The noblest Roman of them all

Exactly one thousand eight hundred and fifty years ago this month Marcus Aurelius became Emperor of Rome. He ranks as one of my favourite figures in all of history, not just a ruler but a thinker. His Meditations, never intended for publication, are a brilliant series of stoic reflections addressed to himself, musings on all aspects of existence.

Now I have the well-thumbed Penguin edition as a companion, but I first came across the book years ago in and much older edition, published under the title To Himself, which father has in his library. To begin with (I was in my mid-teens) I did not fully understand the depth and subtlety of Marcus’ thinking, but it grew on me steadily. I would not dare to underline passages, or add marginalia, to father’s antique edition but you should see my own!

I find it so impressive that he found the time for such deep reflection, flights of thought which mark him out as one of the great stoic philosophers, because his reign was beset with all sorts of troubles, the early signs of the profound crisis that was to overtake the Roman world in the following century.

He was to spend so much time in camps, defending frontiers from the onset of hostile enemies. I would guess that the life he was obliged to lead would fill most normal individuals with a sense of weariness, cynicism, frustration and anger, or the kind of all too worldly calculations that one finds in the writings of Julius Caesar, but not him. He is perhaps the best examples ever of his own maxim that nothing happens to a man that he is not formed by nature to bear. “Do every act of your life as if it were your last”, he also said to himself, another maxim to which he remained true.

Future generations of Romans would have just cause to look back on the reign of Marcus as the last golden age. One of the greatest, most benign emperors was to be succeeded by one of the least and most malign. In place of the worthy father came Commodus, the worthless son. It showed the canker that lay at the heart of the whole system of governance established by Augustus, which time after time allowed self-indulgence to triumph over self-discipline.

Marcus Aurelius was the exception, not the rule. There was something almost superhuman about him, something of the apprehension of a god. He was the noblest and greatest Roman of them all. Ave Imperator!

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

The Song of Cassandra

Channel Four, one of the terrestrial television companies in Britain, broadcast a brief series of historical documentaries last week under the title Bloody Foreigners, detailing the involvement of outsiders in certain key events in our history.

The last of the series focused on the Emperor Septimus Severus’ futile attempt to subdue the tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall in the early third century AD. This was the last try by the Romans to conquer the whole island of Britain, a task which had frustrated emperors and generals all the way back to Agricola in the first century.

The narrative was generally good- though some of the dramatic recreations verged on the naff- completely spoiled by an ending that managed to get the facts of the subsequent fate of the Severan dynasty wildly wrong! Honestly, why don’t these TV companies get some decent advice? :-)

Sorry, that’s a wholly unnecessary diversion, just a small irritation that manages to get the hornets of my intellect buzzing like mad. The essential point the programme made was sound: that the Romans came mob-handed into a complex tribal society, hoping for a pitch-battle, hoping to for a single knock out blow against the ‘barbarians’ which would bring their ‘kingdom’ into final tutelage.

The whole thing was a disaster in men, money and materials. There was no pitch battle. Instead the tribes nibbled away at the Roman army in a series of guerrilla attacks that wore it down. There was no head of a ‘king’ to claim because the political structure of the Caledonian tribes allowed for as many ‘kings’ as there were communities. Severus retreated having achieved nothing, covering his failure in an issue of coins proclaiming a famous victory, the kind of misleading propaganda that Romans went in for.

The point is the Romans were victims of their own preconceptions about ‘barbarians.’ They came, they saw but they did not conquer, they could not conquer. They simply made matters worse, creating ever more enemies with every step. Severus’ army, forty-thousand strong, might as well have been chasing the wind.

Here is another thing that irritates me, the stupid incomprehension of politicians, their inability to read the runes of history. Yes, history does have a message if only one has the intelligence and the patience to take heed. As Septimus Severus marched into Scotland so did George Bush and Tony Blair march into Afghanistan two thousand years later. They found a bad situation and they made it worse. I could tell you exactly what the outcome is going to be, could tell you right now, but you probably already know.

It’s happened time and time again, this blindness in the face of history, this tendency to base strategy on the worst, most stupid preconceptions. And it’s not as if the two Bs had to look all the way back to the Romans in Britain; they had a more immediate example at hand, the example of British involvement in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century.

