ROMAN EMPIRE

A. The term. The word “empire” requires definition, for it is used in two distinct senses, geographical and political, and both are applicable to the Roman Empire.

1. The geographical sense. An empire is an aggregation of territories under a single absolute command. Until comparatively recently Great Britain held a world empire, and one of Disraeli’s dramatic political coups was to dub Queen Victoria the Empress of India. In the same context Rome ruled a ring of territories around the Mediterranean, a widening area of command and authority acquired by a long historical evolution which began when the Lat. tribes by the Tiber broke the encirclement of the hinterland hill tribes and continued to expand until Rome’s frontiers rested on Hadrian’s Wall in far Northumberland, on the long riverline of the Rhine and the Danube, on the Black Sea Coast of Asia Minor, on the Sahara, and on indeterminate eastern and northeastern lines which wavered with Rom. policy toward Parthia, and which, apart from the Arabian desert, found no clear-cut southeastern definition on the Red Sea coasts and in the valley of the Nile.

All this area had fallen under the Rom. imperium or command by the long process by which first the Republic, and then the Principate, probed for a stable frontier, a quest which was never ended, and which paused only when out-reaching power touched its limits. Those limits were on the longest river line in Europe, and were without sharp and secure finality around the whole arc of the Eastern provinces. The Empire was a hard won and not readily defensible mass of territory, destined to divide down its middle line and succumb, first in the W, and then in the E, to the pressures engendered in the more remote land masses of Europe and Asia, from whose tribal incursions Rome had sought for long and significant centuries to protect the culture and civilization of the Mediterranean. With the Roman Empire went the Roman Peace, coterminous and co-extensive. Within these frontiers the Church first found root and growth, and when the vast mass distintegrated, it proved to be the historical link which tied a crumbling world to its successor, the new Europe which arose when the torpor and confusion of the Dark Ages passed.

2. The political sense. The term “empire” is used most commonly to distinguish the Republic from the Principate, the rule of the Senate from the rule of the constitutional autocrats called, from their exercise of supreme military command, imperators, whence the word “emperor.” The Roman Empire, in this sense of the word, is that period of Rom. history which begins with the final victory of Octavian in the Republic’s last civil war to the collapse of all Rom. authority, first in the W and then in the E, which saw the final termination of the great historical movement which began with the coherence of the tribes of the Lat. enclave around the fortified hills of the Lower Tiber River valley. The term imperator was not originally prominent among the various titles available to the ruler. Augustus, as the Senate, conferring an honorific title, called the victorious Octavian, preferred to be called princeps, or first citizen; hence, the preferable term Principate for the Empire politically considered.

B. The transition. It must not be supposed that the Rom. people at large saw, at the time of the Battle of Actium in 31 b.c., that decisive watershed in their history which historians find it convenient to mark today. The accumulation of power in the hands of one man, power constitutionally conferred, was no new phenomenon over the half century of tense and troubled politics which preceded the emergence of Augustus as the giver of peace and order. The strains and stresses, which the possession of provincial responsibility and the inexorable extension of territory that was regarded as necessary to security brought to bear upon Rome’s ruling class, were partial causes behind faction, division, and civil strife. Some mention has been made of this elsewhere (see Rome). Again and again, distracted and confused within, under the continual threat of revolt and a military coup, the ruling oligarchy had resorted to autocracy in their endeavor to retain control of the city, Italy, and the menaced provinces.

The great Pompey, for example, enjoyed two periods of extraordinary command in the sixties of the 1st cent. b.c. During the first he cleared the Eastern Mediterranean of the Cilician pirate fleets which, in the midst of Rome’s civil troubles, had gained control of the seaways, and had interrupted the food supplies on which the urban proletariat, a sinister force in Rome’s confused political situation, depended. During the second, Pompey pacified and organized the whole provincial complex of the E, a contribution to the future Roman Peace which it would be difficult to overestimate. Both of Pompey’s commands involved overriding authority and an adaptation of republican forms to monarchical rule which was the very pattern of the coming autocracy, Augustus’ clever solution to the problem of Rome’s anarchy.

