A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (9 page)

‘Delenda est Carthago’
, ‘Carthage has to be destroyed’, grim old Cato had declared, and it was. Then followed the three civil wars when Roman soldiers fought each
other. Caesar and his son-in-law Pompey joined battle and hostilities culminated in the victory of Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew, at the naval battle of Actium against Antony and Cleopatra.
With Octavian’s change of name to Augustus, the Pax Romana, secured by the Roman soldier who swore an oath to him as ‘Imperator’ (Commander-in-Chief) on joining up and renewed his
oath annually on New Year’s Day, had begun. From this moment on, none but the Emperor could be called Imperator and none but the Emperor could be voted Triumphs. Before, popular generals were
hailed Imperator and could be voted Triumphs by the Senate. Augustus made sure that no bold general could ever again cross the Rubicon and threaten Rome. The Roman army became an army of defence,
regionally based and too static to form the basis of a military
coup.

This potential role passed to the Praetorian Guard in Rome, created by Augustus to protect the
princeps,
but increasingly, if not ‘Emperor-makers’, a
force whose approval (usually simply secured by ‘donatives’) was a
sine qua non
of accession, legal or slightly dodgy, by successive and successful candidates for the principate
(each of whom upped the ante). The Praetorian Guard, stationed at the centre of power like the Brigade of Guards in London, was not supposed to wear uniform off-duty and unlike – but who
knows? – the Brigade, constituted the dirty-tricks department of the Empire. Nero, when other tricks failed, used one of its number to despatch his mama. Equally he himself was killed by a
centurion from the Praetorian Guard and the two tribunes, Chaeraea and Sabinus, who struck the first and second blows slaying his predecessor Caligula had also been from the Praetorian Guard.
Finally, of course, the Praetorian Guard, in a scene beloved of Hollywood, auctioned off the Empire. Oddly it didn’t go for very much – sold to Didius Julianus for 6,250
denarii,
about five years’ full pay, the rate for the job of Emperor paid a century-and-a-half before to Claudius. The Praetorians probably never got their money, for the excellent Severus, one of the
best later Emperors, marched on Rome and remodelled the Guard.

The Praetorian Guard was the first of the tripartite Roman military system, which included the fleets of
Milsenum
and Ravenna and the volunteer fire-brigade – the
vigiles
– serving in which was a six-year route to citizenship. The Romans were not very keen on boats, which were unsophisticated compared to their curtained, marbled, centrally heated houses. Their
sea, the Mediterranean, was thick with pirates until cleaned up by Pompey, and command of ships was vested in the senior army officer on board, leading to the unthinkable
situation (to the British mind) when St Paul in his action-packed (and free) sea voyage could and did take over. Rome produced no Nelson.

The second part of the Roman military system consisted of the legions, each 5,500 men strong, which varied only between twenty-five and thirty in number for 300 years. The Order of Battle given
by Tacitus for the year
AD
23 looked like this: Rhineland 8; Spain 3; Africa 2 (including the Legio III Augusta); Egypt 2 (one of which, the XXII Deiotariana, was chewed up
by the Jewish guerrillas under Simon Bar-Kochba in
AD
132 which provoked Hadrian, then obsessed with promoting his drowned lover Antinous as a god, to settle the problem of
the Jews, who had their own particularly jealous and exclusive God, once and for all); Syria 4; Pannonia 2 (inferior and superior, a large area south of the Danube and north of Dalmatia); Moesia 2
(Bulgaria and the eastern part of what was Yugoslavia); Dalmatia 2. Missing from this list are legions XVII, XVIII and XIX lost by Varus in
AD
9 in the forests of Germany.
The numbers were never used again. To the total must be added three or sometimes four legions needed to keep Britain quiet, since that island, together with Germany, Parthia and Judaea (rewritten
by Hadrian as Palestina), was a trouble-spot for the Romans.

In a sense the Roman army was only defeated by its own success, for the Pax Romana lasted so long and engendered such prosperity that a military career ceased to be attractive, and when the
sturdy volunteer infantrymen were replaced by listless conscripts, it was overwhelmed by hordes of barbarian horsemen. (Given a choice men have always preferred to spend their lives as tinkers,
tailors, rich men, even poor men and beggarmen – the role of most Jews in the Empire – than as soldiers or sailors.)

