of Rome, joined in amity. With Athens and

Sparta at its head, the Panhellenion was fast taking shape. When Hadrian, in

the spring of 129, departed Greece for Asia, it was in the full expectation

that he would soon be back. Although the Olympeion was still covered in

scaffolding, it would not take long for the great temple to be completed. It

was to serve not just as a gift from Caesar to his favourite city, but as a

monument to his many labours in the cause of peace: as the headquarters of

the Panhellenion.

‘No ruler has done more for the glory of Zeus, and for the happiness of

his subjects.’30 The more familiar Greeks were with their own history, the

more remarkable a figure did Hadrian come to seem. It was not just the

ancient rivalry between Athens and Sparta that the Panhellenion aimed to

heal. There was also the scarring left by Hadrian’s own people: the Romans.

Their conquest of Greece had been brutal. Multitudes had been enslaved.

The looting had been wholesale. Most devastating of all had been the

destruction of an entire city. Corinth, situated beside the narrow isthmus

which joins northern to southern Greece, had been celebrated for its wealth,

its industry, its sophistication, its temples, its philosophers, its whores. None

of which had been sufficient to save it. In 146 BC a Roman general had

razed the city to the ground. A century later, when Julius Caesar re-founded

Corinth as a colonia, it had served as the headquarters for the governor of

the province: an island of Romans amid a sea of Greeks. The settlers had all

come from Italy; they spoke Latin; they lived in a city designed in imitation

of Rome. Corinth, a metropolis which once had redounded to the glory of

Greece, had become an emblem of the opposite: Greek prostration, Greek

humiliation. Yet now, under the rule of Hadrian, it seemed as though even

this very deepest of wounds might be healed. ‘Colonists sent from Rome’:31

so, ever since the founding of the colonia, Greeks had referred to the

Corinthians. Yet for how much longer would that distinction apply? The

boundary between natives and colonists, between Greeks and Romans, was

increasingly uncertain. This blurring, it seemed, had the sanction of Caesar

himself. Certainly, alongside Athens, alongside Sparta, alongside Argos,

and Rhodes, and Thessalonica, Corinth too appeared on the roster of the

Panhellenion.

There were, of course, beyond the Greek world, many other cities, many

other lands. These could not, by definition, be permitted to join the

Panhellenion. The Greeks were a distinctive people, and Hadrian’s plans for

them depended on him treating them as such. Nevertheless, there was

inspiration to be had, perhaps, from the remarkable bloom, simultaneously

Roman and Greek, that had sprung from the ashes of the original Corinth.

The torching of famous cities by the legions was not mere ancient history,

after all. In the spring of 130, Hadrian arrived in a province that, within

living memory, had witnessed the utter annihilation of its metropolis:

Judaea. The ruins of Jerusalem remained the base of X Fretensis, and the

emblem of the wild boar still stood guard over what had once been the

Judaeans’ holiest city. A second legion, originally recruited by Trajan, and

transferred from service in Parthia following the emperor’s death, occupied

a base in Galilee. The continued presence of two legions in the province,

over a decade after the suppression of the revolt that had darkened

Hadrian’s first months in power, bore witness to an enduring undercurrent

of unrest. The Judaeans had been given little cause to identify themselves

with Rome.

Nevertheless, to an emperor who had repaired the disaster of Trajan’s

eastern war, built a wall across the wilds of Britain, and succeeded in

joining the Greeks in a common brotherhood, the task of bringing peace to

Judaea seemed far from insurmountable. In Syria, as the emperor was

making sacrifice on the summit of a mountain outside Antioch, a

thunderbolt had incinerated his offering: irrefutable evidence that his efforts

at ordering the world enjoyed divine favour. Hadrian had no reason to

doubt, as he rode towards what had once been the Judaean capital, that his

intentions for the ruined city would be as fruitful as all his other plans. Just

as he had brought peace to Britain, and Africa, and Syria, so now he would

bring peace to Judaea. Not just the site of Jerusalem but the entire province

was to be set on a new and more stable footing.

That Hadrian’s visit promised splendid things was the hope of many

Judaeans too. Looking at his record, comparing him to his predecessors, it

was still possible for them to reckon him ‘an excellent man, whose

understanding spans all things’.32 In Athens, Hadrian had displayed his

respect for the ancient greatness of the city, and sponsored its restoration;

why, then, should he not do so in Jerusalem? Six decades had passed since

the destruction of the Temple, six decades in which the Judaeans had been

unable to perform the rituals prescribed by their scriptures. Blackened

rubble littered the rock where the Holy of Holies, the shrine of the Most

High God, the dwelling place on earth of the Divine Presence Itself, had

once stood. How long, Judaeans wondered, in mingled anguish and

expectation, could the Almighty tolerate such a desecration? Once before,

in ancient times, in the wake of the storming of Jerusalem by the king of

Babylon, a foreign emperor – a Persian by the name of Cyrus – had

permitted the Temple to be rebuilt. Judaean scripture commemorated him as

a christos: a messiah. Perhaps, now that the emperor of Rome had arrived in

Judaea, a second messiah was riding to Jerusalem? Surely, once Caesar

arrived before the Temple Mount, and beheld the sight of the desolation

there, he would command the rubble cleared, the shrine to Proserpina raised

by Quietus removed, and the House of God at long last restored?

But the Judaeans were to be disappointed. Hadrian had no interest in

playing a second Cyrus. It was Corinth, that colonia planted on the ruins of

an ancient and famous city, that provided him with a readier example from

history: the evidence of how it had consolidated Roman authority over a

people initially alien and resentful, but then, over the long run, reconciled to

their subordination. Hadrian, arriving at the camp of X Fretensis, did indeed

– as the Judaeans had been hoping he would – order the clearing of rubble

from the site of Jerusalem; but not because he intended the restoration of

their capital. Instead, he ordered that an entirely new city – a colonia – be

built. As with similar such foundations across the empire, it was to be

thoroughly Roman: in its language, in its layout, in its gods. On the great

rock where the shrine of the Judaean god had stood, Hadrian commanded

the construction of a temple to Jupiter. The name he gave his new city –

Colonia Aelia Capitolina – bore witness both to his forebears, the Aelii, and

to the hill in distant Rome where Jupiter’s greatest temple stood. The

Judaeans, a people inveterately rebellious, had shown themselves unworthy

to have their metropolis restored to them. Better for all concerned, then, that

the very name of Jerusalem be consigned to oblivion. Such, in Hadrian’s

opinion, was the surest way to guarantee an enduring peace.

And so it was, having ordered the affairs of Judaea to his own

satisfaction, that the emperor and his party continued on their way, along

the road that led to Egypt.

Pantheon

Late October, AD 130. The body of a young man – still not twenty – was

found floating in the Nile. Hauled out from the river, dragged through the

silt left by the retreating floodwaters, the corpse was brought to dry land. It

was clear that the drowned man had been a figure strikingly out of the

ordinary. His body was gym-toned. His proportions were perfect. His face

possessed a heart-stopping, almost supernatural beauty. Who was he? A

foreigner, clearly. Yet the stretch of the Nile in which he had drowned was

hardly the haunt of glamorous foreigners. Alexandria lay far to the north.

Although there was an ancient temple, adorned with squat pillars and the

carvings of a forgotten pharaoh, looming over the flow of the waters, the

building did not feature prominently in the roster of Egypt’s tourist

attractions. Nothing stood beside it save a scruffy village. Yet here, to this

obscure and rural spot, Caesar himself had come – Caesar, who ruled in

Egypt as pharaoh, at once king and living god. His barge, together with a

great flotilla of other vessels, stood moored in the shallows by the temple.

Clearly, the young man found in the Nile could only have been of his party.

And so it proved.

The drowned youth was the beloved of Hadrian. His name was

Antinous. The emperor, informed of what had happened to his favourite,

was overwhelmed by grief. ‘He wept like a woman.’33 Such an extravagant

display of emotion was seen as unworthy of a man; but this did not mean

that taking a concubine was itself regarded as scandalous. Quite the

contrary. Men, including emperors, had needs, after all, and whether on a

prostitute or a slave, a woman or a boy, they were expected to satisfy them.

Most citizens, gazing on Antinous, would only have envied the emperor his

good fortune. ‘Such beauty had never before been seen.’34 On this, everyone

was agreed. Domitian’s ban on eunuchs, upheld both by Nerva and by

Hadrian himself, had done nothing to diminish the widespread passion for

delicati. If anything, indeed – by drying up the supply – it had made the

competition in elite circles for boys of lustrous beauty only the more

intense. Antinous was not a slave – but neither was he a citizen, and

therefore, by the stern standards of Roman law and morality, he qualified as

fair game. He came from Claudiopolis, the small town in Bithynia famous

for its cheeses and not much else. * As well as beautiful, he was smart. ‘His

heart was wise,’ Hadrian wrote in praise of his beloved, ‘his intelligence

that of a grown man.’35 Even Sabina – whose relationship with her husband

had long been difficult – found Antinous a sufficiently mollifying influence

that she had agreed, when Hadrian embarked on his tour of the eastern

Mediterranean, to accompany him. The emperor, sailing up the Nile, had

done so with both his wife and his concubine by his side.

To a Roman, a free citizen, submission to the advances of another man,

even a Caesar, would have been a cause of undying shame. Vitellius, who

as a boy was said to have been used by the elderly Tiberius, had been stuck

ever after with the nickname ‘Sphincter’. Even more shocking – because

more credible – was the gossip that Mucianus, Vespasian’s ally in the

winning of the world, had enjoyed being treated in bed like a woman. ‘At

least’, so Vespasian had once muttered, after Mucianus had been

particularly rude to him, ‘I am a man.’36 A reputation stained by the

disgrace of such talk could not hope to be washed clean, of course. Yet even

as Romans scorned males who actively consented to penetration as the very

worst of deviants, they were aware that such a perspective was not

necessarily universal. ‘In Greece,’ they noted, ‘it is the custom to praise a

young man for taking plenty of lovers.’37 The knowledge of this had

fostered a sense both of moral superiority and of titillation. The figure of an

adolescent who was not merely beautiful but shimmeringly and seductively

Greek obsessed the Roman erotic imagination. Playboys, pornographers,

poets: all delighted in the fantasy. It was why delicati were so often given

Greek names. That Antinous was not a slave but a free-born Bithynian – a

native of the very land in which Hylas, Hercules’ exquisite pageboy, had

met his watery doom – only compounded his allure. Hadrian, by taking

such a lover, was merely doing what many a red-blooded Roman would

have leapt at the chance to do. He was living the dream.

Hadrian’s own dreams, however, were peculiarly complex and rich.

Antinous offered something more than just a pretty face. He offered love –

and love, what was more, of a distinctively Greek kind. It served to blur the

erotic with the poetic: to cast Antinous as a Hylas, and Hadrian as a

Hercules. What in Rome might seem a perfectly conventional relationship,

that of a master and his concubine, carried a very different charge in

Greece. When the emperor appeared before the gaze of the Athenian people

accompanied by a freeborn son of the Greek world, they took it not as an

insult, but as a compliment. When he arrived in Alexandria, the presence of

Antinous beside him reassured the citizens of that turbulent city that Caesar

held their traditions in respect. There were many ways for an emperor to

display his superiority, and not all of them were Roman. Hadrian positively

relished the opportunity to meet the philosophers and poets of Alexandria

on their own terms. Convening the city’s leading scholars, he put a battery

of questions to them before triumphantly providing all the answers himself.

Then, informed that a ferocious lion was roaming the deserts beyond

Alexandria, he resolved to play the part of Hercules. The hunt was an

adventure of which even that most famous of lion-slayers might have been

proud. Poets, tipped off by Hadrian as to the precise details of the

expedition, made sure to record it all in song. Fire had come from the lion’s

eyes, showers of foam from its ravening jaws. Hadrian and Antinous, paired

in the battle against the monster, had demonstrated their proficiency not

only as huntsmen but as lovers. Just as Hercules had sought to train Hylas

in the skills required of a hero, so had Hadrian deliberately missed the target

with his spear, so that Antinous might display his prowess; and then, when

Antinous’ horse was brought down by the lion, saved the life of his beloved

by dispatching the monster with a single, muscular thrust. A scene not

merely Greek, but heroically, mythically so.

Yet the dimension of myth, even for Hadrian, was potentially

treacherous. Egypt was an ancient land, and the Nile a mysterious river. The

imperial party, setting sail on their cruise, had witnessed for themselves

how its waters, every late summer and autumn, would rise and flood the

parched earth. This inundation enabled Egypt to serve as the world’s

breadbasket: for the waters, as they retreated, would leave behind black

mud of a miraculous fertility. It was not only the Egyptians who obsessed

over this phenomenon. So, too, did the Greeks. Even before the founding of

Alexandria, they had been fascinated by the Nile, and by the primordial

wisdom of Egypt’s priests, who had long since fathomed the true history of

the gods. By Hadrian’s time, Greek scholars were as familiar with the great

narrative of how and why the Nile had come to flood as they were with the

stories of the Trojan War. The story had come to seem almost their own.

Once, so the report went, the god Osiris had ruled as pharaoh. Isis, his

sister, had ruled as queen. But then their brother Typhon, who was cruel and

savage and red, like the desert that stretched on either side of the Nile,

tricked Osiris by sealing him up in a coffin, drowning him in the great river,

and leaving his body to drift out to sea. Isis, ever faithful, searched the

world for her husband’s corpse and redeemed it; and when Typhon, stealing

back the body, dismembered it and scattered the pieces far and wide, she

found every last missing part – all, that was, except for the penis, which had

been devoured by the fish of the Nile. ‘And so Isis made a replica of it, and

endowed it with a potent and awful power.’38 Osiris, brought back to life by

his queen, passed to the realm of the dead, there to rule for eternity; but

even though he no longer sat enthroned on earth, he continued to serve

humanity as the model of all that was best and most just. Such was the

lesson taught by the flooding of the Nile: for its water was nothing less than

the seed of Osiris, and the earth drenched by its flood-surge the body of Isis,

his queen.

There were many ways of gauging the truth of this story. To the peasants

who, late every October, as the river began its retreat, sowed the black soil,

it was evident in the annual flourishing of their fields. Scholars such as

Hadrian’s secretary, a learned freedman by the name of Phlegon, might

bring a parallel perspective. Corroborating an observation made by Pliny

the Elder, that ‘drinking the waters of the Nile boosts fecundity’,39 he noted

the example of ‘a woman from Alexandria, who had four pregnancies, and

delivered twenty children’. 40 There was no need, however, to live in Egypt,

nor to study its birth statistics, to sense the sheer potency of the ancient tale.

That Osiris was the mightiest of the gods, and Isis the mistress of the

elements, initial begetter of the ages, supreme of divine powers, was a

conviction that had become accepted across the Greek world.

And even in Rome. Not by everyone in the capital, of course: for the

priests of Isis, with their shaven heads and their temples decorated with

animal-headed gods, could hardly help but strike many Romans as sinister

in the extreme. During the dying days of the republic, the senate had even

voted to topple the goddess’s altars and demolish her temples. Yet this

suspicion of Isis – although conservatives might still sniff at her as foreign

– had faded. A century on from the collapse of the republic, a Roman could

worship her and feel that she was not so foreign after all. In the ecstatic

opinion of her devotees, Isis was the queen not merely of Egypt but of

every land. The Romans knew her as Juno, the Sicilians as Proserpina, the

Cypriots as Venus. ‘People across the entire globe – albeit that they may

worship me in any number of ways, and call me by any number of names –

all acknowledge me as holy, transcendent, unique.’41 A goddess capable of

such imperious self-confidence was one that even a Caesar might respect.

Domitian, fleeing the Capitol as it was being stormed by Vitellius’

supporters, had done so disguised as one of her priests; Vespasian and Titus,

the night before their triumph, had stayed in her temple on the Campus

Martius. Like a slave transported from some distant land to the capital of

the world, and there, after lengthy service, granted her freedom, the Queen

of Egypt had become a Roman.

Nevertheless, there were certain opportunities that even Rome could not

provide. To a man as relentlessly curious as Hadrian, the chance to sail the

waters of the Nile at full flood had been irresistible. Everyone in his

entourage, as his flotilla made its way up the river, would have been alert to

the significance of the spectacle around them: hills transformed into islands,

the Nile itself into a sea. They would perfectly have understood what this

portended for the security of the empire: for a flood that failed meant a

ruined harvest, and a ruined harvest spelt danger for Egypt, for Rome, for

Caesar.42 The stability of imperial rule still depended, as it had always done,

on the successful provision of corn to the Roman people.

It was not Annona, however, who ranked as the queen of the heavens.

The great drama of Isis and her love for Osiris, manifest in the very waters

that Hadrian was sailing that late October, revealed more profound truths. It

opened up for those with eyes to see the deepest mysteries of the cosmos: a

place in which the patterns of death and life, hatred and love, extinction and

resurrection, might be distinguished by those with the wisdom to discern

them. A fateful day dawned: 24 October. It was the date on which Osiris,

thrown into the river by Typhon, had drowned. That night, to mark it, small

boats took to the Nile, ablaze with lamps. The sounds of music and revelry

drifted from settlements along the banks. On Caesar’s barge, men and

women of learning reflected on the anniversary and pondered what its true

meaning might be. Philosophy suggested the truest answer. ‘For the soul of

Osiris, so the legend has it, is immortal and imperishable; and although

Typhon may repeatedly dismember his body, and make it disappear, yet Isis

will always search the world for it, and piece it back together. For that

which is true and good is always superior to destruction and change.’43

It was shortly after the anniversary of Osiris’ death, in the final week of

October, that the discovery of Antinous’ body was made. 44 The tears shed

by Hadrian were the least of the scandal. Speculation as to how and why

Antinous might have perished was soon feverish. According to Hadrian

himself, it had all been an accident: ‘He fell into the Nile.’ Others, however,

proposed a more sinister explanation: ‘He was the victim of a sacrifice.’45

The notion that a Caesar, fearful of death, might seek to prolong his own

life by offering up to the underworld the life of another mortal was certainly

not unprecedented. Suetonius, dismissed in disgrace from Hadrian’s service,

and busy back in Rome adding sequels to his biography of Augustus, would

cite in his life of Nero a particularly telling example. A comet – ‘which is

commonly held to presage the death of great rulers’ – had appeared in the

skies. Nero, informed ‘that it was standard practice for a king to counter a

portent like this by having some important figure killed, thereby diverting

the danger from the king’s own head onto that of someone else high-

ranking, decided that he would have the leading nobles in Rome put to

death’. 46 Antinous, admittedly, was hardly of noble rank; but otherwise the

parallels were suggestive. For once again, blazing in the skies, a new star

had appeared. What did it signify? The Nile was a perfect place to ponder

the question. Nero’s own astrologer had once sailed its waters. An

equestrian by the name of Balbillus, steeped in the lore of Egypt, he had

served as Egypt’s prefect. Balbillus himself might be long dead – but his

granddaughter was not. Julia Balbilla, the sister of Philopappus, was present

on the Nile with Hadrian. Mourning the recent death of her brother, she had

accompanied the emperor as Sabina’s companion. Here, for those minded to

detect a conspiracy, were clues enough, perhaps.