Had Pompey not been a loyal and responsible servant of the Senate, he might easily have retained the powers conferred constitutionally upon him, and, using a devoted army, backed and financed by the immense resources of the E which he had organized, might have dictated his own terms to the helpless Senate. He might thus have arranged his own succession and have been marked by historians as the first of the “Emperors.” As it was, Pompey duly surrendered his military and legislative power, and the Senate, now visibly unable to manage the resurgent problems of power, blundered on toward civil war.

Julius Caesar was not as honorable a man as Pompey was. His rise to power followed directly that of Pompey. Twelve years after 62 b.c., when Pompey dutifully resigned his great power, Julius Caesar had become the problem to the Senate which they had long helplessly foreseen. He had beaten Gaul into submission, demonstrated Rom. power across the Channel, and presented a challenge to the divided oligarchy which they could only meet in their political bankruptcy by resorting to their old champion Pompey, the one man around whom some show of strength might rally, the one soldier able to meet the military genius of Caesar; hence the Civil War, described in a self-justifying book by Caesar himself. The decade is, thanks to Cicero’s speeches, letters, and the abundance of other material of historical worth, a well-documented period, and it is possible to follow week by week the events of portent and significance which saw the death throes of Republican Rome.

The Civil War, with Caesar and Pompey as the great opponents, was the Senate’s last attempt to control the military command. From the duel of the two dynasts, Caesar emerged as victor. The decisive battle was fought at Pharsalus on the Thessalian plain on 9 August 48 b.c. Pompey was murdered in Egypt before the year ended. By March, 45 b.c., Caesar’s swift decisive strength had broken up and subdued the remaining pockets of senatorial resistance. In Egypt, Queen Cleopatra, last of the great line of the Ptolemies, secured her personal fortunes by snaring Julius Caesar, the conqueror.

Caesar then turned his undoubted genius to the restoration of law and order in Rome, and peace throughout the Rom. world. His power was absolute and unchallenged, and he exercised it with firmness, clemency, and contempt for opposition, qualities which might have marked him as the first “emperor,” had he also possessed political subtlety, some measure of patience, and even a simulated show of respect for the discredited Republican regime. It is unwise to despise an enemy, however discredited, and the famous Ides of March in 44 b.c. saw Caesar fall under the daggers of a die-hard group of senatorial conspirators who had no alternative policy or program with which to replace his firm, efficient dictatorship. The Republic was dead, and no act of violence could bring the corpse to life, for all the magnificence of the eloquence with which Cicero, the great orator and political archaist, sought to stir it to movement and activity.

Nor had anyone remembered Caesar’s adoptive son and heir, a member of the gens Octavia, and after Caesar’s adoption called Octavianus Caesar, a lad of nineteen years who was studying in Greece. With sublime audacity young Octavian came to Italy and claimed his heritage. The young man had a flair for diplomacy, a genius for picking and choosing men to help him, and a sense of timing in political affairs which matched both qualities. Octavian, however, for all these personal advantages which were conspicuously lacking in the great and independent Julius, could hardly have achieved the astounding success which crowned his audacious venture, had not vast moral forces awaited his clever manipulation. Rome was not spared a second civil war, and Philippi, 42 b.c., followed Pharsalus of six years before as another decisive place and date in Rom. history. Allied with Antony, Caesar’s one-time lieutenant, Octavian broke the remaining forces of reaction.

The Mediterranean world, none the less, amid Rome’s preoccupation with civil strife, approached close to disaster. The Parthians, whose perennially hostile presence was the problem of Rome’s eastern frontier, were menacing Pal. and Egypt. Antony proceeded E to gain control of the threatened provinces, but proved to be no Caesar. The E was in turmoil when Cleopatra, one of the most dynamic women of that age, gained control of Antony, and with her schemes for an Eastern Roman Empire almost anticipated history by four centuries.