In the early days of Rome the soldier was a young man between eighteen and twenty, over five foot, five inches in height, neither a slave nor an ex-slave, with no criminal
record, who signed on for twenty-five years’ service, whereafter he could expect to retire with a wife, farm and Roman citizenship. From the moment he took his
viaticum,
equivalent of
the Queen’s shilling but worth much more, and swore the oath, the army because his life. Unless he was pretty dim and not armed with a letter of introduction, or never bothered to ingratiate
himself with his centurion (to this day Greeks bring their officers apples), he would be allowed off stone-cutting fatigue and encouraged to practise what in my time in the British army was called
a ‘trade’ or, if he were able to manage the three ‘r’s, to go into the ‘office’ and become a
librarius
or clerk. In the Roman army a trade could be that
of ditcher, farrier, glassfitter, limeburner, woodcutter or plumber, and a clerk might be responsible for soldiers’ money left on deposit (in
AD
89 in Mainz, this
mounted up to a point where a legion nearly financed its own rebellion) or work in the surveyors’ or architects’ departments. Here is a letter from one Julius Apollinaris, writing in
his native Greek (Latin was the official language of the army) to his father from Egypt in
AD
107:

Not all recruits to the Roman army had such a cushy time as this artful Greek dodger. Basic training was deliberately arduous, featuring twenty-mile route
marches with a heavy pack, PT with long and high jump, weapon training with dummy wooden shields and staves twice the service weight (with gladiators as instructors) and wooden-horse vaulting,
eventually in full armour. The Roman soldier carried an awful lot of kit, including, to quote Josephus: ‘. . . a lance, a round shield, as well as a saw and a basket, an axe together with a
leather strap, a sickle and a chain and rations for three days’.

His enemies – the Celts, the Germans, the Parthians – exhibited more dash in battle, and none more spectacular than Boudicca (Boadicea), outraged daughter of the King of the Iceni
(Suffolk), in her amazing chariot, but ‘for steady onward pressure and determined stands his training had made the Roman soldier usually invincible’. He was famous for his obedience and
stamina but he also had a mind of his own and would not perform unless he could respect his general; witness the consistent success of Julius Caesar, even when outnumbered, and the catastrophe of
the elderly banker Crassus. Julius Caesar wooed, cajoled, bullied and bribed his soldiers and in return they responded to his magic by following him wherever he led them, for it was never boring
and often profitable. They sang rude songs about him and if they resented his punishments they never mutinied. Crassus was more than just a very rich man – how else could he have become a
triumvir with Caesar and Pompey? He had suppressed the rebellion of the romantic Spartacus, when all around were losing their nerve; he had made a fortune out of dealing in slaves; and the means
whereby he acquired real estate – buying up the estates of those proscribed by Sulla, and waiting for property to catch on fire – have not endeared
him to history.
His plan to conquer Parthia was a classic in doomed unmilitary behaviour. He was too old, Parthia was too far away, he was impatient and resorted to the press-gang for troops. He set sail in the
stormy season from Brindisi, losing ships and men in the crossing. Finally he ignored public opinion (in the ranks of his dispirited army) and quarrelled publicly with his commanders. This tragic
expedition ended in farce when in a mock triumph the victorious Seleucids paraded some pornography found in the luggage of one of Crassus’ officers. His own head was delivered to the Parthian
king Orodes when he was in the middle of a play.

The episode points up the Roman passion for the pursuit of glory through arms – as if Charles Clore, dissatisfied with his millions, had decided to mount an expedition against Ho Chi Minh.
But Crassus with all his money and power could not have raised the wind for such an outing if the will and the discipline of the Roman army had not been there to harness. The will was part of the
Roman belief that the world was theirs to conquer and that other nations, even the Greeks, were inferior. The discipline was the work of the centurions. Military tribunes, often young men taking
the compulsory first step in a political career, and generals, appointed by the Senate for a term and for a specific task, might, as they were designed to, come and go, but the centurion was the
hard, permanent core of the Roman army.

