Image and Reality of Roman Imperial Power in the Third Century AD

The Impact of War

Lukas de Blois

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351135573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Image and Reality of Roman Imperial Power in the Third Century AD focuses on the wide range of available sources of Roman imperial power in the period AD 193-284, ranging from literary and economic texts, to coins and other artefacts. This volume examines the impact of war on the foundations of the economic, political, military, and ideological power of third-century Roman emperors, and the lasting effects of this. This detailed study offers insight into this complex and transformative period in Roman history and will be a valuable resource to any student of Roman imperial power.

1
Introduction

This book focuses on the sources of Roman imperial power in the period AD 193–284. More specifically, it researches the impact of war on the foundations of the economic, fiscal, political, military, and ideological power of third-century Roman emperors. This century, full of difficult wars as it is, is suitable to research this impact of war. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the Roman empire about AD 200, a section on concepts and definitions, a survey of the available sources, and a concise status quaestionis. Chapter 2 contains an up-to-date survey of third-century AD Roman history, which is useful in itself but is also needed as historical background for the following chapters. This chapter comprises four sections: one treating the period AD 193–230, another one describing the escalation of wars and invasions from 230 to 249, a third one analyzing the crisis of the Roman empire (AD 249–268), and a last one discussing the military recovery of the empire (AD 268–284). Chapter 3 concentrates on the erosion of economic and fiscal sources of imperial power and the manner in which emperors tried to repair the deficits. Chapter 4 focuses on military and administrative developments, and on the networks that supported imperial rule, under the impact of war. Chapter 5 discusses changing foundations of imperial ideological power.

1.1. The Roman empire about AD 200

This book treats important aspects of the history of the Roman empire in the period 193–284 AD. By the end of the second century AD this empire stretched from Britain to the river Tigris, and from the fringes of the Sahara to the Rhine and Danube regions and the Black Sea. By then it may have counted about 50 million inhabitants, which admittedly is a supposition based on reasoning, not on hard evidence. Egypt, Italy, Gaul, and Asia Minor were the most populous regions.¹ The city of Rome was a metropolis of about 800,000 inhabitants, by far the biggest city of the empire.² Supplying Rome and the standing armed forces necessitated a permanent logistical structure to get food and commodities from various parts of the Empire to the capital and the border armies, and this structure, added to a long-standing network of trade routes, brought into being a system of regular exchange and traffic.³ Cash money (coinage) was important in all kinds of transactions and above all to pay the military. The supply of money was dependent on the availability of precious metals, the extent to which those metals were used as money, and how hard money was made to work.⁴ The Roman empire was a fairly urbanized society with high levels of trade and exchange, but we should not see it as a modern society; the empire was and remained a predominantly agrarian society, in which most economic activities had a local or regional character. The economy of the Roman empire was a network of local and regional economies. We should not see it, however, as the primitive ancestor to the medieval world. On the contrary, on a number of important indicators Rome clearly surpassed anything that would follow in the Western world until the industrial revolution.⁵

The empire’s population was differentiated into social and ethnic groups. The higher orders consisted of senators, equites (knights), and decurions in the many local communities in the empire, practically all of whom were landed proprietors.⁶ At a lower social level lived free farmers (tenants and independent small-time farmers), professionals, urban workers (either independent craftsmen or day-laborers or combinations of both), slaves and freedmen. Income that facilitated consumption between bare bones subsistence and respectable consumption levels was earned by ‘middling groups’ and poor but not miserable households, and sustained most of local production and exchange, and the selling of some imported goods. A numerically small élite consumed much more individually than anyone else, but for numerical reasons fewer local products than the middling groups did.⁷ At the bottom of the social pyramid were the slaves. Slave society was structured hierarchically, there were huge differences between members of the imperial household and slaves in a quarry. It seems that in the third century the proportion of slaves and freedmen in the population was declining.⁸ Ethnic groups existed in the various provinces, but the higher orders were connected by a common Graeco-Latin élite culture, particularly in the older, inner provinces. Latin and Greek were the dominant languages of the empire but, in some regions, such as the eastern provinces, other languages were admitted into documents too.⁹

At the end of the second century AD the Roman empire was governed by the emperors, their apparatus, provincial governors and procurators, and potentes at the local level in Italy and the provinces.¹⁰ A Roman emperor was what he did¹¹ but also what he appeared and was perceived to be.¹² Emperorship was an ideological construct, an image as much as actual reality. At their accession emperors had to secure acceptance by the armed forces, the people of Rome, and the senate, which was the only body that could legitimize imperial successions by handing over to the successor the formal powers and competences that his predecessor had had. This was as yet no mere cipher. The contemporary author Herodian says that Gordian I in North Africa in 238 only had the name and outward image of an emperor, not the substance, which only changed after senate and people of Rome had received his program of government in a letter, and after the senate had accepted him as lawful ruler.¹³ Roman emperorship had, right from the start of the Principate, a hybrid character: it was monarchical but was formally based on a combination of republican competences, such as the tribunicia potestas (competence of a tribune of the plebs) and the imperium proconsulare in the imperial provinces. At every succession, the senate handed over this combination of powers to the new emperor.