Octavian had chosen with his usual unerring deliberation to remain in Italy. He held there Rome’s true strength, and the challenge from Alexandria was one which Rome could not ignore. War came again, but was concluded at Actium in 31 b.c. when Octavian and his able commanders broke the power of those who challenged peace. Peace was all that a sadly tormented world asked, and Italy and all the provinces were ready to confer divine honors on the man whose genius had brought the boon it so desired. In 27 b.c. after a semblance of “restoring the Republic,” celebrated in coinage and inscr., Octavian received the title of Augustus. He succeeded where Julius had failed because he paid lip service to the forms of constitutional and Republican government. He called himself princeps, or “first citizen,” a popular sounding title which claimed little. He was imperator, by virtue of the fact that, like the President of the United States, he was in supreme command of all the troops. It was a title used only in rare military contexts. Concentrated in Augustus’ hands were also the old powers of the Republic. There were still consuls, but he was one of the two. He also held the “tribunician power,” that is, all the rights, privileges, and functions of the old plebeian magistrates, the “tribunes,” which had been once a bulwark of the dispossessed, but had found strange and potent misuse in the cent. of constitutional strife which had destroyed the Republic. When he would, he also assumed the power of the censors, those old custodians of honor and piety. But all these powers Augustus held, just as others had at times held them, by the Senate’s or the people’s gift. Elections of a sort were held. The Senate still functioned, and provincial administration was shared by the prince (i.e. the princeps) and the Senate, the former retaining command of all those frontier regions which required the presence of an army. Augustus could read history too well not to have marked the role which a cent. of commanders had played in Rom. revolution by the use of the military forces which they had bound to themselves by advantages conferred or by personal magnetism.

C. Augustus. So it was that the first Rom. emperor who ordered “that all the world should be enrolled” (Luke 2:1) entered history. Those who blessed the peace he gave to a weary world were not aware that a sharp change had taken place. A leader, to be sure, had appeared and he was indeed one of the great men of all time, but his powers, autocratic in sum and total, bore ancient and familiar names. Only the farseeing knew that the old regime was dead, and, if they knew, grieved little for it. The new regime sought to revive the virtues of the old, just as it had remedied its vices. Augustus promoted religious revival. As far as legislation could effect that end, he sought to restore the old standards and old moralities. A great outburst of literary activity, some of it promoted effectively by Augustus’ “Minister without Portfolio,” Maecenas, gave Lat. letters their golden age. Augustus knew how to use the ability of great poets to establish his peace and add power and persuasion to his rehabilitation of law and order. The world at large, scarcely believing that an evil age of breakdown and war was ending, was willing to barter liberty for peace. No wonder that a highly sensitive spirit like Vergil the poet, looking back over the history of Rome, saw a mighty destiny working to a beneficent end which found final expression in the work and person of one man. He wove the thought into his epic poem, the Aeneid.

Augustus did much to establish the geographical boundaries of the Empire. His work is not well documented, but twenty years of planning and petty warfare were devoted to the security of the frontiers. He had no zest for conquest. Consolidation was his aim. Ambitious plans for the subjugation of Parthia, Julius’ unfinished project, were abandoned, and until the age of Trajan, who effected brief conquest, diplomacy was the attempted Rom. solution of the intractable problems of that troubled frontier. Galatia was made a province in 25 b.c., Judaea in a.d. 6. Spain was pacified, Gaul reorganized. The hill tribes of the northern Alpine areas, like those of Asia Minor, were brought laboriously under subjection. Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia, and Moesia were established along the Danube and Balkan frontiers, essential buffers against the tribal hinterlands of Europe. Disastrous defeat, and Varus’ loss of three legions in a.d. 9, caused Augustus to abandon what might have been the salutary establishment of a frontier on the Elbe, instead of along the nearer and longer line of the Rhine. All was a vast contribution to the peace of the Mediterranean. It is small wonder that, in the newly prosperous provinces, the imperial cult grew apace. (See Emperor Worship.)

D. Tiberius (a.d. 14-37). By good fortune, the canny choice of loyal men, and perhaps the immense weight of popular desire for peace, Augustus had no trouble from one of Rome’s two unsolved or insoluble problems: the effective and permanent control of the army commanders, men whose abilities and eminence were necessary for the defense of long and menaced frontiers, but whose ambitions and independence were destined to play a disastrous part in four centuries of history.