Reorganized by Marius, the man from the sticks, the Republic’s most successful and popular general, the army turned the citizen into a volunteer, professional soldier, more literate and
numerate than any before or since. Marius invented the cohort of 600 men, which, times ten, constituted a legion. He organized a system of pay and allowances which became standard throughout the
Empire and endured for centuries. He gave the legions their eagles, gave the soldiers their laundry
allowance and burial funds with something over for the regimental
dinner.

He also weighed them down with equipment so that they were known as ‘Marius’ mules’. The ‘whole armour of God’, to use the expression used by St Paul, consisted,
apart from ‘the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit’, of a pike and a dagger which together with
the rest of his kit weighed about forty-five pounds, today’s standard baggage-allowance for air travel. The Roman soldier ‘messed’ in groups of six or ten (the sources differ) and
lived on wheat (which was turned into porridge or bread), salt and some not very nice wine. He might add some vegetables but rarely meat, except for the occasional bacon. The original of St George,
it will be remembered, was a wholesale pork butcher in Cappadocia, whose Christianity was irrelevant until he was lynched by the Roman soldiers for supplying rotten meat. ‘The profession was
mean,’ says Gibbon in one of his best footnotes, ‘he rendered it infamous.’ A soldier’s first step on the ladder of promotion would be to become the head man of his mess, or
an orderly; then he would become the centurion’s second-in-command, then a centurion. His only route to officer status was to move up the centuriate to the first cohort. Then he would be made
a knight and would retire, as it were, with directorships. Centurions literally directed the traffic of the Empire; an indication of the busyness of Antinous’ home town Bithynion (now Boli in
north-west Turkey and buried under the main road to Ankara) was that it needed two centurions to control the traffic. Retired centurions were in demand for decorative positions (today members of
the Royal Corps of Commissionaires tend to be retired company sergeant-majors) or to be in charge of security in a large household. The Roman
army trained some soldiers as
questionarii
– torturers – someone had to do it.

A centurion in full rig, with a crest on his helmet, greaves on his shins, his scale armour clanking with medallions from campaigns all over the known world, and carrying in his right hand the
vine rod of authority with a nasty little switch at the end, was, for most people, the visible symbol of Roman power and, as we know from the New Testament, the nearest to them. An officer and
gentleman would never pass through the rank of centurion, and indeed the distinction between him and the other ranks has been emulated in all modern armies except the Israeli, which functions more
like that of one of the early states of Greece. Under the Republic, twenty-four young men were elected annually by the
Comitia
(the Assembly of the Plebs) to serve in the legions of the
consuls, also elected, so the link between the army and politics was strong. Too strong thought Augustus, so he added to each legion 120 horses for the young gentlemen to ride – not very
effectively because they had no saddles or stirrups – and allocated six tribunes to each legion to serve as aides-de-camp rather than as commanders. A well-connected young officer – and
only exceptional men like Marius got anywhere if they were not – would be taken up by the general, perhaps an old boyfriend of his aunt, and mess with him and then be appointed colonel of a
regiment of auxiliaries. These were the third prong in the Roman military system – the Praetorian Guard and the legions being the first two – and were equal in number, but not prestige,
to the legions.

Auxiliaries were what we might call ‘colonial’ troops, recruited in the provinces, sent elsewhere, less well paid, longer serving, but ending up with citizenship and a vote for
themselves and their family, a more generous dispensation than
that afforded to, say, the Gurkhas, who fought for the British in two world wars. (In 1991 when so many English
and Scottish regiments were reduced or abolished it was suggested that the Foreign Office compensate these fierce little fellows, who had had to be restrained from presenting their British
commanding officers with the genitalia of their enemies in the trenches of the Somme.) As we know, the Roman soldier was essentially a heavy infantryman and the functions of cavalrymen, archers and
slingers were often performed by auxilaries. It was all part of the ‘artful system’ of the ‘artful founder’, phrases used by Gibbon three times in describing the remodelling
of the army by Augustus. He realized that local affiliations could be dangerous, so Gauls served in Spain and Macedonia and Spaniards served in Britain and Judaea. So Romanized was Gaul that no
legions were needed there.