THOUGHTS, DREAMS & ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction.  We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

THOUGHTS   |   DREAMS   |   ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction.  We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

The Glory of Rome

The extraordinary year, AD69, when four separate men laid claim to, and ultimately sat on, the Imperial throne.

To understand why this was such an astonishing change in Roman culture, we have to look back at the shift from Republic (led by corrupt, venal men who essentially bought themselves consulships by dint of handing out favours to individuals or tribes who influenced the voting) to the Empire (led by corrupt, venal men who had inherited the position even if it meant – as it did with Nero – wiping out the potential opposition.)

Octavian, who became Augustus, did not set out to create this.  By the standards of his time, he was a model of probity, or at least, did a sterling job of presenting himself as an upright, moral family man, and the gold standard by which the rest of what had just become an Empire, should be measured.  He went out of his way to maintain the fiction that he was yet another consul, who just happened to be elected in perpetuity; and that therefore he was not an Emperor.

Sadly, this upright model of probity failed to have any sons.  In fact, he divorced his second wife on the day she gave birth to a daughter, who was his only biological child.  He then married a woman who had proved herself capable of bearing sons (it’s always the woman’s fault, obviously, if she has the wrong gender child  – everydaysexism wasn’t invented in Rome, but it was certainly perpetuated by it) and it was one of these, Tiberius, who was both his step son and his son in law, who succeeded him.

Tiberius did not pretend not to be an emperor, but he did spend a great deal of his time endeavouring to find ways to give it up, while realising that if he abdicated, any successor would be more or less bound to kill him.  He famously likened ruling the empire to taking a wolf by the ears: once you’ve got hold, you dare not let go.  Bear that in mind when we get to Vitelius.

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Tiberius, bust, image taken by G.Dallarto, wikimedia commons

From Tiberius, it all went down hill.  Gaius/Caligula was too young to understand the nature of power and when he was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard, they defaulted to his lame, stammering uncle Claudius whom they found hiding behind a curtain: they weren’t ready (yet) to instal someone of their own choosing – Augustus had at least managed to instil a sense that there must be a bloodline of sorts to follow him.

Claudius has had some remarkable spin over the years and comes across as some kind of benignly doddering grandfather.  The truth, of course, is more complex  – and as with all history, is something we’re never likely truly to know.  He was a good organiser and relatively careful with money, while at the same time having a violent, vicious temper, a taste for blood and other men’s pain, and being frequently oppressed by the women he chose to marry (he was virtually the only one of his line who was exclusively heterosexual). The last of the four, Agrippina the Younger, is thought to have murdered him in order to place her son on the throne.

And so we come to Nero, whose failures are all too obvious. A spoiled child became a spoiled young man who was then given absolute power of one of the largest superpowers of his era.  (Parthia may have been larger at times.  China almost certainly was, but it didn’t interfere in external affairs).  Nero had pretensions as a chariot driver – at which he was very bad – and an actor at which he was not only bad, but embarrassing.  His penchant for taking to the stage appalled the upper echelons of Roman society in much the same way our culture would be appalled if one of the royal scions decided to take up public pole dancing and then insisted on doing it on live television.

That said, the early years of his reign were marked by peace and productivity, largely because Rome was ruled through him by a triumvirate of Seneca, Agrippina the Younger and Burrus, the Praetorian Prefect.  These three may not have been obvious bedfellows, but the inner tensions prevented any one of them from overstepping the mark and the five years of their rule is considered one of the golden ages of the Roman Empire.  Then Nero grew up and decided he wanted power for himself and everything went downhill thereafter.

He clung on to power until AD68, having butchered much of the Senate – when he beggared the treasury, one of his favourite methods of refilling it was to find a rich Senator and offer them the option of a) killing themselves after having granted their entire estate to the treasury, thus leaving their family destitute or b) remaining alive long enough to watch Nero’s executioners wax creative on their entire family and then themselves.  Oddly enough, to a man, they chose the first option.  This had the dual advantage of feeding Nero’s excesses while at the same time removing any potential threats.  When they didn’t have money, but proved themselves capable – like Corbulo – they were simply ordered to kill themselves on a trumped up charge of treason.  And last, those few who did rebel, were betrayed and executed before they could do anything active.

Thus Nero survived considerably longer than he should have done, but in the end, the remaining members of the Senate grew themselves a collective pair and named him an ‘enemy of the state’ – which meant he was liable to have his head forced into a cleft stick and then be flogged to death. Faced with this, Nero did what he’d told so many others to do and killed himself.

Which left the door wide open for a new successor.  The problem was, all the good ones were dead.  In the preceding 60 years, a number of good men had died or been butchered: Germanicus, Drusus, Seneca, possibly even Britannicus (tho’ he may have been just as bad as his father: we don’t know) had all either died or been forced to suicide and any one of them could have been good.

Rome was left, though, without a surviving Julio-Claudian and searching for someone to fill the void.