The other problem was the succession. Augustus is a prime illustration of the decisive role of personality in the processes of history, and as the revered person of the man who founded the Roman Peace, moved toward old age and death, men wondered who would replace him. Tacitus captures the atmosphere of the occasion well in the opening chapters of his Annals. No one was better aware of the problem than Augustus himself, who, by misfortune, had no male offspring of his own. His efforts to secure the succession in the direct line of the Julian house were cruelly thwarted by the premature deaths of promising young men on whom he pinned his hopes: Marcellus, his nephew, subject of Vergil’s moving tribute (Aeneid 6. 882-886); Gaius and Lucius, his grandsons; and Drusus, his favorite stepson. Tiberius, his other stepson, was eventually left as the sole successor, but not until he had become an embittered man by the spectacle of Augustus’ visible attempts to find an alternative. Tiberius was fifty-six years of age when Augustus died in a.d. 14. He was a tried and able commander, but, a Claudian on his mother Livia’s side, possessed of all the notorious pride of that ancient and distinguished family, and rendered the more dour by the rejection from which he had suffered. Perhaps Augustus, so able a judge of human nature, had marked his innate sourness and suspicion and foreseen those defects which brought so much unpopularity to Tiberius during and after the twenty-three years of his principate.

It was no doubt Tiberius’ defects of character which led him to place such misguided trust in Aelius Seianus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, the Emperor’s Household Corps, and to whose influence and ascendancy during Tiberius’ absence from Rome, some of the tyrannous acts of the reign may be ascribed. It was Tiberius’ suspicious nature which betrayed him into the too common use of “delation”—treason trials, reminiscent of those of some modern autocracies, and based on the evidence of common informers (delatores). This became a practice loathed by its perennial victims, the old senatorial aristocracy, and later resorted to by every weak or suspicious emperor, notably Domitian. It was Tiberius’ misfortune that Tacitus, one of the most powerful writers of Rome, was a chronicler for his reign. Modern historians, emancipating themselves from the long influence of the mordant Tacitus, have done more justice to Tiberius’ real abilities.

Tacitus wrote in Rome as a Rom. senator, and it is a little difficult when reading him to remember that, over Tiberius’ considerable reign, the frontiers still endured as Augustus had fixed them, and that even the Parthians were held in check. The organization of Cappadocia into a province was the only innovation Tiberius made to the Augustan system. Portents, however, were gathering. Senatorial administration was clearly more subject to the will of the princeps; Seianus showed what a local military commander could do, and the possibilities of personal tyranny were obvious.

E. Caligula (a.d. 37-41). The young madman who followed Tiberius, mercifully assassinated before he provoked a Jewish revolt, underlined the latter lesson. Hereditary succession invariably produces sooner or later the incompetent, the foolish, or the bad. It produced all these qualities in the person of Gaius, nicknamed Caligula, or “Little Boots,” by the troops on the Rhine who had known him as the son of the popular Germanicus.

F. Claudius (a.d. 41-54). It was a sinister fact that, when Gaius fell under the sword of an officer of the Praetorian Guard, the same military group drew from obscurity Gaius’ uncle, Claudius, a man of fifty years, who, like Tiberius, had suffered a lifetime of rejection and humiliation. He suffered from some form of cerebral palsy, which at times made him physically repulsive, but like many victims of a spastic condition was none the less an able man, certainly the most learned man ever to hold the Principate. Enforced withdrawal from society had driven Claudius to low companions and to study. The influences of both were apparent in his reign. Claudius sensibly developed the imperial civil service, using the abilities of the freedman class. Pallas and Narcissus, and Pallas’ brother Felix, were his appointments, and the personal faults and vices of these men were not an indictment of the fundamental good sense of Claudius’ governmental innovations. He sought also salutarily to extend the Rom. franchise. He embarked on a vigorous frontier policy, and the two Mauretanias in a.d. 42, Britain and Lycia in a.d. 43, and Thrace in a.d. 46, were added to the Empire. Claudius died by poison, on the threshold of premature dotage, at the hands of his evil wife Agrippina, who was anxious to secure the succession for Nero, her son by an earlier marriage. Claudius’ death was concealed until the Praetorian Guard, firm in the hands of Afranius Burrus, Agrippina’s nominee, and conciliated by the now customary donation, brought Nero to power at the immature age of seventeen.

