The Roman World from Romulus to Muhammad

A New History

Greg Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume provides a detailed examination of nearly 1, 400 years of Roman history, from the foundation of the city in the eighth century BC until the evacuation of Roman troops from Alexandria in AD 642 in the face of the Arab conquests.

Drawing on a vast array of ancient texts written in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic, and relying on a host of inscriptions, archaeological data, and the evidence from ancient art, architecture, and coinage, The Roman World from Romulus to Muhammad brings to the fore the men and women who chronicled the story of the city and its empire. Richly illustrated with 71 maps and 228 illustrations—including 20 in colour—and featuring a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading, this volume examines a broad range of topics, including ancient climate change, literature, historiography, slavery, war and conquest, the development of Christianity, the Jewish revolts, and the role of powerful imperial women. The author also considers the development of Islam within a Roman historical context, examines the events that led to the formation of the post-Roman states in Western Europe, and contemplates aff airs on the imperial periphery in the Caucasus, Ethiopia, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Emphasising the voices of antiquity throughout, The Roman World from Romulus to Muhammad is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the beguiling history of the world's most famous empire.

Chapter 1

The origins of Rome

In ad 116, the emperor Trajan stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf after a blistering campaign against Parthia, Rome’s ancestral enemy. Trajan’s decisive victories brought Assyria and Mesopotamia into the Roman empire; never again would its reach be so extensive. As Trajan stared out over the water, watching ships come and go, his thoughts turned to Alexander the Great. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Trajan envied Alexander for his own conquests, which had taken him as far as Afghanistan and India. At the same time, however, Trajan dared to think that he had surpassed Alexander, and prepared to write letters to the Roman senate reporting his achievements. As the emperor left Iraq to return home to Europe, he paused in Babylon ‘because of Alexander, to whose spirit he offered sacrifice in the room where he died’ (Cassius Dio, 68.29). Trajan was never to see Rome again. Like his hero Alexander, he died from illness, far from home.

Dio’s remembrance of Trajan displays two elements central to understanding Roman history. The first is the ethos of conquest and the militarised nature of political life. Trajan’s conquests were as natural to him as they were in earlier times to Julius Caesar, Marius, Scipio Africanus, or any of their ancestors: from its foundation, Rome had been built on violence, and the fasti triumphales, the list of victorious Roman magistrates from Romulus to the time of Augustus, was inscribed on marble plaques in the Roman forum, the centre of the city’s public life. The second element is the importance of the broader Mediterranean world, including Etruria, Latium, the Greek colonies of Italy, and particularly the Greek east and many of its most celebrated figures. Alexander the Great occupied a special place for Rome’s leaders as the pinnacle of human achievement, which explains Trajan’s ambivalence: Alexander was someone to admire, but he was also someone to surpass. Trajan was not alone in this, as Augustus would send an expedition to Yemen partly to out-do Alexander’s own travels and explorations, while half a millennium after Alexander’s death, the emperor Caracalla equipped an entire Roman unit with the weapons and kit of the Macedonian phalanx on his doomed eastern expedition.

Rome’s evolution from a small village on the Tiber to one of the most long-lived empires in world history greatly depended on a willingness to conquer and to subjugate neighbours and enemies alike, and a willingness to fight and die for Rome on a horrific scale; the only recent parallel is to be found on the Eastern Front in World War II. The Romans did not agonise over the demise of their foes: for them, their matchless performance in battle was one of the things that made Rome great. Yet their conquests allowed the cultures, religions, political ideas, and other aspects of the Mediterranean world to play a tremendously important role in Rome itself. From its earliest days, Rome welcomed outsiders and internalised their traditions and beliefs. Rome became an empire and an absolute monarchy only after its reach embraced the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, while Etruscan and Greek religious and political ideas found fertile ground in Rome from its very earliest days. Rome’s famous Republican constitution did not survive its bloody dealings with the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus and the state of Carthage intact, and eventually the very sort of demagogues that the Romans claimed to despise presided over the destruction of the state that they had laboured so hard to build. Eventually the centre of gravity in the Roman world would shift east, to the new city of Constantinople and the rich and ancient lands of Syria. In modern parlance, the history of Rome is therefore, in more ways than one, a ‘global history’—one that can only be understood by thinking about Rome though the lens of the world in which it grew and that it then subsequently conquered. That world was a vast area that stretched from Scotland to Arabia, from Spain to Egypt, and from the Caucasus to the Syrian desert.