The emperor personified Rome. According to Herodian 1.6.5, Rome is where the emperor is.¹⁴ Wherever he arrived, he was received with pomp and state, an imperial adventus being quite an event. By the beginning of the third century, the emperor was seen as exempt from the laws, but his spouse was not. In Dig. 1.3.31 Ulpian argues: ‘The emperor is freed from the laws (princeps legibus solutus est);¹⁵ although the empress, admittedly, is not freed from the laws, emperors nevertheless grant her those same privileges, which they themselves enjoy.’¹⁶ Official imperial messages had the force of law.¹⁷ Living Roman emperors did not pretend to be divine, and were not venerated as such, but they certainly had superhuman associations.¹⁸ According to Legutko, in the third century the Roman emperor was already an ideological construct independent of the person who was on the throne.¹⁹ He may be right but there is room for some doubt. In Rome at least, dedications to the emperors were always to the rulers personally, not to them as holders of the office.²⁰ In 2001 Carlos Noreña published an excellent short summary of the ideological position of the emperor. He says:

The Roman emperor served a number of functions within the Roman state. The emperor’s public image reflected this diversity. Triumphal processions and imposing state monuments such as Trajan’s column or the arch of Septimius Severus celebrated the military exploits and martial glory of the emperor. Distributions of grain and coin, public buildings, and spectacle of entertainments in the city of Rome all advertised the emperor’s patronage of the urban plebs, while imperial rescripts posted in every corner of the empire stood as so many witnesses to the emperor’s conscientious administration of law and justice. Imperial mediation between man and god was commemorated by a proliferation of sacrificial images that emphasized the emperor’s central role in the act of sacrifice. Portrait groups of the imperial family were blunt assertions of dynasty and figured the emperor as the primary guarantor of Roma Aeterna. Public sacrifices to deified emperors and the imagery of imperial apotheosis surrounded the emperor with an aura of divinity. An extraordinary array of rituals, images, and texts, then, gave visual and symbolic expression to the emperor’s numerous functions and publicized the manifold benefits of imperial rule. From the clupeus virtutis awarded to Augustus to the Panegyrics of the Later Empire, a broad current of imperial ideology ascribed these functions and benefits to the emperor’s personal virtues. The imperial virtues, moral qualities possessed by the ‘good’ emperor, were also represented visually in a range of official media and systematically communicated by the Roman state to the subjects of the empire.²¹

Roman emperors were aware that wielding power was inextricably connected with the representation of power. Right from the start of the Principate the emperors had a privileged access to the means needed to manipulate images of imperial power all over the empire. The images of the emperor and his family were ubiquitous. The emperor appeared on coins, in statues, in paintings throughout the cities of the empire, and was prominently present not only in and on the great civic or religious buildings but also in more humble shops and inns.²² The emperors and their assistants developed a symbolic language of images.²³ In broadcasting images of themselves, emperors were not completely free to do whatever they liked. On the contrary, in all media they used they were under constraint of traditions, although they could adapt their messages to personal preferences and contemporary situations.²⁴

Loyalty to the emperors was cemented and expressed by the imperial cult. Throughout the empire, people built altars and temples to Roma et Augustus, where deified deceased rulers were venerated. This cult was hardly homogeneous; it was, rather, a patchwork of Roman and local phenomena. The cult was integrated with other celebrations and the buildings connected with the imperial cult often occupied strategic places within the built environment of the towns.²⁵ The imperial cult should not be seen as a monolithic and single entity, but as a complex phenomenon composed of different, locally adapted cult practices.²⁶

The emperors showered not only their images over their subjects, but also messages in texts, for example by inscribing texts on their monuments and publishing rescripts to petitions.²⁷ About AD 200 Roman imperial administration was mainly based on the principle of petition and response, not on political views or bureaucratic top-down rulings. Roman government reacted to problems brought to its attention rather than initiating activities on its own accord, the main exception being premeditated military campaigns.²⁸ Responses contained in rescripts had validity everywhere in the empire, not just to the communities that had handed in petitions. According to Boudewijn Sirks, the rescript system was an elaborated form of imperial patronage, the emperor, the great patronus, lending his aid to his empire-wide clientela.²⁹ The system was fairly successful, for provincial loyalty was the rule rather than the exception, which was strengthened by the ‘imperial habit,’ the tradition of obeying the Roman magistrates. Through this method of petition and response Roman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Wars
• 3 Economic sources of imperial power, AD 193–284
• 4 Sources of military and political imperial power, AD 193–284
• 5 Ideological sources of Roman imperial power
• 6 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index