I would like to be there, in the corridors of power, saying stop! wait! look! think! every time some foreign adventure is being considered, every time a new campaign is being planned. But I know, like all historians, all those who understand the past and the lessons it brings to the present, my fate would be that of Cassandra.

Horrible Hoodie

It really is time to hug a hoodie, for the uniform of disengaged urban youth, of chavs and oiks, has made it into mainstream fashion! Gareth Pugh, Stella McCartney and Marc Jacobs have all made the hooded sweatshirt part of their range. And it’s not just at the low end. John Lewis reports that the sale of cashmere hoodies is currently up 650%, year on year.

Jess Carter-Morley says in her style page in the Guardian that an attempt has been made to re-appropriate the brand, removing it’s more menacing image. But hoods, as she quite rightly continues, cannot be separated from drama and fear, an association that long predates the ASBO-Anti Social Behaviour Order-generation. There is the black-hooded witch, the wicked queen in disguise, in Disney’s Snow White. There is the red-hooded and murderous dwarf in the movie Don’t Look Now and there are the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

There are other associations of the hood and menace that she does not mention. There is La Cagoule, or the Cowl, a violent right-wing fascist movement in France before the Second World War, dedicated to overthrowing the Third Republic and much given to political assassination and terrorism. And there are the sinister hooded monks of the Inquisition.

But surely the greatest hoodie in history has to be the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, the eldest son of Septimius Severus. Marcus, who reigned from 211 to 217, when he was assassinated, is better known to history as Caracalla, derived from the Gallic hooded tunic that he liked to wear, a fashion that spread through the army and the court.

Caracalla has the reputation of being one the worst of the emperors, a man in the same league as Domitian and Commodus. Edward Gibbon says of him that he was ‘the common enemy of all mankind’, a man who spent his reign travelling from province to province so each could experience his ‘rapine and cruelty.’ He had Gaeta, his brother and co-emperor, murdered, ordering the Senate to proclaim a damnatio memoriae-a damnation of memory-proclaimed against him, wiping out all trace of his existence, even forbidding his mother to mourn the loss of her son. When the citizens of Alexandria produced a satire mocking Caracalla’s claim that he had Gaeta killed in self-defence he unleashed his army on the city. The city was sacked as if after a siege, during which time some 20,000 people were killed according to the historian Dio Cassius.

Even his official portraits marked a change from the past. Gone is the philosopher-emperor, the ideal image marked in the busts of the past, no matter if the reality was far different. A new realism is present with Caracalla, that of the close-cropped and gruff-looking soldier-emperor, a scowling, threatening presence, a man dangerous to cross. It was an image adopted by his successors who dropped all pretence of allegiance to the Senate and the old Roman ideals, drawing their power and authority instead from the legions, a major source of political and constitutional trouble for the remainder of the third century.

Today the hoodie-emperor is best remembered by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a monument to the original feral youth of history. Try giving him an ASBO!

Ave Imperator-in Praise of Diocletian

Many of the Roman emperors are worthy of note, including Marcus Aurelius, my personal favourite, and Julian the Apostate, who fought a tragic rearguard action on behalf of the old religion, being overwhelmed by the new faith. I would, however, like to make special mention here of Diocletian, arguably the last truly great pagan emperor.

So, why Diocletian, what makes him any more significant than, say, Trajan or Hadrian? It is simply this: the empire established by Caesar Augustus, properly known as the Principate, was an uneasy compromise between absolutist and republican ideals. The emperor himself was only considered to be primus inter pares-first among equals-and Rome was still nominally governed on the same basis since the last king had been expelled.

The system worked up to a degree, but only insofar as there was a degree of stability and consensus over the difficult issue of succession. The most stable period of all came in the second century, when a succession of ‘good’ emperors adopted the most able candidates they could as a potential successor. But this could not last. In the third century not just the Principate but the empire itself came close to total collapse for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the inherited structural weakness. Now any ambitious general, with a few legions behind him, thought he had as much right to rule as the emperor ion Rome. Anarchy and civil war were almost continuous from the murder of Alexander Severus in 235AD onwards. It was Diocletian who brought the whole crisis to and end.