Yet there were other possibilities. Perhaps Antinous, aware that he was

passing into adulthood, and all too painfully conscious of the contempt in

which a hirsute catamite was conventionally held, had drowned himself.

Perhaps Hadrian, a man normally possessed of iron self-control, but capable

of the occasional violent outburst, had lashed out in a fit of murderous rage.

Perhaps Sabina, envious of Antinous’ hold over her husband, had disposed

of him. Perhaps some prominent figure in Hadrian’s train, as suspicious of

the emperor’s favourite as a previous generation had been suspicious of

Asiaticus, the favourite of Vitellius, had done the deed. 47 Perhaps the truth

was destined never to be known. One thing, however, was certain: the

titanic scale of Hadrian’s grief. Whatever the cause of Antinous’ death, he

appeared, in the days and weeks that followed, broken by it.

Nevertheless, the travel plans of Caesar could not lightly be rearranged.

Rather than leave the Nile, Hadrian continued with his journey upriver. As

he sailed, so he brooded darkly on his loss. In Egypt, reminders of death, of

mourning, of resurrection, were never hard to find. Mooring at Thebes, a

village clustered around a stupefyingly vast temple complex, Hadrian and

his party crossed the river to the western bank, there to visit two colossal

statues of a hero who had died and been brought back to life. Memnon, son

of the Dawn, had perished before the walls of Troy; but Zeus, moved by his

mother’s tears, had raised him from the dead. The two colossi of the hero,

enthroned amid lonely scree, were as celebrated as any landmark in Egypt. *

Generations of Roman sightseers had visited them – among them Suedius,

who had served in Pompeii as Vespasian’s agent. It was not the statues

themselves that drew tourists, however, but rather a remarkable property of

the base on which the right-hand colossus sat: for periodically, when

touched by the first light of dawn, it would make a noise ‘like a lyre when a

string is broken’. 48 Ominously, when the members of Hadrian’s imperial

party paid their first visit, the statues kept their silence. Only when Sabina

and Julia Balbilla returned without Hadrian did they sing. Over the course

of their stay in Thebes, the two women made repeated visits to the colossi.

Four poems by Julia were inscribed on Memnon’s left leg. Hadrian,

meanwhile, returned only once. Memnon, on this occasion, did sing to him;

but the emperor otherwise kept away. Fascinated though he normally was

by memorials to heroes, he had an even greater wonder on his mind. For

Antinous had appeared to him.

‘Because of a revelation he was honoured as a god.’49 Many details

converged to convince Hadrian that his dream, in which Antinous had

revealed his resurrection, was authentic. He had delivered oracles that

Hadrian, putting into verse, had made sure to promulgate. Astrologers,

studying the new star as it blazed in the heavens, assured their imperial

master that, far from portending doom, ‘it had actually resulted from the

spirit of Antinous’. 50 Most haunting of all, and the key to Hadrian’s

understanding of his favourite’s fate, was the fact that he had perished in the

same way, in the same river, and at the same time of year as Osiris. Could

this just be coincidence? Already, only a few days after Antinous’ death,

Hadrian had decided that it was not. A city, he decreed, was to be built from

scratch beside the very stretch of river on which the fateful accident had

occurred, and it was to be dedicated to a new god: Osirantinous.

That winter, back in Alexandria after his voyage up the Nile, Hadrian

developed his plans. The new city, Antinoopolis, was to be a sumptuous

monument to Greek urban planning; but its central temple, in which the

deified Antinous would ‘listen to the appeals of those who invoke him, and

heal the sick among the needy poor’, was to be of Egyptian design.51 In the

new year, messengers were dispatched far and wide to proclaim the good

news: that Antinous, risen from the dead, had ascended to the heavens.

Across Egypt they went, and to Greece, and to his homeland of Bithynia. A

Greek from the Propontis, the favourite of Caesar, drowned in the Nile as

Osiris had been, and risen to eternal life: Antinous was a flamboyantly

multicultural god.

But Hadrian – however much he might have wished to devote himself

solely to the memory of his beloved – still had the rule of the world as his

responsibility. Leaving Egypt, the land that had brought him so much grief,

he resumed his travels. From Alexandria he sailed to Syria; from Syria he

headed overland to the shores of the Aegean. By winter he was back in

Athens. Great things awaited him there. The scaffolding had come down

from the completed temple of Olympian Zeus, the great wall that enclosed

it was complete, and its forecourt was crowded with statues. At its

dedication in the spring of 132, cities from across the Greek world each

donated a portrait of the emperor; the emperor himself donated a snake

brought from India. The Panhellenion, approved by official decree of the

senate, was inaugurated amid splendid festivities. Athens was ready at last

to take her place on the throne that Caesar had prepared so assiduously for

her.

For Hadrian himself, it marked a moment not just of celebration but of

awful solemnity. The joining of the most famous cities of Greece into a

common union was no light achievement. Amity had been forged where

previously, for many centuries, there had been only mutual hatred. Greece,

maimed and drained of its life blood, had been brought back from the dead.

This was why, in Hadrian’s opinion, Athens so richly merited the tribute of

other cities: for her glory it was, every year, to celebrate the possibility of

resurrection, the triumph of life over death, in a rite more awesome than any

other in the world. Eight and a half years had passed since the emperor’s

initiation into the mysteries at Eleusis; three and a half since he had

attended them again in the company of Antinous. Now, by meeting in ‘the

most brilliant city of the Athenians’, the Panhellenion was itself sharing in

‘the fruit of the Mysteries’. 52 It bore witness to the possibility of redemption

from past sufferings and miseries. It proclaimed that brotherhood might

come from fratricide, peace from war, order from chaos.

Meanwhile, in the heavens, the star that signified the elevation of

Antinous to the ranks of the immortals blazed over all the lands of the

world. Even as Hadrian presided over the inauguration of the Panhellenion,

he had not neglected to foster the worship of his beloved. In Athens, he

instituted an annual festival, the Antinoeia, in which youths on the cusp of

manhood were to compete for athletic and artistic prizes; in Eleusis, where

he sponsored a similar series of contests, a statue was erected in the

sanctuary portraying the divine Antinous as a divine physician, healer of the

broken and the wounded. Not since the funeral of Poppaea Sabina, almost

seventy years before, had a Caesar made such a public display of his grief.

Yet Hadrian, by deifying a Greek, a provincial who was not even a citizen,

had displayed a disregard for the traditions and proprieties of the Roman

people that might have given even Nero pause. Never before had a Caesar

added to the ranks of the immortals a mortal who was neither an emperor

nor a member of an emperor’s family. When Nero had mourned his

beloved, he had used the Forum as his stage; but Hadrian was using the

world. Rather than obtaining the senate’s sanction for his elevation of

Antinous to the halls of the gods, he had not even bothered to return to the

capital. When provincials in Egypt, or Asia, or Greece gazed into the face

of the preternaturally beautiful young man who – so it was rumoured – had

died that Caesar might live, they did not see expressed there the might and

distant majesty of Rome. They saw themselves.

That the cults as well as the luxuries of the east might ultimately corrupt

the Roman people had been a cause of dread to moralists in the senate ever

since the city’s first rise to greatness. It was why, back in the days of the

republic, they had viewed the worship of Isis with such stern disapproval.

The danger was always that, in a world where Greeks, Egyptians and

Syrians were able promiscuously to mix, their superstitions might come to

mix as well. Most dangerous of all, of course, were the superstitions of the

Judaeans. The dark strain of fanaticism that they fostered, and that twice in

living memory had inspired rebellion against the Roman peace, had shown

itself alarmingly prone to mutation. Tacitus, whose contempt for it was

sombre and profound, had noted a particularly egregious example: a sect

founded by a Judaean named Christ, a criminal who had been put to death

by Pontius Pilate. These ‘Christians’, as people termed them, had already,

by the time of Nero, established themselves as a notable and sinister

presence in Rome. This, perhaps, was no great surprise. Rare was the

foreign cult that could not be found polluting the city’s slums. The capital,

as Tacitus observed, was a sink into which ‘everything monstrous and

degraded drains’.53

Alarmingly, however, Christians were also to be found even in obscure

reaches of the empire. Travelling through Pontus during his term as

governor, Pliny had discovered them ‘infecting with their wretched

superstition not merely the towns, but the villages and fields as well’. 54

Christ, whom they believed to be divine, was the only god they

acknowledged. Commanded by Pliny to make offerings to Jupiter and to

Caesar, they had refused. The sacrilege of this had been self-evident. It was

one thing for the Judaeans – who were, after all, an ancient people – to

behave in such a manner; but no upstart sect could be granted a legal

sanction to flaunt such arrogance and impiety. Once Pliny was satisfied that

the Christians brought before him were obdurate in their superstitions, he

had duly had them put to death. When Trajan was asked to confirm the

justice of this ruling, he had done so; as, in due course, had Hadrian.

Sacrilege, it went without saying, was beyond the pale. Christians, like

Druids, like the devotees of any superstition that promulgated practices and

doctrines noxious to morality, were an offence to Roman order. No Caesar

could possibly have thought otherwise.

Nevertheless, it was possible to think as well that the aggressive

persecution of any section of society was an unattractive policy. Trajan,

writing to Pliny, had warned him to pay no attention to anonymous

informers. ‘These create the worst kind of precedent, and are not at all in

keeping with the spirit of our age.’55 The perspective of Caesar was

inevitably broader than that of a senator. Trajan had been in the midst of

preparations for the invasion of Parthia when Pliny had written to him about

the Christians, and he had no wish to convulse a region like Pontus by

purging a sizeable proportion of its population. Hadrian, who had responded

to an enquiry from a governor very similar to Pliny’s while he was touring

Britain, had been equally alert to the perils of stirring up civil unrest. The

empire, he knew, had enemies enough already beyond its walls. Distasteful

though he naturally found the Christians, he was not a man to feel greatly

threatened by the range and variety of Rome’s subject peoples. Certainly, he

had little patience with the chauvinism of senatorial traditionalists. This was

why he had scorned to obtain their approval for his deification of Antinous.

That cities and peoples across the vast span of the empire had greeted the

new god with a quite startling degree of enthusiasm, so that even Hadrian

himself had been surprised, demonstrated conclusively that he was right. It

was not the fusty and antique traditions of Rome that had won the

provincials’ love. These were inadequate to inspire the loyalty of the whole

world. The new star blazing in the sky, the star that proclaimed the

immortality of Antinous, proclaimed as well a new order: an order in which

multiple traditions, multiple loyalties, might be reconciled, and all the

empire joined in devotion to its leader, Caesar.

What, though, of traditions, of loyalties that could not be reconciled?

There were many ways, after all, to read the heavens. ‘A star shall come out

of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel.’56 So it was prophesied in the

scriptures of the Judaeans. The star, their scholars taught, was the messiah;

and now, some of these scholars dared to hope, a star had come. * Even as

Hadrian, in Athens, was establishing festivals in honour of Antinous,

messengers were speeding from his legate in Aelia Capitolina with

devastating news. The Judaeans, yet again, had risen in revolt. For years, it

turned out, they had been stockpiling weapons, preparing strongholds,

excavating underground refuges and tunnels. The banditry long endemic in

Judaea had escalated, almost without the Romans noticing it, into a full-

blown insurgency. Only after they had found their supplies and

communications cut off had they come to realise the full scale of the crisis

confronting them. Even as Hadrian, summoned back to war, sought

desperately to marshal reinforcements, the entire Roman position in Judaea

appeared in danger of collapse. Decades later, it would still be vividly

remembered in Rome ‘just how many soldiers were slaughtered by the

Judaeans’. 57 One of the two legions stationed outside Alexandria,

dispatched to the war zone, suffered such grievous casualties that it had to

be cashiered.58 Meanwhile, in the badlands south of Aelia Capitolina, a

brigand chieftain named Simeon proclaimed himself the prince of a reborn

Judaean kingdom. On his coins were stamped ringing slogans: ‘For the

Liberty of Israel’, ‘For the Redemption of Israel’. Bar Kokhba, Simeon was

nicknamed: Son of the Star.

To the Greeks, a people honoured by Hadrian as no foreign people had

ever been honoured by a Caesar before, the emperor himself appeared to be

a prince of peace, a leader whose supreme genius was for the sponsorship

of civic amenities, the restoration of antiquities, the inaugurating of

festivals. ‘He never willingly went to war.’59 Yet Hadrian, whose drilling of

the legions would serve as a model for generations to come of how best to

whip an army into shape, was a man with a grim appetite for pushing his

soldiers to the limit. It did not take him long to fathom the correct strategy

for dealing with Bar Kokhba. The Roman forces, confronting the rebels’

guerilla tactics, had been too ponderous, too muscle-bound. Clearly, the

situation demanded a more agile approach. Hadrian sent for his ablest

general, a former consul by the name of Julius Severus, whose experience

in counter-insurgency had been honed during his governorship of Rome’s

most barbarous province: Britain. Severus, transferred from the distant

Ocean, made brisk work of the rebels. His forces, divided up into mobile

hit-squads, fanned out across the Judaean badlands, smoking out nest after

nest of Bar Kokhba’s men. No respite was offered. No mercy was given.

Such was the slaughter, Judaean scholars would later claim, that horses

almost drowned beneath the blood, and a great wall, measuring eighteen

miles by eighteen miles, was raised by Hadrian entirely out of corpses.

Exaggerated or not, such stories spoke of ruin on a scale that was capable of

appalling even Roman observers. ‘Almost the whole of Judaea was left a

desert.’60 Those Judaeans who did manage to escape death or enslavement

fled to Galilee. Here, because the Galileans had not joined the revolt,

refugees were able to evade the vengeance visited on Judaea. Over the

decades that followed, Judaean communities would succeed in building a

new life for themselves in the region, a new sense of identity, a new

understanding of their scriptures and the purposes of their god. Of their

original homeland, however, not even the name was preserved. What was

once Judaea had become, by imperial decree, the province of Syria

Palaestina. Meanwhile, in the city once called Jerusalem, on the very site of

the demolished Temple, a giant statue was raised of Hadrian, armoured and

victorious, seated on a horse, riding as though to trample down every last

memory of what Aelia Capitolina had originally been.

In Rome, the celebrations were muted. Although Severus was granted

honours appropriate to his achievement, Hadrian was in no mood to hold a

triumph. It was not his wish to draw attention to Bar Kokhba’s revolt. The

war, which had taken him wholly by surprise, might almost have been

dreams of peace: a squalid, inglorious business. Certainly, settled back in

the capital after his many travels, the ageing emperor appeared exhausted,

embittered, disillusioned. If Antinous, by plunging into the waters of the

Nile, had indeed won his lover a new lease of life, then it had brought

Hadrian little joy. His mood, darkened by bereavement and disappointment,

increasingly alarmed his friends. Many, like Arrian, kept well away from

the emperor. Again and again, senators whom Hadrian had particularly

admired ended up the objects of his hatred, envied and detested for the very

qualities that had once led him to consider them potential successors. Ever

darker stories were told of his mood swings. It was claimed, for instance,

that when Apollodorus, the great engineer who had designed Trajan’s

bridge over the Danube, presumed to criticise Hadrian’s plans for a temple,

he was put to death. ‘A man in command of thirty legions must always be

reckoned more learned than anyone else.’61 This, an observation by a

scholar explaining why he had ceded a point of literary criticism to Hadrian,

had once been taken as a joke. No longer. Senators, speaking in hushed

tones, dreaded the worst. Meanwhile, Hadrian had fallen ill. Unable to

travel the world, he retreated to an immense villa beyond Rome, ‘which had

been built for him in a marvellous manner, so that he was able to give to its

extensive range of features the names of various provinces and places’. 62

Here, the much-travelled Caesar might imagine himself back in Alexandria,

or in Athens, or in the vale below Mount Olympus. Masterpieces garnered

from across the empire – paintings, fittings, bronzes – stood everywhere. So

too did statues of Antinous.

Below the vast expanse of the villa – the reception halls, the dining

rooms, the pavilions, the water features – there stretched an underground

chamber designed to simulate the realm of the dead. It was glimmering,

cold, unlit. Hadrian had no happy expectations of the afterlife. There would

be no laughter there, no jokes. Nor, however, did the ailing Caesar find

much joy any more in the land of the living. Sick and paranoid, he

attempted a bungled suicide, forced his elderly brother-in-law to kill

himself on a charge of conspiracy, had his great-nephew put to death for

plotting a coup. Yet Hadrian – even as the talk in the senate was all of a new

reign of terror, of a return to the dark days of Nero or Domitian – had not

abandoned his responsibilities. ‘My faculties’, he insisted, ‘are

unimpaired.’63 He had no intention of permitting the empire to implode on

his death into civil war, nor for his statues to be toppled by vengeful mobs.

Accordingly, on 24 January 138 – his sixty-second birthday – Hadrian

summoned the leading men of the senate to his sickbed. There he

announced to them a plan for the future of the empire designed to preserve

its stability for many decades to come. First, he proclaimed his intention to

adopt a man universally admired for ‘his nobility of character, his mildness,

his compassion, his prudence, who was neither young enough to do

anything rash nor so old as to be neglectful of his duties’:64 a senator by the

name of Titus Aurelius Antoninus. Antoninus in turn, the emperor decreed,

was to adopt the most cherished of Hadrian’s great-nephews, a young man

of immense promise named Marcus Annius Verus. After taking a few days

to decide whether he felt equal to the challenge of ruling the world,

Antoninus accepted Hadrian’s proposal. He was duly adopted on 25

February, becoming Titus Aelius Hadrianus Caesar Antoninus. Marcus

Annius, after his own adoption by Antoninus, became Marcus Aurelius.

That July, when Hadrian died in Baiae, the succession was seamless.

Antoninus, fully justifying his soubriquet of ‘Pius’, met all his adoptive

father’s expectations of him: he protected Hadrian’s memory from vengeful

elements within the senate, had him elevated to the ranks of the gods, and

conducted his funerary rites in strict obedience to the dead man’s wishes.

Work had begun on Hadrian’s mausoleum a full decade previously. Situated

on the far side of the Tiber from the Campus Martius, in an undeveloped

neighbourhood named the Vatican Field, the structure had been designed on

such a massive scale that Hadrian’s ashes were only finally interred there in

139, a full year after the emperor’s death. Located as it was within eyesight

of Augustus’ tomb, sealed forty years previously, after Nerva’s ashes had

been laid there, Hadrian’s mausoleum was designed both as homage to

Rome’s greatest emperor and as a declaration of independence. It would, of

course, have been sacrilege for any Caesar to withhold honour from the

man who had redeemed the Roman people from ruin and ensured their

greatness for all eternity. Equally, it was fruit of the very peace established

by Augustus that Rome, Italy and the empire were no longer what they had

been.