Troy and Rome

Rome was born in violence—at least, that is how its later inhabitants chose to remember it. Roman writers created a foundation myth to explain where they and their state had come from. In this myth, Aeneas, a hero from Homer’s famous Iliad and a relative of king Priam of Troy, crossed the Mediterranean to Rome after the Trojan War with his father Anchises and his son Ascanius (Iulus, in Latin, and hence a fictional ancestor of the Julii family, the clan of Julius Caesar). In some versions of the story, Aeneas fought the king of Latium, Latinus, and after defeating him he married the king’s daughter, Lavinia. Founding a city called Lavinium, Aeneas relinquished rule to Ascanius, who in turn founded a city called Alba Longa. The appearance of Latium (the district around Rome) in the earliest mythologies of Roman origins emphasises the importance of Latium to Rome, and the centrality of the relationship between Rome and the Latin communities in Rome’s political development (Chapter 2).

Twelve generations later in the story, the reader encounters the tale of the twins Romulus and Remus, of whom Aeneas was a distant ancestor. The twins were the offspring of the war god Mars and Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin—a member of a holy female order tasked with caring for the communal hearth. Rhea Silvia was also the daughter of Numitor, the 12th king of Alba Longa after Ascanius. Numitor himself had been violently deposed by his brother, Amulius, who went on to murder all of Numitor’s offspring except for Rhea Silvia. As the Vestals were sworn to chastity, and Amulius had made Rhea Silvia a Vestal to prevent her from having children, the twins were punished by being left out to die near the Tiber river, but as luck would have it, they were saved by a she-wolf and later raised by a shepherd, Faustulus, and his wife, Larentia. As young boys, the twins honed their hunting techniques, growing strong by testing themselves against ‘fierce beasts of prey’ (Livy, 1.4). Later, both Romulus and Remus decided to found a city close to where they had been abandoned; however, as they were twins, neither could claim seniority over the other. Accordingly, they each took up a position on two of the prominent hills that would later be part of Rome: the Palatine and the Aventine. Despite relying on augury—the observation of birds—to decide who should have precedence, they could not agree on the signs provided by the gods; in the melee that followed, Romulus killed his brother, who had jumped over Rome’s walls—representing the city’s future sacred boundary, the pomerium—without permission. Romulus gave his name to the new foundation, Rome, serving the city as the first of its seven legendary kings.

This is the story told by Livy in the first book of his monumental history of Rome, written during the tumultuous final century of the Republic. Livy (c. 64 bc–c. ad 12) was a contemporary of both Julius Caesar and Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. Livy was also a contemporary of the poet Virgil, from whose pen the story of Aeneas would receive its fullest and most patriotic treatment in the Aeneid. Livy’s history, which also includes a famous moralising treatment of Rome’s war with Hannibal (Chapter 4) says a great deal more about the concerns of his own time than it does about Rome’s actual foundation, which the Roman historian Marcus Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Caesar, dated to 753 bc.

Sources for Roman history

To get to grips with ‘what happened’ in ancient Rome, we rely on the five main groups of primary sources—that is, sources produced in or dating from antiquity. The primary sources for the Roman world include:

• written texts—biography and autobiography, histories, poetry, and other literary works
• inscriptions, ranging from texts on monumental buildings to casual graffiti
• papyri and other texts written on perishable materials
• coins
• archaeological evidence, such as structures that have survived from antiquity (‘built heritage’) and data from excavations carried out on land and at sea; this category includes ancient art and sculpture.

Historical writing in the ancient Mediterranean world, and in the Roman world in particular, was driven by a different set of expectations and ideologies than it is today. In Roman antiquity, history was a literary activity and its purpose was not to record the true outline of events, nor was it intended to offer a dispassionate record. It was, instead, a means of moralising and teaching, and a guide to political behaviour. It focused on individuals and their deeds, and on their character—whether poor or exemplary. It was often deeply religious, concerned with questions of hubris, piety, and proper behaviour that could earn the favour of the gods that made up the Roman pantheon, and that guided the state’s leaders in good times and punished them in bad times. It was perfectly reasonable to invent speeches and provide other useful rhetorical flourishes to accentuate the deeds of one family or another, and there was no requirement to provide citations to sources or even say where information had come from. Despite relying heavily on the Greek historian Polybius for his treatment of the war between Rome and Hannibal, for example, Livy barely mentions him.