G. Nero (a.d. 54-68). It was Nero’s youth and his artistic and hedonistic preoccupations which left the bluff Burrus, and the famous philosopher Seneca, Nero’s tutor, free to manage the world’s affairs for five years which, as the quinquennium Neronis, became a proverb for happy conditions in the provinces. The young prince deserved no credit. Agrippina had cleared the way for Nero with murder and intrigue. Her plotting continued. Unpitied victims were Pallas and Narcissus, but Seneca and Burrus became frightened when the ambitions of Agrippina took a wider reach. How far they sanctioned Nero’s turning on the woman who had helped him to power can never be known, but the end was matricide. Nero was clearly beyond control, and the tool of the unscrupulous. Burrus died, and Seneca was ultimately driven to suicide, but the details of a lamentable reign, which included the first persecution of the Christians, need not be followed. There was deterioration around the frontiers. Only the able Corbulo held the security of the Parthian frontier, while the equally able Suetonius subdued Britain aflame with Boudicca’s revolt, in which London and Colchester were burned and the new province all but lost. In a.d. 66 the long threat of the Jewish rebellion became a reality. Vindex rebelled in Gaul, and Galba in Spain, grim portents of the tragic year 69. Universal hatred surrounded Nero in Rome. The Julio-Claudian house, in short, came to an end amid turmoil on the frontiers, disaffection in the armed forces, and the first major threat to the Roman Peace. The wonder is that so much of Augustus’ work, and Claudius’ wise innovations survived.

H. The year of the four emperors (a.d. 69). The Christians who had survived Nero’s purge, and who now labored under legal proscription, could have seen in the horrors of this year of anarchy a divine judgment. The wonder was that Rome again survived. The Beast was wounded to death, and “his deadly wound was healed,” and “all the world wondered after the beast” (Rev 13:3, KJV). Vindex had demonstrated the disaffection in Gaul, and when Galba, the aristocratic governor of Spain, made common cause with the Gallic rebel, the legions on the Rhine became aware of their insecurity, crushed Vindex and tried to set up their commander Verginius Rufus as emperor. The “secret of empire,” as Tacitus put it, was out. It was that “an emperor can be made elsewhere than in Rome.” It was never to be forgotten. The Praetorian Guard declared for Galba. Nero fled, and died a suicide in a Rom. suburb.

A year of complex civil war followed. By January 15 Galba was dead, killed by the praetorians who had declared for him. Otho, another Spanish governor, and first husband of Poppaea, Nero’s wife, knew how to court the household troops and was set up as emperor. The Rhine legions set up Vitellius, and marched on Italy. It was the opportunity of the Ger. tribes, but was never taken. The “beast” was to survive. By April 17, Otho was dead and Vitellius supreme, but the Eastern provinces proclaimed Vespasian, the able general who was in the midst of fighting down the ghastly and expensive Jewish rebellion. Vespasian sent his able deputy, Mucianus, to Italy at the head of a legionary force, retaining enough strength in Pal. to hold the turbulent forces loose there. In a battle near Cremona, where Otho had been beaten by Vitellius and driven to Nero’s resort of suicide, the Syrian legions triumphed. Before the year’s end, Vitellius was destroyed, and by right of survival Vespasian became the ruler of Rome. The Flavian dynasty was born, and endured for a generation. The continuing strength or good fortune of Rome was demonstrated by the fact that, through such civil turmoil, the frontiers held and the Jewish war continued. The Apocalypse quoted popular amazement. Men were saying: “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” (Rev 13:4).