Hadrian’s mausoleum, however, was not the most stunning monument

raised by the emperor to this seeming paradox. That was to be found on the

opposite side of the Tiber, in the heart of the Campus Martius. Here stood

the Pantheon: the great temple to all the gods originally built under

Augustus, and then restored by Domitian. Hadrian had rebuilt it again. This,

to anyone approaching the temple, was not immediately obvious. The

portico, the inscription, the roof: all appeared much as they had originally,

back in the time of Augustus. Only when the visitor passed into the main

body of the temple was it possible to appreciate just how radically, just how

brilliantly, Hadrian had redesigned it. Never before had there been so

immense, so sublime a dome. It appeared, to those who gazed up at it in

stupefaction, less a ceiling ‘than the very heavens’.65 The Pantheon was just

as it had always been; but it was also utterly transformed.

Such was the time-honoured Roman way of managing change. The

phrase novae res – ‘novel enterprises’ – remained what it had always been:

a warning, a nightmare, a curse. Yet Rome, a city once bounded by the

limits of seven hills, now ruled a dominion stretching from Caledonia to

Arabia. It was a measure of just how incomparably great the empire of the

Roman people had become that the entire world, under the benign and

placid rule of Antoninus Pius, seemed blessed by peace. It was as though

history itself had come to an end. The bloodline of Augustus might be no

more, but seventy years on from the civil war that had followed Nero’s

death, a Caesar still ruled over Rome. When a senator from Athens – both a

consul and a tutor to Marcus Aurelius – appropriated the grove where

Egeria had once spoken to Rome’s second king, and turned it into a water

feature, for the delectation of visitors to his garden, the spring continued to

chatter just as it always had. When soldiers in remote provinces marked out

the limits of Roman rule with timber, turf or stone, the existence of such

fortifications in no way implied any diminishment in their martial ardour.

Quite the opposite. Antoninus Pius himself might never once, over the

entire course of his career, have experienced military service; but Rome’s

armies, stationed along the Rhine or the Danube, in darkest Britain or

Africa, remained as proficient as they had ever been. Universal though the

Pax Romana reigned, no one ever doubted what it was founded upon. Peace

was the fruit of victory – eternal victory. It was a soldier in the wilds

beyond Palestine, scratching on a rock face, who put it best, perhaps: ‘The

Romans always win.’66

* Presumably – although it is nowhere stated explicitly – Hadrian first set eyes on Antinous in 123,

while on the road that led from Syria to Nicomedia. If so, Antinous would have been around twelve

years old at the time.

* In reality, the twin statues portrayed Amenhotep III, whose long reign in the fourteenth century BC

had marked the apogee of Egyptian wealth and power.

* Specifically, according to Jewish tradition, Rabbi Akiva.

OceanofPDF.com

TIMELINE

753 BC:

The foundation of Rome.

509:

The expulsion of the monarchy, and the establishment of the

Republic.

340:

Manlius Torquatus executes his son for a breach of military

discipline.

146:

The Romans destroy Corinth.

63:

Pompey captures Jerusalem.

53:

Crassus is defeated and killed by the Parthians at Carrhae.

50:

Julius Caesar completes the conquest of Gaul.

49:

Civil war breaks out between Caesar and his enemies in the

senate.

44:

The assassination of Caesar.

43:

The murder of Cicero.

30:

The suicide of Antony. The annexation of Egypt.

10:

Herod the Great completes the Temple of Jerusalem.

AD 9:

The Varian Disaster.

14:

The death of Augustus. Tiberius becomes emperor.

37:

The death of Tiberius. Caligula becomes emperor.

41:

The assassination of Caligula. Claudius becomes emperor.

53:

Nero marries Octavia.

54:

The death of Claudius. Nero becomes emperor.

55:

The death of Britannicus.

58:

Nero falls in love with Poppaea Sabina.

59:

The murder of Agrippina. The Pompeians are banned from

staging gladiator fights.

60:

Boudicca’s revolt.

62:

Nero divorces, exiles and executes Octavia. He marries Poppaea

Sabina.

64:

The Great Fire of Rome.

65:

The death of Poppaea Sabina.

66:

Outbreak of the Judaean revolt.

67:

Nero competes in the Olympic Games and marries Sporus.

Vespasian pacifies Galilee.

68:

The rebellion of Julius Vindex. The death of Nero. Galba

becomes emperor.

69:

(1 January): Mutiny on the Rhine.

(2–3 January): Vitellius proclaimed emperor by the legions on

the Rhine.

(10 January): Galba adopts Piso.

(15 January): Murder of Galba and Piso. Otho recognised as

emperor by the senate.

(March): Caecina crosses the Alps.

(14 April): The first battle of Cremona.

(16 April): Otho commits suicide.

(Late April): Vitellius arrives in Lugdunum.

(1 July): Vespasian proclaimed emperor in Alexandria.

(16 July): Vitellius enters Rome.

(Late July): Mucianus leaves Syria for Italy.

(Late August): Antonius Primus invades Italy.

(September): Civilis leads the Batavians against the Vitellian

legions on the Rhine.

(18 October): Caecina switches sides from the Vitellians to the

Flavians.

(24 October): The second battle of Cremona.

(26 October): The sack of Cremona.

(18 December): Vitellius tries and fails to abdicate.

(19 December): The storming of the Flavian positions on the

Capitol and the murder of Flavius Sabinus.

(20 December): Antonius captures Rome. Murder of Vitellius.

(Late December): Arrival of Mucianus in Rome.

70:

Mucianus establishes Flavian rule in Rome. Suppression of

anti-Flavian factions in Gaul and along the Rhine.

Titus captures Jerusalem. Vespasian arrives in Rome.

71:

Vespasian and Titus celebrate their triumph.

73:

Capture of Masada.

75:

Dedication by Vespasian of the Temple of Peace.

79:

Death of Vespasian. Titus becomes emperor. Death of Nigidius

Maius. The eruption of Vesuvius.

80:

Inauguration of the Colosseum.

81:

Death of Titus. Domitian becomes emperor.

82:

Agricola invades Caledonia.

83:

Agricola defeats the Caledonians and sends a fleet past the

northernmost point of Britain. Domitian campaigns against the

Chatti.

86:

Defeat of Fuscus by the Dacians. Abandonment of Caledonia.

89:

Saturninus’ mutiny.

91:

Execution of Cornelia, the chief Vestal.

96:

Assassination of Domitian. Nerva succeeds him as emperor. Dio

of Prusa returns home from exile.

97:

The Praetorians march on the Palatine and take Nerva hostage.

Nerva adopts Trajan.

98:

Death of Nerva. Trajan becomes emperor.

99:

Trajan enters Rome for the first time as emperor.

101:

Trajan embarks on the conquest of Dacia.

102:

Trajan celebrates a triumph over the Dacians.

105:

Trajan leaves Rome to resume the conquest of Dacia.

106:

The capture of Sarmizegetusa and the death of Decebalus.

107:

Trajan returns to Rome from Dacia.

110:

Pliny the Younger becomes governor of Bithynia and Pontus.

112:

Trajan dedicates his new forum and baths complex.

113:

Trajan leaves Rome for Parthia. Death of Pliny the Younger (?).

115:

Earthquake in Antioch.

116:

Trajan enters Ctesiphon and reaches the Persian Gulf. The

outbreak of Parthian insurgency and Judaean revolt.

117:

Death of Trajan. Hadrian becomes emperor. He abandons

Trajan’s eastern conquests.

118:

Hadrian arrives in Rome for the first time as emperor.

121:

Hadrian leaves Rome for the Rhine.

122:

Hadrian arrives in Britain.

123:

Hadrian heads east. He visits Athens for the first time as

emperor.

128:

Hadrian visits Lambaesis in Africa. He returns to Athens.

129:

Hadrian leaves Greece. He founds the colonia of Aelia

Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem.

130:

Hadrian in Egypt. The death of Antinous.

132:

Hadrian inaugurates the Panhellenion in Athens. The Bar

Kokhba revolt breaks out in Judaea.

136:

Suppression of the Bar Kockba revolt.

138:

Hadrian adopts Antoninus Pius. Antoninus Pius adopts Marcus

Aurelius. Death of Hadrian.

OceanofPDF.com

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The Beginnings of Rome

ROMULUS: Founder and first king of Rome.

NUMA POMPILIUS: Second king of Rome. Consorted with a nymph.

TARQUIN THE PROUD: The last king of Rome, expelled in 509 BC.

LUCRETIA: A noble virgin, assaulted by Tarquin’s son.

MANLIUS TORQUATUS: A military hero, famed for putting discipline above

family.

The Last Days of the Roman Republic

POMPEY (‘THE GREAT’): The most powerful man in Rome during the last

decades of the Republic.

CRASSUS: A fabulously wealthy power-broker who died fighting the

Parthians.

JULIUS CAESAR: The conqueror of Gaul whose ambitions led to civil war and

his own subsequent dictatorship. Assassinated in 44 BC.

CICERO: Rome’s most famous orator. Murdered in 43 BC on the orders of

Mark Antony.

MARK ANTONY: The rival of the future Augustus for the rule of the world.

Augustus and His Dynasty

AUGUSTUS: Great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. The founder of

Rome’s first imperial dynasty, and commemorated as the city’s original

emperor.

VARUS: Governor of Germany who lost three legions in the ‘Varian disaster’.

TIBERIUS: Rome’s second emperor.

PONTIUS PILATE: Prefect of Judaea under Tiberius.

CALIGULA: Rome’s third emperor. Famously difficult to get along with.

CLAUDIUS: Rome’s fourth emperor. The conqueror of Britain. Married his

niece.

AGRIPPINA: Claudius’ niece, Nero’s mother.

BRITANNICUS: Claudius’ son. Died under suspicious circumstances shortly

after Nero had become emperor.

OCTAVIA: Claudius’ daughter. Nero’s first wife. Died under suspicious

circumstances shortly after Nero had divorced her.

ANTONIUS FELIX: Upwardly mobile slave of Claudius’ mother who ended up

governing Judaea and marrying the sister of Herod Agrippa.

The Age of Nero

NERO: Emperor and showman.

ACTE: Nero’s first love.

POPPAEA SABINA: Nero’s second wife. The love of his life.

STATILIA MESSALINA: Nero’s third wife. Did not resemble Poppaea Sabina.

SPORUS: Young boy castrated on Nero’s orders. Did resemble Poppaea

Sabina.

TIGELLINUS: Prefect of the Praetorians. Thuggish.

NYMPHIDIUS: Prefect of the Praetorians. Ambitious.

CALVIA CRISPINILLA: Nero’s ‘tutor in sexual depravity’.

PETRONIUS ARBITER: The most stylish man at Nero’s court. Author of the

Satyricon.

CORBULO: The greatest general of his age. Forced to commit suicide by

Nero.

CESTIUS GALLUS: Governor of Syria. Incompetent.

GESSIUS FLORUS: Financial administrator of Judaea. Grasping.

CLODIUS MACER: Governor of Africa. Rebellious.

JULIUS VINDEX: Descendant of Gallic kings. Co-conspirator with Galba

against Nero.

VIRGINIUS RUFUS: Commander of the Rhine. Defeats Vindex.

PETRONIUS TURPILIANUS: Commander of Nero’s troops in Italy.

EPAPHRODITUS: Nero’s secretary, later put to death by Domitian.

Galba’s Rise and Fall

GALBA: Governor of Spain. Leader of a successful revolt against Nero. The

first of Rome’s emperors not to claim a dynastic link to Augustus.

OTHO: Former husband of Poppaea Sabina and friend of Nero. Joins Galba’s

revolt. Rules as emperor for three months.

CAECINA: Ambitious and inveterate trouble-maker.

CORNELIUS LACO: Galba’s appointment as Praetorian prefect.

CIGONIUS VARRO: Ghost-writer who picks the wrong side.

LUCIUS CALPURNIUS PISO FRUGI LICINIANUS: Galba’s adopted son. Does not

last long.

Vitellius and the Northern Frontier

VITELLIUS: Commander of Lower Germany. Rules as emperor for eight

months. Fond of pies.

GERMANICUS: Vitellius’ son.

ASIATICUS: Vitellius’ favourite and freedman.

HORDEONIUS FLACCUS: Commander of Upper Germany.

FABIUS VALENS: Colleague and rival of Caecina.

JULIUS SABINUS: Self-proclaimed emperor of Gaul. Supposedly a descendant

of Julius Caesar.

The Flavians

VESPASIAN: Commander of the Roman forces in Judaea. The last emperor

standing in the year of the four emperors.

TITUS: Vespasian’s eldest son. The conqueror of Jerusalem. Remembered as

a man ‘adored and doted upon by the whole of humanity’.

DOMITIAN: Vespasian’s youngest son, and Titus’ heir as emperor. Not

remembered as a man ‘adored and doted upon by the whole of

humanity’.

FLAVIUS SABINUS: Vespasian’s elder brother. City prefect under Vitellius.

MARCUS ULPIUS TRAJANUS: Senator from Baetica. The commander of X

Fretensis under Vespasian. The father of Trajan.

BASILIDES: Syrian prophet.

GAIUS LICINIUS MUCIANUS: Governor of Syria. Vespasian’s plenipotentiary. A

lover of wonders and elephants.

TIBERIUS JULIUS ALEXANDER: Prefect of Egypt.

MARCUS ANTONIUS PRIMUS: Commander of VII Galbiana. Fond of cutting

corners.

JULIUS BRIGANTICUS: Batavian auxiliary commander.

QUINTUS PETILLIUS CERIALIS: Relative by marriage of Vespasian. Governor of

Britain.

HELVIDIUS PRISCUS: Nostalgic for the lost days of the Republic. Put to death

under Vespasian.

PLINY (‘THE ELDER’): Equestrian, admiral, encyclopaedist.

LARCIUS LICINIUS: Governor of Spain, with a talent for giving offence.

ANTONIA CAENIS: Secretary to Claudius’ mother, much beloved by

Vespasian.

DOMITIA LONGINA: Corbulo’s daughter, Domitian’s wife.

TITUS FLAVIUS CLEMENS: Grandson of Flavius Sabinus. Put to death by

Domitian.

FLAVIA DOMITILLA: Granddaughter of Vespasian. Put to death by Domitian.

EARINUS: Eunuch owned and freed by Domitian.

AGRICOLA: Governor of Britain and conqueror of Caledonia.

CORNELIUS FUSCUS: Praetorian prefect.

ANTONIUS SATURNINUS: Governor of Upper Germany. Leads a mutiny against

Domitian.

LAPPIUS MAXIMUS: Governor of Lower Germany. Refuses to join Saturninus’

mutiny.

ACILIUS GLABRIO: Senatorial lion-wrestler. Put to death by Domitian.

Pompeii and the Bay of Naples

GNAEUS ALLEIUS NIGIDIUS MAIUS: The grand old man of Pompeian politics.

MARCUS EPIDIUS SABINUS: Pompeii’s coming man.

AULUS UMBRICIUS SCAURUS: Garum tycoon.

CLODIA NIGELLA: Pig-keeper.

TITUS SUEDIUS CLEMENS: Centurion. Vespasian’s agent in Pompeii. Tourist in

Egypt.

POMPONIANUS: Senator with a villa in Stabiae. Friend of Pliny the Elder.

Kings and Queens

HEROD THE GREAT: Ruler of Judaea under Augustus.

HEROD AGRIPPA: Great-grandson of Herod the Great.

BERENICE: Herod Agrippa’s sister. Titus’ lover.

MITHRIDATES: Client king from Pontus overly fond of a joke.

CARTIMANDUA: Queen of the Brigantes.

DECEBALUS: King of the Dacians. Defeated by Trajan.

CHOSROES: King of the Parthians. Defeated by Trajan.

Rebels Against Rome

THEUDAS: Would-be Judaean miracle-worker.

‘THE EGYPTIAN’: Would-be Judaean miracle-worker.

BOUDICCA: British queen.

ELEAZAR: Judaean priest.

YOSEF BEN MATTITYAHU: Commander of the rebel forces in Galilee. Captured

by Vespasian. Historian. Better known as Josephus.

VELEDA: German seeress.

MARICCUS: Gaul believed by his followers to be the son of a god.

JULIUS CIVILIS: Batavian auxiliary commander who may or may not have led

a rebellion against Roman rule.

SIMEON BAR KOKHBA: Leader of the Judaean revolt against Hadrian.

The Age of Trajan

MARCUS COCCEIUS NERVA: Distinguished senator who briefly ruled as

emperor following the assassination of Domitian.

TRAJAN: The best of emperors.

PLINY (‘THE YOUNGER’): Nephew of Pliny the Elder. Owner of a large number

of villas. Distinguished orator. Enthusiastic letter writer. Governor of

Bithynia and Pontus.

TACITUS: Nephew of Agricola. Historian.

APOLLODORUS: Architect.

DIO CHRYSOSTOM: Philosopher.

LUSIUS QUIETUS: Mauritanian prince. Governor of Judaea.

The Age of Hadrian

HADRIAN: Trajan’s heir as emperor.

SABINA: Hadrian’s wife.

ACILIUS ATTIANUS: Hadrian’s guardian and – briefly – Praetorian prefect.

SEPTICIUS CLARUS: Praetorian prefect in the wake of Attianus’ dismissal.

Patron of Suetonius.

SUETONIUS: Hadrian’s chief secretary. Biographer.

PHLEGON: Freedman. Compiler of wonders.

ARRIAN: Senator from Bithynia. Historian, senator, governor of Baetica.

EPICTETUS: Philosopher.

PHILOPAPPUS: Fabulously well-connected mover and shaker in Athens.

JULIA BALBILLA: Philopappus’ sister. Sabina’s friend.

ANTINOUS: Hadrian’s beloved. Drowned in mysterious circumstances.

Became a god.

JULIUS SEVERUS: Governor of Britain. Appointed by Hadrian to pacify

Judaea.

OceanofPDF.com

NOTES

Preface

1 Aelius Aristides. Regarding Rome: 13

2 C. E. Stevens, quoted by Breeze, p. xv

3 From an interview given by Martin in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhpQwiz0Gq0

4 Rudyard Kipling, ‘On the Great Wall’, in Puck of Pook’s Hill (London, 1906).

5 Gibbon, vol. 1, p. 103

6 Ibid: p. 31

7 Temin, p. 2

8 Revelation. 17.6

9 Ibid: 17.18

10 Ibid: 18.16–17

11 Matthew. 20.16

12 From a life of Saint Gregory the Great, written in the early eighth century by an anonymous

monk of Whitby. Quoted by Vickers, p. 71

13 Origen. Against Celsus: 2.8

14 Quoted by Horbury, p. 15. ‘The biblical and rabbinic title nasi used by Simeon bar Kosiba [the

leader of the Jewish revolt against Hadrian] is also applied to the modern head of state, and is

then rendered in English as “president”.’