This is not to say that there was no analysis—indeed, the great Greek writer Thucydides, who chronicled the epic fifth-century bc struggle between Athens and Sparta, is generally considered to be the father of ‘classicising’ history, a style in which an elementary form of evidential analysis can be found and which was the closest thing in antiquity to modern expectations of what historical writing should look like. Classicising histories normally focused on the political life of the state, the careers of great men, wars, and other topics central to the life of the dominant political class. Some of the most famous historians of the Roman era followed this style of writing, including Polybius (third century bc), Tacitus (first century ad), Cassius Dio (second/third centuries ad), Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century ad), and Procopius (sixth century ad). This genre of writing was particularly long-lived, and the last recognised classicising historian, Theophylact Simocatta, was working in the early seventh century shortly before the armies of Islam conquered much of the eastern Roman empire. The men who wrote these histories were well placed to do so, as they were often members of the government or the military and they had access to documents and eyewitnesses. They attempted to form opinions or judgements based on these sources, all the while adhering to the politically motivated guidelines of their discipline. Polybius, for example, was a politician, and he was deeply interested in issues of causation and political analysis. Tacitus was a magistrate and a provincial governor. Cassius Dio was a senator and active in the Roman civil service; Ammianus was a staff officer to the Roman general Ursicinus and eyewitness to much of which he wrote; and Procopius was the secretary to Belisarius, the most senior Roman general in the east, with access to papers, high-ranking individuals, and the loftiest levels of political power in the Roman state.

Classicising histories can be very useful for certain subjects, but they do not give much attention to social issues, family, issues of gender, the activities of the lower classes, and so on, except when they overlap with the concerns of their authors. Even when they do, the reader often finds clumsy stereotypes: the lower classes are portrayed as an unruly mob while women lack the ability to think rationally, in contrast to aristocratic men. Compounding this general issue is the fact that history writing of any sort was an activity largely confined to aristocratic males; when women appear in the texts, they do so from the viewpoint of men. Within the context of Roman historical writing, this bias further meant that non-Roman voices such as those belonging to the Greeks or Etruscans were often excluded, suppressed, or refracted through the lens of Roman power. Even though Polybius was Greek, for instance, he worked under the tutelage of Scipio Aemilianus, a prominent politician of the day, and his surviving writings very much reflect the influence of Roman political supremacy.

As noted earlier, a great deal of ancient historical writing focused on moralising, didactic tales that could be used to illustrate character flaws, feats of hubris, and acts of valour, and that served as a guide to navigate the needs and shortcomings of the contemporary world. Thucydides justified his history of the Peloponnesian War by explaining that a thorough inquiry had led him to the conclusion that it was the greatest war in human history, and was therefore worthy of a detailed treatment. In contrast, even though he had access to numerous official sources and other works, such as the Histories of Polybius, Livy’s critical thinking was inconsistent and his project was more concerned with a need to exemplify the lofty principles of Rome’s long-ago ancestors in comparison to the vices and lax morals of his own times, advocating traditional Republican values such as piety and austerity as a tonic for a troubled world. The lodestar for Livy’s history of Rome did not, therefore, guide him towards a factual history of Roman origins, aided by diligent and critical labour in the city’s temple archives. Furthermore, when writers such as Livy recounted stories of Rome’s foundation, their tales became fossilised in a sort of literary canon. Impossibly distant for Livy, Rome’s origins were even more so for later historians, such as Tacitus and Cassius Dio. Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, the she-wolf, the shepherd, the seven kings—these were parts of an established set of principles of early Roman history that were never subjected to any sort of serious analytical scrutiny. They were also canonised in religious practice, since the Lupercalia festival, held annually on February 15, involved the sacrifice of animals in the cave where the Romans believed Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the she-w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright notices
• Note to the reader
• Chapter 1 The origins of Rome
• Chapter 2 The early Republic, 509–280 bc
• Chapter 3 ‘True athletes of warfare’: Rome, Carthage, and Pyrrhus, 280–225 bc
• Chapter 4 ‘The empire of the world’: Rome, Greece, Macedonia, and Hannibal, 241–200 bc
• Chapter 5 ‘Against our own Roman gods’: Rome and the Greek east, 200–146 bc
• Chapter 6 The collapse of public order, 140‒63 bc
• Chapter 7 Coup, 63–30 bc
• Chapter 8 Monarchy and empire: Augustus, 30 bc–AD 14
• Chapter 9 From stability to chaos, ad 14–74
• Chapter 10 Consolidating the principate, ad 72–138
• Chapter 11 Decay, 138–235
• Chapter 12 The empire transformed, 235–337
• Chapter 13 Division and collapse, 337–493
• Chapter 14 The end of antiquity, 491–642
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index of individuals, deities, and saints
• General index