I. Vespasian (a.d. 69-79). Vespasian was a rough and able soldier. It was the achievement of his decade of rule that peace and prosperity were restored to the troubled frontiers, the finances of the realm brought to order, and the essential character of the principate retained. Like many a soldier, Vespasian was a born organizer, and his careful restoration on the frontiers, esp. in Britain, were to stand Rome in good stead for many years. It is to Vespasian’s credit and later to Trajan’s, that the first serious barbarian challenge was postponed for a cent. When Vespasian died, Agricola was feeling his way toward a frontier on the Tyne, Parthia was screened by new defenses, and Pal. left devastated by atrocious war. In Rome there was something like an Augustan Age in new building. Vespasian’s decade is not a well documented age.

J. Titus. Vespasian’s popular son, the able young soldier who had finished the Jewish war when his father was called to the duties of the principate in Rome, ruled for less than three years after Vespasian’s death (a.d. 79-81), and left the high office because of his premature death at the age of forty years, to the execrable Domitian, his younger brother. Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in August 79, is a tremendous document of Titus’ Italy.

K. Domitian (a.d. 81-96). Domitian was thirty years of age when he unexpectedly succeeded to the principate. His personal history bore some resemblance to that of Tiberius, a fact which he recognized, for Tiberius’ memoirs were Domitian’s favorite reading. Vespasian and Titus, both capable soldiers, had held the younger brother of their house in some contempt. His awareness of that fact did not improve his personality, or enhance his fitness to rule. Domitian, suspicious, cruel, and by nature tyrannical, filled his reign with treason trials, political murder, and persecution. Senators suffered along with Christians. Tacitus, enraged and embittered by the decimation of his class in this unhappy fifteen years, turned with hatred on Tiberius, whose concept of princely power provided the hated Domitian with so many precedents. The gentle Pliny, as well as the bitter Juvenal, agreed with Tacitus in their estimate of Domitian’s evil principate and of the Reign of Terror which finally brought him down. With Domitian’s death in a.d. 96, which must have nearly coincided with that of John, last survivor of the apostolate, the NT cent., which began with Augustus’ census (perhaps 5 b.c.), ended. This article need not follow its history much further.

L. Five good emperors. Nerva (a.d. 96-98), Trajan (a.d. 98-117), Hadrian (a.d. 117-138), Antoninus Pius (a.d. 138-161), and Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 161-180) cover almost a cent., the “Indian Summer,” as Toynbee has called it, of Rom. greatness. Gibbon regarded this era as the happiest known to man. The famous passage in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (V. I, ch. 1, par. 1) runs: “In the second century of the Christian era the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners, had gradually cemented the union of the provinces....The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence....During a happy period of more than fourscore years the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this and the two succeeding chapters to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall, a revolution which will ever be remembered and still is felt by the nations of the earth.”

Over this period urbanization proceeded apace; the warrior prince Trajan extended the frontiers to their widest yet; Hadrian, most traveled of all the emperors, consolidated them. The great wall across Britain is the lasting monument to his work. Portents, however, gathered, and the philosopher ruler Marcus Aurelius was hard pressed to beat back a Teutonic incursion into the Danubian provinces.

Hadrian’s principate saw the second rebellion of the Jews, and the virtual destruction of the Jews as a nation. Those who seek information on the collapse and recovery of Rome’s power, which covered the years 180 to 330, the final eclipse of the W, the transfer of power to Byzantium or Constantinople, and the thousand years of the Eastern Empire should seek the information in the comprehensive works listed below.

Bibliography J. B. Bury, A History of the Roman Empire from its Foundation to the Death of Marcus Aurelius (1896); S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1905); H. S. Jones, Companion to Roman History (1912); CAH, X-XII (1923-1939); CAH, I, II (1924, 1926): A. H. M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (1937); G. H. Stevenson, Roman Provincial Administration to the Age of the Antonines (Blackwell, 1939); M. Cary, A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine (1954); E. Gibbon, edited by J. B. Bury, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1958); J. B. Bury, The History of the Later Roman Empire (1958); J. Wells and R. H. Barrow, A Short History of the Roman Empire to the Death of Marcus Aurelius (1958); E. M. Blaiklock, The Century of the New Testament (1962).