15 Florus. Epitome: 1.1

I. The Sad and Infernal Gods

1 Ovid. Tristia: 1.5.69–70

2 Cassius Dio: 53.16

3 Suetonius. Life of the Deified Augustus: 28

4 Plutarch. Numa Pompilius: 4.2

5 Livy: 1.59

6 Tacitus. Annals: 13.45

7 Ovid. Tristia: 4.4.15

8 Suetonius. Life of the Deified Augustus: 53

9 Cassius Dio: 53.19.3

10 Statius. Silvae: 5.211–12

11 Seneca. On Consolation: To His Mother Helvia: 10.4

12 From a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Quoted by Capponi, p. 69

13 Tacitus. Annals: 16.6

14 Suetonius. Nero: 31

15 Martial. Book of Spectacles: 2.8

16 Ibid: 2.4

17 Cassius Dio: 63.22.1

18 Suetonius. Nero: 40

19 Cicero. Against Verres: 2.4.82

20 Ovid. Black Sea Letters: 4.9.68

21 Seneca. On Benefits: 4.28.2

22 From an inscription found in 1887 at Karditza, Greece. Smallwood (1967), p. 64

23 Sophocles. Fragment 837

24 Plutarch. Romulus: 11

25 Such at any rate is the most popular theory. See Lyes, p. 53

26 Varro, quoted by Macrobius. Saturnalia: 1.16.18

27 Suetonius. Nero: 49

28 Tacitus. Histories: 1.89

29 Ibid: 1.4

30 Ibid

31 Ibid: 1.73

32 That Calvia came from Africa is nowhere stated in our sources, but only a woman with

substantial holdings and contacts there could possibly have influenced events in the way that

she did in 69.

33 Tacitus. Histories: 1.5

34 Josephus. The Judaean War: 3.123

35 For this theory, see Morgan (2000), pp. 486–7

36 Suetonius. Nero: 16

37 The evidence for this derives from an inscription found on the site of the warehouses, and

which had been set up in the autumn of 68.

38 Tacitus. Histories: 1.7

39 Ibid: 1.16

40 Ibid

41 Suetonius. Otho: 5

42 Ibid: 6

43 So, at any rate, Plutarch reports. According to Tacitus he was arrested, sentenced to exile on a

remote island, and put to death before he could reach it.

44 Tacitus. Histories: 1.49

II. Four Emperors

1 Ausonius. ‘On Bissula’: 17–18

2 Tacitus. Germania: 4

3 Res Gestae: 3

4 Tacitus. Histories: 4.73

5 Livy: 22.38

6 For this explanation of the origin of the name – a thoroughly convincing one – see Bishop

(1990).

7 Horace. Odes: 3.6

8 Tacitus. Annals: 4.4

9 Livy: 8.7

10 Suetonius. The Deified Julius: 24

11 Livy: 44.39

12 Josephus. The Judaean War: 3.83

13 Ulpian: 39.1.42

14 Ennius. Annals: 5

15 Such, at any rate, is the evidence from Vetera, which, like Mogontiacum, was a double-

legionary base, but where – unlike in Mainz – the foundations of the first-century AD fortress

have survived.

16 This was the report of Tacitus, our best and primary source for the events that led up to the

proclamation of Vitellius as emperor. Suetonius, in a much more lurid account, has a posse of

soldiers surprising him in his sleeping quarters, carrying him round Cologne on their shoulders,

and then accidentally setting fire to his headquarters.

17 Tacitus. Annals: 1.62

18 Tacitus. Histories: 1.50

19 Ibid: 2.8

20 Sibylline Oracles: 4.119

21 Aristotle. Politics: 1327b

22 Josephus. The Judaean War: 1.65

23 Ibid: 2.278

24 Tacitus. Histories: 5.10

25 Ibid: 5.4

26 Ibid: 5.5

27 Ibid

28 Theophrastus. Quoted by Goodman (2007), p. 282

29 Seneca, as quoted by Augustine. The City of God: 6.11

30 Smallwood (1967). No. 370

31 Philo. ‘Embassy to Gaius’: 38

32 Pliny: 5.70

33 Josephus. The Judaean War: 2.390

34 Ibid: 2.362

35 So, at any rate, Suetonius reported ( Vespasian: 4)

36 Tacitus. Annals: 13.35

37 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 1

38 Ibid: 20

39 Tacitus. Histories: 2.78

40 2 Thessalonians. 2.4

41 Tacitus. Histories: 2.78

42 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 4

43 Josephus. Life: 16

44 Josephus. The Judaean War: 3.401–2

45 Tacitus. Histories: 4.74

46 Strabo: 4.1.2

47 Pliny: 30.4

48 Tacitus. Histories: 2.32

49 Ibid: 2.46

50 Ibid: 2.47

51 Suetonius. Otho: 12

52 Tacitus. Histories: 2.89

53 Suetonius. Vitellius: 11

54 Dio: 65.10

55 Josephus. The Judaean War: 4.626

56 Daniel. 7.7–8

57 Tacitus. Histories: 2.84

58 Ibid: 4.61

59 Josephus. The Judaean War: 2.401

60 Isaiah. 11.4

61 Josephus. The Judaean War: 3.516

62 Ibid: 5.41

III. A World at War

1 Ovid. Metamorphoses: 15.209–11

2 Frontinus: 4.7.2

3 Velleius Paterculus: 2.100.2

4 Calpurnius Siculus: 7.43–4

5 Tacitus. Histories: 2.88

6 Dio: 64.13

7 Tacitus. Histories: 3.32

8 Pliny: 16.5

9 Dio: 61.3

10 Pliny: 16.3

11 Tacitus. Germania: 29

12 ILS: 2558. The inscription dates from Hadrian’s time.

13 Tacitus. Histories: 4.22

14 Ennius. Annals: 247

15 Tacitus. Histories: 3.54

16 Ibid: 3.63

17 Tacitus. Histories: 3.67

18 Ibid: 3.68

19 Ibid: 3.70. Suetonius, for what it is worth, reports that Vitellius actively incited his men to

attack the Capitol; but this seems – to put it mildly – improbable.

20 Ibid: 3.72

21 Ibid: 3.83

22 Tacitus. Histories: 3.85

23 So Suetonius reports ( Vespasian: 7). In Tacitus’ account of the incident, the second invalid had

a withered hand ( Histories: 4.81).

24 Tacitus, citing Flavian propaganda, reports that some of the legions did in fact take the oath of

loyalty to Vespasian; but his subsequent narrative demonstrates the unreliability of this claim.

25 Tacitus. Histories: 4.54

26 The phrase appears in the third head of an inscription on a bronze tablet that survived thanks to

its incorporation into an altar in the basilica of St John Lateran, and is now in the Capitoline

Museum.

27 Dio: 66.2. The evidence for Mucianus’ presence on the Palatine derives from lead pipes

stamped with his name: ‘the only ones found on the Palatine [in the first century ad] not

mentioning a member of the imperial family’. (de Kleijn (2013), p. 437)

28 Tacitus. Histories: 4.86

29 Dio: 65.2. Suetonius ( Domitian: 1) reports the same joke. Both men interpret it as an expression

of Vespasian’s foreboding that Domitian will prove a tyrant, and is already – even as a young

man – plotting treachery; but this is plainly a misreading. Likewise, the claims made by Tacitus

( Histories: 4.86) that Domitian, as an eighteen-year-old, was secretly plotting rebellion against

his father tell us more about Tacitus himself, and the loathing he felt for the emperor that

Domitian became, than about anything that is actually likely to have happened in the summer

of AD 70.

30 Cicero. Philippics: 6.19

31 Josephus. The Judaean War: 3.248

32 Such, at any rate, is what Josephus claims to have witnessed during the siege that ended with

his being taken prisoner by Vespasian (ibid: 3.246)

33 Ibid: 5.223

34 Virgil. Aeneid: 6.852–3

35 Josephus. The Judaean War: 5.353

36 Ibid: 5.515

37 Ibid: 5.451

38 Tacitus. Histories: 5.12

39 Josephus. The Judaean War: 6.285

40 Josephus reports that the Temple was torched ‘in defiance of Caesar’s wishes’ ( The Judaean

War: 6.266). But since Josephus is constantly trying to square his devotion to the customs of his

people with his status as a Flavian client, this probably tells us more about him than it does

about Titus himself. Flavian propaganda certainly revelled in the burning of the Temple. In his

account of its destruction, Dio reports that the legionaries were so nervous of despoiling it that

Titus actually had to urge them to overcome their superstitious qualms (65.6).

41 Josephus. The Judaean War: 6.275

42 Ibid: 7.2

43 Dionysus of Halicarnassus: 2.34

44 Josephus. The Judaean War: 7.118

45 Statius. Punica: 3.596

46 Martial. Book of Spectacles: 2.11

47 Josephus. The Judaean War: 7.147

48 Quoted by Mason (2016), p. 4. His opening chapter, ‘A Famous and Unknown War’, is a

brilliant example of recognising something that had always been staring historians in the face.

49 Pausanias: 7.17

50 From a fragmentary inscription written in Greek found at Ardea, just south of Rome, in 1947

( L’Année épigraphique: 1953.25)

51 Plutarch. ‘On Love’

52 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 14

53 Tacitus. Histories: 1.50

54 Pliny: 36.102. Pliny specifies that the Temple of Peace is one of the three most beautiful

structures in the world – the other two being a basilica in the Forum and the forum of Augustus.

55 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 23

56 Ibid

IV. Sleeping Giants

1 Strabo: 5.4.3

2 Ibid: 5.4.8

3 Petronius: 48.4. The speaker is a vulgar parvenu – a further refinement of the satire.

4 Aetna: 432

5 Pliny: 18.110

6 Vitruvius: 2.6.1

7 Martial, in one of his epigrams (11.80.1). It was also Martial who hailed Baiae as a princeps

(6.42.7).

8 Strabo: 5.4.6

9 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 3.5.8

10 Pliny: Preface 14

11 Ibid: 14.2

12 Ibid: 7.130

13 Philo. ‘On the Contemplative Life’: 48

14 Suetonius. Vitellius: 13

15 Pliny: 7.6

16 Ibid: 3.39

17 Ibid: 3.42

18 Ibid: 10.135

19 The narrative has to be deduced exclusively from archaeological evidence, and particularly

from inscriptions, edicts and graffiti preserved in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Poppaea’s

engagement with the area is evident from a wooden tablet discovered in Herculaneum that

records her as the owner of some brick-works near Pompeii. It is likely as well – although not

conclusively proven – that the great villa complex at Oplontis, some five miles from Pompeii,

belonged to her. The thesis that Poppaea persuaded Nero to revoke the ban on gladiators draws

on eight instances of graffiti around the town hall hailing the emperor’s ‘judgement’, together

with various other expressions of enthusiasm for the imperial capital scrawled across the city.

The case is presented in forensic and convincing detail in James L. Franklin Jr., ‘Middle to Late

Julio-Claudians – Neropoppaeenes’, in Franklin (2001).

20 CIL: X.1018

21 Cicero. On the Manilian Law: 3.7

22 Juvenal: 10.114–15

23 Murison (2003) convincingly argues that Nerva served Vespasian as a patron at Nero’s court,

and that he looked after Flavian interests while Vespasian and Titus were absent in Judaea.

24 The painting no longer survives. For a detailed account of what it looked like, and its

significance, see Franklin (2001), pp. 263–4

25 Macrobius: 2.3.11

26 CIL: IV.1177b

27 Specifically, the inscription boasted that 416 gladiators had participated in the show. See

Osanna, p. 290

28 Pliny: 31.24. Although Pliny does not say so specifically, it seems that Licinus died seven days

after his visit to the non-flowing springs.

29 Cicero. On Duties: 1.151

30 Ibid

31 Cicero. On Duties: 1.151

32 Cited by Curtis, p. 561

33 Cited by Hemelrijk, p. 264

34 Valerius Maximus: 8.14.5

35 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 18

36 Seneca. Dialogues: 7.24.3

37 Ibid: 12.12

38 CIL: 4.9839b

39 Gaius. Institutes: 1.3.9

40 Demographic estimates in ancient history are notoriously hazy. The servile population of Italy

in the first century AD has traditionally been estimated at around a third of the total, but

Scheidel (2005) convincingly argues that it was closer to a quarter.

41 Diodorus Siculus: 5.38.1

42 Chrysippus, quoted by Seneca in On Benefits (3.22.1)

43 Plutarch. On Curiosity: 520c. Literally, ‘the slave with a head like a sparrow or an ostrich’.

44 So, at any rate, Longinus claims. On the Sublime: 44.5

45 Petronius: 76

46 Dionysus of Halicarnassus: 4.23.7

47 Ibid: 4.23.2

48 Seneca. Letters: 27.5

49 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 3.5

50 Pliny: 2.192

51 Cassius Dio: 66.22.2

52 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 6.16

53 Cassius Dio: 66.22.4

54 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 6.16

55 Ibid

56 Ibid

57 Ibid

58 Pliny: 2.239

59 Ibid: 2.194

60 Martial. Epigrams: 4.44

61 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 6.20

62 Ibid

V. The Universal Spider

1 Pliny: 8.6

2 Petronius. 119.17

3 Pliny: 8.48

4 Martial. Book of Shows: 17

5 Fugitives from Pompeii, it seems, migrated to Capua, and from Herculaneum to Naples. Puteoli

played host to refugees from both cities. See Tuck (2020).

6 Cassius Dio: 66.23

7 Suetonius. The Deified Titus: 8

8 Martial. Book of Shows: 2

9 Ibid: 5

10 Suetonius. The Deified Titus: 8

11 Ibid: 1

12 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 48.5

13 Martial. Book of Shows: 5.8

14 Statius. Silvae: 4.3.128–9

15 Suetonius. Domitian: 4

16 Statius. Silvae: 3.4.26

17 CIL: 6.826

18 Pliny: 3.42

19 Statius. Silvae: 4.2.14–16

20 Tacitus. Agricola: 23. The Romans called the Clyde ‘Clota’ and the Firth of Forth ‘Bodotria’.

21 Statius. Silvae: 5.1.81–2

22 Silius. Punica: 3.597

23 Tacitus. Agricola: 27

24 Ibid: 38

25 Statius. Silvae: 5.1.89

26 Tacitus. Agricola: 40

27 Statius. Silvae: 5.1.84

28 Juvenal: 4.111–12

29 Suetonius. Domitian: 9

30 Tacitus. Agricola: 42

31 Tacitus. Histories: 1.2

32 Cassius Dio: 67.5.6

33 Statius. Silvae: 5.2.91–3

34 Ibid: 5.1.42

35 Such, at any rate, is the evidence of an inscription found in Hippo and published in 1952. The

ultimate origin of Suetonius’ family was most likely Pisaurum, a colony founded on the

Adriatic coast in 184 BC.

36 Plutarch. Life of Publicola: 15

37 Juvenal: 3.20

38 Ibid: 1.131

39 Ibid: 3.73–4

40 Ibid: 3.84–5

41 Pliny: 2.189

42 Josephus. Against Apion: 2.40

43 Josephus. Life: 423

44 For the archaeological evidence, see Reich.

45 See Cohen for the numerous implausibilities of Josephus’ account of the siege, and the failure

of the archaeology to square with his account of it. The possibility that the Romans may have

violated a pledge of safety is suggested by Mason (2016), pp. 573–4.

46 Josephus. The Judaean War: 7.336

47 Josephus. Against Apion: 2.291

48 Cassius Dio: 67.14

49 Suetonius. Domitian: 20

50 Cassius Dio: 67.9

51 Statius. Silvae: 1.93

52 Suetonius. Domitian: 14

53 Cassius Dio: 67.15

54 Evidence that Nerva was proclaimed emperor on the same day as Domitian’s murder is

provided by an inscription from Ostia. Collins makes a convincing case that this ‘refers to a

proclamation of Nerva by the praetorian guard’ (p. 100), and not – as others have argued – by

the senate.

55 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 52.4

VI. The Best of Emperors

1 Cassius Dio: 68.4

2 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 2.3

3 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 4.8.5

4 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 12.1

5 Herodotus: 5.3

6 Julian the Apostate. The Caesars: 327.D

7 Florus: Prologue 7

8 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 8.4.1

9 Cassius Dio.

10 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 4.7

11 Statius. Silvae: 1.65

12 Juvenal: 3.165–6

13 Seneca. On the Tranquillity of the Soul: 11.7

14 Juvenal: 3.257–60

15 Pliny: 36.123

16 Historia Augusta: Alexander Severus: 65.5

17 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 32.1

18 Pliny the Younger, Letters: 6.31.15

19 The phrase was Juvenal’s (10.81), who coined it with satirical intent. Fronto, altogether more

admiringly, summed up Trajan’s commitment to annona et spectacula – ‘the supply of corn and

spectaculars’ – as ‘the height of political wisdom’ ( Principia Historiae: 20).

20 Pliny the Younger. Panegyric: 35.1

21 Strabo: 12.4.9

22 Philostratus. Lives of the Sophists: 1.7.2

23 Dio of Prusa: 44.9

24 Ibid: 38.15

25 Dio nowhere gives the name of this patron. Traditionally, he has been identified with Titus

Flavius Sabinus, the elder brother of the Titus Flavius Clemens who was executed in 95 on a

charge of atheism. Harry Sidebottom (pp. 452–3) has plausibly suggested another candidate: L.

Salvius Otho Cocceianus, a nephew of Nerva, who – according to Suetonius – was executed by

Domitian for celebrating his uncle’s birthday.

26 Dio of Prusa: 13.1

27 Ibid: 13.8

28 Ibid: 12.19

29 Ibid: 45.13

30 Ibid: 47.18

31 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 4.9.4

32 Ibid: 8.14.9

33 Ibid: 10.40.2

34 Ibid: 10.98.1

35 Dio: 38.38

36 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 10.17a.3.

37 Dio of Prusa: 1.65

38 Ibid: 3.86

39 Ibid: 4.4

40 Ibid: 4.54

41 The story is recorded by Augustine in the fifth century ( City of God: 4.4), but the anecdote, it seems, was already being cited by Cicero.

42 Tacitus. Agricola: 3

43 Revelation. 18.19

44 Ibid: 18.12–13

45 Pliny: 33.148

46 Tacitus. Agricola: 21

47 Tacitus. Annals: 1.4

48 Tacitus. Germania: 37

49 Ibid

50 Pliny: 7.21

51 Ibid: 6.58

52 Ibid: 6.88

53 Ibid: 12.14

54 The Akananuru, quoted by De Romanis (2020), p. 115, n. 43

55 Juvenal: 1

56 Assorted papyri demonstrate that it was being dug between 112 and 114.

57 Cassius Dio: 68.23

58 Ibid: 68.29

VII. I Build This Garden for Us

1 Philo. On the Embassy to Gaius: 214. Philo was the uncle of Julius Alexander, the brother of

the Arabarch who gilded the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem.