First to step up was Galba, an octogenarian whose deepest love was for an elderly male slave which meant he had no sons to succeed him.  He was a Senator of the bluest blood and old school values and had been the Governor of Spain, which left him in a safe position far enough away from Nero that he hadn’t been caught up in the various massacres.  He duly named himself Emperor and headed for Rome and there was a glorious gap while everyone waited for him and imagined how good he would be.  Until he arrived, when they found he was worse than Nero.

The only good thing that could be said about someone who was such a stickler for rules that he made life impossible, was that he was old and likely to die.  So everything hinged on his naming a successor everyone could get behind.  Which he singularly failed to do.  When, in January of AD 69, he named a young man named Piso as his heir, he effectively signed his death warrant.  Otho: young, attractive, well-liked, had spent the previous months assiduously courting the Praetorian Guard and it didn’t take much for them to realise that Piso wasn’t the man they wanted in charge.  Galba and Piso died at the hands of the men who were supposed to guard them and Otho became Emperor number 2.

It might have stopped at that but for a couple of legionary commanders down in Germany who had come to their own conclusions about Galba and, on January first, persuaded their troops *not* to renew their oath to Galba, but to give it to someone else instead.  Their problem was who to give it to – their first choice, a man name Rufus, turned them down flat, so they went for Vitellius, a weak, placatory fool who didn’t have the strength of character to tell them he didn’t want it either (and he hadn’t paid enough attention to Tiberius’ observation that taking the throne was the equivalent to taking a wolf by the ears).  Caecina and Vindex were nothing if not competent.  They did what nobody thought was possible and got their troops into Italy in the middle of winter, marching towards Rome.

Otho wasn’t the best of commanders and he didn’t take the threat seriously until too late.  He seems to have believed that all he needed to do was point out that Galba was gone and thank you, we have a new Emperor now and they’d turn round and go back. Which, to be fair, was how things were supposed to work and there’s every chance Vitellius would have gone along with it -except that it wasn’t his shout any more: Caecina and Vindex were calling the shots and they kept on marching.

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Bust of Vitellius, image taken by Marie-Lan Nguyen wikimedia commons

Otho came out to meet them and crucially failed to wait for the loyal legions to join him from Pannonia and Moesia and his forces were defeated at the Battle of Bodriacum.  If he’d waited beforehand, or if he’d let the Moesian legions join him, the war might have been prolonged, the German legions defeated and Otho might have stayed on the throne.  But he had seen men die and didn’t want more to die and, in a gesture that assured him a place in the Roman Pantheon of Great Men, he killed himself rather than see more blood spilled in his name. He had reigned for barely three months.

So Vitellius became the third Emperor on the throne although it took until June before he actually reached Rome and could be said to have begun to reign.

And meanwhile in the east, the legions of Judaea, who were in the middle of a highly successful campaign against the uprising in what became Palestine, took a look at what their brothers had done in the west and thought they could do that, only they had a better candidate.  Against the weak-willed profligate Vitellius, they had Vespasian, a proven war commander who fought in the forefront of battle, was a brilliant tactician and was barely a real Senator: far more one of the lads than the blue-blooded idiots who stuffed the Senate.

They had a problem that Vespasian really didn’t want the job and he wasn’t some pasty idiot who would say ‘yes’ to keep them happy.  There’s a suggestion that Vitellius (or the people who pulled his strings) had sent an assassin to wipe out Vespasian and this pushed him into accepting, but whatever it was, on July first, the legions of Judaea and Syria hailed him as Imperator and the legions of Alexandria followed a few days later.

So Rome was once again heading for civil war although one mitigated by the fact that it was the middle of summer and the legions of the east had a very long way to march before they reached the capital.  All of which rather missed out the fact that there were legions who had been loyal to Otho who were itching for a fight and they were a lot closer to Rome than Vespasian was.

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Bust of Vespasian, image from Shakko, wikimedia commons

Thus a war that should technically have come to a head in the AD 70 fighting season, in fact spilled over into Rome in the last months of AD 69.  To me, the detail of this war is fascinating – the swings back and forth between the factions, the obvious plays for power and influence on the part of various legionary commanders (why did Caecina, having set Vitellius on the throne, then change sides?), the astonishing feats of physical endeavour – like the time when Antonius Pius’ men *ran* thirty six miles to meet their enemies and then insisted on fighting a battle when it would have been perfectly possible to rest overnight and fight in the morning.  The desperate bad luck of the town named Cremona, which was the site of two successive battles, first between Vitellius’ troops and Othos’, then between Vitellius’ and Vespasian’s under Antonius Pius.  Most enthralling of all are the last few days in Rome, when all the agents and counter-agents, bribes, threats, imprecations have worked as much as they are ever going to and the legions clash in the streets of Rome.  It happened during Saturnalia and the people took to the rooftops to cheer on the greens or the blues – the men of either side having taken the colours of the chariots to help distinguish friend from foe.

In the end, Vespasian’s forces won and Rome had one of the best emperors it had ever had – and the only one in the line of succession until then, who died in office of natural causes and was succeeded by his own flesh-and-blood son.  It took them four tries to get there, but they made it in the end, and the story is one of the most inspiring of the ancient world.

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