At first he appeared as just another strong man, a bit like Aurelian before him. But he quickly recognised that the problems of the empire were, first and foremost, political in nature. The emperor, he concluded, should no longer be seen as ‘one of us’, even as primus inter pares; the emperor had to stand above all. In place of the Principate came the Dominate, with the emperor as an absolute and semi-divine figure. It was a system of government which was to evolve in a fully mature form into the Byzantine Empire.

Constantine may have been the ultimate beneficiary of these changes but the true honour belongs to Diocletian, who thus stands alongside Augustus as one of the two great architects of Imperial rule.

I was hoping to say a word or two about the Diocletian Persecutions, but this is getting too long. I’ll leave that for another blog. :)

Hadrian and the Jews

Hadrian showed little sympathy or understanding towards the Jews of the Empire. From the outset his new settlement Aelia Capitolina, built on the ruins of Jerusalem, was intended as a wholly pagan city, to be populated by Roman soldiers.

Hadrian must have known that to erect what was for all practical purposes a military garrison on the sacred city of the Jews was an immense provocation. There was no magnanimity or generosity in the action, no attempt to pacify the local people, or to remind them that their Emperor had their well-being at heart. Jews were specifically forbidden to enter the new settlement, except for one day a year. But the most serious affront of all was the erection of the Temple of Jupiter on the foundations of the Second Temple, an unmistakable symbol of Jewish subjugation and humiliation. It would seem that Hadrian could not have done more to provoke the Bar Kokhba revolt, whether that was his intention or not.

Nero: the First Anti-Christ

Nero probably has, in both Tacitus and Suetonius, a better 'press' than he deserves. Suetonius, although he clearly despises Nero, balances the good with the bad, and Tacitus points out just how commendable at least some of his actions were during the Great Fire of Rome. His reign did not begin badly, especially during the period when he was being advised and guided by Seneca.

Nero was not stupid but the defects in his character were eventually to expose the true weakness of the whole apparatus put in place by Augustus, both tyrannical and contradictory; imperial and republican. The final crisis begins when he starts to lose all restraint in his exercise of pure and egomaniacal forms of power. The Pisonian conspiracy contributed to this, but the real rot came with the building projects he conceived after the Great Fire, so grand that he was on the verge of taxing Rome-and some Romans-quite literally to death. He died an enemy of the state who was in time to become, for the Christians he scapegoated and persecuted, a version of the Anti-Christ. And such is the verdict of history.

Diocletian and Government

Diocletian's system of government, an answer to the murderous political chaos of the third century, was essentially an exercise in good-faith, the assumption that those in power will give way peacefully, and by their own volition, to successors, already in the wings. Better, yes, than succession by murder, the preferred practice after the death of Septimius Severus, but it still failed to recognise that power has its own attractions, whatever the risks. The late imperial system of government, absolutist and uncompromising as it was, certainly contributed to the continuing decline of the empire. Quite simply it depended too much on the capacity and talents of a limited number of individuals; for when the Emperor was good he was very, very good; and when he was bad...well, he was much more than horrid!

The First Christian Emperor?

Most people, if they consider the matter at all, will think of Constantine the Great as the first Christian Roman Emperor, but there is a tradition that this distinction belongs to a third century emperor known as Philip the Arab. This is based on no greater evidence than a report in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, which the author himself doubts, that Philip attended a Christian service at Easter, after being required by an unnamed bishop to confess his sins, though the date and the location are not mentioned. Beyond Eusebius there is nothing, and in his five year reign, about which not an awful lot is known, Philip continued to follow the state religion.

I was interested to note, though, in a glance over Marta Sordi’s The Christians in the Roman Empire that she makes the case for Philip, drawing on Eusebius and traditions after him. “I personally believe the story to be true”, Sordi concludes. What she, what any historian does or does not believe is monumentally irrelevant. All that matters is what can be proved.

Constantine the Great: Christianity as Political Expediency

So why did the Emperor Constantine favour Christianity? It was politics, dear boy, politics! Yes, I simplify, but in simplicity there is always a hard nugget of truth.

Victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was not sufficient in itself; the empire had to be pacified, and one way of achieving this was to end the persecution of the increasingly important Christian community. But the Edict of Milan only extended recognition to Christianity as one of the empire's many cults, with Christ no more significant than Apollo, to whom the Emperor had already pledged his special allegiance. From a purely Christian perspective the Milan decree was just as intolerable, if not more so, than the persecutions of Diocletian.

While Constantine hoped to harness the power of the Christian God, it seems certain, his background notwithstanding, that he had an imperfect understanding of the true nature of the religion. It was his continuing need for political support that served to focus his thinking, to appreciate the power that could be conferred by a church, infinitely better organised than its pagan competitors. It was this unified and organised church that he saw as an essential base to his power, and made him all the more determined to maintain that unity after his victory over Licinius in 324. At the First Council of Nicaea, summoned to address the dangerously disruptive Arian heresy, Constantine appeared as the dominant influence, more powerful than any bishop, beginning a long tradition of Caesaropapism.

Now in the latter part of his reign, Constantine gave further signs of the special significance that Christianity had achieved in his political scheme of things by lavish patronage, in sharp contrast to his neglect of the pagan cults. But it is always well to remember that to the very end, even in the great city of Constantinople, the supreme figure, even the supreme deity, was not Christ but Constantine, which makes him not that much different to his imperial predecessors, all the way back to Augustus. Baptism only came at the very end for an Emperor who was always more mindful of earthly than heavenly power.

Lepcis Magna-what it meant to be Roman

Have you been to Lepcis Magna? Possibly not, as the remains are in Libya, which, until fairly recently, was not the most welcoming place in the world. It’s a magnificent place, arguably the best Roman site in the whole of the Mediterranean basin, better even than Pompeii and Ephesus. It’s all in a remarkable state of preservation; the theatre, the amphitheatre, the markets, forums, circus, baths, arches and basilica, aided by its location on the edge of the desert. It was abandoned in 800AD and largely lost under the encroaching sand, saving it from the free-lance quarrying that has destroyed or decimated so many other ancient sites. Indeed large parts of it are still under the dunes despite continuous excavation since the 1920s.

The city was originally founded by Phoenician traders some seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. It later fell under Roman domination after the Punic Wars. But while Carthage, the other Phoenician foundation, an object of particular Roman animus, was totally destroyed, Lepcis Magna grew and flourished, becoming, amongst other things, an important centre for the production of olive oil. The wealth of the local elite is reflected in the beauty and range of the city’s architecture.

These elites kept close to the centres of power, dedicating monuments to emperors like Trajan and Hadrian. Their greatest moment in the politics of the Roman world came towards the end of the second century, when Lucius Septimius Severus, son of a local family and a leading soldier, became Rome’s first North African Emperor. In 203AD he returned to his home town in triumph, showing his gratitude by relieving it of taxes and institution a new building programme. The subsequent construction is among the some of the city’s most impressive remains. To go there is to understand what it truly meant to be Roman

In Praise of Julian

Julian, the so-called Apostate, was the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire. There is a tragic quality to his brief reign, which seems to give the impression that his attempt to return to the old religion was foredoomed. This is far from being the case. All Julian really needed was time; time to turn matters around, time to establish a new dynasty supported by a new pattern of though. Time, sad to say, was the one thing he was denied.

But he understood the character of his enemy, indeed he did. His Edict of Toleration not only re-established the Pagan Cults but it allowed for the return of all of the dissident bishops who had been sent into exile by Constantius II, his predecessor. And if there was any religion more fissiparous and open to schism it was Christianity. Julian, moreover, did not make the mistake of returning to the wholesale persecutions of the past, which had given the Christians martyrs and momentum. Rather he removed all of the Church’s financial and political privileges.

Just imagine the possible fate of the Church, deprived of money and influence, without the backing of state power to settle the usual intense, and often murderous, theological disputes, divided and dividing, then it is possible to imagine a different future. And if you think such a scenario improbable you might care to investigate the decline of Christianity in Muslim Andalusia.