2 Eusebius, quoted by Jerome in his Chronicle: entry for the 223rd Olympiad

3 Historia Augusta: The Life of Hadrian: 14.11

4 Tacitus. Annals: 1.7

5 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 2.9.4

6 Suetonius. The Deified Augustus: 21

7 Historia Augusta: The Life of Hadrian: 14

8 Cassius Dio: 69.9

9 Historia Augusta: The Life of Hadrian: 10

10 Ibid

11 From an inscription found at Lambaesis detailing a number of Hadrian’s addresses.

12 Dio of Prusa: 1.53

13 Ibid: 1.56

14 Pliny the Younger. Letters: 9.39

15 Dio of Prusa: 1.60

16 Ibid: 1.75

17 The biography of Arrian, whose life of Alexander is a key source for the great conqueror’s

military career, has to be pieced together from a wide variety of fragments – ranging from

excerpts in Byzantine histories to inscriptions found in Cordoba – as well as from his surviving

texts. This inevitably brings hazards. ‘Erudite enquiry,’ warns Sir Ronald Syme, ‘has to seek

after hints or traces in the writings, a seductive pastime but often hazardous and liable to

deceive.’ The outline of Arrian’s life, however, is generally accepted – and such as it is, I have

given it.

18 Smallwood (1966), p. 60

19 Epitome of the Caesars: 14.6

20 Strabo: 12.4.3

21 The story was reported by Arrian in his book on the Parthians.

22 Tertullian. Apology: 5.7

23 Cicero. On the Ends of Good and Evil: 5.5

24 Plutarch. Table Talk: 1.10

25 Pausanias: 1.3.2

26 Epictetus: 3.13.9

27 Dio of Prusa: 38.38

28 Philostratus. Life of Apollonius: 4.27

29 From a speech delivered by Hadrian in Cyrene. Quoted by Oliver, p. 122

30 Pausanias: 1.5.5

31 Ibid: 2.1.2

32 Sibylline Oracles: 5.48

33 Cassius Dio: 69.11

34 Clement of Alexandria, speaking with the full force of Christian disapproval, but articulating a

tradition that had remained constant since Antinous’ own lifetime. Exhortation to the Greeks: 4.

35 Inscription from an obelisk now standing in the Pincian Gardens in Rome, and almost certainly

– although it is written in hieroglyphs – authored by Hadrian himself. Quoted by Lambert, p.

64.

36 Suetonius. The Deified Vespasian: 13

37 Cornelius Nepos. Alcibiades: 2.2

38 Plutarch. Isis and Osiris: 18

39 Pliny: 7.33

40 Phlegon. On Amazing Things: 28

41 Apuleius. The Golden Ass: 11.5

42 It is possible that the flood failed in both 129 and 130, the year that Hadrian sailed the Nile. The

evidence for this, however, is sparse – deriving as it does principally from a lack of coins

celebrating high flood waters dateable to the two relevant years. Nevertheless, for all that

absence of evidence is not proof of absence, the possibility that Hadrian was confronting a

crisis in the corn supply as he sailed upriver does add a further dimension to the mystery of

Antinous’ death. See Lambert, pp. 122–3.

43 Plutarch. Isis and Osiris: 54

44 For a measured survey of the reliability of this dating, see Vout, pp. 57–9

45 Cassius Dio: 69.11. Hadrian’s claim that Antinous had drowned was derived by Dio from

Hadrian’s own autobiography.

46 Suetonius. Nero: 36

47 Speller (p. 289) offers a further possibility: ‘that Antinous merely disappeared from the

imperial entourage, possibly faking his own death’.

48 Pausanias: 1.42.2

49 From an Armenian version of Eusebius’ Chronicle, quoted by Renberg, p. 173

50 Cassius Dio: 69.11

51 One of the hieroglyphic texts on the Monte Pincio obelisk in Rome.

52 From an inscription set up some time in the 130s to mark the admission of the city of Thyatira

to the Panhellenion. Quoted by Spawforth (2012), p. 249

53 Tacitus. Annals: 15.44

54 Pliny. Letters: 10.96.9

55 Ibid: 10.97.2

56 Numbers. 24.17

57 Fronto. Quoted by Horbury, p. 331

58 The evidence, albeit sketchy, is widely accepted. The presence of XXII Deiotariana in Egypt is

attested in 119, whereas an inscription from Rome dated to 162 omits it from an otherwise

comprehensive list of the legions. This is the same inscription from which IX Hispana is

similarly omitted.

59 Pausanias: 1.5.5

60 Cassius Dio: 69.14

61 Historia Augusta: The Life of Hadrian: 15.13

62 Ibid: 26.5

63 From a letter written by Hadrian to Antoninus Pius, preserved on a papyrus from Egypt. Quoted

by Birley (1997), p. 299

64 Cassius Dio: 69.20

65 Ibid: 53.27

66 Quoted in Mattingly (1997), p. 185. The inscription was written by someone who signed

himself ‘Lauricius’, in what is now southern Jordan. That he was a soldier seems by far the

likeliest supposition – but it is also possible that he was a disgruntled provincial. Whoever

Lauricius may have been, the point he was making still serves.

OceanofPDF.com

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INDEX

Acte (lover of Nero), 24, 34

Actium, battle of (31 BC), 12–13

Africa: canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, 308, 311; Carthage, 27, 38–9, 42, 300; Cyrene

(ancient Greek city), 61, 313, 318, 330; Ethiopians, 256; grain ships from, 27, 38, 178, 279–80; Hadrian in (AD 128), 324–5; Lambaesis (army base), 325, 335; Macer revolt in, 38–9, 42, 43;

Mauretania, 208*, 224, 313; Nasamonians massacred, 248; and Pliny, 183, 184; soldiers from on

Hadrian’s Wall, xvi; Suetonius born in, 252; Vitellius as governor of, 70; wild beasts from, 223–5,

344

Agricola, Gnaeus Julius, 238–41, 242, 243, 245–7, 255, 302, 323, 324

Agrippina (mother of Nero), 16, 17, 30, 69

Akiva, Rabbi, 354*

Alexander the Great, 73, 74, 104, 298–9, 303, 304, 305–6, 310, 311, 312

Alexandria: grain ships from, 27, 104, 178; great legionary base outside, 83, 102, 308, 354; Hadrian in (AD 130), 344, 350; immense scale of, 104, 300; Judaeans in, 80, 81, 101, 307, 313, 318; knowledge of India in, 306; Roman governors in, 73, 74; slaughter of Judaeans in (AD 117), 318; Vespasian in, 104, 123, 139

Amestris, city of, 295

Anatolia, 282–2, 293, 294–7, 301, 315; see also Bithynia Annona (embodiment of the corn supply), 27, 178, 279, 301, 347

Antinous, 341–4, 347–50, 351–2, 353, 356

Antioch, 73, 74, 80, 83, 300, 308, 310, 313, 330; earthquake in (AD 116), 310, 330; Hadrian

proclaimed emperor in, 315

Antoninus Pius (Titus Aelius Hadrianus Caesar Antoninus), xx, xxvi, 358, 359–60

Antonius Felix, 208, 225

Antonius Primus, Marcus, 113–5, 119–22, 123–4, 129; advance on Rome (late AD 69), 131–2, 135;

invasion of Italy, 114–16, 119–20, 129, 130–2; Mucianus as rival, 121, 133, 141, 142; and murder

of Sabinus, 136–7, 141; victory at Cremona (24 October AD 69), 120–4, 130, 131; victory in

Rome (19 December AD 69), 137–8, 141

Apameia (Bithynian city), 284–5, 328

Apollodorus (engineer), 273, 281, 318, 356

arabarchs (tax administrators), 307

Arabic language, 187

Arganthonius (promontory), 331

Aristotle, 298

Armenia, 83, 101, 303, 304–5, 308, 318, 329

Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus), 329–30, 336, 356

Arsacids, 303, 304–5

Asia, province of, 73–4, 83, 207, 300, 301–2

Asiaticus (slave), 207, 209, 348

Assyria, 303–4, 310, 331

Athens: Eleusinian Mysteries, 29–30, 351; Hadrian in, xiii, 332–5, 344, 350–1, 354; Hadrian’s renewal project in, 334–5, 337, 338, 340, 350–1; material plundered from, 23, 28; and the Panhellenion, 337–8, 339, 350–1; Roman conquest of, 332; temple of Olympian Zeus, 335, 338,

350; Theatre of Dionysus, 332, 334; war with Sparta, 336, 337

Attianus, Acilius, 316–17, 319

Augustus: attitude to adversaries/enemies, 57; Batavian bodyguards, 126; and built environment, 4–

6, 18, 25–6, 27, 133, 281; and ‘Druids’ in Gaul, 91; equestrian order under, 36; family of as

sacred, 14–15, 34, 38; Forum of, 4, 243; as a god, 4, 15, 18, 169; Hadrian compares himself to,

320–1; and Herod the Great, 107, 108; male descendants of, xxvii, 14–15, 16, 34, 192–3; mausoleum of, 18, 359; monopolises imperium, 13, 65–6, 162, 321; and the Pantheon, 230; political astuteness of, 13, 14, 163–4, 232, 321; regularises auxilia (auxiliaries), 105–6; rise of at

young age, 47; and spectacular entertainments, 118; Tacitus’ view of, 302; and tax collection, 74–

5; treaty with Parthians, 304; victory in civil war, 12–13, 54, 59, 60, 61, 84*, 123, 163

Babylon, city of, 102–3, 310, 312, 314

Babylon, Whore of, xix–xx, xxi

Babylonia, 303–4, 310, 312, 314, 340

Baetica (region of Spain), 43, 58, 85, 193, 268, 293, 329

Baiae, spa town of, 177–8, 218, 222, 358

Balbilla, Julia, 334, 348, 349

Balbillus (Nero’s astrologer), 348

Basilides (priest on Mount Carmel), 86–7

‘Batavian foam’, 125, 127

Batavians, 125–30, 140, 143–5, 238, 240, 259, 322

Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak, xxiii

Berenice (port on the Red Sea), 307

Berenice (sister of Agrippa), 109, 112, 150, 230

Berytus, colonia of, 103, 107

Bithynia, 282–93, 293, 294–7, 301, 328–30, 331; Antinous as native of, 342, 343, 350; earthquake in,

330; Hadrian in (AD 123), 330–2

Black Forest (Decumatian Fields), 165

the Brigantes, 236–8, 259

Briganticus, Julius, 144

Britain: Agricola as governor, 239–41, 242, 243, 245–6, 302, 323, 324; Batavian auxiliaries in, 126,

129, 238, 240; Boudicca’s revolt, 75, 145, 239; Caledonians, 236, 238–41, 243, 245–7; Cerialis’

command in, 145, 236–8; conquest of by Claudius, 16, 60, 158, 236; creation of Roman

infrastructure, xiv, 74, 238, 240, 243, 245; Hadrian in (AD 122), xiii–xiv, 323–44; and human

sacrifice, 79; legions in moved to Danube, 245–7, 323; northwards advance of Roman arms, 236–

41, 323; Roman dismantling of buildings, 245–6; Roman legions in, xxv, 145, 236–41, 243, 323–

4; Roman victory at Mount Graupius, 239–40, 324

Britannicus (son of Claudius), 16, 17

British Empire, xvi

Byzantium, 282, 285, 291

Caecina Alienus, Aulus: and Antonius’ invasion of Italy, 114–16, 119; campaign against the

Helvetians, 89, 91, 93; commands legion on Rhine, 43, 58–59, 60, 62–3, 67–71; delivers treasury

of Baetica to Galba, 43, 58; embezzles public funds, 58; march to Rome (AD 69), 88–9, 93–5, 113;

murder of at Titus’ dinner party, 167; mutiny against Galba/Otho, 67–71, 88–95, 249; switch to Vespasian, 115–16, 122–3, 129; victory at Cremona (April AD 69), 95–6, 98–9, 116, 118–19, 120,

126

Caenis, Antonia, 207–8

Caesar, Julius: Alexander the Great as exemplar, 298, 299; assassination of, 12, 60; conquest of Gaul,

4, 12, 60, 61, 62, 89–90, 116, 273; defeat of Helvetians, 89, 93; Forum of, 4, 12, 17–18, 31, 34;

and gladiator contests, 118; as a god, 4; and Herod the Great, 108; re-founds Corinth, 338–9, 340–

Caesarea, 108

Caledonians, 236, 238–41, 243, 245–7

Caligula, 15, 16, 18, 36, 40, 62, 69–70

Calvia Crispinilla, 38–9, 43

Camden, William, xv

Campania, 173–8, 184–90, 196, 199–200, 210–13, 226; see also Herculaneum; Naples, Bay of; Pompeii, city of

Campus Martius (Field of Mars): AD 80 fire, 229–30; ancient military role of, 18, 59, 65;

monuments/temples/public buildings in, 18, 59, 99, 159, 161, 161*, 402 229–30, 346, 359;

squatters in after 64 AD fire, 19

the Capitol: burning of (December AD 69), 135–6, 140, 147, 150, 160, 226,

253; as centre of ritual, 3–6, 22–7, 47–8, 158–9; as destination for

triumphs, 158, 159; Domitian’s temple to Jupiter, 253, 256; Jupiter’s temple, 23–4, 25, 26, 28, 136, 147, 159, 160, 167, 201, 229, 253, 256; second fire on (AD 80), 229–30, 253; siege of, 134–8, 346; Vespasian rebuilds temple of Jupiter, 160, 167, 201, 253

Capua, city of, 185, 187

Carmel, Mount, 86–7

Carrhae, battle at (53 BC), 304

Carthage, 27, 38–9, 42, 300

Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes, 236–8, 259

Cerialis, Quintus Petillius, 145–6, 236–8

Cestius Gallus, 78, 82–3, 84, 101

Chalcedon, city of, 285, 291

the Chatti, 241–3, 250, 251, 303

Chaukians, 125, 182–3

China, xviii, 306

Chosroes (Parthian king), 310–11, 330

Christianity, xix–xxii, xxiv, 352–3; Revelation of Saint John, xix–xx, xxi

Cicero, 192–3, 194–5, 198, 199, 247, 269, 293, 332

civil war (after Caesar’s assassination), 12–13, 54, 59, 60, 61, 84*, 123, 163, 192–3

civil war (after death of Nero), xxvii; AD 69 as year of four Caesars, xxvii, 100–1, 107, 126–30;

Antonius’ invasion of Italy, 114–16, 119–20, 129, 130–2; and Batavian auxiliaries, 126–30; and Batavian revolt on the Rhine, 127–30, 140, 143–5; battle at Cremona (April AD 69), 95–6, 98–9,

116, 118–19, 120, 126; burning of the Capitol (December AD 69), 135–6, 140, 147, 160, 226, 253;

Caecina switches to Vespasian, 115–16, 122–3, 129; Caecina’s march on Rome (AD 69), 88–9,

93–5, 113; capture and murder of Vitellius, 137–8; chaos at start of Vespasian’s reign, 139–41;

death of Galba (January AD 69), 52–3, 54–5; events of 18–19 December AD 69 in Rome, 134–8;

final defeat of Vitellian forces, 143–6; Flavians exploit crisis on Rhine, 143–6; Galba’s adoption

of Piso, 49–50; Galba’s rule in Rome, 40–3, 45–51; Macer revolt in Africa, 38–9, 42, 43; Mucianus as Vespasian’s plenipotentiary, 141–2, 144–6, 166, 190, 207; Mucianus’ task force from

Syria, 103, 113, 121, 128, 133; murder of Sabinus in Forum, 136–7, 141; and mutiny at Misenum

(AD 69), 131, 179; Otho’s coup against Galba, 50–3, 54–5, 72, 97–8; and the Praetorians, 36–41,

45, 49–53, 94–6, 131–7; prophecies/omens in AD 69 period, 34, 100, 102–3, 104–5, 106–7, 109–

11, 128–9; revolt of Rhine legions (January AD 69), 67–71, 88–95; Rhine legions refuse to accept

Vespasian, 139– 40, 143; second battle at Cremona (24 October AD 69), 120–4, 130, 131; senate’s weakness during, 35, 71; suicide of Otho (AD 69), 96–7, 98–9, 130; Valens’ march on Rome (AD

69), 91–2, 95; Vespasian plans revolt against Vitellius, 100–4, 107, 113; Vespasian waits on events, 85–6, 88; Vespasian’s peace, 159–69; Vitellian diehards in Gaul, 139–40, 144, 164;

Vitellius attempts to abdicate, 134–6; Vitellius enters Rome, 99–100; Vitellius’ surrender

negotiations, 132–4; Vitellius’ war against Otho, 71–2, 84, 88–9, 94–6

civil war (Julius Caesar’s), 12

Civilis, Julius (Batavian commander), 128–30, 143–5, 259

civitates liberae (cities free of taxation), 285, 291

Claudiopolis, town of, 294–5, 342

Claudius, 16, 18, 35, 49, 69, 91; census of (AD 47), 66, 70; conquest of Britain, 16, 60, 158, 236;

death of (AD 54), 16–17; develops Ostia, 27, 178; and former slaves, 207, 208; and respect for

Judaean beliefs, 80, 108

Clemens, Titus Flavius, 260, 262, 264

coinage: and Domitian, 234–5, 242–3, 247, 266; and Galba, 46; GERMANIA CAPTA slogan, 242–3;

historical evidence from, xxvi; IUDAEA CAPTA slogan, 163, 242; Judaean, 147, 354; and Macer,

38; and Nero, 26–7, 32; PARTHIA CAPTA slogan, 311; and Titus, 223–4, 242; and Trajan, 299–

300, 302, 311; and Vespasian, 160, 163, 242, 302

Colonia (headquarters of Lower Germany), 68–71, 88, 266

colonia status, 69, 186, 190–2, 195–6, 284–5, 338–9, 340–1

Comum, town of, 179, 192, 294, 326–7

consulship, 10, 47, 70, 72, 319; and 1 January rituals, 22–4; Augustus takes control of, 13, 193;

consuls from Anatolia, 286; duumvirate in Pompeii, 191–2, 194, 195, 210; as elected during

Republic, 9, 191; and the Flavians, 85, 193, 254–5, 260, 262; and Pliny the younger, 269; Quietus

as consul, 314; during Vespasian’s rule, 166, 167

Corbulo, Gnaeus Domitius, 83–4, 101, 116, 125, 179, 180, 231, 303

Corduba, 43

Corinth, 338–9, 340–1

Cornelia (chief Vestal), 261

Crassus, Marcus Licinius, 49, 304

Cremona, 94–6, 98–9, 115–16, 118–22, 123, 126; destruction of, 123–4, 130, 164, 184

Ctesiphon, city of, 304, 310–11, 312

Cumae, city of, 174, 176, 225

Cyprus, 313, 318

Cyrene (ancient Greek city), 61, 313, 318, 330

Cyrus (Persian king), 340

Dacians: Domitian’s war against, 244–8, 249–50, 251, 271, 272–3, 279; history and culture of, 270–

1; Mucianus expels from Moesia, 128, 244; Trajan’s war against, 267–8, 269–70, 271–5, 290,

