Rome and (ancient) Romans

Editor’s note: I don’t want to preface every sentence hereafter with various versions of  ‘I am no historian but…’ so I am going to assume that every sentence henceforth that deserves that qualification already starts with it.

I find Ancient Roman history fascinating.

First, the Roman Empire was large. Very, very large. At its greatest extent, it covered the entire Mediterranean coast, stretching from the British Isles to Egypt. In a pre-industrial society, with communication taking weeks, this was a massive stretch of land for a single political entity to control, but even so, it was not totally unprecedented. When Alexander the Great died, his empire controlled more land, and there were brief periods coinciding with Roman rule during which various empires united large parts of the Indian subcontinent and China. But none of them lasted for as long. Alexander’s, for example, fell apart almost immediately following his death.

The Roman Empire at its greatest extent, in 117 AD after the death of Emperor Trajan. Image from Wikipedia Commons..

To get an idea about what communication would have meant in the Roman era, check out ORBIS.

Rome’s giant empire lasted far longer. If we concentrate only on the Mediterranean coast, the Romans already controlled most of it by 50 BC, and remained in control of that territory for the next four hundred years. Given the slow communication, the Romans needed to be experts in military and administration, and also had to be able to find leaders who could first conquer and then govern the far-reaching provinces with some level of independence from the central authority, continued for multiple generations. To put this longevity into perspective, 400 years back from today puts us in the 1620s, when Galileo was a middle-aged man, the Taj Mahal hadn’t been built, and… It’s so long ago that I couldn’t find any other examples to contextualize it.

Roman control of the Mediterranean coast at the time of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

 

The political systems underlying this are therefore interesting simply because of the outcome: a large entity that actually lasted for more than a fleeting moment. 

Starting around 500 BC, Rome had four major political eras. The first, lasting until 27 BC, was the Roman Republic. Next was the Roman Empire, which was effectively divided into the Western and Eastern Roman Empire in 286 AD. The Western Roman Empire lasted until 476 AD, while the Eastern Roman Empire survived in some form until the 1300s. 

I am personally most interested in the Republic, for two main reasons. 

The first is the system itself. While not unprecedented (republican governments existed in Ancient Greece) the Roman Republic was the first republic to control territory that went beyond just a city state. By the end of Julius Caesar’s conquests, the Republic controlled most of modern France, nearly all the Iberian Peninsula, all of Italy and Greece, the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and much of North Africa. It would not be outlandish to claim that the stability of the Republic was what made much of this possible, and resulted in a long line of capable leaders who led it through several crises and eventually turned it into a superpower. The systems that provided this stability lasted for several generations, and this was actually unprecedented. Further, even after the Empire replaced the Republic, the administrative backbone continued to be a reformed version of the system from the Republic, which makes this era worth studying.

But that skips a few steps, because stability itself is a double-edged sword, and might have been a strong contributor to the end of the Republic in the first place; the second interesting thing. By Caesar’s time (around 50 BC), the Republic was in trouble. Since stable systems are hard to change, all of Rome’s vast territory was still being administered as if it only controlled the city of Rome, the riches from the conquests had fed widespread corruption, and concentration of power in the resulting rich families had turned it into an oligarchy. Further, the Roman senate, which was the seat of the Republic, had been paralyzed for decades by partisan politics fueled by class divides, and a huge effort would have been needed to fix these issues. Caesar attempted some fixes, but was assassinated before he could finish and within twenty years, the Republic would be dead with Caesars nephew (and adopted son-heir) Octavian as the first Emperor ). The fall of the Roman Republic, to me, is a historical example of what happens when a political system that works well for a time slowly falls apart, and how much work needs to be done to keep these systems running.

Caesar’s untimely death left has left historians debating if Caesar’s actions killed the Republic for his selfish interests, or if it was close to dying anyway and the Empire was an improvement; like all things, the truth is probably in the middle.

The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The Meditations by Emperor Aurelius is considered a foundational text of Stoicism.