303, 316

Daniel (prophet), 102–3

Dante, The Divine Comedy, xxii

Danube, river: defences weakened by civil war, 128, 244; and Hadrian, 315, 317, 318, 330; legions

posted to, 59, 89, 114, 142, 165; reinforced with legions from Britain, 245, 246–7; stone bridge

over, 273, 318, 356; Vespasian strengthens defences, 165; see also Dacians

Decebalus (Dacian king), 270, 272–3

diet/food, 181–2, 199–200, 306–7

Dio Chrysostom, 287–92, 295, 296–9, 301, 326, 327–9, 331, 336–7

diseases, epidemic, 230, 278–9

Domitia Longina, 231, 233

Domitian: amici of, 262, 264; attempts to secure military experience, 146, 231, 241; attention to detail/micromanagement, 234, 235, 244, 252–3; baldness of, 231, 233, 242, 275; becomes emperor (AD 81), 232; and Britain, 240–1, 242, 243, 245–7, 323; building programme, 234, 253,

254, 256, 279, 280, 281, 359; campaign against the Chatti, 241–3, 303; as Censor Perpetuus,

248–9, 260–4; concern for sound money, 234–5, 242–3, 247–8, 266, 299; Cornelia buried alive by, 261; and Domitia Longina, 231, 233; erasure of memory of, 264–5; exiles Dio, 289, 326; grim sense of humour, 248, 262–3; informers of, 246, 248; and the Judaeans, 314; legacy of, 266, 279;

in Lugdunum (AD 70), 146, 241; malevolent rumours about, 231–2, 249; and military infrastructure on Rhine, 242, 244, 251; murder of (18 September AD 96), 264, 265, 290; as natural

outsider/loner, 231–2; and the Praetorians, 232, 244–5, 250, 264, 265; rides in Vespasian/Titus

triumph, 159; in Rome under Vitellius, 133, 135, 136, 138, 145, 346; rules as absolute monarch,

232–5, 247–52, 260–4, 269; Saturninus’ revolt (AD 89), 249–51, 255, 269; and the senate, 232–3,

246–7, 248, 249, 254–5, 262, 264–5, 268, 293; sense of duty, 245, 249, 251–2, 260; sense of

moral mission, 233–5, 247–52, 260–4, 279, 342; strain of paranoia, 246, 262, 263; and the

supernatural, 232–3, 234, 243–4, 248, 251–2, 253, 279; taste for top-end slaves, 233–4; villa in

the Alban Hills, 231, 261, 262; war against Dacians, 244–8, 249–50, 251, 271, 272–3, 279; withdrawal from Caledonia, 245–7, 323; and younger Pliny’s advancement, 269, 293, 302

Domitilla, Flavia, 260

Druids, 91, 353

Earinus (eunuch), 233–4

earthquakes, 188–90, 196, 211–14, 219–20, 310, 330

Eboracum (York), 238

economy/trade: disruptions to corn supply, 38–9, 41; Domitian’s policies, 247, 248, 252–3, 259–60; grain ships from Carthage and Egypt, 27, 38, 178, 279–80; Harbour of Trajan the Fortunate, 280,

300; impact of fire (of AD 64), 27, 76, 78; Indian commodities, 306–7, 311; lack of precise data on, xviii; monthly corn dole, 27–8, 41, 46, 201; prosperity of Roman world, xvii, xviii, 106–7,

174–84, 243–4, 266, 299–302; Rome’s shrinking of world, 180–4; shipping, xvii, 27, 38, 81, 104,

178, 180, 184, 279–80, 282, 300–1, 307, 311; tax collection, 73, 74–5, 76–8, 81–2, 164; Trajan’s

policies, 280, 299–302, 307–8, 311; wealth/treasures from Dacia, 271, 274, 279, 280, 281, 299

Egeria (nymph), 7, 277, 360

Egypt: Amenhotep III, 348–9, 349*; death of Antinous in (AD 130), 341–2, 347–50, 356; gods and

goddesses, 79, 345–7, 349–50, 352; Hadrian in (AD 130), 341–3, 344, 346–50; and India, 306,

307; Julius Alexander as prefect, 101–2, 307; Nile shore as bread-basket of the world, 27, 344–6;

Roman rule of, 4, 27, 59, 73, 74, 101–2, 307, 313; Vespasian in (AD 69), 103–4, 139, 142, 178; see also Alexandria

‘the Egyptian’ (Judaean prophet), 110

Eleazar (Judaean priest), 82

elephants, 181–2, 223–5, 228

entertainment/games: see munera (games/entertainments); theatre

Epaphroditus, 33, 264

Ephesus, xviii, 294

Epictetus (Greek philosopher), 329, 332, 335–6

Epidius Sabinus, Marcus, 194–5, 196, 213–14, 221

eunuchs, 206–7, 226, 233–4, 342

Falco, Quintus Pompeius, xvi*

Flaccus, Hordeonius, 68, 129–30, 139

Flaminian Way, 131, 132

Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum), xix, xxiv, 164, 234, 280; inauguration of, xxvii, 223–5, 227–9; Vespasian orders building of, 161–2, 168

Flavian dynasty: and Agrippa in Judaea, 107–9, 112, 150, 156; and Antonius Primus, 113–15, 116,

119–24, 129, 131–3, 135, 136–8, 141, 142; and the Batavians, 126, 127, 129–30, 140, 144, 145;

and Britain, 236–41, 243, 247, 323; destruction of Cremona, 123–4, 130, 164; and duties on

Indian commodities, 307; historical sources on, xxv–xxvii; hostility to Judaeans, xxii–xxiii, 147–

9, 153–7, 203, 253–4, 259–60; Julius Alexander allies with, 101–2; leniency shown to Batavians,

145; Mucianus-Antonius rivalry, 121, 133, 141, 142; and murder of Sabinus, 136–7, 141; murder

of Valens, 132; pacification of Germany (AD 70), 143–6; planning at Berytus (July AD 69), 103,

107, 113; Pliny as favourite of, 179–80; prophecies of Basilides, 86–7; prophecies of Josephus,

87–8, 100, 102–3, 104, 109, 256–7; securing of Campania, 187–91; social standing of, 85, 160,

169; Vespasian’s ambition, 85–8, 100–4; victory at Cremona (24 October AD 69), 120–4, 130,

131; Vitellius’ surrender negotiations, 132–4; see also entries for three Flavian emperors

Florus, Gessius, 76–8, 81–2, 106, 109

the Forum: ancient cypress in the mundus, 31, 34; of Augustus, 4, 243; buildings in, 3–6, 12, 261;

equestrian bronze of Domitian, 263, 264; events of 18–19 December AD 69 in, 134–8; and AD 64

fire, 19; funeral of Poppaea Sabina, 3–6, 9, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 31, 351; Galba’s death in,

52–3, 54–5; Golden Milestone in, 4–6; of Julius Caesar, 4, 12, 17–18, 31, 34; Lapis Niger (the

‘Black Stone’), 6, 7, 31; Lucretia’s funeral, 10; the mundus, 31–2, 34; murder of Sabinus in, 136–

7, 141; murder of Vitellius in, 138; Stairs of Mourning, 123, 136, 138, 141, 273; temple of

Concordia, 123, 134, 136; temple to Vesta, 261; Trajan’s, 281, 319; triumph processions through,

159; underground shrine to the kings, 7

Fronto, Marcus Cornelius, xxv*

Fuscus, Cornelius, 244–5, 272

Galba, Servius Sulpicius: background of, 34–5, 40–1, 49, 53, 193; and Caecina, 43, 58; character of,

39, 40–2, 67; death of (January AD 69), 52–3, 54–5; decimation of marines, 41–2, 51, 60, 67–8;

disbands Batavian bodyguards, 126; as governor of Spain, 22, 32, 43–4; naming of his heir, 47,

48–50; and Nero’s legacy, 42–3, 48; Otho’s coup against, 50–3, 72, 97–8; and the plebs, 46–7, 48;

and the Praetorians, 35, 39, 41, 44, 49–50, 51–3; raises banner of revolt (April AD 68), 32; reputation for fabulous wealth, 37, 46–7; revolt of Rhine legions against, 67–71; rule of in Rome,

40–3, 45–51; and the senate, 34–5, 40–2, 50, 51; slow advance on Rome, 39; and VII Galbiana,

113–14; and Vindex’s revolt, 22, 67, 97

Galilee, 87, 111, 112, 204, 339, 355

A Game of Thrones (novels/television series), xv–xvi

Gaul: the Aedui tribe, 90, 91–2; Armorica (Brittany), 90; and burning of the Capitol, 226; Domitian

brings security to, 241–2, 250, 251; final defeat of Vitellian forces, 143–6; Galba’s journey through (AD 68), 39; Gallic warriors in Roman army, 62; Gauls of Helvetia, 89, 91, 93; German

threat to, 57, 125, 241, 250; identity in Roman Gaul, 89–90, 93, 117; Julius Caesar’s conquest of,

4, 12, 60, 61, 62, 89–90, 116, 273; loot from, 4, 12; Lugdunum as metropolis of, 97, 104–5, 116,

117, 118; senators from, 193, 238–9, 255; slaves from, 203, 205; traditions of prophecy, 90–1,

110; Vindex’s revolt, 21–2, 32, 67, 91, 93, 97; Vitellian diehards in, 139–40, 144, 164; Vitellius in, 97, 104–5, 116–17, 118, 146

‘Germanicus’ (son of Vitellius), 97, 142, 166

Germany: and Augustus, 4, 55–7; Batavian people, 125–30, 140, 143–5, 238, 240, 259, 322; creation of Roman infrastructure, 74; Domitian’s victory over the Chatti, 241–3, 303; Flavian pacification of (AD 70), 143–6; morals/values in, 78; and Pliny, 179, 182–3; swirl of prophecies in AD 69

period, 105, 106–7; Tacitus’ view of, 302–3; Taunus mountains, 242, 243, 322; Ubian tribe, 68–9;

‘Varian disaster’ (AD 9), 55, 57, 61, 67, 106; Vespasian annexes Black Forest, 165; Vespasian’s punitive raids, 165; see also Rhine, river

Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), xvi–xvii, xx

Glabrio, Acilius, 262, 264

Gladiator (film), xix

gladiators, 117–19, 185–6, 195–6, 228; on the battlefield, 120–1

Greek world: ancient shrines/temples, 29, 326–7; attitude to peoples of Asia, 74; attitudes to

sexuality, 343–4; Bithynian elites, 284, 286–92, 328–30; and Campania, 173–6; Eleusinian

Mysteries, 29–30, 351; elite accommodation with Roman manners, 328–30; enthusiasm for

Nero’s memory, 72–3; Greek-Judaean conflict in Alexandria, 313; Hadrian’s devotion to, 329–38,

339, 343–4, 350–1; Hadrian’s Panhellenion, 337–8, 339, 350–1; Hercules legend, 173–4, 176,

326, 327, 331, 343, 344; and India, 305; Nero remits taxes, 29, 73, 164, 285; Nero visits, 29–30,

76; and the Nile, 344–6; and Pax Romana, 285–92, 294–7, 329–38, 339; Peloponnesian War, 336,

337; philosophy from, 73–4, 176, 287, 288–90, 297–9, 327–9, 332, 335–6, 344; Proserpina myth,

28, 29–30, 31, 47–8; and Roman Army, 65; Roman attitudes to, 254–5, 284–8, 292–7, 332, 343;

Roman conquest of, 332, 338–9; senators from, 328, 329; Vespasian rescinds exemption, 164,

285; see also Athens

Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus): abandonment of Trajan’s conquests, 318, 319, 321; in Africa

(AD 128), 324–5; arranges seamless succession, 358; in Athens, xiii, 332–5, 344, 350–1, 354;

Attianus as plenipotentiary in Rome, 316–17, 319; awards dead Trajan a triumph, 319; beard of,

316, 322, 329; in Britain (AD 122), xiii–xiv, 323–4; and campaign against Parthians, 307–8, 315,

316; chaos and disorder at start of rule of, 315–17; and Christians, 353; compares himself to

Augustus, 320–1; and Dacian war, 267–8, 269–70, 271, 272, 273–4, 316; and death of Antinous

(AD 130), 341–2, 347–50, 356; death of (August AD 138), xxviii, 358; deifies Antinous, 349–50,

351–2, 353; in Egypt (AD 130), 341–3, 344, 346–50; friendship with Arrian, 329–30; and

Gibbon’s golden age, xvi–xvii, xx; and Greek culture, 329–38, 339, 343–4, 350–1; hailed as

imperator by legions (AD 117), 315; as intellectual, xiii, 316, 329, 344; in Judaea (AD 130), 339–

41; Judaean policy of, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 317, 318, 339–41, 354–6; Judaean revolt against (AD 132),

xxiii, xxv–xxvi, 354–6; last years of, 356–8; love for Antinous, 342–4, 347, 351–2, 353;

mausoleum on Vatican Field, xiv, xx, 358–9; as paradox to contemporaries, 316; political

astuteness of, 318–19; rejects dream of dominion without limit, 317–18, 321–2, 323–4, 325;

renewal project in Athens, 334–5, 337, 338, 340, 350–1; and the senate, 316–17, 319, 320, 351–2,

353, 356, 358; Spanish origin of, 267–8, 329; and strict army discipline, 322–3, 325, 354–5; and

the supernatural, xiii–xiv, 339–40; Tacitus compares to Tiberius, 319–20; tour of the Roman world, 322–5, 329–32, 334–41; Trajan sends east, 303, 307–8, 329; villa of (north of Rome), 356;

as ward of Trajan, 267, 268

Hadrian’s Wall, xiv–xvi, 324

Hatra, citadel of, 312–13

Helvetia, 89, 91, 93

Helvidius Priscus, 167

Herculaneum, xxvi, 174, 176, 188; and AD 79 eruption, 214–15, 217–18, 219–20, 225

Hercules, 173–4, 176, 326, 327, 331, 343, 344

Herod Agrippa II (Marcus Julius Agrippa), 107, 108–9, 110, 112, 150, 156, 208, 225

Herod the Great, 107–8, 157

Hippo Regius, colonia of, 252

historical evidence/scholarship, xv, xviii, xxiii, xxv–xxvii

Hylas (companion of Hercules), 331, 343, 344

imperialism, Western, xvi, xxi

India, 305–7, 311

Iran, 304, 310–11

Islam, xxiii

Israel, state of, xxiii, xxv Italica, city in Spain, 193, 267–8

Jerusalem: as Aelia Capitolina, 341, 354, 355; and Agrippa, 108–9, 110; annihilation of by Titus (AD

70), 155–7, 314, 340–1; the Antonia fortress, 152, 153, 154; Cestius abandons siege, 82–3, 84;

Dome of the Rock, xxiii; Hadrian rebuilds as Roman city, xxiii, 341; massacres by Samaritan garrison (AD 66), 81–2; pagan temple on Temple rock, xxiii, 317, 340, 355; Pompey’s storming of,

75; and Roman rule, 76–8, 80–1, 339–41; Samaritans massacred (AD 66), 82; Titus besieges (AD

70), xxii–xxiii, xxvii, 146–57, 162–4; Vespasian mandated to capture, 142, 146–57, 162–4

Josephus, Flavius (Yosef ben Mattityahu): command in Galilee, 87, 110–11, 112; defence of Judaean

culture, 259–60; hostility towards in Judaea, 111, 257; Judaean War, xxvi, 257–9; as prisoner of

Vespasian, 87–8, 100; prophesises Vespasian’s glory, 87–8, 100, 102–3, 104, 109, 256–7; as

Roman citizen, 256–60; at siege of Jerusalem, xxvi, 150, 151; in Titus’ train, 112, 150; Vespasian cuts chains of, 100, 102

Judaea: elite collaboration with Roman authorities, 76, 80, 81, 107–9, 112, 150; Gessius Florus’

extortion/plunder, 76–8, 81–2, 106, 109; Hadrian in (AD 130), 339–41; Hadrian’s policy towards,

317, 339–41; Herod the Great, 107–8, 157; Quietus as governor of, 314, 317, 340; renamed

Palestine by Rome, xxiii, 355; revolt against Hadrian (AD 132), xxiii, xxv–xxvi, 354–6; revolt against Rome (AD 66), xxii–xxiii, xxv–xxvi, 75, 76, 78, 82–8, 107–12, 142, 146–57, 159, 162–4,

257–9; Roman plunder from Temple, 157, 168; Roman rule of, 75, 76–81, 100–3, 107–9; siege of

Masada, xxiii, xxv, 257–9; victory over as Flavian claim to legitimacy, 159, 162–4, 242, 253, 314;

war of extermination against Samaritans, 75–6; see also Jerusalem; Temple, Jerusalem

Judaeans: in Alexandria, 80, 81, 101, 307, 313, 318; Cestius’ force massacred by, 83, 152; conflict

with Greeks in Alexandria, 313; culture and beliefs, 78–80, 86–7, 102–3, 109–11, 146–7, 259–60,

340, 352, 353–4; as an ethnos, xxiv; Flavian hostility to, xxii–xxiii, 147–9, 153–7, 203, 253–4,

259–60; hostility towards Josephus, 111, 257; monotheism of, 79; optimism over Hadrian, 317,

340, 341; Pliny on, 199; refugees in Rome, 253–4, 256, 259–60; reputation of lore/prophecy, 86–

7, 88, 90–1, 100, 102–3, 109–10, 260; revolt in eastern Mediterranean (AD 116), 313–14, 330,

339; slaughter of in Babylon (AD 116), 314; slaughter of in eastern Mediterranean (AD 117), 318; terminology in this book, xxiii–xxiv; Titus’ treatment of prisoners, 203; tribute to Jupiter after

defeat of, 253, 256, 259–60; view of Roman opulence/wealth, 301; see also Josephus, Flavius (Yosef ben Mattityahu)

Julius Alexander, Tiberius, 101–2, 112, 150, 155, 254, 307

the kings, age of, 6–7, 9, 10, 26, 210, 254, 261, 277, 360

Kipling, Rudyard, xvi

knowledge and learning, 182–4

Laco, Cornelius, 39, 51, 52–3

Lappius Maximus, 250

law/legal matters, 23, 252, 301; court as source of drama/excitement, 252; and Domitian, 233–4,

252–3; Judaean tradition, 260; and Pliny the younger, 269, 292–3, 296–7; and rhetoric, 192, 252,

292, 293; and slavery, 202–3, 205, 210, 211

Libya, 61, 313

Licinus, Larcius, 197

Lollius Urbicus, Quintus, xvi*

Lucretia, rape of, 10

Lugdunum (Lyon), 97, 104–5, 116, 117, 118, 146

Lusitania (Portugal), 44

Macer, Lucius Clodius, 38–9, 42, 43

magistracy: duumvirate in Pompeii, 191–2, 194, 195, 210; as elected during Republic, 9, 65–6; and

Galba’s revolt, 43–4; and new year rituals, 22–4; regulation of slave market, 204–5; women as

ineligible, 10; see also consulship

Maius, Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius, 195–7, 201

Manlius Torquatus, 40, 41, 59, 63–4

Marcus Aurelius (Marcus Annius Verus), xxv*, 358, 359–60

Mariccus, 104–5, 117

Mark Antony, 12–13, 61, 107, 192, 304

Martin, George R. R., xv–xvi

Masada, 108, 109, 258; siege of, xxiii, xxv, 258–9

Matapan, Cape, 31

medieval world, xvii

Mesopotamia, 303–4, 310–11, 312–13, 314, 318, 319, 321, 330

Messalina, Statilia (wife of Nero), 24, 96

Misenum, port/naval base of, 32, 131, 178–9, 180, 182, 188, 197, 222; Pliny’s villa in, 211, 214, 219,

221

Mithridates (king), 41

Moesia, province of, 128, 244–5, 246–7, 249–50, 251, 274

Mogontiacum (military camp on Rhine), 65, 127, 128, 144, 241, 322; Caecina’s command at, 60, 62–

3, 67–8, 69; Domitian strengthens, 242; as headquarters in Upper Germany, 60, 61, 62–3;

Saturninus’ revolt (AD 89), 249, 250–1, 255

morals/values: anachronistic perspectives/assumptions today, xxiii–xxiv; ancient dues of civic

responsibility, 227–8; anxiety over effects of the East, 74, 83, 352; attitude to adversaries/enemies,

55–7; and Christian revolution, xix–xxii; conservative loathing of foreigners, 79–80, 193–4, 254–

5; dangers of luxuries, 181–2, 352; Domitian’s sense of mission, 233–5, 247–52, 260–4, 279, 342;

exposure of unwanted babies, 78; glory/honour as ultimate test of worth, 9, 64–5, 66–7, 192–3,

202; and headhunting, 53; liberty-slavery duality, 10, 202–3, 204; martial qualities valued in

Rome, xxi, 59, 63–7, 146, 152, 180, 275, 337–8; prosperity linked to decadence, 301–2; and Roman brutality/violence, xix, xxi, xxvii, 117–19, 229; and rule of Titus, 226–9, 230; softening

influence of Pax Romana, 40–1, 63; suspicion of cookery, 181–2; and traditionalist image of

Rome, 40–2, 53, 63–7; treatment of wild beasts, 224–5, 228, 229; value given to age/experience,

47; view of poverty/unemployment, 201–2; views on incest, 16; virtus, 64, 83–4, 146, 197, 275,

337–8

Mucianus, Gaius Licinius: Antonius as rival, 121, 133, 141, 142; character of, 101, 141–2, 343; and

the Dacians, 128, 244; extorts wealth from eastern provinces, 164; gossip over sexual tastes of,

343; as governor of Syria, 101, 103; leads task force from Syria, 103, 113, 121, 128, 133;

observations of natural world, 183–4, 223; and pacification of Germany (AD 70), 144–6;

Vespasian’s alliance with, 101, 103, 107, 164, 167, 343; as Vespasian’s plenipotentiary in Rome,

141–2, 144–6, 166, 190, 207

munera (games/entertainments): celebrating opening of Colosseum, 223–5, 227–9; celebrating the

dead Trajan, 319; as essential prop of imperial regime, 118; as exclusively prerogative of Caesar,

195; extravaganzas, 116–17, 118, 280; at Lugdunum, 118; and Nero, 21, 26, 118, 337; origins in funerary rituals of Campania, 117–18, 185–6, 228; popularity in Pompeii, 185–6, 195–6; Samnite

style of fighting, 185; spectacles at cremations, 18–19; Trajan’s use of, 280; and violence/spilling

of blood, xix, xxi, 100, 117–19, 153, 229; Vitellius at Cremona, 118–19; and wild beasts, xix, 99,

117, 223–5, 228, 229, 236, 262

Muziris (port in southern India), 306

Naples, Bay of, 27, 32, 131, 173–4; and AD 79 eruption, 214–22, 225; as fundamental to Rome’s security/prosperity, 178–9, 180, 184; Phlegraean Fields, 176–8; villas on, 176

Naples, city of, 174, 218, 222, 225

Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus): and city of Pompeii, 187, 194, 196; and death of

Poppaea Sabina, 11, 14–15, 17–19, 351; extravagance of, 20–1, 75; ‘Golden House’ of, 20–1, 72,

73, 160–1, 168, 176, 178, 227, 280–1; legacy of, 37–8, 42–3, 44–5, 48, 72–3, 99–100, 160, 161;

love of theatre/acting, 14, 29, 30, 42, 163, 229, 337; and the masses/plebs, 21, 72–3, 277; murder

of his mother, 17, 30; Octavia as wife of, 16, 17, 45; orders suicide of Corbulo, 84; and Otho’s exile, 44–5; and Piso’s family, 49; popular nostalgia for, 72–3; portents following death of, 34; and the Praetorians, 17, 36–8; as Princeps (First Citizen), 11–12, 13, 14; promises after great fire,

32, 160, 234; racing of chariots, 29, 69–70, 326; rebuilding of Rome, 26, 45–6; remits Greek

taxes, 29, 73, 164, 285; revolts against, 21–2, 32–3, 91, 97; as Sol, 14, 19, 20–1, 42; as son of

Agrippina, 16; and spectacular entertainments, 21, 26, 118, 337; and Sporus (eunach), 24–5, 47–8;

suicide of (AD 68), xxvii, 33–4, 264; and the supernatural, 14, 19, 20–1, 22–4, 26–32, 42, 47, 229,

347–8; use of death squads, 22, 42; visits Greece, 29–30, 76

Nerva, Marcus Cocceius: adopts Trajan as heir, 265–6, 268, 306, 315–16; ashes of, 359; background of, 193, 262, 264; as emperor, 264–6, 314; as patron of Dio, 289, 290, 297; and the Praetorians,

264, 265; in Vespasian’s inner circle, 193

Nicaea (Bithynian city), 284, 286, 292, 296, 328, 336

Nicomedia (Bithynian city), 284, 286, 292, 295, 296, 328, 329, 330, 336–7

Nile, river, 27, 308, 341–2, 344–8

Numa Pompilius (second king of Rome), 7, 10, 26, 254, 261, 277, 360

Nymphidius Sabinus, Gaius, 36–40, 41

Obringa (river in Germany), 57, 57*

Octavia (daughter of Claudius), 16, 17, 45

Olympic Games, 29, 326

Olympus, Mount (Bithynia), 282, 285, 291

Orkney, 240

Oscan language/culture, 185, 186

Ostia, port of, 16, 27, 178, 225, 279, 300

Otho, Marcus Salvius: backs Galba’s revolt, 43–4, 45, 48; coup against Galba, 50–3, 54–5, 72, 97–8;

defeated at Cremona (April AD 69), 95–6, 98–9, 116, 118–19, 120, 126; exile in Lusitania, 44–5; and Nero’s legacy, 44–5, 48, 72–3, 160; not named as Galba’s heir, 48, 50; in Rome (second half

of AD 68), 45, 48, 58; suicide of (AD 69), 96–7, 98–9, 130; war against Vitellius, 71–2, 84, 88–9,

94–6; youthful friendship with Nero, 44–5, 46, 72, 277

Pannonia, province of, 114, 116

Parthians, 303, 304–5, 307–11, 312–13, 314, 319, 321

pepper, 306–7, 311

Persian Gulf, 311

Petronius (senator), 176, 208–9, 210

Petronius Turpilianus, 32, 33, 41

Philopappus, Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes, 334, 348

Phlegon (Hadrian’s secretary), 345

Pilate, Pontius, 80, 352

Piso Frugi Licinianus, Lucius Calpurnius, 49–50, 51, 52, 53, 142

Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus): account of world’s geography, 240, 305, 306; and AD 79 eruption,

214, 216–17, 218, 219; commands Misene fleet, 179–80, 188, 197; death of (AD 79), 222, 225;

encyclopaedia of, 180, 183, 184, 192, 197, 211–12, 219, 235, 236, 256, 278, 301, 311; and

frontiers of knowledge, 179–84, 197–8, 199, 209, 211–12, 214; and India, 305, 306–7;

observations of natural world, 184, 211–12, 219, 223, 224, 236, 345; observations of people, 182–

4, 206, 256; social standing of, 179–80, 192, 197–8; study of earthquakes, 211–12, 219; villa in

Misenum, 211, 214, 219, 221

Pliny the younger, 192, 197, 211, 269, 272, 326–7; and AD 79 eruption, 214, 219, 221–2; as centred

on Rome/Italy, 293–4, 295; and Christians, 352–3; commendation of Trajan to senate (AD 100),

269–70, 275, 279, 280; as Domitian’s spokesman, 269, 302; and prestige of the senate, 292–3,

302; as Trajan’s legate in Bithynia and Pontus, 294–7, 352–3

Pompeii, city of: and AD 79 eruption, 214–17, 218, 219, 220–1, 225; archaeological remains of, xxvi; architecture/public buildings of, xviii, 185–6, 188, 196, 212–14; Clodia Nigella as ‘public pig-

keeper’, 200; colonia status, 186, 190–2; earthquakes prior to AD 79 eruption, 211–14; flamen Vespasiani, 194–5, 196; Flavian rule in, 187–91, 194–5; garum (pungent fish sauce), 199–200,

301; great earthquake (AD 62), 188, 196, 212–13, 214; and Hercules legend, 174; Maius as

princeps coloniae, 195–7, 201; Neropoppaeenses in, 186–7, 194, 196; Oscan culture in, 185, 186;

politics in, 186–7, 188, 190–2, 194–7, 200–1, 210–11; popularity of gladiator fights, 185–6, 195–

6; social structure/status in, 191–2, 194, 195–7, 199–201, 210– 11; working farms on outskirts,

176

Pompeius Magnus, Gnaeus (Pompey the Great), 49, 75, 284, 292, 298, 299

Pomponianus (senator), 216–17, 218, 219

Pontus (Anatolian region), 287, 292, 294–7, 352–3

Poppaea Sabina (wife of Nero), 10–11, 17, 45, 72, 87, 187, 213; funeral of, 3–6, 9, 10, 12, 14–15,

17–19, 31, 351; and Judaean beliefs, 79, 86, 260

Praetorians: Attianus commands, 317, 319, 320; camp in Rome, 35–6, 39–40; and Domitian, 232,

244–5, 250, 264, 265; as foundation of emperor’s authority, 16, 35–7; and Galba, 35, 39, 41, 44,

49–50, 51–3; massacre of by Antonius, 137; murder of Sabinus on Capitol, 135, 136; and Nero,

17, 36–8; and Nerva, 264, 265; with Otho at Cremona, 94, 95–6; prefectship of, 35–7, 39–40, 51,

167; Septicius commands, 320–1, 322; standard lost to the Dacians, 245, 250, 272; support for

Otho’s coup, 51–3, 97–8; Titus given command of, 167; and Vitellius, 131, 134, 135, 137

property speculation, 188–90

Propontis, 282, 318, 331

Prusa (Bithynian city), 282–9, 290–2, 295, 296–7, 301, 331

public affairs/governance: in Bithynia, 284–9, 290–2, 293, 294–7; and danger of famine, 26–7, 178,

201, 202, 279–80; emperor’s role, 13–14, 42–3, 48; equestrian order, 35–6, 192, 197–8, 198*,

207, 208; fabric of rule in Near East, 74; imperium’s change of meaning, 13, 161–2; politics in

Pompeii, 186–7, 188, 190–2, 194–7, 200–1, 210–11; Princeps (First Citizen) status, 11–12, 13,

14; records of citizenship, 66; security of the corn supply, 26–7, 38–9, 41, 104, 178, 279–80, 301,

346; Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR), 9–10; the triumph, 158–60, 162, 274–5; value given

to age/experience, 11–12, 47; see also consulship; senate (council of elders)

public amenities/infrastructure, xviii, 203–4, 226, 278, 279–81, 290–91; amphitheatres, 116–19, 120,

161–2, 164, 168, 223–5, 227–9, 234, 280 see also Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum); aqueducts,

16, 80, 278, 280, 295, 330, 335; bath-houses, 18, 62, 103, 188, 214, 216–17, 230, 245, 278, 280–

1, 290, 330, 335; fountains, 213, 214, 254, 278; libraries, xviii, 257, 281, 290, 291, 294, 301;

ports/harbours, 16, 108, 178, 184, 243, 279–80, 281, 301; sewers, 277–8, 295; theatres, 18, 49,

108, 230

Puteoli, port of, 27, 178, 180, 185, 209, 218, 222, 223, 225, 280

Quietus, Lusius, 314, 317, 340

race/ethnicity, 256

religion/the supernatural: ancient Greek shrines/temples, 29, 326–7; Annona (embodiment of the corn supply), 27, 178, 279, 301, 347; Apollo, 14, 22, 47, 50–1; ‘auspices’, 23–4, 25, 50–1, 159; Cerealia festival, 26, 99; Ceres, 26–7, 28, 29–30, 31, 326–7; comets as portents, 169, 225, 347–8,

349, 351, 353–4; Concordia-Discordia battle, 123, 130, 134–5; Dacian reputation for occult

wisdom, 270; and Domitian, 232–3, 234, 243–4, 248, 251–2, 253, 279; Egyptian deities, 79, 345–

7, 349–50, 352; Eleusinian Mysteries, 29–30, 351; family of Augustus as sacred, 14–15; funerary

customs, 18–19, 277; the Furies, 30; global veneration of Isis, 346–7, 352; and Hadrian, xiii–xiv,

339–40; Hadrian deifies Antinous, 349–50, 351–2, 353; Juno, 23, 26, 173; Jupiter ( Optimus), 22–

4, 25, 26, 28, 173, 174, 277; Liber, 26, 28; Libera, 25–6, 27–8, 29–30, 31, 47–8; the Liberalia, 26;

Mars, 4, 6, 98; Minerva, 23, 26; the mundus in the Forum, 31–2, 34; and Nero, 14, 19, 20–1, 22–

4, 26–32, 42, 47, 229, 347–8; new year rituals, 22–4, 25, 26–7, 47–8, 67–8; nymphs, 7, 174, 254,

360; portents, 25, 31–2, 34, 47–8, 71, 88, 131, 169, 225–6, 310, 347–9, 353–4; prophecies/omens

in AD 69 period, 34, 100, 102–3, 104–5, 106–7, 109–11, 128–9; Proserpina myth, 28, 29–30, 31,

47–8; reputation of Judaean lore/prophecy, 86–7, 88, 90–1, 100, 102–3, 109, 260; Romans as

gods, 3, 4, 6, 11, 15, 18, 169, 358; signs of cosmic anger, 140, 225–30, 232–3, 234, 243–4, 248,

251–2, 253, 278–9; and Titus, 225–7, 228–9; traditions of prophecy in Gaul, 90–1, 110; Veleda’s prophecies, 105, 107, 128–9, 143, 145, 165; and Vespasian, 86–7, 88, 100, 102–3, 104, 109, 253

the Republic, 7–10, 11, 12–13, 40, 48–9, 59–60, 65–6, 193, 299

Rhine, river: Batavian revolt (AD 69), 127–30, 140, 143–5; Caecina’s command on, 43, 58–9, 60, 62–

3, 67–71; delta area, 124–30; Domitian strengthens military infrastructure, 242, 244, 251;

Hadrian’s palisade on eastern bank, xiii, 322–3; Hadrian’s tour of (AD 121), 322–3; harsh winters

on, 55, 62, 71; legions refuse to accept Vespasian, 139–40, 143; ‘meadows of the legions’ on

eastern bank, 58; military bases along, xiii, 40, 57–71, 88–9, 105, 125–30, 143–6, 164–5, 242,

249–51, 322–3; Pliny’s service on, 179, 182–3; twin military zones along, 57–8, 61, 67, 68–71,

88–9; Vespasian’s military restoration on, 164–5

Rhodes, island of, 328

Roman Army: in Africa, 325; African soldiers in, xvi, xvi*; anxiety over effect of service in the East,

83; auxilia (auxiliaries), 105–6, 125–30, 144, 238, 240, 259, 267, 271, 322; battle of Philippi (42

BC), 60; battle tactics, 64; bureaucratic nature of legions, 66; Caecina’s command on Rhine, 43,

58–9, 60, 62–3, 67–71; and civil war (AD 69 period), xxvii; commanders as Caesar’s legati, 59; construction of marching camps, 65; defeat of Caesar’s murderers, 60; defeats by the Parthians,

304; disciplina Romana, 39, 40–2, 59, 63–7, 83–4, 180, 354–5; double legionary bases abolished,

251; eagle standard/symbol, 41–2, 67–8, 83, 84; ‘Flavia’ legions, 165; Galba’s decimation of

marines, 41–2, 51, 60, 67–8; Gallic warriors in, 62; Hadrian’s strict discipline, 322–3, 325, 354–5;

at Hadrian’s Wall, xiv–xvi, 324; harsh/brutal punishments, 42, 64; historical development of legions, 59, 60–1, 65; legions in Britain, xxv, 145, 236–41, 243, 323–4; legions moved from

Britain to Danube, 245–7, 323; martial qualities valued in Rome, xxi, 59, 63–7, 146; military

bases on Rhine, xiii, 40, 57–71, 88–9, 105, 125–30, 143–6, 164–5, 242, 249–51, 322–3;

overstretched by Parthian campaign, 312–13, 317–18; Pax Romana based on capacity for extreme

violence, xxvii; revolt of Rhine legions (January AD 69), 67–71, 88–95; and revolts against Nero,

32–3; Rhine legions refuse to accept Vespasian, 139–40, 143; rivalries/resentments between

legions, 60–1, 62; sacramentum (oath), 18, 59, 67, 68, 96; Saturninus’ revolt on Rhine, 249–51,

255; self-restraint and ardour for glory paradox, 64–5; structure of, 65, 66–7, 126–7; ‘Varian disaster’ (AD 9), 55, 57, 61, 67, 106; at very centre of Roman identity, 59; Vespasian’s military restoration on Rhine, 164–5; victory at Mount Graupius, 239–40, 324

Roman Army (named legions): I Adiutrix legion, 41–2, 51, 60, 61, 67–8, 126, 179; I Germanica, 69,

70–1; III Augusta, 61; III Cyrenaica, 61; III Gallica, 61, 62; IV Macedonica, 60–1, 62–3, 67–8,

164; IV Scythica, 61; V Alaudae (the Larks), 61–2, 67, 69, 88, 115–16, 127–9, 143; VI Ferrata,

61; VI Victrix, 61; VII Galbiana, 113–14, 122, 142; VII Gemina, 250; IX Hispana, xxv*; X

Fretensis, 83–4, 84*, 85, 163, 258–9, 339, 341; XII Fulminata, 83, 84, 111–12, 152; XIII Gemina,

116, 120; XV Primigenia, 62, 67, 69, 88, 127–9, 143; XVI Gallica, 69; XXI Rapax, 89, 122, 165;

XXII Primigenia, 62, 67–8, 165; see also Praetorians

Roman Navy: command of, 179, 180, 182; glimpses Shetland, 240–1, 324; mutiny at Misenum (AD