Apart from conquering and administrating, Romans were also adept and prolific writers and their writings have survived over the years, to the extent that we have a decent idea about conversations between historical figures from two millennia back. For example, Caesar’s own accounts of his Gallic Wars and the civil war with Pompey have survived, and while these are of course embellished, they give a very personal insight into his eventful life. Even stories of political intrigue have survived. We can read and think about the machinations of Cicero in the aftermath of the Caesar’s assassination and analyze his words when he worries about the end of the Republic; such an opportunity is rare for a person who lived so long back (example: this video).

Ruins in the Palatine Hill. The Palatine Hill Stadium.

All of this meant that I have spent an inordinately long time learning about Rome and Romans. Sufficiently abstracted, there’s often a lot to learn. The tenacity of Rome that allowed them to survive the Punic Wars, winning the war despite losing several devastating battles. Julius Caesar, the genius on the battlefield and the way he waited for the smallest advantages, exploiting them fully when he got one. How the people he trusted the most were among the ones who (literally and figuratively) stabbed him in the back (looking at you, Decimus Brutus). Bibulus, a passive politician who always managed to find himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Labienus, who stood up for his ideals over his friendship with Caesar. Cicero, who tried his best to save the Republic, but whose kind of politics was the reason why the Republic was malfunctioning to begin with. Octavian, and how he used his intelligence and ‘ambition that outshone the sun’ (quote from this video) to overcome a sickly life and multiple serious illnesses to became Augustus Caesar, the first Emperor. His friendship with Agrippa, and how important Agrippa was to Augustus reaching the heights that he did. 

The Colosseum. At night.

Given all of this, when I visited Rome in July of this year and sat in front of the Roman Pantheon, reading Agrippa’s name on the facade made me feel a connection to the place and the long dead person that is hard to describe. Rome is a city that feels like it is a continuation of its ancient past, a modern metropolis with one foot firmly rooted in history. I could almost imagine what the narrow cobblestoned roads must have been like in Roman times. I could enter the Colosseum and imagine being part of a cheering Roman crowd around me cheering, though admittedly helped a lot by the portrayal of the place in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. I could walk on the Roman Forum surrounded by ruins of ancient buildings, and picture some famous senator giving a rousing speech to the citizens. In more somber reflective times, I could also put myself in the shoes sandals of a Roman citizen, perhaps right before one of the several sackings of the city when it fell in the 400s AD. Would I think of the (until that point) 900-year history of the city until that point and be confident that this crisis, like the many, many crises that the city had survived, would also pass? Or would I be able to see the (with the benefit of hindsight) clear signs of decline and drop everything to move somewhere else? What is it truly like when an institution like that falls? Maybe the Romans were good enough at writing things down that someone recorded their thoughts regarding this…

The Pantheon in Rome. The writing on the facade, translated to English, means ‘Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made [this building] when consul for the third time.’

One more Pantheon photo. From under the facade, pointing up.

Footnotes

1. If the problems faced by the Roman Republic that led to its fall seem somewhat familiar to you, you are not alone. Just before publishing this, I saw this answer on Quora which is an interesting read even though I don’t agree with the conclusion in that answer.

2. There are several stories from Rome that are just funny, like the time pirates captured Caesar and demanded a ransom, only for Caesar to object to the payment they were demanding, saying he was worth more money. There’s Diocletian, who retired from being emperor to grow cabbages in the countryside. And then of course there’s Caligula, the emperor who planned to make his horse a consul.

   Diocletian’s story is all the more funny to me because of a book that added the observation ‘Maybe he had a cabbage for a brain’, but looking up his full quote while writing this made me respect him a little more: “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.”

3. The sacking of Rome in 455 AD by the Vandals, a Germanic tribe, left its mark on the language: that’s where the word ‘vandalism’ comes from.

4. If you want to learn more about the history of ancient Rome from some entertaining if somewhat opinionated YouTube video essays, I recommend this playlist from Historia Civilis and this one from Kings and Generals.