69), 131, 179; Pliny commands Misene fleet, 179–80, 188, 197

Rome, city of: Augustus’ building programmes, 4–6, 18, 133; Aventine hill, 25–6, 27–8, 31, 255; Baths of Trajan, 280–1; beginnings/distant past of, 6–7, 10, 31, 158–9; Circus Maximus, 26, 98–9,

136, 162–3, 280; crime and disorder, 277, 281; demographic changes, 255–6; Domitian’s building programme, 234, 253, 254, 256, 279, 280, 281, 359; fire (AD 64), 19, 20, 26, 27, 30–2, 45–6, 76,

78, 160, 161*, 234; fire (AD 80), 229–30, 253; Flavian refurbishment of, 160–2, 167–8; Hadrian’s mausoleum, xiv, xx, 358–9; Nero’s building programme, 20–1, 26, 45–6; Nero’s ‘Golden House’,

20–1, 72, 73, 227, 280–1; Palatine hill, 3, 6–7, 12, 19, 133, 276; the Pantheon, 18, 230, 359; Pons Aelius, xiv, xx; poor living conditions for masses, 21, 276–7, 278; Porta Capena, 7, 254; property

market in, 276; size of during Trajan’s rule, 276; ‘synagogue’, 79; temple of Libera (Aventine

hill), 25–6, 27–8, 31; Temple of Peace, 168; Trajan’s building programme, 279–81, 299–300;

Trajan’s column, xx, xxii, 319; use of loot/plunder for building projects, 4, 12, 23, 28, 73, 161,

162, 279–81, 299; warehouses south of the Aventine, 46; water/sewage infrastructure, 277–8; see also Campus Martius (Field of Mars); the Capitol; the Forum

Romulus, 6–7, 9, 31, 158, 209–10

Sabina (wife of Hadrian), 315, 322, 325, 342–3, 348, 349

the Sabines, 10

Sabinus, Flavius (brother of Vespasian), 85, 99, 133, 134–6, 145, 260; murder of in Forum, 136–7,

141

Sabinus, Julius, 140, 144, 165–6

Samaria, 75–6, 80, 81–2, 106

Samnites, 184–6, 272

Sarmizegetusa (Dacian capital), 251, 270, 273

Saturninus, Antonius, 249–51, 269

Scaurus, Aulus Umbricius, 199–200, 210, 301

senate (council of elders): and Caligula, 15; and Claudius, 16; decrees Vespasian emperor, 141; and

Domitian, 232–3, 246–7, 248, 249, 254–5, 262, 264–5, 268, 293; under the Flavians, 193–4, 196;

and Galba, 34–5, 40–2, 50, 51; and Hadrian, 316–17, 319, 320, 351–2, 353, 356, 358; limited

influence of, 35, 71; Mucianus as Vespasian’s plenipotentiary, 141–2, 144–6, 166, 190, 207;

Nero’s contempt for, 21–2, 35; and Nymphidius, 37, 39–40, 41; and Otho, 71–2; Pliny and

prestige of, 292–3, 302; and rule of Titus, 226–7; senators banned from Egypt, 102; senators from

eastern provinces, 193–4, 254–5, 286–7, 328, 329; Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR), 9–10; sentences Nero to death, 33, 34; size of, 198*; and social structure, 198–200; and Tacitus, 302;

and traditionalist image of Rome, 40–2; and Trajan, 267–70, 308; and Vespasian’s autocratic rule,

166–7; wealth/land qualification for, 198

Sepphoris, Galilee, 111

Septicius Clarus, Gaius, 320–1, 322, 325

Severus, Julius, 355

sex: delicati, 206, 209, 342, 343; free citizens and homosexuality, 343; in Greek culture, 343–4; the Liberalia, 26; Nero’s depravity, 24–5, 38; and Poppaea Sabina, 11; rumours about Domitian, 249;

and slaves, 205–6, 342; views on incest, 16

Shetland, 240–1, 324

Sibylline Books, 7, 30–1, 174

Sicily, 38

silk, 306

Simeon (‘Bar Kokhba’, Judaean chieftain), 354–6

slaves, xxi; barred from legions, 64; eunuchs, 206–7, 233–4, 342; freed, 33, 36, 39, 209–11, 234,

255, 263–4, 265; liberty-slavery duality, 10, 202–3, 204; market regulation, 204–5, 234; and

peoples of Asia, 73–4, 205, 207; rise to power/influence of, 207–11; and sex, 205–6, 342; slave

auctions, 203; as status symbols, 205–6; work done by, 203–4

social structure: and army auxiliaries, 106; cives (citizens), 9, 18, 27, 57, 59, 64–5, 66, 106, 199,

201–2, 255, 256–7; commercial classes, 198, 199–200, 301, 306–7; craftsmen, 201; decurions

(third order of upper classes), 198–9, 210; destitute citizens, 201–2, 254; eques (cavalryman), 35–

6, 192, 197–8, 198*, 207, 208; freed slaves, 33, 36, 39, 207–11, 234, 255, 263–4, 345; great

families/aristocratic clans, 9, 12, 35, 48–9, 193; link to deep past lost under Flavians, 193–4; the

masses/plebs, 19, 21, 25–7, 41, 46–7, 48, 63, 200–2, 208, 227, 269, 275–8, 280; and military

service, 18, 59, 65–7; Nero’s contempt for the optimates, 21–2, 35; the nouveaux riches, 208–9;

operae (labourers), 204; optimates (best class), 9, 12, 15–16, 21–2, 35; in Pompeii, 191–2, 194–7,

199–201, 210–11; social calibration, 198–9, 227–8, 234; wealth/status as organising principle of state, 227–8, 234

Spain: Caecina delivers treasury of Baetica, 43, 58; Galba as governor, 22, 32, 43–4; origins of

Trajan and Hadrian, 255, 267–8, 329; Roman conquest of, 60; Roman rule of, 4, 250, 255;

senators from, 193, 267–8

Sparta, 336, 337–8

Sporus (eunach), 24–5, 206; claimed by Otho, 45, 48, 72; and death of Nero, 33; in Greece with

Nero, 29–30; Nymphidius owns, 37–8; presents ring of Libera to Nero, 24, 25, 26, 27–28, 30, 32,

47–8, 100; suicide of (AD 69), 100; and Vitellius, 99–100

Stabiae, Bay of Naples, 196, 216, 218, 222

Suedius Clemens, Titus, 187–8, 190, 191, 194, 349

Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius, 252–3, 293, 322, 324; leaves secretariat due to scandal, 325, 347;

Septicius as patron of, 320–1; writes life of Augustus, 321, 347; writes life of Nero, 347–8

Sutcliffe, Rosemary, The Eagle of the Ninth, xxv*

Syria, province of, 78, 80, 103, 104, 107, 203, 303, 335; climate in, 74, 83; Commagene realm, 334;

Hadrian in, 315, 316–17, 339– 40; legions stationed in, 59, 74, 83, 84, 187, 293, 308; Roman view

of Syrians, 74, 79, 254; tax collection infrastructure, 74; Trajanus as governor, 193; Vespasian in,

87, 101; see also Antioch

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, xxvi, 246–7, 293, 300, 301–3, 319–20, 352

Tarquin (tyrant), 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 174

Temple, Jerusalem, 110, 111, 112, 149–50, 307; Cyrus permits rebuilding of, 340; Herod the Great

rebuilds, 108; mass slaughter of Judaeans in, 156–7; militants seize control of (AD 66), 82–3;

Roman plunder from, 157, 168; splendour of, 81, 101, 109, 149–50; Titus destroys (AD 70), xxii–

xxiii, xxvii, 155–7, 257, 314, 340–1

theatre, 47, 49, 119, 332, 334; Nero’s love of, 14, 29, 30, 42, 163, 229, 337

Thebes (Egypt), 348–9

Theudas (Judaean prophet), 110

Thule, mysterious island of, 183, 238–9, 241, 324

Tiber, river, xiv, 6, 16, 27, 71, 280

Tiberius, 14, 15, 18, 63, 90, 91, 319–20, 343

Tigellinus, Gaius Ofonius, 36–7

Titus (Flavian emperor): as Berenice’s lover, 112, 150, 230; conducts census, 183; death of (AD 81),

230–1; and eunuchs, 206, 226; historical sources on, xxv–xxvii; and Josephus, 257; as junior officer in Britain, 236; munera celebrating opening of Colosseum, 223–5, 227–9; in Palestine

with Vespasian, 86, 87, 101; and placating of the gods, 225–7, 228; and Pliny, 179; Praetorians commanded by, 167; rule of, 223–30, 278–9; shared triumph with Vespasian, 158–9, 162–4, 168,

180–1, 346; siege of Jerusalem (AD 70), xxii–xxiii, xxvii, 146–57, 162–4; sinister reputation of,

167; and tax on urine, 168–9; treatment of defeated Judaeans, 203; war against Judaea, xxii–xxiii,

111–12, 142, 146–57, 159, 162–4, 257–9

Trajan (Marcus Ulpius Trajanus): affected modesty of, 268–9; Alexander the Great as exemplar,

298–9, 303, 305–6, 310, 311, 312; awarded posthumous triumph, 319; becomes emperor (AD 98),

266; building programme, 279–81, 299–300; campaign against Parthians, 307–11, 312–13, 314,

319, 321; Christian admiration of, xxii; death of (August AD 117), 315; debases the currency (AD

107), 299–300; deified, 319; Dio as advisor, 287–8, 290, 297–9, 326, 327–8, 331; and Domitian,

250, 255, 262, 265–6, 279; and duties on Indian commodities, 307; economic/trade policies, 280,

299–302, 307–8, 311; historical evidence on, xxvi–xxvii; ill health in Antioch, 313, 314–15; and

Judaean uprisings, 313–14; Nerva adopts as heir, 265–6, 268, 306, 315–16; as Optimus Princeps,

269, 297, 300–2, 307, 308, 319; overstretches in Parthian campaign, 312–13, 317–18; passion for boys, 281, 331; and Pax Romana, 297, 300–2; and the plebs, 269, 275, 280; rule in Rome, 275–6,

279–81, 299–302; and security of corn supply, 279–80, 300–1; and the senate, 267–70, 308; sends Pliny to Bithynia and Pontus, 294–7, 352–3; Spanish origin of, 255, 267–8, 329; triumphal

column, xx, xxii, 319; virtus (manliness of), 275, 281; war against Dacians, 267–8, 269–70, 271–

5, 290, 303, 316

Trajanus, Marcus Ulpius (father of Trajan), 85, 193, 230, 314

Turin, 127

Tyne, river, xiii, 324; Pons Aelius (Hadrian’s Bridge), xiii–xiv

Valens, Fabius, 70–1, 88, 91–2, 95, 97, 114, 116, 129, 131; death of, 132; victory at Cremona (April AD 69), 95–6, 98–9, 116

Varro, Cingonius, 39–40, 41

Varus, Quinctilius, 55, 57, 61, 67, 106

Veleda (seeress), 105, 107, 128–9, 143, 145, 165

Verginius Rufus, 32–3, 39, 67

Verona, 114, 115, 119

Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus): agents to do dirty work of, 142, 145, 166, 188–90; alliance

with Mucianus, 101, 103, 107, 164, 167, 343; ambition of, 85–8, 100–4; autocratic rule of, 166–7; and Batavian auxiliaries, 126, 129–30, 144; becomes emperor (December AD 69), 139–41; carries

rubble from Capitol on hod, 160, 201; command in Britain, 129, 236; and concept of duty, 169;

conducts census, 183; control of Egypt, 103–4, 139, 142, 178; death of (AD 79), 169, 196; delays sailing to Rome, 142–3; demolishes Golden House, 160; and duties on Indian commodities, 307;

extorts wealth from eastern provinces, 164; and Flavian rule in Pompeii, 187–1, 194–5, 196; and

former slaves, 207–8; historical sources on, xxv–xxvii; Judaean revolt misrepresented by, 159,

162–4, 242, 253; Julius Alexander as ally, 101–2, 107; legions in Germany refuse to support,

139–40, 143; Mucianus as plenipotentiary in Rome, 141–2, 144–6, 166, 190, 207; orders building of Flavian Amphitheatre, 161–2, 168; plans revolt against Vitellius, 100–4, 107; Pliny as

commander of fleet, 179, 180, 182; Pliny as favourite of, 179–80; political astuteness of, 158–63,

164–7, 168–9, 190, 201; rebuilding work on the Capitol, 160, 167, 201, 253; rescinds Greek

exemption, 164, 285; restoration work on Rhine, 164–5; returns to Rome as emperor, 158, 164,

166; revolt against Vitellius, 113–16, 119–24, 127–38; roughhewn/no-nonsense image of, 85, 101,

104, 141–2, 160, 166, 169; shared triumph with Titus, 158–9, 162–4, 168, 180–1, 346; and the

supernatural, 86–7, 88, 100, 102–3, 104, 109, 253; Tacitus’ view of, 302; and Temple of Peace,

168; war against Judaea, 85–8, 109, 111–12, 142, 146–57, 159, 162–4

Vestal virgins, 261

Vesuvius, Mount, 177; AD 79 eruption, xxvii, 214–22, 225–6; concrete from Phlegraean Fields, 177–

8; and Hercules legend, 174

Vetera (military camp on Rhine), 61–2, 67, 69, 88, 105, 127; Batavian siege of, 127–30, 140, 143–5;

Vespasian moves, 165

Vindex, Gaius Julius, 21–2, 32, 67, 91, 93, 97

Vindonissa (military camp on Rhine), 89, 144, 250, 267

Vitellius, Aulus: and Antonius’ invasion of Italy, 114–15, 119–20, 129, 130–3; and Asiaticus (slave),

207, 348; attempts to abdicate, 134–6; background of, 69–70; and Batavian auxiliaries, 126–30;

capture and murder of, 137–8; as celebrated charioteer, 69–70, 99; defeated by Flavians at

Cremona (24 October AD 69), 120–4, 130, 131; enters Rome, 99–100; and Helvetia, 91, 93; in

Lugdunum, 97, 104–5, 116, 117, 118; and Mariccus, 104–5, 117; and Nero’s legacy, 99–100, 160;

and Otho’s suicide, 96–7; public relations disasters after Cremona, 98, 118–19; regime of, 114–

15, 130–2; reputation for gluttony/greed, 69, 71, 98, 131, 138, 181, 207; and revolt of Rhine

legions (January AD 69), 68, 69, 70–1; rumours over Tiberius, 343; surrender negotiations of,

132–4; treatment of Otho’s defeated army, 97–8; Vespasian plans revolt against, 100–4, 107, 113;

Vespasian’s revolt against, 113–16, 119–24, 127–38; war against Otho, 71–2, 84, 88–9, 94–6

winter, 54, 55, 71, 88–9, 113

Yosef ben Mattityahu: see Josephus, Flavius (Yosef ben Mattityahu)

Zalmoxis (Dacian deity), 270

OceanofPDF.com

The sad and infernal gods: Pluto, the king of the dead, flanked on the left by Proserpina, the goddess

he raped and abducted to the underworld, and on the right by Ceres, Proserpina’s mother.

(Alinari/Bridgeman Images)

Soldiers from the Praetorian Guard, the military garrison stationed in the capital. Responsible as they

were for the security of Caesar, they repeatedly showed themselves capable of swaying the very fate

of Rome. (Tom Hol and)

Four emperors ruled in the fateful year of AD 69: Galba . . .

. . . Otho . . .

. . . Vitellius . . .

. . . Vespasian. (Head of Vespasian, plaster cast. ((C) Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, cast no.529.

(Original: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, I.N. 2585.) CC BY-ND-NC 4.0). Al other images Wikipedia)

The tombstone of a centurion. He is shown wielding a vine rod, the symbol of his authority over the

men under his command. Discipline, the Romans knew, was what had enabled them to conquer the

world. (Archaeo Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

A coin issued by Otho and then, after his death, stamped with Vespasian’s mark. (Tom Hol and)

Legionaries in battle. The relief dates from the Flavian period, and featured on a pedestal erected in

the great military base of Mogontiacum (modern-day Mainz), on the Rhine. (GDKE-Landesmuseum

Mainz (Ursula Rudischer))

The death of Vitellius. (Wikipedia (Creator: Georges Antoine Rochegrosse))

The Temple of Jerusalem: part of a scale model of the city besieged and destroyed by the Romans in

70. (Wikipedia Creative Commons)

The great menorah looted from the Temple and paraded through the streets of Rome during the

triumph celebrated by Vespasian and Titus. (Zev Radovan/Alamy Stock Photo)

IUDAEA CAPTA. Flavian propagandists never wearied of harping on the victory won by Vespasian

and Titus over the Judaeans. (GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Pompeii. Vesuvius looms in the background. (Sophie Hay)

The tomb of Gnaeus Nigidius Maius, the grand old man of Pompeian politics. Erected just outside

one of the city gates, it boasted an inscription listing in detail his many achievements and

benefactions. (Sophie Hay)

Gladiators in the arena, as portrayed on Maius’ tomb. (Sophie Hay)

Fermented fish guts: the making of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus. (Sophie Hay)

Titus. (Tom Hol and)

Domitian. (Tom Hol and)

A scene such as Mucianus, the great lieutenant of Vespasian, might have seen on the quays of

Puteoli. (Wikipedia)

The Flavian Amphitheatre. (agefotostock/Alamy Stock Photo)

The cityscape of Rome: arches, temples and – second from the left – the great amphitheatre we know

today as the Colosseum. (Sophie Hay)

Coins minted by Domitian and Titus respectively to celebrate the tribute paid by nature to the Roman

people. (Tom Hol and)

The northernmost legionary base ever built: Inchtuthil in Scotland. (Wikipedia)

Nerva. (Tom Hol and)

The best of emperors. ((C) Kenneth Garrett)

Auxiliaries on campaign in Dacia present a complement of severed heads to Trajan. (Col ection of the

National History Museum of Romania (C) MNIR 2013)

Sarmizegetusa: the mountainous stronghold of Decebalus, the Dacian king. (Tom Hol and)

Hadrian. (Wikipedia Creative Commons)

Hadrian’s Wall: clinging to crags, bristling with forts, running from coast to coast. (Peter Barritt/Robert

Harding/agefotostock)

Antinous. (Sue Clark/Alamy Stock Photo)

Hadrian’s great villa outside Rome: ‘built for him in a marvellous manner, so that he was able to give

to its extensive range of features the names of various provinces and places’. ((C) NPL – DeA Picture

Library/Bridgeman Images)

The great dome surmounting Hadrian’s reconstruction of the Pantheon. (Nikretas/Alamy Stock Photo)

OceanofPDF.com

Document Outline

• Title

• Copyright

• Contents

• Acknowledgements

• List of Maps

• Preface

• Part One: War

◦ I. The Sad and Infernal Gods

◦ II. Four Emperors

◦ III. A World at War

• Part Two: Peace

◦ IV. Sleeping Giants

◦ V. The Universal Spider

◦ VI. The Best of Emperors

◦ VII. I Build this Garden for us

• Timeline

• Dramatis Personae

• Notes

• Bibliography

• Index • Picuture Section

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Holland Tom Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

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Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age